White Mare's Daughter (87 page)

Danu’s cheeks ached. He was, he discovered, grinning like a
fool.

Sarama was smiling. “You see?” she said.

oOo

Just as Danu was ending his first ride on his own
stallion—and being applauded for it, too, by tribesmen who had much to say of a
man becoming a man at last—Catin appeared, bareback on the mouse-colored mare.
The colt was full of himself, strutting before the rest, because he was, at
last, a man’s own stallion. The arrival of a mare raised his tail over his back
and set him to trumpeting.

When he had loosed the last peal, Catin lowered her hands
from her ears. “That’s well,” she said as if they had all been conversing for
some little while. “You’ll need him when you fight the men from the steppe.”

She was talking to Danu. He saw the gods crowding in her
eyes. Because of that, and because, as Sarama too often said, he was much too
polite a creature, he did not roar out in protest. He said mildly, “I have no
intention of fighting any man, horseman or otherwise.”

“And yet you will,” said Catin. She turned those eyes on
Agni. “And you, my king. You will fail when the horsemen come. Unless you learn
to think like a woman.”

“And how is that?” asked Agni with remarkable aplomb.

“If you need to ask, you need badly to know.” She clapped
heels to the mare’s sides. The mare wheeled and leaped into a gallop.

There was an enormous silence. Agni drew a deep breath and
let it out slowly. Then he said, “Well, brother. If I do your fighting for you,
will you do my thinking for me?”

Danu met those eyes that were, at the moment, so much like a
lion’s. Agni was jesting, but Danu had no mirth in him. “You should ask that of
Tilia,” he said. “Or your sister.”

“Or Catin?” Agni was not to be quelled by such a dullard as
Danu was. He wheeled about, as full of strut as a stallion, and said to all of
those who watched and listened, “Ah! But you see, we don’t know which god is
speaking through her.”

“It’s all of them,” Danu said. “At once.”

“Then no wonder she’s mad.” Agni vaulted onto his stallion’s
back. Mitani was not at all reluctant to show them his paces.

Danu watched. He had grown past envy, which pleased him
rather. He could take in the pure pleasure of it, the man and the horse moving
together like one being. Danu would never be so splendid on a horse. He had
come too late to it.

And yet he had won his stallion. He would take his man next,
he supposed, and be a perfect mockery of a tribesman.

oOo

He did not plan it or even want it, but he rode back to
the city with Agni, he on the gelding that he had been riding for so long—and
his colt was not pleased with that, either. But however proud of himself the
horse might be, he was very young still, and his back was weak.

“He’ll grow,” Agni said, “and be strong. You have a
horseman’s wisdom, you know.”

“Almost as if I’d been born to it?”

Agni slanted a glance at Danu. “I’m not making fun of you.”

“No,” said Danu. “It is the truth, isn’t it? And yet our
children will grow up knowing both the Lady of the Birds and the Lady of
Horses.”

“And thinking like women?”

“That troubles you, doesn’t it?”

Agni did not try to deny it. “Some say I already do. If I
didn’t, I’d have taken this country with fire and sword, and never tried to
speak its language or marry one of its women.”

“There’s more to it than that,” Danu said.

“I’m sure,” said Agni. They had mounted the long hill that
looked down on the city. He paused there, and Danu paused with him.

“Look,” Agni said. “What do you sec?”

“Home,” said Danu.

Agni nodded. “Yes. I—I see strangeness grown familiar, and a
place that belongs to me, but I’m not sure yet that I belong to it. But the
steppe is mine no longer. I can’t go back to it. I have no place that I can,
beyond all doubt, call home.”

“This is home,” Danu said. “Where your kin are. Where Tilia
is.” He thought for a moment. It was not his to say, not really, but it seemed
necessary, just then. He could say that the Lady commanded him. He said, “Tilia
is going to be a mother, you know.”

“Yes, I know that,” Agni said a little sharply. “She’s going
to be a Mother. She’s the Mother’s heir.”

“No,” said Danu. “She’s going to be a mother. To bear a
child. To make you—I suppose—a father. Since that is the way you think.”

At last he had managed to evoke astonishment in the king of
the horsemen. “She never told me!”

“Need she have?”

Agni looked like a horse about to bite. But he held himself
still.

Danu looked down, a little ashamed. “No. I shouldn’t have
said that. Sarama was surprised, too, that I knew and she hadn’t told me. I
could see. As could you, if you knew how. They don’t teach you that, do they,
among the tribes?”

“It’s a thing of the women’s side,” Agni said with the hint
of a growl.

“Not here,” Danu said.

He watched Agni ponder that, and watched the rest of it dawn
on him at last: what Danu had told him. What it meant.

It was a while before he spoke. When he did, it was to say a
thing that Danu had never expected from a tribesman. “She hasn’t before. Has
she?”

Danu understood, but widened his eyes nonetheless.

“Had a child,” Agni said. “She hasn’t been a mother before.
Has she?”

“No,” said Danu.

“Why?”

Danu shrugged. “The Lady knows.”

“Did she think she was barren?”

Danu could not lie, and he had little talent for
prevarication. He nodded.

“Would that stop her from being Mother in her time?”

Danu nodded again.

There was no telling what Agni was thinking. He perceived
more than Danu had given him credit for, but what he thought of it, how it felt
and tasted to him, Danu could not tell.

After what seemed a long while, Agni said, “She knew, didn’t
she? Or hoped. What the Great Marriage would do.”

“What
you
would
do,” said Danu. “There was a foreseeing, I’ve heard. A whisper among the
elders: that the Mother’s heir would get no children save by a man of another
people.”

Agni laughed. There was little mirth in it. “So that’s what
I was meant for. To be stud-horse to the Mother’s heir.”

“Isn’t that what a king takes wives for? To be his
broodmares and bear his sons?”

“Then we’re well matched,” Agni said.

“You’re resentful. Why? You should be glad.”

“Yes,” said Agni. He touched heel to Mitani’s side. The
stallion moved forward, down the long slope.

Danu’s gelding followed with no prompting. Agni spoke to the
air ahead of him, but the words were meant for Danu. “Why did you tell me
this?”

“Because it was laid on me.”

Mitani halted. Agni turned on his back. “Would she have told
me?”

“It becomes obvious,” Danu said.

“And I have to learn to think like that?” Agni snorted in
disgust.

“Ah,” said Danu mildly. “One must learn to see. To observe.
And to understand. I suppose that’s difficult.”

“Not as difficult as keeping myself from thumping you.” Agni
wheeled Mitani full about and sent him curvetting in a circle around Danu on
his mercifully calm gelding.

Danu should be apprehensive, he supposed, and wondering if
this was the battle that Catin had foretold for him: face to face already with
this man from the steppe. But Agni was a little less angry than, however
unwillingly, amused. With a whoop that startled Danu nigh out of his skin, he
whirled again and plunged at the gallop toward the city.

He was going to confront Tilia. Danu might not come alive or
unflayed from his own encounter with her, but he was not sorry he had said what
he had said. He had caught the shock; Tilia, he hoped, would have all the joy.

With Tilia carrying his child—which she stubbornly
persisted in calling hers and hers alone, but he had some hope of waking her to
greater sense—Agni understood at last what made a man fight most fiercely. It
was more than glory, and more than the exhilaration of danger. It was the
heart-deep, bone-solid certainty that he would do anything, anything at all, to
keep his own blood safe.

The woman he had taken in earnest of this land, the child
within her who was his own, his flesh, were all the world. And everything that
was his or hers, he would protect to the death.

Somehow, without his noticing it, she had become a
necessity. If duty kept him in the camp, he caught himself looking about for
her, or reaching for her in the night, or looking for her beside him when he
woke in the morning. He only breathed truly easily when she was in his sight.

She did not seem to respond in kind. Her farewells were
light, her greetings calm, as if she had not missed him at all. She had much to
do, not only in Three Birds but in the towns to the eastward: calling their
people together, seeing that they were provisioned, and even making sure that
they tended to the defenses, the walls and the ditches and the troops of
fighters.

She was gone as often as she was present, refusing to
ride—that was not her fate, she said firmly—but accepting a guard of horsemen
or mounted women. Often it was Sarama and Taditi and their archers; sometimes
it was a company of young men from the camp. They vied to be chosen to ride
with the king’s wife. It was a great honor and a great trust.

Agni found himself bound to Three Birds. If he contemplated
riding about, or for that matter accompanying Tilia on her travels, he ran
afoul of this duty or that, or someone had a dispute for him to judge, or a
deputation had arrived from one of the cities with messages that only he could
answer.

He never managed to escape. Even when he tried to slip away
at dawn with a small company of horsemen, there was the Mother of Two Rivers waiting
for him outside his tent, bidding him judge a quarrel between one of her elders
and a clan-chieftain.

He did that to the evident satisfaction of the Mother and
the elder, if not of the chieftain against whom Agni had laid down the
judgment. He had taken a store of gold that was not his to take, and from the
temple yet. Agni could hardly find him innocent of wrongdoing.

oOo

When they were gone and with them most of the day, Agni
sat for a while on his black horsehide. The others were gone away, both elders
and hangers-on. He was, for once, alone.

He was king at last of the Lady’s people as well as the
horsemen. This was not the first judgment he had been asked to make for people
from the cities, but it was the first that had come between a Mother and a lord
of the tribes. And they had asked him to judge, not the Mother of Three Birds
or the council of the Mothers. They had come to him as king, and accepted his
judgment.

He was not fool enough to think that it would have gone so
well if he had found in favor of the chieftain. But the gods and the Lady had
been kind. It had not even been a difficult verdict.

There would be grumblings in the camp tonight, but he was
not afraid of those. He was strong enough to quell them. And that too was the
mark of his kingship.

He rose at last, stretched and sighed. Everyone else was
free to come and go, but the king must stay. For the first time he felt what
his father must have felt, the weight of the burden, the strain of being the
center.

Tilia was somewhere off to the eastward, sublimely
unconcerned by the danger to herself or her child. Sarama was with her, but
Sarama at least had left her daughter behind. Rani stayed with her father, as
safe as child could be.

oOo

It was an absurd thing to do, maybe, but Agni went in
search of his sister’s lover. He found there an uncritical welcome, the open
hospitality of all these people, and even a little rest. People still came to
him, but not as easily or as quickly as in the camp.

He ate his dinner in the garden of the Mother’s house, in
the fading light of evening, with his sister’s daughter in his lap. Several of
the Mother’s daughters and sons were there, and a great crowd of children. But
Rani wanted her uncle. She was very firm about it, and objected loudly to the
suggestion that she play with her agemates.

Agni was content with her presence. She was warm and clean,
and she patently adored him. He had no doubt that she would grow up to be as
contrary as her mother, but in her youth she was a perfect and worshipful
female.

oOo

He slept in that house, in the bed that smelled of Tilia.
He dreamed of her. She was not making love to him, or even paying much
attention to him at all, and yet he was greatly comforted. Tilia flinging
herself at him and begging him to love her, love her till she cried for mercy,
would have discomfited him sorely.

Far better to see her in the dream-country as she was when
awake, weaving a fabric of all the colors of earth and sky, and conversing with
Sarama and Taditi and a shadowy company of women. He never quite heard what
they spoke of, but he knew no pressing need to hear it. The comfort was in the
sound of her voice, the sight of her face, the perfect dailiness of it all.

Such a dull creature he had become, that he could be so
warmed by a dream of nothing in particular. If she had walked out of it just as
he woke, he would have taken her by storm.

oOo

He woke alone, washed and dressed and ate. As he sat in
the Mother’s garden as he had the night before, warmed by the rising sun, he
contemplated the day’s duties and sighed. He was greatly, almost irresistibly
tempted to cast them all aside and escape to a daylong hunt. But he was too
irrevocably a king. The royal horsehide called him, and the royal burden.

He would have gone to them somewhat since, except that Rani
had come out in the arms of one of her father’s youngest brothers, and she had
insisted anew that Agni and only Agni be her resting place in the sun.