Nine White Horses (7 page)

She died two days later, early in the morning of a grey
and rainy day. She went in her sleep, Janna told me, and she went without pain.
When I saw her laid out in the casket—and how Celia could think the shield was
gaudy and reckon peach satin and mahogany with brass fittings tasteful, I would
never understand—she was smiling.

The funeral parlor was so full of flowers I could barely
breathe, and so full of people I couldn’t move, though it tended to flow toward
the casket and then away into clumps on the edges. I recognized people from the
barn, wide-eyed, white-faced kids with their parents, older ones alone or with
friends, looking intensely uncomfortable but very determined, and the boarders
in a cluster near the door. They all looked odd and half-complete in suits and
dresses, without horses beside them or peering over their shoulders.

I said a proper few words to Celia, who didn’t seem to
recognize me, and to Aileen, who did. Celia didn’t look as triumphant as I
suspected she felt. Her mother had been such a trial to her for so long, and
now the trial was over. She’d get the property and the estate—she’d have to
share with Aileen, of course, and there’d be bequests, but she’d hardly care
for that. She’d administer it all, if she had anything to say about it.

“She lived a full life,” a woman said behind me in the
syrupy voice some people reserve for funerals. “She died happy. Doesn’t she
look wonderful, Celia?”

There was a knot in my throat, so thick and so solid that I
couldn’t swallow. I said something to somebody—it might have been Janna, who
didn’t look wonderful, either—and got out of there.

o0o

The horses were real. They didn’t make empty noises, or
drown me in flowers. Bali stood still while I cried in his mane, and when I
wrapped my arms around his neck, he wrapped his neck around me.

Finally I pulled back. He had an infection, or something in
the new hay had got to him: his eyes were streaming. So, when I turned around,
were Zan’s. I sniffled hard and got a cloth for them and a tissue for me, and
wiped us all dry. “All right,” I said. “So you’re crying, too. Horses don’t
cry. You’ve got an allergy. What is it, mold in the hay?”

Bali bit me. Not hard enough to do damage, but hard enough
to hurt. I was so shocked that I didn’t even whack his nose; just stood there.

And he shouldered past me. He didn’t have a halter on. I’d
come in to the stall to get him, forgotten the halter on its hook, and started
bawling.

I grabbed for him. He kept on going.

Zan arched his neck, oh so delicately, and bared his long
yellow teeth, and slid the bar on his door.

I lunged. He was out, not moving fast at all, just fast
enough to stay out of my reach.

I snatched halters on the way by. Zan pirouetted in the
aisle and plucked them both out of my hands, and gave me a look that said as
clear as if he’d spoken, “Not those, stupid.” Then he spun again and waited.

I heard Mrs. Tiffney’s voice. I was imagining it, of course.
Watch the horses. Do whatever they ask you
to do.

They certainly weren’t acting like normal stallions on the
loose. Bali was waiting, up past Zan, with his most melting expression. Zan—there
was no other word for it—glared. His opinion of my intelligence, never very
high to begin with, was dropping fast.

And it was dark, but there was a moon, a white half-moon in
a field of stars like the ones in the center of the shield. Which was resting
against the barn wall, just outside the door to the yard. And where the surrey
used to stand was something else.

I told myself it was the moon that made the old-fashioned
black carriage look like something ages older and much smaller, and not black
at all. Not in the least. That was gold, glimmering in the light from the
aisle. And gold on the harness that lay on the ground beside it.

“But,” I said, “I don’t know
how
to yoke up a chariot.”

Zan snorted at me. Bali was kinder. He went up to the pole
that rested on the ground and positioned himself just so, and cocked an ear.
After a minute Zan did the same, but his ears were flat in disgust. If he was
choosing me, whatever that meant, he wasn’t going to make it easy.

The harness wasn’t that hard to figure out, once I’d had a
good look at it. Or as good as moonlight and aislelight would give me. The
yoke, of course, instead of collars. The bridles were familiar enough, and the
reins. I ran those the way they seemed to want to run. The horses were patient,
even Zan.

When they were harnessed, I stood back. I don’t know what I
was thinking. Nothing, by then. Except maybe that this wasn’t happening.

Something in the combination of moonlight and barn light
made the horses shine. Bali, of course, with his silver mane and tail and his
pewter coat. But Zan, too, a light that seemed to grow the longer I stood
there, not silver but gold, lambent in the dark.

“Immortal horses,” I said. “Bright gifts the gods gave to
Peleus, and he to his son, and his son—” I broke off. “But the gods are dead!”

Zan shook his head in the bridle, baring his teeth at me.
Bali watched me quietly. His ear slanted back.
Get in the
chariot
, he
meant. And how I knew that, I didn’t want to know. No more than how I knew to
pick up the shield—heavy as all heaven, but lighter than I’d expected, even so—and
hang it where it best seemed to fit, by the left side of the chariot.

I picked up the reins. They weren’t any different from
driving the surrey, though I was standing up in a vehicle that seemed no
heavier than an eggshell, and no better sprung than one either, for all its
pretty gilding.

I didn’t pretend that I was telling the horses where to go.
They started at a walk, maneuvering carefully out of the yard where I’d seen
Lipizzans, so long ago it seemed now, though it wasn’t even nine months. Hardly
long enough to carry a baby to term.

They took the way I’d driven so often, down the road a bit
and into the woods. The moon didn’t quite reach through the new leaves, but the
horses were shining, silver and red-gold, bright enough to light the woods
around them. The track was clear and smooth. They stretched into a trot.

The wind was soft in my face. It was a warm night, the first
after a week of damp and rain, and everything smelled green, with sweetness
that was apple blossoms, growing stronger as we went on. By the time we came
out into the orchard, my lungs were full of it.

The trees were all in bloom, and the moon made them shine as
bright almost as Bali’s coat. He was cantering now, he and his brother, and the
chariot rocked and rattled. I wrapped the reins around the post that seemed
made for just that, and concentrated on hanging on.

If I’d had any sense at all I would have hauled the horses
down to a walk, turned them around and made them go back home. But all the
strangeness had caught up with me. My head was full of moon and night and apple
blossoms, and old, old stories, and the shield-rim under my left hand and the
chariot’s side under my right, and the horses running ahead of me, the
chestnut, the grey, Xanthos, Balios, who couldn’t be, who couldn’t begin to be,
but who surely were.

And I’d inherited them. I’d had the letter this morning, in
her firm clear hand, with a date on it that made me start: the day after I’d
first seen the shield. The shield was mine, if the horses chose me; and they
were mine, too, and the wherewithal to keep and house them. That was how she
put it.

Tonight, in the way the moon’s light fell, I knew that Janna
had an inheritance, too; that Celia would be very surprised when the will was
read. Oh, she’d have a handsome sum, and she’d grow richer than she’d been to
begin with, once she’d invested it. And Aileen had a sum as large, which she
wouldn’t manage a tenth as well, unless she handed it over to Celia. But the
land was Janna’s, and the barn, and the horses, and the house, and everything
that went with them, except Xanthos and Balios and the shield that a god had
made to protect a legend in battle.

The moon had made a seer of me. I’d wake up in the morning
with a headache and a sour stomach, and maybe a little regret for the dream I’d
lost in waking.

It didn’t feel like a dream, for all its strangeness. The
night air was real, and the branch that whipped my face as the horses turned,
mounting the hill. From the top of it, over the orchard that surrounded it, you
could see for miles, down to the river on one side and over the ridges on the
other, rolling outward in circles, with towns in the hollows, and fields full
of cows, and the Riccis’ vineyard with its rows of vines on poles; and maybe,
through a gap in the last ridge, a glimmer that was the ocean. Here was higher
than the hill Mrs. Tiffney’s house stood on: it lay just below, with the barns
beyond it. In the daytime you could see the rings and the hunt course, and the
riders going through their paces like a dance.

Tonight the orchard was like a field of snow, and the hills
were dark with once in a while a glimmer of light, and where Mrs. Tiffney’s
house stood, a shadow with a light at the top of it. Janna, home where she
belonged, alone in the quiet rooms.

I found I couldn’t care that she might be checking the barn,
and she’d find the lights on and Mrs. Tiffney’s horses missing. Or maybe she
wouldn’t. Maybe it was all dark and quiet, the doors shut, the horses asleep,
everything asleep but me, and the horses who had brought me here.

I got down from the chariot and went to their heads,
smoothing Bali’s forelock, venturing—carefully—to stroke Zan’s neck. He allowed
it. I slid my hand to the poll, round the ear, down past the plate of the
cheek. He didn’t nip or pull away.

I touched the velvet of his nose. He blew into my palm. His
eyes were bright. Immortal eyes.

“How do you stand it?” I asked him. “Bound to mortal flesh
that withers and dies, and you never age a day? How many have you loved, and
however long they lived, in the end, all too soon, they died?”

He didn’t speak. He’d been able to, once. I saw it in his
eyes. Dust and clamor and a terrible roil of war, the charioteer cut down, the
loved one—loved more than the master, for the master owned them, but the
charioteer belonged to them, Patroklos who was never strong enough to fight his
prince’s battle—and the bitterness after, the prince taking vengeance, and the
stallion speaking, foretelling the master’s death.

He’d grieved for the prince, too, and the prince’s son in
his time, and his son’s son, and how it had come to daughters instead of sons—that
he wasn’t telling me. It was enough that it had been.

Bali rested his nose on my shoulder. Zan nipped lightly,
very lightly, at my palm. Claiming me. The wind blew over us. West wind.

I laughed, up there on the hilltop, with the wind in my
hair. Little no-name no-pedigree horses: by west wind out of storm wind, or
maybe she had been a Harpy, like Celia and her sister. I belonged to them now.
And a gaudy great platter that owned me as much as they did.

I’d cry again in a little while. I’d lost a friend; I owed
her grief. But she’d be glad that I could laugh, who’d known exactly what she
was doing when she filled her yard with Lipizzans and lured me in, and snared
me for her stallions.

I leaned on Xanthos’ shoulder, and Balios leaned lightly on
mine. They were shining still, and brighter than the moon, but they were warm
to the touch, real and solid horses. We stood there, the three of us, mortal I
and immortal they, and watched the moon go down.

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In the Name of
Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate!

There was once in the land of Egypt a most wise and learned
wazir, as renowned for his mercy as for his justice, whom even his enemies
honored with the name of incorruptible. Egypt, it was said, was blessed in its
sultan; the sultan was blessed in his wazir; and the wazir was blessed in his
wives and in his servants, and in a son who was the light of his eyes.

This son, the only child of his old age, was much loved and
much indulged, and he was most appealing to look at, a fact of which he was all
too well aware. Between his father’s love and his own great beauty, he had
managed to elude all but the most ineluctable of duties, and even those had not
excessively troubled his peace. For he had a mamluk, a slave taken from among
the most beautiful youths of the Franks and raised in all the ways of the True
Faith, who was his age to a day, and who was closer to him than any brother in
blood. In one respect only did they differ: the mamluk, whose name was Khalid,
was a slave as much of duty as of the wazir’s son. What his master could not or
would not do, he inevitably accomplished, always with competence, and often
with brilliance.

The wazir’s son, it was said, was the most fortunate of men.
His conscience was his slave; when it troubled him, he had but to dismiss it
from his presence.

Aside from his own face, the wazir’s son gave his heart’s
love to three things only: women, song, and the horses his father had bred,
which were the best in all of Egypt. A doe-eyed darling, a new song in a new
mode, a foal begotten of the dawn wind—these were all his desire. For his love
of the last, he had won the name
al-Kehailan,
which signifies the pure strain of the horses of Arabia.

On the day on which al-Kehailan began his twentieth year, he
should have been as joyous as any young man could be who had all the world at
his feet. He rode on a hunt in the wilds outside of Cairo. His companions were
picked men of his father’s own guard, and the fairest youths of the sultan’s court;
and he was the fairest and the most accomplished of them all. He bestrode the
most exquisite of his mares, the Pearl of the East, who had run against the
wind and left it gasping in her dust. His mamluk’s bags were bursting with the
fruits of his archery; his newest slave awaited him in the seclusion of the
harem, a Circassian virgin of surpassing beauty, the enjoyment of whom would
crown his night as the hunt had crowned his day.