White Mare's Daughter (51 page)

“Then why?”

He asked it of Taditi, whom he found in the other half of
the tent, behind a curtain, grinding grain into flour. She had come away with
riches, a whole packtrain worth from the look of it.

She looked up when he lifted the curtain, and at first did
not answer his question. When she did, she did it sidewise. “Have you ever
wondered why Yama of all your brothers reckoned himself most fit to be king?”

“He’s the eldest,” Agni said promptly, “even if he was
begotten of a prince and not a ruling king. And he’s a fool.”

“He has a strong-willed mother.” She bent her back to the
grinding of stone on stone. “And a wife who wants to be a king’s wife.”

Agni scowled. His head ached. Strangely, for a moment he
heard Sarama’s voice, observing acidly that yes, indeed, thinking was a
difficult thing. “Yama’s a weakling. I knew that. But even with such a man as
king, the tribe is the tribe. No one simply leaves it.”

“There was nothing simple about our leaving,” Taditi said.

“You shouldn’t have done it,” he said.

“Probably not,” she said. She swept flour from the stone
into a jar, spread a new handful of grain, set to grinding it again. “It’s as
well you don’t understand why people follow you. If you did, it might go to
your head.”

He blinked.

She ground the grain, stroke by steady stroke. Her body in
the coat and the well-worn skirt, her greying hair plaited and wound tight
about her head, had no beauty in them.

She never had been beautiful. And yet she was the strongest
human creature Agni knew. Stronger than his father had ever been.

In the west, if the traveler’s tale was true, a woman could
be a king. It was outrageous and preposterous, but the rumor of it had sent
Sarama into the sunset countries. If there were or could be such people, Taditi
might have been king. What sort of king she might have made—

Agni had lost his wits with his tribe. Men ruled the tribe.
So had the gods ordained. Women ruled men. So people said, but softly, and not
where too many could hear.

“You didn’t want to live in a tent ruled by Yama-diti,” Agni
said. “You said that. But the others—”

“The others made a choice,” she said.

“Did you encourage them to make it?”

She brushed another heap of flour into the jar and wiped the
stone clean. She sat on her heels, staring down at it, as if she could read
signs there, or omens, or the answers to his questions. “They didn’t need any
encouragement,” she said. “They had already considered what the tribe would be
under Yama as king. You would have to leave, they all knew that. They weren’t
prepared for an outcasting; but when it fell on us all, they held to their
choice.”

“They should not have,” Agni said.

“It was rather a wild impulse,” she granted him, “when it
came to it. Patir and Rahim would have done it regardless, for love of you. The
rest were caught up in the heat of the moment. None of them believed that you
of all people would have to force a woman. Not with so many both willing and
eager. They were in a fine and tearing rage.”

“Now they would have cooled down,” Agni said, “and it will
be dawning on them that they can’t go back.”

“There is that,” Taditi said.

“I have to go out,” he said. “Do I have a mantle? Or a
coat?”

“You have both,” she said. She rose stiffly and stretched.
He waited with carefully schooled patience, and with courtesy that she herself
had taught him.

He won no praise for it. It was expected.

She brought him his own mantle of bearskin, and his good
leather coat, too. He needed both. It was rawly cold, the sky heavy, lowering,
threatening snow. His loyal tribesmen kept somewhat of a raffish air, like a
pack of boys on a raid, but there was an aimlessness to them, a kind of
prowling restlessness, that did not bode well.

It was no more than Agni had expected. Though his body
creaked as badly as Taditi’s, he circled the camp, and visited each fire, and
each tent, too, if he was invited; and he nearly always was.

Most of their names he knew, or their kin. Their number
rather took him aback. There were nearly two score of them, which would be nigh
every man of the tribe at or about the age of hunting his stallion, and some
younger, too, no more than boys; even a few who were older, men who for one
reason or another had had nothing to bind them to the tribe. All gathered here
for Agni’s sake, and looked to him as their chieftain.

Food they had, for a while, for both man and beast. There
was hunting round about. No tribe claimed this country, though both the White
Horse and the Dun Cow hunted in it in the spring. It was well chosen.

There was even a sheltered place for the horses, a bowl of a
valley with a stream running through it, its center unfrozen despite the cold.
There was grass beneath the snow, and tender saplings to nibble on.

Agni found Mitani there, and somewhat to his surprise, the
mares that Mitani had claimed for his own. The stallion’s peal of welcome
deafened him, and for some unfathomable reason made him burst into tears.

Mitani roared up to him in a stinging spray of snow. He
caught mane as the stallion wheeled, let the force of the motion swing him onto
the warm back.

Mitani neither started nor bucked, though Agni had not done
such a thing before—should not do it now, either, but a spirit of wildness was
in him. He was making no more sense than anyone else, than anything that had
happened since the kingmaking that had gone so terribly awry.

oOo

He circled the camp as the first flakes of snow began to
fall. Mitani was fresh, lively, snorting and dancing: making himself beautiful
for people to marvel at.

As Agni rode, as the snow thickened, as he bound the camp
tightly in the circle of his riding, it came to him with the strength of a true
dream: what it was that the gods wanted of him. Why they had caused him to be
cast out. Why so many strong young warriors had followed him.

The west. The sunset countries. The place where a woman
could be king. Where Sarama had gone—and where she had forbidden Agni to go.

That had been before he was cast out, when their father was
still alive and whole, when Agni had place and kin and kingship. Now that was
all gone. Agni was free. He could go where he chose, unless he chose to go back
to the White Horse people.

With the tribe that had gathered about him, a tribe of
fighting men, he could do whatever he pleased. Raid, wage war, conquer tribes,
take their women, carve out a kingdom for himself.

The gods had given him the means. Yet now, as the snow flew
about him, blinding him with whiteness, he knew that they had not given it to
him for any simple purpose. They had sent his sister before him into the west.
Now he must follow.

A land where a woman could be king. A land that knew no war.
It would be rich, and ripe for the taking.

It was all but in his hand. He could see it from Mitani’s
back, limned in the snow: a vision of light, warmth, greenery. Winter would
never be so harsh there, or its privations as terrible.

He was almost warm, thinking of it, looking out across the
camp of what would be his army, as the snow closed in and covered it all. In
the spring, he thought, they would go. They would sweep the western tribes
before them. They would fall on the sunset countries and take them. And Agni
would, after all, be a king.

Sarama had thought herself with child in the autumn, but
just as she was sure of it, her courses came and swept away whatever life had
begun in her.

That was the Lady’s will and her doing. Sarama could accept
that. But she could not stop grieving for the child who would never be.

She did not speak of it to anyone. Danu might have grieved
with her; and she did not want him to do that. He was too well content to be in
Three Birds again. He was happy, even in the thing that she made him do, the
instruction in fighting and in the ways of war.

For his sake she kept her sorrow to herself. He was greatly
preoccupied between the ruling of his Mother’s house and the barest raw
beginning of a fighting force.

It was bare indeed, and as raw as Sarama had ever seen.
These people looked on fighting as a thing that only animals did. Men—human creatures—settled
their differences without blows or bloodshed. They could only with difficulty
bring themselves to strike, and then without force; and if by chance a blow
fell hard enough to sway an opponent, the one who had struck the blow was
tearfully apologetic.

Yet as hunters they were admirably skilled. They might mourn
the prey after it was dead, but they pursued it with implacable purpose and
slew it both swiftly and cleanly. If they could learn to think as hunters,
hunters of men, they might begin to have some defense against the war that was
coming.

That winter was the gentlest Sarama had ever known. Except
when she was traveling from Larchwood to Three Birds, she was warm, out of the
wind, in comfort unless she chose otherwise. There was enough to eat, and a
great plenty in the feasts of the dark of the year and of midwinter and, most
wonderful of all, in the very early spring, when the snow began to melt and the
rivers to run free again. They had their flocks and herds and a great store of
the grain that they planted and encouraged to grow. Hunger was a thing that few
of them knew.

In the spring her courses paused again. She did not hope or
even think much on it, as if the thinking itself might cause the child to slip
away. It almost frightened her, how much she wanted this child to live. Better
not to turn her mind to it at all; to let the Lady work her will.

Every morning unless it rained or snowed, Sarama went to an
open field just outside of the city. There gathered the ones whom Danu had
chosen, who might make warriors. They were the hunters, the runners and
messengers, the tenders of herds who had defended them well against wolves.
Most knew the bow and had some skill with the spear. They would happily shoot
arrows and cast spears from sunrise to sunset, but when it came to fighting
hand to hand, they took to it badly.

Danu was no better at it than the rest. Sarama tried not to
be angry with him, or to lose patience.

That was difficult. He could madden her with his
stubbornness, hunch those big shoulders and lower those black brows and look
more like a bull than ever.

He and the one they actually called the Bull—Kosti-the-Bull,
his name was—would have been mighty warriors in the tribes. In the Lady’s
country they were known for their prowess with women, or for their skill in
keeping a Mother’s house in order. They were fast on their feet, powerful with
the spear, could bend a longer, stronger bow than anyone else. And yet when set
face to face with wooden swords, they turned into simpering idiots.

“I’ll hurt him,” Kosti said when Sarama urged him to strike
harder.

“Not if he blocks the stroke,” she said for the hundredth
time. “Now strike. Strike hard.”

He lifted his sword—lovely grip, beautiful balance—and
delivered a love-pat that would have done justice to a slip of a girl. Sarama
growled and snatched the sword out of Danu’s hand and leaped on Kosti, whirling
the wooden blade, raining blows.

He dropped his own sword and covered his head with his hands
and backed away, pure coward; except that cowards whimpered and wept, and he
was simply defending himself and refusing, flatly refusing, to fight back.

“The horsemen will kill you!” she raged at him. “They’ll cut
you to pieces. They won’t care if you won’t hit back. They’ll laugh, that’s
all, and hew your head from your neck.”

Kosti lowered his head and said nothing.

She whirled on Danu. “Hold up your sword. Defend yourself.
Now!”

He used his sword to protect his head, at least, though he
would not strike, only parry.

Sarama flung down her blade in disgust. “Let’s only hope
that you can fight them off with bows and spears; because if they come in any
closer, you’ve lost the war.”

Danu, like Kosti, did not argue with her. Men never did
here. She flung herself onto the Mare’s back and left them all to their
practicing and to their complete inability to strike a blow in anger.

No one even slapped a child here. As far as she could tell,
the children did as they pleased, but what they pleased to do was never
anything reprehensible. People simply were not people in this place. They were
something subtly and infuriatingly different.

oOo

Danu came to bed earlier than usual that night. Sarama was
still undressing when he came in.

Even when she was utterly out of patience with him, the
sight of him could make her heart beat hard. He could not seem to learn to
strike back when someone struck at him, but he had learned easily and quickly
to take her when she wanted to be taken. To come to her as he did now, take her
in his arms, kiss her till she gasped.

He bent his head and teased her nipples with his tongue. She
shivered and caught her breath. They were tender, a tenderness that was new,
that made his touch almost too much to bear.

Just when she must cry out or push him away, he had mercy.
He left her breasts and worked his way slowly down the curve of her belly,
coaxing her to open her thighs. She arched her back against his bracing hands.

He lowered her to the bed with effortless strength, all
quivering as she was, ready to shout or to rage at him if he did not finish it.

He raised himself over her. She locked legs about his middle
and impaled herself on him. The size, the shape of him were exactly as they
should be. Were made for her. Were hers, as she was his.

He tried always to stay awake for a while after, a courtesy
of his people, and one that she had learned to value. She cradled his head on
her breast, tangling fingers in his thick curling hair.