Maybe. Something like that, perhaps. I really don’t know. Only that – well, you couldn’t make him. Not from nothing. I don’t think you could even imagine him. He was beyond the reach of a human mind; hell, I was sitting on him, and I couldn’t come near what he was.
Never mind. Call it magic, if that’s easier. Or an expression of the collective subconscious, or an artefact of true England – the idea that underlies this grubby little nation state – or call him any damn thing you like.
Me, I call him Horse.
W
E RAN,
H
ORSE
and I. Well, he ran. I rode, in so far as I sat on his back and he carried me.
Maybe we didn’t even need to run. Maybe he could have fought them off, all those eels, and sent them back to whatever hell they came from. Maybe. He was something older, deeper, better than them – but the good guys don’t always get to win. Not just for being good. And I didn’t think he’d ever been a warhorse.
Neither did he, I guess. At any rate, he seemed happy enough to run. Literally, I think. I think it was what he was made for. Like the wind is happy to blow, the rain to fall. Movement completed him; speed is what he was about. You can write a word, and then you can say it. You can cut a horse into a hillside, and then you can let him run.
I
DIDN’T TURN
him north; I didn’t need to. The landscape tended that way, and so did he. We followed the ridge until it met a river valley, where it turned aside in confusion. Then we followed the river for a while, for a distance, but that all too clearly had its roots in the west, so we left that too. I don’t know if he read my mind or if he followed his instincts or his own inscrutable whim that just happened to chime in with my needs; how would you ever tell?
Now we were working our way more literally across country, against the grain – except that it was the human infrastructure, the grain of industry that lay across our path. The land would still have eased us northward undelayed, but here was a canal that had to be leaped, and here a motorway in a cut too broad for leaping. I think there was a chain-link fence that smoked and snapped at our approach, but we held back from the traffic until a gap opened wide enough that we could canter through unremarked. When you ride a glowing implication of a horse, remarks will be made, unless you’re careful. And here was a railway marshalling yard so broad we had to detour around it, and here an industrial estate where I think even Horse was feeling lost before the cloud cover relented and he could fling his head up to sight the stars and find our route again.
North, and north: he’d have galloped to the Pole Star, if he could only find good footing as he followed the Plough through starfields. Perhaps he could, perhaps I should have given him his head. Or let him take it, rather; or just let him be, just sat him and been carried into wonder.
But – well, I had a mission of my own, and time and ground were sketchy, stretchy concepts in the mind of Horse. That’s pretty much where we were, I figured, in some ancient idea of England and territory, a space-time discontinuum where physics was contingent on something that you couldn’t call history. It predated the coming of people: older than language, older than understanding. I almost felt like I’d committed some form of archaeology, just rousing Horse from his bed. Archaeology without spades.
Archaeology, lèse-majesté, whatever it was, I wasn’t done committing it. We were coming too far, too fast. It was hard to tell exactly how we stood in relation to the world I knew –
at an angle
was the best that I could think of, as if there were one more axis where Horse stood, at right-angles to everything else – but I could still make out landmarks, though they seemed elastic and uncertain. The longer they’d been there, the more clearly they stood out. Birmingham had been only a smear of distorted light, pale and sickly and unclean, but Doncaster Cathedral was a stark clear silhouette. I’d have preferred road-signs, frankly, but you make do with what you have. When you have to.
I would have leaned forward, but I was leaning already; apparently at some point teenage Fay had reasserted herself, so that I was gripping as best I could with thighs and calves and heels, while my arms tried vainly to loop around his neck. Of course she’d tried bareback riding, but never on a horse stripped so utterly bare, naked of reins and bridle and mane too. Of course there’s a thrill in speed and danger, Desi hankered for it, but – oh, yes. By this time Fay and Desi both were just holding on.
Horse wouldn’t let me fall, maybe, but I wasn’t willing to take the chance. Who knew where I might land, or when?
With me leaning forward that way to twine around his neck, with him being made so exactly to my scale, my mouth was right where his ear ought to be if he were a regular horse, if I wanted to say anything that he might choose to listen to.
Hell, I didn’t have anything else.
I said, “Horse?”
I said, “Slow down, Horse, we’re nearly there.”
I said, “Please, Horse. Wouldn’t want to overshoot, and have to double back.”
At first, at the time, when I thought about him, it had been all about eels and getting away. The eels were far behind us now, a world away. Now it was about where we were, and where I wanted to be. Delivering a message. Pony Express.
That’s the thing about people
, I might have said into his open ear-hole.
Give us one thing, we’ll always take something else. Ask for more, reach for better. We’re programmed for disappointment, and we just have to keep snatching till we find it.
Perhaps he knew it already. Perhaps he didn’t care. He wanted rid of me, or he wanted to serve me, or... Who knows? He was an idea expressed as design, expressing itself in dimensions that I couldn’t quite count; I sat at the perfect confluence of intellect and instinct, where –
Oh, hell. I sat on a horse, and he took me where I wanted to go. That’s as much as I can say, and as much as I need to.
T
HE WORLD STEADIED
around us as he slowed. By the time he was trotting, if you want to call it a trot, everything was fixed and focused and certain again. As certain as things get, that is, as certain as you can be in the dark in the shadow of the Overworld.
I was a little surprised to find it was still night – though there was no telling which night it was, tomorrow or yesterday or not. We might have come whenever.
Slower still, and slower. He came to a stand at last, and... simply stood. All the patience of chalk and grass, not moving beneath me, not breathing, not conspicuously alive.
He was waiting – of course, inevitably – for me. The thing was mine to do, and so I did it; I dismounted.
I slid off his back and set my feet to ground, for the first time in how long, I couldn’t say. It only mattered if time were linear, if Oz could have got ahead of me. Sent his minions ahead. But he could only do that if they knew where to come, and they could only learn that by following me. I thought, I hoped.
Thinking and hoping: by and large, they were what got me by. They are what gets us by, all of us, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Thinking and hoping and good manners. I owed him thanks at least, or more than thanks. I laid my hand on his cool shoulder and tried to tell him, but I had no impression that he was listening. In the back of my mind I think I was half expecting him to lie down and absorb himself into hill and turf again, only that I had brought him somewhere alien, inhospitable, unconscionable. Never mind that he’d brought me; that wasn’t how it felt.
We stood in a river valley, which might not have seemed so wrong even a thousand years ago, even five hundred, even three. Now, though? Now it was a wasteland, flat and drear. We stood on broken concrete, rotting tarmac, rubble; if he still leaned at that impossible angle, I thought it was because he was trying to lean away from everything, all at once. It was good perhaps that he didn’t quite have hooves, that he wasn’t quite in actual contact. I thought this land would poison him.
I remembered the Green Man when Asher took him to Hell, poison at the roots. I wanted to shout at Horse, to slap his rump and clap my hands and wave my arms and do whatever I had to, to drive him off; only I didn’t think he’d go, or not for me. Not because of me. I didn’t really think he’d come because of me. It was more complicated than that. Because I wanted to be here, yes, this was the place exactly – but he’d brought me for his own reasons, not for mine, and he’d stay until he was satisfied. Horses are like that, or ancient powers are, and he was both.
Well, then. There wasn’t anything I could do, to or with or for Horse now. It was hard to take my eyes off him, but I was here to do the hard things, so I did.
There was the river, sluggish and foul behind torn and drooping fences, between hard high concrete banks pocked with open dribbling mouths of sewer-crock. I supposed this must once have been an industrial estate. Then it would have been post-industrial, after the businesses all closed or moved away. Now it was not even that much: just an emptiness, a blasted nothing that still oozed corruption.
Except that a mile downstream stood a gasworks, a refinery too big to move, too useful to let die. There were the great bulbous holders that rose and fell as they were full or empty; there beyond were chimneys rising out of an eely writhe of pipes and processes. Each one flared fire at its high mouth like a dragon aiming upward. I never have understood that, why it’s not worthwhile to capture whatever gases they’re burning off, but science is as science does, and it’s nothing to do with me.
Even less to do with Horse. He looked wrong, in that flaring guttering light: as though his own shine were diminished or tainted. I did so want to tell him to go.
But I hardened my heart, as he didn’t have one, and turned my back. This was what I had come for; this was where I needed to be.
I started walking over that ruined pavement, towards the distant chimneys.
He came after me.
I stopped, he stopped. I’m not even sure how I knew that. He didn’t – quite – touch the ground, I wasn’t sure he touched the air itself; he certainly didn’t breathe the stuff, he had no use for it. He made no noise at all. How I could know without looking that he was right there at my back, shadowing my every move – well, I guess you do know when you’re being tailed by one of the monuments of prehistoric England. Sight unseen, you still know it. Presence isn’t only about interrupted light and atmospheric pressure-waves. Horse can eclipse the world and hush the stars in their courses.
I turned and said, “Horse.” I may have said it sternly. “You don’t have to come.” Meaning,
Thank you, you’ve done your bit, go on now, go home. Go and graze somewhere clean, go and chase white mares, go sleep for a thousand years till some stray mortal wanders by with another spill of whisky, go...
He just looked at me. Empty-headed, dumbest of blonds, mute of malice.
He didn’t go.
Emphatically, he didn’t go.
I sighed, and beckoned him forward with a jerk of my head. “Come on, then. Don’t follow me, it’s creepy.”
I don’t suppose anyone had ever called him creepy before, in quite that tone of voice.
I don’t suppose it mattered. I don’t suppose it made the least difference in the world, not to him – but he came up and paced beside me, which made all the difference in the world to me. If a creature of unknown power and enormous impact is going to loom at you, better to have him looming in the corner of your eye, rather than in some indefinable sense you can’t quite get a grip on. That’s unnerving; this was just annoying, and I could scowl at him sideways and grumble as we went. Which did help, actually, because I really wasn’t looking forward to what waited.
W
E CROSSED THAT
dreary plain, and rusting residual fencewire curled and snapped at his approach so that we could just walk straight through. I have no idea how he does that, none.
We crossed a road – empty, utterly – and came to the refinery, where the fence was bright and recent steel. Not a problem. I could have been over it in a moment even without my Aspect – which seemed to have been left behind on that wild ride, or else it was lurking, sulking, outfaced, something: not there, at any rate, not where I had had it wrapped about me the last time I thought about it, and not obviously within reach – but again, I didn’t need to make the effort. He tossed his bare head at it and bolts sprang apart, metal fizzed and crumpled, it might as well have been kitchen foil for all the strength it had.
We stepped delicately through, and here we were.
Left at the gas-holders; second incinerator down. I hadn’t forgotten my directions.
Here I was, at the foot of a hundred-foot chimney and not going to climb it, no.
Not needing to.
I just looked up to where its flare burned and roared against the night. And wondered vaguely about security guards, alarms, whatever – but there didn’t seem to be any, so I took a breath and called out.
Called up.
Nice and simple, the way I’d called to Horse while he still lay in chalk; it seemed to be the mood of the night.
“Hey, Thom. Thomagata! Want to come down and talk to me? It’s important.”