Work Text:
The thing about being Horsepeople of the Apocalypse is that you need… well. Horses.
Which is slightly inconvenient when the evolutionary system hasn’t caught up yet, even though God’s supposedly got the equine branch of it on a speed run (which will, in future, explain a lot about the digestive system, the way the forelegs don’t really attach to anything else and especially the tendons and a lot of riders would have had happier lives if this hadn’t been the case.)
But still.
The nice thing about being slightly eldritch beings is that linear time is more like a suggestion.
Hence, a meeting a few days after Eden. All four of them have basically adapted to their forms and walking around mostly like humans, but if there were any actual humans within eyesight, they’d probably have ended up with a migraine and a nervous breakdown from watching them. Not so much uncanny valley as uncanny Marina Trench.
IT SAYS WE NEED HORSES.
‘Do we need them now, my Lord?’ War’s voice is sword sharp. It’s probably the sunrise making her hair glint red like that. Hopefully.
‘Will we have to feed them?’ Famine asks. He sounds like the wind drifting down from the north, when spring hasn’t come and the crop fields are laying under snow that should have vanished a month ago.
I DON’T KNOW. THE BOOK DOES NOT SAY.
Pestilence coughs. It’s hard to tell if it’s a prelude to speech or just a cough. The nearest plants turn brown and fall apart. ‘Let’s go find them, then.’
They walk out of Eden together. Death leads the way. He’ll spend the next six thousand years dogging the heels of various expeditions but right now, he’s at the front. The world, only just born, shudders away from his touch and then realises that it needs him and lets him pass.
The others, entirely born of man, walk through the land as if they own it.
Some places and concepts exist quite happily outside of time and space. Your average cross country road trip will normally throw up a couple of them: little buildings that make no sense in their present spot, shops that you’re really sure weren’t there yesterday, diners that sit at ninety degrees to reality if you look at them just right.
Markets are one of them. All markets are linked, in much the same way as all libraries are linked.
Which explains why, a thousand years before horses finally end up with the right number of toes, the four Horsepeople walk straight into a horse market.
Rough concrete floor and clanging metal gates. A pitter-patter voice from the ring, too quick to make the numbers out but rising and rising until the clang of a hammer falling. The smell of shitty coffee, worse bacon rolls and horses and hay. People arguing. Catalogues being marked up.
Time’s weak here. There’s a multimillion guinea racehorse colt. There’s the pride and glory hunters of the shire country being brought up by the Army in 1914. There’s a broken-kneed black carriage horse with a star on his head, throwing out his stiff legs as best as he can as he trots. There’s the New Forest drift foals and the riding school hopefuls and a hundred thousand more looking for a home.
Death blinks. Which is an achievement for someone with no eyelids. It looks like stars winking out of existence for a moment.
THE ONES WE SEEK ARE HERE SOMEWHERE.
They trail around the pens. Trusting their leader. Searching.
Polo ponies from India and mustangs as wild as the American plains and blue blooded stallions from Iberia.
The pony’s as red as War’s hair. So red she hardly passes as chestnut. She shimmers, a little. This angle, a Macedonian horse scared of its own shadow. There, a bay with a star like a cross. Now a great black horse under barding and plate armour. But mostly a Mongol pony mare, all teeth and temper and spite.
War speaks to her. She whinnies and it sounds like swords clashing. She takes up her rope, and leads her out.
The heavy horses stand quietly, tired from their labours. Industry and empire follow in their wake, stumbling furrows and great railways. They walk past them all. Maybe it’s the horse brasses that make sure of it, turn their eyes away.
Pestilence stops at the furthest pen. There’s a bay in there; snotty nosed and crusty eyed. Coughing. It looks like Hayes’ Veterinary Notes for Horse Owners turned to flesh. It looks at him; he looks at it and the metal bars of the pen shimmer out of existence around them. The universe seems to shudder a little.
There’s the criollos and the gaited horses, far away from their South American mountains. A buckskin and a skewbald with an air of far distant miles to travel around them.
Famine stops next. There’s a golden horse there, all long lean lines and racehorse speed. His coat’s the cold shine of ice under moonlight and he carries something of the vastness of the Russian tundra with him. He rests his boney jaw on Famine’s shoulder.
The Arabs stand calmly, as though in their camps and picket lines. One mare has blood stains on her shoulders. Others have blessing marks on their necks. All of them look like the wind made flesh.
Death’s horse finds him, in the end. Just a grey. Just the sort your eye would slide over; the one in the corner stable, the one in the middle of the line up, the one nobody ever chooses first at the school.
He might have been every breed or none of them. The unassuming colour of twilight. A horse that would turn up everywhere.
Death lays a hand on his shoulder in benediction. The rest of the market fades away, back into different times and places.
WE ARE READY.
None of them notice where the other horse comes from. One minute he’s not there and then he’s standing with the others. Perhaps he’s grey, or roan, or just black streaked with dirt. The kind of colour you could only classify as ‘filthy.’
His ears turn inwards. Touch at the tips. His legs and belly are streaked with filth as though he’s been ridden through a river.
Death shrugs and picks up the extra lead rein. It sheds fibres in his bony hand. GUESS WE’LL FIND OUT WHO HE’S FOR SOON ENOUGH.
He clucks the string into a walk.
Four riders and five horses fade off of Earth and into a slightly different plane of existence. Just for now.