White Mare's Daughter (13 page)

He did not know what to do with himself. Ever since his
voice broke he had looked after his Mother’s house and taken charge of such
occasions as this. He had never been a guest, never had to sit while others
waited on him. A woman wanting him—yes, he knew the way of that, but not when
he was twofold guest, of this house and of the company in which he traveled.

At the time when it was proper, the Mother of Two Rivers
rose and held out her hand to him. It was his place to take that hand, to go
where she bade; but he glanced at Catin.

She was not watching him at all. Her eyes were on her
fingers, which had locked in her lap. She dreamed again, or remembered: blood
and fire, present always just behind her eyes. He at least could forget. She
never could.

With a faint sigh he turned back to the Mother of Two
Rivers, and clasped her hand just before it dropped. He had barely escaped
impropriety. She smiled at him, a quick smile, as if she were uncertain, too;
and led him away from his uncomfortable companions.

There was comfort, yes, in one who had known him so long,
who could ask after his sisters and recall with him this escapade or that. Her
name had been Sana then, but all names vanished when a woman became the Mother.
She gave them to the Lady with all of herself that had gone before.

But this young Mother, who had been Sana not so long ago,
still carried a memory of the self who had been. She did not ask him why he had
come here, or what he did with the Mother and the people from Larchwood. She
was content to remember things that had passed long ago. One thing only she
touched in the time that was now. “I hope,” she said before she slept, “that
this night’s work will make an heir.”

He bowed his head at that. Some of the elders still
maintained that men had nothing to do with the making of children; but anyone
with wits could see that a woman who took men to her bed had children, whereas
one who did not remained barren. What was a man meant for, after all, if not to
complete the Lady’s dance?

The Mother slept as soon as she was satisfied. Danu lay
awake.

Her body against his was warm and ample. The room was
strange and yet familiar. The bed with its leather lashings and its warm
coverlets, the little shrine of the Lady with its lamp that was never suffered
to go out, the chest for clothing and the table for oddments, were all as he
had known it in his own Mother’s chamber.

The coverlets here were woven differently, the oddments on
the table less numerous and less varied, and these walls were bare where his
Mother had hung a fine bit of weaving. This was a younger Mother of a lesser
city. And yet, and no doubt of it, a Mother.

In the morning he would leave this place. Maybe he would
come back. Maybe he would not. And maybe, come winter, this Mother would bring
forth an heir. It was all in the Lady’s hands.

oOo

Catin said nothing to Danu when they took the road again
come morning. They left Two Rivers quietly, no dancing, no song, simply a
murmur of farewells as the morning brightened around them. When the full light
of the sun struck the road and burned the last of the dew from the fields, they
were well past Two Rivers.

Danu carried the blessing of the Mother of Two Rivers, and a
wheel of cheese from her own goats. The scent of her went with him, and a
memory of her hands on his skin.

He walked in the lead again today, where the people of
Larchwood seemed to have decided he belonged. The Mother walked ahead of him,
Catin just behind. The Mother’s strides were strong, her pace steady, swift but
not too swift, shortening the way eastward.

After a time Danu dropped back a little till he walked side
by side with Catin. She did not acknowledge him. He thought of words that he
might say, but none seemed worthy of the moment. He settled on silence.

At length it was she who said, “The Mother of Two Rivers
likes you.”

Danu shrugged.

She shot him a glance. “And did you like her?”

He shrugged again.

Her glance heated. “You did!”

“Is that so terrible a thing?” he asked.

“No,” she said quickly. “No. Of course not.”

“So,” said Danu. He relented somewhat, then, though why they
should be quarreling, he was not entirely sure. “We knew each other when we
were children.”

“Ah,” said Catin. “And . . . you never knew
me.”

“No,” Danu said.

“Tonight,” she said, “I may ask for you first. Will you
refuse?”

He shook his head. He did not need to hesitate, or to think
about it.

“And tomorrow night, too,” she said. “And the night after
that. Will you still assent to it?”

“Am I allowed to refuse?”

Her face tightened. He had not meant it that way, but once
he had spoken, he could not unsay it. “What would you do,” she asked, “if I
said that you were?”

“I would assent,” he said.

He had not hesitated. She had seen that: he read it in her
face, in the light she veiled quickly, because it might betray her pride.

He let go a breath he had not known he was holding. It was
difficult—because, after all, he had not known her since he was a child. With
the Mother of Two Rivers he had had a kind of comfort, a sharing of memory;
likewise with the women of Three Birds. But this was a stranger. Everything she
did and said came from a world that he did not know. They shared three days’
memories—that was all.

It was fascinating, when it did not utterly dismay him. He
managed a smile. She looked away hastily. She did not like people to see how
gentle a creature she was beneath the prickly pride.

In that, she was quite like his sister Tilia. He smiled to
himself, thinking that; because Tilia would be furious if he told her.

He walked with Catin in silence, comfortable in it. The sun
rose overhead and sank behind them, its path measured in their footfalls. When
night came, and a city that welcomed them as all cities would in the Lady’s
country, it was Catin whose body warmed him, and her presence that he woke to,
for she had not left him in the night as a woman might choose to do.

She honored him. That honor gave him a place among the
travellers, a presence that he had not had before. They greeted him in the
morning, smiled as if at one of their own. When they shared out the morning’s
bread, his share came to him; he did not have to fetch it for himself. He was a
person of consequence, because the Mother’s heir had made him so.

He could hardly quarrel with it, though he might have wished
to have had some consequence in himself. Was he not the Mother’s son of Three
Birds? But sons were little regarded, except for the women who might be drawn
to them for their beauty or their lineage.

It was the way of the world. He could be content that Catin
had chosen him, that she favored him above the sharing of an ill dream. It made
his way easier and his journey more pleasant, to be part of the conversation
and the laughter; to be one of them, though he had been born in a city far to
the west of theirs.

oOo

They were nine days on the road, nine days of steady walking,
nine nights of resting in cities that, past the second, Danu had never known
before. The country did not change overmuch at first, but on the sixth day he
began to see a shadow on the eastern horizon. That grew clearer with each
hour’s passing, till the whole of the world’s edge was lost in darkness.

Where they walked was still sunlight and open sky. But the
wood loomed in front of them. Danu had never known or imagined the size of it.

Larchwood lay well outside of it, a solid day’s walk to the
edge of the trees. But already the land had changed; had grown less level,
opening into hills and valleys, sprouting copses of trees.

The sky closed in here. One could no longer see along the
whole valley of the river. One’s sight was halted by hills and by the crowns of
trees. But one was aware always, and never more than on the hilltops, of the
wood that walled the world.

The city of Larchwood was as Danu had imagined it, a city of
trees. Its houses were made of wood, set among the trees of the grove. At first
it was difficult even to find them; the eye kept rising into the branches and
ignoring the walls and roofs below.

Not only larch-trees grew here. There were oaks, too, and
the trembling of aspens, and other trees that he had not learned the names of,
child of the plain that he was.

The city welcomed its Mother with singing and with gladness,
with skeins of dancers and garlands of flowers. Danu was half drowned in them,
handlinked between Catin and the Mother as he had been when he walked out of
Three Birds: made perforce a part of them, acknowledged and given a full
welcome. It was a great honor, and seldom given to a man.

He would happily have dispensed with it. His place was more
often in the quiet, ordering the festival; not in the midst of it with others
waiting on him. But he had to endure it, for the honor of Three Birds and in
gratitude to the Mother and the heir of Larchwood.

He hoped that he acquitted himself well. It was all a whirl,
city and people, feast and dancing and the Mother’s entry into the Lady’s
shrine.

That at least he could not enter. He stood outside with the
men who had gone to Three Birds, briefly and blessedly forgotten, before the
women came out and swept him up again. None of the rest was closed to him,
feast or city, nor could he in propriety refuse to be shown it.

So many strangers. Not one face that he had known since
before this moon was new. Nothing familiar, not even the Lady’s face. Here she
was Lady of Wood and Water, crowned with young leaves and mantled in the
running river.

She was still the Lady. He clung to that, as he clung to the
place in which he sat, the bowl that he had been given. It was fine pottery
ware, painted with the waves of the river and filled with a stew of herbs and—yes,
spring lamb. It was savory and sweet, hot and rich in his belly. It was, in its
way, the Lady’s blessing.

The morning song was different in Larchwood. Some of its
words were strange, some of them turned in ways Danu had not heard before.

Oddly, it did not unsettle him. He had slept little in the
night, had kept waking, looking about to assure himself that he was indeed in
Larchwood next to the Mother’s heir, falling asleep again. Near dawn, sleep
deserted him. He heard the whole of the morning song, the last of it from
outside the Mother’s house.

It was strange to see the morning from beneath the branches
of trees. The light fell scattered, bits of gold and green dappling his face
and hands. He wanted half to rip the veil of leaves away and uncover the open
sky; half to draw it over him and wrap himself in green twilight.

As the last notes faded and fell soft to the leaf-strewn
earth, Catin came out of the house behind him. He knew her step already, light
and firm, and the way she had of drawing a breath before she spoke.

“Do you ever sleep?” she asked him.

“Often,” he said. He turned to face her. She stood against
the house-wall. Its wood was dark and old, worn smooth with years. She looked
somehow a part of it, as if she had grown there, like a branch on a tree.

He wondered how he looked to her; if he seemed all out of
place. He read nothing of it in her eyes.

She caught at his hand. “Come,” she said.

She led him not into the house but away from it, down the
tree-lined ways of the city. Past the Lady’s temple the trees thickened into a
wall. She drew him straight toward it.

He dug in his heels. He knew a sacred grove when he saw one,
though this was a thicker, wilder one than he had ever known. Like the temple,
it was no place for a man.

But Catin would not let him stop. She was strong. He could
be stronger if he set his weight into it; he was larger, heavier. But a long
habit of obedience warred against old fear, and lost.

Surely, he thought as she dragged him into the thicket of
trees, she had not brought him all this way only to be the death of him. One
heard of such things among savages; not among the Lady’s people.

Light blinded him. From the near-darkness of the woven wood,
he half fell into the full flame of the morning sun.

He blinked, eyes streaming tears. Slowly his sight came clear.
He stood in an astonishing place, a circle of grass that seemed as broad as a
city.

No trees grew there. Something had been built near the
center: roof but no walls, such a shelter as a shepherd might build for the
lambing, or to shelter his sheep from the rain. It was so commonplace a thing,
and so completely unexpected, that he stood gaping like a fool.

Catin let go his hand. She walked a little apart, not very
far, and seemed to be searching for something.

Under the roof of woven branches, a thing moved. It went
four-legged like a deer, and high-headed like one, too; but something about it
was heavier, less delicate in its grace.

It stepped into the light. Danu knew then what it was. The
tales had said too much, and yet too little.

“It’s smaller than I thought,” he said. His voice sounded
faint and far away.

Catin did not seem to hear anything odd in it. “It’s young,”
she said. “It was born in the last spring. It will grow, the savage said, two
more springs, three, four. Then it will be as tall as your shoulder.”

“So tall?” Danu looked at the creature anew. It came perhaps
to his breast: taller than a deer, and heavier, with a longer, more massive
head. Its ears were small. It had no horns, nor space to grow any.

Its color was odd, between dun and ocher. A dark stripe ran
down its back. Its upper legs were striped, its legs dark to the knee. A thick
dark mane fell over its neck and between its little lean ears. A thick brush of
tail fell below its hocks behind.

It raised its head as he stared at it. Its nostrils flared.
It snorted.