White Mare's Daughter (56 page)

Tillu regarded him blankly. “Ask? They? They do it because
we ask it.”

The man in the deer’s hide spoke. His words were alien,
scattered with gurglings and clicks, like water muttering to itself in its
sleep. Tillu heard him out with an expression that told Agni he understood.

When the speech was ended, Tillu said a little slowly, “This
is a priest. He sees farther than other men see, and understands the speech of
birds. He says to you: ‘We guide you through the wood to serve ourselves.
Promise to harm nothing, touch nothing, conquer nothing. Your gods have
conceived a lust for the White Goddess’ country, but our country is no part of
it. We will not be conquered. Promise.’ ”

Agni frowned. “And if I won’t promise?”

Tillu spoke in that language like water running over stones.
The priest answered briefly. Tillu said, “No promise, no guide.”

“That is reasonable,” Agni said. “But they must guide us
well and safely and by the shortest way, and promise no harm after.”

The priest could promise that. Agni gave his own word in
return.

The priest listened intently to Agni’s words; by which Agni
knew that he understood the speech of the tribes, though he might not choose to
speak it. He answered even as Tillu opened his mouth, but in his own tongue.
Tillu said, “We follow you. Not the others. You. If the others go another way
or try to break the word you’ve given, they have no guides. Only you.”

“Why?” Agni asked.

Was that the glimmer of a smile? “Because,” said the priest
through Tillu, “we wish it so.”

That was simple enough. Taditi would be pleased, Agni
thought. She might even give him a few moments’ peace.

Whether the elders would or no, on the fourth day since
Agni came to the camp by the wood, all the young men struck their tents and
readied to ride.

Their guides were waiting. Agni’s own following champed at
the bit. When he came out to the horselines, he found Patir at Mitani’s bridle
and the chief of the guides standing with the patience of a stone.

The priest was dressed, or not dressed, just as he had been
before, man’s body emerging from the hide of a stag. Agni’s men looked askance
at him. He was a strange, wild figure, a spirit of the wood.

Agni grasped mane and swung onto Mitani’s back. The stallion
was in motion even as Agni settled, fresh and eager and none too unwilling to
venture the shadows of the trees. He would not suffer another horse to go
before him, unless it were a mare; and men of the tribes did not ride mares.

They were bound to foot-pace, since their guides either
would not or could not ride. But Earth Mother’s children were swift on their
feet and tireless, and could run as fast as a horse might comfortably go, there
amid the trees and the tangled undergrowth.

The paths were narrow and twisted. The branches closed in
overhead, shutting out the sky.

Agni, looking back, could see no more than the first dozen
of his following. He could hear farther than that, but sounds were strangely
muffled here, lost in the whispering of leaves. This might be a trap, might be
treachery too perfect to escape: catch the horsemen in the wood, cut them off
from one another, cut them down before they could move to defend themselves.

They could not always ride, either. Where trees grew close
or branches hung low, they must perforce dismount and lead their horses.

Agni on the march liked to ride back and forth along the
line, keep count of his men, see that the baggage was safe, share a song or a
story. Here he was bound to the lead, with only the priest ahead of him. For
all he knew, the dozen men he could see and the dozen more that he could hear
were all that had followed him. The rest might have remained in the open
country under the blessed vault of the sky.

He had bought this with his word and with his conviction
that the gods had led him into the west. He did not know if he even traveled
westward. All directions were the same under the trees.

He must trust in the gods and in his guide. When a clearing
opened with startling suddenness, wide and sunlit and sweet with grass and
flowers, he could draw aside and count the men who rode or walked through it.
Their beginning he knew; he had been in it. Their end was lost in the dimness
of the trees.

As Agni sat Mitani and Mitani grazed, well content with the
respite, Tillu rode out of the trees and curved round to his side. The
warleader of the Stone Tree was mounted on a horse as thick and massive as
himself, a heavy-headed black with feathered hooves, such as one sometimes
found wandering away to the northward. It was taller than Mitani and far more
strongly built, but seemed remarkably placid for a stallion. Tillu sat at ease
on the broad back, watching the army ride past.

“You’ve been in the wood before,” Agni said without taking
his eyes from them.

“Once or twice,” Tillu said. “My mother was a captive from
one of the forest clans. My father took her not for her beauty—she had none—but
for her power in the clan. Women rule here. You may widen your eyes at it, but
it is so.”

“I widen my eyes,” Agni said, “because I’ve heard the same
of the western people. Do they exist after all? Or are these the ones the
travellers tell of?”

“Oh, no,” said Tillu. “The forest people are another people
altogether. It’s said they were made before the dawn of the world, even before
the gods; when Earth Mother was alone, and hungered for company. So she made
the people out of clay and stone, taught them to speak, gave them the gifts that
she had then to give. The grey light of dawn was theirs, and the chill of
morning. But when she made the sun, she took it into her head to refine her
creation. Then she made a new race of men, and made them beautiful. She put
fire in them; but it was too strong for them, burned and consumed them. So she
made them again, but set a core of clay in them, a vessel for the fire; and
what was pure fire, she shaped into the gods.”

Agni heard him out in wonder. “You know great and secret
things,” he said.

“My mother was a clan-mother,” Tillu said. “And yes, as you
asked, there are people beyond the wood, between the trees and the sunset. It’s
called the Lady’s country. The Lady is Earth Mother. They know no other gods.
That, the forest people say, is because they were made between the dawn and the
daylight. They remember the time before there were gods. They worship none but
Earth Mother, because the gods came late and were made of the leavings of their
own creation.”

“And women rule them,” Agni said.

“Oh, yes,” said Tillu. “They’ll find you appalling. The
forest people do. They’re gentle people, too gentle for the likes of us. But
for the terror of the wood, they’d all be dead long ago. The tribes would have
overrun and killed them.”

“Or made pacts with them,” Agni said, “to leave them
unharmed, and overrun and kill someone else.”

“Can you blame them for that?” Tillu asked.

Agni shrugged. “It’s war. One does what one must.”

“Precisely,” said Tillu.

oOo

When night closed in, the men of the steppe found
themselves in a world they had never imagined. There were no stars beneath that
canopy of branches, no moonlight; only a black and whispering dark. It was full
of rustlings and murmurings, far-off howls, the shriek of something dying.

So many men could not camp within sight of each other. Their
guides led them to a chain of clearings and showed them where there was wood to
burn, water to drink. For the horses’ sake they pitched tents under the trees,
leaving the grass clear. Even that was little enough.

By pausing in clearings, Agni had worked his way well back
along the army’s length. Now as dusk grew dim beneath the branches he looked
for his own people again. He found them just short of full dark, camped on a
fire-seared hillside where the grass grew green and rich amid the charred
stumps of trees. They were in greater comfort than some, with more space and
therefore more sky, and better grass for the horses.

He squatted beside the fire, next to Taditi, who tended a
fine haunch of venison on a spit. The rest of the deer roasted nearby, over
Gauan’s fire.

“Lucky shot,” he called across the darkening space.

“Wasn’t luck,” Taditi muttered. “Was sharp wits and a sharp
eye. We’ll need a strong share of that if we’re to come out of this place.”

“I hate it,” said Patir. He was lying on the grass staring
up at the stars. “It makes my skin creep.”

“People are laying wagers whether the whole world is
forest,” Rahim said from across the fire, “and whether the sunset country is
clear of trees.”

“It had better be,” Patir said darkly. “If I see a tree
there, by the gods, I’ll cut it down and burn it.”

“Earth Mother might object to that,” Tillu said, taking
shape out of the darkness and sitting on his heels by the fire.

An antlered figure loomed behind him. Agni saw fingers flick
in a gesture against ill spirits, but it was only the priest in the stag’s
hide.

He was watching Agni. Agni smiled brightly at him and turned
his glance on Tillu. “How long will we be in the wood?” he asked.

Tillu shrugged. “As long as it takes. Five days? Eight?”

“Eight days?” Patir howled like a dog. “
Ai!
We’ll all run mad.”

“Pray,” said a voice like stones shifting.

They all stared at the priest. He stood unmoving, his face
shadowed by the stag’s crown.

“Pray to the gods,” Tillu said, “and think of sunlight. It’s
open country where we’re going, though you,” he said to Patir, “may find a tree
or six to burn.”

“Let it come soon,” said Patir.

oOo

No one went mad, though tempers frayed and men were sore
tempted to quarrel with one another. Agni rode tirelessly up and down the army,
in and out of its camps, soothing and stroking and coaxing people to be
sensible.

He slept, he supposed, though not happily. There were
dreams, and they were dark, hill of murmurings and whisperings like the forest
he slept in. If he came through it, he would wait long before he went near it
again.

Even beyond men’s troubles, the horses were less than happy.
They could forage, but poorly; they were not deer, to thrive on leaves and
twigs and bits of forest flotsam. Water they had; the wood was laced with
streams and little rivers. But grass was scarce, and there was not enough of it
for so many horses. They could not linger much longer if they were to be strong
enough to carry men to battle.

Not a few of those men wondered, sometimes too loudly, if
they were being led in circles, weakened for the slaughter. Agni hoped that
they were not.

The priest’s steps were sure in these tangled places. His
fellows appeared and disappeared—scouts, Agni guessed, with word of the way
ahead. Each evening found them in a clearing that showed no sign of men’s
presence before, or along a riverbank where only the tracks of wild beasts
marred the soft earth.

They never saw a camp or gathering place of the forest
people. They were being led away from such, Agni suspected. He would have done
the same if he had been leading the warriors of gathered tribes through his
people’s country. Warriors were never to be trusted.

These were not warriors. They were hunters, and perhaps more
than one was a priest. They guided their charges through the wood with silent
skill.

Their women were not to be seen, nor their children. They
were all men of indeterminate age, some more gnarled than others. None spoke
the language of the tribes. Only the priest seemed to understand it.

It was like the rite the boys endured when their voices
first began to deepen, when they passed from boys to young men, and began their
long schooling in the men’s arts. They went into the barrows of their
ancestors, deep within the tribe’s lands, and remained there from dusk until
dawn. In the rite they went back to the womb’s darkness and there sought
visions; and when the visions were done, they crawled through the narrow
passage into the first light of morning, and so were reborn into the world and
the tribe.

Here the gathering of warriors slept each night in the womb
of the forest, and crawled each day through the narrow ways. But they never saw
the open country. They were never born again into the world.

Agni’s mind was slipping. He had to struggle to remember the
count of days. Six? No, seven. Five? Four?

“Seven,” Taditi said when he asked. Nothing dismayed her,
not even the crashing in the night that proved, by the signs they found come
morning, to be the passing of a herd of aurochs. If it had veered aside, it
would have pounded their camp to dust.

Taditi had no fear of the dark or of the shadows under the
trees. She professed to be rather more pleased than not to be spared the glare
of the sun.

But then she was a woman. She had grown up in the dimness of
the tents, closed in by walls. Walls of trees, walls of a tent, it mattered
little to her.

Agni had never thought before that a woman might have an
advantage over a man. It was a strange thing to think, in this strange place.

As seemed to happen each night, Tillu appeared at the
campfire in time to share whatever was to be had, which that night was a brace
of rabbits and a string of wood-doves wrapped in leaves and roasted. The priest
was with him for the first time since that first night; where he had been
between, Agni did not know nor venture to ask.

They ate hungrily. Agni and the others of his people were
seldom hungry now. They ate because they must, but they had begun to doubt even
that. But Tillu and his kinsman seemed well content.

When they had eaten their fill and belched politely, Tillu
said to Agni, “The priest has somewhat to ask.”

Agni raised a brow. He had eaten one of the doves, but it
had tasted of ashes. It sat heavy in his stomach.