Lady of Horses (14 page)

Sparrow could not tell even now what her father had thought
of that. He wore his face as a mask at the best of times, and veiled his
thoughts behind his heavy eyelids. He seemed to accept this usurpation of his
authority.

Maybe the shaman, like the king, grew old. Maybe Walker had
meddled somehow with his spirit. Dreams and true visions were not all a shaman
knew. He learned the ways of magic, too, spells and poisons that needed little
enough power for the working. Even as a child, Walker had sought out the
wisewomen and the healers and the priests, flattering them till they told him
their secrets: herbs and potions, workings and wishings both well and ill.
Whatever he lacked as a true shaman, as a witch he was greatly gifted.

Sparrow did not like where that thought led her. She would
have been glad of the mare’s warm strength, but if she left the hollow in which
she hid, the priests would see her. A woman in the herds now of all times would
not be taken back to the camp for judgment. She would be cut down where she
stood, for sacrilege.

And that was maddening. A woman could know what the mares
knew, that the herds would move soon—perhaps as early as daybreak. The mare had
called the new king to her to seal a pact of sorts, to bind him and command him.
Already as she tormented him with his own exhaustion, the elder mares had begun
to call their children together. The eldest of the grey herd, who would lead,
grazed placidly beside her sleeping foal, but Sparrow could see the purpose
growing in her. Her grazing had a pattern to it, a slow drift northward.

The mare, having had her fill of vexing the stallion,
dropped her head and began to graze. Unlike the eldest, she cropped the grass
quickly, sharply, with many liftings of the head, and a squeal as one of the
lesser mares wandered too close. Her drifting too was northward, ahead of the
eldest, till she had passed the rest of her herd and taken the place of guard.
Then for a while she seemed to grow calmer, but her grazing was almost fierce,
as if she must eat as much as she could, as quickly as she could, for strength
on the journey.

By then the priests began to see what Sparrow had seen since
before sunup: that the herds had begun, if slowly and subtly, to move. The grey
herd’s drift had borne it through the lesser herds. It was almost in the lead,
and the others beginning, in casual fashion, to take the places they took on
the march from grazing ground to grazing ground.

oOo

Sparrow escaped while the priests were intent on their
discovery, slipping soft and swift through the grass. Not till she was nearly
to the camp did she rise and compose herself and enter as if from the river,
trusting to the confusion of breaking camp to conceal her.

The tumult was worse than usual, what with so many men still
barely able to move, and everyone in such dismay over the old stallion’s fall.
Some of the women were indulging in shrieking and carrying on, which served no
purpose whatever except to win them a beating from the nearest snarling male.

White Bird, of course, carried on in grand and splendid
fashion, secure in the knowledge that her husband was in council with the king,
and no other man would dare touch the elder shaman’s wife. Even Mallard could
not quell her. It seemed some idiot had tried to coax her yet again to accept
her daughter, who was, for her age, quite a pretty thing.

White Bird had come back to herself in most respects, except
for that one. She was still thoroughly convinced that the child was a
changeling, and someone was hiding her son somewhere, keeping him away from
her.

As Sparrow approached her father’s tent, White Bird burst
out of it, half-naked and shrieking. A handful of women ran in pursuit, but
White Bird was very quick on her feet. She was aiming, as far as Sparrow could
see, for the king’s circle. Her white breasts and streaming hair, and her
ear-splitting shriek, cast everyone into confusion. Such of the men as could
bear the sound of her voice stared hungrily at her body.

Sparrow brought her down quite simply, by catching her as
she hurtled past and flinging them both to the ground. White Bird fell beneath
her, the shriek cut off with the air that had abandoned her lungs. Sparrow was
much the smaller in height, but compact and sturdy and stronger than she
looked. White Bird was slender and tall, and like all the favorite wives who
spent their days lying about and cherishing their beauty, had no strength worth
the name.

Before White Bird could find breath to renew her clamor,
Sparrow scrambled up and pulled her to her feet. Nothing happened to hand, to
cover those exuberant breasts. Sparrow set her lips tight and dragged White
Bird back through the briefly silent tents, and flung her through the flap of
the one that belonged to her father. Who caught her, or whether anyone caught
her at all, Sparrow did not care. Something in her had snapped, quite without
warning. “The herds are moving,” she said sharply. “Get ready to break camp.”

People who had never heard her raise her voice
before—perhaps who had never heard her speak at all—gaped at her with the same
astonishment with which they had regarded White Bird. Before she lost patience
and repeated herself, Mallard emerged from the tent and said in her dry calm
voice, “Do as she says.”

“But the men haven’t—the king hasn’t—” Lark began.

Mallard slapped her, abruptly and firmly. She stopped
chattering for sheer white-faced shock. “The camp moves,” said Mallard. “Get to
it.”

The women had never moved camp on their own before, that
Sparrow had heard of. But the horses would leave, whether the People followed
or no. If the king was not quick enough to see that, then let him follow when
he could.

Maybe, if the camp had been in less disarray, more women
than Lark would have protested, and the men would have understood what was
happening. But one of them, staggering out of his wives’ tent to find the camp
breaking about him, bellowed, “You! You women! What are you hanging about for?
The king says break camp. Break camp!”

One male voice invoking the king’s name was all the People
needed. Out of confusion they fell into a sort of order. People remembered
their places and their duties. Some gathered belongings, others gathered and
packed foodstuffs, still others readied the fire-baskets and put out the fires
that had burned since the People made camp in the spring grazing grounds.

Tents began to fall, one by one and then in companies. Men
and boys mustered themselves to gather the herds of cattle; women and girls
brought together the goats. Priests who had roistered in the camp ran to catch
the horse herds, some in as much disorder as White Bird had been in, but with
somewhat less noise.

Sparrow had her place and her duties, packing the women’s
belongings, bringing down the shaman’s tent and unlacing its joined hides and
packing them to fit on the back of an ox. She had done such things since she
was small, season after season in the long rolling of the years.

Her hands moved of themselves, free of her will. That begged
to depart her body altogether and ride the wind toward the herds, and accompany
the mare in spirit as she could not in flesh. But caution, deep ingrained, and
no little portion of fear, kept body and soul together. She wandered far enough
in dream that often she despaired of coming back. She could not let herself do
it in waking. That was a shaman’s trick—and she could not be a shaman.

oOo

When the sun had begun its descent to the western horizon,
the camp was gone and the People departing from it in a long shuffling column.
Behind them lay the charred corpses of the campfires, and trampled earth, and a
thin scatter of refuse. The steppe opened before them. This road they all knew,
all but the babies born in the spring.

The women trudged afoot as they had since the dawn time.
Those whose husbands had rank and wealth enough led oxen burdened down with tents
and belongings. The rest bore their lives on their backs, and often the
youngest child on top, drowsing contentedly as his mother plodded beneath him.

No man walked. They all rode on horses, riding alongside the
column or ranging ahead of it. Those too old or infirm to ride were set on the
backs of gentle geldings, with younger sons or grandsons to lead them. So were
they raised above the lowliness of women and children, and permitted to travel
at ease while the women labored, bound to the earth.

Girls learned early not to lament the unfairness of it.
Sparrow, who had raced the wind on the mare’s back, hated worse than she ever
had, that she must plod in the dust while fools and braggarts of men knew the
freedom of the air.

The herds led. The People followed. And a mare led the
herds: a mare the color of the moon, who answered to no heart but her own, and
to no power but the goddess inside her.

Keen was away from the camp when the stallions fought
their battle. She had roused in the dawn of that strange day with a griping in
her belly and a hammering in her head that told her it was time to go to the
women’s place, the hut of woven reeds where they went during their courses to
purify themselves and to free the men from the pollution of their presence. It
was early, or was it late? She had lost count of the days. Foolish of her who
hoped so for a child, but there was so much else to think of, so many frets and
worries, Walker’s odd moods of late, and her days’ duties.

Walker had not come back from his vigil. Keen was not sorry
therefore to go away, particularly when she found the hut empty and swept, and
no one in it to share her solitude. She was in the mood to be alone just then.

Some women were terribly ill in their courses. Keen never
had been. She seldom needed the herbs that were stored in the hut, or the
potion that soothed those who suffered most terribly. For her these few days in
every moon’s cycle were rather a pleasant pause.

This was not pleasant. By the time she came to the hut she
was bent nearly double, fighting back the bile that rose and threatened to
choke her. She barely had wit for the rites or prayers, even to invoke the
spirit of the place and ask it to look kindly on her in her time of impurity.

She crawled into the herb-scented dimness. The sleeping
place was clean, though the grasses that bedded it were dry and a little dusty.
She lay there, drawn into a knot about the red pain in her middle, and took
what rest she could.

When morning came, her pain had passed from body into heart.
These were not only her courses, after all, that racked her. With the blood
that flowed out of her came life, a tiny thing, barely begun, and yet in its
passing she knew what it had been. She had been carrying a child. And it was
gone.

She did what was necessary. She cleansed herself, drank the
bitter potion, said the words and prayers that were prescribed. She wept, and
not a little. She let the hut conceal her and her grief, which was greater than
ever such a thing deserved. Life was not life till it was born and named and
given to the People. And yet it had been a beginning.

When she came out at last, the People were gone. The place
by the river was empty. All the herds, the tents, the tribe itself, had
departed.

She was not frightened. She knew where they had gone. It was
sudden, but hardly unexpected.

And yet it was rather terrible to be alone, without the camp
to be aware of, the tribe in its place, and everyone as they had been since
they came here in the first of spring. No one had come looking for her or
seemed to notice her absence, though the tent she had shared with Walker was
gone with the rest. He must have taken it, or seen that it was taken.

He had not sent anyone to look for her, not even one of the
children. Had he forgotten her? Or was he so angry to find her gone that he had
not cared what became of her?

She had a few things with her, a little bread, a bit of
cheese, a few strips of dried antelope. The way was clear, even if she had not
known something of tracking. The whole of the People left a broad and
unmistakable track.

She was numb still with the passing of the child that would
have been, remote and somewhat ill. That perhaps shielded her from the shock of
solitude. She went back to take down the hut and to retrieve what was in it,
the herbs and the sacred things. It was nearly sundown when she finished, close
enough to night that she reckoned it best to stay where she was. She took
shelter in the reeds, made herself a bed there, curled and slept as best she
could.

In the morning she set out on the track of the People. There
was little enough to eat except what she had with her; they had stripped the
land in their passing.

She told herself she did not mind. Fasting was not so ill a
thing. It cleared the mind and purified the spirit.

She was almost happy, walking under the vault of heaven,
lonely as the eagle that soared above her. So it must be when one of the
hunters went out by himself. It was—refreshing, yes. In a way, it made the soul
anew.

oOo

For much too long a while Sparrow did not know that Keen
was absent from the People. She had more than enough to occupy her on the
march, and in the evenings, when they made camp, she was much called upon for
this and that. She did notice that Keen’s tent was not in its accustomed place,
but when she had a moment to wonder, or to think that perhaps she should look
to see where it was, the moment passed too quickly. No doubt Keen was keeping
to another part of the march, and camping at night with some friend or kinsman.
People did that on the march from camp to camp. It was not at all uncommon.

Certainly she was not with Walker. He ran with the pack of
the young men these days, with Linden and the rest. It was not obvious; mostly
he seemed to ride by himself. But he was always near Linden, one way and
another. In camp, as she discovered, he had taken to sleeping just beyond the
circle of the young men. There were no women near them, nor might there be:
they were always mounted, and at night they helped to guard the herds.