White Mare's Daughter (52 page)

His own fingers wandered wickedly between her thighs,
stroking just enough to keep the warmth alive. She gave herself up to it for a
while, rocking with pleasure on pleasure.

But her mind was gnawing on a thing, and even his loving
could not persuade it to let go. “It’s nearly spring,” she said. “By summer
they’ll be here, if we’re seeing true, and if they really are coming.”

“They are coming,” he said.

“And none of you can fight,” she said. “You must be lacking
something, some gift, something in the spirit.”

“Ill spirit,” he said. “That’s what we call a person who
strikes another person with intent to harm. Ill spirit, demon, one whose face
is turned away from the Lady.”

“It’s going to kill you,” she said.

“Maybe,” he said, “when the horsemen come, when they ride at
us, we’ll forget. We’ll be as we are with wolves or the wild boar. We’ll be
able to strike.”

“You had better pray for that,” said Sarama. “There’s no
hope for you else.”

He sighed. “We do try, Sarama.”

“Surely,” she said. “And you fail.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Never be sorry,” she said. “Just learn to fight.”

oOo

Danu might never be of any use as a swordsman, but one
thing Sarama was determined that he should know.

She waited till a warm day of honest spring, just before the
planting time. The snow was gone except from shaded hollows, and the rivers ran
high and free. The first green had begun to spring on the hillsides.

Then when he had gone to the practice-field, with the colt
following as he always did, Sarama rode the Mare to the field. No one remarked
on that. She often did it; it would have been more worth noting if she had not.

But this time, instead of watching from the field’s edge for
a while and then setting the Mare free to do as she pleased, Sarama rode the
Mare to the part of the field in which the archers practiced their craft. Danu
was stringing his heavy bow, making light work of it, with a glance at Sarama
as she came between him and the sun.

“Leave that,” she said, “and come here.”

He was obedient as she had expected. But when she slid from
the Mare’s back and said, “Mount,” he would not move.

“Mount,” she said again.

“No,” he said.

“Maybe you won’t fight,” she said, “but you will learn to
ride. Now mount. Like so.” She showed him: clasp mane, leap, swing leg, and so
astride. The Mare was patient, which was not always her way.

Danu glowered at them both. “What earthly use is there for
me in learning to ride?”

“Every use in the world,” said Sarama from beside the Mare.
She pointed with her chin toward the colt, who grazed nearby. He had grown in
the winter, a little taller, much broader and deeper. He was as tall as the
Mare now, and would be a larger horse altogether.

“Come another spring,” she said, “you’ll be riding him.”

“Oh, no,” said Danu. “No, I am not—”

“Among the tribes,” she said, “when a youth wishes to become
a man, he goes out for a whole summer and seeks his stallion. When he finds the
one who will be his, he captures it and tames it and rides it back in the full
moon of autumn. And so is he reckoned a man among the horsemen.”

“I don’t want to be a man among the horsemen,” Danu said.

“Ah,” she said, “but some would say you already are—or will
be once you ride this colt. He is your stallion. He looks to no one else, nor
has any desire to. When he’s older and stronger, he’ll grieve if you won’t ride
him. It’s what he was born to do.”

“You can ride him,” Danu said.

“No,” said Sarama. “I belong to the Mare. That is your
colt.”

His face set. He was going to be stubborn. Sarama met his
glare with one fully as baleful. “You’re afraid,” she said.

“I am not,” he said too quickly.

All, she thought: so he did have that kind of pride, after
all. “You don’t want to look like a fool,” she said, “because I’ve been riding
since before I could walk, and you’ve never done it. You don’t want the others
to see how you fumble.”

“I do not!” he declared. And, wonder of wonders, he stepped
up to the Mare and got a grip on her mane and managed, one way and another, to
get a leg over her.

It was not graceful and it did not delight her, but she
stood for it, by the Lady’s blessing.

He sat on her back with an expression almost of shock, as if
he had done it without thinking at all, and could not imagine what to do next.
Sarama let him think about it for a while, and grow accustomed to the feel of
it: to be sitting so high, with a living body under him.

The Mare stamped at a fly. Danu gasped and clutched her
mane.

“Relax,” Sarama said. “When she moves, flow with her. Now
touch her with your leg, so. Yes. Don’t clutch! Flow. Let her walk. Let her
carry you.”

She had never seen a grown man before who was not born to
the saddle. It was faintly absurd, but she knew better than to smile.

He had a little talent for it, and more willingness than she
might have expected, once he had been shamed into trying it. It was not like
fighting. Fighting was altogether against his nature.

But riding the Mare—that, as she had seen and he seemed
startled to discover, was a great joy and pleasure. To be carried by a willing
creature, to consider that creature’s comfort, to flow with it, to be a part of
it, to feel the wind in one’s hair, was a thing he could not have conceived of
until he did it. She watched the smile break out, the grin of incredulous
delight.

“Oh,” he said as the Mare walked sedately across the field.
“Oh, this is wonderful.”

“Isn’t it?” said Sarama. “Now turn her. Touch her with your
leg: yes, so. Ask with the rein. Think of turning.”

He did as she bade, and the Mare turned. And again; and
again. And halted, too, when Sarama showed him how to ask, and started again.
Over and over, till Sarama ended it—capriciously, he must have thought, for he
frowned at her. But he was obedient.

He gasped as he slid to the ground. His knees buckled. He
clutched at the Mare.

His look of astonishment was so pure and so profound that
Sarama bit hard on laughter. “I never knew I had muscles there,” he said.

“It gets easier,” she said. “Walk, now. Stretch. Don’t stand
still. You’ll stiffen.”

“You make it look so easy,” he said.

“I could ride before I could walk,” said Sarama. “Now walk.”

He walked. “What did you do, then, if you were too young to
walk?”

“I crawled,” she said. She walked beside him as he limped
back down the field, and the Mare on his other side, concerned for him. She had
not meant him to hurt.

The archers and the spear-fighters, male and female, and
even the few who tried to fight with the sword, all watched him in awe that
must have gratified him. He had ridden the Mare. He had done a thing that none
of their kind had ever done.

He would do it again and again, until he was master of it. Then,
Sarama thought, if there was time before the war came, she would teach him to
shoot that bow of his from horseback. And then, maybe, he would be a warrior
after all.

Spring grew green and rich in the Lady’s country. Danu
danced in the planting festival, and sowed his own seed in the furrow, with
every other man whom the Lady called to the task.

Sarama had never seen fields tilled and sown; her people
took what their gods gave, from the steppe and from the hunt, nor knew either
planting or harvesting. She helped as she might, but she was as clumsy in that
as Danu had been and still was on the Mare’s back.

He could not confess that he was glad. It was one thing he
could do that she could not, one thing in which he had the advantage. It was
not a thought that he would ever boast of, or be proud of, either.

She had, one way and another, become a power in the city.
People reckoned that she must be a Mother. The Lady spoke to her through the
moon-colored Mare; and she carried herself, conducted herself, as a Mother
might. She was not aware of it, that Danu could tell. It was simply what she
was.

She had not taught anyone else to ride the Mare. No one else
asked, either. People were not terrified of the two horses here as they had
been in Larchwood, but they stood in awe of them. Horses belonged to the Lady.
Anyone who rode them must be hers, too.

Now when Danu went to the market, the men sitting in their
alleyway between the stalls greeted him warmly enough, but with a hint of
distance. He had grown away from them. He belonged to the woman from the east,
and to the Lady.

That hurt, a little, even knowing that his closest friends
from the days before had as little time to sit about and talk as Danu did. They
were in the practice-field or waiting on the Mother, learning new duties for
when the war came.

“If it ever comes,” said one of the grey uncles in the
market, on the day when the boats came down the river. The traders had come
back at last with all their wonderful things, shells and colored stones,
painted pots, furs, dye- stuffs for the weavers, nuggets of gold and bits of
copper, all to trade for the fine weavings and the intricately painted pots of
Three Birds.

The traders, who came from the south and the west, knew no
rumor of horsemen or of a terrible thing called war. All was well in the world,
they said, the cities rich, the people content. The omens were for a blessed
summer and a good harvest.

Sarama had told Danu of a thing that people could do in war,
the building of a wall to protect a shrine or a sacred place. Three Birds and
the cities to the east of it were the wall of the Lady’s country, its
protection against the horsemen. If they fell, that fair summer would open the
road for the conquerors, and the harvest would feed them.

It hurt his head to think of people who would take and keep,
and never share. But the ache grew less as time went on. He was hardening to
the truth, to the harshness of Sarama’s world. Some might say that he was being
corrupted.

Danu traded a bolt of his best weaving, the intricate and
many-colored cloth for which Three Birds was famous, for an arm-ring of
hammered gold. It was richer and more intricate than the one he always wore,
incised with the Lady’s spirals, gleaming and beautiful.

As he ended the bargaining and handed over the bolt of
cloth, Tilia appeared next to him, linked arms with him and smiled at the trader,
and said to Danu, “How lovely! Is it for me?”

Danu gave her a look. He tucked the armlet into his pouch,
thanked the trader courteously, and left her booth. Tilia followed perforce.

“She’ll like it,” his sister said when his silence showed no
sign of breaking. “Is there an occasion? Are you celebrating?”

“Isn’t it enough that she is, and that she chose me?” Danu
asked.

Tilia raised a brow. “Ah! Such wisdom. She should give you a
gift. I’ll tell her how it is here.”

“You will not,” Danu said. “In her tribe, men give the
gifts. She says I’d be reckoned a man there, because of the colt. Even if I do have
no aptitude for fighting hand to hand.”

“Her people are strange,” Tilia said. “You really think
they’re coming.”

“I don’t think it will be long,” said Danu. “Can you feel
it? It’s strongest just before dawn. The earth growls in its sleep.”

“I don’t hear such things the way you do,” Tilia said. Her
voice was flat.

Danu could not tell if she resented it, or if she was
accepting an unpalatable truth.

“I wish,” said Danu, “that it were you and not I. I never
wanted to be the Lady’s servant.”

“You know what they say,” she said. “The ones who want it
are the least fit for it.”

He snorted. “I don’t feel fit at all.”

“I don’t think anyone does.” She paused to admire a potter’s
wares. “When do you think she’s going to tell you about the baby?”

Danu could hardly admit to surprise. Tilia might not hear
the Lady’s voice, but she had eyes that saw farther than some. “She’ll tell me
when she’s ready,” he said.

“Not that she needs to,” said Tilia. “But, you know, you’ll
be uncle to it, since she has no other kin here. She should give you a little
warning.”

“In the tribes, it’s the man who sired the child who claims
it and gives it his name.” Danu stooped to examine the intricacies of a painted
bowl. With his eyes on the interlaced spirals, he said, “They even have a word
for him, that has a meaning like
mother
to us.”

“Imagine that,” Tilia said. “A man taking credit for the
making of a baby. Not that he doesn’t have something to do with it, but a few
moments’ pleasure against nine months of bearing and all the pain of
delivering—they are strange people.”

“She still thinks we don’t know what a man does to make a
child,” said Danu, “because we have no word for what he is to the child after,
except
uncle
and
friend
. No word like their
father
.”

“I should think that such a word would give a man too much
power,” Tilia mused. “If he gets a name from those few moments in the night,
and a claim on the woman who gives it to him—who’s to tell where the end of it
will be?”

“Men who rule,” he said, “and who take what isn’t theirs,
and make a glory of war.” He turned away from the potter’s stall, nearly
colliding with a handful of passersby.

oOo

Somehow he found his way out of the market into one of the
quieter circles. On a deserted doorstep where flowers grew in a pot, the first
of the spring, he sank down and lowered his head into his hands.

Tilia had followed him. How not?

She sat beside him. “You won’t turn into one of those just
because you’re learning to fight, or because she lets you ride her Mare.”

He raised his head. “How do you know? How can you be
certain?”

“Because I know you,” she said. She touched his cheek, then
slapped him lightly, just hard enough to sting. “Remember this when you’re
tempted to become a horseman. You belong to the Lady. She shines in everything
that you do. She won’t let you fall to the horsemen’s gods.”