‘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?’
She could almost hear him, so intense were her memories – just behind her as he used to be when seated in the house and she dipping water from the bucket into the copper bowl. She looked round. Nandje stood, with a gentle smile on his face, close by the Red Horse. She knew at once that, though he looked so solidly real, he was without substance, a ghost which could not be touched and could not touch her. He, and all his clothing, looked grey as ashes. With him had come a familiar, long-loved smell, the burnt-sugar odour of his pipe tobacco which floated unseen about him.
‘Gry, my daughter,’ he said, ‘be calm. Do not give way to fear. Aza has released my soul from my body and I must begin my journey to the Palace of Shadows. There is nothing in the mound now but my discarded and useless body surrounded by the offerings of sorrow: that is all. Go in and look at it if you will, but remember me as I was in life – whether at home or abroad with the Herd. Remember me –’
‘Father –’
‘I cannot stay. Take care of the Horse. Remember me …’
Gry stared at the space where Nandje had been. The noise of the Red Horse grazing comforted her: he had behaved as though nothing was amiss so, when she had assured herself that he was content, she turned back to the mound and walked into its dark and cavernous interior. Soon, when her eyes were used to the dimness, she could see. Some light had followed her in, enough to show her the bier of woven willows and her father’s remains lying on it. She approached and looked down on them. What he had said was true: she had no need to fear. This racked and ruined body had nothing to do with Nandje. He had become a memory, and this ugly thing was the same as anything from which the soul has gone, a bird lying dead in winter, a heath-jack killed for the pot, meat which has once been a fleet horse. Gry fingered the offerings which lay in a circle round the body: her two plaits, her silver necklaces and bangles; the little vial of her brothers’ mingled blood, Garron’s best belt and Kiang’s finest dagger; the dishes, beakers, arrows, fish-hooks and snares her uncles and aunts had provided; the bag laid there for Nandje to carry these grave-goods to the Palace of Shadows.
Gry walked sunwise round the bier, bent and kissed the dead thing on what was left of its crushed forehead. Nandje’s weathered skin was taut and dry, punctured full of the holes from which the corpse-moths had crawled, after feeding on his flesh. His falchion and bow were in his withered hands, gripped more by exposed bone than by vanishing flesh; his hands had been calloused, Gry remembered, from the bowstring and roughened by the Plains wind and the cold. He had been dressed in his best, blue aprons, red boots and gilded belt; they was all shabby, drab and decaying. His two clay pipes and his tobacco pouch were in their places on his belt but – she glanced about, searching – not his dagger with its narrow blade of Pargur steel and bone hilt, and the copper sheath with the horse-head chape. She knew it so well. The dagger had been drawn to cut hide into ropes and sheets, to carve meat, slice apples, open hog nuts; even to stir honey into hot kumiz.
‘An Imandi, unlike lesser men with needy families, is always buried with his goods and weapons,’ Gry said to herself. ‘I know this, though I am a woman. Perhaps the knife was mislaid before the burial rite – but another would have been got. Perhaps a thief has crept in here! I shall ask Aza – except that I can’t know the dagger’s gone, or I would be a thief myself in Aza’s eyes. I’ll ask Garron, no – Aunt Jennet. Or look for it myself and bring it back –
‘But how will my father do without a knife to cut his shadow-meat?’
She shivered, though it was not cold underground. The death house had become much darker, for the light was fading. Then she saw the Red Horse in the doorway, head and shoulders filling the gap. She smiled and went to him.
‘You came for me,’ she said. ‘Or did you come to see what has become of your Rider?’
The Horse pushed his head against her and she stroked him. She thought she heard her father’s voice once more.
‘You are the Rider.’
She shook her head in dismissal and disbelief.
‘We must go, Horse,’ she said. ‘You to your Herd and I to the milk and my woman’s duties. Yet I shall spend this day as I have spent so many, wondering where it is my father has gone – oh, not his poor, broken body, not that, but himself, Nandje who rode you everywhere, who was my father and my mother too, since Lemani died.’
Aza, the Shaman of Garsting, crouched in his hollow. He, alone of the Ima, lived always above ground and knew which way the wind blew and what it told; saw sunrise succeed sunset and the sun crowd the moon from the sky. He had put away the death-blanket and the sharpened stick he had used to release Nandje’s soul from his outworn body. The blanket would be used again to cover Garron or Kiang, Battak or Oshac, whoever was chosen Imandi, when his time came; but the stick, that was a mark on the wayward calendar of Malthassan time, and Aza had a bundle of them. He was very old, yet seemed himself to have cheated age in his wrinkled brown skin and mane of white hair. He was old and jealous of the young. He could still run, true enough, but they could walk faster; he could sigh and remember his young manhood, but they were in possession of it, their blood red and their appetites fresh and keen. Nor did Aza feel any softening of his heart towards young women. He had forgotten his first wife, the one who died in childbirth; his second, who had fallen into the flooded River Nargil and his third, the pretty creature who had left him for a horseman. He had outlived his children and his grandchildren and was truly alone upon the earth, but for his talismans and the spirits.
The north wind passed over Aza in his hollow. The shaman kept five spirit-horses, long and fearsome creatures made of ash-poles, skulls, and hides and hair, and he looked up, seeing how the wind moved their skins and brought life to their dried tails and manes. The horses guarded him and there was one to face East and one to face West, one for the South and one for the North; and one to watch the sky. At night, or when he had gone into the breathless trance, Aza spoke with them and learned what they had seen; now they were silent, unless the rattling of their skins against their bones of ash wood was a kind of speech, or a lament for earlier and better days, when they had galloped, eaten the sweet grass and roamed the Plains at will.
Aza had a sixth horse which he had inherited from the old shaman, Voag, when he was called to his seat at Russet Cross. He kept it in a basket. Now, he rose and fetched the basket from where it lay upon a rolled-up prayer flag. Unpegging the lid, he lifted the separate pieces of this horse out of its basket and stable and began to arrange them in an intricate pattern on the ground. He wanted to weave a bridle out of the living grass and to do this, it was necessary to bring the power from the bones of the sixth horse and a hungry sprite from the earth.
‘Svarog, see me! he cried, ‘Stribog, hear me! Feel me walk upon you, Moist Mother Earth. O, send me a puvush, a goodly puvush lacking nothing but her malice and wanting