White Mare's Daughter (35 page)

For Sarama there was no such comfort. In Larchwood she had
had Danu for guardian hound and teacher. Here she was kept under no watch,
given no jailer. The women from Larchwood were gone; had left at dawn. Having
delivered the outland woman into the hands of the Mother of Three Birds, they
were done with their task, and freed to go home again.

Sarama did not miss them in the slightest. But her teacher
she did miss—more than she had expected to. There were people to wait on her,
but none to guide her or to tell her where she should best go. When she had
risen, dressed, been fed, she found herself without duties, the only one of all
about her who seemed to be in such a state. Even the children had tasks that
they were given, or teaching-games to play before they could run off to
freedom.

Sarama’s own freedom had a slightly sour taste. She wandered
out of the house and into the city. Everywhere it was the same. Men looked
after the children, she noticed, as they so often had in Larchwood; even the
smallest went about in the arms or on the backs of men who must be their uncles
or brothers, since no one admitted to fatherhood. Though surely at least some
must be fathers, if they were the mothers’ chosen men; if they had been so
chosen when the children were conceived.

It was oddly complicated to understand how these people
thought of men and women, children and the getting of children. Sarama learned
somewhat by watching: that whatever these men were to the children in their
care, they seemed to take pleasure in the office, and to gain no little respect
for it. Children were greatly valued here.

Here, women bore children—whole tribes of them—and still
ruled cities. They made pots, wove wonderful things, forged copper and gold,
herded animals, traded in a market that seemed little diminished by the
winter’s cold, did everything that Sarama had seen a man do, and more besides;
and often great-bellied with child. It was great honor here to be a mother;
greater honor than any.

The Lady of this city, Lady of the Birds as Sarama heard her
called, was a mother goddess. She sat in her temple, which was greater than any
work of human hands that Sarama had seen before, squat and huge-thighed and
huge-breasted as she always was, her face masked with the likeness of a bird’s
beak, and in her ample arms a sleeping child.

Sarama stood before her in the light of the lamps, with
white snow-light slanting through the open door, and said as if to the Mother
of a city, “I think I may be carrying a child.”

She did not know why she thought it. Her courses had come
and gone—when? Soon after she left Larchwood. That was not so terribly long
ago.

Nevertheless she had said what came into her mind. Once the
words were spoken, they felt somehow more real. More true.

“If I am,” she said, “and it lives, will you claim it? And
if you do, which face will it see? Lady of the Birds? Horse Goddess?”

The lamps flickered. The temple was oddly warm, though no
fire was lit in it. The air held a memory of sweetness. Blood was not shed
here, nor lives taken in sacrifice. On the stone table—the altar—lay bread and
fruit, a beautifully painted pot, a cloth woven in the colors of milk and bone
and snow. A bare black branch lay across it, and a single scarlet feather.

Winter gifts, gifts of harvest past and of life asleep
beneath the snow. As, perhaps, life slept in Sarama’s belly.

It would be born in the autumn, if it was born: in the
golden time, in the last warmth of the year before winter’s coming.

If it was born.

She laid a new thing on the altar, a thing that she had
carried for time out of mind: a small smooth stone from Horse Goddess’ hill. It
was grey like a young mare, banded with the white of the mare in her prime.
Sarama set it on the cloth that was all white, but no two whites the same, next
to the winter branch.

She spoke no prayer. She let it shape itself as it would, as
it chose to be. Let the Lady take it as she pleased, to do with as she would.

Danu in Three Birds, returned to all his old places, still
was not entirely the Danu who had left with Catin in the spring. First there
was Sarama, who had chosen him for herself; and then there was the colt, who
required housing, feeding, and care. Danu had not, in his eagerness to leave
Larchwood, regretted the labor that he had devoted to the house and the pen for
the horses, but in Three Birds he had it all to do again, and winter gripping
hard.

Nevertheless there was fodder stored away for the cattle,
and grain that Sarama said would do; and if he ate a little less bread this
winter, then so be it. House and pen he had none, but the horses had found
themselves a place that they liked well, a meadow and a copse just outside the
city, which like the house in Larchwood lay beside the river. There was a
stream that ran too swift to freeze, and ample grass beneath the snow, and on
the trees still a remnant of frostbitten fruit. The colt and the Mare were if
anything more content there than they had been with a house to retreat to; the
trees sheltered them in ill weather, and they could come and go at will.

Danu’s mornings now were marked first, not by the Mother’s
song, but by the sound of hooves on winter-hardened ground, and the colt’s
rattling of the shutters in Danu’s room. Danu would stagger from his warm bed,
gasping with the shock of the cold floor on bare feet, and open the shutters,
and rub the colt’s face and neck by way of greeting; and as he did that, the
Mother would sing the sun into the sky.

Then the colt would receive his morning handful of grain,
and the Mare hers; and maybe they would linger for a while, or more likely they
would go back to their meadow to graze until Sarama came to ride or to tend the
Mare. If Danu was fortunate he might go with her; if his duties were too
pressing, he could rest assured that at evening the colt would come back to be
given his dinner.

Winter did not appear to dismay the horses. They had neither
fingers nor toes to freeze and blacken. Their coats were as thick as a bear’s.
Snow made them snort and dance. Icy rain met with little more than a snort of
annoyance.

They were hardy creatures, though oddly delicate. Sarama had
warned Danu strenuously against feeding them more than a handful of grain at a
time, and had invoked the terror of the Lady on anyone who fed them but Danu.
“They will die,” she said, “if they eat too much.”

That was a great trust, to be the guardian of creatures so
strong and yet so strangely weak. Danu might have been glad to be free of it; but
if he had been, he would have envied the one who bore it.

It gained him, he could not help but notice, a degree of
respect that he had not had even for being the keeper of the Mother’s house. He
was the one to whom the horses came, who could speak to them in their language
of gesture and touch.

“And grain,” he said when people ventured to marvel. “They
do it for that. Not for me.”

oOo

“Yes,” Tilia said on a day not long after Danu had come
back to Three Birds. The horses had been fed some time since; Sarama was riding
the Mare, to the manifest delight of a crowd of the young and the not so young.
Danu was grinding flour for a sweet cake, a labor that he could well have left
to the servants, but his body welcomed the simple exertion.

His sister perched on a stool, graceful as she had always
been in spite of her bulk. She was more beautiful than he remembered, and also
more aggravating.

“They’re animals,” she said of the horses. “They live to
eat. But they’d come to you even without the grain, I think. Now tell me about
her.”

“Her?” Danu asked, deliberately dense. “The Mare?”

Tilia rolled her eyes. “Of course not, idiot. The woman. You
left with one, came back with another. That’s fast work, little brother.”

Danu’s cheeks were hot. He bent more diligently to the
stone, grinding the emmer grains white and fine.

“Tell me about the woman,” Tilia persisted.

“What’s there to tell?” he said, panting a little. “She
comes from the east of the world. She serves the Lady, whom she calls Horse
Goddess. She’s bearing a message to the Mother, which she’ll deliver when she’s
ready.”

“I know all that,” said Tilia. “Tell me about her.”

He set his teeth and would not answer.

Tilia waited till all the meal on the stone was ground. When
he reached for another bowlful of grain, she caught his hand. “Do you like
her?” she asked.

He nodded.

“She’s not beautiful,” Tilia said, “but she’s interesting.
Different. Her eyes are almost alarming. They’re
green.
”

“There’s nothing demonic about her,” he said, perhaps more
heatedly than he had meant.

Tilia did not tax him with it, for a wonder. “Kosti says the
men are jealous. They want to know how you convinced her to choose you.”

“They should ask me that,” said Danu.

“They would, if you weren’t keeping so close to the house or
else to the woman.”

“Her name,” said Danu, “is Sarama.”

“You like her very much, don’t you?”

“You’re talking like a man,” he said.

She laughed. He had forgotten how difficult it was to prick
her temper. “It’s true, what Kosti said. Isn’t it? In her country, men do the
choosing.”

“How does Kosti know that?”

“He asked her,” Tilia said.

Danu did not know why he should find that objectionable.
Kosti was a great master of attracting women. But Sarama had yet to order Danu
out of her bed.

Tilia’s eyes were dancing. She could see perfectly well what
he was thinking. “So in the east, men do choose.”

“It . . . was both of us,” Danu said.

“Sometimes it is,” said Tilia. “I’m glad you left Larchwood.
The house didn’t like anyone else who tried to run it. The Mother was actually
cross. Nothing was really right, till you came back.”

That was a mighty confession. Danu granted it a moment’s
silence. “So you don’t mind? That I came back with a stranger from so far away
that she doesn’t even speak our language?”

“She does after a fashion,” Tilia said. “I don’t know that I
like her. But she brought you home.”

oOo

“I don’t know if I like your sister,” Sarama said.

She had come in late, as the last light left the sky,
windblown and with her cheeks ruddy with cold. When Danu was done with all his
tasks, he found her curled in the bed they had been sharing, wide awake, with a
cup of warm honey mead that he had kept by the hearth for her.

She insisted that he take half of it. It was strong and
almost unbearably sweet, and still warm enough to startle his tongue.

“I don’t know if I like her,” Sarama said while he savored
the mead, “but I think she is very good as a—Mother?”

“Mother’s heir,” Danu said.

“Yes. She will be a Mother.”

“People say,” said Danu, “that she’s too headlong and
headstrong, and knows too little of serenity. But I think Mothers learn that
once they take their places. It’s something the Lady gives them.”

Sarama nodded. “I—there was Old Woman. Now there is only I.
I should know more, be more. But sometimes, I do know.”

He could see how difficult it was for her, the words
stumbling, perhaps ill chosen, but she knew no others. Still he thought he
understood. “You are a Mother,” he said.

She went white, as if he had struck her. “How did you—” She
broke off. The color came back slowly to her face. “A—a Mother. Like the Mother
of a city. No. No, I don’t have everything that a Mother has. All the people.
The duties. The—everything.”

“A Mother is the Lady’s servant,” Danu said. “You serve the
Lady. She speaks to you. You bear burdens—the whole world, your journey, the
war. That’s what Mothers do.”

“They rule cities,” Sarama said.

“Sometimes,” said Danu. “Not always. A Mother hears the
Lady’s voice.”

“Then
you
are a
Mother,” Sarama said.

He could not see that she was laughing at him. Yet she must
be. “A Mother is a woman,” he said.

“Can’t a man hear the Lady, too?”

“Can they, where you come from?”

She shrugged. “Men hear gods. I think—maybe—my brother could
hear the Lady, if he would admit it.”

“You have a brother?”

“I have many,” she said. “But one—the same mother. We were
born together. I was first. He is—the horsemen have men to rule them. Kings. He
is the king’s heir.”

“King,” Danu said, trying the strange word on his tongue. “A
man who is a Mother?”

“Different,” she said, “but maybe a little the same.”

Danu’s head ached. It often did, when he tried to understand
her. “I am not a king,” he said. “Nor a Mother, either. I am something much
less. Like a flute. It is not the music, nor does it make the music. The music
sings through it.”

“Maybe,” she said, “a seer. A prophet. One who speaks when
the gods speak, so that other people can hear.”

He nodded. “Yes. Yes, that’s it.”

“Then I am that, too,” she said.

“No. You are more.” He spoke swiftly, before she could stop
him. “Teach me your words. Teach me your language, as I’ve taught you mine. I
need to understand. What your words are like. How you think them.”

“You know some words,” she said. “I’ll teach you more.”

“Yes,” said Danu. “All the words you know. Even the ones
that frighten me.”

“That could take a long time,” she said.

“I learn quickly,” he said. “Or are you leaving soon?”

“Not unless your sister sends me away,” she said.

“Tilia won’t do that,” said Danu. “Catin was
afraid—terrified, all the time. Tilia is afraid of nothing.”

“I think she is afraid of some things,” Sarama said, “but
she doesn’t let them rule her.”

“She doesn’t know about war,” Danu said. “When are you going
to tell her?”

“When the Mother asks,” Sarama said.