White Mare's Daughter

by Judith Tarr

  Maybe this Three Birds would be more amenable to reason.

  oOo

  “Is that your city?” Sarama asked Danu when they had returned to the house, while he gathered belongings, food, drink, supplies for the journey, with tightly controlled violence.

  He shot a glance at her, hot enough to sting, but his voice was mild. “What? Three Birds? Yes, that’s my city.”

  “You will be glad to go back.”

  “Very glad,” he said, thrusting one last packet of meal into the pack that he had fashioned, and lashing it shut.

  “Will your Mother listen?”

  He paused as if to consider that. “One can hope so,” he said.

  “Then maybe not,” she said. “Someone must listen.”

  “I listen,” he said. He spread clothing—his and hers—on a pair of folded blankets and rolled them tightly. “I hate it, but I listen. Others may as well. Maybe enough to save us. Maybe not. Who but the Lady knows, or knows why?”

  “Maybe you do,” she said. “Are you sorry you go from here?”

  He did not answer. She cursed her awkward tongue. She could not say the things she needed to say, in the words that she needed.

  She was about to turn away, to see to the horses, when he said, “I am not sorry to leave. No. It was my Mother who laid it on me to come here, and Catin who urged her to do it.”

  “Always Catin,” Sarama said.

  He lifted his head. He was frowning. She did not know why he should be so struck by something so obvious. “Always Catin,” he echoed. “I wonder . . .”

  He did not go on, although she waited. He finished his packing instead, still frowning.

  Sarama decided to relieve him of his burden. “Catin is a—” She paused. The word she needed, she did not have in his tongue. She said it in her own; then struggled in that other language again. “A—one who lets the wind blow through. The gods speak, they use her voice.”

  “That’s what a Mother is,” said Danu. “The Lady speaks through her.” Sarama shook her head. “No. Not just the Lady. Other gods, too. Any god. The Lady, for you. Then, for me, the gods who bring war. She doesn’t know, I think.”

  “She would know about the Lady,” Danu said. “But if other gods can speak through her—what if it happens to all the Mothers? How will we know which words to trust?”

  “It’s not the Mother,” Sarama said. “It’s only Catin.”

  “Can you be sure of that?”

  She had frightened him. She had not meant to do that. “What I am—I know whose voice speaks. The Mother speaks with the Lady’s voice. No gods. Catin speaks for whatever speaks through her.”

  “By the Lady!” Danu murmured. “We should warn—”

  “They will not listen,” she said. “Better go to Three Birds, see if your Mother has better ears.”

  “Or better stomach for what she doesn’t want to hear.” Danu was not happy, but he acquiesced. There were advantages, Sarama caught herself thinking, in a man who would do as a woman bade.

  oOo

  They were not, for all their speed, to go alone or unattended. On the road from the house to the city, they found a company of women waiting, tall women and strong, armed with hunting bows and boar-spears. They looked precisely like warriors, or like the escort of a king.

  Catin stood in front of them. Now that Sarama knew what to look for, she saw the light deep in the dark eyes, the will that was Catin’s own, but fed and nurtured by another altogether.

  “We honor you,” she said, “with the companionship of our people. They go to protect you against beasts, and against the claws of winter. They’ll serve you, feed you, look after you. And,” she said, “make very sure that you go nowhere but to Three Birds.”

  Sarama inclined her head. “I understand,” she said.

  The light in Catin’s eyes brightened briefly, a flare of white fire. “I see you do,” she said.

  So, Sarama thought, did Danu. She wondered if he was aware, as she was, that perhaps these people could fight, if suitably provoked.

  Catin was speaking to the women, to the tall dour-faced woman who appeared to be their leader. “Keep watch,” she said, “and see that she doesn’t escape. If she breaks away eastward—stop her. By whatever means you must.”

  She spoke the last words slowly, with a weight in them that raised the leader’s brows. “By whatever means? Any means at all?”

  “Any that is necessary,” said Catin.

  Even, Sarama could well see, if that means should require killing.

  Not all the women understood. Some, the younger ones chiefly, seemed to look on this as a lark, though they eyed Sarama with mistrust. But a few went still. They knew what had been said, and what had been commanded.

  Sarama smiled at Catin. “You learn,” she said, “after all. Good. Learn more. Then when the war comes—fight.”

  “Without you,” said Catin, “no war will come.”

  Sarama laughed. That was not wise, but she did not care. She touched leg to the Mare’s side. The Mare was delighted to oblige. The women, and Danu, had perforce to follow—at a trot, to keep pace with the Mare.

  Ahead of them all ran the dun colt, tossing his head and flinging heels at the sky. The city could not have kept him if it had wished to. He was Danu’s now, Danu’s stallion—though Danu might not know or accept it.

  No one tried to trap or keep him. They were all afraid of him. Not too foolish, that, stallions being what they were; but it would not serve them well when they met a whole horde of his kind, with men mounted on them, armed with swords.

  Still, there might be strength here. There might be will to resist—to fight. Sarama could only hope for it.

  oOo

  It was a fine day for riding, clear and almost warm. The snow was melting in the sunlight. The rest, traveling on foot, must be less enchanted with the beauty of the day: the road was rapidly turning to mud, though not, to be sure, as deep or as forbidding as it must have been in the spring.

  Sarama was not grieved to leave the city behind. If Danu had stayed . . . that, she would have minded. But he was walking beside her with his arm over the colt’s back, settled into a long easy stride. He did not press his presence upon her, or insist that anything had changed.

  So, she thought. Had it? Riding was interesting; she was sore in places that had seldom heretofore made themselves known. If the Mare’s back had been less round or her gaits less smooth, Sarama might have been in honest pain.

  Among the tribes she would have been said to be dishonored. She had joined in the body with a man not her husband, whom she had chosen for herself, and not through the choice of her kinsmen. Yet among her mother’s people it would have been her right to do as she had done, to choose the man who would take her maidenhood.

  The Lady had led her to him. He had been set there for her, to wait for her—as Catin had so clearly seen.

  He could not by the courtesy of his people refuse her. That much she understood. And yet she did not think he had wished to. He was no spineless thing. He made his own choices, though he might seem to be accepting what was laid on him.

  He sensed her gaze on him, and made her the gift of a smile. Her belly fluttered, startling her. It was not that he had beauty, though he had it in plenty. It was that he was himself.

  She had never looked at a man so before, or thought of him so. This must be what the stories told of, this trembling in the belly, this weakening of the knees.

  The Mare’s servant should be above such things. The Lady’s servant might well regard it as part of her duty, to worship the goddess with the body, to make it fruitful in her name.

  Sarama had taken Danu in no one’s name but her own. She wanted him again, now. If they had been alone, she would have flung herself from the Mare’s back and borne him down, and had her way with him then and there.

  But they were under guard, half a dozen women watching her every move. She would be fortunate if she could even share a blanket with him tonight, or b
e left alone to do what her body so urgently wanted.

  The Mare’s ears flicked back. She was laughing at Sarama. All too often she had been hot for the stallions, and Sarama had mocked her for it. Now Sarama knew what it was to be in season—well and truly and quite completely.

  oOo

  Night found them in a small city—a town, Danu called it, hardly larger than a gathering of tribes. There had been a remarkable number of such towns along their way, more than Sarama could have imagined before she came to this country. Every hilltop, every patch of trees, every little river seemed to have its human habitation, its houses of wood or stone, and tilled fields round about, damp with melted snow. And, unfailingly, its flocks of children running after the strangers, marveling at the horses, spreading word ahead of them that strangers, and strange beasts, had come into their country.

  This town had a temple, though not as tall or as grandly carved as that of Larchwood, and a Mother of divinely vast proportions. She looked like the image in the temple, enormous and fecund—for yes, she was bearing, and close to it. Stranger yet, her daughter and heir, who was nigh as vast, was also with child—perhaps by the same man; Sarama could not quite understand what they said of that.

  It seemed that they might not even know that a man could sire children. That was preposterous, surely. And yet, as far as she could tell, there was no word for father in this language. Only for mother.

  They were all housed in a single room, all six of their guardian hounds and Danu and Sarama. People offered them food, drink, fire on the hearth. There was a feast of sorts, if a small one; a welcome, but subdued. It seemed this was a poor town as towns went here, and its harvest had not been of the best.

  There was still more to eat than Sarama could remember in winter among the tribes, in warmth and comfort, wrapped in beautifully woven blankets and secure beneath a well-thatched roof. Even penury here would have seemed luxury on the steppe.

  They retired ungodly early if this had been a feast. The Mother was weary, she made that clear, and her heir was not bearing as well as she might.

  Sarama found her blanket spread by the inner wall, and Danu’s beside it. If she had in mind to escape, a wall of bodies lay between her and the door.

  As long as there was a pot to relieve herself in, she was glad to be where it was warm: after the warm day, the night had turned to frost. Danu took his time in coming to bed, lingering with the women, combing and plaiting his hair, ignoring Sarama on her blanket by the wall.

  She waited as long as she could bear to wait, but he was not going to have mercy. With a sharp rush of temper, she jerked the blanket up over her head, rolled herself in it, and set her face firmly toward the wall.

  A light hand ran teasingly down her back. She shivered in spite of herself, for the pleasure of the touch. But she set her teeth and refused to turn.

  The hand slipped beneath the blanket that she had thought so tightly wrapped, slid round, cupped a breast. Through coat and shirt she felt the heat of his skin.

  His body fitted itself to hers, front to her back. His breath whispered in her ear.

  It could have been anyone. But she knew the smell of him, the musky sweetness; knew his warmth, and the length and width of his body, as if it had been made for her own.

  She whirled in his arms. If she had hoped to startle him, she failed. He grinned at her, white teeth in his dark face.

  “I thought the woman chose,” she said, not perhaps as angrily as she had intended.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Then why—”

  He simply smiled.

  He was naked in his wrapping of blankets—all bare warm skin. She found that she could slither out of her own clothing, if she had help; and that it made a wonderfully comfortable bed, bundled behind her against the wall.

  She took him inside her, more easily than she had thought she might, and with less pain. He was gentle, a slow swell, like a smooth-gaited horse. Her body knew how to match him, found the rhythm of the dance with newfound ease and a kind of grace.

  As slow, as gentle as it was, the release when it came was breathlessly swift. It startled a cry out of her. She bit back the end of it, flushing hotly, suddenly mindful of the roomful of women beyond the bulk of Danu’s body.

  He seemed altogether undismayed, and well enough content. She buried her face in his shoulder. He held her with his quiet strength, wise enough not to speak, kind enough not to turn away from her and fall into the sleep that she had heard was all too common in men after the gods’ dance.

  She was—by the goddess, she was happy. She was content, even knowing how publicly she had betrayed herself. Here, with this stranger, this man whose tongue she spoke imperfectly and understood only middling well.

  How very strange, to find such a thing where she had never looked for it or known to expect it. It was as he said, the Lady’s gift: wonderful, startling, and greatly blessed.

  33

  From town to town and from city to city, they made their way westward toward Three Birds. Word of them ran ahead, and people came out to see the horses and the stranger-woman who rode the larger of them.

  At first the sky was kind, sending no rain or snow, though the warmth of the first day lost itself in winter’s cold. But with cold came increasing weight of cloud, and raw bleak rain that turned, mercifully, to snow.

  Sarama could not persuade Danu to rest himself by riding on the Mare. He was horrified at the thought. No matter that the Mare was willing: “I belong on feet,” he said, nor would he be shaken from his conviction. Even when Sarama threatened to dismount and walk beside him.

  “Don’t be a fool,” he said. “You aren’t used to walking. Get on, ride. I’d rather not be tending blisters when I could be doing other and much more pleasant things.”

  That made her blush furiously, as no doubt he had intended. He found her shyness endlessly amusing.

  It had become clear to her that people here were not modest of their bodies as they were among the tribes; that while it was not excessively common for a man to walk naked through a stranger’s house, he might do it if the house was warm and there was a bath at the beginning and a bed at the end of it. A woman might wear nothing more than a garment of knotted string the color of blood, shaped like a kilt or a skirt but covering no part of her that mattered, and the rest of her as bare as she was born. Exuberantly so, too often; for women here were only reckoned beautiful if they were vastly fat.

  Sarama had been no beauty on the steppe. Here she was even less of one, too thin and tall and sharp of face to be reckoned even passable. And yet Danu professed himself well content. He had great beauty for a man in this country; women, now that she had eyes to see, watched steadily as he went past, and sighed that he was the stranger’s chosen.

  She was not forbidden to keep him to herself, but neither was she expected to do so. This she discovered on the fourth night, when they rested in a town so small it was hardly a town at all. Village, Danu called it.

  They came in in the midst of a festival, a dance of the young men that took no notice of the snow. They danced naked but for a patterning of ocher and red earth and white chalk, and masks of deer crowned with antlers. It was a hunting festival, she gathered, a thanksgiving for a rich kill, with meat enough for the village for many a winter’s day.

  Danu was not expected to join the dance. But after it was over, when the men had gone off to some rite of their own, or perhaps simply to wash off’ the paint and put away the masks and go sensibly to sleep, the Mother of the village said to Sarama, “This is a very beautiful man, this of yours. Is he as beautiful in the Lady’s dance as he is in face and body?”

  Sarama did not know what to say. The women from Larchwood had never said a word to her that was not of duty or necessity. The Mothers who had offered them lodging had refrained from speech with Sarama, past the most essential courtesies.

  This Mother was warm with honeyed wine, which perhaps had loosened her tongue. She patted Sarama’s arm and smi
led a gaptoothed smile. “There, there. Just chose him, did you? That’s the sweetest time, and well I know it. I’ll not ask you to share him; not while he’s still so new. Pity; he is lovely. But then you know that better than I.”

  Sarama mustered a smile and a word or two, and enough composure to finish out the festival. But when she could be together with Danu—with a whole house to themselves, for a wonder; a hut of a single room and indifferent cleanliness, but warm enough and dry—she let loose what had been vexing her. “Am I supposed to share you?” she demanded.

  Danu had been undressing by the fire, after having succeeded, somewhat, in persuading the smoke to escape through the hole in the roof. He looked over his shoulder. His brow was up. “You can choose not to,” he said.

  That was not what she had asked. “Am I supposed to?”

  He shrugged. It did lovely things to the muscles of his back. “It’s reckoned polite.” He paused. “Catin didn’t like to share me, either. But she allowed it.”

  “That’s what she did,” Sarama said. “Yes? She shared you, but I chose you. Was that polite?”

  “No,” he said, and he looked as if he wanted to laugh but did not dare. “No, when I flung myself at you, she had already unchosen me.”

  “You did not—”

  “I couldn’t choose you,” he said. “A man doesn’t. But he can persuade a woman to choose him.”

  She drew a sharp breath. “You wanted me?”

  “Is that so horrible?”

  “No,” she said. “Goddess, no! But—”

  “Ah,” he said. “I shouldn’t have told you.”

  He did not sound remarkably regretful. She gave up her resistance, rose from the heap of blankets—yes, clothed in nothing but her hair—and wrapped her arms about him from behind and held tightly. “I don’t want to share you,” she said.

  “I don’t want to be shared.” Was he surprised to have made such a confession? She thought he might be. “It’s not at all polite of me, but I want to indulge myself in you. I don’t want anyone else to take me.”