Lady of Horses (59 page)

This was a much younger man than the Bull, hot-tempered,
lean and quick. He had a flint knife in his hand.

Linden was unarmed. Kestrel caught his eye and tossed his
own knife into the waiting hand. Linden grinned at its balance. It was a fine
knife—Aurochs had made it.

The Red Deer king circled, stepping as light as a stag.
Linden was heavier, slower, and still breathing hard from the earlier fight.
But this circling let him get his breath back. When his rival darted in for a
stab, he was ready, beating the blow aside, thrusting underhand. The Red Deer
king twisted out of reach.

Linden pressed after him. Wise, Kestrel thought. The smaller
man was much faster, but if Linden could catch him, he would fall to greater
weight and strength.

But he was so very fast. The second dart of the knife found
flesh, slashed Linden’s shoulder. The third caught his arm. The fourth he
eluded, but barely: it was aimed at his throat. He was like a lion beset by a
small and determined hound, too slow to turn, to run, to leap. The Red Deer king
was everywhere at once.

Linden stopped in the circle’s center, not far from the
fallen Bull. He was breathing hard, bleeding from numerous small cuts and
slashes. He had never even touched his enemy. He crouched down as he could, and
set himself to parry each thrust as it came. He did not try to strike, simply
to defend.

The Red Deer king laughed in scorn. He made a dance of it,
leaping, whirling, stamping, striking. Linden for his part stood as heavy as a
stone, moving only to protect himself.

Kestrel nodded slowly. A truly wise man would have lured
Linden back around the circle, harrying him until he fell. But the Red Deer
king exerted himself mightily while Linden, for all purposes, rested. And
waited. And watched.

Kestrel’s eye was quick. He saw it as soon as Linden did: a
slight hesitation, the hint of a stumble. The Red Deer king was tiring. Linden
smiled faintly. He did not look a pretty fool then, but a man in his element: a
warrior fighting for his life.

A blow, slipping slightly wild, bounced off his blade and
raked down his arm, aimed for the heart.

He caught the knife-hand in his free hand. At the last
possible instant, he leaned away from the blade that almost—but only almost—had
pierced his breast.

The Red Deer king struggled. But he was tired, and Linden
was strong. Linden pulled him in, clasping him in a bear’s embrace, turning the
knife inexorably, inescapably, toward his rival’s own heart.

The Red Deer king was, after all, a king. He did not beg for
mercy. He met Linden’s eyes as he died, and held them without flinching.

Linden lowered him to the ground beside Cliff Lion’s king.
He closed the wide eyes, arranged the slackened limbs. He straightened slowly.

Dun Cow’s king entered the circle without haste. He had two
spears in his hands. He tossed one. Linden caught it.

This was a great warrior, one of the great ones of the
plains. His name was Spear; and that was his weapon. He balanced it in his hand
as if it had been as light as a stem of grass. Then he began to work his magic
with it: whirling it, spinning it on his palm, letting it dance humming up his
arm and over his shoulders and down to his free hand.

Linden leaned on the spear he had been given and watched.
When Spear balanced the whole length of the weapon on his finger, Linden straightened.
When it came spinning down into Spear’s free hand, Linden was ready. Shaft
smote shaft with a clatter audible even above the watchers’ tumult.

Spear was not to be deceived into flailing at Linden while
Linden rested. He forced the White Stone king to follow him, dance with him,
defend his head and neck and shoulders from the haft and his vitals from the
sharp flint head.

Linden was flagging. He had lost blood; he had taken blows
from the Bull’s fists. Now the spear battered him, blow on blow. There was no
opening, no path to Spear’s body.

As Spear swept his weapon high, Linden swept low. Spear,
braced for a stab to the heart, fell astonished. His spear dropped and spun
away. Linden set spearhead to his throat and smiled.

Spear smiled in return. “The gods favor you,” he said.

“Yes,” said Linden. He drove the spearpoint home.

oOo

Three kings down. Three tribes taken. But there were so
many more. Kestrel regarded them in despair. Linden was no longer the glorious
young warrior he had been so little a while before. He was covered in bruises,
stained with blood both fresh and dried. One eye was swollen shut. His lip was
split.

He grinned nonetheless, and beckoned with hand and spear.
“Come. Come here. I’ll fight the lot of you—I swore it, I’ll do it. Come and
take me!”

Eyes slid. Some of the kings who had pressed so boldly to
the front were nowhere to be seen. Some of the others graciously gave way to
their fellows. Tall Grass, who might have been expected to defend the honor of
the greater tribes, was an old man. He should have given himself to the knife
at the midsummer sacrifice; that he had not spoke ill of his courage.

There were younger kings in plenty, and some cocky enough to
reckon Linden an easy target now that he had exhausted himself in defeating the
greatest warriors of them all. As they jostled among one another, squabbling
over precedence, a new sound brought the rest about.

Kestrel’s knees nearly gave way. At last, but somewhat
sooner than he had dared to hope, the rest of Linden’s warband had come. Men of
Red Deer and Cliff Lion rode with it. The Grey Horse led it, men and bold
bare-breasted women on fine grey horses, armed with their strong bows, driving
back the people who crowded near the circle. No one at all had thought to post
guards at the river. Everyone was here, watching the battle for the kingship.

The shock held them rooted. No one was mounted, no one armed
except the kings. And here was an army in their midst, with strangers at the
head of it, and two foremost who made a striking pair: a black-bearded man and
a golden-braided woman. Sparrow was riding beside them on her moon-white
mare—when had she slipped away from the crowd about the circle?

Kestrel wondered too how many people would recognize Keen.
She was not at all the same woman who had run away from her husband. She rode
as no woman of the People was allowed to do, and she rode armed with a bow,
arrow nocked to string, aimed at the heart of the shaman who stood beside the
Tall Grass king.

Walker, Kestrel would wager, had been advising his ally to
wait Linden out, let the younger kings destroy him, then claim the kingship for
himself. How he would do it without winning it by combat, Kestrel did not know or
much care. Walker would have conceived a way.

Walker seemed not at all dismayed to face a bow in the hands
of his erstwhile wife. He murmured in the old king’s ear. The old king frowned
and seemed to protest, but Walker persisted.

The Tall Grass king spoke then in a voice that wavered
before it steadied. “My people! Seize them.”

No one moved. Linden in the circle, leaning on the spear
with an air of insouciant ease, laughed lightly and said, “You’re forgetting
something, my lord. Until someone proves otherwise, I am the king of kings
here. These are my allies—my kindred and my friends.” He turned his eyes to
them. “You are very welcome, hut you have interrupted our game. Will you
dismount and watch?”

“Not,” said Keen, “while that one lives to poison your
hope.” There could be no doubt as to whom she meant. Her arrow did not waver,
even when her eyes rested briefly on Linden.

“You had better not kill him,” Linden said reasonably. “He’s
a shaman.”

“He is a liar and a stealer of children. He is no more a
true shaman than I am.”

“There now,” said Linden. “That’s not—”

“It is true,” Keen said. “You may go on with your
kingmaking, if that is what it is. But first I will take his life.”

Kestrel believed that she would. But Walker laughed, rich
with scorn. “Fool of a woman! Get off that horse and put down the bow and have
some sense. If you kill me, no one will save you. All the shamans will sing you
to your death.”

“It will be worth it,” she said, clear and cold.

It was Sparrow who said, “Not to us who love you. What of
your son? Who will raise him?”

That stopped Keen. Her arm wavered. Her face went white.
Kestrel saw Walker tense, saw the hand creep under the shaman’s robe.

The width of the circle was between them. It was forbidden
any man to enter it unless he would contest for the kingship. But Walker
reached for a weapon—to kill Keen, to kill Sparrow, to kill both, it did not
matter.

Before Kestrel set foot in the circle and doomed himself,
someone else moved, too swift almost to see.

Walker gasped. His arm dropped limp. His shoulder had grown
a length of carved bone: the haft of a knife. Cloud smiled at him, sweet and
terrible, and balanced a second knife in his hand, twin to the first. That one,
his smile said, would be delighted to pierce Walker’s heart.

Cloud was a king’s heir. He could take a shaman’s life and
be suffered to live.

“Take them!” Walker cried in a voice gone thin with pain.
“Take them as you took the others. You outnumber them, curse you! Swarm over
them and bring them down!”

Some few men moved then, perhaps in fear of a shaman’s
curse. Kestrel saw how one was given pause. He found himself breast to point
with a flint arrowhead.

The archer was a slip of a girl, a curly-headed beauty whose
breasts were just budded. Her smile was as sweetly deadly as Cloud’s.

Others were not so easily halted. They surged toward the
horses.

A piercing cry stopped them short. It was a woman’s keen,
shrill enough to split a man’s skull.

All the kings, the warriors, the strong men of the tribe,
were engulfed in women. Wives and concubines, sisters, daughters, even
captives, surrounded them, impeded them, bound them in slender arms and long
braided hair. The kings were overwhelmed.

Not one of them could move. Kestrel, whom none had touched,
realized with a faint and penetrating shock that his mother stood in front of
him, and his father was beside him. “Don’t tell me you did this,” Kestrel said.

Willow tilted her head toward Sparrow. “No, not I. She found
her way to us while the kings were strutting and flaunting their manly parts.”

“But,” said Kestrel, “in that little time, she could not
possibly have—”

“She is a shaman,” Willow said. She turned away from him,
such a thing as a woman did not do to a man among the People, but Kestrel had
to stop to remember it.

Sparrow was speaking, not loudly but her voice was clear. It
carried remarkably far. “It’s over now. If any king still believes that he can
claim the title from the king of the White Stone People, let him remember that
after he takes the king’s life, he must ride the king’s stallion. That, I
promise you, none but Linden may do. Even he does it only on Horse Goddess’
sufferance.”

“Pay no heed to her!” Walker cried out over the excessive
noise that the woman nearest him was making. Her fiery hair and strident voice
left Kestrel in no doubt as to who she was. Blossom of the Tall Grass had come
to claim her husband.

Her husband struck her aside with his unwounded arm, ignored
her shrieks—which were more of rage than of pain—and lifted his voice in the
full force of which a shaman was capable. “This is a liar, an outcast, a
stealer of kings. Look at her! She profanes the very earth she walks on. She
slew our father, O my people. She cut his throat with her own hand, and took
his head. She destroyed the great shaman, the wisest of us all, Drinks-the-Wind
whom we loved.”

“So she did.”

Kestrel had not seen White Bird come, but she was
unmistakably there, sitting astride the old white mare who must have carried
her across the river. Her hair was loose, streaming down her back. Her garment
was a shaman’s robe, one of her dead husband’s, most likely. In her arms like a
terrible child she carried his head, its long white hair and its white beard
streaming. From either side of the mare’s shoulders hung the others: Ash who
would have been king, and—great shock and no little horror to Kestrel who had,
after all, loved her—Rain the young shaman of the Grey Horse.

They were mighty in death, white and terrible, nor had the
passage of days disfigured them. It was clear to see who they had been and how
they had died: the shamans fearless, in exaltation; the warrior in enormous
surprise.

White Bird rocked her husband’s head and crooned to it under
all their stares. “She did kill you,” she said. “Oh, yes, my lord, she took
your life. You offered it—you gave it into her hands. You commanded her to take
it. Because, my lord, my husband, great shaman of the People, she and only she
could take the power that was in you. No one else had the strength. No one else
was brave enough.”

“The woman is mad,” Walker said. “Remove her.”

She laughed, sweet and high. “Oh, I am mad. Divine madness.
The gods whirl in me, sing to me, promise me . . . oh, wonders!
But no son.” Great grief crossed her face. “No son.” She rocked her husband’s
head even more tenderly than before.

Walker stirred. Perhaps he thought to remove her himself,
cast her from the mare’s back and hand her over to someone suitably strong and
suitably inured to such sights as she was. But he had forgotten, perhaps, the
knife in his shoulder. The movement set him reeling.

“You are no shaman,” White Bird said as in a dream. “You
never were. Look, sister of the Tall Grass, what you married. Is he not
beautiful, for a lie? Is he not wonderful? Is he not a great bull of the inner
room?”

“Bull?” Blossom had picked herself up, nursing a bruised
cheek. Her glare was baleful. “No bull, that. That is an ox, and in shaman’s
clothing, yet. He is no shaman. He has no magic. He has no visions. He has
nothing but a web of lies.”