White Mare's Daughter (41 page)

Slowly, cautiously, Agni ran his hand down toward the
shoulder. The stallion snorted but did not turn to snap.

Agni rubbed the joining of neck to shoulder, which ran like
a cliff’s edge between a low plain and a higher one. The stallion did not give
to it as a tamed horse might, but he did not pull away. Agni stroked the big
flat shoulder and drew back.

The stallion watched him. He sighed a little. With a tamed
horse he would end here; but if he let this one go, recapturing him would be
deadly difficult. He had to press on, had to finish it.

From the breast of his coat he slipped the headstall that he
had made of good leather, sturdy but supple. He slipped it on before the horse
could resist, and stood back, braced for war.

But the stallion only shook his head a little, eyes still
fixed on him, weighing him as it seemed, taking his measure. Agni returned to
stroking neck and shoulder, moving back a little now, toward the deep curve of
the barrel. The stallion’s coat was sleek, gleaming like copper. His mane was
thick and matted. Agni rubbed the roots of it. Did the rigidity of that neck
ease a little? It was difficult to tell.

Agni went on slowly, accustoming this wild thing to his
touch. He had won something in the game. It was not submission. It was a kind
of wary trust, a lessening of anger, a rousing of interest in what this strange
creature was doing.

When Agni slipped on the hobbles, the battle was brief. The
stallion had learned. Fighting only bound him tighter. Stillness gained him a
kind of relief. He did venture to snap at Agni then, in annoyance; but not in
the rage that had possessed him before.

Once he was hobbled and haltered, Agni loosed the rope that
bound him by the neck. He reared in triumph, lunged—and nearly fell as the
hobbles caught him. Agni stood back, quiet, while he regained his balance. He
shook his head in frustration, rubbing and rubbing it on his foreleg, but the
halter would not come off.

“Ah, brother,” Agni said. “It’s a defeat, but it needn’t
break you. The goddess meant you for this—else why did she make you so wise?
I’ve seen horses kill themselves rather than do what you’ve learned to do
almost willingly.”

The stallion pricked his ears. He was listening.

Agni babbled on at him, it did not greatly matter what. It
was the sound of his voice that had caught the stallion’s attention, the
cadences and the timbre of it, and the thought behind it, willing calm, willing
reassurance, willing him to yield to this that, after all, was his destiny.

The shadows had grown long. Agni ended the lesson at last,
slipped out of the pen, went to fetch the leather buckets that he had brought,
filled with water. He hung them on the pen’s wall and flung cut fodder over,
the best of the tall grass from the valley’s far end. Then, deliberately, he
went to wash and eat and rest himself.

oOo

He heard the stallion moving in the pen, from where he lay
just outside of it; heard him drink, heard him nibble at the cut grass. He
tried more than once to scrape the halter off, but failed. The hobbles he could
not break, nor did he waste his strength in fighting them. That was a wise
creature indeed, the goddess’ own and no mistake.

At last Agni let himself fall into sleep. No alarm woke him.
He roused once at the sound of hoofbeats, but it was only one of the mares. She
came up close, blew warm breath in his hair, wandered off.

Morning found the stallion still in the pen, the water nigh
all drunk and the cut fodder gone. Agni renewed them both under the stallion’s
eye, and left him to them while he broke his own fast. But then, when he had
eaten, drunk, dressed, tidied the camp, gathered and regathered his belongings,
and seen the sun full into the sky, he returned to the enclosure and to the
game that he had played on the day before.

The stallion remembered. He fought at first, fresh with the
morning, and angry, too; but the hobbles slowed him markedly. When he ceased to
fight, when he moved where Agni bade him, Agni let the hobbles go, and held his
breath.

But the stallion did not burst out in his freedom. He stood
until Agni bade him move. He played the game still as he had learned, with a
look that, had he been a man, would have told Agni that he understood.

Agni hobbled him again, met only slight resistance.
Unhobbled him. Again restored the hobbles. The stallion nipped lightly at his
hair, but did not fight him.

He sighed faintly and went to the fence and lifted the thing
that he had left there, the fleece that was his saddle.

The stallion shied at it, but not badly; and once he met the
end of the rope that bound his halter, he stopped. Agni let him sniff the thing,
showed it to him, stroked it along his neck. He followed it with a rolling eye,
but suffered it.

Agni stroked him all over with it. Then at last, with no
great ado, settled it in its proper place on his back. He twitched his skin at
it, but Agni’s hand held it lest it fall and startle him.

When he had calmed to it, Agni drew up the girth. Little by
little, degree by degree; stopping if he flinched, stroking him, soothing him
with voice and hand. And when he was girthed, and had not lost his wits or his
calm, Agni played the game again, accustoming him to moving with that light
burden strapped to his back.

“Brother,” Agni said to him, “if every tamed horse were as
sensible as you, there’d be no need of whips or hobbles.”

The stallion snorted lightly at that—and discovered, on
examination, that a bit of honeycomb in a man’s hand could have a bridle-bit
hidden in it. He half-reared, threw his head about, loosed a flare of his
former temper; but Agni’s return to the game, and the taste of honey on his tongue,
won him over yet again.

He was discovering that the game went on and on; that each
new thing was more alarming than the last, but that none of it caused him pain.
None did harm to aught but his freedom—and that he had lost when he followed
the spotted mare into a valley that, before the man came, had been open for his
coming and going.

Toward evening, as the sun sank low, Agni crowned the game
with the thing for which the rest had been but prelude. He slipped onto the
stallion’s back.

He had not intended to do it. He had climbed up on the
fence, intending simply to accustom the stallion to the sight of him up so
high, and to fetch his laden pack and lay it on the saddle. But the stallion
stood just so, as if he knew what to do; and Agni’s leg was there; and it was
the matter of a moment to slip it over the waiting back, to settle into the
saddle, to pick up reins and a solid hank of mane, and to wait for what would
come.

At first, nothing, except a blank astonishment.

Then the world went up in flames.

Agni rode it out. Horse Goddess held him in the palm of her
hand: more than once he knew that he had lost the battle, that he must go
flying. But the stallion failed to make that one last move, that twist or that
lowering of the neck or that sudden veer, which would have flung Agni from his
back.

Agni clung for grim life. And at last, after an eternity in
the midst of the whirlwind, the stallion stopped. Agni nearly fell for sheer
surprise; but caught himself, and sat breathless, still in the saddle, on the
back of the stallion that he had won for his own.

Agni wondered if the stallion was as astonished as he was.
He would have wagered that the beast was not as dizzily happy.

Or perhaps he was. His ears flicked back and forth, but less
uneasy than intense, focused, learning this new thing as he had learned all the
others.

He was not, Agni well knew by now, a mere mute beast. He
thought about things. He learned. He liked learning. It was as if he had been
shaped for it. And yet Agni did not think that he or any of his forebears had
ever borne a man’s weight on his back. He was the first.

He would not be compelled. Persuaded, asked politely, he
gave with a glad heart. Force he met with force; he was strong, stronger than
any man could be.

He was like nothing so much as the Mare and her kin. And
that did not surprise Agni at all. Was not he, as much as they, the goddess’
own?

oOo

After those first grueling days, they settled to a greater
ease. The stallion learned to be groomed; to be fed from the hand; to be
bridled and saddled without fuss; and to heed the will of his rider in walk and
trot, canter and gallop, turn, stop, bend and wheel and dance sidewise, little
by little, briefly, day by day.

When he was sure of himself in the pen, he was let out in
the larger valley. Bridled at first, ridden, under Agni’s will. Then free among
the mares, and it was with beating heart that, after he had set the stallion
loose, Agni went to fetch him to be ridden.

He shied, but when Agni called he came, set his nose in
Agni’s hand and took up the piece of honeycomb from the palm, and let himself
be haltered and groomed, bridled and saddled and ridden.

After a handful of days in which he was so tractable, Agni knew.
At last it was time.

None too soon, either. It was summer still, and hotter than
ever, but the trees that were left had begun to the show the first glimmerings
of red and gold. The nights though mild began to have the whisper of a chill
near morning. The stars were shifting, wheeling from summer into autumn.

On the night of the new moon Agni knew that he must go. He
ate and rested for the last time in that camp. The horses, who had now to seek
grazing far up the valley, on some whim had come down to watch him, all four,
mares and stallion. Under their calm regard he finished his supper.

He looked up from the last of it to find the stallion
standing over him. The stars were out, though the west was rimmed still with
light. He looked into that calm dark eye, that somehow had lost none of its
pride even as it submitted to his will, and saw in it what he had not
consciously been looking for.

“Mitani,” he said. That was a name in the language of the
Mare’s people, that his sister had taught him when they were small, to give
them a secret tongue to share between the two of them.
Goddess-blessed
, it meant, and
Son
of the New Moon
; for the Mare’s people had said many things in few words.

“Mitani,” he said again.

The stallion’s ears pricked as if he recognized the name.
Agni lifted his hand. The stallion lowered his nose into it and blew softly.

“Mitani,” Agni said, sealing it, binding it to the one who
owned it.

In the time between the new moon and the full moon of
autumn, Agni rode into the outer camp of the White Horse people.

This was like nothing so much as the young stallions’ herd
from which he had won his Mitani. Here the young men had come leading or riding
their stallions. The first who had come there had found a camp set up for them
by the boys who, next year and the year after, would seek their own stallions.
These had raised tents and built a campfire in the place where it had been from
time out of mind, in the shallow grassy bowl near a stream that ran yearlong.

A hill watched over it, crowned by a cairn of stones. An old
king was buried there, or a god. He was said to guard the place, and to look
after the new-made men who camped there waiting for the night of the full moon,
when they would ride back together to the tribe.

Agni was one of the last to come. He rode in as he had
dreamed of doing, as he had seen his elders do for the past pair of autumns,
riding his stallion and leading his mares. It might be more glorious to show
himself so before the whole of the tribe, but it was wonderfully sweet to hear
the whoops and cheers of his agemates; to see how they came running or
galloping, the latter mounted on their own stallions. Rahim had a fine bay, and
Patir a spotted colt, and little Chukri had won himself a great tall
heavy-bodied creature with a mild eye and an extraordinary set of stones, as
big as a man’s head and seeming as weighty, too.

None was as fine as Mitani, nor did any bear the new moon on
his brow. Agni held himself the taller for that, and let the horse dance a
little, flagging his tail and calling challenge to all these strange new
stallions.
My mares!
he cried.
My world!

Agni laughed for the joy of it. There was a place for his
horses among the lines, and a strong pen for the stallion, to keep him apart
from the others; for stallions would fight if they could, and not every one of
them was as well won to his master’s will as Mitani.

Mitani was not glad to see his prison, but he endured it. He
had his mares, though none of them would permit him any liberties—they were all
in foal, Agni had reason to suspect. He was reasonably content.

oOo

Agni was still smiling as his friends and kinsmen showed
him the tent that had been pitched for him, with the signs of his family
painted on it, and gifts within: furs to sleep in, honey mead to drink, fine
new clothes and ornaments to make him beautiful, and everything that was
fitting for a prince returned to his people. There was even a servant for him:
a shy and tongue-tied youth whom he last recalled as a plump-faced infant with
his thumb perpetually in his mouth. The infant had grown into a gangling colt
of a boy with a patchy growth of new beard, who had outgrown his thumb and
taken to biting his nails instead.

The drums were beating, the dance begun. A brace of fat red
deer roasted over the central fire. While the meat sizzled and the fat streamed
off it and the scent of it wreathed the camp, the young men danced in an
exuberant skein, out and around and inabout.

So they would dance when they returned to the tribe; but
this was freer, and noisier too. They succeeded, with a whoop and a roar, in
circling the fire just as the deer were done. Each dropped down where he stood,
sweating and grinning, and the boys brought the makings of a feast.