White Mare's Daughter (71 page)

Therefore there was no barking and yapping to herald his
passage, nor anyone out or about so late. He did not know where to go,
precisely, but the temple in the city’s heart seemed a useful beginning.

It was dark and empty. He thought briefly of going within,
of breaking the ban on men in the goddess’ place; but as more than once before,
he lacked the stomach for it. He wandered on past to the darkness of trees that
stood, of all places, in this city’s heart. It was as broad as the camp of a
tribe, thick-woven with branches.

Through the branches Agni saw a glimmer of light. He
followed it, and the others followed him, soft-footed on the leafmold. The ways
were twisting and narrow, but no more so than they had been in the great wood
between the steppe and the Lady’s country.

It was not so very far through this wall of trees. Its
center was a broad open space, a circle of moonlit grass.

There were the women, all of them surely, a circle within
the circle. His breath caught at the sight of them. They were all as near naked
as made no matter, hair flowing loose over moon-whitened shoulders. They moved
in a slow dance to no music that he could hear, breasts swaying, hips swinging,
till the cords of their skirts rippled and swirled.

It was the most purely sensual dance that he had ever looked
on, and yet there was nothing lascivious about it. It was pure female, pure
worship of the goddess who had wrought women and men and all the pleasures of
the flesh.

This was no sight that they meant man to see. They were
making a great magic, women’s magic: drawing down the moon. It shivered in his
blood.

He was the king of the horsemen, Skyfather’s own. Day
vanquished night. The sun made the moon grow pale. No woman was ever strong
enough to stand against a man.

Mika was shuddering with terror. Only Agni’s strong grip
kept him from wheeling and bolting.

“What is this?” Agni demanded in a whisper.

Mika could not answer. It was Taditi who said, “They’re
calling on the moon to make them strong.”

“To destroy us?”

Taditi’s face was hidden in shadow, but her voice was as dry
as it had ever been when he was being an idiot child. “These people don’t think
like men.”

“Then what are they doing?”

“Facing what they have to face,” Taditi said. “They’ve
accepted you. It can’t be easy to be conquered.”

Agni wanted to fling doubt in her face, but his eye was
drawn inexorably toward the dance of the women. One had swayed and circled to
the center, one whose belly was as round as the moon. Her hair was dark in the
pallid light, but a different darkness than the rest. She spread her arms wide
and let her head fall back.

Her skin was as white as the moon’s own face. Her breasts
were like milk. She was more beautiful than he had ever known, and unreachably
remote.

He began to understand Mika’s terror. But he was neither
child nor male of this country. With fear came the hot flare of anger. His
sister had turned traitor to her tribe and people. And now he saw her standing
as a person of power among the enemy.

His mind willed to stride forward, to seize her, to carry
her off where she belonged. But his body was frozen where it stood. Under the
sun he could have done it. Under the moon he had no such power.

Nonetheless the moon could not drive him away, nor could the
sight of so many women dancing the moon’s glory. He did not believe that it
could strike him blind, or that he would go mad. He was stronger than that.

He watched it through to its end, till the long skein
unwound itself and the dancers wandered apart. They did not speak to one
another. They simply went away, as if they had done all that they intended, and
saw no need for idle chatter.

Sarama did not come to Agni, or anywhere near him. But he
was barred from going after her.

He recognized the woman who stood in his way. She was the
perfect shape of one of their goddess-images, great breasts, great curving
hips, great swell of thighs. But unlike the images, her face was no blank
immortal mask. This was vivid life, scowling at him, looking on him with little
liking and less admiration. She planted her fists on those ample hips and spat
words at him.

Mika was gone, vanished. There was no one to tell Agni what
those words meant. But he could well guess, from her expression and the way she
spoke them. She was not at all pleased that he had intruded on the women’s
magic.

He did not even think before he did the thing he had always
done with angry women: relaxed, lounged a bit, put on his most winning smile.

It won nothing from her. She cursed him with a glance,
turned on her heel and stalked away through the dappling of moonlight.

She was, he thought, rather amazingly beautiful. His taste
had always run to the very slender and the very fair. She was as far from
either as it was possible to be. And yet she set his blood to singing.

He sighed faintly. That she despised him, he had no doubt at
all.

He was not accustomed to being despised. Hated, yes; his own
brother hated him. But women had always doted on him.

These women had no earthly use for him. He learned
quickly—almost before the sun was up—what it was to be king in Three Birds.
People did as he asked, waited on him as they must judge proper, but there was
no warmth in it. No one sought him out. No one came to him as one comes to a
king. That they left to the tribesmen.

oOo

He refused to be dismayed. He would wait them out. The
Mother had left her house to him and gone to live elsewhere—not far at all, he
discovered, and in the same circle of the city. Some of her servants had stayed
behind. But not, rather to his relief, the one he disliked so cordially. Not
the man who shared Sarama’s bed.

Nor Sarama, either, for the matter of that. Agni met her
coming out of the house that the Mother had taken, the second morning after he
came to Three Birds. She was dressed to ride, with her hair in a plait, as
modest as if she had never danced bare-breasted in the moonlight.

She could hardly fail to notice him, since he blocked her
path. When she stepped sideways, he stepped with her. She sighed audibly and
stood still. “What do you want?” she demanded.

“Is that all you’ll give me?” he shot back. “A cold glance
and a hard word?”

She arched a brow in the way she had had since she was old
enough to find him exasperating. “You come as a conqueror. Should I be falling
at your feet? Are you asking that I be grateful?”

“Ah,” he said. “You were not happy that the Mother
surrendered to us.”

“I was not happy,” she said with quivering calm. “We were
going to drive you back.”

“I might have argued that,” he said.

“I’m sure,” said Sarama.

This time when she stepped around him, he let her. He turned
with her and walked beside her.

She did not run away from him, but neither did she match her
steps to his. She did as she pleased. He could follow or not, as it pleased
him.

He chose to follow. “Maybe,” he said after a while, “the
Mother acknowledges that Skyfather is stronger than her Lady.”

“He may think he is,” said Sarama.

“He made me king here,” Agni said.

“The Mother allows you to be king here.” She looked as if
she would be stopping there, but after a moment she could not resist adding,
“She is a mother. So is the Lady. Won’t a mother choose to indulge her child,
if she sees fit?”

“I never knew you despised us,” Agni said.

She shot him a glance of pure annoyance. “I don’t despise
you.”

“You hate me, then. Why? Because I came here?”

“I am angry with you,” she said, biting off the words. “Why?
What possessed you? You had a whole tribe to be king of, back among the White
Horse people. Or wouldn’t the old man die soon enough for you?”

Agni could not fault her for saying such things. She did not
know. And yet each word was pain, like the stabbing of thorns in tender flesh.

He did his best to hide the pain, to speak levelly, even
lightly. “The old man is dead. He died in the winter.”

That took her aback. She was too angry, still, to be gentle.
“So you left the tribe to its own devices and went chasing a traveller’s tale?”

“As you did?” He caught her glance and held it. “Listen to
me, and listen well. I know you forbade me to follow you. But I was driven out,
and when men stopped driving me, the gods took up the goad.”

“Driven out?” There: he had her attention at last, and some
of her old fierceness on his behalf. “What did they do to you?”

“They accused me of a thing I never did. Of taking a woman
by force, and getting her with child, and being her death.”

He held his breath. Her face had grown terrible. If she
believed the lie, if she condemned him, he did not know what he would do. Fall
on his spear, maybe.

She said, soft and very precise as she did when she was
purely, sheerly angry, “Whoever believed that of you was a perfect idiot.”

“Yama believed it,” Agni said.

“Yama is king?”

He nodded. The taste in his mouth was bitter.

There was a pause. They had walked out past the last circle
of the city and come to the rings of fields about it. She slowed, plucked a
stalk of wheat that was taller and thicker and richer than any wild grain that
Agni had seen, and stripped it of its grains. She chewed on them, frowning at
the air.

“So,” she said at last. “He did it to you, to seize your
inheritance. Or his mother did. I doubt he’s clever enough to do up his own
trousers, let alone plot to destroy a prince.”

“His mother,” said Agni. And made himself say the rest: “And
one of his wives.”

She did not ask which one. For that small mercy Agni was
grateful. “They drove you out. And you did the only thing you could think of,
which was to come running to me.”

“That was not what I did at all.”

She planted fists on hips and thrust out her chin. “You did,
too.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

He did not know which of them burst out laughing first. She
fell on him as she had always done, bore him back and down, and sat on him till
he cried for mercy. She did not let him up then, either, but grinned down at
him with all her old wickedness.

He reared up, overpowered her, rolled through the green
wheat.

They fetched up against a pair of feet. Sturdy feet, solidly
planted on the rich earth.

Agni looked up. Danu stared down.

Agni grinned and bounded to his feet and held out his hand.
Sarama took it with no evidence of embarrassment and let him pull her to her
feet. They stood hand in hand like scapegrace children, but Agni was determined
to be no more discomfited than Sarama.

She at least had stopped fixing him with the cold stare that
had so dismayed him. It was much as it had been when they were younger, the two
of them against the world, and none to come between them.

But this man was the father of her child. It could not be
the same, nor could it be as simple.

Sarama slipped her hand out of Agni’s grip even as he
slackened it, and said to Danu in the language of the tribes, “Good morning,
man of Three Birds.”

“Good morning, woman of the horsemen,” Danu said in a rather
acceptable accent. “And man of the horsemen,” he added after a pause.

Agni inclined his head. He would be civil for his sister’s
sake.

Sarama saw: her eye glinted sidelong. “We’re going to ride,”
she said. “Will you come?”

Danu nodded. Agni almost laughed. It was obvious what he was
doing: protecting his woman from the interloper. Did he think that they had
been doing more than playing like pups in a litter? Was he perhaps jealous of
his woman’s own brother?

Maybe he had cause, though it was not as he might think. No
lover could be what Agni was to Sarama: twinborn, brother and blood kin.

But neither could Agni be to her what this man was. Agni
glowered at Danu, who glowered obligingly back.

“Stop that,” she said, setting her body between them. “I’ll
not have you fighting over me, now or later. Will you swear to that?”

Agni did not want to. Nor, patently, did Danu. But she made
them swear. It did not increase the amity between them, but it forced a truce.

oOo

Danu could ride as he could speak the tongue of the
tribes: not exceptionally well, not as one who has done it from childhood, but
well enough for use. Well enough indeed to ride the Mare, who by law and custom
should carry none but Sarama.

Agni did not have to suffer that. He sent one of the boys to
the remounts and had him bring back something suitable: a big-bodied gelding,
rather plain but sturdy and sound. “My gift to you,” Agni said, he hoped
without irony.

Danu accepted the horse with fair grace. The colt—his
colt—was much less pleased. When Danu mounted the gelding, the colt lunged at
the beast, jealous to the bone and making no pretense about it.

Danu was openly astonished. It was Sarama who headed off the
angry colt, setting the Mare between and bidding him remember his place. He
veered off with ears flat back, casting baleful glances at the horse who dared
to carry his man.

“Now you see,” Agni said rather dryly, “why some of us use
our remounts less often than we should.”

“I don’t ride him,” Danu said. “Sarama says not to, till
he’s older.”

“He doesn’t understand that,” Agni said. “The Mare he
endures, because she’s a mare, and the Mare.”

“This is going to be difficult,” Danu said.

“He’ll resign himself to it.” Sarama cut off what else
either of them would have said. “Here, try your gelding’s paces. Yes, just as I
taught you with the Mare. A little harder, there; he’s not as soft to the touch
as she is. Yes, yes. Just so.”

Agni followed on Mitani, watching the two of them. They did
not act like lovers: no clinging to one another, no languishing glances. And
yet there was no denying the shape of her, or the care she took with the Mare,
sitting lightly, venturing nothing outrageous. Her pupil could not have done it
in any case, but that would not have stopped Sarama.