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‘This makes you bold. You have been a long time at the milking – a morning and an afternoon to bring the milk of ten mares home to your brothers!’
‘My brothers are courting, Aza, and don’t care what I do –’
‘But I do, Nandje’s Daughter – or have you an ambition to be his third son? I saw you by the burial-mound. I saw you and the Red Horse at the burial-mound.’
Aza came nearer, detaching himself from the shadows, a wizened spider of a man hung about with the sharp bills of ravens and the curved beaks and talons of hawks which scratched at and tangled with his strings and necklaces of shell and bone, and with the dried faces of the Plains stoats stitched like battle-trophies to his mantle. A monkey’s skull was fastened in his wild white hair.
‘I saw you astride the Red Horse!’
The shaman leapt forward suddenly and grasped Gry by the arm so that the pail flew from her shoulder and all the milk soared out of it in a great, white arc.
‘More than milk will be spilt,’ said Aza.
Gry did not move. He terrified her, leering in her face with his thin lips and his black and broken teeth. He smelled of corruption and death and his touch was that of a viper, dry and mean. Slowly, he lifted his left hand, waving it as a snake does its head to mesmerise a heath-jack. He held a bridle, she saw and then, in the blinking of an eye and before she could bestir herself or scream, it was tight on her, its straps chafing her cheeks and brow and its bit, which was thick and full of spines, digging into her lips and tongue … she would scream. She tried to open her mouth but the bit, and Aza’s hands on the reins, prevented her; a thick, bubbling sound shook her throat. She thought she would be stifled.
‘You must be shown to the men. You must explain how you bewitched the Horse,’ said the shaman and jerked her forward. Like a stubborn, unbroken horse, she dug her feet into the ground and pulled against the bridle.
‘Proud mare!’ Aza cried. ‘Must I drag you?’
The bit cut into Gry’s tongue and the straps grew tighter; but she did not move, only tried to breathe and struggled to stand her ground. Aza jerked the reins again and raised a hand. There was nothing in it but she felt the sting of an invisible whip. She whimpered and, lowering her head, let the shaman lead her.
They came to Garsting village, Gry and the shaman. Evening had already taken possession of it and dulled the grassy house-mounds and the tracks that wound between them to a uniform leaden hue, the colour of concealment and secrecy. The place was blanketed with the acrid smell of smoke from newly-lit fires and the empty drying-racks looked like skeletons. Aza turned towards the Meeting House, where the men of the village met to hold council and drink and smoke their short clay pipes, and Gry, perforce, turned with him. The shaman ducked into the low entrance-tunnel and dragged her in after him.
When they met at the brook with their washing, or for cheese-making or the berry-picking, the women used to talk about this House of Men. None of them had been in it because none of them was allowed; there were many stories:
‘The puvushi rise up through the floor and dance on the hearth when the men are drunk.’
‘A puvush seduced old Heron, they say!’
‘They keep a spirit-bear, chained up. It tells them who will die and who will go to the Fiery Pit and who to the Palace of Shadows.’
‘Women aren’t allowed there because, once, a girl – Huçul her name was – crept into the House when it was empty and the men out with the Herd. She hid herself behind a vat of kumiz and waited to see what she would see and hear when they returned. Things she would rather not have seen, such as the man from Rudring who had dishonoured her mother. Things she would rather not have heard, such as the name of the man who had killed her father and the name of the bridegroom the men had chosen for her.
‘It was dusty in behind the vat and Huçul sneezed. She was discovered at once and done for, because the men rushed up and caught her. They accused her of wishing to be a man and, setting her on one of the wildest stallions, tied her there. Then they all yelled like demons and let the horse go – they watched him gallop off into the deep Plains.’
‘What happened next?’ Gry had asked that question, while the other women stared at the storyteller and sighed and clucked in sympathy and sorrow.
‘When the Herd was rounded up, next spring, Huçul was still astride the horse, which was madder still and had to be killed. (My Konik loosed the arrow.) The girl was dead and wasted and all her clothing had blown to wisps and rags. Only the ropes held, good as they ever were. The men untied them and coiled them up.
‘Huçul was buried beside the Nargil in puvush-haunted ground, without rites. Don’t walk there at dusk, nor in the early morning! Her fate has made her bitter and she is jealous of young women.’
Aza pulled Gry out of the tunnel and kicked her to make her stand up. The men were in the House. Perhaps Aza had called them together before he captured her. She recognised Battak, Klepper; her brothers; Leal Straightarrow, Oshac.
There was a spirit-bear. Its skin lay on the floor by the fire and Heron, the historian of the Ima, was seated on it.
The House was full of smoke, from the fire and from the pipes of the men who were looking fixedly at her, boring holes in her spirit and consuming her with their eyes.
Heron shifted on the bear’s skin and spoke to Aza.
‘What have you brought us, Shaman? Is it a young mare from the Far Plains? Is it a horse to break?’
‘This?’ answered Aza, leading Gry by the head. ‘What is this? You are right to ask me, Heron. I have brought it here for the men to consider and, when they have considered it and debated its purpose, to decide what shall be done with it. I shall only tell you that it was once a woman of the Ima.’
Gry stared at the double circle of men as she walked and they stared back, each one letting his gaze rest on her feet, her skirts, her milk-drenched back and shoulders, her untidy head with its shameful binding; and her fettered mouth. She would not look down, though Oshac grimaced at her and Battak made the gesture with his left forefinger which meant ‘this woman is not worthy of respect.’ Leal sat next to Battak; at last, she turned her head away. He stood up and she watched him out of the corner of her eye, sidelong. He was a little taller and heavier than the rest, but dressed as were they all in the double apron, soft boots, and belt of silver discs, his dark hair clotted with horse-grease mixed with pine-oil and red ochre. She had liked him for his height. It gave him distinction and made him more like a man of the South and less of a squat Plainsman. He had been very close to her father.
‘Whatever she has done – or is supposed to have done –’ said Leal, glaring angrily at Aza, ‘does not gives you the right to lead her like a slave.’
‘I know what she did: my knowledge gives me every right,’ Aza answered.
‘But let her go – she won’t dare run away. How can she defend her actions if she cannot speak?’
‘For what she has done, there is no defence. But, as you will. Her freedom is over: she can only stand and listen to the debate.’ The shaman pulled the end of the rein and the bridle slipped from Gry’s head and fell into a rope of plaited grass and then into a bunch of hay which scattered on the floor. Aza bent and gathered it up. He dropped it into the fire, and no one moved, or spoke, until it had flared and burned away. Now, it was time for Aza to leave. He must pay his debt to Mother Earth and he bowed swiftly to Heron and was gone. Gry stood alone before the men.
In the silence, Heron drew deeply on his pipe and Leal, without venturing to look again in Gry’s direction, sat down. The smoke from the historian’s pipe drifted towards Gry and she smelled its thick sweetness and breathed it in. Nandje, pulling on his pipe, had once told her where the tobacco came from and now, that name rose to the forefront of her mind: Wathen Fields. But Heron was speaking:
Heron’s Story: How We Began
In the beginning was Sky and Earth, our Father and Mother. Then came the Stars and Water, the birds, fish and animals, the horse and the Red Horse among them. Aagi, the first Man, was born of a chance union between our moist Mother and the Red Horse; and the first woman, who was made to serve and delight Aagi, came afterwards when Earth fell in love with the bright star-warrior, Bail, whose Sword hangs in the sky on clear nights. She was called Hemmel, which means Earth-star; those mushrooms the women gather at the end of summer and cook in milk are also called hemmel because they shine in the dark like stars.
Aagi and Hemmel lived together under the open sky. She bore Ima, and Panch who went away and bred with the forest folk and so come the Southron peoples. Ima met a fair spirit-bear walking by the River Nargil and so came Orso, the same who went to the Altaish where he bred with dwarves and therefore come the Westrons. It is in memory of Orso and his mother than we honour the Bear. Ketch, the brother of Orso, got Lo, and Cabal who made the first Ima house. There are fifty generations between Cabal and Gutta, the grandfather of Nandje, He Who Bestrode the Red Horse, Nandje the son of Nandje, lately Imandi. Nandje the First married Yuega from Sama village and begat the Rider, he who married gentle Lemani of Rudring, the mother of Garron and Kiang and a host of girl-children who died, except for this Gry.
Heron gestured at Gry with the stem of his pipe.
‘This glorious lineage is of no significance,’ he said. ‘Aza has already told us the woman is no longer one of us.’
‘Then you have no right to try her!’ Leal shouted from his seat, so passionately that heads turned in his direction.
‘She was found on our lands and has committed a crime there,’ said Heron.
‘Can you prove it?’ Konik spoke, for the first time.
‘We do not need to prove what the Shaman has declared who sees with the eyes of the night and the wind.’
‘But Aza said we would discuss her!’
‘Discuss? Is she comely, Leal? Would she be a good mother of sons?’
‘I am willing to attempt a proof of that.’
Garron jumped up.
‘I did not hear myself bless your forefathers nor give you leave to court my sister!’
Kiang was half a pace behind his brother. Both men moved from their places and stood on the hearth. They laid their hands on their dagger-hilts and waited for Leal to make the first move, ready to fight without the formality of a challenge or the reason of war. Then all the men were on their feet, shouting and shoving each other, every man of them yelling the name of his champion. Leal! Garron! Some were so excited that they shouted for Kiang, who had lately taken his seat in the Meeting House and was scarcely out of boyhood.
Aza, sitting without in the dark, heard the shouts and smiled to himself. The clouds raced in the sky; there were no stars. All was in turmoil; but let him honour his pledge to the earth and complete the ritual he had begun with the bone horse and the puvush. Swiftly he drew his dagger and drove its point into his arm. The blood came, rapid and hot from the vein. He let it flow until it reached the earth; and let it flow still until there was a wet patch of it beside his knee. The zracne vile overcame him, reached into his hazy mind and set his body on the narrow branch which swings between sky and earth. He swayed giddily there with them, looking down on Garsting and seeing the creatures which, though they walk by night, men ignore: the cockroach and the louse, the green slug and the snail which is the puvush’s horse, and countless spiders weaving their webs of guile. And while Aza was between heaven and earth, the zracne vile played with his thoughts, tossing them like coloured balls through the air.
At last, the shaman became so light and insubstantial that he floated from the spirit’s airy realm and was wafted down to earth, where he lay exhausted in the dirt. He rolled over, and sat up; he wiped his brow. The night heaved and swam about him like the Ocean which, Voag had taught him, lapped at the edge of the world. The angry voices had not ceased. He staggered, half crawling, through the low doorway of the Meeting House and used the lintel to pull himself upright.
They did not see him, full of their manhood and turmoil. The girl stood silent in the midst of their tumult, exactly where he had left her. Rage possessed Aza, empowered by his blood-sacrifice, a cold and holy rage which differed from the anger of the Ima as does a lawful killing from murder. He pushed his way through the throng, his mantle with its stoats’ heads flying and his strings of corpse-gleanings singing the chorus of Retribution, and pulled a burning brand from the fire. Flourishing it, he drove the men back to their seats, a hyena before a herd of cattle. He forced Heron to crouch in a corner and stood on the bear’s skin himself, his flaming torch throwing his spidery shadow across the roof.
The shaman spoke scornfully.
‘It is the usual thing for a herd led by a mare to be strayed and destroyed. She has you all there, beneath her little thumb, pressed as firmly to the ground with your passion and desires as if you lay with her and the position was reversed! Garron is a man of his word and so is Leal; both of them honourable and strict, master horsemen and great kumiz-drinkers. Garron led the wolf-hunt last winter and it is not so long since Leal went adventuring with the Paladin who came to us out of the storm. You are all horsemen and Ima.
‘Yet –’ Aza paused to whirl his brand about until the sparks flew. ‘And yet, you allow your reason to depart and blow about you as wildly as these fire-imps. You let her unman you, in body as in spirit. You bring yourselves as low as she.
‘Keep away from her, Ima. Draw back your feet, draw in your horns! – unless you wish to see the devils which dwell in the cold regions she is destined for!
‘I will tell you what the woman has done; when you have heard me you will know that there should have been no argument.’
Aza let the branch in his hand burn out and smoulder. The smoke from it gathered in a cloud above him; when he had enough for his purpose, he dropped the wood in the fire.
‘Look, Ima!’ the shaman cried. ‘These are her crimes.’ He blew into the smoke, which swirled about and formed itself into the semblance of Nandje’s burial-mound. The men, staring at it with wide eyes and fear raising the hair on their necks, saw Gry standing there; and saw the woman they knew to be the flesh and blood Gry, Nandje’s daughter, stand amazed in the place she had not moved from, the edge of the hearth. The false Gry crouched down and entered the mound.
‘And more!’ Again, the shaman blew into the smoke which, gathering itself once more into a cloud, grew legs, a head and tail, until it looked like the Red Horse. And, in silent dread, the men of the Ima saw the phantom woman, other-Gry, mount the Horse, sit tall upon his back, sit boldly on him like a man as the Horse moved forward and, passing through the solid wall, left the house.
‘Which is the greater crime?’ said Aza into the chorus of sighs and groans. ‘You cannot tell! You can tell nothing because this woman, this daughter of foxes, this sister of the wolf, has stolen the will of the Ima, the hearts of every man of you. She laughs and throws dirt in your eyes while she pretends to be a dutiful sister and to mourn her father as a good daughter should. Let Aza wipe your faces clean: I will free you from your disgrace and send your dignity back to you. The woman deserves to die.’
‘N-ooo!’ Leal’s shout was a cry of pain. ‘No. Give her to me and I will take her and myself away, out of this place and land, to whatever – long life in exile or sudden death on the way to it – lies before us.’
‘Never!’ said Garron and Kiang together.
‘Hear me!’ cried Battak. ‘This is what we must do, and secretly, without the knowledge of the men of Rudring, Sama and Efstow or of the far villages: let us take this instrument of our humiliation to the river and, when we have shaved off what is left of her hair and stoned her into repentance, drown her there – and let her body be left to float downstream as far as Pargur and beyond, to be a warning to light women and Southron sinners.’
‘It is my opinion,’ Konik said, ‘that she should be fastened to the earth, which she has disgraced, and left to her kin, the wandering wolves and the Wolf Mother.’
Oshac said nothing, but got up from his place and walked slowly to the hearth. He stood close to Gry and began to stroke her face.
‘She has been weeping!’ he said. ‘Perhaps she is sorry.’ He let his hands wander over her breasts. ‘She is a pretty girl, and will soon learn willing. Give her to me for a night and, the next night, she shall be yours, Battak; and then yours, Konik; and yours, Heron, and every man’s, even her brothers’, for they should share in the shame she has brought on the family. After this, she will be fit only to carry refuse and ashes to the midden.’
At this, Garron cried out and Kiang held him still; but Leal, who seemed able to snatch courage from adversity, jumped up and swiftly made his way to the hearth where he fearlessly pushed Aza aside and took hold of Oshac. The older man grunted.
‘You have a bear’s grip,’ he said. ‘Keep it to defend yourself when you are proved wrong.’
Leal did not answer, but flung Oshac aside, so that he lost his footing and fell into the first row of men.
‘Answer me this,’ Leal said. ‘How could Gry ride the Red Horse without his bridle? It is not made of the skin of the great Om Ren, Father of the Forest, for nothing; strong magic is necessary to control the Horse. Aza has scared the wits from you with his illusions. There are other reasons for his ill-use of Garron’s sister and they are all to do with the choosing of the next Imandi. For it is no secret that Aza favours Battak and no one but Aza claims to have seen Gry at the tomb and riding the Horse.’
The shaman laughed, and his necklaces chattered their hideous song. On his back, he carried a talking drum, a flat disc of skin and wood shaped like a silfren shell or the face of the full moon. To subdue Leal, he quickly undid the string which held it there and, grasping the drum by the manikin whose outspread limbs made the frame of it, he stroked the taut skin with his nails.
‘Aza always tell the truth!’ said the drum, ‘Aza is a man of honour!’
Like a man who has watched all night, Leal bent his head and let his body droop; and every man sat motionless and listened to the shaman.
‘This Gry,’ said Aza, making his voice hiss like that of the drum. ‘She! This false seductress has forfeited our protection – has been kneeling at the crooked feet of Asmodeus, kissing them no doubt; basely kissing others of his nethermost parts, for how else but by sorcery could she tame and ride the Horse?’ and the Ima all sighed and nodded their heads in agreement, except for Leal whose head remained bowed.
‘Nandje himself could not master the Horse without the Bridle,’ Oshac said, amid a chorus of agreement, ‘and Leal has condemned the woman out of his own mouth. Stand straight, Brother, and admit your error.’
Leal did not move but only stared at Oshac and Aza as if they, not he, had lost their senses, while the shaman beat his drum and brought the violent sounds of quarrelling from it.
‘Many have spoken,’ he said, ‘but none harshly enough. Your punishments are fit for common criminals, mere transgressors of the Law; for tricksters and adulterers, for thieves and murderers. Have you not heard the wisdom of the ancients? The punishment must fit the crime. This woman has put herself in the place of a man and of her father, the Imandi of the Ima. Let me punish her for you! I will tie her to the strongest of the unbroken stallions and chase him for a day and a night until he tires; then, if the woman is still alive, she shall be put in the mound with her father’s soulless body and the ghouls and corpse-moths which tenant it; and the doorway filled with boulders.’
At this, Leal rose like a hurricane and called out with its voice, ‘Never! Never! Not until the rivers dry up and the stars fall!’ His voice was so strong, so loud that the women of the village stopped whatever they were doing, sewing or cooking, and their children began to wail as Leal’s cry went leaping and echoing over them and across the grassland terrifying small creatures and large until it reached the horses which kept watch at the margins of the Herd. These sentinels pricked up their ears and stood ready to signal flight. The mares heard Leal and, turning to their foals, nuzzled a warning; Summer and the Red Colt heard Leal and the Colt danced in alarm as his complaint came at last to the two black-tipped ears of the Red Horse. The great horse turned his head to hear it better; nodded, almost like a man, that long, sagacious head; and cantered forward to join his sentinels.
Then Leal, on the hearth of the Meeting House, called for compassion and justice for Gry and on his friends for aid and support. Seventeen men joined him there; the rest swore to follow Battak, all but Garron and Kiang who were left like abandoned princes between two armies. Each faction began to shout for its leader and Gry, lost in the noise, opened her bruised, sore mouth at last and spoke.
‘Nandje came to me,’ she said. ‘My father told me I might look on his body because his soul was on its way to the Palace of Shadows. He did not chide me for my friendship with the Horse.’
Her voice was so low and full of fear that none but her brothers understood her, and they could not believe their ears. Nor did Gry dare repeat the words which had floated into her head as she and the Horse made ready to leave the mound: ‘You are the Rider.’
Heron rounded on her, out of the throng. The rest, in their growing quarrel, had forgotten her, the source of it. The historian, by contrast, had become civil. Though he dominated her, leaning his bulky body too close to her and touching her indelicately with his eyes and thoughts, his voice was gentle and persuasive.
‘Not one of them is fit to choose the new Imandi,’ he said. ‘I must put you in a place of safety and then, by our fathers! we shall discover what your fate is to be.’ He took her arm and led her from the House and across the empty ground in the centre of the village where the communal hearth, which was used on feast days and for cooking the horsemeat at slaughtering-season, was deserted and cold, another testament to her alienation. She thought of escape, of flight; but her soul was terrified and had curled itself up like an unborn babe and retreated so far into her body that she could not tell where it was; she was nesh, her limbs addled as if she had a fever; and this weakness, she thought, was the shaman’s doing.
Heron, not unkindly, pushed her into the low mound where the dried meat was stored; and came in after her.
‘You won’t be frightened in the storehouse,’ he said. ‘The children play here and lovers, too, at midsummer.’
Gry felt obscurely grateful. He wasn’t so bad, the old memory-keeper. A man would have been tied outside in the cold and watched from the warm shelter of a house doorway. She knew this and began to think herself lucky, resting at last on the ground. It was dark in the storehouse. She heard Heron rummaging and the sound of a hide being dragged.
‘Here is a skin,’ he said. ‘Put it beneath you, there! Soon, I will bring you water and meat, and tomorrow I will speak for you in the House. I have heard many quarrels and listened to many judgements. It seems to me that your punishment will not be as terrible as that of Huçul.’ Again, she heard the sound of horse-leather being moved: it was Heron unbuckling his belt. Where was he, beside her, before? The sun-disks on the belt jingled. ‘Oshac’s solution is best, for then you will not die or have to leave the Plains, nor exchange them for the fiery wilderness of Hell.’
Gry, in the blackness of her prison, felt his hand on her wrist.
‘I have the captive’s choice,’ she said.
‘Then choose wisely! If I am to speak for you, it would help your case to show how willing you are and how meek. Let an experienced man, weighty but wise in his knowledge, be convinced of your remorse.’
His voice came from the darkness directly in front of her; indeed, she could feel, and smell, his breath, which was coming in short gusts like that of an animal which has been running hard.
‘It is no choice at all.’
The man fell on her in a rush, all at once, pressing her down on the horse-hide. He was heavy and his calloused hands tore at her skirt and rasped her thighs. She did not dare resist, nor want to; everything the future held was dull and mean. Slavery meant being used. He was merely the first. She felt his thing nudge her. She thought it was huge and swollen like a stallion’s; it would hurt. It pushed against her as if it would devour her from the inside out or, at last finding the way, suck out her soul through this, the narrow passage which was meant for her lover and her babies. She tried to think of healing, of wind and water, of small, blue flowers in the grass, of birds in flight; but all she knew was the man, his heaviness, his rank smell. The ground heaved under her: she had heard that was what happened when man entered woman’s gates and Heron, with a horrid, passionate gurgle, crashed across her and was still. Astonished, she lifted one hand to touch his face. Was this all? A short struggle and nothing more, no kind words or sweet sensations. Was this the great and wonderful union that the lays told of, the songs celebrated? Like a dead baby in its grave-cloth, Heron’s head was wrapped in the horse’s hide and one of the long tubes of leather which had once covered its legs was taut about his neck. He did not speak, nor ever speak again.
Gry shivered violently. The quarrel in the Meeting House was still going on. She heard the men shouting insults and challenges, their voices fuelled by kumiz. She lay completely still, under the dead man. Time crawled. Something was sticking to her left hand and she moved it, touched it cautiously with the other. It was the cloth of her skirt and Heron’s blood on it – not her own, the blood of her torn maiden’s veil, nor his – stuff. Those – she felt – were lower down, some on her, some on his cast-aside clothing. This – it felt like blood from a wound. She did not, could not understand, and lay motionless again.
After a time, she convulsed and struggled free, throwing Heron off. The body fell to one side, so much dead meat in the hide wrapping, and she spat on it. She was stiff: cramps in her legs and arms. Eventually she got up, on to her knees, and crawled into the doorway.
The night smelled clean, fresh as flowers; cold as spring water. Out in the open it was spaces, stars, wings, freedom. What was in the dark storehouse behind her she wished to forget, seeing, sensing only this, the changed, new world.
Gry wiped her hands, herself, on a tuft of grass and stood cautiously up. There was no one about, the house-mounds dark, the shouting replaced by drunken laughter all muffled like puvushi chanting underground. The sound was not of this wide, starlit world. She was glad to see the stars and Bail’s keen Sword there pointing towards the inhospitable mountains of the Altaish, a pitiless place of ice and snow. Beyond them, as she knew well, the world ended. Far brighter than any other star shone that marvellous light which the Ima called the Guardian of the Herd. It had appeared not long after the stranger Paladin, the wanderer called Parados, had left the Ima and, to Gry, was like a sign from him that all would and should be well. And perhaps it was truly a sign tonight, for it burned ardently and seemed to wait for her, halfway between the rocky ridges of the Altaish and the ragged skyline of the distant Forest. Or perhaps it was a sign that she must seek and find her father, wherever his grey shadow had fled.
A footfall disturbed the grass; she heard it clearly, and another, two, three and four. Not a man. A horse. The Red Horse paced calmly into the village, came close to her and laid his head on her shoulder. His warm lips caressed her neck; then, drawing slightly back, he pricked his ears as she might raise her eyebrows, to ask a question, and raised his foreleg so that she could mount. She heard the voice in her mind:
‘Come on! It’s time to go.’
His hooves marked the frosty grass, once, twice. Then he was into his stride and they were away, crossing the village grounds, bounding up the first hills. She expected him to carry her into the Herd, but it was nowhere in sight and they were heading into the barren wastelands beyond the pasture-grass. The Swan spread her starry wings above them and Gry bent forward and spread her arms to hold the Horse’s shoulders, for it was bitter cold up there on his back. Someone said, ‘No hair, no coat!’ or perhaps it was a thought. At least his long mane covered up her hands and arms.
