The Horsemasters (56 page)

“Come inside me, Ronan,” she whispered. “Now. Come now.”

The time for gentleness was over, and when he drove into her hard, filling her full, she closed around him, holding to him, moving with him in the most ancient of all mankind’s rituals.

* * * *

The following day, accompanied by Culen, Nigak, and the dogs, they walked up the valley to the cave that Thorn had made his own.

After the brightness of the day, it was very dark inside, and Ronan lit both of the stone lamps they had brought with them. Nigak and the dogs curled up outside in the sunshine, and Culen, after peering distrustfully into the damp darkness, announced that he would stay with the animals.

Nel hesitated. “He will be all right, Nel,” Ronan said. “There are no real predators in the valley, certainly nothing that Nigak cannot handle.”

“All right,” Nel relented, and the two of them lifted their lamps and entered the cave together.

It was a small cave, nothing like the tremendously deep sacred cave of Thorn’s Buffalo tribe. This cave had only two chambers: a small outer room and a larger inner chamber, and it was in the inner room that Thorn had done his work.

Ronan felt his breath catch as he realized what it was that surrounded him on the walls: scenes of the valley, drawn in black pitch and colored in ocher. There was an ibex pawing with a foreleg, to sweep the snow away from its forage; there a sheep, peacefully reclining, its eyes mere slits of satisfaction as it chewed its cud. And horses. Everywhere on the wall there were horses.

“Look,” Nel said, “there is White Foot! And Acorn!”

“Sa, and here is Impero, standing guard over the mares.”

After a while they moved slowly on, circling the cave to their left, and as they moved they realized that while Thorn had devoted the right wall to the valley animals, the back wall had been devoted to something else.

“Ronan,” Nel said. “Look how he has drawn Berta.”

Without a doubt it was Berta, with her smooth dark hair and her large brown eyes. It was a picture of her head and shoulders only, and Thorn had caught the secret smile that so often played upon her lips.

Thorn had been true to his word, Ronan saw, and had only drawn those members of the tribe who had not objected. “Here you are, Nel,” he said.

“Sa.”

Slowly they moved along until they came to the end of the back wall; then they turned to look at the wall to their left. The other walls had been uneven, and Thorn had placed his pictures according to the contours of the rock. But the left wall was very smooth, and as Ronan lifted his stone lamp he realized that it contained only one very large painting.

“Oh…” It was Nel’s soft breath as she came to stand beside him and saw what was there.

It was a painting of Ronan and Cloud, a painting of their two faces, the stallion’s positioned just above the man’s, as if he were standing at the man’s shoulder. Together, they seemed to be watching something that was out of reach of the painting.

Ronan looked at Cloud’s face. Arched, regal, and masculine, the eyes wide-set and large, the edges of the thin flaring nostrils dilated in faint alarm, his horse might almost be breathing, so real did he seem. Ronan felt tears sting behind his eyes.

Thorn,
he thought.
Thorn.

“You look alike,” Nel was saying wonderingly. “Why did I never see that before? You and Cloud look alike.”

Ronan tried to swallow around the lump in his throat. He glanced at his own picture. “Are you saying I look like a horse, minnow?”

“Your expressions are the same,” Nel said.
“Look.
Surely you can see for yourself what Thorn has done.”

“Sa,” he said after a moment. “We look like arrogant bullies, the both of us.”

He felt her arm come around his waist. He never had to tell Nel what he was feeling; she knew.

“He should not have died,” Ronan said harshly.

“What he did in this cave will remain,” Nel said. “Long after you and I are dead, Ronan. Long after the Tribe of the Wolf is but a memory, this cave, and what Thorn did here, will remain.”

He thought about that, thought about what might happen, many many years hence, when strange people might come into this cave and see these pictures upon the walls.

“He drew for the joy of it,” Ronan said. “He did not do it for a hunting ceremony, or for any other reason save the pure joy of it.”

“It is in my heart that you can see that in the pictures.”

A small voice came from the outer chamber, “Mama?”

“Dhu,” said Nel, and she moved hastily toward the doorway. “I am coming, Culen. Stay where you are, please.”

“Where Dada?” Ronan heard the child say next.

“He is coming too.”

With one last look at the picture upon the wall, Ronan turned away and moved to rejoin his family.

To Patty, best of sisters, best of friends

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my appreciation to two particular friends who were of invaluable assistance to me in the writing of
The Horsemasters.

First, thanks to Edith Layton Felber, who helped me sort through a chaos of ideas and characters to come up with the shape of a novel.

And I would also like to acknowledge Elsa, my beautiful bay thoroughbred mare, whose shadow stands behind all of the horses in this book.

Afterword

The catalyst for
The Horsemasters
came from Paul Bahn, the English archeologist who has written in several places of his suspicion that humankind’s partnership with horses might have begun earlier than most historians presently think. Bahn points out a number of Cro-Magnon engravings and pictures in which the horses appear to be wearing harnesses, as well as some pieces of portable art taken from the cave of Le Mas d’Azil, where there are numerous horseheads that seem to be wearing some kind of a bridle.

One other fascinating piece of evidence Bahn cites to buttress his theory is the fossil of a horse’s tooth that he found in the Begouen family collection. This tooth, dating from about thirteen thousand years ago, bears two transverse polished grooves, which seem to represent a variation of normal cribbing wear. As any horseman knows, cribbing (wood chewing combined with sucking air) is a vice peculiar to horses kept in captivity; it never occurs when they are running free.

In the words of Bahn, “…there has never been a valid reason for rejecting
a priori
the idea of close animal control in the late Paleolithic, and indeed there is a body of very varied evidence in favour of such a view; on this basis I consider it perfectly feasible—even likely,—that some human groups in the later part of Wurm (and possibly even earlier) travelled with pack-animals, on horseback, or in transport harnessed to horse or reindeer”
(Pyrenean Prehistory
by Paul Bahn).

* * * *

Throughout history, whole civilizations have changed because of the horse. People who were once sedentary suddenly found themselves masters of space. Distances dwindled, and settlements were perceived not as homes but as springboards for endless plundering.

This particular kind of horse mentality is relentlessly male; the possession of horses conferred power. From the Bronze Age Kassites, to the Hittites, to the Scythians, to the cavalry of Alexander the Great, horsemen rode over the world. Central Asian horsemen called Huns challenged the power of Rome, and Genghis Khan and his Mongol army conquered much of Asia and Europe. In our own country, the introduction of the horse rapidly transformed the Plains Indian from a subsistence farmer into a buffalo-hunting warrior.

The coming of the horsemen, then, is one of the most ancient of themes, and, considering Bahn’s evidence, I decided to explore it in this novel.

* * * *

The setting for
The Horsemasters
is the Pyrenees mountains some thirteen thousand years ago. Anthropologists call the people of this time Cro-Magnon, and their culture is called Magdelenian.

The language used in this book, as in my previous prehistory novel
Daughter of the Red Deer,
is modern English. The characters are supposedly speaking their own language, and rather than attempt some kind of pseudo-Cro-Magnonese, I preferred to “translate” their words into our own speech.

The horses of the Valley of the Wolf are loosely based on the Villano, the Iberian horse of the Pyrenees referred to in ancient books.

The River of Gold is the Garonne, the Atata is the Ariege, and the Greatfish is the Salat. The sacred cave of the Tribe of the Buffalo is the cave of Niaux, the Great Cave is Le Mas d’Azil, and the sacred cave of the Tribe of the Red Deer is Le Tuc d’Audobert. Thorn’s cave in the Valley of the Wolf has never been found.

Copyright © 1993 by Joan Wolf

Originally published by Onyx (ISBN 0451405056)

Electronically published in 2011 by Belgrave House

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This is a work of fiction. All names in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to any person living or dead is coincidental.