by Judith Tarr
Agni almost did not mind that these women saw him naked, and remarked on it, too. They were not displeased, he gathered.
“So smooth,” one of them marveled, stroking his back and sides as if he had been a horse.
They groomed him as if he had been one, too, washed and combed his hair and plaited it with feathers and bright beads, trimmed his beard and dressed him in clothes that were all new, even to the belt and the boots. They were made of finest leather, and a little of the woven cloth that traders brought from the west and the south, ornamented with beads and with clever stitchery.
The coat was a wonder of fine work, embroidered with the great tales of the tribes: men on horses riding out of the sunrise, women bearing burdens and carrying children on their backs, men at war and at peace, the sacrifice of the Stallion and the dance of the spring festival, and the king on his sacred horsehide above the gathering of the people.
It was a wonderful coat, a glorious coat, a coat for a king. Agni stood up in it with pride and a kind of awe. The labor of kingship he had always known, and the power that it brought with it, but the splendor was a new thing. His father had cared little for pomp and show. He had been a plain man, if never simple.
Agni might choose to be beautiful. Sometimes. For his own pleasure and for the honor of his people.
He smiled at the women whose gift this was. “I thank you,” he said. The words were little enough, but he thought they understood.
“Go on,” Taditi said with the roughness that in her always masked great emotion. “Show the men what a king you’ll make.”
Agni went out as casually as he could. As he had more than half expected, his friends were waiting for him, a guard of honor round the tent that the women had raised. They were remarkably handsome, too, he noticed, fresh-plaited hair and best coats and new boots here and there. They whistled and hooted at Agni.
“O beautiful!” Rakti warbled. “O light of our eyes!”
Agni chased him down and thumped him, but the others were quicker on their feet; and he did not want to spoil his wonderful new coat. He settled for a glare and a snarl all round, which they met with a singular lack of concern.
“Come,” said Patir with a touch of impatience. “We have to be there when the elders come out.”
They all knew that very well, and said so, too; but they did not dally longer.
oOo
For all their haste, it was a long while before the tentflap opened and the chief of the elders of the White Horse led the rest blinking into the hard bright daylight.
The people had gathered in the open space before the tent. They had, one way and another, contrived to give Agni and the young men the foremost places.
Agni saw Yama off to the side, surrounded by the usual flock of sycophants. He did not look at all cast down, though he had an air of tension about him, a tautness that drew Agni’s companions in close and set them on watch.
The sun mounted to the zenith and sank with winter’s swiftness. It had been almost warm; but as the shadows lengthened, the cold closed in.
The men of the Red Deer had come, people were saying, just before Agni came out. They had paused to speak to no one, had ridden straight to the tent and left their horses for the boys to look after, and disappeared within. Their faces had been grim.
As the hours lengthened, anticipation turned to curiosity, and curiosity to apprehension. There should have been no such delay. At noon the chief of the elders of the White Horse should have come out of the tent with the others after him, and lifted the staff of his office, and named the one who had been chosen to be king.
But he had not done so, and the elders of the Red Deer had come in late and at last, just before he should have done it. The people hummed with conjecture. War, perhaps. Wrath of the gods. Some other terror, or some dispute so great that the kingmaking must wait upon it.
But what that dispute could be, no one professed to know. There had been no rumor of war, no contention between tribes, nothing but a hard winter and a slain king.
Agni ran the same gamut as the others, but on him the burden lay heavier. He could not imagine that they delayed for difficulty in choosing a king. It was some matter of the Red Deer, then.
One who was not an elder should not intrude on the elders at such a time as this. And yet the people were waiting. Which the elders must know very well. And yet . . .
He had stepped forward, had determined to approach the tent and to inquire within, when the flap lifted at last.
A sigh ran through the people, marked by a chattering of teeth.
The chief of elders of the White Horse stepped into the sunlight, but one step only. No others followed him.
His face was grim. His eyes passed over the gathering, but they were oddly blind. When they found Agni, they came alive; but not with joy.
“Agni,” he said, “son of Rama son of Tukni of the White Horse people. Come here.”
It was not the call to kingship. It was like the beating of the drum at the king’s sacrifice, dark and slow. In a rising murmur and in a kind of numbed obedience, Agni went as he was bidden. The elder retreated, beckoning him sharply, summoning him into the tent.
oOo
It was dark within, blind dark after the glare of daylight. There was a fire, and light through the opening in the roof, but smoke so filled that space, and the stink of it and of unwashed humanity was so strong, that for a stretching while Agni was as one blinded and deafened and reft of his senses.
They came back, if slowly. He stood where he had been led, inside the circle of elders, near the fire that flared suddenly, illuminating faces. Not one looked on him with gladness.
He began to grow, not afraid, but alarmed. This was not a matter of the tribes. This was something to do with himself, with something that he had done.
Yama. Rudira.
But if he was to be denounced, Yama should be here. And Yama was outside, unsummoned, nor did anyone leave to fetch him.
Men came round the fire, strangers wearing the stitched and beaded signs of the Red Deer. Agni remembered vaguely one or two of their faces. Two of them were young, which surprised him; too young to be elders. They looked on him as if he were their bitter enemy.
“Yes,” said the youngest, who was somewhat older than Agni himself. “Yes, that is the one.”
A low murmur ran round the circle, a rumble like a growl. Agni stiffened at the sound of it. “And who may you be?” he demanded. “Have I done you injury? By the gods, if I had, surely I would remember it.”
The stranger’s lip curled. “Would you now? And would it matter to you if you had?”
One of his elders laid a hand on his shoulder, silencing him. That one’s glance was no more friendly, but his words were rather less intemperate. “You are Agni son of Rama of the White Horse people?”
Agni bit back the first retort which came to his head, that if he had answered to that summons, surely he must be the one who had been summoned. He drew a breath, calmed himself, answered quietly. “I am the king’s son of the White Horse tribe. And you are?”
The elder did not answer that. “Agni son of Rama, you are charged with crimes against our people.”
Agni stood very still. “I do not recall,” he said, “that I have ever committed injury against a man of the Red Deer.”
“Man, no,” said the young man. He was shaking, Agni saw, and not with cold. With anger. “But a woman dishonored and defiled, the daughter of a chieftain, wife of an elder, taken by force—”
Memory struck like a blow to the belly. Spring gathering, a wedding, a pair of green eyes glinting boldly on him, luring him away from the dancing and the firelight.
She had been a maiden—no doubt of that at all. She had worn her hair as an unmarried woman will, loose beneath her headdress.
He had never asked her name or known her lineage, nor, trusting the evidence before him, troubled to fret that she might be another man’s wife. It had not been the most pleasant of meetings, nor had they
parted excessively well.
Agni had forgotten her within moments of her leaving him, all memory of her burned away in the heat of Rudira’s body. But that he would not speak of.
He almost laughed. His greatest fear had always been that he would be caught in dishonor with a married woman—and so he had. But not with the one he had expected, his brother’s wife Rudira. With a woman who had, in ways both subtle and wicked, concealed what she was.
He drew a breath, gathered the words, spoke them calmly. “I do recall that a girl of the Red Deer accosted me at my brother’s wedding. She was a maiden, I can swear to that. She wore her hair loose, as a maiden will. She was no man’s wife.”
The young man of the Red Deer burst out almost before Agni was finished, overrunning the last of his words. “She was the wife of Bapu the Hunter, whom a wild ox gored, and who could not enjoy a woman in the normal way thereafter. She was still his wife—and she would never lie, or conceal it, or pretend to be an unmarried woman. You lie, prince of the White Horse. You seized her out of the shadows while she watched the dancing, carried her off and raped her, and left her bleeding and all dishonored. Look at your face! You don’t remember that, do you? You don’t even remember!”
“I don’t remember,” Agni said with deliberate calm, “because it never happened. She was standing in the shadows, yes, while I danced with the young men. She made an assignation. I went to it. I never took her by force. She asked, and I gave what she asked.”
“That is a lie!” the young man cried. “My sister was seized and taken and ravished, and left to make her own way back to her husband’s tent.”
“If that were so,” Agni demanded, “where is her husband? Why is he not here? Why was it left to you, and why did you wait till now to charge me with it? Both of you should have come in the morning, faced me and challenged me, and called for a reckoning.”
The young man spat on the ground at his feet. “Bapu the Hunter is dead. He suffered much from his old wound. The shock of her return, the horror of her dishonor, prostrated him. He fell ill and died. And she told no one else, not then. Her grief was too great, her shame too deep. She hid it from us. We noticed how she was always weeping, but women do such things when they are widowed, and she had seemed fond of her husband. But then she delivered herself of a child, she who should have been untouched; who was to be given in the spring to a prince of the High Hills people, and he had been much concerned that she come to him a maiden. He would never have raised her bastard.”
“I am sorry for that,” Agni said, “but she said not one word of her husband or her kin. She came to me as a woman unwed. I took her as she asked. If she had come to me when she knew she was with child, I would have taken her in. I am honorable when I know that I have need to be. I will take her in now, if you ask it.”
“No,” said the man of the Red Deer. “You are lying. You have raped an elder’s wife, a chieftain’s daughter. The elder is dead because of it. Our chieftain died of an apoplexy when word was brought to him that his favorite, the light of his eyes, the daughter whom he loved above the rest, had delivered herself of a daughter. She is dead. The birthing killed her. You killed her, man of the White Horse. That is the charge I raise against you. Murder, and dishonor of my family and my tribe, and blood feud on you and all your kin unless I am given satisfaction.”
Agni reeled at the blow of her death, though he had not known her at all, except in the body. The rest of it seemed like something from a story, tragedy heaped on tragedy. But it had nothing to do with him. She had snared him with a lie, with seeming to be what she was not.
He forced himself to focus, to hear the rest of the words that her brother spoke. “I will give satisfaction,” he said, “in whatever measure I may. But I did not rape her, nor knowingly trample on her honor or the honor of her kin. I am not her murderer.”
“She swore on her dying soul,” said her brother, “and on the souls of her mother and her father before her, and on the soul of her husband who had died of the shock, that you had done so. She swore it to the priests and sealed it in her own heart’s blood. And then, man of the White Horse—then she died.”
There was a silence. Agni turned about slowly. There was no oath greater than the oath of one who was dying, sworn before priests and sealed in blood. And there was one of the priests to whom she must have sworn it, carrying the sign of it, the polished bone of an ox, carved with the gods’ eyes and stained dark with old blood.
It was the seal of a lie. Though why a woman should hate him so much, should trap him with a lie, then pursue him beyond the grave, he could not imagine. Maybe—yes, maybe she had hoped to snare a prince, and dreamed of shedding her eunuch of a husband and making herself wife to a king.
Had she seen where he went after? Had she watched him with Rudira, and seen how great his pleasure was, and hated him for it? Or had it simply been that she had conceived when she had never thought to do such a thing, and had borne her dishonor, and had looked for revenge on the man with whom she had wrought it?
With a woman, there was no telling. And she was dead.
“The child,” Agni said. “Is it—”
“We took it to the steppe,” the woman’s brother said, “and left it.”
Agni held himself still, forced himself to think clearly. Of course they had cast the child out. It was ill-begotten, and a girl. There was no place for such among the tribes, least of all in a hard winter.
He looked from face to face around the circle. He had been tried, he could see. And he had been condemned. By the oath of a dying woman, by a lie against which he had no defense. He had told no one of that assignation, not even Rudira. It had been a secret, swiftly done, nigh as swiftly forgotten. He had had a dozen such since his beard began to come in. All the young men did.
“I do not know,” he said slowly, “why she lied. And yet she did. She sought me out. She summoned me to her. For what came of it I am sorry, but she never came to me, nor asked me for help. If she had, I would have given it. That I swear by my father’s spirit.”
“Maybe you believe that,” said the chief of elders of the White Horse, who was his own kinsman: speaking heavily, with evident regret. “Still there is the oath that she swore, and the grief that her family suffers, and its great dishonor. Three of its own have died for this. The shame will blacken the tribe forever after.”
Agni kept his head up, though his belly had cramped into a knot. “I acted in as much honor as I knew to act. I granted a woman what she asked, as she urgently asked it, during a time when such things are, if not approved of, then at least regarded with indulgence. That I am guilty I do not deny. That I am guilty of such great transgression as I am accused of, I most firmly refuse to accept.”
“We have only your word for that,” said the chief of the elders. “And this.” He tilted his head toward the bloodstained bone. “Against this you have no defense. The law grants you none. You must pay as the law demands.”
The knot in Agni’s middle clenched tighter yet. “With my life?”
“No.” That was the woman’s brother, thick with disgust. “I asked it, but they refused to grant it.”
“Then,” said Agni, “I’ll pay whatever penalty you ask. Horses, cattle—”
“No,” the man of the Red Deer said again. “I will take nothing from you.”
Agni spread his hands. He must not allow them to see anger in him, or to suspect the slightest sign of fear. “Then what will you have? What can I do?”
“Leave,” the other said. “Be banished. Go away from the tribes forever.”
Agni swayed on his feet. Death he could contemplate. Heavy fines in cattle, in horses, in wealth of whatever kind—those he could pay. But this—
He turned his eyes on the chief of elders of his own tribe. “Did you grant him this?”
“We persuaded him to accept it.”
The elder said it without joy, but without wavering, either.
Agni shook his head, as if so simple a movement
could sway all these gathered elders. “I can’t go away. I have to be king. My father—”
“If your father had known what you were,” said someone whom he did not know, wearing the signs of the Black Stallion, “he would have cast you out himself.”
“But I am not—” Agni stopped. No one believed him. Even those who looked on him with sympathy, who appeared to grieve for the judgment that they had made, still reckoned him an ill creature, a man who had not only taken another man’s wife, but who had done so against her will.
If she had indeed been what she pretended, a young woman seeking a husband among the dancers, and if there had been no charge of rape, he would have borne the burden of her death, and owed forfeit to her kin. But she had been an elder’s wife. And she had a claimed a thing, perhaps to salvage what honor she had left, that he had never done nor dreamed of doing.
It had not even been a pleasant meeting. He had obliged her out of courtesy, and forgotten her as soon as she was gone.
He could not remember her face. Green eyes—yes, he remembered those. But of the rest, nothing.
He looked at the world that had been so bright, at his wonderful coat that had been made for a king, at the circle of elders who had proclaimed his sentence. A sentence against which he had no appeal. If he had been struck down by a bolt from heaven, he could not have been destroyed so swiftly.
So this, he thought with distant clarity, was why Yama had not risen to challenge him, nor interfered in the old king’s death and burial. And yet, how could this have been Yama’s doing? Yama was never so subtle or so perfectly cruel.
Yama’s mother, his sisters—maybe. But if they had done this, they were more terrible than he had ever imagined. They could find a wife who was a maiden, and persuade her to act out the lie—promising her a new husband, a prince, who would take her out of guilt but keep her and give her honor. Then, somehow, they proved to her that such could never be, and taught her to hate him, and drove her to her death; and so destroyed the one who stood between Yama and the kingship.
