White Mare's Daughter (92 page)

Danu happened to be among those who went north, which was a
little farther but the cover was better. The boar that used to make the place
terrible had been killed that summer—by Kosti, who had been sore baffled when
the horsemen offered him an outpouring of admiration for the feat.

The beast had been ravaging farmsteads in the village beyond
the wood, and had nigh killed a man who had gone to gather firewood. Kosti had
happened to be hunting out that way, and the Lady had blessed him; she had
allowed him to give the boar her mercy. It was only sensible that she should do
so. Everyone knew that Kosti was the strongest man in Three Birds.

The horsemen had acted as if Kosti should take credit for
that strength. It embarrassed Kosti terribly, and made him the butt of a jest
or two round the market.

Danu was glad, just then, that Kosti had subjected himself
to such embarrassment. The boar’s wood was dark and deep and much too tangled
to admit a man on horseback. But for a hunter with good night-eyes and light
feet it was penetrable enough.

They found a clearing not far in, a place to rest and wait.
Most slept under the lightening sky. A few of the women took the time to paint
themselves in the Lady’s patterns, painting them thick as if for a great
festival, circles and spirals round breasts and belly, and wide staring eyes on
their foreheads, and a coil of serpents on legs and arms. They took great care
about it, with others waking as the morning went on, and taking up the paints
for themselves.

Danu took his turn as the sun moved into the sky. Chana
helped him, and his sister Mareka. They were not merciful. His beauty he lived
with; it was nothing he could help. But women were not often given opportunity
to comment on all of it—or to decide that while Kosti was bigger, Danu was made
more to measure.

“No wonder your outlander won’t share you,” Chana said,
rubbing his rod for luck, and clapping her hands as it rose to greet her.

And to think, thought Danu, that he had daydreamed once of
her choosing him. She was lovely in her smallness, and would be delicious in
his arms. At the moment she was threatening to paint his rod, which did not
endear her to him at all. He slapped her hands away, rose over Mareka’s
protests, and stalked off to finish in peace. Their laughter followed him.

They could laugh all they liked at that distance. He painted
himself as for the dance, and passed the pots to his brother Tanis, who always
woke latest and surly, and was no different this morning. His weapons were
ready, he had seen to that before. Nothing was left but to wait.

The ram’s horn blew both sooner and later than Danu had
expected. Sooner, because no one had thought the enemy would come so early in
the morning. Later, because they had all known long since that the horsemen
were coming. It was a rumble in the earth, the sound and sense of a great herd
of horses. But a herd alone, unridden, never came on so straight, with such
evident purpose.

They were not to move until the second signal. The first
waiting had been difficult. The second was excruciating. It was not so terribly
long by the sun. By the spirit’s time it was half of eternity.

Danu was one of those inclined to slip out to the wood’s
edge, to see what could be seen, so that the rest could be ready when the call
came. The horsemen were just riding past, rank on rank of them, gleaming with
stolen gold, draped in fine weavings. They looked like nothing that Danu had
seen before.

He had seen Agni’s riders, and they had been a wild enough
sight when first they came. But these were wilder.

It was death, he thought. Death in their eyes, and blood on
their souls.

Agni had come to conquer. These had come to kill.

Something inside Danu went cold. He was not aware of it at
first, except as a silence of the spirit: as if a voice that had spoken to him
lifelong had gone mute.

It was not the Lady’s voice. She was there still, her wind
breathing in his ear, her breast against his as he lay in hiding and watched
the horsemen ride by. For a moment he felt her arms about him, warm and strong.

He folded his arms and rested his chin on them. The horsemen
rode on by, down to the dark line of defenses. They could see all that he could
see, and they spoke of it, heedlessly, as if none of them cared that they might
be spied on.

They were arrogant, Sarama had said. They had heard of
Agni’s easy conquest. They expected just the same—and never a thought that the
people might have learned, not just to fight, but to wage war.

Agni was gods-gifted, Sarama said. He could see the pattern
of a war as a weaver could see the pattern in a loom half-threaded: with an eye
that saw past the moment to the moments that could be. Danu had not found a way
to tell her that he saw nothing remarkable in that. He hunted so, and danced
so. And even, on occasion, persuaded a woman to court him.

Well then: Agni had a gift for war. Danu did not, nor wanted
one, but all the plan as Agni had unfolded it seemed simple in its essence.
Other people called it deadly complicated.

He sighed, but softly lest after all there be scouts or
spies within earshot. Down below, the army had halted. Agni had come out of the
city: Danu saw the flame of his standard like a second sun. Soon, thought Danu.

Now
.

The horn’s song was piercing, and won a snort from Danu.
Brought to bay, was it? Yes; one could say that of the city, with so many
horsemen fighting over it.

He rose up out of his hiding place. Already the first of his
fellows emerged from the wood.

He ran this time for life and breath, but with care still,
because he must fight when he was done. He saw how those to the north had kept
together, but those to the south ran more raggedly.

Of the riders who should have come round from the east, for
too long a while he saw no sign. Then the first of them rode over the hill; but
before he could see who it was, he had to watch where he was running, or fall
and break his neck.

The horsemen had scattered as Agni had said they would,
dividing into smaller companies. There were still an ungodly number of them,
and every one raised from infancy with a weapon in his hand.

You’ve hunted from a child
. Taditi’s voice, both
harsh and sweet, with no slightest hint of softness in it.
You’ve killed in
order to live. That’s what war is. Only you’re not killing the boar or the
defenseless deer. You’re killing men who have a burning desire to kill you.

He had not wanted to listen when she told him that. Now he
could not get the words out of his head. They pursued him straight down the
hill into a knot of men on horses.

Horses. Aim for the horses if your nerve fails you. Think
of the wolf culling the herd
.

Danu aimed for the horses. Tanis was close by, and Mareka
and Chana and Beki, and threescore more of his friends and kin. That was a
tribe.

Friends, kin. And there was the enemy, thickset dun horse
shying at Danu, Danu shying from the stroke that would sever its hamstring,
knowing something, learning something that he had never wanted to learn. He
could not aim for a horse. But a man—a man with death in his eyes and a bone
knife in his hand—a man he could leap upon. Could strike with a copper blade
that he had hoped never to use. Could—kill.

A stag died no differently. Killing was killing. And yet, to
kill a man—

A shadow flickered in the corner of his eye. His body spun
all by itself, knife stabbing at air that, somehow, thickened into flesh. A
spear thrust where a moment before his head had been. He clawed his way up it
to the man who clutched at it, too shocked to let go.

And these called themselves fierce warriors.

Danu backed away from that thought, from the contempt in it,
the dark hard thing that was not himself. Was not Danu. Was—the Lady knew what.
But it was
not
Danu.

The knife that had been pointed to thrust, he reversed and
thrust into its sheath instead. He seized the spearhaft and heaved, flinging
the rider from the horse. With a rather sublime lack of good sense, he hauled
himself onto the animal’s back.

It was a smaller beast than he was used to, and thin enough
that its backbone clove upward even through the heaped fleeces of its saddle.
But it was a horse, and it agreed to do as he asked it, once it had got over
its startlement at being relieved of its more familiar rider.

From a horse he could fight as he had been trained to, as he
had expected to: as an archer. He could hardly be mistaken for a tribesman,
wild naked man with dizzying patterns painted on his breast and face and arms.
But he could ride, and that took them aback; and somehow he was riding round the
lot of them, calling his kinsfolk together.

Some of them came limping; some did not come. Chana,
Tanis—the fighting must have carried them away. Yes, it must have.

This was battle. Heat, dust. Stink of sweat, blood, entrails
ripped and trampled. Smell of death, death above all.

And yet much of it was a surprising stillness. People
resting, people licking their wounds. People gathering to reckon losses, and to
settle on targets. Danu looked into faces that must mirror his own. There was
death in them now, death in their eyes.

The stillness shattered. A horde of yelling horsemen
thundered down on them. With a strange and potent clarity, Danu saw their
banner, a wolf’s head fixed in a snarl, and the men beneath it much the same,
all in wolfskin mantles and reeking to high heaven.

They had no more mercy than winter wolves. They fell on that
company, all of them on foot but Danu. He saw Beki fall; saw the stone axe
cleave his skull. Saw how the spirit left him, wailing its shock, and the man
who had killed him laughed and wheeled his horse and sprang upon another.

But Danu was there, mounted as the tribesman was mounted,
with a spear and a copper-bladed knife and no intention at all of letting him
kill another of the Lady’s children.

It was nothing Danu decided. It was deeper than teaching.
One stood one’s ground. One looked death in the face. Then when it struck, one
struck back. Spear straight to the heart.

The other veered, but he was not fast enough, never fast
enough. Danu thrust the spearpoint home.

The dead man’s weight pulled Danu from his stolen horse. He
fell as best he could, bruised and a little winded, but had no time to lie
there, no time to indulge himself. Hooves pounded deathly near. He rolled,
knotted, snatched the spear and staggered to his feet.

Edged stone whistled past his ear. He spun, stabbing,
whirling in a terrible dance, the dance of the dark god on the burning ground,
the dance that was death.

The sun ascended in a smoke and reek of battle. Sarama’s
archers, having done their part to show the enemy that he was surrounded, had
drawn back over the crest of the eastward hill. They would fight again when
there was need; but Agni had been insistent that they hold themselves in
reserve.

Agni was being a wise lord of warriors, but he was also
protecting a company of women. He had never been so careful with the
foot-fighters, who were nigh as many men as women. And one of whom was Danu,
because like a fool he did not trust his seat on a horse, and he would not risk
his colt in battle.

Sarama would never have tried to prevent a man from going to
a fight. In that much, she was of the tribes. And yet, waiting, lurking out of
sight, creeping out to see how the battle fared, she wished devoutly that she
had ordered Danu to stay at home. He might even have obeyed her.

That was why she had not done it. For pride, because a man
who would not fight was not, after all, a man.

He was down there somewhere, fighting for his life, while
she lay about in the rising heat of the day. The horses cropped grass in peace.
Most of the archers seized the chance to rest.

At last Sarama could not bear it. The sun had risen toward
noon, and the heat had risen with it. But the battle had abated not at all.

Nor would it, that she could see. The enemy was not in the
least daunted. It was a young warrior’s delight, a grand fight, and the prize
hovering in front of them: the city within its defenses, as beautiful as a
woman, and to these men perhaps more alluring.

Sarama had to move. To do something. The Mare was not
excessively willing to leave the sweet grass of the meadow, but she yielded to
persuasion.

As Sarama swung onto her back, one or two of the others
roused to curiosity. “Where are you going?” Taditi demanded, direct as always.

Sarama shrugged. “We’re not doing any good here. I thought . . .
we might find their camp. I’ll wager it’s ill defended. If we can take it,
we’ll strike a harder blow than maybe they expect.”

“They expect nothing of us,” Taditi said, not bitterly; it
was the truth. “Agni wanted us at the enemy’s back.”

“And won’t we be, if we’re holding the camp?”

It was not particularly clever persuasion, but not only
Sarama had perceived Agni’s purpose. Taditi looked around at the circle of
eager faces, frowned, shrugged, sighed. “Very well. Pray our luck holds, and we
don’t fail him by being elsewhere when he needs us here.”

“He needs us on the path of the enemy’s retreat,” Sarama
said. “The camp is the first place they’ll go. And they’ll find us in it,
holding it against them.”

That made sense even to Taditi. They were up, mounted, and
ready to ride in remarkably little time; and glad, too, after all, to be doing
something.

Rather too late, Sarama hoped that it was not madness; that
she had chosen rightly. That the force driving her was the Lady, and not some prankster
among the gods.

oOo

The horsemen had made little effort to hide their camp, no
more than they had when Sarama found it before. It was a little better
defended: a few boys with spears, and warriors who had been wounded but still
could ride and wield a spear.