White Mare's Daughter (20 page)

Sometimes Sarama wondered if she yearned for her people, for
the herd that ran the steppe near the goddess’ hill. She seemed content to be
alone, if only she was near Sarama. And yet horses were herd-creatures; and
these more purely a part of their herd than some, so that horses of other kinds
were strangers, and only their own kind worthy of friendship.

“Horse Goddess blessed them long ago,” the Old Woman had
told Sarama, “and gave them strength and intelligence beyond the common lot of
their kind. But for it she exacted a price. They have little patience for horses
of other kinds, that to them are too patently lesser. And horses of other kinds
look on them in incomprehension; find their language difficult, their spirits
strange.”

“And yet they come to us,” Sarama had said. It was winter,
she remembered, and she was still young enough that her breasts had not budded.
She was grinding dried herbs by the fire, and Old Woman was brewing them into a
potion for the winter rheum. The Mare had not yet come to Sarama, but the Old
Mare drowsed in her stall in the goddess’ house, and a herd of her sisters
grazed the winter grass of the hill just below. Sarama could see them from the
Old Woman’s house, through the door that lay open to let in the sun.

“They come to us,” she said, “and give their hearts to us.”

“Well, and so do we to them,” said Old Woman. “We were made
for them, and they for us, by Horse Goddess in the dawn time. But they grow
few, and we grow fewer. The lesser ones—horses and people—rule the world.”

“Then will we all die out?” Sarama asked. She was calm; the
calm of disbelief.

Old Woman stirred her pot. When Sarama had thought that she
would not answer, she said, “That will be as the goddess wills.”

Often when she said that, Sarama knew not to press her. But
the horses grazing in the windswept grass, the white Mare contentedly asleep in
her stall nearby, struck her so strongly with their beauty that she could not
keep silent. “What does she will? Did she only make them, and us, so that we
could vanish into forgetfulness? What are we for, Grandmother?”

Old Woman frowned slightly, enough that Sarama quailed. Yet
she did not complete the rebuke. “We are her servants. What she does in this,
that you are the last of us, and of the horses there are only these few dozen
in the world—that is known to her, and will come clear in its own time.”

“I think,” said Sarama with shaky defiance, “that she means
us to grow strong again. Someday. When the world is ready for us.”

“Maybe so,” Old Woman said.
And maybe not
, her eyes said; but she did not say it in words.

oOo

Sarama sighed as the memory slipped away. Now Old Woman
was dead, and the Old Mare with her. The herd had gone away from the goddess’
hill. It lived, she knew; she would know if it had died. But where it had gone,
or why, had not been made known to her.

There was still the Mare, content as if Sarama had been her
whole herd and the world about it. So had the Old Mare been. So—if Sarama
admitted the truth—was Sarama with the Mare. That was all her people, and all
the kin she needed, while she rode abroad in the world.

Past that place of open grass and clear sunlight was
nothing but a wilderness of woven trees. Sarama could find her way if the sun
was in the sky, by the wan shadow of it below. In clouds and rain, or by night
when the moon was out of the sky, she could only stop and wait till she had her
guides again, sun and stars that were the same over the forest as over the
steppe.

No tale had told of people in this wood; only of beasts and
birds. And yet as she picked her way, straining to keep the sun behind her in
the morning and before her in the evening, she knew that she was watched. It
was a prickling in her spine, a tautness in the shoulders.

Perhaps it was a wolf, or a forest lion, if there were such.
But the pressure of eyes, the sense of watchfulness, had no taste of simple
beast. This was a human creature.

Or creatures. It, or they, never made a move against her, or
threatened her. They simply watched.

She laid traps for them. They were too canny, or she too
unskilled in such things. She caught nothing; saw no track, heard no body
passing. It was an awareness, that was all. A certainty that she did not ride
alone.

Her wits were slipping. The trees closed in. She yearned
with physical hunger for a stretch of open sky. But even clearings were few,
and in those she felt the eyes more strongly than under the trees. They weighed
on her even more heavily than the shadows of the branches.

Where people were, must be habitations; remains of camps at
the least, or tracks on which they walked. Of beasts she found ample sign, but
of men, nothing.

It must be that she was going mad. That the trees had taken
the sense from her, and the darkness drained the light out of her spirit. She
walked and rode westward because she could think of nothing better to do. She
hunted and foraged when she must, as she must, because she must live to see the
land that the traveller had said was beyond the wood. If there was any such
land. If the wood ever ended.

The Mare was quiet, but Sarama could sense uneasiness in
her, too; tautness in her body at the sudden flight of a bird or the leap of a
deer, or a roll of eye at a wind-gust in the branches. She had never required a
great deal of fodder, but here where grass came seldom and leaves were not
always either sweet or safe to eat, she had begun to drop flesh. Sarama could
first feel, and then see, the jut of ribs along her barrel.

Sarama was growing somewhat ribby herself. It was difficult
to muster will for a hunt, or to lay snares when she stopped because of
darkness or rain. Roots and berries were not as rare as grass, but she seldom
knew if they were safe to eat. Rabbits seemed to gather in tribes and clans in
some part of the wood and not in others. Birds likewise: in one place the air
would be full of their calls and the flutter of their wings; in another, not
one could be seen or heard.

Small things like furry-tailed rats that chittered in the
trees proved not ill to eat, if she could catch them. Sometimes she could not.
Then she went hungry, and told herself that she was fasting. She had fasted
often enough on the steppe, in the goddess’ name. She could fast here. Could
she not?

On the steppe she had had the sun to nourish her. Here she
had little of that. She caught herself more than once, stopping beneath a tree
that had suffered a shaft of light to touch the ground, standing motionless,
drinking the light as if it had been water. She was parched for it, starved for
lack of it.

How many days she had been wandering in this place, she did
not know. She had forgotten. The moon had waned, then waxed again. Was it
waning now? Was it swelling to the full? She could not remember. On the steppe
she would have known by the shifting of seasons whether summer had advanced or
passed. Here the trees were endless, shadowy green. Their kind changed not at
all from spring to winter. They were always the same.

She woke one morning from a dream of sunlit grass, to a
green darkness and a shape of leaves and branches that looked remarkably like a
face. It was a broad face, brown as a tree-bole, with dark eyes set deep in it,
and wild tangle of beard. It was very real, very lifelike, staring down at
her.

She blinked. It vanished. Yet she thought she heard the
faintest whisper, as of leaves parting and then slipping together again.

It had not been inadvertent, she thought. He wanted her to
see him. As to why—who knew? He might not be a man at all, but a spirit of the
wood. He had a look as of something older and wilder, and perhaps darker, too,
than any man she had seen before.

Thereafter she caught glimpses of him, or of men like him,
shadows flitting among the trees, faces in the branches, a gleam of eyes at
dusk or at dawn. She wondered if she had wandered aside from her path to the
westward, whether they would turn against her; or whether they only, ever, watched.

They could not bring back the sun or the sky. Only her will
could do that, her feet walking, the Mare under her when the trees grew wide
and high enough.

oOo

She stumbled into the camp as yet another day was waning.
She had seen, with some startlement, that the trees were different in this
place. They were a softer green, and that green was giving way to gold.

So, she was thinking: it was autumn, or nearly. No wonder
then that the nights grew chill. She had thought it was only the chill in her
heart.

She was on foot, the Mare following. Then she was alone, and
there was sunlight on her face, and a circle of green-golden trees about her;
and in the circle an oddity of shapes. They were tents perhaps, tents woven of
branches, each perched on a platform made of treetrunks.

People stood staring at her. They were thickset,
broad-faced, brown-skinned people, strong and solid to look at, with bones as
heavy as stone, and jaws like outcroppings of granite. And yet there was about
them something wild and shy. They looked like the aurochs, the great bull of
the woods; yet in their eyes she saw the timidity of the deer. There was a
strangeness about them, an otherness. Earth Mother’s elder children, she
thought: people of earth and stone, born before the gods brought air and fire
into Earth Mother’s creation.

She should have turned and run. She was a woman, and alone.
Any man who saw her would reckon her prey—and they did not know Horse Goddess
here. But she stood where she was.

She was not afraid. None of the men was as tall as she,
though even the women were easily twice as broad. They could break her in two,
she had no doubt of it. But that they would—no. There was no hostility in them.

The Mare stepped delicately past her. The people’s eyes
widened. They muttered among themselves: low voices, words that she did not
understand. She heard no fear. Only wonder.

The Mare found a patch of sweet grass near the outermost of
the dwellings. The people drifted toward her, but not too close. They watched
her as Sarama had watched her mother and her aunts once, for the pure delight
of her beauty.

Sarama’s body betrayed her without warning, and without
great gentleness, either. Her knees gave way abruptly. The dark swooped over
the sun. She cried out in protest. Not here—not when she had found the light
again.

oOo

Voices murmured. Someone was singing, or chanting: a kind
of tuneful tunelessness. A manifold reek stung her nostrils. In spite of
herself she picked out the parts of it. Smoke, mansweat, hides tanned and
untanned; roasting meat, burning herbs, and the strong green sweetness of
fresh-cut grass.

She was lying on the grass, that had been spread to make a
bed for her. Walls closed her in. She lay inside one of the dwellings, lit by a
fire that burned in the center.

Some of its smoke escaped through a hole in the roof. The
rest wreathed the people who crowded into the space, thick bodies, broad faces,
bright eyes fixed on her as if they had been waiting long for her to wake.

One bent closest. The face made her think of that which she
had first seen, but they were not the same. This one wore no beard. It could
have been a man’s regardless, with its wide cheekbones and heavy jaw, but the
eyes were a woman’s. The hair was thick and smoke-yellowed and grey with dirt,
but had it been scrubbed clean it would have been as white as the Old Mare’s
hide.

Here was a woman who carried herself like a king. She put
Sarama in mind of the Old Woman: the same steady gaze, the same calm surety of
her place in the world.

She saw that Sarama was awake. Her eyes shifted; she
beckoned. A younger woman, less strong-featured but still as heavy-jawed as
many men that Sarama had known, came out of the crowded people, bearing cup and
bowl. She filled the cup from the bowl and held it out.

The old woman lifted Sarama with an arm too strong to
resist, so that Sarama could take the cup. She sniffed, trying not to seem
suspicious.

It was milk. Goat, she thought. Nothing had been mixed into
it that she could sense. It was warm and fresh, sweet and strong. She had not
known how badly she needed it until she had drunk the bowl dry and been given
another. That too she drained, with a sigh that ran round the circle, and
sparked a flicker of smiles.

Whatever she had done, she had done it well. There was a
great easing among the gathering. They began to chatter to each other, and at
her too, though she understood not a word of it.

Somewhere amid what had become a kind of revel, a feast
appeared: roasted meats and bread made from wild grains, milk and honey, cheese
and fruits, more good things than she had known the forest could provide. What
had seemed a barren wilderness, for these people must be a rich and pleasant
country.

Surely they seemed at ease in it, and joyful, welcoming a
stranger as if she had been both friend and kin. Her own blood had not received
her so well or with such open gladness.

oOo

Sarama tested her welcome. She rose and walked out.

No one stopped her or tried to hinder her. She emerged from
the close and crowded place into a startling blaze of light. It was full day,
and cloudless, and the sun so strong that her eyes streamed with the shock of
it. While she lay unconscious she had been stripped of all but her soft leather
undertunic. Even that was almost too much for the heat of the day.

She stood on the platform of a house near the center, with
the others in nested circles about it. People came and went among the houses.
Beasts rooted in the shade beneath—pigs, but smaller and less fierce to look at
than the wild boar that only the strongest on the steppe had dared to hunt.

Neither people nor pigs seemed dismayed by her scrutiny. The
people, if they saw her, smiled. As rough as they seemed, with their heavy
faces and their mossy tangles of hair, they were gentle enough in their
manners.