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Like readers, characters come to Darkover for a variety of reasons. Each person and each reason is a story, and each creates ripples in the complex tapestry of the planet of the Bloody Sun. Some come for escape, others for adventure or romance or trade...and some for even stranger, more wonderful reasons. Like the magnificent horses of the Alton Domain.
Judith Tarr is the author of over forty novels and numerous short stories, including World Fantasy Award nominee Lord of the Two Lands and the space opera, Forgotten Suns. She writes that she has been a Darkover fan since a college friend tempted, er, corrupted, er, encouraged her to read The Heritage of Hastur. She devoured it, then every one of the others as she could find them. The world of the Bloody Sun remains one of her favorite alien worlds, and she is honored and delighted to be allowed to play in it.
The horses, her heroine reflects, were worth the journey....
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Spend enough time on any world, and you can get used to anything. Even a sun the color of blood, and snow at high summer in what passes for temperate latitudes, and people who...
But that’s getting ahead of myself.
This story begins on a different world altogether, under a yellow sun, with a single moon hanging over a palace that had been old when the first rocket dared the sky. It was a brisk day in early winter, and the horses were fresh for the morning exercises. Even the veterans snorted and danced, and the young ones, just beginning their life’s work in our ancient school, ranged from energetic to downright obstreperous.
There was always an audience in the galleries, either smaller or larger depending on the weather and the season. That day I remembered because the Director was entertaining dignitaries: not particularly rare or remarkable, except for one young person with an outworld accent, who came down to the stables afterward and asked penetrating questions about the horses.
That wasn’t unheard of, either, though I happened to be handiest for fetching out horses, and he wouldn’t look at me at all. He was rude, I thought, but I’d met enough outworlders to know that one world’s rudeness is another’s good manners.
I’d never heard of his world. Darkover—odd, evocative name. He was a fine specimen, big and broad-shouldered, with the reddest hair I’d seen outside of the Scottish Highlands.
“We breed for blacks,” he said, “but we have our share of greys, as well. Is it true your silvers don’t keep their dark points? They grey out as they age?”
“Yours don’t?” I asked.
He still wouldn’t look at me, except sideways, but he answered politely enough. “Some do. But a few of our lines are born black, and the body goes silver but the points stay as they were.”
“A mutation, maybe,” I said. “We preserve the old lines here—genetics that go back more than three thousand years.”
“I can see that,” he said in clear admiration, running his hand down the neck of my lovely, if headstrong, Galatea. Galatea, who despite his feminine call-name was quite the studly personage, arched against the touch and pawed imperiously.
The outworlder laughed. “Yes, indeed! Apologies; I am keeping you from your breakfast.”
“So you are,” I said, but with a spark of humor.
As I led Galatea back into his stall, where the manger waited, overflowing with good mountain hay, I heard the outworlder say to the Director, “Someday, sir, you must come to my world and see my horses. There’s much that we could learn from you, both of riding and of breeding.”
“That would be a fine thing,” the Director said, diplomatic as always, but I could tell he was tempted. He used to love to travel, before duty and the needs of the school bound him here in Old Vienna.
~o0o~
The visitors went away; the school stayed where it was. I pursued my studies in the riding hall in the mornings, and in the university and at the stud farm in the evenings and the holidays.
Then one morning, twenty years after the young man from Darkover admired my stallion, the Director found me in the stable, taking down the name of Galatea from the stall and not trying to fight the tears.
The Director is a horseman. He said nothing of the four younger stallions in my charge, or the fifth doing his duty in the mountains with the mares. Nor did he utter platitudes about a quick end as opposed to a slow decline, or how we still, after all these millennia, could do nothing of any use when a horse fell prey to his damned primitive digestive system.
No one had ever been able to change that without changing the species itself—and we preserved the old lines. With all that meant, for good or bad.
He said nothing about any of that. He said, “I have a task for you, if you’ll take it. A mission. A sabbatical, if you like.”
I glared through the tears. “I’m not that traumatized. I don’t need to be put on psych leave.”
“Of course you don’t,” he said, “but we’ve received a rather unusual invitation, and the Federation has had one of its intermittent attacks of indulgence. It asks—no, requires us to accept. It’s even offered a bribe: five years’ worth of support for the school.”
My eyes went wide. The school has a very long history of struggling to survive—and those struggles have at times come close to death-throes. We were nowhere near that desperate just then, but five years of operating expenses were a considerable incentive.
“What do we have to do for that?” I asked. “Move all the horses to Ceti IV?”
“I should hope not,” he said with a hint of starch in his tone. “We’ve been asked by a planetary dignitary to send one of our riders to his own estate to evaluate his horses, advise on his breeding program, and instruct his trainers in our methods.”
“Just one rider? Not half a dozen? And horses with them?”
“Just one,” he said. “It’s at the back of beyond—a proscribed world, no less.”
“For how long?”
“An Earthyear,” he said. “Plus transport time.”
I released the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. I’d been expecting him to tell me I’d be sent out for the rest of my life. For what the Federation was paying, it might actually be worth it.
A year—that was just enough to make it an adventure. I’d earned my academic degrees long ago; I’d gone on tour with the school and taken vacations on an assortment of worlds. But never on a restricted world, let alone a proscribed one.
“No weapons that leave the hand,” the Director said when I asked. “Swords and knives, that’s all. No tech beyond the medieval. No aircraft or paved roads. No computers; no web connections. Not even a cellular communicator.”
That gave me pause. “What are they, New Amish?”
“I don’t think they’re that technologically advanced,” he said. “But they have horses, and they want to learn from us. The Federation is willing to pay for it. I can send Harald—put that passion for mock-Old-Medieval reenactment to use—but he doesn’t have your knowledge of genetics or your years of work at the stud farm. He’s a rider, not a breeder.”
“Yes, I am a mutant,” I said. “I have the genes for training and breeding. A combination not usually seen in nature.”
That wasn’t all I had in my genes, but the rest wasn’t relevant, I thought then.
I turned Galatea’s nameplate in my fingers. For an instant I felt him close behind me and felt the warmth of his breath on my neck.
“I’ll go,” I said.
~o0o~
The Director should probably have sent Harald after all. Cottman IV is one of those worlds: males in charge, females suitably repressed and perpetually pregnant, and no skin tone darker than light Mediterranean.
By the time I rode up to the grand estate in its ring of mountain-sized hills, I’d been stared at, muttered over, and even spat at, and the guards who rode with me had a bet going as to whether and how much the brown of my skin would wash off with a good scrubbing. All that kept me from turning around and heading straight back to the spaceport was the mare I was riding and the prospect of more like her in these fields that rolled away under the blood-red sun.
The lord of the manor wasn’t waiting for me. The man who met me at the gate was dark and wiry, with a look I knew well: poised and quiet, as one learned to be around horses.
“Mestra Tahawy,” he said, not mangling my name too badly. His accent there was certainly better than mine in his language. “Lord Alton sends his sincerest regrets. He was called away unexpectedly, and will greet you properly on his return. Meanwhile, I’ll be your host here, and your guide about the estate.” He bowed. “Angus MacAran, z’par servu.”
This man, I noticed, didn’t stare as hard as most. He’d been forewarned, maybe. I nodded as we learned to do at the school, where riders outranked everyone but their horses and the only reverence we offered was to the ancient portrait above the royal gallery in the Riding Hall.
“You’ll want to meet the horses first, I’m sure,” he said. “Though if you’d rather I showed you to your rooms—”
“Horses, of course,” I said, though my hands and feet were numb with cold and the sky looked ready to drop a spit of snow. This man knew. Horses first, always. Everything else came after.
~o0o~
The horses were worth the journey. The men who cared for them—all men, of course, on this world—were horsemen by any reckoning, but most of what they did was strictly on the utilitarian side. They used horses. They weren’t, for the most part, inclined to see them as we did: as partners; as fellow sentients.
Riding for them meant transportation. Riding as art, focused through years of close study, was almost as alien to them as I was.
My genetic studies had to wait until I was back in the Terran Zone. All I could do here was pull and store hair samples, study bloodlines and stud lists, and set one earnest young person to work copying, by hand, such of the studbooks as I might find relevant. No copying machines here, no mechanical reproduction equipment of any kind.
But the horses—oh, those horses. Blacks mostly as I’d been told, but greys and bays, too, and the rarer, distinctive silvers. I saw the ancient Iberian in them, and the alterations of time and use and alien feed and care and sunlight.
Nothing in any world could compare to our dancing white beauties, but these came close. They were more tolerant of human blindness and unthinking force, but they had their own way of training those who handled them. They were subtle about it, with a kind of wry humor that made me swallow laughter, the first time I watched an arrogant twit of a boy try to teach a mare a set of movements that she had long since learned for herself.
Animals are often more intelligent than we realize. Our species is all up in its head, framing the world in its own invented words. It’s a rare human who pays attention well enough, or long enough, to understand what the less verbally or technologically minded sentients are saying.
These horsemen had a gift—strong, some of them, Angus MacAran most of all. But it was oddly constrained. They would command the horses, but it didn’t seem to occur to them that communication could go both ways. That horses were more than simple-minded animals without much by way of higher intelligence.
They were tools to be used. Beautiful ones, finely honed and, as far as their handlers knew how, exquisitely trained. They were valuable and highly prized, like the swords that males of status wore, but not granted much more emotional autonomy than that.
“Horses have neither memory nor imagination,” MacAran told me in all seriousness as we stood by the rail during a training session.
Training on this cold and frequently storm-ridden world took place, sensibly enough, in a covered arena surrounded by horse stalls: a courtyard with quite decent sand footing and the benefit of heat from the bodies of the horses in the stalls. They were starting young stock this tenday, colts and fillies brought in from the pastures to be evaluated and marked either for breeding or for sale.
The young ones had been within walls for long enough to have lost some of their nervousness after a lifetime in open pastures, but they were still inclined to shy and snort and ignore the monkeys on their backs. One had just shed her rider and tossed a kick at his head on the way past, which occasioned MacAran’s remark.
“You believe that?” I asked. “That they have no memory?”
“They’re animals,” he said. “Prey for anything that can stalk them, out there. Creatures of flight, without much by way of common sense—except what we can teach them.”
I’d been keeping my mouth shut and my judgments strictly to myself. I was a guest here, after all, and every word and move was watched and noted. But the boy who had been thrown had picked himself up and got hold of the reins and hauled on them so hard that the mare reared in protest.
The young idiot reached for the stick that he had dropped in his fall and swung it whistling across the mare’s sensitive nose.
I was over the rail and on the horse and the boy before anyone could have seen me move. When the dust stopped flying, the boy was flattened to the wall and the whip lay in the sand a dozen meters away, and I had the mare in hand, calming her with touch and voice and the stillness of my body.
She was not in a mood to listen or to believe that a human could have anything to say to her, but there was nothing especially complicated about her. She was young, raw, and justifiably angry. The person underneath, the mind and heart, was still unspoiled; still able, and eventually willing, to learn.
I was focused on the horse, but I heard the whispers behind and around me, echoing faintly in the stone vaulting of the court. My command of the language was good enough, I had thought, but this word was new to me: leronis.
Whatever that was, it struck them with a kind of awe. That, I was used to, and had been trained to let pass. What I did was art and long practice, and three millennia of teaching, passed down from master to student, generation after generation.
“A horse has memory,” I said as this one bent her head, licking the salt from my palm: claiming me and deigning to accept the knowledge I brought. “She dreams; she feels. She’s a living being, as we are—not the same, no, but neither is she our inferior. For us, for my school, these are our companions and often our masters. And always, our partners in the dance.”
With that word I broke down a barrier. They understood dancing here. It was one of their arts, like swordplay and breeding fine horses.
“Show us,” Angus MacAran said. “Teach us your dance of horse and rider.”
I could have said there was no time; if a student comes in young and unspoiled by wrong teaching, in ten years maybe, or fifteen, he begins to be a rider. I had less than a year, and these were horsemen who already knew what they thought they knew.
The young mare blew softly into my hand. For her I said, “I can try.”
~o0o~
The grey stone halls of Armida are full of ghosts. I’ve learned to shut them out—otherwise I’d never sleep. They flock around anyone who can hear or see them, begging for help or simply wanting to be noticed.
These offworld ghosts were downright importunate. The things they said...
“All the telepaths in the world,” said one irascible old lady, “and not a medium in the lot.”
She was remarkably coherent for a spirit. She could form words as clearly as if she spoke them in life, though it cost her—and me—a great deal of energy.
Even wrapped in quilts and blankets and furs and with a fire roaring on the hearth, I was cold to the bone. The air was full of whispers and faint flutterings.
“Mechanics,” the old lady said in my ear. “Skeptics. Blind and deaf to anything outside their own heads. And they call themselves sorcerers.”
The dead speak to be understood, and mostly we understand them in our native language. But the word that floated beneath was one I’d heard before: leroni.
I said it aloud. “Leroni. What are they? They can’t really be—”
“Ask them,” the voice said. It was fading, the room warming as the spirits receded.
Spirits had their humor. I thawed slowly, now they’d let me be. Eventually I managed to fall asleep, and dream of the dance in the Winter Hall, with Galatea warm and alive and strong as we went through the paces of the stately Quadrille.
~o0o~
Our school lives by a paradox. Our horses are not ours; they’re State Treasures. But we belong to them, and they to us. We’re assigned to them when they come in fresh from the pastures, not quite four years old, ready to claim their inheritance. We stay with them for twenty years and more, their health and the school’s Director willing.
They are our art, and we are theirs. We live for each other; for the training, and the dance.
Every one is special, unique; wonderful. But some more so. Some are our hearts, and when they die...
My heart was dead. I was a trainer of horses and a teacher of riding and a sometime geneticist; that was all I had any need to be, on this world or any other. I thought I was content with that.
Especially since, because of what I was, I still kept some remnant of Galatea. The spirit, the presence. Whatever one might like to call it. He was with me wherever I went.
The local spirits found him as fascinating as they seemed to find me. They followed both of us into the stables and gathered like a panel of judges as we trained, and had so much to say that I could hardly hear myself think.
They were growing stronger. My defenses were just sufficient for Terran ghosts. These taxed me more with every day that passed.
No human here seemed to sense them. The horses did, oh yes, and at times it was more than they could cope with. And then their trainers ate arena dirt and cursed the flightiness of the species.
It came to a head as such things do, in the midst of one of this world’s fierce and sudden summer storms: thunder, lightning, sleet, snow, and torrents of rain. The stone-vaulted roof of the arena held it off easily as it had for years out of count, but the wail of the wind and the clatter of sleet and hail robbed the young horses of what sense they had.
Thunder fed spirits. I saw a row of faces in the gallery, some as solid as in life, but none of them had drawn breath in at least a century.
After the third rider flew off and landed awkwardly—but only bruised, nothing broken—I sent them all out with their snorting, rearing, tail-flagging charges. MacAran stayed, because he was stubborn and because the middle-aged mare he was training for a lady was disinclined to be an idiot, even for an army of ghosts.
She would do. I’d just brought out the young mare of that first day, whose name was Aili. She vividly remembered her inauspicious beginning but had made up her mind to trust me. I set her an exercise just within her capacity, one that absorbed her mind and made the wild weather and the crowding spirits matter less to her than the careful precision of step and step and step.
It was hard. Her back was tense; her ears twitched. I persuaded her gently to relax, breathing with her, making a world that held nothing in it but the two of us and the movements we performed together.
Very simple ones still, circles and changes of hand. Her young balance and skill had all they could do to carry both herself and me.
I felt the change in her as a gradual thing. Her back became more supple, but at the same time her gaits seemed a little less certain. At first I thought she was responding to my training, but there was something not quite right about it.
A young or untrained horse has a certain feel to him: not quite sure of himself, sometimes stopping, sometimes rushing ahead, as he learns to carry a rider in motion and at rest. This was...different. Not just in the way she moved, but in the quality of it. It was as if—
It was not Galatea. Even in a strange and female body, my lost stallion would have called to me with blessed familiarity. This had not been a horse before, I thought. Its awkwardness was completely different from what I’d felt a few moments before.
“Out,” I said to the ghost that possessed this lovely young horse. “Out of this body. Now!”
I was so angry that I forgot there was any other human in the arena, and spoke aloud, snapping out the words.
Aili jibbed, throwing her head from side to side. She was fighting the spirit, too, with such utter lack of fear that I went from admiring her to actively loving her.
I gritted my teeth while my body did what I had to in order to stay on that rearing, plunging back. “Whatever you want of me,” I said to the ghost, “tell me. But get out of this body first.”
I had a sinking feeling that the spirit was refusing to obey because it couldn’t—that it had been trying to jump into me and had trapped itself inside the mare. I would appreciate the irony later, when I wasn’t trying to ride a whirlwind.
It took all the skill and guile and sheer ferocity I had to ride through the explosion, calm the dual entities and bring us all to a quivering, snorting, sweat-streaming halt. I would have stroked Aili’s neck to calm and thank her, but I didn’t dare move except to vault off her back.
I kept a grip on the reins, expecting her to erupt again once my weight was gone, but she stood frozen. Her eyes rolled white; her breath came fast and hard.
This was not good. She could throw herself into shock or lose her mind completely and never get it back.
I began to breathe deep and slow, calming myself down to my center. I was distantly aware of the arena around me, the older mare and her rider gone still, the flock of ghosts in the vaulting. My focus narrowed to the mare in front of me and the battle inside her.
“Out,” I said. “Be gone. Leave!”
I could feel the spirit battering against its bonds. A horse’s mind has depths and heights that most humans would never believe, let alone comprehend. It’s as alien as anything you might find out among the stars. For a human consciousness to be caught in it, even decades after death, must be a peculiar horror.
I was not about to invite the ghost into my own mind. I have empathy enough, but I’m not insane. Whoever it was—he, I thought; it had that flavor about it—was well and truly dead, and should have the grace to remain that way.
“Out!”
Aili bucked and plunged. The reins tore out of my hands; I stood with stinging fingers and aching throat, while she circled the arena, around and around.
I followed her with the edges of my vision. My focus was on the wavering, shadowy thing in front of me, hardly more than a shimmer in the damp, chill air.
“Whatever you want,” I said, “whatever you need, ask. But no more stealing.”
The ghost drew himself up. In life he’d been one of the redheaded Darkovans, with a cast of feature that I’d learned to notice.
Aristocrat, I thought, as this world measured such things. Even depleted by his battle, he had strength enough to show himself to me in almost solid form. Not long, still, and not enough to speak—or maybe he chose not to. Ghosts can be capricious.
Well, and so can I, and I have the weight of flesh behind me. I swept my hand through him, dissipating him like mist.
Aili wound down slowly. She was a wise one even in a galloping fit: her reins were unbroken, though she’d trailed them in the dirt. After some little time she let me catch them as she cantered past, though I had to run with her down half the long side of the arena before she stopped.
She stood wringing wet, with sides heaving, but her head was still up, and she snorted at the ghosts in the vaulting. “Those won’t hurt you,” I said. “Or touch you, either. I promise.”
She rolled a skeptical eye at me. I walked forward, and she followed; that habit had formed already.
On my third circuit of the arena, as she began to cool down perceptibly, MacAran stepped in front of me. “That,” he said, “was impossible.”
He looked angry. That often happens when the world and the world view clash. I met his anger blandly, as I would with one of the horses, and said, “Shall I apologize? Or may I cool down this horse first?”
He stepped aside. He still had his own mare in hand, with her air of lofty calm. I felt her spread it like a cloak over the young one. Aili sighed and at last, if stiffly, lowered her neck.
“There are no ghosts,” he said, stalking along beside me. “When we die, we go to the Overworld, and then...somewhere. No one knows where. We don’t walk without our bodies. Not once those bodies are gone.”
“You’re very sure of that.” I shouldn’t have said it; it’s never wise to get into religious arguments, on any world. But I couldn’t help myself.
“I know—” He broke off. “This must be a Terranan thing. Something you brought with you. Some—thing—that has nothing to do with us. Or our world.”
“It is possible,” I said as neutrally as I could manage. I had brought a gift with me that seemed to be unknown here, or so deeply denied that no one would recognize it. The ghosts’ frustration was rather extreme, as was their strength, once they managed to manifest.
I’d learned, with difficulty, not to miss the Terran databases or the ease and speed of access that I would have had even in that distant outpost which was our spaceport, but just then I craved them with an addict’s ferocity. I wanted to know what was really going on here. I needed to know.
Even if I could have run the searches, this being a proscribed world would have meant an impenetrable wall of Access Denied. I heaved a sigh as deep as any long-suffering horse’s, and kept my mouth shut, and focused on Aili. She was a little shocky still; I didn’t want her colicking after all she’d been through.
~o0o~
I stayed with Aili that night, wrapped in blankets and bedded in straw. The stable hands clearly thought I was insane, but that’s a condition common to horse people; they shrugged and left me to it.
MacAran stayed for a while, which let me catch a little sleep. He left after evening stable rounds. Aili was a little low but otherwise normal; my gut told me she’d taken no lasting harm.
Still, I stayed. I didn’t trust the ghosts of this place to let her be, now she’d been ridden. One of them would try to succeed where the first had failed. Spirits’ hunger for the warmth of flesh was strong, and she was open in ways she hadn’t been before this long day began.
“It is your fault, you know,” the ghost of the old woman said. She seemed to be standing outside the stall, with her feet braced sturdily on the floor. The lamplight shone through her.
“You want me out of here,” I said. “Off this world.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “We need you. That’s irony, you know. Or you will know. Tell MacAran you want to meet his sister.”
“Why?”
She was already beginning to fade. I couldn’t shout at her—I’d wake the mare, who had fallen into a doze. I hissed instead. “I hate coy, damn you. Tell me what you want me to do.”
“Her name is Mhari,” the ghost said. “Tell her the truth.”
“Will she believe me?”
Of course there was no answer. The ghost was gone. One last word she left with me—a name. “Valery.”
~o0o~
Angus MacAran’s sister found me before I could go hunting for her. She rode into Armida in the calm after the storm, accompanied by a pair of women armed with swords, and a small, wide-eyed, tongue-tied girl with hair so red and skin so white they glowed in the fitful blood-red sunlight.
Mhari was older than I, taller than her brother by a head, and as strikingly redheaded as the child with her. They might be mother and daughter, but my breeder’s eye said no, not quite. Related, yes, in the convoluted way of rare breeds of any species.
I wasn’t introduced to the child, which might be significant or might not. I’d learned already that this culture was complicated. Mhari dismounted briskly, strode up to me, and said, “Well, then. You’re not what I expected.”
“Nor are you,” I said. “I thought women were seldom seen and never heard, here.”
She laughed, a deep, infectious sound that startled me even more than the rest of her. “Not hardly! You’ve been mewed up here the whole time, haven’t you? Don’t you miss the company of women?”
I’d thought she was going to ask if I missed my fellow Terrans. I had to stop and shift, and find an answer that would make some sort of sense. All I could manage was, “One learns to cope.”
“That is true,” she said. She had managed to draw me in and turn me without touching, leading me into a part of the great house that I hadn’t entered yet.
The little girl followed us silently. The swordswomen were gone, and the men as well, even MacAran.
My quarters were serviceable and, I’d thought, rather elegant, but now I saw that I must have been housed in servants’ accommodations. The suite of rooms in which Mhari settled all of us had a considerably more palatial air, though there was a sense of age and long use about them.
Here were servants in the plural rather than the taciturn if efficient elderly woman who had been looking after what needs I had. They fed us a minor feast in the warmest room I’d been in since I left the spaceport, and left us to enjoy it at our leisure.
Mhari had a noble appetite and no shame about it, either. I was fairly hollow around the middle myself; I matched her plate for plate and bowl for bowl, until there was nothing left but crumbs and a bottle of fairly acceptable wine.
“You can grow grapes here?” I asked.
“There are relatively warm areas,” she said, “and varieties of grapes that have adapted, as have the humans and their horses.”
And their ghosts, I thought.
There were none in evidence here, but I knew better than to think that meant anything. I sipped my wine and basked in the warmth of the fire, and did my best not to fall asleep.
“Tell me,” Mhari said, “Mestra Tahawy, how it is that a woman becomes a master of horse.”
“Noura,” I said. “My name is Noura.”
“Noura,” Mhari said. “Were you born to the art?”
“Not really,” I said. “My aunt by marriage was a rider in the school, and I was horse-mad as girls often are on Terra. I begged, she submitted my application, I passed. I groomed horses and oiled saddles for years, and learned to ride in among the rest of it.”
“Very well, my brother says.”
“Your brother is kind.”
She snorted. “My brother is a man, and men have to bestow their approval in order to feel manly. He admits you have skills he never thought possible, and gifts that he didn’t know could exist.”
Her brow arched at that. Even across the gulf of cultures, I caught a whiff of meaning. “What, that I believe horses are sentient, and he’s of the dumb-animal philosophy?”
“That,” she said, “and more. Our family has the Gift of mastering animals.”
The way she said it, she wasn’t speaking strictly metaphorically. She meant something specific. “There’s more to what I do than mastery,” I said.
She bent her head.
“I’m to tell you,” I said, or the wine said, or the ghost running the chill of her presence down my spine, “that I speak not only to horses but to the dead. They gave me a name for you. Valery.”
Her face went stark white. She swayed, but caught herself on the table’s edge.
I drained the last of the wine. It had already gone to my head; now it sat leaden in my stomach. I set the cup down carefully and folded my hands and waited.
Patience is a horseman’s skill. It took Mhari a long count of heartbeats to find her composure again. Her voice when she spoke was barely steady. “Who gave you that name?”
“She never has introduced herself,” I said, “except to give me the impression that she lived a very long time ago, and is extremely frustrated with what she calls the head-blindness of the living on this world.”
Mhari choked. She was laughing, I realized, though it had a distinct edge of pain—or maybe panic. “She said that? Head-blind?”
“Is that not a word?” I asked.
“Oh, it is a word,” she answered. “It’s the irony that cuts.”
I went back to waiting again.
Finally Mhari said, “Oh, you’re good. You won’t ask, will you?”
“What should I ask?”
She drew a pendant from beneath her bodice: a pouch of what looked like silk, on a silken ribbon. She handled it with care, as if it would break, or perhaps explode.
I continued to wait. I could feel the ghosts now, crowding close; they drained the room of warmth and reduced the fire to a low flicker.
Mhari seemed oblivious. She tipped the bag’s contents into her palm: a faceted blue jewel, flickering deep within. “Do you know what this is?”
I shook my head. The ghosts knew, but they were refusing to tell. Mhari would have to do that. It was her task, they gave me to understand. Her responsibility.
“This,” she said, “is why our world is proscribed. It’s our greatest asset, and our greatest secret—though there are those who would make it known everywhere that humans go. I have doubts as to the wisdom of such a course, myself, but I’m no great power in this world.”
The ghosts had their own opinions of that—and not all agreed. The old lady had to shout them down so that I could hear what Mhari went on to tell me: briefly, as such things went, and rather clinically, as if reciting from a book.
Laran and leroni. Magic, if you will. Psychic powers. Sorcery and sorceresses—female stronger than male, for the most part, and greater in worldly power, too.
She opened a whole world to me that evening in front of the dying fire, a whole new way of understanding this place to which I had been sent. The depth of her trust startled me at first, until she made it clear how little I could hide from her—thoughts, memories, reactions.
And ghosts. Through me she could hear them, and sense them, too; they weren’t manifesting for anyone’s sight tonight.
“Mechanics,” I said. “That’s what she called you. Technicians. What do you suppose that makes me?”
“An artist,” Mhari said. “You’re not the usual run of Terranan, are you?”
I had to think about that. After a while I said, “I’m quite usual, in many places. Better at horses than most, maybe, but in the rest, I’m nothing exceptional. But you wouldn’t see that, would you? Soldiers, diplomats, traders—that’s what comes out here. Male, mostly, because of what’s understood of your culture. They’re a very small fraction of what we are.”
“I see that,” she said as slowly as I had—thinking, too, and processing. We both had a great deal to ponder.
We might have gone away to do it, but the ghosts had no patience. A gust of icy wind killed the fire. In the darkness a thin small voice said, “Light. I need light.”
A blue glow swelled in the room. Mhari had unveiled her matrix.
I saw the little girl’s face in that eerie light, blank and pale, with shadowed eyes. Her mouth opened in a shriek that came near to splitting my skull.
One word, over and over. “No! No! No! No!”
Darkness fell again. Silence was slower. Little by little my eyes adapted to the faint glow of embers.
My ears were ringing, but I heard Mhari say, “Valery?”
There was no answer. My hands, groping, found a candle on the table; I inched toward the hearth.
I deliberately kept my eyes on the embers and not on the crowded blackness of the room. All the ghosts were there, more than I could count, or wanted to. Centuries’ worth.
The candle sprouted a flame that grew tall and still, nothing like any natural flame I’d ever known, but it shed enough light to drive back the ghosts.
All but the one that had possessed Mhari’s young companion. She sat bolt upright beside the table, and the candlelight turned her face into a death mask.
Those were not her small pointed features, to my eyes, though they had a similar cast. This was or had been male, and he was older than the child he inhabited, though not very old.
Mhari couldn’t see him. She was staring at me, as if she’d forgotten the child existed. “Tell me about Valery,” I said, not taking my eyes from him.
“Valery.” The breath she drew in had the catch of a sob. “He was one of us in the Tower at Dalereuth. Technician in the circle. Talented, a little wild, and arrogant, but young ones often are. He’d heard a little too much about forbidden towers and altered traditions.
“One night when he was on the relays, doing maintenance only, and alone but for the monitor, he tried something that he must have been planning for some time. I don’t know if I can explain it. It had to do with enhancing the power in the screens, making them more efficient, but also with taking the Keeper’s place—channeling forces that needed far more skill and strength than he had.
“He was dead before we could get to him, and the monitor near death; she died a few days after, but her mind was gone long before her body let go. The damage to the screens was considerable; and the circle...it was as if we’d lost a part of ourselves. Some of us never recovered; they left the Tower and didn’t come back. I was too stubborn to do that, but it was a good long while before I was myself again.”
She spoke clearly, dispassionately, distilling that terrible night and its aftermath into a few bald words. Even I could feel the pain behind them. The grief, the guilt.
“If he died in a Tower,” I said, “what’s he doing here? Ghosts stay where their unfinished business is. Or where they were happy, or miserable. Or they attach to things, or people—but he was here before you came. Is there someone else here who mattered to him? Or something that was his?”
“Or someone who can see him?”
That startled me. I hadn’t had time to understand what it meant, the things she was and could do. She was a magician in the very old sense: a master of technical magic. Psionics. Matrix technology, which I would have to think long and hard about, ask many more questions, before it all made sense.
Of course she could make connections that managed to elude me. She was trained to do just that.
“Ya Allah,” I said in the language of my childhood. “If that’s true, every wandering spirit on Darkover is going to find its way here—drawn to me like a beacon in the dark.” I had a desperate urge to leave then, ride out no matter the hour, and bolt for the spaceport—hoping and praying to outrun the ghosts.
Sanity prevailed. Or what passed for it in the state I was in. I had a commitment here. Obligations. And who could be sure that if my fears were real, the ghosts wouldn’t follow wherever I tried to go?
I had to stay. Valery was lodged deep in the little girl’s body and mind, doing what damage I could only imagine.
She sat perfectly still, hands folded her in lap. Whatever battle she was fighting, she showed no sign of it.
“Valery,” I said. “Valery, come out.”
Neither he nor the child moved. I glanced over my shoulder at Mhari. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but what is her name?”
“Callie,” Mhari answered. “Callista.”
“Callista,” I said, pitching my voice to be heard through the veils of consciousness. “Callista, help me. Tell him to leave. We want to help him if we can, but not if he keeps stealing bodies.”
“I need life,” Valery said through Callista. “I need to be warm. It’s cold. So cold.”
I’d heard of such things but never seen it. The spirits I’d spoken to might have business to finish or messages to send, but outside of stories I’d never seen any that wanted to be alive again.
“Something’s not right,” I said.
Mhari snorted. “Is there anything right about this?”
I shook my head. It might be rude, but I needed space to think. “We hear of spirits who ride the living to feed their own or a sorcerer’s power. Genuine possession—taking a body to live in it—is the province of things that have never lived. This is a human spirit, but what he wants doesn’t fit. I’d say it’s another aspect of your world’s unusual nature and talents, but the rest of the dead here are as ordinary as the dead can be.”
A blast of cold pierced through me. “Ordinary?” The old lady sniffed loudly, though she’d had no breath for several hundred years. “I resent that.”
“Normal, then,” I said. “As you should be.”
“We are that,” she said, mollified. “By the numbers, as you people like to say, death is considerably more normal a state than life.”
“Is it life he craves?” I asked. “Or warmth? Blood? The ancient dead fed on that, I’m told, though they got out of the habit after the Christians bent the world in their direction.”
“We certainly don’t crave blood,” the old lady said, “and as for warmth, we can feed on that whenever there’s a fire. Or any other energy that might happen past—sunlight, even. That boy over there—he’s odd.”
“How?”
She didn’t answer.
Of course not. That would have made things simpler.
Mhari was staring at me with an expression I could all too easily read. She was trying not to think that I’d lost my mind. Talking to myself; hearing voices.
Callista hadn’t moved at all, or spoken. I could still see that other face laid over hers.
“Mhari,” I said. “Take out your matrix again.”
She didn’t argue, for which I breathed a blessing. The cold blue light swelled in the room. It was stronger than before: brighter, steadier.
I could feel Mhari’s startlement, a tightening in my own stomach. My body tingled; I hovered just on the edge of an urge to sneeze. I wanted to laugh at that, but I didn’t dare.
Callista had been still before, but now she was frozen, absolutely motionless, inside and out. Valery’s terror had gone beyond voice or speech. He was completely lost—drowned in light.
“Cold,” I said, or thought, or breathed. “So cold. Trapped in the blue. Lost—bound—can’t—”
I felt him inside me. He’d leaped out of the child. Her skin was tight and cramped. Mine was better.
I had a moment’s vision of the world as he saw it: networks of energies contained in crystal lattices, structures so intricate and so precise that the scientist in me joined the artist to stand in awe. They were beautiful, and they were terrible. They were traps to snare a soul.
The gathering of ghosts at Armida had drawn him. He saw them as clusters of energy, constellations of light both large and small. He couldn’t touch or merge with them, but he could follow them toward the warmth of the living.
And there I was, able to see and hear him, with living things all around me, both animal and human. He could force his way into them, but they weren’t enough. He wanted—he needed—
My heart was slowing. My body was cooling as he drained it of warmth. He was desperate, but not to feed. To be free.
“Mhari,” I said. My voice sounded faint and far away. “Mhari, can you, will you—”
She didn’t understand. How could she? I barely did myself.
Soft presence wrapped around me. A memory of warm breath, strong neck, mane falling like water.
Galatea.
Mount, he willed me. Ride.
I saw him in the Winter Hall, in a slant of sunlight through the crystals of a chandelier. He was saddled and bridled in white and gold. The scarlet of the saddlecloth was as bright as blood.
That broad back was home, that lift and coil of effortless power, that swift response to rein and weight and leg. I took the reins in my left hand; in the right was the birch sapling that was all the whip we had ever carried, in all the years of our schooling, held upright like a sword.
We rode the pattern cast in light on the floor, lines of blue and gold that recalled the facets of a jewel. There were others with us, riding on either side: Mhari, and an older woman of impressive girth and upright carriage. The horse that Mhari rode looked remarkably like the mare Angus had been training for her, and the old lady was riding the young one who had won my heart.
Galatea snorted gently—even in death he was a gentleman of parts—but his steps never faltered and his balance didn’t waver. Forward in passage; collect; canter; pirouette; canter; collect, collect, collect; piaffe—gathering strength, sinking deep on his haunches.
And then up, with a pure and exhilarating surge of power, a leap into the light, and a kick so fierce it flung me straight up out of the saddle—and broke the bonds of energy that had trapped the young man’s spirit.
I came down as I had a thousand times, back to the solidity of Galatea’s saddle, finding my own balance again, coming to earth and sudden, singing stillness.
Valery was gone. I ran my hand down Galatea’s neck, committing the sweep of it to memory—as if I hadn’t done that already, year after year, since that first day when I settled gently on his young and untried back.
He blew out softly, as horses do when they’re content. More than one spirit had released itself tonight.
I dismounted slowly. I let the tears come; there was no shame in them.
He laid his head in my arms, resting against my chest and holding for a long moment. As my own breath sighed out of me, he melted away, dissipating into the last of the light.
~o0o~
“Do you think anyone will ever believe us?”
Mhari had come down to the riding hall in the morning, ostensibly to inspect the mare her brother was training for her. But I knew, and Aili knew, that there was more to it.
Aili stood relaxed under me while MacAran put the older mare through her paces. Mhari leaned on the rail as she spoke and stroked the sleek silver neck—idly, it seemed, but I could feel the lines of energy shifting, smoothing rough edges, strengthening weaknesses, bringing the whole into balance.
Not many on Earth would believe what we had done—and no one on Darkover. Their arts of the mind had taken a completely different direction.
“Would you be offended if I observed that Darkovans and Terrans are more alike than they might imagine?” I asked.
Mhari narrowed her eyes at me. “I might. Or I might ask what you mean by that.”
“Mechanics,” I said. “Focused on their technologies. Blind to the worlds beyond, and so very sure that those worlds don’t exist.”
Mhari sniffed, sounding remarkably like the most outspoken of Armida’s ghosts. “I am offended, rather—but it’s true. He really is gone, isn’t he?”
“Yes.” I smoothed the dark mane on Aili’s pale neck. Mhari meant Valery, of course. I meant someone else, too. Someone I’d never forget, but whom I’d begun, finally, to let go.
“When you’ve been here a while longer,” Mhari said, “and your students of both species are ready to work on their own, you should come to Dalereuth. See a little more of our world; visit me. Show us some of your art with horses.”
“And with something else?”
“Maybe,” she said.
And maybe I’d be pursued by hordes of spirits, all clamoring for me to hear them, see them, help them.
It might have been exhaustion after the night before, or Aili’s deepening calm under Mhari’s hand, but I found I wasn’t afraid. Rather the opposite, in fact.
I took a deep breath, all the way down, and let it go in a long sigh, and smiled. “I’d like that,” I said.
