by Judith Tarr
She lay naked on the grass, letting the sun both warm and dry her. She should go on, she knew that. She could not know for certain that the hunters had turned back at the wood’s edge. And yet she could not make herself rise, dress, move.
It was hunger that roused her at last, a growling in her belly that would not be ignored. Berries alone had barely whetted its appetite. She fed it the last of the dried meat; she would have to hunt and kill more, if her body craved it.
Her courses were on her. She gathered grass from the meadow and moss from the treetrunks, to do what was necessary; then gathered up bow and arrows and set out to find what she could find.
oOo
As soon as the wood had surrounded her and the meadow vanished behind, she knew that she had erred. On the steppe she knew her way, even when the country was strange to her. In this tree-bound place, cut off from the sky, she could not choose right from left, forward from back. She was all out of her reckoning.
With an effort she quieted her thudding heart, breathed deep, willed calm. Her tracks were visible behind her, more visible indeed in the leafmold than they would have been in tall grass. If there were rabbits here, or deer, she would find them by sign or scent, and retrace her own path to the meadow. It could not be so difficult. She was a hunter from her childhood. She could learn to hunt here as she had on the steppe.
It was none so simple, but need drove her, the gnawing of hunger. Panic stood at bay. Foolish to be so frightened of these closed spaces, these rustling silences. If demons walked here, Horse Goddess would protect her from them. Was she not on the goddess’ errand? Must she not live, and thrive, in order to perform it?
Perhaps it was the goddess who led her to a place crisscrossed with rabbit-sign. She shot two in quick succession, and a third after a not inconsiderable while. They were larger than their cousins of the steppe, plump and well fed. A deer would have given her more meat, to eat and to carry, but these would more than suffice.
She traced her way back with no more than a handful of missteps and pauses to calm herself yet again. The sun in the meadow, now much shifted toward the west, was a golden blessing on her face.
The Mare was grazing as she had been when Sarama left her. She raised her head and whickered a greeting, and after a moment’s consideration came to investigate the quarry and to have her nape rubbed.
Flies had been a great torment to her. Sarama wove an eye-fringe of grass and bound it to her headstall. She tossed her head to make the braided fringes fly, snorted disgust at the dead things swinging from Sarama’s belt, and went back to her grazing.
Sarama caught herself smiling as she skinned and cleaned the rabbits by the stream, gathered bits of wood and grass for a fire, and waited with snarling stomach for the cooking to be done. A bit of liver, sweet and blood-raw, calmed the worst of the snarls, and a double fistful of berries from amid the grass.
She lay on her stomach not too near the fire, chin propped on hands. The Mare cropped grass with singleminded determination, her white tail flicking steadily at the flies.
She was beautiful, Sarama thought. She often thought so, but it was different to lie here, at ease, even content, and simply watch the Mare be beautiful.
It was not so much the lines of her, though those were good, solid and yet elegant, or her coat like moonlight and rain, or even the way she moved, with both strength and grace. It was more than that; a way she had of carrying herself. She knew that she was beautiful. She took great pride in it. And she would be more beautiful still, when she was grown out of her dappled youth.
Sometimes Sarama wondered if she yearned for her people, for the herd that ran the steppe near the goddess’ hill. She seemed content to be alone, if only she was near Sarama. And yet horses were herd-creatures; and these more purely a part of their herd than some, so that horses of other kinds were strangers, and only their own kind worthy of friendship.
“Horse Goddess blessed them long ago,” the Old Woman had told Sarama, “and gave them strength and intelligence beyond the common lot of their kind. But for it she exacted a price. They have little patience for horses of other kinds, that to them are too patently lesser. And horses of other kinds look on them in incomprehension; find their language difficult, their spirits strange.”
“And yet they come to us,” Sarama had said. It was winter, she remembered, and she was still young enough that her breasts had not budded. She was grinding dried herbs by the fire, and Old Woman was brewing them into a potion for the winter rheum. The Mare had not yet come to Sarama, but the Old Mare drowsed in her stall in the goddess’ house, and a herd of her sisters grazed the winter grass of the hill just below. Sarama could see them from the Old Woman’s house, through the door that lay open to let in the sun.
“They come to us,” she said, “and give their hearts to us.”
“Well, and so do we to them,” said Old Woman. “We were made for them, and they for us, by Horse Goddess in the dawn time. But they grow few, and we grow fewer. The lesser ones—horses and people—rule the world.”
“Then will we all die out?” Sarama asked. She was calm; the calm of disbelief.
Old Woman stirred her pot. When Sarama had thought that she would not answer, she said, “That will be as the goddess wills.”
Often when she said that, Sarama knew not to press her. But the horses grazing in the windswept grass, the white Mare contentedly asleep in her stall nearby, struck her so strongly with their beauty that she could not keep silent. “What does she will? Did she only make them, and us, so that we could vanish into forgetfulness? What are we for, Grandmother?”
Old Woman frowned slightly, enough that Sarama quailed. Yet she did not complete the rebuke. “We are her servants. What she does in this, that you are the last of us, and of the horses there are only these few dozen in the world—that is known to her, and will come clear in its own time.”
“I think,” said Sarama with shaky defiance, “that she means us to grow strong again. Someday. When the world is ready for us.”
“Maybe so,” Old Woman said. And maybe not, her eyes said; but she did not say it in words.
oOo
Sarama sighed as the memory slipped away. Now Old Woman was dead, and the Old Mare with her. The herd had gone away from the goddess’ hill. It lived, she knew; she would know if it had died. But where it had gone, or why, had not been made known to her.
There was still the Mare, content as if Sarama had been her whole herd and the world about it. So had the Old Mare been. So—if Sarama admitted the truth—was Sarama with the Mare. That was all her people, and all the kin she needed, while she rode abroad in the world.
19
Past that place of open grass and clear sunlight was nothing but a wilderness of woven trees. Sarama could find her way if the sun was in the sky, by the wan shadow of it below. In clouds and rain, or by night when the moon was out of the sky, she could only stop and wait till she had her guides again, sun and stars that were the same over the forest as over the steppe.
No tale had told of people in this wood; only of beasts and birds. And yet as she picked her way, straining to keep the sun behind her in the morning and before her in the evening, she knew that she was watched. It was a prickling in her spine, a tautness in the shoulders.
Perhaps it was a wolf, or a forest lion, if there were such. But the pressure of eyes, the sense of watchfulness, had no taste of simple beast. This was a human creature.
Or creatures. It, or they, never made a move against her, or threatened her. They simply watched.
She laid traps for them. They were too canny, or she too unskilled in such things. She caught nothing; saw no track, heard no body passing. It was an awareness, that was all. A certainty that she did not ride alone.
Her wits were slipping. The trees closed in. She yearned with physical hunger for a stretch of open sky. But even clearings were few, and in those she felt the eyes more strongly than under the trees. They weighed on her even more heavily than the shad
ows of the branches.
Where people were, must be habitations; remains of camps at the least, or tracks on which they walked. Of beasts she found ample sign, but of men, nothing.
It must be that she was going mad. That the trees had taken the sense from her, and the darkness drained the light out of her spirit. She walked and rode westward because she could think of nothing better to do. She hunted and foraged when she must, as she must, because she must live to see the land that the traveller had said was beyond the wood. If there was any such land. If the wood ever ended.
The Mare was quiet, but Sarama could sense uneasiness in her, too; tautness in her body at the sudden flight of a bird or the leap of a deer, or a roll of eye at a wind-gust in the branches. She had never required a great deal of fodder, but here where grass came seldom and leaves were not always either sweet or safe to eat, she had begun to drop flesh. Sarama could first feel, and then see, the jut of ribs along her barrel.
Sarama was growing somewhat ribby herself. It was difficult to muster will for a hunt, or to lay snares when she stopped because of darkness or rain. Roots and berries were not as rare as grass, but she seldom knew if they were safe to eat. Rabbits seemed to gather in tribes and clans in some part of the wood and not in others. Birds likewise: in one place the air would be full of their calls and the flutter of their wings; in another, not one could be seen or heard.
Small things like furry-tailed rats that chittered in the trees proved not ill to eat, if she could catch them. Sometimes she could not. Then she went hungry, and told herself that she was fasting. She had fasted often enough on the steppe, in the goddess’ name. She could fast here. Could she not?
On the steppe she had had the sun to nourish her. Here she had little of that. She caught herself more than once, stopping beneath a tree that had suffered a shaft of light to touch the ground, standing motionless, drinking the light as if it had been water. She was parched for it, starved for lack of it.
How many days she had been wandering in this place, she did not know. She had forgotten. The moon had waned, then waxed again. Was it waning now? Was it swelling to the full? She could not remember. On the steppe she would have known by the shifting of seasons whether summer had advanced or passed. Here the trees were endless, shadowy green. Their kind changed not at all from spring to winter. They were always the same.
She woke one morning from a dream of sunlit grass, to a green darkness and a shape of leaves and branches that looked remarkably like a face. It was a broad face, brown as a tree-bole, with dark eyes set deep in it, and wild tangle of beard. It was very real, very lifelike, staring down at her.
She blinked. It vanished. Yet she thought she heard the faintest whisper, as of leaves parting and then slipping together again.
It had not been inadvertent, she thought. He wanted her to see him. As to why—who knew? He might not be a man at all, but a spirit of the wood. He had a look as of something older and wilder, and perhaps darker, too, than any man she had seen before.
Thereafter she caught glimpses of him, or of men like him, shadows flitting among the trees, faces in the branches, a gleam of eyes at dusk or at dawn. She wondered if she had wandered aside from her path to the westward, whether they would turn against her; or whether they only, ever, watched.
They could not bring back the sun or the sky. Only her will could do that, her feet walking, the Mare under her when the trees grew wide and high enough.
oOo
She stumbled into the camp as yet another day was waning. She had seen, with some startlement, that the trees were different in this place. They were a softer green, and that green was giving way to gold.
So, she was thinking: it was autumn, or nearly. No wonder then that the nights grew chill. She had thought it was only the chill in her heart.
She was on foot, the Mare following. Then she was alone, and there was sunlight on her face, and a circle of green-golden trees about her; and in the circle an oddity of shapes. They were tents perhaps, tents woven of branches, each perched on a platform made of treetrunks.
People stood staring at her. They were thickset, broad-faced, brown-skinned people, strong and solid to look at, with bones as heavy as stone, and jaws like outcroppings of granite. And yet there was about them something wild and shy. They looked like the aurochs, the great bull of the woods; yet in their eyes she saw the timidity of the deer. There was a strangeness about them, an otherness. Earth Mother’s elder children, she thought: people of earth and stone, born before the gods brought air and fire into Earth Mother’s creation.
She should have turned and run. She was a woman, and alone. Any man who saw her would reckon her prey—and they did not know Horse Goddess here. But she stood where she was.
She was not afraid. None of the men was as tall as she, though even the women were easily twice as broad. They could break her in two, she had no doubt of it. But that they would—no. There was no hostility in them.
The Mare stepped delicately past her. The people’s eyes widened. They muttered among themselves: low voices, words that she did not understand. She heard no fear. Only wonder.
The Mare found a patch of sweet grass near the outermost of the dwellings. The people drifted toward her, but not too close. They watched her as Sarama had watched her mother and her aunts once, for the pure delight of her beauty.
Sarama’s body betrayed her without warning, and without great gentleness, either. Her knees gave way abruptly. The dark swooped over the sun. She cried out in protest. Not here—not when she had found the light again.
oOo
Voices murmured. Someone was singing, or chanting: a kind of tuneful tunelessness. A manifold reek stung her nostrils. In spite of herself she picked out the parts of it. Smoke, mansweat, hides tanned and untanned; roasting meat, burning herbs, and the strong green sweetness of fresh-cut grass.
She was lying on the grass, that had been spread to make a bed for her. Walls closed her in. She lay inside one of the dwellings, lit by a fire that burned in the center.
Some of its smoke escaped through a hole in the roof. The rest wreathed the people who crowded into the space, thick bodies, broad faces, bright eyes fixed on her as if they had been waiting long for her to wake.
One bent closest. The face made her think of that which she had first seen, but they were not the same. This one wore no beard. It could have been a man’s regardless, with its wide cheekbones and heavy jaw, but the eyes were a woman’s. The hair was thick and smoke-yellowed and grey with dirt, but had it been scrubbed clean it would have been as white as the Old Mare’s hide.
Here was a woman who carried herself like a king. She put Sarama in mind of the Old Woman: the same steady gaze, the same calm surety of her place in the world.
She saw that Sarama was awake. Her eyes shifted; she beckoned. A younger woman, less strong-featured but still as heavy-jawed as many men that Sarama had known, came out of the crowded people, bearing cup and bowl. She filled the cup from the bowl and held it out.
The old woman lifted Sarama with an arm too strong to resist, so that Sarama could take the cup. She sniffed, trying not to seem suspicious.
It was milk. Goat, she thought. Nothing had been mixed into it that she could sense. It was warm and fresh, sweet and strong. She had not known how badly she needed it until she had drunk the bowl dry and been given another. That too she drained, with a sigh that ran round the circle, and sparked a flicker of smiles.
Whatever she had done, she had done it well. There was a great easing among the gathering. They began to chatter to each other, and at her too, though she understood not a word of it.
Somewhere amid what had become a kind of revel, a feast appeared: roasted meats and bread made from wild grains, milk and honey, cheese and fruits, more good things than she had known the forest could provide. What had seemed a barren wilderness, for these people must be a rich and pleasant country.
Surely they seemed at ease in it, and joyful, welcoming a stranger as if she had bee
n both friend and kin. Her own blood had not received her so well or with such open gladness.
oOo
Sarama tested her welcome. She rose and walked out.
No one stopped her or tried to hinder her. She emerged from the close and crowded place into a startling blaze of light. It was full day, and cloudless, and the sun so strong that her eyes streamed with the shock of it. While she lay unconscious she had been stripped of all but her soft leather undertunic. Even that was almost too much for the heat of the day.
She stood on the platform of a house near the center, with the others in nested circles about it. People came and went among the houses. Beasts rooted in the shade beneath—pigs, but smaller and less fierce to look at than the wild boar that only the strongest on the steppe had dared to hunt.
Neither people nor pigs seemed dismayed by her scrutiny. The people, if they saw her, smiled. As rough as they seemed, with their heavy faces and their mossy tangles of hair, they were gentle enough in their manners.
Not one spoke a language that she knew. Even the traders’ argot, of which she had learned a little, met with blank stares and uncomprehending smiles.
They seemed to be testing her mastery of tongues as well: people inside and now people in the street would stop and speak, sometimes in a quick light rhythm, sometimes in tones more guttural, buried deeper in the throat. None of it made sense to her.
Somehow she had not expected the people of the west to be so foreign that she could not understand them. The traveller had said nothing of that.
But, she thought, these were not the westerners he had spoken of. This was a village, and a small one at that, smaller than a clan-encampment of her own tribe. She saw no riches, no woven fabrics, no pots wonderfully and intricately made, no copper nor anything that could be the metal called gold. These were savages, hunters and herdsmen from the look of them, rich in contentment but in little else that the men of the steppe might reckon valuable.
