Lady of Horses (43 page)

She had not seen that yet. Her eyes were small and hard. “Where
is my gift from the gods?”

“That,” he said, “you have to earn.”

“I did earn it. It hurt.”

He shook his head. “Pain is not the price. Pain is the test.
When the pain goes away, you win the gift.”

“That’s not fair. I want it now!”

“You don’t know how to win it,” he said.

“So teach me.”

“Not tonight,” he said. He was tired of her—suddenly and
profoundly.

“But I want my gift!”

He slapped her, to her lasting shock. In the silence that
gained him, he took up his robe and left her.

oOo

He slept that night on the plain not far from the horses.
First however he bathed in the river, wading out into the starlit water,
scouring away the blood and the smell of her, and as much of the memory as he
could. Then, clean and naked, he walked till he found a place that suited him,
spread his robe for a blanket and lay in the sweet-scented grass.

He dreamed of Keen. In his dream she was her sweetest self,
so modest and so seeming shy, but passionate in her loving. She had been a
maiden, too, but she had known what a man was and what he did; she took great
joy in learning the ways of it.

Blossom did not know joy in anything a man did with a woman.
In the morning he sent White Bird to her—for surely that of all women could
teach her both the art and the pleasure. But when he came to her at night, she
clung grimly to her garments, and recoiled from his ardor. “It’s disgusting,”
she said. “It hurts.”

“Did my father’s wife teach you nothing?” he demanded.

She shrugged. He had come to know and loathe that shrug.
“She rubbed me there. That didn’t hurt, and after a while it was rather nice,
but I don’t see how you can do it with that. It’s ugly. I don’t like it when it
goes inside me. I don’t like the way you kiss me, either. Your beard scratches.
When she kissed me, her lips were soft, and her skin was lovely. Your skin
isn’t like that at all.”

“That,” he said low in his throat, “is because I am a man.”

“I don’t like it,” she said. “She said I had to let you kiss
me and do that with me, because that is what a wife does. But I don’t want to.”

“What you want matters very little,” he said.

“I want the gods’ gift.”

“That,” he said with no little satisfaction, “is only given
if you want a man, if you hunger for him, if you love the sight and smell and
feel of his body. If when he comes to you, you open to him, and accept him, and
give him of your heart. Then the gods give their gift. And only then.”

“Then,” said that astonishing creature, “I don’t want it.
I’ll take a necklace instead.”

“Not without the gods’ gift,” he said.

oOo

He had no desire for her after that. He slept again under
the stars, and again dreamed of Keen; and when he woke, he had spent his seed
in the earth. He hoped Mother Earth was glad of it; for indeed, that wife of
his would never be.

A man learned to endure what he must, if it gained him the
ends he looked for. Blossom had brought with her the strength of the Tall Grass
People. Between that and the alliances that Walker had forged for Linden, the
tribes were mollified, for a while. Many of their young men went out hunting
the thieves who had stolen the king of stallions, which quieted the gathering
considerably, and let the older men set about making marriages and confirming
alliances and making use of what remained of the gathering.

The king was still without a stallion. And, as
Drinks-the-Wind had foretold, the royal herd refused all comers. Stallions who
came with war in mind were given war indeed. The mares would have none of them.
All were in foal and in no mood to suffer the rule of a stranger.

Walker pondered long and hard. Cliff Lion’s example might be
worth following: to declare that the gods had chosen another herd and another
stallion to lead the herds of the People. But to succeed in that, he would have
to remove the royal herd. All the mares looked to those, and where the grey
mares went, the others followed.

He could arrange another theft. There were men who would do
it, for the game or in the gods’ name; and if any of them threatened betrayal,
Walker would assure that he did not come back from a hunt, or that he died in
his tent of something that he ate.

But in that, he reckoned without Drinks-the-Wind. The elder
shaman made no effort to take Walker’s place beside the king, or to reclaim the
office of chief of shamans. Yet neither he nor Walker could prevent the king
from seeking him out.

Linden emerged from his nine days’ seclusion with his
brides, by no means as lazy or as sated as Walker had meant for him to be. He
was well satisfied, but that satisfaction had only sharpened his anger at the
women who had stolen his stallion.

Especially since no one, not one of all the hunters who had
gone out, had found any sign of the thieves. They spoke of sudden storms,
unexpected floods, and attacks by wild beasts—“As if,” they said in the
gathering, “the gods were driving us back.”

Linden sneered at that, without even Walker to prompt him.
“Cowards,” he said. “You gave up too soon.”

But when he went in search of advice, he went to Drinks-the-Wind.
It was happenstance, perhaps. Walker was laboring among the tribes, speaking
softly to kings who again were losing patience, and expecting that Linden, like
a good fool, would tup his wives or hunt with his companions or find himself a
horse from among the unbroken stallions. All of which he would eventually do,
but first he sought the elder shaman in his tent.

He stayed there, Walker was told, for most of a morning.
When he came out, he went straight to the herds and inspected the young
stallions, and chose one as pretty as one might expect: a lovely golden dun
with glossy black mane and tail, and each leg perfectly black to knee or hock,
and no white hair on him anywhere. Linden devoted the rest of the day to the
horse, and the next day, too, taking his time about it, as if he had been
advised to do just that.

oOo

While Linden was so occupied, Walker in his turn visited
his father. Drinks-the-Wind received him politely, ordered his wives to wait on
the guest, and in no way conducted himself as if he had anything to fear. But
Walker took note that he was received not as a beloved son but as a guest of
rank. Drinks-the-Wind was letting him know, subtly but clearly, that he had set
aside the bond of blood kin.

It hurt. Walker was surprised at that. Drinks-the-Wind was
an old fool and a weak one, but he was still Walker’s father. That Walker had
been undertaking to dispose of him, and would again when he no longer had need
of such visions as the old man might have left in him, stood apart from the
fact of their kinship.

But not, it seemed, to Drinks-the-Wind. He observed every
courtesy with excruciating exactness, until Walker had had enough. “What did
you say to the king?” he demanded abruptly.

Drinks-the-Wind raised his brows. “Why, did you think I
would break my word?”

“The king went to you,” Walker said. “Tell me why.”

“Perhaps,” said Drinks the Wind, “because he needed wisdom,
and you were elsewhere.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing that you’ve not heard before, I’m sure. He’s very
troubled. He feels the loss of the stallion keenly. His spirit is bound to the
stallion. But the stallion is bound to the mare, who is Horse Goddess.”

Walker was not concerned with that. He focused on the heart
of the matter, which was Linden’s obsession and his folly. “You told him to
find another horse.”

“I told him to distract himself as best he could. A new
mount would be useful, I said. He agreed. I take it he’s taken my advice?”

“You know he has.” Walker fixed his eyes on his father.
“Tell me what else you told him.”

“Nothing,” said Drinks-the-Wind. His gaze was unwavering.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Believe what you like.”

Walker held tight to his temper. “I’ll find it out. You may
be sure of that.”

“There’s nothing to discover,” Drinks-the-Wind said. And
that was all he would say. Until, as Walker was leaving in disgust, he said,
“You might consider that no one can find the thieves. No one will—not before
winter. The tribes should go when the time comes to go, and keep to their own
runs. In the spring, the world will begin to change.”

Walker stopped, turned on his heel. Drinks-the-Wind was not
looking at him. The pale eyes were remote, lost in visions.

“Tell me how the world will change,” Walker said.

“In the spring,” Drinks-the-Wind said, “it will begin. Look
for the one who left on four feet but comes back winged.”

That was all Walker could get out of him. If he knew more,
if he saw more, he would not speak of it.

It was maddening. It was the price the gods had laid on him
for his power: that all his visions should come blurred and darkened through
the eyes of another.

oOo

As vague as the vision had been, Walker made full use of
it. He held the gathering together with his tireless passing from camp to camp
and tribe to tribe, soothing kings, pacifying elders. That his efforts also
kept him away from the tent that was nominally his, and gave him manifold
excuse to sleep wherever he happened to be when exhaustion took him, he
regarded as a blessing.

After the time of weddings and alliances and feasting was
done, the tribes parted as they had since the dawn time, going each to its own
fields and hunting runs. White Stone was first to go, roused by the peal of a
horse’s call. The old mare, the queen of the royal herd, had wearied of these
grazed-out pastures. She called her kin and the lesser herds together and led
them away northward.

They had always gone east before in summer. But north she
went, and north they must go. That a mare led them was an omen Walker liked
little and the priests liked less, but it was as the gods decreed.

Linden did not want to go. “My stallion went south!” he
cried as his people broke camp around him. “I know he went south—I saw him. Why
are we going north?”

“Because the gods will it,” Walker said with studied
patience.

Linden shook his yellow braids and stamped his foot like a
child. “I will not go! Let the women go, and the old men. I’ll take the
warband. We’ll go south. We’ll find my stallion.”

There was a certain strong logic in that. But it was not the
first time Linden had proposed it, and the visions—as Drinks-the-Wind saw
them—were clear. The People would go north.

“I am going south,” Linden said. Nor would he be moved. When
the People set off on the northward way, Linden and the warband galloped south.

oOo

Walker went with the People. He had debated it long, but
without great doubt as to his course. Kings came and went. The People endured.
And he was shaman of the People.

While Linden pursued his revenge, Walker ruled in his place.
He sat in the royal circle, though not on the royal horsehide. He wielded the
royal justice. He kept the People on their path, following the white mare to a
new grazing-ground altogether, a rich and well-watered region which seemed
empty of tribes.

It was a gift of the gods, that place, and the hunting and
the fishing were splendid. Even bereft of their kings, both man and stallion,
they were manifestly content.

All that summer the People reveled in their new camp and
their splendid good fortune. Come autumn the old mare led them to a more
familiar camp, south and east toward the joining of two rivers.

oOo

There Linden found them. He had lost a dozen of his men
and thrice that number of horses. The rest were gaunt and wild-eyed. They
brought no booty, no fruits of their raiding. All the enemies they had fought
were beasts of the earth and forces of the air: storm, flood, fire on the
plain. They had never reached the great river of the south at all.

“When we were closest,” said one of the king’s companions in
dull wonder, “the earth opened up and swallowed five men.”

“The gods were against us,” another said. “At night when I
tried to sleep, I could feel their eyes staring down.”

“Nonsense!” Linden cried.

He alone of all of them seemed almost his wonted self. He
had gone straight to his tent when they first returned, and emerged much later,
much cleaner, and much happier than he had been before.

His wives, it was said, had mourned his absence and were
delighted to have him back again. But the one he had taken to his bed was not
his wife. It was the elder shaman’s wayward wife, White Bird.

He was full of himself now by firelight, and full of kumiss,
too. “The gods weren’t against us,” he said. “How could they be? Those thieves
broke the gods’ own law. It was a bad storm season, that’s all. We’ll go back
in the spring. We’ll find my stallion.”

“Maybe lions got him,” someone muttered. “Or a tribe in
search of meat.”

“He lives,” Linden said. “He’s in the south. I feel him.
Come spring I’ll go to him. And no god or storm will stop me.”

People did not argue with that. Linden was a king robbed of
his stallion. If he had been less than obsessed, they would have been less than
pleased.

Walker would have been happier if Linden had stayed away
through the winter. But while it was a nuisance to have the king back and
getting in his way, it was useful, too. Decrees that had been difficult to
uphold in the king’s absence were now, with a compliant king, much simpler.
Walker had only to see that Linden was well occupied with his women and his
pleasures. The rest was Walker’s to order as he pleased.

In the winter, he decided, Drinks-the-Wind would give way at
last to the weakness of age. It would leave Walker without eyes to see visions,
but surely the gods would provide. Or they would send Sparrow back, for him to
use as he had before.