Daughter of Lir (51 page)

If they had been even a fraction less perfect in their
obedience, Emry’s poor skill would have brought him to grief. These were wonders,
marvels of their kind. The chariot, he thought, was not too ill a thing,
either.

He brought it to a halt from a full gallop. The horses’
rumps tucked; they slid to a stop. He stared astonished at a crowd that he had
not even known was there, men of the tribes whooping and cheering.

Only one man’s praise mattered. Metos halted much more
sedately than Emry had. “Let me,” he said.

Emry was surprisingly reluctant to give up his chariot, but
this was Metos. He stepped down, surrendered the reins.

Metos drove like a wild boy. The horses, the chariot were
like parts of his body: swift feet, deft hands. It was pure beauty to watch
him.

A long sigh escaped them all when at last he finished. The
horses stood snorting, streaming sweat and foam, but their eyes were bright,
their necks arched and proud. They would happily have run another race, if this
man had asked it.

Metos tossed the reins to Emry. “It will do,” he said. “For
a first effort.”

“You think I’ll do it again?” Emry asked him.

“It’s not in your blood now?”

Emry shrugged uncomfortably. “I still have no gift for it.”

“A gift is very well,” Metos said. “Without will and heart,
it matters little.”

That was praise. Emry ducked his head under it. The dun
stallions tugged gently at the reins. Emry began to walk them out, lest they
stiffen.

“Good,” said Metos. “Care for them well. They belong to
you.”

Emry bowed. He could not quite keep the grin off his face;
but he thought he managed a little dignity.

Aera knew what Emry was doing—she could hardly escape it.
It was the talk of the gathering. She refused to watch him, or to approach him.
Part of it was pride, and part was fear that if he failed, and she saw him do
it, her heart would break.

On the day when he finished his chariot, she heard the roar,
the shouts and cheers that told her he had won his wager. But she did not go
out of her father’s tent, nor did she stop what she was doing, though moments
after she had done it, she did not remember what it was.

She was not waiting. Oh, no. But the cheering died down, and
the sun touched noon and began its descent, and nothing changed. He did not
come. No one came. She was alone, abandoned even by her sisters.

Well, she thought; he had done the thing for his own pride,
and because no one believed he could do it. She had nothing to do with it, even
as the prize he fought for.

She had no cause to be angry. She had laid the price on him
herself, by demanding her due as a woman of good family. If he chose not to
take what he had paid for, then that was his choice.

o0o

It was a long and lonely night. She heard the sounds of
feasting and laughter, dancing, music, gladness.

She lay in the dark, listening to the breathing of her
sisters. They slept the sleep of the blameless. She felt as if her skin were on
fire; but her heart in her breast was cold.

She would not go to him. Oh, no. Even if he had told her
that a woman could do that among his people. Even if he would be abed and not
dancing round the king’s fire. She was a woman of the People. She could not be
other than she was.

She buried her face in the worn furs of her bed. If she wet
them with tears, only she would know.

o0o

She woke abruptly from a heavy doze. It was still dark,
her sisters still sleeping, snoring softly.

A shadow bent over her. Her heart knew who it was, even as
she caught the clean warm scent of him, and felt his arms closing around her,
lifting her up. She was still a good part asleep: she nestled against that
broad breast, wrapped in nothing but a blanket, content as a child with its
mother.

He carried her out into starlight. It was late, not far from
dawn. He trod softly through the sleeping camp.

She drowsed herself, altogether without apprehension. Part
of her tried to declare that this was mad; that he could be carrying her off to
a terrible fate. But this was Emry. She trusted him.

Past the king’s tent, notable for its height and the bull’s
head and hide raised on spears in front of it, he paused. There was a new tent
there, of respectable but not remarkable size.

A cluster of lamps burned within. Everything was in it that
she had asked for, all the comforts, the necessities—all but the servants; but
she was not going to insist on those tonight.

Emry set her down. The blanket slipped. She clutched it, but
it had a will of its own. It pooled about her feet.

He, bless him, kept his eyes on his own feet. She fought the
urge to cover herself with her hands, turning slowly, taking it in.

This was a lord’s tent. The bed was thickly covered with
woven fabrics, riches from the traders’ store. There was a carved chest and a
nest of copper pots, and a splendid golden platter set to catch the lamps’
light. Birds flew on it in graceful spirals, paying homage to the Goddess of
the westerners.

“If you would prefer,” he said as diffidently as she had
ever heard him, “you can be brought here in daylight, in my chariot, so that
the world knows—”

“Gods forbid,” she said.

“Or,” he said, “you needn’t come at all. It was presumptuous
of me to carry you off. I only wanted to talk to you, and there seemed no other
way to do it.”

“It was presumptuous,” she agreed. Her lips kept wanting to
twitch. He was blushing and shuffling his feet, awkward as a boy.

“I do mean what I say,” he said. “This is yours to choose.
You can simply go. I did this for you, but not to buy you. Not to make you my
slave.”

“Then why did you do it?”

“Because you asked it of me. Because . . .
when I think of you, my heart sings.”

“They’re making songs of you,” she said. “Did you know
that?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t do it for them.”

“It gives you standing,” she said. “Respect. Position in the
tribe. They love audacity. A man who ventures the impossible—if he goes far
enough and lasts long enough, they call him a god.”

“That is not why I did it.” He spoke through gritted teeth.
“What is it? You want me to drive you off, because a woman doesn’t refuse a man
here? You have no need for that. Just go. I won’t pursue you. I won’t even keep
this tent, if you want it. It belongs to you—it’s your dowry. This is all
yours, to accept or cast away.”

“If I told you to go, would you go?”

“I would go,” he said.

“And not come back?”

“If that was your wish.”

She pondered that, standing in the lamplight, just close
enough to him to touch. She stretched out a hand and laid it over his heart. It
was beating hard, though his face wore no expression.

Such a strange man, she thought. To do so much to win her,
and give it all to her, freely—truly he was a marvel.

She moved closer, till her body was almost against his body.
She was naked, as she had never been in front of a man. And yet she did not
feel immodest at all. His eyes clothed her in beauty.

He made no move to seize her. It was she who stripped him of
his tunic and loosed the lacing of his leggings. Then they were equals.

She closed the hand’s breadth of distance between them.
“Promise me something,” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

He sounded dazed. Had he not dared after all to believe that
he had won? Foolish child. There had never been a battle, not in truth. Not in
her heart.

“Promise,” she said, “that you will never betray me. Even if
we become enemies. Even if one of us must kill the other.”

“I will never betray you,” he said steadily. “Nor shall I
ever take your life.”

“I will kill you,” she said, “if I must. If you betray me, I
will do worse than that.”

He bent his head. She drew it down a little further and
kissed him. “I belong to you now,” she said, “and you to me. You’ve won me full
and fairly. Pray your Goddess that you don’t regret the bargain.”

“That I shall never do,” he said. All his heart was in it,
and his clean bright spirit.

“Nor I,” she said after a pause. “Whatever comes of this, I’ll
never regret that I chose it.”

Minas had never passed a winter in such comfort as that
first winter he spent in Lir. These houses of wood and stone were wonderfully
warm, and food was plentiful, kept in storehouses that silenced him in awe when
first he saw them. No one here grew thin, and few sickened and died. Truly this
country was blessed of the gods.

Every night he dreamed of the steppe. His days were
occupied, and richly, with the makers and smiths who had gathered in the king’s
house. When cold and snow permitted, he could ride out with the chariots, both
those that had been brought from the east and those that had been made here,
and he could oversee the training of the horses. But these tamed fields were
nothing like the sea of grass. The sky was walled in stone or wood, or hemmed
in with trees. Sometimes he thought he would die for want of air, waste away
like a wolf in a cage.

In Rhian’s arms he found what rest he could. She was even
less a part of this place than he was. Her office was a strange one, high and
holy but rather formless. She served the mare wherever the mare chose to be,
which this winter was in Lir. Herdsmen had come from afar, and silent weathered
women, traveling one by one to impart to the mare’s servant those rites and duties
which she should know.

She was welcome in the king’s council and, Minas gathered,
should have been welcome among the priestesses, but they had declared
themselves her enemies from the day of her birth. Although she was a priestess,
she could not be one here, not without offending the temple. She could learn,
but not practice what she had learned.

Most of her days she spent among the horses. She took to
herself the choosing and training of the chariot-teams; and that, by none too
subtle design, took her out and about a great deal. There were grasslands to
the south, steppe less wild than that from which he had come, where great herds
ran, and descendants of the horsemen whose forefathers had conquered, and been
conquered by, the priestesses of the Goddess.

She was gone for a whole month in the spring, performing the
mare’s rite in the south, and gathering young horses to be trained to chariots.
Minas should have barely noticed her absence: once winter’s grip broke, the
wagons began to come in, rolling down from the forests in the west and north.
They carried a wealth of wood, such as Metos would have killed to get; and the
makings of bronze for the smiths, and bales of tanned hides. Men and women
came, too, to learn the making: a small army of them.

And yet however long he might stretch his labor, he had to
sleep. His dreams were of the steppe, as always, but now Rhian was in them,
riding with him, hunting, dancing, lying bare under the stars.

She came back just before the festival they called high
summer. He had been hearing of that in the city, how wild it was, how wanton.
Women chose new lovers then, and lay with them in the furrows, blessing the
land with fruitfulness and gaining its blessing in return. It was even wilder,
people assured him, than the rites of spring; and those had driven him into
hiding, shocked out of all reason.

Rhian had brought a herd for the training, and a company of
herdsmen. Those were mostly men, and all besotted with her. Minas had yet to
see a man who was not.

But he had not, before this, seen her ride quite so close as
she rode with one of the herdsmen—knee to knee and touching hands. When the man
looked at her, Minas saw a thing he could not mistake. Rhian had not slept
alone while she traveled among the herds.

He was a slave. He was not allowed to care what a free woman
did, or with whom she did it.

He fixed himself grimly on his work. There was a great deal
of it, and the workers were sorely distracted by the coming of the festival. He
dismissed them well before sundown, and ordered them not to come back before
the festival was ended. They danced and sang at that, and proclaimed him the
best of men.

He stayed after they had gone. He had learned to cast
bronze: a wonder, a marvel, an art like no other. He was making fastenings for
a harness, small work and delicate, and easily ruined. It was not perhaps the
best task for his state of mind, but it kept him occupied.

When the light dimmed, he closed up the forge. He was
careful about it, as he had been with the casting. Metos had taught him that
care, that patience, even when he wanted to burst out in a temper and fling it
all into the fire.

At the coming of dark, a clear call rang from the summit of
the temple. That was the summons, the call to festival.

Minas retreated to the stable. The king’s house would be
full of revelry, and he was in no mood for it. The horses had been fed; their
caretakers were gone, he could well imagine where. They had left behind a
little dry bread and a jar of thin sour barley-beer. He dipped the bread in the
beer, and it quieted his hunger well enough. His stomach yearned toward the
feast in the king’s house; but he stayed where he was, alone among the horses.

He made a bed of straw near the grey stallion. The sound of
horses breathing, snorting, working their way through heaps of cut fodder,
filled him with a kind of peace.

Warm arms slipped about him. Soft breasts pressed against
his back. A gust of breath tickled his nape.

It was she. He would know her anywhere, with or without
eyes.

He bit his tongue on bitter words. Silence was best, he
thought as she drew him round. He buried his face in her hair, and let her take
him where there was no thought, nor any words. Only pleasure.

o0o

Rhian would not let Minas hide through this festival as he
had through the last. She was up before him, dragging him to the bath, waking
sleeping servants to attend them both. For the first time since he came to Lir,
Minas wore the garments and ornaments of a prince.