Gry went a little closer to the old ones. One of them was a woman who must, in life, have been a great beauty. Her skin, even in death, was smooth, though it was blue with tattoos; her head had been shaved and a wig of black horsehair, dressed in a crowd of little plaits, put skew-wise on it and, over that, a tall wooden crown from which hung small figures of horses and deer. She wore SanZu silk under her horsehide and furs and Gry, without thinking what she did, touched the shaman lady’s hanging sleeve.

So, she woke the sleeping princess who raised her tattooed arms from where they rested on the table, turned her head to look at Gry with blind, opaque eyes and spoke with the sad voice of the winter wind:

‘Who disturbs the Lady Byely?’

Gry fell to her knees and bowed her head.

‘Gry, Madam. Only myself, Lady. Gry, Nandje’s daughter.’

‘Look at me!’

Byely was holding a sharp knife like doom above her. She was too frightened to move and could only stare at the skeletal fingers and the dagger-hilt they gripped, a doubled ring of bone chipped at the top – and with a dark smoke-stain below it running all the way about and down to the steel, Pargur steel.

‘That is my father’s dagger!’ Gry exclaimed.

‘Do you need it? Do you demand it?’ Byely loosed her hold and let the dagger fall lower between her naked finger-bones.

‘It should be with him so that he can cut his spirit meat – yes! – give it me!’

And Byely let the dagger fall altogether, clattering on the rock.

‘I can – not … harm … yooo …’ she said, and slumped down on her chair and was again a corpse and withered remnant many ages dead.

‘Poor lady,’ Gry whispered, while her eyes filled with tears and she felt her heart beat strongly in her chest.

‘Not poor. Once great, greatest shaman in the world. Past – pastures of Heaven,’ sighed Byely.

‘Sad lady, you must struggle for your voice.’

‘Sad now – go, Gry – know you …’ Byely, spent by her efforts, fell across a bowl of desiccated plums and mulberries, sundering her frail bones and dispersing her lovely face, brittle as an eggshell, across the table. Mouse-Catcher, who had stood by silently, opened his mouth and whimpered so loudly that Gry swung round. The scabbard which belonged to Nandje’s dagger lay on the table in front of Voag whose ruined hand covered it as a spider covers her young.

Touching Byely’s sleeve had woken her. What might Voag do, if his sleep were violated?

Nandje, when he put away the dagger, had always been careful to lodge its sharp tip exactly in the chape, the hollow horsehead of shiny cherrywood which protected it. Gry bent, picked up the dagger and felt its edge and tip: still keen. She must have the scabbard as well. Moving stealthily, she tried to pull it free and did not touch the hideous hand. The copper sheath slid forward, once and again, but the hand came with it, keeping tight hold, and the voice of Voag snapped out at her, a scratchy thorn-snared twig.

‘Aza sent me this! Why should I give anything to Aza’s enemy?’

‘Because I am the daughter of Nandje, the Rider of the Red Horse, and the Lady Byely gave me his dagger.’

‘The vultures stole it from Aza and storm-birds carried it to her, but Aza gave me the scabbard. Why should I part with it?’

‘Because it belongs with the dagger.’

‘Because, because! What has reason to do with the matter? Nandje is like me now, girl, dead as mutton, blind as a granite boulder. He does not need either: dagger or scabbard.’

‘The scabbard protects the blade.’

‘Well, well: common sense too from Nandje’s daughter who was condemned by the Ima, ravished like a captive, forced to flee –’

‘My father’s spirit spoke to me.’

‘That is – not a bad thing –’

‘The Red Horse travels with me.’

‘– and, I was about to say before you interrupted, you are a murderess into the bargain.’

‘I did not kill Heron!’

‘I know you didn’t, quick little fool; but Aza thinks you did and so do Battak and Konik, all the men except your brothers, who do not know what to think. And Leal, of course, but he is blinded by love … that, in your hand, is what killed Heron: Nandje’s dagger, and the grey horsehide which had an old score to settle.’

Gry held the dagger more tightly, moved it about as if she would strike.

‘I’m already dead!’ Voag shrilled.

‘I don’t understand …’ said Gry.

‘Are you a magician? Are you a shaman? No? Well, accept what you are told by one who knows. Go away now, go! I shan’t give you the scabbard: you don’t deserve it. Yet.’ His fingers rattled on the table, reaching for her.

‘Unless you would like to sit beside me,’ he said. ‘This is your seat, next to the one that waits for Aza.’

‘No!’

The Lady Byely lifted her drooping head with broken fingers and began to collect the shattered fragments of her face from the table-top and put them back in place.

The dagger, useless here where the dead stood up and spoke and the living had no defence against them, was in her hand; Gry gripped it and with her other hand the mane of the grey wolf. They ran together, fleeing unsteadily down the steps. The sound of the sea came up to meet them and, from above, rang down the clatter of bone joining with bone and of angry voices skirling. The stair plunged into deep water and only the heavy body of the wolf, pushing her back, stopped Gry from falling in. The Horse – where was he?

She saw him then, a red island rising and falling with the waves, and she leaned down to grasp his trailing mane and slide on to his back. Mouse-Catcher jumped into the sea and struck out, paddling hard.

‘All’s well,’ said the Red Horse, with a smile in his voice. ‘The dead can’t harm you. So welcome, Gry. Have you got it?’

‘My father’s dagger, which should be in his tomb – how did you know?’

‘I guessed.’

Her feet trailed in the water, so high had it risen, but she must sit there, watching the bobbing back of the wolf and the mobile ears of the Horse, which signalled his discomfort and the effort he made to bring her safely to the shore; and she must continually look behind, over her shoulder, for a sight of the angry ancients; for she knew better than the Horse, that dead shamans were not as the common dead. But only the thickening clouds appeared behind them, gathering together in a dense wall of fog. She wanted a clear view – they might all come leaping out of the cloud and fall on her; she was certain they had no need ever to swim but could fly and levitate themselves across any obstacle. The water soaked her and the dampness crept upwards until she felt it reach her waist and, rising still, begin to soak her bodice.

The sound of the Horse’s hooves, striking rock, woke her. She had been dreaming, or daydreaming, of Leal who was lost to her; and it was no longer day but a grey evening as full of moisture and mists as she felt herself to be, cold and nodding on the wet back of the Horse. Were those lights, low down but sparkling, just there? She blinked, and blinked again. He was cantering now, easily.

‘That is the village of Russet Cross. Not to be confused with the tower of rust and bones,’ he said cheerily. ‘Our shepherd lives there. You must dismount and lead me in and it will be wiser, and more polite, if you take that scarf of yours and lead Mouse-Catcher as well. Shepherds and wolves are never the best of friends.’

Seven low houses, built of rocks from the shore, and a large pen of hurdles in which the sheep were confined, was all the village of Russet Cross. Dogs came barking out to defend it, snapping at Mouse-Catcher as he walked subdued by his leash of blue cloth. In her other hand, Gry held a lock of the Red Horse’s mane, to lead him, and she had secured the dagger at her waist so that its hilt, old and damaged as it was, protruded from the skins there and looked workmanlike, not to be trifled with. Doors opened, light spilled, and someone with a tremulous voice called,

‘Traveller, wolf or wight?’

‘No wight,’ Gry answered, ‘but a traveller – with her horse – and her wolf.’

In the pen, the sheep had begun a tumult of bleating; in the houses, men began to shout wildly, as if they were drunk or crazy with fear. Gry shrank into herself, remembering the men of the Ima. A single flame detached itself from the blaze of lights in the nearest house and moved rapidly towards them. It was carried by the shepherd and he, as he came up and saw them, the soaking, fur-clad girl, the grey wolf on her left and the great horse walking docilely on her right, dropped to his knees and lifted his torch on high like a greeting or a gift.

‘I ran from you this morning,’ he said. ‘Trouble us no more, I beg you.’

‘We won’t hurt you, or your sheep. We are gentle creatures.’

‘A wolf – gentle!’ The man almost laughed.

He was the first living man she had been close to since Heron. He was dark and rough-looking with an untidy beard and wild hair and the smells that rose up from him were meat, smoke, beer and boastful maleness. Gry shivered; yet he was one of her kind, a human animal with two legs to walk on and two arms with proper fingers and thumbs; and that long fifth member – vile, dangerous, inevitable! Her eyes filled with the hot darkness of the storehouse in Garsting and she heard Heron’s lustful breaths.

‘Come up,’ said the Red Horse as if he were a man speaking to a disobedient horse. ‘Come out of it, Gry; step away from the shadows of the past.’

‘I am only an outcast woman,’ she said, hoping to waken the shepherd’s sympathy.

He crouched lower. ‘Wild Lady!’ he said, ‘Lady of the Wolves.’

‘Make him get up!’ she cried to the Horse.

‘You can command him. Be a great lady.’

So Gry tried again, imagining herself a person of consequence like Nemione or the Goddess of the Grasses the Ima men sang of, in their spring song.

‘Stand up, shepherd. We are not used to waiting for our dinner.’

He got up immediately and began to shout for his fellows who came running, burning brands held high, while the women of the village who were dressed like those of her own in heavy skirts and silver and copper jewellery, gestured towards the lighted doorways from which spilled welcoming smells of meat and new-baked bread. The men helped her down and led the Horse away – in the direction of the sheep-pen. Hearing him sigh ‘O, for a jug of wine, a loaf of bread and Thou, dear Gry,’ she thought he mocked her and, standing uncertainly in the middle of the excited crowd of women, tried to sleek down her unruly scrub of hair.

Mouse-Catcher did not try to follow the Horse or herself, but lay down where he was, and curled into a ball, nose between paws, thick tail over all. Gry tied his leash to the leg of a slaughtering-bench, and was ashamed to restrain him.

She woke early and did not know where she was nor, for an instant, who. The mat beneath her was pliant and warm – wool, she remembered and, reaching about in the darkness, found the objects the shepherds had given her, presents of a rare and costly kind. Gry, I am, Gry alone, she thought. I have no place here, nor anywhere. She listened: the shepherdesses in whose hut she had been entertained were all asleep, breathing softly as lambswool clouds in a summer sky, and there was another sound of breathing, deeper, familiar, kind. The Red Horse was close by.

Gry rose from the warm bed and, pausing only to gather her gifts into her skirt, crept from the house. The sky above the distant Altaish was the colour of butter and she could see the Horse waiting by the porch. He had evidently grown tired of his confinement in the sheep-pen and leapt out. She ran to him and kissed him on the nose. The wolf, Mouse-Catcher, rose like a shadow from the place where he had lain down and licked her hand. Some brave person had thrown him meat in the night, she guessed, for a much-licked and gnawed bone was lying beside him. She untied the leash and freed him, putting the torn, blue cloth it to its proper use as the scarf about her neck.

‘Is it time to go?’ she asked the Red Horse.

‘It certainly is! The Altaish are no closer – indeed, they seem to be further away.’

‘Is that where we are going?’

‘Not immediately. Mount, Gry, and let us be gone or the shepherds will interrupt our journey with their fuss and ceremony.’

‘They were kind to me. They gave me lots of presents.’

‘They were hospitable, but you are neither the Wolf Lady nor Goddess of the Grasses. They would beggar themselves feasting you.’

‘I am Nandje’s daughter.’ Gry spoke uncertainly as, burdened by the gifts it seemed she had no right to, she clambered on to the Horse’s back.

‘I am well aware of that!’ He tossed his head and broke into a swift trot before she was settled. The present she had liked best, the multicoloured string of beads, dropped from her bundled skirt and fell behind. She looked back for an instant, full of regret for the pretty necklace; but the Horse would not stop, she knew that. His head and his limbs were full of purpose and soon he broke into a canter.

The wolf ran before them as they travelled in the dawnlight beside the sea. The watery plain was green now and raw and tossed its uncountable heads impatiently. A shoal of ripples escaped the waves and ran on to the beach. Gry, soothed by the rocking motion, gazed out to sea, surprised to see neither mist nor rusty tower. Instead, a strange object moved over the water, almost at the horizon, a floating house or a waggon maybe, pale in colour and glistening like a polished catamountain’s claw. It flew along parallel to the shore and Gry, seeing how inexorably it sped, grew alarmed and called out to the Horse, ‘Faster!’

The Horse laughed softly and plunged to a halt.

‘Watch, and learn!’ he said.

The thing in the sea had huge black awnings above it which flew out from a pole and had many ropes attached. The waves, flying faster than the strongest wind, were broken into white and scattered fragments by its tapering, buoyant body and a multitude of sea birds followed it, mewing and shrieking in their own mournful language.

The Horse, facing out to sea, considered, while Gry trembled on his back and the wolf raised the mane on his neck and all along his back and held his ears stiffly out, listening.

‘You are right to be terrified; and I am wary and ready to flee, my Gry,’ the Horse said. ‘It is a ship, although there are no ships upon the seas of Malthassa. That is the one and only: Hespyne, the Ship of the Dead, which never sails close to the land unless someone is dying, and never lowers her anchor unless there are fresh corpses lying in their graves. Hespyne comes for the souls of the dead and carries them far away, to the Palace of Shadows.’

‘Then I will soon see my father!’

‘She has not come for us. Maybe a shepherd has died this morning, or the hermit of Worldsend who dwells on the island there, beyond the marshes. But we must flee or the Wanderer, Jan Pelerin, who captains the ship, may hear us and draw us to him in a net of spells.’ At once, the Red Horse bounded into a gallop, Mouse-Catcher speeding beside him, and there was nothing for Gry to do but bend low and hide her fear in his whipping mane while she clung to his pounding shoulders.

Her skin smelled of the sea. She put out her tongue and touched it to her arm: salt! Yet the raw-meat-and-blood smell had evaporated and her odd and daggletail skin garments were as fresh as good, cured furs.

‘Are you cold?’ asked the Red Horse.

‘Not cold, but very thirsty. My skin is as salty as meat in winter.’

‘Be patient for a little longer. Soon, we will come to Pimbilmere, where you shall drink, and bathe if you will. Listen, while I carry you deep inland. This is why your skin is salt: it is the same phenomenon you know in the Plains, the Salt Wind; but all the air by Russet Cross is salt and the sea itself is salt – a good place for a leathery old shaman to preserve his mortal remains!’

‘Or hers,’ said Gry. ‘There was a she-shaman on Russet Cross, tall and stately. Her skin was covered all over with blue tattoos.’

‘That is the Lady Byely.’

The Red Horse’s Story: The History of the Lady Byely

Byely was the daughter of a long-ago king of the Ima, when your people lived in cities which rose up like the hills of the Plains and are buried now beneath them. She was a Music-Maker and a Beauty, crossed in love, before she became a shaman. Her tears were salt and they have preserved her as much as the wind and the sea.

Byely played a lute made of the shell of an ocean-turtle. She strummed its seven strings with a hind-toe of the beast and sang to it, small plaintive melodies which told of forsaken lovers and maids who drowned themselves or hurled their lovesick bodies from tower-tops when the moon was on the wane. The courtiers, especially the ladies, said she was melancholy herself, but they listened in silence to the songs and, afterwards, applauded.

‘My songs are sorrowful because they have water in them,’ Byely told them. ‘Salt water, of the sea. My turtle,’ she patted the polished shell, ‘swam in it, breathed it, swallowed it, heard it. The Ocean is in him and of him. Listen!’ And she played a rippling chord.

When Byely grew to marriageable age, she was taken out of the city to meet Scutho, the Shaman of the Plains. First, she was put up on her horse – a mare like your Juma, round and not very tall; red-roan too, her dapples scattered on her coat like bird-cherries in the grass. Her name was Martlet. Now, although Byely (being a princess) was used to being treated with ceremony, she had always mounted Martlet without help and, soon as horse and reins were properly gathered, galloped off with the young women who were her companions, the daughters of great herdsmen and traders. They were like a bunch of fillies themselves, playing in the strong, spring sunlight while they raced each other and the cloud shadows in the Plains.

Byely was told to rein Martlet in and go sedately after her father in the procession. It passed along Chance Street where the gaming-tables were set up in the shade and where pipes of good, Wathen Fields tobacco could be bought, even in those far-off days, and out by Slate Gate, on which the Ima hung the heads of their enemies. Just then, a company of horsemen passed by, the young men boasting and shouting, Plains partridges, heath-jacks and strings of quail slung across their horses’ necks; the older men were smiling like good schoolmasters. There was a youth in their midst, short-haired and dressed all in green; not a Plainsman, not one of the Ima though he was mounted on a russet Ima horse. He smiled at Byely, who turned her head to look after him.

‘Who is that?’ she asked; but no one would answer her in the solemnity of the procession. Only the wind breathed ‘Haf!’ and, not knowing the name of the youth, she named him after this gusty sound, ‘Haf! Haf …’

Byely spent fourteen days with Scutho, the Shaman of the Plains and fourteen more with the College of Shamans in Rudring. When the new moon rose, she was a shaman herself and must not ride out with her friends but, laying aside her turtle-shell oude and her jewellery, put on the skins and fox-fur robe of her calling and submit to the barber, who shaved her head to make way for the headdress of rowan-wood and wig of horsetail plaits she must wear. Her body was tattooed, even to the corners of her eyes and the beautiful bow of her upper lip. For everything a shaman does and wears has a significance beyond this world of Malthassa.

As for her mare, Martlet: she had been killed and eaten at the initiation ceremony.

‘What it is to be the daughter of a great man,’ said Byely to herself, ‘promised to the four winds and the moon from birth. I cannot shirk my destiny, but what man will look at me now? Certainly not Haf. I will have to marry Scutho, who is kind enough when in his proper body – though he’s as ugly as a wolverine with his filed teeth and his dirty, ridged nails.’ And she went on foot from the city and far beyond, until she found Scutho lying in the summer grasses in a trance. She woke him with a kiss and he turned to her and gave her his wolverine smile. And so, in a little while, they had mated as the beasts do and he had run off to his hut while she sat amongst the broken grass stems and salted the eye-bright flowers with her tears. The flowers closed tight and so they have ever after when the Salt Wind blows.

The moon rose and Byely stared up at her.

‘Now you are both shaman and wife,’ said the moon. ‘Never forget which is the greater calling.’

Having no instrument with which to celebrate her sorrow, Byely picked up two stones and beat them together. She sang of her lost love and, in the morning, began to make a healing song. When the sun began his slow decline towards afternoon, she collected herbs and went among the poorest herders to cure them of their ailments. She cured many and the people revered her. Once, they say, she brought a stillborn baby to life and she was sovereign at horse-medicine and horse-lore.

One blazing summer’s day, Byely sat outside Scutho’s hut to wait for the cool of the evening. Horsemen were travelling in the Plains: she could see the dust rising and, soon, riders grew out of it and approached her. Dismayed, she saw the youth she had named Haf in their midst.

Scutho was inside the house, preparing spells, and so she must greet the travellers herself. They dismounted and sat in a circle while the servant-boy brought them kumiz and bread and cheese.

‘Who is that?’ Scutho called from within.

‘Only a party of herders,’ she replied, and sat down with the visitors. Haf was sitting in the next place. She looked at him and loved him, still more; and he, looking beneath her tattoos, saw her beauty and loved her.

‘Who is that beside you?’ called Scutho from within.

‘Only a poor herdsman who has a pox to be cured,’ she replied.

It grew dark and the travellers lay down to sleep. Haf and Byely rose from the circle, to be private with each other beyond the nearest hill.

‘Who has broken the circle?’ called Scutho from within.

‘Only the servant-boy and a maid of the herders,’ she replied.

Scutho and the travellers found Byely and Haf next morning. Their throats had been bitten out.

‘It is not safe to sleep away from the house,’ the shaman said. ‘Every herder knows how far and keen the wolverine roams. Help me raise a mound to cover my wife, for she was once a princess. But let the stranger lie where he is and may the rats and vultures feed well; for he stole Byely from me.’

‘Poor lady,’ said Gry. Her tears fell like rain on the Horse’s shoulders and, when she had shed enough of them to make her feel cheerful, she dried her face on his mane and sat up. The wolf carried his tail high and happy and Gry’s posture on the Red Horse’s wide back was easy and relaxed. They ran through a green landscape where bushes laden with catkins and blossom grew and the sun shone in a blue sky. Skylarks rose from the ground, ascending specks against the sky. She heard their song flood down and fill the open lands through which they rode, and she smiled. The shepherds’ gift of sparkstones danced a lively jig in their bag, which hung round her neck, and she had tied their beautiful blouse about her waist until she could find the time and the place to wear it. It was yellow like the day and made of Flaxberry silk bound with ribbon as juicily red as mulberries.

‘I shall put it on when I have bathed in Pimbilmere, whatever that is and wherever that may be, for I would follow Mouse-Catcher anywhere; and I would ride my beloved Red Horse to the edge of the world,’ Gry said to herself.

The Horse was silent, pounding along. Soon Gry found herself singing the song Lemani had learned from the tobacco traders:

‘Oh, soldier, soldier, won’t you marry me,

With your falchion, pipe and drum?

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