White Mare's Daughter

by Judith Tarr

  Without thinking, he slipped into the scented darkness of the corner that Rudira had claimed for her own. Its walls of leather were lowered and tied, but he could see a glimmer of light through the joining. He made his way toward it, moving cautiously, without sound.

  Rudira sat with Yama’s mother in the common space of the women’s side. Lamps were lit. The remains of a small feast lay between them. A small girlchild curled half in and half out of the lamps’ light, sound asleep. She had been waiting on them earlier, perhaps.

  They sat together and apparently at ease, but there was a tension in the air, such as Agni had seen between two men in war, or two stallions at battle over a mare. Their conversation had a desultory air: small things, this woman bearing, that child ill of a fever, this pair to marry and that pair at odds, and such gossip as women might be expected to exchange of an evening.

  He lay beside the curtain, breathing as lightly as he could, and listened. He should never have been here, never have lingered, but there was a peculiar comfort in it, a strange kind of contentment, just to see her face, her hair silver in the lamplight, the clear line of her profile. Next to that heavyset old woman she was like a fall of bright water down the face of a crag.

  Agni at first was hardly aware that the current of conversation had shifted. Its tone was much the same, idle, casual, but the words were no longer quite so harmless. “When my son is king,” the old woman said, “mind you well that you do as I tell you.”

  Rudira arched a brow. This was no new thing to her, it was clear. “Are you so certain that he will be?”

  “He will be,” said the old woman.

  “There are a fair few who would contest that,” Rudira said.

  “Ah,” said Yama’s mother with a gesture of dismissal. “They may talk. My son will take the king’s place when the old one dies.”

  “He’ll have to fight for it.”

  “Not if you do your part,” the old woman said.

  “What if I won’t?”

  “You will.” Yama’s mother said it with calm certainty.

  The old woman left soon thereafter. Rudira sat for a while alone, narrow-eyed, contemplating the space in front of her. The tent was quiet. The other wives, if they were there, were asleep or silent behind their curtains. There were no babies, no children. The gods had not yet so blessed the lord of this tent.

  Rudira sighed and rose. She stretched. Her body arched in the light gown that a woman might wear in the women’s place, letting slip the shawl that had warmed her shoulders. She ran hands down over her breasts and hips, and smiled, and danced a step or two, a little dance of delight in who knew what. Perhaps no more than her own beauty.

  She turned in that light-and-shadowed space, shaking her hair out of its plait till it poured like water down her back and shoulders. With a wicked glint then she wriggled out of her gown. She was naked beneath it, full white breasts, sweet rounded belly, silver tangle of her sex. Her nipples were erect, as long and large as the end of her smallest finger. She stroked them, circling them idly, smiling at some vision that only she could see.

  Agni could hardly breathe. His rod was rigid, aching—remembering too keenly how long it had been since last he had a woman. This woman, the night before he left the tribe to hunt his stallion. Outside of dreams he had touched none since.

  She danced, fancying herself alone; stroking her belly, her thighs. Slipping fingers through the curling hair that grew there, stroking herself, eyes closed, head falling back, and such a smile on her face as he knew well indeed.

  The sight of her, the remembered scent, the heat of her body reflected in his, burned all thought, doubts, fears, clean out of his head. There was only she. She, and none other.

  He slipped the knot of the curtain and stepped into the room where no man but the lord of the tent should ever go. It was a dizzying thing, a mad thing, and he did not care at all.

  She was oblivious to him. He moved softly, slipped arms about her, kissed her ear, her neck, her shoulder.

  She did not flinch or stiffen. She melted into his clasp, purring in her throat.

  It was he who tensed, who half pulled away. “Were you expecting someone?”

  She turned in his arms, supple, laughing softly. “Oh, yes,” she said. “You.”

  “You—” He growled at her. “You knew I was here!”

  She smiled and would not answer.

  “Witch,” he said.

  “Hush,” she said, and made a sign to ward off evil. “Don’t say such things.”

  “Then how did you know?”

  “I know you,” she said. She slipped the clasp of his belt and freed his rod, that felt as great as a stallion’s; and pinned it between them, dancing a slow dance of hip and thigh, till he must drown himself in a kiss or groan aloud. Here, where Yama could come, or any of his wives or servants, any woman of the tribe, and see them so.

  There was a wild delight in it, an edge of terror that made it so much the sweeter. She mounted him where he stood, locked legs about his middle, rode him with urgency as desperate as if she, and not he, had known no pleasure of the body since the stallion-hunt began.

  Some distant part of him laughed at that. She would never have been without that pleasure, whether she took it from her husband or from her husband’s brother. Or—who knew? Perhaps some other eager lover had crept through the slit in the tent-wall.

  Then there was no thought in him at all. Only the heat of her body and the fierce female scent of her, and the surety. Here, with her, at last he had come home.

  44

  Agni went back late and in secret to his bed in his father’s tent. He left Rudira all warm and purring in her sleeping furs—nor did he leave her willingly. But the night was passing, and he could not be caught in her bed. Not for her sake. Not for his own.

  He had thought that he would fall direct into sleep, all his limbs and body loosed by the pleasure that they had shared. And yet he lay awake. This tent was noisier by far than Yama’s. There were babies in it, and children; his brothers and sisters, and their mothers, and the king himself with the woman whom he had chosen to keep him warm in the night. It was easier to come and go unnoticed, but harder to sleep once he had come back.

  He had, after all, remembered the words that Yama’s mother spoke to Rudira. Something that Rudira must do, that would assure that Yama became king.

  What, betray Agni? But if she did that, she betrayed herself; and for that she would die.

  She was the white fire in his soul, the woman to his man, but he was not blind to the truth of her. She had no honor. No woman did, except perhaps Sarama. Honor was for men. For women there was only the body’s urgency, and their own pleasure.

  Rudira would do whatever it best pleased her to do; and she was not of the White Horse people. She had no loyalty to their king. To her husband, it seemed, she had some little semblance of it, enough at least to conspire with his mother to make him king.

  Agni had meant to remonstrate, to remind her that he would be king and not her husband; and when he was king, he would find a way to claim her. But she had reft him of thought or sense, blinded and dizzied him with her body.

  There was time yet. The king was strong, and the tribe prospered. When he died or was taken into the circle of the sacrifice, then the brothers would contest for the mastery.

  Agni would win it. He was the chosen one, the heir. The people would speak for him.

  oOo

  Agni never did ask Rudira what she had been plotting with Yama’s mother. She was endlessly, burningly hungry for him. On nights when he could not go to her, when some rite or gathering of the men kept him away, he might come late to his bed to find her scent in it, or a strand of her hair, or something that told him she had been there.

  She never came when he could come to her. When he remonstrated with her, called her mad, bade her remember the price of such things, she would not listen. “I needed you,” she would say. And that was all.

  Her husband did not
take her to his bed, that Agni knew of. She must be finding ways to put him off, for surely Yama would not be able to resist her.

  She would never say. That was a woman’s secret, as was so much else that passed within the tents.

  oOo

  Winter closed in, hard and cold. They danced the death-dance at autumn’s ending, called the spirits of the dead to be fed and warmed and feted, and laid them to rest again in the stone barrows of the people. At the dark of the year they sacrificed the black goat and the spotted bull, but no stallion; not that creature of wind and sun and the bright morning of the year.

  Agni was made a priest that winter of Skyfather and the lords of horses. What he did in the rites of his priestmaking, what visions he saw, what words the gods spoke, he told to no one. In the spring he would wear the Stallion mask and perform in the sacrifice; would speak the words that had come down from the dawn time, and dance the steps that were as old as human memory.

  So preoccupied, between his nights with Rudira and his days of learning to be a man and a priest, he saw little of his father, and thought less of it.

  One day when the dark of the year was past but the spring was far away, he braved the knives of wind and snow to cross the camp from the priests’ tent to his father’s. He had no thought but of warm mead and dry clothes, and aunts and cousins fussing over him, and a little rest of the spirit.

  The priests’ tent was the domain of men, crowded with the instruments of their calling, cluttered and indifferently clean. One never dared sit unless one looked first; there might be a bleached skull there, or a bundle of herbs, or the makings of a mask for the spring festivals. They ate there when someone remembered to cook, which was not unduly often. They kept no order that Agni could discern.

  His father’s tent was a haven: warm, full of light and the scents of cooking, the chatter of women and children, smiles and open arms and willing welcome. The brothers who were his rivals, the wives who schemed for their sons, would not trouble him under the king’s eye. They all preserved a kind of determined amity.

  That day he went in search of it. He had finished his mask for the sacrifice and laid it with those other, older masks that priests had made in years before him.

  He was tired. His back ached. He was chilled to the bone. He had no thought but of the pot that hung over the fire, full of whatever the hunters had brought back the day before, and warmed mead and warm feet, and sleep without dreams.

  He found the pot and the fire in the small tent that the women put up when the wind blew high and the snow flew fast, and meat and herbs and a few savories therein. But in the tent was a heavy stillness.

  He struggled to get some sense out of the brothers nearest the door, but they were babbling. The eldest of the aunts, dour Taditi, overran them with little pretense of humility.

  “The king fell,” she said.

  Agni thrust through crowding, useless people. They were all either standing and staring or standing and sniveling. No one seemed possessed of wits enough to move.

  The king had fallen indeed. He had been eating his dinner, Agni saw, when the fit had taken him. Bowls were scattered, a jar of mead spilled, darkening the royal horsehide with its sticky wetness. The king lay in the middle of it.

  He was still alive. His eyes burned in a face that had twisted horribly, as if some god had turned it to clay and pulled it awry. Half of it was as it had always been. The other was all melted and misshapen.

  Not one of the people crowding about him had even thought to lift him out of the puddle of mead. Agni hissed in anger, bent and raised him, grunting with the effort: for he was a big man, and heavy, a dead weight. But Agni was strong enough to carry him out of the common space and into the king’s own place.

  People tried to follow. He heard Taditi’s voice raised, piercing as a hawk’s cry, driving back all but the most determined. Even those hesitated somewhat, so that Agni had time to lay his father on the bed of hides and furs, to arrange the lifeless body and straighten as best he could the right arm that had twisted tight and would not let go.

  All the while he did that, his father watched him, hot-eyed, furious at this thing that had struck him down. Agni could think of no words to say that would comfort him. He settled for making his father’s body as comfortable as it might be, for cleaning it—he had soiled himself, worst of humiliations, as if he had been a helpless infant—and dressing it afresh and covering it with a clean coverlet.

  He had help in the last of it, Taditi as fierce-eyed as the king and as silent as Agni, and one or two of the younger wives with their veils forgotten. And, when he was nearly done, Yama’s mother, eldest of the wives, thrusting the other women aside to finish covering her husband’s body.

  Agni she either did not deign or did not dare to touch, but neither did she look on him with any welcome. “I’ll look after him now,” she said. “You can go.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Agni. He sat beside his father, seeing full well that she had been about to take that place, and smiled at the woman whom he should, he supposed, think of as his enemy.

  When he spoke again, it was to Taditi. “Someone should make sure that all my brothers know, and the elders, too—but my brothers first.”

  “He may not die,” Taditi said, not as if she contradicted him; simply as if she thought that he should know. “People can live years, sometimes, and even recover from such strokes of the gods’ hand.”

  “To be sure,” said Agni, though in his heart he did not believe that his father would live long, or come back again from the edge of death’s country. But in front of those who watched and listened, in particular Yama’s mother, he would pretend that he did believe. For his father’s sake he could do no other.

  To Taditi he said, “Nevertheless, my brothers must know.”

  She inclined her head, turned and went to do as he had not quite bidden her. One did not command Taditi. She was like a man in that, and a man who was a king.

  She was his father’s eldest sister, who had married long ago, but her husband had died. She had come back to her father’s tent, which after a while became her brother’s, and kept order in it even above his wives.

  She did not put herself forward, and there were many who did not know what she did or how she ruled in this tent, but Agni knew. She had brought him up when his mother died and his sister was taken away, raised him and taught him what she knew, that she judged fit for a manchild to know.

  She would see that his brothers were told, and that the news was spread slowly, lest the tribe forget itself and begin to wail that its king was dead.

  Not yet. He could not move or speak, but his eyes were alive. He knew where he was, and who bent over him. From the glitter in his glance, he understood the words that people spoke, too: perhaps more than any of them knew or wanted him to know.

  Agni remained beside him. He did not demand it with his glance, but neither did he forbid it. Agni preferred to think that he wanted it, that he was glad of his son’s presence.

  The brothers began to come in ones and twos and threes. And, inevitably, Yama came. He shouldered aside the rest, thrust his way to the front, stood glowering down at Agni. “What did you do to him?” he demanded.

  Agni took time for a slow breath. Now was not the moment to leap up and challenge this idiot. When he answered, he answered softly, with as much courtesy as he could muster. “Our father fell,” he said, “to a stroke of the gods’ hand.”

  “What did you say that caused it?”

  Agni gritted his teeth. “I was among the priests, performing my duties to the gods. I arrived just after he fell.”

  Yama grunted. “So you say.” He lowered himself to one knee and bent, peering at the stricken man. “Is he awake? Can he hear us?”

  Agni had long since concluded that a man could not study to be as dense as Yama was. It was a gift, a jest of the gods. Any fool could see the fury in those eyes: the one that opened wide, fixed on Yama’s face, and the one that sagged as if the bone
that housed it had melted with the rest.

  “He is awake,” Agni said levelly. “I believe that he can hear us. I pray that he will recover. Will you do as much, son of my father?”

  Yama shook a fist in his face. “You watch your tongue, puppy. If you had anything to do with this, as the gods are my witness—”

  “I had nothing to do with this,” Agni said. “Will you come to blows over the body of a man not yet dead? Do please try to have a little respect.”

  Yama would have struck him then, if Taditi had not stepped between them. “Enough,” she said in her harsh old woman’s voice. “You may quarrel all you like, and bring the tribes down about you—but not here.”

  Yama drew back growling. Agni remained where he was.

  He permitted himself the flicker of a smile before he turned back to the king. “Father,” he said. “Shall I send these people away?”

  The rage in that eye altered a little, enough perhaps for an answer. Agni sighed. “Very well. But when you begin to tire, I will send them out.”

  It was unbearably difficult to sit there, to see how his brothers alternately wept and blustered; how the best of them sat mute, and the worst babbled much as Yama had, seeking for someone to blame.

  “There’s no one to blame but the gods,” Agni said to that, cutting across the currents of conversation.

  “But someone might have—” one of the younger brothers began. He had always been Yama’s echo. Agni could hardly expect him to be different now.

  One of the others stopped him. “Someone didn’t. I feel the gods’ hand in this, and the hand of time. It grieves me—but it is what is.”

  Those with sense murmured agreement. Those without snarled at it.

  Yama dropped down at the king’s side opposite Agni, and made it clear that he intended to stay there—to prevent Agni from doing whatever fancied harm Agni might do.

  Very well, Agni thought. Let him amuse himself.