White Mare's Daughter (2 page)

Agni’s face flushed. Bored he might be, and desperate to be
gone, but his brothers were watching. They would call it dishonor, to be sent
away before the sun had touched the horizon. They would laugh among themselves
and reckon that Agni the arrogant had had his comeuppance, summoned from the
dance to be set above them all, but after a bare hour of such honor, sent off
to play like a weanling child.

But one did not argue with one’s father. No matter how one
longed to cry a protest, one bowed low and kissed one’s father’s hand and went
as one was bidden.

Agni put a swagger in his stride, lifted his chin and
straightened his shoulders and took his leave as a proper prince should.

And by the gods, he was glad—though he should be stiff with
shame. “Gods,” he said when he was well away, “how crashingly dull!”

No one was near to remind him that he did, after all, want
to be king when the old man gave himself up to the gods; then it would be his
place to sit on the royal horsehide and be fed the flesh of the Bull and
forswear the pleasures of the dance.

oOo

The dancers had passed the Red Stallion and the Black, and
wound now through the Spotted Bull. That was not so far to go, if Agni would
join the dance again.

The tightness of shame eased in his belly. He was smiling as
he strode in the dancers’ wake.

A girl of the Dun Mare leaned against a tentpole, her face
wantonly bare, and smiled at him. But his mind saw another face altogether. He
smiled because yes, this one was pretty, though never beautiful as Rudira was;
and went on toward the line of the dancers. He did not look back to see if she
shrugged and waited for the next handsome passerby, or if she stuck out her tongue
and cursed him.

Between the tents of the Brindled Hound and the outriders of
the Red Deer, a commotion brought Agni veering about. The dancers were close
now, just beyond the next line of tents, invisible for the moment but clearly
audible until a nearer clamor drowned them out. “Sarama! Sarama! The White
Mare! Ai, she comes, the White Mare! Sarama!”

Sarama was not the name of the White Mare, who carried
naught but her title and, on suitable occasion, her servant: but that servant’s
name, indeed, was Sarama. Agni forgot even Rudira the beautiful in a surge of
pure and ringing joy. Of beautiful women the world had a sufficiency—but he had
only one sister of the same mother, and they twinborn, blessed of the gods.

And there she was riding the Mare who was not yet white but
dappled like the moon, with her hair as dark as blood under the moon, and her
narrow witchy face. It lit with her broad white smile as she caught sight of
him standing tall above the boys and women who flocked to her coming.

That smile soothed the last of the tightness in his belly,
and healed a wound he had not known was there: an old oozing scar like the
stump of a severed limb. He thrust his way through crowding bodies into her
opened arms and the familiar weight and smell of her, wind and grass and smoke
and horses, slipping down from the Mare’s back and standing—

“Little sister! You’ve shrunk.”

They who had been eye to eye when she went away were sore
unbalanced now. She tilted her head back and laughed. “No,” she said in a voice
as new as her smallness, “you’ve shot up like a tree on a hilltop. And your
voice—what bull did you steal it from, eh, little brother?”

“What Bull but one, O elder sister?” he answered her, great
daring on this day of all days, but Sarama was never shocked as other girls
might be. Sarama was not at all as other girls were; not now, nor had she ever
been. Sarama was the White Mare’s child. She laughed at him and linked her arm
through his, and with the Mare following in a ring of awe and quiet, went back
the way he had come.

oOo

No woman but one might set foot in the feast of the Bull.
That one had no delicacy, nor any hesitation. Even Agni was not so bold as to
walk with her through the circle of chieftains, but hung back on the fringes.

The Mare, unled, unbound, moved slightly ahead of her
servant, so that it was the beast who led the woman before her father. No man
presumed to lift a hand to the Mare, which was well: one who did not move aside
swiftly enough had to scramble away from the lash of an outraged heel.

The old king’s glower lightened as his daughter came to
stand in front of him. She did not kneel as a woman should; she knelt to none
but the Mare. Nonetheless she bent her head in respect as a son might in the
privacy of the tent, and held up what she must have carried all this way in the
fold of her coat: a cup of polished bone, the cup of a skull, carved with
something that Agni could not see, but must be a skein of galloping horses.

“The Old Woman is dead,” she said in her voice that was
deeper than he remembered, deeper and more still, as if the silence of the
steppe had sunk into it. “The Old Mare has borne her into the place beyond the
sun. Now I come back to you, I and the Young Mare, to take the place that they
have left behind.”

There was a silence. It was deep within the circle, thinning
without, till far away one heard the dancers singing and stamping their feet.
No one could have failed to expect it; the Old Woman had been failing at the
last gathering, and the Old Mare had been thin and worn and lank of coat. And
yet it shocked them, as the death of a goddess can; it shook the world a
little. Not even the oldest of the old men could remember another servant of
the White Mare than the Old Woman.

Now there was a Young Mare, and Sarama her servant, holding
the cup that had been the Old Woman’s skull. What had become of the rest of
her, what had happened to the cup that she had carried in her turn, that had
been the skull of the Mare’s Servant before her, was a mystery. A shiver walked
down Agni’s spine, a chill of awe.

Sarama looked no different than she ever had. Thinner,
perhaps, and finer-drawn, but she was herself still. There had always been a
god in her, a strangeness that to Agni was as familiar as the wayward curl of
her hair.

She lowered the cup and secreted it in the folds of her
coat, took the old king’s hands and kissed them, and received a kiss on the
brow. Then she turned, and the Mare turned with her, departing from the circle
as she had entered it, with the aplomb of one who may go wherever she pleases.

No one moved to stop her. The elders and the chiefs would
drink tribute to the Old Woman, but after that they would forget her. She had
served a goddess, but she had only been a woman after all. Men had little to do
with the likes of her.

oOo

Sarama was rather too glad to leave the old men’s circle.
It had always been the Old Woman’s part to enter it when rite or the Mare’s
will ordained; doing that, walking where and as the Old Woman had walked,
brought back the grief and some of the chill of winter, the black days of the
Old Woman’s sickness and the blacker ones of her death and consecration to the
goddess. Alone in the freezing cold, Sarama had performed the rite, all of it,
every step and word and gesture, no matter how terrible, no matter how grim the
task.

Clean white bones lay under the earth in the Mare’s Place,
half a moon’s ride from the place of gathering; the Old Mare’s white tail
fluttered from the summit of her hill. Other, far older bones lay beneath those
that Sarama had laid there, bones on bones from time before time, mares’ bones
and women’s bones laid one atop the other till together they had made a high
and sacred hill.

“You are the last,” the Old Woman had said before she died.
“You, and she”—tilting her age-ravaged chin toward the Young Mare. “Her blood
continues in certain of the herds, but of her servants are none left, save only
you. Once we were a tribe, a great throng of us. Then the tribes of men ran
over us, outnumbered us, diminished us into veiled and feeble women. Your line
we kept pure, as pure as it could be; but it dwindled and faded, and now there
is but one. Be strong, my child. Be mindful. Remember.”

Sarama had promised to remember. She had made other
promises, too, promises that she must keep or her soul would die.

But now, this moment, having done her duty by the old man
her father, she was free to be a part of the tribe again. The Mare nipped
lightly at her shoulder, bidding Sarama recall her presence. Might she not go
now? The wind was calling her.

“The stallions, rather,” Sarama said. The Mare flattened her
little lean ears and snapped with temper. Sarama laughed, which made her wheel
and lash out with a wicked heel; but Sarama was too quick for her.

She went to torment the stallions in their tethered lines.
Sarama lingered till her brother came loping up beside her, all long limbs and
young male arrogance. He made her think of a stallion himself; but she was not
minded just then to torment him.

He dropped an arm about her shoulders, easily, as if they had
been parted only yesterday and not a year and more ago, and swept her toward
the tents of the White Horse. “You’ll be hungry,” he said, “and thirsty—
Aiiii!
such a thirst as must be on you.
We have a new thing that came from the sunrise countries, a drink that the gods
must drink in the houses above the sky. Come, I’ll fill you a cup.”

Sarama had no desire to dizzy and fuddle herself with strong
drink, but she let him have his way. With Agni, as with the fire he was named
for, that was always a wise thing.

Their father’s tent was kingly broad, housing as it did all
the wives that he had won in battle or in debts of honor, with their daughters
and their youngest sons, and such of the grown sons as were either unmarried or
unbound to one of the companies of young men. It surprised Sarama, somewhat, to
find that Agni had not gone off to run with a pack.

He did not explain or excuse himself. All the brothers were
gone, and many of the sisters, too, on this night of all the year; but the
wives were there still. They could go nowhere, do nothing, till their husband
gave them leave.

Sarama’s arrival sent them into a flurry. She had never
understood them, never comprehended minds and spirits so utterly encompassed by
the walls of a tent. That there were factions among them she knew; she had been
subjected to no few of those in the times when she was sent to visit her
father’s tent. But she was part of none of them. In time and with her silent
persistence, they had learned to keep a respectful distance; to conceal either
envy or rancor, and never to bid her choose sides in one of their wrangles.

They knew in their bellies what she had had to tell their
husband in raw half-shaped words. The women always knew. Each met her eyes
boldly or looked circumspectly away, as her character dictated. No one fell in
worship at her feet. Such was not done in the tents among the women.

They brought her the new thing that Agni had spoken of, the
thing called wine: dark and potent and richly sweet, almost too sweet, and
headier by far than kumiss. Sarama was not sure what she thought of it. It was
too strong, maybe. Too full of the spirit that reft men of their wits.

Agni drank as little as she did, she noticed, though he had
made great vaunt of its excellence. Agni was not the toplofty young fool he too
often liked to seem.

He caught her staring at him; stared back hard, eyes
gleaming amber beneath ruddy brows, and laughed for gladness. “Ah, sister,” he
said. “It’s good to have you here again.”

Sarama could not say that it was good to be in this place;
not with such tidings as she had brought. Still she could say, and say truly,
“I’m glad to rest eyes on you again, my brother. Even if I do have to crane my
neck to do it.”

He grinned, inordinately proud of himself.

He might be as tall as the sky, but she knew a trick or two.
She fell on him while he basked in his own grandeur, toppled him with
gratifying ease, and sat on him till he cried for mercy. Which he did soon
enough: and that was all as it used to be, as it well should be. Even he, in
the end, was persuaded to admit to that.

Sarama woke with a sour taste in her mouth and a sour
scent in her nostrils: the scent of too many people crowded too closely into
too small a space. Instinct bade her leap up and flee; but awareness dawned, holding
her still. She lay in the camp of the gathering, in her father’s tent,
surrounded by her blood kin. No one pressed up against her, for a marvel; even
if the grownfolk would not do it, the children always seemed to pile like
puppies wherever a newcomer was. Maybe the goddess had protected her, for once.
Or maybe they had chosen another instead.

She did not know why that should irk her as strongly as it
did. She hated to be roused by the weight of a bare-bottomed infant bouncing on
her breast, choking the breath out of her. She was glad to wake of her own
accord, in a quiet place near the tent’s wall. Still she felt alone and oddly
bereft, left to herself.

Two of her father’s wives were whispering nearby, giggling
over ripe fruits of gossip. Sarama did not will to listen, but she could hardly
avoid it, not with them so close. The names and scandals were much the same as
always. This wife caught with that young bull, and ah! such a shocking thing,
the husband had been so preoccupied with tupping his neighbor’s wife that he
had never even known of the transgression. “Not but that her brothers would
have killed her for it, such dishonor as it was,” the teller of the tale said,
“but with him being caught and gelded by the husband he’d wronged in his own
turn, and dying of it, they were all a little distracted.”

“
I
heard,” said
her sister—and they were sisters; women of the Running Wolf brought from far
away as gift and tribute to the lord of the White Horse: “I heard tell that
after all that, she flung herself screaming on his body, and found his knife,
and cut her own throat with it.”