The Shepherd Kings (95 page)

“You should be a king’s wife,” Agni said with sudden
fierceness, seizing her and holding her tight. She laughed, fearless. Her hips
rocked against him. He was reviving; but not enough to matter. Not yet. “When
I’m king, I’ll make my brother give you up.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “That would only be dishonor. I’d have
to go back to my father; and I could never be the king’s wife then. You’ll have
to kill your brother, my prince. Then I can be your wife.”

Agni’s stomach clenched round a small cold knot. But he
managed to laugh. “Oh, you are a fierce creature! Come, give me a kiss, and let
me go. I have to stand beside the king.”

“Oh yes,” she said sulkily. “Leave me for that smelly old
man. And make me lie here waiting for my so-noble husband to remember that I
exist.”

“I don’t see how he can forget,” Agni said. Her kiss nearly
broke his resolve; and her breasts rising as her back arched; and the hot moist
valley of her sex, coaxing him to lose himself in it.

But the king was waiting, and Agni had dallied more than
long enough. He slipped out the way he had come, biting back the smile that
kept breaking out in spite of him. If he came flushed and disheveled to the
king—well, and the dance was wild, and he had come straight from it. Had he
not?

He glanced back once, half expecting to see her peering
through the gap in the tent’s wall. But the gap had vanished. She nursed her
sulks in solitude.

oOo

If the king had grown impatient, he did not show it. Agni
presented himself in the circle of elders, bowed as was proper, and received
the gesture that he had looked for: bidding him come in, even to the center,
and wait on his father. His brothers were where Agni had known they would be,
relegated to places unhappily distant, except for the lighthearted few who had
gone off with the dancers.

Yama in particular glared poison at him. Yama was the
eldest, though begotten of a mere prince and not a ruling king, and fancied
himself greatly; but he was never the hunter or the fighter that Agni was, and
everyone but Yama knew it. No more did he know what was between Agni and the
youngest and fairest of his three wives. That was a secret that Agni meant to
keep—for Rudira’s sake if not for his own. She could die for what she did.

Agni liked to think that what they had was in some way
blessed, though the priests would have been appalled to hear it. Was he not the
king’s heir? Was she not the fairest woman in the tribes?

He would have been glad to be with her now, or with the
dancers who had reached the river and begun the circle back. He could not help
a longing glance or six toward the leaping, yelling skein of men and boys. They
would dance round and round and inabout, weaving together every strand of the
camp, till it was all bound up and blessed of the Bull; and then they would
drink the strong dizzying kumiss till the moon went down, and fall insensible
on the ground, and so bless that. Agni was not so enamored of the headache
afterward, but he did love the dance and the drinking, the laughter and
singing, and maybe, if one was lucky, a willing girl creeping out of a tent to
lie, as they said, with the Bull—meaning any young man full of drink and the
god.

Not, thought Agni, that he had failed to give the gods their
due. Maybe Rudira would quicken from this night—and maybe Yama would claim the
son that came of it, but Agni would know, and she would know, whose it truly
was.

He sighed and did his best not to look bored. The elders and
the chieftains had little to say. Their mouths were too full of the Bull, their
faces slick with grease. Their cups were kept well filled with kumiss that he
as servant was not permitted, and for the few who held to the oldest ways, the
Bull’s own blood caught fresh from the cutting of his throat.

“You! Boy!”

Agni started to attention. The old man glowered up at
him—his wonted expression, and no more eloquent of disapproval than it ever
was. “You, boy,” he said in a somewhat milder tone. “Go on, go and play, I’ll
share a cupbearer with old Muti here.”

Old Muti was, as far as anyone knew, some considerable
number of seasons younger than his king; but it was true, he did look older,
with his toothless grin and rheumy eyes. The man who waited on him had the same
face, albeit much younger—and already gaptoothed when he grinned at Agni.

Agni’s face flushed. Bored he might be, and desperate to be
gone, but his brothers were watching. They would call it dishonor, to be sent
away before the sun had touched the horizon. They would laugh among themselves
and reckon that Agni the arrogant had had his comeuppance, summoned from the
dance to be set above them all, but after a bare hour of such honor, sent off
to play like a weanling child.

But one did not argue with one’s father. No matter how one
longed to cry a protest, one bowed low and kissed one’s father’s hand and went
as one was bidden.

Agni put a swagger in his stride, lifted his chin and
straightened his shoulders and took his leave as a proper prince should.

And by the gods, he was glad—though he should be stiff with
shame. “Gods,” he said when he was well away, “how crashingly dull!”

No one was near to remind him that he did, after all, want
to be king when the old man gave himself up to the gods; then it would be his
place to sit on the royal horsehide and be fed the flesh of the Bull and
forswear the pleasures of the dance.

oOo

The dancers had passed the Red Stallion and the Black, and
wound now through the Spotted Bull. That was not so far to go, if Agni would
join the dance again.

The tightness of shame eased in his belly. He was smiling as
he strode in the dancers’ wake.

A girl of the Dun Mare leaned against a tentpole, her face
wantonly bare, and smiled at him. But his mind saw another face altogether. He
smiled because yes, this one was pretty, though never beautiful as Rudira was;
and went on toward the line of the dancers. He did not look back to see if she
shrugged and waited for the next handsome passerby, or if she stuck out her tongue
and cursed him.

Between the tents of the Brindled Hound and the outriders of
the Red Deer, a commotion brought Agni veering about. The dancers were close
now, just beyond the next line of tents, invisible for the moment but clearly
audible until a nearer clamor drowned them out. “Sarama! Sarama! The White
Mare! Ai, she comes, the White Mare! Sarama!”

Sarama was not the name of the White Mare, who carried
naught but her title and, on suitable occasion, her servant: but that servant’s
name, indeed, was Sarama. Agni forgot even Rudira the beautiful in a surge of
pure and ringing joy. Of beautiful women the world had a sufficiency—but he had
only one sister of the same mother, and they twinborn, blessed of the gods.

And there she was riding the Mare who was not yet white but
dappled like the moon, with her hair as dark as blood under the moon, and her
narrow witchy face. It lit with her broad white smile as she caught sight of
him standing tall above the boys and women who flocked to her coming.

That smile soothed the last of the tightness in his belly,
and healed a wound he had not known was there: an old oozing scar like the
stump of a severed limb. He thrust his way through crowding bodies into her
opened arms and the familiar weight and smell of her, wind and grass and smoke
and horses, slipping down from the Mare’s back and standing—

“Little sister! You’ve shrunk.”

They who had been eye to eye when she went away were sore
unbalanced now. She tilted her head back and laughed. “No,” she said in a voice
as new as her smallness, “you’ve shot up like a tree on a hilltop. And your
voice—what bull did you steal it from, eh, little brother?”

“What Bull but one, O elder sister?” he answered her, great
daring on this day of all days, but Sarama was never shocked as other girls
might be. Sarama was not at all as other girls were; not now, nor had she ever
been. Sarama was the White Mare’s child. She laughed at him and linked her arm
through his, and with the Mare following in a ring of awe and quiet, went back
the way he had come.

oOo

No woman but one might set foot in the feast of the Bull.
That one had no delicacy, nor any hesitation. Even Agni was not so bold as to
walk with her through the circle of chieftains, but hung back on the fringes.

The Mare, unled, unbound, moved slightly ahead of her
servant, so that it was the beast who led the woman before her father. No man
presumed to lift a hand to the Mare, which was well: one who did not move aside
swiftly enough had to scramble away from the lash of an outraged heel.

The old king’s glower lightened as his daughter came to
stand in front of him. She did not kneel as a woman should; she knelt to none
but the Mare. Nonetheless she bent her head in respect as a son might in the
privacy of the tent, and held up what she must have carried all this way in the
fold of her coat: a cup of polished bone, the cup of a skull, carved with
something that Agni could not see, but must be a skein of galloping horses.

“The Old Woman is dead,” she said in her voice that was
deeper than he remembered, deeper and more still, as if the silence of the
steppe had sunk into it. “The Old Mare has borne her into the place beyond the
sun. Now I come back to you, I and the Young Mare, to take the place that they
have left behind.”

There was a silence. It was deep within the circle, thinning
without, till far away one heard the dancers singing and stamping their feet.
No one could have failed to expect it; the Old Woman had been failing at the
last gathering, and the Old Mare had been thin and worn and lank of coat. And
yet it shocked them, as the death of a goddess can; it shook the world a
little. Not even the oldest of the old men could remember another servant of
the White Mare than the Old Woman.

Now there was a Young Mare, and Sarama her servant, holding
the cup that had been the Old Woman’s skull. What had become of the rest of
her, what had happened to the cup that she had carried in her turn, that had
been the skull of the Mare’s Servant before her, was a mystery. A shiver walked
down Agni’s spine, a chill of awe.

Sarama looked no different than she ever had. Thinner,
perhaps, and finer-drawn, but she was herself still. There had always been a
god in her, a strangeness that to Agni was as familiar as the wayward curl of
her hair.

She lowered the cup and secreted it in the folds of her
coat, took the old king’s hands and kissed them, and received a kiss on the
brow. Then she turned, and the Mare turned with her, departing from the circle
as she had entered it, with the aplomb of one who may go wherever she pleases.

No one moved to stop her. The elders and the chiefs would
drink tribute to the Old Woman, but after that they would forget her. She had
served a goddess, but she had only been a woman after all. Men had little to do
with the likes of her.

oOo

Sarama was rather too glad to leave the old men’s circle.
It had always been the Old Woman’s part to enter it when rite or the Mare’s
will ordained; doing that, walking where and as the Old Woman had walked,
brought back the grief and some of the chill of winter, the black days of the
Old Woman’s sickness and the blacker ones of her death and consecration to the
goddess. Alone in the freezing cold, Sarama had performed the rite, all of it,
every step and word and gesture, no matter how terrible, no matter how grim the
task.

Clean white bones lay under the earth in the Mare’s Place,
half a moon’s ride from the place of gathering; the Old Mare’s white tail
fluttered from the summit of her hill. Other, far older bones lay beneath those
that Sarama had laid there, bones on bones from time before time, mares’ bones
and women’s bones laid one atop the other till together they had made a high
and sacred hill.

“You are the last,” the Old Woman had said before she died.
“You, and she”—tilting her age-ravaged chin toward the Young Mare. “Her blood
continues in certain of the herds, but of her servants are none left, save only
you. Once we were a tribe, a great throng of us. Then the tribes of men ran
over us, outnumbered us, diminished us into veiled and feeble women. Your line
we kept pure, as pure as it could be; but it dwindled and faded, and now there
is but one. Be strong, my child. Be mindful. Remember.”

Sarama had promised to remember. She had made other
promises, too, promises that she must keep or her soul would die.

But now, this moment, having done her duty by the old man
her father, she was free to be a part of the tribe again. The Mare nipped
lightly at her shoulder, bidding Sarama recall her presence. Might she not go
now? The wind was calling her.

“The stallions, rather,” Sarama said. The Mare flattened her
little lean ears and snapped with temper. Sarama laughed, which made her wheel
and lash out with a wicked heel; but Sarama was too quick for her.

She went to torment the stallions in their tethered lines.
Sarama lingered till her brother came loping up beside her, all long limbs and
young male arrogance. He made her think of a stallion himself; but she was not
minded just then to torment him.

He dropped an arm about her shoulders, easily, as if they had
been parted only yesterday and not a year and more ago, and swept her toward
the tents of the White Horse. “You’ll be hungry,” he said, “and thirsty—
Aiiii!
such a thirst as must be on you.
We have a new thing that came from the sunrise countries, a drink that the gods
must drink in the houses above the sky. Come, I’ll fill you a cup.”

Sarama had no desire to dizzy and fuddle herself with strong
drink, but she let him have his way. With Agni, as with the fire he was named
for, that was always a wise thing.

Their father’s tent was kingly broad, housing as it did all
the wives that he had won in battle or in debts of honor, with their daughters
and their youngest sons, and such of the grown sons as were either unmarried or
unbound to one of the companies of young men. It surprised Sarama, somewhat, to
find that Agni had not gone off to run with a pack.