Caine's Law (58 page)

H
e woke to twilight among trees and stone. A soft rush of falling water came from not far, and also not near. Earth rose up before him, and behind and beside. Far above, indigo sky glittered with stars framed by outcrops of sun-bleached rock.

Ah: a canyon.

He remembered walking into a canyon. He wasn’t sure it had been this one. It had twisted and curved in upon itself until he’d entirely lost track of any notion of north, south, east, or west. This didn’t worry him. Compass points are half-imaginary anyway, useful mostly to those who don’t know the road. Here the only directions were this way and that way, up and down. These seemed to be enough.

He woke also to the understanding that he had not been sleeping. He had been walking. He wasn’t sure for how long or how far, and he wasn’t sure it mattered. He also wasn’t sure why he was now walking awake, where before he had walked somewise else.

He rounded a sharp angle and found her there, beside an earth-banked fire on a sward that filled a long slow bend in the river. Two horses were with her. One placidly cropped grass. The other, larger horse dipped its head and nickered as if to say
I see you, I know you, and I am not afraid
, and he recognized the young stallion he and the ogrillo had followed into the south.

The woman by the fire said, “He likes you.”

“He does?”

“He wants to know if you like him back. He wants to know if you want him to be yours. He asked me to find out because you don’t speak horse.”

He stopped across the campfire from her and lowered himself to the grass. “I’ll have to think it over.”

She nodded. “It’s a serious matter.”

“I get that.”

“He likes you because you’re strong and fierce, and because other men fear you and do what you say. He thinks that together you and he would be the wind, and laugh at fences and chains and castle walls; he thinks that together you would be the thunderbolt, that men would tremble and hide their faces, and pray to you to spare their lives.”

“That’s kind of dramatic.”

“He’s very young. And very male.” She smiled at him. “What was your dream, when you first became a man?”

He had to smile back. “Well, yeah. Okay.”

“Also—and this is very important—he likes you because I like you. He believes I’m very wise, and that I see deeply into the hearts of others.”

“I kind of believe that myself.”

“Because I like you, he believes that strong and fierce is not all you are. He believes you can be gentle. He believes you can be kind, and that you will care for him. He believes you understand what it is to love, and to be loved.”

He had to look away.

“He’s young, and full of extravagant fantasy; his heart holds more dream than reality. Young of that type are fragile. If you take him to be your horse, you are making a sacred vow—to both of us—that he’s right about you. That I’m right about you.”

“That’s why I have to think about it,” he said, barely above a whisper. “It’s kind of an intense relationship.”

“There are horses who pass their lives cheery and carefree, who play with their herds and are not troubled by the imperfections of riders, however many there may be. Many horses, most horses, don’t need a single person on whom to rest all their trust and devotion.”

She met his eyes across the fire. “Horses like those don’t join the witch-herd.”

He drew up his knees and wrapped his arms around them. “Pretty much the same for people, huh?”

“I’ve been waiting for you to understand that.”

They were silent then for a time, letting the fire’s crackle and the ripples
on the river speak for them. A brush of wind and cricketing of frogs and the mare’s contentedly methodical rip-and-crunch of the grass, and he said, “That sound. The river and the frogs. The grass. Mostly the grass. Something about hearing her eat grass …”

“Lets you be calm,” she said. Slowly. Quietly.

“Better than a tranquilizer.”

“Even an ordinary horse’s senses are a hundred times sharper than ours. Prey animals. Fear is their life. Sight, scent, sound. These are what keep them alive. And the senses of the witch-herd horses are a hundred times sharper still. They’ve learned that ordinary fear isn’t enough. A horse can eat while she’s afraid … but not slowly. Not evenly. For more than a hundred thousand years, your ancestors have known a placidly chewing horse means safety.”

“You talk more than you used to.”

She shrugged. “You live on words. You don’t understand until it’s explained, to you or by you.”

“Everybody’s like that.”

“I’m not.”

“Yeah, but you’re the horse-witch.”

She smiled, and her smile warmed him like a kiss of fire.

He looked back to the young stallion. “Fucking grass. Shit, if I’d known that years ago …”

“If you’d known that years ago, you’d be somebody else.”

“Better?”

“Different.”

“Still—grass. Just grass.”

“Food is powerful. Shared food is more powerful. Here.”

She tossed him a carrot she must have gotten out of that same other-place where she kept her knives and rasps and medicines. “Take a bite. Take two.”

He did. The carrot was perfect: sweet and crisp and earthy. It made him smile.

“Give the rest to him.”

He looked up and saw that the young stallion was behind him, sidling up warily, watching him sidelong. He offered the rest of the carrot on a flat palm. Gravely, decorously formal, the stallion took the carrot from his hand and began to chew it. The man chewed too. They watched each other chew. The stallion stared intently, long enough to be sure no more carrots might unexpectedly appear, then turned slightly aside and joined the mare in crunching grass.

“You made him happy just then.”

“More like he made me happy.”

“If you’re with him, what makes him happy will make you happy. What makes you proud will make him proud. In lands to the south, from Kor to Yalitrayya, the wise women say your horse is who you are without your name.”

“It’s like magick.”

“It is magick,” she said. “Good magick. Magick that does no one harm.”

He discovered he was hungry. He chanced to look down into the campfire, and found a pair of spits, on which were roasting the limbs and torsos of some small animals. Jackrabbit, probably. And a substantial-looking camp oven, cover off, in which boiled a thick pottage of beans and barley. “Was that always there?”

“Yes.”

“Always as in from before I came walking up, or always as in, y’know, always?”

She shrugged.

“Smells good,” he said, because it did.

“I hope you’ll like it.”

“When will it be ready?”

“When would you like to eat?”

He looked around. The twilight made the rocks and trees and grass and river seem alive somehow, changeable and permanent together. The grass smelled like a hayfield after the rain. Some twilight-blooming flowers were opening upstream on the riverbank, and the water carried their delicately inviting scent. He rubbed his fingers together, scowling faintly at the grime caked under his nails, and slowly he became aware of how stiffly sweat-salted and greased he was, and he imagined how he must smell. “Will it keep long enough for me to take a bath? Maybe wash my clothes?”

“If the hare overcooks, I’ll strip its meat into the pottage and we’ll have stew. If you’re too tired to eat tonight, it will still be warm in the morning.”

He nodded and went to rise, but the weight in his heart made him pause on one knee. “Have I been here for a long time?”

“You’ve been here since you got here.”

“No—I mean, it
feels
like a long time. And like a short time. And somehow the light doesn’t change …”

“That’s why I like canyons,” she said. “Dusk feels like forever. Dawn too.”

He nodded again. “Things take as long as they take. They last as long as they last. Horse time.”

Her doe eye twinkled at him. “I like my apple better.”

“I guess I do too.” Again he went to rise, and again the weight surpassed his strength. “Seems like I walked a long way to get here. A really long way.”

“Three or four days, probably. Unless you walk very fast.”

“No, I mean like … like twenty-five years. More. My whole life.”

“When did I go literal and you metaphoric? Aren’t we supposed to work the other way around?”

“Now you’re teasing me.”

“Only a little.” She smiled fondly. “Myself a little too.”

Sometime later, he stirred himself to speak again.

“I just wish …” He shook his head. “I wish we could have met a long time ago. Then maybe everything would be different.”

“We did meet a long time ago,” she said, “and everything is different.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“But it is. You just don’t know it yet.”

He looked pained. “None of that, huh? No more gnomic epigrams.”

“Gnomic epigrams!” She laughed delightedly. “Oh, I
like
that.”

“Stop. No games, all right? This is serious.”

“Come at this with solemn resolve and it will eat you alive. Forever. And its teeth aren’t even sharp.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Powers have been loosed upon the world who make the future more frantic than a lunatic’s nightmare, and make the past less than words you might write with your finger on the surface of this river.”

“Um, actually …” He frowned. “Yeah, actually that’s pretty much it. How do you know about this?”

“There are ways in which I’m very like a mortal woman,” she said. “There are ways in which I’m more like a horse. Horses never forget. They can’t. Teach a colt a trick and forty years later the aged gelding he’s become will know that trick without reminder. Every smile, every frown, every caress. Every slap. Every whipping. Always there. Always. That’s how I am. I remember. I remember more than even horses. I remember things that didn’t happen.”

“You remember—?”

“The past is in motion. In these days, nothing is certain. Anything can change. This moment itself may evaporate like a dewdrop in summer sun. But I remember what is lost when the world is changed.”

“That’s a … um, interesting power.”

“It’s not power. Only memory. I mention it because you should know some things
don’t
change.”

“Really?” The more he thought about that, the more important it sounded. “Because you’ve lived—”

“Mostly forever,” she said lightly. “I have been to interesting places, and seen exotic things. Witnessed events small and events vast. Some of which are still real.”

“I guess it’s those still-real ones I should know about.”

“Most things that don’t change are inconsequential; they mean so little to the wider world that no god can be bothered to change them. Then there are others that have stood so eternally themselves, I believe they
can’t
be changed.”

“Tell me.”

“I have seen a man-god with a sword strike the hand from an arm of a god-man. I have seen a man-god with a sword drive a thousand thousand gods into a crack in the universe. I have seen a man throw himself upon a sword to slay his dearest enemy and save his bitterest love. I have seen a sword slay a goddess, transubstantiate a god, and bring forth upon this guilty world an empire of immortal justice.”

“Um …” He frowned, swallowed, coughed, and started again. “A couple of those, I was there.”

“I saw you.”

“I didn’t see you.”

“You seemed a little distracted.”

“Did we—did I ever meet you before—wait. Here. Did I ever meet someone who wasn’t you yet? Someone who wasn’t the horse-witch?”

“Why?” Something dark and wary in her tone caught him and turned him toward her. She had drawn back from the fire, and the twilight had thickened enough to shadow her face. “What can the answer to that question mean to you?”

“A woman in Faltane. A slave at the manor. She died in the fire.”

“That didn’t happen. You didn’t meet her.”

“I know. Please. You remember?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about her.”

“I would prefer not.”

He nodded. “I won’t try to make you.”

“It’s a dark tale,” she said. “A perilous road, one that will take you somewhere you may not like.”

“Pretty much the same as any road.”

She sighed. “Yes.”

“I can’t think of a road I’ve walked that
isn’t
perilous.”

She said, “She is gone, and no one remembers her except me. This will take a woman and make her into a story. There was more to her, more in her, than can be told. She deserves a better story than I can give her.”

“Most people do,” he said. “Start with her name.”

“Slaves don’t have names. She was called by whatever word pleased her master that day.”

“Oh. It’s that kind of story.”

“Of slavery, yes. But mainly: rape.”

He looked down.
Rape
was a hard word. Harder when it’s someone he knew. And cared about. The sick twist in his guts booted denial right the fuck out of his head.