Iftikhar
mare . arabian . chestnut . 15.0hh . 10
His words disgust her, but Iftikhar keeps her ears up and all expression from her face. “It does not make sense to me,” she says. Breeders as kings. These Isles truly are barbaric, she thinks, and transfers her gaze to their surroundings. Breeders are stupid and can think no further than the ends of their pricks. The white-stockinged chestnut does not expect to find things much different here, which is why it is both shocking and repulsive to learn that sex-driven males are considered kings. Where, she wonders, are the queens?
As the breeder beside her describes Kaywunaywun’s behavior as “keeping busy,” Iftikhar snorts lightly. The short stallion has no concept of how valuable such a mare truly is. It pleases her to find another fault in him. He speaks of another, Freya, but as Iftikhar has only met the short breeder beside her and not the mare herself, the Arabian doubts very much the abilities of the absent female. Kaywunaywun is the mare who challenged Iftikhar’s presence in the Inlet, before even the breeder, and the chestnut is disinclined to give credit to the stallion’s words. A breeder’s praise is no praise at all.
Iftikhar keeps her dark eyes on the flattening landscape and wonders if the stallion is trying to impress her with his insistence that he treats the mares who live with him well. His words only objectify the herd he claims to care for so assiduously, and by claiming that his partner is “more than just a mare” Iftikhar hears him discount her very gender. Her ears pin briefly. This is the kind of behavior that, years ago, preceded the Uprising among the Akhal-Tekes and put the mares on equal footing with the stallions. The Arabians were pleased to see this change in their neighbors only because from the very beginning, they knew it was right for mares to lead the herd. It had been beyond time for the males to realize that the mares they lived with were as worthy, if not more so, of the power the stallions wielded so carelessly.
Perhaps, in time, the same thing will happen at these Isles. Iftikhar resolves to further that cause in any mare she meets from here on out. It is not by her will that this be done, but by that of the Gods. It goes against the very nature of the world when stallions rule over mares.
These thoughts flit through her head one after the other in a matter of seconds, and her ears lift almost immediately after they had been flattened. She smells the sea again, and with that thought come the realization that she has heard the deep shush of its waves against the shore in her ears since the middle of their conversation. Sensing their time together is nearing its end and having no desire to meet this breeder face to face again unless it is in battle, Iftikhar turns a pleasant smile to the stallion she walks with and asks, “How did you come to rule this place? The Inlet,” she amends, to show she knows the name of the territory.
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