White Mare's Daughter (95 page)

And Tilia, kneeling outside of the king’s tent. The Mother
lay in front of her. There was nothing of sleep in that heavy body. Only death.

Agni’s heart constricted. His throat was dry. It was only a
woman, part of him insisted. King she might have been in the reckoning of her
people, but she was conquered. She had had no power but what he chose to give
her.

And yet she had been the Mother. And she was dead.

Of all the deaths that he had seen that day, this was the
last that he had expected. She was not supposed to die. She was supposed to
keep safe in the city, and come out in a cloud of birds when the fighting was
over, and heal what could be healed, and teach the earth to grow green again.

He surprised himself with grief. He sank down beside her,
bent and laid his hand on her breast over the silent heart. The cause of her
death was unmistakable. Tribesman’s knife: blade of flint, hilt of carved bone.

He met Tilia’s gaze over the cooling body. He expected
grief, and found it in plenty. Yet he had not expected to find serenity.

Anger, rather. Bleakness. But Tilia was as serene as the
Mother had ever been. It was a little cold, that serenity, but there was no
mistaking it.

“Tell me how,” he said.

Tilia did not answer. It was Sarama who said, “She asked me
to admit her to the king’s tent. I didn’t know—I think—she knew. She knew what
she was doing. But why?”

There was a wail in that, though tightly reined in. Taditi
gripped her shoulder and said, “It was Yama’s wife. The white bone of a woman.
Rudira.”

Agni started as if struck. “Ru—” He took himself in hand
with all the strength he had. Made himself stop shaking. Said as calmly as he
could, “Where is she?”

A cluster of the archers stirred, drawing his eye. A figure
erupted from them and flung itself at Agni.

Only Sarama was quick enough. Her knife slashed.

Rudira darted aside, but not far enough. With a cry she
stumbled and fell.

Agni caught her. It was madness, he knew it, yet he had seen
no weapon in her hand. And he had heard a word in her cry: the sound of his
name.

She lay in his arms, gasping, whimpering with pain. Her odd
pale beauty had not changed, nor had she. She was still Rudira.

His body, remembering the heat of her, quickened in
response, but his heart was cold. “Why?” he asked her. “Why did you do it?”

She carried on with her whimpering for a while, but he was
not taken in. She swallowed the last of it and stroked his cheek, wincing at
the pain in her side. “I thought—I was—it was an enemy. I couldn’t let her in
the tent.”

“Yama-diti said the same,” Taditi said. “I suppose it’s
true. She couldn’t have known who it was that was coming in.”

“She knew,” said Sarama, clear and cold.

Rudira clung to Agni with sudden strength. But her eyes were
on Sarama, glaring at her. “You hate me. Everyone hates me. But you can’t do
anything to me. I belong to him. I’m his wife.”

Sarama’s eyes widened, but no wider than Agni’s own. “Are
you now?” said Sarama.

Rudira held Agni in a deathgrip. “Yes. Yes, I am. Aren’t I?
Tell them, my lord. Tell them I am.”

Agni opened his mouth, shut it again. Nothing that he could
think of to say would be of any use.

Tilia astonished them all with a ripple of clear laughter.
“By the Lady! You all look so dumbfounded. So tell us, king of the horsemen.
Are you married to this woman?”

“No,” Agni said. Then more vehemently, “No, I am not. She
was married to my brother.”

“He is dead,” Rudira said. “I am the king’s wife. I must be
the king’s wife. You are the king. How can I not be your wife? As,” she said
with sweet reason, “we have been to one another for lo these several years.”

Agni heard her with much less horror than he might have
expected. The women who heard were neither surprised nor shocked. Nor, as far
as he could tell, were the men who had followed him. Was there anyone who had
not known what he was to Rudira?

With a kind of revulsion, Agni laid Rudira down, and not
with great gentleness, either. He had to pry her hands loose and hold them
tightly to keep them from locking behind his neck.

She arched her back and flaunted her breasts at him; but he
had only to lift his eyes to see better. “Husband,” Rudira said. “Beloved.”

“You’re mad,” he said.

“Oh, no,” said Tilia. “She’s quite sane. Just . . .
slantwise.”

“I must be a king’s wife,” Rudira said.

“You’ll be nothing,” said Agni, “because you killed the
Mother of Three Birds.”

“She was an enemy,” said Rudira.

She made him think, piercingly, of Rahim. The same
simplicity. The same incomprehension. The same unmistakable failure to
understand what she had done.

Rahim he had loved. Rudira . . .

Love had never been a part of it. Lust, oh yes. His body
sang to be near her. If it had had its way, he would have fallen on her then
and there, and taken her by storm.

But his heart did not want her at all. “You’ll die,” he
said, and there was no more pain in the words than if she had been a tribesman
who had fallen afoul of the laws. Pain enough, that was, but not as it would
have been for one he loved.

It was Tilia who asked, “Why?”

He stared at her.

She repeated the question. “Why? Why will she die?”

“Why— Because she killed the Mother.”

“That’s no reason,” Tilia said.

Agni gaped like a fish. “But—she killed—”

“She didn’t know,” Tilia said.

“You can’t let her live. She’ll try to kill you.”

“I don’t think so,” said Tilia. She came and knelt beside
Rudira, looking her in the face. “That was my Mother you killed,” she said.

“Do you want me to be sorry?” Rudira asked.

“No,” Tilia said. “I want you to know. And that,” she said,
tilting her head toward Agni, “is mine. Are you thinking that I’ll share him?”

Rudira’s eyes narrowed. “He was mine first.”

“I married him,” Tilia said.

“Of course you did,” said Rudira. “He needed you. He
couldn’t be king here without you.”

“He could,” Tilia said, “but this way was easier.”

Rudira sat up. She had forgotten that Agni stood near her,
and could hear every word. She had also, it seemed, forgotten that she was
wounded. “He belongs to
me
,” she
said.

“I don’t think so,” said Tilia.

“I’ll kill you too,” Rudira said.

Tilia laughed. Agni tensed to leap, for Rudira’s expression
was murderous; but she did not spring on Tilia.

Any hope he might have had of mastering this debacle was
long gone. There was Yama all forgotten, and the Mother unregarded, and these
two women deciding his fate.

He could give in to rage, or he could rise and see that both
Yama and the Mother were cared for as they deserved. Yama as king, for after
all he had been that; and the Mother as befit her rank and office.

He did not delude himself that either Tilia or Rudira was
chastened by his actions. Rudira was not to be punished, as far as he could
see. There had been a brief moment when he might have overcome her, but that
was past. Tilia appeared to bear her no rancor. And that was the strangest of
all the things he had seen in this country: that a Mother should be dead, and
the one who had killed her was not even rebuked for it.

“She’ll pay,” a voice said above him. He looked up startled.
Catin looked down from the back of her mare. She was as ragged and insouciant
as ever, sitting cross-legged on the broad rump, and the horse did not even
turn an ear.

“She’ll pay,” Catin repeated. “Have no doubt of it. You may
not understand the price, but she will.”

“What, to give me up?”

Catin looked long at him, then shook her head. “Man,” she
said. “Irredeemably a man.”

“I should be ashamed of that?”

“It might do your spirit good.” She stood on the dun mare’s
rump, as steady as if it had been a level floor, and stretched her arms to the
sky. “Look!” she cried. “The world’s changing. Do you feel it under your feet?
Do you taste it on the back of your tongue?”

“I see it clear enough,” Agni said.

“You barely see your rod in front of your belly.” She
somersaulted off the mare’s back, bounding lightly, impossibly, to her feet.
“Rudira,” she said. “Rudira, destroyer of worlds, come and talk to me.”

There was the mad greeting the mad, dark woman face to face
with bone-white over the Mother’s lifeless body.

Rudira had even less use for this tattered vagabond than for
the Mother’s heir—now, before the Lady, Mother indeed—of Three Birds. She
sneered at Catin.

Catin grinned at her. “Run away with me,” she said.

“I’d rather die,” Rudira said.

“Certainly,” said Catin. “But we’re going to run away
first.”

“I am staying here. That man is mine. I am not giving him
up.”

Catin half-turned over her shoulder and looked Agni up and
down, a long raking sweep. “Why, child, whatever for? He’s pretty, I grant you,
but there’s a surfeit of pretty men in the world. Come with me and you can have
them all.”

“Are they all kings?”

“In their own minds they are,” said Catin.

“I must have a king,” Rudira said. “Nothing less is worthy
of me.”

“Every man you choose is a king,” said Catin. “Think of it.
How splendid you make them. How they fall over one another to love you.”

Rudira preened. “So they do. But, stranger, what do you gain
from it?”

“Amusement,” Catin said.

Rudira’s brows drew together. “You’ll not laugh at me.”

“Never you,” said Catin. “No, not ever.”

“Well then,” Rudira said. “I’ll make my own kings. But that
one—he is so lovely. I want him.”

“Who’s to say you won’t have him?” Catin laid her arm about
Rudira’s shoulders, close as a sister. “Come, see, there’s the most delightful
young thing among the Stormwolves. He took a wound—a scratch, little more— but
he’s in great need of comforting. Because, you see”—and she lowered her voice
almost to inaudibility—“he’s afraid he might not be able to love a woman
again.”

“What,” said Rudira in shock, “is he wounded
there?
”

“Of course not,” said Catin, “but too close for him to tell
the difference. We can show him very well, don’t you think?”

“Exceptionally well,” said Rudira.

oOo

Agni watched them go in a kind of disbelief. Of all the
strange things he had seen, this was the strangest. And, now it was too late,
the most dismaying.

He should have kept Rudira here. He should have seen her
punished according to the laws of the tribes. For that, for killing an enemy so
treacherously, she would have died.

He called himself back to his senses. There was more than
enough to do besides fret over a pair of madwomen. A king and a Mother were
dead. A battle had ended in blood and slaughter. There were armies to see to,
terms to offer. A world to change—that much Catin had seen clearly.

A great part of him wanted to run after Rudira, seize her,
throttle her—tumble her in the grass. But enough of him was king, and enough of
him was sane, that he turned his back on the dwindling sight of her and set his
face toward the duties of his kingship.

The world had shaken on its foundations. And when it was
still again, the battle was over. Agni had won it.

The tribesmen would make great legends of it, but Sarama
could see the dazed look on his face. He did not believe it yet, not really. He
was numb.

He could have cast his brother Yama to the dogs. It would
not be the first time a victorious king had done that to a vanquished
enemy—particularly an enemy whom he had detested for his life long. But Agni had
never had the art of cruelty. He gave Yama a king’s burial before all the
gathered tribes, and raised his barrow with all proper honor.

It was atonement, maybe. Agni would never admit it, but
Sarama knew her brother.

oOo

While he did as a king must for a fallen king, the Lady’s
people saw their Mother to her rest.

It was a rite of silence, a giving of her body to the earth
that had borne it. There were no dirges, no great processionals, no displays of
fire and splendor. She made her way on the shoulders of her children, down from
the horsemen’s camp, over the eastward hill and across the field of battle, and
so into the city over the bridge that spanned the pit of spears. Her people,
all that lived and could walk, came slowly in her wake.

They passed to the Lady’s grove. The men and boys hung back
on the edges of the trees. The women went on into the green and peaceful circle
that neither blood nor war had ever touched, until now. Until a Mother was laid
within the earth, the first Mother that had ever died of treachery, in an act
of war.

A woman of wealth in a city as rich as Three Birds might be
buried with gold and with beautiful things that she had loved. But a Mother
belonged to the Lady.

Her rite was old, older than memory. She went into the earth
naked as she had been born. No work of hands adorned her. Her bed was made of
flowers, and flowers covered her.

They laid her to sleep in a waft of sweetness, and covered
her over with green turves. Then as the moon rose above the trees that ringed
the grove, her sisters and daughters, her kin, her friends, the women of her city,
danced to honor her memory.

oOo

Tilia led the dance as was her duty. A vast quiet had
filled her when she saw the Mother dead at her feet: an emptiness that was not
serenity, nor yet acceptance.

The dance anchored her to the world again. It made her real;
confirmed her in the truth.

The Mother was dead. She was the Mother. When she came out
of this grove, her name would be taken away. She would be no longer Tilia. She
would be Three Birds, and Three Birds would live in her, in her body, just as
her child grew and stirred and dreamed of the world into which it would be
born.