White Mare's Daughter (14 page)

Without thinking he snorted back. It pawed the grass. Its
hoof was undivided: hard, round, black, a single thing.

Again as his body bade him, he eased forward. The
creature—the horse—did not retreat. It watched him alertly, eyes bright under
the thick forelock.

It reminded him, suddenly and incongruously, of Tilia. Just
so would she eye him when she had a mind to test his patience.

He had never been afraid of Tilia. Nor, for that matter, had
she ever feared him. This creature seemed of the same mind. It stood still even
as he came within reach.

He laid a hand on its neck. The fur was soft and rather
thick. Winter fur. It was coming out in patches, showing a lighter, far thinner
coat beneath.

It itched, he knew without needing to ask. He rubbed the
broad flat neck, carefully at first, then more vigorously as the horse leaned
into his hand. More, it told him. There. And there. And there: all over,
shoulder and back, belly and haunches.

It was male. He was rather surprised. Here in the Lady’s
grove, male things were seldom welcome.

Well; and perhaps that was why Catin had brought him here.
To show him the secret that she had promised. To . . . test him?

He turned to her. She had not left the field’s edge. He had
to raise his voice so that she could hear him. “Do the men of your city come
here, too?”

“No,” she said.

“Why?”

“The Lady forbids,” she said.

“Yet you brought me,” said Danu. “Shall I be condemned now?”

“No,” Catin said. “The Lady asked for you. In the night she
told me:
Bring the man here.”

“In the night? And not before?”

“In the night,” said Catin, “before I left Three Birds.”

Danu lowered his eyes. “Does my Mother know what you keep
here?”

“Yes,” Catin said.

“It’s not . . .” said Danu; and yelped. The
horse had nipped him, caught him in the shoulder, painfully, and danced away
with head and tail high. It was laughing at him.

He finished what he had begun, through gritted teeth. “It’s
not a spirit, or a thing of the dark. It’s an animal. It bites.”

“Yes,” said Catin. He thought she might be laughing behind
her carefully bland face.

“And you keep it hidden?” he demanded. “Why? What’s there to
hide?”

“Fear,” she said. “Holiness. This is the Lady’s creature.”

“This is not his place,” Danu said. He did not look at her
as he said it.

His eyes were on the horse as it circled the field, snorting
and shying at shadows. “He needs his own kind. Or failing that, room to run,
and companions in his running.”

“We have no other horses,” Catin said.

“Goats,” said Danu. “Let him run with the goats.”

“And let him escape?”

“No,” Danu said. He did not know where the words came from.
They were in the turn of the horse’s head, the flick of his heel. “He’ll not
run away. He was born here. But he was never made to live in solitude.”

“And what of the people?”

“The people know,” he said. “Don’t they?”

“In Larchwood,” she said, “yes. But the Mother—”

“I’ll speak to the Mother,” Danu said; and stood amazed to
hear himself say it.

It was the horse. He did not know this thing called
submission. He only knew the wind that called him, the earth under his feet,
the blood that ran swift as spring waxed into summer.

He danced up to Danu, head high, half in play, half in
challenge. He was heavier, less graceful than a deer, and yet beautiful, with a
power that no deer ever had. When he was grown, he would carry the weight of a
man, and never stagger or stumble. Men and women mounted on the likes of him
could outrun the wind.

Danu held up his hand, wary of wicked teeth, but unafraid.
The horse blew warm breath in his palm. He worked a knot out of the thick
coarse mane, and rubbed the neck beneath it. There was a great pleasure in that
simple thing.

He hated to leave the horse, but the sooner he spoke to the
Mother, the sooner the beast would be free. It followed him back across the
field. On the wood’s edge it paused. He fought the urge to hesitate; made
himself walk into the shadow of the trees. Catin was ahead of him, leading him
on the hidden path.

Behind him he heard footfalls, and a muted snort. He
stiffened but did not turn to drive the horse back. If it followed—if the Lady
willed—who was he to gainsay it?

Where the path turned, where it seemed to vanish into
tangled undergrowth, the horse halted. Danu could not pause, could not turn, or
he would lose his guide. It startled him, how hard that was, how much he wanted
to turn back.

oOo

“The Lady speaks to you,” the Mother of Larchwood said.
They had found her in the house of a friend, helping that one tend the kiln,
for she was a potter. Danu had to move carefully in space shrunk small by the
potter’s wares, finished and unfinished.

The potter looked more like a Mother than the Mother did, a
vastly beautiful woman with wonderful, delicate hands. Those hands shaped a pot
on a wheel, while the Mother worked a small bellows, feeding the fire in the
kiln.

Danu waited to be acknowledged. He had been seen, he could
not doubt that: the potter had smiled at him, a smile of warm and open
pleasure. But the Mother, preoccupied, did not spare him a glance.

Only when the fire was burning to her satisfaction did she
leave the bellows and turn. Danu bent his head in respect. She smiled as the
potter had: startling, because he had never seen her smile before.

He managed to smile back. Then she said it, the thing that
he could not believe: “The Lady speaks to you.” It was her greeting, and
addressed to him, he could not doubt it: she met his eyes, and not her
daughter’s.

He was not fool enough to ask how she could know. Mothers
knew. But he did say, “I hear no voice.”

“She seldom speaks in words,” the Mother said. The potter
nodded. The wheel spun, the pot taking shape on it, a thing of magic and of the
woman’s hands. That was the Lady too, he thought. It was all the Lady.

He shook his head in confusion. “She speaks to the Mothers,”
he said. “She speaks to my sisters. She never speaks to me. Why should she?
What can I possibly be to her?”

“Her child,” said the Mother. “Tell me what she said to
you.”

She said nothing,
Danu began to say, but stopped himself. “She said—she showed me—the horse—” He
glanced at the potter. She listened without surprise. “The horse,” he said. “It
can’t live as it is now, alone. It needs the sky. It needs companions. Goats,
maybe—sheep are too dull, and cattle too slow. Since it can’t have—”

The Mother nodded slowly, eyes on his face, as if she
studied it. As if she had hoped to hear such a thing from him.

Catin spoke behind him. “Mother! Dare we? Can we? What if it
runs off?”

“Then that will be the Lady’s will,” the Mother said, as
serene as ever a Mother could be. “This was given to her, not to us, though we
have kept it in her name. You know it was not thriving; it was running,
endlessly, and tearing at its house, and fleeing from anyone who came to tend
it.”

Danu turned to stare at Catin. She had never said a word of
that.

She seemed unaware of him. Her eyes were on the Mother. “It
had calmed before we left.”

“And your dreams were darker than ever.” The Mother shook
her head slightly, as if to silence Catin before she spoke again. “It is all
bound together. The dreams, the horse. This one, this child of Three Birds.
What did the horse do when it saw him?”

“It came to him,” Catin said almost sullenly. “It spoke to
him. It never spoke to any of us.”

“Perhaps none of us knew how to listen.” The Mother warmed
him again with her smile. “It told you what it needed in order to thrive.”

He nodded. “You’ve been afraid of it,” he said. “Haven’t
you?”

“It told you that?” Catin demanded.

He answered her, but spoke to the Mother. “It’s neither
dream nor demon. It’s living flesh. The Lady speaks to you. Did she tell you
nothing of this?”

“We were afraid,” the Mother said. “It was born here, in
this city, of one of the horses that the stranger brought. When he left us, the
Lady asked that the young one—the foal, he called it; the colt—be left as
tribute. He had no objection. It was young and small, he said, and would slow
his return; but it was old enough to live apart from its mother. He told us how
to feed and care for it. But it wanted none of us. We kept it in the temple for
a time, till its pacing and fretting grew too much to bear. We coaxed it into
one of the sheepfolds. It broke free and ran into the Lady’s grove, and there
stayed. We built the house for it. We fed it as we could. It let none of us
near it, nor let us touch it. It might have been a wild thing, for all the
trust it gave us.”

“It smelled your fear,” Danu said. “One of you could have
gone in with courage in your heart, and it would have come to you. Then you
could have led it out again. It can’t live in so small a space, not if it’s to
grow and be strong.”

“It will run away,” Catin muttered.

The Mother ignored her; therefore Danu did the same. “Since
it speaks to you,” the Mother said, “then I name you its keeper. Do with it as
the Lady bids you. I think that she brought you here for this, even more than
for the rest.”

Danu did not know that, but then he was not a Mother. He
bowed to her, for respect and for submission. “May I do as—as the Lady tells
me? May I command people if I must?”

“Whatever she bids,” the Mother said, “you may do. My people
will obey you.”

They would do that. He saw the flash of her glance at her
daughter, and the inclination of the potter’s head. The rest would follow where
those three led.

He bowed again, lower this time. As he straightened, he saw
that the potter’s wheel had stilled. On it sat a graceful shape, a vessel for
oil perhaps, with a handle like the curve of a horse’s body, and the rear of
its head above. Power and grace. And no fear.

Yes
, he thought.
Yes
. No fear. Without fear they could
master anything; even a creature out of a dream. Even a horse.

The savage from beyond the wood had shown the people of
Larchwood how one confined and led a horse: much as one did an ox or a sheep,
with a cord knotted into a halter for the head. Danu might have trusted the
horse to follow him at the Lady’s bidding, but Catin was not so certain of the
beast. Danu was not in a mood to contest with her.

The horse, it seemed, was; but while he would not come near
Catin, he stepped willingly to Danu and suffered the halter to be slipped over
his nose and ears. He had worn it before, Catin had said, when he was small;
the savage had taught him to lead and to obey, though no one had succeeded with
him since the savage went back into the east.

Danu did not see the difficulty. The horse—the colt—was
large, but oxen were larger, and heavier, too. He liked to dance and snort and
threaten terrors, but so did a he-goat or even a young ram. Any shepherd knew
to keep the will firm and the lead well secured, and the beast would give up
its fighting and go where it was led. No beast could be as insistent as man or
woman could, unless driven by fear or hate.

The colt had no fear, nor had ever learned to hate the
people who tended it. That he had little respect for them, Danu could well see;
but he had learned the art young, and Danu bade him remember it. The
crooked-horned ram in Three Birds had been more obstinate by far, and more
willing to wreak bodily harm on anyone who presumed to lead him. The colt would
strike but not to wound, and bite, but not when halted by a firm hand and
firmer voice.

The flurry of argument was brief enough by the sun’s path,
and ended in the colt’s walking sweetly beside Danu to the grove’s edge. The
trees alarmed him; he pressed closer then, and paused often to arch his neck
and snort.

Catin’s eyes would roll back then as she led them through
the wood, white as the colt’s. He could not stroke her neck and soothe her as
he did the horse, but he pitched his voice to carry. Maybe it comforted her; or
eased her fear at least, because the horse would do nothing that he did not
allow it to do.

They came out of the grove into the full light of the sun.
The colt threw up his head at the flame of it, braced his feet and opened his
mouth and loosed a cry such as Danu had never heard. It was like the trumpeting
of a stag, the bellow of a bull; but clearer, higher, more piercing than
either. The force of it nigh flung him down.

Somehow he kept his grip on the rope, and kept his feet.
Catin had clapped hands over her ears. The city that had seemed deserted when
they sought the grove was suddenly full of people, peering out of windows and
doorways, running into the streets, staring at the beast that had raised such a
peal of sound on the edge of the Lady’s grove.

Danu had never craved to be stared at as some people did.
Kosti-the-Bull had loved it, had done great feats simply to draw the women’s
eyes. Not so Danu. He was a quieter spirit.

And here he stood on the edge of Larchwood, clinging to the
lead of this great, trumpeting creature, with every eye on both of them. He
felt the slow heat rise in his body.

The colt did not care how bitterly he embarrassed the man.
He danced to the end of the lead, and pawed, impatient.

Danu scrambled himself together. It was some little distance
to the goats’ spring pasture. Danu would have to walk it through the much too
richly peopled city, with the colt snorting at everything, dancing and shying,
making a spectacle of himself.

“The Lady bids it,” Danu said to himself, and perhaps to the
colt. He stepped forward. The colt danced with him.

Step by step. The colt was quiet now. Amazingly so. Perhaps
the Lady had calmed him. He offered no insolence. He stepped lightly among the
trees and the houses, alert, prick-eared, but obedient.