White Mare's Daughter (15 page)

A train of people had fallen in behind. Children mostly, but
men, too, and women. They followed without urgency, as if they had taken it in
mind to wander down to the goats’ pasture.

Danu could not look back to see who had come, or how many
there were. It was a kind of pride. There were many, he knew by the sound. The
horse was aware of them: his ears flicked back, then forward, uneasy but
unafraid.

Past the last of the city’s houses, the trees thinned and
the land rose in a long stony slope. The goats, Catin had said, pastured on and
about the summit and down the southern side, where the grass grew rich and
sweet.

The colt was tiring a little, perhaps. He had been kept so
long in so small a space, and naught in it but level land. The hill gave him
much to think of.

He was not as light on his feet as a goat, nor as sure of
himself on stony paths. Still he did not hesitate once he had begun, or shrink
from going where Danu led him. He had courage.

He saw the goats before Danu, or more likely scented them.
He stopped on the slope just short of the summit, and stood staring.

Danu surrendered to the opportunity to rest. “Has he seen
goats before?” he inquired of Catin.

She looked down from her perch on a stone above him. “No,”
she said.

He suppressed a sigh. As all Mothers were unshakably serene,
all Mothers’ heirs were impossibly difficult. The Lady made them so, he had
concluded long ago, to try the spirits of lesser mortals.

He had paused long enough. He coaxed the colt up and
forward, stepping carefully for the way was steep. If he slipped and fell, he
would not fall far—the slope was crowded with people. But bruises were no
pleasure. He scrambled the last of the way, with the colt scrambling behind,
and stopped again to breathe and to stare.

It was a broad hilltop and nearly level, falling off less
steeply to the southward. Goats grazed on it, watched over by a pair of
shepherds. All of them were staring as the people of the city had, at the man
and the horse.

Danu could bear a goat’s slotted yellow stare more easily
than a woman’s brown one. He slipped the colt’s halter free, conscious as he
did it of a gasp that must have been Catin’s. Yes: and if the colt had a mind,
he could run away southward.

But not, thought Danu, while there was grass here, and companions
who smelled strange and looked even stranger, but who ran on four legs, danced
and leaped and played, and when they paused, cropped grass as the colt himself
did.

The colt forgot the weariness of his climb in dancing toward
the goats, neck arched, nostrils wide, drinking their scent. The youngest and
boldest of them broke out of the herd to rear to their full height, leap and
challenge and threaten him with their horns.

He reared in startlement, taller than any of them. They
leaped on their hindlegs. He tossed his head and pawed the air. They leaped
higher. He wheeled and spun.

A young spotted he-goat stood his ground, shaking his horns.
The colt’s eye laughed. He caught a horn on his teeth. The goat butted and
bucked. He held easily, till the goat twisted; then he let go. The goat reared.
He snaked his head, aiming again for the horns.

“Dear Lady!” Catin cried. “He’ll be killed.”

“No,” said Danu. “Look. They test. He plays. He’s never in
danger.”

Catin glowered at him. Still she must have heard the Lady in
his voice: she held her peace.

Danu held his own breath. He trusted the Lady. How could he
not? And yet Catin had the right of it. Those horns could rip and gore, and the
colt had no perceptible fear of them.

The goats pursued him, or he pursued the goats, from end to
end of the hilltop, down the southward side and up again. Then at last—and none
too soon for Danu’s peace—they tired of the game. All together, as if at the
end of a dance, they dropped their heads and began to graze.

Danu dared to breathe. The colt was unscathed, cropping
grass with his strong yellow teeth, much as an ox would, while the goats
nibbled and browsed about him.

He towered over them. And yet they seemed to have accepted
him.

A murmur brought Danu about. The people of Larchwood were
turning away, descending the hill, going back to the city. None of them had
spoken, to approve or disapprove what he did.

He had not asked them to judge. He remained where he was.
The grass was soft for sitting, the sun warm. One of the goatherds sat quietly
by him, produced a packet from the satchel that she carried, unwrapped a loaf
and a cheese and a bowl of fruit stewed in honey. She spread them on the grass
between the two of them.

It came to Danu as he sat there, that he had not eaten at
all that day, nor remembered till this moment. The goatherd broke off a piece
of the loaf and held it out to him, smiling. He smiled in return as he took it,
and a bit of the cheese with it.

His stomach growled like a dog. He laughed in startlement,
and bit into the cheese. Goat’s cheese, salty-strong, melting on his tongue.

Catin crouched beside him, broke off her own share of the
loaf. She had a satchel herself, and in it a napkin of cakes, both sweet and
savory.

It was a fine feast they had, there at the top of the hill,
while the goats and the horse grazed. The second of the goatherds milked one of
the goats for them to drink, and offered them herbs to cleanse their mouths
after.

Danu had been a goatherd when he was younger. He remembered
how it had been: hard work enough in season, but in the spring there was little
to do but watch the goats browse, and keep count lest one of them stray. In
Three Birds, people had come on certain days to milk the goats and to carry the
milk away in jars for the cheesemaking.

If such was done in Larchwood, this was not one of the days
for it. It was a day of lazy watchfulness, of the goats coming to accept the
stranger among them, of the stranger finding his way in the order of their
herd. The herders were not afraid of him as the rest of their people seemed to
be.

“He’s flesh and blood,” said the woman, whose name was Nati.
Her brother Lati seldom spoke, and then chiefly to the goats. She said all that
was needful for both of them. Now she said, “It’s the dream that frightens them.
A living thing, walking on feet and eating our grass . . .
that’s nothing to harm us.”

“He’s very large,” Catin said, eyeing him as he loomed over
the goats. “He’ll grow much larger before he’s done.”

“Never as large as an ox,” Nati said: Danu’s thought
precisely.

“Oxen don’t bite,” she said, “and look at you while they do
it.”

“Goats do,” said Lati, startling them. He got up from his place
beside his sister, wandering along the hilltop. He paused to rub the big
he-goat between the horns, and to dance a turn or two with the gathering of the
kids.

He seemed to take Catin’s objections with him. She rose
after a few dozen heartbeats. “Come back to the city at evening,” she said to
Danu.

“And the horse, too?” he asked her.

“No!” she said, too vehemently. “Leave him here. Nati will
see that he comes to no harm.”

Nati did not seem to mind this burden that the Mother’s heir
had laid on her. She raised a brow, that was all. Catin turned, rather abruptly
Danu thought, and set off down the hill, back to Larchwood.

She had not asked Danu to follow yet. Nor was he moved to do
so. He lingered in quiet but for the wind and the bleating of goats, and the
high far singing of birds.

oOo

At evening Danu left the hill as he was bidden. He was not
averse to a night in a soft bed, after a dinner cooked and served under a roof.
And yet he was reluctant to leave the colt.

The colt hardly knew that he was there. Replete with grass,
content with four-footed company if not of his own kind, with playmates who
could run nigh as fast as he could himself, he needed nothing that Danu could
provide.

Lati laid a hand on Danu’s arm as he hung back, eyes on the
horse. “Go,” the herdsman said. “I’ll look after him for you.”

Danu nodded, but slowly, and turned more slowly still, and
made his way down toward the city. His shadow paced beside him, looming huge on
his right hand. The sun hung low. He should not dally; not if he hoped to be in
Larchwood by dusk. He knew the city’s ways by daylight, easily enough now he
had walked them, but not in the dark.

It was absurd, so to loathe leaving an animal, and one that
had forgotten him besides. And yet the Lady had set this beast in his charge.
If it came to harm while he lolled in a soft bed, he would bear the burden till
he died.

Foolish. Whatever would attack a horse-colt would strike the
goats first; and the goatherds would defend him. They had promised.

He straightened his shoulders and firmed his strides. It was
dim dusk as he came under the trees. He directed his steps as he could best
remember, trusting in the Lady to guide him. As in the morning, the city’s ways
were empty, as if this were a city of trees and not of people. And yet,
tonight, lights glimmered in windows and in open doors. People were watching
him, waiting for him to come back as the Mother’s heir had commanded.

Almost he did not know the Mother’s house as he passed it;
but the spiral dance carved on the door, and the young tree in front of it,
touched his memory. He was half a dozen steps past before he paused. He turned,
to find himself face to face with Catin.

“You came late,” she said.

He bent his head. It was neither submission nor reply, but
she seemed to accept it as both. She took his hand and tugged him through the
door, into light and warmth and the fragrance of roasted meat and new-baked
bread.

She kept her Mother’s house. He had known that. And yet it
struck him as a new thing, a thing that he had not expected. It was a common
thing; much more so than a son who saw to his Mother’s care. While she was gone
a younger sister had done duty for her. The brothers lived in the men’s house,
all but the one whom one of the elders had chosen. In and from the men’s house
they did what men did in the Lady’s country: tended children, spun and wove and
stitched clothing for the people, or went out to the herds, to hunt the woods
or fish the river, or to bear messages for the Mother and the elders to this
city or that.

Danu’s place was in the Mother’s house, beside Catin; and,
while the sun was high, on the hilltop with the colt whom he had taken out of
the grove. Whatever he had come to this place to do, he had not expected that.

Tonight he could eat, drink, rest as much as Catin would
allow. She seemed weary herself, though never as dulled of spirit as she had
been in Three Birds. They were all quiet: the Mother, the sisters, one or two
elders who had come to share the fine roast of lamb. Danu, the only man not a
servant, could not wish himself one of them. Not tonight.

It was the horse’s pride, perhaps, working in him. They all
looked on him with respect. Even the elders. Even—and that was more remarkable—the
acolytes who brought the wine.

They all finished at once, and parted as if by agreement.
He, too. He went where he had learned to go the night before, to the room
farthest back, with its window on the kitchen garden.

Catin had duties still to perform. Danu well knew; in Three
Birds that would have been his to do. Still with the horse’s pride, he did not
go in search of her, nor offer his help. She would not have accepted it.

He undressed and washed in the basin that was set for them
both, slowly, all over; a luxury of time that he was seldom given. In the
morning, he decided, he would go to the river and wash his hair. Tonight he
only combed it out, plaited and bound it, or by morning it would be one great
knot and tangle.

Clean, warm, and naked, he lay on the bed. It was a broader
bed than he had had in Three Birds, a woman’s bed, with room for the man she
chose and for her own comfort. Its coverlet was richly woven but worn, as it
had come to Catin from an elder sister. Or perhaps, he thought, her Mother.

He had meant to keep himself awake until she came, but his
body betrayed him. He roused, perhaps, as she slid into the bed beside him, but
the memory did not linger. Another thing drove it out.

Blood and fire. A roaring as of wind, and a sound like
thunder, that broke into shards, and those shards were the sounds of hooves on
earth. Horses, horses in multitudes, tossing manes, pounding hooves, bodies
jostling as they swept onward. The light on them was blood-red: sunset light.
Already the east was dark. And still they came, horses beyond number, streaming
out of the night.

Yet he was not afraid. The fear that had ridden his dreams
before was gone. In this one he stood on a high place, and the young horse
stood beside him. Its presence made him strong.

That was the secret. That was the thing for which he had
come to this place. Not only the horse. The strength that the horse carried. If
his mind could encompass it, if he could understand it—he could mount a defense
against this thing that came upon them. He, and every one of the Lady’s people
who could learn not to fear the horse.

Even in his dream he knew the difficulty of that. Catin was
the proof: stubborn in her terror, persistent in her refusal to cast it down.
If he could make her strong, the rest would follow.

The Lady never asked for easy things. He laughed in his
sleep, since if he did not laugh he would cry; and that would do him no good at
all.

Sarama rode away from her brother and his companions,
toward the sun’s setting. It was morning still; her shadow rode ahead of her,
laying down the path. She did not look back. The Mare was fresh and eager. Even
the packhorse danced a little under his burden.

She was no stranger to long journeys. She had traveled the
steppe since she was a child, in service to the Old Woman and to Horse Goddess.
She set a pace that would not tax the packhorse unduly, but swift enough that
by sunset of that first day she was far out of sight of the place where her
brother had met her.