White Mare's Daughter

by Judith Tarr

  They were guarding Agni. They were not being obvious about it. He might not have noticed, except for the way Rahim had set himself so that anyone coming in must either step around him or fall over him, and Rakti had placed himself rather conveniently near to the store of the king’s weapons.

  Agni had never been guarded before. Not as a king is guarded. It was strange, like a gift, and like a burden, too.

  It expected things of him. It asked him to be what he hoped to be. To be a king.

  He shook off the tremor that came with the thought. Rahim and Rakti were his friends. They were making sure he was safe. That was all. They would have done the same in battle or on the hunt.

  While they watched over him, he could rest. He stretched out beside his father’s bed, meaning simply to close his eyes, to wait till Patir came back. Just until then. And then . . .

  46

  Agni slept deep and long. From deep sleep he passed into dream.

  It was strange, because he knew that he was dreaming. He knew where he was and what he did there, lying on heaped furs beside his father. And yet he was also standing on the steppe under a sky the color of dawn.

  There were others near him. And nearest, like a flame in that dim place, the stallion Mitani. But the stallion’s eyes held a man’s awareness, a man’s intensity.

  “Father?” Agni asked, half in wonder, half in disbelief.

  The stallion bent his head. He gestured with it, and pawed. Mount, he said.

  Even as Agni moved to obey, in the moment when he set hand to the stallion’s neck, a whirlwind howled between them. Agni clutched at Mitani, wound fingers in mane, clung desperately as the storm raged about them. Mitani stood steady, unmoved.

  The wind buffeted Agni, beat on him like fists. Only Mitani’s strength kept him on his feet.

  Borne up by that strength, he lifted his head. The wind whipped his hair in his eyes, blinding him, but here in the place of dreams he could see clearly. He saw the storm, its rage and its power. It blew from the east with battering force, surging toward the west.

  In the west, under a serene and sunset sky, a woman was sitting. She sat alone, illuminated by the sunset. Its light was no more ruddy than her hair.

  Sarama. Agni did not speak the name, and yet it resounded in his skull. His sister Sarama sat at the gate of the west, her face a mask of quiet like the face of a goddess.

  She did not move, nor did she speak. She seemed unaware of him. She offered nothing, no escape from the storm; and yet where she was, was stillness.

  oOo

  Agni woke abruptly. The dream lingered, the taste of it, the bruising force of the wind; and Sarama’s face.

  Dreams were never simple in their meanings, but this one seemed clear enough. Sarama was safe, had come into the west. He need have no fear for her, nor fret for anyone but himself—and for their father.

  He sat up in sudden dread. But the king lay as he had lain before, neither more nor less alive. Rahim and Rakti were on guard still.

  Taditi sat in the place she had marked for her own, fiercely and rather defiantly awake. Only her presence assured him that he had indeed slept, and not simply closed his eyes for a moment.

  He rose and stretched. Yes, he had slept, and for a long while, too, by the stiffness in his body.

  That was well enough. He would be the stronger for having rested.

  He would need to be strong. It was coming to end, this dance. Whether in two days’ time, in the dark of the moon; or, if the king so chose, sooner than that. Then Agni would take what the king had laid aside. Agni would be king.

  Waiting was a terrible thing. On this day, perhaps because the rite had been decided on, more people came than had come in the hand of days before. Taditi let them in, muttering over it, but acceding to Agni’s will in the matter.

  “Let them see,” he said. “Let them say goodbye, if that’s their wish. It’s no harm to him.”

  And, he thought but did not say, if anyone tried to help the king on his way, Agni would know. If that one was Yama, then Yama would be a murderer; for a man marked for the sacrifice must not be touched by any mortal hand, nor sent to his death except by his own will and his body’s consent, before the time appointed.

  The king was clinging to life. Waiting, perhaps. Wishing to go as a king should go, by the knife, in a flow of clean blood; not ignobly in his bed.

  oOo

  He clung to breath if not to consciousness, and the moon shrank and dwindled till the last feeble glimmer of it vanished in the dawn.

  On the day of the new moon, in cold so bitter that the air cracked like ice, the tribe prepared for the sacrifice. Priests of the Bull chose the victim from the sacred herd, a black bull, young, without white marking, without blemish. The women prepared the fires, and such feast as there could be so far into a hard winter. The men and boys and the priests of other gods gathered stones for the barrow in which king and bull would lie.

  It was hard labor in the cold, but it warmed them admirably, and whetted their appetites, too: they fasted all that day, for the gods and for the king who soon would walk among them.

  Agni dug stones out of stone-hard ground and fitted them together until his hands bled. Then, because his heart was uneasy, he left the rest to finish, and went back to his father’s tent.

  Taditi stood guard over the king. He lay unchanged, breathing faintly.

  “Did anyone come?” Agni asked his aunt.

  She inclined her head. “Yes,” she said. “Prince Yama came.”

  Agni raised a brow. “Did he?”

  “He came,” said Taditi without expression, “and looked, and saw me. And went away.”

  “Indeed,” said Agni. “What was he carrying? Knife or vial? Or did he cast his eye on one of the pillows?”

  “He had a knife,” Taditi said. She smoothed the coverlet over the king’s body. “You be careful, child. This one will go before the night is over—it’s his time. But it’s not yours.”

  “You think—” Agni did not say the rest. Of course she did. So did Rahim and Patir and all the rest of the young men who had been so careful to surround him since the king’s fall. If he left this tent now, he would find a handful of them hanging about, always with good and sufficient reason, but never very far from him.

  Aid here was Taditi, looking after him, too. It was a gift, such care for his life.

  “We do it for the tribe,” Taditi said. “The people are best served if you lead them.”

  Agni bent his head and was silent. He did not know what kind of king he would make; he had never been one. But he had been raised for it, and this he knew: he would be a better king than Yama.

  oOo

  As the sun sank over the winter steppe, sere grass and windblown snow, the people gathered round the great fire that the women had made. The cold had deepened with the sun’s fading. The chattering of teeth and the stamping of feet marked the gathering; but no one fled to the warmth of the tents. Every man and woman, and every child to the infant strapped to his mother’s back, had come to see the king’s passing.

  Agni left his father to the women as the rite prescribed. They would prepare him, wash him and clothe him and make him fit to walk among the gods.

  Agni could trust them to protect him. He prepared himself with care, not that it mattered what anyone but the king wore or how he plaited his hair; but the people would see, and Agni wanted them to see a man who would be a king.

  As he bound off the end of his plait and reached for his best mantle, the cured hide of a bear that he had killed, a soft sound brought him about. He had leaped for his dagger before he thought.

  Rudira stared wide-eyed at the blade hovering a bare hand’s width from her face. Agni did not lower it at once. He wanted to, but his hand would not move.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he hissed.

  She tossed her head at that, irritable, like a mare vexed by a fly. “Why? Everyone’s out by the fire.” She made no great effort to lower her voice, though t
his was but a curtained corner of the king’s tent, and the women were close by with the king. “You haven’t come to me. Even after I told you.”

  “I couldn’t,” he said. “My father is going to die tonight. Or doesn’t that matter to you?”

  Her eyes glittered. “It doesn’t matter in the least. Not to me. Though to my husband it matters a great deal. He wanted to be rid of the old man days ago. He’s not happy that it’s come to this.”

  “Why? Because it lets my father go as a king should?”

  She shrugged a little, tilting her head, letting her mantle slip. She was clothed under it, but Agni well knew what was under that. His body responded like a well-trained hound, leaped to the alert and poised.

  But for once his mind was stronger. It was fixed on the sacrifice, and on the king’s death. She looked to him like a foolish child, shallow and self-absorbed, and growing petulant as she saw how her blandishments had failed.

  She was not so beautiful then. Her beauty seemed overwrought. It cloyed.

  “Why did you come here now?” he demanded out of the cold place where his heart had been. “Did my brother send you?”

  She did not answer that, which was her right. But she did not deny it—and that struck him deeper than he had expected.

  “He knows.” She did not deny that, either. He seized her, shook her. “Tell me he doesn’t know!”

  “I can’t,” she said. Her voice was faint.

  “How long?”

  Her shrug was invisible, but he felt it under his hands. She was more the sulky child than ever.

  Agni’s belly cramped. If Yama knew—then he would use it. Yama was never one to refuse a weapon.

  “Who told him?” Agni demanded of her. “Who betrayed us?”

  “He just knew,” she said. Had she always been so dull of wit? Had Agni simply been blinded by her beauty?

  She was extraordinarily beautiful. Whatever made a woman sheerly and fiercely desirable, she had it. The turn of her glance, the lift of her shoulder, the sweet curve of her breast under the coat—

  It was a witchery. He rent his mind away from it and fixed it on the king. Through the memory of that grey maimed face, he forced himself to think of what this meant, that Yama knew what Agni had been doing with his wife.

  “No,” said Agni. “No, he doesn’t know, or he’d be here with the knife in his hand to cut me to ribbons. He’s not clever enough to lay this subtle a trap. Nor are you—though you may think you are. What are you trying to do? Keep me away from the sacrifice so that your husband makes the king-cut? Why? What care do you have for him?”

  “For him, nothing,” she said. “I want to be a king’s wife.”

  She could not marry Agni, not unless he killed her husband; and for the killing of a brother, the penalty was exile. Agni could neither dispose of Yama nor take Yama’s wife for his own. That had always been so, and Agni had always known it, as had she.

  She wanted to be a king’s wife. It was as simple as that. Badly enough to betray Agni to death or exile or worse?

  Perhaps.

  Time was growing short. If she kept him here, kept him away from the sacrifice, she cost him the kingship. She might think that little enough price for him to pay, if she were married to a king, and Agni the prince remained her lover.

  She would not be imagining that he would refuse. One sight of her naked body and he would be hers again, heart and soul.

  It was amazing, he thought, how quickly one could come to hate what one had loved.

  She must have seen something in his face. She shrank back.

  Time was when he would have gentled her, taken her in his arms and kissed away her fears. But the king was going to his death, and Agni must be with him when he died.

  Not for any woman would Agni fail in that. Least of all for this one who had betrayed him—whether in speaking of him to her husband, or in pretending that she had. Truth or lies, with either one she had lost him.

  He set her aside as if she had been a child, swept his mantle about him and strode out of the tent, into the moonless night.

  oOo

  They made the sacrifice of the black bull under a vault of frosty stars, lit by the great fire. The bull was young and huge and confused as to what was wanted of him. He did not like the fire; he lowed and flung back his head, and tried to turn and bolt.

  The priests struggled with him, turning him, pricking him with goads until he surrendered to their will.

  They brought him to the fire, where the chief of them waited, armed with the knife of sacrifice. He was quick, springing on the bull, sinking the blade in the heavy throat, freeing the bright blood.

  The bull sighed and toppled slowly in the space prepared for it. When at last it was dead, when the blood was drained from it and poured out before the gods, the slow drums began to beat. Set high on a bier, borne by the women of his tent, the king came for the last time before the people of his tribe.

  They had set him upright, combed out his hair and beard, and dressed him as a king. From below, in firelight, he seemed as he had been before his fall, erect and impeccably royal.

  Yet he did not move. His eyes were shadowed beneath the high headdress, the planes of his face gaunt, carved clean. He might have been a corpse borne to its grave.

  Agni moved into the light. The priests of the Bull had drawn back, leaving the great carcass where it had fallen.

  The women brought the king beside it, lowered his bier and withdrew as the priests had. They were veiled, all of them, and yet Agni recognized the eyes of Yama’s mother, and Taditi behind her, silent, watchful.

  There was no sign of Yama. Agni had more than half expected him to leap forth and bellow a challenge, but there was nothing. Only silence.

  He stood in the circle of light, alone but for the king. He looked down into those shadowed eyes.

  Perhaps the king returned his gaze. Perhaps he did not. The soul in that body was well set on the road.

  If Agni would be king, he must finish what the fall had begun. He must sever the cord that bound this man to life.

  He had killed men before, in battle, as any warrior must. But to kill so, in sacrifice—the sacrifice that was made only of and by a king—was nothing that he had ever done.

  He must do it. The knife was in his hand, the black blade, the haft carved of bone. A priest held out the cup that was a skull, the skull of a king long dead. Agni took it slowly.

  The king sat unmoving. He breathed: Agni saw the faint lifting of his breast.

  He would go as a king should go, by the blade as he had lived. Agni gathered his courage in both hands. T

  he drum beat, slow, slow. The priests began to chant the hymn of the opening of the way. For the king it would be as if a gate rose before him, opening slowly, showing before him the gods’ country.

  But he could not go to it unless Agni aided him. Agni tightened his fingers round the haft of the knife. The skull-cup fit closely in his hand, ready to drink the blood as it sprang.

  He drew a deep breath, let it go. As it fled away, steaming in the cold, Agni made the king-cut.

  Swift, hard, clean. The blood ran high and strong: startling in one who had been so close to death.

  As the life poured out of the king, the fire flared, catching the glitter of his eyes. Full into Agni’s, alive, vivid—aware.

  And glad. Heart-glad.

  47

  The king was dead. Agni poured his blood on the earth to mingle with blood of the bull. Priests took up the body, wrapped it in the bull’s hide, and laid it on the bier. Beside it they laid the bull’s head with its great curving horns.

  The people would feast on the body of the bull. Agni, fasting, aching with cold, must follow the priests away from the warmth and the light, into the cold dark. Only the women followed.

  Yama did not step forward, did not challenge, did not demand that he and not Agni go to the grave with the king’s body. Agni’s back ached with the tension of waiting for it; but it never came. He wen
t as he should properly have done, alone with the priests and with the women of his father’s tent.

  They walked in starlight, unlit by lamp or torch. The path was clear before them. The people had beaten it all the day long, going back and forth from camp to new-raised barrow.

  Now Agni saw it all but finished, rising higher than he had expected, dark against the stars. They had built it well. It would endure, first in heaped stones, and then when spring came, when the ground had softened, it would be covered over and made into a hill like one born of Earth Mother herself.

  They laid the king in it, wrapped in the hide of the bull, and when the barrow was built the bull’s head would mount guard over it. The bull would look to the rising sun as the sacrifice had done since the dawn time; looking back the way that the people had come.

  But the king looked westward. It was not the way of the people, but Agni set him so, and the priests did not contest it.

  Agni could not have said why he commanded it. Because Sarama had gone into the west, the daughter whom the king had loved. Because the tribes had always gone westward; had always followed the sun when they looked for new lands to conquer. So would the king do, turning his face forward instead of back, ahead to what would be, and not behind to what had been.

  They laid his precious things with him, that the women had brought: his weapons, his shield, the trappings of his horse. They laid baskets and bowls beside him, food for his journey, all that the people could spare.

  They had brought his old stallion; the beast came willingly, and suffered the knife to be set in his throat. He sank down at his master’s feet, sighed and slipped into death. Then they built the barrow over king and stallion and buried them deep, and labored till dawn to do them their last honor.

  oOo

  As the night passed, people of the tribe came from the feasting to lay a stone, a blessing, a prayer; to bid the king farewell. His kin came, his sons, the elders who had been his friends and rivals. They all came, every one, with gifts for his memory, food and drink for his spirit, tales that remembered him, that made him live again for a little while.