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wove rope and winter cloaks. They used her hide and hooves and even her teeth, grinding these for beads and dyeing them into belts for their maidens’ loins. The people were happy. They ranged God’s estate in freedom, wanting nothing which Horse and their own hands could not provide. They would have roamed so forever, had not the gods, by their own discord, intervened.
    For that race of humankind which knew not the horse dwelt in misery and abjection, scratching its living, as swine do, of acorns and the roots and grubs of the slough. Prometheus the titan took pity on them. He stole fire from heaven, when Zeus of the Thunder expelled the generation of immortals elder to himself.
    Prometheus gave fire to man.
    Horse feared fire. The free people fled from it as well. But those bog-bound of humankind discovered the arts by which it could be made their patron. Meat they roasted, and grain; they tamed the wild rye and barley and made these to grow at their bidding, imprisoned within their walls, and by the close flame to bake these to bread.
    With fire came pride, as Prometheus (whose name means Forethought) well knew, whose object was the overthrow of heaven. And in his pride man tore the flesh of his mother, the earth, rending her with the beaked plough, to sow the seed by which he would stoke his arrogance.
    Man knew speech now, and collected into towns, stinking kennels abhorred by God, where not even His holy storm may penetrate, but walls and ramparts keep it out. Man lived in hovels, reeking with smoke and sooty with ash. These made his hair smell, and the dirty rags he wore to clothe his nakedness; his hands stank with it and his skin grew ashy and abraded. The free people drew scent of these creatures and fled, as horses do, from his foul and malodorous approach.
    Men’s language succeeded the language of birds and horses and the silent tongue of the free people. The stem of his speech was fear, fear of God and God’s mysteries. Man sought by naming things to denature them and deplete them of the terror they held for him. His words were harsh and disharmonious, and as remote from true language as the screech of bats is from the music of the stars. Yet among our captains it was recognized that those encroaching tribes as Pelasgians and Dorians, Aeolians, Hittites, and such, who coveted our lands and the herds which ranged them with us, made speech with words and employed these as weapons. So some of our race must learn their tongue to resist and confute them. In each generation a number were chosen. I hated and feared this, for God had cursed me with facility for this art, and I hid myself each time the war queen’s gaze scanned among the people.
    I had a friend Eleuthera (such was her name in Greek) and her I loved beyond moon and stars and breath itself. Among my race, any who displays promise as a leader may not grow to womanhood among her own, lest her mates, out of their love for her and fear of seeing her elevated apart from them, work mischief to damp her gifts. So she is sent away to allied tribes, where she is tutored in the arts of war and politics, to return only after her moon’s blood. When she was ten, and I seven, Eleuthera was called to this commission. All light left my heart at this hour and when they came to me, the ministers, calling me to learn the languages of men, I resisted no longer.
    I was taken out, dressed in doeskin with my hair beaded and parafinned, to the trace which runs from the Gate of Storms to the sea and along which the traders’ trains pass. A war-schooled mare carrying a foal was staked out with me. The traders took me across the sea to Sinope and placed me in a proper household, under whose law I became what they call a
sinnouse,
a sort of companion to the daughters of the house, who is above a slave but beneath a sister. I learned the Greek tongue, both Aeolian and Pelasgian, to speak and spell.
    The family was not unkind to me. The father offered no