Nine White Horses (16 page)

They all look at one another. Getting confused is one thing.
Even a Fate is subject to that, what with everything she has to look after. But
forgetting—that’s not in the specs. Fate remembers everything. Every fall of a
sparrow. Every vibration of that damned butterfly’s wing in Venezuela, and if
you think it’s easy getting that to resonate just right so it makes a president
trip over his feet on the golf course, you should try it yourself.

“Check the records,” says a voice so old it’s barely a whisper,
but it throbs in every corner of the continuum.

Everybody starts and stares at the One who always sits alone,
who never changes, who doesn’t even have a name. When she swam out of the dark,
nothing was named; everything just was. She never talks—can’t, Orgoch would
have said, except that obviously she can.

Lachesis doesn’t argue. Doesn’t ask questions. Just does
what she’s told. That’s power, Orgoch thinks. She’s interested to see how
strong it is, especially coming from that tiny, wizened, naked figure like a
mangy monkey, with its heavy forehead and its moist brown eyes.

It’s a long while, reckoning in shifts of the continuum, while
Lachesis goes from record to record. Stone tablet, clay, papyrus, parchment,
paper, phosphor, neural induction, pure mind-to-mind, she runs through them
all. The others wait. Nobody says anything. They all look as headachy as Orgoch
feels.

Finally Lachesis sits up straight. Her face is grim. “Something,”
she says, “has been meddling with our continuum.”

Orgoch mentally applauds her. Brilliant deduction. It only
took Orgoch half a millisecond to reach the same conclusion.

But Lachesis can prove it, which helps with the skeptics,
such as Circe, whose obsession with pigs keeps her from seeing much of anything
else. Lachesis calls up an image of the continuum—it comes through to Orgoch as
a flow chart inside a crystal ball—and points with a long bony finger. “There,”
she says. “There, and there. Disruptions. Shifts of fate from one line to
another.”

Third Witch, known in polite circles as Dame Fortune,
considers the scrying bowl in front of her and nods. “Somebody’s turning the
wheel out of turn.”

“That’s not possible,” says Tyche. “Fate rules even the gods.”

Lachesis casts her a quelling look, but not before Orgoch
observes, “It’s possible if someone’s done it. Does anyone have a spell for
migraine?”

“Moly,” says Circe promptly.

“Willow bark,” says Third Witch with a sharp glance at Circe,
“gathered in the dark of the moon, steeped in water from a virgin’s bath, drunk
three times standing and three times sitting, while intoning a Paternoster.”

“What nonsense,” says Lachesis. “Take two aspirin and call
your broker in the morning.”

Orgoch sighs. Her headache is worse, or maybe better. It’s
hard to tell. “So who’s twisting fate? That poet isn’t loose in Baghdad again,
is he?”

Lachesis shudders delicately. “Spacetime forbid. This is
something different. Something that—”

o0o

“Stop it!” Mary Ann whacks Leroy on the nose. He’s objecting
to coming home after his visit with the pretty lady mare, not to mention the
hunt course with its lovely, lovely jumps. So of course he tries to jump the
shadow of a telephone pole in the road, and nearly pulls Mary Ann off her feet.

“I’ll sell you down the river,” she threatens him. “I’ll chop
you up for dogmeat.”

He picks up the irritation but not the threat, seeing as how
Mary Ann would never sell any horse to a cannery, even Leroy the grasshopper
horse. He’s just a little bit contrite. He likes Mary Ann, she sits light on
his back even when she won’t let him run, and except for not letting him jump
enough, she’s a nicely trained human. She feeds him fine grain and sweet hay,
and grooms him when he itches, and talks to him in that long pleasant
water-flow of speech that humans are so inexplicably fond of.

So he doesn’t jump the next few shadows, and walks quietly
into his stall, where there’s plenty of hay and fresh water and—oh joy joy joy,
a carrot in his special sweet-things bucket. Carrots are almost as good as
jumps. He eats it with loud appreciation, dribbling orange bits in
thanks-offering to the human who’s leaning over the stall door.

Mary Ann shakes her head. “I don’t know what I’m going to do
with you,” she says. “I’m not about to take you on the Grand Prix jumping
circuit. Couldn’t you just, like, be a little bit inclined to do exercises on
the flat once in a while?”

Leroy, nose down in his hay, swishes his tail and stamps at
a fly. He’s thinking about leaping things. Tall buildings, why stop there?
Mountains. The moon.

Leroy thinks big. And Leroy, not being entirely a horse,
thinks in the future tense once in a while, which is part of what being a Nexus
means.

o0o

“—means trouble,” says Lachesis jerkily. They all felt the
continuum shift that time. Being aware of it means they can feel it, but it doesn’t
stop the shift. Orgoch notices that the room’s edges are blurry. Bits are
starting to fade out altogether.

“
What
can cause a
thing like this?” Circe demands.

“You should know,” says Tyche.

“There, there,” says Third Witch. She looks at Circe with
something resembling kindness. It comes across as condescension. “Witchcraft
could do it, yes. It would have to be a very strong witch, or a coven of witches.
And they would need a very strong will.”

“We would know of such,” says Lachesis.

“But why would they do it?” Circe wants to know.

“Why do witches do anything?” asks Tyche. “For the fun of
it. For power.”

Orgoch is fascinated. She’s not paying much attention to the
catfight, she’s seen enough of those through the aeons to leave her yawning
unless the blood flies. She’s found something else to fix her eye on. The robe that
Lachesis is wearing at the moment seems to be all white, but it’s subtly and
intricately figured. And it’s unraveling around the hem. As she watches,
bringing her eye a bit closer to be sure, the thread slips another handspan.

Lachesis doesn’t seem to notice, but then anyone can see how
the walls are turning transparent. What’s beyond doesn’t bear looking at, even
if you’re a Fate and inured to anything. She says, “Get to work, ladies. Find
the coven.”

“And then?” asks Third Witch. She has a gleam in her eye,
and Circe and Tyche in either hand, spitting at one another.

“Then,” says Lachesis, “we do what we have to do.”

o0o

“No,” says Mary Ann, pushing Leroy’s nose away. He’s
hunting for another carrot. She isn’t carrying any. He’s death to her carrot
budget as it is, and he hasn’t done much to earn one carrot today, let alone
two.

He goes back to his hay. She thinks for a while, then heads
into his stall with brushes and currycomb, and starts grooming him. She doesn’t
have to. She just feels like it.

His mane is in knots. His tail is even worse. She starts working
out tangles. While she works, she hums to herself. Nothing particular. She
hates Top Forty. She likes to make up her own songs anyway.

This one has words to it, sort of.
Tangle in, tangle out, tangle back and round about.

o0o

“
Got
it!”

Orgoch’s howl wouldn’t shame a wolf. The whole continuum by
now is swimming like an underwater extravaganza. Her voice brings the others
homing in on her like fish to a blood trail. They’re losing shape. Circe’s
profile has a remarkably porcine cast. Third Witch’s cloak looks like a bat’s
wings. The others have a shadowy look to them.

They’re solid enough close up, crowding around Orgoch’s
scrying bowl. “What’s that?” Lachesis snaps. She sounds waspish—Orgoch can almost
see the stinger.

They all stare at the image in the bowl. It’s a big brown
horse, eating hay, and a smallish brown girl, grooming the horse. She’s singing
to herself. The horse is in horse bliss.

“
Look
at it,” says
Orgoch. “Really look.”

It’s Circe who says, “Great Father Zeus. Look inside the
horse.”

A slow sigh goes round the circle. “A Nexus,” Third Witch
says. “How in the world? None of us approved that!”

“Who rules the Fates?” says the voice they’ve all forgotten,
the old, old voice, the One who alone stays solid and substantial no matter
where she is, no matter how the continuum frays. “We deal in futures—we make
them, we like to think. Who balances us?”

“Why,” says Lachesis, “no one. We are past and present and
to come, all that was and is and will be.”

The Old One shakes her head.

“Chance,” says Orgoch suddenly. “Chance balances Fate.”

“But
I
am Chance,”
says Tyche, “and I had nothing to do with this.”

The Old One shakes her head again. Tyche looks mulish. Or
pigheaded, Orgoch thinks, not very kindly.

“You are Chance given coherence and substance,” Orgoch says.
“Raw Chance, essence of chaos—that’s something different. Look, there’s a seed
of it in the horse. And every time she touches him—”

o0o

“Stand still,” says Mary Ann, working away at Leroy’s
mane. The horse stands still. So does all the rest of the continuum, Fates and
Chance and all.

“All right,” she says, smoothing the last of the mane, moving
back toward the tail.

And the continuum can move again.

o0o

“Lightning,” says Tyche. “A thunderbolt.”

“A spell,” says Circe. “If she were a pig, could she touch
the horse and affect the continuum?”

“Cast her from the wheel,” says Third Witch with blood in
her eye.

Lachesis frowns, thinking about it.

“Obviously,” says Orgoch, wondering why the others can’t see
it—her eye is good, but she never thought it was that good—“this child is a
little something more than a slave to her fortune. Or, for that matter, to her
horse.”

“Coincidence,” says Tyche. “Chance. Every time she touches
him, she says just the right thing.”

“But how could she,” Orgoch points out, “if she weren’t
something else in her own right?”

“There are no witches in her sub-era,” says Lachesis. “We
removed them. You seconded the motion, as I recall.”

Orgoch shakes her head. “This is raw Chance, ladies. Anything
can happen. Anything at all.”

“And,” says Third Witch, “if she says the right thing—or the
wrong one—”

She breaks off. They all freeze. But the girl is still brushing
out the horse’s tail, and she’s not even singing. She’s working at a knot full
of burrs, scowling with concentration.

“I wish,” she says suddenly, “that you could keep it all straight.”

The continuum quivers. Are the walls more solid? Orgoch
doesn’t dare hope.

It’s a rare spectacle. The online committee of Fate, Chance,
and the Future Imperfect, huddled around a scrying bowl, praying as hard as
even gods can pray. They can’t do direct intervention. That’s against the
rules. All they can do is wait.

It’s beastly like being human.

“I wish,” says the girl behind the horse, “that you could be
reasonable about things.”

The continuum is making a noise somewhere between a groan
and a purr. The horse, to Orgoch’s eye, is starting to glow from inside, like a
very large clay lamp. The girl doesn’t seem to notice.

“I wish,” she says, and it rings like gongs under the sea, “that
you could be, like, normal, you know?”

There’s a seed of fire in the horse, so bright it turns the
big horse-body to air and shadow. It’s not sentient, not exactly, but it has
purpose. That purpose has been asleep. It’s remembering stars. And mornings.
And leaping over the moon.

“There,” whispers the Old One. Her voice somehow sounds the
way the fire-seed looks. “There, out yonder. Second on the left.”

The spark wobbles a bit. It wavers to the right. It hesitates.
Then all at once, so fast it leaves a trail like a meteor, it heads where the
Old One is pointing.

o0o

In the cave that’s a heath that’s a boardroom that’s an
environmental module that’s a nexus of not-space, there’s an immense and awful
quiet. The walls are solid. So is the floor. Circe has her Greek-vase profile
back, above a Halston twinset. Third Witch straightens her blazer and smooths
her impeccably coiffed hair.

Lachesis takes a deep breath. “Right. Then. Orgoch, the
minutes, please? You can leave out the…disturbances. We were on Belgrade, I
believe.”

Belfast, Orgoch thinks, but she doesn’t say it. It’s business
as usual again, and vacation not much closer than it was before. She sighs. She’s
going to be glad to hand over that eye and head for Club Med Elysium.
Meanwhile, there are futures to deal, fates and chance and all the rest of it, just
one more aeon in the old continuum.

o0o

Mary Ann finishes brushing Leroy’s tail, gives him the
horse cookie she finds in her pocket, and adds a hug to it. “Oh, well,” she
says. “You may not be perfect, but you’re my horse. I guess I’ll keep you.”

Leroy sighs contentedly and nibbles her hair. He has a vague
sense of something missing, and a lot more of something asking for a way in. He
thinks about jumping mountains. No, maybe not that. Maybe outrunning the wind.
Yes. He’ll show his human tomorrow. Grand fun, a grand run, and carrots joy joy
joy.

Leroy is a happy horse. Leroy is also a Nexus. There’s a
whole continuum full of essences, and a crowd of them right here, all begging
for a turn. What’s a horse for, after all, if you can’t ride him?

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They turned off the rain at dawn that day.

By early feeding the sun was on, the filters at their most
transparent, and the sky so blue it hurt. The grass was all washed clean, new
spring green.

Some of the broodmares had taken advantage of the wet to
have a good, solid roll in their pasture. Old Novinha, pure white when she was
clean, had a map of Africa on her side, and a green haunch. She was oblivious
to it, watching with interest as the stallions came out for their morning
exercise.