White Mare's Daughter (54 page)

“You think I led them here,” Sarama said.

“I think,” he said, “that once the westward way was opened,
others would think to follow.”

“I wasn’t the first,” she said. “There was the man who
brought horses to Larchwood.”

“Yes,” said Danu. “You followed him. Why wouldn’t others
follow you?”

“The gods send them.”

“And the Lady sent you ahead, to prepare us.” Everything, it
seemed, was in order. He turned to face Sarama. “Only Catin tries to lay blame,
and Larchwood follows her because she’ll be its Mother when her time comes. We
lay no blame here in Three Birds. What is, is. If you hadn’t come to teach us
how to fight, we might have no hope at all.”

“You think they’d have come?” Sarama asked. “Without me?”

“You said it,” said Danu. “A traveler was here before you.
He told tales everywhere. Yes? If you heard him, then others must have as well.
There’s fertile ground there for such seeds to grow in.”

Sarama looked about. She had learned to see this place as
simply itself. But if she tried, she could still see with a tribesman’s eyes.

So many things in this one small room, and some that she
might not even have recognized, intricate and strange. Riches: a copper pot, a
carved wooden box, a great heap of painted bowls. And, more than anything else,
the larder full and it was barely summer, a wealth of things to eat.

These people never went hungry, even in the dead of winter.
Such was a tribesman’s dream, to live in a land so rich that he could eat well
the year round, nor suffer unduly in the achieving of it.

Danu brushed her cheek lightly with his finger. She shivered
at the touch, and caught herself in the beginning of a smile.

He warmed her with his own. “We’ll not send you away,” he
said. “That I can promise you.”

“You can?” she asked.

He nodded. “The Mother said. You’ll be guest and friend here
for as long as it pleases you.”

“Even when the war comes?”

“We’ll need you most of all then,” he said.

“I hope you remember that,” she said, “when you see what war
is. Words can’t describe it. You have to see.”

“I won’t forget,” he said.

“Maybe,” said Sarama.

Agni broke camp within a handful of days after he was cast
out of the tribe, as soon as he could ride and not fall dizzy from Mitani’s
back. The gods favored him with a run of warmth, a false breath of spring.
There was more and deeper winter on the far side of it, but bright sun and soft
breezes sped him on his way.

He rode due west, as Sarama had done before him. His journey
in truth was shorter than hers; the high tor stood at the western edge of the
hunting grounds, looking out toward the sunset.

Sarama must have ridden as a hunter rides, because none of
the tribes camped along the way had seen or heard of her. Agni made no secret
of his coming. He could hardly have done so, with twoscore and a handful of
men, a great herd of horses, a herd of cattle, and Taditi riding demurely
veiled on the back of an ox. They were a tribe, and they traveled as such.

A tribe on another tribe’s lands was, in most instances, a
call to war. But Agni rode under the sign of the gods’ messenger: the horns and
the tail of a white bull. He had sacrificed it on the night before their
departure from the high tor, with his own hands had led the beast up the steep
hill and onto the summit, and there slit its throat. The blood had sprung red
and steaming on melting snow and bare brown earth, and all the omens had been
good.

Under the bull’s horns and its tasseled tail, Agni could ride
openly through the lands of every tribe. He could enter its camp, walk
unmolested where a stranger would far more likely be killed, face its chieftain
or its king and deliver the message that the gods had given him while he slept
atop the tor, with the bull’s hide wrapped about him. Skyfather’s emissary had
come to him in his dream, the raven of battle with its glossy black feathers.

“We give you the sunset,” it had said to him. “Go now and
take it, and hold it in Our name.”

Agni told the tale of that dream, and conveyed the message
that went with it. “The sunset countries are ours for the taking. Come, ride
with me. Ride and conquer.”

The chieftains nodded wisely, and the elders murmured in
wonder, and the tribe did not break camp in the morning when Agni left it. But
beyond the camp and the herds, just out of sight of the tents, inevitably Agni
would find a company waiting for him. The young men, the wild of heart, the
bored and the headstrong and the men without wives or inheritance to bind them
to the tribe, were ready and eager to follow a man whom the gods had sent to
them.

He made no secret of his coming, or of his exile, either.
“Best they know what they’re following,” he said to Patir as they rode away
from the camp of a clan that called itself the White Bear. “I’ll not lie or
hide. I’m doing as the gods bid me.”

Patir nodded a little abstractedly. “We’d better hope the
newcomers start thinking about feeding themselves. There’s nigh a hundred of
them now, and a wide stretch of steppe ahead of us.”

“I’ll see that they think of it,” Rahim said, and Taditi
nodded.

Agni was left with nothing to say, and no promise to make.
It was all done for him. Time was when he would have been angry, but at the
moment, as he thought on what he was and what he was doing, all that came to
him was laughter.

The others did not try to understand. Agni supposed he had
been saying and doing strange things since he woke by the high tor and found
himself both exile and chieftain.

He had felt strange. His world had shattered, and these were
the shards: an army of dreamers, a red stallion with a crescent moon on his
brow, and the sun riding low ahead of him, beckoning him onward.

With a hundred men at his back, he was stronger than many
kings. But he would not let them call him by that name.

“I’ll earn it,” he said. “I’ve sworn as much. But I’m not a
king yet.”

They called him by the name that his father had given him,
therefore, the simple name, without title or mark of respect. And that became a
mark of respect in its own right.

None of the people Agni met knew anything of Sarama, until
he came to the camp of the Stormwolves. They were a strong tribe in their part
of the steppe, under a chieftain hardly older than Agni. His name was Gauan. He
of all the chieftains and kings heard Agni out as eagerly as one of the young
rakehells on the fringes, leaning forward, nodding at this observation or that,
rapt in the tale that Agni told.

When Agni was done Gauan said, “I’ve seen a face like yours
before.”

Agni leaned forward himself. “What? My face? On a woman, by
any chance?”

Gauan’s delight was palpable. “Why, yes! So you’re the
brother she never quite failed to admit to.”

“Why would she—” Agni did not finish that. Instead he asked,
“Was she well? Had she traveled safely?”

“Perfectly so,” Gauan said, “from everything that I could
tell. We gave her escort as far as we could. I would have followed her to the
ends of the world, but I was going to my wedding.”

“Would you follow her now?” asked Agni.

Gauan rubbed his chin under the thick ruddy beard. Of course
he hesitated. He was the lord of a tribe. Women and children looked to him for
protection. The riches of his people, its herds, its sons, its stores of
weapons, were his to guard. He could not simply take horse and ride in pursuit
of a dream.

And yet he said, “My wedding is long over, and my wife is
suitably with child. Yes, I would follow Horse Goddess’ servant. I should like
to see that she came safe into the sunset country.”

“I, too,” said Agni, as much prayer as answer.

In the morning the warband of the Stormwolves rode with
Agni’s gathering, leaving the women and children behind, and a reluctant
company of men to defend them. Then Agni knew that this was real; that it was
no dream or delusion. Truly, as he lived and breathed, he was leading an army
that meant to conquer the west.

If the west did not conquer his army. Past the borders of
Gauan’s country for the first time he saw the shadow that was the great wood.

The tribes within sight of it were restless, stirring
already before he ever reached them. They had had their own dreams, their own
summonings. Their fear of the wood was deep, their tales of it harrowing, yet
they had mustered their courage before the faces of their gods. They had made
their own gathering, massed their own army.

Agni came to it warily, stepping softly. A false word, an
ill-conceived action, could strike a spark that flared into war.

He had tribes in his army who had been bitter enemies before
they made common cause with the march to the west. These new tribes, none of
whom he had ever known before, were as uncertain in their temper as bears in
the spring. It well might please them better to slake their thirst for blood
with the slaughter of strangers from the east, than to face the wood that they
had feared all their lives long.

He took great care to ride into that camp with his weapons
secured out of reach. His people were watching him closely, the archers with
bows ready to hand, but these strangers would not see that. They would see a
man riding all but alone, unarmed, with nothing to mark him a king.

He had argued that even with Taditi, insisted that he put on
no airs, assume no dignity beyond what any man could claim. It should be enough
that he had an army at his back.

He would never confess to her how tight his throat was as he
rode into the camp, or how taut the muscles were across his shoulders. An arrow
or a thrown spear could have cut him down in an instant.

So many faces. So many strangers. They had made no pretense
of excitement, nor did any of them quicken his pace to see the easterners ride
in. And yet they all were there, opening a passage for him. He could not turn
aside from the straight path, must ride direct to the camp’s center.

Since that had been his intention, he made no effort to
contest it. He smiled at those whose eyes met his—not many; they were all
staring, but not into his face. He put on every appearance of ease, as if he
came to a camp of friends.

The elders and the leaders waited for him in the center.
They were not all young, though even the eldest looked to be still of fighting
age. These were warleaders, commanders of armies. From the weathering of their
faces and the count of their scars, they had seen more wars and raids than Agni
had ever dreamed of.

Such men among the eastern tribes had told him that he was a
fool; that he had no hope of piercing the wood, let alone of conquering a
country that only one man of the tribes had ever seen. If that one was lying or
had stretched the truth, Agni and his army might find themselves standing at
the edge of a precipice, or worse, facing a tribe to which war was breath and
life. War was glory, but people in the east were rather fond of peace. After
all, it let them enjoy the fruits of war.

In front of these dour men with their hard faces and stony
eyes, he slid from Mitani’s back. The stallion stood where Agni left him,
patient, as he had been taught. Agni walked forward a step, two, three. He
could feel his own men behind him, but hemmed in by greater numbers than their
own. If it came to a fight, it would not go well for them.

He turned his mind away from that. He stood here because he
had been guided to this place; because every night in dreams, the gods urged
him onward. Surely these people believed in dreams. How else could the gods
speak to them?

He halted just out of their reach and let his eyes pass over
each face. Every tribe had its own features by which one might know its people,
but they were all of much the same stamp: narrow, high-cheeked, hawk-nosed.
They were fair or red or brown for the most part; blue-eyed or grey or green
or, rarely, pale brown or amber like Agni’s own. Few were dark, and those few
were known to have foreign blood.

There were a number of dark faces here, men not as tall as
some but broad and strong, and their faces were heavy, as if carved out of
stone. Their hair was black, their eyes dark. Perhaps because they were so
dark, they seemed to regard Agni with more mistrust than most.

He considered putting on a grim face, but that would be too
much like the rest. He relaxed therefore, smiled, said easily as a man might
among friends, “A fair day and a warm welcome to you, men of the west.”

Some of them blinked. Others seemed taken aback. The
greeting should have been theirs to utter, but they had sat silent, saying
nothing.

Maybe Agni’s presence had driven words out of their heads.
He turned in his place, looking about at a camp that spread as wide as a gathering
of tribes. “I see,” he said, “that the gods have spoken to you, too. Are you
ready? Will you go into the west?”

One of the grimmest of them all, a black-browed man with a
great scar that rent his face in two, said in a voice like stone grinding on
stone, “Are you all so light-minded, you in the east?”

Agni laughed. “Are you all so dour, you in the west? Is it
the wood that does it to you? Come, be glad. Skyfather is calling you. He lays
his blessing on you.”

“Earth Mother is not greatly pleased,” the grim one said.

“She should be,” said Agni, “if the gods call us to war.
Blood is meat and drink to her. It makes her rich; it nourishes the green and
growing things.”

“Yes,” said the grim warleader. “The grass is never so green
as on an old battlefield.” He looked Agni over, a black look under black brows.
“You’re but a boy. How much blood have you shed in battle?”

“Enough,” said Agni with his own flash of darkness. “If I
say I hope we can win the sunset countries with little bloodshed, will you
still ride with me?”