White Mare's Daughter (99 page)

Agni could not read Rudira’s expression. It might be relief;
it might be annoyance. Or it might be something else altogether. “I want to
belong to him,” she said, sliding a glance at Agni.

“Why? He doesn’t want you.” Catin crouched beside her.
“Really, you don’t need him. It’s a wide world, and he’s bound himself to such
a tiny corner of it.”

“But I want him,” Rudira said.

“Whatever for? Besides the obvious, of course. He’s pretty,
but I’ve seen prettier. His rod is lovely, neither too large nor too small, and
he’s even learned to please a woman with it; but the world is full of men who
know how to please a woman.”

“He’s a king,” Rudira said.

“What, that again? Silly. Here, get up. Come ride with me.”

“But I don’t—”

“You’re much too pale,” Catin said, “and much too thin. You
need the sun and the wind, and air that’s not been shut inside of a tent.”

“But—”

“Come,” said Catin. “I’ve a mind to ride to the world’s edge
and see what lies beyond it. Haven’t you ever wondered? Don’t you want to see?”

Rudira stared at her, pale eyes wide. They were all staring.
Catin took not the slightest notice. “I’m going,” she said.

“But why do you want—” Rudira began.

“Never ask why,” Catin said. “Just come.”

Rudira’s face twisted as if in pain. “I’m afraid,” she said.

“Ah, child,” said Catin with rough gentleness, “of course
you are. You don’t even know what you are, still less what to do about it.”

“What am I?”

“That, no one can tell you. You have to see for yourself.”

“You’re mad,” said Rudira.

Catin smiled. “Of course I am. Come to the world’s edge with
me.”

Rudira wavered visibly, on the verge of diving into hiding,
or worse, into Agni’s arms. But Catin held out her hand.

Rudira stared at it. It did not move. She clasped it, a
desperate leap, as if she had been drowning. Catin pulled her up, but gently, and
drew her into the light.

She stood blinking at it, tears streaming down her cheeks. After
an incredulous while she straightened. Her eyes cleared. She lifted her face,
turned it to the sky.

Suddenly she laughed. There was pain in it, and no little
terror. But it was honest laughter. Now it was she who led Catin, half running,
laughing in the sun.

oOo

Long after they were gone, Agni sat unmoving, and the
others with him. At last Patir said, “Only a god could be so incomprehensible.”

“Incalculable,” Agni said.

“What’s difficult about it?” said Taditi. “They’re both
exactly as mad as they need to be. That’s very sane, sometimes. Catin knows
that you can’t keep Rudira here. Rudira doesn’t know anything worth knowing.
She’s been set free of the world. She’ll not trouble you after this. You were
all the brightness she knew. Now she has the sun itself.”

“I don’t understand you, either,” said Agni.

And yet, in a way, he did. If he had lived all of his life
inside of a tent, and if his spirit yearned for the light, but did not know
either what it yearned for or why . . . he might have been as
Rudira was. He too might have reached for such light as he could find, and not
reckoned the cost.

The Mother of Three Birds, whom Agni had never learned not
to call Tilia, became a mother at last in the autumn of the year. It was
harvest time, the golden time, when summer lingered in the days, but the nights
were sharp with frost.

Sarama was out with the archers as she often was that
autumn, running the king’s messages from town to town, or reminding the
scattered tribes that they were to keep his laws. There were horsemen
everywhere that war had touched, healing what they had harmed, and mending what
they had broken. Not all of them were pleased to be so constrained; but Sarama’s
company of grim-faced women on fast horses, armed with bows and deadly of aim,
had proved to be the king’s best weapon against young tribesmen’s arrogance.

Girls and women were coming out of the towns and cities,
begging to learn to ride and shoot. Sarama had a handful of them with her that
day as she rode back to Three Birds from a long month’s riding about. They were
mounted awkwardly on remounts, and not all were as glad to be riding as they
had thought to be; it was not a comfortable thing to learn, in the beginning.

But she had some hope of these. The fires of war had swept
over them and tempered them like gold in the forge.

She was steppe-born, bred to wander lifelong and never
settle in any one place. But as every tribe had its camps to which it returned
season after season, she had Three Birds. She was not always sorry to leave it,
particularly since the walls had begun to go up about it, warding it against
war thereafter, but she was never aught but glad to come back. Her friends were
there, her kin, her daughter—and Danu, who was her heart’s center.

She came from the east this time, all the way from
Larchwood, where Tillu had made himself lord and guardian of the eastward
borders. He had done well for himself, king’s friend that he was, and husband
to the king’s sisters. Through his kin in the wood he knew all that passed
there, and much that passed on the steppe beyond.

All was quiet, the flood of tribes stilled. They would have
time, and perhaps much of it, before war came back into this country.

Unless of course they wrought it themselves. But Sarama had
no expectation of that. Not this year, and not the next. Thereafter . . .
the Lady knew.

She was thinking of this as she topped the hill and looked
down on the city. The field between had almost healed. The grass upon it was
very green, and flowers grew on the mounds where the dead slept.

The pit of spears with its bridge was still there, and
Agni’s wall rising just beyond it. He was building in earth and stone. Already
it was breast-high to people standing behind it.

She could still see the city, its circles, its high peaked
roofs, and the temple rising above them all. And, riding up from the bridge, a
lone man on a dun horse, with a much smaller figure riding in front of him.

Her heart leaped. As if to match it, the Mare half-reared.
Sarama let her go, plunging down at a gallop.

A pealing cry rang out: Danu’s stallion fighting the bit,
till Danu surrendered as Sarama had, and set the stallion free to run.

They met on the field where the grass grew thick, swirling
about one another. Sarama was laughing, dizzy with wind and speed. Rani called
out to her: “Mama, Mama, Mama!”

They spun to a halt. Rani leaped into her mother’s arms.
Sarama held her tight, drinking in the sun-warmed child-scent, till she
wriggled and squawked in protest.

Reluctantly Sarama loosened her grip and let Rani slide down
astride the Mare’s neck. Rani clasped her about the middle and clung, babbling
happily: a headlong mingling of words and baby-talk.

Sarama met Danu’s gaze over the tangle of dark curls. She
was grinning, she realized, like a perfect fool.

And so was he. He was beautiful. He sat his stallion now
with easy grace, not quite as one who had ridden before he could walk, but
close enough. “You’ve been practicing,” she said.

He shrugged a little. “I have your honor to think of.”

“And your own pride?”

He shrugged again, a roll of wide shoulders. She would have
loved to stroke them, to trace their width in kisses.

Tonight. His glance knew what she was thinking: it warmed
till she came nigh to springing on him then and there, and never mind the baby
between.

But she was wise after all, rather wiser than she sometimes
liked to be. She kept to her place as he kept to his, and took note of his
expression as he recalled what had brought him out to greet her. “The Mother,”
he said. “It’s time.”

Sarama’s head emptied of everything, even Danu. “But—it’s
early.”

“Not so early,” he said, “and all’s well. But since you’ve
come, she would like—”

“Yes.” Sarama flung the word over her shoulder. The Mare was
already a dozen long strides closer to the city than she had been before.

The dun stallion was hard on her heels. Rani whooped with
glee. She loved a gallop, that one. No doubt of it: she was her mother’s child.

oOo

Tilia—the Mother—had gone into the birthing-room in the
morning. The child was coming, but not for a while yet.

Tilia looked tired and ruffled and no more distressed than
she should. Agni was much less composed. His beard looked red as fire against
his white cheeks. His eyes were wild.

“You look,” said Sarama, “like a spooked colt.”

He glowered at her. “What, are you laughing at me? I’ve
never even seen a baby born before.”

“You’ve foaled mares,” Sarama said. “It’s not so different.
It just takes a great deal longer.”

“Mares aren’t foaling my child.”

“Stop that,” Tilia said before Sarama could muster a retort.
“I need him and I want you, but if you’re going to squabble, you can do it
somewhere else.”

Agni looked down, sulky as a boy. Sarama felt no little bit
sullen herself. They were both excessively well rebuked.

Agni laughed first. That was a remarkable thing; unheard of.
But so was seeing the king of the horsemen in the birthing-room with the woman
who carried his child.

Sarama would have laid wagers that he would never do such a
thing. But for Tilia he had done it. Oh, he loved her indeed, so to overcome
the strictures of custom and apprehension and pure male pride.

oOo

Their daughter was born just before sunset, and their son
not long after, just on the threshold of the night. They were dark children,
but Sarama suspected in her bones that the son’s eyes would be amber when he
was older.

Agni looked on them as fathers had, perhaps, since the
morning of the world: half in awe and half in incredulity. He could not stop
looking at them, or touching them, or counting fingers and toes. “They’re
perfect,” he said, and more than once.

“Of course they are,” said Tilia. She was vastly and
luminously happy. To be barren for so long, and when at last she came to it, to
bear two—that was a great thing, and proof to any who might have doubted, that
she was fit to be Mother in Three Birds.

Her gladness blessed them all. Sarama drew back with Danu,
leaving them to each other: Agni in his wonder, Tilia in her deep and singing
joy.

Danu’s arm slipped about Sarama’s middle. He had learned,
and very well, to act as well as to be acted upon. He set a kiss in the hollow
of her neck and shoulder. “Shall we make ourselves another?” he murmured in her
ear.

She smiled sidelong. “Would you like to?”

“With all my heart.”

“And some of the rest of you, too.”

He laughed, soft and deep. But his mind had wandered
somewhat afield. “Would you have thought it? Those two, of all people that
could have been. She’s tamed the king of the horsemen.”

“And he has conquered the Mother of the cityfolk.” Sarama
laid her head on his shoulder as she had wanted to do since he came riding
toward her across the healing battlefield. “Are you conquered, beloved? Am I a
tamed thing?”

“Do you want to be?”

“I want . . .” She slipped a hand beneath his
coat, but only to let it rest there. People were coming, crowding to look on
the wonder and share the blessing: twin children born to the Mother in her
city, and to the king who had joined with her in the Great Marriage. They took no
notice of the two in the shadows, nor listened to the words that they murmured
to one another.

“I want to be blessed,” Sarama said. “To be yours as you are
mine. To go out as the Lady calls me, and to come back, and you are here.”

“Always,” he said. “I am always here.”

“Promise?”

“By my heart,” he said.

“You know,” she said, “what this is. What all of it is. We
were what we were. Horsemen. Gods’ children. Bound to the Lady of Horses. And
you were unlike anything we had ever known. We never understood you—maybe never
will. And yet, look at us. We’ve come together. We’ve made something new.”

“Something that knows the meaning of war.”

He did not often go as dark as that, or as quickly. She
brushed his lips with hers, to warm them, and wrapped her arms about him and
held him tight. “All things have a price. Would you go back altogether to what
you were?”

He shivered, but he shook his head. “No. Not without you.”

Sarama drew back until she could see his face. Shadow lay
half across it, but his eyes were clear. They saw farther than they wanted to
see, and deeper, too. “You’ve grown strong,” she said.

“No. I’ve grown hard.”

“Strong,” said Sarama. “You’ll never be a hard man. Not you.
Just as I’ll never be gentle, nor those two yonder be aught but proud. We
change, the world changes. But what’s in the heart of us, that holds fast.”

“Pray the Lady it be so,” Danu said, “for if it’s not, then
all this world of ours that was so beautiful—it will die. Nor will it ever be
reborn.”

“The Lady won’t die,” Sarama said. “Listen to her. Listen!
She’s older than the gods. When all of them are gone, she will remain. So too
her children. They’ll change; there’s no help for that. But they’ll never
vanish from the world.”

Danu’s eyes were as dark as ever. He was not comforted, not
wholly. He had seen too much for that; too much war, too much death.

So had they all. As Sarama moved to speak again, a baby’s
cry silenced her. One of the Mother’s children, the king’s children, had roused
and was proclaiming its presence in the world.

It was a strong cry, and swiftly doubled, more shout of
triumph than wail of anguish. The world was pain, it declared, and yet the
world was joy. Hunger; satiation. Sorrow and gladness.

She let their voices speak for her. Danu was a wise
creature, when he allowed himself to be. She watched the light come back into
his face.