by Judith Tarr
On the morning after the tribe had come to this place, Agni, wandering in search of diversion, came on his pack of young wolves playing at the game of princes. It was a milling, tumultuous melee of men and ponies, sticks and clubs and no few bruises.
As Agni sat his pony, watching the uproar, the object of it flew out of the melee and fell ripely at the pony’s feet.
The pony shied. Agni urged him back toward the reeking thing: the goat’s head long since burst out of its leather bag, and separated from the rest of the goat even longer since.
Stick or club he had not thought to carry with him, but spear he had, and a good, thick one, too; he had been thinking somewhat desultorily of going after boar. He kicked the pony over, swooped and caught the goat’s head with the butt of the spear, and hurled it back into the mass of players; and himself in hot pursuit.
It was a grand game, a game fit for princes. It distracted Agni rather admirably from contemplation of the steppe without Sarama on it, and the emptiness that opened in him; and from the fact that tomorrow he must go out alone himself, and find his stallion.
A game could not go on forever. He drove the goat’s head at last between two yelling players, straight at the peeled wand that was the goal of all their battle, and sent the wand flying. He whooped and whirled his spear about his head, calling out, “Now then! Who’ll go hunting boar with me?”
They were all avid for it, even Tukri, whose head was nigh split: he had got in the way of a club. He had tied it up with a strip of his shirt, and he sat his pony steadily enough, though he had a drunken look in his eye.
Agni wheeled his sweating pony to lead them out of the camp. But someone was standing in his way. The boys and men tangled behind him, some pressing past before they could stop their ponies.
Agni swept his arm at the rest. “Go.” And when they hesitated: “Go! I’ll follow.”
They were none too reluctant, though a few went slowly, with many glances back.
Agni let them go. His pony was glad enough to stand and breathe. Agni was not so glad to look into the face of his brother Yama.
There was always that dislike which they had cherished since they were children; but leavened now on Agni’s part with memory of the words his father had spoken, the secret that the king knew. That Agni was the hidden and frequent lover of Yama’s youngest wife.
That did not suffer itself to be spoken, nor would it while Agni was master of himself. “Good morning, brother,” he said lightly enough. “I trust I find you well.”
“You’ve always had a glib tongue,” said Yama. “Are you thinking to talk a stallion into your snare?”
“If it works,” said Agni, smiling sweetly, “why not?”
Yama had always hated it when Agni refused to be baited. He snarled now, but would not move aside to let Agni pass. “Where are you going? Have you forgotten what you must do tonight?”
“Not for a moment,” Agni said. “Why? Is it forbidden that we bring somewhat home for the feast?”
“It is rather expected that you remain in the camp until the feast,” said Yama. “Others can hunt for once, and bring home the quarry. Or are you afraid you’ll be outmatched?”
Agni smiled again, sweeter than ever. “I’m never afraid of that,” he said.
He urged the pony forward. Yama could have stood his ground, but he was not as brave in the body as he was in his boasting. He stepped aside hastily.
Agni laughed—not prudently, but at the moment he did not care. Yama was a blusterer and a fool. Anyone with eyes could see it.
oOo
They tracked the boar to his lair and slew him there, and it was Agni—of course—who made the kill. Agni was the gods’ beloved. There were few who could equal him in the hunt, and none who could best him.
It was a great boar, and old, with tusks so potently curved that they had pierced his lip thrice. Agni had met the little red eyes as the boar plunged upon his spear, and seen his own death there.
But not yet. Not this day. The boar died with its breath hot and reeking in Agni’s face, and its jaws gnashing impotently, snapping at his hands.
He took no wound at all, and the boar died as the gods had ordained. They carried him back to the camp with singing and rejoicing, and laid him at the king’s feet where he sat amid the elders.
The king bestowed on Agni a wintry smile, a gift so rare as to be beyond price. Agni took its memory with him when he went among the priests, he and those of the young men who would be sent out on the morrow to find their stallions.
The priests in their masks and their horsehide mantles would be the young men’s guardians from now until morning. The feast was not for them: they would fast while the tribe gorged itself. They must go out empty, empty and singing, and find life and sustenance on the steppe.
Some of them had eaten heavily this morning, the better to endure the long night. Agni, who had been hunting, felt already the edge of hunger. But he would be strong. He would prove to the gods that he was worthy, and pray for a king of stallions, a horse fit for a man who would be a king.
There were half a score of them, a great number for a single tribe. They had all hunted and raided and fought with Agni. It was inevitable that he find himself in front of them, the first to be taken by the priests, and the first to go away with them, away from the tribe, down the river to the circle of stones that had been raised by the gods long ago. He had walked in that circle before: when he gave up the amulet of his childhood, when he slew his first boar, when he killed his first man in battle.
This, if the gods willed, was the last time he would pass the gate of stone as a youth not yet a man. He was nigh as tall as the lintel now, and nigh as broad as the two stones that held it up. That, people said, was the measure of a man; of perfect rightness, neither too large nor too small.
The space within was sunlit still, but the shadows of the stones were long. The altar stone was swept clean. A great basin had been set near it, a cauldron of boiled and tight-bound leather, broad enough and deep enough to hold the body of a man. It was full of water, and more in skins, waiting to be poured in.
The priests who had led him here took him by the arms. He stiffened but made himself submit. They stripped him unresisting, lifted him into the cauldron and bathed him without gentleness.
It was his pride to make no sound, even when they scraped his skin raw. They were scouring off the years of his youth and making him new. They took his beard with a keen stone razor and consecrated it to the gods. They lifted him out and bade him lie on the grass, while one by one each of the others was accorded the same ritual cleansing.
The wind was cool on his drying body. His cheeks felt strange, bared to the world as they had been when he was a child. The others as they came to lie beside him were unwontedly quiet. The usual badinage, the jests and the vaunting, were quenched.
oOo
The sun sank lower and the air grew cooler. Just at the fall of night, the last of the young men was brought among the rest. “Up!” commanded the priest in the mask and high headdress of the Stallion. His voice echoed hollow in the mask, as if it came from beneath the earth.
They rose in their various ways, with grace or without, smoothly or in an awkward, shivering scramble. Agni hoped he managed grace. The sky was full of light, the earth growing dark. They stood in a wavering line, white skin glimmering, hair hanging lank with wet.
The priests, who in daylight had been merely men in masks and the hides of beasts, in the dusk swelled to godly vastness. The Bull, the Hound, the Stallion, loomed over the naked boy-men.
A drum began to beat. Lesser priests, naked but for faceless masks, plain coverings of tanned hide over heads and faces, danced into the circle. Each bore the horn of a bull, carved and limned and bound with cords, filled to brimming with what proved by scent and color to be kumiss.
There were ten horns, one for each of the young men. The priest who approached Agni was a thickset man, shoulders furred with hair, and very thick and short
in the manly parts. Agni searched for the gleam of eyes in the mask, but found only darkness.
It was not Yama, surely. There were other men of such proportions in the tribe.
Agni took the horn as it was proffered. The reek of kumiss dizzied him. Something else rode under it, something more potent still.
Others had recoiled from their own drinking horns, startled as Agni had been. If this was a drug, then it was meant for them all.
Agni drew a deep breath and held it as he drained the horn.
“All of it,” one of the priests told someone else down the line. “Every drop.”
Agni’s ears were ringing even as he lowered the horn. The priest took it, bowed—did his eyes gleam mockingly?—and wheeled away.
The stars were singing. The drum beat in his own flesh, in his blood. The Stallion reared over him: great crest, streaming mane. From a man’s loins sprang a great black rod, the tip of it as broad as a man’s hand, great as a club and hot as a brand from the fire.
Agni swayed between heaven and earth. Beneath him, before him, the Stallion mounted the Mare. His strong yellow teeth seized her nape. She squealed. The sound pierced Agni’s skull. The Stallion’s hammering strokes kept pace with the drumbeats.
They danced, the young men. There was no will in them. The drug, the drink, the drum, seized them and wielded them. They danced round the Stallion and the quiescent shadow of his Mare. Their feet woke the thunder. Lightnings cracked in their hair.
Agni felt his own growing long, sweeping like a stallion’s mane. His feet were hooves, hard and stony. Strength rippled through his body, the strength of the stallion that acknowledges no limit. The sound that burst from him was a stallion’s scream, both exuberance and challenge.
Another scream met it. His nostrils flared. He scented musk, male-enemy. Stallion trespassing on the herd that he had won in battle. Young stallion, bright-maned, heavy-shouldered—but never as heavy as he.
He flung the mass of his body against the stranger. His teeth snapped, diving for the throat. Hooves battered, forelegs tangled. They reared against the stars; reared and wheeled and fell away, shrunken into human shape again.
Others danced that same dance, the dance of stallions doing battle for their mares. The Stallion was in them all.
The Mare waited, a patient shadow. To the victor she would go. To the one who conquered; who was worthy to reckon himself her master.
Agni, mere naked man, looked about him at the warring stallions, and laughed. The one who had fought him would, with morning’s coming, be Patir his friend and yearbrother, with whom he had hunted the boar. Tonight it was a fallen man-beast, man’s body, stallion’s eyes.
Agni danced past him toward the Mare in her solitude. She was silent, a thing of night and starlight. The scent of her dizzied even his human senses.
He caught at mane like a fall of moonlight. Warm neck flexed under it. She wheeled, startled. He let the force of her movement draw him up and round, onto a warm living back, the back of a mare indeed, rearing under him.
He rode with her. She tossed her head. He stroked her neck, gentling her, while the stallions fought and the stars wheeled over them all. He had the victory. He had the Mare—as man, and master.
38
The stars wheeled overhead. Agni was aware, dimly, of lying on the grass; of staring up at the loom of a stone. The others were somewhere in the circle, the priests, the mare who had been the Mare. But here was silence, as if the night had held its breath.
The stone moved; divided. The lesser part of it, the slender upright shadow, bent over him. It breathed. Eyes gleamed in it. He drew in a scent that he knew extraordinarily well, musk and sweetness and a faint, pungent hint of fire.
He sucked in breath to cry out: You should not be here!
Her hand stopped the words before they began. Her lips followed. He had no power to resist them.
She lowered herself on him, the folds of her mantle falling over him, veiling them both. Her body was as bare as his, and warmer by far. She coaxed and teased his shriveled rod, tormenting it till it rose in its own defense. When it rose high and rampant—and no will of his at all, to make it so—she loosed a sigh as of relief, and impaled herself on it.
She rode him as he had ridden the mare, smaller, lesser in strength, and yet by far the greater. The part of him that cried sacrilege was vanishingly small. Man had mounted man in the madness of the dance; Stallion had mounted Mare, and all the rest had caught the heat of his passion.
Now Agni shared in it. Rudira the headlong, Rudira the impossibly bold, took him in the shadow of the gods’ stone, in the place to which no woman was admitted, and no female thing except the Mare.
He believed then what his father had said, that she was a witch, a creature outside of simple human nature. Else how could she dare such a thing as this?
There was no woman in the world like her. That much the king had failed to see. In clasping her, Agni clasped a burning brand.
She fitted her body to his body, breasts to his breast, riding the last slow surging strides into a taut and ecstatic stillness. She slipped from him then, skin sliding on sweat-slicked skin, and lay on the grass beside him.
His head was frill of the scent of her. He tried to shake himself free of it, to whisper urgently: “You shouldn’t be here! Go!”
She ignored him. Her hand sought and found his shaven cheek. She peered at him, as if she could see more of his face than a dim blur in the starlight.
Maybe after all she could. Witches had night-eyes, he had heard, like the creatures of the dark that they were.
When had he last seen her in daylight, by any light but that of lamp or star?
He shivered. Her hand burned, but he had no power to thrust it away.
“I had forgotten how beautiful your face was,” she murmured. “As beautiful as many a woman’s. No wonder you were in such haste to hide it behind a beard.”
He tensed at the sound of her voice, barely audible as it was. If a priest happened to be lying nearby, or one of the initiates—
She stroked the tension out of him. Her fingers were supple and strong. She had no fear, and none of the shyness that was supposed to be proper to a woman.
When he was slack on the grass, held back from sleep only by the heat of her presence, that presence left him. She melted into the night, dark mantle mingling with the darkness. He heard no sound of her passing.
He might have thought that he dreamed it all, except for the scent of her that was on him still. That was real. That was incontestable.
oOo
When he opened his eyes again, the grey light of dawn met them. Dew had fallen heavy in the night. He shivered with the damp and the cold, and no garment to warm him.
They were all rising in the circle of stones, groaning, shivering. The bravest of them washed in the dew, scrubbing away the excesses of the night. Agni, too; losing her scent that had lingered on his skin, making himself all new.
There were no priests to bid them do their duty. They did not speak to one another. Each was wrapped in silence.
For each, just within the circle, a gift waited: clothing made for the hunt, and boots for walking, and a pack laden with necessities for the journey.
Agni scrambled hastily into the warmth of clean new clothes. He took up the pack and shouldered it, and followed the track that the sun showed him, shining through the stones.
Outside of the circle waited the men of the tribe. No woman, no mother or sister, for this was the men’s rite. Each father or elder brother held the bridle of a horse, or more than one, if his son or brother could or would muster the wherewithal; and each horse was saddled and laden with supplies for the journey.
They stood as if they had been there nightlong, though they must have come out of their tents just at dawn; they would have roistered till the stars grew dim, then rested for a while, till it was time to greet the initiates as they came out of the circle.
Agni, leaving the cold of the stones behin
d, found himself face to face with his father. The king stood upright without assistance, with a fair handful of the elders at his back, and three fine strong ponies waiting beside him—one more than Agni had looked for, but that was well and more than well.
They were all, as Agni had hoped, mares. People were looking askance at that, perhaps, if they thought to turn their eyes from their own kin, but Agni had asked for mares and no geldings. He had no fear of his manhood, and some little hope of bringing home a stallion.
Agni did not see Yama, or indeed any of his elder brothers. But of younger brothers and fellow hunters and his friends and companions there were more than enough, a whole grinning pack of them, though some of the grins were strained with the aftermath of too much kumiss.
They all hung back in awe of the king. He embraced his son ceremonially and kissed him on both cheeks, and held him so, speaking swiftly in his ear. “Find your stallion, and come back as soon thereafter as you may. I’ll be king still when you return. My word on it.”
Agni stiffened, his eyes widening, but the king’s grip was too strong; he could not pull away.
“Listen to me,” the king said, fierce and swift, as if he must say it all before anyone could grow suspicious. “The factions are forming. The wolves gather to pull down the old stag. But not before the autumn dancing. Not, if the gods will, before you come back. Come back soon, O best of my sons. While I live I can protect you. Once I am dead—”
“You won’t die,” Agni said, just as fiercely. “I’ll come back. And you’ll live years yet.”
“Maybe,” the king said. He slapped Agni’s cheek lightly, more blessing than rebuke. “May the gods bring you a king of stallions, and bring you back safe to the tribe.”
Those were the words that tradition prescribed. Agni barely eased for the speaking of them, even as he bowed and murmured the response: “May the gods grant that I come back a man.”
The king let him go. He had to take his horses and mount and ride away as all the initiates did, each in his separate direction. Agni’s was north and somewhat west. He was not bound to it, but it seemed as good as any.
