White Mare's Daughter (37 page)

They were none too reluctant, though a few went slowly, with
many glances back.

Agni let them go. His pony was glad enough to stand and
breathe. Agni was not so glad to look into the face of his brother Yama.

There was always that dislike which they had cherished since
they were children; but leavened now on Agni’s part with memory of the words
his father had spoken, the secret that the king knew. That Agni was the hidden
and frequent lover of Yama’s youngest wife.

That did not suffer itself to be spoken, nor would it while
Agni was master of himself. “Good morning, brother,” he said lightly enough. “I
trust I find you well.”

“You’ve always had a glib tongue,” said Yama. “Are you
thinking to talk a stallion into your snare?”

“If it works,” said Agni, smiling sweetly, “why not?”

Yama had always hated it when Agni refused to be baited. He
snarled now, but would not move aside to let Agni pass. “Where are you going?
Have you forgotten what you must do tonight?”

“Not for a moment,” Agni said. “Why? Is it forbidden that we
bring somewhat home for the feast?”

“It is rather expected that you remain in the camp until the
feast,” said Yama. “Others can hunt for once, and bring home the quarry. Or are
you afraid you’ll be outmatched?”

Agni smiled again, sweeter than ever. “I’m never afraid of
that,” he said.

He urged the pony forward. Yama could have stood his ground,
but he was not as brave in the body as he was in his boasting. He stepped aside
hastily.

Agni laughed—not prudently, but at the moment he did not
care. Yama was a blusterer and a fool. Anyone with eyes could see it.

oOo

They tracked the boar to his lair and slew him there, and
it was Agni—of course—who made the kill. Agni was the gods’ beloved. There were
few who could equal him in the hunt, and none who could best him.

It was a great boar, and old, with tusks so potently curved
that they had pierced his lip thrice. Agni had met the little red eyes as the
boar plunged upon his spear, and seen his own death there.

But not yet. Not this day. The boar died with its breath hot
and reeking in Agni’s face, and its jaws gnashing impotently, snapping at his
hands.

He took no wound at all, and the boar died as the gods had
ordained. They carried him back to the camp with singing and rejoicing, and
laid him at the king’s feet where he sat amid the elders.

The king bestowed on Agni a wintry smile, a gift so rare as
to be beyond price. Agni took its memory with him when he went among the
priests, he and those of the young men who would be sent out on the morrow to
find their stallions.

The priests in their masks and their horsehide mantles would
be the young men’s guardians from now until morning. The feast was not for
them: they would fast while the tribe gorged itself. They must go out empty,
empty and singing, and find life and sustenance on the steppe.

Some of them had eaten heavily this morning, the better to
endure the long night. Agni, who had been hunting, felt already the edge of
hunger. But he would be strong. He would prove to the gods that he was worthy,
and pray for a king of stallions, a horse fit for a man who would be a king.

There were half a score of them, a great number for a single
tribe. They had all hunted and raided and fought with Agni. It was inevitable
that he find himself in front of them, the first to be taken by the priests,
and the first to go away with them, away from the tribe, down the river to the
circle of stones that had been raised by the gods long ago. He had walked in
that circle before: when he gave up the amulet of his childhood, when he slew
his first boar, when he killed his first man in battle.

This, if the gods willed, was the last time he would pass
the gate of stone as a youth not yet a man. He was nigh as tall as the lintel
now, and nigh as broad as the two stones that held it up. That, people said,
was the measure of a man; of perfect rightness, neither too large nor too
small.

The space within was sunlit still, but the shadows of the
stones were long. The altar stone was swept clean. A great basin had been set
near it, a cauldron of boiled and tight-bound leather, broad enough and deep
enough to hold the body of a man. It was full of water, and more in skins,
waiting to be poured in.

The priests who had led him here took him by the arms. He
stiffened but made himself submit. They stripped him unresisting, lifted him
into the cauldron and bathed him without gentleness.

It was his pride to make no sound, even when they scraped
his skin raw. They were scouring off the years of his youth and making him new.
They took his beard with a keen stone razor and consecrated it to the gods.
They lifted him out and bade him lie on the grass, while one by one each of the
others was accorded the same ritual cleansing.

The wind was cool on his drying body. His cheeks felt
strange, bared to the world as they had been when he was a child. The others as
they came to lie beside him were unwontedly quiet. The usual badinage, the
jests and the vaunting, were quenched.

oOo

The sun sank lower and the air grew cooler. Just at the
fall of night, the last of the young men was brought among the rest. “Up!”
commanded the priest in the mask and high headdress of the Stallion. His voice
echoed hollow in the mask, as if it came from beneath the earth.

They rose in their various ways, with grace or without,
smoothly or in an awkward, shivering scramble. Agni hoped he managed grace. The
sky was full of light, the earth growing dark. They stood in a wavering line,
white skin glimmering, hair hanging lank with wet.

The priests, who in daylight had been merely men in masks
and the hides of beasts, in the dusk swelled to godly vastness. The Bull, the
Hound, the Stallion, loomed over the naked boy-men.

A drum began to beat. Lesser priests, naked but for faceless
masks, plain coverings of tanned hide over heads and faces, danced into the
circle. Each bore the horn of a bull, carved and limned and bound with cords,
filled to brimming with what proved by scent and color to be kumiss.

There were ten horns, one for each of the young men. The
priest who approached Agni was a thickset man, shoulders furred with hair, and
very thick and short in the manly parts. Agni searched for the gleam of eyes in
the mask, but found only darkness.

It was not Yama, surely. There were other men of such
proportions in the tribe.

Agni took the horn as it was proffered. The reek of kumiss
dizzied him. Something else rode under it, something more potent still.

Others had recoiled from their own drinking horns, startled
as Agni had been. If this was a drug, then it was meant for them all.

Agni drew a deep breath and held it as he drained the horn.

“All of it,” one of the priests told someone else down the
line. “Every drop.”

Agni’s ears were ringing even as he lowered the horn. The
priest took it, bowed—did his eyes gleam mockingly?—and wheeled away.

The stars were singing. The drum beat in his own flesh, in
his blood. The Stallion reared over him: great crest, streaming mane. From a
man’s loins sprang a great black rod, the tip of it as broad as a man’s hand,
great as a club and hot as a brand from the fire.

Agni swayed between heaven and earth. Beneath him, before
him, the Stallion mounted the Mare. His strong yellow teeth seized her nape.
She squealed. The sound pierced Agni’s skull. The Stallion’s hammering strokes
kept pace with the drumbeats.

They danced, the young men. There was no will in them. The
drug, the drink, the drum, seized them and wielded them. They danced round the
Stallion and the quiescent shadow of his Mare. Their feet woke the thunder.
Lightnings cracked in their hair.

Agni felt his own growing long, sweeping like a stallion’s
mane. His feet were hooves, hard and stony. Strength rippled through his body,
the strength of the stallion that acknowledges no limit. The sound that burst
from him was a stallion’s scream, both exuberance and challenge.

Another scream met it. His nostrils flared. He scented musk,
male-enemy. Stallion trespassing on the herd that he had won in battle. Young
stallion, bright-maned, heavy-shouldered—but never as heavy as he.

He flung the mass of his body against the stranger. His
teeth snapped, diving for the throat. Hooves battered, forelegs tangled. They
reared against the stars; reared and wheeled and fell away, shrunken into human
shape again.

Others danced that same dance, the dance of stallions doing
battle for their mares. The Stallion was in them all.

The Mare waited, a patient shadow. To the victor she would
go. To the one who conquered; who was worthy to reckon himself her master.

Agni, mere naked man, looked about him at the warring
stallions, and laughed. The one who had fought him would, with morning’s
coming, be Patir his friend and yearbrother, with whom he had hunted the boar.
Tonight it was a fallen man-beast, man’s body, stallion’s eyes.

Agni danced past him toward the Mare in her solitude. She
was silent, a thing of night and starlight. The scent of her dizzied even his
human senses.

He caught at mane like a fall of moonlight. Warm neck flexed
under it. She wheeled, startled. He let the force of her movement draw him up
and round, onto a warm living back, the back of a mare indeed, rearing under
him.

He rode with her. She tossed her head. He stroked her neck,
gentling her, while the stallions fought and the stars wheeled over them all.
He had the victory. He had the Mare—as man, and master.

The stars wheeled overhead. Agni was aware, dimly, of
lying on the grass; of staring up at the loom of a stone. The others were
somewhere in the circle, the priests, the mare who had been the Mare. But here
was silence, as if the night had held its breath.

The stone moved; divided. The lesser part of it, the slender
upright shadow, bent over him. It breathed. Eyes gleamed in it. He drew in a
scent that he knew extraordinarily well, musk and sweetness and a faint,
pungent hint of fire.

He sucked in breath to cry out:
You should not be here!

Her hand stopped the words before they began. Her lips
followed. He had no power to resist them.

She lowered herself on him, the folds of her mantle falling
over him, veiling them both. Her body was as bare as his, and warmer by far.
She coaxed and teased his shriveled rod, tormenting it till it rose in its own
defense. When it rose high and rampant—and no will of his at all, to make it
so—she loosed a sigh as of relief, and impaled herself on it.

She rode him as he had ridden the mare, smaller, lesser in
strength, and yet by far the greater. The part of him that cried sacrilege was
vanishingly small. Man had mounted man in the madness of the dance; Stallion
had mounted Mare, and all the rest had caught the heat of his passion.

Now Agni shared in it. Rudira the headlong, Rudira the
impossibly bold, took him in the shadow of the gods’ stone, in the place to
which no woman was admitted, and no female thing except the Mare.

He believed then what his father had said, that she was a
witch, a creature outside of simple human nature. Else how could she dare such
a thing as this?

There was no woman in the world like her. That much the king
had failed to see. In clasping her, Agni clasped a burning brand.

She fitted her body to his body, breasts to his breast,
riding the last slow surging strides into a taut and ecstatic stillness. She
slipped from him then, skin sliding on sweat-slicked skin, and lay on the grass
beside him.

His head was frill of the scent of her. He tried to shake
himself free of it, to whisper urgently: “You shouldn’t be here! Go!”

She ignored him. Her hand sought and found his shaven cheek.
She peered at him, as if she could see more of his face than a dim blur in the
starlight.

Maybe after all she could. Witches had night-eyes, he had
heard, like the creatures of the dark that they were.

When had he last seen her in daylight, by any light but that
of lamp or star?

He shivered. Her hand burned, but he had no power to thrust
it away.

“I had forgotten how beautiful your face was,” she murmured.
“As beautiful as many a woman’s. No wonder you were in such haste to hide it
behind a beard.”

He tensed at the sound of her voice, barely audible as it
was. If a priest happened to be lying nearby, or one of the initiates—

She stroked the tension out of him. Her fingers were supple
and strong. She had no fear, and none of the shyness that was supposed to be
proper to a woman.

When he was slack on the grass, held back from sleep only by
the heat of her presence, that presence left him. She melted into the night,
dark mantle mingling with the darkness. He heard no sound of her passing.

He might have thought that he dreamed it all, except for the
scent of her that was on him still. That was real. That was incontestable.

oOo

When he opened his eyes again, the grey light of dawn met
them. Dew had fallen heavy in the night. He shivered with the damp and the
cold, and no garment to warm him.

They were all rising in the circle of stones, groaning,
shivering. The bravest of them washed in the dew, scrubbing away the excesses
of the night. Agni, too; losing her scent that had lingered on his skin, making
himself all new.

There were no priests to bid them do their duty. They did
not speak to one another. Each was wrapped in silence.

For each, just within the circle, a gift waited: clothing
made for the hunt, and boots for walking, and a pack laden with necessities for
the journey.

Agni scrambled hastily into the warmth of clean new clothes.
He took up the pack and shouldered it, and followed the track that the sun
showed him, shining through the stones.