Lady of Horses (10 page)

Aurochs nodded. His brows had drawn together slightly. He
waited for Wolfcub to go on.

Wolfcub meant to, but he needed to think for a bit, to get
his thoughts in order. His father did not mind. Aurochs had a gift of silence.
He would lie there all night if it suited him, sleep, wake, and keep on waiting
for Wolfcub to say what was troubling him.

In the end he said it baldly, without easing up to it. “It
was the young shaman. Walker. He dared Linden to bring him home a piglet, and
sow’s milk to cook it in. I heard him do it. I was going hunting on my own, but
after that I went with Linden. I didn’t know what I could do, but I wanted to
be there. I suppose the gods were calling me to use my spear against the boar.”

“And that troubles you?”

“No, not that. Walker. He’s a shaman. He must have known
what the boar would do.”

“Any hunter would know that,” Aurochs said. “Have you
considered that the shaman foresaw what you would do, and sent the prince to
lead you on?”

Wolfcub had thought of it. But that had not roused the
quiver in his bones when he saw Walker with Linden. Walker had not been
thinking about Wolfcub at all—Wolfcub was sure of it. “It was Linden he thought
of,” he said. “He wanted Linden to provoke the boar. I think he wanted Linden
dead.”

“Or Linden was meant to kill the boar,” said Aurochs, “and
not you. That could well be.”

Wolfcub shook his head. “That’s not what my bones say. My
bones say the shaman is up to no good.”

“Shamans usually are,” Aurochs said dryly. “That’s what they
do. They brew trouble.”

“Yes,” Wolfcub said. “Yes, that’s what my bones say. What
if—what if he wants Linden dead? Or the king?”

Aurochs seemed not to find that thought disturbing, though
it made Wolfcub’s stomach feel cold and sick. “What, king-killing? What purpose
would that serve?”

“It’s a ninth year,” Wolfcub said. “And it was a hard
winter, and is a dry spring.”

“Not so hard anybody died of it,” said Aurochs, “and not so
dry that we suffer unduly.”

“But it’s a ninth year,” said Wolfcub, “and the king is no
longer young.”

“The king is not old, either, or diminished in strength.”
Aurochs shook his head. “You never liked that young man, even before he was a
shaman. Not that I have any great regard for him, but I doubt he’s strong
enough yet, or bold enough, to try his hand at making and unmaking kings. If
you had said that the old one, old Drinks-the-Wind, had done it . . .
then I might believe. But that boy, for all his pretensions? I don’t think so.
In the next ninth year, or the next, be wary and more than wary—but not in this
one.”

Wolfcub set his lips together. Of course his father must be
right.

And yet his bones said no, and no, and no again. Walker was
very young to be what he was, and he was reckoned extraordinarily gifted. He
might not care that he was too young or too weak to do such things. He had been
working great magics since before he grew his beard.

Aurochs knew that. He was also a man grown, with grown sons.
He could not see that a boy, which was all Walker must be to him, might not
only think of king-killing, he might try to do it.

Sparrow would not be pleased, Wolfcub thought rather
distractedly. But this much he could do for her—and for himself, and for
Linden. He could say, “Maybe that is so. But there are rumblings in the tribe
that my bones don’t like. It is a ninth year. People do strange things in a
ninth year, and so do the gods. Didn’t they raise my spear to kill the boar?
Who knows what they will do next?”

“And you think I can do something about it?”

Wolfcub looked into his father’s face. Aurochs was indulging
him—a rare enough thing that it caught him off guard. But his wits rallied. “I
think a man of sense, a man whom everyone respects, might be useful if
something odd happens.”

“I suppose,” mused Aurochs, “I could hunt closer to the camp
for a while. And visit my wives and the rest of my sons. Maybe make more sons.
Would that content you?”

Wolfcub flushed. “Does it matter what I think?”

“Clearly you seem to think so, since you came so far to ask
me to come back.”

Wolfcub bit his lip. “It was presumptuous. I’m sorry I did
it. Sorry I—”

“Stop that,” Aurochs said mildly, but the words had the
force of a slap. “You never did it before. Mind you don’t do it again. But this
once, I’ll humor you.”

Wolfcub bent his head. He would never tell his father who
had in truth wanted Aurochs to come back. Aurochs might not be angry and he
might not be insulted, but he well might decide to continue his hunt after all.
No man of any standing would do something because a woman wanted it—though if
it was his wife, and she pressed hard enough, he would do it simply to win a little
peace.

Sparrow would have known this when she sent Wolfcub to his
father. Wolfcub sat and watched his father sleep, but the face he saw was quite
different: dark round face with eyes too big for it, fixed on him with fierce
intensity.

He sighed. It was as well, he sometimes thought, that a
woman could not be a shaman—because Sparrow would have made a terribly strong
and dangerous one. Stronger than Walker, even. Maybe stronger than her father.
She had the will for it, and the sheer bloody- mindedness. Though he could not
imagine that she would ever want to kill the king.

No, he thought. That was not so. She might, if she decided
it was right and just, take the king’s life with her own hand. But she would
never dream of killing the king’s son. Not Linden, whom she had followed about
like a forlorn puppy since she was small. Linden was not, that Wolfcub knew,
even aware of Sparrow’s existence, but that had never mattered to Sparrow.
Sparrow was in love with the king’s empty-headed but undeniably pretty son.

And Wolfcub was a fool, very probably, for doing her
bidding. He did not dislike Linden, at all, but the man was by no means worthy
of Sparrow—king’s son or no.

It was an odd world, Wolfcub reflected as he lay by the
dying fire and closed his eyes. He could still see Sparrow’s face. As he gazed
at it, he saw again what he had seen when he left her: the white mare at her
back, glowing like the moon. It meant something, something important. But
before he could grasp it, he had fallen asleep.

The mare was never satisfied. She wanted Sparrow with her
far more often than Sparrow could manage. And it was never safe to be there; if
any of the men caught her among the horses, she would be charged with
profanation.

The mare did not know this, or if she knew, she did not
care. Sparrow was hers. She wanted Sparrow there, with her, on her back or
serving her. She hated it when Sparrow stayed away, as she had to, sometimes for
days. Sparrow began to be afraid that the mare would follow her into the camp,
and horrify everyone by trying to storm her father’s tent and carry her away.
Sometimes Sparrow wished she would do it and get it over. But she never did.

The nights were the best. Sparrow could slip out then,
eluding wakeful children and suspicious wives, and leave the camp, and find the
mare grazing in starlight or moonlight. Horses did not sleep as much as humans
did, by night or by day. The mare was glad to leave her grazing and take
Sparrow on her back and carry her as far as they both had a mind to go.

More than once they wandered almost till morning. Much more
than once, Sparrow slept among the horses, nestled in grass under the stars,
with the mare standing guard over her. She never slept as well as she slept
then, though she had to rise in the dark before dawn, and hasten back to her
father’s tent before anyone knew she was gone.

When she was with the mare, she dreamed strong dreams, and
sometimes terrible; but she never was afraid. The mare stood guard, a white and
shining presence, warding her against the dark. She would wake and find that
the world without was the same as the world within: the vault of stars, the
breathing night, the white mare.

It was harder and harder to go back to the day’s duties, the
women’s pettiness, the men strutting about or lying in their circles, boasting
of the things they had done or meant to do, and fancying themselves lords of
the world. The real world, the world Sparrow longed to live in, had nothing to
do with them at all.

She had always been apart from them, captive’s child that
she was, suffered by her father to live but little regarded past that. Then the
dreams had come, that should have belonged to a shaman. And now she belonged to
the white mare.

She began to think things that shocked her, that should have
been unthinkable. This was not her tribe. These were not her people. Everything
she was, they forbade, because she was a woman. She should go. She should ride
away, one of those long starlit nights, and not come back.

Leave the People? Leave the safety of the tents, the
protection of the tribe, even as little as that had ever profited her? Go out
alone, forever?

What of Keen? What of Wolfcub? What of Linden, who had never
even noticed she was there, but her world was the brighter for that he was in
it? How could she leave them? How could she live all alone in the world? No one
did that and survived.

Even the hunters who went out by themselves always came
back. The exiles, the people sent away, all died within the year. Sometimes the
People found their starved bodies by the track as they traveled from camp to
camp, or hunters came on them far out on the steppe. People were like horses,
like wolves. They lived in packs and herds. They did not live alone.

So then
, the
spirit in her said.
Find a tribe that is
yours. Or make one.

She silenced that dangerous voice, that seductive spirit,
but it pursued her wherever she went. It woke her on the rare nights when she
slept in the camp, or followed her when she went to the mare. It would not let
her be.

oOo

She had no thought for what anyone would think of all
this, till one morning she stumbled out of her father’s tent, barely awake and
still remembering a long ride under the moon. She had been sent to fetch water,
but she had forgotten the waterskins. One of the wives pitched them after her,
shrilling at her to be quick, and adding nastily, “That is, if you can walk,
after all the riding you’ve been doing of nights.”

Sparrow stopped as if she had been struck. She did not even
know who had spoken; it could have been any of the older wives. Someone else
laughed and said, “Whatever she’s been riding, it must be a marvel—the smile on
her face when she comes staggering home . . . ah, to be so young
again!”

Sparrow did her utmost to still her hammering heart, to
overcome the horror that held her rooted. They did not mean horses, or that
kind of riding—or she would have been cast in front of the king and the
priests, and beaten to death for profaning the herds.

They thought she had a lover.

She would have laughed if she had had any breath for it. She
unlocked her stiff fingers, bent and picked up the waterskins, and made her
way, not too awkwardly, down to the river.

oOo

Keen heard what people were saying of Sparrow. At first
she laughed and told them to stop talking nonsense. But they insisted. Even
sensible people, such as Aurochs’ senior wife, declared that it was true. The
shaman’s odd daughter was creeping out at night and running off who knew where,
and coming back late or just before dawn, looking both hollow-eyed and deeply
satisfied. What else could she be doing but trysting with a lover?

Certainly people did such things. Some of the unmarried
women kept whole herds of young men, concealing them all from fathers and
brothers, if never from the women. The young men were not always discreet;
sometimes one would get to boasting, and the wrong people would hear, and the
woman would pay with her freedom or even her life—or if she had an indulgent
father, she would be given to the man who boasted of the conquest, and so end
the scandal.

And yet. . . Sparrow? Keen would never have imagined that
Sparrow would creep away to lie with a lover, unless that lover was Linden. And
Linden, as everyone knew, was dancing the old dance with Greyling’s red-haired
daughter. She was a jealous sort, and wildly beautiful, and had let it be known
that she expected her lover to offer half a dozen horses for her at the next
gathering of tribes, and so make her an honorable wife. She would have flown
into a rage if Linden had been lying with anyone else.

Not Linden, then, unless he was far more circumspect than
Keen would have thought he could be. And not Wolfcub—he was gone on one of his
long and solitary hunts. There was no one else among the young men that Keen
could think of, who might have drawn Sparrow’s eye, or been inclined toward
Sparrow, either.

One of the older men? Maybe; some of them might actually
have eyes to see the beauty in that small dark woman, though Keen rather
doubted it. And if any of them had wanted her, he could simply have asked her
father for her, and had her for but a token price. Drinks-the-Wind was in no
way attached to that one of his daughters.

Maybe Sparrow was going out to sleep under the stars, that
was all, and finding rest by herself that she could not have among her kin.
Sparrow had never been afraid of night spirits or the things that walked in the
dark. Even when she was small, she had said, “The stars watch over me, and
Mother Moon protects me. I’m safe in the night.”

Keen should be content with that. But people were talking,
and Sparrow was taking no notice at all. She had a look about her that warned
Keen not to approach, and certainly not to demand an answer to the riddle. Keen
had learned long ago to heed that look.

Keen had also learned how to circle round it. It was not
easy. Walker came home every night of late, and wanted his dinner and her body.
She was glad to give him both, but would have been content to see him go away
again after, chasing his dreams; but he seemed to have decided that the dreams
would come, or not, whether he lay in his own tent or on a hilltop under the
stars.