Nine White Horses

Some of us are born with the gene. We’re drawn to horses
from the time we can walk or talk. We dream about them, write about them, try
our best to find ways to be around them.

Sometimes we grow out of it. We discover the opposite sex.
We find other passions, other hobbies and avocations. Maybe we miss the old one
occasionally, but not enough to do anything about it.

And sometimes, either it never stops, or if there is a hiatus—for
pursuing our education, for lack of funds, for building a career or a
family—inevitably we find ourselves drawn back to these peculiarly fascinating
animals.

There’s a magic in them. Dogs are beloved companions, cats
are mysterious and obviously divine. Horses are beauty and power, and a level
of companionship that may startle those who have never spent time with them.

Horses are deeply important to a large number of human
cultures. Thanks to the horse, humans had the strength and the speed and the reach
of animals much larger than themselves, the ability to travel farther, spread
wider, and wage war more powerfully and efficiently than they could have done
on their own. They could plow more fields more quickly, transport goods and
people in greater quantities over greater distances, and communicate with one
another more rapidly.

There is more to the connection between horses and humans
than pure utility. Horses have minds of their own, and personalities that mesh
remarkably well with those of humans. When humans allow it to happen, and
horses are raised and trained to trust it, there’s a genuine partnership
between the species.

These nine stories range from fantasy to historical to
science fiction and back again. They take place in the modern United States, in
the distant and not quite so distant past, in an imagined future, and even in a
completely imaginary world, Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar (which she generously
shares with her friends, and where real horses as well as her magical
Companions live and thrive). But wherever they are, and whenever they are,
horses are still horses—and people still love them. That, in my mind, is a
universal constant. Or by all means should be.

As the man said, God forbid there be a heaven in which there
are no horses. I would say the same of any world, past or present or to come.

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I.
Horses of Legend
Nine White Horses

For Jonathan

The king’s grief knew no bounds. His nephew whom he loved,
his Paladins, his wise and worldly Archbishop, were dead. Betrayal and treason
had killed them—and the fault, in the end, was entirely his.

He had a kingdom to grow and defend, pagan Saxons raiding
again in the north and east, Rome demanding that he render unto it what was
God’s and a good part of what was his as well, and a pack of obstreperous
nobles baying so loud he could barely hear himself think. He sat in his camp
outside of Narbonne, which was not his ally nor exactly his enemy, and found in
himself no desire to move. He could not even weep. He had shed all the tears
that were in him.

His cooks tried to tempt him with fine meats and local
delicacies. He had no appetite for any of them. His mayor of the palace brought
him accounts to figure and decisions to make. He turned his face away. He was
empty; a hollow king. He was not sure that he would ever be full of either life
or joy again.

In the morning—it might have been the third day in that
place, or the fifth; it did not matter—he thought he might shut himself in his
tent and simply not come out again. But the wind was blowing off the sea,
buffeting the walls; each gust smote harder than the last. Even in his state of
dire accidia, he observed that the rear wall was close to slipping its
moorings.

He watched as the pegs worked their way loose, dazzling him
with glimpses of merciless sunlight—for the storm was all wind; the sky was
bitterly, brilliantly clear. The wall tore free and boomed like a sail, with a
hapless page clinging to one corner.

Other tents within the camp had given away altogether and
gone flying inland, giving him a clear view all the way to the horselines.
Those were in less disarray than he might expect: his master of horse was good
at what he did.

Amid the tossing manes and scrambling horseboys, Carl’s eye
found the one who had, one way and another, come into his heart and refused to
leave. He was a big horse, a fit mount for as big a man as the king, grey as
ash, with a high arched neck and a waterfall of silver-grey mane.

“Tencendur,” Carl said, and even in his grief he smiled.

He could swear the little curling ears pricked, though they
could hardly have caught the sound of his voice through the howl of the wind.
“Tencendur my heart,” he said.

It was no day to be out on a horse—even the best horseman
might struggle to keep his seat—but Carl hated his tent suddenly, hated the
chair he had been sitting in and the tent that was tearing itself apart around
him. He braced himself and forayed out into the gale.

It struck the breath out of him, buffeted his body and
flattened his cheeks to the skull. It was like a gate with half the defenders
of a city on the other side, barricading it against him. But he was stronger,
just.

He could not see where he was going; he had to navigate by
memory and by occasional glances to the side, to straighten his path if it
started to wander. The wind blew the smell of the horses toward him. Then he
was among them, and the gale was somewhat less in the shelter of their bodies.

The wiser among them had turned tail to the wind and dropped
their heads and resolved to endure. The younger and the more foolish started
and skittered and deafened each other with the explosive snorts of alarm, but
hours of wind had taken the edge off all but the worst.

He made his way to Tencendur’s place in the line. Someone
was there with the stallion, a wild-haired boy in a rough shirt and bare feet.
The feet were filthy, but something about them made Carl pause.

It was not that they were particularly small, but they were
narrow, and they lacked the calluses that distinguished the habitually
barefoot. These feet were accustomed to be shod, but not for a while, from the
look: they were scratched and bruised as well as thick with dirt.

The boy was doing something with Tencendur’s tether:
securing it, one would think. Except that, like the feet, something was not
right there, either.

Just as Carl hurled himself against the wind, the boy tugged
the tether free and clambered onto the stallion’s back.

And Tencendur allowed it. All too well the king knew how
little tolerant he was of strangers on his back. He would not suffer to be
ridden without a saddle at all, and even Carl, who was by no means an ill
horseman, had eaten a fair few mouthfuls of dirt in persuading the horse to
accept him.

Tencendur bore this ragged scrap of a child as if he had
been the most docile of plow horses, and obeyed him without so much as the
slant of an ear: sat down on his haunches, wheeled and sprang full into the
gale.

o0o

The boy was a witch, there was no other explanation. By
the time a party had scrambled together and mounted for pursuit, he was long
gone, and the king’s best-loved charger with him.

They knew where he had gone. He had galloped straight toward
Narbonne. And that, in the king’s mind, shifted the city perceptibly away from
friendship and into hostility.

Carl had not survived so long in this world of strife by
allowing his temper to overcome his good sense. But he was angry, and when he
was angry, people walked very, very softly and hoped to keep their heads.

o0o

Aymery the page heard them talking under the somewhat
diminished roar of the wind: king and commanders arguing over the taking of
Narbonne. Some said it was a waste, that they should leave this place and go
back to Italy, go back to Francia, go back to Germania—go anywhere but here.
Others were all hot for a fight, to wipe away the shame and the folly of
Roncesvalles.

It was a good thing Aymery was only a page and not a
general, or he would have had plenty to say to that. He had lost father and
brothers and cousins in those mountains. He was all alone in this part of the
world.

He had not felt anything since he walked the battlefield,
turning over the bodies and naming those he knew. His father had been in six
pieces. Six. He had counted. He still counted them every night in his dreams.

If they went back to Francia, he would have to face his
mother and tell her what he had seen. His mother was a daughter of the old
blood; she bent her knee to the new religion and said the words that were safe
to say, but he knew to whom she prayed in the sanctuary of her own house. She
could curse, too, with an aim as sure as a Saracen archer’s.

If she cursed him, he would bow his head and endure it. If
she cursed the king…that was something he thought about often, in these long
useless days outside of Narbonne.

Now the king’s horse was stolen. Horse of ash, whose name
meant Strife—Carl had won him in a battle, speared his rider through the heart
and hurled the body into a ford.

The horse had not taken kindly to being conquered. He had
flung the king off when he tried to mount, and forced him to make do with
another horse for the rest of that battle. But the king loved him, had loved
him from the moment he crashed to the ground and saw those deadly hooves rise
up and over him and forbear to trample him. He had forbidden his Companions to
punish the horse, and commanded them to capture him and take him back to the
camp.

He had persevered until the beast let him stay in the
saddle. “And I’m much the better horseman for it,” he had said to Aymery, who
happened to be at hand on the day he managed the whole of a ride without being
pitched off.

Love was strange. Aymery did not love the horse, and he was
not sure about the king. But he was doing nothing of any great use here, and he
had grown up in the woods of old Armorica. He knew how to hunt. What he hunted,
he always found.

It was a gift. People said he got it from his mother, along
with his small stature and his nut-brown skin and his thick black hair. In
Spain he had as often as not been taken for a Moor. In these parts he could
pass for a child of the old Romans, or of older people still—and that was true
enough in its way.

While the king and his council went on with their arguing,
Aymery put on his plainest clothes and hid his knife under his tunic and
slipped out into the wind. It was little more than a brisk breeze now, though
still strong enough to make the banners flap and strain.

The king’s tent was a tattered remnant; he had had to set up
housekeeping in a relic of one of the Spanish battles, a captured Saracen
emir’s pavilion, all silks and tassels and bejeweled carpets. Aymery’s feet had
grown unreasonably fond of those carpets. It was hard to forsake them for sere
summer grass and bare dusty earth.

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