Nine White Horses (19 page)

The fence along the road was an atavism, a real
post-and-rail fence, though there was a forcefence just behind it to keep it
secure. One of Papa Morgan’s predecessors had thought it worthwhile to have at
least one old-fashioned fence for leaning on and watching the horses. Papa
Morgan did just that now, and Shanna Chen-Howard kept him company. Watanabe
hung back, with Marina still behind him.

The mares had been aware of them all along, but most were
busy cropping the new grass. It was Novinha’s colt who came forward first,
curious to see who these visitors were. He took a circuitous way about it,
showing off his floating gait, spiraling in toward the fence till he stood just
inside of it, nostrils flared, head up, bright eye fixed on them all.

Shanna Chen-Howard took a while to find her voice. When she
did, it wobbled a little, but then it was its forthright self again. “Well. You
weren’t exaggerating.”

“Neither were the holorecords we sent you,” Papa Morgan
said.

“No,” said Shanna Chen-Howard, “but somehow, in the flesh,
it’s more effective.”

She stretched a hand over the fence. The colt sniffed it,
thought about nipping, caught Marina’s eye and behaved himself. He let Shanna
Chen-Howard stroke his nose, and stood still for her to run her hand up it till
it touched the base of the horn. She almost recoiled then: Marina saw how she
tensed. But he leaned into her, encouraging her to scratch where it was always
itching.

“It is real,” she said as he obliged him. “It really is.” She
began to laugh.

The only one who seemed to need an explanation was Watanabe.
He was not about to get one. She kept laughing when Papa Morgan let her into
the pasture, the same way Tante Estrella had when the colt was born, and Tante
Concetta. It was a grand joke on the Mandate.

o0o

“The trouble,” she said as they lingered over dinner that
evening, “is that the Mandate has no sense of humor whatsoever. You’re
exonerated—there’s no sign of tampering, and every breeding was administered
entirely by technicians from the Hippodrome—but you know how the law works. It
has to cast blame on somebody.”

No one looked at Hendrick Manygoats Watanabe. He had a plate
in front of him as they all did, the elders and the trainers who had been
admitted to the meeting, the senior trainers and the younger ones like Marina
who were in charge of this year’s foals. He had eaten nothing and said nothing.
It was probably excruciating for him to have to dally like this, being
endlessly inefficient, eating and drinking and hanging about instead of working
on the problem at hand.

“I’d ask, Why not blame the Mandate?” said Tante Estrella, “except
I’m not that foolish. We did warn you—them—of what might happen if they tried
to meddle with old stock.”

“So you did,” said Shanna Chen-Howard, “but after all, the
horses bred under the Mandate were meddled with, too, in the beginning. Why
would these be any different?”

“Because they’re old stock,” Tante Estrella said. “The
others had already been meddled with till they forgot where they came from.
These never did. The Arabian is the oldest and purest of all. The others were
bred from it by masters who knew better than any Mandate how to make perfection
in the form of a horse. It’s dangerous to meddle with perfection.”

Shanna Chen-Howard shook her head. She was not arguing, at
least not with Tante Estrella. “So. We tampered with something that was already
finished. We turned it into something else altogether.”

“Exactly,” said Papa Morgan.

Shanna Chen-Howard sighed heavily. “This is not going to go
over well with the committee in the Hippodrome. There’s that clause in the
Mandate, you see, that your predecessors helped write. The one that draws the
line between modification and complete transformation. We can tidy up your
horses’ helices. We can’t turn their offspring into something other than
horses.”

Papa Morgan smiled. There was nothing smug about it, but Hendrick
Manygoats Watanabe got up abruptly, kicked back his chair, and stalked out.

None of it was really about the Mandate, or about the
Hippodrome’s mistake. Marina’s, too, for thinking that it was so simple. She
had not been paying attention. That was a bad fault in a horse trainer.

It was a long summer. The weather was on a random cycle,
which meant heat and sun and a daily explosion of thunder. The nights were
steamily warm, with a crackle of lightning near the horizon.

Marina liked to walk the pastures at night. The horses were
quiet then, grazing or drowsing. There were monitors set to catch anything out
of the ordinary, but they were part of the forcefence, invisible and almost
imperceptible.

She went out on a night when the moon was full and the
lightning had sunk almost out of sight over the world’s rim, and wandered from
pasture to pasture. There were mares in foal again, bred the old way, without
the Mandate to interfere. They were standing together at the far corner of
their pasture, looking out into the next, where their sisters were, and the
foals.

Novinha’s colt had a horn now as long as Marina’s hand. It
was ivory, densely spiral-grained and keenly pointed. The elders had been
talking about blunting the foals’ horns or capping them like an elephant’s
tusks or removing them altogether, for their own and their mothers’ safety.

While the elders failed to agree on what to do, the foals
did each other no damage, though they loved to spar like swordsmen. They seemed
to have an instinct, a sense of just how far it was wise to go. It held even
with humans.

And that, thought Marina, was the most unfoallike thing
about them. Young horses were reckless of their strength, but these were
remarkably careful, for babies. It was as if they were born knowing how to
conduct themselves in the world.

Novinha’s foal called to Marina as she came down to the
pasture, running along the fence with head and tail high, tossing his head with
its moon-bright gleam of horn. The others followed more slowly. They had their
own chosen humans; they acknowledged Marina but did not welcome her as the colt
did. In that they were Lipizzans, but again they were young for it.

She slipped through the gate in the wooden fence. The colt
was waiting for her. He followed her as she walked to the river, with the
others trailing behind, and even a few of the mares.

She stopped as she always did at her favorite place, a stone
like a chair, where she could sit and watch the water flow by. The colt lay
down as he liked to do and laid his head in her lap. The moon glowed in his coat.
She stroked it. It was the softest thing in the world, and warm, and it smelled
of flowers. He closed his eyes and sighed.

He was not asleep, not quite. His ears flicked as the other
foals and their mothers found things to do nearby. A pair of shadows moved
softly through them, stroking a neck here, a nose there.

Tante Estrella and Tante Concetta sat on the grass near
Marina’s stone. Some of the foals circled, curious, even came to be petted, but
none came as close as the colt had, or laid his head in a welcoming lap. Maybe
it was Novinha who prevented it: she had come to stand over Tante Concetta,
huge and white and quiet.

Marina’s head was full of questions. There were too many of
them; they crowded each other. They silenced her.

Tante Estrella only sat for a moment before she was on her
feet again, stroking and talking softly to one of the younger mares. That one
had a filly, who came to investigate Estrella, nibbling boldly on the hem of
her coat.

“Look,” Estrella said abruptly. Marina started. The colt
opened an eye but closed it again, refusing to wake for anything as trivial as
human chatter.

“Look around you,” Estrella said. “Do you know what you see?”

She was expecting an answer. Marina groped for one. “A
mistake,” she said. “The Mandate carried too far.”

“No,” said Estrella. “You don’t see.”

Marina frowned. She had come here to be alone in the quiet,
not to be put in the training ring and set on a circle.

“Estrella is saying,” said Concetta from Novinha’s shadow, “that
you need to look harder. What do you see?”

“Twelve baby unicorns,” Marina said sharply, though she
tried to be light. “Next you’re going to tell me you planned this.”

“We did expect that it would happen, yes,” Concetta said. “We
thought the Hippodrome needed a lesson.”

“It could have blown up in your faces,” Marina said. “We
could have been shut down. If they get angry enough, we could still—”

“No,” said Estrella. She was smiling. It was the same smile
Papa Morgan had had, that had driven away Hendrick Manygoats Watanabe.

Marina was not as easily routed, and she had a unicorn in
her lap. She looked around as she had been told to, in the moon’s bright light.
The mares were all around them, and the foals, watching as if what she said
could matter to them. And how could it? She had nothing wise or intelligent to
say.

She had to say something. She said, “We’re old stock, too.
Aren’t we? What happens if they put us under the Mandate?”

Estrella laughed. It was a silvery sound, but very human. “Not
what you’re afraid of! We turn into what we were to start with. Gypsies. Tinkers.
Tamers of horses from Old Troy onward. No more and no less than we always were.”

“But,” said Marina. “I don’t—” She stopped herself, started
again. “I’m not seeing what I obviously should see.”

“We’re all blind when we’re young,” Concetta said. “We have
to learn to see. Like foals.”

“Not these,” Marina said, ruffling the colt’s mane. “We’re
custodians, aren’t we? We were given them, and they us. We protect them.”

“That’s part of what we do,” Concetta said. “We watch over
the old arts, too, and the old lines.”

“Which happen to go back to the old stories,” said Estrella.
She seemed to find the fact delightful. So would Marina, if she had time to
think about it—if she were not so afraid. She had grown up under the Mandate.
She could not imagine it giving way so easily. The family could not be that
strong. No one was.

She said that last aloud. Estrella shook her head at Marina’s
foolishness. “We don’t need to be. We have our horses. And,” she said, “their children.
Haven’t you wondered what will become of them?”

“Often,” Marina said.

“In an older world,” said Concetta, “there would be no place
for them. This world, that makes new species out of the rags of the
old . . . there’s room in it for a myth.”

Marina looked at the colt asleep in her lap. He did not feel
like a myth. He was warm and solid and inescapably real.

“Is he going to live forever?” she asked.

She had no idea where the question came from. It simply was,
hanging out there in front of them.

One of the mares snorted and stamped. The sound swelled to
fill the silence.

Estrella spoke softly, almost too soft to hear. “We don’t
know.”

Marina widened her eyes. “You don’t know? But you know
everything!”

Estrella said nothing. Concetta sighed. “We only know what
all the elders know. What we teach the young ones when they’re ready. What we
preserve here, as far as the world ever knew, is the old way of training
horses, and the old lines. Now it knows what the old lines are, and what they
come from. But what else we’ve let the Mandate make here . . . we
don’t know. They may just be very long-lived.”

“How? Like their mothers, still strong at thirty? Or like us
with our hundred years? Or more than that?”

They did not answer.

The colt stirred suddenly and scrambled to his feet. He
shook himself all over. He scratched an ear with a hind hoof; scratched his
rump with his horn. He nudged against Novinha and, with a careful twist of the
head that kept the horn from her belly, began vigorously to nurse.

Miranda could see how he would grow, from the way the
moonlight struck him: not tall but broad and sturdy, built to carry a rider, to
pull a carriage, to stand in marble on a monument. He was not the delicate
goat-creature of the myth. None of them was, even the ones who had been bred
from Arabians. They were all as real as the stone she sat on.

“And they said,” she said, “that the rootstock was a
rhinoceros.”

“That was a diversion,” said Estrella, “to keep the secret
safe till people were ready to know it. It’s not how long one of them lives, do
you see? It’s that the line lives. Just as with us. One person dies, gives way
to another, but the species goes on and on. Eventually it changes. Or if people
meddle with its helices, it discovers what it would have been.”

Marina nodded slowly. “I wonder,” she said. “Will they breed
true?”

“We don’t know that, either,” said Concetta, but not as if
she were deeply troubled by it.

Marina thought of finding answers. Of breeding under the
Mandate; of being exempt from it. Of discovering what they had, and what it
would turn into.

Shanna Chen-Howard would come back. Others would come with
her. They would try to meddle. They could not help it.

Somehow under the moon it did not matter. The world was so
much wider than it had been, the day the Mandate lowered itself on Dancer’s
Rest.

“It did better than it knew,” she said.

“Oh, it knew,” said Concetta. “It just didn’t know how much
it knew.” She pushed herself up, shaking out her skirts. “It was meant, after
all, to make the imperfect perfect.”

“And when it found something that was exactly as it ought to
be,” Estrella said over the back of her favorite mare, “it made something completely
new, that was as old as memory.”

And they said the magic had gone out of the world. Marina
shook her head and found herself smiling. It was hard not to smile, with mares
and foals all around her, and one coming to rest his horn gently over her
heart.