The Bone Forest Read Online Free PDF

increased in pitch until they became an ululating echo. Sometimes they screeched
words
, but these were frightening and alien sounds. Each of the men wore his hair in a different, elaborate plaited style. Each was bedecked with stone or bone or shells or wood. Each had a color on his face: red, green, yellow, blue. They passed by Huxley, sometimes running, sometimes laughing, all of them torn by thorn and holly, the leaf and wood impaling their crude clothing, so that they seemed no less than extensions of the birch and thorn forest itself.
    Crying out and celebrating their vigorous pursuit of horses!
    It was, Huxley chose to think at that moment, their way of controlling the horses. How many myths of the
secret language
of horses had come down to modern times, he wondered briefly? Many, he imagined, and here were men who
knew
those secrets! He was watching an early herding, the horses pushed into the tangle of the wood, the best way to trap them, in fact, a
wonderful
way to trap them, in a time before corrals or stables! Run the horse into the thicket, and the sheer difference in size between
chaser
and
chased
would have marked the difference between
eaten
and
eater
.
    For he had no doubt at that moment—this being a preneolithic event—that these beasts were being herded for food, rather than as creatures of burden.
    Striking at the underbrush with long, flint-edged sticks, the four men strode past. And the hindmost of them, looking as broad in his heavy furs as he was tall, turned suddenly to stare at the hooded intruder, green-gray light glittering in pale eyes. On his chest he wore an identical amulet to that which Huxley had found in the Horse Shrine. He touched it, almost nervously, a gesture of luck, perhaps, or courage.
    His companions called to him, shrill sounds, almost musical in their rhythm and pitch, that sent birds whirring from the tree tops. He turned and was gone, consumed by the thickets of holly, and the confusing patterns of light and shade of the birchwood. Nervously, Huxley tugged the green hood of his oilskin lower over his face.
I followed, of course. Of course! I wished to see this ritual herding through to its final, awful conclusion. For I had now begun to imagine that a
sacrifice of horses
would be the outcome of the pursuit to which Ash, by her magic, had dispatched me.
    Yet, in substance I was wrong. It was not to be the oddly bedecked stallions that were sent on to the afterlife, encouraged there by flint and by flax rope. Not immediately, anyway. In the wide clearing, with its tall, crudely fashioned wood-gods, the horses were disturbed by the smells and the cries of extinguished life. The gathering of winter-clad men calmed the beasts. The glade in the birchwood echoed to the thumping of wood drums and the chanting of ancient hymns. There was laughter within the cacophony of sacrifice, and throughout all, the whooping cries of other herders, the music of magic, punctuating the confusion, serving to bring peace to the restless horses as they were held by their harnessings, and loaded with their first real burden.
    Toward dusk, the horses were sent into the world again, running, slapped to encourage them, back along the broken tracks, toward the edge of the wood, wherever that lay. On their backs, tied firmly to cradles of wood, the horrific shapes of their pale riders watched the gloom, dulled eyes seeing darker worlds than even this darkening forest. The first to depart was a chalk-white corpse, grotesquely garroted. Then a man, still living, swathed in thorns, screaming. After that, a ragged creature, stinking of blood and acrid smoke from the part-burned but newly skinned pelts that were wrapped around him.
    Finally came a figure decked and dressed in rush and reed, so that only
his arms were visible, extended on the crucifix-like frame that was tied
about the giant horse. He was on fire; the blaze taking swiftly. Flame
streamed into the night, shedding light and heat in eerie