During the scant time she had to sleep, Estrella began to have shark dreams, terrible dreams seeped with raw, silent violence. What disturbed her most was the whiteness of the shark and his utter silence. Most creatures squawked or whinnied or perhaps roared, but the shark — like the Shadow Eater — was completely mute.
Then one evening, it seemed as if the creature vanished. The next morning, there was still no sign of the Shadow Eater. And throughout the day and into the next, the horses began to wonder if the shadow had receded forever. They kept a watch, but they began to relax. Slowly, the terror left them, until, five days after the creature had disappeared, Corazón caught the sweet heavy fragrance of a bucket plant and wandered a short way off to follow it. Some bucket plants grew from the ground, but others, the sweetest ones, attached themselves to the trunks of trees. She was stretching toward one near the base of a tree when there was an explosion of spots and a terrible shriek.
Something slammed into Corazón’s side and she collapsed to the ground. It took only seconds, but to the horse, it felt as though time had slowed.
Each moment dropped like small fragments into Corazón’s mind. I am down. The Shadow Eater is going to kill me. I feel his claws! She rolled and kicked out desperately. The cat’s fangs were near her face, near her neck, and she knew —
There was a loud clatter, and a rainbow shattered through the green canopy overhead. The jungle rattled with a clamorous squawking, and then the squawking was cut by a horrific shriek. Feathers of all colors spun through the dim light, and the Shadow Eater rolled off Corazón’s body, blood coursing down its face.
Birds! The high-pitched, shrill screams of macaws and parrots pierced the air like arrows. “Go for the the eyes! The eyes!” they shrieked.
The Shadow Eater raced away, his face a mask of blood. Corazón rolled to her feet and stood shivering. Miraculously, she’d suffered only a small cut on her shoulder where the Shadow Eater’s claws had torn her skin.
Lala and Alfo and half a dozen other birds landed in front of the horses.
“You came back?” Estrella gasped.
“The nutting was no good. Then we got here and saw the jaguar stalking you.”
“You were just in time,” Hold On said.
“Just in time,” Estrella whispered. She cocked her head and looked at the array of colorful birds, some perched on branches, others on fallen logs. There was a scattering of bright feathers on the ground. “Are you okay? Can you still fly?”
“Of course!” said a bright green parrot, who swooped down from a branch. “Most of us were close to molting as it was.” The bird paused and looked hard at Estrella with her small beady eyes. “Look. This is the jungle. You are earthbound. You have none of the natural advantages we have. But you are twice as big as that jaguar and we’re hardly bigger than one of his paws —”
Estrella broke in. “And you saved Corazón.” The horses hung their heads in shame.
“Thank you … thank you …” Corazón’s voice was ragged, her chest still heaving in panic.
“Don’t thank us,” said a scarlet macaw. “Learn to fight!”
“We — we —” Angela began to speak but could hardly muster the breath. “We carried our masters into battle sometimes. But they rode us. They guided us.”
“Precisely!” the macaw said. “They rode you. We know about masters. Oh, yes, we know about masters.”
Estrella peered down at the macaw, who was perched on a rotting log. “I don’t understand how you did that. How you beat the jaguar off. You tore out his eyes!”
With a quick look at Estrella, the green parrot picked up a thick, sturdy branch in his beak and bit down. There was a loud crack and the branch broke in two. The horses were stunned.
“No one expects it,” said a bird with beautiful turquoise and green feathers. “They just think we’re pretty. But back in the Old Land, I broke out of my cage. A metal cage!”
“You’re from the Old Land?” Angela asked.
“Some of us,” Alfo replied. “Some not.”
“Some of us have always been wild!” cawed a parrot.
“Wild.” Hold On whispered the word. But Angela and Corazón looked at each other nervously.
“We were not always wild, uncaged,” Lala replied. “We had to learn.” She turned her head toward Alfo.
“Learn what?” Estrella asked.
“To fly and to be wild,” the birds answered at once.
“But you’re birds!” Corazón exclaimed.
“We were birds with clipped wings, and with clipped wings we are not fully flighted,” Lala replied. “It would be as if you were missing a hoof — you couldn’t walk or run.” She swiveled her head toward Angela. “When we first met, you spoke of royalty, my dear.”
Angela nodded and shoved her ears forward with new interest.
“Alfo and I spent our early lives in the royal menagerie of the Duke of Cadiz. We became a gift to the captain of a ship from the duke. Of course, the understanding was that the captain would return with money. But on his return, not far out from land, the ship began to founder. They opened our cages to let us escape.” Lala stopped now. It was as if she could not go on.
Alfo continued. “That was when we found out what it meant to be clipped. We could hardly fly the length of the ship with our primaries sheared off. How far can one go?”
“It wasn’t just that they sheared our primaries. They clipped more on our port wing than our starboard, which meant that we flew unbalanced. We could only turn in one direction,” Lala added.
“That seems even crueler,” Hold On said. “It’s as if they were tempting you with flight but punishing you for trying.”
“Exactly!” said Alfo.
“How did you get away?” Estrella asked.
“The bosun,” Alfo answered. “The man who tends the rigging on the ship. He rescued us.”
“The ship started to sink and he scooped us back into our cage and took us in the lifeboat with him. We got back to land just fine, and shortly after, he found his way to a new ship.”
“Still no smarter about birds,” Alfo said. “He was a bit of a lazy fellow and didn’t take the trouble to clip us.”
“We could feel our feathers growing every day; it was quite wonderful. When the time was right, we would fly.”
“We didn’t even have to bite the metal to get out of the cage!” said Alfo. “On calm days, when the weather was good, the bosun would take us deckside and tether us to a winch pin.”
“A winch pin?” Corazón said. “That sounds hard — anything with a tether sounds difficult to break away from. A tether is a rope, right?”
“We know ropes,” Hold On said ominously.
“Ropes are nothing to us,” Alfo replied, and picked up a large and very hard nut in his beak. With a sharp crack, he split the nut in two.
Lala sighed as if savoring the memory. “We were fully fledged. We were ready for flight. One clip of the beak, and we were free.”
“It’s … it’s like when I ran on the beach. The first time,” Estrella said. Her voice brimmed with excitement. “I had never set my legs on earth. I had been told I was a horse, but it wasn’t until then that I felt it.”
“And where are you going now on those fine legs of yours?” Lala asked. The four horses swung their heads toward Estrella, ears pricked.
Estrella swallowed. “There’s a place far north, where the sweet grass grows. A green place with sweeping seas of grass and no people. A place where horses can run and be free. It’s … it’s yonder.”
“Yonder.” The other horses nodded and whispered the word. Estrella was filled with great excitement. The other horses may not have seen the flash in her dam’s eyes, but somehow they were beginning to understand. She knew they were with her now, all the way to the sweet grass, to the yonder.
Alfo nodded and began to speak. His voice seemed to have lost its rasping edge. “You will discover, as you meet your true self, that you’re not encountering a stranger
. So there’s nothing to learn,” Alfo said. “When you find your true self, there are only things to unlearn.”
“Unlearn,” Angela whispered, and looked down at her hoof with the missing shoe.
Uncaged, Corazón thought.
And Estrella and Sky both wondered what a cage was like. A stall perhaps? A sling?
The macaws and the parrots soon departed in search of nut trees. The jungle seemed silent without the clatter of their flight and their noisy squawking.
On the evening of the following day, it began to drizzle softly. The vegetation had thinned considerably, save for an immense banyan tree. Hold On thought that perhaps they were finally coming out of the jungle and he picked up his pace.
Suddenly, he caught a scent that made him and the two mares nervous. It wasn’t the heady fragrance of the jungle flowers, but a slightly metallic odor on the brink of rotting, mingled with something familiar.
“Horses!” Angela exclaimed.
Corazón inhaled deeply. “Grullo! My old friend Grullo!”
The two mares whinnied and broke into a gallop, tearing through a screen of vines that dripped from the banyan tree.
Hold On held up his head and peeled back his lips as if he were drinking in the night and the odious smell. There was something wrong. Under the scent of the Seeker’s horses was the rotting, metallic smell. Blood! he thought. Dead men.
“Wait! Wait!” Hold On bellowed. “Fools!”
He wheeled on Estrella and Sky. “We have to get them before it’s too late!”
Hold On, Estrella, and Sky streaked after the two mares. They caught up to them on the far side of a clearing where the mares stood stiff-legged and trembling. The jungle growth had been deliberately cut back here, and the ground was scraped bare except for a few large, broken stones that were wet with blood.
Hold On jumped sideways and screeched, and Sky began to stamp in place, his eyes bulging. Estrella felt a deep fear invade her.
There was blood, blood all around. She felt as if she were being dragged back to that white place in the middle of the sea, stained with the blood of her dam.
On one of the broken rocks, blood dripped down carvings of monstrous figures with faces like men and bodies like snakes or animals.
“Whose blood is this?” Hold On roared. They looked around wildly, but at first they saw nothing. No humans. No bodies.
The drizzle stopped and a frail wash of moonlight fell through the scrim of scudding clouds, illuminating their surroundings. What they’d taken for formless lumps in the darkness were actually the bodies of men and women strewn along the far edge of the clearing. Hold On spotted a red, meaty hunk placed on a stone with intricate carvings, and his eyes seemed to stumble in his head. Horror engulfed him.
“It’s a heart! A human heart!” Hold On felt his legs buckling.
“Hold On!” Estrella screamed.
The stallion managed to recover and his legs stopped quivering. In the pale moonlight, the horses could all see the body from which the heart had been cut. And there were other bodies as well, also with gaping wounds.
“That’s — that’s … a shoe print. Centello,” Angela said. “Centello has been here.”
“And Grullo, and Arriero … and Bobtail.” Corazón started naming the horses whose tracks she could identify. She walked slowly, still stiff-legged, and studied the hoofprints.
“But none of the dead are the Seeker’s men,” said Hold On.
“I don’t understand,” Estrella gasped. “Did the Seeker do this?”
“I don’t know, but this is not the work of a Shadow Eater. This is the work of men.” Hold On spoke in a voice he had never before used. “Men did this!”
The two mares seemed rooted to the ground. “No! No! The Seeker would never!” Angela insisted. “I heard about this on First Island. The Chitzen, they sacrifice their own to their gods.”
“I heard it, too.” Hold On shook his head. “But I never believed …” His voice dwindled as he looked down at the broken stones. There were stone heads and arms and legs of animals and men. These had been the Chitzen gods. The Seeker and his men must have smashed them.
Then a squeal pierced the air, a sound like nothing Estrella had ever heard, and she spooked. “That’s not a horse!” she cried.
“It’s a baby!” Hold On yelled as he wheeled about.
“A foal?” Sky asked.
“A human baby!” Hold On galloped down a path through a thin stand of trees, and the rest of the horses ran to catch up.
In the next clearing, a group of humans was gathered in front of a well, over which perched a rough-hewn carving of the Virgin. Not the Seeker’s men, but men of the New Land. One man in a long white cloak, his hair clotted with blood, held a baby dangling over the well’s dark mouth.
Hold On was confused. The white people’s God was here. But the Virgin does not take babies, he thought. Then it became clear to him. The horses had stumbled onto a war of gods. The Seeker had attacked the new men’s gods and now the men were frightened and trying to lure their gods back. They would give anything, even their babies.
The disgust Hold On felt that moment for humans rose like bile in his throat. He charged, and the man in white stumbled in alarm. A woman darted out and snatched the baby from the man’s arms, then ran away sobbing. The crowd screamed and scattered, cowering in fear as the horses ripped through the throngs.
The five horses ran as if they were still in the thick of it. They could not run hard enough or fast enough to get away from the awful killing place. When they finally stopped, they were all sweating heavily. They had left the jungle behind and emerged onto a high flat plain, each full of the terror of the heart dripping blood on the stone and the baby held over the well.
“I don’t understand. I just don’t understand what was happening back there.” Estrella was breathing heavily. It hurt to speak, but she had to know.
“It was the strange new men who did that,” Angela said.
Hold On looked at her. What was she really trying to say?
“Yes, it was the new Chitzen,” Corazón concurred.
“But did you see the prints of Centello, Arriero, and dear old Grullo?” Angela asked.
Estrella couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She flinched and felt her withers tighten up, her shoulder muscles contract. Something made her nervous about the way the old mares were talking, and it was obviously disturbing Hold On as well.
“Angela, Corazón, listen to me,” he said harshly. “It wasn’t only the new Chitzen who murdered back there. It was Ibers as well. Men like the ones who curry you, who bring you water and grain. Who put bits in your mouth and saddles on your back!” Hold On was roaring now. “Men who call themselves masters. When they cannot master, they murder!”
Corazón and Angela were still for what seemed like a long time. There was a wildness in their eyes, as if they’d been spooked by something inside. They began to paw the ground, snorting and wheezing in renewed agitation. Angela curled her neck in tightly, tucked her muzzle close to her chest, and began to take small mincing steps in place. But she seemed unconscious of what she was doing. It was as if her mind had fled from her body. The motions were unthinking, automatic.
“She’s doing the threshing step!” Hold On whispered to Estrella. Corazón began to make the same dainty steps. “Poor things,” he murmured. His head drooped and he gave a mournful whinny.
“The mares.” His voice seemed to break. “They … they are caught between two worlds — the Old Land and the New.”
Then he turned to the mares. “Listen to me. Your masters are gone. You’re not in a wheat field. There’s no need to thresh. That work is over. You’re free, Corazón. Free, Angela.”
Angela stopped in place. “Angela?” she said in a soft whispery voice. Her large dark eyes swam with confusion at the sound of her own name. “I like my old name.”
“Fea?” Hold On uttered in disbelief. “You liked being called Ugly?”
“And I li
ked mine, La Vieja — Old One,” Corazón cut in.
Hold On shook his head. They are hopeless. Even after what they have just seen, they are hopeless, he thought.
“What are you, loco?” Estrella blurted in a loud snort.
“We want to find the others. Grullo, Arriero,” Angela replied. “We’re too old to learn these new ways and to forget the old.” She glanced at Estrella. “They didn’t treat us poorly, the Seeker and his men.”
“They threw us off the ship!” Estrella said.
Corazón stepped forward. “But remember, the blacksmith said that we were strong and that we would make it to land and we did! We made it! They’ll be happy to see us. And we will serve them well, as our sires and dams have and their sires and dams before us. It is in our life chain. It is in our blood.”
Angela drew herself tall and once more arched her neck so her chin groove nearly vanished.
Hold On blinked. It was as if Angela had a bit in her mouth. Why did the two mares want to go back? What was there to go back for — combat, the burden of a fully armored soldier and his sharp spurs? A trip across an ocean in a sling? He did not know what exactly to do in this new land, but he sensed that the filly did. Perlina hadn’t been simply a smart horse but, like so many pale horses, was said to have an “old eye” or “an eye of time.” It was an eye that could see back to the ancient dawns when the horses first ran on this earth. They ran! Free in their own coats, their necks stretched out as they were meant to be. And these two mares wanted to go back to the Seeker! Age was no excuse. He was old, older than Angela and almost as old as Corazón, and yet he wanted to go on!
He turned to the mares. “You want to go back to the Seeker and to all that? To the Ibers and the Chitzen and all that blood?”
Both the mares’ heads drooped. Angela nickered so softly, the others could hardly hear her.
“What did you say, Angela?” Hold On asked.
“I want a world with no Ibers and no Chitzen. Just … just … animals. I’d even prefer crocodiles and Shadow Eaters to the Ibers and the Chitzen!”