White Mare's Daughter (24 page)

Then what was the man who had brought her here? He had not
followed her into the walled place. She glanced back. He stood in the gate,
arms folded, as if on guard.

There were no men here. They were all women.

Their king spoke. At first Sarama thought the words were
addressed to her, but the man answered from behind her.

His reply seemed to interest the king: her brows rose. She
spoke again. Their conversation went on for a while, with Sarama in the middle,
uncomprehending, and beginning to lose her temper.

At much too long last, the king turned her dark eyes on
Sarama. She inclined her head. Sarama inclined her own in response. The king’s
lips curved slightly. She glanced toward the man in the gateway, and beckoned
with the arch of a brow.

Not only he was astonished to be so summoned. The women
about the king seemed shocked, and one or two protested.

The king ignored them. She spoke a word.
Come
, that must be.

The man moved stiffly, walking as if the grass were edged
blades, or as if the sky would crack and swallow him. He came to face the king,
went down on his knees and bowed his head and seemed to wait for it to be
struck from his shoulders.

The king laid her hand on it and said something soft, with a
smile in it. It did not comfort him overmuch, but it did bring his head up. She
glanced again at Sarama, and signed with her hand: at Sarama, at the man. She
tapped him briskly on the shoulder. “Danu,” she said.

Sarama frowned.

He tapped his own breast. “Danu,” he said. And reached, and
not quite touched her, lifting his brow as the king had.

Name, she thought. That was a name. “Sarama,” she said.

“Sarama,” said the man, twisting it oddly but not
unpleasantly.

The old woman nodded and smiled, raised her arms and waved
them away. The audience, it was clear, was ended.

oOo

Sarama did not think to object until she had been swept in
the man—in Danu’s wake, out of the green place and into the street again, to
his manifest relief.

Someone else was waiting there. The Mare, clean and brushed
and evidently fed, and queenly glad to see Sarama again. Sarama had not known
how lonely she was, until she wrapped arms about that warm horse-scented neck
and buried her face in the Mare’s mane.

Too quickly the Mare wearied of such foolishness, pulled
away and went in search of grass. Sarama followed. Danu trailed behind.

He had been confirmed as her guardian: that much Sarama understood.
That she neither wanted nor needed a guardian, nor intended to submit to one,
seemed to have occurred to no one. She kept her back turned to him, shutting
him out, but there was no escaping the awareness of his presence.

The Mare led them through the circles of the city, past more
dwellings than Sarama had ever seen, even in the gathering of tribes. All the
people here were like the man, shortish and solid, though he was more solid
than some. The women dressed in weavings that would have done justice to kings’
wives at a festival. The men were if anything more handsomely adorned.

Many wore ornaments of copper, or wore colored beads or
bright stones in their ears or about their necks or on their fingers. None but
Danu wore gold. By which she was certain again that he was a prince, or a man
of importance at least—though why he would be relegated to caring for a
stranger, and a woman at that, she could not imagine.

They passed the last of the houses, and the people who
stared or smiled but did not interfere. Sarama looked down a long green slope
to a slow roll of river; and then up to the blessed sky. No trees here, just
where she stood. Not even one.

The Mare had not paused with Sarama. She strode down a path
that led to a house, the outermost of those that ringed the city, and rounded
it, and found there, at last, the patch of grass that she had been seeking.

A soft snort of laughter brought Sarama about. The man Danu
was watching the Mare with an expression of wry amusement, as if she had done
something that he had not expected, but that did not surprise him.

He caught Sarama’s eye on him. Did he flush faintly? She
could not tell.

His laughter died. He pointed to the Mare. “Horse,” he said.

It was mangled and slurred, but there was no mistaking the
meaning of the word.

Sarama set her lips together.

He pointed to her. “Sarama.” To himself: “Danu.” Stamped the
earth. “Earth,” he said; and plucked a blade of grass. “Grass.”

So that was what the king had commanded him to do. Teach the
outlander a civilized tongue.

Sarama could admit the wisdom of it, but a wicked spirit was
in her, a spirit of contrariness. She did not want to learn his language. Let
him learn hers.

She stabbed her finger where he had pointed: “Sarama. Danu.”
And in her own tongue: “Earth, grass, horse, river, hill, tree, sky.”

“Earth, grass, horse, river, hill, tree, sky,” Danu said as
rapidly as she had, and with a spark in his eye that told her how well he
understood what she was doing.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “So,” she said. “You’re a
bard, or a singer of stories. Or do they have such, in this place?”

He did not echo that—somewhat to her disappointment. He
listened intently, and no doubt committed the sounds to memory, but he was too
canny to take them for aught but acid commentary. When she had finished, he
said deliberately, in her language with his barbarous accent, “Earth, tree,
sky.” And turned his back on her and went into the house.

She stood staring at the space where he had been. Was she
free, then? Could she go?

Where? She had come here at the goddess’ bidding. Now that
she was here, she must do what the goddess willed—whatever that was to be.

She set her teeth and squared her shoulders, and followed
him through the high rounded door.

Danu did not like the stranger at all. He had been less
than delighted to be given charge of her; but the Mother’s logic had been
incontestable. “She came with a horse. You speak the language of horses. Learn
her language, too, and discover what she is and what she intends.”

“I know what she is,” he had said with a kind of grand
defiance, because she was standing next to him, listening and, he hoped,
comprehending nothing that he said. “She intends something terrible. Haven’t
you dreamed of it?”

“I dream men on horses,” the Mother said. “This is a woman.
You will look after her.”

This was not Danu’s Mother, but he was living in her city,
by his own Mother’s will. He bowed his head in submission.

It was not he who had brought the two of them, and her grey
horse, too, to the house that he had decided to take for himself and the colt.
The horse made her way unerringly there, and the others followed.

Danu had no doubt that the stranger resented his
guardianship as much as he resented his charge. That she was quick-witted he
could see, but he was just as quick. He had always been able to remember words
when they were spoken to him. He took her aback with that, he suspected.

He had had enough of it and of her. He went to the work that
he had set himself, cleaning and repairing the lower story of the house for the
horses’ habitation. Tomorrow some of the people of Larchwood would come to help
him repair the pen outside.

He rather hoped that the stranger would go away, or at least
occupy herself with her horse. Of course she did no such thing. She followed him
into the house. She gaped about at the stone walls and the deep-set windows,
stamped her foot on the packed earth floor, found the ladder and clambered up
it and vanished into the rooms above.

He sighed faintly. Good; she was out of his way. He bent to
the sweeping and scouring, clearing and tidying.

Just as he tackled a spiderweb as large as a Mother’s cloak,
with the spider crouched furious in it, her voice rang out above him, calling
his name.

“Danu!
Danu
!”

He started, tangling himself in sticky web. The spider
scuttled up his body, scaled the crags of his face, and leaped for the safety
of her torn and mangled weaving.

He bit back a shriek that would have done his people no
justice, and extricated himself with taut-strung patience. She was still calling,
and curse her for it, too. If she was dying, he could not come to her any
quicker.

At last he was free. He ran for the ladder.

She was not in the outer room above. He strode toward the
inner.

She was not lying dead or caught in a fit, nor had she met some
enemy, ill spirit or living beast. She had flung open the shutters of the
window and leaned precariously out.

He peered past her. The meadow ran down to the river, mellow
with autumn gold. The grey horse stood in it, chest-deep in grass. The colt,
who was nigh the same gold as the grass, stood nose to nose with her.

The tightness in Danu’s throat eased abruptly. “Colt,” he
said. “Horse.”

The stranger—her name, he reminded himself, was
Sarama—wheeled on him as if he had uttered a blasphemy.
“Colt!”
She loosed a spate of words, too swift and too many to
follow. The burden of it seemed to be that she was not pleased to see another
horse in this place—or perhaps, a male horse. A young bull among the cattle, a
yearling ram among the ewes . . .

A piercing squeal snapped Danu erect. The grey horse had put
the colt in his place, and handily too.

Danu could not help himself. He laughed.

He was still grinning as Sarama rounded on him. She was
fierce: she scowled as terribly as his sister Tilia ever had.

That perhaps made him less cautious than he should have
been. He did not wipe the grin from his face in the teeth of her evident
indignation. “Colt,” he said.

Sarama muttered something that he doubted was complimentary.
She pushed past him and out of the room, down the ladder faster than he was
inclined to follow, and out into the sunlight.

He pursued her at his own pace. When his eyes had settled to
the brightness, he found her beside her horse, glowering at the colt.

The colt regarded her with interest but no fear. The grey
horse was busily ignoring him. He approached her again with every appearance of
care, and did an odd thing: mouthed at her as if about to break into human
speech.

She flattened ears and snapped. He retreated hastily,
settled to snatching bits of grass, but watching her all the while.

Sarama glared at him, but he would not let her near. They
danced a pretty dance round the grey horse and the field, while the grey horse
grazed in conspicuous contentment.

Danu watched until it began to pall on him. He stepped in
then, held out his hand and said to the colt, “Come.”

The colt considered disobedience. But he was a
sweet-tempered creature despite his fondness for testing anything and
everything with his teeth. Nor did it hurt matters that Danu had taken to
keeping bits of fruit or sweet cake about him, for such moments. He stepped
lightly up to Danu and thrust a soft nose into Danu’s hand, demanding his bit
of cake.

Sarama’s renewed glare was gratifying. Danu smiled at her.
The colt was in comfort; the grey horse seemed undismayed. Danu left them to
return to his scouring of the colt’s winter quarters—and the horse’s, too, as
it would seem.

oOo

The grey horse’s name was Mare. Or rather, her kind and
sex was called a mare, and her rider called her the Mare, as one might call a
woman the Mother.

Sarama seemed insistent that Danu understand this. She was
also unduly agitated about the colt, as if his presence might somehow defile
her precious Mare.

The colt, whom Danu had not presumed to give a name, showed
no sign of being a great burden to the Mare. If anything she seemed fond of
him. She tolerated him near her, let him graze beside her.

He was allowed no insolence: if he offered any, she fell on
him with hooves and teeth and beat him into submission. He learned quickly to
mind his manners, as a male should.

Well before the sun sank on that first day of the Mare’s
meeting the colt, Danu could see clearly that the two of them would do well
together. Sarama however seemed convinced that something dire was going to
happen. He caught her trying to drive the colt off, without notable success;
and while the colt watched, not at all dismayed by her leaping and yelling and
whirling her belt about her head, the Mare shouldered in front of her and moved
her firmly and irresistibly away from the colt.

Sarama was taken off guard. She stared at the Mare. She
spoke: a few words in a tone of disbelief. The Mare shook off a fly and went
back to grazing—standing exactly between Sarama and the colt.

Even Sarama could understand that. She hissed, but she
retreated.

Danu went back hastily to his task of sweeping out the
house. When he thought she might not be looking, he let the grin loose. It was
not at all proper of him, but he was glad to see this haughty stranger so
neatly put in her place.

oOo

By the third day of his guardianship, Danu was ready to
hand it on to a stronger spirit. Sarama just barely tolerated his presence. She
might not have done that much if her Mare had not insisted on living in the
meadow by the river, next to the house that Danu had taken and was making ready
for the winter. He kept on with that, particularly once it was evident that
Sarama was not going to join with him in the task of teaching each the other’s
language.

He persisted doggedly: naming things as they came to hand,
making brief stories of them, repeating the small words, the important words,
over and over. If she listened at all, he doubted that she troubled to
remember. She would not teach him in return, except sometimes to flood him with
a spate of words; then to curl her lip in disgust when he did not leap to obey
whatever command she had laid on him.