White Mare's Daughter (74 page)

She laughed, her old familiar laugh, sweet and lilting. “You
went where I made you go. I wanted to be a king’s wife. Through you I won it.”

“And it tastes of ashes?” Agni could not help but ask.

She laughed again, a ripple like bright water, but with
shadows stirring beneath. “It tastes of honey from the comb. Did I harm you,
after all? We both have what we wanted. You are a king, and I am a king’s
wife.”

“You betrayed me,” said Agni.

“I gave you into the gods’ hands.” She swayed closer. Her
veils melted as such things will in dreams. She was all as he remembered her,
skin as white as new milk, hair as pale as moonlight, eyes like rain on clear
water. She who had seemed richly curved among the women of the tribes, now
seemed slight and even fragile, with her high round breasts and her narrow
waist and her hips hardly wider than a boy’s.

Yet still he could not see her face. Her body he remembered
vividly. So many days, such a stretch of seasons since he had held her in his
arms, and he remembered every line of her. Her scent, her softness, even the
way her hair grew on her forehead—everything was as clear as if he had lain
with her just this morning.

She took him into her as she had always done, with a kind of
breathless leap and cling, wrapping legs about him, holding him tight when he
would have recoiled in startlement. Her grip was soft but very strong, stronger
than it had ever been in the waking world.

Resistance only made her cling the closer. She roused him as
only she had ever been able to do, and warmed him to burning.

There was no woman like her. Even as he knew with perfect
clarity what she was, that she had no honor nor knew the meaning of
loyalty—still he wanted her. Even when she had drained him dry, milked him of
his seed and left him gasping, her body made his blood sing.

It was a madness, a demon in him. A demon with her face.

He covered her with kisses—with, he thought, clever intent.
But she arched away as he drew near to her face, swayed and wove and turned, so
that he never touched her lips or her cheeks. Her hands were as light as
kisses, as strong as blows. She shaped him as Earth Mother shaped the world,
molded of clay, soft and malleable in her fingers.

He did not want to be molded. He wanted to take her as one
can in dreams, again and again, no weariness, no need to rest. But she held all
the power. Her strong white hands, her drifting veils, were image and trappings
of great magic.

The Rudira of the waking world was rumored to be a witch of
a line of witches; and for a certainty she had power to drive a man mad. But
she had never been as this dream-Rudira was. This was the earth’s own power,
goddess-power. It thrummed in his bones.

“You would take the woman of the Lady’s people in the Great
Marriage,” she said, cooing the words as if to a loved child. “Do you believe
that the Lady would approve of such a thing?”

“Skyfather wills it,” Agni said.

“Ah,” she said. “He is her son. They are all her sons, the
gods, or her sons’ sons. She let them loose when they were born, let them run
as they pleased. But she will bring them back to hand.”

“Not through me,” Agni said.

“If you take the Mother’s heir to wife, she will hold you in
the palm of her hand.”

“Skyfather holds his hand over me,” Agni said.

She swayed closer. “You want her?” Her voice was a whisper.
“You lust after her?”

“I want her country,” he said. “I want her people’s
loyalty.”

“And you want her,” said Rudira.

He could not lie to a dream. “She is beautiful,” he said.

“More beautiful than I?”

“No one is more beautiful than you,” he said, and he meant
it. But when he had said it, he remembered a smooth brown face, a pair of eyes
as great as a doe’s but never as gentle, a tumble of blue-black hair.

Beside that, this woman of the tribes seemed thin and
bloodless. Her body that had seemed so ripely curved was pared to the bone, her
breasts shrunken, her ribs sharp-caned beneath the skin.

He reached again for the veil; looked again to be thwarted.
But before she slipped away, his hand caught at fabric as softly yielding as
mist.

It shredded and tore. He looked into her face.

No flesh at all. White bone, black pits of eyes, the
ceaseless, relentless grin of the death’s-head. Laughter echoed from the hollow
skull. “Am I not beautiful?” her voice demanded, sweet as ever. “Am I not the
fairest of all the living?”

It was sweet, that voice, and yet it was not Rudira’s. For a
stretching while he did not know it. But it did not mean him to escape so
easily.

In the shadows on the naked bone, he saw another face than
Rudira’s. A face less beautiful and less sleekly sure of itself. The face of a
woman of the Red Deer, a woman who died because of the child that he had set in
her.

“You are dead,” he said. “You were laid to rest. Begone! You
have no power over me.”

She laughed at him, sweet and terrible. Her laughter
followed him all the way out of the dream-place and into the land of the
living. He woke with the memory of it echoing in his skull.

The coming of the horsemen changed everything. And yet if
one lived from moment to moment, the Lady’s world was much as it had always
been. Then one looked up and met eyes that were blue or grey or green or even,
occasionally, amber, set in a narrow blade-nosed face.

The women thought them handsome, these tall narrow men with
their pale skin and their odd-colored hair. In Danu’s eyes they were frankly
ugly.

He did not know why he disliked them so intensely. They had
not brought the horrors of his dreams. They were here, that was all, eating
what they were fed, filling the fields with their camp. The harvest promised to
be rich enough to feed these extra mouths; no one expected a lean winter after
all, though it would not be as fat or the storehouses as full as in other good
years.

So far the horsemen had taken little that was not given
them, nor shown aught worse than bad manners and ignorance of proper courtesy.
Sarama had warned the women to expect rudeness beyond their easy belief, and
there had been some of that. But nothing so grievous as to require the Lady’s
mercy.

Catin and the Mother and the people of Larchwood were gone.
They had left as the horsemen drew near to Three Birds, gone away westward to,
they said, warn the cities beyond.

Tilia had not been charitable in her opinion of their
departure. “We won’t see them again,” she had said after the last straggler
climbed the hill to the west and disappeared.

“I think we will,” Danu said. “Catin will come back. She
won’t be able to help herself. She has to face this dream, face it and let it
make her stronger.”

“She’s not strong enough to begin with,” said Tilia, “to
think of being stronger.”

Danu did not argue with her. She believed what she believed.
He knew what he knew. And the horsemen came, and they forgot that they had come
near a quarrel over Catin.

Now, with the horsemen here and showing no sign of going on,
Danu understood a little how Catin could so dislike Sarama. Danu loved the
Mare’s servant. But Sarama’s brother—now there was a man who made him bristle
and snarl.

oOo

Sarama did not see why they should so dislike one another.
“You could be friends,” she said. “He’s not a ruthless warmonger as some are;
mostly he’s like me, though he’d be hard pressed to admit it. He can tell you
all the stories, what I teethed on and how I used to quarrel, and what I was
like before my breasts budded. All the things a brother knows.”

“I don’t need to know them,” Danu said.

It was a rare quiet moment at midday. She had come back to
the house they were living in, for what reason he had not happened to ask. He
was bringing in the washing, overseeing the line of servants and acolytes and
some of his brothers and sisters as they brought up new-dried armloads from the
field by the river. The outer room of this smaller, crowded house was full of
the scent of sun and grass and new-washed cloth.

Sarama pressed against the wall to let Beki pass with a
billowing heap of bedding. Danu’s second in the house warmed her with a smile.
She returned it somewhat abstractedly. “I think you’re jealous,” she said to
Danu.

“Probably,” he said. “I know he is. What is his trouble? Is
he angry because you didn’t ask his leave before you chose me?”

Her glance was a little surprised, a little pleased—and it
stung a little, because of what else it said. He had startled her by
understanding this thing about the tribes; as if he had neither wits nor
perception, nor could learn her customs as she had learned his.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, he’s unhappy—more with me than with
you. If he were other than he is, he could have killed you and flogged me, and
so preserved the honor of the tribe.”

“He is generous, then,” Danu said. “And merciful.”

“And you dislike him as much as ever.”

He shrugged uncomfortably. “He makes me feel as if I’m less
than I am.”

“All,” she said, as if that explained it all. She did not linger
much longer; she went out while he was settling the disposal of a great amount
of bedding in a house somewhat too small for as many people as were living in
it. Which, he reflected uncharitably, was another cause to dislike the king of
the horsemen, for displacing them all and never acting as if he understood the
sacrifice.

It was all very petty. He should master himself and practice
discipline, grow strong enough in his spirit to be, if not friendly, then
suitably amiable toward Sarama’s brother. Even if the man had gone so far as to
ask for Tilia as a wife.

oOo

Not long after Sarama left, when the washing was put away
as best it might be and Danu was considering the prospect of a few moments to
himself, Tilia came in as Sarama had, as women had a way of doing: taking no
notice of the bustle around them, aiming straight for Danu and bidding him wait
on their pleasure. Which, with Tilia, was to take refuge in the kitchen garden.
There among the lettuces and the peas on their vines and the beans growing up
over the wall, she said, “I’m going to give the horseman what he wants.”

Danu had no words to say to that.

“Don’t look so flattened,” she said. “You had to have known
I’d give in. He won’t let go till he has what he’s asking for.”

“He’s asking for you,” Danu said. His tongue stumbled a bit
still, but it did his bidding.

“Yes,” she said. “He wants me.”

“Do you want him?”

She narrowed her eyes—as if she had any need, now, to think
on her answer. “If he were passing through as he did elsewhere, and if he were
behaving himself with reasonable propriety, I’d have taken him to my bed long
since.”

“You like him,” Danu said. He did not mean his voice to
sound so flat.

“He interests me,” she said.

“Enough to bind yourself to him in the Great Marriage?”

“There,” she said. “There, you see? You can think like him.
Think like me. He will bind himself to me. That may be more than he bargained
for.”

“And he can’t escape it once it’s done.” Danu felt his lips
stretch in a slow smile. “You are wicked.”

She stooped and plucked a lettuce and nibbled on it
reflectively. “That’s what the Mother said.”

Danu raised a brow. “Does she disapprove?”

“Not at all,” Tilia said. “She says the horsemen will learn
to understand a different kind of power. I’m to teach it to that one first—since
he reckons himself higher than a Mother.”

“He could kill you,” said Danu, “if he became very angry.”

“So will any animal if it’s mishandled,” she said, as calm
as ever. “I’ll remember what he is. Don’t fret for me on that account.”

“Maybe I’ll spare a little fret for him,” Danu said. “He’s a
proud man. You’ll break his pride.”

“If that’s the way of it,” she said, “then so be it.”

Tilia went away as Sarama had, with precious little pause
for farewell. Danu considered indulging in resentment, but none of them—for he
reckoned Agni with the rest—would trouble to notice or to care. They would all
do what they pleased to do. His wanting or not wanting meant nothing to them.

oOo

In that mood, and rather inevitably, he came on Agni
himself near the hayfield that had become a camp. Danu was going to ride the
horse he had been given, a bit of generosity that he understood all too well:
he must not embarrass Sarama’s kin by failing in that essential art.

Agni also was afoot, and seemed to be going to find his own
horse, the red stallion that ruled the herds as Agni ruled the men who had
followed him. He greeted Danu with a nod, amiable enough if not precisely warm;
but these tribesmen were always cool with strangers. It was because, Sarama had
told Danu once, any stranger might be bent on killing.

“Animals are like that,” Danu had said then. “Not humans.”

She had shrugged and gone on thinking thoughts that no one
of the Lady’s country could bear to think.

Agni’s greeting was warm enough for what it was. He seemed
to bear Danu no enmity.

Danu said it straight out, without preamble and without
embellishment. “My sister is going to give you what you ask for.”

Agni stopped short. Danu was gratified to see the shock that
came first, and to see how long it took him to ease back into his usual
insouciance.

“Is she?” he asked at last, with a touch of breathlessness
still. “What price is she going to put on it?”

“Price?” Danu did not need to pretend incomprehension. He
honestly did not understand.

“Price,” Agni said with carefully nurtured patience. “What
she expects in return, if she gives me what I ask for.”

“She’ll get your promise to hold off the horsemen who come
after, and your voice in their counsels—while she goes on as she always has,
being the heir of Three Birds.”