Lady of Horses (37 page)

The mare was waiting, a white glimmer in the starlight.
Sparrow laid Old Woman over the white back and held her there. The mare stepped
softly under that fragile weight, picking her way through the snow, climbing to
the summit of the hill.

It was a low hill, but the stars had granted it some of their
lofty height. The world seemed to spread beneath it, a pattern of signs and
images like the embroidery of Sparrow’s coat.

She stood beside the mare on the hilltop and eased Old
Woman’s limp light body down. It was alive, but the life clung to it by a
thread.

She laid it gently in the snow. It was beyond cold and
beyond fear. She, who was neither, still was taken somewhat out of herself.
Such cold and fear as she felt were remote, and therefore bearable.

She was the mare’s chosen, Horse Goddess’ child. She was
high priestess of a rite that had not been seen in the world before, a new
rite, terrible and holy.

There in the dark of the moon, under the winter stars, she
sang the words that came to her, words as high and cold and sweet as the stars’
own singing. She called on Horse Goddess and Earth Mother and the gods of death
and rebirth. She invoked the mare, and the life that swelled within the mare.
And finally, kneeling in the snow, she bowed low before the old woman, the
shaman of the lost tribe, the firstmother of this new order that was made flesh
in her.

She bowed in deep respect, and in admiration, too; and if
not in love, then in more esteem than she had ever thought to feel for that
rough-spoken, ungentle creature. For they were very like—as like as kin,
whatever the truth of that might have been. They had, in their way, been as
grandmother and granddaughter. What the Grandmother had begun, Old Woman had
completed.

So it was done. She drew the knife that Old Woman had bidden
her take, long and wicked, with a strange black blade and a haft of polished
bone. Singing, wordless now, a long, high keen, she performed the sacrifice.
She severed the thread that bound spirit to body.

The body lay still and cold. The spirit soared up, matching
the note of her song, swelling it, till it rang in the sky.

oOo

The silence that fell thereafter was enormous, and bore
still a memory of sound. In it, with steady hand, she took the heart from the
still breast and the liver from the belly. She offered them up to the gods. In
their name, and by Old Woman’s firm command, she ate of each: heart for knowledge,
liver for spirit. They were warm and rich with blood—richer than she would ever
have expected.

In blood was life. It drained out over the snow, black in
starlight. She bowed low again, with the taste of blood in her mouth. Old
Woman’s command had been strict. She had no choice but to follow it. As if the
body had been the carcass of a deer, she gutted and flayed it, stripped flesh
from bones, and made a great offering of the flesh. She set it in fire that she
had prepared on the hilltop, a tall pyre of cured wood that Old Woman had set
aside in a hidden place, and lit it from the hearthfire, so that it blazed up
to heaven.

The bones she kept, polishing them till they were white and
clean. In bright firelight she buried them in the grave that she had dug that
day, laying them with care as if they had been the bones of a king. She covered
them with the hide of a white mare, a mighty thing and holy: first of the white
mares that had been in the world, foaled when Old Woman was young, in the grim
spring after her people were destroyed.

She had been Old Woman’s hope and her salvation. She had
died at a great age, in the herd of her children and grandchildren, all of them
greys as she was, sires and dams of greys, a whole royal race from whom
Sparrow’s own mare had sprung.

Now her hide covered Old Woman’s bones. They needed no other
shroud, and no greater treasure.

But the globe of the skull, Sparrow did not bury. When she
had raised the cairn over Old Woman’s bones, that remnant lay waiting, unburned
and unburied. Grey dawn shone on it. The fire had died to embers and ash.

Sparrow bowed to the corpse of the fire, and deeper to the
cairn in which lay the bones, but deepest of all to the skull, the clean white
bone still faintly tinged with the rose sheen of blood. She took it up in her
hands, turned and carried it down from the hill, as the sun rose full in her
eyes.

oOo

She made a cup of the skull, as men did with the heads of
their enemies. Three days she labored over it. She scoured and polished it. She
inlaid it with stones as Old Woman had instructed her, such stones as she had
not seen before, blue as the summer sky. With the black knife she carved a
winding spiral pattern, the same as that which wove round about her breasts and
belly, and colored it with soot from the bonfire and with red ocher that was
almost as bright as blood.

All the while she did this, Old Woman’s spirit watched,
hovering above her, offering acid commentary. It was no more gentle than it had
been in life, and no more complimentary, either. And yet, perhaps because it
was freed of the flesh, it could not deceive Sparrow as it had done before. She
could sense its approval, however grudging and however well hidden. Old Woman
was pleased, though she loathed to admit it.

On the third day the cup was complete, or as much so as
Sparrow could make it. It was a beautiful thing, a terrible beauty, like the
rite that had made it. When she lifted it in her hands, she could feel the
power pooling in it. Sunlight poured into it like water, filling it, brimming
over.

She carried the cup to the stream that ran through Old
Woman’s camp. The water was icy cold and very swift. It filled the cup quickly,
mingling with the sunlight. Sparrow, kneeling by the bank, lifted it up to sun
and sky—and yes, to Old Woman’s spirit that hovered still—then lowered it to
her lips and drank.

It was like drinking winter, pure and cold, and yet sun’s
warmth was woven in it. It turned her blood to ice and then to fire. It pooled
in her belly. There in her center, the rite was complete: heart and liver,
blood and bone.

With a sigh that seemed half exasperation, Old Woman’s
spirit took wing at last, arrowing into the sun. Yet it left a part of itself
behind, as a bird might: a feather of living light. It drifted gently down into
the cup, and there rested, melting and flowing, until it had vanished into the
cleansed and polished surface.

The cup was alive in her hands. She could feel the warmth in
it, the presence that would not leave it now, not till the cup itself was
broken and its fragments ground to powder.

Which will happen,
said a voice in her mind, a voice very like Old Woman’s,
when you die yourself, and your successor makes of your skull a new
cup.

That would not be soon, if she survived the war that was
coming. She set the thought aside, and the cup, too, wrapping it in soft
doeskin and concealing it among the belongings in the shelter. Old Woman’s
shelter—hers now, if she chose to stay.

Or she could go. She was free. She was, by every rite, a
shaman.

“I still don’t know that I am one,” she said.

Somewhere perhaps, Old Woman ground her few teeth in
frustration. But Sparrow could not lie to herself, or to Old Woman either.

The power that was in her, that she had drunk from the cup,
still needed something to be whole. Time, maybe. Wisdom. Patience. Patience
above all, one of the many virtues which Sparrow signally lacked.

Keen rode into the camp of the Grey Horse People on the
back of a black-and-silver stallion who had been a king once and perhaps would
be a king again. There were people waiting for her: Storm, Rain, and Cloud
standing behind them. At sight of him, entirely without her willing it, her
heart leaped.

They welcomed her warmly, handed the stallion to eager
children for tending, took her to Storm’s tent and fed her and made much of
her. For all her worry and her grief, her fear for Sparrow and her sorrow that
Old Woman was dying and she could not be there, she felt as if she had come
home.

It was a strange feeling, because it was so unexpected.
These were not her people. They looked nothing like her. She did not speak
their language, though they were pleased enough to speak the trader- tongue
that they had in common.

And yet they were honestly glad to see her, and clearly
happy to be entrusted with the care of her. She had never been so welcome among
her own kin. The People reserved such effusions for sons, never for daughters.

She tried, guiltily, not to be content, or to be
comfortable. Sparrow would be neither, keeping the deathwatch over Old Woman,
and then doing what must be done thereafter.

Exactly what that was, she did not know. She did not want to
know. But it could not be anything easy or pleasant. Great magic never was. She
was—had been—a shaman’s wife. She knew.

But it was warm here, in the heart as in the body. No one
asked where Old Woman was. They knew. They grieved for her; she had been a
great shaman of this country, much admired and even loved. But it was her time.
If she did not go, she would defy the gods; and that would be a great ill
thing.

Keen had no duties here. Tomorrow she would ask to be given
somewhat to do. Today she was content to rest, and to stitch at the swaddling
she was making for the baby. The camp’s life went on around her, preparing for
the rite that would greet the sunset: the ritual and sacrifice of the dark of
the year.

It was not as great as among her people—this was a poor
tribe, and focused too on sun and earth, so that the rites of spring and fall
and the brief night of midsummer were greater to them than this. But they had
their priests and their procession, their fire built high against the dark, and
their sacrifice, a black goat offered to the spirits of night and the world
below.

Or so Cloud told her, sitting by her in the long and
wonderfully mild afternoon. “Aren’t you a priest?” she asked him. “Shouldn’t
you be preparing?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “This is a women’s rite. I offer the Bull
at midsummer, and dance with Earth Mother’s daughter in the spring. Autumn is
for the old men, and winter for the women who are elders, and for my mother,
who is king and shaman.”

“And your clan-sister?”

He nodded. “I’m not needed at all, nor am I wanted. Time was
when as male and heir both, I would have been kept in my tent, lest my presence
bring ill luck to the rite.”

“Truly?” Keen asked, surprised. “That’s how it is for women
among the People, for all the great sacrifices.”

“All of them?”

“We weaken them, you see. Because our spirits are so
feeble.”

He snorted like a startled horse. “That is outrageous! And
you believe it?”

“It’s the gods’ command.”

“Not our gods.” He shook his head. “Women are strong. To
bear and give birth to a child—there’s no battle more terrible, and no courage
greater. To call you weak . . . what, are your men blind?”

“We are weak,” Keen said. “We can’t fight as well, run as
fast. We’re not brave, or strong in battle.”

He did a terribly improper thing: he laid his finger on her
lips. It was warm and very light. “Hush,” he said as if to a child. “Don’t say
such things. Don’t believe them.”

“They are true.”

“Not here,” he said.

She sat still. He had reclaimed his hand, to her deep and
altogether unwilling regret.

She would not touch him in turn. She refused. Though her
fingers yearned to discover if his beard was as crisp as it looked, or if it
was soft. Though her body would have loved to lean toward him, to rest in his
warmth.

She had never felt such things for a man before. Walker had
aroused her, had made her eager for his touch. But she had never wanted so
simply to be near him, to be there because he was there. Walker came to take
her as a man takes a woman, and she had submitted gladly to the taking.

She wanted to take this man. To be bold as a man was. To go
to him and take him in her arms and love him. Even with the child between—the
child that her husband had set in her.

It was terrible, this wanting. It tormented her. It made her
loins ache, and set the child to stirring restlessly, protesting the tightness
in her middle.

She was both glad and sorry when a child came with a message
from Cloud’s mother, bidding him go on some errand that had to do with the
sacrifice. He seemed to regret the need to go; but he could hardly disobey his king.

The child who had fetched him lingered, perhaps on the king’s
orders. It was a girlchild, very bold in her expression, with a pair of
smaller, male shadows. She amused herself for a while in watching Keen stitch
at her baby-clothes. But soon, bored, she wandered off, followed by one of the
boys. The other lingered, hanging back as if he worked up the courage to do
something.

All at once, and quickly, he did it: he touched the long
bright plait that hung over her shoulder. He horrified himself with his bravery.
In the light of her smile, like a startled rabbit, he ducked and spun and fled.

She was still smiling when the currents of the camp, which
had been more or less aimless, gathered and focused. She thought, as she
watched, that perhaps the rite had begun, though it was well before sunset.

But it was nothing of the sort. It was an arrival in camp, a
hunting-party coming back with wherewithal for the night’s feast. Keen did not
need to go out to see what they had brought: they came toward the king’s tent,
bearing two nobly antlered stags and a young bear. It was a splendid hunt, she
could see, and a great omen for the rite.

The hunters laughed and sang, and some danced, beating on
drums and shaking rattles. It was an oddly bright music for the dark of the
year, but fitting in its way. It suited the pale sunlight and the almost-warmth
of the day, and helped a little to hold back the dark.