Nine White Horses (15 page)

Shams spoke for his sister as for himself. “Why have you
brought us here?”

“Convenience.” Barak’s tail switched a fly from his flank.
His eye on Ghazalah was wickedly bright. “You need not fear a new captivity.
The house is empty; the servants have departed. No one here can be appalled at
our spectacle.”

Shams glanced down at himself and blushed. Ghazalah’s
garments had followed her through her transformations; she gave him her mantle
to wrap himself in. There were advantages, it seemed, in Jinni magic. “O prince
of enchanters,” she said, “you have our profoundest gratitude. And, now that by
your working we are free, our leave to go where you will.”

The Jinni smiled, as human in shape now as she, but no less
wicked of eye. “Why, lady, I have done exactly that. Here is where I will to
be. Have you forgotten the whole of your bargaining?”

She had not. She had hoped that he would.

Males were never idiots when one wanted them to be.

“Bargaining?” growled Shams.

“Bargaining,” said Barak, smiling sweetly. “I agreed to aid
her in her freeing of you. Surely you will grant that I have fulfilled my side
of the bargain. In return . . .”

“I never said that he could have me. I only said that he
could court me.”

Why was she talking to Shams? Barak was laughing. Shams was
struck dumb.

Barak did not remind Shams that he stood here, on feet and
not on paws, because Barak had known the sole and single remedy for his
enchantment. And more than known it: administered it. And thereby spared
Ghazalah the anguish of slaying her brother that he might live again.

“But,” said Shams, “she is mine.”

Mares and women were made to be bought and sold. Ghazalah
knew that. Her temper, unfortunately, did not. “I am my own. I choose for
myself.”

If she had startled Shams, Shams startled both of them. His
eyes lowered. “You are,” he said, subdued. “You’re all new to me. I keep
forgetting.” He paused. “What the Hospitaller said . . . Do you
hate me, Ghazalah? Was it for that, that you never showed me all that you were?”

She snorted. “Hate you? Idiot. For hatred I would never have
faced the Master of Krak. Nor,” she added, eyes sliding sidewise, “made a
bargain with that nape-nipper yonder.”

“Do you want to be free of it?”

She glanced at Barak, who had the grace not to speak. “No,”
she said, and she had said it before she thought. When she did think, she knew
that she meant it. “No, I don’t want to be free of it. It was a fair bargain.
He was only to court me, after all.”

“You know where courting leads,” Shams said darkly.

“Only where the lady wishes,” said Barak.

He meant to guide her if he could. She showed him her teeth,
lest he forget who ruled where mares and stallions met.

He bowed to memory. The flash of his eyes was for what he
hoped would be. “If Allah wills,” he said, “and you, O light of my desire.”

She tensed to shake her head, found that she shrugged instead.
“Maybe,” said Ghazalah.

o0o

Of what followed thereafter, Allah knows best, and Ghazalah
who was a mare before she was a woman. She chose as she willed to choose, and
found thereby both delight and joy, and of peace, little enough. Yet that was
as she willed it. Al-Barak, after all, was a spirit of wind and sky, and a
stallion of his will and choosing, and peace is not a stallion’s virtue.

No more is it a mare’s. They had light and fire, and many a
fine battle, and children that were the wonder of mortals and of Jinn.

As for Shams, whose folly had brought about their meeting,
he had learned to swear no oaths he could not keep. Constancy in love would
never be his nature. Yet good faith he could manage, and did, and when in time
he took wives of beauty and of lineage, he pleased them as well as any man can
please a woman. With that, in the end, even his sister professed herself
content.

Such is the tale that is told in the annals of the wise, of
al-Ghazalah the beautiful, and Shams al-Din, and al-Barak the prince of the Jinn
who dwell under the earth. Praise be to Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate,
to Whom are known all things that were, and all that are, and all that are to be!

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“Right,” says Lachesis. “So where were we?”

“Pigs,” says Circe, who crashed the meeting on a
technicality. “Pork futures. Swine plague in—was it Gondwanaland?”

“Botswana,” says Orgoch, who wants a vacation. “Along with
bubonic plague in Santa Fe, tobacco mosaic in South Carolina, and a plague of
dental plaque in Stockholm. For this particular sub-era.”

In honor of the sub-era, everybody’s in dress-for-success
superwoman mode, in your basic boardroom, with pads and pencils logoed
Futures, Incorporated: Que sera, sera.
They’re also, because this is that kind of continuum, in a cave lit by
flickering lamps, wearing robes and sniffing fumes from the vent in the floor,
and on a withered heath around a cauldron (which gets crowded when they’ve got a
quorum), and in an environmental module jacked into a neural net, not to
mention the completely indescribable not-place in the not-there that makes even
Orgoch—who keeps the minutes—stop and think before she comes up with an
era-reference. Somewhere a long way down the line. She gets a break after that,
and somebody else gets to be Orgoch.

Anyway, they’ve covered Disease and are into Disaster, and
Lachesis is running through the rest of the list. “Right, so,” she says. “Is
that enough trouble for Sarajevo? How about Berlin?”

“We already did Berlin,” says Tyche, also present on a technicality.

In Orgoch’s opinion, since Lachesis put herself in charge,
there are an awful lot of Greek types getting in on technicalities. Or were. Or
will be. Time slips in this continuum. Makes it hard for even a Fate to keep
up. She tends to get things confused herself—runs together Genghis Khan, Gog
and Magog, and George Bush, or thinks about hitting Ur of the Chaldees with a
nice blast of the Black Death.

While Orgoch thinks about rats in Ur, Lachesis makes a note.
“Berlin, normal complement of disasters, check. Who’ll take care of Belfast? It’s
due for another bombing.”

o0o

“No way,” says Mary Ann.

Mary Ann doesn’t know she’s just uttered words that resonate
through the continuum and stop Lachesis cold. Mary Ann thinks she’s riding
Leroy the gift Thoroughbred up in the woods behind the barn, and Leroy wants to
jump a four-foot deadfall. She hauls him back down to a reasonably slow gallop
from a flat run, and swerves him in between the deadfall and a tree. Quite a
bit farther on, he actually slows down.

Mary Ann starts breathing again. She hates it when Leroy
gets it into his head to jump anything and everything that’s even halfway in
his path. Leroy thinks that he was born to leap tall buildings at a single
bound.

As a matter of fact he was, but something happened and that
particular twist of fate got sidetracked, and the essence that should have
headed right at the second star from the left, took a left at the second star
from the right instead and landed at a crossroads in the dark of the moon. A mare
happened to have stopped there after breaking out of her barn, and was going
about having the foal she was six weeks and six days and six hours and six
minutes late with. The essence, being too curious for its own good, got sucked
in. By the time it realized what was happening, it found itself in the body of
a then very gangly, burnt-sugar-colored Thoroughbred with a mark on its
forehead like a five-pointed star.

Now, five years later, having had a completely lackluster
career on the track thanks to his habit of trying to jump out of the gate
before it sprang open, not to mention the time he did a mile and a quarter like
a steeplechase, hurdling every shadow that hit the track, Leroy belongs to Mary
Ann, who thinks he should learn to be a dressage horse. What Leroy is, in fact,
is an Accident of Fate. Which makes him a Nexus, and a Critical Point.

He doesn’t know that. He just wants to jump.

Mary Ann just wants him to learn how to go around a circle
at less than thirty miles per hour, and maybe stop once in a while on command.
Mary Ann really wants a Lipizzaner, but Lipizzaners not being easy to come by, she
takes what she can get. She’s beginning to think that she should have looked this
gift horse in the mouth, or at least in the eye, and pegged him for a
grasshopper in a Thoroughbred suit.

Whatever, she thinks, when he finally comes jolting to a
halt. He snorts and does a little bit of a happy-horse dance—he sees another
deadfall, and it’s even higher than the last one. He’s going to jump this one,
his whole body says, no matter what.

o0o

“—what?” Lachesis looks around. Nobody moves. The
boardroom is looking wan around the edges—there’s a touch of cave wall showing
through, and a suggestion of glasteel dome. The echoes are still ringing. “Who
said that?”

Blank faces. Circe’s suit has a distinctly classical—as
opposed to classic—look. Sleek, well-groomed Third Witch is looking quite a bit
ruffled, as if she’s been standing in the wind.

Orgoch shakes herself out of a dizzy spell. She’s been
seeing things she wasn’t supposed to see for another two sub-eras according to
the agenda. That war on Ceti Five—

“Well,” says Lachesis, straightening her wimple. “Just an
interruption in the flow. We were on the Black Death, weren’t we? Third round,
the score gets better for the human faction. What say we make it worse for
round four? Add a little more pneumonic to the mix?”

o0o

“Not bloody likely,” says Mary Ann, cranking in rein
before Leroy can head for his dream jump. She has no idea she just saved
Belfast from a bomb that would kill twenty and injure thirty-four. Or that,
just now, back a sub-era or three, round four of the Black Death didn’t up the
ante and wipe out most of northern Europe.

She rides Leroy at a walk past the deadfall—he’s sulking,
dragging his feet and making sure he stumbles at least twice as they go around
the obstacle. After that it’s pretty well a clear ride down to the road and
home.

Mary Ann can’t really stay mad at Leroy. She pats his neck
and tells him he’s all right for a Thoroughbred. He hears the “all right” part
and snorts. Sure it’s all right. He didn’t get to jump, did he?

He’ll jump the pasture fence later and head for Mackey’s-down-the-road,
which has a field full of jumps all set up, and usually a pretty white mare
grazing in it. The mare, being a mare, believes in putting geldings in their
place, but Leroy’s not proud. He knows his place as well as her princesshood
does.

o0o

“—and then they end the interregnum on Ceti Five,” says
Lachesis, in the environmental module, linked to the rest of the Fates and
Fortunes through the neural net. “Give the CEOship to Princess Marjo-Sixteen,
send the king into exile, polish it off with a nice short space war.”

Nods around the net. Except for Orgoch, whose headache is
getting worse. She can’t remember the shift from sub-era to sub-era. Weren’t
they doing the Black Death? Or the Early Computer Age? Or are they still in the
Ur-era, and have the mammoths died?

She starts to say something, but gives up. Circe is at it
again. “Men are such pigs. Let’s zap the patriarchy on Gehenna and roust out
the Retro-Feminists.”

o0o

“Oh, no, you won’t,” says Mary Ann. She had a feeling
Leroy would get up to something once she put him out to run off his
frustration. Sure enough, there he is, ready for takeoff over the pasture
fence.

He’s gone before she gets there, with a little flick of his heels.
She says something not very nice and starts trudging. No use running. She knows
where he’ll go.

And to be honest, she doesn’t much mind heading over to
Mackey’s. They’ve got a Lipizzaner. All right, just a mare, and all the books
say the mares aren’t any good, but she looks pretty good to Mary Ann. Mary Ann
thinks the books are just a little bit sexist, you know?

Right, and there’s Leroy in the jumping field, but he’s
barely paused to say a polite horse-hello and get his due squeal-and-strike
from the mare, before heading for the jumps.

“I think he’s trying to tell you something,” says Mackey’s
kid, the one who’s a year behind Mary Ann in school, what’s his name, she can’t
remember.

Doesn’t matter anyway. They lean on the fence and watch
Leroy jump a nice clean round, then go back and do it again, just to show
everybody how he did it.

The mare isn’t paying any attention. She’s got priorities,
and those start with the clover in the south corner.

“I think,” says Mary Ann, “I’ve got the wrong horse. All he
ever wants to do is jump.”

“You don’t jump?” asks Mackey’s kid. Mary Ann hopes he isn’t
sneering, because she’ll pop him one if he is.

“Of course I jump!” she says. “Just not every spare minute.
When he’s not jumping, he’s running his feet off.”

Mackey’s kid looks sympathetic, for a boy-type. “All
Belladonna wants to do is levades. And caprioles. She doesn’t see why she has
to do the other stuff, too.”

“Oh,” says Mary Ann with a bit of a sigh, “but she’s a
Lipizzaner.”

“And your guy’s a Thoroughbred. They run. And jump.”

Mary Ann hates it when people are logical. “I’d rather have
a horse who did levades.”

Mackey’s kid shrugs. “She jumps, too. Just not all the
time.”

o0o

“Time,” says Lachesis, “is getting short. Are we done with
Disaster? Do we add a few, or keep them for the next session?”

“I don’t think…” says Tyche. She’s looking puzzled. “Did we
do the early late empire yet? I can’t recall.”

“Why, of course we—” Third Witch stops. “By Hecate, I can’t
remember, either.”