White Mare's Daughter (29 page)

The snow fell lightly. It was just deep enough to leave
tracks in, but the storm had not passed: the clouds were thick with it. It
would snow again, and heavily, before nightfall.

The children did not follow Sarama into the Lady’s garden.
Nor, somewhat to her surprise, did Catin or the colt. She rode into it without
escort, slipped from the Mare’s back and stood a little distance from Danu.

He did not acknowledge her. He huddled against a treetrunk,
knees clasped tight to chest, scowling at nothing that she could see. Snow
heaped his shoulders and melted in his hair. He looked like one of the old
stone gods from a shrine on the steppe.

She squatted on her heels nearby, rubbing her hands together
for warmth. She said nothing. The words she needed were more than she knew how
to say in his tongue. Best to keep silence and wait.

He might outlast her. He might not. She had no intention of
lingering here till her feet froze.

The Mare nosed about, pawing snow from still-sweet grass.
One particularly delectable clump happened to be that on which he sat. She nibbled
round about him. He appeared oblivious to the snap and crunch of her teeth so
close to his fundament.

She taught him the folly of that: a sharp nip that brought
him cursing to his feet.

Sarama smiled contentedly. “You sulk badly,” she said.

“I am not sulking.” He stamped his feet as if he had only
just noticed how cold it was, and brushed at the snow on his mantle. “I was
thinking,” he said with dignity.

“Thinking too hard,” Sarama said, “and it’s too cold. Why
not do it inside a house?”

“Because I needed to breathe.” He drew a deep breath, let it
out again; shivered convulsively. “By the Lady! When did it grow so cold?”

“Last night,” Sarama said.

He snorted and stalked away from her.

She followed, quiet again. The Mare followed her.

At the garden gate he halted. He stared at the flock of
children, at Catin, at the colt who came at him whickering and trying to chew
on his hair. He wheeled on Sarama. “I have
not
been in this place since yesterday!”

She arched a brow.

“You have been here since morning,” Catin said, impatient.
“Now tell us why.”

“No,” said Danu, and shut his mouth tight.

“Then tell the Mother,” she said.

Sarama thought that he might refuse again. But the Mother’s
power was strong, as strong as a king’s on the steppe. Danu let Catin take him
by the hand and half-lead, half-drag him to the Mother’s house.

oOo

Sarama was glad of the warmth there, the wine heated with
honey, the fresh hot bread with cheese melted on it. The Mare and the colt had
been let in, too, if only into the first of the rooms, and fed bits of fruit
and cut fodder. They would all have been well content, if Danu’s mood had not
been so black.

When Sarama had eaten and drunk her fill, though Danu had
barely touched what he was given, the Mother sent the servants and the children
into the outer rooms, and gestured to Catin to secure the door.

“Now,” she said to Danu. “Tell me.”

Danu hunched into himself as he had in the garden. “Ask
her,” he said, thrusting his chin at Sarama. “It’s her nightmare we’ve all been
having.”

“She hasn’t the words,” the Mother said before Sarama could
speak. “You tell us.”

“She has—” Danu broke off. Sarama had not found the Mother’s
expression particularly daunting, but then she was not a man in this backward
country. Reluctantly but obediently he said, “Our dream is of a thing that her
people know. That thing is called war. War is when men—it is only men, she
says—kill other men, but women, too, and children.”

Catin’s breath hissed between her teeth, but the Mother’s
expression remained serene. She gestured to Danu to continue.

He gathered composure as he went on, as if the telling of
the horror eased the force of it, a little. “War is killing. Men of her
people—men of the east, horsemen—reckon it great glory. They fight one another,
and they kill one another, and whoever lives is called the victor. And the
victor takes everything.”

Sarama had not told him that. Perhaps his goddess had.

“Are you saying that these people make a virtue of shedding
blood?” Catin’s voice was thick with disgust.

“They make a virtue of fighting,” Danu said. “Fighting is
the duty of every man.”

“And the women? What are they doing while the men fight?”

“Nothing,” said Danu.

“They allow it?”

“They are powerless,” Danu said. “They are less than men are
here—they are like children. Men command them. They have no choice but to
obey.”

“That is preposterous,” said Catin.

“It is true,” Danu said. “That is why I went—where I went.”
He did not mean the goddess’ garden: not entirely. “It seems . . .
she speaks to me. Even though I am . . .”

“Yes,” the Mother said. Her voice was soft, but it silenced
Catin. “She will speak to a man, if he will listen. Men seldom will.”

“Yes,” said Danu. “And those, the horsemen—they hear others
than she. Gods, they call themselves, powers of the sky, of the storm. They
deafen their servants to the Lady’s voice. They call for blood, and not only
the blood of her sacrifice, or the blood that women shed with the turning of
the moon. Blood and fire. Killing. War. To take what they will to take, whether
it be theirs or no. To kill any who resists them.”

Catin opened her mouth. The Mother’s glance stilled her. It
shifted then, not to Danu but to Sarama. Yet she spoke to Danu. “Not all the
horsemen are men.”

“I am only one,” Sarama said. “Horse Goddess’ servant. My
people—long dead. Only I. And the Mare. The gods are too strong.”

“The Lady sent you,” the Mother said.

Sarama nodded. “I don’t know why. Look at him. If all are
like him—”

“He is an extraordinary man,” the Mother said, “but
nevertheless, a man. Men are not as strong of spirit.”

Extraordinary
.
Sarama committed the word to memory. It was a lovely word, which she hoped she
understood. “The horsemen would be angry if they heard you,” she said.

“I imagine they would,” said the Mother.

“You must learn to fight,” said Sarama.

“We will learn what the Lady wishes us to learn,” the Mother
said.

“The Lady says fight,” Sarama said. She did not mean it to
come out so flat, but she did not have the words of this tongue to soften it.
“The men broke us, before. The gods fought the goddess. She lost. Now I am the
only one. All are gone but me. I think—we did not know how to fight.”

“How can the Lady lose?” Catin demanded. “The Lady is all
that is. She cannot be anything else.”

“She might change,” Danu said. He seemed surprised that he
had spoken, but he went on nonetheless. “She might wax and wane like the moon.
Waxing then, for your people, until her time came to wane.”

“We are not waning,” Catin said fiercely. “We are as strong
as we’ve ever been.”

“You are not as strong as men who know how to fight,” Sarama
said.

“Fighting is ugly,” Danu said. “It shames us.”

“It will save you.” Sarama fixed her gaze on the Mother.
“Let me teach your people how to fight.”

“I must think,” the Mother said. “What you ask—what you say
the Lady asks—may be too much for our people.”

“Then you will die,” Sarama said, “or worse.”

“What is worse than death?”

Sarama turned to Catin. “War,” she said. “War is worse than
death. And worse than war—to lose.”

“Defeat.” Danu sounded weary. “To lose—that is defeat.”

“Defeat,” said Sarama. “Death in war is bad. Life in
defeat—worse than bad. It kills the spirit.”

“I will think on this,” the Mother said.

“You people think too much.”

Danu had been eager to return to the quiet of the house by
the river. Now that he was in it, and surprised to find it clean and swept and
the fire banked, too, he caught himself missing the Mother’s house, the people
crowded together, the warmth of bodies, even their pungent scent now that
winter made washing difficult. This was too clean, too open, too empty—or not
empty enough, since he must share it with Sarama.

She had no mercy. “You think too much,” she said again. “You
should not think. You should do."

“Is that how it is with your people?” he demanded of her.
“You never think, you only do? No wonder you have this thing called war!”

She seemed taken aback. He had never lost his temper with
her before—never been provoked truly beyond bearing.

Let her think him weaker than ever. He did not care. She
brought the overturning of his world.

He could not accept that quietly. No, not even for his
pride, which the Mother of Larchwood insisted was greater than he knew or liked
to think.

She rallied quickly, “
I
do not have war,” she said. “Never say I have war. War broke my people. War
will break yours.”

“You are one of them,” Danu said. “You have a horse. You
know how to fight. You must, if you say you can teach us.”

“We learned to fight,” she said. “Too late. All are dead. I
am the last.”

“Perhaps we would rather die than fight.”

“Then die,” she said.

oOo

She went to bed. For all he knew she lay awake nightlong.
He lingered in the outer room till his back ached and his eyes were gritty with
exhaustion.

Even after he had spread his pallet and lain down on it,
well wrapped in coverlets against the creeping cold, his mind would not rest.
It spun endlessly on the same thoughts that had dizzied it since Sarama taught
him this terrible lesson.

It was not that he feared he could not learn to fight. It
was that he feared he could.

He lay on his face in the heap of furs and wool. Sometimes
when he was younger—not so long ago, if he admitted the truth—he had felt
himself a stranger in his body, a child who had fallen somehow into the shape
and semblance of a man.

Now as then, he was too keenly aware of the size that he had
grown to, the strength, the width of his shoulders and the solidity of his
arms. He would have given much to be a child again, slight and smooth-skinned,
weak and gladly so, because a child’s weakness could not do the harm that a
man’s strength could all too easily do.

Imagine a world in which a man was proud of his strength; in
which, when his temper slipped its bonds, he could do whatever he pleased.
Rage, strike, kill. And no Mother to stop him, no sister strong enough to stand
in his way.

Sometimes the boys in Three Birds had whispered of such
things, half in horror, half in desire. Every boy wondered what it would be
like if men ruled. But it was not anything that they dared speak of in public,
or even think of, much.

Now they would learn what such a world could be. A world in
which the Lady was defeated and cast down; in which her servants were all gone
but for one prickly-proud young woman with a stumbling tongue and an irascible
temper.

oOo

Danu woke to familiar scents: fire burning, bread baking.
He yawned and sighed. Such pleasure, to know that the house was well run, the
Mother well looked after.

He started awake, was on his feet before his mind caught up
with his body. He was not in Three Birds. That was not one of the Mother’s servants
moving in the outer room. It was Sarama.

He was scrupulously careful to wash and dress and make
himself presentable before he came out to face her. She had everything in
excellent order. Last night, too, he had come home to a house that was properly
run, that had not suffered from his neglect of it.

He should be glad. He should not be resentful. He should
not, above all, show her precisely how she had seemed to him every morning that
she had been in his charge.

He could help none of it. She knew: there was laughter in
her eyes as she waited on him. “Do you wait on men where you come from?” he
demanded.

“No,” she said. “I serve the Mare. Not men.”

“So you are a proper woman,” he said.

“Not proper,” she said, “where I come from.”

“Proper here,” said Danu. And after a pause: “If you teach
us how to fight, we’ll never be the same again.”

“If you die, you will not be at all.”

He bent his head under the force of that. “For years out of
count we have been the Lady’s people. Now you say that we must change or die.”

“The Lady keeps you,” she said. “Always. Even if you learn
to fight.”

“I don’t want to—” He bit his tongue. Swallowed hard. “Teach
me.”

“Here? Now?”

“Here. Now.”

“No,” she said.

“No? But—”

“Eat,” she said. “Drink.”

“Then fight?”

“Then begin to learn,” she said. She thrust a laden plate at
him. “Eat!”

Danu ate sullenly, but eat he did. And when he had done
that, she bade him dress to go out, found his hunting bow and his boar-spear
and made him take them both, and led him into a world of white light and soft
snow. The horses followed for a while, warm in their thick coats, snorting and
dancing in the cold, but Sarama sent them back before they had gone out of
sight of the house.

It did not take him long to understand what they were doing.
He stopped short. “This isn’t fighting. This is hunting.”

“Hunting is the beginning,” Sarama said. “I want to see you
hunt.”

“But—”

“Hunt,” she said.

oOo

Danu hunted. In any case they needed meat for the pot, and
the snow offered clear tracks. He persuaded himself after a while to forget the
silent one who followed him. She was light on her feet, quiet, and offered no
interference. She knew how to hunt.

Anger might have sent him in pursuit of a boar or even an
aurochs, the great bull of the wood, but Danu was only half a fool. He hunted
the red deer, that was swift enough and canny enough to require a skilled
hunter, but not so dangerous that it could cost him his life. No doubt this
woman of the horsemen would have preferred more dangerous prey; but she said
nothing of it.