Wings of Flame Read Online Free Page A

to find his knife.
    Likely his men thought more of their own fears than of learning, but if they obeyed him, they remembered the legend.
    In the beginning days the Mare Mother rose up, the brown mare great of girth, she whose black, bristling mane forms the forests of the Kansban, she whose ears are the holy eminence, and this great mother of earth opened herself and was impregnated by the hot, wild waft of the south wind, and out of that union Suth was born.
    And Suth’s first and final form was that of a stallion, the most splendid of horses, of what color men could not agree; the Vashtins said that he was the varicolored horse of the pattern that is or is not, but the Devans scorned the piebald horse as a cousin to the cow, and they called Suth the kumait , the shining and sacred bay. In his broad forehead between his wise and dangerous eyes nestled a jewel, which jewel men could not tell, but all men knew that he carried that treasure between his eyes. And all men agreed that he was winged to fly with his father wind, though the Vashtins sometimes said that the wings were made of flame.
    And the Mare Mother bore daughters as well, the lovely twins Vashti and Deva—and men quarrel still as to which one came first from the womb—and Suth came to his sisters in his holy stallion form and wed them, and they bore him seven sons to fly with him, winged on the wings of wind. The white horse of moonlight and the yellow dun steed of the sun, the red horse of red fire and of the fertile red soil of Vashti (for in Deva the soil is as yellow as the sun), the blue horse of love and leaping water, the sorrel brown of the mountains, the gray horse of the mysteries, and the black horse of death and thunder and the stardark sky.
    And on the flanks of the mother the scurf and small sheddings rose up and became people, men and women, and they had children, and needed barley to feed them. Then lovely Vashti came (said the Vashtins) and lay down as a willing sacrifice, and the hero struck the blow of immolation, he, Auberameron, first priest and first king of Vashti, and out of the wound the red blood flowed, and bright green vegetation sprang up all around it. And ever since that day the good soil of Vashti has been as red as that blood, but the soil beyond the bourne, the boundary river, where no one goes, where magic grows and the melantha, that soil is as black as that black lily flower.
    And in those days all the horses could fly, and they spoke to man as equals, or more than equals, for they were far wiser than men and possessed of prophetic powers. In the fall of all things from the glory of those beginning days, they had lost the wings and the power of speech, but Devans said that they still possessed the wisdom, and Vashtins, that they retained the power of prophecy.
    But how could the horses be called wise and prophets, she wondered, the girl who was a boy who was newly named Seda wondered while sitting on a blue roan rump and waiting. How so wise, when they let the Devans use them so, suffered themselves to be sat upon, and so tamely? Being a horse was a godlike state. It ought not to be at all like being a shuntali.
    Kyrem returned with his knife, and Omber lowered his head and neck to help him vault on. Silently the party rode the length of the meadow and down through the next belt of blackthorn. Shadow-tails moved in the trees—small furry climbing creatures; squirrels, the Devans called them. Thin and famished with springtime hunger, they scurried about to feed on buds, and at each scrape or clatter of the branches, every rider stiffened on his mount. Though none of them would say it, they were each taut and tense, ears alert and eyes roving, watching for the return of the horse-bird. Hunger and human enemies were almost forgotten, except by Seda, who was accustomed to thinking of the many foes at once, the rocks that came hurled from all directions.
    They are not so accursed, she thought, though she did not