Nine White Horses by Judith Tarr Page A

into the hands of Allah. Praise be to
Him, Lord of the Worlds, the Beneficent, the Merciful, in Whom are the
beginning and the end of all tales!
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Al-Ghazalah
    In the Name of
Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate!
    It is related in the annals of the wise—but Allah knows
all!—that once in the city of Cairo dwelt a mare of remarkable lineage. For her
dam was kehailan and queenly, daughter
through many mothers of the queen of the Khamsa ,
most blessed of the mares of the Prophet, on whose name be blessing and peace;
yet through her sire she traced her line to the Prophet himself. Born and bred
a man and a prince, for a space and for his sins he wore the body of a horse.
And being a horse, and quite untroubled by the eunuch’s malady, he had done as
any horse would choose to do, until love and an ifrit princess returned him to
his former dignity.
    The get of his stallionhood were numerous and of exceptional
beauty, but most beautiful of all was the last of them. Al-Ghazalah, they
called her, so like the gazelle was she: great of eye, slender of limb, swifter
than the wind across the sand. Her color was the best of all colors, the bay
that sprang first from the mind of Allah, Who made all things that are. Her
mane was night and silk; her coat was silk and fire; a star shone on her brow.
    Her existence, and that of her sisters, was a difficulty. The
imams had settled it by fiat. What Hasan Sharif al-Kehailan had done in
stallion’s shape was only what stallions were made to do. The issue were a
stallion’s get, and kehailan : of the
pure blood of the horses of Arabia. They did not partake of their sire’s
humanity.
    None of them knew what she was, and none would have cared if
she had known. They lived out their lives in peace, treasured like queens,
mated to kings, mothers of royal houses.
    All but Ghazalah. She did not know when she first knew that
she was different. She was the youngest, the last and fairest. On the day when
she was foaled, her father’s wife brought forth a son: the first and, by the
will of Allah Who is ever merciful, the last of the children of his human form.
    It was inevitable that they be brought together, the sister
and the brother; it was written that there be love between them, and that
al-Ghazalah be the sole and cherished mount of Shams al-Din. His beauty was the
sun to the moon of hers; in spirit, in temper, in fire, each had no equal but
the other.
    Yet even he did not know her secret. For a long while she
was not aware that she had one. It came first upon her all unlooked for, in the
deep night, as she drowsed by her mother’s side. She yawned and stretched and
thought of hunger, and there was strangeness in her.
    She looked at herself, and she was not she. She was
something other. Something frail and soft and hairless, with toes where hooves
should be. And hands. Humans had hands, clever for opening gates, skillful in
stroking one’s tender places. She had hands. She was human.
    But she was not. She reached toward the warm drowsing
horseness of her mother, and something shifted. It was like pain. It was like
pleasure. She was herself again, slender-legged, drowning her bafflement in her
mother’s milk.
    The strangeness kept coming back. In the night, always: she
would wake from a dream, and she would have hands. She taught herself to walk,
tottering two-legged. She listened to the humans; she learned to talk, if only
to her mother. She learned that she could will herself to change. She
discovered the advantages of hands on latches and bolts, and the wideness of
the world beyond her stable yard.
    She never shifted where anyone but her mother could see her.
It was not secrecy. It was a sort of delicacy. Everyone could do this, surely;
no one did it in front of everyone else; therefore it was a private thing.
    She wondered whether all the humans were horses in the
night, or whether some were hunting dogs, or cats, or even—she knew which those
would