Nine White Horses (2 page)

But needs must. He ducked his head and made himself
invisible, which was another gift he had. As swift and silent as a shadow, he
ghosted through the camp.

o0o

Everyone else said the horse had gone into the city.
Aymery had a habit of ignoring what people said. He followed the tracks in the
dust.

They led him toward the city, but angling gradually around
it. They never went near the gates at all.

The city was locked shut. The farmsteads outside of it were
deserted; the road was empty. No one in the king’s army had done anything to
encourage it, but it looked and felt like a siege.

Aymery was even more careful than before to pass like a
whisper of wind. Even invisible, he felt the twitch between his shoulder
blades, as he caught the glint of metal atop the wall. There were archers up
there, armed and ready to shoot.

He had no particular thought of stopping a war. He was
curious, more than anything: to know why a vagabond child would do such a
thing, and how he had managed to tame that of all horses. One would think that
the horse and the boy knew each other.

Aymery was a little off his head, maybe. He had been since
the battle in the pass. So many had died already; the gates of Heaven must be
crowded with souls clamoring to get in.

Well then, he had better find the horse.

He passed under the walls without taking an arrow in the
back or setting off the alarms. But his luck had failed in another way: the
horse’s trail was gone. A flock of sheep had run across it, and what looked
like a fleet of oxcarts after that.

None of them had lingered. He knelt in the road where the
tracks were most tangled and confused. The horse’s hoofprints were still there,
buried under all the rest; the memory of his passing was in the road still, and
dissipating in the air.

The wind had died to a whisper of breeze. It stirred up the
dust. When Aymery closed his eyes, he could see the horse tripping lightly past
the city, with his rider perched insouciantly on his back.

He followed that memory, that sensation like a shaft of sun
on his face. If he turned too far, it faded. He aimed toward the direction
where it was strongest, walking with eyes shut as often as not, because it was
easier that way.

o0o

“Are you blind, then?”

The horse’s track was stronger now, the road as deserted as
ever. The voice came out of empty air. It was clear and imperious, and it spoke
priestly Latin with a distinct southern lilt.

Aymery opened his eyes. He was still under the wind-tossed
sky, but there was no city to be seen—and it should have been looming behind
him. He stood on a wide and empty heath, an expanse of summer-seared grass and
wild thyme that rolled down toward a tumbled sea.

There was a road ahead of him, perfectly straight. Its
paving stones were worn but still smooth.

Romans had built this. It stretched behind him, though he
did not remember the feel of it under his feet, and it stretched ahead, vanishing
into a fold of the hills.

There was no living creature anywhere in sight. Aymery
addressed the direction from which the voice had come, civilly, as one was wise
to do in the presence of magic. “What should I be seeing?”

“What is in front of your face.” The voice was full of
laughter. It had shifted from the side to the front, but there was still
nothing to see, not even a ripple in the air.

For lack of greater inspiration, Aymery walked forward. He
half expected to collide with an unseen body, but the way was clear.

He decided to find that encouraging. It could be a trap, but
he had a nose for that, and it detected only thyme and the sea.

And something else. Something faint, slightly pungent, more
pleasant than not. The smell of horse, hanging in the air ahead of him.

He followed it down the straight track into the hills.

o0o

The hills opened as he had known they must. The green was
somewhat less wild here, the roll of the land divided with walls of unmortared
stone. The heart of it was such a place as one saw everywhere that Rome had
been: villa and outbuildings, stables and storehouses.

Aymery saw no cattle in the fields and no flocks of sheep in
the hills, and no ash-grey stallion grazing in safety near the villa.
Everything was still, as if the earth itself forbore to breathe.

The road led straight to the villa’s gate. No bird called,
no insect buzzed. He walked through an empty world, into a deep and eerie
silence.

And yet he was not afraid. The horse’s scent led him still.
In front of the gate was a pile of droppings, so neat it seemed to mock him,
and more fresh than not.

The gate opened before him. He paused, remembering tales of
traps and dangerous deceptions. But the horse had gone in, and Tencendur was
even warier than the run of his kind.

That did not mean Aymery was safe, at all. Still, the horse
was inside; that, his bones were sure of. He took a breath and stepped over the
threshold.

Chickens clucked and fluttered in the courtyard. Cattle
lowed in the byre beyond. Sheep bleated. Life teemed and hummed and buzzed as
it did everywhere that humans were.

He was in the world again, but where exactly it was, he
could not have said. It was solid under his feet, and the sky was open
overhead. And there was a woman coming toward him in the fading daylight.

She looked ordinary enough: a sturdy woman in a plain and
practical gown, with a long bony face, and dark hair gone mostly grey. “Good
evening,” she said civilly in Latin, with an accent that Aymery had not heard
before: low and liquid, with a strong rhythm, almost as if she sang the words
rather than spoke them. She was not the one who had addressed him on the heath,
but he thought she might be a relative.

“A fair evening to you,” he answered her with equal
civility.

“You are welcome in this house,” she said.

He bowed as if she had been a lady of the king’s court.

That seemed to amuse her: her lips twitched and her big dark
eyes glinted. She turned with a flourish that took him by surprise, swirling
her skirts, and strode before him with her thick long braid swinging to her
substantial haunches.

He was gaping like an idiot. He shut his mouth and hastened
after her.

o0o

The villa had been quite grand once, with a pool in the
courtyard and mosaics on the floors. The pool had long since been filled in; a
kitchen garden flourished there now, with the chickens keeping the weeds and
the insects at bay. The floors were still lovely though faded, especially in
the dining room, where the rest of the inhabitants of the house were gathered.

Aymery had little time to appreciate the glory underfoot,
though he did manage to notice the number of horses leaping and gamboling and
peacefully grazing in fields of malachite and golden glass. There were live and
breathing beauties gathered around the table.

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.

o0o

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.

o0o

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.