She whinnied, “Follow me! Follow me!” There was an island ahead, she could tell. First they must reach that island and then, though she could not explain it, they had to find their way to where the sweet grass grew. They must go back to where the first herd had run across the great plains. Would the others follow her? She almost didn’t dare to turn around to look, but when she did, three heads bobbed behind her. The dapple gray stallion was nearly at her side.
Like a gossamer specter from an ancient place, the mare Perlina seemed to lead the filly, and the filly Estrella led the rest. She had been born but a short time ago. She had never galloped and she still could recall the taste of her dam’s milk in her mouth. Yet right now she felt older than time.
The wind picked up and soon the waves were tossing up white swagged crests, like the manes of salt ponies skimming across the sea. One mountainous wave broke, sending up a fantastical eruption of ragged spume — pearl-white spume. To the filly, it felt for a fleeting second as if her dam were back. She could feel the mare’s breath, sweet with the wind grass. Like a ghost horse, the spindrift whipped across the water. Overhead in the bluest of skies, clouds raced like an ancient herd coming home at last.
“¡Adelante! ¡Adelante! Onward, swim on!” the filly whinnied.
And the four surviving horses did. Their long eyelashes were encrusted with salt crystals. Occasionally, they swallowed a mouthful of water and began to choke. Estrella felt her legs weaken, but she kept churning forward. She knew she had no choice. The image of her dam in the shark’s mouth flashed before her, and she kicked harder. The image of a tiny horse racing through a windswept grassland flickered brightly in her mind.
One of the older mares began to tire and sink lower in the water, her head barely above the surface.
“Vivi! Vieja! You can do it!” said the mare next to her, nudging the old mare on. “You are a royal horse, a horse of the court. You carried a queen, a prince. Your bloodlines go back to the Barbs. You have been bred for not just elegance but endurance. Endure!”
The old mare swam on, slowly, but with more strength. The words of her friend seemed to help.
Estrella heard the colt panting beside her. He, too, was tiring and beginning to fall back. What could she say to him? Had he been in a court, a royal — what was it? She turned to the colt.
“Just try … keep trying. It’s not far now. Look, you can see the island.”
And it was not long after that their hooves touched bottom.
“So this is land!” Estrella gasped as she staggered from the surf onto the beach and collapsed. They all did. They were exhausted, exhausted and with a powerful thirst. Their tongues were coated with salt; their eyes stung.
“Water!” the colt gasped.
As the sun dried the large stallion’s coat, the salt crusts on his body turned him nearly white. He lay on his side breathing heavily, his eyes closed and his tongue hanging out. A small crab skittered over it and he didn’t seem to notice. But then he stirred and croaked a few words. “There’s fresh water here. Not far.” He made a dim motion with his head toward a grove of trees at the edge of the beach. One by one, the horses roused themselves and moved toward the trees. They drank deeply from the stream there, then collapsed on its banks, too tired to walk farther.
The horses lay under a fringe of broad palm fronds for a long time, and some slept. As Estrella’s eyes opened, she saw, for the first time, the light change. When they swam ashore, it had been nearly noon — the time of the short shadows. But when she woke briefly during her nap, she noticed that the shadows had lengthened. Long shadows, she thought, and remembered that her dam had told her how the shadows would change in the meadow as the sun slipped lower in the sky. Now as she stood, she saw that she cast a very long shadow. My shadow, she thought, is as big as a stallion!
The colt was soon up and standing beside her. They were the first to recover. A few of the horses coughed in their sleep from the salt water they had accidentally swallowed. Their eyelids were puffy, but they were alive, which seemed miraculous.
Estrella and the colt took halting steps toward the deeper part of the creek. They drank and drank, and when they were full, they let their tongues loll in the cool water. Soon the three other horses came to join them. The one called Vivi walked to the center of the stream where the water was even deeper and crumpled to her knees, immersing her head for several seconds, then lifting it and spurting water from her nostrils. The other two horses followed and began rolling around in the muddy bottom.
Estrella and the colt looked at them curiously.
“What are you waiting for?” the stallion asked. “It’s like bathing in a meadow pond!”
“I’ve never been in a meadow,” Estrella replied.
“I think I have, once maybe.” The colt spoke as if he were trying to recall a time from so long ago. But he was just a colt and most likely had spent only a very short time, perhaps until he was weaned, in any meadow.
The two mares came out of the stream, but the stallion remained splashing in the water. “I was born a dappled gray, not a salty white!” he muttered.
“There must be a corral around here someplace.” Vivi looked about.
“Corral!” the stallion thundered, and then rushed up the bank, exploding from the water.
“Yes, a corral, Gordo. A recinto. Grain, water in buckets. Grooms to — to … groom us. Look at me! I’m all splattered with mud now that I got rid of the salt. It will dry and I’ll need a good curry.”
“A groom with a currycomb? That’s what you want?” Gordo tossed his head. “Let me remind you, Vivi, a groom with a currycomb stood by while you were thrown overboard. And not only that, the padre said a blessing!” He paused and looked at Estrella. “It was men — grooms, priests, the Seeker, and his soldiers — who threw us over. They betrayed us.”
“But they were good to us once,” ventured the other mare.
“Once! Once means nothing!” the stallion rasped. The two mares hung their heads and said nothing, but the stallion was not finished.
“Once they curried you and braided ribbons in your manes for saint days. Once they put gilded saddles on our backs. But you know what?” He looked directly at the two mares. “Once doesn’t count for anything! They valued that gilded saddle more than they valued you. Do you think they’d throw gold over the side if the ship wasn’t going fast enough in the light winds? Never!” He lowered his voice and snuck a look at Estrella. “The men are responsible for Perlina’s death.”
Estrella’s withers shuddered at the mention of her dam’s name. She looked down at her hooves. It was then that it really struck her that here she was on land, unmoving land, where her dam so wanted her to be. It was here where she would learn to run, to buck…. Her dam said that she would not have to learn! She would just be able to do it!
In the name of her dam, she wanted to run, to gallop, to buck under the blue sky that she had longed to see. There were no more slings, no more stalls. She was free, but she was also alone. She would run as hard and as fast as she could and try to crush the grief that was crushing her. “Mamita, watch me!” she whispered, and she broke into a gallop down the beach, skirting the swags of foam from the lapping tide.
Everything was so different from the ship’s hold where she had spent her entire life. She had never really experienced her weight on her own feet. Her tail flew out behind her, and air streamed past. The moon rolled up on the darkening horizon, casting a silver path across the water. The trembling light of newborn stars spangled the night.
Faster and faster Estrella ran until her front legs were just a blur devouring the land. Her heart was thumping in an insistent rhythm and something was singing down her bones, into her tendons and every fiber of her muscles. I am horse, born to run! I am faster than the wind!
She was not sure how far she had run. The beach was long, but soon she caught the sound of pounding hooves behind her.
“Jacinta!” the colt called.
She stopped
short in her tracks and wheeled about. “No! That’s not my name,” Estrella said.
The other horses caught up with her.
“But that’s what the men called you,” Vivi said.
“Jacinta is what the Seeker named me!” Estrella said. “But my dam named me Estrella. And now we are here, like Gordo says — free of the Seeker, free of men. We need new names now that we are in this … this —” Estrella wasn’t sure what to call this new place. She hesitated to call it a new world, because it was not. But would the other horses understand, did they also feel this sense of coming home? They had not seen that flash in her dam’s eyes. They did not have the image of the tiny horse running through their minds.
“Name ourselves?” said the chestnut mare. “The men — they always called me Fea, Ugly, because of the spots on my muzzle.”
“You are much more than the spots on your muzzle,” said Vivi, nuzzling the chestnut’s flank. “They should call you Angela. When I was scared in the water, you kept saying you knew I could do it and you stayed by me. You reminded me that I had been a horse of the royal court who carried queens and princes on my back! You reminded me that I had a big chest and could swim. You gave me strength and — and courage. You were like the angel the old padre sometimes spoke of.”
“Oh, but bless my withers, you were always so kind to me in the hold!” the chestnut mare said. “Not selfish like Centello. You shared everything. You are much more than just Vieja, Vivi, the Old One. In that big chest is a big heart.”
“So we should call you Corazón,” Estrella said.
“But they always called me the Old One, La Vieja. I’m not sure I can get used to this new name.” The old mare cast an anxious look at her friend. La Vieja was a handsome horse. Her coat was a dark bay, but her hindquarters were white with scattered dark spots. It looked as if she carried a blanket of snow that had melted in patches, revealing swathes of her bay coat.
“Well, now we can call you Corazón for your big heart,” Estrella said, and dipped her head. “With your permission.”
“Yes … yes, Corazón,” said the old mare, as if savoring the name in her mouth. “With my permission, call me Corazón.”
“And me,” said the old stallion. “They didn’t call me old, though I am older than Corazón. They called me fat. Gordo.”
“What would you like to be called?” Estrella asked.
“I’m not sure. I’d like to wait and see.”
“See what?” the young colt asked.
“See if I find my name or if perhaps my name finds me.”
The horses whinnied softly, as if chuckling.
“What will we call you while you wait?” Corazón asked.
“Hold On.”
“Espero?” Estrella said.
“Yes, it’s a nice word for waiting. I’m just holding on. I have patience; it comes with age.”
“We could call you Paciencia,” Angela replied.
“No,” the old stallion said firmly. “I like Hold On.”
“Then Hold On it is until you find your name or your name finds you,” Angela said.
“I know what my name is!” the young colt whinnied happily.
“And what is that, Mitty?” Angela looked into his eyes. One was brown and one was blue, the blue one particularly striking against his black coat. It looked as if a piece of blue sky was peeping through the night. “I never understood why they called you Mitty,” Estrella said.
“It was short for mitad y mitad. Half and half. For one eye blue and one brown. As if I am only half right. But I saw the reflection of my eyes in the water bucket on the ship and I love my blue eye.”
“So should we call you Ojo Azul, Blue Eye?” Angela asked.
“No, no. Just call me Cielo, Sky. When we were swimming, I looked up and I saw the sky. It’s the same color as my eye and it filled me up and made me whole.”
“B-but, but …” Angela hesitated. “What if we meet up with our masters again and they call us by our names?”
“You mean their names for us,” Hold On said rather sharply.
“Well, yes, their names. Don’t you think it could be confusing, Gor — I mean, Hold On?”
“No! And put it out of your mind that we’ll meet up with them again. We are on our own now. No masters! We’ll figure things out for ourselves.”
The two mares exchanged nervous glances.
Later that night, as the moon rose higher in a sky powdered with stars, the horses settled under the grove of palmettos by the stream. The shadows of the palm fronds splashed across the sand. It was the perfect refuge for them, with shade, shelter, fresh water. But where do we go from here? Estrella thought.
They must move on. She knew it deep in her bones, in her legs. The flash in her dam’s eyes drove her. That tiny, flickering figure and the swirling scent of the sweet grass stirred something deep within her. She had proved to herself that she could run. Her legs were strong despite the endless days confined in the hold. And now something was waiting for her, for her and the four other horses as well, something that defied the power of men.
Estrella could not sleep. She missed the scent of her dam, and to succumb to sleep was to succumb to blood-swirled dreams and the terrible image of that knife slicing through the water. In the quiet of the night, there was nothing to distract her from the horrible images, and she grieved. She missed the pungent scent of her dam. The realization that her dam was gone seemed to course through her, and she gasped. Suddenly, the absence was raw, and sheer want overwhelmed her. The world seemed too big and there was a hole in it.
Some of Perlina’s last words had been Keep your head high. But now Estrella felt as if she were drowning, swallowed by the void her mother had left. A panic surged within her and she gasped again for air. I can’t breathe! she thought. She had not nursed from her dam for several days but now she missed the milk, even though it had been thin and watery at the end. She missed the sounds that came from deep inside her dam — the sound of her enormous heart beating, how gusts like the wind that once filled the ship’s sails would stream through the bellows of her dam’s chest. Estrella missed the smell of the stiff hair of Perlina’s coat, and her sweat. Yes, her sweat. That was the smell of her dam.
Before the wind had disappeared to wherever winds go when they grow tired, the young groom and the blacksmith would gently take Estrella from her sling and steady her while she nursed. These had been her favorite times. Her mother was very quiet then. They were busy — the filly nursing, the dam trying to hold still for her. The blacksmith and the boy would lower her just a bit so she could set her legs on the planks and she would try her best to steady herself. And afterward, her dam would always say, “Estrella, this is the most important thing you can do now. You must drink my milk and grow strong. But it’s easier nursing on land.”
“Why?” Estrella had asked.
“Land doesn’t move.”
Now she was on land and she felt nothing but desolation and uncertainty. Yes, she had pounded down that beach and felt the sudden thrill as her hooves beat the earth. But for the filly, the rocking of the sea meant the smell of her dam. Motion meant the gentle knocking of her sling against Perlina’s. The rhythm of her dam’s heartbeat intertwined with the pitch and roll of the vast sea. Here there were no memories of her mother. Only the dry brush of the palmetto branches, the stars winking through their fronds, the quiet lap of the water on the beach. This was the world she was supposed to love, and yet … She laid back her ears.
A strange brew of fear and anger began to stir deep within her. She sensed it was dangerous to feel this way. To succumb to the terror and rage that felt like poison inside her. And yet they drew her in. I want to die! I want to die now and forget the blood and the white shadow that took Mamita!
However, slowly but surely, a scent began to thread through her grief. The filly stood up and lifted her head. She smelled the sweet grass on the verge of the wind. It was far away, on the edge of a new world she did not yet know. Someh
ow, her fear began to recede. She lifted her head higher. She could almost feel the beating of her dam’s heart again. Everything was very still. The slight breeze dropped, but she could smell the grass in the distance.
The filly stretched her neck. Her ears softened and she moved them forward gently. She swished her tail slowly and felt the tension in her hindquarters dissolve. The filly stood quietly for a long time. Moonlight splashed down on her back. In the trees, she heard the chatter of night creatures. She looked straight up and saw one of the small creatures swinging through the treetops on the vines that fell like ropes. Hold On had called the creatures monkeys and said sometimes sailors kept them as pets. In the glitter of the moon, she saw the bright wings of a bird flying overhead. It was as if the ship’s painter had taken a brush to the creature’s feathers. And in the highest part of the tree were bursts of flowers that were suspended on the same vines from which the monkeys swung. A petal from one of the flowers floated to the ground, settling directly at Estrella’s hooves. She bent down to smell it. It had a sweet, almost tangy fragrance, but she had no desire to taste it. She raised her head again and peered toward the treetops and thought how there was an entire world up there she did not know about. A secret world.
Estrella took deep, even breaths and felt a calm steal through her. The ground under her hooves felt good. Her legs felt solid; her muscles seemed to sense the earth she stood on. She let the stillness seep through her — through the horn of her hooves, the tendons of her legs.
You’re ready for the new world, said Perlina’s voice in her head. And with that, Estrella broke into a gallop.
Estrella pounded down the moon-streaked beach. She heard her own heart beating fiercely now, harder than her dam’s ever had beaten. The earth was once more a blur beneath her hooves. The voice wound through her head again. You are the first herd, I the last herd, and we’ll go forward together.
Behind her came a heavy pounding and then a whinny.
“Hold on! Espera! Do as my name and hold on!” the stallion shouted.