by Judith Tarr
Then and no sooner, Yama came. He set himself on a stone, lifted no hand to the barrow, but held court as if he had built it himself. Only a fool would have believed it, but there were fools enough in the world.
Agni kept his distance. Yama did not denounce him, did not stand up and challenge him in front of the people. He did not in fact say anything at all to Agni, or acknowledge his presence. By that Agni grew more certain that Rudira had lied.
Women had no honor. Agni must never forget that. And Rudira had even less than most. Rudira the beautiful, Rudira the spoiled and endlessly indulged, Rudira who saw nothing but what she wanted, and sulked until she had it.
He despised her. And yet the thought of her sent a rush of heat through his body. She had lied only out of selfishness, and because she was angry; because he had neglected her. If he went to her tomorrow, she would be as eager for him as ever, would rebuke and then forgive him, because she could not imagine that anyone would honestly wish to be free of her.
And did he? He had looked at no other woman since he met those silver eyes above the bridal veil. They had warmed to his regard, and beckoned; and within days of Yama’s wedding, Agni had found himself in Rudira’s arms. There had never been a woman so gifted in giving a man pleasure. He did not think there could be.
Such thoughts to think upon the grave of his father. Agni set them aside, stood on the summit of the great cairn and watched the sun come up.
The bull’s head rose above his own, mounted on a spearshaft. The new sun gleamed on its horns, caught its eyes and woke in them a semblance of life. It would guard its charge well, till the flesh fell from the bones, and the empty skull bleached white in wind and sun.
The king was well set on his way. Agni bowed to him one last time and spoke his own farewell, the last that the king would hear before he passed the gate into the gods’ country. It was simple; Agni had never been one for great flourishes of speech.
“Fare you well, king and father,” he said. “May your bones rest gentle on the breast of Mother Earth. May Skyfather hold your spirit in his hand. May the gods welcome you among them, and raise you high, and make you a king as you have always been.”
He looked down at the faces of the people who lingered. Many faces; a great portion of the tribe, and great honor, that they should have remained in the bitter cold. The rite would not allow him to speak again while he stood on the barrow, but he could encompass them in the sweep of his arms, and offer thanks with his eyes and his smile.
Some smiled back. Others regarded him steadily, somberly, as if they weighed him and reckoned his fitness. He would, after all, be their king.
But not till the days of mourning were over. From the new moon to the full; time enough, since this thing had been expected, for word to reach the tribes over which the king had ruled, and for their elders and their warleaders to come to the kingmaking. Then it would be done. Then Agni would be king of the White Horse people.
oOo
He went back alone to the tent that had been his father’s, ate something perhaps—he did not afterward remember—and fell headlong into sleep.
He slept the sun out of the sky and back into it again. Then at last he woke, ravenous, and found Taditi sitting by him, wafting a cup of warm mead under his nose.
He swam up out of a dream that he forgot as soon as it was gone, reached blindly for the mead, drank till he was dizzy. Then she fed him, carefully as one did after fasting, until he was something close to himself again.
The world felt strange. The king was not in it. Neither the maimed and dying thing that Agni had watched over for so many days, nor the strong old man who had held the tribe in his hand. Agni caught himself looking for that one, listening for the rough-sweet voice, wondering why the accustomed place was empty.
He could sit in it. It was his right—if for no other reason than that, as favored son, he had inherited the tent and everything in it, even the women. But he could not bring himself to take them. Not yet.
Once he had risen properly and dressed and made himself presentable, he took his own place, the place that he had always had, to finish his breakfast. As he was nibbling the last bits, the women came to him there, unveiled as they might properly be before the man who was now their master.
He had not known there were so many. A dozen wives, a dozen more who were concubines, and daughters innumerable, some nigh old enough to marry, others still nursing at the breast. And then there were the sons, the youngest clinging to their mothers and staring at their elder brother, the rest with the boys or the young men, or grown and married as Yama was.
At least, he thought wryly, he need not consider the daughters who were married. Those belonged to their husbands, and need only be his concern if they dishonored the tribe.
Those who came to him now were his whether he was king or no, his inheritance. The wives were his to keep or to send away. The concubines likewise. The daughters he must raise till they could be married.
He was a wealthy man, who had been possessed of nothing but his weapons and his clothing and the stallion whom Horse Goddess had sent to him. He could give it all away, if it pleased him, but that would do no honor to the king his father. Or he might ask these women what they wished: to stay, to go, to belong to him or to return to their kin.
It was no shame to them or to him if they left. But if they chose to remain, then he was theirs as they were his.
They paid him reverence, kneeling to him and bowing their heads, though one or two of the menchildren did so with visible reluctance. None of them would speak until he spoke first.
“Very well,” he said, speaking the words he had rehearsed before he came there. “I’ll give you the choice now. To stay or to go. If you stay, I care for you as my father did before me. If you go, you go with no dishonor. I give you the freedom of your choosing.”
He heard, or thought he heard, the whisper of a sigh. The tension in them eased, if only somewhat.
They glanced at one another. He could see the factions in the way they sat or in the way their eyes met. There seemed to be several small factions and a pair of larger ones, subtle but clear to see once one found the way of it. It was like this in battle, when enemy fought against enemy, and within each army the tribes and clans held together.
The chief of one such spoke abruptly, breaking the silence. “I go to my son,” said Yama’s mother, “I and my daughters.”
That was defiance, since a mother might go, but her daughters should remain in their father’s tent. But Agni did not mean to contest that of all choices. Whatever might come of it, whatever the woman’s reason for taking herself and her offspring away, he was glad. Glad to be rid of them. Glad to be free of their hostility.
He bowed his head as he had seen the king do. “You may go,” he said.
In strict propriety she should wait until all choices were made, but Yama’s mother had no desire to be proper. She rose, and her daughters rose with her. Agni would have wagered that their belongings were all packed, and that those were few; that the rest had long since been carried into Yama’s tent.
Memory woke in him, of this woman deep in converse with Rudira, speaking of plots and of things that should be done. He might have served himself ill by sending this of all people into the enemy’s camp.
And yet if he had compelled her to stay, he would have had an enemy in his own tent. Best to let her go.
When she departed, and without a word of farewell, either, others rose also. Them too he granted leave. They would go to fathers, brothers, and no doubt new husbands when the time of mourning was over.
When they had gone, they left behind more than half of the wives and concubines and most of the daughters, and Taditi looking grimly pleased. It was an honor to Agni that so many had stayed, had chosen him over their own kin.
He would have to learn all their names. And the wives . . .
He found himself flushing. Patir had suffered enough for the choice of half a dozen sisters, and he had only had
to marry one. Agni stood face to face with half a dozen wives, and all of them his by the custom of the tribe.
He knew what was expected of him. “I welcome you,” he said. “I take you as my father would have wished, to be mine as you were his, and to bear my sons for the strengthening of the tribe.”
They bowed to him, submissive as women should be. Not one offered him a bold glance or lured him with the hint of a smile. Only Taditi would look him full in the face, and she was an aunt, and could never be his wife.
He swallowed a sigh. A tentful of Rudiras would have worn him to nothing and made him unfit to be king. Yet he could not help but yearn for what he could not, and should not, have.
He put on a smile for them and sent them back to their duties and their places. They went willingly, taking comfort perhaps in the return to daily things, in knowing that nothing would change except the face of the man who summoned them to his bed in the nights.
Maybe that was not so terrible, either. He was young, after all, and not ill to look at.
oOo
He would not be expected to take up his duties until after the mourning. That was a reprieve of sorts.
The king’s tent returned to its familiar round, the babble of voices, babies’ cries, even a woman singing as she tended her child. Agni escaped from it into the cold and the spit of snow; to the company of his friends and his red stallion under him and the exhilaration of a hunt.
They brought back a pair of winter-gaunt deer, poor enough prey but welcome. Agni gave his share to one of the smaller tents, to the widow there, who was more than glad of it. She and her children would eat well for a handful of days, if she was thrifty, and the deer’s hide would make a fine coat for one of the sons.
“Generous as always, I see,” Yama said as Agni turned from the woman’s tent. Agni had not seen him coming. He smiled at Agni, seeming amiable, as brother should be to brother. “Do you do it because it’s well done, or because people will think it is?”
“Should it matter?” Agni walked past his brother. It was open rudeness, but Yama was choosing not to remark on it.
“It looks well,” Yama said, matching step with Agni. “So you’ve taken his wives.”
Agni smiled thinly. “Were you thinking to claim them?”
Yama shrugged. “I have enough of my own. Though if they’re too great a burden for you . . .”
“I’ll remember,” Agni said.
“I’m going to be king,” said Yama.
Agni did not pause, did not glance at him. “And how do you intend to accomplish that? I struck the king-blow. I saw the king to his grave. I claimed the king’s women.”
“It’s the elders who elect the king,” Yama said.
“The elders hold to custom,” said Agni. “They honor the wishes of the one who is dead.”
“Custom,” said Yama, “yes. And the gods’ law.”
Agni’s heart went still. But Yama did not say it. Did not challenge him.
Nor would he. To challenge Agni would be to admit that he could not keep his own wife satisfied. More than honor, more than law to Yama was his precious self. Yama might strike Agni with a knife out of the dark, but he would never stand up in front of the elders of the tribes and confess himself a cuckold.
Agni, knowing that, smiled sweetly at his brother and went lightly on his way. Nor did Yama follow.
Maybe he fancied that he had won. Well enough if he did, if it gave Agni a moment’s peace.
48
“He’s up to something else,” Patir said. They had come to dinner in the tent that was now Agni’s, Patir and Rahim and a fair handful of the others. To most, still as lanky as young wolves, and still unmated, too, it was a matter for much staring about and some ribaldry, that Agni had become such a man of substance.
Agni bore it with such fortitude as he might. There was no ill-will in it. It was only friendship.
They sprawled at their ease in the warmth of the tent, round the fire in its hearth of stones. Some of the smoke even wound up through the opening in the roof. They were eating from the great pot and drinking the last of the summer’s mead, savoring it, remembering warm air and the sweetness of honey.
But Patir’s mind was fixed firmly in winter. “Yama has some plan that he’s sure will make him king.”
“He can’t be king,” said Agni, “unless I’m killed. And I don’t intend to be.”
“Still,” said Patir, “we’d all best watch your back.”
Agni laughed at him. But after they had all gone away, when Agni lay in his sleeping-furs, buried deep and wonderfully warm, the one cold thought lingered with him.
They could not live in the same tribe, he and Yama. Not if one of them was king. And since that one must be Agni, Agni well might have to kill his brother.
Yama could challenge. That was custom. Agni would win. That was truth. Agni was the better fighter, the better hunter. But Yama could be treacherous; and therefore, as Patir had said, Agni must watch his back.
oOo
Agni watched his back. His pack of young wolves guarded it, turn and turn about. And the elders began to come, riding off the steppe, windblown and raw with cold. They brought tales of winter even more brutal elsewhere, hunting not merely thinned and difficult but shrunk to nothing, tribes forced to wander far within their winter ranges simply to stay alive.
They had been fortunate here. There was hunting still, and the herds could find forage. Westward, the newcomers said, it grew worse, and word was that the farther one traveled, the more terrible it was.
“Skyfather is angry,” said an elder of the Dun Cow as he feasted on roast kid. He sucked the meat from a bone, noisily, and wiped the grease from his beard, and licked his fingers. “No one knows why he’s angry, or why he’s angrier at people who live toward the sunset countries. The omens tell us nothing. The signs are all unreadable. It’s as if he’s lost all patience.”
“All’s quiet here,” Agni said. “Our ill omen was the fall of our king; but the rite of the bull appeased the gods.”
“Not all of us have kings ripe for the killing,” the elder said. Because he was an elder, no one upbraided him for his callousness. He tossed the stripped bone to the dogs and downed a full cup of kumiss. “Though mind you, if every tribe sent its king to the gods, they might sit up and take notice. At least they’d have to listen to so many newcomers at once.”
“That might make them even angrier,” grunted an elder of the Spotted Hound.
“I can imagine,” someone else said; Agni did not see who it was. “All those young fools yapping and whining at the gate.”
A snort of laughter ran round the fire. Agni was mildly shocked by it. Elders could be horribly irreverent. It was a privilege of their position.
A king had to be more reverent than any. Agni preserved such aplomb as he could, saw to another round of kumiss, made certain that no one lacked for food or drink or comfort. He received no thanks for it, though he would have heard, and soon, if anything had failed of perfection.
They seemed content. Tomorrow was the full moon, and the kingmaking. There were still a few elders absent; they were coming, messengers said, but slowly, for a storm had delayed them. The sky was clear now, and would remain clear, the priests said, until after the kingmaking.
It would be well. Agni convinced himself of that. He maintained an air of calm, or so he hoped; did the duties of a host, saw his guests provided with everything that they could wish for, and maintained judicious silence when he saw one or another of them in company with one of Yama’s followers.
Tomorrow it would be done. He would take the place that had been made for him, and be what his father had raised him to be.
oOo
He could, in courtesy, leave his guests early, see them well tended, and seek out his solitude. It might have served his cause better if he had stayed, but he lacked the stomach for it.
He half expected to find Rudira in his bed, sulky as ever and demanding that he atone for his sins of ne
glect. But his bed was empty. Tomorrow one of the king’s wives—his wives—would fill it. Tonight he had it to himself.
Briefly and rather wildly he thought of slipping out, finding the opening in Yama’s tent, winning Rudira’s forgiveness. It would take the whole night long, and promises of nights to come, but he could do it.
If his brother caught him tonight of all nights, he would lose everything that he had lived for. He dropped onto his furs, wrapped them about him, sank gratefully into their warmth.
His body would have been glad of another warmth, soft arms, supple hips. He groaned and rolled onto his face. He would not—would not—go to Rudira.
One night. Only one night. Tomorrow, when he was king, he would let himself think of her again.
oOo
On the morning of the kingmaking, the elders gathered in a tent raised for them, heated with a fire burning sweet herbs. The latecomers had come in near sunrise, having ridden through the night; all but the men of the Red Deer. Those would come or they would not. The kingmaking would not wait for them.
Agni had no part in their council. Even if he had been of age to sit among them, they would have excluded him, because he was the chief cause of their deliberations.
They would, he knew, settle other business first, disputes and petitions, matters of the clans and the tribes that looked to the White Horse. Last of all they would consider the matter that had brought them here, the making of a king.
The women of the king’s tent had arranged a diversion for Agni. It was a gift and a marvel. They had set up a small tent beside the larger one and lit a fire inside, and set over it a cauldron, and filled that with water from the river. Taditi fetched him to it with a command that he was not inclined to disobey, and the youngest wives and concubines drew him in, giggling like silly girls.
A bath in winter. Some might reckon it an invitation to catch one’s death of cold. But hot water on winter-chilled body, and steam to draw out a whole season’s worth of sweat and dirt and the inevitable vermin, and herbs for sweetness, and a salve that Taditi had made, worked with slow strokes into clean skin, were pure bliss.
