Every man on the flats doffed his mask save for those already unmasked, as I was. I scarcely ever bothered with my metal skin-some artisan’s shaping of a falcon’s head-but wore it fastened oh my shoulder as others did when going bare-faced.
Even some of the horses ceased running, as if they sensed the lord was near, and froze, intently staring sideways through the smoky afternoon.
Erran rode out onto the flats, his company trotting behind, and reined up, looking about with his golden leopard-head.
“Blue-Sleeve,” he called to the equerry.
151
Blue-Sleeve hurried to Erran. He bowed, and stood answering questions with nods and brief humble sentences. Like all Erran’s dogs, he was well trained.
I glanced at the silver people, in particular the women. I had not seen many females of that class. Generally they did not eat at the evening meal with the captains. Not a face was on show. Even the round breasts and arms so frequently offered to view in the palace were muffled from the cold. Then I saw the deer-mask of Demizdor.
I had not laid eyes on her for fifty or sixty days, and on the last occasion I had glimpsed her, it was from a distance. She was walking to and fro on a high gallery in her yellow gown, but becoming aware of me, she had quickened her step and gone away.
Today she wore a black fur hood, and though her face was silver still, her dress was fringed with gold and her velvet sleeves ringed with it. However, she was not with Erran but with a stocky golden bear. He fondled her wrist in its velvet gauntlet, but she was staring straight at me.
Erran called a second time, my name, or the name I had been given here.
“Vazkor.”
I went to him, more leisurely than the equerry. I put my hand on his horse’s neck; it knew me, I had had a part of its training a month before.
“My lord.”
A few of the ladies murmured that I had not bowed to him (I never did), and I heard some man say, “This is the proud tribal dog of the mixed blood.”
“I have been telling Blue-Sleeve,” Erran said, “that we should like his best riders to put the horses through their paces for us. He has recommended you, Vazkor, above all the rest. There is none to match you, he says.”
“Ah, yes, my lord,” I said, “that is no doubt because of my tribal pride and my mixed blood.”
The man whose sentence I had borrowed swore. I nodded to him politely and went away to do my tricks for Erran’s brainless court.
There were three others picked beside me. It was the equerry’s compliment to us, rather than an effort to please Erran. Still, it rankled, and for the thousandth time I must recite to myself the old spell: Act his dog, for you are not his
152
dog; it is worth the play for the bone. I had not yet learned the lesson that when you are forever telling yourself that such and such is worth the price, then the price is too high and has been paid too often.
The grooms led the animals over. We mounted up and had them do the usual things that show a horse’s mettle, and please any gentlemen and ladies who happen to be watching: standing jumps, and jumping over obstacles of various heights, and a mock fight, horse with horse and rider with rider. This bout, having been choosen for it, I won. I was not sorry to knock my opponent out of his saddle; he was an imbecile I had had dealings with before.
Presently, when it was all done and we were walking the horses to cool them, three golds came up to me with their silver women, and one of these princes was the bear who escorted Demizdor. Partly I had forgotten her in the hard exercise, and that she had changed hands.
The golden bear put his palm on my elbow and another finger under my chin to halt me, for all the world as if I were some serving girl he fancied. I stopped and looked at him, and felt stupidly like a boy who had been touched up by one of his father’s guests and must keep quiet about it when he would prefer to answer with his fist.
“Excellent. I applaud your skill,” Demizdor’s new master said. “Do you lie with the mares to make them so cooperative?”
I pulled my wits together, smiled courteously, and asked him with deferential interest, “Do you recommend it, sir? Is it good?”
His friends laughed. I was a dog who could crack jokes as well as ride horses. The golden bear, however, was not finished.
“Well,” he said, “we’ve seen the fancy dancing, but not how you break a corse to your lord’s service. That I should like to witness indeed.” Whereat he turned about and shouted to Erran, “My lord Leopard, have I your permission to get this breaker of yours to tame a beast of mine?”
Erran had been talking with Blue-Sleeve; he left off and crossed to join us. Behind the eye-holes of his mask his eyes were bright with piercing interest, and, more than any other thing, Erran’s eyes told me I should beware.
153
“Tame a horse of yours, my lord? I believed your beasts were tame already.”
“Every one, save for the red stallion.”
“The red? But you won him at four-headed dice a month back.”
“So I did, my lord. And he has been a curse to me.”
“Surely you exaggerate;” Erran said smoothly, enjoying the dialogue with unmistakable razored anticipation. “That gentle stallion is softer than your lady there, damask Demizdor.”
If he had meant to warn me-to this hour, I am not certain-he could have done it no more plainly.
“Yet, my lord Leopard, I beg your permission,” the bear said.
“Well, then, if you are reduced to beggary, sir, you had better have it. You will not object to exercising this gentleman’s animal, will you, Vazkor?”
“Ask me again, my lord,” I said, “when I have done so.”
The bear had slapped one of his silver men on the shoulder, and the man had gone off down the avenue of statues. After half a minute, a closed-in horse box of black metal was brought at an even pace up the avenue and onto the flats.
The box was a sort of prison-on-wheels, a city object I had never taken to. Now I and the whole company could hear there was some need of it.
Something inside the box was kicking and lashing and bellowing to get out.
Erran’s eyes currently conveyed entire surprise and mystification.
“Why, my lord” he said to the gold bear, “can your passive beast have grown into a demon overnight? I think we had better withdraw before the creature is let loose. My Vazkor, do you judge you can handle this horse?”
I looked the bear in the face, and said, “I should say this horse had been handled somewhat already.”
Surely a babe yet warm from the crib could have guessed the facts. If they could not doctor my food, they could doctor the food of their horses. From the noise of it, my lord Prince Bear had stoked his animal with the seeds of death for both the steed and whoever should happen in its path.
I had never been so angry since I had been a boy in Ettook’s krarl. Anger that he should waste a fine beast for his Wretched villainy, anger that I must risk my life to make the-
154
ater for them, and a darker, sicker anger for the woman I knew had been behind his scheming.
I stood there on the flats while the lords and ladies of the leopard’s court drew off to safe harbors, and the mad horse screamed and lunged in his jail. Even the grooms ran, leaving just one poor cloth-rank boy with a bare face like gray suet, who slipped the bolt on the box door and pelted for safety.
This time I thought, If I survive this show, it shall be the last. By the sow-harlot-bitch-whore goddess who grunted me forth from her belly, this hound has offered his last trick.
Then he was out, and I stopped thinking neatly in words.
He was not like a horse. If I had been remembering the legends of the wind god of Tathra’s tribe, this was surely he, not black but red, not wind but whirlwind.
He shot from confinement like ball from cannon, smoking foam, and came right at me with his eyes on fire.
I had reckoned on that. My legs and entrails said, Fly him. But instead I ran to him as he to me, and leaped for his great blazing horse’s head.
I got his breast, hard as rock, in my side; the impact almost winded me, save I had been ready. I swung over his neck and landed on his back like a gasping fish slung down on some heaving ship’s deck, and grabbed the foam-sticky mane.