Daughter of Lir (28 page)

“She won’t geld you,” Rhian said.

“No,” he said. “She won’t.”

Rhian dropped to the grass beside him. “This is the Goddess’
will, or I would never have urged it on you.”

“Nor would I ever have accepted it.” He turned to face her.
“Sister, believe me when I say, I do this of my free will. It only horrified me
for a while. Now I know I can do it. What’s so difficult about it, after all? I
please a woman who wants me to please her. I live with a tribe that treats its
own well enough. Everything I see and hear, I’ll take back with me, the better
to wage the war when it comes to us.”

“You’re a brave man,” she said.

He heard no mockery in her voice. “I’m no braver than I have
to be.”

“That’s brave enough.”

She had been eyeing the water. He watched without surprise
as she stripped off her breeches and dived smoothly from the bank. She swam as
well as she did everything else: with easy grace, as if there were no effort in
it.

It was astonishing, he thought, that she had lived her life
in a village as small as Long Ford, and no one had ever wondered to find such a
swan amid the common geese. If the priestesses truly had feared what she would
become, then they had been fools to let her live.

Now he the prince, the heir, the one born with blessings on
his head, was sold a slave to the conquering tribe, and she was going to the
city that had been forbidden her. “Strange are the ways of the Goddess,” he
said to the air.

o0o

Minas heard the man’s deep voice speaking in a language he
did not understand. He had gone hunting that morning, because the young men’s
tent needed meat—and never mind that he had both yearned and dreaded to see the
western woman again. He was fleeing her as much as hunting down a fat doe for
his fellows. He had come back, he thought, by a way known to few, and there the
gods had set them, the woman in the water, the man on the bank, both as naked
as they were born.

He shocked himself with the force of his jealousy. Even knowing
that that was her brother—that they should see each other so, and be so at ease . . .
he ground his teeth at the thought of it.

He hid in the grass and watched them. The man lolled at his
ease. The woman rose out of the river like the goddess she was. Water streamed
down her body. She lay beside her brother, close but not touching. They spoke
together in their own language, idly, as if they had no worry in the world.

Minas wondered if they were speaking of him. As soon as he
thought it, he felt a fool. Of course they were not. Why should they? He
doubted that he mattered excessively to either of them.

He was in a black mood and no mistake. Dias had taxed him
with it this morning, when he stalked out with his bow and spear, and would accept
no companion, not even the brother he loved most. He had growled wordlessly and
left Dias still upbraiding the morning air.

The traders would be leaving soon. Traders never stayed
long; they always moved on. She would go with them. If he saw her again, it
would be in another age of the world.

And that he could not bear. Twice now she had lain with him,
and when he tried to think of other women, he saw only her face. When he tried
to remember the others he had lain with, his memory called up her body. She had
swept all the rest away.

He would not let her leave. He could not. And yet, how was
he to do that? She did as she pleased. Prince he might be, but she was a
goddess. She would laugh at anything he did to bind her.

As he lay in the grass and watched, her brother sat up. She
began to comb and plait his hair as she had done for Minas—was it only
yesterday?

Jealousy gusted anew, so fierce that he was like to die of
it. This was her brother. She was his sister. There was nothing between them
that spoke of man and woman. They were as easy with one another as Minas was
with Dias. Yet he burned to be the one who sat so, with her light fingers in
his hair, and her breath gusting soft on his back.

It took her a long while to make order of that thick black
tangle—much longer than it had taken her with Minas. She was patient. The man
was less so, but she cuffed him when he fidgeted. He submitted as any sensible
brother should do, growling a little, but half-heartedly. Minas could imagine
what she was telling him: that beauty has its price, and it was his duty to pay
it.

When her brother was as tidy as he could be, he returned the
favor. She fidgeted even worse than he had. He laughed at her for it.

Minas ground his fists into the earth. He would go to her
tonight, as she had gone twice to him. He would bid her stay when the others
went. He would beg her if he must. He would give her all that he had, trade her
his every treasure, if she would stay with the People. With him.

He slipped away before she saw him. It was as hard a thing
as he had ever done, but he had a little sense left. If she knew that he had
been desperate enough to spy on her from the grass, she would drive a bitter
bargain. Worse: she would refuse to hear him at all, but mock him for a pitiful
besotted thing, and leave him to die for want of her.

o0o

The young men were glad to dine on venison that evening.
Minas, who had hunted and brought it back, had no stomach for his own kill.
They had kumiss, and that he could swallow; and Aias had procured a skin of
wine, Minas did not know where, nor care.

His friends and yearmates were not the only ones around that
fire that night. Some of the king’s men had wandered over; most were his blood
kin, sons of his father. They had brought wine, a better vintage than Aias’. It
was good wine, sweet and strong, and no one was overscrupulous in watering it.

It was a grand feast. In the morning, Minas thought, he
would go to the woman, stride up to her and claim her. How could she refuse
him? He was the king’s heir of the People.

He told his brothers of this, at length, in figures of noble
oratory. It dawned on him somewhere in the middle that he might do better to
tell Dias. Dias he loved; Dias he trusted. He did not trust any of these young
men with their wild white hair.

But Dias was not there. He had not seen Dias since the
morning. These were his brothers, too. They were his great good friends. They
gave him wine. They gave him kumiss. They listened gladly when he told them of
the woman whom he must, he utterly must have.

It was good wine. Very, very good wine. He swam in the river
of it. He danced around the fire, light as air, swift as a flame. All the faces
now were narrow ruddy-browed faces. They were all his brothers, his blood. The
rest had whirled away with the sparks from the fire.

“A raid,” they were singing. “Let us ride on a raid!”

He paused. He was far gone in wine, but a minute part of him
found wits to ask, “What, tonight?”

“Why not tonight?” they said. “Are we not strong? Are we not
wonderful? Can we not see in the dark?”

“I have eyes like a hunting cat,” he declared.

“So,” they said. “Lead us! Let us raid—westward. Let us find
a tribe that still has its gold and its women. Let us take it and conquer it
and bring back the spoils. And then,” they said, “you can lay all of them at
her feet. She’ll love you then. She’ll fall headlong into your arms.”

“She,” he said distinctly, “will fall into
my
arms. Not yours! Not anybody’s.
Mine.”

“Yours,” they agreed willingly. “She is yours. You’ll win
her with the prizes of battle.”

“All mine,” he said. “Mine.”

They all had arms about one another in a long chain of
laughing, staggering men. Horses, he thought. Chariots. They needed horses and
chariots. “We raid in chariots,” he reminded them.

“In chariots!” they echoed joyfully.

It was a grand confusion, finding horses and chariots in the
dark, harnessing them, gathering weapons, preparing for a raid that was
altogether glorious and altogether mad. Adis declared that he had found an
unconquered tribe within a day’s chariot-ride. It was small but it was rich,
and it thought itself safely hidden in the vastness of the steppe. “Its priests
and shamans are strong,” he said, “but I found them, I, because the gods love
me.”

“And us!” his brothers sang.

They mounted the chariots two by two. Minas rode as
warrior—of course. Adis was his charioteer. The horses were fresh and wild in
the night. They leaped at the touch of the lash.

The wind was stronger than wine. It whipped Minas’ face and
sent his hair streaming out behind him. Something bumped against his foot. A
wineskin—wonderful! He hooked it with his toe and flipped it into his hands—laughing
as the chariot rocked and swayed—and drank till the world reeled.

It reeled straight down into the dark. There were stars in
the heart of it, and the murmur of wind, and a sound like a wolf’s laughter.

Rhian, hidden in shadows, saw how the king’s men—his own
brothers—plied Minas with wine and laid their mistress’ spell on him. This
served her purpose amply, and yet she did not have to like the taste of it. It
hurt to see him staggering, giggling, his lovely keen face gone slack and
stupid.

When they took chariots and rode on their lie of a raid, she
found the mare beside her. She had barely time to swing astride before the mare
was in motion.

The king’s men rode far enough out to escape any scouts or
spies, but not so far that it would take any of them overlong to creep back
toward the camp. There they stopped, circling round Minas’ chariot. Minas
sprawled in it, snoring loud enough for Rhian to hear. His brothers rolled him
out onto the ground.

She could not see what they did, but the snoring stopped
abruptly. They stripped him, bound him, wrapped him in something dark and
voluminous. Then they flung the limp bundle of him over the back of a horse.
One of the brothers rode with it, leading it. The rest circled and circled,
trampling all traces of what they had done there, and rode away westward. They
had not been lying about the raid, then; or they would not wish their fellows
of the tribe to think that they had.

It was terribly clever. Rhian pondered any number of things,
wise and not so wise and frankly insane. But the mare had her own purpose, and
that was to follow the man who had taken Minas.

He was not riding direct to the camp, though it was nearly
dawn. He had angled off somewhat to the north.

Rhian rode as close as she dared. He had no apparent
suspicion of her presence: he rode in leisurely fashion, asking little of his
horse. Sometimes he drank from a skin of wine—not, she would have wagered, the
skin that Minas had had in the chariot. That was drugged, she was sure.

The sky had lightened in the east when he stopped. They were
farther out from the tribe’s camp than they should have been, and not angling
closer. The place he chose had nothing to distinguish it from a hundred other
hollows in the endless roll of the steppe. It was convenient, that was all. He
slid from his horse’s back and turned toward the horse on which Minas was flung
like a sack of trade-goods.

He nigh jumped out of his skin. Rhian smiled at him in the
pale light, sitting on the back of her pale mare. “Good morning, king’s son,”
she said. “I see you have my baggage.”

The boy was too astonished to go for his sword. Rhian’s
smile widened at that. “Go on with your raid,” she said. “I’ll take this as we
all agreed.”

“But she never said—” The boy bit his lip. Rhian could see
how glad he was, how eager to ride with the others, and how sulky he had been
to be relegated to this duty. And what, she thought, might it have been? Might
he have been bidden to deliver a dead man to the traders?

She sweetened her smile even further and said, “Surely you
didn’t think you’d be denied a raid? Here, give me the rein—and be quick. If
you ride fast, you’ll catch them.”

That might or might not have been true, but clearly he
wanted it to be. He all but flung the rein at her, scrambled onto his horse,
and kicked it into a run.

Rhian drew a long breath. The shape on the horse’s back
never moved. It was too securely wrapped for her to hear if it breathed.

She had to trust that their poison had not killed him, and
that they had bound him living in his wrappings. Time was short. The caravan
would be ready by sunrise. She had to have him secure in the baggage then, one
bundle among many, neither more nor less valuable than anything else the
caravan carried.

And yet if she rode back now, she would be seen; the
tribesmen would know that this baggage mattered. If they asked to see what was
in it—to trade for it . . .

The horse on which he was bound was of no particular
distinction: bay without markings, thicker and heavier than the chariot-teams,
a beast of burden rather than a prince’s prize. It looked, in fact, a great
deal like the caravan-guards’ horses.

Rhian undid the bindings and eased the dead weight to the
ground. She arranged it as best she could, and hoped it was face up and alive.
“Guard him,” she said to the mare.

The mare was grazing with perfect aplomb. She did not
acknowledge Rhian, but neither did she fling up her tail and bolt. Rhian mounted
the bay and turned him toward the camp. She could only pray that when they came
this way, the mare would still be here, and her charge with her, and that he
was still alive.

o0o

The caravan was all but ready to go. Most of the gold had
come. They were waiting for the rest of it, not obviously, but she blew the
look. And there was Emry, the only guard not in armor. More of the king’s
white-haired boys stood about him. They were guarding him, though like the
caravaneers, they were not proclaiming the fact to the world.

Rhian had left the bay horse among the herds and walked to
the remains of the traders’ camp. The tents were down and packed, the line of
horses and donkeys falling into place. She slipped in between Hoel and Conn and
said, “He’s on the steppe. The mare’s guarding him.”