White Mare's Daughter (16 page)

She camped in a place that she knew, a hollow rich with new
grass. A circle of stones marked a firepit, for the place was well known to
hunters and walkers abroad.

Such camping places traced a web of roads and hunting-runs
across the steppe. They marked the nearness of water, or a place of truce
between two tribes, or a resting place on the path of the wild herds.

In this one was a spring welling up from beneath a rock, and
a warren of rabbits that yielded a sacrifice for Sarama’s pot. She ate to
repletion and slept well under a vault of stars. Far away she heard the calling
of wolves, but none came near. She lay safe in the goddess’ hand.

oOo

This was White Horse country in a year when no wars raged.
She had cause to hope that none would begin, not after a mild winter. The grass
was thick and green, the streams and rivers running high yet no longer in
flood. The hunting was good: herds of deer and antelope with fine crops of
young, rabbits springing underfoot, birds flocking till they darkened the sky.
She hardly needed pause to hunt for the pot. The gods’ blessing lay on the
earth.

While that was so, the tribes would share the steppe in
peace. There was grazing for all their herds, and hunting enough to occupy their
young men who might otherwise begin to think of raiding.

Nonetheless a woman alone was prey. Sarama did not creep and
hide like a rabbit making its way through a wolfpack. Neither did she ride the
ridges, or pursue the tracks of hunters or herdsmen. She cherished her
solitude. The wind’s song bore her company. Sun by day, stars and moon at night
kept watch over her.

Thrice she slipped round camps of the tribes. Red Stallion
and Dun Cow looked for kingship to the White Horse. Black River tribe had long
been a rival of the White Horse; its young men raided White Horse country in
fiercer seasons. They were much given to stealing women and mares.

Even in this rich spring they would look on Sarama and the
Mare as ripe fruit fallen into their laps. She took great care to conceal her
traces, slipping through their lands like a wind through the grass.

She gave due thanks to the goddess for keeping her safe, and
so again each morning and evening, as she passed unmarked into the west. The
steppe rolled under the Mare’s feet, changeless and yet endlessly, subtly
different. The color and flavor of the grass, the flowers that hid in it, the
earth and stones beneath it, changed in ways that she had learned to see. Thus
she knew when she had come to Red Sand country, and when she left it for the
Tall Grass: grass that waved and rustled above her knees as she rode the Mare,
and nigh engulfed the smaller pack-pony.

This was country she had not traveled in, that she knew only
from tales that she had heard. She had to hunt now for water and for camping
places, trusting in her craft and in the noses of her horses. They could always
find water. It was her part to keep them more or less on the westward way.

oOo

For all her craft and art and her trust in the goddess,
still one day her vigilance failed her. She had known that she was on the track
of a hunting party, but had seen where the herd it pursued had veered aside
from an outcropping of stone. The hunters had followed it, hot on the chase. It
was still some distance ahead of them; therefore when she came to the remnants
of the hunters’ camp, she had no fear that they would come back to it.

It was well before sunset still, but late enough in the day
that she chose to stop rather than go on. There was grazing in plenty—the hunters
had not paused overlong, nor suffered their horses to strip the hillside of
grass. Sarama hobbled the pony and turned the Mare loose and bade them take
their ease, and built a fire of dried dung that she found near the firepit.

Earlier in the day she had shot an antelope, cleaned it and
skinned it and wrapped it in its hide to roast for her dinner. All of it that
she did not eat tonight would dry and smoke over the fire, and feed her for
days thereafter. With herbs and cresses that she had found by a little river,
it made a feast, the best that she had had since she left her brother’s camp.

She had the habit of watchfulness, but this day she was at
ease. It was, she calculated, another half-moon’s journey to the wood that
rimmed the world. She had traveled swiftly, without hindrance even from the
weather; when it had rained, she had gone on, undaunted by a little wet.

She lay by the fire while her dinner cooked, contemplating
the sky. Rain again tomorrow, she thought. Maybe she would linger here, rest, let
the packhorse graze and restore its strength. It was looking a little ribby.

Rather to her surprise, she fell asleep. Some last remnant
of sense pricked at her to rouse, to mount a better guard—at least to call in
the Mare and bid her stand watch. But sleep came on too swift.

oOo

Sarama woke abruptly. It was still daylight; still some
time indeed from sunset. The place in which she lay was quiet—too quiet. No
wind blew. Nothing stirred the grasses.

The sound when it came was thunderous after the silence, and
yet the part of her that measured such things knew it was soft, barely to be
heard: the shift of a foot on cleared ground.

Her skin counted them before the rest of her woke to
awareness. There were a dozen, perhaps more. A dozen young men afoot, standing
in a circle, staring at her as she lay like a child in its mother’s tent.

As if her awareness gave them leave to move, to breathe, to
be audibly and visibly present, they roused to the myriad small sounds of men
gathered together. Feet shifted, weapons clattered, someone coughed. Farther
off, a horse snorted. She should have heard those coming—must have, in her
sleep; but she had been too great a fool to rouse for it.

She had not, yet, opened her eyes or stirred. She ventured a
slit of sight under her lashes. A pair of legs rose next to her, booted and
leather-trousered. By the embroidered loin-covering and the broad tooled belt
she knew it for a man, though of a tribe she had not seen before—unless the
devices on covering and belt were his alone.

No: they all had some form of the same symbols, a burgeoning
of cloud, a slash of rain, a creature that must be either wolf or dog. Not all
were as rich or as elaborate as that which she had seen first. He had splendid
embroideries on his loincloth and leggings, much tooling on boots and belt, and
a shirt so fine he might have worn it to a festival.

He was a handsome creature, too, even without the pretty
clothes: a big man even if he had not been looming against the sky,
broad-shouldered, with hair as yellow as sunlight, and a thick, curling red
beard. If his beauty had a flaw, it was that his hair had thinned somewhat at
the temples. But that was little to the whole of him.

She pretended to wake slowly, with much blinking and
yawning, as much like a child or a harmless creature as she could manage. That
was not as easy as it might have been, what with the knives she wore at her
belt, and the bow in its case near the fire. But maybe these strangers had not
seen that. It was hidden, somewhat, by the bulk of her pack.

The stranger-chieftain watched her with the dawn of a grin.
Any hope she might have had that he would think her a boy on stallion-hunt
vanished as he said, “Good evening, beautiful lady. Your man has gone away and
left you. That’s a poor protector he is, and it so close to sundown, too.”

Sarama bit back the first retort that came into her head.
They were poor trackers indeed, if they could not see that she had come here
alone.

She was an idiot if she let them know that. Let them think
her man had gone off hunting—then they would be wary of his return, and be less
inclined to trouble her.

She sat up therefore and stretched, which was perhaps a
mistake: eyes widened, tongues licked lips. She had never thought herself
particularly good to look at. Certainly she had little by way of breast and
hip, and no softness; she was all bones and angles.

She was still a woman, and that, so far out on the steppe,
was a great rarity. She rose carefully. No one moved to hinder her. Two of the
strangers, she saw with a flare of temper, had crouched by the fire and were
hacking off a collop from her antelope. “Good!” one said with a grin and a
leer.

As if that had been a signal, the rest sauntered over to
share the feast. Their chieftain made no effort to stop them.

Sarama’s anger carried her straight through them, elbowing
them aside, kicking the laggards, making a weapon of their openmouthed
surprise. The last one, the one who had tasted first, she heaved up by the
scruff of the neck and dispatched with a swift kick to the seat of his
trousers.

She planted her feet in the space that he had left, set
fists on hips, and glared at the lot of them. “This is my dinner. If you hunger
for a share of it, ask. Were you raised in a wolves’ den? Where are your
manners?”

She had taken them completely off guard. The lesser ones
shuffled and muttered. Their chieftain wavered transparently between wrath and
laughter. By good fortune and the goddess’ will, he settled on the latter. He
threw back his great golden-maned head and roared.

The others followed suit, some hesitantly, some faintly—but
they were all their prince’s men. He strode through them still laughing, swept
a bow as if she had been a king or a king’s son, and said with elaborate
courtesy, “Lady of the hearth, great queen of the steppe, if your generosity
can spare a traveller’s portion, we would be glad of it.”

“Your hunt fared ill?” she asked him. That was not
courteous, but she was in no mood to indulge his fancy.

His eyes flickered. She was put in mind again of the horses
hidden away out of sight—and, no doubt, the quarry that they carried. He had
seen that this place was occupied, had marked the lone woman, and come to prey
on her.

Wisdom would have put her to flight while he was still off
guard. She would lose provisions, bow and arrows, blanket—but she would have
the Mare and the pack-pony, and she could hunt for what else she needed.

Unless the horses had been captured.

She would have known. And he would not have thought that she
had a companion.

But she was not wise. She was angry. This was her camp, her
antelope, her rest that these strangers had disrupted. Let them find their own
camp and cook their own dinner.

Her smile made the chieftain flinch. She did not pause to
wonder why. “That was a fine herd of deer you were tracking. Did they escape?
My brother would have brought home half a dozen, enough to feed the tribe. He’s
a great hunter, my brother is. He killed a lion once, because he’d tired of
lesser sport.”

The chieftain flushed. Sarama had told no lies. Agni was
indeed as she had said; though he would have growled at her for saying it so
baldly. Sarama had never learned the fine art of the vaunt.

Still it was enough, perhaps, to shame this yellow-haired
prince. If he thought that it was her brother out on the steppe, hunting new
prey while his sister roasted the old, then so much the better.

“Suppose,” Sarama said, “that you bring one of those fat
bucks, and such bread and sweetness as you may have, and we feast together.
Have you kumiss? Or honey mead? My brother loves the honey mead—though he’s
grown somewhat fonder of that thing called wine. You know wine, yes?”

“Wine comes from the west,” one of the lesser strangers
said. “She talks like an easterner. What do easterners know of wine?”

Sarama forbore to upbraid him for speaking of her as if she
had not been there. Men did that in the tribes. These did not know who or what
she was—nor, quite yet, did she intend to tell them. If they could not see
Horse Goddess’ hand on her, so much the worse for them.

She answered him therefore, as sweetly as she knew how. “We
know what wanderers and traders bring, and what our king takes in tribute in
the gathering of tribes. My brother is very fond of western wine.”

“We have none of that,” the chieftain said, and perhaps his
regret was genuine; perhaps he told the truth. “Mead we have. Rodri! Maelgan!
Go, fetch the horses. We’ll feast here with this stranger, and with her brother
when he comes back.”

The two whom he had commanded wheeled and leaped into a run.
The tightness in Sarama’s back relaxed the merest fraction. She was not at
ease—not in the least. But she had passed a test of sorts. They had declared a
truce. For a little while. Until the horses were brought, and indeed they were
laden with fruits of the hunt.

Men set to work skinning and cleaning the kill. Others
tended the horses, built a fire, made camp as the sun sank low.

Sarama sat beside her own fire, close by her pack and the
shadow-hidden bow. The chieftain settled near her with an air of one who never
thinks to ask another’s leave. She wondered if he was indeed a king, or a
chieftain of this Stormwolf tribe; or whether, at home among the tents, he bent
his head to another, older chieftain. He did not look like one who had ever
bent his head to any man.

He was protection, of a sort. None of the others would
trouble her while he sat near her. She settled herself more comfortably, back
against her pack, hand resting on the grass near the hidden bow.

oOo

The chieftain’s name was Gauan. It was an odd name in his
western burr, of which she heard a great deal as the camp took shape around
them. Gauan was a talking man. He loved the sound of his own voice.

It spared her the effort of entertaining him. Every question
that he asked of her, he answered for himself, without pause to let her speak.
She had no need to lie, then, or turn her words in ways that concealed the
truth.

She was traveling with her brother, he had decided, on some
errand of dubious significance—hunting wine, he said laughing, or chasing the
horizon. Or they were exiled from their tribe; sinners against the king,
condemned for some infraction that would seem small in the eyes of a stranger.
“Did you step in his shadow? Laugh at the wart on his nose? Offend him by being
children of an elder wife?”