Lady of Horses (34 page)

“For a while,” Old Woman said. “Until the dark of the year.
Quite possibly longer, but his strength burns low.”

“How do you know that? How do you know him?”

“Why,” said Old Woman, “the same way I know you. I know.”

“Does he know you?”

Old Woman grinned, baring her few blackened teeth. “Do you
think he does?”

“I think,” said Sparrow, “that even if he knew you existed,
he wouldn’t believe you.”

“There,” Old Woman said. “You see?”

What there was to see, Sparrow could not exactly determine.
Old Woman was like this: odd, elliptical, infuriating. She was less like a
shaman than a trickster: one of those rare personages, quite hopelessly mad,
who appeared sometimes among the tribes. The last one she had seen was a huge
man, rampantly male, with a great brown beard and a pelt like a bear, who minced
about in a fine deerskin tunic and insisted that he be called Flower of Perfect
Beauty. He spoke prophecies, it was said, but so much of what he said was
nonsense that there was no telling what was true and what was mad rambling.

Sparrow had found him pitiable and rather disgusting, with
his crown of wilted flowers and his grease-encrusted beard. Old Woman was
nothing of the sort. But she had that antic spirit, and that refusal to be
bound by plain human reason.

“Child,” said Old Woman, “as long as you think you know what
you know, you will know nothing.”

Sparrow stared at her.

“Empty yourself,” Old Woman said. “Be a reed in the wind. Be
the word the gods speak.”

“How do I do that?”

“Beyond knowledge,” Old Woman said, “you know.”

oOo

Sparrow was ready to leave then: take the mare and the
stallion and such belongings as they had, and go. But Keen would not budge. “I
want to stay here,” she said. “There’s food, shelter. There’s hope of living
through the winter.”

“It’s months yet till the snow comes,” Sparrow said. “We’ll
find a place—a place where people are sane.”

“Old Woman is very sane,” Keen said. “Saner than anybody.”

“Old Woman is mad.”

But Keen would not listen. She had finished one coat and was
well embarked on the other. Sparrow jabbed a finger at it. “When that is done,
we go.”

“When Old Woman is ready for us to go, we go.”

Sparrow had never seen that quiet strength in Keen before,
that placid refusal to be moved. It was the baby making her stubborn, thought
Sparrow. She wanted to stay in a place that she reckoned safe, even if a
madwoman lived in it.

Old Woman had not spoken to her since those strange words on
the hilltop. She was back in her place, doing what little she did now that she
had two sturdy young women to keep the camp for her. For the most part she sat
like a lizard on a rock, blinking in the sun. No doubt, Sparrow thought nastily,
she was emptying herself—knowing nothing, seeing nothing, perceiving nothing.

She had been a shaman once. Her tribe had died. Now she was
a solitary fool, witless and wandering, who had found two greater fools to look
after her.

oOo

Not for long. Sparrow might wish it were summer still, but
the days were growing short. The leaves were changing in the wood. The nights
were not so warm now, the stars not so close. They were retreating to their
winter eminence, to the cold heights.

Keen began to wax like the moon, her belly swelling, it
seemed, overnight. There was no doubt now that she was carrying a child. She
had that habit of bearing women, of resting her hand on the place where the
child was, as if to assure herself that yes, it was there, growing inside her.

Because Keen would not go, they stayed. Sparrow hunted
farther and farther afield, avoiding Old Woman and the camaraderie of the camp:
the friendship between Keen and the shaman that felt, too often, as if they
conspired against her.

There had been no tribes within a day’s ride, but as winter
drew in, Sparrow found signs that one of them was camped not so far away. Some
of its hunters took a doe from a herd that she had been watching. She followed
their track for a while, but her courage failed. She turned back. She did not
want to meet these people, though they might be like her: small, dark,
headstrong.

oOo

The chill rain of autumn fell on her as she rode toward
Old Woman’s camp. It was not yet edged with ice as it would be later, but
summer’s warmth was long gone from it. She was glad of the coat she was
wearing, that she had made and Keen made beautiful, and of the bit of fire that
she had thought to bring with her in a pot.

Dark would fall far too soon for her to return tonight. She
would camp in a place she had marked before, a hollow in a hillside like a
shallow cave, where there was room enough for her and for the mare. She had
water to drink, a brace of rabbits to eat. She was not at all displeased to be
kept by the storm from going—not home, no. Back to the camp.

The mare might have been glad, too. She was in foal, not
hugely as yet but she was as aware as Keen was of the life growing in her.
Mares in foal, like some women with child, had no use whatever for males—and
the stallion vexed her sometimes as thoroughly as Old Woman vexed Sparrow.

The cave was warm once Sparrow had lit a fire in it, and
fragrant with the scent of roasting rabbit. The mare grazed for a while in the
rain, then came in to be dry. Sparrow rubbed the rain out of her pale coat with
the goatskin that had lain over the mare’s back, spread the goatskin by the
fire to dry, and fed the mare an apple from her bag. The mare would have been
delighted to eat all that Sparrow had brought, but Sparrow pushed her questing
nose away. “No, you don’t! Those are for me.”

The mare snorted in disgust, but forbore to press harder.

Sparrow ate her dinner and one of her apples, gave the mare
another and put the rest away for the morning. The night was wet and cold, hut
she was as warm as she needed to be, out of the wind, with a fire and the mare
and a full belly. She was content.

But something was niggling at her. She lay down to sleep on
heaped grass, with the mare nibbling the edges, but sleep eluded her.

Empty yourself.
Old Woman’s voice, soft as wind in branches.
Be a reed in the wind. Be the word, but never the god who speaks it.

Somehow, in this place, that made her think of Walker: his
pride, his cruel spirit. His conviction beyond any doubt in his heart that
despite lack of either gifts or vision, he was a shaman.

What was he doing without her? Was he inventing visions? How
long would he succeed in that before he trapped himself in the web of his own
lies?

Perhaps a very long time. Walker was clever. He knew how to
make men listen to him. He was very, very skilled in forming alliances and
playing on the trust—and mistrust—of princes.

Walker was full of so many things. Pride, insolence, surety
of his own right to rule. All that he lacked was magic—the thing that made a
shaman.

What was magic, then? Was that what Old Woman meant? Not
emptiness, but emptying. Clearing the spirit. Letting it be like water in the
sun: transparent, yet full of light.

Sparrow did not want Old Woman to make sense. But if she
gave way to temper and to her dislike of that odd creature, she was no better
than her brother.

Of the two, she much preferred Old Woman. Old Woman might be
mad, and she was certainly strange, but she was a shaman in truth. She was so
full of magic, she had emptied herself clean away.

Sparrow sat up, hugging her knees. She was shivering, though
the fire burned well and the mare’s warmth was close by her. That was fear.
Fear of what she had just understood.

She could not let go of her self. That self, proud and
stubborn and headstrong though it was, was all that she had ever had, until the
mare. If she let it go, what was left?

The mare sighed vastly and groaned and folded her legs, till
she lay down beside the fire. She seemed so much smaller then, curled like a
foal, with her nose tucked in her tail. And yet she was all that she had ever
been, living goddess, queen of horses, powerful and holy.

Sparrow was no less terrified for knowing that. She gave
herself into the mare’s charge every time she mounted and rode. The mare had
brought her here, had brought the stallion, had set in motion things that were
barely even begun. War—it would be war, not before winter, but certainly before
summer came again. The tribes would cross the river in search of the lost king.

The mare willed it. She kept the stallion by her when she
could have sent him back. She wanted this war, for reasons that Sparrow did not
understand.

Sparrow was thinking too much, circling wildly, shying from
the thing in the center. The emptiness. The singing silence.

If she touched it, she would be changed. How much or how
little, she did not know.

She had done no less in answering the mare’s call, This was
ordained; had been since she was born. She could run away from it, but it would
follow her. She could refuse it, but it would force itself upon her. She had no
more will in this than a young stallion in the taming. She was caught, bound.
The more she fought, the tighter her bonds became.

Empty yourself.
So
she did when her spirit flew free of her body; but something must fly free from
the spirit itself. Self. Awareness. Resistance.

Be.

Simply be.

Clear water in a pool. Still, untroubled. Empty, and yet
full of light.

White light. Light like the moon, the mare’s light. Pure
stillness, and pure essence. Knowledge beyond knowledge. Knowing as horses
knew, deep in the bone, and not all on the surface as humans were.

Not working magic. Being magic. Becoming the visions, living
them, reflecting them as water reflects the sky.

What she had seen before as shadows and fragments came
clear, distinct, manifold and beautiful as the embroideries of her coat. They
were the embroideries, thick over back and breast and sleeves, running along
the hems, dancing among the fastenings. Keen, no shaman and yet as empty of
self as shaman ever need be, had given living substance to all of Sparrow’s
foreseeings.

Wonder was a pure thing, untainted with self. So was love
for that quiet woman, so unassuming and so modest, who had come so far and
stayed with such contentment. She was the gods’ vessel, too, Earth Mother’s
child, as Sparrow belonged to Horse Goddess.

Consciousness grew out of this, knowledge as deep as the
blood, set strong in the bone. Sparrow lay curled tight against the mare’s
back, wrapped in her warmth, comforted by her smell, which was part sweet grass
and part horsehide and part living earth.

The mare slept as horses sleep, brief but very deep. Sparrow
slid effortlessly into her dream. It was a simple dream, a horse dream:
moonlight on snow and swift hooves flying, keen air in the lungs and keen joy
in the heart, and no end to it ever, until she woke to the living world again.

Old Woman did not mock Sparrow with what should have been
self-evident far sooner if Sparrow had been less intent on her own pride and
her lack of manners. But neither was she inclined to praise Sparrow for what
was, as she pointed out, the simplest and most essential beginning of true
power.

“Shamans are shadows dancing on a tent-wall,” she said.
“They awe people with their tricks. But true power has nothing to do with
chants and spells. True power is.”

“I’ll never understand it,” Sparrow said.

“No need to understand,” said Old Woman. “Just be.”

That was the hardest thing for Sparrow to do. Keen did it as
she breathed, that simply, that easily. Sparrow was a restless creature, always
up, always about, always doing this or that.
  
To
stop doing, to sit, to let be, was an art beyond her skill.

“So learn,” said Old Woman, no more sympathetic than she had
ever been.

Old Woman never taught lessons as such, nor did she
undertake to teach Sparrow spells or rituals. As far as Sparrow could tell, her
teaching consisted chiefly of exasperating her pupil into discovering certain
things for herself. It was a strangely erratic method, nothing at all like the
Grandmother’s meticulous and daily lessons.

“You had those as a child,” Old Woman said when Sparrow
taxed her with it. “I won’t call you a shaman yet, but you’re rather more than
a child.”

“But how will I know when I’m a shaman?”

“You’ll know.”

Sparrow went away as frustrated as always. What she had
discovered in the cave, she had thought would reveal everything; but when she
woke fully, she was much the same as before. She understood a little more, that
was all. She saw somewhat more clearly. She had learned to read the signs
embroidered on her coat and Keen’s, though what they meant was still for the
most part dark to her.

One day between autumn and winter, the last truly warm day,
Old Woman stopped Sparrow as she prepared to go out hunting. “Not today,” she
said.

Sparrow considered disobedience, but she was too curious.
Old Woman had a pot in her hand, and a bundle.

“Strip,” she said.

Sparrow stared at her.

“Take off your clothes,” Old Woman said.

Sparrow’s jaw set. Whatever this was, she wanted nothing of
it.

Old Woman sighed in sorely taxed patience. She did not do
anything, say anything, but before Sparrow knew what was happening, she was
taking off her tunic and leggings and standing naked in the sun. It was warm,
but not as warm as that. She shivered.

Old Woman took no notice. She led Sparrow to her favored
place outside the shelter, where she had spread a finely tanned hide. At first
Sparrow thought it was cowhide, but the shape was subtly different.

When she lay on it, she knew. It was horsehide. She
shuddered in her skin. Foolish—but she was enough of the People to know that
only kings sat on horsehide, or lay on it as she was doing.