White Mare's Daughter (67 page)

“They’re not going to,” Mika said.

Agni sighed faintly. Tillu had opinions and was not shy in
expressing them, but he never argued as this child did. Neither had he spoken
as well for Agni, or been so keenly aware of these people’s minds: how they
thought, what they meant by the words they spoke.

“Just tell them,” Agni said.

Mika told them—or so Agni could suppose. One of the women in
the front rank answered in a harsh clear voice. Agni knew the word: “No.”

“Tell her that if she resists, it is an act of war. And in
war, people die.”

“She says she knows,” Mika said when he had spoken and been
answered.

“Very well,” Agni said. He turned Mitani about and raised
his voice.

“We ride forward. Don’t strike unless someone strikes you
first. Use your horses’ weight to drive them back. This town is ours. We will
take it.”

They all nodded. He caught and held any eye that gleamed too
brightly, and stared it down. When he was satisfied that they would do as he
bade them, he turned again and rode Mitani toward the line. It did not waver,
which spoke well for these people’s bravery and badly for their common sense.

Very deliberately he kept his spear on his saddle and his
long knife in its sheath. He simply rode forward.

Mitani hesitated, unwilling to trample living flesh; but
Agni urged him on. He could feel the weight of his warriors behind him, their
numbers smaller than the people gathered here, but strong, and mounted on
horses.

The line stiffened against the weight of them, but it could
not hold. It weakened and wavered and broke.

Agni was through, and the road was clear, his warriors
quickening their pace behind him.

oOo

He did not see how it began. He heard a sound that he knew
too well at first to understand. The song of an arrow, the soft thud as it
struck flesh; the cry of a wounded man. But as he turned, he saw as in a dream
the raising of a spear, the woman—it was a woman, he could not mistake
her—driving it into the body of a horseman who pushed past her.

One blow bred another. The tautness of waiting shattered.
With a howl of pure glee, Agni’s warriors leaped into the fight.

Agni drew breath to bellow at them, to command them to stop.
But the words never escaped. The people of this town, the Lady’s people, were
fighting—not well, but fighting it certainly was. Their archers were
particularly dangerous. Maybe for them it was easier, because they need not
stand face to face with a man before they shot him.

Agni waded in. He slipped his spear from its lashings and
struck with the butt of it, fending off wild blows, ducking arrows that flew
overhead.

It was an untidy, unlovely melee, no order or reason in it,
but blood enough. Patir was down—off his horse but on his feet, staggering,
bleeding from a wound in his forehead. Past him Gauan lay unmoving, his yellow
hair stained scarlet.

Dead. Agni sat Mitani above him, staring down at his bruised
and broken face. Someone must have had a stone and smitten him with it. His
expression, what there was of it, was enormously surprised.

Agni bent low, leaning far out of Mitani’s saddle, and
trailed his fingers in Gauan’s blood. He tasted it, the sweet strong taste.

He straightened. His mind was very clear. He called to as
many of his people as could hear, and beckoned them to him, away from that
travesty of a battle. “Come,” he called. “Come with me!”

They took the town with fire and blood, swept over it and
devoured it. They took its women and children. Any who fought them, they
killed. They made war in the Lady’s country, made a sacrifice of blood to the
red gods, the war-gods. They poured it out on the earth in Earth Mother’s name,
that the grass grow rich and the rains fall steady, and make the people strong.

oOo

Agni sat in the Mother’s house. She was dead, killed in
the fight on the road. Her daughter, her heir, lay badly wounded, with women
tending her. Agni did not mean for her to die, unless the gods willed it. His
heart was all cleansed, all empty. Blood had washed it clean.

In a little while he must see to Gauan’s burial. No other
horseman had died; only the prince of the Stormwolf people, that amiable man
who had ridden so often at Agni’s side. Friends they had not been, not as he
and Patir were, or as he had been with Rahim. But they had ridden far together,
and shared many a campfire of an evening. Agni would miss his familiar
presence, his light touch with a jest, the way he had of coaxing people to
smile when they were inclined to be surly.

It should be easier than losing Rahim. Rahim he had killed
with his own hand. But dead was dead. There was no calling Gauan back. He was
gone.

Agni looked around him at this house so like every other
Mother’s house, as if, like the temples of the Lady, Mothers’ houses were
prescribed by rite and custom. The hangings just so, the carpets thus, the
furnishings in this order and no other. All Mothers, these people believed,
were faces of the Lady. And she, it seemed, liked all her houses to be alike.

He was tired of that sameness. If he ever paused long enough
to do it, he would remake a Mother’s house into a king’s tent. He would cast
out the furnishings, pull down the hangings, hide the harsh wooden walls behind
softer walls of leather or woven cloth.

Tonight he endured it as it was, because there was no time
to change it. Outside, in the town, his men celebrated noisily. They had all
been spoiling for a fight. This easy victory suited them well. They had women,
willing or unwilling, and wine and mead, and here and there a wound to brag of.
This was war as they had been raised to wage it.

He had caught some of them hoping that there would be more
armed townspeople farther on; that this would not be the only fight or the only
honest victory in this strange conquest.

oOo

“Where are we going?” Patir asked Agni over the remains of
a dinner prepared and served by silent, tight-lipped men. “Will we just keep
riding westward till we find the edge of the world?”

Agni had not honestly thought about it. “I suppose we could
do that,” he said. “Or we could find a city that suits us and take it to live
in as if it were our summer hunting lands; and in the winter we’ll go
elsewhere—maybe back to Larchwood, maybe farther west, wherever we please to
go.”

“We could,” said Patir, “take what we’ve won and go back to
the steppe.”

“Where would we go?” Agni asked him. “We’re outcast from the
White Horse. Everywhere else we’re likely to go, some tribe or clan has claimed
it. We’d have to wage war, conquer a tribe. Wouldn’t you rather stay here,
where no one knows how to fight, and the whole country’s ours for the taking?”

“It’s settled country,” Patir said. “Cities everywhere you
look. You can’t ride half a day without coming across half a dozen villages.
There’s no room to breathe.”

“There’s hardly room on the steppe,” said Agni,
“particularly in the westward lands. The world’s filling up with people.”

“It’s too full here.” Patir stretched out, propped up on his
elbow, and sighed.

“Are you asking to go back?” Agni asked.

“No,” said Patir. “You like it here.”

“I do not,” Agni said.

“You do.” Patir grinned at Agni’s glare. “You like a country
full of women who talk back to you.”

“So does Taditi,” Agni said. “If I go, she’ll stay. She’s
already told me that.”

Patir did not ask how Agni could let her be so insolent. He
knew Taditi. “Have you ever wondered if she’s warming her bed with fine young
things while we take our pick of the women?”

Agni sucked in a breath. It was supposed to be a word, but
none came out. Taditi? Disporting herself with doe-eyed youths?

“She’s a woman,” Patir said, “and she’s not as old as all
that. Mika told me the men rather like her looks. She’s too thin by far, they
think, but they admire her strength, and her seat on a horse.”

“These men are all like women,” Agni said. “They giggle and simper
like girls. I’m surprised none of them has asked me into his bed.”

“They are weaklings.” Patir lay flat and stretched, arching
his back and yawning loudly. “
Ah!
I
could sleep till winter.”

“You can’t,” Agni said. “We have to bury Gauan.”

That sobered Patir, for a little while. “His kin want to declare
blood feud against this whole country.”

“They’ll settle for taking their revenge on this town,” Agni
said.

“Why?” Patir asked. And when Agni lifted a brow, not certain
of the meaning: “Why are you so easy on these people? We’ve found we can
provoke them into a fight. That makes this honorable war. Why won’t you let it
happen as it happens?”

“Because I want to rule this country, not destroy it,” Agni
said.

“You are a strange one,” said Patir. He sprang to his feet.
“Come. We’ve a barrow to raise.”

Agni rose more slowly. Sometimes it seemed that whatever
Patir said was only half of it; that Rahim should be there to complete it. And
now Gauan was gone. More would go if these hotheads had their way; till this
country with its crowding people and its relentless refusal to fight
overwhelmed and consumed the last of them.

He considered explaining that to Patir, but Patir was nigh
gone already. He held his peace instead, and went to lay Gauan on Earth
Mother’s breast.

Of course it was Catin who had the news first. A town
called Wild Rose had given way to its fear and determined to stand against the
horsemen. They had killed a horseman, and for that a whole dozen of them had
died and many more been wounded, and their town taken as a prize of war.

“You see?” cried Catin to the assembled people of Three
Birds. “This is what comes upon you. This is what comes of fighting.”

“If you don’t fight,” Sarama said, raising her voice only a
little, but enough to carry, “they’ll only go on until they find someone who will.”

“So they’ll stop,” said someone from among the crowd.
“They’ve taken Wild Rose. They’ll be content.”

“No,” said Sarama. “Wild Rose is little more than a village.
A king of the horsemen will want a city worthy of his presence. He’ll take
whatever comes between himself and such a city, but he won’t let it turn him
aside. Once he comes to that mother of cities—then he’ll stop.”

“Three Birds is the mother of cities in this part of the
world,” Danu said.

“We can make sure that he stops here,” Sarama said. “We may
even turn him back. He can’t have many men with him. Everyone agrees, these are
men, not tribes with women and children. He’ll be stretched thin, so far from
the steppe, and with so many towns and cities in back of him for him to hold.
If we stand fast—”

“If we stand fast,” said Catin, “we die, and he runs over
us. Why not just give him what he wants? Then he’ll go away.”

“I don’t think so,” Sarama said.

“You don’t make sense,” said Catin.

Sarama bared her teeth. Danu spoke smoothly and easily in
her silence. “I think she means that the horsemen will come to Three Birds
because no city is greater—and if we fight them they’ll cut us apart, but if we
don’t fight them they’ll take us and break us. They’ll stop here whatever we
do. If we can push them back, maybe they’ll give up their war.”

“It won’t be that easy,” Sarama said, “but the rest is true
enough. He may look for us to be cowed because of what he did to Wild Rose. He
may meet further resistance as he comes toward us, but it won’t stop or even
slow him. It will give his men something to do—and that he’ll regard as a
blessing.”

“Why bless him?” Catin demanded. “Let’s offer him nothing.
No fight. No bribes to go away.”

“Then he’ll simply take what he pleases,” said Sarama. She
turned away from Catin. “You may dream as you like. I’m going to see that our
fighters are ready for whatever comes.”

oOo

They were ready; but what came first was a wave of the
Lady’s people. Townsfolk and villagers, struck to horror by the killing in Wild
Rose, fled the horsemen’s advance. There was a little resistance, they said, a
few of the younger women and men refusing to run away, but wise people gathered
their belongings and set off westward.

They did not mean to stop in Three Birds. Like Sarama they
had seen that it was the greatest of the cities and the most likely to draw the
horsemen’s eye. They would rest there for a night or a day, but they would go
on; would travel westward until their fear was gone away, or until they came to
the edge of the world.

People in Three Birds, Sarama was pleased to note, did not
run away. Some elected to go on trading ventures or to visit kin in cities well
away from the horsemen’s advance, but no one actually, openly fled.

The same could not be said of the people from Larchwood. As
seemed to be their ancestral way, once they had clear sight of danger, they set
themselves as far away from it as they could go.

Catin professed that someone must bring warning to the west,
as if every trader and traveler could not have done it as well as she. Her
Mother was weary, though she insisted that she was not ill. She was content to
go wherever her daughter led her.

Good riddance, Sarama thought. Let them take their fear and
their doomsaying elsewhere, and leave Three Birds to fight its battle as it had
long prepared to do.

The fighters whom she had labored so long to train were as
ready as they would ever be. She had raised such defenses as the Mother and the
elders would allow: had set a mob of young men and women to digging a ditch on
the sunrise side, all around the edges of the fields, deep enough and wide
enough to give a horseman pause. At the bottom of it she had them set sharpened
stakes.

It was an ugly thing, but then, as she said to Tilia, war
was ugly. Since the city could not pick itself up and move, and since the
people on foot could never match the pace of men on horseback, there had to be
some way to stop the horsemen; some barrier that they could not cross.