White Mare's Daughter (46 page)

“I think he’ll want to die,” Rahim said. He said it a little
gingerly, as if he expected Agni to rise up in rage.

Agni watched the fire’s dance. Diviners could see portents
in the lick and leap of flames. He was no diviner. Still he could see beyond
the fire to his father’s face, that dreadful half-alive, half-melted thing. If
it had been Agni . . . Agni would have preferred to die.

“I have to ask,” he said. He stood. “I do have to ask.”

Rahim nodded. “And when—
if
he finds a way to say yes?”

“Then that is his will,” said Agni.

oOo

Patir had not left the king’s side since he sent Agni
away. He greeted Agni calmly, but Agni thought he saw a faint, wild flicker in
Patir’s eyes: more than a hint of gladness to be freed from the duty he had
taken on himself.

He did not leave at once—did not flee. He lingered, and
Rahim who had followed Agni back to the king’s tent, and a handful of the
others. Their eyes were on Agni.

Agni knelt by his father’s bed. It was only, he told
himself, that he had been away; that he had looked on other, untwisted faces.
The king was no more frail, if no less.

And yet the shadow on him was deeper. Maybe, thought Agni,
he would cheat the priests, and die before the dark of the moon.

Agni bent and whispered in the king’s ear. “Father. Father,
listen. In three days it’s dark of the moon. They’ll sacrifice the black bull
then, and send you with him. But if you will it—if it’s your will to live—I’ll
stand against them. I’ll defend you.”

The king did not move. No light dawned in his eyes. He lay
as he had since he fell.

Agni sank back on his heels. A great weariness was on him,
sudden and crushingly heavy. As if, he thought—as if the burden of the king’s
life had fallen on him.

The elders had taken it on themselves, but the weight and
force of it had come to Agni. Which was only fitting. Agni was the son, the
heir. It was his to choose, and his to ordain; because the king himself could
not speak.

“Patir,” Agni said. Even to himself he sounded faint and far
away. “Go to the elders. Tell them to make the sacrifice. But tell them . . .
the king may take his own way into the gods’ country.”

Patir nodded. There was something about the way he did it,
as if he bent his head to a king. He took the others with him, all but Rahim,
who had curled comfortably on a heap of furs, and Rahim’s brother Rakti.

They were guarding Agni. They were not being obvious about
it. He might not have noticed, except for the way Rahim had set himself so that
anyone coming in must either step around him or fall over him, and Rakti had
placed himself rather conveniently near to the store of the king’s weapons.

Agni had never been guarded before. Not as a king is
guarded. It was strange, like a gift, and like a burden, too.

It expected things of him. It asked him to be what he hoped
to be. To be a king.

He shook off the tremor that came with the thought. Rahim
and Rakti were his friends. They were making sure he was safe. That was all.
They would have done the same in battle or on the hunt.

While they watched over him, he could rest. He stretched out
beside his father’s bed, meaning simply to close his eyes, to wait till Patir
came back. Just until then. And then . . .

Agni slept deep and long. From deep sleep he passed into
dream.

It was strange, because he knew that he was dreaming. He
knew where he was and what he did there, lying on heaped furs beside his
father. And yet he was also standing on the steppe under a sky the color of
dawn.

There were others near him. And nearest, like a flame in
that dim place, the stallion Mitani. But the stallion’s eyes held a man’s
awareness, a man’s intensity.

“Father?” Agni asked, half in wonder, half in disbelief.

The stallion bent his head. He gestured with it, and pawed.
Mount
, he said.

Even as Agni moved to obey, in the moment when he set hand
to the stallion’s neck, a whirlwind howled between them. Agni clutched at
Mitani, wound fingers in mane, clung desperately as the storm raged about them.
Mitani stood steady, unmoved.

The wind buffeted Agni, beat on him like fists. Only
Mitani’s strength kept him on his feet.

Borne up by that strength, he lifted his head. The wind
whipped his hair in his eyes, blinding him, but here in the place of dreams he
could see clearly. He saw the storm, its rage and its power. It blew from the
east with battering force, surging toward the west.

In the west, under a serene and sunset sky, a woman was
sitting. She sat alone, illuminated by the sunset. Its light was no more ruddy
than her hair.

Sarama
. Agni did
not speak the name, and yet it resounded in his skull. His sister Sarama sat at
the gate of the west, her face a mask of quiet like the face of a goddess.

She did not move, nor did she speak. She seemed unaware of
him. She offered nothing, no escape from the storm; and yet where she was, was
stillness.

oOo

Agni woke abruptly. The dream lingered, the taste of it,
the bruising force of the wind; and Sarama’s face.

Dreams were never simple in their meanings, but this one seemed
clear enough. Sarama was safe, had come into the west. He need have no fear for
her, nor fret for anyone but himself—and for their father.

He sat up in sudden dread. But the king lay as he had lain
before, neither more nor less alive. Rahim and Rakti were on guard still.

Taditi sat in the place she had marked for her own, fiercely
and rather defiantly awake. Only her presence assured him that he had indeed
slept, and not simply closed his eyes for a moment.

He rose and stretched. Yes, he had slept, and for a long
while, too, by the stiffness in his body.

That was well enough. He would be the stronger for having
rested.

He would need to be strong. It was coming to end, this
dance. Whether in two days’ time, in the dark of the moon; or, if the king so
chose, sooner than that. Then Agni would take what the king had laid aside.
Agni would be king.

Waiting was a terrible thing. On this day, perhaps because
the rite had been decided on, more people came than had come in the hand of
days before. Taditi let them in, muttering over it, but acceding to Agni’s will
in the matter.

“Let them see,” he said. “Let them say goodbye, if that’s
their wish. It’s no harm to him.”

And, he thought but did not say, if anyone tried to help the
king on his way, Agni would know. If that one was Yama, then Yama would be a
murderer; for a man marked for the sacrifice must not be touched by any mortal
hand, nor sent to his death except by his own will and his body’s consent,
before the time appointed.

The king was clinging to life. Waiting, perhaps. Wishing to
go as a king should go, by the knife, in a flow of clean blood; not ignobly in
his bed.

oOo

He clung to breath if not to consciousness, and the moon
shrank and dwindled till the last feeble glimmer of it vanished in the dawn.

On the day of the new moon, in cold so bitter that the air
cracked like ice, the tribe prepared for the sacrifice. Priests of the Bull
chose the victim from the sacred herd, a black bull, young, without white
marking, without blemish. The women prepared the fires, and such feast as there
could be so far into a hard winter. The men and boys and the priests of other
gods gathered stones for the barrow in which king and bull would lie.

It was hard labor in the cold, but it warmed them admirably,
and whetted their appetites, too: they fasted all that day, for the gods and
for the king who soon would walk among them.

Agni dug stones out of stone-hard ground and fitted them
together until his hands bled. Then, because his heart was uneasy, he left the
rest to finish, and went back to his father’s tent.

Taditi stood guard over the king. He lay unchanged,
breathing faintly.

“Did anyone come?” Agni asked his aunt.

She inclined her head. “Yes,” she said. “Prince Yama came.”

Agni raised a brow. “Did he?”

“He came,” said Taditi without expression, “and looked, and
saw me. And went away.”

“Indeed,” said Agni. “What was he carrying? Knife or vial?
Or did he cast his eye on one of the pillows?”

“He had a knife,” Taditi said. She smoothed the coverlet
over the king’s body. “You be careful, child. This one will go before the night
is over—it’s his time. But it’s not yours.”

“You think—” Agni did not say the rest. Of course she did.
So did Rahim and Patir and all the rest of the young men who had been so
careful to surround him since the king’s fall. If he left this tent now, he
would find a handful of them hanging about, always with good and sufficient
reason, but never very far from him.

Aid here was Taditi, looking after him, too. It was a gift,
such care for his life.

“We do it for the tribe,” Taditi said. “The people are best
served if you lead them.”

Agni bent his head and was silent. He did not know what kind
of king he would make; he had never been one. But he had been raised for it,
and this he knew: he would be a better king than Yama.

oOo

As the sun sank over the winter steppe, sere grass and
windblown snow, the people gathered round the great fire that the women had
made. The cold had deepened with the sun’s fading. The chattering of teeth and
the stamping of feet marked the gathering; but no one fled to the warmth of the
tents. Every man and woman, and every child to the infant strapped to his
mother’s back, had come to see the king’s passing.

Agni left his father to the women as the rite prescribed.
They would prepare him, wash him and clothe him and make him fit to walk among
the gods.

Agni could trust them to protect him. He prepared himself
with care, not that it mattered what anyone but the king wore or how he plaited
his hair; but the people would see, and Agni wanted them to see a man who would
be a king.

As he bound off the end of his plait and reached for his
best mantle, the cured hide of a bear that he had killed, a soft sound brought
him about. He had leaped for his dagger before he thought.

Rudira stared wide-eyed at the blade hovering a bare hand’s
width from her face. Agni did not lower it at once. He wanted to, but his hand
would not move.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he hissed.

She tossed her head at that, irritable, like a mare vexed by
a fly. “Why? Everyone’s out by the fire.” She made no great effort to lower her
voice, though this was but a curtained corner of the king’s tent, and the women
were close by with the king. “You haven’t come to me. Even after I told you.”

“I couldn’t,” he said. “My father is going to die tonight.
Or doesn’t that matter to you?”

Her eyes glittered. “It doesn’t matter in the least. Not to
me. Though to my husband it matters a great deal. He wanted to be rid of the
old man days ago. He’s not happy that it’s come to this.”

“Why? Because it lets my father go as a king should?”

She shrugged a little, tilting her head, letting her mantle
slip. She was clothed under it, but Agni well knew what was under that. His
body responded like a well-trained hound, leaped to the alert and poised.

But for once his mind was stronger. It was fixed on the
sacrifice, and on the king’s death. She looked to him like a foolish child,
shallow and self-absorbed, and growing petulant as she saw how her
blandishments had failed.

She was not so beautiful then. Her beauty seemed
overwrought. It cloyed.

“Why did you come here now?” he demanded out of the cold
place where his heart had been. “Did my brother send you?”

She did not answer that, which was her right. But she did
not deny it—and that struck him deeper than he had expected.

“He knows.” She did not deny that, either. He seized her,
shook her. “Tell me he doesn’t know!”

“I can’t,” she said. Her voice was faint.

“How long?”

Her shrug was invisible, but he felt it under his hands. She
was more the sulky child than ever.

Agni’s belly cramped. If Yama knew—then he would use it.
Yama was never one to refuse a weapon.

“Who told him?” Agni demanded of her. “Who betrayed us?”

“He just knew,” she said. Had she always been so dull of
wit? Had Agni simply been blinded by her beauty?

She was extraordinarily beautiful. Whatever made a woman
sheerly and fiercely desirable, she had it. The turn of her glance, the lift of
her shoulder, the sweet curve of her breast under the coat—

It was a witchery. He rent his mind away from it and fixed
it on the king. Through the memory of that grey maimed face, he forced himself
to think of what this meant, that Yama knew what Agni had been doing with his
wife.

“No,” said Agni. “No, he doesn’t know, or he’d be here with
the knife in his hand to cut me to ribbons. He’s not clever enough to lay this
subtle a trap. Nor are you—though you may think you are. What are you trying to
do? Keep me away from the sacrifice so that your husband makes the king-cut?
Why? What care do you have for him?”

“For him, nothing,” she said. “I want to be a king’s wife.”

She could not marry Agni, not unless he killed her husband;
and for the killing of a brother, the penalty was exile. Agni could neither
dispose of Yama nor take Yama’s wife for his own. That had always been so, and
Agni had always known it, as had she.

She wanted to be a king’s wife. It was as simple as that.
Badly enough to betray Agni to death or exile or worse?

Perhaps.

Time was growing short. If she kept him here, kept him away
from the sacrifice, she cost him the kingship. She might think that little
enough price for him to pay, if she were married to a king, and Agni the prince
remained her lover.