White Mare's Daughter (6 page)

Now came the sign that Sarama had been waiting for, the
words of a traveller who might be mad or a liar. Agni said as much, as she had
expected him to do.

Agni was her brother and she loved him, and he often
understood her, but he was a man. In the end he thought as a man thinks, of
owning and mastering. Even when men prayed, they bargained: this for that,
prayer and worship in return for success in the hunt, perhaps, or strong
healthy sons, or power among the people. They did not simply lay themselves
open to the gods, to be done with as the gods willed.

The goddess had willed that she hear the tale of the sunset
people. A land of women who were kings—yet a land that knew no horses.

Sarama’s heart beat faster at the thought of it. Surely
these people would welcome her, and the Mare whom she served, whose lot in this
place would be only to fade and vanish among the herds. Men never saw how the
mares ruled, nor cared. They could only see the stallions’ noise and vaunting.

Agni’s voice startled her. She was halfway to the sunset
already. “You can’t go. What if you die on the road? You’re the last of the
Mare’s people. What will she do without you?”

“Better than she would do here,” Sarama said. “I met our
eldest brother yesterday. He informed me that when he is king, I shall learn to
be a proper woman. Our time is over, he meant me to understand. His time—the
Stallion’s time—is long since begun.”

Agni’s face flushed; his fists clenched. “And who says that
Yama will be king?”

“Yama means to make sure of it,” she said. “You have to go
away—unless you win your horse, you can’t claim authority over the White Horse
people. Yama won his a good while since.”

“Oh yes,” Agni growled. “And it’s said he did it less than
honorably, too, by trapping a herd in a barren valley and starving it into
submission—and the stallion died rather than submit; so he came home with a
yearling colt. For certain the poor thing didn’t last out the year, in such
state as it was when he brought it in.”

“Still, he won it,” Sarama said. “The winning is all that
matters. And he’ll be here with the people while you wander far and long,
hunting an honorable prey.”

Agni did not look as if she had surprised him, except with
her perception of things as they were. He must have thought her ignorant, or
innocent at least, as far from the people as she had lived for so long. He
said, “I have friends here. They’ll be on watch. Our father will be alive when
I come back, alive and in possession of the kingship. Then what will happen,
will happen.”

“Pray that it be so,” said Sarama.

oOo

Muriadni’s wedding was as wild as one could ask, even as wearied
as people were by three days of festival and sacrifice. Agni whirled back into
it from his conversation with Sarama, seized a cup as it went past and found it
full of kumiss, drank it down and went in search of another. They had put the
bride away once the marriage-words were spoken, hidden her in her tent as was
proper, but the young women were still out and about, dancing their ring-dances
and teasing the men with the flash of slim ankles and the clatter of their
little finger-drums.

One pair of bright eyes called to him from a fall of shadow.
They were not Rudira’s, no, never; Rudira was a married woman. She must keep to
her husband’s tent. She would expect him there—but later. Not so early, not
yet.

These were very fine eyes, as green almost as grass. She who
owned them wore the devices of the Red Deer people, and splendidly too, as if
she were a chieftain’s daughter. Her tunic was rich with beadwork. She
glittered with gauds, brow and throat, cars and wrists and ankles. She might
have been the bride herself, save that the hair unbound beneath the headdress
with its disks of carved and painted bone, proclaimed her both unwed and unbetrothed.

She was hunting a husband, then, and from a covert, as it
were. Agni was not hunting a wife—oh, no; not for a long while yet. Still they
were enchanting, those eyes, even if they were not Rudira’s, and he was warm
with kumiss. What harm after all in honest worship of the gods? This at least
was no man’s wife, least of all his brother’s.

She saw the light in his eye. The dance whirled him into her
reach. He did not recall stretching out his arm, and yet she was caught in the
curve of it, rich with the warm scent of woman.

She could not suffer that, not and be proper; indeed she
must gasp in outrage and whirl out of his grasp. But not before she had
whispered in his ear, “Out behind the tents. Come!”

He had to keep his face blank as the game required, and join
in the dance for a while longer, then drink from the cup that was handed him,
exchange a pleasantry with someone whom he forgot as soon as he was done. Only
then might he begin to wander away.

oOo

The sun had set a little while since. The sky was wild
with stars. The moon was waxing, a bright half-moon. Agni with his hunter’s
eyes needed no aid of torch or firelight to find his way out past the tents,
out where the wind blew untrammeled across the world of grass. It was soft
tonight, soft and cool, no winter in it.

She was waiting for him in the place that everyone knew, a
hollow just far enough from the camp that no one could hear what one did there,
and yet close in if there should be a raid—if there had been a war, which this
year, by the gods’ grace, there was not. She had spread her mantle on grass
well beaten down by assignations before theirs, and arranged herself on it in
all her finery. She had even—wise lady—brought a skin of kumiss and a pair of
cups.

There was nothing either modest or shy about her. No dove’s
voice, either. Hers was clear and perhaps a little sharp, though he could tell
she strove to soften it. “Good evening, my lord,” she said, “and welcome.”

“Well come indeed,” said Agni. He was looming over her. He
dropped to one knee, to bring their heads more level. Even in the dimness her
eyes were bright. Fevered, he would have said; but was it not a fever, after
all, that ran in the blood?

She let fall her veil. He was not greatly disappointed. Her
features were like her voice, a little sharp, but well-shaped. She was not a
beauty, not as Rudira was. Neither was she ugly.

Once her face was bared, her eyes seemed to grow shy. They
lowered. “Am I ill to look at, my lord?”

“No,” said Agni. “Oh, no. Not in the least.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “the rest of me will suit you better.”

He drew breath, to protest perhaps; but the swiftness of her
movement startled him into silence. She was on her feet, looming as he had
loomed a moment before. She took off her garments one by one.

It was a dance, meant to warm a man if he were not warmed to
burning already. She danced it well, and yet she did not linger. As each garment
fell, more of her revealed itself under the moon. Indeed she was fair, deep of
breast, broad of hip, with strong round thighs: made for bearing sons.

At the last garment, the thin brief tunic of fine-tanned
hide, she paused. Agni knelt unmoving. Too late he saw what she had wanted: for
him to rip the tunic from her, to prove his passion.

Passion he had. His rod was stiff under his own tunic. Yet
he was not quite reft of his wits. He was remembering a body far more slender,
far whiter of skin, white as milk, as snow; but hot as the gods’ own fire. This
beside her was an ember among ashes. He began to think perhaps—after all—

Before he could finish the thought, she had caught the
lacings at her throat and tugged them free, and skinned the tunic over her
head. She stood naked before him. Her breasts were full double handfuls, the
nipples as wide as a child’s hand, and dark. Her hips were full as broad and
deep as he had expected, centered with the triangle of her sex, thick hair and
crisp like a horse’s mane, strong with the scent of musk and woman.

A heat came off her, as if she were an open fire. The scent
of her was dizzying. She lifted her breasts in her hands, weighed them as if
they had been twin kids. “Am I not beautiful?” she demanded of him. “Is there a
goddess who is as fair as I?”

A shiver ran down his spine. Even Rudira had never dared to
speak so—though she had mocked her mortal husband often enough. His rod was as
stiff as ever, as if a spell lay on it, the spell of those heavy breasts and that
potent scent. Ill might a woman speak so of the immortals.

Maybe there was a goddess in her, possessing her. She
advanced upon him. He did not move. No spell lay on him: he was sure of that.
He liked to play before he mated; to laugh, to kiss, to tease, till they were
both half blind with wanting one another.

She seemed to know nothing of play. For her this was as grim
as duty.

She did not wait for him to undress as she had done, as he
might have liked to do. She caught at his belt, fumbling the clasp. It slipped
free. She tugged down his trousers. Her breath came hard, as if she ran a race.
“Come, my lord. Why do you dally? Am I ugly after all?”

“Not ugly in the least,” he said, and that was true enough.

She bore him backward. He fell hard, hard enough to jar the
breath from him. “
You
are beautiful,”
she said. “I’ve seen you, wanted you—oh, how I’ve wanted you! Have you wanted
me?”

He did not answer. His voice was not back yet, though his
rod had barely softened. She clasped it in her hand. Her grip was firm.

There was no way to tell her how he liked to do it. She
would not listen. She bent over him, those big breasts swaying, veiling him in
the curtain of her hair. Her breath was strong with kumiss. She had been
drinking deep of it, perhaps to gather courage.

He wanted to laugh, but laughter would have offended her
terribly. It did not do to offend a woman with one’s manly staff in her hand.
She rubbed and squeezed, squeezed and rubbed. What she roused was rather too
much like pain.

His breath had come back, though it was caught in his
throat. He used what there was of it to lift himself up, bearing her with him,
till she lay beneath, he atop her. Her legs had locked about his middle. His
shaft found what it had wanted, armed itself, plunged through a wall that tore,
shredded, was gone.

She cried out. He nearly fell backward, but her arms were
about him, too, arms and legs pinning him, holding him fast. He was deep in
her, the first that had ever done such a thing.

No wonder she had been so maladroit. She had been a maiden.

He was appalled. Of course every girl went virgin to her
wedding, though the blood on the coverlet might be calves’ blood, and even her
husband might know where she had been before. But he had never danced this
dance with a true maiden, a woman who had never known a man. That she was as
old as she was, his own age surely or near to it, and so new to the dance—either
she had father and brothers of exceptional ferocity, or she had kept herself
for some useful purpose.

To snare a prince, perhaps?

She would not let him go. And all the while his thoughts
raced on, frantic as a startled colt, he rode her as a man rides a woman. His
body knew well what it should do, though the soul within it was all scattered
and gone.

Ah well, he thought with what wits he had left: a shrug of
the mind, accepting what he could not help. Let this first ride be as
pleasurable as it could be, since she had forced it on him. He smiled down at
her and stroked her hair, and was almost dismayed at the light in her eyes. He
did not want her to love him; only to remember him with fondness. “There,” he
said, crooning it. “There now. Steady, steady.”

So he would have spoken to a filly whom he was taming. She
responded as the filly might, calming, easing into the dance, which was the
oldest of all.

She was well made for this, deep and strong, not small and
tight as maidens were said to be. She had pleasure, he thought, or feigned it
well: breath that quickened as his stroke quickened, and broke into soft cries,
and of a sudden, as she arched beneath him, a muted shout.

His own breath caught just after, and he stilled, locked
body to body.

She was, he realized without surprise, sobbing into his
neck. Women did that, he had heard. Never women he chose—but then he had not
chosen this one.

He freed himself carefully. She clung with desperate
strength, but he was stronger. “You should have told me,” he said as gently as
he could.

It was not gentle enough. “Now you hate me!”

“I do not.” But, he thought, he well could, if she kept on.
He softened his voice as he might with a particularly aggravating filly whom he
had in mind to train. “Come, sit up, wipe your face. You chose this. Are you
truly sorry that you did it?”

“No!”
she wailed.
But she did sit up, and she did wipe her face—with her hair, which was nearest
to hand.

He smiled at her. “You see? It only takes courage.”

“I am a woman,” she said. “I have no courage to find.”

He snorted. “Oh come! It takes all the bravery in the world
to face what women face, bearing and bringing forth children. They are the
honor of their tribe, the good name of their family. They are a great thing, a
strong thing, and let no man tell you otherwise.”

“You are very strange,” she said.

Yes; and she had stopped blubbering, which was a great
relief. He shrugged. “I’m who I am. My mother wasn’t . . . like
other women. Nor is my sister.”

“Ah,” she said. “Yes. The Mare’s servant. She rides about
like a man, and has no modesty. All the girls are jealous of her.”

“She would be amazed to hear that,” Agni said.

“No, really! They are.”

“Are you?”

She smiled a slow smile that reminded him of the girl who
had so allured him, back among the tents. Then indeed she was beautiful. “I
might be. But could she be here, where I am?”