White Mare's Daughter (27 page)

These people knew nothing of war.

No; surely she was deceived, or had failed to see something
of vital importance. And yet all this place was open to her. These people were
without guile. They hid nothing, unless it might be in their goddess’ temple.

Maybe that was their house of war. Tomorrow she would go
there. She would see if she was let in; then she would see what was kept behind
that door which so seldom opened.

It shook her to think such things; to feel the world
unsteady beneath her. She ate what was set in front of her, blindly, and went
to bed after.

The bed on its platform was hers. Danu had insisted on it.
She had thought it was his whim, atonement for a sin perhaps. She had been
amazed that he made no effort to join her there; that he slept on the floor, as
naturally and as calmly as he waited on her; as if it was only to be expected.

What if—

Again she shut down the thought. She would sleep. Yes. And
in the morning she would discover the truth of this place.

If Catin stayed the night, Sarama was not aware of it.
When she woke in the morning they were both gone. There was food on the table
for her, covered in one of the finely woven cloths that were in such casual use
here. She ate the cheese and the bread and the fruit stewed in honey, and drank
the cup of water just barely sweetened with wine.

The horses were out in the meadow. The Mare barely deigned
to acknowledge Sarama, which was her privilege. The colt called gladly as colts
will, and came running to have his neck scratched. She went on, smiling,
because after all he was an engaging creature.

It was a fair day, warm for this time of year. People were
out and about, and children in particular, faces that she was beginning to
recognize from daily familiarity.

They greeted Sarama with courtesy, often with smiles. They
liked to try words in her language, sometimes a fair string of them. One or two
were growing frankly fluent.

Her own smile died as she reflected on what those easy,
sunny smiles meant. Innocence. Ignorance of war.

There were so many of them, and all so rich. They did so
many things. They worked copper. They made pots. They wove on looms and tanned
hides. They made clothing and shoes. They ground flour and baked bread. They
traded in wonderful things, bright stones, shells whole and carved, wine and
sweet herbs from far away. They sang as they worked, many of them; as she had
caught Danu doing when he made supper of an evening, singing to himself in his
lovely deep voice.

No woman hid in house or tent here. Most of those in the
streets, in fact, were women. Men seemed to keep to the houses, or else to be
out hunting or herding—though always, that she had seen, in company with women.

When she saw little children, as often as not the one
tending them was a man. And that was a shock, too, now that she could see it.
Women had to nurse the babies, that was nothing a man could do, but once they
were weaned, they seemed to be given into the men’s charge.

Sarama saw men walking about with children in slings on
their backs, as women of low estate might do among the tribes. But these were
men in profusions of copper ornaments, in beautiful coats, with strings of
bright beads woven in their hair. Rich men, men of consequence, although they
deferred to women as richly adorned as they.

It was true. Men were as women here, and women were as men.
Everywhere that she looked, she saw it.

It was not obvious, not at first. Only if she studied them
could see how it was. Women ruled here. They ruled with a light hand, but rule
they did. Men were the lesser, as seemingly content to be so as women were on
the steppe.

oOo

The temple rose in the heart of the city, center of all
its circles. It was of two stories like the house in which Sarama was living,
but larger, broader, and loftier.

The peaks of its roof were carved in a strange fashion, huge
bulging eyes in a face half human, half other: bird, fish, trunk and branches
of a tree. Its walls were painted in white and black and red, a dance of
spirals, of branches, of shapes like wings, and shapes that made her blush for
all their innocence, because they made her think of a woman’s sex. There was
strong magic on those walls, magic that even she could sense, who knew little
of the gods of this place.

Or perhaps there was only one goddess. This was her house,
her dwelling in the city. From its summit every morning the Mother lifted her
voice in an eerie shrilling cry, half song, half summoning.

She was calling the sun, Danu had said once. Rousing the
day. As if the sun could not come up of himself; as if he were not a god but a
servant, and must do a woman’s bidding.

The door of the temple was open, as if it waited for her.
Sarama breathed deep before she ventured in. No guard prevented her. No bolt
leaped out of the dimness to transfix her where she stood.

A breath of cool air whispered past her face. The night’s
chill lingered within.

It was only a dim room with a lamp lit in it, flickering on
a stone table. There were vessels on the table, fine work of the potter’s art.
In one, a great bowl, sat or reclined a circle of clay-molded people, women
all, with little round breasts and great round eyes.

A greater image sat beyond the table, a massive blocky thing
rough-carved of stone. Its face was a blank shield with slits of eyes,
noseless, mouthless, but its body was vastly, blatantly female: huge pendulous
breasts, great swollen belly, deep-incised triangle at the meeting of its heavy
thighs. There was nothing human in it, and everything female.

Horse Goddess, when she wore flesh at all, wore the
semblance of the White Mare. She was nothing like this mass of stone.

And yet
, thought
Sarama.
And yet
.

Sarama advanced slowly, lifting each foot and setting it
down with a hunter’s care. The floor was made of stones fitted close together,
polished by time and the passage of feet. They were smooth, and cold even
through the soles of her boots. Winter had settled in them, though autumn
lingered in the world without.

Light came in through the open door. Where it ended, the
lamp somewhat feebly began. Sarama halted in front of the stone table and
looked up at the goddess.

The image sat in a chair of darker stone, more smoothly
carved. It made her think, somehow, of the Mother sitting in the room where
they all gathered in the evenings. The Mother had perfected that same immobility,
that same divine stillness. Perhaps it was the way of kings here, as kings on
the steppe endeavored to be stern and strong.

Past the image Sarama saw a door. It was small, not deliberately
hidden, but not wide open to the world, either. She bowed to the image,
offering it reverence, and perhaps apology, too, for searching out its secret.

There was nothing beyond the door except a stair going
steeply up. Sarama had seen such a thing in the Mother’s house. Here as there,
the stair opened on the roof, a flat space between the carved peaks.

Here must be where the Mother stood to sing her morning
song. Sarama had no sense of sacrilege. This place regarded her with neither
welcome nor hostility. It accepted her.

She rested her hand on the carving of the eastward peak. It
was worn, as if many another hand had rested there.

This place was old. How old she did not know, but she
thought perhaps as old as her own people, as old as the dawn time.

From this eminence she could see all the circles of the
city, ring upon ring of human habitation, shaded by trees, divided by roads,
interrupted by the open square of the market and, behind the temple itself, the
dark loom of trees that surrounded the goddess’ sacred place. Through
winter-bared branches she saw the house in which she had been sleeping, and the
horses, tiny with distance, grazing together down by the river that touched the
city’s edge.

Even the great gatherings of the tribes had not so many tents,
nor spread so wide. She had not seen how large the city was while she was in
it. From above it she understood much that she had been blind to before.

The tribes arranged their tents in lines, straight for the
most part, and in squares round the king’s tent. Some, like those of the White
Horse, even rode to war in ranks, which had proved useful against less
disciplined tribes. These soft edges and nested circles, wreathed in branches
and in faded greenery, would have struck them as very strange.

Sarama, raised on the Mare’s hill, stood outside of both.
She saw what she had come here to see. Truth. A country ruled by women, as men
ruled the steppe.

She should have been more keenly struck with the wonder of
it. She could only think of horsemen riding joyfully to war. And no one here
knew how to fight. Their weapons were all for hunting, for slaughtering cattle,
for harvesting the grain that they had made into a tamed thing.

The horsemen of the steppe could run over these peaceable
people as if they had been grass underfoot. They had no defenses. They knew
none, nor knew the need.

Soft people, rich people. People who had never known hunger
or want, murder or rapine.

The men’s gods had cast their eyes on this place. And Sarama
had been sent ahead of them. This stone goddess with her monstrous breasts and
her masked face was still the goddess of the horses, the women’s protector,
lady of the white mare. She looked after her own.

Sarama stood on the summit of the temple, gripping the head
of the bird-faced roofpeak, and closed her eyes to the crowding world. In the
darkness she felt herself below again in the lamplit gloom, standing near the
goddess’ image. Shapes moved beyond the stone table, glimmering naked
woman-shapes, dancing a spiral dance. Their bodies were human, and not all
young: huge sagging breasts, slack bellies, greying black hair between their
broad thighs. But none of them had a face. They wore the goddess’ own: the flat
shield with its slitted eyes.

Masks. Sarama shivered at their strangeness. Priests on the
steppe would dance masked in the hunting-dances, and in the dances before the
tribes rode off to war. In wearing another face, they became other; became the
gods in whose names they danced.

So too, perhaps, in this place. Every woman was the goddess,
and the goddess every woman.

A mask would not save any woman from the tribesmen’s swords.

Sarama opened her eyes. The air had gone chill: a cloud had
drifted across the sun. She had been waiting impatiently for the goddess’ word;
to discover her purpose here. Now she knew.

“Lady,” she said, “I’m one woman alone. And you ask me to
stand against all of the tribes?”

The goddess never answered such things. Sarama descended
into the temple and thence to the city.

She meant to return to the house by the river, but she took
the long way round, circling the city slowly and more slowly. There was no
wariness here. People made no move to protect themselves or their belongings.
Everything was open, free for the taking.

oOo

It was growing late as she made her way back to the river.
The horses grazed near the house as they liked to do in the evenings, the
better to receive whatever dainty Danu might be persuaded to give them. He,
knowing nothing of horses, treated them much as a man might treat a favorite
hound. They took shameless advantage of him.

Sarama, whose hands were empty of fruit or sweet cakes,
escaped with a nose-thrust from each and a flattened ear from the Mare. She
emerged from the dark of the lower space into light and warmth and a deep voice
singing softly to itself.

He was oblivious to her, stirring something wonderfully
savory in a pot over the fire. It was more than strange to see a man so broad
and strong, doing women’s work with evident pleasure. It made her angry—and why
it should do that, she could not think.

He was a tall man here, and no weakling even had he been a
tribesman. She had seen him carrying half a slaughtered ox from the market, and
watched him butcher it, too, dividing it half for the Mother and half for
himself. He would have been a great warrior, had he turned such strength to the
killing of men.

She had too few words yet to say what she yearned to say. To
cry out to him that the tribes would come with blood-red war—and come far too
soon for him or for his people. Winter would pass, spring would come, and the
horsemen would dare the wood. Their gods would drive them on.

And there were no defenses here. No arts of war. Nothing to
stop them, or to protect the Lady’s country from fire and sword.

Nothing but Sarama.

She must have made a sound: Danu looked up. He smiled as if
he were glad to see her. Perhaps he was only relieved that she had come back
into his charge.

She stalked past him to the inner room. There was no Catin
there today, and no sign of her. Sarama dropped her coat on the floor—knowing
with a small stab of meanness that he would pick it up and lay it in the chest
where in his opinion it belonged—and kicked her boots into a corner, and flung
her cap after it.

Something was lying on the bed, something that looked like a
field at sunset, a little green, a little gold, a little red. It was a coat.
She lifted it and shook it out. It was finely made, bright-stitched with
patterns that made her think of the play of wind in leaves.

So, she thought. Danu had a new coat. But it was rather
narrow to fit across those shoulders. On a whim she slipped it on. It fit—not
badly. Not badly at all. Its fastenings were of pale bone carved like little
fat-breasted women. Each was carved with a different expression: mirth,
contentment, comic surprise.

She looked up into Danu’s face. He was smiling—again. “For
you,” he said.

Her hand ran down the front of the coat, loving the feel of
it, the richness, the fine weaving. But the anger that was always in her when
she looked at him made her say, “Why?”