Lady of Horses (55 page)

“The gods are hungry for blood and souls today,” Drinks-the-Wind
said. He had ridden up beside Kestrel, as light on his white mare’s back as a
young man. He turned his face to the sun and smiled. “Are you not, my lords of
light and darkness?”

Beyond him Kestrel saw some of the companions make swift
signs against ill fortune. But he did not think the shaman was cursing them,
nor was he mad, either. Drinks-the-Wind seemed as much in the world as he ever
was, and in great good humor, too. “We’ve paid our day’s passage,” he said. “As
for the night . . .”

Kestrel shivered in spite of himself.

Drinks-the-Wind’s smile warmed and broadened. “There, lad.
You’ve little to fear. Death is a simple thing. The gate opens. You pass
through. Then you journey—far, sometimes, but that should never dismay you,
great wanderer and hunter that you are. The game in that country, they say, is
better than any in this one: swifter, stronger, and far sweeter to the taste.”

“You’ve hunted there,” Kestrel said.

Drinks-the-Wind shrugged. “A little. In dreams. Enough to
lose my fear of the life beyond life.”

“I think I’m too young for that,” said Kestrel.

The shaman laughed. He looked and sounded uncannily like his
son Walker, but Walker made Kestrel’s hackles rise. Drinks-the-Wind made him
uneasy, but not as an enemy would. He was a strange creature, powerful, and
perhaps beyond Kestrel’s comprehension. But he meant Kestrel no harm.

“Child,” he said, “do you think I am old? To the gods I am a
child, an infant, a creature of a mere day’s span. I feel it in my spirit. I’m
as young as the morning.”

“And I,” said Kestrel, “was born a heartbeat ago.”

Drinks-the-Wind applauded him. “Always remember that,” he
said. “It may not help you to understand the gods, but it will help you to
survive their notice.”

“Does any man survive that?”

“In the end,” said Drinks-the-Wind, “sooner or later, we all
die.”

He left Kestrel to ponder that, riding off to regale Walker
with his uncomfortable wisdom. Walker seemed rather less appreciative of it
than Kestrel was.

Kestrel, watching, caught himself wondering again what the
night would bring. Sparrow would not tell him. No one else seemed to know. That
it was a matter of shamans, and a great matter, too, he had no doubt. He could
only pray that the rest of them would come out of it alive and sane.

They stopped in the heat of the day and made a few hours’
camp by a little river. Trees overhung the bank, offering a green shade. It was
a cool and sweet-scented place, and there was a thicket of brambles somewhat up
the river. While the horses grazed and drank, they ate a midday feast of
berries and journeycake, and rested for a while.

Not all of them were sleeping. Walker, looking for a place
to relieve himself in peace, passed by no few Grey Horse women sharing their
favors with men of their tribe and any other who happened by. He turned his
face away from them.

He was aware that he had an escort. Aurochs the hunter
seemed to have appointed himself Walker’s guardian hound—or perhaps Keen’s
protector.

Walker was keeping a careful distance from his wife. She, he
noticed, was clinging to her black-bearded lover, and hiding as best she could
among the Grey Horse People—like a tall young mare in a flock of goats, foolish
and cowardly and altogether like a woman.

He could be patient, now that it was too late to feed his
power in coupling with her. By the next day’s dawning, everything would be his.
All the power, all the gods’ favor.

Then she would come to him, and remember at last that she
belonged to him. If the Grey Horse prince tried to stop her then, he would die.

Walker paused on the riverbank and made water into the
stream. Aurochs’ eyes were on him, tireless in their fixity. He smiled sweetly
at the hunter and wandered along the bank, with no intention of escaping, but
not minded to stay put, either.

Aurochs simply followed like the two-legged hound he was.
Walker toyed with the thought of disposing of him. But that would cause a great
deal of fuss. Time enough later, when all was won.

Some distance upstream, under a tree with fronds that
trailed in the water, Sparrow sat with her own guardian hound—waiting for him.
Walker regarded her in something close to contentment. “So,” he said. “You have
visions for me.”

“Crowds and hordes of them,” she said.

He smiled. She was almost good to look on, sitting there in
her mockery of a shaman’s robe, with her hair escaping as always from its
plait.

He had noticed before this that she was either growing plump
or growing a child; from the way her hound hovered, and the way she carried
herself, it was clear which it was. He would enjoy exacting the punishment for
that, come the time. But for now he chose not to speak of it.

It was a pity, too, that they were both so well guarded. Two
of them, brother and sister, a shaman’s children, on the day of the new moon,
could have raised great power in their coupling—power that Walker could well
use.

He would have to settle for mere words. He sat a little
distance from her on a bank of grass and flowers, and let his smile widen.
“You’ve been making good use of my visions,” he said.

“They were never yours,” she said: so tiresome, and so
untrue.

“You play shaman very well,” he said.

“Because I am one.”

“There is more to a shaman than visions,” he said.

“Yes.”

Truly, he thought, she had grown insolent among these
southern women. “My visions,” he said. “Give them to me.”

She smiled, the first time that he could recall that she had
ever smiled at him. It made the small hairs rise on the back of his neck.

From a bag that had lain half-hidden in the grass, she took
a cup. It was a skull-cup, somewhat small but very rich, beautifully and
magically ornamented. His fingers twitched toward it. This, they knew, was a
thing of great power.

She filled it with water from the stream, holding it without
awe, as if it had been a plain cup of wood or clay. She brought it back to him,
still smiling, and set it in his waiting hands.

He bowed under the weight of it. The pain—the crushing
burden—

Her hand passed before his face. He could see again. The cup
was a cup, cool and round in his hands, brimming with water. Some of it had
spilled. It was cold.

“Look into the cup,” she said.

“What, scrying like a crone by a campfire?”

“Look,” she said, unruffled by his contempt. “See.”

He looked, not to obey her but to prove that it was folly.

The cup was full of fire.

It was water—water, cold within the white bone.

Cold fire. And in it, such things—such visions—

They were too many. They were too fast. They were too
terrible. He could not look away from them. They seared through his eyes into
his spirit.

Blood and fire, fire and water, stone and blood. A black
knife raised against a starlit sky. Blood springing, glistening black in
firelight. Kings and princes, warriors, armies riding.

And horses. White horses. A white mare in the heart of the
moon.

“Enough.”

Her voice, as cold as the moon. His eyes lifted of
themselves. He gasped.

She was full of light. It filled her to brimming and
overflowed. The touch of it was pain so terrible he could not even cry out.

“Now you have visions,” she said in that cold, still voice.
She took the cup from his slack fingers, bowed over it, poured the water out
upon the grass. Then she put the cup away, rose and left him to his shock and
waxing terror.

He mastered himself. He was a shaman of a line of shamans
that went back to the dawn time. His power was great and would be greater
still. And now he had visions.

Visions . . .

He staggered to his feet. Aurochs made no move to help him.
The hunter’s arms were folded, his eyes flat. If Walker had ever doubted that
this was his enemy, he would have known it now.

Tonight
, Walker
thought. He had power such as he had not known a man could have. And all his
enemies would know the force of it.

oOo

“Do you think that was wise?”

Sparrow stumbled. Kestrel caught her, pulling her into his
arms. She let him hold her. She had been strong enough when she faced her
brother, but now that she had left him, she could feel the weakness in her
knees. “Horse Goddess wanted it,” she said.

“Horse Goddess is going to get you killed.”

“Hush.” She could feel the anger in him, but greater than
that was fear. Fear for her; fear of her brother. She tried to reassure him.

“He still is no shaman, no matter what he thinks. These
visions will confuse him.”

“They don’t confuse you?”

“They’re mine,” she said. “They’re part of me.”

He lifted her suddenly, carrying her in his arms. She folded
her own arms about his neck and let her head rest on his shoulder. Pride did
not matter here; if people thought her weak, that was not an ill thing.
Particularly if Walker thought it.

“I’m afraid for you,” he said.

“I suppose you should be. It’s not going to be an easy
night.”

“If you will let me—”

“No,” she said. “I’ve told you what to do.”

“But to stand by—to—”

“You will do it,” she said, putting the force of command in
it; but then and perhaps not so wisely she softened. “My love, my beautiful
one, this is the gods’ will. Be as strong as you know how to be, and help me.
Do what I ask.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Yes,” she said.

He did not believe her. But he set his lips and left off
arguing.

She kissed his shoulder and sighed. “Oh gods,” she said. “I
love you.”

oOo

It was summer in the world, but Keen’s heart was cold and
bitter winter. When she looked at her son whom she—she, not his father—had
named Summer, and at her lover, with whom she had broken the laws of the People
so often and in such gladness, she warmed a very little. But Walker had taken
away her joy. His hands on her, his eyes that had no love in them, only the
certainty that he owned her—she had washed and washed, scrubbed herself till
she was raw, but she could not scour away the memory.

Cloud tried to comfort her. His touch was balm for her
wounds, but it could not take the pain away. She had tried to lie with him; but
when he took her in his arms, she gasped as if she were drowning, and struggled
frantically to escape.

He, blessed man, had let her go. And such pain in his face, such
love and such deep anger against the one who had done this to her: oh, by the
gods, she did not deserve him.

She wanted Walker dead. It was a terrible thing, an unholy
thing, but it was the truth. If he died, she would be happy. Even if she died for
it—it would free the world of him.

Tonight, she thought, it would be settled. Sparrow had said so.
And Sparrow saw what no one else could see.

There was indeed a sacred place, as Sparrow had known from
Old Woman’s teaching. It was a hill crowned with a thin ring of trees, and a
great thing of power within: a black stone sunk deep in the hilltop, heavy and
cold and throbbing with potency. The black stone in Old Woman’s belongings,
Sparrow had come to understand, was such a stone. It had fallen from the sky,
it was said; it was the burnt cinder of a star.

Sparrow wore Old Woman’s piece of it in a bag about her
neck. It hung between her breasts, heavier than anything so small should be.
The mother stone called to it, drawing Sparrow with it.

They came to the hill somewhat before sundown. Sparrow bade
them make camp at the hill’s foot, where a spring bubbled from beneath a rock
and poured into a broad shallow pool. From there it ran in a stream down to a
greater stream. There was water in plenty for the horses, and grazing, and
space to pitch tents.

The scouts found them there as the campfires flared in the
sun’s sinking. They had the word that Sparrow had been waiting for: Walker’s
allies were camped down the stream and over a low ridge. A Red Deer warrior had
crept out of the camp as it was being made, and been seen entering the outland
camp.

Sparrow nodded, satisfied. “Good. It’s ready, then. Come
full dark, we’ll ascend the hill.”

“All of us?” Rain asked. “No guards? No one to look after
the horses?”

“Every one of us,” Sparrow said. “It’s not horse-stealing
these raiders have in mind tonight.”

Rain bowed to that. She was headstrong and inclined to
argue, but only in lesser matters. In greater ones, she knew when to keep
still. She was a good shaman, Sparrow thought, and would be better as she grew
past her youthful impatience.

Everything was as ready as it could be. Those with the
stomach for it, and those innocent of what Sparrow expected to pass come
nightfall, ate a quick daymeal while the sunset poured blood across the
horizon.

Drinks-the-Wind ate well and drank an imposing quantity of
kumiss. He was the lightest of heart of any of them. He told tales and even
sang, and kept the warband and the Red Deer riders well entertained.

In the twilight he managed to leave them for a while on
pretext of a full bladder. After he had relieved himself he came upon Sparrow
sitting a little apart.

She had just sent Kestrel to keep watch on Linden.
Drinks-the-Wind watched him go with an appreciative eye. “That’s a handsome young
stallion,” he said.

“I do think so,” said Sparrow.

“But you won’t marry him.”

“No.”

“Would he like you to?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. He seems content.”

“You’re fortunate.” The old man laid his hand on her head,
briefly: a father’s blessing. “I regret now that I took so little notice of
you. There are things I could have taught you. Paths I could have smoothed
under your feet.”