White Mare's Daughter (43 page)

Agni suppressed a groan. Of course it would be Yama’s
horse—not the yearling he had brought back from his own summer’s hunt, but the
one who had succeeded that one; a heavy-boned creature very like its master,
and known to be of uncertain temperament. Mitani beside him seemed slender and
gangling-tall, and somewhat awkward in his youth. But not weak. No, never that.
Even as Agni came running, he lunged for his rival’s throat.

There were people about, but no one was bold enough to come
between warring stallions. Agni, who should have known better, could only think
of death and maiming, of his beautiful gift of the gods torn and bleeding on
the morning after he came to the tribe. With no thought but that, he bided his
moment; and when the stallions in their battling came round to where he stood,
he launched himself toward Mitani’s back.

Mitani barely noticed. The stallions had drawn apart,
circling, necks snaking, bracing for a new and deadlier lunge. The first had
dealt no more than bruises. This one would draw blood.

Agni slipped the belt from about his middle and held it by
one end, letting it fall along his thigh, balancing on Mitani’s back. The
bunching of muscles brought him to the alert.

Yama’s stallion sprang first. Agni tightened his grip on
sides and mane, whirled the belt up and round, and caught the charging stallion
full across his tender nose.

He recoiled, staggering, half-falling. Agni kicked Mitani
about, utterly against the stallion’s will—but his training held; thank the
gods, he had not forgotten. He wheeled, snorting and snapping at Agni’s leg,
but obedient in his fashion.

It did not last long; but it lasted long enough. When he
spun back, his rival was gone. Fled; which, had the beast been a man, he would
have declared loudly to be only prudence.

Mitani trumpeted his victory. Once Agni had been so kind as
to slip from his back, he circled his mares as a proper stallion should, and
herded them apart, and kept them so. No stallion challenged him, even the king.
The mares were, after all, his daughters.

oOo

“He’ll be king when the old one goes,” someone opined.
Agni did not see who it was, and it was not to his advantage to crane and peer.
He had to pretend that he had not heard. To walk away with a light step, as if
he had no doubts of himself or of anything else in the world.

After so long alone with no human creature about him, he
felt strange, as if his skin had worn away; and now the close quarters of the
tribe rubbed painfully on it. But he could not escape onto the steppe, even to
hunt; not so soon. People would take it ill. And that above all he must not
permit.

He was convivial therefore. He walked through the camp. He
visited friends. He was cordial to his kin.

He found Patir in front of Korosh’s tent with a pair of that
man’s sons, playing knucklebones. Patir looked as haggard as one might expect,
but he grinned at Agni and tossed him the cup. “Win a round for me,” he said.

Agni won one for him and another for himself, and took Patir
away, not greatly to Patir’s distress.

“Have you chosen a daughter yet?” Agni asked him.

He nodded, none too eagerly. “It’s decided. I’m to have the
eldest. She’s not the prettiest, but she’ll do.”

“Does she have sense?”

“I can’t tell,” Patir said. “All I’ve seen of her is a pair
of eyes above a veil. She never says a word.”

“Then how do you know if she’s pretty?”

“I asked my sisters,” Patir said. He did his best not to
look embarrassed.

“Ah,” said Agni. “That was wise. What did they say?”

“That the second eldest is beautiful but vapid, the third
has a voice like an eagle shrieking, and the rest are too young to trouble
with. But the eldest is good enough to look at, has a pleasant voice, and says
she’s ready to be a wife.”

“Do you ever wonder,” Agni mused, “if it’s really the women
who rule? We have to ask them everything, and when we choose wives, who else
knows which one we should take?”

Patir shrugged. “It doesn’t make a great deal of difference,
does it? They’re in the tents. We’re outside. We don’t have to go in unless it
pleases us.”

“Or unless we want to eat,” Agni said, “or sleep, or wear
clothes.”

“We can do all of that ourselves,” said Patir, “if we have
to.” He slanted a glance at Agni. “Are they talking wives for you, too?”

“Not yet,” Agni said.

“They will,” said Patir.

But not too soon, Agni thought. There had been talk, of
course. There was always talk. This man’s daughter or that, this one’s niece,
that one’s granddaughter, would make a useful alliance for the king’s son. No
one ever spoke of beauty or wit, or of the gift of driving a man wild.

oOo

Evening came none too soon. Agni took his daymeal with
others of the new-made men, in a circle round a fire tended by Rahim’s mother.
She was a widow and therefore permitted to walk abroad, though she must cover
her face.

It was said she had been a great beauty in her day; and
there were men, elders, who would have been glad to relieve her of her
widowhood. But she never saw fit to accept them, and her male kin were not so
bold as to compel her. She kept her own rent therefore, and looked after her
daughters and her only son, and was adept at feeding hungry young men.

Everyone knew that if Rahim married, it would be outside of
the tribe. His mother had long since discarded every girl in it as unworthy.

He was in comfort. Agni and the rest, waited on by Rahim’s
veiled and studiously demure sisters, were wondrous well aware of their new
manhood.

They could command and be obeyed. They could meet a girl’s
eyes—even if she were only Rahim’s sister—and not look away, though it was as
much as any’s life was worth to venture more.

oOo

Agni slipped away as the night grew dark, when the mead
had gone round enough to blur the keenest-sighted. He had only pretended to
drink, taking a sip to warm him, no more. In the full dark he made himself a
shadow, ghosting round to the tent that stood to the west of his father’s.

No fire burned in front of it, but the horsetail hung limply
from its peak, signifying that its master was in the camp. Agni had seen Yama
earlier, sitting in a place of honor at a campfire tended by a minor clansman
with a great number of brothers and cousins. All of them that Agni could see
had been waiting eagerly on him.

When Agni looked for him, peering out of the shadows, he was
still there. He looked well advanced in kumiss, and well settled in his place.
He would stay there nightlong, as a man might do if he chose. Some of the
new-made men had professed their intention of doing just that round Rahim’s
fire, because they could; because they were no longer expected to go obediently
to bed in their fathers’ tents.

Agni had been asking no leave but Rudira’s for a long while
now. Tonight he did not mean to ask it. He did not expect that he would need
to.

He knew well where she slept in Yama’s tent, which was nigh
as large as the king’s—larger in fact than it should be, as young as Yama was,
and as little respected for his skill in the hunt or in war. It was like Yama,
like Yama’s stallion: oversized, overbearing, and hollow at the heart.

The slit in the tent’s wall that Agni had made some seasons
since was still there, unmended, and it seemed undiscovered. He listened
outside of it as he had many a time before. The camp’s sounds separated
themselves, near and far, from the barking of a dog to the laughter of a woman
to the lowing of a bull. But within he heard nothing, till he was ready to
stoop and slip beneath the wall.

Then he heard voices, too low almost to perceive. His breath
caught, but they were women’s voices, and low only because they were somewhat
distant. One was Rudira’s. The other, it came to him after a while, belonged to
Yama’s mother.

Without thinking, he slipped into the scented darkness of
the corner that Rudira had claimed for her own. Its walls of leather were
lowered and tied, but he could see a glimmer of light through the joining. He
made his way toward it, moving cautiously, without sound.

Rudira sat with Yama’s mother in the common space of the
women’s side. Lamps were lit. The remains of a small feast lay between them. A
small girlchild curled half in and half out of the lamps’ light, sound asleep.
She had been waiting on them earlier, perhaps.

They sat together and apparently at ease, but there was a
tension in the air, such as Agni had seen between two men in war, or two
stallions at battle over a mare. Their conversation had a desultory air: small
things, this woman bearing, that child ill of a fever, this pair to marry and
that pair at odds, and such gossip as women might be expected to exchange of an
evening.

He lay beside the curtain, breathing as lightly as he could,
and listened. He should never have been here, never have lingered, but there
was a peculiar comfort in it, a strange kind of contentment, just to see her
face, her hair silver in the lamplight, the clear line of her profile. Next to
that heavyset old woman she was like a fall of bright water down the face of a
crag.

Agni at first was hardly aware that the current of
conversation had shifted. Its tone was much the same, idle, casual, but the
words were no longer quite so harmless. “When my son is king,” the old woman
said, “mind you well that you do as I tell you.”

Rudira arched a brow. This was no new thing to her, it was
clear. “Are you so certain that he will be?”

“He will be,” said the old woman.

“There are a fair few who would contest that,” Rudira said.

“Ah,” said Yama’s mother with a gesture of dismissal. “They
may talk. My son will take the king’s place when the old one dies.”

“He’ll have to fight for it.”

“Not if you do your part,” the old woman said.

“What if I won’t?”

“You will.” Yama’s mother said it with calm certainty.

The old woman left soon thereafter. Rudira sat for a while
alone, narrow-eyed, contemplating the space in front of her. The tent was
quiet. The other wives, if they were there, were asleep or silent behind their
curtains. There were no babies, no children. The gods had not yet so blessed
the lord of this tent.

Rudira sighed and rose. She stretched. Her body arched in
the light gown that a woman might wear in the women’s place, letting slip the
shawl that had warmed her shoulders. She ran hands down over her breasts and
hips, and smiled, and danced a step or two, a little dance of delight in who
knew what. Perhaps no more than her own beauty.

She turned in that light-and-shadowed space, shaking her
hair out of its plait till it poured like water down her back and shoulders.
With a wicked glint then she wriggled out of her gown. She was naked beneath
it, full white breasts, sweet rounded belly, silver tangle of her sex. Her
nipples were erect, as long and large as the end of her smallest finger. She
stroked them, circling them idly, smiling at some vision that only she could
see.

Agni could hardly breathe. His rod was rigid,
aching—remembering too keenly how long it had been since last he had a woman.
This woman, the night before he left the tribe to hunt his stallion. Outside of
dreams he had touched none since.

She danced, fancying herself alone; stroking her belly, her
thighs. Slipping fingers through the curling hair that grew there, stroking
herself, eyes closed, head falling back, and such a smile on her face as he
knew well indeed.

The sight of her, the remembered scent, the heat of her body
reflected in his, burned all thought, doubts, fears, clean out of his head.
There was only she. She, and none other.

He slipped the knot of the curtain and stepped into the room
where no man but the lord of the tent should ever go. It was a dizzying thing,
a mad thing, and he did not care at all.

She was oblivious to him. He moved softly, slipped arms
about her, kissed her ear, her neck, her shoulder.

She did not flinch or stiffen. She melted into his clasp,
purring in her throat.

It was he who tensed, who half pulled away. “Were you
expecting someone?”

She turned in his arms, supple, laughing softly. “Oh, yes,”
she said. “You.”

“You—” He growled at her. “You knew I was here!”

She smiled and would not answer.

“Witch,” he said.

“Hush,” she said, and made a sign to ward off evil. “Don’t
say such things.”

“Then how did you know?”

“I know you,” she said. She slipped the clasp of his belt
and freed his rod, that felt as great as a stallion’s; and pinned it between
them, dancing a slow dance of hip and thigh, till he must drown himself in a
kiss or groan aloud. Here, where Yama could come, or any of his wives or
servants, any woman of the tribe, and see them so.

There was a wild delight in it, an edge of terror that made
it so much the sweeter. She mounted him where he stood, locked legs about his
middle, rode him with urgency as desperate as if she, and not he, had known no
pleasure of the body since the stallion-hunt began.

Some distant part of him laughed at that. She would never
have been without that pleasure, whether she took it from her husband or from
her husband’s brother. Or—who knew? Perhaps some other eager lover had crept
through the slit in the tent-wall.

Then there was no thought in him at all. Only the heat of
her body and the fierce female scent of her, and the surety. Here, with her, at
last he had come home.

Agni went back late and in secret to his bed in his
father’s tent. He left Rudira all warm and purring in her sleeping furs—nor did
he leave her willingly. But the night was passing, and he could not be caught
in her bed. Not for her sake. Not for his own.

He had thought that he would fall direct into sleep, all his
limbs and body loosed by the pleasure that they had shared. And yet he lay
awake. This tent was noisier by far than Yama’s. There were babies in it, and
children; his brothers and sisters, and their mothers, and the king himself
with the woman whom he had chosen to keep him warm in the night. It was easier
to come and go unnoticed, but harder to sleep once he had come back.