Gabbar
stallion . arabian . bay . 14.3hh . 8
They had fought well together the day he and Valve took over the Dunes. And so, when Gabbar found himself standing behind the mare’s black shoulder in the Lagoon, once again preparing for an assault, muscles lax and hot and ready to spring him toward the dunalino overo bachelor as soon as Valve commanded it, he felt confident about the outcome of this fight.
Then Evaline had arrived. That cold, standoffish mare he had claimed to protect was a wreck. One ear was mangled, her belly bulged like a starving creature’s and accentuated every rib, and those eyes.... He still saw them, sometimes, when he dreamed. They would appear in unlikely places, like in the gaze of a foal frolicking or as he spoke to an adult horse about inconsequential and nonsensical dream-things, so out of place they’d jar him into nightmares he thrashed out of and allowed to dissipate once he woke. It was his fault she had suffered, his fault that Valve was now fighting a fight that perhaps wouldn’t even have been necessary, had he been more steady under the weight of his unfamiliar responsibilities.
It had done something to him then, seeing Evaline emerge in such a state of ruin with eyes downcast, sent some trembling through his own body he’d never felt before. And when she lifted her gaze and started to cry, he felt entirely unmanned.
It was because of him, and his failings as a band stallion, that Evaline suffered.
Responsibility squeezed the air out of his lungs and his heart beat wildly in an attempt to pump blood and oxygen through his body as the boss of the bachelors sniped and jeered at him, words that battered Gabbar’s ears like sand whipped in a high wind past his head— he distinctly recalled closing his eyes to slits as if literally assaulted by a sandstorm as the boss antagonized him. None of that mattered. Evaline had suffered, immensely, and Gabbar was too late to protect her.
When Valve lunged forward Gabbar felt his body move automatically, pivoting him away from Kasabian and out of the black mare’s way as he wheeled to confront the bachelor she had decreed his responsibility. Even then, he fought without thinking, without any justification behind his rearing and striking out; he could not even be sure any of his hooves hit the other stallion. Everything was a jumble: another stallion showed up, more words were launched, and suddenly he was running away, following the heels of his target away from the quarreling group of horses.
For a time he ran. Later, he was vaguely aware of his legs churning through water, but it was some time before Gabbar came back to himself, and by then he knew he wasn’t even on the islands anymore. He’d returned to the mainland. He recognized the route he’d taken to fulfill Rakkas’s orders —tell the Honorable Iftikhar and her High Seer El Halin they are needed at home, not running about after some prophecy while a real war waged. Gabbar had done that. It made sense, then, that he had begun to return home.
For a time Gabbar believed that lie, and kept walking.
Then he found himself standing still in the middle of a flat field, lips pursed and ears turned out as he considered that thought. Where was the lie? He had completed the task Rakkas had set for him, that was true, and now— now he thought about the desert and the viciousness that veined it like drought cracks in the hard ground, of the fierce mares who clashed among themselves and the stallions who were less than nothing to them, of Rakkas who had scraped and lied and manipulated his way to a position of meager importance and lorded it over his brothers, of Gabbar’s own experience of feeling numb even in the hottest afternoons as the eyes of the mares passed over him like he was no more than dung and of a misplaced sense of brotherhood among stallions just as restless and discontent and lonely as he was.
That wasn’t home.
The bay stallion turned in a new direction, one that led not to his birthplace nor to the islands in which he’d failed so spectacularly as a stallion, and walked on.
It took some time, but eventually he found himself standing still again, one and a half years later, aware that he was still lying to himself. Wandering alone was no better than being lonely in the middle of a herd. There was only one place he’d felt himself, felt useful and valued despite his trip-ups as he navigated an unfamiliar and, to one raised in the Arabian culture, forbidden role— it was beyond moronic that he was still traveling away from it.
Home was on the Islands. That is where Gabbar belonged.
And so he returned, six months later, to the very first island he’d set hoof on when Rakkas had first sent him after the two mares, to find high summer and a humidity he found oppressive awaiting him on the Crossing. Had it been winter, had the sky been clouded over and snow falling to coat the earth, he would have returned to the Falls and the very place where Valve had first found him as if he could reset fate and start again.
But he knew better than to expect a clean slate. He would rest from his ocean crossing, fill his belly with the lush grass in the Meadow, and then— guilt stopped him in his tracks, before he even made it out of the water and onto the beach. The ocean washed around his hooves and foamed at his hocks like shackles.
He had failed Valve not once, but twice now. He had failed Evaline— he did not even know the fate of the two mares. And what of Avangeline? Had she returned to the Dunes after alerting Shamwari of his mother’s predicament, to find it empty? Or had she gone to the Lagoon with her noble heart in an attempt to help the herd, and met with a fate similar to Evaline’s? Gabbar knew Valve to be a capable, formidable mare, but she was not immortal nor all-powerful. It was entirely possible the fight had been lost, and with he not there to assist her in escape or revenge he felt thrice-damned.
How could he return to the Dunes with so much shame? Valve would want nothing to do with him, surely.
Gabbar stands in the cold water, feet going numb, and tucks his chin in toward his chest as if that will contain the agony beating through his heart. He is a failure, a disgrace. |