White Mare's Daughter (9 page)

Neither would know after, which of them began it; only that
they embraced and kissed each other on both cheeks, as close kin might do. Agni
did not at once let her go. He held her in a fierce grip, strong enough almost
for pain. “Come back,” he said. “Please. Say that you’ll come back.”

She could not say it. But she could say, “Wherever I am,
whatever I grow to be, I’ll always remember you. Tarry well, brother. Be king
for me.”

“I do intend to,” he said.

She laughed at that, with a catch in it, which they all
pretended not to hear. “The gods love a man who knows his mind,” she said. She
kissed him once again, for luck, and slipped out of his grasp.

Even after she had reclaimed her horses and sought again the
westward way, he stood where she had left him, with his friends about him. He
looked like a king: a very young one, but surer of his strength than anyone
knew, least of all himself.

The gods would protect him as they chose. She turned her
back on him and her face toward the westward horizon. There she must go. There
she would go, of her own and the goddess’ will.

Every morning the Mother went out, soft-footed in the
dawn, and sang the sun into the sky. For all the years of his life the sound of
her voice had roused Danu from sleep, that high sweet singing, calling the
light back into the world. When he was small he had thought that no one was
alive or aware till the Mother sang; that the night was a vast emptiness shot
with dreams, and only she could make the world real again, or give life to the
people in it.

Now that he was a man, he knew that he had seen true—but that
it was also true that people could lie awake in the dark, beset with this fret
or that, and wait for the long night to end and the sun to come back. The sun
would do that no matter what the Mother did. She was a great witch and
priestess, and magic was the air she breathed; but the sun was a god, and
greater than she.

Still he was comforted by the sound of her rising, the soft
pad of her bare feet on the floor, the opening and shutting of the door as she
went out to the Lady’s place. Sometimes he would rise from his bed and stand in
his doorway and watch her go. She would smile then, beautiful and serene, with
her great breasts that had nourished a round dozen children, and her ample
belly, and her huge round thighs. And he would smile back, content with the
ordered round of his world.

On this morning, a clear morning of spring with the promise
of summer in it, Danu woke gasping from a dream of fire. Fire and shouting, and
thunder, and a bright river of blood. He lay for a long while, struggling to
breathe, to fit the world about him again. Dark world, gentle world, cry of a
night bird, rustle of the Mother’s pallet as she rose to greet the sun.

There was no haste in her movements, no tremor of fear, no
sign that she had dreamed as he had dreamed. It had beset him with the force of
a true-dream, or such as he had heard they were. But the Mother had not dreamed
it. How then could it be true? Men did not see past the veils of the world.
That gift was given to women.

He wished that he could be surer of that; that he could
thrust aside the conviction that this dream came not from the night spirits but
from the Lady herself. It was terrible arrogance, to think such a thing.

He stumbled to his feet. His skin felt too thin, as if a
breath would tear it.

The Mother passed by, soft padding of feet, faint ripple in
the door-curtain. Danu moved without thought, softer even than she, following
her out into the chill of the morning.

oOo

The light was dim and grey yet oddly clear. The stars were
fading. Light glimmered along the eastern horizon, over the walls and roofs of
the city. It was the greatest city of the Lady’s country, where one could stand
atop a roof and see a city on every side. Her people were rich in cities, rich
in copper and gold, in fine weavings and work of hands, in songs and magic.
This was the richest of them all; and the Mother was lady of it, in the Lady’s
name.

She walked down the street from her house to the Lady’s
shrine, that stood higher and prouder than any other. Its walls were painted
with holy things, wings and eyes of birds, fishes, shapes of women and does,
she-goats and ewes, and over and over, the image of the Spiral Dance.

Strangers grew dizzy at sight of it. Danu had been born
inside it, had grown up with it before him. To him it was merely itself.

The Mother entered through the lesser door. Danu was a man
grown; he could not follow. He sat on the doorstep, shivering slightly with the
morning’s chill, clasped his knees and rocked and waited till she should ascend
the tower.

Then it came, the thing that he had waited for. The high
clear call like the cry of a bird, and the ripple of pure notes thereafter.

Words grew out of them. They were older than anyone living
could remember, as old, some said, as the world. The meaning was all worn away
from them.

But not the power. That was strong with the strength of
ages. It rang in her voice. It hummed through Danu’s bones and thence into the
earth. It called the sun into the sky.

The blaze of it, the pure daily glory, made Danu weep. It
washed away the memory of fire, and stripped the dream of its terror.

The Mother’s voice fell silent. Danu sighed faintly. Well
before she came out of the temple, he was gone.

oOo

His sister was waiting for him, sitting on his rumpled bed
in her fine red skirt and her striped shawl. She had been gone the night
long—dancing the dance with Kosti-the-Bull, Danu could well guess. Women always
had that look of creamy contentment after a night with Kosti.

Danu ignored her in his quest for a clean tunic. She was
sitting on the one he had wanted, but he had another, if he could remember
where he had put it.

“In the chest,” Tilia said. “Under the cloak with the hole
in it.”

Danu shot her a burning glance. Of course the tunic was
where she had said it was. “You’ve been in my things again,” he said.

She shrugged, unrepentant. “I was looking for a shawl to
wear to the Planting Dance. What did you do with the one Mother made for you,
with the birds woven on it?”

Danu showed her his teeth. “I hid it,” he said. “I’m keeping
it for a morning-gift.”

“Oh!” she said brightly. “Are you going to get Chana to ask
for you, then?”

He flushed hotly but kept his head up. “Chana doesn’t want
me. She’s after Kosti.”

That was nasty, but Tilia only laughed. “Oh, is she? Poor
Chana. Such a stick of a girl, and Kosti, as everybody knows, prefers a woman
with substance.”

Danu thought Chana lovely as a willow is lovely, lissome and
slender, but he was not going to say so to Tilia. Tilia was beautiful as a
woman well should be, as the Mother was beautiful, great-breasted and
broad-hipped, with wonderfully potent thighs. She would be Mother in her own
time, would speak before the goddess for the people of this city, and the
Mothers of the lesser cities would look to her for wisdom.

But that was far away in the round of years. She was young
yet, and neither as wise nor as imposing as she fancied she was. Danu pulled
the tunic over his head and raked fingers through his wild curly hair, taming
it somewhat with a bit of leather wound and knotted at his nape.

Tilia watched with frank appreciation. “You really are a
pretty thing,” she said. “Why would you want to waste yourself on Chana? You
could have yourself a woman of worth in the world. It’s only right, after all,
since you’re the Mother’s son. You owe it to her name.”

Danu had not the faintest intention of wasting himself on
Chana, who was pretty to look at but dull to listen to—unless one was
fascinated by minutiae of trading in fine clay pots. Chana meant to be very
rich, and likely would be, though her family was nothing in particular.

Because it would drive Tilia wild, Danu said, “Chana will be
richer than the lot of us. Wait and see. Shouldn’t I be looking for a woman
with ambition?”

Tilia snorted in disgust. “Oh, you men are always
thinking—with your manly parts. It’s well women speak first to the goddess; if
it were left to men, there’d be nothing in the world but mating and
squabbling.”

“You mate well, I’m told,” Danu said sweetly, “and you
squabble famously.” He ducked the blow she aimed at him, laughed and danced
aside and out the door, and left her cursing his impudence.

oOo

In some parts of the Lady’s country, young men were given
nothing to do, or were cast out to run in packs like dogs. Not so in the
Mother’s city. There everyone, even the least regarded boychild, had a task and
a place. Danu’s was to tend the Mother’s house and to run her errands as she
required of him. It was a great task, and a great trust. He was well aware of
the honor she did him.

This morning there was considerable to do: it was a
washing-day and a baking-day, and later a guest would come, the Mother of a
city to the westward. Danu roused the Mother’s acolytes: new since the Planting
Dance, awkward and sullen, resentful that they must do the bidding of anyone
but the Mother herself. The menservants were at their tasks already and long
since.

The last of the ill dream faded beyond recall, lost in the
day’s brightness. When the washing had been brought up from the river smelling
of sun and of the grass it had been spread on to dry, and the bread and
honeycakes and the guest-cakes were made and set to cool, Danu sent the
acolytes to wait on the Mother, and the menservants to take an hour’s leisure,
and set himself free to wander down to the market.

It was, after all, a duty of his. He brought a little wool
to trade, a bead or two, even a bit of copper if he should find something
irresistible.

At this hour, just after noon of a fair day in spring, the
market was humming. A trading party had come in from the east, bringing furs
and tanned leather and ivory; there were weavers with fine wool of the northern
cities; and it was a day for the livestock market, a tumult of lowing and
bleating, haggling and crying of wares. Danu loved the liveliness of it, the
babble of voices, the unexpectedness of a new thing and the familiarity of an
old one side by side in the broad market square.

He bought a thing or two that he or the house had needed,
and a frippery for Chana, mostly to spite his sister; then in a fit of remorse
he bought another for Tilia.

Some others of the young men were out and about, freed or on
errands. Danu wandered past a favorite place of theirs, a stall that offered
middling bad wine for a middling decent exchange. A twist of wool gained him a
cup and a sop of bread to dip in it, and a place on the bench between that
stall and the next.

One or two others were there already. They slid down to make
room for him, smiling or lifting a cup in greeting. He settled into their
companionship, which was mostly silence, with lowered eyes when a woman walked
past. Sometimes she would stare, and they would try not to look as if they
noticed.

Danu ate his bread and drank his wine, and sat for a little
while, enjoying the contentment of full stomach, warm sun, leisure that must
end soon—but not yet.

Others had come while he ate, till there was a fair
gathering of them, the sons of the elders and such of the weavers and potters
who could escape for a little while from their labors. With so many, the
silence could not last; ripples of chatter ran down the line, rumors, gossip,
snatches of stories. Of late it had too often been the same story, one that had
come out of the east.

A stranger had come to the city called Running Waters, near
the wood that rimmed the world. He had come through the wood, he said in signs
and gestures and snatches of traders’ speech, he in his leather and furs, with
his stone knives and his bold manners. The people of the wood had let him pass,
as sometimes they did, on a whim or for curiosity: to see what the cities would
make of him.

He was a savage, ignorant of true speech, and he reeked like
an ill-kept animal. But savages were not as uncommon as that, though mostly
they came from north or south rather than from the east. Strangest and most
wonderful were the beasts that he brought with him, huge creatures, hooved like
cattle but shaped to carry a man on their backs.
Horses
, he called them.

“Great as a bull,” Kosti was saying; and he would know,
since he was himself. “Strong as one, too, but fast—faster than any man can run.
Whole tribes of them ride on these horses, the savage said, racing the wind
across their plains of grass.”

“I think they’re the dead,” said Shuai, whose mother was one
of the singers before the goddess. “Only the dead can outrun the wind. That was
a ghost come to trouble us all.”

“Ghost or dark spirit,” someone else said; Danu did not see
who it was. People murmured, agreeing, disagreeing.

No one argued. They did that in less public places, where
the women could not hear and disapprove.

Everyone was full of this story of the stranger and his
beasts. Ghosts at least one could believe in. Savages, surely. But horses? What
sort of animal was as tall as the temple, as swift as light on water, with a
hide like living copper?

“Like fire,” Kosti said. Kosti had not seen the horses, but
he had been sopping up stories as bread sops wine, and remembering them all. It
gave him something to do, Danu thought uncharitably, between flexing his
muscles in the smithy and being a bull for the women. “Red as fire, and gleaming
like copper in the forge. They’re gods, it’s said, or the children of gods.”

“Goddess,” Rami said. “That’s what I heard. He said Horse
Goddess.”

“How could he say that,” Shuai demanded, “if he didn’t speak
any language of the living?”