Lady of Horses (36 page)

“You will always be welcome here,” he said in that soft deep
voice. “Remember.”

“Honorably welcome? And not only because you want me in your
bed?”

That was breathtakingly bold and awesomely rude, and it
seemed to come from someone else altogether; but that was her voice speaking.
He only smiled. “In all honor,” he said, “though if you were to invite me to
your bed, I would never refuse.”

Kestrel knew he was healed when he went out to hunt the
morning after Rain lay with him, and the hunt kept him out through the night
and into the next day; and when he came back, he had been gone three days and
the people of the Grey Horse were beginning to fret. But he had a fine buck to
show for it, and a pack of doeskin laden with dried meat of the doe, enough to
feed the whole of the king’s family for a fair few days.

“We thought you’d gone away completely,” Rain said.

She accosted him soon after he came back, as he had both
expected and dreaded. He had devoted the days to his hunt, but in the nights he
had reflected long on her, and on Cloud who was her lover but not her husband,
and on the ways of men and women among these strange people.

Yes, he had thought of walking on and on till there was no
hope of returning to the Grey Horse. But he owed them something for the saving
of his life. And he owed Rain—something. Or she owed him. He went back and
faced her unflinching, even though she might be angry.

She did not seem to be that. She was glad, oh yes, and she
had fretted: there was a hint of strain about her eyes. It eased as she looked
at him. In front of anyone who could see, there by her mother’s tent, she stood
high and high, on very tiptoe, and drew his head down and kissed him.

It was quick, no more than a brush of lips, but it shook him
almost to his knees. “Next time,” she said, “don’t walk away like that. Tell
someone where you’ve gone.”

“The king knew,” he said. “I saw her when I went out. She
gave me her blessing.”

That took Rain aback. Kestrel’s pleasure in her startlement
was not altogether praiseworthy, but it was rare enough, and striking enough,
that he did not care.

“She never told me!” she said in considerable pique.

“Should she have?”

“Oh!” she said. “You’re as bad as she is.”

He grinned. “I thank you,” he said.

She hissed at him, wheeled and stalked away.

Kestrel sighed when she was gone, suddenly as weak in the
knees as if he had just risen from his bed. He was glad to seek the refuge of
his tent, and find no woman there, but clean furs waiting, and bread and
goat-cheese and a skin of kumiss.

He ate well and drank sparingly, contemplated the furs,
decided to rest but not sleep. He was not tired. The hunt had been good, the
air clean. He was himself again, no weakness left; or none that mattered. It
would be a while before his side stretched as it should, or the stitch of pain
left his ribs.

He was well enough. He stripped out of the clothes he had
worn since he left, wrapped himself in his lionskin, and set to taking his hair
out of its plaits and combing it. It was simple labor, empty of thought, close
to sleep but not yet over the edge of it.

In the middle of it he gained an audience. Children here
were given to going wherever they pleased. Their elders did little to quell
them. They could even wander into great rites and high holy things, if they
were quiet and did not interrupt with questions. Nor did it matter if they were
male or female; they were all treated alike.

These were three who were given to following him about. The
eldest was a girl, and of the royal clan, though whether she was Rain’s sister
or Storm’s daughter, Kestrel had not yet determined. The other two were boys,
much shyer and quieter than the girl, and overwhelmingly in awe of the stranger
from far away.

Time was when he would have undertaken to drive them out, but
that, he had learned, only brought them creeping back as soon as he relaxed his
guard. He sighed therefore and endured, and went on with what he was doing.

After a while the girl said, “Will you teach us to hunt?”

Kestrel blinked. Not because the question was startling;
because, as tired as he was, it had taken him back to another place and another
tribe. A young and solitary Wolfcub was stalking shadows through the tall
grass, hunting them down and killing them with the bow his father had given
him. He was not very good at it, at all, but he was inordinately proud of such
skill as he had.

Until a clear voice said, “You couldn’t hit the side of a
hill if it stopped and waited for you.”

He whipped about. He had never heard that voice before, but
he recognized the owner of it: the shaman’s dark-eyed daughter, the one whose
mother had been a captive from a long way away. She did not play with the other
children. Wolfcub had thought it might be because she was different, but maybe
it was for the same reason he kept mostly to himself: he simply preferred his
own company.

He faced her as a man was supposed to face a woman, standing
tall and glaring down at her. He did rather well, he thought, until she laughed
at him. That made him forget dignity and snap, “I suppose
you
know how to shoot a bow.”

“Not a bit,” she said. “You could teach me. Then when I’m
better than you, I’ll show you how to do it.”

The logic of that was perfectly preposterous. Even if it had
made sense, Wolfcub resorted to the fundamental truth. “You won’t ever be
better than me. You’re a girl.”

“What does that have to do with it?”

“Everything!”

She snorted. “Show me how to shoot. Then I’ll show you.”
Because she was so stubborn, and so determined that she was right, he did teach
her.

And she did surpass him. Worse: another child wandered into
one of their lessons, picked up the bow while they were squabbling over the
fletching of an arrow, fitted one of the disputed arrows to the string, and put
it neatly through the target they had both been missing by a notable distance.
That was Keen, escaped from her doting mother, drawn by the sound of their
voices to discover that she had a better eye and a greater gift for the bow
than either of them. In the end she taught them both, though without seeming to
understand what she was doing. She simply knew: how to stand, how to nock, how
to release.

Wolfcub, grown into the man called Kestrel, wondered if any
of these children would prove as gifted as Keen had been. Likely not. But he
would not refuse to teach them, either.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Today I’m tired. I need to rest.”

“You can sleep,” the girl said. “We’ll watch.”

“You could go away,” he suggested, “and come back in the
morning.”

“We’d rather stay here,” she said. “Do you want us to be
quiet? We’ll be quiet. Or we could sing. Skimmer loves to sing. Don’t you,
Skimmer?”

The shyer of the boys ducked his head and mumbled into his
tunic. The girl understood him, apparently. She glowered at him. “Of course he
won’t laugh! Sing him the song your mother taught you, the one about the
trees.”

Kestrel sighed and resigned himself to being entertained. He
could lie down for that, at least, and be comfortable.

The child did have a lovely voice, such as some boys had
before they grew into men: clear, true, and piercingly sweet. The song was in
the language of the tribe, which he was learning, a little, but not enough to
understand more than that it was about a hunter in a wood. There was a lion, or
maybe a bear, and nightfall, and sleep; but beyond that, he could not tell.
Maybe the hunter sang the bear to sleep, then slept himself.

Kestrel was not quite ready to follow, though he closed his
eyes and let himself drift. The song ended. The children conversed quietly in
the way of children here.

Some of it he caught. Tomorrow’s hunt, and what they would
learn. The venison they would eat for dinner tonight—and maybe tomorrow night,
too, if they became mighty hunters. Visitors who had come while Kestrel was
away, very important people, a shaman or great worker of magic and, it seemed,
the shaman’s apprentice.

They were much enthralled with that one. He was too close to
sleep then to listen harder, or to wonder why. It was nothing that mattered to
him.

Winter came somewhat more gently here than it did north of
the river. The rolling green country and the thickets of trees broke the wind,
and the rain was a little softer. But when the cold and the snow came, they
came fast and hard.

They bound Sparrow to Old Woman’s camp, where all had been
made ready for them. There was ample food stored in the shelter, fodder for the
horses and goats until they could go out again to forage, and the shelter
itself was made larger with Keen’s and Sparrow’s labor, till it held the three
of them in comfort, and the horses, too.

Old Woman at first seemed much as she always had. But as the
cold went on and the snow deepened with storm after storm, even to Sparrow’s
less than loving eye it seemed that she was not as strong as she had been. She
slept longer, rose later, spoke less.

So too did Keen, but Keen was swelling with the child; in
her it was strength. In Old Woman it was a clear fading.

Sparrow had seen it before. The old could die at any time of
the year, but winter was most bitter for them. The Grandmother had died in
winter, in much the same way, though it seemed she had gone much more slowly.
Old Woman was like a dry stick in the fire, flaring swiftly into ash.

She did not slow or stop her odd oblique teaching for that.
The brief storm-ridden days and long cold nights were made for turning the
spirit inward.

Sparrow traveled far within, and far without as well, riding
the winds of the world. Sometimes Old Woman flew near her, a presence sensed
but not seen. Her spirit was growing stronger as her body weakened. Death for
her would be triumphant, a soaring into light.

She was eager for it. She had lived a long, long time; had
outlived a tribe, and lived past the deaths of any who had been born the year
she was born. She was ready to cast off the outworn skin and fly free.

But she did not go. She clung to life and breath, as little
as that was. Keen particularly, but Sparrow too, made her as comfortable as
they could, kept her wrapped in furs, kept the fire burning well and tried to
tempt her with warm herb-possets and goat’s milk laced with honey. What she
would not eat, which was most of it, Sparrow forced on Keen—“For the baby,” she
said when Keen resisted. Keen would obey then, though not willingly.

oOo

The dark of the year came upon them. That year was a Great
Year: when new moon and longest night were one and the same. Even without
priests to count the days and reckon the moon’s phases, Sparrow knew when it
came. It was in her blood and bone, deep as the breath she drew.

With the moon’s waning, Old Woman waned, too. Night by night
she sank lower. The night before the new moon, she seemed nearly to have
stopped breathing, but when the sun rose, she revived a little. Enough to say
to Sparrow who was stirring the last of the honeycomb into the milk that she
had taken from one of the she-goats a few moments before: “You, rude child.
Come here.”

Sparrow was startled enough at the sound of that voice,
faint and fading as it was, to do as it bade her. Old Woman’s eyes were almost
as bright as ever, seeing far too clearly through all her pretensions.

“I never did teach you manners,” Old Woman said. “But that’s
no matter now. I’ll die tonight, in the moon’s dark. Be sure you stay awake and
watch me go. And when I’m gone, there is that which you must do.”

Sparrow frowned. “Do you think I’ll fall asleep, then?”

“You’ll be tempted. Don’t give in to it. You have to watch.
And then you have to do as I tell you. Do it exactly. Do you understand?”

“Tell me what it is,” Sparrow said.

Old Woman told her. Sparrow listened in horror. When the dry
and dying voice had gone silent, she said, “I can’t do that.”

“You can. Because you must.”

“But—”

“I don’t matter, child. Not any longer. You need this.
Therefore you will do it.”

“Why do I need it?”

“Always the questions,” Old Woman sighed. “Always ‘Why?’
Child, when it’s done, you will know.”

“You said that of my being a shaman. When I was one, I would
know. But I never have!”

“Yes,” Old Woman said. And with that, maddeningly, she
slipped back into her long dream. Nothing that Sparrow did or said could rouse
her.

oOo

Keen wanted to stay. But Old Woman had made it clear: she
was not to be part of this thing that had been laid on Sparrow. It was a mild
day, for winter; the sun was almost warm. She took the stallion as Old Woman
had instructed, and rode off eastward. There was a tribe camped at only a little
distance, Old Woman said. The people there would welcome her and look after
her.

Sparrow did not like that any better than Keen did. “You’d
entrust her to strangers?” she had demanded of Old Woman.

“Not strangers,” Old Woman said. “They know me, and know of
my guests. She’ll be more than safe with them.”

Sparrow had to accept that, as Keen did, because Old Woman
was firm. It was to be done just so. Neither of them was given a choice.

Therefore, in the morning, Keen rode away. The stallion
carried her gladly, with understanding of his duty. Sparrow would have
preferred that the mare do that, too; but the mare must stay. She was part of
the rite that loomed ahead of Sparrow.

There were preparations. Sparrow made them. They did not
take long enough; the day still stretched interminable. Old Woman lay like a
banked fire, the life in her sinking low.

At long last the sun set. It was a mild night for winter,
but with an edge of frost. The stars were high and far away. By their cold
faint light, Sparrow lifted Old Woman in her arms, finding her as light as a
bundle of sticks, and carried her out of the shelter.