White Mare's Daughter (90 page)

“This is what happens when men are allowed to rule,” said
Galia.

Sarama could not argue with that, and Taditi chose not to.
They passed through the rest of the ruins in silence, the silence of grief
overlaid with the simmer of anger.

The archers would take this memory home with them. It would
make them stronger when the battle came. Sarama caught herself grieving for
innocence. Even the brightest spirits had gone all dark. It was a long while,
and a long way in the sunlight, before any of them smiled again.

oOo

It was no longer the fashion in Three Birds for women to
play at being women of the tribes. Some stayed in the tents because they had
conceived a fondness for the men they had chosen, but most returned to the city
and to the companies that would stand to its defense. Tales of horror told by
people fleeing westward were dismaying, but little more. Tales told by their
own people, people they had known from childhood, struck fiercely home.

Agni still doubted that the Lady’s children could learn to
kill. They would turn tail and run, he was unhappily certain, once they had a
sight of blood.

But he had a deeper trouble than that. “You were sure?” he
asked his sister and his aunt, over and over. “It was Yama riding as king?”

Over and over Taditi said, “Yes. It was Yama. You don’t
think I’d know him?” And on the dozenth repetition, she added acidly, “Don’t
tell me you don’t know how your own kind think. He’s their puppet on a stick.”

“He’s coming for me,” Agni said. He heard her, but her words
had little meaning. “Whatever people are saying, whatever their reason for
raising him up—he persuaded them to do it because I did it. I gathered the
tribes, too. I led them westward.”

“They were looking to the sunset countries long before you
ever dreamed of coming here,” Taditi said.

“Yes, but why should Yama trouble with it? White Horse lands
are—were—far enough east that the people need never pass the wood. They could
simply inherit the lands that the western tribes left behind.”

“Not if it’s as bad on the steppe as people say,” Sarama
said. “What would they eat? How would they live? No; they had to come here. The
gods scoured the steppe clean, so that they’d not be tempted to linger.”

“What, even the gods?” Agni’s mouth twisted. “You know what
that makes me, don’t you? I’m the lure sent ahead of the hunt. I’ve drawn the
whole pack to the quarry.”

“Don’t wallow in it,” Taditi said. “You don’t have time.
They can’t be far behind us, even at the speed they must be making, as loaded
down with spoils as they are.”

“Someone in the army will come to his senses,” Agni said,
“and command people to leave their booty lying; they’ll get more and far better
here.”

“Here is where we want them,” Sarama said. She did not sound
excessively happy, but neither did she seem cast down. “And we were worried
that they might not come to the bait.”

“I didn’t expect that I would be the bait,” Agni muttered.

oOo

All that any of them could do, they had done. They had
only to wait.

Agni had never waited well. Everyone else had ample to do to
shore up the defenses and hone the skills that battle would call for; or just
as important as those, carry on the daily tasks that kept people in comfort:
baking bread, washing clothes, tending children. But Agni had wrought too well.
His own task had been to apportion each task as it best might be; once that was
done, there was nothing to do but sit and look kingly, and wait for the enemy
to come.

Too many of the elders took open pleasure in sitting and
being looked after, but Agni was not an elder yet. He was young still—very
young, if truth be told—and he had a great need to be up and doing.

He found occupation at last in a rather unexpected place: in
a smith’s workshop, tending the bellows to her terse instructions. She was not
in the least impressed that the king of the horsemen himself was laboring in
her forge. Her apprentice was gone, galloping about on the back of a horse, as
she put it. It was only fair that the man whose fault it was should have taken
the girl’s place, if only for an hour.

She was working gold that day, not copper as one might have
expected. There was a row of copper knives awaiting the finishing polish,
beautiful things, sharp and deadly, but her chief concern was with the spinning
of a gleaming golden wire. It was simple work, quite tedious, and yet it
absorbed the mind.

She spun the golden wire as the gods might spin the fate of
the world, stretching it impossibly long, winding it round a spool as Agni had
seen weavers wind the thread of their spinning. Such thread had never clothed a
human body. This would be for beauty’s sake, and no more—if never any less.

Patir found him there, to the smith’s visible disgust. “Just
when he showed signs of learning how,” she said.

But she could not keep him with her, not with the news that
Patir brought. “Scouts are in. They’re coming.”

Agni had no need to ask his meaning. It was the matter of a
moment to lay down the bellows, bow politely to the smith, and bolt into the
sunlight.

oOo

It was still a long while before the enemy could reach
Three Birds. They had been seen west of Two Rivers, had passed by it without
turning aside to take it.

Danu was not sorry to hear that. He was fond of the Mother
of Two Rivers, whom he had known since they were children. If she and her
people were safe, then a little more of the world was as it should be.

That night everyone was advised to sleep, but almost no one
could. One of the few was Rani, whom Danu had dosed with a little mead mixed in
goat’s milk. She might have been fretful to be put to bed in the temple, as
unfamiliar as that place would be, but as safe as any in the city; but she was
nodding as he carried her there, and sound asleep when one of the Lady’s
acolytes took her from him to carry her within.

“Even for this, they won’t let a man in the temple,” Sarama
said.

He had heard her coming, felt her on his skin. As he turned,
she stepped into his arms and clung tight. It was brief, and nigh squeezed the
breath out of him. Then she was gone again, standing at a little distance,
seeming remote and rather cold. “You still won’t do the sensible thing and take
her to the Long Bridge?”

“No,” he said as he had been saying for days now. “If she
isn’t safe here, she’ll be safe nowhere that the horsemen can reach. And they
will reach as far as the sunset itself, unless we stop them now.”

“But she might—” Sarama stopped, and bit her lip. He had
heard that, too; that Rani might at least live a little longer—as if she could
live without ever knowing her mother; for Sarama would not leave this place
until the battle was fought.

“Let’s not quarrel now,” she said. “Not now. Let’s go—let’s
go somewhere—”

“Yes,” he said, since she could not finish. She made no move
to go; he led her therefore, not far, but far enough to rest her spirit a
little.

The house into which he led her was empty. The people who
had lived in it had gone westward, except two of the daughters, who rode and
camped with the archers. Everything within was clean, tidy, ready for its
owners to return. They would not mind that he took refuge here for Sarama’s
sake.

She looked as if she might protest, but he silenced her with
a finger on her lips. There was wine stored in a jar, and a cheese wrapped
close in a cloth, even a round of the bread that people made for journeys, made
of nuts and dried fruit and grains both crushed and whole. It was not new made,
but it was the better for that, rich and sweet.

They made a feast in that empty house, with the long light
of the day’s end slanting through the opened shutters. The quiet, startling at
first after the hum and tumult of a city preparing for attack, grew until it
filled them as it filled the house. Danu watched the tension ease in Sarama,
the stiffness fade from her body, the taut lines smooth from her face.

She was never pretty as anyone would reckon it—as her
brother was, if one admitted the truth; features that in him were drawn as
clean as the edge of a blade, seemed too strong for her woman’s face. And yet
she was beautiful, an odd fierce beauty that only grew the stronger, the more
the years touched her. She was not a pretty woman, nor had been a pretty child;
but when she was old, none of that would matter. Only the beauty would remain.

They had not said a word since they came into the house, or
needed any. Danu left the place where he had been sitting, knelt at her feet
and laid his head in her lap, and sighed as she bent to close him within her
arms. In that space, not so long ago, her daughter had slept coiled in the
womb. Now Rani slept in the temple, safe in the Lady’s arms, with the rest of
the children.

Danu had never minded before that he was forbidden to enter
the temple. It was the women’s place, their sanctuary. But they had taken
Sarama’s daughter—his daughter. He wanted her back.

Foolishness. Sarama slipped down from the bench to her
knees, arms still about him. Her breathing had quickened, but it was no quicker
than his own.

They were alone here, as they never were; all alone in a
house empty of people. Anything they did or said, no one else would hear. No
one even knew where they were. It was wonderful; wicked.

She laughed as he took her—
he
took
her
, which was
just as she wished it. Such a strange language, hers was, to say he took, when
in truth it was he who gave and she who took.

He rose above her; she lay beneath, all joyfully open to
him, and laughing that sweet wild laughter. It sounded as the wind must sound
on the steppe, or the rain on the endless expanses of grass.

She did not want him to be gentle. She dared him to be as a
stallion is, as the stag in his season.

He was trained to gentleness as a tribesman trained for war.
Yet he had learned to fight. He could seize her, too, and drive deep, and
impale her as if on a spear.

She gasped; but before he could recoil, she clutched him
tight. He could move nowhere but within her.

He remembered what the tribesmen never did: that it was the
mare who accepted the stallion, and the doe who allowed the stag to fall upon
her. With the faintest of sighs, he let his body do what it clamored to do. To
take her swift and hard, no measure to it, no long slow ascent into pleasure.
He went up like a burning brand, in a shower of sparks.

When they were gone, he lay beside her, cold and ashamed.
She lifted herself over him as a little before he had risen over her.

She was smiling, the same warm rich smile as when they had
loved all night. She kissed the corner of his mouth. “There, there. Why so
glum?”

“I—” he said. “I didn’t—”

“What? Love me long enough? Are you as proud as that?”

“I didn’t please you,” he said. There: the truth. And the
shame of it, too.

She seemed remarkably unperturbed. “You are that proud. No,
my beloved, you did not fail to please me. Not in the slightest.”

“But—”

“Hush,” she said. And he obeyed, because he was raised to
obey. She knew that, too: she began to laugh again, irresistibly. Even he could
not cling to his pride in the face of such mirth.

It was not an ill thing, he supposed, to find both love and
laughter on the eve of war.

They came with the sun, riding over the eastward hills,
rank on rank of them, and their shadows marching long ahead of them. There
seemed no end to them. Nor were they either weary or laden down as Agni had
hoped they would be. They were flush with victory, greedy for spoils, as if
there could never be enough in the world to sate their hunger.

Everything was ready for them, everyone sent to her place.
Agni had risen before dawn as he always did, dressed and broken his fast in his
ordinary way. Tilia was already gone. The rulers of the women had gathered in
the night to make what magic they could.

As Agni came out of his tent, fed and ready to face the sky,
the Mother’s song rang out faint and piercing clear. The sun climbed over the
horizon, and the enemy with it.

Agni did not hasten even then, even with the city struck to
a kind of quiet panic and the camp humming with excitement. Battle—battle at
last.

The hum was much less than it would have been the day
before. All the tents were pitched as always, the fires lit in front of them,
everything from a distance as it should be. But most of the tents were empty,
and the westward horse-herds, out of sight of the enemy, were much depleted or
gone, earning warriors where Agni had bidden them go.

Mitani was waiting by the horselines, bridled, saddled with
his best fleece, and beads and luck-feathers woven into his mane. Patir stood
near, but it was the child Mika who held the rein.

Agni leveled a glance on him. “Why aren’t you in the
temple?”

Mika’s head tossed as if he had been a horse himself, and
his eyes glittered. “I’m not a baby! I have twelve summers. That’s old enough
to fight. Tillu said so.”

“I don’t see Tillu,” said Agni: and it was well he did not,
because the elder of the Stone Tree people should be leading the army that was
gone out.

“What are you going to do,” Mika demanded, “make him say he
really said that? He did. I heard him.”

“You bullied it out of him, no doubt,” Agni said. “Do you
even know how to fight?”

Mika nodded vigorously. “I can shoot. I’m a very good shot.”

Agni sighed. He knew that look too well. If he forbade, the
brat would come regardless, and get himself killed trying to prove that he
really could fight.

“Well then,” Agni said. “You come. But you stay with me. If
I tell you to go elsewhere, you go. Not one word against it. Promise me.”

“I promise,” Mika said without a tremor.