White Mare's Daughter (70 page)

Sarama had let the Mare loose to graze along the ditch. But
something, somewhat past noon, led her to call the Mare to her.

They came on slowly for a band of marauders, hardly faster
than a walk. They were not as thick as locusts, but they were numerous; more
than Sarama had expected. She saw banners and tokens of a great gathering of
tribes, some that she knew, many that she did not. Someone—Agni?—had swept the
steppe, and brought in every young rakehell that had ever vexed a tribe.

Not all of them were so very young, at that. There was a
grizzled beard here and there, the face of priest or elder or a warrior who had
outlived his battle-brothers.

She came to him last, the one she had been aware of from the
moment the first rank of horsemen came over the hill.

He had grown. His shoulders were broader, his beard thicker.
He rode the stallion who must have come to him at the Lady’s bidding, a tall
red beauty with a crescent moon on his brow.

She had forgotten how tall a man could be, or how keenly
carved her people’s faces were. Even their pale skin, their eyes blue or grey
or green or Agni’s rare amber, their hair yellow or red or fair brown, were
strange after brown faces, dark eyes, blue-black curling hair. Did she look as
odd as that to the people here?

The horsemen rode down the hill, spreading out across the
fields, trampling the grain that was near to harvest. Maybe they did not know
that it was planted with care and great labor, and its loss would mean a lean
winter. Certainly they did not care.

When the earth opened in front of them they stopped, the
foremost starting, shying, tangling the ranks behind. The line bent like a bow,
recoiling. But Agni sat his red stallion on the edge of the ditch, staring down
at the stakes as Tilia had not so long ago.

His expression was difficult to read. Maybe it was surprise.
Maybe, even, admiration.

He looked up. Sarama met his glance.

His eyes widened slightly: not surprise, that. Greeting, of
a sort. Gladness? Maybe. Neither could escape the fact that they faced one
another across a deep ditch filled with sharpened stakes.

He was the enemy. And yet he was her brother. The sight of
him was like cool water in summer’s heat. She had been a stranger among
strangers, even those she had come to love. This was her own blood, her own
kin.

She doubted that he felt the same. He was a man, after all.
He was, she could see, a king—and of more tribes than the one that he had been
born to rule.

She spoke across the barrier, not loudly, but loud enough
for him to hear. “Good day, brother. Have you come to conquer us?”

“‘Us’?” He raised his brows. “Are you their king, then?”

“Not likely,” said Sarama.

“Good,” he said, “because I’d not like to fight you for it.”

“Would you do that?”

He nodded. “This is the place the gods have led me to. I saw
it in dreams every night as I rode here. It’s just as I dreamed.”

“Even this?” Sarama tilted her head toward the ditch.

“No,” he said. “But there was fire and war in my dream, and
a rattling of spears. Did you muster these fighters? Can they actually fight?”

“We can fight.”

Sarama started. Danu’s voice was deep and deceptively soft,
pitched to carry. It was utterly unlike him to put himself forward, still less
to speak as if he were, by his lights, a woman.

But then this was a man who faced them. Danu must find him
unbearably presumptuous.

Agni looked him up and down. “So. Do they all speak a decent
human language here?”

“Only some of us,” Danu said. He had stepped out of the line
of fighters, spear in hand. He leaned on it with ease that was insolence, hip
cocked, chin up, and such a look about him that Sarama wished for a leash and a
whip, to bring him to heel.

Agni was no better. There was no mistaking the challenge in
his glance. Young males—hounds, bulls, or stallions; they were all the same.
“And who are you? Are you anyone of note among these people?”

“Probably not,” said Danu. “I’m the Mother’s son.”

“Ah,” said Agni. “A prince.”

“A man,” Danu said. “No more, if no less.”

Sarama rode the Mare between them, treading delicately on
the edge of the ditch. “Enough,” she said. “Take your men away, brother. Find
another city to be king in. This one is not for you.”

“But it is,” Agni said. “I’m going to take it.”

“You may try,” said Sarama.

“You’d fight me?”

“Yes,” Sarama said. Her heart was not as steady as her
voice, but that was stone, and sufficient.

“You’d betray your own kin?”

“Yes,” she said again.

His eyes narrowed. He was a stranger then, a man she knew
and yet did not know at all.

He had seen at last the shape of her in the enveloping coat.
He could not fail to see how Danu stood, how he glared across that barbed
space.

“So,” he said. “That’s the way of it. If he’s the Mother’s
son here, will you be Mother when the old one dies? Is that how it’s done?”

“No,” she said.

“No?” He arched a brow. “I don’t believe you. I think we’re
rivals here. Aren’t we?”

“We are whatever you force us to be.” Sarama backed the Mare
away from the edge, holding his gaze, half wishing he might follow it and
tumble into the ditch. But he did not move.

Not so the men behind him. They were shifting, restlessly as
it seemed, but as she focused on them she saw a method in it. Spearmen to the
front. Archers to the rear, stringing bows, fitting arrow to string.

They would fight. Agni might weaken in the last instant, but
Sarama doubted that he would try to overrule them. They would call him fool and
coward, words that no man could bear to hear.

She flicked her hand in the signal that she had agreed on
with her own fighters. She did not look back to see what they did. They would
be readying spears, stringing bows in their own turn. Hand to hand it could not
be, not across three manlengths’ width of bristling trench, but thrown spears
and well-aimed arrows could wound and kill well enough.

The moment stretched. The air had a taste of heated copper,
of blood and fire. Neither would give the signal that would loose the arrows.

Strings could only stretch so long; archers’ arms were
strong, but not strong enough to hold arrow nocked to string forever. And yet
Sarama could not find in her the word that would begin the fight. No more, it
seemed, could Agni.

A stir behind her almost—but not quite—brought her about.
She would not turn her back on the horsemen.

They were staring at something in back of her, something
that began in the distance and drew steadily closer. Sarama heard a flutter as
of birds’ wrings, and the voices of birds.

The horsemen wore such a look of blank astonishment that
Sarama dared to look over her shoulder.

It was only the Mother of Three Birds with the flock of her
daughters. Her acolytes preceded them. A few of her sons followed, and others
of the people behind. But what had struck the horsemen dumb was the escort that
went with them: a shifting, twittering flock of bright-winged birds.

The birds had come out of the Lady’s wood to follow the
Mother. Three white doves circled above her. She walked in stately calm, as if
she went about every day in a cloud of wings.

Sarama’s fighters parted before her. Sarama half expected
her to walk right over the ditch, to float on air or to sprout wings and fly
like one of the birds, but her daughters set hand and shoulder to the bridge of
wood that had been made to lie across the trench, swung it up and round and
over to the other side. Then, as calmly as ever, the Mother walked across and
stood in front of Agni.

He sat tall on his tall horse, and she was not a
particularly tall woman. Still she towered before him. She said clearly in the
language of his own people, that Sarama had not even known she knew, “Be
welcome, king of the horsemen, in Three Birds.”

Sarama swayed on the Mare’s back. No one else seemed
stunned, but most on this side could not understand the language of the tribes.
The horsemen wore expressions half of smugness, half of disappointment. They
had been hoping for a fight, but they had been too wise, their faces said, to
honestly expect one.

And there was the Mother face to face with Agni, for he had
slid from his stallion’s back. He was still much taller than she. She admired
his height openly, as women did here. They were never circumspect about a man’s
attractions.

“Come,” she said to him, and led him back across the bridge.

His men hesitated briefly, much too briefly for Sarama to
persuade anyone to overset the bridge. It was wide enough for two to ride
abreast, or for three to walk leading their horses. And so they did, all of
them, leaving no one behind. They were not fools, to be trapped on the far side
of a city’s defenses, with no way to come through if the people of the city
chose to cut them off.

So much, thought Sarama, for the defending of Three Birds.
In but a moment’s time, the Mother had set it all at naught, had given up the
city without so much as a murmur.

Her people said nothing against her. Even Sarama’s fighters,
even Danu, bowed their heads and acquiesced. A Mother could not choose wrongly,
could not betray her people to an enemy. There was no space in their minds for
such a thing.

Agni would never confess even to Sarama—especially to
Sarama—how truly astonished he was, to be given this of all cities as a gift.
He looked for a trap, for a subterfuge that would destroy him and all his men,
but there was none. The city was open to him. The Mother led him through the
circles and the curving ways, to her house that was the largest he had yet
seen.

A great tribe of people lived in it, filling its many rooms.
They broke camp and shifted elsewhere with all apparent willingness, to make
space for him and for as many of his people as could be persuaded to sleep
under a roof. The rest camped in a field just outside the city, on the westward
side, where no ditch had been dug or defenses raised.

She was a great personage, this Mother of Three Birds. Her
house was richer than Agni could have imagined, back on the steppe. There were
even copper vessels, and in the room that he was given, there was an image of
the goddess of these people, and it was made of gold.

They feasted in the fashion of this country, with a richness
and a variety that were almost too much to conceive of. There were different
kinds of wine, he discovered, and different ways to bake bread, and an art to
herbs and sweetness that made every bite a novelty and a marvel. And yet for
those who needed the refuge of simplicity, there was a whole ox roasted without
embellishment, and bread very like that which they made on the steppe from the
ground seeds of the wild grasses.

Sarama must have taught them to do that. Agni did not see or
speak to her. For that matter, there were not as many women about the Mother as
he remembered from the field. The servants were men, as they had been elsewhere.

The one who had stood so close to Sarama was rather
excessively in evidence. He was, Agni began to understand, the chief of the
Mother’s servants—what in a king’s tent would have been the first of his wives
or the foremost of his daughters.

He did not carry himself like a woman, or like an effeminate,
either. He was respectful without servility to the Mother and to the others of
the women. To the guests he was perfectly and pointedly polite.

Agni studied him beneath lowered lids. Something about him
must be extraordinary, if Sarama had let him take her to his bed. Agni could
see nothing but a man of these people, pleasanter to look at than most, with
shoulders as broad as the span of an aurochs’ horns, and a curly black beard.
He spoke the language of the tribes well, better than Mika did. But then he had
had better teaching.

Agni disliked him intensely. He must know what Agni was, not
only the king of the horsemen but Sarama’s own brother, but he treated Agni as
he did all the rest. The same courtesy. The same distance. He offered nothing
that he did not give to every other guest in his mother’s house.

A tribesman would never have been so calm. A man who filled
a woman’s belly without her kinsmen’s consent was either a gelding or dead.
Here, it appeared, such things were of no consequence. Certainly this man had
no shame of it, and no fear of the kinsman, either.

oOo

When the feast was done, when they were all filled to
bursting and awash in wine, Agni went to a solitary bed. No woman presented
herself to him or to any other. The women were gone.

Agni struggled with that understanding, through a haze of
wine. Women gone. Only men in a silent house, and children from the sound of
it: somewhere not too far away, a baby cried. No woman’s voice or presence.

This was the thing he had half dreaded. This was the
reckoning. The women would come, would—

He walked, he thought, not badly, with steps only a little
uncertain, out of the room with its golden goddess-image. He stepped carefully
over fallen bodies of his men. Some were upright, if one were charitable.

One was full awake, aware, and behind him. And he had
companions. Patir had kept his head.

So too Mika, and Taditi whom Agni had not remembered as
staying with them in that house at all. He had thought her with the baggage as
she had chosen to be since—when? At least since the city that offered them a
fight. Wild Rose, that was its name: now crushed and trodden underfoot.

Still Taditi was here, dressed as a rider but decently
veiled. With such an escort he could venture the halls of the Lord of Skulls
himself, the dark god who danced on the field of war. Was that his face,
grinning out of the moon’s blind eye?

oOo

Agni walked in the moonlit city. It was quieter here than
it would ever be in a camp of the tribes. Few people in this country kept dogs,
and most of those herdsmen and hunters. City folk as a race had little use for
them.