White Mare's Daughter (7 page)

Not naked, no, and not still warm with his loving. Agni
conceded her the point.

He helped her up, helped her dress. She had recovered some
of her bold spirit, he was pleased to see.

They could not go back together; that would betray too much.
He left first, walking quickly. He did not look back.

Only when he was long gone did it strike him. He had never
asked her name.

oOo

Rudira could not have known what Agni had been doing. Nor
did he think it wise to tell her. He went from the place of the lovers all the
way to the river, and scrubbed himself clean before he went to her.

She was waiting where they had agreed, out beyond the tents,
but far away from the place where Agni had gone with the woman of the Red Deer.
She was wrapped in a mantle, a shadow in starlight.

When he went to fold arms about her, she slipped away.
“You’re late,” she said. Her voice was petulant.

“I came as soon as I could,” Agni said.

“That was not soon enough,” said Rudira. “There’s no time to
do anything now. I have to be back in the tent when he comes back. He asked for
me tonight. He told me to wear the amber that he gave me.”

“I thought,” said Agni, “that we agreed: you’ll not be going
to him.”

“I never agreed to that,” she said. “He’s my husband. When
he asks, I have to obey.”

He seized her shoulders before she could escape, and held
her tight, though she made no effort to resist him. “You don’t have to let him
ask you!”

Somewhere in the flurry of movement, the mantle had slipped
from her hair. Her face was a pale glimmer, her eyes paler still. She looked
like nothing mortal. But her voice was altogether of earth. “He is my husband.”

“That never mattered to you before.”

“And did it matter that I was waiting, when you went into
the night with that slut from the Dun Cow?”

“She was never from the Dun Cow,” Agni had said before he
thought. He bit his tongue, but the words were out.

She hissed and sprang. He caught her before her clawed nails
could rake his face; caught her and fastened his lips on hers. She twisted, but
he was stronger. With a sound like a moan, deep in her throat, she set about
eating him alive.

This—oh, gods, this was fire. With the woman of the Red Deer
he had known but a glimmer of warmth. This was a white heat. The touch of her
lips, of her hands, roused him as none other ever had. Or, he thought— wished,
vowed—ever would.

They tumbled in the grass, reckless of any who might hear.
She was naked under the mantle; wonderful, wanton creature. Her white body
glimmered in the starlight. His own, darker, heavier, joined with it. Her eyes
gleamed silver. “You,” he said, or gasped. “You are—”

“I am all that is,” she said, calm as one may be at a truth
that is inarguable.

“Gods,” he said. “Oh, gods.”

“Goddess,” she said. And when he would have said more, she
swooped and seized him and drowned him again, and yet again, in her kiss.

Sarama lived in the camp as one who both belongs and does
not belong. She had a place to sleep, she was fed, more often than not she knew
the names of the people who greeted her when she went here or there. That she
knew more of the horses than of the people did not concern her greatly. Horses
were more interesting by far than the run of human folk.

Those who were her kin, or rather her father’s kin, his
wives and children, had little to do with her. Except for Yama her brothers did
not trouble her; the sisters and the wives mostly let her be. The children
followed her about, but children always did that; and them she would speak to.
They were eager to learn, pelting her with questions, which she was glad to
answer.

Of the king her father she saw as little as any woman did
who was not one of his wives. Even they, unless they were favorites, saw him
only when he called for them, and then only to wait on him of a day or to
please him of a night. His daughters were never regarded. She doubted if he
even knew how many he had.

He was reckoned merciful, perhaps too much so, for that he
suffered them all to live, nor had commanded that they be drowned in the river
or set out on the steppe for the wolves to dispose of. Sarama did not know if
it was mercy or simple absentmindedness. She did not know him, not well. He had
always had eyes only for her brother.

Men and their sons, she used to think. Then she had seen
other fathers doting over their daughters, and decided that her father was
odder than most. Maybe it was that he was a king; a king must be unlike other
men.

After she knew in her heart that she must go to find the
sunset people, she knew another thing, a thing that pleased her rather less.
She could not simply ride away. She must stand face to face with the king, and
understand . . . something. What it was, she did not know; only
that she must do it.

oOo

In the end she went to him not as a petitioner while he
sat in the circle on his royal horsehide, nor as a feaster among feasters in
the firelit evening, but as a daughter to her father. She approached him as was
permitted a woman, in the morning after he had risen and been dressed but
before he went out among the men. Then he would summon this or that wife or
daughter to keep him company, and would break his fast, sometimes with a
friend, sometimes alone.

Today he had with him his eldest wife and a handful of her
daughters—all sisters of Yama, daughters of his mother, and one strikingly pale
creature whom she remembered, vaguely, as one of Yama’s wives.

Yama’s sisters and his mother were as large as he and as
good to look at, but none of them had his half-finished look. They eyed Sarama
narrowly as she approached the king’s dining place. There was no friendship in
their gaze, but no enmity either. They were reserving judgment.

The wife was slender and icily lovely. She might have seemed
a pretty fool, vapid with her white skin and her wide colorless eyes, and yet
Sarama thought that there might be more to her than met the eye.

Here, thought Sarama, was the strength that she had not seen
in Yama. She would have been willing to wager that these women had set Yama on
her, and told him what to say.

This was not the wisest or best time, perhaps, to speak to
the king. But nothing would free her from the intrigues of the women’s side;
and while she had these in front of her, she could know precisely what they
knew.

She inclined her head therefore, first to the king and then
to his wife and daughters, and last, but not least, to Yama’s wife. They
inclined theirs in return. It was simple courtesy, nor could they properly
refuse it.

The king smiled at her. In the tent’s dimness, without the
high horned headdress to lift him up above simpler men, she could see how old
he was, how grey and worn he had become. The long braids of his hair were thin
and dulled to ash. Deep lines were carved in his cheeks, cleaving into the
grey-shot beard. His eyes under the heavy brows were clouded.

Perhaps, she thought, and that thought was cold and still,
Yama had had the right of it. This was a Ninth Year. A king who faded, whose
strength was failing, should mount the Stallion and ride him into the gods’
country. He should not linger, should not weaken the tribes with his weakness.

No. The man was aging, no one could doubt it. But his shoulders
were straight. His eyes though dimmed saw clear enough. His voice was strong,
his mind unblurred. “Sarama,” he said. “Daughter. Are you well?”

“I am well,” she said.

He smiled. “Good,” he said. “Good.”

Sarama fought the urge to wriggle as she had done when she
was small, when her father had summoned her for this reason or that. Their
conversation then as now had proceeded in fits and starts, in twitches of
discomfort. They had never known what to say to one another.

She wished that she had brought Agni with her, though he
might well have chosen to hinder her. Agni was his father’s favorite. Anything
that he asked, the old man would grant.

But Agni was off doing whatever a young man did in the
morning. Sarama had only herself to look to. She drew a deep breath. “Sir,” she
said, “I’m going away.”

He blinked at her. Whatever he had expected her to say,
clearly it had not been that. She fancied that she could see Agni in him then,
in the startled expression, perhaps somewhat in the line of cheek and jaw under
the grizzled beard. “And where will you go?” he asked, much as Agni had before
him.

“West,” she answered, “where the goddess leads me.”

“West? To the sunset countries?”

Sarama half-smiled. So he did listen when people talked
around him, though he never seemed to. “To the sunset countries,” she agreed,
“where they know nothing of Horse Goddess. She calls me there.”

“We had thought you would stay here,” he said.

“I go where the goddess bids,” said Sarama.

He nodded. He looked senile then, falling asleep where he
sat, with his gimlet-eyed wife and too-silent daughters about him, staring. But
beneath the thicket of grey brows, Sarama saw the gleam of his eyes. He was
watching her.

Old fox,
she would
have said had they been alone,
you watch
us all, don’t you? And what do you think of your sons who would be king?

But she could not say such a thing in this company. She said
instead, “Your blessing would set me well upon my way.”

He stirred as if she had roused him from a doze, but it was
as she had suspected: his eyes were bright, no sleep in them. “What would you
do with my blessing, goddess-child?”

“Be glad of it,” she answered, “O my father.”

“You look,” he mused, “like your mother. Oh, indeed, very
like her. You think as she thought, too. She was a most interesting woman, was
my beautiful Surti.”

“She was the last of her people,” Sarama said. “Now there
will be no others.”

“There is you,” said the king.

“And is there none of your blood in me?”

“Some said,” said the king, “that she conceived of the dawn
wind, as mares are said to do—as if the stallions had no part in it. But the
boy is mine. There was never any doubt of that.”

“So too am I,” Sarama said. “The goddess made me, but your
seed was her instrument. Of that she has assured me.”

He regarded her in silence for a moment. “You believe that
you speak truth,” he said. “Perhaps it is so.” He lifted his hand, she thought
to bless her—she bowed her head for it—but he waved her away, irritably. “Go.
Go! Do as you must. I was never given authority over you, not even as a father.
Horse Goddess took all of you from the moment you were born.”

But she would not go, not without what she had asked. “And
your blessing?”

“You have it,” he said. “Now and always. Now go.”

Then she went, not for obedience, but because she had what
she had come for. Not only a blessing. An acknowledgment.

oOo

The king did not walk out and about, not in these days.
Therefore it was a profound shock to Agni to be minding his business near his
father’s tent, fletching a quiverful of arrows, and to look up as a shadow fell
over him, and to see his father’s face bent down.

The king regarded his work with interest. He took up an
arrow that Agni had finished, weighed and balanced it, nodded. “Good work,” he
said.

Agni considered various forms of obeisance, settled for the
inclination of the head that he had seen his sister use. It seemed his father
knew it: that was a smile lurking under the beard. He sat on his heels with
none of the stiffness that one might expect, took up one of the arrows as yet
unfletched, began deftly to cut and fit the grey dove-feathers to the readied
shaft.

It was strange, Agni thought, and perhaps intended; but the
king was alone. He was dressed like any man of the tribes, no mark on him that
he was king. The many who saw him only seated in state with his tall crown on
his head might never have known him as he was now, crouched companionably with
the prince, performing a task that any mortal hunter could do.

He was good at it, too. Agni wondered if he practiced when
he was shut up in kingly solitude, making and fletching arrows that he would
never use, simply for the occupation they gave his hands.

Agni wanted to be king. But not for a long while yet. Not
till he was old himself, and weary of the hunt and the raid, and ready to sit
on a well-tanned horsehide and wear a tall heavy crown and be father to the
gathering of the tribes.

They worked in silence. Agni was quicker but the king was
surer, his skill honed with years and patience. When the last pair of arrows
had gained their wings, the king said, “Your sister is going away.”

Agni nodded.

“She has never been here,” the king said. “Never in spirit.
She was always with the Old Woman, being servant to the goddess. Odd that it
matters now, how far she will go, and where.”

“She wants to bring Horse Goddess to people who never knew
her,” Agni said.

“So she told me,” said the king. He paused. “And where will
you go, my son?”

So, thought Agni. That was his trouble. “I have to hunt my
horse,” he said, “or never be reckoned a man.”

“Indeed. And will you hunt westward?”

“There are no free horses in the west, Father,” Agni said.

The king sighed. “No. There are not. You would do well to
hunt north; there’s a herd, an old one, that some say descends from stock that
bred the Mare. For all that any of us knows, the Mare herself came from it.”

Agni bit his tongue. The Mare came from such a herd, he had
no doubt; but not the one his father spoke of. There was a band that ran the
steppe near the goddess’ hill, a band of greys, with here and there a black or
a bay.

But he could not speak of that. It was a mystery. He only
knew it because he had crept out there when he was supposed to be hunting, and
he had found the herd and known it for what it was.