Daughter of Lir (44 page)

“Then pray she may protect you,” the shaman said.

Dias shot a stag in the snow, and Emry a doe. There was
meat enough there to feed the young men’s tent, and some of their less
fortunate kin, too; and hides and bone and sinew that could be turned to good
use.

The sun came out as they rode back to the camp on its
hilltop. They could see the smoke of the campfires from out on the plain. As
they rode up the steep hill, men and boys on horseback came whooping down. It
was a grand welcome, and a royal procession.

Dias seemed disconcerted, but he let them sweep him up and
over the rim and into the broad circle of tents. Emry, following like a good
servant, saw to it that no one came close enough to be a threat.

The prince’s warband, which had been Minas’ and now seemed
to have elected to belong to Dias, came at the gallop from the far side of the
camp, howling like exuberant wolves. They plucked Dias from his first escort,
relieved his horse of its burden of the stag, and carried him off to the place
where the charioteers trained their horses and had their wild rattling races.

The chariots were put away today, covered and protected
against the melting snow. The young men had been playing a game on horseback, a
mad trampling melee with a very dead goat as either prize or victim. Some of
them went off with the stag; the rest pulled Dias into their game.

Emry was no part of that. He still had the doe, gutted and
drained, slung in front of him on the bay gelding’s back. Dias was surrounded
by men who, Emry had reason to believe, were devotedly loyal. Emry elected to
leave him there, and to withdraw a little distance, toward the circle of the
makers’ tents.

Aera was still living in her father’s tent. He found her in
front of it, grinding the seeds of the wild grain into the rough flour of these
people. Two women were with her, both somewhat younger, and both very like her:
slender and tall, ruddy-haired, but the eyes of both were more grey than green.

None of them was veiled in the wintry sunlight. That surprised
him. The two he did not know—her sisters?—turned their faces away at his
coming, but Aera seemed not to care how proper or improper she was. She looked
full into his face. The sun was bright but certainly not blinding, and yet she
seemed barely to see through the light in her eyes.

Emry laid the doe in front of her. “For the maker,” he said.

She blinked, and seemed to focus. Her brows drew together.
“For my father? Not for me?”

“I think,” said Emry, “that it might be improper for me to
give you a gift.”

“It’s improper for you to approach me at all,” Aera said.

“Even if I meant to approach your father?”

“Did you?”

“Well,” he admitted, “no. The gift is still for him. Dias
shot a stag for the young men’s tent. This is for the maker of chariots. And
for his daughters.”

“Ah,” she said. “All three of us.” Her sisters did not
believe that any more than she did: they were all dubious alike.

“Lady,” said Emry, “you may do with the gift as you will. I
wish you well; I wish you good day.”

He had startled them, he hoped as he turned and strode away,
but it was more likely that the sisters were laughing at him. It was a long
while since he had felt like a raw boy, but just now, he was close to it.

He shrugged off his doubts and fears. Dias was still at play
in the field. Emry stood in the crowd of watchers and tried to understand the
game. It seemed to partake of a great deal of galloping and shouting, and no
little bruises and bloodshed. The purpose, as far as he could tell, was to gain
possession of the goat’s carcass, but then it seemed that one was supposed to
go somewhere with it—and the rest of the players did their roaring best to stop
it.

It was entertaining, if incomprehensible. He could not tell
whether Dias had won, but everyone seemed delighted with the outcome. They
hauled off the wounded, returned the horses to the herds, and went in a noisy
crowd to find food and drink and the warmth of a campfire.

Emry was cold, his feet were wet, and he was hungry. He was
more than glad of food and fire. One of the boys brought him heated kumiss. The
stuff was even more vile hot than cold, but it was warm. Warmth was welcome,
just then.

They were not treating him like a slave. Nor was anyone
looking askance at him for taking a place near the fire, beside Dias, and being
given a share of the prince’s portion.

“The prince’s dog,” Aias said. He was one of the warband, a
huge man by any reckoning: he towered over Emry, who was not small. For all his
size, he was a gentle creature, and he was patient with Emry’s attempts to
learn his language.

“A prince may have a dog,” he said. “That is, a man who
lives in his shadow, serves him, protects him, does his bidding. There were
many who called Dias the dog of the one who is dead. Now Dias has his own dog.
It’s a comfortable office, outlander. Whatever he has, you share.”

“If he has enemies, they’re my enemies?”

“Of course,” Aias said. “They’ll threaten you as they
threaten him. And if he dies, you die with him.”

“Dias didn’t die with his brother.”

Aias grunted. “Clever, aren’t you? Dias is a prince. The
king will name him heir, come solstice.”

“It’s different for a prince,” Emry said.

“Yes,” said Aias. “Here, will you have more kumiss?”

“No more,” Emry said. It was a cry for mercy.

Aias laughed at him but let him be. Some of the young men,
indefatigable, had begun to dance around the fire. Someone had a drum and
someone a pipe, and someone else began to sing. The music was simple but there
was a strong rhythm to it, the rhythm of the blood.

Emry would have thought himself too weary and too homesick
for any gaiety, but this music set deep in his bones. He rose and slipped in
among the line of dancers. They made space for him. Dias was on one side, Aias
on the other. Emry fit well between. They linked arms as the music quickened.
It still matched the beating of Emry’s heart, swifter, swifter, swifter, around
in a dizzy whirl until the stars spun away.

o0o

Aera saw him dancing with the young men as the icy dark
came down. She should have been safe and warm in her father’s tent, sitting in
companionable silence with her sisters. Instead she was out here in the
trampled snow, wrapped in a mantle that her son had given her, watching the
outland slave conduct himself like a warrior of the People.

She should hate him for being alive when Minas was dead; for
being a slave but clearly suffering no inconvenience from that condition. She
should loathe his broad-cheeked foreign face, his thick body, his pelt of black
hair. But she could only think that he was beautiful, like a young bull; and
that—oh, gods—she wanted him.

The king had not taken her to his bed in time out of mind.
She had told herself that that was a good thing; that she was well rid of his
weight on her, his rod thrusting in her, the rank man-smell of him as he took
what he wanted. After Minas, he gave her no more children, not even daughters
to be set out for the wolves. Now she was old enough not to want that burden,
even if she was still able to carry it.

Yet when she looked at this boy who was no older than her
son, she felt as if her loins would melt. He was as big as the king—broader,
maybe—and he did indeed smell of man. But it was not a rank smell. It was
sharply pleasant and somehow clean, as if he rubbed his skin with green herbs.
She wanted to bury her face in the hollow of his shoulder, and feel his arms
about her, and—

Her wits were shattered with grief. That was why she did
this. It was permitted that she leave her husband for a time of mourning, that
she return to her father. But that she should cast eyes on a man to whom she
was not given by law and custom, that was a terrible dishonor.

It was very difficult to care, as she stood in the dark and
the cold, and neither of them any bleaker than her heart. Her son was dead and
burned in fire. Was it so horrible a thing for her to want a little warmth for
herself?

He was a warm man. He had been raised to defer to women, and
yet he was not weakened by it. Certainly he could ride and dance and hunt as
well as the common run of tribesmen. He could sing, too, in a voice like dark
honey, while the drum beat slow and the pipe sang sweet beneath.

Her wiser self knew that even to stand here was betrayal of
the king her husband. However dead his spirit might be, his body but a shell
for Etena’s will, he was still her king and her rightful lord.

She cared remarkably little for that, just then. Her son was
dead. Her husband was worse than dead. The People were scattered across the
steppe, driven back by fire from the path they had been following for years out
of count. Was it so terrible or so ill an omen that her heart yearned for a
pair of strong arms and a sweet smile?

She turned her back on him and clasped her arms tight about
herself, shivering with cold that ran deeper than that of snow underfoot and
ice in the air. As troubled as her world had been before the traders came to
the People, it had at least been whole. Now it was shattered. She did not know
that it would ever be mended again.

Winter set in swift and hard. After that first early
storm, the sun came back for a little while, but then the storms rolled in, one
after another, with blasts of bitter wind and unrelenting snow.

Emry had always dreaded winter; it could be terribly dull,
shut in the city day after day, with nothing to do but tell tales, polish
weapons, and vie to be chosen by the strongest of the women. Tedium could be a
terrible curse, unless one found an occupation to while the time. Emry had
learned the whole of the Great Song of Lir one winter, that told the tales of
all the Mothers since the dawn time.

And yet, as tedious as winter was, he had always been warm,
and his belly had always been full. Even in a lean year, the dwellers in the
king’s house were well enough fed.

Winter on the steppe was hard. There was kumiss and dried
meat laid away, but not a great deal of either. The cattle and goats and sheep
grew thin, and their milk dried up; nor were there as many as there should have
been, for they had lost a great number in the flight from the fire. If they
slaughtered the flocks and herds to eat, they would have no young in the
spring, no milk, no cheese. As good as the hunting had been when they came to
this camp, as the storms closed in, it grew harder to track and find the game;
and the game when they found it had barely enough flesh on its bones to make a
mouthful.

Everyone was hungry, to greater or lesser degree, and cold—for
tents could not keep out the wind as walls of wood or stone could do. The only
warmth in them was that of bodies crowded together. There could be no hearth inside
a tent, and these people had no braziers, no ovens or firepots; the best they
knew was a stone heated in the campfire and wrapped in a bit of hide and laid
in the sleeping-furs. There were stories and songs enough, and weapons tended
and harness mended, and the chariotmakers kept on with their craft; but mostly
people huddled together and struggled to stay warm.

At the heart of this black season came the feast of the
solstice. With the priests and shamans all driven out of the tribe, there was
no one to declare the day on which the shortening of nights ended and the first
faint glimmer of a longer day began. The king, or Etena speaking through him,
made the decree; and whether or not it was the day itself, the tribe was glad
of its coming, and the three days of festival that went with it.

The king had not been seen in long enough that people had
begun to whisper that he was dead. But he came out of his tent for the
festival: pale, blinking in the wan sunlight, but patently alive. He performed
the sacrifice of the black ram, of the bull and the stallion. He laid their
bones in a cairn that his men built on the steppe, and set their skulls on
guard about it.

When the sacrifice was made and the gods propitiated, they
feasted. They slaughtered oxen and roasted them whole on great fires of dung
and dry grass and precious, hoarded wood. They brought out what they called
summer wine, which was made from honey; it was sweet and strong, like a taste
of summer in the heart of winter.

For those three days they were warm and well fed. The king
sat among them, silent and aloof, but they reckoned that kingly. On the day of
the sacrifice he did as they had all expected: he brought the head and hide of
the spotted bull to Dias who stood among the young men, and bestowed them on
him. So without a word was Dias named king’s heir of his people.

The women did not show their faces through any of this
festival. Boys and men of lesser clans tended the fires and prepared the feast,
then served it to the warriors and the elders, and to the king. To Emry it
seemed a strange unfinished thing, this world without faces or voices of women;
and most of all in a time of festival, when they should have shown themselves
in their greatest glory.

The solstice feast was a little like the feast of the dark
of the year in Lir. There were sacrifices there: the king offered a bull, the
Mother a heifer to the Goddess, and fires burned on every hilltop, warming the
chill of the winter night. They did other things to warm it, too; things that
he saw little of here. He heard of it; young men loved to boast. But he did not
think they had as much of it as they pretended.

Tonight the young men put on the heads and hides of beasts—Dias
in his bull’s hide foremost—and painted their faces with sacred signs, and wove
a skein of dancers through the camp. They were binding it together, sealing it
with the blessing of their gods.

Emry was pulled into the dance, caught up in it from the
young men’s fire, around in a winding track to the king’s tent. It spun him off
there, by accident it seemed, but it was no accident that brought him up
against the tentwall, and a woman standing by it. He recognized one of Etena’s
three servants, the tall one with the cold grey eyes.