Gill Alderman - Lilith’s Castle

The flies will follow me now and bother the Horse – I have no lemon-root to rub on him and keep the flies away.

She felt Mogia licking her hand and put her sad thoughts away. The Red Horse nudged her and offered his foreleg to help her mount. Mouse-Catcher danced, eager to be off and running hard.

Leal’s rage had settled inside him like a hard and indigestible fruit. He had ceased to mull over Aza’s accusations or regret his own passion at Gry’s fate although it made him an outcast too, and a thief. He was in Garron’s house, turning over the household goods, Gry’s possessions, her brothers’ things – as for Garron and Kiang, they were without somewhere, helplessly watching as Battak and Aza drummed up a pursuit. He would pursue her too, alone – without those loyal seventeen who had pledged him their faith. There was no other way: he must be silent and circumspect like a hunter in the forest. No one must know which way he had truly gone; and he would go, very soon, when he had found what he sought in the house.

In the village, there was anarchy and the men of Rudring had heard of it. It would not be long before they of Eftstow and of Sama also heard and rode to join the throng.

Where was it? He lifted the lid of a chest. It was full to the brim with carefully-folded clothes. He let the lid fall softly.

The women had their opinions, too. He had listened to some of them when he washed, at the river.

‘She was foredoomed – a spirit was in her,’ one had said – Daia, Konik’s daughter.

Battak’s wife had no sympathy: ‘If she had taken one scrap of her father’s wisdom to herself, she would be on solid ground. But she was always wayward. If she had liked our company and gone milking with us, she would have kept clear of the Horse and of temptation. What folly to milk alone, when the dew is still on the grass and the puvushi scarce abed!’

‘I heard she has a lover in Rudring,’ said Oshac’s wife maliciously.

He came out from behind the reeds then, naked, just as he was, thinking to shame them. But they had stared at him, bold as hares, and Daia had smiled and flirted up her skirt, pretending its hem was wet. He clearly heard what she whispered to the other women: ‘Leal is a horse of a man.’

Where had Nandje kept it? Leal spun slowly on his heels. Ah! Fool that he was. The bridle hung on the wall, in full view. It had been behind him. He lifted it gingerly down, almost expecting it to burn him. Then it was in his grasp and stolen, the Red Horse’s bridle – which I shall need, he told himself, when I find Gry and the Horse. It was made of soft Om Ren skin, cut from the hide of the old Forest Ape which the Red Horse himself had killed.

But somewhere in the forest fastness there would be a young Om Ren growing, and his hide would be taken for the Red Colt when the time came.

Leal looked about him, trying to memorise the interior of the house. Here, Gry had cooked and worked, sewing hides into horse-gear and silk and linen into garments for her father and brothers. She had tended the fire on the hearth where the cold, black ashes lay. Earth, an ill season! Time to go. His feet scuffed up the dry soil of the floor and something which had been missed, for all Gry’s sweeping, caught on the toe of his boot. It was a single band of silver with a clasp of horn, Gry’s ankle-ring. He sighed, remembering her narrow feet and long, grass-stained toes, kissed the silver and tucked it in the folded cloth at his waist.

Then he moved, ducking swiftly out of the house and striding out to the hollow in the Plains where he had left his gear. He caught fleet Tref and the sorrel mare Yarila, saddled Tref and hung the magic bridle from the cantle, under his bow, put a halter on the mare; and was gone from Garsting.

Aza listened to the wind. Stribog, he blew from the north, bringing the thud of hoofbeats and the howling of hungry wolves to the ears of the shaman who breathed in the god through dilated nostrils, filling his lungs. Cold, his body sang, Meat, Salt.

‘Russet Cross!’ he cried, the words leaping from his open mouth.

‘We ride, then,’ said Battak gruffly. ‘Into the bitterness and the cold.’

‘Ay!’ Konik shivered. ‘Bring a fire-pot, Klepper. We shall need it.’

The men mounted their horses and turned their heads into the wind. They rode slowly at first, rubbing their watering eyes, until the immensity of the Plains and its high and empty sky took hold of them and they urged their horses into a lope and then a gallop, laying out the thin, black line their enemies feared.

Gry expected to see the Altaish, immense, cold heights upon the horizon, as they travelled into the day, herself, the dear Red Horse and the grey wolf, Mouse-Catcher; but the hills before them were low and crimson as blood. The salt wind, blowing in her face, alarmed her, but Mouse-Catcher paused to relish it, wagging his tail as if all was well. The air grew damp and the bothersome flies left her. She put out her tongue and licked salt crystals from her lips.

They were still among rocks, boulders scattered across level pavements of stone whose crevices were home to low, fleshy plants. Mouse-Catcher, by biting their leaves and sucking out the dew inside, showed her that these were almost as good for thirsty travellers as groundapples. There was nothing else fit to eat or drink: the further from Wolf’s Castle they journeyed, the saltier the ground became until they were crossing white flats on which the larger crystals lay as thick as frost and glittered as the sun rose higher. Further on, the salt-bearing rock was red or, sometimes, the two kinds of salt lay close together, forming wonderful, twisting patterns. The hills were nearer, seeming homely because, for all their weird colour, they were shaped like the green hills of home.

Again, the wolf sniffed the wind which, whirling over the salt ground, sang with a mournful note. Mouse-Catcher howled with it.

‘We must go further,’ the Red Horse told Gry.

The wolf and the Red Horse travelled hard, stopping neither to eat nor rest, while Gry slept deeply, so benign was the rocking motion of the Horse. She woke and slipped from his back at evening, while Mouse-Catcher ran among the rocks and found what edible plants he could. Swiftly, they ate and sucked the water from the fleshy leaves.

‘… and further still,’ said the Red Horse, offering a foreleg for Gry to mount by.

When morning came again and the sky was pale as the inside of a new-laid egg, Gry sat tall in her seat and stretched. The salt ground had never altered, continuing to unroll beneath them like the skin of a skewbald horse. The pallor of the horizon was remarkable, dipping down to touch land which wavered like a summer mirage in the Plains. She watched the sun colour the land, marking out the different zones in the rock, russet and stark white; laying a watery tint on the undulant distance. All at once a man appeared, motionless in the landscape. He had one thick, brown leg and one which was thin as a stick of willow. She did not want to meet him.

‘Please turn back,’ she begged, but the Red Horse gave no sign that he had heard her and kept up his steady pace, following after the wolf. It was the man who began to run, waving the long stick he had been leaning on and which Gry had thought a leg, and followed closely by the large flock of sheep which she had taken for bushes.

‘Wolves and sheep don’t mix!’ said the Red Horse.

Mouse-Catcher turned his head in the direction of the fleeing sheep and gave a deep, appreciative sniff.

‘He is an honest wolf and he is hungry – but we must hope he will not follow his instincts,’ the Red Horse remarked. ‘Are you comfortable up there? It has been a long ride.’

‘As if I sat on my mare, Juma,’ said Gry. ‘I think my legs have stretched to fit your broad back.’