Although he was small in stature, I saw now that he was built perfectly in proportion and his limbs were clean lined and clearly defined, dense with corded muscle. He was hairy, too, his entire body—or all that I could see of it—apart from his clean-shaven face, coated with a thick pelt of soft blond hair, its color ranging from faded yellow in places to grayish white in others, with one swirling whorl of a cowlick thatch at his crown that showed signs of once having been a bright yellowy gold. His forearms and the legs below his knee-length tunic were deeply sun-bronzed, and the hair that coated them was bleached almost white. I was fascinated to see that the hair on the back of his hands grew right down to his knuckles and that the phalanges of his fingers had coarse black hair growing on them, utterly unlike the hair on the rest of his body.
It may have been the thickness and profusion of his body hair that made the bareness of his face so obvious, but irrespective of what caused it to seem so, the man’s face, smooth cheeked and deeply tanned and dominated by brilliant, flower blue eyes, glowed with health and a special kind of self-sufficient beauty. His eyebrows, the first thing I had noticed about him, were a thick, unbroken bar of white, and the tangle of hair surmounting his forehead was unkempt and long untrimmed.
“Hmm,” he grunted, oblivious to or uncaring of my scrutiny. He lowered his shoulder and allowed the coil of rope to slide off and drop into his waiting hand, and then he threw the coil to me. I caught it with both hands. It was a running noose of the exact kind used by Ban’s stablemen.
“You know how to use that?”
“Yes,” I managed to say.
“Hmm. We’ll see. Come.”
He led me to a wide, barred wooden gate at the far end of the stable yard and held it open as I went through, after which he closed it carefully behind us and secured it in place with a loop of rope. We were in a long passageway now, with two paddocks on each side, each of them measuring approximately fifty paces in length by the same in width. The first enclosure on my right held eight mares, all of them in foal, and in the one beyond that, I could see others, these accompanied by newborn colts. The paddock on my immediate left held five healthy young geldings, and the fourth space lay empty. I followed the stable master as he led me the length of the passageway to the gate at the far end and beyond that into a wide, fenced pasture with clumps of trees scattered here and there and a lazy brook meandering among them. I had no idea how big the pasture was, because the trees obscured the boundary fences, but I knew it was enormous and I guessed from the position of the sun that we had to be close to the northern outskirts of the town. There were horses everywhere, and I immediately began to count them, but I lost track as I passed thirty and realized that just enough of them were moving to make my task impossible. The wiry little man looked around him and then glanced at me.
“Bring me one,” he said, then walked away. Unsure of myself and even of what he meant, I watched him as he went, and when the trees blocked my view I followed him again, keeping him in sight until he disappeared inside a small, low-roofed building with thick stone walls. He had not glanced back once in my direction, and so I moved closer, stopping only when I drew close enough to identify the building as a small smithy with a forge and a heavy, sturdy-looking bellows. Cato was already bent over the bellows, blasting gales of air into the coals of the forge and filling the smithy with clouds of smoke and ashes. As the scent of the hot ashes reached my nostrils I grasped my coils of rope more firmly and turned back toward the horses.
I knew I was facing some kind of test here, but I had no idea what was being tested, and yet I knew somehow that time was of no great importance in whatever it was. And so I made myself think about what I knew. Cato had told me to bring him one, and the only thing there in numbers greater than one was horses, so he evidently expected me to bring him a horse. Clearly he meant me to select one from the herd, and I was to be judged, in some manner, on the one I chose. I began to walk among the animals, looking at them, and quickly made a number of discoveries. Scattered among the herd, but numerous enough to be clearly evident, were horses of a breed I had never seen. They were all completely black and larger than any of the other animals in the herd; big, strongly muscled animals with dense, extraordinarily heavy coats of deepest black, long, thick manes and tails, and beautiful feathered fetlocks that almost covered their hooves. The other herd animals were of several breeds and sizes, all familiar to me, and their colors ranged from gray to red to chestnut brown. There were mares and fillies, immature colts and a preponderance of geldings, but there were no stallions. And then, mere moments after realizing that, I found the first of the stallions and smiled in admiration. There were six of them, I soon discovered, each one magnificent and each securely confined in its own strong enclosure. The six enclosures were strung along the paddock’s perimeter fence like beads, each separated from the others by a distance of at least twenty paces. Two of these six animals were of the beautiful long-haired black breed, and I found myself admiring them even more than I had earlier.
It was evident, however, that I was not expected to select a stallion, so that left me facing a choice between a mare or a gelding—all of the colts were too immature to qualify as horses in this instance, I suspected. I examined all of them again, and all of them were beautiful, but my eyes kept returning to the big black animals.
A short time after that, I reached the door of the small smithy, leading the horse I had chosen. Tiberias Cato, hunched over his forge and peering into the blue-white coals, paid me no heed until I stepped across the threshold and called out to him. He started slightly and straightened up, swinging to face me, his eyes taking in the horse I was holding. He tossed the tongs he had been holding onto a heavy workbench and came toward me, wiping his hands on a rag he had pulled from somewhere.
“Why’d you pick him?” he asked when he reached me.
“He’s beautiful,” I replied. “I’ve never seen his like before. What kind is he?”
“Forest horse. Wild stock. But why him in particular? He’s not two years old yet.”
“He’s magnificent, and when he’s two, and older, he’ll be the best here.”
“Will he, by God? D’you say so?” Listening to him say that, I actually believed he had not realized that and was surprised, but I had not yet come to an appreciation of sarcasm or irony. His eyes were already moving beyond me to another mount, and he pointed. “That one. Let’s see you mount him.”
Not catch him or bring him, but mount him. I turned to look at the bay gelding Cato had indicated and then swung back, tightening my grip on the reins in my hand. “Why can’t I mount this one?”
“Because he’s not broke yet. Trying to ride him now could get you killed, or it could end up with his being ruined as a good horse. Besides, I showed you the one I want you to mount, and I’m waiting.”
Disappointed, but no longer feeling rebellious, I quietly took the rope bridle off the black gelding, then loosened and removed the noose around his neck. I coiled my rope again and went after the bay, which stood placidly watching me and allowed me to come close enough to slip both the noose and the bridle over his head. He was not a tall horse, and his head was too big and heavy to be beautiful or even handsome, but he was stocky and deep chested, strongly muscled. When the bridle was secured, I led him to an old tree stump that was obviously much used as a mounting block and heaved myself up onto his broad back. The bay stood there with his head down, his ears twitching back toward me as though he was listening to my breathing. Apart from that, however, he remained motionless as I made myself comfortable.