The Horses of Heaven
Set sometime after the scene of Badon Hill—perhaps 453 CE…
Somewhere east of the Caucauses and south of the Urals, in the land called by the Romans as Sarmatia—or more generally, the Sea of Grass…
Three horses speeding upon the gusts of wind sweeping across the infinite plains. Three horses—black, white and gray. The sun sets, painting the grassy ocean before my eyes the colors of ruddy gold, violet shadow and twilit blue. The wind spurs the beasts onward to the East, away from the setting sun, following the golden length of the rays thrown across the plains.
The scent of crisp mountain streams, valleys full of meadow flower and flax seed carries on that wind, stretches back to distant lands far to the west where the land folds into crags and peaks of unbelievable heights, to touch the sky so blue. The gate of the world, those mountain ranges, divide the Sea of Grass from the lands of civilized men and civilized cities.
Three horses speeding upon the gusts of wind sweeping across the infinite plains.
We called them the Horses of Heaven once, my people keeping alive the memories of their ancestors—our wise-man beating out the story of First People and Horse Goddess to the rhythm of drums on a winter's night. The flickering of torchlight and flame molds the image of times long gone upon the withered tattoos of his face and arms. His skin hangs like the loose folds of a starved horse's hide, but the magic of chanting, drumbeat, give life to the nameless and the dead.
Three horses speeding upon the gusts of wind sweeping across the infinite plains.
With their ground-eating pace, they come to a rare stream-bed, vein of fertile hydration in the parched Kingdom of Grass. They pause to drink from the cool, life-giving water.
The black one lifts his head, sensing my presence as I wade into the stream. The slow slither of water moves around my legs, bare skin where I've rolled my trousers up to the knees. In the twilight, the sun strikes the murky tones to bronze and rust—like the color of the broach lining the neck of my jerkin.
I watch his eyes, the black—full of intelligence and bright with the wisdom of horse-kin. He is beautiful, sleek and muscular, jet and midnight formed into vital equine spirit.
His nostrils flare, catching the scent of woman and human as I stand in the path of the breeze. The flesh of his nares is pink and tender.
The stomach sacks I meant to fill with water are forgotten on the bank. All I can think is that it has been fifteen years—fifteen years since I watched my brother ride west beneath the standards of a dying empire.
I reach out slowly, toward the young colt, murmuring in a tongue so old, its words are like the dust of bones from which muscle and tendon long decayed beneath the cruel glare of sunlight.
The tongue of Saranyu and her servants—the language of Horse Goddess.
And I know, even as I reach forward, I am reaching back…back into the mists of a memory my mother's many times fore-mothers can hardly recall.
With any truth, that is.
The black lowers his proud head to my level, ears twitching, and raises one hoof hesitantly, to step into the water. I can hear the whuffle of his breath, the impatience in the snort from his white companion, the gray flicking its tail and tossing its head—the language of horse-kin. They want to be on their way—to follow upon the back of the strong east wind.
But the black pays them no heed, recognizing in my voice the language I speak, and steps with another strongly placed hoof, into the gentle flow of the stream.
And I sing of the first ones who were defeated so long ago, on the frozen waters of Mother Danu—before the time of the Huns, and our cousins the Alani pushed us even further west, and we became absorbed into their tribes. When we were our own people, offspring of the proud woman warriors, and the Royal Scythes--the Iazyges—we ruled the Sea of Grass at the impetus of the gods, the seasons, and the beasts.
I sing of a prince who sacrificed his pride and took with him the flower of a generation—the strongest and bravest warriors who survived that awful battle on the ice-covered waste of the Danube. Twelve generations ago, but to the mind of my tribe—what is left of the Iazyges--only one thread of many woven into the tapestry of my people, a mirage of colors--birth, life, death and rebirth.
But they were the first who went to that island—the Isle of the Mighty—and there were many who did not come back when their service to Rome was done. Many died to defend the shores of that mist-veiled isle, and others simply did as men will do, falling in love and planting the seeds of new life with the inhabitants of that mysterious, distant shore.
In the shadows of a setting sun, glinting gold across the lazy, crawling stream, my hand is extended, my voice soft like the night wind rising. And the black offers his muzzle cautiously, sniffling my fingers in the way of horse-kind.
But some never forgot, blessed by the gods to live into the age of the elderly, not having fallen in battle, nor met with the ravages of disease. And they returned to the Sea of Grass when their service to Rome, to Empire and Emperor, was fulfilled.
Blessed to live, but cursed to be the last of that generation—the first ones who had gone to Britannia—and carry back the many voices of the men and women who had fallen in the defense of that far Isle. Her restless ghosts, her servant called Brigantia—the mother of the land—Britannia's children, who claimed uncaring, the blood of her own peoples and the Iazyges together. Britons and Sarmatians, it was told by that last man, twelve generations before, had learned to live, love and die along a great Wall of Stone which crowned the north-country of that far-land.
The conscripts of the Sarmati tribes learned to live, and serve with love, the very man who himself had sent that first generation into exile after their humiliating defeat upon the winter-locked waters of the Danube. A man, it was rumored, who had been greatly betrayed by the Empire he'd once fought for so proudly. A man who had been a great general, a war-leader of Roman legions, and was punished as a slave for a crime none would ever decipher, except that he'd been too well loved by an emperor and an emperor's daughter. That he'd served Rome too well, and won the jealousy of that emperor's son.
The colt's eyes are burning like embers in an ocean of night, liquid black and dark with uncanny intelligence. His breath makes a whiffling sound into the palm of my hand, the lips of his muzzle moist and soft.
I sing of betrayal and death—the general who was a slave—dying, it was said, shamefully for the amusement of a bloodthirsty mob. And as is the wont of men, becoming honored as a hero only after his death, the tragedy of his life warping into the stuff of epics and poetry, lost to legends and half-truths as the years past, and all memory of any truth eventually was swept away.
Here, though, in this twilight domain, the cries of the meadow-larks and finches harkening a last farewell to the day, the grassy whisper of the wind plays through the branches of the river bed, a quiet shudder to calm the sorest of souls.
And here, my own soul is crying. I speak now those same words as they had been passed down twelve generations before, by the forefathers of my father's kin—the line of Zanticus, whose son was Batrades. Batrades, sent with a thousand upon another thousand of the Royal Iazyges to the Island of Mist and Shadow at the edge of the world.
And who returned many years later, to the lands of his birth to find a world greatly changed from the one he'd left, but whose spirit, would never rest until he came back to the earth upon which he'd been born a prince. A Sarmatian prince defeated by a Roman general; a Sarmatian prince who was exiled to Britannia with an entire army of his cavalry; the Roman general who was dishonored and supposedly died a slave.
A slave whose life was saved by a British woman practicing the art of the Greeks; herself, the child of queens and generals.
The long, feathery tail of the colt flicks absently, the bite of gnats and summer-flies sending an irritable shiver through the sensitive muscles of the sleek black coat.
I sing, in that summer twilight, of love now, and how two men, both dead to their worlds, came to love that same woman. But unlike the tales of the Greeks and Romans, lands where women are kept as servants to men—holding honor only as virtuous wives and mothers—where daughters have little value beyond her dowry—this tale did not end in hatred and death. This tale--as Batrades passed it on to his son, whose son told his daughter, who told her own daughter, and there-on, twelve generations since—this tale is one of true men, who were cursed by the gods to do deeds far more wearing than what any man should ever be asked.
And learned that the bond of brotherhood need not be destroyed by sharing the love of one woman, but is forged deeper, the way the hilt of a sword is smelted to the blade by heat and fire.
The compassion, the courage of one woman whose devotion to an island, even amid events heralding the imminent decay of the Empire, can inspire men to feats of legend in their darkest, most desperate hours.
The man who had been a general and a slave, who became a nameless refugee to the Empire, but on the Island of Mist, won back his honor, and with the love of that woman, became a king to the people of Britannia. Artos—the Bear, consort of Brigantia and defender of Britannia.
The name itself, Batrades said, nigh on twelve generations ago, became a title—a thing of insular meaning, with little significance to the Roman occupants beyond forming into the vowels of the Latin—officializing it for their records.
Artorius—DuxBrittaniarum
His family never forgot—the descendents of the woman he grew to love.
Neither did the Royal Iazyges—those of us who remain of the line of Horse Goddess and Batrades.
Neither, it seems, did the people of Britannia.
I am a servant of Horse Goddess—Saranyu—a daughter of First People, the Royal Iazyges who are the Children of Apa, from whose birth blood all living are formed, and will return upon their death.
I carry the wisdom of generations, whose memories reach back into a formless past, so I might translate an even more formless future.
The last light of sun disappears, the molten ball dropping below the edge of the far horizon, casting the black colt's eyes to a glimmer of dark flame.
And I can see in that future, we live—all of us from the Sea of Grass to the distant shores of Britannia—we live in a dying age.
The Empire is crumbling, though for that one thing my own people may finally rejoice. The gods know, as I stroke the muzzle of the black, gazing into the creature's keen eyes, there has been little enough to rejoice over in these last years.
But I see only death and suffering to come. A king weeps for a fallen hero, the blaze of the pyre bright and strong, reflecting from the colt's dark, glistening eyes.
Upon a rocky, cliff-hued shore, whose summit is graced with a circle of stones, staring with pitiless, flinty sentiment across the raging sea, a man and a woman wed to unite a peoples one last time. That same king, and a last queen—daughter of a hidden nation.
I feel none of the joy I know I should, gazing into the colt's gaze, watching that scene unfold as it would in the mind's eye.
There is only sorrow, drying my tears in the thick, straggling mane of the black, as I weep. The gray and the white have approached now, all gathering to offer their comfort in the only way horses can—big, warm bodies surrounding me, gentle nudging with velvet muzzles, and soft, muted whickering.
Fifteen years since I have seen my brother, and now I know he shall never return here, to this land—not as the boy I knew, nor as the man I'd imagined.
Lancelot is dead. His spirit, perhaps, flies free in the body of this great black colt before me. But I weep, harder all the more, tears soaking into the black's sleek, silken coat, my hands wrapped in his mane. I am now the last of my people, what was left of the Iazyges, the keeper of Horse Goddess' teachings, and the last descendent of Batrades—once prince of the Children of Apa, who first led the warriors of the Dracconis to the Isle of the Mighty.