Lady of Horses

by Judith Tarr

• ISBN13: 9780312875725
• ISBN10: 031287572X
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2002-08-17
• Publisher: Forge Books

Summary

Journey back into the deep mists of time, enter the lives of a savage people whose rituals include human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism; a superstitious people who fear the magic of the Shamans who live among them; a patriarchal people who forbid women to be hunters, or go among the horse herds, or become shamans. Enter the frightening, powerful life of Sparrow, the daughter of the tribe's Shaman and a captive woman. She is destined to do all those things, for the Horse Goddess herself has come among the herds of the tribe in the form of a proud mare, and she has chosen Sparrow to be her servant and priestess. Lady of Horses is a passionately romantic book, a historically accurate book, and a wildly adventurous book. It is a love song to the ancient, mysterious bond between women and horses, and, like Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon, takes the reader back to a time of goddess worship and women's power.

Author Biography

Judith Tarr is the author of more than twenty widely praised novels, including The Throne of Isis, White Mare's Daughter, and Queen of Swords, as well as five previous volumes in the Avaryan Chronicles: The Hall of the Mountain King, The Lady of Han-Gilen and A Fall of Princes (collected in one volume as Avaryan Rising), Arrows of the Sun, and Spear of Heaven. A graduate of Yale and Cambridge University, Judith Tarr holds degrees in ancient and medieval history, and breeds Lipizzan horses at Dancing Horse Farm, her home in Vail, Arizona.

Table of Contents

1
 
 
WALKER WAS MAKING magic. It was only a small magic, a matter of fire and breath and a green plover's feather, and yet he set his soul in it, as if it had been a great working before all the tribe.
Keen lay in the tumbled sleeping-furs and watched. He had forgotten her, as he had forgotten everything else but the magic he was making. She did not mind. She had given him the strength to do this thing, whatever it was—she seldom asked. Her body in its deep places, the fire in her spirit, had fed his, till he rose and left her, and went to rouse the fire and work his spell.
Whatever he did, she loved to watch him. Walker was a young man, far too young, some said, for a shaman; and yet he was the prophet of the tribe, the speaker to the gods who rode on the wind, the Walker Between the Worlds. He was beautiful, too, in the way of the People: slender and tall, fair-haired and grey-eyed, his face carved as clean as the edge of a fine flint blade. When the young men danced, he danced in front of them all, and all the women envied Keen, because her husband was both graceful and strong.
Keen hugged herself amid the furs, clasping her arms tight about her breasts and running her hands down her belly. One came to rest there; the other slipped between her legs where she still throbbed gently from their loving. Maybe this time, if the gods were kind—maybe this time they had made a child.
She smiled, thinking of it; letting herself slip into a dream of a bright-haired infant, a son for his father, with Walker's beauty and his grace, and his gift of magic. From the middle of the dream, she almost convinced herself that he would be born; that he would exist. That she could reach in the furs beside her and touch him, and show him what his father did, finishing his spell, letting the feather fall spiraling into the fire, and so vanish in a flare and a brief, pungent stench.
Walker lingered for a while after his spell was done, crouching in the fading firelight. The shadows stroked the long lines of his back; they clasped his lean hard buttocks as, only a little while before, Keen's own hands had done.
When he rose, he took her somewhat by surprise. She lay still. He took no notice of her. He was smiling, a faint, edged smile. Whatever the working had been intended for, it seemed he was satisfied.
She was ready to take him back to bed again, and to do the other thing, too, that he loved to do after his workings as before; but he ignored her. He pulled on the long tunic of pale doeskin that was his right as shaman, and plaited his thick pale-yellow hair, weaving into it another feather of the plover; and then he went out, leaving her all alone in the dimness of the tent, with nothing to keep her company but the dying fire and the lingering stink of burnt feather.
* * *
Sparrow did not see Walker come out of the tent he shared with Keen, but she knew that he was out and about, just as a sparrow knows when the hawk has left his nest. The camp was different when Walker was abroad in it. People walked softer where he was, and watched their tongues. Everyone was afraid of the Walker Between the Worlds.
Sparrow was not afraid of him. But neither did she exert herself to attract his notice. She was on her way to fetch water from the river, a task not particularly urgent but demonstrably useful—not least for that it freed her from her father's tent. The wives were at their feuds again, White Bird taunting the others with her beauty and her wealth and the son who, she was certain, was swelling her belly. The rest, who had given the old man mostly daughters, were inclined to be bitter about it. And when the wives were bitter, the daughters were most likely to suffer.
Sparrow, eldest and least regarded of those daughters, kept her head down and her shoulders bent as she trudged through the camp. Her back was still sore from the blow she had caught before she left the tent, when she strayed unwisely in reach of an angry wife. She would straighten it when she came to the river, down among the reeds where no one could see, or care that he saw. Maybe she would bathe, too. Maybe she would swim. Maybe even she would visit the horses-though that would require great caution and no little store of luck.
She had to be careful while she was still in the camp, not to walk too swift or too light, or look too glad of her errand. People must see nothing but the brown shadow, the shaman's ill-regarded daughter, the little dark changeling among the tall fair tribesmen.
She had almost escaped—was almost free of the camp, and ready to slip away through the reeds and sedges of the river—but she had outwitted herself. She had strayed too close to the camp's edge where Walker's tent was.
Walker did not always see her. Only when he chose to. Only when he had a use for her.
“Sparrow,” he said. His voice was as beautiful as his face, deep and sweet. “Sister. Have you come to visit us, then?”
Sparrow could hardly pretend not to have heard: not with him standing full in front of her, blocking her advance. He was a great deal taller than she, and rather broader. He was, she saw in a glance under her brows, smiling that thin smile of his. People found it terrifying. Sparrow merely glowered at it.
“What, little sister,” Walker said, “no welcome for your brother? Not even a smile?”
“What do you need now?” she asked him—rudely, she knew, but she did not care.
“I could say I only needed your company,” Walker said.
She snorted. “And I need your absence. White Bird thinks she's near her time. I'm to fetch water for the birthing. Or shall I tell her why I've been delayed?”
“White Bird, is it?” Walker said. “Well then, you mustn't keep her waiting. Here, I'll take one of the waterskins. The task will go the quicker if two of us do it.”
Walker had never in his life offered to do anything out of the generosity of his heart—and certainly not the drawing of water, which was the most menial of labors. He needed her, then, and desperately, if he would stoop so far.
People saw him. They could hardly avoid it. They had seen him before, keeping company with his ill-favored sister; it was a kindness, they thought, and a mark of his strong spirit, that he had no shame of her company. They admired him the more and her the less, the more often he did it.
Sparrow had never cared overmuch for what people thought. Since the Grandmother died, nine winters past, she had cared even less. She performed her duties quietly and well, because that was the least troublesome way to do it; then she had the world to herself.
Except, of course, when her brother the shaman vexed her peace. He did not do it often, which was a mercy. Mostly he went his own way, strutting among the men or making a great show of seeking solitude to perform his magics. When he came to her, it was because he needed something. A gift. A thing that he had little or nothing of, and she had altogether too much.
He walked with her down to the river, the image of noble solicitude. But as soon as the reeds had risen to hide them, he turned on the narrow path and stopped her.
She had been expecting that. She stopped somewhat out of his reach, even if he stretched his arms long, and eyed him warily. She was not going to give him anything. Not unless he asked.
Of course he knew that. He hated her for it: she saw how his eyes went narrow and cold. There was no warmth in his voice, either. “You've been dreaming again. I can tell. What is it now?”
Sparrow considered the lie that veils the truth—the lie the Grandmother had lived by. She was living one, too. She had been living it since the third spring after the Grandmother died, when her women's courses had come, and with them the dreams. And other things, things that brought her no pleasure and certainly no peace; but the dreams most of all. Her brother had not been Walker then. He had been Minnow, for the little fish that darts in an eddy of the river. But she had always been Sparrow, and no doubt always would be.
She knew better even then than to trust him. He was a slippery creature, like the little fish of his name. And yet when she woke from the first dream, the dream she knew was truth, he had been there; and in her befuddlement she had seen only the beauty of his face and the clear grey of his eyes, and she had told him what she dreamed. And he had listened to every word of it, intently, for he was their father's pupil, and was to be a shaman when his beard had grown. He had said words that she forgot almost as soon as they were spoken, words that soothed, that bade her rest, be at peace, forget the fear that had flung her into the light of morning.
Then he went away, and when next she heard of him, it was as a wonder and a rarity, a true dreamer, a shaman of power such as the People had seldom seen. But the dream he related to the tribe, the prophecy he spoke in a voice thrumming with power, was her dream. Hers, and never his.
She was still dreaming dreams. And he was still taking them and claiming them as his own. It was just as it had been with the Grandmother and the prince. No one would ever believe that a woman could do what she had done. If she tried to proclaim the truth, people would call it a lie. Then where would she go? What would she do? A woman could not be a shaman. That was the way of the world. That the gods had chosen to give her such gifts and to withhold them from her brother—that was their jest. Of course, her brother declared, she was to give those gifts to him, one by one, as each was given. He was the one who had been meant to receive them. She was but the vessel through which the gods passed them to their rightful master.
Now he demanded yet another vision. If he had a gift, it was to know when she dreamed; but this dream she had no desire to share. It was the dream she had most often. It had been the first, though she had not known it then for what it was, nor had she ever betrayed it to him. It came to her the night the Grandmother died, as a sort of death-vision—and that was what she had thought it was, until the spring, when other dreams began to come.
This dream had no fear in it, and no horror. It was a dream of pure splendor. In it, she stood on the steppe under the moon. And out of the moon came a Mare. It was Mare as the men's stallion was Stallion—greatest of all her kind, glory and goddess. She was as white as the moon, and she shone, leaping down out of the sky. The earth sighed as she touched it. The stars shone brighter in the light of her. She was splendid; she was beautiful beyond words. She was too holy, ever, to give to this man, this liar, her brother.
Therefore she gave him the other dream, the first that she had betrayed to him. “I saw it again,” she said, flat and hard. “The black claw of winter, and the bitter spring. Then the summer of plenty. The bone-thin horses in the blowing snow, and the bleak plain and the dying herds of cattle and goats; and then, as always, the fat herds grazing in a field of flowers.”
Walker hissed between his teeth. She thought for a moment that he would strike her. Sometimes he did, if she did not give him as much as he wanted. But this time he held back the blow. “Is that all? It's useless—worse than useless. I need something better!”
“Then let the gods give it to you,” she said. “I have only this. I never ask for it. It simply comes.”
His hand rose then. She braced against it. But again he did not strike. He turned instead, stiff with disgust, and stalked away.
He was still carrying the second, larger waterskin. She shrugged. It was not water she had come for, not really. She was free of him now, and would be, she could hope, for days yet. Everyone else was safe in the camp, or out hunting, or riding with the herds of horses. She had the river to herself.
* * *
She shook off the oppression of her brother's presence, the shadow that darkened her spirit when he had been at her again, stealing her visions. She was not giving him as many as she had before. If she could help it, she would give him none at all; but he was too determined for that. He needed the visions. He could not be a shaman without them.
And she could not be a shaman with them. She was a woman. She could not be anything, she sometimes thought; but that was foolishness.
For now she was free. She hid the waterskin in the reeds, in a place she had used before, and wandered down the riverbank toward a broad eddy. There, where the bank curved round an islet, was a quiet place, a pool where one could swim, or paddle in the water. The horses came there sometimes to drink, and deer, and once she had seen a bear fishing.
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,” Sparrows 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 other 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.
 
Copyright © 2000 by Judith Tarr

Excerpts

1
 
 
WALKER WAS MAKING magic. It was only a small magic, a matter of fire and breath and a green plover’s feather, and yet he set his soul in it, as if it had been a great working before all the tribe.
Keen lay in the tumbled sleeping-furs and watched. He had forgotten her, as he had forgotten everything else but the magic he was making. She did not mind. She had given him the strength to do this thing, whatever it was—she seldom asked. Her body in its deep places, the fire in her spirit, had fed his, till he rose and left her, and went to rouse the fire and work his spell.
Whatever he did, she loved to watch him. Walker was a young man, far too young, some said, for a shaman; and yet he was the prophet of the tribe, the speaker to the gods who rode on the wind, the Walker Between the Worlds. He was beautiful, too, in the way of the People: slender and tall, fair-haired and grey-eyed, his face carved as clean as the edge of a fine flint blade. When the young men danced, he danced in front of them all, and all the women envied Keen, because her husband was both graceful and strong.
Keen hugged herself amid the furs, clasping her arms tight about her breasts and running her hands down her belly. One came to rest there; the other slipped between her legs where she still throbbed gently from their loving. Maybe this time, if the gods were kind—maybe this time they had made a child.
She smiled, thinking of it; letting herself slip into a dream of a bright-haired infant, a son for his father, with Walker’s beauty and his grace, and his gift of magic. From the middle of the dream, she almost convinced herself that he would be born; that he would exist. That she could reach in the furs beside her and touch him, and show him what his father did, finishing his spell, letting the feather fall spiraling into the fire, and so vanish in a flare and a brief, pungent stench.
Walker lingered for a while after his spell was done, crouching in the fading firelight. The shadows stroked the long lines of his back; they clasped his lean hard buttocks as, only a little while before, Keen’s own hands had done.
When he rose, he took her somewhat by surprise. She lay still. He took no notice of her. He was smiling, a faint, edged smile. Whatever the working had been intended for, it seemed he was satisfied.
She was ready to take him back to bed again, and to do the other thing, too, that he loved to do after his workings as before; but he ignored her. He pulled on the long tunic of pale doeskin that was his right as shaman, and plaited his thick pale-yellow hair, weaving into it another feather of the plover; and then he went out, leaving her all alone in the dimness of the tent, with nothing to keep her company but the dying fire and the lingering stink of burnt feather.
* * *
Sparrow did not see Walker come out of the tent he shared with Keen, but she knew that he was out and about, just as a sparrow knows when the hawk has left his nest. The camp was different when Walker was abroad in it. People walked softer where he was, and watched their tongues. Everyone was afraid of the Walker Between the Worlds.
Sparrow was not afraid of him. But neither did she exert herself to attract his notice. She was on her way to fetch water from the river, a task not particularly urgent but demonstrably useful—not least for that it freed her from her father’s tent. The wives were at their feuds again, White Bird taunting the others with her beauty and her wealth and the son who, she was certain, was swelling her belly. The rest, who had given the old man mostly daughters, were inclined to be bitter about it. And when the wives were bitter, the daughters were most likely to suffer.
Sparrow, eldest and least regarded of those daughters, kept her head down and her shoulders bent as she trudged through the camp. Her back was still sore from the blow she had caught before she left the tent, when she strayed unwisely in reach of an angry wife. She would straighten it when she came to the river, down among the reeds where no one could see, or care that he saw. Maybe she would bathe, too. Maybe she would swim. Maybe even she would visit the horses-though that would require great caution and no little store of luck.
She had to be careful while she was still in the camp, not to walk too swift or too light, or look too glad of her errand. People must see nothing but the brown shadow, the shaman’s ill-regarded daughter, the little dark changeling among the tall fair tribesmen.
She had almost escaped—was almost free of the camp, and ready to slip away through the reeds and sedges of the river—but she had outwitted herself. She had strayed too close to the camp’s edge where Walker’s tent was.
Walker did not always see her. Only when he chose to. Only when he had a use for her.
“Sparrow,” he said. His voice was as beautiful as his face, deep and sweet. “Sister. Have you come to visit us, then?”
Sparrow could hardly pretend not to have heard: not with him standing full in front of her, blocking her advance. He was a great deal taller than she, and rather broader. He was, she saw in a glance under her brows, smiling that thin smile of his. People found it terrifying. Sparrow merely glowered at it.
“What, little sister,” Walker said, “no welcome for your brother? Not even a smile?”
“What do you need now?” she asked him—rudely, she knew, but she did not care.
“I could say I only needed your company,” Walker said.
She snorted. “And I need your absence. White Bird thinks she’s near her time. I’m to fetch water for the birthing. Or shall I tell her why I’ve been delayed?”
“White Bird, is it?” Walker said. “Well then, you mustn’t keep her waiting. Here, I’ll take one of the waterskins. The task will go the quicker if two of us do it.”
Walker had never in his life offered to do anything out of the generosity of his heart—and certainly not the drawing of water, which was the most menial of labors. He needed her, then, and desperately, if he would stoop so far.
People saw him. They could hardly avoid it. They had seen him before, keeping company with his ill-favored sister; it was a kindness, they thought, and a mark of his strong spirit, that he had no shame of her company. They admired him the more and her the less, the more often he did it.
Sparrow had never cared overmuch for what people thought. Since the Grandmother died, nine winters past, she had cared even less. She performed her duties quietly and well, because that was the least troublesome way to do it; then she had the world to herself.
Except, of course, when her brother the shaman vexed her peace. He did not do it often, which was a mercy. Mostly he went his own way, strutting among the men or making a great show of seeking solitude to perform his magics. When he came to her, it was because he needed something. A gift. A thing that he had little or nothing of, and she had altogether too much.
He walked with her down to the river, the image of noble solicitude. But as soon as the reeds had risen to hide them, he turned on the narrow path and stopped her.
She had been expecting that. She stopped somewhat out of his reach, even if he stretched his arms long, and eyed him warily. She was not going to give him anything. Not unless he asked.
Of course he knew that. He hated her for it: she saw how his eyes went narrow and cold. There was no warmth in his voice, either. “You’ve been dreaming again. I can tell. What is it now?”
Sparrow considered the lie that veils the truth—the lie the Grandmother had lived by. She was living one, too. She had been living it since the third spring after the Grandmother died, when her women’s courses had come, and with them the dreams. And other things, things that brought her no pleasure and certainly no peace; but the dreams most of all. Her brother had not been Walker then. He had been Minnow, for the little fish that darts in an eddy of the river. But she had always been Sparrow, and no doubt always would be.
She knew better even then than to trust him. He was a slippery creature, like the little fish of his name. And yet when she woke from the first dream, the dream she knew was truth, he had been there; and in her befuddlement she had seen only the beauty of his face and the clear grey of his eyes, and she had told him what she dreamed. And he had listened to every word of it, intently, for he was their father’s pupil, and was to be a shaman when his beard had grown. He had said words that she forgot almost as soon as they were spoken, words that soothed, that bade her rest, be at peace, forget the fear that had flung her into the light of morning.
Then he went away, and when next she heard of him, it was as a wonder and a rarity, a true dreamer, a shaman of power such as the People had seldom seen. But the dream he related to the tribe, the prophecy he spoke in a voice thrumming with power, was her dream. Hers, and never his.
She was still dreaming dreams. And he was still taking them and claiming them as his own. It was just as it had been with the Grandmother and the prince. No one would ever believe that a woman could do what she had done. If she tried to proclaim the truth, people would call it a lie. Then where would she go? What would she do? A woman could not be a shaman. That was the way of the world. That the gods had chosen to give her such gifts and to withhold them from her brother—that was their jest. Of course, her brother declared, she was to give those gifts to him, one by one, as each was given. He was the one who had been meant to receive them. She was but the vessel through which the gods passed them to their rightful master.
Now he demanded yet another vision. If he had a gift, it was to know when she dreamed; but this dream she had no desire to share. It was the dream she had most often. It had been the first, though she had not known it then for what it was, nor had she ever betrayed it to him. It came to her the night the Grandmother died, as a sort of death-vision—and that was what she had thought it was, until the spring, when other dreams began to come.
This dream had no fear in it, and no horror. It was a dream of pure splendor. In it, she stood on the steppe under the moon. And out of the moon came a Mare. It was Mare as the men’s stallion was Stallion—greatest of all her kind, glory and goddess. She was as white as the moon, and she shone, leaping down out of the sky. The earth sighed as she touched it. The stars shone brighter in the light of her. She was splendid; she was beautiful beyond words. She was too holy, ever, to give to this man, this liar, her brother.
Therefore she gave him the other dream, the first that she had betrayed to him. “I saw it again,” she said, flat and hard. “The black claw of winter, and the bitter spring. Then the summer of plenty. The bone-thin horses in the blowing snow, and the bleak plain and the dying herds of cattle and goats; and then, as always, the fat herds grazing in a field of flowers.”
Walker hissed between his teeth. She thought for a moment that he would strike her. Sometimes he did, if she did not give him as much as he wanted. But this time he held back the blow. “Is that all? It’s useless—worse than useless. I need something better!”
“Then let the gods give it to you,” she said. “I have only this. I never ask for it. It simply comes.”
His hand rose then. She braced against it. But again he did not strike. He turned instead, stiff with disgust, and stalked away.
He was still carrying the second, larger waterskin. She shrugged. It was not water she had come for, not really. She was free of him now, and would be, she could hope, for days yet. Everyone else was safe in the camp, or out hunting, or riding with the herds of horses. She had the river to herself.
* * *
She shook off the oppression of her brother’s presence, the shadow that darkened her spirit when he had been at her again, stealing her visions. She was not giving him as many as she had before. If she could help it, she would give him none at all; but he was too determined for that. He needed the visions. He could not be a shaman without them.
And she could not be a shaman with them. She was a woman. She could not be anything, she sometimes thought; but that was foolishness.
For now she was free. She hid the waterskin in the reeds, in a place she had used before, and wandered down the riverbank toward a broad eddy. There, where the bank curved round an islet, was a quiet place, a pool where one could swim, or paddle in the water. The horses came there sometimes to drink, and deer, and once she had seen a bear fishing.
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,” Sparrows 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 other 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.
 
Copyright © 2000 by Judith Tarr

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Excerpted from Lady of Horses by Judith Tarr
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.