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Authors: Judith Tarr

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BOOK: Lady of Horses
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The People knew about the eddy, but mostly they kept away
from it. A strong spirit lived there, they said. It was sacred, and therefore
frightening. The only spirit Sparrow had ever sensed in that place was a spirit
of peace: the lapping of water, the darting of dragonflies among the reeds.

Today she came there as unwarily as she could come anywhere—and
found others there before her.

She dropped down in the thicket, swallowing a gasp that was
more than half rage. That so took her by surprise that she could not move,
could only lie and stare.

It must have been a dare. The young men were much given to
such. They were there, a whole pack of them, naked and whooping. It was a grand
thing, they were telling one another, to face down the spirit that haunted this
place, and swim in its pool. And frighten away the fish, Sparrow thought nastily,
and drive the deer far away.

The ringleader, as always, was the king’s son. He was not
the tallest, but he was far from the smallest, and at an age when the rest were
as awkward as yearling colts, he carried himself with lightness and grace. Even
in a raw fury, Sparrow could not help but sigh as she watched him. He was
beautiful. His hair was like winter sunlight, pale gleaming gold. His eyes were
the clear blue of the sky in summer. His face . . .

She bit her tongue. That small pain helped her focus; kept
her anger alive. Linden the prince barely knew she existed, nor ever would. She
knew that, and yet she yearned after him. He was more beautiful than her
brother Walker, as beautiful for a man as Keen was for a woman. When they were
younger, Sparrow had believed devoutly that Keen should belong to
Linden—perfect beauty mated to perfect beauty. But when Walker laid the
courting-gifts in front of Keen’s father’s tent, Keen had let herself be given
to Sparrow’s brother.

“They’re both beautiful,” Keen had said when Sparrow taxed
her with the choice. “But I prefer a man with wit as well as beauty. Your
brother’s mind is as marvelous as his face. Whereas Linden . . .”

“But Linden has a heart,” Sparrow said.

Keen shook her head. She would never believe that Walker was
as Sparrow knew him to be: beautiful to look at, ugly beneath. No one believed
it. “Walker has a great heart,” Keen said: “maybe not as warm as some, but he
can be wonderfully gentle, and very kind. He sees beyond his own face. Linden
has no such gift.”

“Walker has a pretty way with words,” Sparrow said; but she
did not say the rest. Keen was not listening. She had wanted Walker since she
was a child, as Sparrow wanted Linden.

But Keen was beautiful, and her father was one of the great
warriors of the People. He accepted a lofty price for his daughter, and
returned it thrice over—as Walker had fully expected. Walker, who had had
little of his own before he took Keen to wife, was now a wealthy man. And, to
be fair, he was still kind to his wife.

Linden would never come asking for Sparrow as Walker had
asked for Keen. Sparrow was both daughter and sister to shamans, but the old
man’s daughters were legion, and he reckoned this one of little account. She
was a captive’s daughter, a little dark bird among the tall fair People. She
had no beauty and little grace. Her father’s wives used her like a servant.
There was nothing about her to draw the eye of a prince as lovely, and as
empty-headed, as Linden.

She knew all that, had always known it, but she could still
dream of lying in those long strong arms, and running her fingers through that
pale-gold hair, and waking after a night’s loving to that fair-skinned,
clean-carved face.

She sighed now as she watched him at play with the rest of
the new-made men. They were wrestling in the shallows. Linden heaved up the
Bullcalf—all the great roaring mass of him—and flung him into the water.

The Bullcalf bellowed. Linden laughed. He was not
particularly broad, but oh, he was strong, and lovely in his strength.

She almost forgot to be angry that they were profaning her
secret place. Then she saw a figure that had been hovering about the edges,
gathering courage, she supposed, to join the others. As if he had made up his
mind at last, he stripped and plunged into the water, swimming as an otter
swims, sleek and swift.

The others paddled gracelessly like dogs—even Linden, though
his awkwardness had a certain beauty. Wolfcub, who on land was a tangle of
knees and elbows, in the water was pure grace. He cut through the yelling crowd
of young men, straight for Linden; tweaked his dangling rod, which Sparrow
reckoned as lovely as the rest of him; and escaped just ahead of the whole pack
of them.

At first Sparrow was too startled to realize what had
happened. One moment the eddy was full of boisterous idiots. The next, they
were all gone, baying after Wolfcub.

She let her breath out slowly. The quiet was deep. Not even
a bird sang. Then, not too far away, one essayed a chirp. Then another. A fish
splashed tentatively. A dragonfly ventured out above the newly stilled water.
The eddy returned, little by little, to itself.

2

“You were mad to do that.”

Wolfcub grinned at Sparrow. She did not need to know how
painful that grin was. One or two of the young men had come close to catching him,
and one had flung a stone that smote his shoulder a shrewd blow. He would be
nursing the bruise for days.

“Of all the ways you could have freed this place of its
invaders, tweaking the prince’s rod was surely—surely—”

Wolfcub enjoyed the spectacle of Sparrow at a loss for
words. “It worked,” he pointed out. “I’ll even live. Linden’s been coveting my
third-best hunting bow for time out of mind. He was happy to take it.”

“Your third . . .” Sparrow glowered at him.
“You didn’t give him that one.”

“It’s pretty,” he said. “It’s carved with a frieze of
leaping deer. It draws easy, too, though it doesn’t shoot particularly far.
Linden is so happy he’s almost forgotten how he won the bow.”

“And he thought it was your best.” Sparrow sighed gustily.
“Someday, wolfling, you’re going to outsmart yourself.”

“You thought I had today.” Wolfcub had been lying on his
stomach in the sand beside the river-eddy, to which the spirit of quiet had
come back.

He rolled carefully onto his back, lacing fingers behind his
head, studying the play of clouds about the sun. If he glanced quickly, he
could see Sparrow without her knowing it.

She was watching the river as he watched the sky. Water was
her element, as the air was his. Her soul ran as deep and quiet as the river.
How deep, no one knew—maybe not even she.

She thought she was ugly. She did not look like the other
women: small, round, dark. Her mother had been a captive of the old people, the
earth-spirits, whom the People had conquered in battle.

She had been a witch, people said. If she had been a man,
she would have been a shaman. The chief of the shamans of the People had taken
her as was only fitting, subdued her and bedded her and got this one odd child
on her. Then she lay down, it was said, and simply died—walked out of the
world, Wolfcub thought, shed her skin like a snake and vanished away among the
spirits.

This daughter whom she had left behind, child of a witch and
a shaman, could have been all that her brother claimed to be. But she chose to
slip like a shadow through the tribe, to be ignored, disregarded, forgotten. It
was her protection, he supposed. It kept people from vexing her—or from
discovering what she was.

She was not beautiful, no. She was a small brown bird of a
woman. Her eyes were as dark as a doe’s, and difficult to meet: she veiled them
with her long black lashes under straight black brows. But when she lifted them
to his, they came near to stopping his heart.

That was not all of her that he saw, either. Her rounded
cheeks. Her firm chin. Her small strong hands. Her breasts, round and sweet,
and her broad hips. Even the turn of her ankle, which for some reason he loved
to see. Maybe only because it was hers.

Sometimes he dreamed of creeping out in the night and laying
the bride-gifts before her father’s door. And when in the morning they all came
out to stare and wonder which of the shaman’s many daughters he had chosen, he
would turn and stretch out his hand and say, “That one.” And everyone would
marvel, and no one would dare to laugh, though he had chosen the least and the
smallest. They would all learn then to see what she was.

But he never did it. He was too young yet. His name was not
made in the world. He needed to be more, to be worthy of her.

He sighed and filled his eyes with sky.

oOo

Sparrow left him drowsing by the eddy, found the waterskin
and filled it, and went back to her father’s tent. Her duties there, the
squabbling wives, slipped over her like water over a stone.

When the sun had set and the men been fed, then the wives,
then the children, Sparrow was free at last to eat her portion. She would have
settled in a corner to do that, except that a flurry of whispers brought her
alert.

The young shaman was coming. People thought he came to see
his father, but that could not be so: his father was gone, being a shaman. But
Sparrow could feel his presence like fire on the skin. Walker would pause, yes,
to pay his respects to his father’s wives, and maybe to speak of visions. But
he had no vision but what Sparrow gave him. He needed one—needed it
desperately.

He was up to something. Sparrow did not want to know what it
was. She slipped away under cover of the women’s uproar—White Bird had decided
that it was time to build the birthing-lodge, and was making a great deal of
noise about it.

Even as Sparrow escaped beneath the back of the tent, she
heard a woman’s voice raised in welcome. Walker had come—and she had eluded him
none too soon. Gods be thanked, the younger women and old Mallard who was a
midwife were departing in a flock, bearing White Bird with them, for she was at
her time. The men knew better than to slow or stop them.

Sparrow made herself a shadow. The camp was still very much
awake, with the sun just set and the stars coming out. Some of the young men
had gathered round the king’s fire, singing vaunts and dancing their prowess.
Linden strutted in the light, brandishing the bow that he had won from Wolfcub.

Wolfcub himself she did not see. He would be wise to lie
low, she thought, after what he had done to the prince.

She slipped from darkness to darkness, skirting circles of
firelight. The camp dogs might have liked to follow her—she could be relied on
for a kind word and sometimes a bit of meat—but she sent them back to their
places. She had little enough to eat tonight, and nothing to share.

She went back to the river, meaning to hide in the reeds,
eat her meager supper, and sleep as she could. But when she had made herself a
lair in the rustling thicket, and eaten the seedcake and the bit of meat that
had been her portion, she found herself wide awake.

She crept out onto the riverbank. The stars were bright
overhead. The moon was rising, huge white full moon.

Sparrow’s breath caught. This—this was—

Moonrise. It led her along the river past the eddy, then
inland to the fields of grass.

She was awake, she was not dreaming. And yet this was like a
dream: vividly, almost painfully clear, and yet oddly remote.

She knew where she was going. To the grass. To the steppe,
and the herds of horses.

oOo

The horses went where they would. The People followed.
That was the way of the world, as it had been since the dawn time.

The herd that she knew best was the smallest. It had come in
a few seasons before, as strays: mares without a stallion, searching for a new
protector. The king of stallions had taken them in, mated with them and made
them his own.

He thought he ruled them. But since they came, they and not
the king led the herds in the great round of the year. They chose the pastures
in each season. They drove off other mares and kept the king for themselves.

The men seemed not to know what the mares had done. That
these strays were different, even the greatest fool could see. They were white
or grey or dappled like the moon. Their foals all seemed ordinary at birth:
black or bay, dun or brown. But as they grew, they paled, dappled, whitened.

Some of the shamans wondered if they might not be the gods’
own. But Sparrow’s father, the great shaman, Drinks-the-Wind, scoffed at such a
thought. “All horses are sacred,” he said. “These are strays, wanderers off the
steppe—odd as to color, but ordinary enough else.”

Drinks-the-Wind was truly a shaman as his son was not, but
in this, Sparrow thought, he had no vision. Maybe because they were mares, he
could not see what they were. The moon shone through them. The night wind sang
in their manes.

There was one in particular. She was young; she had been
born after the herd came to the People—born, in fact, at Sparrow’s feet, on a
night of the full moon, when the feet of gods trod the earth, and their voices
whispered in the heavens. When she was a foal she was black dun—rare enough
among horses, but not unheard of. But as she grew, as with the others, her
color had faded, paling and dappling to silver.

Now, in her fourth summer, she was like the moon at the
full. Other foals of her year had bred and borne foals of their own this
spring, but she had cast off the young stallions who importuned her. Her sire,
who might have driven her off as he had the rest of his daughters, had made no
move against her. She grazed with her mother and her aunts and her sisters who
had come to the herd from elsewhere, ran and played with the foals and the
yearlings, squealed and tormented the lesser stallions.

It was she who always greeted Sparrow’s arrival, lifting her
head and calling as a mare calls to her foal: soft but peremptory. From the
moment of her birth, she had looked to Sparrow, trailed after her when she
walked through the herd, learned from her how frail and yet how strong a human
creature could be.

BOOK: Lady of Horses
11.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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