White Mare's Daughter

by Judith Tarr

  He shook his head in confusion. “She speaks to the Mothers,” he said. “She speaks to my sisters. She never speaks to me. Why should she? What can I possibly be to her?”

  “Her child,” said the Mother. “Tell me what she said to you.”

  She said nothing, Danu began to say, but stopped himself. “She said—she showed me—the horse—” He glanced at the potter. She listened without surprise. “The horse,” he said. “It can’t live as it is now, alone. It needs the sky. It needs companions. Goats, maybe—sheep are too dull, and cattle too slow. Since it can’t have—”

  The Mother nodded slowly, eyes on his face, as if she studied it. As if she had hoped to hear such a thing from him.

  Catin spoke behind him. “Mother! Dare we? Can we? What if it runs off?”

  “Then that will be the Lady’s will,” the Mother said, as serene as ever a Mother could be. “This was given to her, not to us, though we have kept it in her name. You know it was not thriving; it was running, endlessly, and tearing at its house, and fleeing from anyone who came to tend it.”

  Danu turned to stare at Catin. She had never said a word of that.

  She seemed unaware of him. Her eyes were on the Mother. “It had calmed before we left.”

  “And your dreams were darker than ever.” The Mother shook her head slightly, as if to silence Catin before she spoke again. “It is all bound together. The dreams, the horse. This one, this child of Three Birds. What did the horse do when it saw him?”

  “It came to him,” Catin said almost sullenly. “It spoke to him. It never spoke to any of us.”

  “Perhaps none of us knew how to listen.” The Mother warmed him again with her smile. “It told you what it needed in order to thrive.”

  He nodded. “You’ve been afraid of it,” he said. “Haven’t you?”

  “It told you that?” Catin demanded.

  He answered her, but spoke to the Mother. “It’s neither dream nor demon. It’s living flesh. The Lady speaks to you. Did she tell you nothing of this?”

  “We were afraid,” the Mother said. “It was born here, in this city, of one of the horses that the stranger brought. When he left us, the Lady asked that the young one—the foal, he called it; the colt—be left as tribute. He had no objection. It was young and small, he said, and would slow his return; but it was old enough to live apart from its mother. He told us how to feed and care for it. But it wanted none of us. We kept it in the temple for a time, till its pacing and fretting grew too much to bear. We coaxed it into one of the sheepfolds. It broke free and ran into the Lady’s grove, and there stayed. We built the house for it. We fed it as we could. It let none of us near it, nor let us touch it. It might have been a wild thing, for all the trust it gave us.”

  “It smelled your fear,” Danu said. “One of you could have gone in with courage in your heart, and it would have come to you. Then you could have led it out again. It can’t live in so small a space, not if it’s to grow and be strong.”

  “It will run away,” Catin muttered.

  The Mother ignored her; therefore Danu did the same. “Since it speaks to you,” the Mother said, “then I name you its keeper. Do with it as the Lady bids you. I think that she brought you here for this, even more than for the rest.”

  Danu did not know that, but then he was not a Mother. He bowed to her, for respect and for submission. “May I do as—as the Lady tells me? May I command people if I must?”

  “Whatever she bids,” the Mother said, “you may do. My people will obey you.”

  They would do that. He saw the flash of her glance at her daughter, and the inclination of the potter’s head. The rest would follow where those three led.

  He bowed again, lower this time. As he straightened, he saw that the potter’s wheel had stilled. On it sat a graceful shape, a vessel for oil perhaps, with a handle like the curve of a horse’s body, and the rear of its head above. Power and grace. And no fear.

  Yes, he thought. Yes. No fear. Without fear they could master anything; even a creature out of a dream. Even a horse.

  14

  The savage from beyond the wood had shown the people of Larchwood how one confined and led a horse: much as one did an ox or a sheep, with a cord knotted into a halter for the head. Danu might have trusted the horse to follow him at the Lady’s bidding, but Catin was not so certain of the beast. Danu was not in a mood to contest with her.

  The horse, it seemed, was; but while he would not come near Catin, he stepped willingly to Danu and suffered the halter to be slipped over his nose and ears. He had worn it before, Catin had said, when he was small; the savage had taught him to lead and to obey, though no one had succeeded with him since the savage went back into the east.

  Danu did not see the difficulty. The horse—the colt—was large, but oxen were larger, and heavier, too. He liked to dance and snort and threaten terrors, but so did a he-goat or even a young ram. Any shepherd knew to keep the will firm and the lead well secured, and the beast would give up its fighting and go where it was led. No beast could be as insistent as man or woman could, unless driven by fear or hate.

  The colt had no fear, nor had ever learned to hate the people who tended it. That he had little respect for them, Danu could well see; but he had learned the art young, and Danu bade him remember it. The crooked-horned ram in Three Birds had been more obstinate by far, and more willing to wreak bodily harm on anyone who presumed to lead him. The colt would strike but not to wound, and bite, but not when halted by a firm hand and firmer voice.

  The flurry of argument was brief enough by the sun’s path, and ended in the colt’s walking sweetly beside Danu to the grove’s edge. The trees alarmed him; he pressed closer then, and paused often to arch his neck and snort.

  Catin’s eyes would roll back then as she led them through the wood, white as the colt’s. He could not stroke her neck and soothe her as he did the horse, but he pitched his voice to carry. Maybe it comforted her; or eased her fear at least, because the horse would do nothing that he did not allow it to do.

  They came out of the grove into the full light of the sun. The colt threw up his head at the flame of it, braced his feet and opened his mouth and loosed a cry such as Danu had never heard. It was like the trumpeting of a stag, the bellow of a bull; but clearer, higher, more piercing than either. The force of it nigh flung him down.

  Somehow he kept his grip on the rope, and kept his feet. Catin had clapped hands over her ears. The city that had seemed deserted when they sought the grove was suddenly full of people, peering out of windows and doorways, running into the streets, staring at the beast that had raised such a peal of sound on the edge of the Lady’s grove.

  Danu had never craved to be stared at as some people did. Kosti-the-Bull had loved it, had done great feats simply to draw the women’s eyes. Not so Danu. He was a quieter spirit.

  And here he stood on the edge of Larchwood, clinging to the lead of this great, trumpeting creature, with every eye on both of them. He felt the slow heat rise in his body.

  The colt did not care how bitterly he embarrassed the man. He danced to the end of the lead, and pawed, impatient.

  Danu scrambled himself together. It was some little distance to the goats’ spring pasture. Danu would have to walk it through the much too richly peopled city, with the colt snorting at everything, dancing and shying, making a spectacle of himself.

  “The Lady bids it,” Danu said to himself, and perhaps to the colt. He stepped forward. The colt danced with him.

  Step by step. The colt was quiet now. Amazingly so. Perhaps the Lady had calmed him. He offered no insolence. He stepped lightly among the trees and the houses, alert, prick-eared, but obedient.

  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 s
et 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.