White Mare's Daughter (81 page)

He looked over his shoulder at Patir. His friend sat easily
on the back of his spotted stallion, surveying the herd as Sarama had done. But
his eyes were alert, keen, taking count of the mares, the foals, even the three
yearlings who had been born in the conquest of the Lady’s country.

“A raid,” he said, “as great as any I’ve heard of in
stories. Not just to seize a few horses, but to take and bring back a great
wealth of them.”

“Would you go?” Agni asked him.

Patir’s glance lit with eagerness, but he hesitated. Agni’s
brows went up. “Ah,” he said. “Who is she?”

Patir the insouciant, Patir the unshakably composed, was
blushing like a girl. “What makes you think—”

“What’s her name?” Agni asked.

Patir looked down in remarkable contusion. “All right,” he
muttered. “All right. Her name is Chana.”

“Ah,” said Agni.

Patir shot him a blazing glance. “Fine one you are to laugh
at me, with what you’ve got filling your bed.”

“I could kill you for that,” Agni said mildly.

“You could. And then you’d have to find someone else to
round up your mares for you.”

“So you’ll do it,” Agni said. “Even if Chana objects?”

“Does it matter if she does?”

“She may think so.”

Patir shook his head. “Chana won’t. Chana is different. She
likes it when I command her as a man should command a woman. It’s tiresome, she
says, to rule the world. She finds it restful to let me do it.”

“And you believe her?”

“She’d never lie to me.”

Agni could hardly contest that, since he had never met the
woman. But that any female of this country would willingly submit herself to a
man, even a man as pleasant to the eye and the spirit as Patir, taxed his
credulity sorely.

Nevertheless he had noticed a number of dark-eyed women in
the camp, rather a large number when he stopped to think. It seemed that there
had been none all through the autumn and much of the winter. Now suddenly there
were a dozen or two. Or three. Four?

oOo

Agni rode as he had intended, then sat on his bay
horsehide for his day’s stint of being formally king. And as he rode and judged
and listened, he watched. He counted.

There were women everywhere, or nearly. Some were rather
obviously living in tents. Others seemed to be visiting, or to be indulging
curiosity. They were tending fires, mending garments, even looking after the
cattle. All things that women or children would do in any camp of a tribe.

And yet these were women of the Lady’s country, dark-eyed,
dark-haired, more often plump than not. The one standing framed by the flap of
Patir’s tent was a beauty, small-boned and delicate—striking among these sturdy
people. She did not conceal her face behind a veil as a tribeswoman would have
done, nor did she duck her head and vanish when she felt his eyes on her. She
smiled, dazzling him.

Shocking. Bold beyond belief. Agni wondered what she would
do if he grinned back at her. Not that he intended to try. Not from the king’s
horsehide, and not in front of Patir.

He ended the hour of judgment rather short of its full span,
and sought out Taditi, whom he had seen walking back from the horselines with
her bow in her hand. He found her in the tent, putting bow and arrows away, and
rubbing the string with fat to keep it supple before she coiled it and laid it
in its case.

She glanced at him but did not pause. He squatted near the
flap, where the sun slanted in to warm him, and waited till she came and sat on
her heels beside him.

From where he was, he could see a fair arc of camp, and the
women coming and going, and men, too. “How long has this been going on?” he
demanded abruptly.

“What?” said Taditi, rather reasonably in the circumstances.
“My riding and shooting? I thought you knew I’d been doing it since the
winter.”

“Of course I knew,” he said. “I don’t mean that. I mean
this. All these women. Where are they coming from? When did they start coming
here?”

“Ah,” said Taditi, reminding him somewhat forcibly of how
exasperated Tilia could be when he used the same expression. It could make one
feel a right fool.

Taditi ignored his scowl. “So you finally noticed. Some of
the men have a wager. It’s been going on since winter—since a little after your
sister’s baby was born.”

“Why? Why just then?”

“Who knows?” said Taditi. “Suddenly it’s a fashion. Leave
the city, find a tribesman, look after his tent. I expect we’ll see a good
number of dark-eyed babies come winter.”

Agni seized on the one thing that honestly mattered. “It’s a
fashion? That’s all it is?”

“It seems so,” she said.

Agni sank back onto his heels. “Does that fashion also
partake of the woman’s submitting her will to the man’s? Simply for the novelty
of it?”

“My,” she said. “You are perceptive.”

Agni had learned long ago not to lose his temper when Taditi
spoke to sting. “I suppose it’s all the rage to have one’s own tribesman, just
like the Mother’s heir.”

“That should bother you?” said Taditi. “It serves you well,
I should think. It binds these women to your men, and mingles our blood with
theirs.”

“I’m not bothered,” he said. “I’m wondering how long it will
last.”

“A long while,” said Taditi, “if your men have any wits at
all. Has it struck you yet that if these women learn to act like women of the
tribes, they might come to think like proper women, too? And then they’re
yours, bound to you and to the gods.”

Agni shivered a little. Sometimes Taditi spoke as if the
gods were in her, too; or maybe Earth Mother spoke to her as if she had been a
Mother of this country.

“Fashion can become custom,” Taditi said as if to herself.
“I remember when I was a girl, how we all wore our hair loose as they still do
in the dancing at festivals. Then someone took it into her head to wear a crown
of braids—because, she said, it got her hair up out of the way. In no time at
all, every unmarried girl was wearing her hair up except in the dancing. Now
it’s custom, as if from the dawn time: braids wound around the head for young
women without husbands, and braids down the back or coiled at the nape for
married women. All because of a fashion that everyone thought would be gone in
a season.”

“Obviously it was practical,” Agni said. “Now tell me what’s
practical about one of these women giving up her power in the world.”

“How do you know any of them is doing that?” Taditi
inquired. “Not, mind, that they aren’t discovering how easy it can be to let
someone else do their thinking for them.”

“That’s what Patir said. That they’re finding it restful.”

Taditi nodded. “Just so. A mind is like a body, as you know
perfectly well. It has to keep working, or it grows fat and slow. This that
they’re doing—it’s easy. It lets them be lazy. And it gives you the power you
need to make this country yours beyond any doubt. If you win its women, if
their children grow up in the ways of the tribes—you’ve won, not only for this
little hour in the sun, but for the generations after you.”

“And you,” said Agni. “You don’t approve.”

“I don’t approve or disapprove. I see what is. This is a
greater victory than any in battle.”

“If we can hold it. If they don’t all get tired of the game
and go back to their own ways. And,” said Agni, “if they don’t conquer us while
we preen ourselves for conquering them.”

Taditi shrugged. “There is that. I think, if you stay here,
you’ll end up winning as much as you lose. Particularly if you keep the
advantage over these innocents.”

“I don’t know how innocent they are,” Agni said darkly.
“They’re only learning to fight—but they can twist a man in knots.”

“Really? I should study them.” Taditi straightened—creaking
less than Agni did, which was a little distressing—and set to filling the pot
for the daymeal.

oOo

Agni stayed where he was. He had much to think on. Horses,
and women. War. Warriors. Spring and all that it meant: festival and
sacrifices, dancing and feasting. These people had a festival of their own;
that much he had discovered from listening here and there. It seemed to have
something to do with planting the fields and making the grain grow, and eating
a great deal, and women choosing men and going off with them to make a
sacrifice of themselves to Earth Mother.

He began to wonder as he sat there, whether there might be a
way to mingle the festivals. It was a peculiar thought, and disturbing. The
festivals were the festivals, and had been since the dawn time. It was a great
ill thing to change them.

But Taditi’s tale of women and their fashions had set his
mind on a track as daring as it was strange. All things began somewhere—even
festivals. Surely those had begun in the dawn time, or so it was said.

But was this not a dawn of its own? There had never been
horsemen in this country before. They were changing the world. If the world
changed—might not custom change also?

He clasped his knees and rocked. People would object. People
objected to changes; and changes in sacred things were, to most, unthinkable.

It must be the Mare’s blood in Agni that made him so
different. If people objected strongly enough, they well might kill him. Or
they would refuse to follow him, to perform the rites as he had altered them.
He was but a king, after all, and the gods’ servant. He was not a god himself.

oOo

“There is a way,” said Danu.

Agni did not know how it happened that he had told Danu, of
all people, what he was thinking of. He had gone in search of Sarama or Tilia
or even the Mother, and found the Mother’s son looking after the baby.

It was a warm morning, almost summer-warm, and Danu had
brought his daughter out onto the doorstep. She was tiny still, but not as
wizened as she had been when she was born.

Agni peered into her face. She startled him: she peered
back.

He grimaced at her. She smiled as sweetly as her mother ever
could, and with much the same air of distraction, too.

“Here,” Danu said.

Agni found himself with an armful of baby. For lack of
greater inspiration, he cradled her as he had seen her father do, and rocked
her. She sighed and smacked her lips and went to sleep.

“Amazing,” Danu said. “She howls for everyone else but me.”

“She knows her kin,” said Agni.

Danu smiled, leaning back against the house-wall. It was
always a little startling to see him with baby in arms or spoon in hand, doing
women’s work. That strong face, those heavy shoulders, should have marked a
great warrior. Nor was he at all an ill hand with bow or boar-spear; but it was
obvious that he preferred this gentler occupation.

And Agni found himself unburdening to this man whom he did
not like and whom he most certainly did not admire. Danu heard him out with
evident attention. When Agni was done he said, “There is a way. If you make
your sacrifice and we make ours, and we all come together after and dance till
dawn, might not both sides be satisfied?”

“That’s not a mingling,” Agni said.

“It’s as much as anybody will accept. You know that or you’d
not have asked me.”

Sometimes Agni could not fathom these people’s logic. The
men thought like women, and the women thought like nothing he could put a name
to. And yet, rather to his dismay, Danu made perfect sense. “You don’t think we
can make a new rite.”

“I think time can change much,” Danu said, “but there hasn’t
been enough of it yet. If we dance together—that’s enough. For now.”

The baby stirred in Agni’s arms, annoyed that he had stopped
rocking her to talk to her father. He did as she clearly bade, watching her
face, seeing Sarama in the shape of the chin, the molding of the brow; but the
rest was Danu. “Our children will make a rite of their own,” he said.

“I think so.” Danu seemed calm about it. He walked close to
the Lady always; probably he had seen it all already, and schooled himself to
accept it.

Agni had had the answer he was looking for, but he lingered
for a while. It was pleasant here, warm in the sun, with the baby asleep and her
father humming softly to himself. The world and its troubles seemed far away.

This must be what it was to be one of the Lady’s children.
Sunlit peace. Never any doubts, and few fears. Their nights were moonlit and full
of stars. Dark things never walked there.

Agni shook himself, lightly lest he wake the baby. Nothing
was ever as simple as that, even here.

He handed Rani to her father, who took her smoothly, so that
she never stirred.

Danu smiled. Agni found himself smiling back, and still
smiling as he walked away.

He did not like Danu at all. And yet the man was wise in his
way, and he was pleasant company. All things considered.

Camp and city held their festivals on the same days, by
agreement between Agni and the Mother. Great Sacrifice and Spring Planting,
sacrifice of blood and sacrifice of wine and seed, one in the camp, one in the
city—and dancing all together after.

That was the pact they made. Agni was reasonably certain
that the rites would go as they should go. But the dancing might be more
difficult. He made sure that word was spread: any man caught taking a woman
against her will, no matter how mild the protest, would be seized and punished
according to the magnitude of his crime. Even to gelding or death, if the
offense warranted.

“And if one of the women takes one of us against his will?”
one wag wanted to know.

“They’ll pray over her,” said someone else, “and make her
live in his tent for a month.”

The men who were near seemed to find that vastly funny. Agni
failed to see the humor in it. There was nothing amusing about rape. Rahim had
died for it. Agni had been outcast for an accusation of it.

Memories were short, and it had been a fair while since
anyone enjoyed a festival. Agni hoped that his prohibition would be enough—and
that the Mother would bid her women be cautious.