The Scorpio Races

CHAPTER SIX

That first day, Gorry has me come down to the beach before anyone else to try a piebald mare he has dredged from the ocean some indeterminate time before. He is so certain that I will want her for Malvern that he’s priced her high enough for two horses. Under the dark blue early morning sky, the tide just starting to pull back from the sand, my fingers frozen where they poke from my fingerless gloves, I watch him trot her back and forth for me. Her hoofprints are the first on the beach; the tide has wiped the sand clean, removing all traces of Mutt’s botched efforts the night before.

She’s striking. Water horses come in every color that normal land horses do, but, like land horses, most are bay or chestnut. Less often dun or palomino or black or gray. It’s very rare to find a piebald water horse, equally black and white, sharp white clouds across a black field. But flashy color doesn’t win races.

The piebald mare doesn’t move terribly. She has a good shoulder. Lots of capaill uisce have good shoulders. Unimpressed, I watch black cormorants spin through the sky above us, their silhouettes like small dragons.

Gorry brings the mare to me. I hitch myself onto her back and look down at Gorry. “She’s the fastest capall uisce you’ll ever sit on,” he says in his grainy voice.

Corr is the fastest capall uisce I’ve ever sat on.

Beneath me, the piebald mare smells like copper and rotting seaweed. Her eye, turned toward me, weeps seawater. I don’t like the feel of her – sinuous and hard to hold – but then, I am used to Corr.

“Take her out,” Gorry says. “Tell me you can find anything faster.”

I let her trot; she minces through the packed sand toward the water, ears pinned to her mane. I thumb my iron pieces out from my sleeves and track them counterclockwise on her withers, right on a heart-shaped spot of white. She shudders and twists her body away from my touch. I don’t like the unhorse-like tilt to her head or the way that she never unpins her ears. None of the horses are to be trusted. But I trust her less than most.

Gorry urges me to gallop her. Feel her speed for myself. I doubt that there is anything she can do at a gallop to convince me that what she is like at a trot is worth it. But I let out her reins and nudge her sides.

She is down the beach like an osprey diving for a fish. Breathlessly fast. And always, always conscious of the water, angling toward the sea. And again, that sinuous, slippery movement. She seems far less horse than sea creature to me, even now, even in the deep of October, even on dry land. Even with me whispering in her ear.

But she is fast. Her strides eat the sand, and we pass by the cove that marks the end of the good surface in only seconds. The rush of speed bursts through me, like bubbles popping on the surface of water. I don’t want to think of her as faster than Corr, but she must be close. Anyway, how can I know, without him there?

It’s beginning to get rocky. When I move to slow her, the piebald courses upward in a rear, her teeth snapping, predatory.

All of a sudden she smells overwhelmingly of the sea. Not of the beach, which is what most people think is the odor of the sea. Not of seaweed, or of salt, but of your head beneath the surface, breathing water, lungs full of the ocean. The iron has no effect as we pelt toward the water.

My fingers work through her mane, tying knots in threes and sevens. I sing in her ear, and all the while my inside hand turns her in smaller and smaller circles, each one away from the water. Nothing is sure.

As we charge across the sand, the magic in her calls to me, insidious. Precious little of my bare skin touches her – a wrist against her neck, perhaps, though my leg is guarded inside my boots. But still, her pulse hums through me. Lulling me to trust. Compelling me to join her in the sea. It’s only a decade of riding dozens of the water horses that allows me to remember myself.

And only barely.

Everything in me says to abandon the struggle. Fly with her into the water.

Threes. Sevens. Iron across my palm.

I whisper: “You will not be the one to drown me.”

It feels like minutes to slow her, to bring her back toward Gorry, but it’s probably only seconds. And all the while her neck still feels snaky to me and her teeth are still bared in a way that no land horse would present them. She’s trembling beneath me.

It’s hard to forget how swift she was.

“Didn’t I tell you she was the fastest thing you’d ever ride?” Gorry asks.

I slide off her and hand him the reins. He takes them with a puzzled expression on his already puzzling face.

I say, “This mare is going to kill someone.”

“Hey now,” Gorry objects. Then: “They’ve all killed someone.”

“I want no part of her,” I say, even though part of me does.

“Someone else will buy her,” Gorry says. “And then you will be sorry.”

“That someone else will be dead,” I reply. “Throw her back.”

I turn away.

Behind me, I hear Gorry say, “She’s faster than your red stallion.”

“Throw her back,” I repeat, not turning around.

I know he won’t.