White Mare's Daughter

by Judith Tarr

  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.

  13

  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.

  Without thinking he snorted back. It pawed the grass. Its hoof was undivided: hard, round, black, a single thing.

  Again as his body bade him, he eased forward. The creature—the horse—did not retreat. It watched him alertly, eyes bright under the thick forelock.

  It reminded him, suddenly and incongruously, of Tilia. Just so would she eye him when she had a mind to test his patience.

  He had never been afraid of Tilia. Nor, for that matter, had she ever feared him. This creature seemed of the same mind. It stood still even as he came within reach.

  He laid a hand on its neck. The fur was soft and rather thick. Winter fur. It was coming out in patches, showing a lighter, far thinner coat beneath.

  It itched, he knew without needing to ask. He rubbed the broad flat neck, carefully at first, then more vigorously as the horse leaned into his hand. More, it told him. There. And there. And there: all over, shoulder and back, belly and haunches.

  It was male. He was rather surprised. Here in the Lady’s grove, male things were seldom welcome.

  Well; and perhaps that was why Catin had brought him here. To show him the secret that she had promised. To . . . test him?

  He turned to her. She had not left the field’s edge. He had to raise his voice so that she could hear him. “Do the men of your city come here, too?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “The Lady forbids,” she said.

  “Yet you brought me,” said Danu. “Shall I be condemned now?”

  “No,” Catin said. “The Lady asked for you. In the night she told me: Bring the man here.”

  “In the night? And not before?”

  “In the night,” said Catin, “before I left Three Birds.”

  Danu lowered his eyes. “Does my Mother know what you keep here?”

  “Yes,” Catin said.

  “It’s not . . .” said Danu; and yelped. The horse had nipped him, caught him in the shoulder, painfully, and danced away with head and tail high. It was laughing at him.

  He finished what he had begun, through gritted teeth. “It’s not a spirit, or a thing of the dark. It’s an animal. It bites.”

  “Yes,” said Catin. He thought she might be laughing behind her carefully bland face.

  “And you keep it hidden?” he demanded. “Why? What’s there to hide?”

  “Fear,” she said. “Holiness. This is the Lady’s creature.”

  “This is not his place,” Danu said. He did not look at her as he said it.

  His eyes were on the horse as it circled the field, snorting and shying at shadows. “He needs his own kind. Or failing that, room to run, and companions in his running.”

  “We have no other horses,” Catin said.

  “Goats,” said Danu. “Let him run with the goats.”

  “And let him escape?”

  “No,” Danu said. He did not know where the words came from. They were in the turn of the horse’s head, the flick of his heel. “He’ll not run away. He was born here. But he was never made to live in solitude.”

  “And what of the people?”

  “The people know,” he said. “Don’t they?”

  “In Larchwood,” she said, “yes. But the Mother—”

  “I’ll speak to the Mother,” Danu said; and stood amazed to hear himself say it.

  It was the horse. He did not know this thing called submission. He only knew the wind that called him, the earth under his feet, the blood that ran swift as spring waxed into summer.

  He danced up to Danu, head high, half in play, half in challenge. He was heavier, less graceful than a deer, and yet beautiful, with a power that no deer ever had. When he was grown, he would carry the weight of a man, and never stagger or stumble. Men and women mounted on the likes of him could outrun the wind.

  Danu held up his hand, wary of wicked teeth, but unafraid. The horse blew warm breath in his palm. He worked a knot out of the thick coarse mane, and rubbed the neck beneath it. There was a great pleasure in that simple thing.

  He hated to leave the horse, but the
sooner he spoke to the Mother, the sooner the beast would be free. It followed him back across the field. On the wood’s edge it paused. He fought the urge to hesitate; made himself walk into the shadow of the trees. Catin was ahead of him, leading him on the hidden path.

  Behind him he heard footfalls, and a muted snort. He stiffened but did not turn to drive the horse back. If it followed—if the Lady willed—who was he to gainsay it?

  Where the path turned, where it seemed to vanish into tangled undergrowth, the horse halted. Danu could not pause, could not turn, or he would lose his guide. It startled him, how hard that was, how much he wanted to turn back.

  oOo

  “The Lady speaks to you,” the Mother of Larchwood said. They had found her in the house of a friend, helping that one tend the kiln, for she was a potter. Danu had to move carefully in space shrunk small by the potter’s wares, finished and unfinished.

  The potter looked more like a Mother than the Mother did, a vastly beautiful woman with wonderful, delicate hands. Those hands shaped a pot on a wheel, while the Mother worked a small bellows, feeding the fire in the kiln.

  Danu waited to be acknowledged. He had been seen, he could not doubt that: the potter had smiled at him, a smile of warm and open pleasure. But the Mother, preoccupied, did not spare him a glance.

  Only when the fire was burning to her satisfaction did she leave the bellows and turn. Danu bent his head in respect. She smiled as the potter had: startling, because he had never seen her smile before.

  He managed to smile back. Then she said it, the thing that he could not believe: “The Lady speaks to you.” It was her greeting, and addressed to him, he could not doubt it: she met his eyes, and not her daughter’s.

  He was not fool enough to ask how she could know. Mothers knew. But he did say, “I hear no voice.”

  “She seldom speaks in words,” the Mother said. The potter nodded. The wheel spun, the pot taking shape on it, a thing of magic and of the woman’s hands. That was the Lady too, he thought. It was all the Lady.