White Mare's Daughter (4 page)

“Ah beautiful,” Agni sighed. “How the gods will love you!”

The Stallion tossed his heavy mane and pawed.

Yes
, thought Agni.
Yes. Get on with it.
He could have
wept for the beauty and bravery of this creature, this child of the gods, whom
they called back to themselves.

Perhaps it was the gods who spoke, bidding him do what he
did. He dropped the cord over the Stallion’s neck, left him loose to come or to
flee, as he willed; then walked forward through the broken circle, onto the
holy ground before the altar.

And the Stallion followed. Calmly, sweetly, as—yes, as the
Mare followed Agni’s sister Sarama, he followed Agni to the altar of his
sacrifice. Later Agni would marvel; would mark the omen as they all did. Now it
was only as it should be, like the sun overhead, the grass underfoot, the wind
in his face. He could smell the smell of the Stallion, the warm slightly
pungent scent, and hear the soft thud of his footfalls.

Before the altar Agni halted, and the Stallion halted with
him. He took the cord then. He looked into the dark bright eye. “O beautiful,”
he said, crooning the words. “O blessed.” And with no more words than that,
though the priests were full of them, chanting the death-song all about him, he
lifted the knife gripped still in his hand, and thrust it deep in the gleaming
red throat.

Blood was redder far than any stallion’s hide, even if he
were the get of a god. It sprang forth in a fountain, flooding the dark stone
of the altar. The Stallion sank down in it, slowly, as if lying down to sleep.

Yet there was no sleep in his eyes. He was wide awake,
seeing through the veils of the world, looking with wonder on the gods’
country. Almost Agni could see it, almost know the light of it, almost walk
where the Stallion walked.

Death took the Stallion as he touched the altar’s stone. The
light in his eyes went out. The breath departed from him in a sigh. His soul
fled away, bright airy thing, head up, tail up, galloping swifter than mortal
horse could gallop, vanishing into the endless vault of the sky.

Agni’s half-dream shattered in a roar of sound: the shout
of exultation at the Stallion’s sacrifice. He wobbled in his place, the knife
slipping in slackened fingers, till he tightened them with a convulsive
movement.

He would remember, later, how very red the blood was, and
how very different a red was the Stallion’s body; how the hair whorled on the
broad brow beneath the tumbled forelock, first sunwise, then, above it, the
opposite. There should be a white mark on that forehead, he thought, curved
like a crescent moon. He did not know why it should be so; and yet it was.

He fell back into himself all at once, into consciousness of
the priests dancing and swirling about him, and the people calling out, and the
rest of the young men, the hunters who would seek their horses between now and
the summer’s end, running forward to finish the sacrifice.

His part was done. He hated to see that beautiful body cut,
the hide stripped off and carried away to be made into the king’s new
year-seat, the flesh sundered from bones, the fire lit for the feast. And the
head, the splendid head, cut off entire and buried in the holy place, to watch
over the tribe until the year should return to its beginning.

But he could stand apart from that, nor need he watch it
unless he wished. People let him be. Maybe they could see the gods’ hand on
him. He could feel it, strong as a stallion, heavy as worlds.

He bowed and laid the knife on the altar’s edge and backed
away as one did before the gods, letting the crowd of people surge past him to
the conclusion of the rite. In a little while they were all gone ahead of him
and he was alone on the trampled grass.

He looked up. His sister was gone from the hill, and the
Mare with her.

He shed his robe of ceremony, let it fall on the grass. The
trews underneath were all he wore. The wind was chill, but he barely felt it.
He walked back slowly to the ring of tents, the women and the children and the
blessing of quiet.

oOo

Sarama tended the Mare with her own hands. That was as it
should be, and as it had always been. People knew better than to interfere,
though children hung about and watched, fascinated as children always were by
the sight of a woman in trousers tending a horse.

Sometimes one of the boys would strut and fret and
disapprove, though he never spoke directly to her. Rather he made sure that she
could hear: “Look at that! A woman without a veil, and with a horse. Horses are
for men. Women belong in tents.”

Sarama never had to respond, even if she had been inclined.
Another of the boys was always there to hush the arrogant one and warn him:
“That’s not a woman like other women. That’s Horse Goddess’ servant. She lives
to serve the goddess.”

“Women live to serve men,” the arrogant one would often
retort.

Sarama had been angry at first, long ago when she was still
a child. She had been the Old Mare’s lesser servant then, fetching and carrying
for the Old Woman. Then it had mattered that she dressed more like a boy than a
girl, and that the boys teased and tormented her behind the Old Woman’s back.
Boys had no respect for the gods, or the goddess either.

Since then she had learned to ignore them, and to resist the
temptation to teach them manners. The gods would see that they learned proper
respect, sooner or later.

Today, even as she combed out the Mare’s long mane with her
fingers and fed her bits of honeycake from breakfast, the loudest of the
arrogant ones tripped and fell over his own feet and split his lip on a stone.

She happened to be watching him just then. He raised himself
on shaky arms and happened, by the gods’ will, to catch her eye.

She smiled sidewise. His face went white under the scarlet
stain of blood. She was merciful: she looked away, and let him make his escape
in peace.

They left her alone after that. Boys were cowards, when it
came to it. Girls could be bolder. It took great courage and no little
ingenuity to escape the stifling confines of a tent and creep out to the
horselines.

There with hunter’s stealth they eluded the boys’
watchfulness and lurked in shadows. She would feel their yearning on her skin,
their eyes fixed on her, wanting what she had: free air, white Mare, open sky.
She never betrayed them, not even when their mothers or brothers came hunting
them, cursing their impudence.

There were two in shadows now, two pairs of eyes watching
her. She could not acknowledge them, but she could teach as the Old Woman had
taught her, by singing the songs that had come down from the time long ago.
Today it was the Song of the Mare and the Woman, how the Mare had come to the
Woman in the dawn time, spoken to her in the voice of the goddess and called
her most beloved of servants.

Men sang that the Stallion had come to the Man, that there
had been no Mare, no Woman; that horses were men’s province and men’s alone
from the long beginning. But the Mare and the Woman lived and endured, and
proved them false. She sang that, too, how men had seized the power of horses,
claimed the Stallion as if he and not the Mare were the lord of the herd, and
wrought a whole world of clever lies to keep the Mare and the Woman forever
bound and mute.

It was terrible, that song, sung soft and sweet as a woman
could sing it, as if she sang her child to sleep. It was never sung where man
or boy could hear. It was a woman’s mystery, and a woman’s remembrance.
Let the men remember as they please,
she
sang.
We women—we remember as it truly
was.

Some girls fled then in fear, because in the world that they
were bound to, the men’s world, it was blasphemy. But these were of a rarer,
bolder sort. They lingered after the song had ended, silent in their patch of
shadow, waiting to see what she would sing next. She considered for a while,
but in the end chose silence.
Leave them
hungry,
the Old Woman had taught her.
Make
them yearn for more. Then they come back. Then truly they begin to learn.

Sarama hummed softly to herself as she made the Mare’s coat
a smooth and shining thing, and stroked mane and tail till they ran like water.
The Mare’s beauty was a great weapon in itself. Sarama did not wonder that men
had seized on it and claimed it for their own.

Somewhere, she thought, must be a world in which a woman
could speak freely as a man, and not only because Horse Goddess had commanded
it; where every woman walked free, nor had to creep and whisper and hide lest
she be caught and shut up in the tents again. Such would be a marvelous world
indeed. Then she could teach the girls and the young women what she best knew
to teach, and no need to conceal the truth in riddles or in songs.

Old Woman had known no such world, not in this age. “Long
ago,” she had said, “such things were so. Now the gods will otherwise; and
Horse Goddess in her wisdom permits it.”

“But why?” Sarama had demanded. “Why does she allow it? It’s
not fair.”

“Nothing is fair,” Old Woman said, “nor simple, nor easily
comprehensible. Particularly when there is a god in it. What is, is. That is
the most that one can know.”

“I would know more,” Sarama had said, but Old Woman had told
her to hush and set to work peeling roots for dinner.

When Old Woman spoke in that tone, Sarama had learned to
obey. But the questions lingered, though she never gained an answer.

A shout brought her about. The men were coming back from
their feasting, bearing the head and hide of the Stallion, and well gone in
kumiss, too.

She whose sacrifices were secret things, who had laid the
Old Mare to rest in clean bones and tanned hide, looked on the men’s poor
likeness of the true sacrifice, and sighed. There was another
incomprehensibility, another folly of the gods. Horse Goddess took no joy in
stallion’s blood, though the milk of a mare and the caul of a newborn foal
gladdened her greatly.

Still, the men’s gods seemed pleased by the rite, as by the
rites of Bull and Hound; and without them the tribes would suffer. Sarama had
heard too how people whispered that more than beasts should have died in this
festival, that the king held on past his proper time, that he should have
offered his own throat to the knife, and ridden the Stallion into the gods’
country.

And perhaps it was so. It was a Ninth Year. Horse Goddess
had taken Old Woman and the Old Mare, had accepted their lives and blood as was
her due. What the men’s gods wanted was not for Sarama to know.

The Mare was clean, shining, and sulkily uncomfortable. She
would roll in the grass when Sarama left her, staining her grey hide green.

“Yes,” Sarama said to her, “and my sacrifice becomes your
sacrifice, and all is well in the world.”

The Mare snorted wetly. Sarama leaped back laughing, slapped
her neck and let her go. She danced away with head and tail high, beautiful and
knowing it, though beauty to a horse was dusty and filthy and thick with burrs
and mud and tangles.

oOo

Yama the king’s eldest son set himself across Sarama’s
path as she returned to the circle of tents. That they were begotten of the
same father meant little to Sarama. The mother’s line was strongest, Old Woman
had taught her. It was the mare who conceived and bore and raised the foal, not
the stallion who mounted her when she came into season. But among the tribes
the father meant much; and one’s father’s son was one’s brother, and if one was
a woman one must yield to his will as if he were a god.

Certainly Yama expected as much, though he should long since
have known better. He was a big man, bigger than Agni but not as strong to look
at. There was something soft about him, something not quite firm; a weakness
that he concealed with bluster.

The path was narrow but there was space enough on either
side. Nonetheless she stopped, because clearly he expected her to. It was a
form of contrariness.

She was supposed to cower, she could see. She kept her head
up, and though she was much smaller, she refused to be diminished by his lordly
bulk.

“Sister!” he boomed in his deep voice that sounded so well
in the circle of the men. “Here, I’ve something for you. A returning-gift.”

Sarama’s brows rose. Now that was something new. Yama had
never tried to buy her before. He set in her hand a thing that, shaken out,
showed itself to be a woman’s veil.

She kept her expression still, her eyes level. “I thank
you,” she said. She gave him no title, nor any name of kinship.

Either he did not notice or he chose not to care. “You are
welcome home,” he said, “where indeed you belong. Our father will have arranged
for your housing, I’m sure, and your welcome among the people. Still, if you
have need of hospitality, my wives have been instructed to welcome you into my
tent.”

Sarama inclined her head as she had seen Old Woman do. “You
are generous,” she said. “Again I thank you.”

“Remember,” he said, “that I offered this. It may serve you
well.”

“I shall not forget,” murmured Sarama.

He nodded as if pleased, and went on his way.

Sarama went on hers, somewhat less content within herself
than she had been. Yama had not accosted her out of the goodness of his heart.
Oh, indeed not. His gift was meant for a message, and his offer for a sign—and
a warning.

Some perhaps might have scorned him for a fool, to so insult
Horse Goddess’ servant: to give her a gift that was proper to a woman, and to
imply that she would enter the tents as a woman of ordinary lineage should.
Sarama was no veiled or tentbound creature, nor would ever be, by the goddess’
will.

Yama knew what he did. He was telling her somewhat that Old
Woman had warned her of long since. Sarama was the last of Horse Goddess’
lineage, last of what had in the old time been a great tribe. After her, if
Yama had his way, would come no other—not of her likeness.