Across the Spectrum (22 page)

They were all kin, or near enough: the same cast of face and
the same eyes, and even the same hair: from black flecked lightly with silver
to white just touched with black. The faces framed in it were not all old or
even middle-aged; one or two seemed hardly more than children.

There were six of them—seven, with the lady who had led him
there. The two youngest were round-bellied with child.

Aymery looked for signs of husbands or sons or father, but
there were only the women, and a table laden with plates and bowls and cups,
and a feast that made his stomach growl appallingly loud.

They all laughed at that, but not in mockery: warmly, with a
plate filled for him and a chair set in the midst of them. He found himself
surrounded by ladies, feasting on new milk and cream, eggs and early apples and
sweet berries, a fine sallet of greens and herbs, and so many different kinds
of cheese that he almost failed to notice that there was no meat at all. They
plied him with honey mead and something that tasted of herbs and sunlight and
made his head spin straight out of the night and into a fierce bright morning.

∞

He lay nursing a noble headache and trying to remember the
last thing he saw. One more face, younger than the rest, and slim brown hands
pouring that dangerous cordial into a cup of blue-green glass, ancient and
precious. He had been terrified of dropping it, he seemed to recall. She had
plucked it from his fingers and held it to his lips, and laughed as he choked
on the fiery cordial.

It had not been cruel laughter. He told himself that.

He was lying in a soft clean bed, and he was clean, too, and
as bare as he was born. He surged up, gasped at the pain that split his skull,
but saw his own clothes folded on the chest at the bed’s foot.

They were as clean as the bed, and the seams that had been
starting to give way because he was growing again were neatly mended. When he
had put them on, he discovered that he was not locked in, either. He was a
guest, then, and honored at that.

His head stopped pounding quite so much as he made his way
down the passage. There were doors, all shut, and one at the end that opened on
the courtyard.

He followed his nose back to the dining room. The table had
been cleared, but there was a plate at his former place, with bread of the new
day’s baking, and a bowl of pickled onions, and a cup of milk still warm from
the cow.

His hosts were nowhere to be seen or heard. The house was
silent and seemed to be deserted; the kitchen when he found his way to it was
dark, the hearth fire banked.

Someone had fed the cattle and turned them loose in the
fields, and milked the cows—none of them was lowing for release. The barns and
byres were swept and clean. But he was the only human creature anywhere that he
could think to go.

∞

In the field farthest from the house, on the other side of
a low hill that dipped down and then swooped upward to the ridge that walled
the valley, he found a herd of horses. He might not have known they were there
at all, if he had not heard the call of a stallion: the clear and piercing
trumpet that declared to all the world that here was a mare, and she was
his—and the Goddess of horses help any man or beast who challenged him.

Aymery bolted toward the sound, and so found the pasture. A
smallish herd of mares grazed in it, and a stallion whom he recognized.

Tencendur pricked ears at him, tossed his head and snorted.
Aymery took the warning, stopping short on the field’s edge and standing
scrupulously at ease.
Harmless,
his
posture said.
Innocent. No threat at all.

The stallion’s ears flattened. Aymery breathed deep into his
belly. He was ready to leap, or strike, or try to swing onto that back if he
did not get kicked into the next world.

Or he could stay where he was, while Tencendur danced and
caracoled and proclaimed his delight in this small but perfect kingdom.

This was a quandary. Aymery was a guest in this place. And
Tencendur, from the look of things, was the lord of it.

It had seemed simple enough when Aymery set out. He would
find the king’s horse and take him back to the king. It had not occurred to him
that the horse might have gone home to his own kingdom.

The mares took no notice of either of them. There were
eight. Some were white with age. Two had dark hairs in their manes still, and
round pregnant bellies.

One was young, with a dappled coat and a tangled black mane.
She was less preoccupied with grazing than the rest, and more curious: slanting
an ear at him, angling toward him, keeping him within her sight.

Aymery’s brows climbed higher as he counted each mare, and
took the measure of her, and noticed how dark and soft her eye was. He knew
magic, after all. He had learned to look beneath the skin when he wanted to
know a person—whatever outward form she wore.

It explained rather a great deal, and left at least as many
questions. He sat in the grass, clasping his knees. Apart from a snort or two
and a warning stamp, the stallion let him be.

He watched the mares until the sun had risen past noon;
until his belly was hollow and his throat was parched and his head was light
and spinning from the sun and the heat. He creaked to his feet then and found a
stream to drink from, down toward the middle of the field—with an eye on the
stallion. But Tencendur was minded to let him live.

He wandered back toward the villa. It was cool inside, and
the shade blessed his sun-weary eyes. He foraged in the kitchen and in the
garden beyond, filling his belly with the last of the bread and a knob of
cheese and a handful of radishes pulled fresh from the good black earth.

Aymery was a fighting man in season, but he had grown up on
a farmstead not so different from this. He knew how to bake bread and weed a
garden and tend a flock of chickens.

Toward sundown the cows came in, lowing for relief of their
swollen udders. He eyed them a little warily, but none of them seemed likely to
choose a human form.

He milked them, his fingers clumsy at first, stiff with
memory of swordhilt and spearhaft. Then they remembered.

Halfway through, another joined him. He glanced over his
shoulder.

The girl from his dream stared back at him. She was no older
than he, and her tangled mane was only lightly touched with silver.

He recognized her from another place, too: those narrow
feet, much cleaner now, and that quick grace as she leaned against the cow’s
side. Here was the horse thief from the king’s camp.

The bucket between his feet was full, foaming with new milk.
He eased it out from under the cow and stood with it in his hand.

“Why?” he asked her.

She finished milking the cow before she answered. When she
did, it was not in words.

She led him to the spring beneath the cow byre, and set her
bucket beside his in the cold clear water. Then she walked out into the long
light of evening, down to a paddock where Tencendur dined on sweet grass and
barley.

He fluttered his nostrils at her and showed Aymery his
teeth.

That was clear enough. Aymery kept a careful distance from
the girl, who was also a young mare.

She leaned on the paddock’s wall and folded her arms atop
it. She was a lissome thing, but sturdy: she would grow to look much like her
elders, he thought, and that was a pleasing prospect.

“Your husband?” Aymery asked.

Her lips twitched. “Sire,” she said.

That was the voice Aymery had heard on the road. What it
said. . .

His eyes widened. He inched even farther away. “He’s. . . a
man? Sometimes?”

She laughed. “Oh, no!” she said. “He’s as mortal as any
one-skin you’ll ever see.”

“Then why—how—”

“He belongs to us. And we,” she said, “in our way, to him.”

“But—”

“Tales are for night and firelight, and for full bellies,”
she said. “I can hear your stomach from here. It sounds like a pack of hounds
with one bone.”

“
You
ate grass all
day.”

“And I’ll eat the bread you baked tonight, too.” Her eyes
slid at him. “I hope you’re a good baker.”

∞

He might be and he might not, but no one complained.
Otherwise it was as fine a feast as the night before, and the ladies were
splendid company. Some of them could sing, and the eldest had a harp, which she
played like wind through glass and silver.

The song was a story. It took shape from the dance of light
and shadow.

In the time before time, when the world was still more than
half a dream in the long sleep of Her who was before gods, three Ladies rose up
out of the new-formed earth. They were still half-formed themselves, more light
than substance, but as the winds blew them hither and yon and the rains fell on
them and the sun now warmed and now burned them with its fire, they first
marveled at and then craved the stability of a living body.

It happened one bright morning, as they rode the wind across
a field of endless grass. They had been apart for long ages then, but the
currents of air had brought them together. As they danced and whirled and spun
in the joy of their reunion, a herd of creatures that had been grazing below
began to mirror their movements.

That was not so uncommon, because the world in those days
was a joyous place. But these creatures took joy and turned it into beauty and
swiftness and power.

The Ladies took that beauty to themselves. They put on the
swiftness and made the power theirs. They ran among the herd and danced with
it, and when the dancing was over, they called the stallion to them and danced
another and no less joyful dance.

From that dance came children of two worlds: the world of
living things and the world of the Mother’s deeper dream. Many of those
children ran and grazed and danced as living creatures only. But a few were the
Ladies’ truest and strongest children.

Those were born while their mothers skimmed the air as
breath and life and spirit. Air was their element, but their fathers’ substance
called to them; drew them down to earth, and gave them shape, and taught them
to run on ringing hooves.

And that was joy and beauty and power, and they were glad in
it.

But it was not the end of their story. On another morning,
when the world was not so young but still as beautiful as it had ever been, a
new kind of creature came among the herds.

It was a strange creature, small and soft and weak, and it
tottered upright on two legs. Instead of hooves or paws it had soft, flat feet,
and its forefeet were strange and supple and weirdly dexterous.

At first it tried to kill and eat the weak or the slow among
the herds, and the herds knew it for yet another predator—one that could not
run as the wolf ran, or kill with the strength of the lion, but the Mother had
granted it the wits to conceive of weapons that sped faster and killed more
terribly than either, and the hands to make and wield them.

But not all those wits were devoted to hunting and killing
and eating. These new creatures
wanted
.
And what they wanted, among many other things, was the speed and the joy and
the beauty that the Ladies also had wanted.

But these were not Ladies; they had no such power as Ladies
had, to become what they yearned for. They had to get it in another way. And
that way was to tame the herds, to feed and tend and foster them, to ride on
their backs and harness them to carts and chariots. They became the lords of
horses.

The Ladies’ children had never been many. Under human eyes
and human husbandry, almost none were born at all. The Ladies were long gone,
none of their children knew where; their children, though not mortal, could age
and change, and in the end put flesh aside and become as their ancestors, pure
air and spirit.

“Now we alone remain,” the youngest lady sang, “of all that
ever were. Only we. And the world grows old, so old.”

“Not so old,” Aymery said, “and not so few. I see two more
at least who will be born, and maybe three?”

His voice broke the spell of harp and sweet high voices. It
was melodious enough as voices went, but it was human and it was male, and it
set his own teeth on edge, a little.

He braced for anger, but the ladies regarded him with calm
dark eyes. “Three,” the youngest said. “And we are glad, because we have not
borne so many in many a year.”

“That I can believe,” he said. “And yet you told
me—Tencendur—”

“He is mortal,” she said, “and a one-skin, but the Ladies’
blood is in him, too. And more than that. . .”

She did not go on. Nor did any of the others speak, or move,
or aid her in any way that Aymery could see.

He tried. He said, “My king won him from the lord of
Narbonne. Or he thought he did. Certainly the man was riding him, and he seemed
to have submitted to it. There was no sign about him of anything otherworldly,
though he was, and is, a very fine horse.”

“He is very fine,” she said, “and therefore human men
persist in stealing him. Though they call it ‘claiming’ and ‘taxing’ and
‘winning in battle.’”

“They do that,” Aymery said. “So you stole him back again.”

“I fetched my sire out of captivity,” she said, “and brought
him home.”

He narrowed his eyes. He had been chewing that over since
she first spoke to him, out by the stallion’s paddock. He reckoned the years
she seemed to have, and the years the stallion had, from the look of his teeth.
“But that’s not—”

“In some things,” she said, “it’s best not to think too
hard.”

He had to grant her that. Magic especially—where that was,
human logic and what passed for sense meant very little.

Still.

“Wherever he came from,” Aymery said, “he’s my king’s now.
Which, if you know anything about kings, doesn’t bode well for his staying
here.”