Daughter of Lir (21 page)

“I can’t take this,” she said. But her hand that rose to it
made no move to strip it off. She stroked the petals of a golden blossom.

“Beauty deserves beauty,” he said. He bowed as if she had
been a lady of Lir, and left her to her gift and her wide-eyed silence.

Aera watched him walk away. He was as circumspect with his
eyes as a woman—and like a woman, he knew well how to use them. But there was
nothing female in the breadth of those shoulders or the fluid power of that
walk. He trod like a panther, light and easy and subtly dangerous.

If that was a simple caravan guard, then the princes of his
people must be lofty indeed.

She took off the necklace. Its linked blossoms were cool in
her fingers. They were as delicate as if they had grown in the earth, but they
were all made of gold.

This was a far more valuable thing than Etena’s garish
collar. What had he hoped to gain with it? Her goodwill, she supposed, but he
could have had that at rather less cost to his share in the caravan.

What else a man might hope to gain with gold . . .

She had a son hardly younger than he was. She belonged to a
king. He had no right whatever to cast his eyes on her, let alone to give her
gifts.

She would see that the necklace was returned to the caravan.
Later. When there was time. She slipped it into a deep fold of her gown. Its
weight rested between her breasts, not far from her heart.

o0o

The traders opened their camp to trade not long after the
sun rose. By midmorning, half the men of the People must have come to see the
treasures from the east.

Minas, still dazed by his dream of the dawn, wandered past
without great interest in gold or weavings. Bronze he did not see. Nor did he
see her—the goddess who had made his dream so very sweet. There were only men
in the traders’ camp.

He sought out his grandfather’s place, and his work on the
chariots. Metos had begun a new battle-car, larger than any before, in which
two archers could bend their bows while a third man drove the horses. It needed
either lighter wood or stronger horses; as he had made it, it was too heavy for
two horses to pull above a struggling trot.

“Three horses,” Minas said, “or four.”

“How would you hitch them?” Metos inquired.

“Three abreast,” Minas said. “Or . . .”

He tugged at his chin, frowning at the trainers in the field
beyond his grandfather’s camp. They were gentling the young ones at this hour,
the stallions of three summers who had been broken to the traces the year before
and then turned free to run and grow, but who were now asked to be warriors for
the People.

“Suppose,” said Minas, “that there were a way to hitch a
third horse in front of the two. Or if three, why not four? Two and two,
maybe.”

“That would demand a great deal of the trainers,” Metos
said, but not as if it troubled him.

“First we need a hitch that works.”

“Then find one,” said Metos.

Minas’ lips stretched in a grin. There was little mirth in
it, but his heart was oddly light. How better to forget his dreams of a woman
than to lose himself in his grandfather’s dreams of chariots?

“If we had bronze,” he said, “for fittings and bindings,
those would be stronger. You could make your chariot larger.”

“They have bronze in the west,” Metos said.

“So they do,” said Minas.

“Are there not traders from the west here among the People?
Would they not know of bronze?”

“Surely,” Minas said, “that would be a great secret among
their priests and shamans. Bronze has too much power to be a common thing, or
easily known.”

“Ask them,” Metos said.

Minas gaped at him. He had wandered off already, intent on
the turning of the shafts for his great war-car. Minas heard him curse the wood
he had to work with—it was poor stuff, little better than leavings.

Yet another reason to press the advance into the west, if
truly there were forests such as the tales told of.

Minas wavered. He could—perhaps should—engross himself in
the matter of hitches and traces. But there was the bronze. And there was the
woman, the goddess who rode the moon-pale mare.

The gods favored him. Hardly had he thought of her before he
saw her. She was standing outside the ring of Metos’ tents, watching the
chariot-drills with utter fascination. He barely noticed the shadow behind her:
another of her big bearded men, this one even bigger and more heavily pelted
than most.

She was wearing a gown of woven blue and green that did
pleasant things to the curves of her body. She had bells in her ears, and they
were not gold; they were bronze.

He took this gift the gods had given, though his heart beat
so hard he was near to fainting. She even spared him the necessity of finding
words to greet her. She greeted him with the white flash of a smile. “My lord!
Those are the young horses, yes? They’re being taught to run in pairs?”

“Some of them are,” Minas said.

“They’re all stallions. Don’t they fight?”

“They learn not to,” said Minas.

“I should like,” she said, “to learn how that is done.”

“Patience, mostly,” he said, “and wise choice of the pairs.”

“And driving them? Is that so easy, too?”

The thought of a woman driving a chariot was so novel and so
shocking that Minas could only stare at her, speechless.

“I should like to see a chariot,” she said, “and touch one.
There are so many rumors, you see. So many stories. But the reality of
them—why, they’re but wood, carved and painted, and bits of leather.”

“A bargain, trader woman,” he said. “If I show you chariots,
will you tell me of bronze?”

Her eyes flickered. For an instant she caught her
guardsman’s glance. His eyes, Minas realized, were much keener than the heavy
face might have led one to expect.

“You don’t know bronze?” she asked. She seemed a little
surprised.

“It is new to us,” Minas said. “But not to you, it seems.”

“We’ve known it since our great-grandmothers’ time,” she said.

He drew a breath to steady himself. “That is a wonder,” he
said. “And the bronze itself. . . heaven’s own power is in it.”

“It is strong metal,” she said. “Stronger than copper.”

“I will show you the chariots,” said Minas again, “if you
will tell me what bronze is.”

She yearned toward the chariots as he yearned toward the
bronze. And what, some distant part of him wondered, did she want with the
battle-cars of the People?

What indeed? Yet what harm could it do? She was a woman,
however beautiful, however powerful. To build the chariots, to fashion the
traces, to train the horses to draw them, had taken long years of Metos’ life
and the lives of the men who followed him.

She was speaking to her companion again in glances. He was
not as eager as she was, nor, Minas suspected, as trusting, either. But she
prevailed: the tilt of her chin proclaimed that. “I will tell you what I know,”
she said, “if you will teach me of chariots.”

“Done,” he said quickly, before she could regret the
bargain.

Not that she seemed to do any such thing. She seemed
delighted. She followed eagerly, her guardian hound less so, as he went back
into the circle of Metos’ tents.

Metos was still cursing the wood he had chosen for his
chariot-pole. It was the best he had, but it was neither long enough nor strong
enough for what he had in mind.

He did not acknowledge Minas’ guests at all. The rest of the
chariot-makers regarded them in varying degrees of curiosity, and some with
more than that, for Rhian was very beautiful; but none was so bold as to
question her presence in Minas’ company.

She turned in the circle, eyes as wide as they would go. In
her face was the pure delight of a child. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, this is
marvelous! Tell me what this is. Tell me all of it.”

“First tell me of bronze,” he said.

Some of the light left her face. “Bronze is mingled metal,”
she said. “Copper and arsenic, or copper and tin.”

“Arsenic? Tin?”

“Grey metal,” she said. “Red and grey makes the false gold.”

Tin, he thought. Arsenic. He knew nothing of any such
metals. Maybe Metos did. If not . . .

If not, he knew where they must go, all the People.
Westward. Of course. Westward until they all found what they looked for.

Her voice broke in on him, clear and imperious. “Show me
chariots! Show me how they are made.”

He kept his bargain. He showed her step by painstaking step.
At first he thought she might grow bored, but that did not seem possible. Her
mind was quick. Her questions were not as numerous as he might have expected,
but they were to the point.

“You are a maker,” he said after a while, as they watched
hunchbacked Patron bend and shape willow-withies into the body of a car. “You
know the works of hands.”

“I know a little,” she said. “I was raised a potter’s
child.”

It was more than that. But if she did not wish to tell him,
he would not force her. He watched her instead, saw how she watched Patron.

She knew what to look for: she studied the swift movements
of those hands. She never shrank from his deformity. He should have gone to the
shamans, but Metos had taken him while he was still a small child, nurtured him
and cherished him and taught him greater magic than most shamans could know.

This woman from the sunset country leaned close to him, as
easy as if he had been her kin. At first he shrank from her, but when she made
no other move, he let his work absorb him again.

“Did you make pots at home?” Minas asked her.

She did not glance at him, but her response was clear
enough. “I made pots. Toys, too, for children. A bauble or two. Small things,
nothing of consequence. Nothing as great as this.”

“And your father allowed it?”

“My father . . .” Her lips had drawn thin.
“For all I knew, my father was dead. My aunt was my teacher, and she needed me
at the kiln.”

“No father,” he said. “That is a sad thing.”

“No mother is sadder,” she said.

“For a woman,” he conceded, “I suppose it is.”

“Even men need mothers,” said Rhian.

Patron did something that she did not quite see. She leaned
in even closer, so that her breast brushed the maker’s arm. Patron seemed too
intent to notice. Minas thrust back a surge of pure mindless rage. How dared
she touch any man so?

Any man but himself.

He had only dreamed of her. She need never know of it. If
she did, he thought she might laugh. She was not the kind of woman to be in awe
of any man’s rank or wealth.

She left Patron soon enough, to watch someone else fashion a
wheel—which fascinated her for an endless time—and yet another man forge
fittings for the chariot and its harness.

Her guardian hound paused there when she went on. The copper
was good; one of the conquered tribes had been rich in it. But it was not
bronze. It had begun to seem a poor thing, weak and soft.

The man from the west watched the forging in silence. He
offered neither criticism nor commentary. He offered no threat, either, that
Minas could sense. Warily but without great fear, Minas followed Rhian, who had
come round at last to Metos himself. She squatted beside him and said, “If you
bind several shorter lengths together with metal, it will be stronger than the single
pole.”

“But also more likely to break if there is a weak link,”
Metos said, with no evidence of surprise that she, a foreigner and a woman,
should speak so wisely.

“All things can break,” she said. “Copper is stronger than
wood. Wood bound with copper should be stronger than wood alone.”

“And bronze is stronger than copper,” said Metos.

“So it is,” she said.

“Can you forge it?”

“I’ve never done it,” she said.

Metos grunted. He called the smith who was nearest. “We’ll
brace this with bands of copper,” he said. “As strong but as light as you can
make it. If you can lengthen it, too—two horselengths in all, and a little over . . .”

Rhian wandered off again, this time toward the chariots that
were finished. There were a handful of them, waiting to be tested, then to be
given to warriors who had earned them. She paused not by the first or even the
second, but by one that was plainer than the others but more finely made. Metos
had wrought it for lightness and speed. It was an elegant thing, as clean in
its lines as a bird in flight.

She ran her hands over it, murmuring in delight. She lifted
the pole, testing the weight and balance. She stroked the wheels. They were
spoked—Metos’ great genius, to make them light but strong. She wondered at
them, peering to see how they were made.

It was a pleasure to watch her, to see how swift an
intelligence she had. She was like no woman he had ever met, even his mother.
She focused on things that were not women’s matters at all—and stranger yet,
she seemed to understand them.

He would have her. It was clear to him then, as clear as
anything he had known. He had never wanted a woman so before; never wanted one
that was his own. But this one he would take.

“The prince wants you,” Bran said.

He so rarely spoke to Rhian that at first she could not
think what to say. The traders were to share the daymeal in the king’s circle
again, that had been made clear to them, but there was a lull now, as the sun
sank toward the horizon. The caravan’s wares were put away—nicely diminished
since the morning, and a trove of treasures given in return.

Rhian had come looking for Emry. He had gone to bathe in the
river, one of the traders said; but as she went to find him, Bran stood in her
path. “You should be careful,” he said. “When these lords want a thing, they
take it. And women to them are things, like gold and fine horses.”

“I want him to want me,” she said. “He’s a gift from the
Goddess herself. He’s a maker of chariots—do you understand what that means?
He’s not just a fighting man.”