Lady of Horses (47 page)

He shivered at that, with a murmur of pleasure. It seemed he
liked her hands in his hair, combing fingers through it, trying to make order
but only making it more riotously unkempt. The slide of it against his
shoulders roused a gasp from him. She followed it down his back, finding the
places that made him gasp anew, stroking slow circles along his spine and
across his shoulders, then down into the hollow of his back.

She should have flinched from that; from taut buttocks and
firm thighs, and the discovery that, rather to her startlement, his ribs were
wickedly tender. Fingers brushed across them made him flinch and shiver.
Persistence made him collapse in helpless laughter.

Laughter—in this. He took revenge, too. He snaked out a sly
hand and found her own vulnerable portions, till they rolled together like
puppies, he laughing, she giggling with no control over it at all.

They came to a halt against a heap of bundled hides, he on
his back, she half-sprawled across him. One small shift, one turn of the hips,
and the hard hot thing between them would be inside her.

She could not move. His laughter had died somewhat after
hers. He lay quietly. All but his rod, which knew well what it wanted.

She rose over him. She shifted, turned. She did—herself,
with no aid from him—what no proper wife should ever do. She danced the rest of
the ancient dance with a man not her husband.

The gods did not strike her down. Her flesh did not wither
from her bones. Nor did her womanly parts shrivel and grow cold. Not at all.

This man was large, and filled her almost too full; but as
he matched her slow and rather tentative rhythm, it seemed she had never been
filled, or satisfied, before. He took heed of her. He noticed what made her
flinch, and what made her quiver, however slightly, with pleasure.

She had not known how lovely it would feel to be stroked
along the back and flanks while he was inside her, or how exquisitely sensitive
her breasts would be, sparking with delight at the quick dart and flick of his
tongue. He loved her everywhere, not only in her secret place. And she,
belatedly, tried to do the same. She was awkward; she lacked the sense of what
to do. Rut she did try.

The summit when she reached it was sudden; it caught her by
surprise. She had been so intent on him that she had hardly taken notice of her
own body.

But he was intent on it. He raised her slowly, step by step,
higher than she had ever known it was possible to go. When she was near to
crying aloud with the intensity of it, he held her there. And met her, in a hot
swift rush that sent them both swooping down into breathless stillness.

She lay for a long while, all her body thrumming. Little by
little she remembered how to breathe again.

He was holding her in his arms. Her head lay on his
shoulder. It fit perfectly there. His warmth, the scent of him, the strength
that he never flaunted, were all perfectly as they should be.

Guilt was there, no doubt of it, but faint and far away. Her
hand found his. She wound her long fingers in his shorter, broader ones. Her
spirit felt as if it had done the same. Woven with his. Become a part of it.

oOo

Keen was a terrible creature, a monster, a woman who had
betrayed her husband. And she was as happy as she had ever been. It burst out
of her in song, in a voice she had barely known she had: clear, pure, and
surprisingly strong. She sang as she tended the children. She sang as she plied
her needle, fetched wood or dung for the fire, gutted fish or plucked fowl or
skinned rabbits for the pot.

“We should call you Linnet,” Sparrow said with every
evidence of amusement, as she came on Keen rocking the cradle with her foot,
sewing a tunic and singing a song that had come to her out of the sunlight and
the birdsong and Cloud’s presence in her arms the night before.

Keen blushed. He always came well after dark, and never when
there was anybody about. And Sparrow had not been in her own tent in days.

Still, Sparrow was a shaman. She must know. And though she
hated her brother, surely what her brother’s wife did to dishonor him—

She did not seem angry or outraged. She was smiling, not as
brightly as she would have before Kestrel went away, but warmly enough for any
purpose. “It’s good to see you happy,” she said.

Keen could not look at her till her hand tipped Keen’s chin
up, making her meet Sparrow’s eyes.

“I know,” Sparrow said. “Everybody does. It’s a wonderful thing;
a great joy, too. Do you know what the Grey Horse People say? Men and women are
made for one another, and often in great numbers. But when a man is made for
one woman, and a woman for one man, the gods have given their greatest gift.”

“I haven’t—” Keen said.

“I forgot—you can’t see it, can you? Wherever you go, his
shadow goes with you. Where he walks, your shadow walks beside him.”

Keen shook her head. All the brightness had vanished from
her heart. “It can’t be so. I belong to someone else.”

“Not any longer,” Sparrow said, “if in fact you ever did.
Are you tormenting yourself over my brother? Silly fool. He never thought twice
before he supplanted you with a richer wife. Would you like to wager that he’s
taken another already? Or that if he hasn’t, come the gathering he’ll find
himself an even more advantageous match?”

“I’m sure he will,” Keen murmured. “But I still belong to
him.”

Sparrow shook her head. “You always were a stubborn thing—even
when you seemed most pliant. Promise me something, Keen. Promise that whatever
you do, you won’t harm Cloud.”

“What, do you love him, too?”

Sparrow bared teeth at her. “Not as you do—but he’s a good
man and will be a very good king. Promise.”

“I’ll try,” said Keen. It was as much as she could do.

If she did harm him, if anything she had done caused him any
suffering, she would die. She contemplated it with perfect calm. If it must be,
then so it would be. The gods would do as the gods chose to do.

The gods were against Linden’s riding into the south.
Walker swore that it was not so, but Kestrel knew what Walker was, and that was
not a shaman. The waves of storms that swept spring into summer, the flooded
rivers, the unwonted cold and the delay of summer’s warmth, kept the king in
camp long after he would have been gone. And the hunting was as bad as Kestrel
had known it would be—worse, once the storms began.

The People would not have suffered terribly for that, for
they had their herds, which were numerous. But the storms brought a plague in
among them. Calves and kids, such as were born alive, died of sickness. So too
the foals, which were the People’s greatest treasure.

Only the royal herd seemed to escape the curse that was on
the rest. The white mares foaled in proper time and brought forth strong
young—and every one a filly. No colt was born to them, no stallion who would
be. Then when each came to the foal-heat, her sisters drove off the stallions
who came courting, savaging any who persisted.

“This is a curse indeed,” Walker said. “And we know who laid
it on us. We must go. We must destroy the thief who stole our king of
stallions, the witch who has afflicted us with this plague of ill fortune.”

Linden heard him avidly. So, by then, did the elders. The
young men of course were all afire to be gone. No one pressed him to stay, to
wait until the gathering, when he could muster the warbands of the lesser
tribes and ride southward with an army.

“That’s too late,” he said, and Walker abetted him. “We’ll
go now—as soon as there’s a break in the rain.”

oOo

That break came, by chance, within a day of Linden’s
saying so. The clouds lifted in the night. The sun rose over a sodden earth,
rivers swollen beyond their banks, and drowned things floating in them. But
Linden did not care. The light was brilliant, and warmer than it had been in
all that bleak season. “An omen!” he cried. “The gods are with us after all.”

His men cheered. The elders and those who would stay behind
echoed them.

The women in their tents were silent. Only when the warband
had gathered and mounted and ridden out did they lift up the song that every
man heard as he rode to war: the shrill and piercing keen that was half dirge,
half war-cry.

Kestrel’s mother had told him that morning as she plaited
his hair in the war-braids that she would not sing for him, or for his father
either—for Aurochs was riding with the warband as guide and guard.

“If we could bring you with us—” Kestrel began.

“A woman in a war-party?” Willow shook her head sharply.
“Not unless she’s a captive—and I refuse to be that. Stay alive, child. You and
your father both.”

oOo

The memory of her face followed him as he rode away from
the camp. She was refusing to weep. Tears were a weakness. She sent him out
firmly, and his father after him, the two of them so alike, she declared, that
if they lingered she would be calling each by the other’s name.

Kestrel eyed his father sidelong. It did not seem likely
that he was as handsome as that. He was certainly not as calm or as beautifully
composed.

Aurochs had greeted his return with an entirely uncharacteristic
display of emotion: brimming eyes and a long, breathlessly tight embrace. Since
then he had been much his usual self, except that he kept to the camp much more
than Kestrel might have expected. But with the hunting so bad, there was little
enough profit in going out.

Kestrel had not looked for him to come on this riding. Most
of the older men stayed with the tribe, to rule and guard it, and to escort it
safely to the gathering. But Aurochs prepared for war with the younger men,
chose his remounts, mounted and rode with the warband.

Kestrel wondered briefly and unbecomingly if he did it to
keep watch over his son. That was hardly likely. He wanted to go to war, that
was all. Men did, even men of substance, husbands and fathers.

He was welcomed gladly. Before he was a hunter he had been a
famous warrior. His skill with weapons was if anything greater than it had been
then, and he was still a young man after all, still in his prime.

Strange to ride with Aurochs as an equal, not as father and
son but as warrior and warrior. Other people than his mother remarked that they
looked alike; that Kestrel seemed older and his father younger than he was.

Aurochs said nothing to that. Kestrel had nothing to say.

oOo

The weather held as they rode south. They had somewhat to
do to ford the one or two greater rivers, which should have been sinking to
their summer levels but were flood-high. That delayed them, but not by as much
as Kestrel would have liked.

The time for gathering was coming, but they had passed the
great camping-place already. They paused there to pay respect to the sacred
places. Linden offered a young stallion on the stone—the beast had gone lame
beyond repair, but he was fine enough to please the gods, once his blood had
been let and his bones laid on the fire.

They ate his consecrated flesh and raised the hide above the
altar-stone for the People to find when they came, such of it as the beasts and
birds might have left. Its stripped skull they raised on a spear and left on
guard, the king’s promise and his boast, that he would come back riding his own
royal stallion.

Linden was sure of it. He rode as one possessed by the gods,
in a white fire of certainty.

Walker abetted him. Kestrel wondered when people would begin
to notice that the shaman had no visions to give them. Those that he spoke of
were old, from before Drinks-the-Wind left the tribe. The vision that led the
warband was Linden’s.

oOo

Kestrel was not asked to guide them. Not yet. South of the
river was all Linden needed to know until he came there.

Kestrel rode as a warrior. Most days he even managed to
pretend that that was all he was. Then memory would strike, or some glint of
the sun or ripple of the wind through grass would remind him of what he was,
and of what he went to.

Sparrow was there. When he let himself, he could feel her, a
warmth of presence, cooling if he turned east or west, going cold if he turned
north; but while his face looked southward, it was as if he stood in front of a
fire.

He dreamed of her as he always had, and that was strange,
because she never upbraided him for what he had done. She came into his arms
with a sigh of homecoming, loved him with as much passion as ever, and never,
not once, called him what he was, which was betrayer of his faith to her.

oOo

The weather grew gentler and the hunting better as they
made their way south. They met the Red Deer on their way to the gathering,
paused in their camp for a night, and in the morning took with them a good
portion of the tribe’s warband.

Its king did not come, which was as well. Two kings were too
many on such a raid as this. But the young men were delighted with the
adventure. They brightened the air immensely with their laughter and singing,
their fresh horses and their lively spirits. They had not had such a spring as
the People had. All the storms had kept to the north.

Tall Grass must have passed them by. Kestrel could not tell
if Walker was glad or sorry for that. Glad, maybe, that he did not have to
pretend to his wife’s father that she was a frequent occupant of his bed. He
had not gone to her, people said, since soon after he married her. She was
known not to be with child, nor was she likely to be.

“Some women have no use for men,” Willow had said when
Kestrel happened to ask.

“Maybe she has no use for that man,” Kestrel had said.

“That’s possible, too,” said his mother.

Whatever the truth of that, they passed the place of the
Tall Grass spring camp, but the tribe was gone. They camped southward of it,
near the river. In the morning they would cross.