GILL ALDERMAN

Lilith’s Castle

Each page a promise that all

shall be well

COPYRIGHT

Harper Voyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Gill Alderman 1999

Gill Alderman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006482727

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008228446

Version: 2016-12-22

DEDICATION

To Justine and Dorothy

with love.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

The Pathless Way

The Palace of Shadows

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

he fleeth as it were a shadow

Nandje, Rider of the Red Horse, Father and Imandi to the Ima tribe, lay still beneath the ceremonial blanket which covered him. The bustard feathers woven into it pierced his face with their long barbs and the rawhide strips lay heavier than lead on his throat, part of him and also something separate, deadly and symbolic. The felted horsehair had sucked up his blood and sunk into the rotting craters which were his wounds. He knew himself to be no longer human and a man but as much and little as the earth on which the Horse Herd also trampled, wounding its soft surface with the same lunular pits.

It was ill to be thus trapped underground, within a redundant body whose eyelids were held down with stones, nostrils and lips sewn shut with dried Plains grasses. Nor could he recall the Past, whatever that unlikely concept was, or look into the Future as he had once been able, in life. The Now, terrible, endless, was all: death inescapable, triumphant, eternal.

Aza, the Shaman, lifted the blanket from Nandje’s face and observed the dead Imandi’s crushed skull and grotesquely distorted face. The skin was drying out and splitting, pulling his twelve-month-old stitching apart. He found an end and pulled the grass strands out, to the last shred and wisp, using his nails where the flesh had tightened round the thread.

‘The sleep of death is long,’ said Aza ‘but there comes a time to awaken.’

He took up the pointed stick he had prepared during the long mourning and thrust it between the lips and teeth of the corpse, down savagely, hard to the base of the throat. It groaned and belched as the gases rose and bubbled from its liquid interior and a terrible stench was hurled into his face. The corpse moths which had been incubated in Nandje’s body flew free, a many-winged pied cloud.

‘Nay, go peacefully to the Palace of Shadows!’ he cried. ‘Be wise and kind, as you were with us.’

The final alteration had taken place with the freeing and the flight of Nandje’s soul. All that remained was lolling, putrefying matter which Aza might leave alone to complete its metamorphosis, flesh to grass. Tenderly and carefully, for this was the last office he was able to perform for Nandje, he rolled back and folded the death-blanket and carried it with him, up into the light.

THE PATHLESS WAY

Leave the past behind; leave the future behind;

leave the present behind

It is the usual thing for a herd led by a mare

to be strayed and destroyed

The night was almost over and the Red Horse walked slowly out of it, pacing steadily over the low hills which lay between Nandje’s tomb and his Herd. He had made this nightly journey since the burial, observing how the body he had carried at both easy walk and furious gallop was decaying and what tender care the shaman took over his rituals. Yet, each time he returned to the Herd, he felt at heart less satisfied and more restive. These emotions, he knew, came to him because his understanding was beginning to awake and not from sorrow at the untidy fate of Nandje, nor any fellow-feeling for the fine man he had been.

The horses stood in small constellations, group by group within the universe of the Herd. The stars were fading and dawn about to break. A skein of geese, pointing like an arrow to the far horizon, flew overhead and the Red Horse paused to watch them out of sight. They were flying into the wind and making heavy weather of it, yet the song of their wings was hopeful and eager: they were always moving on from riverhead to marsh, from forest lake to seashore, water their element as his was this grass-grown earth of the Plains. The wind pushed at his back and he moved off, breaking into a canter as he breasted the last hill and saw his mares and young stallions, his filly foals and colts all facing forward, all looking out for him. The Herd neighed a soft welcome, the sound passing from horse to mare, and he returned the greeting joyfully: this part of his life was whole and good. He turned his head toward the village where the Ima slept. The sun always rose beyond it. He waited patiently for its first, arising rays to touch the round roofs of the houses.

Nandje’s daughter crawled from her house. It was the only way to enter or leave it, through the low tunnel which was both doorway and defence. She was still in mourning for her father, deeply shocked and deeply grieving; but there were the everyday tasks to do, the chores which kept her headless family comfortable and the wolf, hunger, from the door. Milking was the first each day, a little thin, blue-tinted milk to take from each milch mare. She (as every Ima man and woman must) loved her horses and, equally, her wide, bleak birthplace in the Plains. Her name was Gry and her age, since time is lawless in Malthassa, was perhaps seventeen.

The cold wind blew in Gry’s face. She tasted the salt in it and covered her ears against the stories it brought from far away. Nothing could be done while the Salt Wind blew from the furthest corner of the Plains and passed over Garsting on its way to bring down the trees of the forest; and nothing could be done while they were all in mourning.

Her hair had begun to grow again and covered her scalp as the new spring grass does the ground, sparse and short. She knew how ugly she was and had been, shorn thus and stripped of every piece of her silver jewellery. That lay, with her hair and her happiness, in her father’s tomb while each new day began heavy and slow and continued unrelieved into night. She lifted her milking-pail and laid it across her shoulder, turned her back on the wind – that was where the Horse Herd would be, facing away from the salt-savour, heads low and ears flattened to diminish the rumours which – now – ears uncovered – she heard fly past her, the brittle voices of the zracne vile shrieking ‘Sorrow! Sorrow! Bitter death!’ It seemed to Gry that all of Malthassa, from marsh to ocean, from the unknown beyond the Plains to the end of the world at the back of the mountains, had died with her father. She trudged out across the first low hills, her bare feet shrinking from the chilly ground and the skin pail clammy against her neck. All the world was grey and dusky; of late, the birds, cowering in bush and grass, had forgotten their songs and did not take to the air on pliant wing; but the zracne vile, the spirits of the air, tumbled past in the wind, now head first, now blown backwards, hair and limbs awry.

None of the women, save Gry, could see spirits; sometimes her companions looked strangely at her, or whispered tales behind her back, for all that she was Nandje’s daughter. But today she had come alone and early to the milking, stealing out before anyone else in the village was awake.

Gry climbed the third hill. Something was keeping pace with her: she sensed its warmth and knew it was not a wolf or any beast to fear. A heath-jack perhaps or a deer strayed from the forest to graze. It moved closer and she saw its outline as the light increased, big, massy, equine. A thrush flew up and sang suddenly, tossing random, joyous notes on high in the instant she recognised the horse and her heavy heart, against all expectation, lifted. The Red Horse: it was he. Lately, over six or seven recent days, he had begun to come to her, stand only feet away and watch her from huge and sympathetic eyes. Once, he had nudged her with his moss-soft nose and shied away; once snatched the sweet grass she shyly offered him. He loomed, a dark bulk in the dawn, and she reached out, awed when her hand at last touched and rested on his smooth hide. He suffered her to walk with him. Then, as the sun rose higher, something marvellous: the Red Horse halted for a moment, turned his head to Gry and rested it against her chest. She, leaning forward, enclosed as much of the great face as she could reach with her free arm; and they walked on, horse and girl, into the midst of the Herd, where the mother-mares were waiting to be milked.

Gry drew a little milk, before the foals fed, from each mare’s teats. The white mare named Summer, a rarity in a herd of dun and russet Plains horses, and chief wife of the Red Horse, waited last. Gry stroked her and bent beneath her to milk. When her pail was full to the brim she drank a little of it herself, wiped her mouth on her hand, and set the pail upright on a level piece of ground. The Red Colt was feeding well, the long sticks of his legs splayed and his short tail rotating with pleasure. Gry smiled and heard the Red Horse snort his pleasure. He moved close again; she felt she should hold her breath or repeat one of the shaman’s lucky charms aloud. The great horse shivered, nervous as a cricket, and lowered his head still further as if he wanted to kneel before her and beg a favour. She found herself leaning against him, taking comfort from his bulk and warmth and, when he bent his near foreleg, placing her left foot there, above the knee and springing without thought but only instinct upward, turning in the air and settling on his back while she spoke the ritual phrase her father had always used.

‘Greeting, Horse. Permit me.’

Gry sat in her forbidden seat, elated and fearful. The reputation of the Horse was all ferocity, virility and fire. No one was able to ride him – except her father, Nandje, who had worshipped the Herd for itself and as a symbol of life, who had loved each individual horse as much as his children; who had died when he was swept from this same, broad back (so wide it pulled the muscles of her groin to straddle him.) The terrified Herd had trampled Nandje into the ground.

No one was allowed to ride the Red Horse; save the new Imandi when he, at last and at the end of the long days of mourning, was chosen. She remembered the trials Nandje had undergone, in the old days when she was a child, to catch and afterwards mount and master the Horse and she looked down on the mane and neck which swept upwards to his pointed, eager ears. In a moment he would bend that neck, throw up his hind feet in a mighty buck and dash her down; then she would see Nandje again, in the place beyond death. But all the Horse did was whinny softly and, shaking a presumptuous fly from his head, settle into his long, smooth stride. Gry breathed more easily and let herself sink into and become a part of the force and balance which made him what he was, the Master of the Herd. It was not as if she could not ride. Horses and their culture were her birthright. Her own mare, Juma, had lingered, heavily in foal, on the margin of the group of milch-horses; lately she had been lent the swift and stubborn Varan who belonged to her eldest brother, and she had many times ridden the lesser stallions and Summer too, before the getting of the Colt. But today there were no reins to be gathered up, none of the usual preparations and practices; just herself, Gry, and the Red Horse. She pulled her skirts into place and rested her hands comfortably on her thighs. How much more easy would she be in loin-cloth and twin aprons, bare-legged and booted like the men!

Her country, the great Plains of Malthassa, was before her and about her, turquoise in the morning light. She could see the blue flag of her people fluttering above Garsting, though the village itself was hidden behind a hill. Three other villages, Sama, Rudring and Efstow were visible, their underground houses grass-grown mounds very like the green hills of the Plains. She looked into the wind, which blew less strongly but was still laden with the bitter salt, and her gaze came to rest on the distant, grassy knoll which was her father’s last dwelling place and tomb. Outwardly there was little to distinguish it from the houses of the living.

Nandje’s burial-mound had been raised a half-morning’s journey from his village. Gry, although she was female and so excluded from funerals, executions and the daily rituals of the Shaman, which belonged to the men, knew that it was dangerous to let the dead stay close by the living, for they may talk to one another or appear in each other’s dreams. And she knew that there were strict rules and observances to be obeyed when any man of the Ima visited an ancestor in his house. The first of them was that no woman may enter there.

I am already guilty, sitting up here on the Imandi’s Horse – no, riding forward, letting him carry me toward the burial-mound, thought Gry. So there will be only a little more harm if, when we reach it, I get down and walk to the mound – just to see the doorway they must have carried my father through, and to stand there and remember him and say farewell. I am beginning to forget him already: I have thought only of myself and this pleasant morning since I milked the mares – and the milk will be quite safe where it is. The wind will cool it well.

‘Well!’ echoed the zracne vile, ‘Farewell!’ and the Red Horse, before she could change her mind or jump down, broke into a ground-eating canter, which carried her swiftly forward across the Plain.

He halted in a hollow below the burial-mound and let Gry slide from his back before lowering his head to graze the sweet, young grasses which the wind, become as gentle as a sleeper’s breathing, moved hardly at all. Gry went on tiptoe up the slope of the hollow and knelt outside the entrance to the tomb. Someone had walked there a little while before. The grass showed the prints of large, booted feet leading away and she remembered that the shaman had been living there for a long while, to tend her father’s body. There was no door. Doorposts and a lintel of the boulders which littered some parts of the Plains surrounded a dark opening. She peered into the darkness, but could see nothing within. Indeed, the darkness brought back all her sorrow: it was terrible to end in such a dismal place. She closed her eyes to hold back her tears.

‘Oh, kind and valorous Rider, wise Imandi,’ she began bravely, but could not stop the tears. ‘Oh, my father – why did you have to die? I could not even say goodbye because the men took you away and put you in there.’

He used to come home at sunset, she remembered, and hang the Horse’s bridle on its hook on the east side of the house. Then, after walking round the fireplace to the far side, would sit and wait for her to bring him water to wash in. ‘The sun is low,’ he always said, ‘I am glad to sit by our fire’ or, sometimes, ‘There is a wonderful smell coming from the pot, Gry – like the thyme your mother used in her cooking. Is it her recipe, my daughter?’

She could almost hear him, so intense were her memories – just behind her as he used to be when seated in the house and she dipping water from the bucket into the copper bowl. She looked round. Nandje stood, with a gentle smile on his face, close by the Red Horse. She knew at once that, though he looked so solidly real, he was without substance, a ghost which could not be touched and could not touch her. He, and all his clothing, looked grey as ashes. With him had come a familiar, long-loved smell, the burnt-sugar odour of his pipe tobacco which floated unseen about him.

‘Gry, my daughter,’ he said, ‘be calm. Do not give way to fear. Aza has released my soul from my body and I must begin my journey to the Palace of Shadows. There is nothing in the mound now but my discarded and useless body surrounded by the offerings of sorrow: that is all. Go in and look at it if you will, but remember me as I was in life – whether at home or abroad with the Herd. Remember me –’

‘Father –’

‘I cannot stay. Take care of the Horse. Remember me …’

Gry stared at the space where Nandje had been. The noise of the Red Horse grazing comforted her: he had behaved as though nothing was amiss so, when she had assured herself that he was content, she turned back to the mound and walked into its dark and cavernous interior. Soon, when her eyes were used to the dimness, she could see. Some light had followed her in, enough to show her the bier of woven willows and her father’s remains lying on it. She approached and looked down on them. What he had said was true: she had no need to fear. This racked and ruined body had nothing to do with Nandje. He had become a memory, and this ugly thing was the same as anything from which the soul has gone, a bird lying dead in winter, a heath-jack killed for the pot, meat which has once been a fleet horse. Gry fingered the offerings which lay in a circle round the body: her two plaits, her silver necklaces and bangles; the little vial of her brothers’ mingled blood, Garron’s best belt and Kiang’s finest dagger; the dishes, beakers, arrows, fish-hooks and snares her uncles and aunts had provided; the bag laid there for Nandje to carry these grave-goods to the Palace of Shadows.

Gry walked sunwise round the bier, bent and kissed the dead thing on what was left of its crushed forehead. Nandje’s weathered skin was taut and dry, punctured full of the holes from which the corpse-moths had crawled, after feeding on his flesh. His falchion and bow were in his withered hands, gripped more by exposed bone than by vanishing flesh; his hands had been calloused, Gry remembered, from the bowstring and roughened by the Plains wind and the cold. He had been dressed in his best, blue aprons, red boots and gilded belt; they was all shabby, drab and decaying. His two clay pipes and his tobacco pouch were in their places on his belt but – she glanced about, searching – not his dagger with its narrow blade of Pargur steel and bone hilt, and the copper sheath with the horse-head chape. She knew it so well. The dagger had been drawn to cut hide into ropes and sheets, to carve meat, slice apples, open hog nuts; even to stir honey into hot kumiz.

‘An Imandi, unlike lesser men with needy families, is always buried with his goods and weapons,’ Gry said to herself. ‘I know this, though I am a woman. Perhaps the knife was mislaid before the burial rite – but another would have been got. Perhaps a thief has crept in here! I shall ask Aza – except that I can’t know the dagger’s gone, or I would be a thief myself in Aza’s eyes. I’ll ask Garron, no – Aunt Jennet. Or look for it myself and bring it back –

‘But how will my father do without a knife to cut his shadow-meat?’

She shivered, though it was not cold underground. The death house had become much darker, for the light was fading. Then she saw the Red Horse in the doorway, head and shoulders filling the gap. She smiled and went to him.

‘You came for me,’ she said. ‘Or did you come to see what has become of your Rider?’

The Horse pushed his head against her and she stroked him. She thought she heard her father’s voice once more.

‘You are the Rider.’

She shook her head in dismissal and disbelief.

‘We must go, Horse,’ she said. ‘You to your Herd and I to the milk and my woman’s duties. Yet I shall spend this day as I have spent so many, wondering where it is my father has gone – oh, not his poor, broken body, not that, but himself, Nandje who rode you everywhere, who was my father and my mother too, since Lemani died.’

Aza, the Shaman of Garsting, crouched in his hollow. He, alone of the Ima, lived always above ground and knew which way the wind blew and what it told; saw sunrise succeed sunset and the sun crowd the moon from the sky. He had put away the death-blanket and the sharpened stick he had used to release Nandje’s soul from his outworn body. The blanket would be used again to cover Garron or Kiang, Battak or Oshac, whoever was chosen Imandi, when his time came; but the stick, that was a mark on the wayward calendar of Malthassan time, and Aza had a bundle of them. He was very old, yet seemed himself to have cheated age in his wrinkled brown skin and mane of white hair. He was old and jealous of the young. He could still run, true enough, but they could walk faster; he could sigh and remember his young manhood, but they were in possession of it, their blood red and their appetites fresh and keen. Nor did Aza feel any softening of his heart towards young women. He had forgotten his first wife, the one who died in childbirth; his second, who had fallen into the flooded River Nargil and his third, the pretty creature who had left him for a horseman. He had outlived his children and his grandchildren and was truly alone upon the earth, but for his talismans and the spirits.

The north wind passed over Aza in his hollow. The shaman kept five spirit-horses, long and fearsome creatures made of ash-poles, skulls, and hides and hair, and he looked up, seeing how the wind moved their skins and brought life to their dried tails and manes. The horses guarded him and there was one to face East and one to face West, one for the South and one for the North; and one to watch the sky. At night, or when he had gone into the breathless trance, Aza spoke with them and learned what they had seen; now they were silent, unless the rattling of their skins against their bones of ash wood was a kind of speech, or a lament for earlier and better days, when they had galloped, eaten the sweet grass and roamed the Plains at will.

Aza had a sixth horse which he had inherited from the old shaman, Voag, when he was called to his seat at Russet Cross. He kept it in a basket. Now, he rose and fetched the basket from where it lay upon a rolled-up prayer flag. Unpegging the lid, he lifted the separate pieces of this horse out of its basket and stable and began to arrange them in an intricate pattern on the ground. He wanted to weave a bridle out of the living grass and to do this, it was necessary to bring the power from the bones of the sixth horse and a hungry sprite from the earth.

‘Svarog, see me! he cried, ‘Stribog, hear me! Feel me walk upon you, Moist Mother Earth. O, send me a puvush, a goodly puvush lacking nothing but her malice and wanting nothing but food. I will feed her, I will put bread in her mouth and send her back to you uncharmed and unharmed.’

In front of Aza, the ground rippled as if it had become water, and the limbs of the bone horse lying on it clashed together. A small mound grew beneath the grass and, suddenly bursting open, let go a long, grey body thinner than a snake or blind-worm. The puvush reared up and the skeletal horse jumped high to follow her and join her wild dance. It had been strong and fleet before it was killed and remembered how its joints fitted together and how it had run and shied at shadows whenever it desired, and drunk the constant wind; and how its head had been taken from its body and burned in a fire so that it could no longer do any of these things.

‘Rest, little Tarpan!’ Aza commanded it. ‘Your part is finished.’ The bones subsided and lay still and Aza knelt beside the dancing puvush to wait until she tired. At last, her head and body bowed and she turned her pinched and greedy face towards him. He was ready and thrust the bread crust he was holding into her open mouth.

‘I have you. You are mine,’ he said, ‘for the time that begins now and the time it takes for this feather to fall to earth. Make me a bridle: I have something to bind.’

Aza’s magic skylark’s feather rose into the air and swayed there while the puvush, moving faster than the winter wind about the shaman’s sky-roofed house, picked a bundle of grass stems, twisted each stalk thrice and wove them into a bridle. The shaman’s eyes grew sore and his head dizzied from watching her. It was done, the charm complete; but Aza groaned aloud. The price of this charm was a cupful of blood, to be drawn from his arm before sundown and offered to Mother Earth. The feather fell to earth and he bade the puvush be gone in a gruff voice, testy with fatigue.

It was done. The hooves of the spirit-horses clapped together at the ends of the skin tubes which had been their legs: Aza had his bridle, which he held up, admiring its close weave and counterfeit, bristly bit. He was ready, he, Aza the Shaman, who no longer had any use or affection for women, excepting the Night Mare, and who had seen Gry, Nandje’s daughter, an unwed woman, riding like a man (no less!), doing what she should not, and entering where she was forbidden. Therefore the shaman had made his preparations, his defence and attack.

Gry sang. Her sorrow had lifted as the day lengthened. I do not know where Nandje’s shadow rests, she thought, but there is no longer any reason to cry because I have spoken with him. Life ends so that death may begin.

The Red Horse followed as she walked him back to his mares and to her pail of milk, which she lifted to her shoulder. Then she patted the Horse with her free hand and watched him wander into the new grass and lower his head to graze, his back toward her, his tail twitching off the flies. She turned in the opposite direction and made for home. The blue flag of her people was flying bravely over Garsting and its colour, brighter than the sky in midsummer, made her think of warmth and the coming Flowering of the Plains. She sang cheerfully of love and marriage:

‘I long to be married when the red poppies grow

And the grass whispers “Leal is my darling,”

It’s time to wear yellow and braid up my hair,

But I need a pair of boots for my wedding –’

It was that time before dusk when the light lingers on the hilltops of the Plains and the hollows in between are awash with violet shadow; it is hard then to judge distance and to keep one’s mind from wandering into the dreamworld which rightly belongs to night. Yet Gry, carolling the chorus to her love song, strode through the gloaming and wondered if anyone had missed her. There were few to do so. Her aunts had their own households to care for and their own mares to milk, while she had only a few milch mares and Garron and Kiang, who were both courting and often out teasing their lasses or hunting jacks and partridge to give them. When she got home, she would pour the milk into the kumiz vat and rake away the ashes from the embers on the hearth; she would pile on fresh fuel, knead last night’s dough again and set it to bake on the stone; perhaps Garron would come in then, with his keen gaze that was so like her father’s and his forest-wood bow. He would sit to unstring and grease it while they talked over the day. Or Kiang would hurry in, bending in the doorway, laughing at some mishap or joke – Gry started and the milk slopped over her neck. The song had already died … It was Aza: what could he want? She did not like him, for all he was a holy man. He used to scare her with his auguries and chanting when she was small; she did not nowadays care to be alarmed for nothing. Especially when she had just learned to be whole and happy again.

‘It is warm; the grass grows,’ she said, conventionally.

‘It is warm, my daughter, and warm enough for travelling,’ the shaman answered. Gry immediately resented his words and, her face reddening, said stubbornly, ‘I am my father’s daughter, Aza.’

‘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.

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.’

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.’

Gry held the dagger more tightly, moved it about as if she would strike.

‘I’m already dead!’ Voag shrilled.

‘I don’t understand …’ said Gry.

‘Are you a magician? Are you a shaman? No? Well, accept what you are told by one who knows. Go away now, go! I shan’t give you the scabbard: you don’t deserve it. Yet.’ His fingers rattled on the table, reaching for her.

‘Unless you would like to sit beside me,’ he said. ‘This is your seat, next to the one that waits for Aza.’

‘No!’

The Lady Byely lifted her drooping head with broken fingers and began to collect the shattered fragments of her face from the table-top and put them back in place.

The dagger, useless here where the dead stood up and spoke and the living had no defence against them, was in her hand; Gry gripped it and with her other hand the mane of the grey wolf. They ran together, fleeing unsteadily down the steps. The sound of the sea came up to meet them and, from above, rang down the clatter of bone joining with bone and of angry voices skirling. The stair plunged into deep water and only the heavy body of the wolf, pushing her back, stopped Gry from falling in. The Horse – where was he?

She saw him then, a red island rising and falling with the waves, and she leaned down to grasp his trailing mane and slide on to his back. Mouse-Catcher jumped into the sea and struck out, paddling hard.

‘All’s well,’ said the Red Horse, with a smile in his voice. ‘The dead can’t harm you. So welcome, Gry. Have you got it?’

‘My father’s dagger, which should be in his tomb – how did you know?’

‘I guessed.’

Her feet trailed in the water, so high had it risen, but she must sit there, watching the bobbing back of the wolf and the mobile ears of the Horse, which signalled his discomfort and the effort he made to bring her safely to the shore; and she must continually look behind, over her shoulder, for a sight of the angry ancients; for she knew better than the Horse, that dead shamans were not as the common dead. But only the thickening clouds appeared behind them, gathering together in a dense wall of fog. She wanted a clear view – they might all come leaping out of the cloud and fall on her; she was certain they had no need ever to swim but could fly and levitate themselves across any obstacle. The water soaked her and the dampness crept upwards until she felt it reach her waist and, rising still, begin to soak her bodice.

The sound of the Horse’s hooves, striking rock, woke her. She had been dreaming, or daydreaming, of Leal who was lost to her; and it was no longer day but a grey evening as full of moisture and mists as she felt herself to be, cold and nodding on the wet back of the Horse. Were those lights, low down but sparkling, just there? She blinked, and blinked again. He was cantering now, easily.

‘That is the village of Russet Cross. Not to be confused with the tower of rust and bones,’ he said cheerily. ‘Our shepherd lives there. You must dismount and lead me in and it will be wiser, and more polite, if you take that scarf of yours and lead Mouse-Catcher as well. Shepherds and wolves are never the best of friends.’

Seven low houses, built of rocks from the shore, and a large pen of hurdles in which the sheep were confined, was all the village of Russet Cross. Dogs came barking out to defend it, snapping at Mouse-Catcher as he walked subdued by his leash of blue cloth. In her other hand, Gry held a lock of the Red Horse’s mane, to lead him, and she had secured the dagger at her waist so that its hilt, old and damaged as it was, protruded from the skins there and looked workmanlike, not to be trifled with. Doors opened, light spilled, and someone with a tremulous voice called,

‘Traveller, wolf or wight?’

‘No wight,’ Gry answered, ‘but a traveller – with her horse – and her wolf.’

In the pen, the sheep had begun a tumult of bleating; in the houses, men began to shout wildly, as if they were drunk or crazy with fear. Gry shrank into herself, remembering the men of the Ima. A single flame detached itself from the blaze of lights in the nearest house and moved rapidly towards them. It was carried by the shepherd and he, as he came up and saw them, the soaking, fur-clad girl, the grey wolf on her left and the great horse walking docilely on her right, dropped to his knees and lifted his torch on high like a greeting or a gift.

‘I ran from you this morning,’ he said. ‘Trouble us no more, I beg you.’

‘We won’t hurt you, or your sheep. We are gentle creatures.’

‘A wolf – gentle!’ The man almost laughed.

He was the first living man she had been close to since Heron. He was dark and rough-looking with an untidy beard and wild hair and the smells that rose up from him were meat, smoke, beer and boastful maleness. Gry shivered; yet he was one of her kind, a human animal with two legs to walk on and two arms with proper fingers and thumbs; and that long fifth member – vile, dangerous, inevitable! Her eyes filled with the hot darkness of the storehouse in Garsting and she heard Heron’s lustful breaths.

‘Come up,’ said the Red Horse as if he were a man speaking to a disobedient horse. ‘Come out of it, Gry; step away from the shadows of the past.’

‘I am only an outcast woman,’ she said, hoping to waken the shepherd’s sympathy.

He crouched lower. ‘Wild Lady!’ he said, ‘Lady of the Wolves.’

‘Make him get up!’ she cried to the Horse.

‘You can command him. Be a great lady.’

So Gry tried again, imagining herself a person of consequence like Nemione or the Goddess of the Grasses the Ima men sang of, in their spring song.

‘Stand up, shepherd. We are not used to waiting for our dinner.’

He got up immediately and began to shout for his fellows who came running, burning brands held high, while the women of the village who were dressed like those of her own in heavy skirts and silver and copper jewellery, gestured towards the lighted doorways from which spilled welcoming smells of meat and new-baked bread. The men helped her down and led the Horse away – in the direction of the sheep-pen. Hearing him sigh ‘O, for a jug of wine, a loaf of bread and Thou, dear Gry,’ she thought he mocked her and, standing uncertainly in the middle of the excited crowd of women, tried to sleek down her unruly scrub of hair.

Mouse-Catcher did not try to follow the Horse or herself, but lay down where he was, and curled into a ball, nose between paws, thick tail over all. Gry tied his leash to the leg of a slaughtering-bench, and was ashamed to restrain him.

She woke early and did not know where she was nor, for an instant, who. The mat beneath her was pliant and warm – wool, she remembered and, reaching about in the darkness, found the objects the shepherds had given her, presents of a rare and costly kind. Gry, I am, Gry alone, she thought. I have no place here, nor anywhere. She listened: the shepherdesses in whose hut she had been entertained were all asleep, breathing softly as lambswool clouds in a summer sky, and there was another sound of breathing, deeper, familiar, kind. The Red Horse was close by.

Gry rose from the warm bed and, pausing only to gather her gifts into her skirt, crept from the house. The sky above the distant Altaish was the colour of butter and she could see the Horse waiting by the porch. He had evidently grown tired of his confinement in the sheep-pen and leapt out. She ran to him and kissed him on the nose. The wolf, Mouse-Catcher, rose like a shadow from the place where he had lain down and licked her hand. Some brave person had thrown him meat in the night, she guessed, for a much-licked and gnawed bone was lying beside him. She untied the leash and freed him, putting the torn, blue cloth it to its proper use as the scarf about her neck.

‘Is it time to go?’ she asked the Red Horse.

‘It certainly is! The Altaish are no closer – indeed, they seem to be further away.’

‘Is that where we are going?’

‘Not immediately. Mount, Gry, and let us be gone or the shepherds will interrupt our journey with their fuss and ceremony.’

‘They were kind to me. They gave me lots of presents.’

‘They were hospitable, but you are neither the Wolf Lady nor Goddess of the Grasses. They would beggar themselves feasting you.’

‘I am Nandje’s daughter.’ Gry spoke uncertainly as, burdened by the gifts it seemed she had no right to, she clambered on to the Horse’s back.

‘I am well aware of that!’ He tossed his head and broke into a swift trot before she was settled. The present she had liked best, the multicoloured string of beads, dropped from her bundled skirt and fell behind. She looked back for an instant, full of regret for the pretty necklace; but the Horse would not stop, she knew that. His head and his limbs were full of purpose and soon he broke into a canter.

The wolf ran before them as they travelled in the dawnlight beside the sea. The watery plain was green now and raw and tossed its uncountable heads impatiently. A shoal of ripples escaped the waves and ran on to the beach. Gry, soothed by the rocking motion, gazed out to sea, surprised to see neither mist nor rusty tower. Instead, a strange object moved over the water, almost at the horizon, a floating house or a waggon maybe, pale in colour and glistening like a polished catamountain’s claw. It flew along parallel to the shore and Gry, seeing how inexorably it sped, grew alarmed and called out to the Horse, ‘Faster!’

The Horse laughed softly and plunged to a halt.

‘Watch, and learn!’ he said.

The thing in the sea had huge black awnings above it which flew out from a pole and had many ropes attached. The waves, flying faster than the strongest wind, were broken into white and scattered fragments by its tapering, buoyant body and a multitude of sea birds followed it, mewing and shrieking in their own mournful language.

The Horse, facing out to sea, considered, while Gry trembled on his back and the wolf raised the mane on his neck and all along his back and held his ears stiffly out, listening.

‘You are right to be terrified; and I am wary and ready to flee, my Gry,’ the Horse said. ‘It is a ship, although there are no ships upon the seas of Malthassa. That is the one and only: Hespyne, the Ship of the Dead, which never sails close to the land unless someone is dying, and never lowers her anchor unless there are fresh corpses lying in their graves. Hespyne comes for the souls of the dead and carries them far away, to the Palace of Shadows.’

‘Then I will soon see my father!’

‘She has not come for us. Maybe a shepherd has died this morning, or the hermit of Worldsend who dwells on the island there, beyond the marshes. But we must flee or the Wanderer, Jan Pelerin, who captains the ship, may hear us and draw us to him in a net of spells.’ At once, the Red Horse bounded into a gallop, Mouse-Catcher speeding beside him, and there was nothing for Gry to do but bend low and hide her fear in his whipping mane while she clung to his pounding shoulders.

Her skin smelled of the sea. She put out her tongue and touched it to her arm: salt! Yet the raw-meat-and-blood smell had evaporated and her odd and daggletail skin garments were as fresh as good, cured furs.

‘Are you cold?’ asked the Red Horse.

‘Not cold, but very thirsty. My skin is as salty as meat in winter.’

‘Be patient for a little longer. Soon, we will come to Pimbilmere, where you shall drink, and bathe if you will. Listen, while I carry you deep inland. This is why your skin is salt: it is the same phenomenon you know in the Plains, the Salt Wind; but all the air by Russet Cross is salt and the sea itself is salt – a good place for a leathery old shaman to preserve his mortal remains!’

‘Or hers,’ said Gry. ‘There was a she-shaman on Russet Cross, tall and stately. Her skin was covered all over with blue tattoos.’

‘That is the Lady Byely.’

The Red Horse’s Story: The History of the Lady Byely

Byely was the daughter of a long-ago king of the Ima, when your people lived in cities which rose up like the hills of the Plains and are buried now beneath them. She was a Music-Maker and a Beauty, crossed in love, before she became a shaman. Her tears were salt and they have preserved her as much as the wind and the sea.

Byely played a lute made of the shell of an ocean-turtle. She strummed its seven strings with a hind-toe of the beast and sang to it, small plaintive melodies which told of forsaken lovers and maids who drowned themselves or hurled their lovesick bodies from tower-tops when the moon was on the wane. The courtiers, especially the ladies, said she was melancholy herself, but they listened in silence to the songs and, afterwards, applauded.

‘My songs are sorrowful because they have water in them,’ Byely told them. ‘Salt water, of the sea. My turtle,’ she patted the polished shell, ‘swam in it, breathed it, swallowed it, heard it. The Ocean is in him and of him. Listen!’ And she played a rippling chord.

When Byely grew to marriageable age, she was taken out of the city to meet Scutho, the Shaman of the Plains. First, she was put up on her horse – a mare like your Juma, round and not very tall; red-roan too, her dapples scattered on her coat like bird-cherries in the grass. Her name was Martlet. Now, although Byely (being a princess) was used to being treated with ceremony, she had always mounted Martlet without help and, soon as horse and reins were properly gathered, galloped off with the young women who were her companions, the daughters of great herdsmen and traders. They were like a bunch of fillies themselves, playing in the strong, spring sunlight while they raced each other and the cloud shadows in the Plains.

Byely was told to rein Martlet in and go sedately after her father in the procession. It passed along Chance Street where the gaming-tables were set up in the shade and where pipes of good, Wathen Fields tobacco could be bought, even in those far-off days, and out by Slate Gate, on which the Ima hung the heads of their enemies. Just then, a company of horsemen passed by, the young men boasting and shouting, Plains partridges, heath-jacks and strings of quail slung across their horses’ necks; the older men were smiling like good schoolmasters. There was a youth in their midst, short-haired and dressed all in green; not a Plainsman, not one of the Ima though he was mounted on a russet Ima horse. He smiled at Byely, who turned her head to look after him.

‘Who is that?’ she asked; but no one would answer her in the solemnity of the procession. Only the wind breathed ‘Haf!’ and, not knowing the name of the youth, she named him after this gusty sound, ‘Haf! Haf …’

Byely spent fourteen days with Scutho, the Shaman of the Plains and fourteen more with the College of Shamans in Rudring. When the new moon rose, she was a shaman herself and must not ride out with her friends but, laying aside her turtle-shell oude and her jewellery, put on the skins and fox-fur robe of her calling and submit to the barber, who shaved her head to make way for the headdress of rowan-wood and wig of horsetail plaits she must wear. Her body was tattooed, even to the corners of her eyes and the beautiful bow of her upper lip. For everything a shaman does and wears has a significance beyond this world of Malthassa.

As for her mare, Martlet: she had been killed and eaten at the initiation ceremony.

‘What it is to be the daughter of a great man,’ said Byely to herself, ‘promised to the four winds and the moon from birth. I cannot shirk my destiny, but what man will look at me now? Certainly not Haf. I will have to marry Scutho, who is kind enough when in his proper body – though he’s as ugly as a wolverine with his filed teeth and his dirty, ridged nails.’ And she went on foot from the city and far beyond, until she found Scutho lying in the summer grasses in a trance. She woke him with a kiss and he turned to her and gave her his wolverine smile. And so, in a little while, they had mated as the beasts do and he had run off to his hut while she sat amongst the broken grass stems and salted the eye-bright flowers with her tears. The flowers closed tight and so they have ever after when the Salt Wind blows.

The moon rose and Byely stared up at her.

‘Now you are both shaman and wife,’ said the moon. ‘Never forget which is the greater calling.’

Having no instrument with which to celebrate her sorrow, Byely picked up two stones and beat them together. She sang of her lost love and, in the morning, began to make a healing song. When the sun began his slow decline towards afternoon, she collected herbs and went among the poorest herders to cure them of their ailments. She cured many and the people revered her. Once, they say, she brought a stillborn baby to life and she was sovereign at horse-medicine and horse-lore.

One blazing summer’s day, Byely sat outside Scutho’s hut to wait for the cool of the evening. Horsemen were travelling in the Plains: she could see the dust rising and, soon, riders grew out of it and approached her. Dismayed, she saw the youth she had named Haf in their midst.

Scutho was inside the house, preparing spells, and so she must greet the travellers herself. They dismounted and sat in a circle while the servant-boy brought them kumiz and bread and cheese.

‘Who is that?’ Scutho called from within.

‘Only a party of herders,’ she replied, and sat down with the visitors. Haf was sitting in the next place. She looked at him and loved him, still more; and he, looking beneath her tattoos, saw her beauty and loved her.

‘Who is that beside you?’ called Scutho from within.

‘Only a poor herdsman who has a pox to be cured,’ she replied.

It grew dark and the travellers lay down to sleep. Haf and Byely rose from the circle, to be private with each other beyond the nearest hill.

‘Who has broken the circle?’ called Scutho from within.

‘Only the servant-boy and a maid of the herders,’ she replied.

Scutho and the travellers found Byely and Haf next morning. Their throats had been bitten out.

‘It is not safe to sleep away from the house,’ the shaman said. ‘Every herder knows how far and keen the wolverine roams. Help me raise a mound to cover my wife, for she was once a princess. But let the stranger lie where he is and may the rats and vultures feed well; for he stole Byely from me.’

‘Poor lady,’ said Gry. Her tears fell like rain on the Horse’s shoulders and, when she had shed enough of them to make her feel cheerful, she dried her face on his mane and sat up. The wolf carried his tail high and happy and Gry’s posture on the Red Horse’s wide back was easy and relaxed. They ran through a green landscape where bushes laden with catkins and blossom grew and the sun shone in a blue sky. Skylarks rose from the ground, ascending specks against the sky. She heard their song flood down and fill the open lands through which they rode, and she smiled. The shepherds’ gift of sparkstones danced a lively jig in their bag, which hung round her neck, and she had tied their beautiful blouse about her waist until she could find the time and the place to wear it. It was yellow like the day and made of Flaxberry silk bound with ribbon as juicily red as mulberries.

‘I shall put it on when I have bathed in Pimbilmere, whatever that is and wherever that may be, for I would follow Mouse-Catcher anywhere; and I would ride my beloved Red Horse to the edge of the world,’ Gry said to herself.

The Horse was silent, pounding along. Soon Gry found herself singing the song Lemani had learned from the tobacco traders:

‘Oh, soldier, soldier, won’t you marry me,

With your falchion, pipe and drum?

Oh no, sweet maid, I cannot marry you …’

‘For I have no coat to put on – I know it well,’ the Red Horse interrupted, ‘but a horse can only nei-hei-heigh! – carol on, little Rider. My heart is singing with you.’

The lake called Pimbilmere stretched left and right before them, an open eye in the heathland. Birch trees huddled together in small stands or hung over the water, dipping long, silver fingers. The mere was bordered by a bright margin of green grass and a line of clean sand.

The three companions were delighted. Mouse-Catcher jumped over the heather-clumps, disturbing the mice and voles which were hiding in them and living up to his name. Gry, longing to drink the water and to cleanse herself, slid down from the Red Horse’s back and ran to the shore. As for the Horse, he flexed his lips in the shape of a smile, shook out his mane and the aches in his neck, lay down and rolled his weariness away.

‘The grass looks fresh and good,’ he said. ‘I am hungry! – and perhaps Mouse-Catcher will bring you a heath-jack for supper.’

The wolf’s hunting had already taken him out of sight and, soon, the Horse was a red shape in the distance as his grazing led him along the shore. Gry stood at the water’s edge, shyly lowered her dress and overskirt to the ground and stepped out of them. She unwound her leggings and, leaving them where they fell, walked into the water. It was warm from the sun, clear over a sandy floor from which sparkling grains swirled up as she trod. She undid the strings of her cape and threw it ashore. The mere received her like a lover; she lay down in it and swam, drinking the water and ducking her head. Time slowed as she floated there, content. Her bleeding had stopped: they must have been travelling seven days, but months and seasons did not always follow each other, Herding after Birthmoon, Summer before Leaf-fall, in the Plains and, now that she had left, they were altogether out of order. She knew left from right and right from wrong but, if anyone had asked, she would have told him that at Russet Cross it had been springtime while, here, it was a fine day in autumn.

The sun dried her as she sat by the water, clothing to hand in case the Horse or the Wolf should appear.

‘I am not like Byely,’ she thought, studying her lean, brown body. ‘What man will look at me?’

When she was dry, she dressed in her old rags and slowly put on the beautiful blouse, buttoning it carefully and turning about to admire her reflection in the evening-shadowed mere. Next, she collected dry heather roots and dead wood from a birch-clump and made a fire with her sparkstones. The smoke smelled sweet and woke her hunger: all she needed now was meat – and there, in the lengthening shadows, came Mouse-Catcher, a fat heath-jack in his jaws. The Red Horse was following close behind. He carried some twigs in his mouth which, when he dropped them by her, she saw had blueberries on them. She ate the fruit hungrily while she skinned and cut up the heath-jack and set it over fire on a skewer of tough heather-stem.

‘That is a splendid garment for a poor nomad,’ said the Red Horse, looking at her with his great, umber eyes.

‘It is better than my old dress!’

‘It turns you into a princess. Dear Gry, if I were …’ She waited, full of guilt and melancholy, for him to finish his speech, but all he did was strike the ground impatiently with one of his forefeet and mutter, ‘A horse! A damned horse!’

‘That is a good knife,’ he said, after a while.

‘My father used it all the time – for every kind of task. But it should have gone with him and not to the Lady. If I could, I would lay it on his body in the mound –’

‘Only you cannot return to the Plains. Not yet. Perhaps you will find a way, as we travel, of telling him that you have it and take good care of it. Surely the rabbit is cooked? It smells delicious! If I were not a horse, I’d eat with you.’

‘But you are a horse, the Horse. I am glad of it.’ She patted his neck and turned away, to her meal of roasted meat.

They crowded together in the firelight, the Horse, the wolf and Gry who was busily tying and folding her old bodice into a carrying-bag. When it was done to her satisfaction and she had made a strap for it from her scarf, she wrapped the remains of the heath-jack in grass and put it in her bag.

‘Breakfast – maybe dinner as well.’

‘After sleep. So – Goodnight, Gry.’

‘Goodnight, Red Horse and Mouse-Catcher. Sleep tight.’

The wolf answered her, his voice more certain than before, ‘Starshine on you, small She,’ as she lay down between him and the Horse and pillowed her head on her arms.

She slept at once, her breathing light and relaxed. The Horse, keeping the first watch, looked fondly at her and, a thought from his mysterious and mystical past floating light as thistledown into his head and, spiny as a thistle, sticking there, wrinkled the velvet of his nose and shook his great head to dislodge it:

‘They were all as false as fool’s gold, my great Loves.’ He snorted. ‘It is better to be the Horse.’

The stars came out and Bail’s sword was mirrored in Pimbilmere. The great guardian-star shone in his solitude over by the Altaish, and the air, as the night deepened, grew cold. Gry stirred, curling tight against the Horse. She was dreaming of a knight like those in the old Lays of her people, not Bail but one who was beautiful to look upon and who was gentle and brave, gallant and bold; so, she passed from dreaming to deep sleep as the night-animals of the heathland hunted or were hunted, living out their short and furious lives. In the mid-night, the wolf woke and took over the watch while the Red Horse closed his eyes to sleep and was powerless to prevent the alternative story he could resist by day from capturing his mind:

I, Koschei the Deathless, Traveller Extraordinary, Onetime Archmage and Prince of Malthassa, now Magister Arcanum, write this sitting at the cedarwood table in the small white temple with the gilded roof which is the satellite of my Memory Palace locked in unreachable Malthassa. It is a fair room and I can see the pink siris and the smaller Tree of Heaven from my seat. Beyond, in the ‘real’ world (as some say) it is a Holy Day, the day for the propitiation of the great Naga or cobra snake, and the people have laid food and water at the round doorways of the snakes’ houses. My Lady smiles and says nothing; she has kept her human form since we first met on the slopes of the Rock at Solutré; she has been Helen for two whole world-years who once was Helen Lacey, supreme gypsy-witch; who was Silk Leni, Lèni le Soie; Ellen Love, the Bride of the Loathly Worm and Helena, Grand Duchess of Galicia with Beskiden, schemer, stealer of hearts, drinker of young mens’ and maidens’ blood; who once, in the Golden Age, belonged to Menelaus, was stolen by Paris and taken to be the glory and the bane of Troy! Who is Lamia, snake and woman, viper and pythoness, beauty of the jewelled far-seeing eyes and banded coat, sin-scarlet, bitter-orange, deathly black …

Oh, Mistress of Mortality, Identity and Age! How gladly I travel with her, knowing Wrecker of my heart, dark shadow of my older Love, the fair, inviolate Nemione, whose brown body and lustrous witch’s hair, whose forked tongue and pitch-mirk eyes are the counter of Nemione’s fair pallor and golden showers, soft corals and sapphires set in pearl. Parados loved her as well as I, that’s sure and she has left him to his fate to go with me.

Q What difference for her, since I inhabit his discarded body, which works hard for me, by day and by night?

A My mind, controller, not his. My intent, vicious, not his. My way, devious, not his.

But I have, with Parados’s body, his fount of brute energy! And something of his hopefulness, I think, a residue he left behind when he condemned himself to exile from himself! Mine’s the better deal – new life, new landfalls and horizons, new mistress; and the same misspelt name, Koschei, which he – or I – trawled from the infinite world of the imagination, collective memory, universe of tales.

Here they think it is a gypsy name and that is what they take me for, one of themselves, dark-skinned from the hot sun of this land, a Rom colourful and canny.

Our lives are simple, Helen’s and mine. Our angel-haired son left us a while ago in a cold country, in winter, the snows and the mountains calling him – he drove away in the wheeled firebird to whatever dissolute or physically punishing pastime best amuses him and we travel on. Our conveyance now is a creaking cart with a canvas tilt for the rains or worldly privacy; once it was painted in gold and red and black and decorated with suns and moons. A few streaks, weather-ravaged, of this old coat remain, for we fashioned it together (one starlit night in the Yellow Desert) out of the material of her vardo, her gypsy caravan. From the skewbald horse we made a brown and white ox to draw it. We love and laugh and live as gypsies, the last of the true vagrants, and tell fortunes when we are asked. Helen reads hands while I pretend to scry in my little prism – I found it lying in Limbo beside Parados’s abandoned body. It is a useless, shiny bauble now, the only souvenir I have of Malthassa, its compound, magnifying eye fixed firmly on the last thing it saw, the dove-woman Paloma flying (in her second apotheosis at my, or should I say ‘the cruel hawk’s’ talons?) into Malthassa’s sun.

My divine Helen, for her rich clients, uses her magic Cup, the King’s Goblet upon whose surface passes not only What is Gone but What Will Be, here on Earth. It is not hers, this wondrous Cup, but stolen like my body – and I think we are both scented by an ambitious pursuit for I have seen (one dawn in the Shalimar Mountains) an eagle fly up hastily from the rock beside our camping-place and (in the hot afternoon when the red dust rises over the Thar) a camel wake from deep sleep to stare after me.

We have wandered through the warm, wine-loving countries which crowd around the shores of the Mediterranean Sea; we have crossed the driest deserts and the highest mountains to reach this, our temporary home. Its people, who are god-fearing and industrious, call it Sind; but we belong to a smaller nation, my Lady’s Tribe of Romanies which history, legend and themselves name the Gypsies of the Gypsies, the Dom, whom Firdusi called the Luri and others, the Zott. They crowd about and protect us with their noise and numbers while we make our grail-less, idyllic odyssey.

All too soon, the stars waned and dawn came. Gry woke suddenly, for Mouse-Catcher with eyes wide open and ears erect was sitting by her, a great furry watchdog waiting for the sun to shine; but the Horse snorted in his sleep and pricked his ears as if he were listening to another’s tale.

Go into the forest till you come to a fallen tree;

then turn to your left and follow your nose.

‘I must show you my tail,’ Mouse-Catcher said to Gry. ‘The Red Horse will be pack-leader of you as before-me. What-men-call Pimbilmere is the last place of my wolf-mother.’

Gry looked into his yellow eyes in case she were dreaming still. Inside the small, contained world of her head she had heard the wolf’s voice clearly. It was a voice which travelled quickly up and down an inhuman scale and was full of yelps and soft growlings.

‘She says, leap quickly beneath the trees. Run there. A tree fell down –’

‘And then – what will we find?’ Gry interrupted.

‘New animal-country? I never smelled it. Never jumped Pimbilmere in my cub-days. But now. Dear She, Mogia says again, do not howl to the samovile.’

‘I am not afraid of spirits!’

‘But do not yap to the birch-people. They know brother-spirits in the shadow castle.’

The wolf looked about him and sniffed the air. He pointed his nose at the sky, which was high and grey with heavy clouds flying fast toward the country they had come from, and gave a queer little howl.

‘I know your smell. Until breath stops,’ he said, came closer and thrust his muzzle under her hand so that she had to lift it and stroke him. For a short time, he was still while she smoothed his heavy ruff of hair and wished he would stay. Then he lifted his tail high and bounded away from her across the heather clumps. He did not pause or look back and soon was hidden by the purple stems and the gaunt yellow grasses which grew amongst them.

Gry stood up to stretch and taste the wind. It blew steadily and smelled of wet earth and toadstools. The Red Horse stirred, lifted his head and shook it. His hairy lips wobbled as he snorted and blew the sleep from his nostrils and eyes.

‘So Mouse-Catcher has gone home to the Pack,’ he said. ‘A wolf is uneasy when he is away from his kin.’

Gry stared at him as he rose, forelegs first. He was so very big and his tail so long and mane so thick: all horse; magnificent now, and when he guarded and chivvied his mares, when he mounted them in season, when he fought the lesser stallions. He was splendid as when Nandje used to ride him on feast-days or at the horse-gatherings, his red coat hidden beneath ceremonial trappings of spotted catamount skins, the tails hanging down all around him and bouncing as he galloped.

Yet –

You don’t sound like a horse, she thought, remembering how the wolf had howled and yowled his words and the peculiar way he had of fitting them together, so that you had to guess at his meaning; while the Horse spoke well, like a village elder or a travelling teller of tales.

She ate one of the legs of the heath-jack Mouse-Catcher had killed, chewing the tough meat reflectively and sucking the grease from the bones. Then she packed her belongings into her bag, and walked a last time on Pimbilmere’s sandy shore. She drank its water thirstily. The sounds she made when she walked and drank seemed to her loud and rudely human: she had neither the speed and elegance of the horse nor the courage and stamina of the wolf although, like Mouse-Catcher, she wanted to go home. The wind had nothing now to tell her and merely stirred the reeds and ruffled the expanse of water which was grey and cheerless like the sky. She hurried back to the Horse.

Gry, riding between the blackened, wintry stems of sloe and gorse, had lost her look of sturdy fortitude, shrinking in the chill immensity to a fragile, brown elf. Even the Red Horse looked smaller.

‘These melancholy lands are called Birkenfrith by the heath-cutters who live alone in their most secret dells,’ he told her as they passed from the heather in amongst the birch trees where, to avoid being swept to the ground, she had to lie full length along his back.

Golden leaves brushed her head and she looked up at the tree spirits’ feet, appearing no more substantial than they, who were green of hue and whose tangled skeins of hair hung down like spiders’ webs. She felt the transcendent power of the birches themselves. The spirits stared back with huge, shining eyes whose pupils were as luminous as moonlit pools, and gestured at her with spiky fingers like broken twigs. Some had young clinging to their backs, two or three chattering imps which lunged outwards from precarious holds to bite off crisp leaves and nibble them with long black teeth. The older samovile had grey skins like their trees and thin, silver hair. Their faces were wrinkled and lichen-hung.

As the Red Horse and his small burden passed the samovile called out to him and shook the branches till they groaned and the trees cast their dying leaves to the ground where they lay and drifted in trains of gold and ochre. Their song passed from mouth to mouth and from tree to tree:

Red Horse come not near!

Horse run mad, Horse afear’d!

Leave our birch frith wild and weird,

To your pastures, to your Herd!

Away!

Be gone!

‘Keep your horny hooves away from us, Old Nag!’ they screeched and danced wildly on the tossing branches.

But the Horse walked stolidly on, looking neither to right nor left. Some of the vile dropped leaves on him; and these covered Gry in a rustling blanket. Only her eyes and the tip of her nose showed. Fragments of birch-song filled her ears and ran about in her mind with alluring images of sun and snow, of the slow drop of falling leaves and of new, yellow growth thrust forth in spring. There came a muttering and commotion in the branches above her and a gust of wind as the vile blew the leaves away and soothed her with warm draughts of air. Suddenly the Horse gathered his legs beneath him and jumped a fallen tree trunk. Some of the spirits were holding a wake over it and tending it by straightening its crushed boughs and brushing the soil from the broken toes of its torn-up roots. They bowed to Gry.

‘Turn to your left, little brown woman!’ they cried. ‘Follow your nose.’

Wishing to thank them she opened her mouth and whispered, ‘You are kind folk –’ and bit her tongue as she remembered Mouse-Catcher’s words: ‘Do not yap to the birch-people. They know brother-spirits in the shadow-castle.’ He meant ‘You must never speak to the birch-vile unless you want to find yourself with the dead.’

The birches grew more sparsely; tall chestnuts whose arrow-shaped leaves were blowing away on the wind succeeded them. Gry saw no vile but sensed them close by, hiding in hollow trunks or lying high where the tapering branches waved at the sky and whispered sparse songs. Once, a stony-faced puvush looked out from a hole in the ground; once, a blue and white jay flew chattering above them. She sent a thought to the Red Horse:

‘Is this the Forest?’

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘The Forest-margin at the least, safe enough for woodcutters and foresters by day. This must be Deneholt where the young River Shu runs; it is brother to the Sigla and, like him, a tributary of the great River Lytha.’

‘My father often spoke of the Lytha – though he had never seen it! And Leal too, who had not seen it either.’

‘Near Pargur it is so wide you cannot see the far bank.’

‘Shall we go far enough to find it?’

‘Perhaps, little Gry, perhaps – but the Shu, as you will see, is more like your own Nargil, shallow, fit to drink and easy to cross unless it is in spate.’

‘Battak threatened to drown me in the Nargil.’

‘Battak is a hard and tormented man – and no river is without danger.’

‘They say the Nargil flows into the Lytha …’

‘All rivers flow into the Lytha; all the river-water flows into the Ocean.’

‘You will fall into the Shu, Horse!’

‘Then hold fast, Gry! Perhaps I will have to wade.’

From her high seat on his back, Gry saw how steeply the river bank swept down to water’s edge. The Horse went cautiously, slipping and sliding on the dead leaves until he reached the shallows. Here, he stopped to sniff the air and to drink. The far bank was hidden in vegetation except for a narrow beach littered with mossy stones and for this, he struck out the water creeping to his knees and, near the middle, swirling as far as his belly. He stood still and looked down into the water.

‘I am a handsome fellow, Gry, am I not?’ he said, as he admired his reflection. ‘The nivashi think so. I can see one there, by the big boulder. She has the haunches of a high-bred mare and a smile like the Lady Nemione’s. Her eyes are white opals.’

Gry was afraid. He sounded less and less like her dear Red Horse; but perhaps he was bewitched and a nivasha had got hold of his soul. She sat very still to listen for its thin, ululating cry; and heard nothing. A fly buzzed in her face and she waited until it had flown away. Then, like the whine of a gnat on a still summer’s night, she heard the soul of the Horse. ‘Help!’ it was crying. ‘Help me!’

The Horse, while she listened, had lowered his head and now stood with his mouth in the water and his eyes on the hurrying ripples which flashed silver and green as they eddied about him.

Gry kicked him hard, as if he were an ordinary horse. She clicked her tongue and whistled to him; and he stayed where he was, frozen and immobile in the middle of the River Shu.

‘I am not afraid of you, nivashi!’ she said, and slid into the water. It came to her waist but she surged regardless through it until she reached the beach on the far side, where she wrung out her skirts as best she could. The Horse had spoken of foresters and woodcutters; such men would have ropes or might know of a shaman who could break the enchantment. Before she set off, she called out to the Red Horse but, dull and motionless as the stones themselves, he did not look up.

The brambles and thorns above her looked impenetrable so Gry walked along the beach. The river bent twice, to the right and the left; the shore became sandy and low. She climbed a bank and stepped at once into a grassy glade. Five hens and a splendid cockerel were feeding there, close to a gypsy bender-tent which stood like a small, multicoloured hillock in the exact centre of the clearing; for the bender, though clearly made of willow sticks and green-fir branches, was finished with a roof of chequered cloth, red, yellow and blue. So soon! Gry rejoiced. A gypsy forester: I never thought of that! The bender reminded her of the shelters the Ima put up when they were herding far out on the Plains and she hurried to it, while the chickens clucked and pecked contentedly at some corn-grains scattered in the grass.

She could not see the door. ‘Hello!’ she called. ‘Is anyone at home?’

No one answered her, but there was a loud rattle. The bender moved suddenly, jumping up on seven-toed feet of willow twigs and settling as quickly on the ground, while Gry rubbed her eyes and shook her head in disbelief. At least, she thought, she had found the door, there, arched and low in front of her. Again, it reminded her of home and she knelt and peered in.

She called again, ‘Are you inside?’

No sound came from the dark interior though a chaffinch in a treetop trilled, dipped his wings and flew off. She saw a three-legged stool on a hearthstone, bent her back and crawled forward. There was no entrance tunnel: you were either out or in, and she was within. Her eyes grew used to the dimness. She saw a bedplace made of cut bracken, a blanket of the tri-coloured cloth lying across it, and a small chest for clothes and possessions. There was also the stool, very low like the ones at home. She sat down on it to look about her. Curious – it almost seemed as if the place was growing lighter – and bigger. A rustle in the hearth made her jump. The sticks had fallen together and a small flame leapt up. Soon the fire was burning brightly and the kettle began to sing, while her wet clothes steamed faster than the kettle and in a moment were bone dry.

In the far wall was an archway tall enough for her to walk through and there, beyond it, was a high and airy bedroom equipped with every luxury from cushion-littered bed to silk carpets and cut-glass bottles of lotions and perfume. She pulled the stopper from one and put a dab of golden liquid on her wrists. It smelled of waxy cactus-blooms and far-off, spicy desert sands. She saw them as she breathed it in, enchanted. Beyond the bedroom was a transparent, six-sided tent with an empty bath sunk in the floor. She touched the walls and marvelled at their hardness; knelt to examine the pictures of deer and huntsmen with which the bath was lined. Water began to flow from the mouth of a stone snake coiled on the bath’s rim: Gry backed away and bumped into the glass wall. Outside was a garden in which herbs and sunflowers grew against a picket fence and bees made constant journeys to and fro between a row of wallflowers and a straw bee-skep. But there was no door into the garden and neither grassy glade nor forest trees beyond the fence. The view was wide and inspiring: of a flower-starred meadow amongst high mountains capped with snow and divided, one stone face from another, by shiny ribbons of falling water.

Gry ran back the way she had come. The fire burned merrily on the central hearth, but the doorway had gone: the curving wall of branches ran all the way round the room. She beat her hands in vain upon it and turned away, tears welling in her eyes.

‘The Horse,’ she murmured, ‘I must get out and rescue him …’

But nothing seemed to matter greatly, neither the Red Horse trapped in the river, nor her own predicament. The bed-place vanished and a velvet-covered chair appeared. A tin box stood on the hearthstone beside a spouted pot and two cups. Gry sat down on the three-legged stool and opened the tin: it contained dry leaves which had a sharp and appetising smell and a spoon with a short handle in the shape of a briar topped by a rose.

The kettle boiled, its quiet song bubbling to a crescendo and Gry, surmising that the leaves were much like those of the water-mint she used at home, warmed the pot with a little boiling water and tipped it to one side of the hearth with an automatically-muttered charm.

‘May the grass grow sweet.’

She put three spoonfuls of leaves into the pot and poured the water in.

‘Do you take it with milk?’ someone asked.

Gry swivelled wildly on the stool and almost upset the pot.

The doorway had come back! But it had grown big enough to accommodate the tall, stoop-shouldered figure of an old gypsy-woman. In her large and capable hands she held a brown jug which matched the teapot in Gry’s hand. She wore a scarlet skirt and a black bodice and the shoes on her feet had high, scarlet heels; her jewellery was made of gold and bone, of amber and jet; she had a wart on her chin and blood-spots on her apple-cheeks; her eyes, bright as a wren’s, were full of knowledge and cunning; worse, her grey hair fell straight down to her shoulders where it began to twist and curl in waves as tumultuous as water in a rocky rapids. In short, she had all the signs and hallmarks of a witch.

Gry was speechless.

‘Go into the forest till you come to a fallen tree; then turn to your left, and follow your nose – and you will find me!’ said the witch and cackled with laughter. ‘And here you are – a little, thieving Ima woman.’ The witch advanced and set down her milk jug on the hearth. ‘A female horse-herder far from home. They don’t let their women roam alone, those handsome, doughty horsemen; so this one must be a harlot or a murderess. An outcast, plainly.’

She bent over Gry and took the teapot from her unresisting fingers, poured milk and tea into the cups.

‘Will you take a cup of tea with me, my dear?’

‘I –’ said Gry. ‘I –’ but she could find no other words.

‘Drink your tea and then you will tell me all you know and every detail of your story,’ said the witch; and Gry drank, feeling warmth and courage flood into her with every sip.

‘Now!’ The witch was sitting in her chair, leaning back against the purple velvet like a queen on her throne.

Gry recited her tale, without sentiment and without apology, right to the end,

‘… and so I sat on the three-legged stool and put some leaves and boiling water in the pot –’

‘Tea!’ interrupted the witch. ‘You made my tea! Witless girl: couldn’t you see the house was waiting for me, making itself comfortable and laying out the things it knows I like. You’ve confused it, don’t you see? – look at the wall, are those a gypsy’s traps?’

Hanging from a peg were three Ima bird-traps and a horse-goad which shimmered and disappeared as the witch glowered at them.

‘You are a gypsy?’ said Gry hesitantly.

‘Am I a gypsy! By all the stars and Lilith, I am Darklis Faa, the famous gypsy witch, the celebrated chov-hani.’

‘The gypsies sometimes came into the Plains to buy horses of us,’ said Gry, the picture from childhood strong in her head; though whether it was her own memory or a tale her father had told, she could not remember. ‘The women carried willow baskets and their children on their hips and the men had bright neckerchiefs and big, gold earrings and sprigs of rosemary in their buttonholes and whips plaited from the hides of griffons. They prized our horses above all others.’

‘Tosh! We use Ima horses to pull our vans, but never for riding: they are too coarse.’

‘They are the chosen mounts of the Brothers of the Green Wolf.’

‘Thieves and murderers all – perhaps your ingenuousness comes of true innocence after all. You seem extremely stupid for a woman with the Gift,’ said Darklis crossly.

The hair stood up on Gry’s neck.

‘I am no diviner,’ she said fervently.

‘I, who can see a person’s soul-light, say it is otherwise. The light above your head is clear as crystal – and if that does not indicate a shaman who understands the speech of animals, I am not Darklis Faa! You were in luck, Ima woman. If I had not recognised a fellow-adept, you would have been a statue in my garden as quickly as Lord Koschei can say “Snipper-snap!” and turn his foes into woodlice.’

‘I can understand the Red Horse, Madam Faa, and the wolf, Mouse-Catcher; but their speech is as thought to me. I hear nothing and they certainly make no noise – they are animals after all and have their own ways of talking with tail and ears.’

‘I think you can also scry. Look at the tea leaves in your cup! What do they say?’.

‘I cannot read –’ Gry began; but there were no signs or letters in her cup. The tea leaves had crowded together in a dark mass which bubbled and sighed like marsh-mud and, settling, became the bottom of a clear pool. In this mirror there appeared first the Red Horse and, as the picture widened, a second horse or pony with a coat of dapple-grey. Gry’s hands trembled and the picture shimmered.

‘Be still!’ cried Darklis.

The Red Horse and his companion were grazing quietly in the glade, the Horse cropping near the mare and gallantly leaving her the most tender shoots.

‘That is my Streggie,’ the gypsy explained.

Gry smiled, and felt a small pang of jealousy.

‘Your Horse is a finer specimen than the average Plains animal,’ said Darklis carelessly. ‘Fortunately for him, I discovered him before the nivasha got her teeth into his tender flesh. She’s a good girl, Hyaline, but she loves to tease animals – and drown them.’

The picture spun in the cup and the horses vanished. When it was still Gry saw a stoat, which had run into the clearing and frightened Darklis’s chickens into a huddle of ruffled feathers which the cockerel protected with neck and spurs outstretched.

‘What a fine house I have!’ gloated Darklis. ‘Better at guarding my possessions than a whole army of the Archmage’s soldiers.’

‘How does it turn itself about?’ Gry whispered. ‘For that is what it did when I arrived – and I did not believe my eyes.’

‘On its four feet – and by my enchantments, addlehead!’ cackled the witch. ‘How fortunate you are, little woman, to have found me and my canny home. What is your name? Will you give it me, for I have told you one of mine.’

‘The Ima have no superstitions about names,’ said Gry. ‘Our souls are our own and free. My name is Gry and I am the daughter of that Nandje I told you of, the Rider of the Red Horse and Imandi of all the Ima.’

‘Are you sure of your name, girl? “Gry” is the gypsy word for “horse”.’

‘It is the Ima word for “Princess of Horses”, Darklis Faa.’

‘Look into the bowl once more, Princess.’

Now, the hut itself was visible, squatting like a mother hen on its feet of twigs. The little flock had run beneath it and settled in the dust to bathe. Gry sighed, but did not know if she envied the chov-hani or was merely tired of her questions and her conversation. She yawned.

‘Show me – something wonderful, something I can only dream of such as Pargur, the illustrious Crystal City, or else the handsome knight I see when I sleep. Please, Darklis,’ she pleaded. ‘Show me a glad sight, something to cheer a fugitive.’

‘No,’ said Darklis. ‘The leaves are spent,’ and she tipped them into the fire. ‘Instead, let us smoke a pipe together.’ She felt in the pocket of her skirt and drew out a knobbly, briar-root pipe and a small sack of tobacco closed at the mouth by a piece of red cord. She filled the pipe, tamping the tobacco down with a horny thumbnail, and gave it to Gry.

‘Take a glowing twig from the fire – there is one! – and hold it to the weed; but suck on the pipe and draw your breath in as you light it, or there will be no smoke and no satisfaction.’

The pipe-end was worn and marked by the chov-hani’s teeth. It tasted foul but, persisting out of fear and a wish to propitiate the witch, Gry persevered, sucking hard. Smoke shot into her throat and she choked.

‘More gently. As if you tried to suck a spirit in, for that is what you are doing, communing with the soul of the tobacco. Which brings contentment.’

And now the smoke flowed, cool and aromatic, by way of Gry’s throat into her nose, her vision, her heart and soul, and she was filled with calm and good will.

‘Aah!’ she said and handed the pipe to Darklis. They smoked quietly together, turn and turn about, until the Swan, the Hoopoe and Bail’s Sword itself were visible through the smoke-hole in the roof.

‘Like you I journey,’ said the gypsy, ‘but my quest has an object where yours discovers its objective as you search.’

Darklis Faa’s Story: The Silver Dwarf and the Golden Head

Once upon a time, not so long ago, I was camped at Lythabridge with my tribe. My sister, Lurania, had been taking the air and improving her fortune by cheating the men of their gold – which they have far too much of. She came to me in high spirits and with merry mien, accompanied by a dwarf of lofty ambition, resplendent courage and singular appearance.

I recognised him at once: he was Erchon, the Silver Dwarf. You may know (or you may not) that the miner-dwarves of the Altaish are marked by their trade and take on the colour of the material they win from the earth. Thus an Iron Dwarf has a rusty skin and a Copper Dwarf is the colour of a new penny, an Emerald Dwarf is green – and these are easily told from their common brothers, the Stone Dwarves, who are merely grimy. Silver Dwarves are more rare and Gold Dwarves only heard of.

Erchon is famed for his dense colour, like a duchess’s teapot – all over I don’t doubt! – and is a fine rapiersman always armed. Also he wears one of those flourishing hats of the fantastical kind, large and highly-coloured with a gigantic cock’s feather, for dwarves as you may also know (or not) are celebrated for their voracious carnal appetites and like to demonstrate their potency in an obvious and manly way. It does no harm!

The dwarf my sister had met bore all these characteristics. So, to cut the thread close, there was I exchanging pleasantries with the eminent Erchon outside this very bender-tent, which was pitched by the roadside.

He is bold and he is brave, I thought. I will test his courage and see if it can bring me gain; I will try him for my own amusement. So I made him a proposition and would have offered to pay him whatever his heart desired – but that, he was already in pursuit of though he knew it could never be his. He loved the Lady Nemione, his mistress: she who could never be his Mistress for she was courted by both Koschei and by the Kristnik, the stranger-knight. He took up my challenge out of goodness of heart and his love of adventuring. I thought that he, of all brave hearts, could find what my heart desired and bring it to me.

I wanted him to bring me Roszi, that wonderful gold head which sees and speaks all; Roszi, who was once a beautiful nivasha in the Falls of Aquilo; Roszi whom Koschei, by joining her icy soul and head to the body of a fire-demon and enchanting them both, had made into a puppet, a mere bed-toy to play with in the dark.

Ah, how I long for the Golden Head, spoiled and wayward though it be. How it would improve my shining hours! I would give it a proper, fitting use.

My wits are – a very little – sharper than Erchon’s; nevertheless I was surprised when he obeyed me and lay down on the banks of the river, the mighty Lytha. Before he could raise his sword or otherwise resist, I kicked him into the water and at the same time spoke a spell. I turned him into a drop of river water and off he went to Pargur, which at that time was under siege from the Kristnik, Lord Parados, and which the Archmage, Koschei the Deathless, held.

Erchon tricked me, somehow, somewhere. He never returned from Pargur; much less carrying the Golden Head with him. I do not believe him dead, for no one has seen him or Roszi – but she is no longer in Koschei’s gluttonous grasp, for she vanished the same day from Castle Sehol.

Darklis blew out a fan of smoke and idly watched it float above her head.

‘I fear that he is using her, though I did not know he could work magic. Certainly, he uses her for his convenience and pleasure. Neither dwarf nor man, if he love a nivasha, will ever rest easy or be content with a common, mortal woman.’

She put down the pipe and leaned forward.

‘Have you seen them, little Princess? Did they stray into your Plains, pretty Gry?’

‘They are surely creatures from a fable – no!’ breathed Gry. ‘I have never seen nor heard of anything, of any creature like this Roszi. No. But I knew Githon, the Copper Dwarf –’

‘Who is Erchon’s cousin twice-removed in the female line?’

‘Yes. Githon is a fine, upstanding dwarf, a travelling philosopher and lover of the curious. He was my father’s friend.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I do not know.’

The gypsy witch stared long at Gry, paying particular attention to the luminous, unwavering flame above her head, which was the light of her soul and which only she could see, and to the depths of her dark pupils. Gry, like all Ima women, could hear the soft interior pulse-beat and other tiny sounds a person’s soul makes within him; now, feeling the eyes and attention of the gypsy on her, she listened for Darklis’s soul and soon heard it yawn and begin to snore, calmed into slumber by the strong tobacco. Soon, Darklis herself yawned.

‘I am quite sure you are telling the truth,’ she said, a little grudgingly. ‘How late it is – or how early! You had better take my bed. I will sleep here, in the chair. There is too much of soft living in that bedroom for me: it is an ambitious conceit and I am happier by my smoky fire.’

Gry lay between clean, white sheets beneath a quilt of softest eider down and a coverlet embroidered with rainbows and clouds. The tobacco made her drowsy and her attention wandered, following the long journey she had made from home, and straying on the borders of sleep where the knight dressed all in silver waited to welcome her to his castle.

A gentle, querulous neigh broke into her dreams,

‘I trust you are lying in the lap of luxury, dear Gry?’

‘I am, I am, Red Horse,’ said Gry, laughing.

‘Then sleep safe,’ the Red Horse answered. ‘Goodnight!’

‘Goodnight, dearest Horse.’

She fell asleep in the warm, dark haven of the bed. In the fire-lit room beyond, Darklis’s soul was still snoring, while the witch talked in her sleep,

‘What happened to the Kristnik, I wonder? Where’s Parados, twelfth son of Stanko, the stranger-knight? I’ll give a pound for a penny to any of you, man, mouse or maiden, who’ll tell me. Where has the fellow got to since he disappeared at the Siege of Pargur?’

She is neat and slender-hoofed, thought the Red Horse in the glade; she has a small and pretty head and the hairs of her mane and tail are almost as fine as linen thread; her eye is kind and she smells good, of hay, horse-grease, mare’s-scent. But she is not a Plains horse, not my white Summer, wife and mother of my Red Colt; nor any of my mares; she is not a Plainswoman, not Gry – she is nothing but a dapple-grey pony. However, I shall not stop her from leaning her head so comfortably against my shoulder. In fact I shall return the compliment by resting my head on her neck. His eyes closed and he lifted one hoof up to a tip-tilted position so that, should he slip into the still waters of profound sleep, he would stagger and so wake himself.

When your Intelligence has passed out of the dense forest of delusion, you will become indifferent to all that has been heard and all that is to be heard.’ I have these words from the Sage who begs outside the Temple of the Highest Thought and, having noted and learned them, resolve to use them as text and precept during my sojourn in this hot land of Sind. I shall make them the bread and wine of truth – or rather, since the priests and people here are sparing and ascetic by nature, the dry biscuit and water, the very stuff and staff of life. It would be a great convenience, could I close the doors of my mind on all the perils and trials through which I and my divine Helen have passed and – no small benefit – on the bustle of our gypsy encampment; for it is the driest season, dusty, fruitful, abounding in deep noontide shadow and patches of bare ground too hot for a naked foot to bear. Our people are restless and tired.

To pass from delusion: what does the sage mean, do I want to accept his gift of mental peace? I live by delusion, by sowing and spreading it in the minds of others. Necessarily, my own temple of thought, my inner self, is full of strange creatures and fantastic images. To clear all this away, to prune and then burn as the gardener does when he tends an overgrown tree? To be empty, to be calm? What hard questions.

This afternoon, when I was in my usual perch, the cleft in the mango tree upon which blows the little, warm breeze which seems by contrast cool, I looked lazily down on the heart of the encampment Surely its noise was not unbearable? Fragments floated up to me, a confetti of conversations, both human and animal; a salmagundi of music and song. The oxen were lying dully awake like opium-eaters, and chewing the cud; Mana’s children played with their pet mongoose while she, squatting in the shade, was shaping dough between her flattened hands which she clapped together with a sound like self-applause as the paste began to fall and was caught. Raga sat on the fallen log, tapping his small, round drum while the flies buzzed unheeded about his shaggy head. The boy, Chab, accompanying him on the nose-flute, was so lithe and golden I wished I had carnal inclinations toward the male of our species. On solitary nights, when Helen was abroad with the snakes who are her soul-sisters, I had played with an idea of transforming myself into a sodomite and my redblood masculinity into something fittingly lickerish so that I might seduce and enjoy him. (Temperance, Koschei! Are you not about to make a resolution to quit such excellent diversions, to absolve, to abjure; to try the ascetic’s way?) Laxmi, combing out her night-black hair, reminded me for an instant of my beloved, yet not so exquisite, not so voluptuous despite her curves in their wrappings of shockingly pink cotton, and her bell-hung, chiming rings … (Soon I will be free of such distracting images!) Slender Ravana waved to me and, again, I was tempted and tormented; he had the outward appearance of a woman, bright clothing, kohl-rimmed eyes, red-painted lips and beneath this frippery, a great piece of meat, a male tail almost as long as mine and two mighty testicles. He had been an actor with a travelling theatre before he ran away with we greater vagabonds.

I found myself half-aroused at these sights and thoughts; allowed the thoughts to reorder themselves until the recollection of magnificent Helen overcame them. Then, was I truly aroused – to what purpose? For Helen has gone. I write it again:

‘Helen has gone. ‘Helen has left me.

and again

Eluned va da. Eluned mi da vyda, the language of the dwarves being most suitable for incantations mal or bona. All the languages that are and ever were or will be cannot contain my perturbation, my utter disquiet.

‘For our good. For mine, but yours principally, dear Koschei,’ she assured me as we took our last drink (the sweet juices of the melon and the passion fruit mingled, and a pearl against poison dropped in) together from her Cup. She kissed me on the lips and wiped the sweat from my face with the end of her scarf. I caught the phantom perfume which remained upon it in my nostrils; she had used the last drop long ago but, like its name, Sortilège, Spell, it lingers in the memory and wreaks sensual mischief there.

Helen turned the cup in her hand and sighed. I did not look at her again, being mesmerised by the spinning colours of the Cup, the sky-blue ground, the gold of the graven flames, the crimson and green letters. Words grew from her sighing.

‘Must go – far – you know the Cup is dangerous – you know we are pursued, Koschei – Koschei-i-i-i-i.’

I looked sharply up, in time to see the Cup accelerate, turning now upon a seven-ringed shaft of light, and Helen’s beautiful face above it, rapt. Then it and she vanished like a paper lantern crumpled, like leaves in a storm, and I was left alone to speak my question into the void.

‘Where are you going?’

I listened, while the gypsies’ talk hummed outside the cart, while the mocking jays sang. No answer came.

That was before noon. Hence it was that I sat like a monkey in the tree, hair tousled, body aching for love; and like a man, for I can reason: Helen, knowing my arcane and sensuous nature as well as she does her own and, well understanding how I might yearn, provided for me before she left. She will be away for no longer than one moon, she told me, before we drank our loving cup, or the time it takes for a crawling grub to become a winged and glorious butterfly; long enough, think I.

‘I have left you a gift,’ she had said. ‘Something of myself, you may call it; something I know will please you.’

She has left me Nemione, expertly plucking her senseless body from the great Plane of Delusion where she deposited it near the end of our last adventure and dressing it prettily in the female fashions of Sind – some lengths of more or less transparent, silver-bordered cloth, which go by the names of saree, yashmaq, fascinator &c – and bidding it lie in her place in our bed: for Nemione’s soul is Helen’s and so may my beloved put the pale, matchless Beauty to any use she will.

Nemione, my Lady, fair where Helen’s dark, slender where she has abundance, voiceless where the rich tones of my witch surpass the beauty of the dove’s ‘curroo’, the night owl’s throaty hiss. Oh terrible asceticism, hard master, cold mistress! Must I spurn her? Must I abjure her? I stood up in the fork of the tree, reached out a little way and plucked a rosy-red fruit – so fecund is this little paradise. I tested the mango with my nail, making a shallow fissure from which its yellow juice ran out, and this I sucked, thinking first of absent Helen and then of present Nemione. (Perhaps my mind seeks the ascetic’s way because I have excess of pleasures? I cannot believe it.) Decided for the time being, I climbed down and ran to my waggon, eager to share the fruit with Nemione.

Inviolate Nemione! Entire creature, unravished maid!

The curtains were closed beneath the tilt and I lifted a comer of the nearest to expose Nemione to my gaze. She was asleep, her snow-white skin flushed with the heat or from desire, perhaps, and she was sweating gently so that the womanly smell mingled with her jasmine perfume. Scenting her, I became excited and I dropped the mango in the dirt. Then, it was a moment’s work to mount into the cart and, straddling the sleeping virgin while I uncovered myself, mount her. She woke as I drove into her; Nemione woke and smiled, who in Malthassa was cold to me as snow and ice, as the everlasting Altaish mountains themselves. I paused a moment in my exertions to put some words into her mouth, that she might speak and, ‘Lord Koschei,’ she whispered, her voice rasping with emotion and desire. It brought me to the brink and I erupted within her, a volcano released.

The first time is the last, I thought.

I looked down on Nemione, enjoying her transports, feeling her intimate grip and release as she sank panting in her own waking dream; and wondered, as we subsided together in the bed and lay close-twined, whether she could keep my seed and conceive of it. She was a toy; but she was flesh and blood and her blood stained my Parts, evidence of her chastity when she was a she-mage in our own country and proud proof I was the first to take her.

‘Could you carry and bear my child?’ I asked her, forgetting; of course, she answered nothing, being not only voiceless but senseless as far as mental matters go, and I heard Helen laugh in my mind, a ribald echo. Such a fancy would please her keen, malicious mind. The sounds of the encampment broke over me, pushing away the passing moment, demanding to be heard. I kissed Nemione on her parted lips and tasted her patchouli-scented breath.

‘Say “Whatever you will, dear lord. I am here to worship and serve you alone, potent Archmage, king of my heart,” I whispered and pushed the words into her mouth with my tongue.

‘Whatever you will, dear lord. I am here to worship and serve you alone, potent Archmage, king of my heart,’ Nemione breathed, her lash-fringed gaze the colour of an indolent, afternoon sea.

“Sleep,” I bade her, ‘until I have need of you.’

She slipped from beneath me then and, turning her back, fell deeply asleep. Solitary again, I adjusted my clothing (the loose cotton trousers they call shulwars, nothing more), lifted one of the starry curtains which made the walls of our travelling house, and picked up a mirror, a common one, for grooming and vanities, no magic there – unless it was in the face reflected. My face, browned by the sun and the wind, blue-eyed; thatched with thick, greying hair in which still glittered many strands of yellow, a corn-colour; clean shaven. His face, browned by the sun and the wind, blue-eyed; thatched with thick, greying hair in which still glittered many strands of yellow, a corn-colour; clean shaven.

The even-contoured face, confident of life, its beauty enhanced by wisdom and the years, looked at me, Koschei Corbillion. Once, it belonged to Guy Parados. He’s good as dead, lost in my world of Malthassa while I, in his, can do whatever I will, can travel as now I do, can live and love where I choose, can journey to his native country and claim all that is his.

When I last saw Parados, he had taken over the body of a horse and was using it for his so-called noble ends –

’Tis pity there’s no notation in this alphabet for laughter.

We wise men of Malthassa think little of changing one body for another. It is from this, I think, my new ideas spring; for the sage of Highest Thought also taught me that by following his Way, any can become what is ordained be it dog, ape, or prince; and this notion, I wish to explore. My hunger for knowledge exceeds my lust by many a degree. Besides, it is written in the Twofold Scripture that the priest and the mage are one and the same and I suspect that he of the Temple is a deep magician.

These thoughts, which I now record, were mine while I regarded the face in the mirror. I put it down to look at sleeping Nemione. Asmodeus, she was beautiful, a perfection of soft colour and form!

‘Snare!’ I said, ‘Delusion!’

But I could not forbear kissing her – thrice – in farewell.

So I went out into the evening. The sun had set and the heat his fires wake in the earth had receded to a gentle warmth. Fireflies and night birds were abroad. I stepped over the dry moat which divides the encampment from my garden, a magic garden I had made to surround the little annexe to my Memory Palace left in far Malthassa and in which I stored my most tender and amazing memories. It had taken seven nights to erect to my satisfaction, to decorate: a pretty thing, carved and ornamented in the style of this country yet cool and elegant, white as milk. I approached it through the garden, ducking under the branches of the flowering siris trees and passing the lake where the black swans and gold-winged divers swam. I paused to inhale the perfume of the night.

It was dark when I stood before my little building, if dark it can be when the skies are encrusted with jewels, and I went gladly in at one of its arched entrances and sat with crossed legs on the floor. It is the posture the sage uses when he exercises his body and mind to meditate and I had practised it until I was perfect. Such suppleness is the reward of discipline and I had my body well-attuned. I would begin work on my mind.

First, to clear it, I repeated the mantra the sage had given me and which I can record here in the secrecy of mind and journal. ‘Jaa’ it is, meaningless to me but, I know, a noise like that of the thunder and with an echo in my mind or the mind of this body which I cannot locate.

Jaa! No room in my mind for thought. Jaa! No room for hunger. Jaa! No room for desire. Jaa! Here is the engine of the body, pulsing, breathing.

I heard nothing but these, the sounds of life, and the near world fell away from me. I opened my eyes: the building had gone, the trees which surround it, the stars, the night. I sat in an empty place where a redness glowed. Sense of distance, sense of time: they had gone, but somewhere, maybe before me or to one side, I saw a rise in the ground and something indistinct upon it. I thought I was on the Plane of Delusion and blinked to clear my vision. The place glowed, red as the fire of a volcano. My eyes closed, opened. I was back in the annexe and the stars were visible, sparkling gladly beyond the arches.

I was glad, to be back, to have travelled; but I wondered, where? I took my journal from its place on the shelf beside the statue of Cyllene and wrote in it. At the end of the passage I drew a neat line and a sigil of protection, breathed upon that and replaced the volume. My hand, as I withdrew it from the shelf, knocked against something, the corner of a picture which had not been there before. I stared at it: I had no knowledge of it, had not conjured it; yet there it hung, framed in dark red mulberry wood and glazed with fine, clear glass. It was a portrait in oils and I recognised the sitter, Gry of the Plains, Nandje’s daughter, or to put it in the hyperbolic, Ima style: the picture was a likeness of the Princess of Horses, Gry, Daughter of He Who Bestrides the Red Horse, the Rider, the Imandi. The woman looked serenely at me, dark eyes limpid – beautiful eyes! – her two plaits of hair bound with silver wire at the ends and silver in abundance, worked and engraved rings of it, on her bare arms and one, which had a cunning bone clasp fashioned to look like the tail of a horse, about her left ankle where the hem of her blue dress hung down.

Parados has done this, I thought. He intruded into my Memory Palace and now he is hanging his memories in my annexe. Yet I could not see how he gained entrance.

The rolling green Plains made the background in this pretty intrusion, hills and hillocks under the grass, some of them the dwelling-places of the Ima who burrow in the ground as if they were marmots or moles. The sky above the woman’s head was clear and light. That is all, a plain composition truly yet a skilful one for it showed Gry as she is, untouchable and incorruptible, a true daughter of the Horse.

Marvelling the while, I saw that the sun was fully up. The fires aroused by my writings of Nemione above were quite damped by my writings of what passed here in the night, or maybe by the purity of the new portrait. I lay down to sleep on the hard, marble floor and felt its smooth cold enter my body and freeze my lust altogether. But when I emerge into the day and the camp and am again confronted by the startling beauty of Nemione, I may be in different case.

The witch’s house, as Gry came in the morning from her sunlit, magic bedroom, had a disordered look. The chair and chest were gone, the stool was upended on the hearth and the tinware packed away. The light at her back, which gilded her dark hair and outlined her slight figure, snapped out as, with a suck and a sigh, the bedroom and all its luxuries vanished; but she spared it not one thought. The experiences of the night had taught her this, that magic may work for ordinary folk, and she ducked outside, through the original, low doorway.

There was Darklis, holding a steaming cup and a white plate on which lay two slices of dark, rye bread and a boiled egg. The chickens scratched in the grass at her feet. Beyond them, the Red Horse and Streggie waited, the pony laden with two panniers packed with all manner of gear, and a high-backed and embossed saddle. The expression on the pony’s long face was resentful. I’d bet gold – if I had any – that she kicks, thought Gry.

‘Ha!’ said Darklis, as Gry advanced and Red Horse neighed a welcome. ‘A tousle-headed lay-abed. Come, chi, hurry yourself. Here’s a break-fast.’

The food was welcome and Gry ate it quickly and made haste to greet the Horse.

‘We must never be parted, you and I,’ she whispered.

‘Never again,’ he agreed.

With many a curse and sigh, the gypsy was dismantling her hut and Gry went to help her, but the willow-sticks whined as they were untied and separated from each other. She dared not touch them.

At last, Darklis finished loading her long-suffering pony and heaved herself up into the painted saddle, settling with a grunt, her feet hanging low either side. Gry mounted the Red Horse by knee and mane.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Where we are taken, I suspect; but I think her journey is ours and will take us to Wathen Fields.’

‘Come, pretty Chickens and you – my fine fellow!’ the gypsy cried as she touched the pony’s sides with her scarlet heels, and the five hens and the cockerel fluttered in a panic after her and shot, one by one, into the sunny, morning air and so to their perches on the panniers and the pony’s neck.

‘Streggie knows where she’s going,’ Darklis called, over her shoulder.

furious fiery flanks narrow

brave brutal thick breasted

Deneholt that merry morning was full of light. The breeze touched but did not hold the autumn leaves so that they rustled quietly; the wood-birds sang with voices as golden as the leaves. Gry too sang cheerily:

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