Whisper (6 page)

*

At the end of the day, Sonya did not kick us out for cheetah fodder like our deal entailed. Instead, she called me into her tent.

“Wouldn't you make faster progress without the tents?” I inquired.

“We get into some pretty toxic air,” she responded. “The tents help filter some of it out. Ashe, at least.”

I stood uncomfortably, not sure what the little conference would hold. But her tent smelled horsey, her saddle and an extra pair of boots stowed in the corner, and that was homey to me.

Not sure what to do with my hands for the exchange – with horses it was more obvious; you just petted them – I tried to shove them in my pockets, but they didn't fit well. Retracting them, I opted to almost clasping them in front of me, playing with my ring finger as a married person might.

“How do you do it?” Sonya wanted to know.

“Do what?”

“Do what indeed, Miss Wilde. The thing you do with the horses.”

“I did tell you I whisper to horses.”

“But how does it work? Is it science? Art?”

“It's hereditary.”

“So you just...crawled around under the horses' feet as a toddler and they bent to your whim?”

“It manifested later on. But it's from my father. And neither science nor art will describe it by themselves.”

“Can it be taught?”

No,
felt like the obvious answer, the one I wanted to give, but in truth, “I've...never tried to teach it.”

“Do you think that you could? Try, that is.”

“To who?”

“I have a number of trainers in my employment. Experts, all of them. Their work produces some good solid horses. But we don't need solid. We need magic.”

“Magic doesn't exist,” I said, but really it was only an attempt to lower expectation, to stay in control of the situation. For I knew what it felt like to harness a thousand pounds of wild muscle, to feel sweat-foamed mane in my face like the spray of the ocean, to outrun the wind and shake the earth to its bones as surely as any quake with the very hooves beneath me. I knew what it was like to feel coarse wild-mustang coats turn to silk beneath my stroking hands, to dance among hooves that could kill wolves, to breathe my carnivore breath into nostrils that channeled wind and freedom and see the eyes of these beasts of prey soften to me, open to me. 'Magic' was the only word for it.

“Even still,” Sonya said. “It takes more than good training to prepare ordinary mounts to go up against Gabriel's Demon Horses. No practical training can properly reinforce a horse's mind with the manner of courage that is required to resist turning tail and running in the face of fire-breathing, fanged and clawed, carnivorous kin-like demons. If we could incorporate a method that went, shall we say, more
soul
-deep, our armies might find it in them to aspire to doing more than getting their feet wet in the blood left over from yesterday's slaughter.”

“My bond with horses does not thrive on the terms of duping them into running full-tilt toward their deaths,” I said wryly.

“Duping? Is what you do really so much of a sham?”

“Charming. Whatever.”

“And here I thought you were as
piring
to charm your way into my operation,” Sonya said, a little surprised at my resistance.

I needed to get my story straight. But I couldn't help being conflicted. For survival's sake, I was aspiring to what she suspected, but I was still raw over the incident with Fly. It was inevitable that I resented this operation as much as I saw a place for myself in it.

I ducked my head, not knowing how to smooth the dual-impression I was giving off. A lock of hair slipped from behind my ear and fell in my face, a single branch of willow veil bobbing in the draft of my thoughtful breath.

“It's a hard world right now, Alannis. War is reality. If you don't claim to believe in magic, then good – blood, sweat and tears are the practicality this age calls for. And if you really do subscribe to magic, you will have to stop living in a fantasy sooner or later. Gabriel's armies will trample whatever and whomever they encounter in their trailblazing. They are paving the way for a new empire, not pausing to appreciate the scenery or spare the innocent. And there is nothing beautiful enough in this world to be worth saving. It is to be all new. All his.”

I looked up, my face grave in appreciation for what she was saying. “How bad is it?”

“He has seized the Northwest outright and conquered a good portion of the Midwest.” Unbuttoning the cuff of her sleeve, she rolled it up to reveal a vaccination tattoo of the initials C.O.; the territory that was once called Colorado. Many of the military personnel preferred the initials of the things they were honoring on their skin. Everything was code and abbreviation for them. “According to this, I belong to him,” she said; an indication he had taken the sector of land that used to be her state. “Many of us are branded by land that is now his. Of course, he'll call it something else.”

“Like what?”

“Stupid things. The entire thing, he seems to be calling Reincarnation – a painful play on words pertaining to the way he envisages the nation and his plans for it. Particular states are being deemed things that follow along the same lines. Washington, his home and first seizure, is now called 'Rebirth'. Oregon has become Revival. Nevada: Evolution. Idaho: Resurrection. Montana is 'Redeemed'. California, of course, broke off from the United States entirely in the first quake. What is left of it is being called Reach, or Reach Island. Arizona has become Ripen, and Wyoming he is calling something along the brainless lines of Transmogrification.”

“I guess he ran out of R's,” I said gravely, a sad attempt at humor in the face of such devastating news.

“Unfortunately, that seems to be doing nothing to stop him. He'll be happy to move right along with Transmutation, Distortion, and...Vicissitude.”

“There was Evolution in there anyway,” I pointed out soberly, thinking. What was my role to be in this? Was my lovely Virginia to become Maturation? Augmentation? Some new made-up synonym for what was becoming of our nation that completed Gabriel's continental Frankenstein?

I looked up, meeting her waiting eyes. “What about Jay?” I asked.

“If you can teach horse whispering to the rest of my staff, there's no reason he can't fill another pair of boots for mass-production of these creatures.”

“And if I can't? If it's just me?”

“You said he could make things disappear. Anything,” Sonya reminded me. “Maybe he could try his hand with Gabriel.”

Though she had to be joking, her face was serious. She was offering us a chance – both of us – but as I prepared to accept, I also prepared myself for convincing Jay it was in his best interests to take up a serious hobby as a magician, and the excuses I would have to conjure up to explain why it had suddenly become necessary for him to do so.

Six –

B
y the time we reached the official camp that hosted the East's defensive efforts, we were traveling with a great many horses. Two more raids had waited in the path of the return trip – it made more sense, the Lieutenant said, to travel light as far out as they planned to raid, and only then start recruitment as they worked backwards, so they did not have to worry about driving and feeding and containing extra horses both ways.

Tara's camp had been just inside the ruptured border of what used to be Kentucky, respectively. It was hardcore horse country – or had been – and I was not surprised that two more raids were carried out in this part of the Shardscape. Both of the operations were salvaged-white-picket-fence compounds, with lots of Thoroughbred blood in their ranks. Thoroughbreds – America's racehorses. Tall and hot-headed and bred with the desire to be turned loose. I had my hands full, quickly deemed their keeper.
“Do your thing,”
Sonya had said, and suddenly I had a whole herd of racehorses under my newly-promoted wing.

Camp Safeguard lay in what was left of Missouri. With boundaries so toppled and skewed, it was all the same to me, but it still hit home, imagining. Imagining that this place used to be defined, as my Virginia was defined. That it used to be its own body, before demon seizures had taken over, before disease had scarred it beyond recognition.

Safeguard was encircled by an impressive reconstruction of walls, various towering slabs salvaged from the Shardscape that were pitched upright and reinforced by a lining of tree pillars. Fallen trees that had been hoisted vertically again for the purpose, restored to a partial state of glory. It was dormant glory, but it was at least better than leaving them to rot on the ground, enduring entities of great heights defeated underfoot.

We rode through the gates, our entrance wave-like and lengthy. The camp reverberated with our arrival, drawing onlookers. They appeared used to the procedure, standing with hands resting casually on their hips, merely curious as to the result of the harvest.

At close range, I could see that some of the wall panels were actually asphalt, the interrupted yellow lines of faded paint running up their lengths announcing them as pieces of street. I could even make out potholes, bitten into them. What a world we lived in, I thought, when streets ran straight up into the sky.

The interior of the camp was arranged so that the stables were a round formation in the center and the tents all circled about the edges. Many of the tents were beige or brown or faded green, or camouflage altogether, but some of them were beautiful patchwork masterpieces. I did not get enough of a chance to study them before we were being whisked into the big arena at center, and then it was a sea of horses churning all around me. Finally freed of the constant direction divvied out by the drivers, the horses unleashed themselves to test their new boundaries, prancing about and sniffing the ground and trotting up and down the fence panels. Jay was already on the ground removing Sunny's bridle, and, with a pat and a fond thank-you whispered in Lake's flicking ears, I swung off to let her do her thing with the others.

Sonya showed us to the tack room – more like a tack hut – where Jay stowed Sunny's bridle, and then he was moving on to helping the military men unload the rest of the tack from the pack mules. We hadn't even gotten a proper tour yet and he was already hard at work. I supposed that was good, though, since he needed to secure his services. Perhaps he would do well enough without magic. And really, Jay was one of the best horsemen that I knew. Surely he would have no trouble impressing our new hosts. He may not have whispered to horses, but he could make no secret of communicating well with them. I had seen his handiwork many times. It was beautiful. If anyone could fake horse-whispering, I was sure it was him.

Sonya was caught up momentarily in some piece of return business or other, and I took the opportunity to survey what I could see of the encampment while my companions were occupied. It was dirt and pipe corral and vertical pavement, but really rather colorful with all the varying shades of horses and those patchwork tents. There were flies, of course, but they were green. Iridescent. Probably toxin-tainted. I wondered if their bite was corruptible to the horses in any way.

“Ready for the grand tour?” Sonya inquired at my side.

She led us through the stables first, since that's where we started, showing us where everything belonged and functioned. There were two barns, a number of sheds, and round pens between everything.

“There are a couple makeshift pens at the back of camp as well, behind the tents,” the Lieutenant informed us, and with that our attention was led to the outskirts. “Military personnel fill the boring tents. They're what we came in. If you need one of us in the dead of night, you can be sure to find us in one of them. Lady Alejandra, however – a resident here – has allowed us to expand. She's somewhat of a gypsy, came to us from the Shardscape. Survived there on her own until pitching us a deal. She makes tents – out of salvaged paintings and curtains. You can see her handiwork” - she gestured to some of the patchwork entities as we came upon them - “Quite something.”

“Who are they for?”

“We have a couple refugees on hand. But also, they make it possible for those of us who used to share to split and have some privacy.”

I marveled at the contraptions as we passed, at the overlapping array of artwork that each was. I recognized the works of Thomas Kinkade and Claude Monet, but there were many, many others who had unknowingly contributed to these masterpiece shelters. Sometimes panels of curtain were secured over the tops like pleated hats, and sometimes they were trimmed and put across the entrances like respectable curtains, patterns that contrasted or complimented the kaleidoscope of canvas art. It was a fascinating medium to come out of the rubble.

“This one is vacant,” the Lieutenant pointed out, indicating a shelter that was heavily done in the works of the first artist I had recognized. And to think: I had always fancied I might live in a Thomas Kinkade house. I was charmed.

The charm was dampened, however, as the Lieutenant pointed out another availability to Jay, a few tents down the line, and I inquired after the previous occupants.