White Mare's Daughter (49 page)

“Come,” said Patir with a touch of impatience. “We have to
be there when the elders come out.”

They all knew that very well, and said so, too; but they did
not dally longer.

oOo

For all their haste, it was a long while before the
tentflap opened and the chief of the elders of the White Horse led the rest
blinking into the hard bright daylight.

The people had gathered in the open space before the tent.
They had, one way and another, contrived to give Agni and the young men the
foremost places.

Agni saw Yama off to the side, surrounded by the usual flock
of sycophants. He did not look at all cast down, though he had an air of
tension about him, a tautness that drew Agni’s companions in close and set them
on watch.

The sun mounted to the zenith and sank with winter’s
swiftness. It had been almost warm; but as the shadows lengthened, the cold
closed in.

The men of the Red Deer had come, people were saying, just
before Agni came out. They had paused to speak to no one, had ridden straight
to the tent and left their horses for the boys to look after, and disappeared
within. Their faces had been grim.

As the hours lengthened, anticipation turned to curiosity,
and curiosity to apprehension. There should have been no such delay. At noon
the chief of the elders of the White Horse should have come out of the tent
with the others after him, and lifted the staff of his office, and named the
one who had been chosen to be king.

But he had not done so, and the elders of the Red Deer had
come in late and at last, just before he should have done it. The people hummed
with conjecture. War, perhaps. Wrath of the gods. Some other terror, or some
dispute so great that the kingmaking must wait upon it.

But what that dispute could be, no one professed to know.
There had been no rumor of war, no contention between tribes, nothing but a
hard winter and a slain king.

Agni ran the same gamut as the others, but on him the burden
lay heavier. He could not imagine that they delayed for difficulty in choosing
a king. It was some matter of the Red Deer, then.

One who was not an elder should not intrude on the elders at
such a time as this. And yet the people were waiting. Which the elders must
know very well. And yet . . .

He had stepped forward, had determined to approach the tent
and to inquire within, when the flap lifted at last.

A sigh ran through the people, marked by a chattering of
teeth.

The chief of elders of the White Horse stepped into the
sunlight, but one step only. No others followed him.

His face was grim. His eyes passed over the gathering, but
they were oddly blind. When they found Agni, they came alive; but not with joy.

“Agni,” he said, “son of Rama son of Tukni of the White
Horse people. Come here.”

It was not the call to kingship. It was like the beating of
the drum at the king’s sacrifice, dark and slow. In a rising murmur and in a
kind of numbed obedience, Agni went as he was bidden. The elder retreated,
beckoning him sharply, summoning him into the tent.

oOo

It was dark within, blind dark after the glare of
daylight. There was a fire, and light through the opening in the roof, but
smoke so filled that space, and the stink of it and of unwashed humanity was so
strong, that for a stretching while Agni was as one blinded and deafened and
reft of his senses.

They came back, if slowly. He stood where he had been led,
inside the circle of elders, near the fire that flared suddenly, illuminating
faces. Not one looked on him with gladness.

He began to grow, not afraid, but alarmed. This was not a
matter of the tribes. This was something to do with himself, with something
that he had done.

Yama. Rudira.

But if he was to be denounced, Yama should be here. And Yama
was outside, unsummoned, nor did anyone leave to fetch him.

Men came round the fire, strangers wearing the stitched and
beaded signs of the Red Deer. Agni remembered vaguely one or two of their
faces. Two of them were young, which surprised him; too young to be elders.
They looked on him as if he were their bitter enemy.

“Yes,” said the youngest, who was somewhat older than Agni
himself. “Yes, that is the one.”

A low murmur ran round the circle, a rumble like a growl.
Agni stiffened at the sound of it. “And who may you be?” he demanded. “Have I
done you injury? By the gods, if I had, surely I would remember it.”

The stranger’s lip curled. “Would you now? And would it
matter to you if you had?”

One of his elders laid a hand on his shoulder, silencing
him. That one’s glance was no more friendly, but his words were rather less
intemperate. “You are Agni son of Rama of the White Horse people?”

Agni bit back the first retort which came to his head, that
if he had answered to that summons, surely he must be the one who had been
summoned. He drew a breath, calmed himself, answered quietly. “I am the king’s
son of the White Horse tribe. And you are?”

The elder did not answer that. “Agni son of Rama, you are
charged with crimes against our people.”

Agni stood very still. “I do not recall,” he said, “that I
have ever committed injury against a man of the Red Deer.”

“Man, no,” said the young man. He was shaking, Agni saw, and
not with cold. With anger. “But a woman dishonored and defiled, the daughter of
a chieftain, wife of an elder, taken by force—”

Memory struck like a blow to the belly. Spring gathering, a
wedding, a pair of green eyes glinting boldly on him, luring him away from the
dancing and the firelight.

She had been a maiden—no doubt of that at all. She had worn
her hair as an unmarried woman will, loose beneath her headdress.

He had never asked her name or known her lineage, nor,
trusting the evidence before him, troubled to fret that she might be another
man’s wife. It had not been the most pleasant of meetings, nor had they parted
excessively well.

Agni had forgotten her within moments of her leaving him,
all memory of her burned away in the heat of Rudira’s body. But that he would
not speak of.

He almost laughed. His greatest fear had always been that he
would be caught in dishonor with a married woman—and so he had. But not with
the one he had expected, his brother’s wife Rudira. With a woman who had, in
ways both subtle and wicked, concealed what she was.

He drew a breath, gathered the words, spoke them calmly. “I
do recall that a girl of the Red Deer accosted me at my brother’s wedding. She
was a maiden, I can swear to that. She wore her hair loose, as a maiden will.
She was no man’s wife.”

The young man of the Red Deer burst out almost before Agni
was finished, overrunning the last of his words. “She was the wife of Bapu the
Hunter, whom a wild ox gored, and who could not enjoy a woman in the normal way
thereafter. She was still his wife—and she would never lie, or conceal it, or
pretend to be an unmarried woman.
You
lie, prince of the White Horse. You seized her out of the shadows while she
watched the dancing, carried her off and raped her, and left her bleeding and
all dishonored. Look at your face! You don’t remember that, do you? You don’t
even remember!”

“I don’t remember,” Agni said with deliberate calm, “because
it never happened. She was standing in the shadows, yes, while I danced with
the young men. She made an assignation. I went to it. I never took her by
force. She asked, and I gave what she asked.”

“That is a lie!” the young man cried. “My sister was seized
and taken and ravished, and left to make her own way back to her husband’s
tent.”

“If that were so,” Agni demanded, “where is her husband? Why
is he not here? Why was it left to you, and why did you wait till now to charge
me with it? Both of you should have come in the morning, faced me and
challenged me, and called for a reckoning.”

The young man spat on the ground at his feet. “Bapu the
Hunter is dead. He suffered much from his old wound. The shock of her return,
the horror of her dishonor, prostrated him. He fell ill and died. And she told
no one else, not then. Her grief was too great, her shame too deep. She hid it
from us. We noticed how she was always weeping, but women do such things when
they are widowed, and she had seemed fond of her husband. But then she
delivered herself of a child, she who should have been untouched; who was to be
given in the spring to a prince of the High Hills people, and he had been much
concerned that she come to him a maiden. He would never have raised her bastard.”

“I am sorry for that,” Agni said, “but she said not one word
of her husband or her kin. She came to me as a woman unwed. I took her as she
asked. If she had come to me when she knew she was with child, I would have
taken her in. I am honorable when I know that I have need to be. I will take
her in now, if you ask it.”

“No,” said the man of the Red Deer. “You are lying. You have
raped an elder’s wife, a chieftain’s daughter. The elder is dead because of it.
Our chieftain died of an apoplexy when word was brought to him that his
favorite, the light of his eyes, the daughter whom he loved above the rest, had
delivered herself of a daughter. She is dead. The birthing killed her.
You
killed her, man of the White Horse.
That is the charge I raise against you. Murder, and dishonor of my family and
my tribe, and blood feud on you and all your kin unless I am given
satisfaction.”

Agni reeled at the blow of her death, though he had not
known her at all, except in the body. The rest of it seemed like something from
a story, tragedy heaped on tragedy. But it had nothing to do with him. She had
snared him with a lie, with seeming to be what she was not.

He forced himself to focus, to hear the rest of the words
that her brother spoke. “I will give satisfaction,” he said, “in whatever
measure I may. But I did not rape her, nor knowingly trample on her honor or
the honor of her kin. I am not her murderer.”

“She swore on her dying soul,” said her brother, “and on the
souls of her mother and her father before her, and on the soul of her husband
who had died of the shock, that you had done so. She swore it to the priests
and sealed it in her own heart’s blood. And then, man of the White Horse—then
she died.”

There was a silence. Agni turned about slowly. There was no
oath greater than the oath of one who was dying, sworn before priests and
sealed in blood. And there was one of the priests to whom she must have sworn
it, carrying the sign of it, the polished bone of an ox, carved with the gods’
eyes and stained dark with old blood.

It was the seal of a lie. Though why a woman should hate him
so much, should trap him with a lie, then pursue him beyond the grave, he could
not imagine. Maybe—yes, maybe she had hoped to snare a prince, and dreamed of
shedding her eunuch of a husband and making herself wife to a king.

Had she seen where he went after? Had she watched him with
Rudira, and seen how great his pleasure was, and hated him for it? Or had it
simply been that she had conceived when she had never thought to do such a
thing, and had borne her dishonor, and had looked for revenge on the man with
whom she had wrought it?

With a woman, there was no telling. And she was dead.

“The child,” Agni said. “Is it—”

“We took it to the steppe,” the woman’s brother said, “and
left it.”

Agni held himself still, forced himself to think clearly. Of
course they had cast the child out. It was ill-begotten, and a girl. There was
no place for such among the tribes, least of all in a hard winter.

He looked from face to face around the circle. He had been
tried, he could see. And he had been condemned. By the oath of a dying woman,
by a lie against which he had no defense. He had told no one of that
assignation, not even Rudira. It had been a secret, swiftly done, nigh as
swiftly forgotten. He had had a dozen such since his beard began to come in.
All the young men did.

“I do not know,” he said slowly, “why she lied. And yet she
did. She sought me out. She summoned me to her. For what came of it I am sorry,
but she never came to me, nor asked me for help. If she had, I would have given
it. That I swear by my father’s spirit.”

“Maybe you believe that,” said the chief of elders of the
White Horse, who was his own kinsman: speaking heavily, with evident regret.
“Still there is the oath that she swore, and the grief that her family suffers,
and its great dishonor. Three of its own have died for this. The shame will
blacken the tribe forever after.”

Agni kept his head up, though his belly had cramped into a
knot. “I acted in as much honor as I knew to act. I granted a woman what she
asked, as she urgently asked it, during a time when such things are, if not
approved of, then at least regarded with indulgence. That I am guilty I do not
deny. That I am guilty of such great transgression as I am accused of, I most firmly
refuse to accept.”

“We have only your word for that,” said the chief of the
elders. “And this.” He tilted his head toward the bloodstained bone. “Against
this you have no defense. The law grants you none. You must pay as the law
demands.”

The knot in Agni’s middle clenched tighter yet. “With my
life?”

“No.” That was the woman’s brother, thick with disgust. “
I
asked it, but they refused to grant
it.”

“Then,” said Agni, “I’ll pay whatever penalty you ask.
Horses, cattle—”

“No,” the man of the Red Deer said again. “I will take
nothing from you.”

Agni spread his hands. He must not allow them to see anger
in him, or to suspect the slightest sign of fear. “Then what will you have?
What can I do?”

“Leave,” the other said. “Be banished. Go away from the
tribes forever.”

Agni swayed on his feet. Death he could contemplate. Heavy
fines in cattle, in horses, in wealth of whatever kind—those he could pay. But
this—