White Mare's Daughter (28 page)

“You were cold,” he said. He picked up her own coat as she
had known he would, and shook his head as he looked at it, prodding one of its
many worn patches. “I can mend this. But you need a warmer coat.”

“This is warm,” she said.

“So,” he said. “You do speak better than you would admit.”

She shut her mouth and glared.

He laughed. “Come and eat,” he said.

When Sarama came to Larchwood, Danu had stopped dreaming
of blood and fire. But the night he gave her the coat that the Mother’s
daughters had woven and he had sewn, slipping her own coat out of the chest at
night to match the size, the dream came back.

Now the shadows had faces. Narrow sharp-boned faces, strange
pale eyes. All of them were mounted on horses.

They were riding, more of them than he could count, shoulder
to shoulder, and in each hand a great long knife or a wicked-bladed spear. They
were hunting. And what they hunted—

He woke with a cry. Something trapped him—he was hunted—

He flung it off. It fell hard, with a gasp that startled him
into memory. He leaped from his pallet to kneel by Sarama.

She had had the wind knocked out of her, but she could still
muster her wonted glare. He lifted her while she was too stunned to resist,
finding her again a lighter burden than he expected. She had no more bulk to
her than a bird. He laid her on the bed.

“You,” she said, still struggling a little for breath, “are
too strong.”

He flushed. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t!” Her voice was fierce. It made him stiffen. “Don’t
say sorry. Stand up. Be strong.”

“You said I was too—”

“I mean,” she said, “very. Very strong.”

Maybe, he thought. She was a difficult creature, more
difficult than most. Her hand darted out to grip his arm. “You had bad—” She
groped for the word.

“Dream,” he said, rather thick in his throat. “I had a bad
dream.”

“Very bad,” she said. “Tell me.”

“Why should I tell you?”

He bit his lip. That had escaped without thought, without
any vestige of proper conduct.

She did not seem appalled. “Because,” she said, “I ask.”

He almost laughed. Oh, that was proper: if one were, for
example, his sister Tilia. Because she asked, then, and because he was reeling
still from the memory of the dream, he told her what he had dreamed. Blood,
fire. Men on horses. Knives and spears. And screaming. People screaming in an
extremity of fear and pain.

When he stopped, because he had no breath or will to go on,
she said a word.

“War.”

He stared at her.

“War,” she said. “Men fight, men kill. That is war.”

“War.” It was a brief word, to be so terrible. Its taste was
oddly bitter. “War. You have a name for it.”

She nodded. “We . . . have much of it.”

“You kill each other?”

His horror must have struck her strangely: her eyes were
wide, fixed on him. “Men kill,” she said. “Men fight in wars.”

“Men kill?”

Her eyes flickered. Was she laughing? “Yes,” she said.
“Men.”

“Not here,” said Danu.
“Not
here.”

He did not know if she slept after that. He lay on his
pallet, wide awake, staring into the shadows. Between his dream and her words,
he did not know that he would ever sleep again.

oOo

Danu had learned a new word, discovered a new thing, and
it gave him no joy at all. In Three Birds he would have taken his trouble to
the Mother. In Larchwood he should, and he did intend to, but he was slow to
come to it.

He brooded on it as he went about his duties. Sarama, to
whom this horror must be an old thing, hardly to be remarked on, seemed not to
notice his silence.

What it must be to be one of her people, to have a word for
the killing of men; to know at once what had so baffled the Lady’s people, the
thing that she had called, without hesitation, war.

At that, she seemed to have a trouble of her own, and Danu
was a part of it. It was not his ill dream—or not only that. She watched him
when she might have thought he did not see. Something about him perturbed her.

He could not imagine what it was. Perhaps that he did not go
out and kill someone? If men in her country were given to bloodshed, if they
were not like men here but like young forest lions, or like wolves in a hungry
winter—then well she might be looking for him to turn manslayer.

Was that, he wondered, why she had been so strange at her
first waking? She had recoiled from him, had conducted herself as if she
expected him to harm her. Was this what she had looked for? To be killed, because
the men of her people were all mad?

If that was so, then her people were barbarous. And they
were coming. This was the Lady’s warning, this her messenger. The red thing,
the thing called war, rode in her wake.

oOo

“Tell me about the women,” he said to her of an evening,
when the first snow hung heavy in the clouds, and the fire within held off the
numbing cold without. “Your men kill, you say. What do the women do?”

She regarded him in some little startlement. He had not, he
realized belatedly, said a word to her all day. Or the day before, either.

He was failing of his teaching. But she, somehow, had
learned to speak more clearly, with fewer stumbles. “The women do nothing,” she
answered him.

“What, nothing at all? Not one thing?”

“They do what you do,” she said with a touch of venom. “They
cook. They clean. They serve.”

“And they let the men kill? Why do they allow it? Where are
the Mothers?”

“There are no Mothers,” she said. “The men are—the men tell
everyone what to do.”

“And everyone listens?”

“Everyone obeys.”

Danu blinked hard. Sarama was watching him again with that
odd intensity. “You were afraid of me,” he said. “Because you thought—because
men in your country are not tame creatures.”

“I was not afraid of you,” she said, firmly but without anger.
“I was . . . wary. Men don’t ask. Men take.”

“Here,” said Danu, “we ask.”

Her lip curled. “You are weak.”

“Is that weakness? To ask before one takes?” Danu curled his
own lip in his own flare of scorn. “Then I am weak. I would rather be weak than
whatever you reckon strong.”

oOo

At least, Danu thought, Sarama had stopped pretending that
she would not learn the Lady’s tongue. She had learned it well. That it had
taken a quarrel to reveal it . . . so be it. He was in no
conciliatory mood himself.

She seemed startled in the morning when he would not smile
at her, would offer her no more than the barest courtesy: silent service,
averted eyes. After some few moments of it, she began to laugh.

Danu gritted his teeth and finished filling her cup. As he
began to withdraw, she stopped him. He stared at her long pale hand on his
broad brown wrist. She was stronger than she looked.

He could still have broken her over his knee.

“You are not weak,” she said. “Is that why you’re angry?
Because I said you are weak.”

He would not dignify that with a response. He pulled against
her grip. She tightened it. “Let me go,” he said.

“No,” she said.

He stood still.

“You see,” said Sarama. “Not weak. Not strong, either. You
do not know how to fight.”

“Fighting is for children,” he said, “and for animals in
rut. Not for men.”

“Men fight better than any,” said Sarama.

He twisted free of her. “I will not fight.”

“Fight will come to you,” she said. “They come. You saw in
your dream.”

“The Lady will prevent them,” he said with more confidence
than he felt.

“Lady—Horse Goddess—sent me,” Sarama said. “I think—to
teach. To fight.”

To teach you to fight.

Danu shook his head. “No. Animals fight. Not men.”

“Men,” said Sarama, “and women. You can learn.”

“I will not,” said Danu.

“You will die,” said Sarama. She said it dispassionately.
“In war, you fight, or you die.”

“That is not a human thing,” Danu said, “or a thing of the
Lady.”

“It is what is,” said Sarama.

He had never hated anyone, nor wanted to. He did not hate
her. But the words she said, the things she made him think of, were terrible.

So too the dreams. They were true, a truth worse even than
he had feared. Men killing men.

“Why?” he demanded of Sarama. “Why do they do it?”

“To get,” she said, “to be—more. To be more. To have.
To—win.” Her hand swept the room. It was a simple room as he would think of it,
but rich in comfort. “To have this.” She touched the armlet that he had won
from Tilia. “And for this.”

“For this?” He smoothed the armlet. “They could trade for
it. Why take it?”

She shook her head sharply, perhaps in disgust, perhaps in
frustration. “Trade is not—trade is a small thing. War is great.”

“I do not understand you,” Danu said. “I do not want to
understand you.”

“You must,” she said. “Or you die.”

“I think I would rather die.” He snatched his mantle off its
peg, not even caring that he had left everything, breakfast half served, fire
unbanked, nothing done that should be done to prepare for the day. It did not
even matter what he flung himself out into: the raw cold of a snowy morning,
snow underfoot, snow falling on his head.

It cooled him. That was good. He only wanted to be away, to
escape from the thoughts she forced on him, the words he had no desire to
learn.

Danu had gone out and not come back. Sarama might well have
left the house—his house, which he kept as if he had been a woman—for him to
look after, but a pot had boiled over, nearly quenching the fire.

She leaped to its rescue. Once she had done that, it was not
difficult to remember skills she had learned in Old Woman’s service.

It was rather more fitting she should do these things than
that bull of a man. A bull who would not fight to defend his herd. What idiocy
did they teach their men here? How had they lived so long, grown so rich,
without ever knowing the meaning of war?

Their Lady had protected them. Danu had said so. But the
gods of the steppe were coming, and they had no mercy on the weak.

“Animals fight,” Sarama muttered. She spat into the fire.
“Idiots!”

It took her a remarkably long time to perform the tasks that
for Danu were so swift and so evidently easy. She was rather glad of them. They
absorbed her mind; they shut out, somewhat, the clamor of the truth. That she
was here for this. To teach the arts of war to a people who had never heard of
war and did not wish to hear of it.

oOo

As she finished the last of the sweeping and tidying, the
ladder creaked. She looked toward it with something rather like gladness—that
she told herself was relief.

The head that climbed up from below was dark, but its hair
was almost straight and not richly curling, and its face was narrow as these
people went, pinched narrower with hostility. Sarama set the broom in its
corner, carefully, and put on a face of greeting. “Catin,” she said, since she
knew no other title.

Catin did not return the courtesy. She set fists on hips and
glowered at Sarama. “What did you do to Danu?”

Sarama blinked. “What—” She mustered her wits. “I did
nothing.”

“You did something,” Catin said. “He came to us like
stormwrack. He sits in the Mother’s garden by the temple, where no other man is
allowed to go, and the snow heaps white on his shoulders, but he will not move.
He will not speak.
What did you do to
him?
”

Sarama did not understand every one of that spate of words,
but she understood enough. “He sits in the snow?”

“He sits in the snow,” Catin said, mocking her stumbling
tongue. “Why?”

“You don’t know?”

Catin surged forward. Sarama braced for a blow.

But it seemed that even the women here, though they were
like men in everything else, were taught not to fight. Catin stopped before she
struck, stood with fists clenched, flung words in Sarama’s face.
“You know!”

Sarama very much feared that she did. She could explain war
to this woman, too, and send her off to sit brooding in the snow. She would
explain it to the whole city, to this whole country. Then maybe, just maybe,
someone would wake to sense.

Or they would all freeze to death, and Sarama would await
the coming of the horsemen in a land empty of people. That would please the
men’s gods to no end.

Catin had not moved, seemed disinclined to move until Sarama
spoke. Sarama said, “I told him a thing he did not know how to hear.”

“That is what he said,” said Catin, almost spitting it. “He
won’t even talk to the Mother. He simply sits.”

“Do you want me to be sorry?”

“I want you to bring him in out of the cold!”

Sarama raised her brows. “If you could not, and the Mother
could not, how can I?”

“You caused it,” Catin said. “You cure it.”

Sarama set her lips together. If this man had been her
lover, she would not have demanded that another woman beat sense into him. She
would have been sure to do it herself.

People were different here. Everything was different. That
was why Danu was sitting in the snow. Because he had seen a face of the world
that he could not have imagined until she forced it on him.

Better he learn it now, and his people with him, than be
taken by surprise. He had time to learn to defend himself. They all did. That
was the goddess’ gift.

oOo

Sarama wrapped herself as warmly as she could, and rode
the Mare, who was more than lively with the exhilaration of snow and cold. It
was a fair procession: Sarama on the Mare, Catin trudging sullenly behind, and
the colt running circles about them all.

The city was wrapped in white silence. Voices of children
pierced it: the young ones bundled to the eyes and tumbling in the snow while
their elders stayed warm within. Most of them trailed after the women and the
horses, curious as children always were.