My Story: the Horse
Copyright© 2010 by Oz Ozzie
Memory Lane
The horse was bored, and given who he is, I really don’t like it when he gets bored. He understands he’s not supposed to talk around other two-legs, but it’s my job to make that easy for him. So I decided I’d take him for a good long ride.
And the castle we’re at — while the Prince sweats through three whole days of treaty talks, poor man — happens to be the castle of my youth. So I’d kill two birds with one stone, and take a trip down memory lane. Eight years since I rode away from here to meet the Prince, and I’ve been too busy ever since to come back. Now I wonder what it’ll be like. Is that old house in the forest even still standing? Hard to imagine. It was so small.
I suppose I’m used to the Prince’s scale of things now. Where the horse is, so am I.
And how lucky am I? I told the horse so as we left, and he laughed and said, “Take me to that lovely forest” — only his vowels were as funny as they ever were. He’s just a horse, of course. Only he can talk.
I’m not the crazy one either.
## Scotten
The bakery was easy to find. There’s only the one, and you can follow your nose to it from the end of the lane — that good brown smell that means somebody’s been up since the dark hours. It was a proper little shop, too, with a painted board over the door and flour-dust on the step, and through the window I could see loaves stood up in rows like they were proud of themselves. I left the horse around the side, told him to behave, and went in.
The man behind the counter took one look at me and bent himself near in half.
“My lady. An honour. How may I serve you this morning?”
For a moment I just stood there. I’d been so many places by then where that’s how people talk to you that I’d near forgotten it could be wrong. I looked at him — the flour on his forearms, the burn-shine on the backs of his hands, the way his shoulders had thickened from the work — and I thought, well, he’s filled out. And then I thought, filled out from what?
“It’s just me,” I said, which made no sense to him, and I watched it not make sense, and then I said it properly. “Scotten. It’s me.”
He gave me a look I can only call stupid. Mouth a little open. A baker’s daughter would’ve laughed.
“Tenni?”
“Tenni.”
“Tenni?” He came round the counter slow, like I might be a thing that bites. “But — you’re dead.”
“I’m not.”
“No, you — everyone said. You went off with all them soldiers, in all that trouble, and that was the last of it. We had it you were dead. Eight years, Tenni.” He said it like I’d done it on purpose. Which, I suppose, I had. I’d ridden off to die for Dro, and then I’d very much not died, and somewhere in all the wonder of that it had never once occurred to me to send word down the road to the brother I’d written my whole heart out to, the brother I’d thought I’d never see again. He’d buried me. He’d had eight years of me being in the ground, and I’d had eight years of being too busy to tell him otherwise.
I didn’t say any of that. I said, “Well. I’m sorry to disappoint.”
And he laughed — Scotten’s laugh, exactly Scotten’s laugh, I’d have known it anywhere — and grabbed me by both arms and held me out at the length of them to have a proper look, and his eyes were wet and he wasn’t going to mention it and neither was I.
“Look at you,” he said. “Look at you. Is that a real dress?”
“It’s a real dress.”
“God’s teeth.” He let go of one arm to wipe his face on his shoulder, casual, as if it were sweat. “Sit. Sit down. I’d offer you something but you’d not want our bread, you eat castle bread now I’ll wager —”
“I’d love your bread.”
“— and you can’t have the good loaves, they’re spoke for.” He cut me an end off something dark and dense and pushed it over, and it was better than anything I’ve had at any table since, and I told him so, and he waved it off and was pleased as anything.
So I sat in my real dress on a flour-sack and we talked, and it came out in the way these things do, which is sideways and complaining. Can’t complain, he said, and then complained, lovely and steady, about the supplier who waters the yeast and the boy who’s quick but careless and his own feet, which have gone flat from the standing. Not a word of it bitter. Just a tired man laying his days out for someone who’d listen, and glad of the listener.
And then the real of it.
The bakery’s the baker’s still — old Hennet, who took Scotten in when Scotten was a runt crying in the dirt with no future on him at all. Hennet’s eyes have gone. He can’t see to work the dough and it grieves him, and he sits in the back and keeps the books by holding them an inch off his nose and getting the boy to read him the numbers. And Hennet’s offered Scotten the shop. Not to sell — to give. Outright. No loan, no usurer with his teeth in it, no twenty years of paying a moneylender for the privilege of his own oven. Just: it’s yours, son.
“That’s — Scotten, that’s everything. That’s the whole Future.” I heard the big letter on it as I said it and so did he, I think, though he couldn’t have known why.
“Aye.” He turned a crumb over on the counter. “In exchange for I keep him. To the end. Whenever the end is.” He said it plain. “He’s not asked it out loud. He doesn’t have to. I give you the shop, you don’t put me out — that’s the deal, that’s always the deal.” He looked at me. “And I’ll do it. Course I’ll do it. He’s the only father I ever — “ and he stopped, because we don’t, the two of us, and he started again somewhere drier. “It’s just it could be two years or it could be ten. Wiping him, towards the end. Feeding him off a spoon. And it won’t be me does the most of it, will it, I’m at the oven by four.”
“Mira,” I said. I’d had the name off him five minutes before.
“Mira.” And there it was — he wanted her to say yes to all of it first. The old man and the shop and the spoon-feeding, the whole bundle, before he closed with Hennet. Because it wasn’t fair to land it on her after. “She’s no fool,” he said. “She can see what she’d be taking on.” He scrubbed at the counter. “Only it’s a bakery, Tenni. Roof, oven, bread the year round, never hungry — that’s a good marriage, that is, by what’s going. And whoever she takes she’ll be wiping somebody’s nose by and by, that’s marriage, that’s the job. Might as well be a nose that comes with an oven.”
I thought that was about the least romantic thing I’d ever heard, and also that he was completely right, and I didn’t know how a person held both of those at once except that I was learning I did it all the time now.
She came in while we were at it — Mira, with a basket, not expecting a lady on the flour-sacks, and she went stiff and careful the way they all do. So I did the one thing I had to give, which costs me nothing and isn’t nothing: I was warm at her. I stood up and took her hand and was pleased to meet her, told her Scotten had grown into twice the man I’d feared he’d be, said I’d come down from the castle the moment I could because family’s family however far you go — and I watched her do the sum behind her eyes. The brother’s not just a baker. The brother’s got a sister who wears a dress and comes from the Prince’s own house. I saw the marriage go up in her reckoning by exactly the weight of me, and I spent that weight gladly, the only coin I had on me that morning.
She softened. She had a quick laugh under the carefulness, once it came out, and a way of putting her hand flat on Scotten’s back when she passed behind him that he didn’t even notice and leaned into anyway.
I liked her for him. That’s the truth of it — not that I’d fixed a thing, because I hadn’t, the old man and the spoon and the years of it were all still sitting there unsettled when I left. But I’d seen enough marriages made and unmade by then to know a workable one when it’s in front of me, and that was one. Which was just as well, because the pair of them had the look of people already most of the way to doing it and only waiting to find out they’d decided.
He walked me out to the horse. Asked, on the step, half-shy: “You got someone, then? Up at the castle?”
“Sort of.” The horse swung his great head round to listen, the nosy article. “Trying to decide.”
“Decide.” Scotten said it like the word was a foreign coin, turning it over to see if it was real. A man who’d take an oven and a dying man together because that was the hand on the table, looking at a sister who got to decide. He didn’t say any of that. He just nodded, and squeezed my arm, and said, “Good luck. Both ways, eh. Good luck both ways.”
I got up on the horse. From up there the whole shop looked even smaller, and even prouder somehow, the loaves in the window catching the light.
I didn’t give him the diary. I had it with me — I always have it with me — and I sat on it the whole ride out, same as I did the first time, and I didn’t take it out and I didn’t tell him it existed. I don’t know why. Yes I do. I just wasn’t ready to hand my brother the book where I’d called this place a tomb and gone off to die, not when he’d only just got me back out of the ground.
## Dro
I found Dro the way Scotten said I would — follow the King’s road out the far side of the village till you hit the smell of lye and tallow, and there’s the soap-works, and there’s Dro in the yard of it with his sleeves shoved up, stirring something in a vat the size of a bathtub.
He knew me at once. No bow, not at first — just his whole face opening up like a window. “Tenni.” And then, because some part of him caught up with the rest of him and remembered what I was supposed to be now, he came over wiping his hands and ducked his head and started in. “My lady. My — Tenni. Forgive me. My lady. I didn’t —”
“Dro.”
“I’d heard you were alive, I never thought — and look at you, you’re —” He gestured at all of me, the dress, the horse, the everything. “And I never thanked you. Eight years and I never once —”
“Dro, you don’t —”
“I owe you my life.” He said it flat and certain, the way you’d state a debt to a moneylender, a true fixed sum. “I was on the boards, Tenni. They had the rope. I’d said my prayers. And you came through that crowd on this — “ he looked up at Lightning and lowered his voice as if the horse might be offended “ — on this great brute, and you shouted me free. I think on it most days. I’ll think on it the day I die, and I’ll be glad I had the extra days to think on it in, because of you.”
And there it was, the thing I can’t ever do anything with. I stood there in my real dress and let a good man thank me for a thing I didn’t do — not the way he means it. He thinks I’m a hero. I know I’m a girl who had a talking horse drop into her lap and couldn’t stand to watch them hang her friend for it. There’s no nobleness in it. There’s just luck, and one decent thing done because I couldn’t have lived with the other. But you can’t say that to a man with the rope still around his neck in his memory. You can’t hand him back his gratitude and say it’s counterfeit, I didn’t earn the face value. So I did what I always do, which is try to wriggle out from under it.
“I only wanted to say hello,” I said. “I was passing. How’s it all going? How are you?”
He wasn’t going to be hurried off it that easily — he got one more in, a proper “I owe you everything,” with a hand on his heart — but I asked after the family loud enough to change the weather, and that did it, because there’s nothing on this earth will distract a man faster than the chance to show off his children.
“Wait. Wait. You have to —” and he was gone, into the house, hollering, and out he came herding three of them in front of him and his wife behind, drying her hands on her apron and trying to get them into a line. He arranged them like he was presenting them at court, oldest to littlest, and said their names with enormous gravity, and the littlest one immediately sat down in the dirt.
His wife — Anet — looked at me like I’d stepped out of a tale, which, in that house, I had.
“My lady. I never — I never thought I’d set eyes on you. Dro talks of you. The children know it. How you saved their father.” She had hold of my hand in both of hers. “If you hadn’t, none of these’d be standing here, would they. So. Thank you. From the whole of us.” And she meant it down to the floor, and her two eldest stared up at me like I might do a miracle on the spot.
I’ll tell you a thing I didn’t expect to feel. In Scotten’s shop, two hours gone, I’d been a ghost — a dead sister climbing up out of eight years in the ground. And here I was a saint on the wall, told to the children at night. Same girl. Same eight years. I haven’t worked out yet which one’s the lie.
“And how’s the soap trade treating you?” I said, to be standing in the ordinary world again.
“Oh — soap.” Dro pulled a face, the face of a man who’s about to complain on principle. “It’s a living. It’s hard, mind. The tallow’s gone dear, and the carter I use is a thief, and you’re either scalded or you’re freezing, there’s no between with it.” He said all this cheerfully, leaning on his vat. “But the boys eat. The girl’s got shoes coming for winter. Roof doesn’t leak above the bed, only above the store. So.” He spread his hands. “Can’t complain.”
“You just did,” I said. “At some length.”
“Well.” He grinned, not a bit ashamed. “You have to, don’t you. Say it’s good out loud and something hears you.”
I laughed, because he was the same Dro, exactly the same, the boy who used to bring me news of Scotten down a forest track and grumble the whole way through telling me good things. A man doing well, and grumbling because admitting it felt like daring the sky.
“Can they come up?” I nodded at Lightning. “On the horse. If they’d like.”
If they’d like. You’d have thought I’d offered them the moon on a plate. We sat them up one at a time, the two big ones brave as anything, the littlest gone suddenly shy and clinging to my dress and then howling to have her turn the moment her brother had his. And Lightning stood like a carved thing, patient, gentle, dropping his great head down to breathe at them, careful as careful.
And then he did his laugh.
It’s a thing he does — a noise that, if you didn’t know, you’d take for an ordinary horse being an ordinary horse, a sort of blowing, stuttering, hiccuping snort, huh-huh-huh-hrrrrf. Only it’s not. It’s his imitation of a two-leg laughing, and it is, I’ll be honest, a terrible imitation, which is the entire point. He worked it up years ago to make me laugh on a bad day and he’s never once let it go because it lands every time. He did it now, right down into the littlest one’s face, huh-huh-huh-hrrrrf, and she shrieked, and the boys went off like kettles, and within about four heartbeats all three of them were back down in the dirt where they’d started, helpless, rolling, that breathless silent laughing where no sound comes out, while a very large warhorse stood over them looking — I’m the only one who’d know it — extremely pleased with himself.
He loves it. That’s the thing nobody in that yard knew but me. The bored, restless creature who’d dragged me out here for something to do — this was the something. Three children in the dirt, laughing fit to be sick, at a joke only he and I understood was a joke. He’d have stayed all day.
We didn’t stay all day. The light was getting on and I had a forest to get to. Dro held my stirrup, which I didn’t need and didn’t refuse him, and Anet pressed a cake of their good soap into my hand wrapped in a cloth — “the lavender, the proper one, not the yellow” — and the children waved until the soap-works was out of sight behind us.
For a little while the road was just us again. The horse, and me, and quiet.
“That was a good house,” Lightning said. His vowels round and ridiculous in the late sun.
“It was,” I said. “It really was.”
And it had been. The one place on the whole map where the sum came out right, where the thing I did when I was a child had gone and turned itself into shoes for a girl and bread for two boys and a wife drying her hands on her apron, and not a shadow on any of it. I rode out of it lighter than I’d ridden in.
I had the diary under me the whole time, same as ever. Dro’s in it, you know — the real Dro, the boy on the forest track. I thought about that. I didn’t take it out. But I thought about it, which I hadn’t done at Scotten’s. A small thing. A door not opened, but noticed.
## The forest’s edge
Scotten had told me where to find her, and he’d told me about Uncle while he was at it, though it cost him something to do it. Dead three winters now. A fever that started as a cold and went into his chest and stayed there, and him too worked-down to throw it off — out in the wet after firewood when he should’ve been by the fire himself, because somebody had to fetch it and there was only him to go. Scotten said it the way you’d report weather. He’d never forgiven them, Scotten, not for one day of it, and he wasn’t about to start forgiving a dead man, and I understood that. I did. He’d earned the right to it the hard way, lying in the dirt at thirteen with the word runt still ringing, watching the cart take me off and leave him standing.
Only — and I turned this over the whole ride out, and I didn’t like myself much for turning it — I wasn’t sure he had the whole of it. The deciding of it I couldn’t fault, try as I might to, for his sake. Where would they have put him? One room walled into two, the four of them already in it, and me on the stable floor with the goats. You take the girl in to family and you find the boy a trade — anyone in the country would have told you that was right, would have called it the kind way to split a bad business. And it came good, didn’t it. The trade made Scotten a baker. The done thing put him in an oven of his own and put me on a horse. I’ve turned it every way and I can’t get the choice itself to come out wrong.
But she called him a wicked runt. That’s the bit. That’s the bit that won’t lie down. Not that they sent him to the baker — that they sent him off with that in his ears, a frightened boy of thirteen with nothing left in the world, and the last thing his only living kin had for him was a curl of the lip and the word wicked. She needn’t have. The decision didn’t ask it of her. Nothing asked it of her except the thing that was always in her, the sharp tongue that couldn’t let a hard moment pass without putting an edge on it — the same tongue that scolded me lazy while she fed me, that told me I was lucky while she gave me the only roof she had to give. With me there were apples after. With Scotten there was only the blade, and the cart, and gone. He got the worst of her and none of the rest, and that’s why he can hate her with a clean heart, and I can’t, and I rode out there carrying the difference like a stone.
I didn’t say any of that to Scotten. You don’t. He gets to keep his clean hate; they gave it to him fair and square. It’s only me they were soft enough with that I have to do the hard kind of remembering.
The house was where he’d said, out on the last of the cleared ground before the trees take over. Not the old cottage — that’s deeper in, the forest’s own hem. This was a different place, nearer the village by a mile, and I worked out whose it was before I’d properly reached it. Ruthy’s. Ruthy and her boy had bought this, the labourer she’d gone husband-hunting for all those summers ago, doing her hair over and over in the glass — she’d landed him, and between them they’d got themselves a cottage and a fenced garden and a name as people who owned their ground. That’s no small thing, out here. That’s a life built, by a girl who’d had nothing to build it with but a tidy face and the wit to use it.
It was a poor place, mind, by the measure I’m kept in now — a low cottage gone grey, a garden being worked hard for everything in it, a few chooks, two goats on a tether, washing graying in air too damp under the trees to dry it right. But it was hers, and that changed how it looked at you. Not the floor I’d crawled up off and fled. A rung above it, climbed by hand.
There was a woman in the garden, bent over the rows with a hoe, a clutter of children about her ankles in the dirt. She heard the horse before she saw me — you would, a thing his size — and came up out of her work with a hand to her back and the other against the light.
It was Ruthy. I knew her the way you know a face under the years. Five-and-twenty now and looking past it, thickened and weathered, grey already starting at one temple, and her hands when she lowered the one from her eyes were a labourer’s hands, cracked across the knuckles. She’d been a grown girl chasing a husband when I was a child on the floor; we were never of an age. But she’d plaited my hair back, the once. The only one of them who ever did a thing for me she didn’t have to.
She looked straight at me and saw nothing. Not a ghost, not a question, not the smallest catch of don’t I know — nothing. She saw the dress, and the horse, and the quality of me, and her whole body did the thing I’d watched bodies do all morning, the gathering-in, the readying to be of use to someone set above her.
“Lady.” She wiped her palms down her apron and got a child clear of where the horse might step. “Beg pardon. Can we help you? Are you lost, out this way? There’s nothing past us but the trees.” And then the size of it reached her — a lady, a real one, at her fence — and she half-turned and called back toward the house, over the noise of the chooks, “Mam! Mam, come out — there’s a lady come —”
“A lady?” The voice came before she did — that voice, I’d have known it from the bottom of a well, only thinner now, a reed where there’d been a rod. And then she was in the doorway, wiping her hands on a rag, and she took me in all at once the way Ruthy had, the dress and the horse and the rest of it, and she did something I had never in my life seen her do. She dropped a curtsey. Low as her knees would take her, which wasn’t far, and coming up she put a hand out and jabbed Ruthy in the arm — down, you, down — and Ruthy bobbed again beside her, the both of them folded over in their own garden to the quality at the fence.
I’d seen the iron fist do a great many things. I’d never seen it curtsey.
“Lady,” she said. “How can we help you. We don’t see folk of your sort out this way, we’re right at the end of everything here, but whatever’s wanted —” and she was already half-turning to send Ruthy for something, a stool, a cup, some offering to put between themselves and whatever a lady at the fence might mean.
I wasn’t going to be caught flat-footed, not this time. Three stops I’d had to learn it. I came down off the horse before she could get any further into it — got my feet on their ground, on the level, and pushed Lightning off toward a patch of grass by the fence with a word, go on, and he went, the great obliging article, and left me standing there just a woman in a dress and no longer a woman up on a warhorse, which I hoped might help. It didn’t, but I hoped it.
“Aunt,” I said. “It’s me. It’s Tenni.”
I’d meant to get straight on past it, the way I’d worked out on the road — get ahead of the dead business before it could start. “I’m sorry I never sent word. After I went off, the Prince took me to do his work, and it was the Prince, see — he’d not let me say where I’d got to, not for years, you know how lordly folk are about their own —”
And that last was a thing of hers, you understand. You know how lordly folk are. I’d had it off her a hundred times at the stream, the whole sermon, them and us and the wall between and never you mind trying to climb it. I handed it back to her now because I knew she’d take it — you’ll always take your own gospel back, no matter whose mouth it comes out of — and it would explain the eight years without my having to say the truer thing, which is that there was no Prince forbidding it, there was only me, too full of my new life to spare a thought down the road to a woman I’d been glad to leave.
I was braced for what came after. The you’re dead, but you can’t be, but everyone said — Scotten’s whole reel of it. I had answers ready.
But she wasn’t doing that. She’d gone very still, the rag knotted up tight in both hands, and she was looking at me — at my face now, not the dress — and what was on her own face was not surprise and not gladness and not the old sharp suspicion either. It was fear. Plain animal fear, the kind I’d worn myself on that stable floor when I heard her coming. I knew it from the inside. I’d just never once thought to see it pointed back the other way, at me.
“Tenni,” she said. Not a question, quite. Trying it. “Little Tenni. It’s — you’re —” Her eyes went down and then up again, the length of me, the dress, the lady of me, and I watched the fear get worse, not better, as it came clear to her exactly who it was that had ridden out of the world she’d cast me into and come back grown and shod in the Prince’s cloth. Not a stranger she could be afraid of in the ordinary safe way. Me. The one with the grievance. The one who’d every cause.
“Oh —” and her knees went again, that terrible little dip, an old woman ducking to a girl she’d raised on the floor. “Oh, lady — Tenni — we did our best by you, we did, I swear it before God. We’d nothing, you saw it, there was nothing to be had, but we never turned you out, did we, we took you in when there was no one else would, when your poor mother — we kept you, we fed you what there was —”
It came out of her in a rush, all run together, and every word of it true. That was the thing that stopped my mouth. Every single word of it was true. They had taken me in. There had been nothing. They hadn’t turned me out. She was reciting it like a prisoner who’d learned the charges and meant to get her answer in before the sentence, and it was all true, and it was a wall, brick on brick on brick, and I understood standing there that she’d built it a long time ago and lived behind it for years — her own account of those days, the one where she’d done a hard kindness to an ungrateful child and got nothing for it but abandonment and a grown lady at the fence come God-knew-why. As true as mine. As partial as mine.
And under it, the worse thing, the thing I’d come three stops and eight years to find and hadn’t known I was looking for until it wasn’t there: there was no aunt in that garden. Not the one I’d come for. I’d ridden out with a grievance the size of a stone, all ready for the woman who ruled us with her iron fist and her sharp tongue, ready to stand in front of her grown and even and make her see — and there was no one to make see anything. There was just a frightened old woman in her daughter’s vegetable patch, apologising to my dress, certain I’d come to do her some harm she couldn’t even name. She’d made me, floor and apple and sharp word together, every bit of me — and she didn’t know me at all. I’d stopped being her kin somewhere in those eight years and suddenly reappeared into her life as the one thing her whole gospel had taught her to dread, which was quality at the gate with the power to hurt, and that’s all she could see.
So I gave her the only thing that would answer it. “I know, Aunt.” Quiet. “You did take me in. There was no one else, and you did. Thank you.”
Something in her loosened — not all the way, but the worst of the fright went out of her shoulders, the way a dog eases when the raised hand turns out to be reaching for its head and not to strike. And because the easing wanted feeding, I fed it. “I’ve thought about it. The time I had here.” Here’s where I gilded, and knew I was gilding even as it came, the same trick I’d worked on Mira three hours gone. “It was a special time for me, that’s the truth. That’s why I came back. To see the place. To see you all.”
Ten weeks on a stable floor with the goats. Special. But it had given me the glade and the horse and every good thing I owned, by the back door, and that’s a kind of special if you hold it at the right angle and don’t look too hard, and I’d got very good at holding things at the right angle.
“Special,” the Aunt repeated, testing the word like a coin she wasn’t sure of.
“Yeah, but —” This was Ruthy, who’d stood there the whole while with a child on her hip and her curiosity plainly killing her, and now the lady at the fence had turned out to be only Tenni she’d lost every scrap of her awe and found her tongue. “Yeah, but what happened, though? You went off on some great horse, big as a house, and there was soldiers, and the whole crowd in an uproar, and they carried you off — I never saw the half of it for the press of people — and word came back you’d been took, and then you were dead, and now here you are in a dress out of a story. So what happened?”