White Mare's Daughter (47 page)

She would not be imagining that he would refuse. One sight
of her naked body and he would be hers again, heart and soul.

It was amazing, he thought, how quickly one could come to
hate what one had loved.

She must have seen something in his face. She shrank back.

Time was when he would have gentled her, taken her in his
arms and kissed away her fears. But the king was going to his death, and Agni
must be with him when he died.

Not for any woman would Agni fail in that. Least of all for
this one who had betrayed him—whether in speaking of him to her husband, or in
pretending that she had. Truth or lies, with either one she had lost him.

He set her aside as if she had been a child, swept his
mantle about him and strode out of the tent, into the moonless night.

oOo

They made the sacrifice of the black bull under a vault of
frosty stars, lit by the great fire. The bull was young and huge and confused
as to what was wanted of him. He did not like the fire; he lowed and flung back
his head, and tried to turn and bolt.

The priests struggled with him, turning him, pricking him
with goads until he surrendered to their will.

They brought him to the fire, where the chief of them
waited, armed with the knife of sacrifice. He was quick, springing on the bull,
sinking the blade in the heavy throat, freeing the bright blood.

The bull sighed and toppled slowly in the space prepared for
it. When at last it was dead, when the blood was drained from it and poured out
before the gods, the slow drums began to beat. Set high on a bier, borne by the
women of his tent, the king came for the last time before the people of his
tribe.

They had set him upright, combed out his hair and beard, and
dressed him as a king. From below, in firelight, he seemed as he had been
before his fall, erect and impeccably royal.

Yet he did not move. His eyes were shadowed beneath the high
headdress, the planes of his face gaunt, carved clean. He might have been a
corpse borne to its grave.

Agni moved into the light. The priests of the Bull had drawn
back, leaving the great carcass where it had fallen.

The women brought the king beside it, lowered his bier and withdrew
as the priests had. They were veiled, all of them, and yet Agni recognized the
eyes of Yama’s mother, and Taditi behind her, silent, watchful.

There was no sign of Yama. Agni had more than half expected
him to leap forth and bellow a challenge, but there was nothing. Only silence.

He stood in the circle of light, alone but for the king. He
looked down into those shadowed eyes.

Perhaps the king returned his gaze. Perhaps he did not. The
soul in that body was well set on the road.

If Agni would be king, he must finish what the fall had
begun. He must sever the cord that bound this man to life.

He had killed men before, in battle, as any warrior must.
But to kill so, in sacrifice—the sacrifice that was made only of and by a
king—was nothing that he had ever done.

He must do it. The knife was in his hand, the black blade,
the haft carved of bone. A priest held out the cup that was a skull, the skull
of a king long dead. Agni took it slowly.

The king sat unmoving. He breathed: Agni saw the faint
lifting of his breast.

He would go as a king should go, by the blade as he had
lived. Agni gathered his courage in both hands. T

he drum beat, slow, slow. The priests began to chant the
hymn of the opening of the way. For the king it would be as if a gate rose
before him, opening slowly, showing before him the gods’ country.

But he could not go to it unless Agni aided him. Agni
tightened his fingers round the haft of the knife. The skull-cup fit closely in
his hand, ready to drink the blood as it sprang.

He drew a deep breath, let it go. As it fled away, steaming
in the cold, Agni made the king-cut.

Swift, hard, clean. The blood ran high and strong: startling
in one who had been so close to death.

As the life poured out of the king, the fire flared,
catching the glitter of his eyes. Full into Agni’s, alive, vivid—aware.

And glad. Heart-glad.

The king was dead. Agni poured his blood on the earth to
mingle with blood of the bull. Priests took up the body, wrapped it in the
bull’s hide, and laid it on the bier. Beside it they laid the bull’s head with
its great curving horns.

The people would feast on the body of the bull. Agni,
fasting, aching with cold, must follow the priests away from the warmth and the
light, into the cold dark. Only the women followed.

Yama did not step forward, did not challenge, did not demand
that he and not Agni go to the grave with the king’s body. Agni’s back ached
with the tension of waiting for it; but it never came. He went as he should
properly have done, alone with the priests and with the women of his father’s
tent.

They walked in starlight, unlit by lamp or torch. The path
was clear before them. The people had beaten it all the day long, going back
and forth from camp to new-raised barrow.

Now Agni saw it all but finished, rising higher than he had
expected, dark against the stars. They had built it well. It would endure,
first in heaped stones, and then when spring came, when the ground had
softened, it would be covered over and made into a hill like one born of Earth
Mother herself.

They laid the king in it, wrapped in the hide of the bull,
and when the barrow was built the bull’s head would mount guard over it. The
bull would look to the rising sun as the sacrifice had done since the dawn time;
looking back the way that the people had come.

But the king looked westward. It was not the way of the
people, but Agni set him so, and the priests did not contest it.

Agni could not have said why he commanded it. Because Sarama
had gone into the west, the daughter whom the king had loved. Because the
tribes had always gone westward; had always followed the sun when they looked
for new lands to conquer. So would the king do, turning his face forward
instead of back, ahead to what would be, and not behind to what had been.

They laid his precious things with him, that the women had
brought: his weapons, his shield, the trappings of his horse. They laid baskets
and bowls beside him, food for his journey, all that the people could spare.

They had brought his old stallion; the beast came willingly,
and suffered the knife to be set in his throat. He sank down at his master’s
feet, sighed and slipped into death. Then they built the barrow over king and
stallion and buried them deep, and labored till dawn to do them their last
honor.

oOo

As the night passed, people of the tribe came from the
feasting to lay a stone, a blessing, a prayer; to bid the king farewell. His
kin came, his sons, the elders who had been his friends and rivals. They all
came, every one, with gifts for his memory, food and drink for his spirit,
tales that remembered him, that made him live again for a little while.

Then and no sooner, Yama came. He set himself on a stone,
lifted no hand to the barrow, but held court as if he had built it himself.
Only a fool would have believed it, but there were fools enough in the world.

Agni kept his distance. Yama did not denounce him, did not
stand up and challenge him in front of the people. He did not in fact say
anything at all to Agni, or acknowledge his presence. By that Agni grew more
certain that Rudira had lied.

Women had no honor. Agni must never forget that. And Rudira
had even less than most. Rudira the beautiful, Rudira the spoiled and endlessly
indulged, Rudira who saw nothing but what she wanted, and sulked until she had
it.

He despised her. And yet the thought of her sent a rush of
heat through his body. She had lied only out of selfishness, and because she
was angry; because he had neglected her. If he went to her tomorrow, she would
be as eager for him as ever, would rebuke and then forgive him, because she
could not imagine that anyone would honestly wish to be free of her.

And did he? He had looked at no other woman since he met
those silver eyes above the bridal veil. They had warmed to his regard, and
beckoned; and within days of Yama’s wedding, Agni had found himself in Rudira’s
arms. There had never been a woman so gifted in giving a man pleasure. He did
not think there could be.

Such thoughts to think upon the grave of his father. Agni
set them aside, stood on the summit of the great cairn and watched the sun come
up.

The bull’s head rose above his own, mounted on a spearshaft.
The new sun gleamed on its horns, caught its eyes and woke in them a semblance
of life. It would guard its charge well, till the flesh fell from the bones,
and the empty skull bleached white in wind and sun.

The king was well set on his way. Agni bowed to him one last
time and spoke his own farewell, the last that the king would hear before he
passed the gate into the gods’ country. It was simple; Agni had never been one
for great flourishes of speech.

“Fare you well, king and father,” he said. “May your bones
rest gentle on the breast of Mother Earth. May Skyfather hold your spirit in
his hand. May the gods welcome you among them, and raise you high, and make you
a king as you have always been.”

He looked down at the faces of the people who lingered. Many
faces; a great portion of the tribe, and great honor, that they should have
remained in the bitter cold. The rite would not allow him to speak again while he
stood on the barrow, but he could encompass them in the sweep of his arms, and
offer thanks with his eyes and his smile.

Some smiled back. Others regarded him steadily, somberly, as
if they weighed him and reckoned his fitness. He would, after all, be their
king.

But not till the days of mourning were over. From the new
moon to the full; time enough, since this thing had been expected, for word to
reach the tribes over which the king had ruled, and for their elders and their
warleaders to come to the kingmaking. Then it would be done. Then Agni would be
king of the White Horse people.

oOo

He went back alone to the tent that had been his father’s,
ate something perhaps—he did not afterward remember—and fell headlong into
sleep.

He slept the sun out of the sky and back into it again. Then
at last he woke, ravenous, and found Taditi sitting by him, wafting a cup of
warm mead under his nose.

He swam up out of a dream that he forgot as soon as it was
gone, reached blindly for the mead, drank till he was dizzy. Then she fed him,
carefully as one did after fasting, until he was something close to himself
again.

The world felt strange. The king was not in it. Neither the
maimed and dying thing that Agni had watched over for so many days, nor the
strong old man who had held the tribe in his hand. Agni caught himself looking
for that one, listening for the rough-sweet voice, wondering why the accustomed
place was empty.

He could sit in it. It was his right—if for no other reason
than that, as favored son, he had inherited the tent and everything in it, even
the women. But he could not bring himself to take them. Not yet.

Once he had risen properly and dressed and made himself
presentable, he took his own place, the place that he had always had, to finish
his breakfast. As he was nibbling the last bits, the women came to him there,
unveiled as they might properly be before the man who was now their master.

He had not known there were so many. A dozen wives, a dozen
more who were concubines, and daughters innumerable, some nigh old enough to
marry, others still nursing at the breast. And then there were the sons, the
youngest clinging to their mothers and staring at their elder brother, the rest
with the boys or the young men, or grown and married as Yama was.

At least, he thought wryly, he need not consider the
daughters who were married. Those belonged to their husbands, and need only be
his concern if they dishonored the tribe.

Those who came to him now were his whether he was king or
no, his inheritance. The wives were his to keep or to send away. The concubines
likewise. The daughters he must raise till they could be married.

He was a wealthy man, who had been possessed of nothing but
his weapons and his clothing and the stallion whom Horse Goddess had sent to
him. He could give it all away, if it pleased him, but that would do no honor
to the king his father. Or he might ask these women what they wished: to stay,
to go, to belong to him or to return to their kin.

It was no shame to them or to him if they left. But if they
chose to remain, then he was theirs as they were his.

They paid him reverence, kneeling to him and bowing their
heads, though one or two of the menchildren did so with visible reluctance.
None of them would speak until he spoke first.

“Very well,” he said, speaking the words he had rehearsed
before he came there. “I’ll give you the choice now. To stay or to go. If you
stay, I care for you as my father did before me. If you go, you go with no
dishonor. I give you the freedom of your choosing.”

He heard, or thought he heard, the whisper of a sigh. The
tension in them eased, if only somewhat.

They glanced at one another. He could see the factions in
the way they sat or in the way their eyes met. There seemed to be several small
factions and a pair of larger ones, subtle but clear to see once one found the
way of it. It was like this in battle, when enemy fought against enemy, and
within each army the tribes and clans held together.

The chief of one such spoke abruptly, breaking the silence.
“I go to my son,” said Yama’s mother, “I and my daughters.”

That was defiance, since a mother might go, but her
daughters should remain in their father’s tent. But Agni did not mean to
contest that of all choices. Whatever might come of it, whatever the woman’s
reason for taking herself and her offspring away, he was glad. Glad to be rid
of them. Glad to be free of their hostility.