My mistress howls and it is a sound full of sorrow. When I try to join her the hound master comes at me with his big, heavy stick. But why am I not to join my mistress in her wailing? We are all her pack; we must bay in unison when she calls.
I spend the day digging and digging at the wooden kennel wall. My mistress fell silent when we left her alone in her keening. I must go to her. Is she safe?
It is nighttime when I am under the earth and out again. I creep about the human buildings. I am not allowed inside, but I have been in before. The cook chased me from a room with good smells. I go there now, nose along the floor until I find a bone, charred and delicious.
I go to where my mistress paces and drop the bone at her feet. A gift, an apology, my love for her. She recoils, like a horse rearing at a snake. She howls again. Before I can join her, her mate strikes me.
The dog has been taken away. I hear him whining and yipping as he is beaten. Noisome thing. But here now! See! A bird has come into the Queen’s bed chambers. I leap!
No – not a bird. The Queen’s hair in a bird-like clump. Should I return it to her?
Another ball of hair, a hair ball, wisps down. Queen Brunehaut is ripping out her hair, the way I might rip out the guts of a mouse. She stops her tearing, but only to press her hands against her own throat. She heaves and gasps for breath. It is strange. I think I ought to go to her, rub my sleek fur against her muscled legs, purring and purring, so that she might calm. But her stamping, churning feet frighten me; I dare not approach.
Her husband enters and catches the queen in his arms. Sigebert presses his own head against hers to block her traitorous hands. Tears fall from the fire in Brunehaut’s eyes. She speaks her sister’s name.
Sigebert does not speak any name at all.
Brunehaut guides Sigebert’s hand to the pommel of the sword at his side.
I creep away in hunt of rats.
The man comes wearing his gleaming coat of scales. It rings and clatters as he approaches, like ice falling from the stable roof. I do not like to carry the man when he is wearing his scale coat. Two boys trail him, bearing even more metal and its sharp tang. One holds my fittings, and the other a spear which the man will lower over my withers. The man takes these, and the boys slink off like beaten dogs.
I watch the man. He sags against the stable door. He is like a bag of grain, heavy and cascading. He should take off his gleaming coat, which is burdensome. But it is unlikely he will.
The man sighs, and straightens, no longer grain, but a weight I must now carry. Is he heavier than he once was? Am I older?
The man strikes me, and we are running. All of us horses running and running, spurred on by our men. We will run until we meet other men and their spears and their arrows, and all is screaming, and the smell of blood churning beneath our hooves.