White Mare's Daughter

by Judith Tarr

  “You people are very strange,” she said. “Mine don’t share. The men don’t. Women must. Men take them, and take many.”

  “Truly?” He turned in her arms and folded his own about her, and regarded her with great interest. “That doesn’t sound proper.”

  “Women choosing men is not proper.”

  “It is very proper.”

  “No,” said Sarama.

  He shook his head and laughed. “We are so different,” he said.

  “Men and women are,” Sarama said. “I thought you were weak, at first. Because you acted like a woman.”

  “Like a man.”

  “Like a woman.” His grin was irresistible. “Oh, you are beautiful!”

  “They say I am,” he said.

  “Women are supposed to be beautiful,” she said. “Men are supposed to be strong. You are both.”

  “I try to be as I should be,” said Danu.

  “They won’t understand,” she said: “the horsemen. You must learn to fight.”

  “I will learn to fight,” he said. His face had gone dark. “They are coming. I see them in the daylight now, as we walk toward my city. I hope Catin’s dreams are as persistent. She did well to send me home, but ill to send you away.”

  “She sends me where the Lady needs me,” Sarama said.

  Danu did not reply to that. In a little while there was no need for words.

  oOo

  The farther they traveled, the more people seemed to follow. They were a processional through the cities and the towns and the villages, even in snow, or in black icy rain. Sarama had never seen such a country, nor dreamed of one, in which cities were as common as tents in a gathering of tribes.

  The spaces between grew smaller, till city seemed to beget city, and each had its own offspring of towns and villages. They were built in circles, all of them, and never a straight line or a corner. Everything danced the great dance, the spiral dance, inward and outward in dizzying progression.

  Now Sarama could see that Larchwood, which had seemed so vast and so unimaginably rich, was a small and poor city. The great city, the king city of this country, was the one to which she came on a grey evening. It had snowed, would snow again. The cold sank to the bone and lodged there.

  The city offered no warmth to weary eyes, only blank walls and shuttered windows. But the people who streamed out of those houses, who ran through the snow, calling to one another, were as bright as birds in spring.

  Some carried torches, some clay lamps that sent beams of light across the snow. They were laughing, singing, dancing a long skein of welcome. It wrapped the newcomers about and drew them inward to the city’s heart, to the place that was sacred, because it belonged to the Lady.

  The Mare and the colt were part of it. The Mare, who did not like to be crowded, endured this with remarkable patience. The colt, having tried and failed to climb into Danu’s arms, settled for pressing as close as Danu would let him, and keeping his teeth to himself.

  People should have been wiser; and yet Sarama could not help but be glad to see so little fear. These people were strong of spirit. These might, indeed, learn what they must learn in order to defend their country against the tribes.

  34

  The Mother of Three Birds, Danu’s mother, was an imposing presence. She was not the most vast of the Mothers that Sarama had seen, but neither was she meager. She was the image of the Lady that was in every temple, great belly, huge buttocks and thighs, and breasts well fit to nourish multitudes. And multitudes she had, too, more daughters than Sarama could easily count, and a whole pack of sons. There was even a baby, a child no more than a summer old, wide-eyed and solemn in the arms of one of her brothers.

  Danu was not the eldest of the sons, but the second or third. They must be children of different fathers: each was quite different as to looks, and yet they shared a common semblance, perhaps no more than a habit of expression, that spoke vividly of their mother.

  A man of the tribes would not have been ashamed to boast so many strong children, all of whom had lived past infancy. And this was a woman. She was blessed of the Lady, visibly and palpably the Lady’s own.

  The eldest of the daughters, the Mother’s heir, was named Tilia. She was going to be as vast as the Mother, Sarama could well see, but as yet she was merely imposing in her bulk—and very light on her feet.

  Her eyes were bold, raking Sarama and finding her too evidently disappointing. “People said that you were beautiful,” she said, “like the new moon in autumn. You are thin and your nose has an amazing curve, but is that beauty?”

  It seemed that Mothers’ heirs were not subject to the discipline or the strictures of politeness that bound other women. Catin had been much the same, and had been likewise uncorrected.

  Sarama smiled at this one and said, “No, I am no beauty. I never was.”

  “You are interesting,” Tilia said. She tilted her head to one side and studied Sarama’s face. “Yes, interesting. Very. Don’t you think so, brother?”

  Danu did not answer. His cheeks were dark above the beard. He was blushing.

  “Ah,” said Tilia, looking from him to Sarama and back again. “So. Did she?”

  He nodded. He seemed unable to do otherwise.

  “I thought so,” said Tilia with every evidence of satisfaction. “That was a venomous message the heir of Larchwood sent, though it was oh so polite.”

  No one censured her for speaking so openly of what might better be said in private, but the Mother intervened before Tilia could speak again. She sent the women from Larchwood in the care of certain of her sons, to rest and be fed. Her son who had newly returned, and Sarama, she kept with her.

  Danu did not seem overly pleased by that. His sister slapped him on the shoulder as she went to do their mother’s bidding, and said, “There, there, brother. Tomorrow you can have it back again. But for today we’ll wait on you, and you will undertake to endure it.”

  oOo

  Endurance was the word for it. This Mother’s house was larger by far than the Mother’s house of Larchwood, and richer. Its gathering-room was large enough for a dozen people to eat in, and for a dozen more to wait on them. Woven hangings warmed the walls, and treasures gleamed in niches, beautifully wrought pottery, images carved of stone or bone, and even a shimmer of gold that proved to be the likeness of a bird. They were there, Sarama realized, simply because they were beautiful; not because they had any immediate or constant use.

  What a strange thing: beauty for its own sake. Sarama needed to think on it, to understand it.

  But not now. She was seated next to the Mother, a position of great honor there as it would have been among the tribes. Everyone watched her and judged her, and reckoned her people by the way in which she conducted herself.

  She knew no other way than the courtesy of a tribesman, to partake second after the king, to exchange politenesses but no matters of state, and to leave a little on the plate, to be given to the women and the children. All of that did not appear to shock anyone, though they ate everything they were given.

  It was a fine feast, with roast mutton and roast kid and a haunch of venison, and fine bread, and milk rich with curds, and finer wine than Sarama had tasted before. Then after it they were given cakes made with honey and nuts, and sweet bits of fruit. Sarama recognized the cakes from Danu’s baking. This then was where he had learned the way of them.

  He should have been in great joy to be home again, but he was clearly in discomfort, clearly distressed that he must sit and others serve. Sarama wondered if Tilia had intended that. Sisters took petty revenge sometimes for brotherly slights.

  It was all very different from Larchwood, where she had been thrust out to the city’s edge and away from the people, and given little honor by the Mother or her heir. Catin might have said that these were rich people, sheltered people, who did not know what evil might come from the wood. And yet, thought Sarama, innocence was preferable to fear. Innocence might be amenable to reason.<
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  She ate and smiled, smiled and ate, and said little; but no one seemed to expect her to babble excessively. Soon enough she was let go, shown to a room that though tiny was beautifully appointed. It came with water heated for washing—remarkable in winter—and a stone that had been warmed in the hearthfire and laid at the bed’s foot.

  It also, and rather to her relief, came with Danu, who was visibly glad to be away from the feast. “I hate to be waited on,” he said.

  Sarama dared not even smile. As soberly as she could, she said, “Sometimes one has to be a prince.”

  She had used the word in her own language, because she did not know what it was in his, or even if there was such a word.

  He seemed to understand. “I would rather serve than be served. One waits so long, you see. And nothing is ever quite as one would do it oneself.”

  “I never thought of that,” she said.

  “People don’t.”

  His tone was brusque, almost angry. Sarama had never learned to be conciliatory, but she could at least distract him. “Was this room yours?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Should I be in it?”

  “I would go to yours,” he said, “if you had one. But since you don’t, and since this is not too uncomfortable—”

  “It is most comfortable,” she said. “I like it.”

  “Do you?”

  Ah, she thought. Good. He had brightened. She judged it wise then to pull him down with her on the bed, and to distract him completely and most pleasantly.

  oOo

  Either Tilia had mercy on her brother, or the Mother exerted her will. When morning came, Danu was keeper of the house again.

  He tried to look as if it were nothing more or less than he had expected, but Sarama caught the spark of relief in his eyes. Had he worried that someone had supplanted him?

  Clearly no one had. He muttered happily over the condition of the pots in the kitchen, and reckoned up the winter stores, and restored order among the servants. Not that Sarama could find any disorder; but this was a king in his domain, and he knew well how he wished it to be ruled.

  For Sarama there was no such comfort. In Larchwood she had had Danu for guardian hound and teacher. Here she was kept under no watch, given no jailer. The women from Larchwood were gone; had left at dawn. Having delivered the outland woman into the hands of the Mother of Three Birds, they were done with their task, and freed to go home again.

  Sarama did not miss them in the slightest. But her teacher she did miss—more than she had expected to. There were people to wait on her, but none to guide her or to tell her where she should best go. When she had risen, dressed, been fed, she found herself without duties, the only one of all about her who seemed to be in such a state. Even the children had tasks that they were given, or teaching-games to play before they could run off to freedom.

  Sarama’s own freedom had a slightly sour taste. She wandered out of the house and into the city. Everywhere it was the same. Men looked after the children, she noticed, as they so often had in Larchwood; even the smallest went about in the arms or on the backs of men who must be their uncles or brothers, since no one admitted to fatherhood. Though surely at least some must be fathers, if they were the mothers’ chosen men; if they had been so chosen when the children were conceived.

  It was oddly complicated to understand how these people thought of men and women, children and the getting of children. Sarama learned somewhat by watching: that whatever these men were to the children in their care, they seemed to take pleasure in the office, and to gain no little respect for it. Children were greatly valued here.

  Here, women bore children—whole tribes of them—and still ruled cities. They made pots, wove wonderful things, forged copper and gold, herded animals, traded in a market that seemed little diminished by the winter’s cold, did everything that Sarama had seen a man do, and more besides; and often great-bellied with child. It was great honor here to be a mother; greater honor than any.

  The Lady of this city, Lady of the Birds as Sarama heard her called, was a mother goddess. She sat in her temple, which was greater than any work of human hands that Sarama had seen before, squat and huge-thighed and huge-breasted as she always was, her face masked with the likeness of a bird’s beak, and in her ample arms a sleeping child.

  Sarama stood before her in the light of the lamps, with white snow-light slanting through the open door, and said as if to the Mother of a city, “I think I may be carrying a child.”

  She did not know why she thought it. Her courses had come and gone—when? Soon after she left Larchwood. That was not so terribly long ago.

  Nevertheless she had said what came into her mind. Once the words were spoken, they felt somehow more real. More true.

  “If I am,” she said, “and it lives, will you claim it? And if you do, which face will it see? Lady of the Birds? Horse Goddess?”

  The lamps flickered. The temple was oddly warm, though no fire was lit in it. The air held a memory of sweetness. Blood was not shed here, nor lives taken in sacrifice. On the stone table—the altar—lay bread and fruit, a beautifully painted pot, a cloth woven in the colors of milk and bone and snow. A bare black branch lay across it, and a single scarlet feather.

  Winter gifts, gifts of harvest past and of life asleep beneath the snow. As, perhaps, life slept in Sarama’s belly.

  It would be born in the autumn, if it was born: in the golden time, in the last warmth of the year before winter’s coming.

  If it was born.

  She laid a new thing on the altar, a thing that she had carried for time out of mind: a small smooth stone from Horse Goddess’ hill. It was grey like a young mare, banded with the white of the mare in her prime. Sarama set it on the cloth that was all white, but no two whites the same, next to the winter branch.

  She spoke no prayer. She let it shape itself as it would, as it chose to be. Let the Lady take it as she pleased, to do with as she would.

  35

  Danu in Three Birds, returned to all his old places, still was not entirely the Danu who had left with Catin in the spring. First there was Sarama, who had chosen him for herself; and then there was the colt, who required housing, feeding, and care. Danu had not, in his eagerness to leave Larchwood, regretted the labor that he had devoted to the house and the pen for the horses, but in Three Birds he had it all to do again, and winter gripping hard.

  Nevertheless there was fodder stored away for the cattle, and grain that Sarama said would do; and if he ate a little less bread this winter, then so be it. House and pen he had none, but the horses had found themselves a place that they liked well, a meadow and a copse just outside the city, which like the house in Larchwood lay beside the river. There was a stream that ran too swift to freeze, and ample grass beneath the snow, and on the trees still a remnant of frostbitten fruit. The colt and the Mare were if anything more content there than they had been with a house to retreat to; the trees sheltered them in ill weather, and they could come and go at will.

  Danu’s mornings now were marked first, not by the Mother’s song, but by the sound of hooves on winter-hardened ground, and the colt’s rattling of the shutters in Danu’s room. Danu would stagger from his warm bed, gasping with the shock of the cold floor on bare feet, and open the shutters, and rub the colt’s face and neck by way of greeting; and as he did that, the Mother would sing the sun into the sky.

  Then the colt would receive his morning handful of grain, and the Mare hers; and maybe they would linger for a while, or more likely they would go back to their meadow to graze until Sarama came to ride or to tend the Mare. If Danu was fortunate he might go with her; if his duties were too pressing, he could rest assured that at evening the colt would come back to be given his dinner.

  Winter did not appear to dismay the horses. They had neither fingers nor toes to freeze and blacken. Their coats were as thick as a bear’s. Snow made them snort and dance. Icy rain met with little more than a snort of annoyance.
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  They were hardy creatures, though oddly delicate. Sarama had warned Danu strenuously against feeding them more than a handful of grain at a time, and had invoked the terror of the Lady on anyone who fed them but Danu. “They will die,” she said, “if they eat too much.”

  That was a great trust, to be the guardian of creatures so strong and yet so strangely weak. Danu might have been glad to be free of it; but if he had been, he would have envied the one who bore it.

  It gained him, he could not help but notice, a degree of respect that he had not had even for being the keeper of the Mother’s house. He was the one to whom the horses came, who could speak to them in their language of gesture and touch.

  “And grain,” he said when people ventured to marvel. “They do it for that. Not for me.”

  oOo

  “Yes,” Tilia said on a day not long after Danu had come back to Three Birds. The horses had been fed some time since; Sarama was riding the Mare, to the manifest delight of a crowd of the young and the not so young. Danu was grinding flour for a sweet cake, a labor that he could well have left to the servants, but his body welcomed the simple exertion.

  His sister perched on a stool, graceful as she had always been in spite of her bulk. She was more beautiful than he remembered, and also more aggravating.

  “They’re animals,” she said of the horses. “They live to eat. But they’d come to you even without the grain, I think. Now tell me about her.”

  “Her?” Danu asked, deliberately dense. “The Mare?”

  Tilia rolled her eyes. “Of course not, idiot. The woman. You left with one, came back with another. That’s fast work, little brother.”

  Danu’s cheeks were hot. He bent more diligently to the stone, grinding the emmer grains white and fine.

  “Tell me about the woman,” Tilia persisted.

  “What’s there to tell?” he said, panting a little. “She comes from the east of the world. She serves the Lady, whom she calls Horse Goddess. She’s bearing a message to the Mother, which she’ll deliver when she’s ready.”