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Excerpt from Mistress of the Sun
Chapter One
A Romany woman in a crimson gown flashes by, standing on the back of a cantering horse. Her crown of turkey feathers quivers under the burning summer sun.
"The Wild Woman!" announces the showman, flourishing a black hat.
The crowd cheers as the lathered horse picks up speed. It tosses its big head, throwing off gobs of sweat and spittle. Its tail streams, and its hooves pound the dust.
The Wild Woman puts out her hands, her diaphanous skirts billowing out behind her. Slowly, she raises her bare arms to the cloudless sky and shrieks a piercing war cry.
A pale girl—barely tall enough to see over the rails—watches transfixed, imagining her own thin arms outstretched, her own feet planted on a horse's broad back.
She presses her hands to her cheeks in wonder. Oh, the wind!
It was 1650, the eighth year in the reign of young Louis XIV—a time of famine, plague and war. In the hamlets and caves and forests beyond, people were starving and violence ruled. The girl had just turned six.
She was small for her age, often taken for a four-year-old—until she spoke, that is, with a matter-of-fact maturity well beyond her years. She wore a white close-fitting cap tied under her chin with ribbons, her golden curls falling down her back to her waist. Her gown of grey serge was adorned with a necklace she'd made herself from hedgehog teeth. A pixie child, people sometimes called her, because of her diminutive size, her fair coloring, her unsettling gaze.
The girl followed the Wild Woman with her eyes as she jumped from the horse and bowed out. Waving her feathered crown, she disappeared from view. The girl pushed her was you through the crowd. Ignoring two jugglers, a clown walking on sticks, and a tumbling dwarf, she circled around to the sprawl of carts on the far side of the hill. There, she found the Wild Woman, pouring a leather bucket of water over her tangled black hair. The tin spangles on her gown caught the light.
"Thunder, it's hot," the woman cursed. Her horse—a piebald with pink eye-lids—was tethered to an oxcart close by. "What do you want, angel?" she asked through dripping tendrils.
"I want to ride a horse like you do," the girl said. "Standing."
"Do you," the woman said, wiping her face with her hands.
"I'm horse-possessed," the girl said soberly. "My father says."
The woman laughed. "And where be your father now?"
The horse pawed at the dirt, kicking up clouds. The Romany woman yanked its frayed lead and said something in a foreign tongue. The horse raised its ugly head and whinnied; a chorus answered.
Horses.
The girl crept between the wagons and tents, making her way toward a clearing where four cart horses, a donkey and a spotted pony were grazing. The tethered bell mare looked up as she approached, then returned to chewing the loaves of mouldy bran bread that had been thrown down in a heap. The summer had been dry, and grass was sparse.
It was then that the girl saw the horse standing apart in the woods?a young stallion, she knew, by his proud bearing. He was fenced off from the others, one foreleg bound up with a leather strap.
He was a White, high in stature. His neck was long, slender at the head, and his up-pricked ears were small and sharp. Words from the Bible came to her: I saw Heaven open, and behold: a White horse. His eyes looked right into her. Sing ye!
She thought of the stories her father had told her?stories of Neptune, sacrificing his Whites to the sun, stories of winged Pegasus. Worship Him that rides on clouds. She thought of the King, a boy not much older than she was, stopping the riots in Paris by riding into the fray on a White. He who rides Him is faithful and true.
She knew this horse. He was the horse in her dreams.
She picked her way across the clearing. "Ho, boy," she said, her hand outstretched.
The stallion pinned back his ears, threatening to strike.
{Copyright © 2008 by Sandra Gulland}
From the Josephine B. Trilogy:
1. The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.
2. Tales of Passion, Tales of Woe
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