Gill Alderman - Lilith’s Castle

None of the women, save Gry, could see spirits; sometimes her companions looked strangely at her, or whispered tales behind her back, for all that she was Nandje’s daughter. But today she had come alone and early to the milking, stealing out before anyone else in the village was awake.

Gry climbed the third hill. Something was keeping pace with her: she sensed its warmth and knew it was not a wolf or any beast to fear. A heath-jack perhaps or a deer strayed from the forest to graze. It moved closer and she saw its outline as the light increased, big, massy, equine. A thrush flew up and sang suddenly, tossing random, joyous notes on high in the instant she recognised the horse and her heavy heart, against all expectation, lifted. The Red Horse: it was he. Lately, over six or seven recent days, he had begun to come to her, stand only feet away and watch her from huge and sympathetic eyes. Once, he had nudged her with his moss-soft nose and shied away; once snatched the sweet grass she shyly offered him. He loomed, a dark bulk in the dawn, and she reached out, awed when her hand at last touched and rested on his smooth hide. He suffered her to walk with him. Then, as the sun rose higher, something marvellous: the Red Horse halted for a moment, turned his head to Gry and rested it against her chest. She, leaning forward, enclosed as much of the great face as she could reach with her free arm; and they walked on, horse and girl, into the midst of the Herd, where the mother-mares were waiting to be milked.

Gry drew a little milk, before the foals fed, from each mare’s teats. The white mare named Summer, a rarity in a herd of dun and russet Plains horses, and chief wife of the Red Horse, waited last. Gry stroked her and bent beneath her to milk. When her pail was full to the brim she drank a little of it herself, wiped her mouth on her hand, and set the pail upright on a level piece of ground. The Red Colt was feeding well, the long sticks of his legs splayed and his short tail rotating with pleasure. Gry smiled and heard the Red Horse snort his pleasure. He moved close again; she felt she should hold her breath or repeat one of the shaman’s lucky charms aloud. The great horse shivered, nervous as a cricket, and lowered his head still further as if he wanted to kneel before her and beg a favour. She found herself leaning against him, taking comfort from his bulk and warmth and, when he bent his near foreleg, placing her left foot there, above the knee and springing without thought but only instinct upward, turning in the air and settling on his back while she spoke the ritual phrase her father had always used.

‘Greeting, Horse. Permit me.’

Gry sat in her forbidden seat, elated and fearful. The reputation of the Horse was all ferocity, virility and fire. No one was able to ride him – except her father, Nandje, who had worshipped the Herd for itself and as a symbol of life, who had loved each individual horse as much as his children; who had died when he was swept from this same, broad back (so wide it pulled the muscles of her groin to straddle him.) The terrified Herd had trampled Nandje into the ground.

No one was allowed to ride the Red Horse; save the new Imandi when he, at last and at the end of the long days of mourning, was chosen. She remembered the trials Nandje had undergone, in the old days when she was a child, to catch and afterwards mount and master the Horse and she looked down on the mane and neck which swept upwards to his pointed, eager ears. In a moment he would bend that neck, throw up his hind feet in a mighty buck and dash her down; then she would see Nandje again, in the place beyond death. But all the Horse did was whinny softly and, shaking a presumptuous fly from his head, settle into his long, smooth stride. Gry breathed more easily and let herself sink into and become a part of the force and balance which made him what he was, the Master of the Herd. It was not as if she could not ride. Horses and their culture were her birthright. Her own mare, Juma, had lingered, heavily in foal, on the margin of the group of milch-horses; lately she had been lent the swift and stubborn Varan who belonged to her eldest brother, and she had many times ridden the lesser stallions and Summer too, before the getting of the Colt. But today there were no reins to be gathered up, none of the usual preparations and practices; just herself, Gry, and the Red Horse. She pulled her skirts into place and rested her hands comfortably on her thighs. How much more easy would she be in loin-cloth and twin aprons, bare-legged and booted like the men!

Her country, the great Plains of Malthassa, was before her and about her, turquoise in the morning light. She could see the blue flag of her people fluttering above Garsting, though the village itself was hidden behind a hill. Three other villages, Sama, Rudring and Efstow were visible, their underground houses grass-grown mounds very like the green hills of the Plains. She looked into the wind, which blew less strongly but was still laden with the bitter salt, and her gaze came to rest on the distant, grassy knoll which was her father’s last dwelling place and tomb. Outwardly there was little to distinguish it from the houses of the living.

Nandje’s burial-mound had been raised a half-morning’s journey from his village. Gry, although she was female and so excluded from funerals, executions and the daily rituals of the Shaman, which belonged to the men, knew that it was dangerous to let the dead stay close by the living, for they may talk to one another or appear in each other’s dreams. And she knew that there were strict rules and observances to be obeyed when any man of the Ima visited an ancestor in his house. The first of them was that no woman may enter there.

I am already guilty, sitting up here on the Imandi’s Horse – no, riding forward, letting him carry me toward the burial-mound, thought Gry. So there will be only a little more harm if, when we reach it, I get down and walk to the mound – just to see the doorway they must have carried my father through, and to stand there and remember him and say farewell. I am beginning to forget him already: I have thought only of myself and this pleasant morning since I milked the mares – and the milk will be quite safe where it is. The wind will cool it well.

‘Well!’ echoed the zracne vile, ‘Farewell!’ and the Red Horse, before she could change her mind or jump down, broke into a ground-eating canter, which carried her swiftly forward across the Plain.

He halted in a hollow below the burial-mound and let Gry slide from his back before lowering his head to graze the sweet, young grasses which the wind, become as gentle as a sleeper’s breathing, moved hardly at all. Gry went on tiptoe up the slope of the hollow and knelt outside the entrance to the tomb. Someone had walked there a little while before. The grass showed the prints of large, booted feet leading away and she remembered that the shaman had been living there for a long while, to tend her father’s body. There was no door. Doorposts and a lintel of the boulders which littered some parts of the Plains surrounded a dark opening. She peered into the darkness, but could see nothing within. Indeed, the darkness brought back all her sorrow: it was terrible to end in such a dismal place. She closed her eyes to hold back her tears.

‘Oh, kind and valorous Rider, wise Imandi,’ she began bravely, but could not stop the tears. ‘Oh, my father – why did you have to die? I could not even say goodbye because the men took you away and put you in there .’

He used to come home at sunset, she remembered, and hang the Horse’s bridle on its hook on the east side of the house. Then, after walking round the fireplace to the far side, would sit and wait for her to bring him water to wash in. ‘The sun is low,’ he always said, ‘I am glad to sit by our fire’ or, sometimes, ‘There is a wonderful smell coming from the pot, Gry – like the thyme your mother used in her cooking. Is it her recipe, my daughter?’