White Mare's Daughter (77 page)

Her hands were light; yet Agni felt the force of them as he
could feel the sun’s strength on his face at midday. Just so had he seen a
smith in the city, smelting copper in a forge. Fire had melted the lumpen ingot
as ice melts into water. Then the smith had added another ingot, and it had
melted into the first, till there was a single pool of molten copper.

Agni met Tilia’s eyes. They were wider than usual, and fixed
on his face. Did he look as wild as that?

Still there was no word spoken. Only the music, and that had
faded to a murmur.

The Mother’s voice rippled over it, rich and sweet. Tilia
murmured the words in Agni’s own tongue, or as much of it as she had: a gift,
and a great one. “My children,” the Mother said, with Tilia as her echo, “look
at one another. See what you see. Look deep. Look long. And look well. This you
must see with every day that passes, from now until your death.”

Agni’s belly tightened. To take, to hold, to be master of a
woman—that, he knew. This—it bound them both. As the Mother had said: until
death.

“Look,” she said. “Know this one beside whom you will walk,
with whom you will bear and raise children, whose life will be your life, whose
heart your heart. Look, and understand.”

Agni looked. He could not have done otherwise, even had he
willed to. He saw a face limned in lamplight, the arch of dark brows, and eyes
too dark to read. He saw beauty of a kind that his people never knew; darker,
smoother, broader. He saw the night in her eyes, and stars caught in her hair.
He saw himself reflected as in a dark pool: narrow face, blade of nose,
sunburnt cheeks and ruddy hair and eyes the color of amber, like a lion’s, or
like a goat’s.

He did not want to see how she saw him, even with a noble
arc of horns and a fine long beard. He peered past that so-mocking image, far
into the shadows where thoughts darted like fishes in a pool. He hunted her as
he would hunt the red deer in a deep wood.

He found her in a singing silence, not sitting as he had
expected, motionless as the image of a goddess, but standing erect, on guard,
with a bow in her hand, and an arrow ready to nock to the string.

So warlike. So bold, and yet so much afraid.

Within him too she must find much the same; he on his tall
red horse with spear and bow and long wicked knife. Marriage was a kind of war,
he supposed: the Great Marriage more than most.

The Mother’s voice sounded soft in his ears. “See,” she
said. “How different, and how very like. Such is my creation. Such is beauty,
twofold: sun and moon, dark and light, woman and man. Be two now. Be two who
are one.”

Hand locked in hand. Eye locked on eye. Heart beating—not
quite together. Agni’s breath shuddered as his heart leaped, wavered, steadied.
Beating as hers beat, stroke for stroke.

Words slipped away. The music, that had gone on unnoticed,
swelled to fill the world. Voices wove into it, voices of women, voices of men,
singing in no language that he knew, perhaps in no language at all: a ripple of
pure sound. This was the song the stars sang; the song that swelled with the
waters in spring, and fell silent with them under the weight of winter’s cold.
But even in silence it went on, more beautiful than anything of earth.

This was like no rite he had ever known. It bound without
oaths. It asked nothing of him, and yet it asked everything. To be one. No word
of master or servant, man or woman, husband or wife. Simply—one.

He was not asked to accept or reject what was laid on him.
Gods did not ask such things. They commanded. Mortals obeyed.

If he could have escaped, he should have done it long ago.
His presence here was binding enough, and his hand in hers was all the oath
that he was expected to swear. He was breathing as hard as he was, and her
hands were no longer quite so steady.

“So mote it be,” said the Mother, spreading her arms to
embrace them both.

Agni’s instinct cried to him to shrink and bolt. But he was
stronger than that. He stood his ground.

The Mother’s warmth wrapped him about. Her breath was sweet.
She smiled and kissed his brow, and kissed her daughter’s, and gently but
irresistibly turned them to face one another.

There could be no doubt of what she wanted. Agni had never
kissed a woman in the light before, in front of strangers. It froze him with
shyness.

Tilia had no such scruples. She moved almost too quick to
see, caught him and held him and kissed him till he gasped.

When she would have let him go, he caught her as she had
caught him, and kissed her with all his art and passion. Her eyes were wide. He
laughed as he drew back, laughed and embraced her and spun her about in sudden,
wild elation.

It came from nowhere and everywhere, like the music. It was
probably terror, but it felt like mad glee.

Everyone was laughing, singing, whirling in the same dance,
the whole great crowd of them under the stars. All that had been solemn was
suddenly wild with joy. They crowned Agni and Tilia with flowers, wound them
with garlands about necks and arms and bodies; took them up and carried them,
singing, far along the line of the river to a place as new as this morning.

It was a house made of green boughs, built under the
branches of a great tree, with a smaller river flowing past it. From the greater
river one could see only the loom of the tree’s crown. The house one could not
see at all, nor the stream, nor the field of grass about it. It was a lovely
place, and secret, and it was clear what Agni was expected to do here.

The throng did not linger as it would have on the steppe,
though from what Agni could gather, their songs were quite as bawdy. They
danced in a long winding skein, an endless line of them, round and round about
the hut of branches, down along the stream, and back the way they had come.

Silence came slowly in the fading sounds of voices, pipes
and drums and stamping of feet. The acolytes had left their lamps behind, a
half-circle of them outside the house, and one glimmering within. Agni stood
wrapped in flowers, feeling hot and rather tired.

He gathered his wits about him and mustered strength to step
over the lamp in front of him and explore the house. Tilia caught him with his
foot in midair.

“No,” she said. “Not that way.”

He lowered his foot. He had a brief, rebellious thought of
entering the circle regardless, but he had sworn to undergo the rite in its
proper form.

Tilia took his hand. “Now,” she said. “Jump.”

Agni felt a perfect fool, but jump he did, hand in hand with
her, as high and far as they both could go. Right over the lamp, from darkness
into light, from the great world to the shelter of the house. They came down
lightly, still handlinked, turning face to face in the ring of light.

Tilia was smiling. At last. And at him, too, with no
constraint that he could perceive. She looked him up and down with every
appearance of pleasure. “Such a beautiful man,” she said.

Agni flushed. “And you,” he managed to say. “So beautiful.”

“Yes,” she said. There was no modesty in her. She tugged him
with her into the fragrant dimness of the hut. It was all bark-brown and leafy
green within. The bed was of sweet grasses under a woven coverlet. Jars along
the wall yielded wine and mead, fruits cured in honey, cheeses, dried fish and
cured meat.

Agni looked round from tasting the last. “How long are we
supposed to stay here?”

Tilia shrugged. “Until it’s time to leave,” she said.

“What, days? Months? Years?”

“As long as we need,” she said.

These people were like that. Vague; frustrating.

Agni did not mean to be frustrated on this of all nights. He
shrugged as she had, and tried to mimic her calm. “Well then,” he said. Which
was all he could think of to say.

“Indeed,” said Tilia.

He drew a breath, let it go. Did she do the same? He stepped
toward her, just as she moved toward him. They nearly collided: a snort of
laughter, quickly suppressed. Her eyes were dancing with it.

She was nothing like Rudira, not in any slightest respect.
Even the heat of her was different. Cleaner, somehow. Lighter. She had washed
herself in a mingling of scents, herb-green, flower-sweet.

Her skin was as soft as a child’s. He ran his finger down
the line of her cheek, her shoulder, her breast.

Her nipples were large and dark, like her eyes. He traced
the spiral of the dance about them. She shivered a little with pleasure, and
caught his hands when they would have withdrawn. Her back arched. Her breasts
flowed over his palms, soft and yet surprisingly firm.

All the while he was lost in her and she should have been
lost in the things that he did to her, she was finding and loosing the
fastenings of his clothing, freeing him from it, all of it. The air was soft on
his skin.

Her hands were light, tickling and teasing. They had no need
to stroke his shaft erect. It was raised long since, straight as a spear.

She circled it with her fingers. He quivered. Her grip
tightened: soft, soft, but with a promise of strength.

He stilled. Her fingers loosened. She smiled.

Trapped. And yet so was she, her breasts in his hands, her
body arching toward his. She kissed him deep, just till he strained for breath,
then outlined his body in kisses. All of it, crown to ankle, down the heart side
and up the other, and back round to his lips again. Each kiss was like the lick
of a flame.

He had never felt as he felt now: as if his bones would flare
to ash, and all for the touch of a woman’s lips. Rudira had heated him to
burning. Beside this, she had been ice and dry bones.

Tilia drew back a little, searching his face. Not as she had
when the Mother commanded her, but as if this time she did it for herself. To
see what he was. To understand him, if she could. If any of her kind could
understand one of his.

She seemed more sure than he that she could do it. She
traced his face with her fingers, marking each line of it. She raked nails
lightly through his beard and played with his hair. Its straightness seemed to
fascinate her. She extricated it from its braid and coiled a strand of it around
her finger, and watched as it sprang free.

He slipped fingers through her mass of black curls. They
caught and tangled, thick as tendrils of vine in a wood or roots of grass on
the steppe. Yet they were softer by far, like nothing that he knew a name for.
Sleep, maybe. Curls of mist in the morning. The first tender grass of spring,
winding round his fingers.

He learned to know her fingerbreadth by fingerbreadth, from
crown to soles. She had a mole on her shoulder, and a whorl of dark down in the
small of her back. The down of her legs and arms was heavier, but still soft;
not at all like the black mat of her sex, with its crisp curls concealing the
tender pink lips. The scent and taste of her were subtly different than the
women he had known, even those of this country: salt-sweet as they all were,
but more sweet than salt.

She had no shyness, nothing that one would call modesty.
Where his touch gave her pleasure, she arched into it, purring in her throat.
He, who had learned silence in his nights with Rudira, caught himself gasping
audibly as without warning she rolled him onto his back and mounted him.

He matched her rhythm, finding it strong and deep, slower
than he was used to, like a surge of water in a lake. He rode it like water,
slow undulant motion, almost like a man in a dream. But dreams were never as
vivid as this, even the dreams from which one woke having spent one’s seed,
pouring it out on Earth Mother’s belly.

One could burn swiftly, as he had with Rudira; flare like a
torch and cool almost at once thereafter. Or one could burn slowly, fire that
grew stronger as it burned, nor consumed the flesh about it. She brought him to
a shout of triumph and a slow descent thereafter, heartbeat by heartbeat into a
quivering stillness.

She sat astride him still, though he had slipped from her,
slack as a man must ever be after he has spent his seed. Her face drifted above
him, past the deep swell of her breasts. She was smiling, a smile that made him
think of cream.

Some madness in him, some imp or demon, brought him awake
all at once. He seized her, spun her, sat astride her as a moment ago she had
sat astride him.

Her smile barely wavered, though her eyes were wide. He was
exhausted, drained dry, and yet he could not resist. He kissed those warm ripe
lips. Those cheeks. That broad brow beneath the peak of night-black hair. That
firm round throat, those shoulders, those breasts, that belly made for carrying
children. Sons. Strong sons for a king of men.

And, he thought in a kind of wonder, no one would come to
challenge him, no one threaten him with death or worse for daring to touch this
woman. She was his wife. His first wife, his royal woman, who would, the gods
willing, bear his heir.

She would do that. All her people cherished children deeply,
and made as many, as often as they could.

His joy darkened abruptly. How many children had she had?
How many men had she—and would she—

“Tell me this,” he said. “This Great Marriage. Will you
be—taking men after this?”

“Of course,” she said.

“That’s not our custom,” he said: taking pride in his
calmness, in his strength in not seizing her and shaking her and shouting at
her for saying that terrible thing. Of course—as if oaths and marriage meant
nothing at all.

From that thought he asked her, “Then what did we do? What
is the Great Marriage, if it’s not to keep one only for the other?”

“Me only for you,” she said with dismaying perception. “You
for whatever woman pleases you.”

“That’s the gods’ way,” he said. “A man loves many women,
sires many sons. A woman loves one man, bears his sons, submits to his will.”