Daughter of Lir (32 page)

She answered his question with a question. “What use do you
think I’ll make?”

His lip curled. “The same use I would make of a woman I had
captured.”

“That would be pleasant,” she granted him.

“But that’s not all of it, is there?” he demanded. “Even as
a bedmate, I’m hardly worth an exchange of prince for prince.”

“I have many brothers,” Rhian said, “and most are princes.
What makes you think we can’t spare one?”

He hunched and glowered. He looked like a half-fledged bird.
She wanted to comfort him, but she was the last person, just then, that he
would look to for such a thing.

“Etena I understand,” he said. “She’ll reckon herself well
rid of me. But you, I don’t understand at all.”

“I’m simpler than you think,” she said. “Consider what you
have that we do not. What you know, that we can use.”

He was fuddled and furious, but he was far from dull-witted.
“Chariots,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

“You should kill me now,” he said, “and have done with it.”

“We won a dozen chariots,” said Rhian, “and the horses to
pull them. They’ll teach us much. But you will teach it faster.”

“I will teach you nothing.”

“What if I offer you a trade?”

He glared under his brows. “What can you possibly offer that
would cause me to betray my people?”

“Bronze,” she said.

He snapped erect.

“Bronze for chariots,” she said. “Secret for secret.”

“I am not a merchant!” he snapped.

“No,” she said. “You are not. You are my slave, whom I
bought with my brother’s life.”

He shrank into himself. Something about his expression
frightened her—not for her safety but for his.

When she was small, one of the village boys had captured a
she-wolf in the wood. He had kept her in a kennel, and plied her with such
dainties as a wolf might love to eat, and done his best to tame her. She had
spurned him. She had curled into a knot of ragged fur and shut out the world.
In a few days she was dead.

Minas looked as the wolf had. As if captivity were beyond
unbearable. As if, unless he were free, he would die.

She knelt beside him. His hair was matted and filthy, its
copper darkened to ruddy brown. The bell that she had braided into it, plaiting
it tight, was still there. It chimed softly as she touched it.

A shudder racked him.

“We will give you the secret of the bronze,” she said. “All
of it, in the forges of Lir. Only teach us to build chariots, and to tame
horses to draw them.”

“So that you can fight against my People,” he said.

“So that we can fight against the tribe led by Etena and the
king who is under her spell. Etena, who sold you to us, because killing you
would have been too merciful.”

“Etena doesn’t know,” he murmured. “She doesn’t see. Bronze—she
doesn’t understand.”

“We will give you bronze,” she said.

“Indeed? And then let me go?”

“After you have taught us to build chariots,” she said, “and
train horses, we’ll reward you. Have you thought, prince of the Windriders,
that you might find allies against your enemy? That you might be able to oppose
her, even defeat her?”

“What, with an army of westerners? Against my own People?”

“Your own People will destroy you if you go back now. Your
enemy will see to it.”

“Not everyone follows her,” he said.

“No one can follow you, if you are dead.”

He scowled. She breathed out slowly. He was not ready to
hear what she had said, not truly. But the death was gone from his eyes. He was
secure in the world again. He wanted to live.

She left him to his thoughts, with the mare to guard him.
When the evening's bread was baked and the wild goose that she had shot on the
day’s ride was cooked, he ate his share of both.

He was still scowling. He was very young, she thought. However
bloody his hands might be, however many wars he had fought and tribes he had
conquered, he was a sheltered creature. Intrigue was alien to him.

No doubt his father had been the same, and so Etena had
snared him. Minas had been kept safe. Aera’s doing, she was sure, and Aera’s
fault, too, for not teaching him to be subtle. He had had no defenses, in the
end. Etena’s plotting had trapped him with effortless ease.

In Lir he would learn how princes ruled in cities. If he had
the will. If he set himself to the task.

She had been simple, too, thinking only that if she stole
him, he would do what she wanted of him. She had taken no thought for what it
would mean—to him, to his tribe, to Lir.

But the Goddess had known. This was the Goddess’ doing, all
of this.

The wall of fire, the charred ruin of the steppe, would hold
back the tribe until her people were ready. Then they would come, that was
inevitable. And when they did—what might Lir not do, with the son of their king
within the city, and the tribe divided against its rulers?

Rhian was simple enough, too, when all was considered. Such
thoughts made her head ache. She would leave them to the Goddess, and to
Mothers and priestesses. It only mattered, for now, that she bring this man
safe to Lir.

In the end Minas was no better than Etena. Her lust was
for gold and a man’s body. His was for bronze—and a woman’s body.

It hurt his head to think as Rhian wanted him to think. To
see the world as she saw it; to understand how he could use this terrible thing
to break Etena’s power.

The eastern wall of the world was fire. It burned for day
upon day, but the wind blew steady from the west and south, driving it away
from them. Squalls of rain lashed them, wetting down the summer-seared grass.

On the third day Rhian let him ride unbound. That night,
when she was fast asleep, he slipped away from the bit of fire toward the
shadow that was the stallion.

A shape of moonlight rose in front of him, set shoulder
against him and threw him down. For the second time he lay on the ground and
looked up into the mare’s calm dark eye, and knew that if he resisted her, he
would die.

Time was when he would have sought that. But the dream of
bronze had weakened him. He retreated in as good order as he could, went back
to the blanket by the fire, wrapped himself in it and glared at the stars.

He, lord and warrior of the People, man grown, taker of many
skulls, maker of chariots, tamer of horses, king’s heir, lay captive to a lone
woman and a white mare. He might have been a newborn child for all the power he
had to oppose them.

He could gnaw his liver till there was nothing left of it.
He could seethe with anger till his belly was an aching knot. But as he lay there,
with naught but her blanket to cover him, and no possession but the bronze bell
knotted in his hair, he made a choice. He would not accept this. But he would
endure it.

He was up in the dawn before she was. When he left his
blanket this time, the mare raised her head but did not stop him. He went down
to the stream by which they had camped, with a handful of ash from the fire
mixed with the last of the fat from the goose that she had shot a day or two
before. That, and certain herbs from the streambank, scoured the dirt and the
stink of smoke from his body and his hair. He even shaved his face with her
bronze dagger, which he had slipped from its sheath beside her while she slept.

He came back to the fire in the first of the sunlight, no
happier than he had been before, but notably cleaner and better kempt. Rhian
was up and tending the fire. She carefully said nothing, but as he approached,
she tossed him a bundle of something.

He shook it out. It was a pair of leather breeches. They
were wide in the hips and snug in the waist and a good foot too short, but they
covered the parts of him that mattered. He decided not to mind that they
belonged to a woman. He pulled them on and laced them tight, and squatted to
eat the morning’s bread and a handful of tubers baked in the coals. “Good,” he
said as he licked his fingers.

She raised a brow but refrained from comment.

At least, he thought, he was slave to a woman who knew the
uses of silence. That silence deepened considerably when he returned her dagger
to its sheath and sat to work the tangles out of his drying hair.

She made no move to help him. Nor did she hurry him onto the
stallion’s back. She let him finish on his own, while she bathed herself, then
basked naked in the sun.

He refused to stare at her. He worked out the mats and
tangles, grimly, and freed the bronze bell. For an instant he considered
flinging it in her face. But when his fingers moved, they plaited it into his
hair again. Its soft chiming had become part of his world. It reminded him of
what this ride was for, and why he suffered it.

It was midmorning before they mounted, but Rhian seemed in
no hurry even then. She sent the mare out at a walk, riding easily. She was
half-naked as she mostly preferred to be. His eyes rested as usual on her back,
on the heavy black plait that divided it, and the swell of her hips in her
ragged breeches.

The core of his anger cast him into a daydream of riding up
beside her, flinging her off the mare’s back, and taking her whether she would
or no. But he had never raped a woman even in battle, and he did not honestly
want to begin now. When he took her again, she would be willing—she would be
begging him. And he would refuse her more than once before he gave in to her
pleading.

That was a pleasant dream to indulge in while he rode
through the tall grass. He became aware, somewhere in the middle of it, that a
wolf was running beside him. The stallion seemed not to see it: no lifting of
the head, no startled snort. And yet it was very real to his eyes, very solid,
loping at his heel. “Brother wolf,” he said.

“Brother stallion,” said the wolf. “You’re a long way from
the People.”

“Are they safe?” Minas demanded. “Did they escape the fire?”

The wolf shrugged with its whole body, ending in a fillip of
the tail. “That won’t matter to you now, will it? You belong to this woman from
the west.”

“I am still clanborn and blood kin to the People,” Minas
said tightly.

“Well then,” said the wolf, “they were never in danger. The
wall of fire has stayed west of them. They’ll not be taking the war farther
westward this season, but they’ll live to conquer the world.”

“Is that the gods’ word?”

“You think they talk to me?” said the wolf.

“I think you spy on their councils,” Minas said.

“As you spy on ours?”

Minas bared teeth at him. “We all do what we must. Does this
visitation mean that I’ve not been abandoned, now I’m defeated? That my lessons
will continue?”

“We can’t cross the river,” the wolf said. “When you go
there, you go out of our sight and our power. There will be no gods to defend
you, and no shamans to watch over you. Only the Goddess who rules the west.”

“She already rules me,” Minas muttered.

The wolf howled with laughter. “O wisdom! Have a care,
prince of slaves, or you’ll be a shaman yet.”

“Gods forbid,” said Minas.

o0o

Minas had lost count of the days when they came upon a
circle of chariots and a herd of horses that Minas knew very well indeed. Both
were in better state than he would have expected, with thieves who knew so
little of either.

The thieves themselves were in comfort, having shot a pair
of antelope and set them to roasting over a fire. The horses were tended, tents
pitched. The men were mending garments, plaiting one another’s hair, playing a
game with a set of marked bones. One, seated cross-legged near the fire and
intermittently turning the spit, was doing something with a bit of harness.

They greeted Rhian with a great whoop of welcome, leaping up
all together, dancing, spinning, singing a wild whirling song. Minas gaped at
them. The People were not restrained in welcoming their great ones back to the
tribe after a raid, but this put them to shame.

He was swept up in their exuberance, borne off the back of
the grey stallion, carried to the fire and set on his feet beside a laughing,
blushing Rhian. “Alive!” they sang. “You came back alive!”

“Of course I did,” she said. “Both of us.”

That quelled them for a long moment, as they stared at him.
It was as if they had never seen him before.

Maybe they had not seen a slave in borrowed breeches before.
He stared back steadily, till some of them looked down as if abashed, and the
rest shrugged and went back to their celebration.

He did not know if it was a victory. He decided not to call
it a defeat. There was meat, there was kumiss. There was a tent for the
newcomers—only one, but it seemed they all expected him to share it with Rhian.

He had no intention of doing such a thing, but he kept quiet
while they ate and sang and told stories. Mostly they spoke in their own
language. He slipped into a doze, sitting and then lying curled in a knot by
the fire.

He spent the night so. They were up much earlier than he
would have expected, after the night they had indulged in. They broke camp,
rounded up the horses, harnessed the chariots. They were no more clumsy at that
than boys of the People would have been.

One of the wheels had broken—he could see where it had been
mended. There was a pin of bronze in it, and bindings of leather stretched
tight. It was oddly but cleverly done.

In spite of himself he walked among the chariots. He had
meant to stand back, to refuse to give them help they had not asked for, but
there was a tangle in a harness here, and a bit fitted upside down there, and
an axle-pin that was ready to slip loose. As he finished securing that, he
found himself face to face with one of the dark bearded men. This one he
thought he recognized: the big bear of a man who had always seemed to be
hanging about Metos’ circle.