White Mare's Daughter (83 page)

It was not the women’s fault that the gods were driving all
the tribes into the west. They were no more to be blamed for it than the grass
that catches the lightning and sets the steppe afire.

oOo

He did what he could to calm his people, by spreading word
that the omens were never as ill as they seemed; that they were simply a
promise of war. Had not they all been hoping for just such a thing? Some
believed him, he could hope. The rest would be quiet for fear of seeming
cowardly.

Wine soothed them soon enough, wine and sunlight and the
heat of the dancing. There were women in the dancing, more of them even than
Agni remembered, and every one seemed eager to find herself a tribesman to play
wife to. That was the fashion, the thing that all the young women were doing
this season, for the novelty of it.

Let fashion become custom; then let them all become one
people. Agni did not make a prayer of that, not exactly. But if the gods chose
to take it so, then he would not object.

oOo

Somewhat before moonrise, when the dancing and the
feasting were in full cry, Agni slipped away from his place in the king’s
circle.

He put off his festival garments, his beautiful coat, his
ornaments of beads and feathers. The torque of gold and amber he kept, because
he was seldom without it. He put on riding clothes, plain and meant for use,
and plaited his hair tightly behind him. No one was in his tent to help him,
not even Taditi. He was completely alone.

But when he came out, blinking in the light of torches, he
found Patir and Taditi both, and somewhat to his surprise, the westerner Tillu.
And, keeping to the shadows but not carefully enough, the boy Mika.

“I don’t think I’m to go in company,” Agni said.

“The women did,” said Taditi. “There must have been three
hands of women on that hill—ruining the sacrifice, if you ask the odd fool.”

Agni considered that, and considered forbidding them all to
venture past the camp. But Taditi had the right of it. The women had come in
force to see the Stallion die. Why should he not attend their rite with his
small company? One of whom, he could not help but reflect, was a woman.

He nodded curtly. Taditi did not weaken into an expression,
and Tillu’s scars did not allow much of one at all, but Patir was biting back a
grin. He always had loved to see Agni bested by his aunt.

Agni showed Patir a fine set of teeth, and set his face
toward the city and the temple. They followed. He would have been astonished if
they had not.

oOo

It was daylight still, the hour between sunset and dark,
when the light is too clear almost for earth, when the west is stained with
blood but the stars have begun to glimmer in the vault of heaven. Agni walked
down silent streets, past closed doors and shuttered windows. The city had shut
itself up tight—as if none of its people dared walk abroad for fear of the
Lady’s wrath.

How very strange to keep a festival by shutting oneself in
one’s house and hiding from the moon. How like a city of women.

Lights glimmered outside the temple: lamps hung from the
beams and set on the steps, shedding a soft glow into the street. They looked
from a distance like a fall of stars.

So many beauties here; so many strange things. Agni stepped
into the circle of light.

The door of the temple was open, an oblong of darkness. He
thrust down a stab of fear, the terror of descent into night. There was light
inside—there must be.

There was not. It was blind dark and full of whispers. Agni
stopped just inside the door, still within reach of the lamps. His following
did not even go so far. The edge of his glance caught Mika’s face, stark white.
How much courage it took a manchild of this country to come here for this
purpose, Agni could well imagine.

Agni held his ground just inside the door. His hand had gone
to his belt where his knife hung, and clenched tight round the hilt.

The whispers grew louder, imperceptibly, until he realized
that he did not have to strain to hear them. There were words in them, a rhythm
like a chant.

Slowly it swelled. Women’s voices, low and sweet. A
chittering as of birds. The thin wailing of a pipe. A sound of plucked strings,
and the beating of a drum.

As subtly as the silence had lifted, the darkness faded
away. Lamps shone within as they shone without. They illumined nothing more
mysterious than a room of wooden walls floored with stone.

The Lady sat at the end as the Mother sat in her house,
squat and holy. There were heaped pots about her, the most beautiful that the
potters made, and the first flowers of the spring, and a sower’s bag bulging
with seed, and other things that Agni could not quite see.

The temple was full of women. They were all masked as they
had been in the Lady’s wood, that day when he trespassed on their rite. Now, no
longer a trespasser, he saw them again in the garb of their goddess, faceless
and nameless. Their bodies were painted in black and red and white, a dizzying
pattern of spirals round breast and belly and thighs.

They did nothing to allure him, did not move, did not
acknowledge his presence. And yet his rod was hard and painful against his
belly. His breath came short, his heart beat fast. The air thrummed. They were
raising the powers, the same powers that woke the earth in spring. Their bodies
were full of it, burgeoning with it.

Women’s rite. Women’s magic. Small wonder that they had
suffered him to see it: no little power of his could weaken this of theirs. Was
it mercy, that they forbade their men to enter the temple or share in its
rites?

No; the men knew already what weaklings they were.

Agni had not meant the thought to be so bitter. He must
remember—must keep in mind the glare of the sunlight, the bright red of blood,
the strength of the Stallion as he fought his death. That too was power, as
strong in the daylight as was this one under the moon.

Two faces. Two powers. Two sides of the world.

The women danced, stately as trees in the wind; dipped,
swayed, circled. He remembered that dance from the Lady’s grove, though it was
smaller here, constrained within walls. It wound its spirals before the
goddess’ image, round and round, tighter and tighter, till it burst in a flurry
of sound: music and voices both.

So they sealed the planting and blessed the harvest that was
to come. But as yet they were not done. Each woman whirled alone, spinning in a
kind of divine abandon, and none ever touched another, nor collided, nor
stumbled into the walls.

One spun from altar to door. Her hand caught Agni as he
stood all unwary, caught and held him fast, and spun him with her into the
temple itself.

The dance bred its own force. He could not stop it. He spun
as the stars spun, as the sun wheeled on his daily course. Round and round, and
irresistible.

It was Tilia gripping his hands, her body that he knew so
well, the feel of her skin, the scent of her, the way she held herself as she
danced. They whirled together from end to end of the temple, from side to side
and round in a great circle. He was aware, dimly, that the others had stopped;
that they had linked hands round the walls and left Agni with Tilia in the
middle.

This could not be the common rite. If no man could enter the
temple . . .

oOo

“It’s the Great Marriage,” Tilia said. “It changes everything.”

“So it’s not a new thing or even very unusual,” Agni said.

They had gone from the rite to an astonishing and quite
splendid festival. For when the women came out of the temple, the city came
alive with light: lamps and torches everywhere, in every street, round about
every house. The city was lit almost as if it were day. Its people came out
with dancing and singing, with laughter and merrymaking. Dark and quiet
shattered as if they had never been.

Agni sat next to Tilia in the garden of the Mother’s house,
in a blaze of torches, and ate things of marvelous complexity, for which he had
no name. But wine he knew, and roast lamb, and bread fresh from the baking, and
cakes made with honey. Tilia fed him because it suited her fancy, pressing on
him both the strangely delicious and the merely strange.

She explained it, too, after her fashion. “The Great
Marriage is rare and wonderful. It gives a man rights and powers that he would
never otherwise have. It makes the rite of the planting stronger, if he dances
the dance with the woman whom the Lady has bound to him.”

“What if I hadn’t asked to come?” Agni demanded. “What
then?”

“We’d have gone on as we always have,” she said. “Your
presence was a great gift.”

“I meant it to be a bargain. A kind of defiance.”

“That, too,” she said. Her eyes glinted. She was laughing at
him.

He was too tired and too mellow with wine to be angry. He
spared a snarl, for pride, but no more than that.

She dipped a bit of bread in honey and offered it to him. He
had to take it or have a lapful of honey. She pursued it with a kiss, sipping
honey from his lips.

Here, in front of her kin, her brothers, even her mother.
Agni had seldom been so mortified. And she never knew or seemed to notice.

Mercifully she drew back, distracted by somewhat or other,
some word that one of her sisters spoke. Then Danu came in with the servants,
bearing yet another course in this endless feast.

Agni’s embarrassment faded a little. No one after all had so
much as looked askance. People here were not modest as they were among the
tribes. Nor were they shy of touching one another in public. This thing that
man and woman did together, they had no shame of it. It was a sacred thing, a
rite of their goddess.

Agni was a more modest creature. He could not help it. He
kept a little distance, held himself somewhat apart, and Tilia let him be. He
doubted that she noticed particularly; she was distracted with some of the
children.

Women
, he thought.
Even women of the tribes could never let men get the better of them. He began
to wonder, rather dangerously, whether women kept to the tents of their own
will because it pleased them, and not because their men required it. Just as
the young women were doing in his own camp: following a fashion, fashion become
firm custom, but among themselves they had nothing but mockery for the men who
imagined that they ruled the world.

Bitter thoughts again; women’s magic, twisting his
perceptions. He hoped that the Sacrifice had unbalanced the women as badly as
they had unbalanced him. Somehow he doubted it.

oOo

Tilia did not even give him the satisfaction of conquering
her in their bed. It was full of children doing things that no child among the
tribes would dare to do, and laughing while they did it; when they were caught,
they only laughed the harder.

Agni turned away from them in disgust. His tent was safe—was
sanctuary, deep among his own people. He was so dismayed, and so shaken, that
he did not notice till he was in the tent, that Tilia had not followed him. For
all he knew, she had leaped into bed with the children, and joined in the
revelry.

Agni lay alone in the chill of the late night. His body was
cold, but his temper warmed him. He had not been ill advised to go to the
temple. He told himself that, sternly. But it had done strange things to him,
had made him see in ways that were not comfortable. Not in the least.

Here was peace. Here was the world as he had always known
it, walled in leather, with the smell and sound of horses close by. This was
his world. Not that other. He might rule it, he might name himself king of it,
but he was no true part of it. Nor, here in the dark, did he believe that he
ever could be.

Patir left on the morning after the Stallion’s sacrifice.
He took with him a dozen young men of the White Horse, strong horsemen all and
intrepid raiders. They would bring back mares for Agni—“Safe, sound, and in
foal,” Patir promised.

They took with them the memory of an omen. In the night,
while Agni nursed his bitterness and Tilia did whatever Tilia did, the Mare had
foaled of a filly. Then, to everyone’s profound astonishment—even Sarama’s—of a
colt.

Twins were rarer by far among horses than among men, and
twins that were born alive, that lived and thrived, were rarer yet. These were
small but they were strong, and stood and nursed as quickly almost as if each
had been born alone.

That was a great portent, a gift of the gods. It heartened
Patir and his men enormously. It roused the spirits of the camp, that had been
dampened by the Stallion’s resistance to his sacrifice. War, and fruitful
herds—those were joyful omens to a tribesman.

oOo

Agni saw Patir off and lingered on the camp’s edge,
watching the riders dwindle into distance and vanish over the long hill to the
eastward.

Then for a while longer he stood there. He had a whole
mingled tribe at his back, and some of the elders close by, and Tillu, who was,
when it came to it, a friend, but his brother in spirit, the friend of his
youth, was gone; gone to hunt mares as they both had gone in search of
stallions. And Agni must stay behind, must strengthen the defenses in this
country, and prepare it to face the war that the gods had promised.

It was a great charge. Agni would have given it all to be
riding with Patir, back to the steppe. Back home.

This was home. He stiffened his back, turned on his heel and
walked firmly away from the eastward road. That was his no longer. He had made
his choice. He was bound here. He would live and die here.

That was the omen he saw in the Mare’s foals. He sought them
out, and found them in a sheltered valley. Sarama was with them, and Danu, and
somewhat to Agni’s surprise, Tilia. The Mare grazed as placidly as Agni had
ever seen her, while her offspring discovered the delights of the world.