By the eve of the new moon, the scouts had brought word: there was an army riding toward the Grey Horse lands. But something else was riding ahead of it.
It came in between noon and sundown: a pair of white mares, and a pair of riders on their backs.
Kestrel could not say he was astonished to see Drinks-the-Wind, though he had thought the old shaman long dead. But the other—
“White Bird!” Linden spoke for all who knew her, with lasting astonishment.
She smiled at him. “Linden,” she said. “You look well. Are the women keeping you happy?”
He flushed crimson. Even if he could have answered, he would have been forestalled: Walker was standing in front of his father, quivering with what could only be fury. “What, by the gods,” he asked in a voice so soft it was nearly a hiss, “are you doing here?”
Drinks-the-Wind smiled down at his son from the white mare’s back. “Well met again, my child. Are you prospering? Is all going as you would will it?”
“It will be,” Walker said grimly.
“Then you must be very pleased with yourself,” said Drinks-the-Wind. He left Walker to white-faced silence, turning to bow low to Storm, and lower to Sparrow.
Sparrow seemed as startled as Walker, but considerably less furious. “Father,” she said. “I did not expect—”
“It seems no one did,” Drinks-the-Wind said. “Come, shall we settle the horses? Then I think my wife would be glad to bathe and eat and rest. We’ve ridden far. Farther I think than she bargained on when she asked to come with me.”
Sparrow’s brows rose, but she held back her questions as they all did, until everything was done as he had asked—as indeed was only proper in welcoming guests from far away.
oOo
This they had not been prepared for. Even Sparrow. Kestrel asked her when there was a moment, when Drinks-the-Wind had been taken away, and White Bird, too, and food and drink were being prepared for them. “No,” she said. “I had no foreseeing of it at all. It . . . changes things.”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She sounded uneasy. “I only know that it does. I’ve got to think. Will you do something for me?”
“Anything,” he said.
“Warn everyone you trust, beginning with the king. In the morning we’ll go to a sacred place for the new-moon sacrifice—a place that happens to be north of here, and on the path of Walker’s second army. Let our people go armed. And watch Walker! If he grows suspicious, he may turn on us too soon. I want us to reach the place of sacrifice before sunset tomorrow. Be ready. There will be no fighting if I can avoid it—but there well may be bloodshed.”
Kestrel nodded. “May I ask . . . ?”
“Tomorrow we face one another, he and I. Today I’ll see he’s distracted.”
“Be careful,” he said.
She smiled and took his hand, and set a kiss in the palm. She folded his fingers over it. “Beloved,” she said.
oOo
Walker’s tent had been a frequent refuge since he came to this impossible country. Something in the air here threw him endlessly off his balance. Women’s magic, he thought. Dark, secret, odorous magic like a woman’s private parts, overwhelming men’s strength by subtle degrees, till they sank down gibbering in corners.
He was still strong, though his temper was far less certain than he would wish it to be. His men here were ready for what was to come. His army was riding southward.
Tomorrow it would halt at a useful distance, and there wait until he sent a man with the signal. His chosen one, his young king, rode at their head—not entirely to the liking of Cliff Lion or Red Deer, but they had been appeased with promises of greatness once the new year-king was raised up.
He should be content. But that Drinks-the-Wind had come back, as it were from the dead, disconcerted him sorely. And his sister . . .
She was not a shaman. Yet she rode about as if she had been a king of men, a great lord of shamans. Everyone, even his own people, bowed to her.
The visions she gave them were his visions. His. She had stolen them as she had stolen the king of stallions.
Now Linden was seduced by her spells. Walker knew the look: the vague, dreaming eyes; the sudden lapses in speech or movement. Walker knew what she must have done when she took Linden away. Women’s magic again: magic of her body, trapping a man in coils of flesh.
That, Walker thought, might serve him better than she dreamed. Linden weakened and corrupted by magic would be all the easier to lead to the slaughter. But Walker was not entirely easy in his mind. It was this country, these people. Their magic was not stronger than his, it could not be, but it cast spells of confusion. And he had to be perfectly clear in mind and power, come the new moon.
What he needed, he knew in a flare of sudden light, a vision surely, such as were given to him most often through others’ eyes. He went seeking it, passing quietly, keeping to less traveled ways.
oOo
She was not in the tent which he had been told she shared with Sparrow. He tracked her through the children, who would tell him what their elders would not, though they stared round-eyed at his pale beauty. He must seem to them like a god or a spirit.
They led him past the camp’s edge to the eaves of the wood. Women gathered berries there—men, too, doing women’s work as if it could not sully them. He could see that some of them were using it as an excuse: baskets abandoned, rustles and giggles coming from the undergrowth.
She had gone farther in than any, to a clearing edged with brambles and difficult of access, but she had found a way in. Her basket was full; she had sat down in the grass to rest. Another had come with her, was still gathering berries, eating as many as he let fall into his basket.
As Walker paused, watching, he bent over Keen and dropped a ripe red berry in her opened mouth.
She swallowed it. He sweetened it with a kiss.
Her laughter rippled. She lay back still laughing, arms stretched above her head, wanton and merry.
The man, who was no less than the prince-heir—difficult as it was to tell one black-bearded savage from another, this one Walker remembered, because he was a man of rank—lay down with her and lifted her tunic. She wriggled till she was rid of it. He cast off his own leggings and mounted her, and rode her as a man rides a woman, but long and slow.
She did not giggle as her sister harlots did. She smiled, sweet and rapturous, and covered that blunt bearded face with kisses.
Walker watched it to its end, which was an unconscionable time in coming. Then he watched as they lay together, murmuring inaudibly, the prince’s broad brown hand caressing her white breast.
This was not the first time, he could well see, that they had lain together. They had an air of ease that came from long familiarity.
They were still lying so, shamelessly naked, when a newcomer slipped through the brambles. It was a woman, carrying a black-eyed baby on her back and another swaddled in her arms. Keen flushed faintly and half-moved to cover herself with her arms, but her lover laughed and kissed her until she remembered again to be wanton.
The newcomer was no less so herself, half-clad as women went in this place, in leggings but no tunic. She sat near the lovers and began calmly to nurse the child in her arms.
The prince lifted the other from its cradleboard on her back, set it in his naked lap and dandled it till it crowed with laughter. Keen leaned against him, smiling down at the baby, which grinned back up at her.
Walker was so intent on them, so appalled and yet so fiercely aroused, that it was some few moments before he truly saw the infant whom the second woman was nursing. It was a perfectly ordinary child, fair-skinned, fair-haired.
Ordinary for one of the People. Not for these dark southerners.
The child finished its dinner. Keen reached for it, drawing it to her, slipping it free of its swaddlings. It was a fair child indeed, as fair as she was herself, golden-haired, longer and more slender than the other, darker infant. If it was not her own, then there must be another woman of the People among these tribesmen.
And if it was hers, then . . .
Only the thickness of brambles kept Walker from bursting in upon them. With that to stop him, he had time to think, to grow calmer, to understand a number of things.
It was an infant, but not a newborn. As it lay in its mother’s lap, he saw that it was a manchild. A son. Beautiful and perfect, and clearly robust: when the dark girlchild cooed and crowed, he roared his strength to the world.
The second woman took the girlchild from the man’s lap and set to nursing her as she had the other. She did it without fuss, smiling and chattering with the man while Keen rocked the golden manchild to sleep.
oOo
Walker slipped away then, but not to his own tent. He was waiting in Keen’s tent when she came back, decorously clad, hair in a tidy plait, arms empty of the child. Nor was her lover with her. She was alone.
She did not see him at first. It was dim in the tent, and she was not expecting to find anyone there. She slipped off her tunic and searched in a basket for another, drawing out one fit for a festival, or for welcoming strangers to the camp.
She saw him then as she stood naked with the tunic in her hands. She lifted it quickly to cover her breasts.
Walker looked her up and down. “What, are you so modest then? And you my wife, whom the gods know I’ve seen the whole of, and more than once.”
Her face was stark white. “What are you doing here? What do you want?”
“Why,” he said, “to visit my wife. And, I rather hoped, my son. It is true, yes? I have a son?”
She gasped. “How did you—”
“I know these things,” he said. “Were you going to present him to me? It must be a difficulty for him, to have lived so long without a name.”
“He has a name,” she said, low and tight. “Mothers name their children here.”
“Do they? Do they give their children to others to nurse, as well?”
“I had no milk,” she said. “A—dear friend offered to be his milk-mother.”
“No milk? You? Why is that? Did the gods curse you? Or did you see to it that your lovely breasts would not be ruined?”
“Get out,” she said.
“I am your husband,” Walker said.
“I said get out.”
“No,” said Walker. “I need the power you can give. Even as stained as you are, you are a woman of the People, and my wife. No one else will do as well.”
Beneath the new boldness that she must have learned from southern women, she was stiff with terror. It was delicious, that mingling of bravery and fear. It aroused him even more strongly than the vision among the brambles.
He surged up. She whirled to run, but she was too slow. He caught her. She twisted, kicking, clawing at his face. He laughed. “O beautiful! What a lioness you’ve become.”
“Let her go.”
Walker looked from her to a dark figure standing in the shaft of light from the opened tentflap. In his moment of inattention, Keen tore free and flung herself into her lover’s arms.
He put her gently but firmly behind him. “Go,” he said.
She obeyed him—a marvel, and maddening.
The prince braced his legs well apart and folded his arms. He was a fine figure of a man. Walker could admit that, even in his anger. And he had seen all of this man that there was to see; even the size of him when he rose in tribute to a woman.
“It seems,” the prince said, “that you failed to understand my warning. This woman is a guest here. She is not yours to take.”
“That woman is my wife,” said Walker levelly. “Among my people, that bears with it certain rights and privileges.”
“You are among my people now,” the prince said. His voice was soft, his expression amiable.
“Indeed,” said Walker. “In this country, does the king claim any woman who comes to him without a man?”
“Not at all,” the prince said.
“In my country,” Walker said, “a man who lies with another man’s wife can be gelded or killed. Or both.”
“Truly?” said the prince with no sign of fear. “Yes, you did speak of that. You’ll pardon me for thinking it rather barbarous. Rather insulting, too, to the wife—as if she were incapable of deciding for herself whether a man was worthy to lie with her.”
“A wife lies only with her husband.”
“And a husband only with his wife?”
“Of course not.”
“How unfair,” said the prince. “Tell me. If your king claimed her, would you have to give her to him?”
Walker’s mouth opened. He shut it with a snap. “No king would dare touch my wife.”
“But if he did. Would you geld and kill him?”
“A king may claim another man’s wife. Even a shaman’s—if he has no fear of the shaman’s curse.” Walker spoke the words sharply, biting off each one.
The prince smiled with all the sweetness in the world. “I am not afraid of your curse,” he said.
He stepped aside. Men stood behind him, two tall ruddy-haired men with long stern faces.
“Come, my lord,” the elder of them said. “The king is asking for you.”
Walker gritted his teeth. “Is he really?”
“Really,” said the younger. “He wants you to help him give your father a proper welcome.”
“Tell him—” Walker broke off. His temper was slipping free again. He brought it back to hand.
One more day. Only one. He put on as calm a face as he could, smoothed his tunic and straightened his shoulders. “Take me to him,” he said.