White Mare's Daughter (76 page)

“Never apologize to a woman,” Agni said to him. “It only
diminishes you.”

She could not have understood all of that, but she
understood enough.

“You think you can win me?” she said. “Is that what you do?
Win a woman? You’re not doing it well at all.”

“So what do you do?” he demanded. “Do you try to win a man?
Or do you just point to him and say, ‘You. Now. Come’?”

She laughed. It was pure mirth, untainted with anger or
perceptible dislike. It made him think of Danu rising up out of the river,
white teeth gleaming, laughing as if there were nothing in the world more
hilarious than being pitched into an icy river.

All these people were mad, Agni decided. Since madness was
sacred, and since a wise man never stood in the way of true insanity, he waited
till Tilia was done with her high amusement at his expense. Then he waited
longer, until she recovered such wits as she had.

“Mika,” she said, “say it.”

Mika blanched and stammered, but he mastered himself before
Agni could move to do it for him. He spoke haltingly at first, but thereafter
with growing confidence, as the words he had been taught rolled out of him.

“She—she wants me to speak for her, because she’s a fair
novice in this language you speak, but I’ve been at it longer. And I’m younger,
you know. And the Lady has given me the gift. So she asks—she tells me to say
to you: Man of the horsemen, what you ask is presumptuous beyond bearing, and I
should laugh in your face. But the Lady speaks to me, and she tells me that the
winds of the world are changing. That a storm is coming down on us, and you are
but the wind that blows before it. But wind can be strong in itself, stronger
than the lightning or the rain. A blast of it can topple a forest, or lift up a
river and cast it on dry land.

“I have no desire to be poured out like water, or left in a
bed of mud and gasping fishes. I’ll ride with you on the storm, horseman. I’ll
make the Great Marriage with you as you ask me to do.

“Now I ask you,” Mika said, and Agni heard Tilia clear
behind the words, even as he saw her face as she listened, with its wide dark
eyes and its firm chin. “Do you know what this is that you ask? Do you
understand what the rite is, and what it will do to us both?”

He was to answer that. He did, slowly, because it seemed to
matter a great deal to her. “We have marriage among my people.”

“Great Marriage,” Tilia said, speaking for herself, thus granting
Mika a reprieve. “What you speak of—a man takes a woman, the woman obeys the
man, she bears his children, she keeps his tent—that’s what a man does when a
woman asks him to be the keeper of her house. That’s not the Great Marriage.”
She inclined her head toward Mika.

He spoke hastily, babbling the first few words, but again he
calmed as he went on. He was a brave child, was Mika, and gods-gifted. “The
Great Marriage is the Lady’s strongest rite. It partakes of everything that she
is, and everything that she wishes for her people. It makes a woman and a man
one. It sets them in the center of the circle, and the circle encompasses them,
and they give the circle its power. Once that rite is done, there is no
sundering the two so joined. There is no walking away, horseman. No changing it
once it’s done. The vows you take in that rite, you take for as long as your
soul shall live.” He paused. Tilia nodded again, bidding him go on. “Will you
do this, then? Will you even go so far?”

“Will you?” Agni asked her directly.

“It may be the saving of this city,” she said.

“That’s all?” Agni did not like to admit it, but the stab in
his belly was not anger. It was disappointment. “If I were elderly and ugly and
walked with a limp, would it be the same to you?”

“You are not those things,” she said.

“Does it matter that I’m not?”

“Of course it matters,” she said.

“So,” Agni said. “You want me, a little.”

“Any woman would,” she said with the breathtaking bluntness
that seemed to mark all her people. She rose, and without farewell or further
word, left the room.

It seemed empty without her in it. Mika had sunk back
against the wall. His breath was coming a little quickly; his face was greenish
pale.

“There now,” Agni said as to a skittish colt. “There. She’s
gone. And I won’t eat you.”

“You’re sure?”

Agni sighed gustily. “I don’t think I’m hungry. I don’t know
if I dare to be hungry.”

“Yes,” Mika said in all seriousness. “She’s a Mother’s heir,
you see. That’s what Mothers and Mothers’ heirs do.”

“I am going to tame her,” Agni said.

“She’ll tame you first,” said Mika.

“We’ll see about that,” Agni said. Mika clearly did not
believe him; equally clearly he decided not to argue with such a perfection of
folly.

Maybe it was folly. Maybe, by the gods, it was not.

oOo

Patir said nothing at all, which proved to Agni that he
was of Mika’s mind: Agni was mad to press this thing. Taditi however made her
opinion known in words as cutting as they were clear. “You marry that woman,
you’ll never be the same again. She’ll have you bitted and bridled and broken
to saddle.”

Agni did his best to be reasonable. “She will only do that
if I let her.”

“She’ll see to it that you do the letting.” Taditi folded
her arms and set her chin and looked terrifyingly grim. “It’s one thing to take
the chieftain’s daughter—that’s tradition, and wisdom mostly, if a man wants to
be king. But this isn’t the steppe. These people have no such customs, and no
mind to adopt them. You think you want to take this woman in order to make you
one of them—to win their acceptance. You’ll win nothing but the gelding’s
portion, once she gets her claws in you.”

Agni shook his head stubbornly. “She’ll come round. You’ll
see. After all, she gave in. She swore she’d do no such thing. I’ll be her
master yet. Be sure of it.”

Taditi went off muttering about arrogance and young idiocy.
Agni forbore to take her to task for it. She had always been outspoken. Here,
in this country of outspoken women, she seemed if anything rather subdued.

She was not altogether comfortable here. Agni had been
surprised to realize that. He would have thought that she would be at ease
among people who were so much like her; but she had tired of the gentle,
complaisant men, and the women irritated her with their boldness that far
outmatched her own.

Still she had to endure, because Agni had no intention of
leaving. Where would he go, after all? His tribe was barred to him. He had no
mind to battle for a kingship on the steppe. This place, this title that he
held—yes, this woman whom he meant to make his own—all were as they should be.
He knew it in his belly, where one knew the deepest certainties.

The others would acquiesce in the end, because he was king,
and because the gods were moving in him. Even Tilia knew it, and Tilia was the
Lady’s child.

They made the Great Marriage under the first moon of
autumn, a slender crescent hanging in the sky at sunset. Agni’s tribesmen, the
people of Three Birds, traders who had come by the roads and on the river,
everyone who had heard of the thing that was to be done, all came to see the
king of the horsemen swear the great vows with the Mother’s heir of Three
Birds.

Agni wore the coat that had been made for him when he was to
be king of the White Horse people. Taditi had taken it when she left the tribe,
and kept it for him—at what cost, she refused to tell him. She brought it out
as he prepared to dress, and put aside the much lesser garment that he had meant
to wear, and clothed him in the coat that was fit for a king. “Now we’ll make
you beautiful,” she said.

She did her best. He went out scrubbed clean, his beard
clipped close, his hair plaited tight and wound with beads and thread-thin
strands of copper. There was a gift waiting for him from the Mother herself: a
glorious thing, a collar of gold, heavy and gleaming, and an armlet of the same
metal. They, with the torque that he had been given in that first of his
conquered cities, weighed him down with splendor.

He was to wear no weapon. On that, the Mother had been most
firm. No spear in his hand, no bow at his back, not even a knife at his belt.
He must go to the Lady as one of her children, washed clean of blood.

If it would make him truly king in Three Birds, he would do
it. The price was not too high. No one would threaten him here.

He walked out of the house that had been the Mother’s, into
the long light of evening. The circles of the city were empty. They were all by
the river, gathered in a great throng beside the curl and glisten of the water.

Agni had thought to ride there, but these were not horsemen.
They asked that he come afoot. He did it because he was too proud to refuse,
walking gingerly in his boots that were made to ride in.

He was aware of Taditi behind him, following him as she
would never have done in the camp of a tribe. She was freer here by far, though
she was quiet about it.

So escorted, he came with the last light of sunset to the
field by the river. It was black and teeming with people, and set with torches
like stars. A line of these guided him inward down a path left open for him.
Eyes gleamed on him, catching the torchlight. Pale blurs of faces turned to
follow him.

Under all those eyes he strode out as a man should. He
walked alone: Taditi had slipped away amid the crowd.

Where he walked was light. The rest was darkness. His back
prickled with the consciousness of it; of being utterly exposed, clear to any
eye that saw, but of the people who surrounded him, he saw only shadows.

It was a test, he told himself. A proof of his courage. To
do as he had been raised and trained never to do; to make himself vulnerable,
and not flinch at it.

A murmur of voices had greeted and followed him, but as he
walked on it subsided into silence. In that silence he became aware all at once
of the beating of his heart, the hiss of his breath, the sound of his feet
striking the ground.

Somewhere deep in it, a new sound grew. At first it seemed
to come from the blood, a faint high singing, but as it grew in intensity, he
knew it was no part of his body. It was a pipe, thin and high and twittering as
a bird’s call. Just as he recognized it, another joined it, deeper, like a
woman’s voice crooning wordlessly to a sleeping child. A drum wove into it, echoing
the beat of Agni’s own pulse, but with a roll as of thunder. Then amid the
thunder came a sound like the falling of rain, drop by drop tinkling into a
pool: the music of plucked strings.

Birdcall and woman’s croon, thunder and rain: all the spirit
of Three Birds caught and held in that mingled music. It carried him to the
riverbank, to a half-moon of torches that sprang suddenly alight, blinding him.

When he could see again, he saw the shapes standing among
the torches. Broad shadow-shapes like stones set in the turf by the roll of
water: heavy shoulders, heavy breasts—for they were naked but for the blood-red
skirts that women wore here. Their faces were blank, smooth oval masks, long
slits of eyes.

Agni quelled the shudder of fear. Priests—priestesses—here
went masked as they did among the tribes, masks that transformed their wearers
into blank images of divinity.

It was eerie and strangely arousing to see those naked and
powerfully female bodies and those sexless, featureless faces. Their skirts
clothed them, not as women’s gowns did on the steppe, to protect their modesty,
but to draw the eye to their sex. Not for concealment, but to flaunt their
beauty. All of it, even its most secret places.

The masked women had stood still as the light first fell on
them, but as Agni approached they began to move in a slow swaying dance. Their
circle opened, swaying outward till it had taken Agni into itself and drawn him
to its center.

There at last, stepping from deep shadow into the ruddy
golden light of the torches, was Tilia. Agni looked for the Mother, but there
was only Tilia, and no way to tell which of the dancers was the ruler of Three
Birds. If any of them was.

Tilia was dressed, or not dressed, as the others were. But
she wore no mask. Her hair flowed free down her back and over her breasts and
shoulders, framing the broad oval of her face. It was unmistakably her face,
unmasked and unconcealed, and yet it was as blank as one of the masks. No joy,
no resentment. Not even welcome, though when he had paused in front of her, she
took his hands in hers.

Her grip was warm and firm, no tremor in it. Agni fought to
achieve the same.

The dancers circled them, flickering from shadow into light
and from light into shadow. How anyone beyond could see, Agni could not imagine.

Even as the thought touched him, the circle spun outward,
wheeling like a flock of birds, scattering in the rolling of drums and the
sudden shrilling of the pipes. Agni stood alone with Tilia under the starlit
sky, and a circle of open grass about them, but beyond it the great dark ring
of people, thick as trees in the forest.

Then at last the Mother came forward, surrounded by acolytes
with lamps that cast a gentler light than the torches. Each lamp was shaped
like a bird. The young girls held them as if they had been birds indeed,
cradling them, cherishing each fragile flame.

In that soft light, the Mother was as perfectly herself, as
unmistakably human as the dancers had been inhuman. She wore the same skirt,
flaunted the same bare breasts, but her face was bare, her hair as free as her
daughter’s, and her head was crowned with woven stalks of grain.

Her eyes on Agni were warm, the first warmth that he had
seen in any of them since he came down to the river. She even smiled, which
made his heart quiver unaccountably.

Agni’s hands were joined to Tilia’s even yet across a space
of stillness. The Mother laid her own over them.