Rainfall Incantations by Liz Lazo

Author:Liz Lazo [Liz Lazo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liz Lazo
Published: 2022-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Horses of Cangough

When the first Wild mare appeared, wild-eyed and dripping salt water on the sandy grasses that marked the edge of Marishka’s lands and the beginning of the king’s protected lands, she knew something bad had happened. It was common for her to see Wild horses here, in fact, their presence among the treetops—only just barely brushing their shoulders—was why she’d moved here. Over the years, she had nursed many of them back to health after the treacherous crossing they took each spring over the sound to return to their ancestral birthing grounds on Cangough Island. She had mourned the early foals that were too weak to survive the crossing but so desperate to stay with their mothers they plunged into the freezing waters after the herd and drowned. Her fortune came from capturing them in paint for years—the wobbly-legged fillies as they took their first steps, the righteous stallion defending his harem from usurpers with vicious teeth and deadly hooves, mother and baby nuzzling and suckling and galloping across the soft rolling hills. Finally, she thought, as the deep sleep of a job well done claimed her, perhaps for the first time in her life.

Marishka knew these horses nearly as well as knew herself. She knew their soft downy hair, their multitudes of color, rich browns, speckled sepias and whites, endless obsydians, their powerful, rippling flanks, their sweet intoxicating sweat, and the friendly nickers the older ones greeted her with as a trusted ally of the herd. She knew that each spring the stallion would trot over to her, a few days after the crossing, until he towered over her, her head just barely reaching his knobby knees. She waited each year, breathless, half convinced this was the year he would kill her for her insolence. But then he’d bend his great head down, snuffle her graying windswept hair, and then turn back around to his mares.

It was her unspoken agreement with the stallion, with the herd, not to paint until after they’d reacquainted themselves with each other. Each year he would come to her, to determine if she was still worthy. If she broke that agreement, she would instantly become unworthy. And he would know.

So not once in all her years had she captured the crossing. It would have been a glorious painting, she knew. The determination and fear in the horses’ eyes, the kicking legs, the crash of waves and the white foam surging around the horses’ bodies, the raging current tugging the horses towards the rocks downstream, a promise of certain death should they lose their footing. It would have been dramatic and hypnotizing and very likely her best seller.

But it wasn’t worth it, for that one painting, to violate the herd’s trust in her. No amount of money could replace the satisfaction of painting the horses. Her horses, her heart whispered.

The crossing was due any day, and though she had seen the mares and their foals off in the distance across the sound,

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