by Judith Tarr
The goddess never answered such things. Sarama descended into the temple and thence to the city.
She meant to return to the house by the river, but she took the long way round, circling the city slowly and more slowly. There was no wariness here. People made no move to protect themselves or their belongings. Everything was open, free for the taking.
oOo
It was growing late as she made her way back to the river. The horses grazed near the house as they liked to do in the evenings, the better to receive whatever dainty Danu might be persuaded to give them. He, knowing nothing of horses, treated them much as a man might treat a favorite hound. They took shameless advantage of him.
Sarama, whose hands were empty of fruit or sweet cakes, escaped with a nose-thrust from each and a flattened ear from the Mare. She emerged from the dark of the lower space into light and warmth and a deep voice singing softly to itself.
He was oblivious to her, stirring something wonderfully savory in a pot over the fire. It was more than strange to see a man so broad and strong, doing women’s work with evident pleasure. It made her angry—and why it should do that, she could not think.
He was a tall man here, and no weakling even had he been a tribesman. She had seen him carrying half a slaughtered ox from the market, and watched him butcher it, too, dividing it half for the Mother and half for himself. He would have been a great warrior, had he turned such strength to the killing of men.
She had too few words yet to say what she yearned to say. To cry out to him that the tribes would come with blood-red war—and come far too soon for him or for his people. Winter would pass, spring would come, and the horsemen would dare the wood. Their gods would drive them on.
And there were no defenses here. No arts of war. Nothing to stop them, or to protect the Lady’s country from fire and sword.
Nothing but Sarama.
She must have made a sound: Danu looked up. He smiled as if he were glad to see her. Perhaps he was only relieved that she had come back into his charge.
She stalked past him to the inner room. There was no Catin there today, and no sign of her. Sarama dropped her coat on the floor—knowing with a small stab of meanness that he would pick it up and lay it in the chest where in his opinion it belonged—and kicked her boots into a corner, and flung her cap after it.
Something was lying on the bed, something that looked like a field at sunset, a little green, a little gold, a little red. It was a coat. She lifted it and shook it out. It was finely made, bright-stitched with patterns that made her think of the play of wind in leaves.
So, she thought. Danu had a new coat. But it was rather narrow to fit across those shoulders. On a whim she slipped it on. It fit—not badly. Not badly at all. Its fastenings were of pale bone carved like little fat-breasted women. Each was carved with a different expression: mirth, contentment, comic surprise.
She looked up into Danu’s face. He was smiling—again. “For you,” he said.
Her hand ran down the front of the coat, loving the feel of it, the richness, the fine weaving. But the anger that was always in her when she looked at him made her say, “Why?”
“You were cold,” he said. He picked up her own coat as she had known he would, and shook his head as he looked at it, prodding one of its many worn patches. “I can mend this. But you need a warmer coat.”
“This is warm,” she said.
“So,” he said. “You do speak better than you would admit.”
She shut her mouth and glared.
He laughed. “Come and eat,” he said.
27
When Sarama came to Larchwood, Danu had stopped dreaming of blood and fire. But the night he gave her the coat that the Mother’s daughters had woven and he had sewn, slipping her own coat out of the chest at night to match the size, the dream came back.
Now the shadows had faces. Narrow sharp-boned faces, strange pale eyes. All of them were mounted on horses.
They were riding, more of them than he could count, shoulder to shoulder, and in each hand a great long knife or a wicked-bladed spear. They were hunting. And what they hunted—
He woke with a cry. Something trapped him—he was hunted—
He flung it off. It fell hard, with a gasp that startled him into memory. He leaped from his pallet to kneel by Sarama.
She had had the wind knocked out of her, but she could still muster her wonted glare. He lifted her while she was too stunned to resist, finding her again a lighter burden than he expected. She had no more bulk to her than a bird. He laid her on the bed.
“You,” she said, still struggling a little for breath, “are too strong.”
He flushed. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t!” Her voice was fierce. It made him stiffen. “Don’t say sorry. Stand up. Be strong.”
“You said I was too—”
“I mean,” she said, “very. Very strong.”
Maybe, he thought. She was a difficult creature, more difficult than most. Her hand darted out to grip his arm. “You had bad—” She groped for the word.
“Dream,” he said, rather thick in his throat. “I had a bad dream.”
“Very bad,” she said. “Tell me.”
“Why should I tell you?”
He bit his lip. That had escaped without thought, without any vestige of proper conduct.
She did not seem appalled. “Because,” she said, “I ask.”
He almost laughed. Oh, that was proper: if one were, for example, his sister Tilia. Because she asked, then, and because he was reeling still from the memory of the dream, he told her what he had dreamed. Blood, fire. Men on horses. Knives and spears. And screaming. People screaming in an extremity of fear and pain.
When he stopped, because he had no breath or will to go on, she said a word.
“War.”
He stared at her.
“War,” she said. “Men fight, men kill. That is war.”
“War.” It was a brief word, to be so terrible. Its taste was oddly bitter. “War. You have a name for it.”
She nodded. “We . . . have much of it.”
“You kill each other?”
His horror must have struck her strangely: her eyes were wide, fixed on him. “Men kill,” she said. “Men fight in wars.”
“Men kill?”
Her eyes flickered. Was she laughing? “Yes,” she said. “Men.”
“Not here,” said Danu. “Not here.”
He did not know if she slept after that. He lay on his pallet, wide awake, staring into the shadows. Between his dream and her words, he did not know that he would ever sleep again.
oOo
Danu had learned a new word, discovered a new thing, and it gave him no joy at all. In Three Birds he would have taken his trouble to the Mother. In Larchwood he should, and he did intend to, but he was slow to come to it.
He brooded on it as he went about his duties. Sarama, to whom this horror must be an old thing, hardly to be remarked on, seemed not to notice his silence.
What it must be to be one of her people, to have a word for the killing of men; to know at once what had so baffled the Lady’s people, the thing that she had called, without hesitation, war.
At that, she seemed to have a trouble of her own, and Danu was a part of it. It was not his ill dream—or not only that. She watched him when she might have thought he did not see. Something about him perturbed her.
He could not imagine what it was. Perhaps that he did not go out and kill someone? If men in her country were given to bloodshed, if they were not like men here but like young forest lions, or like wolves in a hungry winter—then well she might be looking for him to turn manslayer.
Was that, he wondered, why she had been so strange at her first waking? She had recoiled from him, had conducted herself as if she expected him to harm her. Was this what she had looked for? To be killed, because the men of her people were all mad?
If that was so, then her people were barbarous. And they were c
oming. This was the Lady’s warning, this her messenger. The red thing, the thing called war, rode in her wake.
oOo
“Tell me about the women,” he said to her of an evening, when the first snow hung heavy in the clouds, and the fire within held off the numbing cold without. “Your men kill, you say. What do the women do?”
She regarded him in some little startlement. He had not, he realized belatedly, said a word to her all day. Or the day before, either.
He was failing of his teaching. But she, somehow, had learned to speak more clearly, with fewer stumbles. “The women do nothing,” she answered him.
“What, nothing at all? Not one thing?”
“They do what you do,” she said with a touch of venom. “They cook. They clean. They serve.”
“And they let the men kill? Why do they allow it? Where are the Mothers?”
“There are no Mothers,” she said. “The men are—the men tell everyone what to do.”
“And everyone listens?”
“Everyone obeys.”
Danu blinked hard. Sarama was watching him again with that odd intensity. “You were afraid of me,” he said. “Because you thought—because men in your country are not tame creatures.”
“I was not afraid of you,” she said, firmly but without anger. “I was . . . wary. Men don’t ask. Men take.”
“Here,” said Danu, “we ask.”
Her lip curled. “You are weak.”
“Is that weakness? To ask before one takes?” Danu curled his own lip in his own flare of scorn. “Then I am weak. I would rather be weak than whatever you reckon strong.”
oOo
At least, Danu thought, Sarama had stopped pretending that she would not learn the Lady’s tongue. She had learned it well. That it had taken a quarrel to reveal it . . . so be it. He was in no conciliatory mood himself.
She seemed startled in the morning when he would not smile at her, would offer her no more than the barest courtesy: silent service, averted eyes. After some few moments of it, she began to laugh.
Danu gritted his teeth and finished filling her cup. As he began to withdraw, she stopped him. He stared at her long pale hand on his broad brown wrist. She was stronger than she looked.
He could still have broken her over his knee.
“You are not weak,” she said. “Is that why you’re angry? Because I said you are weak.”
He would not dignify that with a response. He pulled against her grip. She tightened it. “Let me go,” he said.
“No,” she said.
He stood still.
“You see,” said Sarama. “Not weak. Not strong, either. You do not know how to fight.”
“Fighting is for children,” he said, “and for animals in rut. Not for men.”
“Men fight better than any,” said Sarama.
He twisted free of her. “I will not fight.”
“Fight will come to you,” she said. “They come. You saw in your dream.”
“The Lady will prevent them,” he said with more confidence than he felt.
“Lady—Horse Goddess—sent me,” Sarama said. “I think—to teach. To fight.”
To teach you to fight.
Danu shook his head. “No. Animals fight. Not men.”
“Men,” said Sarama, “and women. You can learn.”
“I will not,” said Danu.
“You will die,” said Sarama. She said it dispassionately. “In war, you fight, or you die.”
“That is not a human thing,” Danu said, “or a thing of the Lady.”
“It is what is,” said Sarama.
He had never hated anyone, nor wanted to. He did not hate her. But the words she said, the things she made him think of, were terrible.
So too the dreams. They were true, a truth worse even than he had feared. Men killing men.
“Why?” he demanded of Sarama. “Why do they do it?”
“To get,” she said, “to be—more. To be more. To have. To—win.” Her hand swept the room. It was a simple room as he would think of it, but rich in comfort. “To have this.” She touched the armlet that he had won from Tilia. “And for this.”
“For this?” He smoothed the armlet. “They could trade for it. Why take it?”
She shook her head sharply, perhaps in disgust, perhaps in frustration. “Trade is not—trade is a small thing. War is great.”
“I do not understand you,” Danu said. “I do not want to understand you.”
“You must,” she said. “Or you die.”
“I think I would rather die.” He snatched his mantle off its peg, not even caring that he had left everything, breakfast half served, fire unbanked, nothing done that should be done to prepare for the day. It did not even matter what he flung himself out into: the raw cold of a snowy morning, snow underfoot, snow falling on his head.
It cooled him. That was good. He only wanted to be away, to escape from the thoughts she forced on him, the words he had no desire to learn.
28
Danu had gone out and not come back. Sarama might well have left the house—his house, which he kept as if he had been a woman—for him to look after, but a pot had boiled over, nearly quenching the fire.
She leaped to its rescue. Once she had done that, it was not difficult to remember skills she had learned in Old Woman’s service.
It was rather more fitting she should do these things than that bull of a man. A bull who would not fight to defend his herd. What idiocy did they teach their men here? How had they lived so long, grown so rich, without ever knowing the meaning of war?
Their Lady had protected them. Danu had said so. But the gods of the steppe were coming, and they had no mercy on the weak.
“Animals fight,” Sarama muttered. She spat into the fire. “Idiots!”
It took her a remarkably long time to perform the tasks that for Danu were so swift and so evidently easy. She was rather glad of them. They absorbed her mind; they shut out, somewhat, the clamor of the truth. That she was here for this. To teach the arts of war to a people who had never heard of war and did not wish to hear of it.
oOo
As she finished the last of the sweeping and tidying, the ladder creaked. She looked toward it with something rather like gladness—that she told herself was relief.
The head that climbed up from below was dark, but its hair was almost straight and not richly curling, and its face was narrow as these people went, pinched narrower with hostility. Sarama set the broom in its corner, carefully, and put on a face of greeting. “Catin,” she said, since she knew no other title.
Catin did not return the courtesy. She set fists on hips and glowered at Sarama. “What did you do to Danu?”
Sarama blinked. “What—” She mustered her wits. “I did nothing.”
“You did something,” Catin said. “He came to us like stormwrack. He sits in the Mother’s garden by the temple, where no other man is allowed to go, and the snow heaps white on his shoulders, but he will not move. He will not speak. What did you do to him?”
Sarama did not understand every one of that spate of words, but she understood enough. “He sits in the snow?”
“He sits in the snow,” Catin said, mocking her stumbling tongue. “Why?”
“You don’t know?”
Catin surged forward. Sarama braced for a blow.
But it seemed that even the women here, though they were like men in everything else, were taught not to fight. Catin stopped before she struck, stood with fists clenched, flung words in Sarama’s face. “You know!”
Sarama very much feared that she did. She could explain war to this woman, too, and send her off to sit brooding in the snow. She would explain it to the whole city, to this whole country. Then maybe, just maybe, someone would wake to sense.
Or they would all freeze to death, and Sarama would await the coming of the horsemen in a land empty of people. That would please the men’s gods to no end.
Catin had not moved, seemed disinclined
to move until Sarama spoke. Sarama said, “I told him a thing he did not know how to hear.”
“That is what he said,” said Catin, almost spitting it. “He won’t even talk to the Mother. He simply sits.”
“Do you want me to be sorry?”
“I want you to bring him in out of the cold!”
Sarama raised her brows. “If you could not, and the Mother could not, how can I?”
“You caused it,” Catin said. “You cure it.”
Sarama set her lips together. If this man had been her lover, she would not have demanded that another woman beat sense into him. She would have been sure to do it herself.
People were different here. Everything was different. That was why Danu was sitting in the snow. Because he had seen a face of the world that he could not have imagined until she forced it on him.
Better he learn it now, and his people with him, than be taken by surprise. He had time to learn to defend himself. They all did. That was the goddess’ gift.
oOo
Sarama wrapped herself as warmly as she could, and rode the Mare, who was more than lively with the exhilaration of snow and cold. It was a fair procession: Sarama on the Mare, Catin trudging sullenly behind, and the colt running circles about them all.
The city was wrapped in white silence. Voices of children pierced it: the young ones bundled to the eyes and tumbling in the snow while their elders stayed warm within. Most of them trailed after the women and the horses, curious as children always were.
The snow fell lightly. It was just deep enough to leave tracks in, but the storm had not passed: the clouds were thick with it. It would snow again, and heavily, before nightfall.
The children did not follow Sarama into the Lady’s garden. Nor, somewhat to her surprise, did Catin or the colt. She rode into it without escort, slipped from the Mare’s back and stood a little distance from Danu.
He did not acknowledge her. He huddled against a treetrunk, knees clasped tight to chest, scowling at nothing that she could see. Snow heaped his shoulders and melted in his hair. He looked like one of the old stone gods from a shrine on the steppe.
She squatted on her heels nearby, rubbing her hands together for warmth. She said nothing. The words she needed were more than she knew how to say in his tongue. Best to keep silence and wait.
