White Mare's Daughter (50 page)

He turned his eyes on the chief of elders of his own tribe.
“Did you grant him this?”

“We persuaded him to accept it.”

The elder said it without joy, but without wavering, either.

Agni shook his head, as if so simple a movement could sway
all these gathered elders. “I can’t go away. I have to be king. My father—”

“If your father had known what you were,” said someone whom
he did not know, wearing the signs of the Black Stallion, “he would have cast
you out himself.”

“But I am not—” Agni stopped. No one believed him. Even
those who looked on him with sympathy, who appeared to grieve for the judgment
that they had made, still reckoned him an ill creature, a man who had not only
taken another man’s wife, but who had done so against her will.

If she had indeed been what she pretended, a young woman
seeking a husband among the dancers, and if there had been no charge of rape,
he would have borne the burden of her death, and owed forfeit to her kin. But
she had been an elder’s wife. And she had a claimed a thing, perhaps to salvage
what honor she had left, that he had never done nor dreamed of doing.

It had not even been a pleasant meeting. He had obliged her
out of courtesy, and forgotten her as soon as she was gone.

He could not remember her face. Green eyes—yes, he
remembered those. But of the rest, nothing.

He looked at the world that had been so bright, at his wonderful
coat that had been made for a king, at the circle of elders who had proclaimed
his sentence. A sentence against which he had no appeal. If he had been struck
down by a bolt from heaven, he could not have been destroyed so swiftly.

So this, he thought with distant clarity, was why Yama had
not risen to challenge him, nor interfered in the old king’s death and burial.
And yet, how could this have been Yama’s doing? Yama was never so subtle or so
perfectly cruel.

Yama’s mother, his sisters—maybe. But if they had done this,
they were more terrible than he had ever imagined. They could find a wife who
was a maiden, and persuade her to act out the lie—promising her a new husband,
a prince, who would take her out of guilt but keep her and give her honor. Then,
somehow, they proved to her that such could never be, and taught her to hate
him, and drove her to her death; and so destroyed the one who stood between
Yama and the kingship.

No. He could not believe such a thing, even of Yama-diti.
Because if he believed it, then he must believe that Rudira had played some
part in it. That what he had heard in Yama’s tent that night after he came back
with his stallion was a pact between the prince’s mother and the prince’s
youngest wife. That they had acted together to destroy Agni, so that Rudira
could be a king’s wife.

No. And no again. This was the gods’ doing. Only gods could
lift him so high, and give him so much farther to fall.

He turned blindly. “I must speak to the people,” he said. “I
must—”

“No,” said the chief of elders. “You will say nothing. You
are outcast.”

“But who will be king?”

“That will be settled,” the elder said.

“Promise me,” said Agni. “Promise me that it won’t be—”

“We promise you nothing,” said the elder. “We owe you
nothing. You are no longer one of us.”

With each word, the blow struck harder. Agni had been numb,
unbelieving. Now he woke to sensation—and that sensation was pain.

Of all the ways in which Agni could have lost the
kingship, this was the one he had never expected. The irony was exquisite. If
he had lost it for Rudira—that, he would have understood. But to lose it for
this, for an hour’s encounter, for the folly of obliging a woman who had
demanded it of him, was beyond anything he had thought to fear.

His own elders condemned him in sorrow that seemed
unfeigned, but they would not alter their judgment. They brought him out of the
tent into the glare of the day, to the shouts and cheering of the people, which
died down raggedly as those closest saw the grim faces, and marked how Agni was
brought before them: as a captive and not as a king. They had not asked to bind
his hands. But they gripped him by the arms and thrust him into the light, and
held him as the silence spread.

Then they stripped him. They reft him of his beautiful coat.
They snatched away his ornaments, even to the beads and the feathers in his
hair. They laid his body bare before the people. And all the while they did it,
they proclaimed aloud the tale of his crime—the lie that had been sealed with a
dying woman’s oath.

He, the part of him that thought, that reasoned as a man can
reason, had gone away. He was nothing, no one. He had no name. They had taken
it. He had no tribe, no kin. All that he was, all that was left of him, was
outcast.

They drove him out with whips and stones and clods of earth
and close-packed snow. They made a passage through their midst and pursued him
down it, out, away, onto the steppe.

Barefoot, naked in the bitter cold of winter, bruised and
bleeding and numb in the heart, still he walked erect out of the camp. He
stumbled, rocking at blows, but he did not fall, nor did he flinch or grovel.
That much he could show them in his ruin: a straight back and unmarred pride.

Pride carried him away from the camp of the White Horse
people. Pride kept him on his feet until the last of them had fallen away,
weary of the pursuit. And pride took him farther, and farther again, till the
cold was set in his bones, and the dark had swooped down on him and taken him
out of the world.

oOo

Agni swam out of sleep. Through the blur of its leaving,
he saw faces. Patir; Rahim. Taditi frowning down at him, looking as severe as
she ever had when he was a scapegrace child.

He frowned back at her. “I had the most horrible—” He
yawned, stretched; gasped. Dreams did not ache in every bone, or catch on ribs
that must be broken.

“You didn’t dream it,” she said, harsh as ever, and as
little inclined to soften the blow.

He tried to scramble up, but he was as weak as a newborn
foal. “What are you doing here? Where is this? If they cast me out, and you are
seen with me—

“—we’ll be cast out.” Patir seemed unruffled by the
prospect. “We’re camped by the high tor. You’ve been wandering in a fever for a
night and a day. The kingmaking went on after all, though some of the elders tried
to stop it.”

“They chose Yama.” The taste of it was bitter in Agni’s
throat. “He did this. I don’t know how, but he did it.”

And yet he suspected. Rudira, Yama’s mother—women had their
own world, their own wars. If somehow they had discovered what Agni had done
with the woman of the Red Deer, and conspired with her, even persuaded her to
do what she had done, then all the rest would have been inevitable.

None of the others disputed with him. He looked about,
seeing at last where he was: in a tent, and not a particularly small one, with
all the comforts one could ask for; and most of those his own. “How—” he began.

Patir looked inexpressibly smug. “Sheer brilliance,” he
said. He caught Taditi’s eye and flushed. “Hers, not ours.”

She nodded grimly. “I had a feeling in my bones,” she said.
“When the elders didn’t come out when they should have, I packed everything I
could. I told these puppies to be ready. And I waited.”

“And you never told me?” Agni demanded.

She refused to be cowed. “You would have wanted to do
something foolish. So did the rest of them, but them I could threaten. They
weren’t eager to face your wrath if my bones were wrong.”

Agni shut his mouth tight.

She nodded, approving. “Yes, be sensible. I was. As soon as
the word came, we did what was necessary.”

“We gathered everything,” said Patir, “and took our horses
and rode out while the people were in disarray. We found you where she said we
would, blue with cold but burning with fever, and brought you here.”

“You should never have done it,” Agni said.

“That’s gratitude,” said Taditi to the others. “When are you
going to tell him how many of the people wouldn’t follow Yama?”

Agni sat bolt upright. He gasped, he reeled, but he stayed
there. “How many—”

“It’s only the hunting party,” Rahim said. “And some of
their brothers and cousins.”

“Rather many of their brothers and cousins,” Taditi said.
“With such of the herds as they could claim for themselves, and tents and
belongings, weapons, horses, whatever they were able to ride away with. You can
thank the gods this new king is a fool, or he’d have thought of ways to stop
them.”

Agni sat with his body jangling, stabbing with pain, and
tried to fit his mind around both his exile and the number of men who had gone
to it with him. So terrible a thing, the ruin of everything that he was—and
yet, by the gods’ will and the will of his friends, he found himself chieftain
of a tribe.

Nor was it a lie, a false comfort lest he will himself to
death. He insisted till they surrendered, struggled to his feet and stumbled
out of the tent, leaning on Rahim and Patir.

There was a camp of goodly size, campfires, herds of cattle,
horses, men performing duties as they must in a camp of warriors, since there
were no women to do it for them. Taditi was the only one.

“I had no desire to live in a tent that was ruled by
Yama-diti,” she said.

He looked out over this camp that, without even knowing it,
he had made. His eyes brimmed and overflowed. One stroke, one lie, had cast him
out of the tribe; yet here was a tribe that had chosen him, that had left its
own in order to follow him.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“What’s difficult?” said Rahim. “They made Yama king.”

“But the people,” Agni said. “Your honor, your name, your
kin—”

“There’s no honor in a lie sworn as truth,” Patir said.

“It could be true,” said Agni.

Patir shook his head. “Most men, yes. Not you. Because . . .”

“Because,” Taditi said when Patir could not say it, “you’ve
never in your life taken a woman who was not willing, nor had any need. And
you’ve had eyes for only one, this past year and more. She’s a shallow,
spiteful thing, and she wanted to be married to a king. She told her husband’s
mother of you, of what you’d done that she reckoned a betrayal. All the rest
came of that.”

Agni opened his mouth, shut it again.

Taditi shook her head. “There’s no fool like a fool in love.
It was an open secret, puppy. All the women knew. Even a few of the men.”

“I saw you,” Rahim confessed, “creeping out to meet her
once.”

“He told me,” said Patir, “and one way and another the
others had wind of it. We agreed to keep it a secret, but to keep a watch on
her. None of us trusted her. Her kin have a name for treachery.”

“I feel,” said Agni after a stretching while, “as if I must
be the only fool in the world.”

“All young men are fools,” Taditi said. “Now come back in
and lie down. You’ve a bit of mending to do yet.”

Agni did not want to go back into the smoky dimness of the
tent, but they were stronger than he, and he was wobbling on his feet. Taditi
fed him, though what it was he did not afterward recall. Somewhere between bite
and sip he fell into a heavy sleep.

oOo

His dreams were dark: fire and shouting, grim faces
circling, voices repeating the rite of his exile. Rudira came in her glimmering
white nakedness, and took him as a man takes a woman, headlong, and no pause to
ask his leave.

He struggled, but she was too strong. As she held him, as
she drained him dry, her face shifted and changed, until he looked into a face
he had nearly forgotten. The face of the woman of the Red Deer. She grinned at
him, and her grin was the grin of a skull.

He woke gasping, battling the furs that wrapped him. He
fought his way out of them and lay on the icy floor of the tent and struggled
to breathe calmly. These were not true dreams. Only fear-dreams. So he told
himself.

He crawled back into the furs, shivering as if he would
never be warm again. Somewhere in his sleep it had all come home to him. The
numbness was gone. He was cast out of the tribe, his kingship taken from him
before he could properly lay hand on it. Everything that he was and had been
was gone.

He should have been dead. And yet he lay here in comfort,
looked after by the aunt who had tended him when he was small, and a whole pack
of idiots camped around him, waiting for him to tell them what to do. That
could not be at all to Yama’s liking.

Yama could do nothing. Unless Agni took the army that had
followed him and led it against the people, Yama was powerless. Agni had been
made as nothing, was invisible, did not exist. The tribe could not go to war
against nothingness.

Agni was not comforted. The heart of him, the indissoluble
center, was gone. He had been born and raised in the White Horse people. When
he named himself, he was Agni son of Rama of the White Horse.

Now that was taken away. He was outcast. He had no family,
no tribe. Even his name had been taken away, though that clung stubbornly and
refused to go—like the friends and allies who had followed him and so destroyed
themselves.

His fault. He did not know how or understand why, but
somehow he had bound them to him beyond the dissolution of his bonds to tribe
and kin.

It was not supposed to have happened. When a man was cast
out, he lost everything. His friends, his allies, shut him out of mind and
memory. They were not supposed to follow him.

He must have cast a spell on them. Maybe it was as some
people had whispered, that his mother had been a sorcerer of great power; and
maybe after all he, and not only Sarama, had inherited that power.

He snorted in his wrapping of furs, and sneezed. That was
nonsense. He had no power but what any man had.

oOo