White Mare's Daughter

by Judith Tarr

  He might outlast her. He might not. She had no intention of lingering here till her feet froze.

  The Mare nosed about, pawing snow from still-sweet grass. One particularly delectable clump happened to be that on which he sat. She nibbled round about him. He appeared oblivious to the snap and crunch of her teeth so close to his fundament.

  She taught him the folly of that: a sharp nip that brought him cursing to his feet.

  Sarama smiled contentedly. “You sulk badly,” she said.

  “I am not sulking.” He stamped his feet as if he had only just noticed how cold it was, and brushed at the snow on his mantle. “I was thinking,” he said with dignity.

  “Thinking too hard,” Sarama said, “and it’s too cold. Why not do it inside a house?”

  “Because I needed to breathe.” He drew a deep breath, let it out again; shivered convulsively. “By the Lady! When did it grow so cold?”

  “Last night,” Sarama said.

  He snorted and stalked away from her.

  She followed, quiet again. The Mare followed her.

  At the garden gate he halted. He stared at the flock of children, at Catin, at the colt who came at him whickering and trying to chew on his hair. He wheeled on Sarama. “I have not been in this place since yesterday!”

  She arched a brow.

  “You have been here since morning,” Catin said, impatient. “Now tell us why.”

  “No,” said Danu, and shut his mouth tight.

  “Then tell the Mother,” she said.

  Sarama thought that he might refuse again. But the Mother’s power was strong, as strong as a king’s on the steppe. Danu let Catin take him by the hand and half-lead, half-drag him to the Mother’s house.

  oOo

  Sarama was glad of the warmth there, the wine heated with honey, the fresh hot bread with cheese melted on it. The Mare and the colt had been let in, too, if only into the first of the rooms, and fed bits of fruit and cut fodder. They would all have been well content, if Danu’s mood had not been so black.

  When Sarama had eaten and drunk her fill, though Danu had barely touched what he was given, the Mother sent the servants and the children into the outer rooms, and gestured to Catin to secure the door.

  “Now,” she said to Danu. “Tell me.”

  Danu hunched into himself as he had in the garden. “Ask her,” he said, thrusting his chin at Sarama. “It’s her nightmare we’ve all been having.”

  “She hasn’t the words,” the Mother said before Sarama could speak. “You tell us.”

  “She has—” Danu broke off. Sarama had not found the Mother’s expression particularly daunting, but then she was not a man in this backward country. Reluctantly but obediently he said, “Our dream is of a thing that her people know. That thing is called war. War is when men—it is only men, she says—kill other men, but women, too, and children.”

  Catin’s breath hissed between her teeth, but the Mother’s expression remained serene. She gestured to Danu to continue.

  He gathered composure as he went on, as if the telling of the horror eased the force of it, a little. “War is killing. Men of her people—men of the east, horsemen—reckon it great glory. They fight one another, and they kill one another, and whoever lives is called the victor. And the victor takes everything.”

  Sarama had not told him that. Perhaps his goddess had.

  “Are you saying that these people make a virtue of shedding blood?” Catin’s voice was thick with disgust.

  “They make a virtue of fighting,” Danu said. “Fighting is the duty of every man.”

  “And the women? What are they doing while the men fight?”

  “Nothing,” said Danu.

  “They allow it?”

  “They are powerless,” Danu said. “They are less than men are here—they are like children. Men command them. They have no choice but to obey.”

  “That is preposterous,” said Catin.

  “It is true,” Danu said. “That is why I went—where I went.” He did not mean the goddess’ garden: not entirely. “It seems . . . she speaks to me. Even though I am . . .”

  “Yes,” the Mother said. Her voice was soft, but it silenced Catin. “She will speak to a man, if he will listen. Men seldom will.”

  “Yes,” said Danu. “And those, the horsemen—they hear others than she. Gods, they call themselves, powers of the sky, of the storm. They deafen their servants to the Lady’s voice. They call for blood, and not only the blood of her sacrifice, or the blood that women shed with the turning of the moon. Blood and fire. Killing. War. To take what they will to take, whether it be theirs or no. To kill any who resists them.”

  Catin opened her mouth. The Mother’s glance stilled her. It shifted then, not to Danu but to Sarama. Yet she spoke to Danu. “Not all the horsemen are men.”

  “I am only one,” Sarama said. “Horse Goddess’ servant. My people—long dead. Only I. And the Mare. The gods are too strong.”

  “The Lady sent you,” the Mother said.

  Sarama nodded. “I don’t know why. Look at him. If all are like him—”

  “He is an extraordinary man,” the Mother said, “but nevertheless, a man. Men are not as strong of spirit.”

  Extraordinary. Sarama committed the word to memory. It was a lovely word, which she hoped she understood. “The horsemen would be angry if they heard you,” she said.

  “I imagine they would,” said the Mother.

  “You must learn to fight,” said Sarama.

  “We will learn what the Lady wishes us to learn,” the Mother said.

  “The Lady says fight,” Sarama said. She did not mean it to come out so flat, but she did not have the words of this tongue to soften it. “The men broke us, before. The gods fought the goddess. She lost. Now I am the only one. All are gone but me. I think—we did not know how to fight.”

  “How can the Lady lose?” Catin demanded. “The Lady is all that is. She cannot be anything else.”

  “She might change,” Danu said. He seemed surprised that he had spoken, but he went on nonetheless. “She might wax and wane like the moon. Waxing then, for your people, until her time came to wane.”

  “We are not waning,” Catin said fiercely. “We are as strong as we’ve ever been.”

  “You are not as strong as men who know how to fight,” Sarama said.

  “Fighting is ugly,” Danu said. “It shames us.”

  “It will save you.” Sarama fixed her gaze on the Mother. “Let me teach your people how to fight.”

  “I must think,” the Mother said. “What you ask—what you say the Lady asks—may be too much for our people.”

  “Then you will die,” Sarama said, “or worse.”

  “What is worse than death?”

  Sarama turned to Catin. “War,” she said. “War is worse than death. And worse than war—to lose.”

  “Defeat.” Danu sounded weary. “To lose—that is defeat.”

  “Defeat,” said Sarama. “Death in war is bad. Life in defeat—worse than bad. It kills the spirit.”

  “I will think on this,” the Mother said.

  29

  “You people think too much.”

  Danu had been eager to return to the quiet of the house by the river. Now that he was in it, and surprised to find it clean and swept and the fire banked, too, he caught himself missing the Mother’s house, the people crowded together, the warmth of bodies, even their pungent scent now that winter made washing difficult. This was too clean, too open, too empty—or not empty enough, since he must share it with Sarama.

  She had no mercy. “You think too much,” she said again. “You should not think. You should do."

  “Is that how it is with your people?” he demanded of her. “You never think, you only do? No wonder you have this thing called war!”

  She seemed taken aback. He had never lost his temper with her before—never been provoked truly beyond bearing.

  Let her think him weaker than ever. He did not ca
re. She brought the overturning of his world.

  He could not accept that quietly. No, not even for his pride, which the Mother of Larchwood insisted was greater than he knew or liked to think.

  She rallied quickly, “I do not have war,” she said. “Never say I have war. War broke my people. War will break yours.”

  “You are one of them,” Danu said. “You have a horse. You know how to fight. You must, if you say you can teach us.”

  “We learned to fight,” she said. “Too late. All are dead. I am the last.”

  “Perhaps we would rather die than fight.”

  “Then die,” she said.

  oOo

  She went to bed. For all he knew she lay awake nightlong. He lingered in the outer room till his back ached and his eyes were gritty with exhaustion.

  Even after he had spread his pallet and lain down on it, well wrapped in coverlets against the creeping cold, his mind would not rest. It spun endlessly on the same thoughts that had dizzied it since Sarama taught him this terrible lesson.

  It was not that he feared he could not learn to fight. It was that he feared he could.

  He lay on his face in the heap of furs and wool. Sometimes when he was younger—not so long ago, if he admitted the truth—he had felt himself a stranger in his body, a child who had fallen somehow into the shape and semblance of a man.

  Now as then, he was too keenly aware of the size that he had grown to, the strength, the width of his shoulders and the solidity of his arms. He would have given much to be a child again, slight and smooth-skinned, weak and gladly so, because a child’s weakness could not do the harm that a man’s strength could all too easily do.

  Imagine a world in which a man was proud of his strength; in which, when his temper slipped its bonds, he could do whatever he pleased. Rage, strike, kill. And no Mother to stop him, no sister strong enough to stand in his way.

  Sometimes the boys in Three Birds had whispered of such things, half in horror, half in desire. Every boy wondered what it would be like if men ruled. But it was not anything that they dared speak of in public, or even think of, much.

  Now they would learn what such a world could be. A world in which the Lady was defeated and cast down; in which her servants were all gone but for one prickly-proud young woman with a stumbling tongue and an irascible temper.

  oOo

  Danu woke to familiar scents: fire burning, bread baking. He yawned and sighed. Such pleasure, to know that the house was well run, the Mother well looked after.

  He started awake, was on his feet before his mind caught up with his body. He was not in Three Birds. That was not one of the Mother’s servants moving in the outer room. It was Sarama.

  He was scrupulously careful to wash and dress and make himself presentable before he came out to face her. She had everything in excellent order. Last night, too, he had come home to a house that was properly run, that had not suffered from his neglect of it.

  He should be glad. He should not be resentful. He should not, above all, show her precisely how she had seemed to him every morning that she had been in his charge.

  He could help none of it. She knew: there was laughter in her eyes as she waited on him. “Do you wait on men where you come from?” he demanded.

  “No,” she said. “I serve the Mare. Not men.”

  “So you are a proper woman,” he said.

  “Not proper,” she said, “where I come from.”

  “Proper here,” said Danu. And after a pause: “If you teach us how to fight, we’ll never be the same again.”

  “If you die, you will not be at all.”

  He bent his head under the force of that. “For years out of count we have been the Lady’s people. Now you say that we must change or die.”

  “The Lady keeps you,” she said. “Always. Even if you learn to fight.”

  “I don’t want to—” He bit his tongue. Swallowed hard. “Teach me.”

  “Here? Now?”

  “Here. Now.”

  “No,” she said.

  “No? But—”

  “Eat,” she said. “Drink.”

  “Then fight?”

  “Then begin to learn,” she said. She thrust a laden plate at him. “Eat!”

  Danu ate sullenly, but eat he did. And when he had done that, she bade him dress to go out, found his hunting bow and his boar-spear and made him take them both, and led him into a world of white light and soft snow. The horses followed for a while, warm in their thick coats, snorting and dancing in the cold, but Sarama sent them back before they had gone out of sight of the house.

  It did not take him long to understand what they were doing. He stopped short. “This isn’t fighting. This is hunting.”

  “Hunting is the beginning,” Sarama said. “I want to see you hunt.”

  “But—”

  “Hunt,” she said.

  oOo

  Danu hunted. In any case they needed meat for the pot, and the snow offered clear tracks. He persuaded himself after a while to forget the silent one who followed him. She was light on her feet, quiet, and offered no interference. She knew how to hunt.

  Anger might have sent him in pursuit of a boar or even an aurochs, the great bull of the wood, but Danu was only half a fool. He hunted the red deer, that was swift enough and canny enough to require a skilled hunter, but not so dangerous that it could cost him his life. No doubt this woman of the horsemen would have preferred more dangerous prey; but she said nothing of it.

  There was little challenge in tracking a deer in the snow, but when the track was confused and tangled by a herd of them, and a pack of wolves had trampled through, and a herd of wild pigs, then it was not so easy to find one slotted hoofprint amid so many. They had gone well past the hill that sheltered the town of Running Waters, toward the wood itself. If the deer—a stag, from the size of his tracks and from the marks of antlers that he had left on the trees that thickened, the nearer they came to the forest proper—if the deer escaped into the wood, they well might be there nightlong.

  So be it. He was being tested, he knew perfectly well. Women underwent such a testing in the Lady’s temple, the rite that no man was allowed to see. He had seen his sisters coming from it, his cousins, the women of Three Birds and later of Larchwood, and seen how they had changed: how their eyes were deeper, as if they had looked into the Lady’s heart. That light was on them ever after, though it sank beneath the surface of their ordinary selves.

  For men there was no such thing. A boy grew up. His voice deepened, his manly organ grew large, his body thickened with hair, his face sprouted a beard. When all of that was done, if a woman had not chosen him, he lingered in his mother’s house and did as she bade him, raised his sisters’ children, faded into one of the grey uncles who sat in the market watching the youth of the world go by.

  Danu did not want to be a grey uncle. Neither did he want to be this thing that Sarama had shown him, this horror, this slayer of men, this warrior. He wanted to be what he had always been. Loved, valued, given duties beyond the usual lot of a man. Could not the world go on as it always had? Why must it change, and change so terribly?

  All the while his spirit ran on the dark tracks, his body ran in the light, seeking the red stag. He did not care if he outran Sarama—though in truth she kept pace with him, breathing as softly as she could while running through snow. He ran at the wolf’s pace, long steady lope, alert to the shifts of the quarry’s path.

  They brought the stag to bay not far inside the wood, in a stand of young trees, birches, tall and white and slender. He was a great one indeed, with a lofty crown of antlers, his neck swollen with rut, and the musk of him so strong that Danu had caught and followed it easily the last few hundred paces.

  The stag stood blood-red against the snow and the trees, head high, poised, motionless and yet vividly, vibrantly alive. Danu nocked arrow to string with a heartfelt prayer to the Lady, begging her forgiveness for the taking of this life, giving her thanks for the life it g
ave him. The arrow flew straight and true, and buried itself in the great beating heart.

  The stag leaped, high and high, up to the sky. Even before he fell, he was dead.

  30

  “Out of death, life; out of blood, sustenance.”

  Sarama did not know what all the words meant. They were a prayer, she knew that much. Danu wept as he spoke them. Yet even as he wept, he was cleaning and trussing the stag, lashing together branches, fashioning a litter to haul the carcass home.

  On the steppe one gave thanks to the gods for granting one success in the hunt. But one never mourned the quarry. Beasts were beasts, even those of sacrifice. Their lives were set on earth for men to take.

  This man wept as if for a brother, and begged pardon for each stroke of the skinning knife, as if the stag could feel it even in death. Yet he had hunted as skillfully as any she had seen, and killed cleanly, with one beautifully aimed shot. He was not a weakling.

  Nor would he make a warrior. Not as he was now.

  oOo

  She helped him drag the carcass the long way back to the city. It was dark before they came there, but there were stars, and a wan moon through scudding clouds. Those, and the snow, lit their way well enough.

  The Mare and the colt met them well outside the city, bounding through the snow, the Mare quietly glad, the colt noisily so. They made a royal escort, and watched with interest and no little snorting as the two of them finished butchering the stag and hung it on the outside of the house, high up lest the wolves come.

  It was very late when they ascended at last to the blessed warmth of the banked fire, took turns washing in water from the cauldron that Danu had hung that morning, and fell headlong to bed or pallet.

  Morning came rather too soon for Sarama. This time Danu was up before her. The scent of roasting venison drew her out at last, to find him in his usual morning semblance, even to the murmur of song.

  The stag was all butchered, and roasting or smoking or drying; Danu was scraping the hide, readying it for curing. Its bones and antlers would be put to use, its hooves, its sinews, every scrap of it—and a great labor it was, too, but he seemed glad of it. His mourning had been brief. And yet she thought it was heartfelt.