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Where had Nandje kept it? Leal spun slowly on his heels. Ah! Fool that he was. The bridle hung on the wall, in full view. It had been behind him. He lifted it gingerly down, almost expecting it to burn him. Then it was in his grasp and stolen, the Red Horse’s bridle – which I shall need, he told himself, when I find Gry and the Horse. It was made of soft Om Ren skin, cut from the hide of the old Forest Ape which the Red Horse himself had killed.
But somewhere in the forest fastness there would be a young Om Ren growing, and his hide would be taken for the Red Colt when the time came.
Leal looked about him, trying to memorise the interior of the house. Here, Gry had cooked and worked, sewing hides into horse-gear and silk and linen into garments for her father and brothers. She had tended the fire on the hearth where the cold, black ashes lay. Earth, an ill season! Time to go. His feet scuffed up the dry soil of the floor and something which had been missed, for all Gry’s sweeping, caught on the toe of his boot. It was a single band of silver with a clasp of horn, Gry’s ankle-ring. He sighed, remembering her narrow feet and long, grass-stained toes, kissed the silver and tucked it in the folded cloth at his waist.
Then he moved, ducking swiftly out of the house and striding out to the hollow in the Plains where he had left his gear. He caught fleet Tref and the sorrel mare Yarila, saddled Tref and hung the magic bridle from the cantle, under his bow, put a halter on the mare; and was gone from Garsting.
Aza listened to the wind. Stribog, he blew from the north, bringing the thud of hoofbeats and the howling of hungry wolves to the ears of the shaman who breathed in the god through dilated nostrils, filling his lungs. Cold, his body sang, Meat, Salt.
‘Russet Cross!’ he cried, the words leaping from his open mouth.
‘We ride, then,’ said Battak gruffly. ‘Into the bitterness and the cold.’
‘Ay!’ Konik shivered. ‘Bring a fire-pot, Klepper. We shall need it.’
The men mounted their horses and turned their heads into the wind. They rode slowly at first, rubbing their watering eyes, until the immensity of the Plains and its high and empty sky took hold of them and they urged their horses into a lope and then a gallop, laying out the thin, black line their enemies feared.
Gry expected to see the Altaish, immense, cold heights upon the horizon, as they travelled into the day, herself, the dear Red Horse and the grey wolf, Mouse-Catcher; but the hills before them were low and crimson as blood. The salt wind, blowing in her face, alarmed her, but Mouse-Catcher paused to relish it, wagging his tail as if all was well. The air grew damp and the bothersome flies left her. She put out her tongue and licked salt crystals from her lips.
They were still among rocks, boulders scattered across level pavements of stone whose crevices were home to low, fleshy plants. Mouse-Catcher, by biting their leaves and sucking out the dew inside, showed her that these were almost as good for thirsty travellers as groundapples. There was nothing else fit to eat or drink: the further from Wolf’s Castle they journeyed, the saltier the ground became until they were crossing white flats on which the larger crystals lay as thick as frost and glittered as the sun rose higher. Further on, the salt-bearing rock was red or, sometimes, the two kinds of salt lay close together, forming wonderful, twisting patterns. The hills were nearer, seeming homely because, for all their weird colour, they were shaped like the green hills of home.
Again, the wolf sniffed the wind which, whirling over the salt ground, sang with a mournful note. Mouse-Catcher howled with it.
‘We must go further,’ the Red Horse told Gry.
The wolf and the Red Horse travelled hard, stopping neither to eat nor rest, while Gry slept deeply, so benign was the rocking motion of the Horse. She woke and slipped from his back at evening, while Mouse-Catcher ran among the rocks and found what edible plants he could. Swiftly, they ate and sucked the water from the fleshy leaves.
‘… and further still,’ said the Red Horse, offering a foreleg for Gry to mount by.
When morning came again and the sky was pale as the inside of a new-laid egg, Gry sat tall in her seat and stretched. The salt ground had never altered, continuing to unroll beneath them like the skin of a skewbald horse. The pallor of the horizon was remarkable, dipping down to touch land which wavered like a summer mirage in the Plains. She watched the sun colour the land, marking out the different zones in the rock, russet and stark white; laying a watery tint on the undulant distance. All at once a man appeared, motionless in the landscape. He had one thick, brown leg and one which was thin as a stick of willow. She did not want to meet him.
‘Please turn back,’ she begged, but the Red Horse gave no sign that he had heard her and kept up his steady pace, following after the wolf. It was the man who began to run, waving the long stick he had been leaning on and which Gry had thought a leg, and followed closely by the large flock of sheep which she had taken for bushes.
‘Wolves and sheep don’t mix!’ said the Red Horse.
Mouse-Catcher turned his head in the direction of the fleeing sheep and gave a deep, appreciative sniff.
‘He is an honest wolf and he is hungry – but we must hope he will not follow his instincts,’ the Red Horse remarked. ‘Are you comfortable up there? It has been a long ride.’
‘As if I sat on my mare, Juma,’ said Gry. ‘I think my legs have stretched to fit your broad back.’
She heard the gentle laugh of the horse again and, again, it puzzled her.
‘What is that place?’ she asked. ‘Is it another plain?’
The voice of the Horse, busily talking like a dream-voice in the very centre of her head, was even and affectionate.
‘It is a plain, of sorts,’ he said, ‘but it is made of water. Men call it the Ocean. It rolls between the worlds, too deep and cold to swim across. It is ruled by the moon, which pulls its waters first one way, then another. Such movement is called a tide; and those rolling hills you see in the water are waves. In a moment – there! – one will arrive and break in pieces on the shore.’
Gry watched the waves surge up the beach.
‘The Ocean is like a huge river,’ she said. ‘River-water also turns to mist when it hits rock.’
‘You are a wise woman.’
‘I? – I know little beyond the Plains. But you are a wise horse. How can a Plains horse, though he is the Horse, know so much?’
‘I have heard many tales,’ the Horse muttered evasively.
‘In Garsting? When Nandje rode you?’
‘My ancestors had the wisdom of centaurs.’
‘Of sentries?’
‘Centaurs. Mythical beasts, half-man, half-horse. You know, Chiron – of course, you would not … Come, Gry, muffle your face in the scarf you have made of your seductive skirts, blue as eyebright in the grass! We shall soon be on the shore and the wind will try hard to fill your mouth with grit.’
Obediently, she wrapped her head in the torn cloth. The smell of the sea caught her by the throat, frightening and exciting her. The Horse’s hooves drummed on the rippling watermarks and the wind, as he had promised, blew salt sand in her face and filled her eyes with tears.
It was a lonely place. The sands ran on for ever, combed and billowed by the sea and the land curved gently down on left and right; but ahead, where she was being carried, there was nothing but the glinting water with its random spouts and crests of white spray; and that water made roaring, dragging sounds which deafened her and filled her head and senses so that, though he was speaking, she could not hear what the Red Horse said. Strange plants grew in the sand, stiff like trees made of glass, their tiny branches broken. Fresh cloven hoofmarks crisscrossed and surrounded them, for the sheep had been feeding here.
The wind got inside her thin clothing and chilled her to the bone. They forged on, the wolf pushing himself forward with all his might, his fur blowing wildly about him.
‘Where are we going?’ she cried into the din. ‘Over the edge of the world?’
The Horse was shouting too, a whisper in her mind.
‘Almost! Look ahead.’
The waves were roaring louder than a thunderstorm. Gry wiped the wind and water from her eyes. It was hard to see. The water tossed up its countless heads. Something stood there, firm in the spray, a giant or a mighty beast of the spume. It reared high and held out stiff limbs. Gry wiped her eyes again.
It was a great tower, stripped of any skin or covering it might once have had, a rusty, metal skeleton many times taller than a forest tree.
‘Russet Cross!’ the Horse shouted. ‘What a structure!’
‘Russet Cross?’ she echoed, and scarcely heard herself, scarcely believed it. An awful thing, she thought, like the shaman, Aza’s, house which was no house but a grassy hollow in between the hills. Or like Wolf’s Castle, no castle but stones piled up by the spirits themselves: as this storm-blasted tower, she supposed, had been built and wrecked.
The Red Horse stopped at the water’s edge, Mouse-Catcher sheltering, ears down, beneath his belly; both of them gazing at the metal monster.
‘Russet Cross,’ Gry repeated. ‘What is it?’
‘A misplaced memory, a meeting place,’ the Horse replied. ‘The point at which the winds and the waters meet. Where spirits howl together and pass on their voices to those who must hear.’
‘Mogia wanted me to come here?’
‘She had her good reasons, Gry. The water is not deep at this state of the tide,’ said the Horse calmly and, for the first time, Gry heard the wolf’s answer, an audible shadow in her mind,
‘Deep for me. Terrible for the warm land-She.’
The Horse walked into the water. Gry clung tight, looking down, horrified as each wave rose and threatened to engulf him and her clinging self, and passed them by to be succeeded by another just as great. Nothing was steady now, nothing sure. The good ground had vanished; in its place, the treacherous, moving water.
The wolf, who had remained behind, spoke in his throat, neither whining nor growling: ‘Rurr – rrr – rurr!’ And, having voiced his opinion, followed them.
They soon reached the nearest limb of the tower. A stairway hung from it, giddily down to touch the water.
‘You must climb it, Gry.’
‘I can’t – Red Horse – I can’t. How can you climb stairs?’
‘I shall wait here, up to my withers in sea water. Mouse-Catcher will go with you so there is no need for fear.’
‘It is high; I can’t tell how high!’
‘Fear not, trust me. You won’t fall – look, there is a rail.’
There it was, a handrail looping and scrolling at the staircase-side, though she had not noticed it before. She reached out and took hold of it. The Horse was warm beneath her. Wasn’t she well-used to climbing trees at gathering-time, when the women journeyed across the Plains to pick a harvest of nuts and berries from the trees at the forest-skirt, and mushrooms, toadstools, puvush-cushions, puff-balls and spirit’s saddles from inside the forest itself? The stair looked firm. She swung suddenly on to it, climbed two steps and looked down. The Horse was afloat already, solid, glossy, alive in the cold, wet Ocean, his tail fanned out like weed behind him. Mouse-Catcher was swimming too and his ears were up. She tried to be brave.
‘Goodbye, dear Horse!’ she called.
‘Climb, my sweet Gry! I shall soon welcome you back.’
Thirty steps, and she was in translucent cloud, chasing raindrops and rainbows as she climbed. She felt the wolf behind her, hairy, soaking wet, and then his nose against her hand, comforting her. The rust-coloured limbs of the tower bent about and enclosed them as they climbed. Thirty steps more: her head was above the mist, in sunshine. She looked up and saw, flying on the tower-top where two metal beams made a huge, jagged cross, the blue flag of her people, the Ima of the Plains. Its fluttering challenge stirred her heart and she climbed more rapidly, passing through a circular doorway in the floor of a rickety platform. The nose of the wolf touched her hand once more.
A table had been placed there, far above the sea, a table set for a feast. The guests were waiting for her and two stools were empty. She crept forward, wary and reassured by turns for the other feasters were dressed like her, in tattered indigo and skins. The wolf at her side began to moan quietly, in that midway voice: ‘Rurr – rrr – rurr.’
The old ones had been sitting a long time, wind-dried and wizened in the eye of the sun, neither on the land nor in water, each one salt as grief and dead as stone.
Gry buried her fingers in Mouse-Catcher’s thick mane and looked at the circle of shamans. They were fearsome, shrunken like trophy-heads, preserved but loathsome like the food on their plates, withered plums, black slivers of meat and grey heaps of mulberries. The skulls of some were visible through leathery pates, under wisps of hair; from others, the fingers had dropped and these lay on the table among the dishes. They wore creased robes of balding stuff which had once been good horsehide, and were hung about like Aza with necklaces of birds’ skulls, thunderstones, claws and bones; a circlet of wood, which had been a drum, was propped against the foot of one; another had lost its nose although its lips had dried into two hard ridges which were pinched together in disapproval.
Gry curtsied to the dead shamans, while she wailed, ‘Oh, my father – protect me!’
The shaman nearest the stair was less cadaverous than the rest: he must be Voag, Aza’s master, who had died when Nandje was a boy. To propitiate him, she spoke his name and said, as she might to any one of her people, ‘The grass grows!’ Immediately the words were out, she clapped her hands over her mouth: what if he should answer with thin words blowing? She listened hard, but no sound issued from Voag’s cracked lips and she sighed with relief and bent close to the wolf, putting her own warm lips against his head. She kissed his muzzle and spoke softly in his ear.
‘Why am I brought here?’
Mouse-Catcher licked her hand and his voice came to her, a tiny whisper in the terrifying silence: ‘Yours is not theirs.’
Gry went a little closer to the old ones. One of them was a woman who must, in life, have been a great beauty. Her skin, even in death, was smooth, though it was blue with tattoos; her head had been shaved and a wig of black horsehair, dressed in a crowd of little plaits, put skew-wise on it and, over that, a tall wooden crown from which hung small figures of horses and deer. She wore SanZu silk under her horsehide and furs and Gry, without thinking what she did, touched the shaman lady’s hanging sleeve.
So, she woke the sleeping princess who raised her tattooed arms from where they rested on the table, turned her head to look at Gry with blind, opaque eyes and spoke with the sad voice of the winter wind:
‘Who disturbs the Lady Byely?’
Gry fell to her knees and bowed her head.
‘Gry, Madam. Only myself, Lady. Gry, Nandje’s daughter.’
‘Look at me!’
Byely was holding a sharp knife like doom above her. She was too frightened to move and could only stare at the skeletal fingers and the dagger-hilt they gripped, a doubled ring of bone chipped at the top – and with a dark smoke-stain below it running all the way about and down to the steel, Pargur steel.
‘That is my father’s dagger!’ Gry exclaimed.
‘Do you need it? Do you demand it?’ Byely loosed her hold and let the dagger fall lower between her naked finger-bones.
‘It should be with him so that he can cut his spirit meat – yes! – give it me!’
And Byely let the dagger fall altogether, clattering on the rock.
‘I can – not … harm … yooo …’ she said, and slumped down on her chair and was again a corpse and withered remnant many ages dead.
‘Poor lady,’ Gry whispered, while her eyes filled with tears and she felt her heart beat strongly in her chest.
‘Not poor. Once great, greatest shaman in the world. Past – pastures of Heaven,’ sighed Byely.
‘Sad lady, you must struggle for your voice.’
‘Sad now – go, Gry – know you …’ Byely, spent by her efforts, fell across a bowl of desiccated plums and mulberries, sundering her frail bones and dispersing her lovely face, brittle as an eggshell, across the table. Mouse-Catcher, who had stood by silently, opened his mouth and whimpered so loudly that Gry swung round. The scabbard which belonged to Nandje’s dagger lay on the table in front of Voag whose ruined hand covered it as a spider covers her young.
Touching Byely’s sleeve had woken her. What might Voag do, if his sleep were violated?
Nandje, when he put away the dagger, had always been careful to lodge its sharp tip exactly in the chape, the hollow horsehead of shiny cherrywood which protected it. Gry bent, picked up the dagger and felt its edge and tip: still keen. She must have the scabbard as well. Moving stealthily, she tried to pull it free and did not touch the hideous hand. The copper sheath slid forward, once and again, but the hand came with it, keeping tight hold, and the voice of Voag snapped out at her, a scratchy thorn-snared twig.
‘Aza sent me this! Why should I give anything to Aza’s enemy?’
‘Because I am the daughter of Nandje, the Rider of the Red Horse, and the Lady Byely gave me his dagger.’
‘The vultures stole it from Aza and storm-birds carried it to her, but Aza gave me the scabbard. Why should I part with it?’
‘Because it belongs with the dagger.’
‘Because, because! What has reason to do with the matter? Nandje is like me now, girl, dead as mutton, blind as a granite boulder. He does not need either: dagger or scabbard.’
‘The scabbard protects the blade.’
‘Well, well: common sense too from Nandje’s daughter who was condemned by the Ima, ravished like a captive, forced to flee –’
‘My father’s spirit spoke to me.’
‘That is – not a bad thing –’
‘The Red Horse travels with me.’
‘– and, I was about to say before you interrupted, you are a murderess into the bargain.’
‘I did not kill Heron!’
‘I know you didn’t, quick little fool; but Aza thinks you did and so do Battak and Konik, all the men except your brothers, who do not know what to think. And Leal, of course, but he is blinded by love … that, in your hand, is what killed Heron: Nandje’s dagger, and the grey horsehide which had an old score to settle.’
