White Mare's Daughter (44 page)

He had, after all, remembered the words that Yama’s mother
spoke to Rudira. Something that Rudira must do, that would assure that Yama
became king.

What, betray Agni? But if she did that, she betrayed
herself; and for that she would die.

She was the white fire in his soul, the woman to his man,
but he was not blind to the truth of her. She had no honor. No woman did, except
perhaps Sarama. Honor was for men. For women there was only the body’s urgency,
and their own pleasure.

Rudira would do whatever it best pleased her to do; and she
was not of the White Horse people. She had no loyalty to their king. To her
husband, it seemed, she had some little semblance of it, enough at least to
conspire with his mother to make him king.

Agni had meant to remonstrate, to remind her that he would
be king and not her husband; and when he was king, he would find a way to claim
her. But she had reft him of thought or sense, blinded and dizzied him with her
body.

There was time yet. The king was strong, and the tribe
prospered. When he died or was taken into the circle of the sacrifice, then the
brothers would contest for the mastery.

Agni would win it. He was the chosen one, the heir. The
people would speak for him.

oOo

Agni never did ask Rudira what she had been plotting with
Yama’s mother. She was endlessly, burningly hungry for him. On nights when he
could not go to her, when some rite or gathering of the men kept him away, he
might come late to his bed to find her scent in it, or a strand of her hair, or
something that told him she had been there.

She never came when he could come to her. When he
remonstrated with her, called her mad, bade her remember the price of such
things, she would not listen. “I needed you,” she would say. And that was all.

Her husband did not take her to his bed, that Agni knew of.
She must be finding ways to put him off, for surely Yama would not be able to
resist her.

She would never say. That was a woman’s secret, as was so
much else that passed within the tents.

oOo

Winter closed in, hard and cold. They danced the
death-dance at autumn’s ending, called the spirits of the dead to be fed and
warmed and feted, and laid them to rest again in the stone barrows of the
people. At the dark of the year they sacrificed the black goat and the spotted
bull, but no stallion; not that creature of wind and sun and the bright morning
of the year.

Agni was made a priest that winter of Skyfather and the
lords of horses. What he did in the rites of his priestmaking, what visions he
saw, what words the gods spoke, he told to no one. In the spring he would wear
the Stallion mask and perform in the sacrifice; would speak the words that had
come down from the dawn time, and dance the steps that were as old as human
memory.

So preoccupied, between his nights with Rudira and his days
of learning to be a man and a priest, he saw little of his father, and thought
less of it.

One day when the dark of the year was past but the spring
was far away, he braved the knives of wind and snow to cross the camp from the
priests’ tent to his father’s. He had no thought but of warm mead and dry
clothes, and aunts and cousins fussing over him, and a little rest of the
spirit.

The priests’ tent was the domain of men, crowded with the
instruments of their calling, cluttered and indifferently clean. One never
dared sit unless one looked first; there might be a bleached skull there, or a
bundle of herbs, or the makings of a mask for the spring festivals. They ate
there when someone remembered to cook, which was not unduly often. They kept no
order that Agni could discern.

His father’s tent was a haven: warm, full of light and the
scents of cooking, the chatter of women and children, smiles and open arms and
willing welcome. The brothers who were his rivals, the wives who schemed for
their sons, would not trouble him under the king’s eye. They all preserved a
kind of determined amity.

That day he went in search of it. He had finished his mask
for the sacrifice and laid it with those other, older masks that priests had
made in years before him.

He was tired. His back ached. He was chilled to the bone. He
had no thought but of the pot that hung over the fire, full of whatever the
hunters had brought back the day before, and warmed mead and warm feet, and
sleep without dreams.

He found the pot and the fire in the small tent that the
women put up when the wind blew high and the snow flew fast, and meat and herbs
and a few savories therein. But in the tent was a heavy stillness.

He struggled to get some sense out of the brothers nearest
the door, but they were babbling. The eldest of the aunts, dour Taditi, overran
them with little pretense of humility.

“The king fell,” she said.

Agni thrust through crowding, useless people. They were all
either standing and staring or standing and sniveling. No one seemed possessed
of wits enough to move.

The king had fallen indeed. He had been eating his dinner,
Agni saw, when the fit had taken him. Bowls were scattered, a jar of mead
spilled, darkening the royal horsehide with its sticky wetness. The king lay in
the middle of it.

He was still alive. His eyes burned in a face that had
twisted horribly, as if some god had turned it to clay and pulled it awry. Half
of it was as it had always been. The other was all melted and misshapen.

Not one of the people crowding about him had even thought to
lift him out of the puddle of mead. Agni hissed in anger, bent and raised him,
grunting with the effort: for he was a big man, and heavy, a dead weight. But Agni
was strong enough to carry him out of the common space and into the king’s own
place.

People tried to follow. He heard Taditi’s voice raised,
piercing as a hawk’s cry, driving back all but the most determined. Even those
hesitated somewhat, so that Agni had time to lay his father on the bed of hides
and furs, to arrange the lifeless body and straighten as best he could the
right arm that had twisted tight and would not let go.

All the while he did that, his father watched him, hot-eyed,
furious at this thing that had struck him down. Agni could think of no words to
say that would comfort him. He settled for making his father’s body as comfortable
as it might be, for cleaning it—he had soiled himself, worst of humiliations,
as if he had been a helpless infant—and dressing it afresh and covering it with
a clean coverlet.

He had help in the last of it, Taditi as fierce-eyed as the
king and as silent as Agni, and one or two of the younger wives with their
veils forgotten. And, when he was nearly done, Yama’s mother, eldest of the
wives, thrusting the other women aside to finish covering her husband’s body.

Agni she either did not deign or did not dare to touch, but
neither did she look on him with any welcome. “I’ll look after him now,” she
said. “You can go.”

“I don’t think so,” said Agni. He sat beside his father,
seeing full well that she had been about to take that place, and smiled at the
woman whom he should, he supposed, think of as his enemy.

When he spoke again, it was to Taditi. “Someone should make
sure that all my brothers know, and the elders, too—but my brothers first.”

“He may not die,” Taditi said, not as if she contradicted
him; simply as if she thought that he should know. “People can live years,
sometimes, and even recover from such strokes of the gods’ hand.”

“To be sure,” said Agni, though in his heart he did not
believe that his father would live long, or come back again from the edge of
death’s country. But in front of those who watched and listened, in particular
Yama’s mother, he would pretend that he did believe. For his father’s sake he
could do no other.

To Taditi he said, “Nevertheless, my brothers must know.”

She inclined her head, turned and went to do as he had not
quite bidden her. One did not command Taditi. She was like a man in that, and a
man who was a king.

She was his father’s eldest sister, who had married long
ago, but her husband had died. She had come back to her father’s tent, which
after a while became her brother’s, and kept order in it even above his wives.

She did not put herself forward, and there were many who did
not know what she did or how she ruled in this tent, but Agni knew. She had
brought him up when his mother died and his sister was taken away, raised him
and taught him what she knew, that she judged fit for a manchild to know.

She would see that his brothers were told, and that the news
was spread slowly, lest the tribe forget itself and begin to wail that its king
was dead.

Not yet. He could not move or speak, but his eyes were
alive. He knew where he was, and who bent over him. From the glitter in his
glance, he understood the words that people spoke, too: perhaps more than any
of them knew or wanted him to know.

Agni remained beside him. He did not demand it with his
glance, but neither did he forbid it. Agni preferred to think that he wanted
it, that he was glad of his son’s presence.

The brothers began to come in ones and twos and threes. And,
inevitably, Yama came. He shouldered aside the rest, thrust his way to the
front, stood glowering down at Agni. “What did you do to him?” he demanded.

Agni took time for a slow breath. Now was not the moment to
leap up and challenge this idiot. When he answered, he answered softly, with as
much courtesy as he could muster. “Our father fell,” he said, “to a stroke of
the gods’ hand.”

“What did you say that caused it?”

Agni gritted his teeth. “I was among the priests, performing
my duties to the gods. I arrived just after he fell.”

Yama grunted. “So you say.” He lowered himself to one knee
and bent, peering at the stricken man. “Is he awake? Can he hear us?”

Agni had long since concluded that a man could not study to
be as dense as Yama was. It was a gift, a jest of the gods. Any fool could see
the fury in those eyes: the one that opened wide, fixed on Yama’s face, and the
one that sagged as if the bone that housed it had melted with the rest.

“He is awake,” Agni said levelly. “I believe that he can
hear us. I pray that he will recover. Will you do as much, son of my father?”

Yama shook a fist in his face. “You watch your tongue,
puppy. If you had anything to do with this, as the gods are my witness—”

“I had nothing to do with this,” Agni said. “Will you come
to blows over the body of a man not yet dead? Do please try to have a little
respect.”

Yama would have struck him then, if Taditi had not stepped
between them. “Enough,” she said in her harsh old woman’s voice. “You may
quarrel all you like, and bring the tribes down about you—but not here.”

Yama drew back growling. Agni remained where he was.

He permitted himself the flicker of a smile before he turned
back to the king. “Father,” he said. “Shall I send these people away?”

The rage in that eye altered a little, enough perhaps for an
answer. Agni sighed. “Very well. But when you begin to tire, I will send them
out.”

It was unbearably difficult to sit there, to see how his
brothers alternately wept and blustered; how the best of them sat mute, and the
worst babbled much as Yama had, seeking for someone to blame.

“There’s no one to blame but the gods,” Agni said to that,
cutting across the currents of conversation.

“But someone might have—” one of the younger brothers began.
He had always been Yama’s echo. Agni could hardly expect him to be different
now.

One of the others stopped him. “Someone didn’t. I feel the
gods’ hand in this, and the hand of time. It grieves me—but it is what is.”

Those with sense murmured agreement. Those without snarled
at it.

Yama dropped down at the king’s side opposite Agni, and made
it clear that he intended to stay there—to prevent Agni from doing whatever
fancied harm Agni might do.

Very well, Agni thought. Let him amuse himself.

The women had hidden when the young men came in, and so many
of them, too; all but Taditi. It was she who called forth some few of them and
bade them fetch food and drink for their sons and brothers.

Some ate, drank, and left. Too many lingered.

And more came: the kin, the elders, men of the tribe hearing
word of the king’s fall, come to see him in his infirmity.

Such a thing should never have happened. People said it none
too quietly as they came and went, and the king lay helpless, mute, powerless
to speak in his own defense. If he had gone to the knife as some had urged him,
if he had allowed himself to be sacrificed while he still had somewhat of his
youthful strength, this ignominy would never have befallen him.

“It’s a bad omen for the tribe,” the elders muttered among
themselves. “A king smitten down in the black heart of winter, and not to death
but to a kind of death-in-life. It bodes ill for the time ahead of us.”

Worse omen, Agni thought, to speak of it, to wake terror in
hearts already much afraid. And none of them, not one, had the least care for
the man who lay trapped in the prison of his body. Only for the king, and for
what his fall would mean to the tribe.

Agni took the gaunt cold hand in his, the one that perhaps
could still feel, and warmed it as best he could. “Father,” he said, “fight
this. Be strong. Your people have need of you.”

And well he knew it, too, Agni saw in his eyes.

He could do nothing. Not one thing. The gods had seen to
that.

The king did not die that night, or any of the nights
thereafter. He clung to life though it must be a bitter burden, speechless,
helpless, half of him withering away even as his people watched.

Agni never left his side; and not only because it so
evidently galled his brother Yama. If the king died, he wanted to be there. If
the king lived, he wanted to be part of the cause of it.