White Mare's Daughter (21 page)

Not one spoke a language that she knew. Even the traders’
argot, of which she had learned a little, met with blank stares and
uncomprehending smiles.

They seemed to be testing her mastery of tongues as well:
people inside and now people in the street would stop and speak, sometimes in a
quick light rhythm, sometimes in tones more guttural, buried deeper in the
throat. None of it made sense to her.

Somehow she had not expected the people of the west to be so
foreign that she could not understand them. The traveller had said nothing of
that.

But, she thought, these were not the westerners he had
spoken of. This was a village, and a small one at that, smaller than a
clan-encampment of her own tribe. She saw no riches, no woven fabrics, no pots
wonderfully and intricately made, no copper nor anything that could be the
metal called gold. These were savages, hunters and herdsmen from the look of
them, rich in contentment but in little else that the men of the steppe might
reckon valuable.

There were, to be sure, no horses. Unless those were hidden
in the wood and all signs concealed from her, then that much of the tale was
true. This country knew nothing of Horse Goddess’ children.

Sarama was not a prisoner here. She could descend the ladder
made of a cut treetrunk with well-placed branches, and walk where she pleased.
Children followed her as children loved to do, because she was something new to
run after and stare at.

She could walk if she wished right out of the village, back
to the wood again.

At the thought of walking in that green darkness, away from
the sun, her body shuddered. She had to stop, cling to the piling that upheld a
house, gasp till she could breathe again. The flock of children crept in close,
staring and whispering. Their curiosity roused her somewhat. She pushed herself
erect and made herself walk onward, round the camp to the place from which she
had begun.

The revel was still going on, the revellers delighted to see
her, calling to her in their incomprehensible language, offering hands to pull
her up onto the platform. She set her heels when they would have pulled her
inside. They laughed with no sign of offense, and brought the revel to her
since she would not give up the sky.

Words were of no use, but the people of the wood spoke
well enough by signs and smiles, inclinations of head and hand, and sounds
that, though not words, had meaning enough. From them Sarama gathered that her
kind was known to them; that the Mare was known, and looked on with reverence.
As to how they knew without words to convey such things, they smiled and
pointed to their breasts and bellies, and thence to the trees that ringed their
village about. Their gods, they seemed to say. Their gods told them.

Her own goddess granted her the mercy of rest, for a little
while. But after the day of sun and two days of cold driving rain, when the sun
came back again, she saw how the trees had gone all golden. The day was warm,
but the night had been cold, a sharp bite of chill when she went out late to
relieve herself.

She gathered her belongings. The house in which she had
slept, which she thought might belong to the elder of the clan—if an elder
could be a woman—was unwontedly empty, but there were people enough out and
about.

The Mare, as always, had an entourage of the curious, the
young and not so young. They watched as Sarama picked out her feet, combed mane
and tail with deft fingers, and readied her to ride. Someone had bathed her
this morning; she was damp and gleaming, and there was a garland of flowers
about her neck, golden and red, the colors of autumn.

Courtesy of the steppe would have sent Sarama to the king to
bid farewell, but there was no king here. She wavered, not ready to mount, yet
desperate to be away.

As she stood there, a small flurry brought her about. The
old woman whose guest she had been walked toward her in a shifting crowd of
people. They were dancing, almost, handlinked or alone, weaving in and out,
laughing when they tangled.

The elder wore a crown of flowers. She smiled as she
approached Sarama, spread her gnarled hands, bent with unexpected grace. One of
the young girls with her danced forward, balancing a bowl in lifted hands.

It was goat’s milk, again: their drink of parting, it
seemed, as well as of greeting. The milk of greeting had been unadorned. The
milk of parting was sweet with honey. Sarama drank it down, while the people
smiled and nodded, and some of the girls giggled, and the boys scowled and
thrust out their chests at one another.

The elder herself took the bowl from Sarama’s hands, bowed
over it and passed it to the girl who waited to take it. Then she took Sarama’s
hands in strong dry fingers, turned them palms up and looked hard and long at
each. She seemed to read something there as a scryer might in a clear pool, or
a priest in the stars.

A sigh escaped her. She looked bright-eyed into Sarama’s
face, and said something in that guttural language which Sarama could not
understand. It was a prayer, her manner said, or a blessing.

Sarama bowed to her in turn. For lack of greater
inspiration, she said what her people would say on departing for a journey.
“May the gods keep you,” she said. “May Horse Goddess hold you in the palm of
her hand.”

The old woman nodded and smiled. She could no more have
understood Sarama than Sarama had understood her, but blessings were much the
same wherever one was.

oOo

In mutual amity, with smiles and nods and gestures of
farewell, the people of the village sent Sarama on her way. Some followed her,
as she might have expected; trailing after her far into the wood.

They helped her more than they could ever have known. While
they were with her, she could turn her mind away from the wood, from the
dimness that closed about her, from the dearth of sunlight that had driven her
so close to mad before. It would do so again. She could feel the madness
hovering.

These people held it at bay. Inevitably they fell behind,
but some few remained with her, and one pair of sturdy young creatures, as like
as brother and sister, seemed to have appointed themselves her guardians. They
strode just behind the Mare when the track was narrow, beside her when it
widened. One carried a bow, one a bone-tipped spear. They did not speak, to her
or to one another.

When, near evening, Sarama looked about for a place to camp,
the woman slipped ahead. The Mare seemed content to follow her.

She led them to a clearing. A spring bubbled in it. A tree
bent over the spring, heavy with fruit.

The woman had vanished. The man settled by a ring of stones,
a fire-ring of evident antiquity, and set to kindling a fire. After a while, as
the light faded from the sky, the woman came back with a young deer over her
shoulders. They dined on venison roasted over the fire with herbs from the
clearing, and ripe sweet fruit, some roasted with the deer, some fresh from the
tree.

Sarama did not know what she had done to earn this
guardianship. Perhaps, as with Gauan’s people, it was the Mare. Whatever the
cause, she was grateful.

She should perhaps be apprehensive; should wait to be
waylaid, robbed and beaten and left for dead. But not here. Not these people.

If she was a fool, then so be it. If these guides led her
astray, Horse Goddess would set her on the right path. She must trust in the
goddess. Always; unshakably. Or there was no trust in the world.

oOo

Her guides, guardians, whatever they reckoned themselves,
continued with Sarama. They made no effort to divert her from her course,
except when it turned aside from true west; as too often it did in the dark
tangle of the wood. But they knew, perhaps in their bones, which way was true.
So did she know on the steppe, from the angle of sun or star, or from the lie
of the land when rain or mist or snow obscured the sky.

These guides were a gift. They hunted the wood, fished the
rivers. They made her eat when she would have simply slept, and rest when she
would have gone on too long or too far. Because of them she rode safe and
strong, and stronger as she went on, though she would never be wholly herself
until she stood under sky again, unshadowed with trees.

She had thought them brother and sister, but that, it
seemed, was only her eye that had not learned to tell one broad heavy-jawed
face from another. In the nights she heard them together, sounds that she could
hardly mistake.

That too was a comfort, warm and real and unmistakably human:
all that the wood was not, nor for her could ever be. She wanted only to be out
of it. If she could—if there was ever an end to it.

That was her great fear. That the trees went on and on. That
there was no country of the west, no plain well watered with rivers, no great
gathering of people who had never known the horse. That she would journey
westward until she died, and never find aught but an endless tangle of trees.

oOo

On the day when she knew that even for Horse Goddess, even
for her soul’s sake, she could not go on, on the day when she had determined
that if the wood did not end by evening, she would give up her service and turn
back eastward, the trees opened before her. That was nothing to astonish her.
There had been clearings enough with her guides’ help, even a village of people
like them, who welcomed her as those others had, and showed no fear of the
stranger.

But this light was brighter than any she remembered. It was
evening light, red-golden, bathing the trees with a sheen as of copper, or of
blood. Shadows of the trees stretched long behind her.

Her guides, always so silent, were murmuring to one another.
She heard no fear in it; yet there was a kind of excitement, as if they had
come on something new.

They had fallen behind her, rarity enough that she might
have remarked on it. But she was too intent on the light. The Mare’s head was
up, her ears pricked.

The trees thinned. And then, all at once, they ended. A few
stragglers wandered down a long hillside. Grass grew there, sere with summer’s
ending. A wide rolling country opened before her, so wide that she reeled,
caught unawares after the stifling closeness of the forest.

Just as she willed to venture forward, the Mare essayed a
step. Her nostrils were wide, her head high, drinking this new and wonderful
air.

She was well away from the loom of the wood before Sarama
felt any lack. Sarama turned to look over her shoulder. Her guides stood in the
shadow of the trees, visible only to eyes that knew to find them. They did not
move.

Sarama opened her mouth to call to them, but shut it with
the words unuttered. So it always was with spirits of a place. They were bound
to it. They could not leave it.

Perhaps she was a spirit of the steppe, a creature of sky
and of open spaces. She could feel her heart grow wide, her soul unfurl. She
could not make herself turn back, even if the Mare would have allowed it. Her
thanks must go unspoken.

She lifted a hand. One of the woodfolk lifted a weapon in
return: the bow, from the curve of it.

She blinked, or shifted slightly. When she looked again, her
guides were gone.

oOo

It was night under the trees. Here under the sky, the
light lingered.

Sarama rode on in it, keeping the westward way. Somewhere on
the hills in front of her, or in the hollows between, were habitations of men.
If the traveller had spoken true. If he had not lied, or stretched the truth to
breaking.

He had not spoken of the forest people; but perhaps he had
not known of them. They were secret, and shy, though welcoming to one who had
fallen into their midst. He might have passed through the wood without ever
finding one of their villages.

But that he had found this country, she could hardly doubt.
There it was before her, plains and rivers, and on the plains and beside the
rivers, shapes that might have been crags, or heaps of stones, or dwellings of
human people.

The Mare carried her through the waning light. The Mare was
not weary, nor afraid of the night. Sarama, who must confess to both, lacked
will to hold her back.

This she had come for. This she must face. Whatever it was.
Whatever the goddess wanted of her. Was she not the goddess’ servant?

In Larchwood in the autumn, when they brought in the
harvest, the young men danced for the goddess’ glory—and for their own, too,
while the women watched. After days of grueling labor, oftentimes against the
threat of rain, when the barns were full and the winter’s comfort secured, they
bathed all together in the river, put on their best finery, plaited flowers and
leaves and ears of wheat or barley in their hair, and came out in firelight to
dance the harvest-dance.

In Three Birds it was much the same. Danu had left the
horse-colt in the autumn pasture with the goats, entrusted him to the herders’
care, and come down to the city to help with bringing in the harvest. On this
last night, with every muscle groaning and his body yearning to fall into a bed
somewhere and sleep till spring, he found himself as he always had before,
armlinked with the rest of the bone-weary men.

The drums beat strength into him. The pipes sent the blood
coursing swifter through his veins. The singing—clear voices of women, deep
voices of men—lifted him up.

The Lady’s song was different here, but its rhythms were
close enough. Her praises changed little from city to city. She was the great
one, the Mother, life-giver, creator. She woke the earth in the spring, taught
it to burgeon in the summer, made the harvest rich with autumn’s coming; and
when, with winter, the earth slept, she watched over it, guardian and
protector, till spring should come again.