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Her mother used to carry her in safety, in front before the saddle, so that she could sit straight and believe she was riding alone, stretch forward and embrace the striding warmth of the mare’s shoulders or, leaning back, nestle into the fur binding of Lemani’s jacket: when they were all young and hopeful, Nandje not yet leader of his people, Lemani a beautiful young woman whose silver and jet jewellery was handed down from the oldest ancestors, perhaps from Hemmel herself; when she had sisters still alive and was herself a child, Garron a little boy, and Kiang an unborn soul in the Palace of Shadows. Those were the days, the Ima at peace with their enemies and with one another, the grass rich, the horses glossy and fat, Nandje himself strong and ardent, but wise. Gry let herself pretend, feeling the white wolf-fur and the cold, hard beads and the sharp-pointed silver stars touch her back. She grew tolerably warm.
The grass flowed like a dark river beneath them, the Horse and herself; but sometimes he made mighty bounds and sideways leaps across streams or into the stretches of gravel that appeared with greater frequency as they neared the wastelands; and always a restlessness or a tensing in her mind preceded these leaps and bounds so that Gry knew she must likewise move back a little way or tense the muscles of her legs to keep her seat on his back. The Horse, it was clear, was trying to confuse anyone who might find and follow his hoofprints.
The low hills of the open country gave way to steeper, rocky hills. Narrow valleys, which the Horse must thread, passed between them; falls of water dropped suddenly, cascading out of the dark; a rustling patch of bushes, which might hide any number of thieves, or lions, appeared on the left. Yet, the Red Horse hardly slowed his pace and, in Gry’s mind, nine words constantly jumped and span,
‘Good. Free. Good Bridle. Free of. It is good to be free of the Bridle.’
In Garsting, Aza, flushed with kumiz and the madness of failed magic, crawled from the Meeting House and squinted at the sky. A flight of cranes passed overhead, marking the ground with their cleft shadows. Aza read what the shadows told him: the Heron is dead. The hoofmarks in the grass told him the rest: the girl has fled with the Horse. He plodded wearily across the village to the storehouse.
It had become a death house during the long night. Aza crouched to examine Heron’s throttled, bloodstained body, primming his thin lips briefly, almost smiling when he saw what carnal conquest the historian had been attempting when he died, his scarlet, double apron cast aside but still attached to his unbuckled belt, his unwound loincloth stained with the tinctures of his last, greedy act and with the bright blood which had spurted from the unstoppable fountain of his heart.
‘She did not have a dagger – she found a dagger? One was lost among the skins, perhaps?’
The shaman puzzled over Heron’s death-wound. As to the throttling, it was all too obvious how that had come about: the iron grey horsehide which was still wound tight about Heron’s head and neck had come from the stallion, Winter, jealous rival of the Red Horse, fast and cunning, if a mite too weak to usurp the rule of the Horse. Both stallions had favoured the white mare, Summer, but the Horse had won and taken her; now she nursed and nurtured the Red Colt while Winter had died in the last Killing, driven over the precipice of the Rock of SanZu. Leal had skinned him; Garron and Kiang had disembowelled and cut up his carcass; Leal’s mother had made him into wholesome food, dried hross, succulent stews, sausages thin and thick, lard – but it had been Heron who spoke the ritual of placation over all the dead horses of the killing-harvest. So.
Aza frowned and struck his forehead with his rattle. None of this explained the heart-wound. None of it made sense. And his head was thick with kumiz-ache, his mouth and tongue parched, longing for a draught of clear river-water.
Heron was dead. Nothing remained of the Ima’s long history but a few fragments in the head of Heron’s successor, Thrush – who had committed only one third to memory. What was left? Gossip and women’s talk; some songs; the Lays, the Tales too – inaccurate fables which praised the ancestors and the deeds of the rare and heroic strangers who strayed into the Plains. Heron was dead. History was dead.
Henceforth, all Ima history would begin with the Red Horse’s Flight.
Why had he gone with her?
Aza trembled then, recalling his accusations in the Meeting House: ‘this daughter of foxes, this sister of the wolf, has stolen the will of the Ima’ and ‘how else but by sorcery could she tame and ride the Horse?’ He had not known fear since he had fought to rid himself of the death-curse of his last wife, and now it visited him, licking the nape of his neck with its long and slimy tongue, laughing and blowing up the skirts of his gown so that he shivered. He wanted to rid himself of it, lie down upon the spirit bear and surrender to the dreams which lived there – he could not. He must discover Revenge, drag her out and parade her before the Ima until they, too, were possessed with her spirit.
Aza closed Heron’s eyes and weighted them with stones. That was all he could do: for rites, for burial, the historian must wait; meanwhile, let him haunt whoever and wherever he would. The shaman crawled into the day, uncovered his drum and began to beat it. He pounded it, walking always about the village, hurrying before the crowd as it gathered.
Leal Straightarrow, Garron and Kiang, Nandje’s sons, ran in a pack with their supporters:
‘Gry is gone!’
‘May Mother Earth protect her.’
The men rushed from their beds, or from their drunken slumber in the Meeting House:
‘Who is dead?’
‘The story of the Ima has been murdered.’
The women came from their milking, wild-eyed and wailing:
‘Where is the Horse?’
‘Search for the Horse! Find our Red Horse!’
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf,
and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack
Night stayed a long time in the wastelands where it was hard for the sun to penetrate the valleys and drive away the shadows which dwelt amongst them. The crags seemed to build themselves up about Gry and the Red Horse, towering high, until they resembled buildings made by men. Nandje had told her how the city men, they of Tanter, Myrah, Pargur, made themselves artificial cliffs and tors from stone, great hollow eyries where men and women ate and slept, made love, gave birth and died. Castles, they were called. So, Gry imagined these fabled people as she rode, lords and ladies, sorceresses and magicians, lovely Nemione, evil Koschei.
Overhanging bushes caught at her clothing. She could duck and dodge them but the shadows, which travelled with them and tormented her because she could not make out what they were, she could not avoid; and, soon, she noticed that the shadows had legs and were running; she saw ears, long, bushy tails and ‘Wolves!’ she breathed. Wolves, which could catch the birds out of the air and pull down a charging wisent and, easily, a horse, even one as fleet and mighty as this, her saviour.
‘But wolves are Good Animals,’ murmured the Voice.
It was clear that the wolves were driving the Red Horse. He had lost impetus and his pace had slowed. The wolves knew where they wanted him to go and pushed him on with small rushes and nips at his heels. Gry tucked her feet up, as high as they would go on the undulating back of the Horse. Above and before them, the lowering cliffs and giddy bluffs had joined themselves together to make a castle indeed, an ominous pile of deep, unpierced darkness which loomed huge at the summit of a pile of jagged rock. She was terrified, feeling the Horse tremble too. They were forced on, always on, and upward towards the walls in which, at the last dreadful moment when she believed the wolves would trap and overcome them against the barrier, she saw a doorway – yet it wasn’t a doorway, only an arched formation in the rock and the great room beyond was no chamber but an open space, walled in by the rocks and roofed with the dark sky and a welter of glittering stars. This castle had not been built by men.
The wolf pack had fallen behind, dragging itself like a furred train after the Horse; ready, she thought, to run in and dismember them whenever it would with teeth of ivory and jaws of iron, and she crouched lower on his back and bit into a strand of his mane in her fear. He had stopped moving altogether and was bowing his head, cowering before a lone wolf almost as big as he. The wolf pointed its nose in the air and howled, ‘Foe, foe, foe!’ and the pack answered, ‘Woe, woe, woe!’, its hundred voices reverberating among the rocks and echoing across the sky, loose and terrible among the cold stars.
‘It is their queen,’ whispered the Voice and Gry, in the same moment, thought, ‘It’s the Wolf Mother.’
The great wolf sniffed the air and put out her red tongue. She panted and her tongue lolled over her teeth and moved about her jaw and her thin black lips – ‘She’s smiling,’ Gry said aloud. ‘Just like my Juma when I give her sweet grass to eat,’ – The tail of the wolf thumped audibly on the ground. ‘And they are going to eat us.’
The wolf walked slowly all round the Horse, who had become a horse merely, a poor mesmerised animal stripped of his power; about to die. Again, she circled them and stopped, was approaching, was close, her head level with Gry’s knee. Gry shrank back, and felt the wolf’s wet tongue lick her foot. She looked into the beast’s eyes where a yellow flame flickered in a ring about pupils as dark and deep as wells; soon, when she had enjoyed her triumph, the wolf would pull her by the ankle from her perch.
The wolf continued to lick, smoothly, softly. She backed away and crouched on the ground, her hindquarters high and her tail tucked so far in, it was no longer visible. Her ears shrank; she pulled them tight against her head; she made tiny, puppy-like whining noises.
‘She’s bowing to you.’
‘Oh …’
‘Say something to her!’
‘Good w-wolf,’ stammered Gry.
‘That’s hardly appropriate! She doesn’t speak our language.’
‘What …’ said Gry, ‘Ah –’ and put her hands suddenly to her head, holding them high and confident, like ears. Then she lowered one arm and swung it like a tail. The wolf sprang up, Gry shrank away and, growing bold again, leaned forward, talking with her ‘ears’ until, at last, the wolf persuaded her with whines and gigantic thumpings of her tail upon the ground, to jump from her last refuge on the back of the Red Horse to the certain peril of the hard and open ground.
Gry glanced behind her fearfully. The wolf pack was still, its two hundred eyes upon her and glowing with desire. Her ‘tail’ drooped and all the wolves tremulously lowered their tails and shrank into their skins until they looked more terrified than she.
But wolves are treacherous.
‘Not to their friends.’
Gry looked at the Red Horse. He stood tall, huge and invincible; his ears were up. What did he mean? Meanwhile, the Wolf Mother had crouched down beside her and was delicately sniffing her crotch.
Gry heard the voice in her mind. Its tone was one of amusement and delight:
‘Just like a faithful dog!’
‘It’s you!’ she cried and the Red Horse nodded his head.
‘It’s me.’
‘But –’
‘Not the time to explain – attend to your hostess. She is not interested in me: I’m just your conveyance.’
Gry sniffed the air as close to the tail of the wolf as she dared.
‘Her name is Mogia,’ said the voice of the Red Horse.
‘Mogia?’
‘It means Child of the Lightning.’
The big wolf, when she heard her name, leaned against Gry in a friendly manner, wagged her tail and seemed to invite Gry to walk with her. Over the stony ground they paced, backwards and forwards, while Mogia sang to the stars and the Red Horse walked solemnly behind. Soon Gry was singing,
‘When the bright stars hang clear and still
The grey wolf comes loping o’er the hill,
He is hungry, he is strong, it won’t be very long
Before he has hunted and eaten his fill.’
It was a song her mother, Lemani, had taught her, of fifty-two verses and a chorus repeated fifty-five times. In Verse Thirty, events turned against the hungry wolf and he was pursued, surrounded and hacked to death by brave Ima; but this, Verse Two, fitted the time and place and Gry sang it over and over again, her voice lifting as free and high as that of Mogia, the Child of the Lightning.
Mogia, pressing her right side hard, turned her about and led her across the sky-roofed chamber to a great boulder on the top of which was a lesser, but wide, flat stone; and here girl and wolf sat and sang together while the pack howled and the Red Horse kept time by beating his hooves on the ground.
Presently, the wolf stopped howling and lay down, her nose on her front paws. In the court below, the pack followed her example and the head of the Red Horse nodded, as if he too, would sleep. The wolves’ eyes closed; some of them snored, or dreamed in their sleep, ears and tails twitching, while the legs of the smallest cubs, which had not yet learned to know motion from stillness, moved continually as they slept. Gry lay close to Mogia, her head pillowed on the soft flank of the wolf.
At dawn, Mogia woke, turned her head and licked the bare arm of the sleeping girl tenderly, as she might one of her own cubs. The Red Horse was awake already, staring out into the new day beyond the Wolf’s Castle. Gry, confused, yawned and stretched in her wolfhair bed.
‘Yellow dawn – Good morning!’ The voice of the Horse, sudden and cheerful as a happy thought, woke Gry properly. She was hungry; she was cold – as soon as she moved away from the warm body of the wolf – but, she thought, free and outside, far from the terrible, dark storehouse where Heron had died as he lay on her; very far from the men of her tribe, their Meeting House and their Law; far from her home and every small thing which filled it and her life; a very long way from Leal, whom she had (once upon a time: it was all as distant as a dream or a fairy tale) begun to love. Her dress was torn and bloodstained; she had neither silver nor horsehide on her, no wealth whatsoever.
‘It may be a good morning for some,’ she said.
The pack had also woken. Several young wolves, whose manes were as yet small and brown in colour, were dragging something across the ground and up, across the jagged rocks towards her. It was a chesol deer, tawny as the Plains grasses when they flowered. A number of other wolves – five, six – followed them; these carried groundapples in their mouths. Raw deer and fresh fruit, this was breakfast, Gry realised, when they had all climbed the rock of the throne and laid their burdens in front of her.
‘Wise creatures!’ said the Red Horse. ‘You have eaten my poor relatives, mixed with quail eggs and wild garlic in your Herdsman’s Comfort, Gry; so do not gag at this sacrificial deer. And the groundapple, intelligent choice! You know as well as I do that its juice is as good as fresh water.’
‘But I’m cold,’ moaned Gry.
The food helped warm her. As she ate, quickly swallowing the pieces of deer-meat which the wolves chewed from the carcass for her and sucking the acid juice from the groundapples, she saw that other yearling wolves had come to the deer and were tearing its skin into long strips and rough triangles. Soon, while the Wolf Mother directed them with little barks and sharp nips in their ears, the young wolves had picked up all the golden pieces of the deerskin and were laying them at her feet. Two were bold enough to drop their gifts in her lap.
Mogia wagged her tail and, cocking her head, gave Gry a lop-sided look.
‘Warm clothes,’ murmured the Red Horse.
Gry gathered up the bloody pieces of hide and, too modest to be a true member of Mogia’s pack, retired behind a rock and tried to make a garment from them. When she squatted to evacuate and relieve herself, she found fresh blood on the insides of her thighs – Svarog – Sky! It was her own blood: she should rejoice; she bent forward until her forehead touched the ground and gave thanks to Mother Earth. This blood-cleansing was another freedom, and nothing of Heron had remained inside her long enough to make a luckless, bastard child. Hastily, shivering, unburdened, she tore rags from her skirt and made a pad to soak up the blood. Next, the deerskin strips made footless leggings and, with the help of more rags from her skirt, the triangles could be fashioned into a shorter, thicker overskirt and a small shoulder-cape. She chewed holes for her makeshift cape-strings in the skin, tasting the fat and sinew, spitting out hairs and feeling as gorged as a well-fed wolf. So, dressed at last, she stepped out and showed her new clothes to the pack and the Horse. A cub barked once, quickly silenced by his mother, and the adult wolves howled an acclamation; but, deep inside Gry’s head, a low, delighted chuckle started and swelled – the Horse: as if a horse could laugh! Evidently, he could. She listened well – had she not heard that laugh somewhere before? In some place that was friendly, homely? In a place in which her father was alive and lively, Nandje, Son of Nandje, He Who Bestrides the Red Horse, Imandi of the tribe? Nandje’s laugh had been raucous, cackling; this, it was gentle, even cautious, in its happiness.
She remembered walking along the main street of the town of Vonta in the Near Altaish where Nandje and Lemani had taken her for the Horse Fair; she had been sucking a greengage lollipop when a boy her age had passed her and grinned, waving his own lollipop in the air, before he blushed and turned away, pretending to look in the window of a toy shop. Something in the display there had amused him and he had laughed aloud, a happy, bubbling sound: it was not that laugh.
That, until now, was the only time she had been out of the Plains.
Gry shook her puzzled head and, making a small fist of her right hand, thumped the Red Horse gently on his neck. In answer, he nuzzled in her breast.
‘Horse!’ she cried, and thumped again.
‘You are beautiful, even now,’ came the reply.
‘I am as wild as a drunken shaman after a spirit-feast,’ said Gry.
‘When you find a tarn or lake up in the hills and use it for your mirror – oh, you will! – you will see that I am right. But listen to Mogia. She says that, though you look like a deer, you are almost half a wolf for “eating meat with Us brings the wisdom of wolves, which men call cunning.”’
Mogia’s Story: Winter Hunger.
Take care. The road to true wisdom is long and hard. I was a cub in the years of Koschei’s Winter. Snow covered the Plains and the rivers were ice. Small birds fell dead from the skies and, for a while, we were content to eat them. Then came a day when all the birds were dead. We had eaten the land-animals long before: the deer, the heath-jacks and their kith and kin. The last mouse had been swallowed whole.
My mother called the Pack together and we left the Plains, journeying long and high into the Altaish, where the snow and ice endure for ever. Some of the wolves spoke against her, arguing that if we could not find food in the frozen Plains, what could there be to eat in the mountains? There was a fight – so bad that two wolves were killed in it, and wolves never kill their own: to this, the magician had driven us with his foul heart and fouler weather. The rest of the dissenters left the pack and turned into the forest where, they said, they were certain to find prey. We travelled on.
Soon the way grew grim. Great boulders made of ice reared themselves in front of us and the ice made hard stones of itself in the soft spaces between the pads of our paws so that we had many times to lie down in the cold and chew the ice away before we could walk on. It snowed, sometimes so hard that we lost our way and must, once more, lie in the bitter cold until the storm died and we could see. Four of the old wolves lay in their snowy nests and never got up again. Still my mother led us on, and higher.
We dared venture into the remote, Upper Altaish and here, as my mother well knew, we found great companies of mountain lemmings which, being animals of the cold and the heights, had not died out. We had a great feasting – taking care, by my wise mother’s orders, to leave enough of the creatures alive to breed new colonies, which they do most rapidly, in the time it takes for the moon to grow from a claw to an open eye; so we remained in the Altaish until Koschei’s power waned and the spring came, living as do men-farmers by taking care of our herds.
‘See, my Sisters and Brothers, my Daughters and Sons,’ said my sagacious dam, ‘the truth of our old saying For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack!
‘“But, woman-Gry, wolves’ wisdom will not serve you at all the turns,”’ said Mogia in the Horse’s familiar voice. ‘“You must consult your own ancients, the shamans at Russet Cross. I will lend you a guide –”’
Mogia broke off her whining in the Red Horse’s ear and howled once. A young, grey wolf came running to her side.
‘“This is my scout, my dear son Mouse-Catcher! – who loves a succulent mouse so much he hunted nothing else in his infancy, bounding over the long summer grass, high and low, like a heath-jack in his love-madness. Mouse-Catcher knows the salt wilderness. It is one of his hunting grounds. He loves a mouse with a salt savour. Hey! dear Cub,”’ and the great wolf licked her son’s ears lovingly.
Gry looked up at the Red Horse. He was nodding his head but, this time, she could not tell whether he meant to speak to her or was only ridding himself of the first flies of the morning which, attracted by the meat or by her strange, uncured skin clothing, were beginning to swarm about them.
It is the blood, she thought. Flies love to drink it – and I am stained with it, Heron’s, mine, and the chesol deer’s. Three have died – there was Heron and the deer; and there would have been a baby if I had not begun to bleed. Poor soul, it must hurry back to the Palace of Shadows and wait for a happier coupling to bring it to Malthassa.
The flies will follow me now and bother the Horse – I have no lemon-root to rub on him and keep the flies away.
She felt Mogia licking her hand and put her sad thoughts away. The Red Horse nudged her and offered his foreleg to help her mount. Mouse-Catcher danced, eager to be off and running hard.
Leal’s rage had settled inside him like a hard and indigestible fruit. He had ceased to mull over Aza’s accusations or regret his own passion at Gry’s fate although it made him an outcast too, and a thief. He was in Garron’s house, turning over the household goods, Gry’s possessions, her brothers’ things – as for Garron and Kiang, they were without somewhere, helplessly watching as Battak and Aza drummed up a pursuit. He would pursue her too, alone – without those loyal seventeen who had pledged him their faith. There was no other way: he must be silent and circumspect like a hunter in the forest. No one must know which way he had truly gone; and he would go, very soon, when he had found what he sought in the house.
In the village, there was anarchy and the men of Rudring had heard of it. It would not be long before they of Eftstow and of Sama also heard and rode to join the throng.
Where was it? He lifted the lid of a chest. It was full to the brim with carefully-folded clothes. He let the lid fall softly.
The women had their opinions, too. He had listened to some of them when he washed, at the river.
‘She was foredoomed – a spirit was in her,’ one had said – Daia, Konik’s daughter.
Battak’s wife had no sympathy: ‘If she had taken one scrap of her father’s wisdom to herself, she would be on solid ground. But she was always wayward. If she had liked our company and gone milking with us, she would have kept clear of the Horse and of temptation. What folly to milk alone, when the dew is still on the grass and the puvushi scarce abed!’
‘I heard she has a lover in Rudring,’ said Oshac’s wife maliciously.
He came out from behind the reeds then, naked, just as he was, thinking to shame them. But they had stared at him, bold as hares, and Daia had smiled and flirted up her skirt, pretending its hem was wet. He clearly heard what she whispered to the other women: ‘Leal is a horse of a man.’
