White Mare's Daughter

by Judith Tarr

  No. He could not believe such a thing, even of Yama-diti. Because if he believed it, then he must believe that Rudira had played some part in it. That what he had heard in Yama’s tent that night after he came back with his stallion was a pact between the prince’s mother and the prince’s youngest wife. That they had acted together to destroy Agni, so that Rudira could be a king’s wife.

  No. And no again. This was the gods’ doing. Only gods could lift him so high, and give him so much farther to fall.

  He turned blindly. “I must speak to the people,” he said. “I must—”

  “No,” said the chief of elders. “You will say nothing. You are outcast.”

  “But who will be king?”

  “That will be settled,” the elder said.

  “Promise me,” said Agni. “Promise me that it won’t be—”

  “We promise you nothing,” said the elder. “We owe you nothing. You are no longer one of us.”

  With each word, the blow struck harder. Agni had been numb, unbelieving. Now he woke to sensation—and that sensation was pain.

  49

  Of all the ways in which Agni could have lost the kingship, this was the one he had never expected. The irony was exquisite. If he had lost it for Rudira—that, he would have understood. But to lose it for this, for an hour’s encounter, for the folly of obliging a woman who had demanded it of him, was beyond anything he had thought to fear.

  His own elders condemned him in sorrow that seemed unfeigned, but they would not alter their judgment. They brought him out of the tent into the glare of the day, to the shouts and cheering of the people, which died down raggedly as those closest saw the grim faces, and marked how Agni was brought before them: as a captive and not as a king. They had not asked to bind his hands. But they gripped him by the arms and thrust him into the light, and held him as the silence spread.

  Then they stripped him. They reft him of his beautiful coat. They snatched away his ornaments, even to the beads and the feathers in his hair. They laid his body bare before the people. And all the while they did it, they proclaimed aloud the tale of his crime—the lie that had been sealed with a dying woman’s oath.

  He, the part of him that thought, that reasoned as a man can reason, had gone away. He was nothing, no one. He had no name. They had taken it. He had no tribe, no kin. All that he was, all that was left of him, was outcast.

  They drove him out with whips and stones and clods of earth and close-packed snow. They made a passage through their midst and pursued him down it, out, away, onto the steppe.

  Barefoot, naked in the bitter cold of winter, bruised and bleeding and numb in the heart, still he walked erect out of the camp. He stumbled, rocking at blows, but he did not fall, nor did he flinch or grovel. That much he could show them in his ruin: a straight back and unmarred pride.

  Pride carried him away from the camp of the White Horse people. Pride kept him on his feet until the last of them had fallen away, weary of the pursuit. And pride took him farther, and farther again, till the cold was set in his bones, and the dark had swooped down on him and taken him out of the world.

  oOo

  Agni swam out of sleep. Through the blur of its leaving, he saw faces. Patir; Rahim. Taditi frowning down at him, looking as severe as she ever had when he was a scapegrace child.

  He frowned back at her. “I had the most horrible—” He yawned, stretched; gasped. Dreams did not ache in every bone, or catch on ribs that must be broken.

  “You didn’t dream it,” she said, harsh as ever, and as little inclined to soften the blow.

  He tried to scramble up, but he was as weak as a newborn foal. “What are you doing here? Where is this? If they cast me out, and you are seen with me—

  “—we’ll be cast out.” Patir seemed unruffled by the prospect. “We’re camped by the high tor. You’ve been wandering in a fever for a night and a day. The kingmaking went on after all, though some of the elders tried to stop it.”

  “They chose Yama.” The taste of it was bitter in Agni’s throat. “He did this. I don’t know how, but he did it.”

  And yet he suspected. Rudira, Yama’s mother—women had their own world, their own wars. If somehow they had discovered what Agni had done with the woman of the Red Deer, and conspired with her, even persuaded her to do what she had done, then all the rest would have been inevitable.

  None of the others disputed with him. He looked about, seeing at last where he was: in a tent, and not a particularly small one, with all the comforts one could ask for; and most of those his own. “How—” he began.

  Patir looked inexpressibly smug. “Sheer brilliance,” he said. He caught Taditi’s eye and flushed. “Hers, not ours.”

  She nodded grimly. “I had a feeling in my bones,” she said. “When the elders didn’t come out when they should have, I packed everything I could. I told these puppies to be ready. And I waited.”

  “And you never told me?” Agni demanded.

  She refused to be cowed. “You would have wanted to do something foolish. So did the rest of them, but them I could threaten. They weren’t eager to face your wrath if my bones were wrong.”

  Agni shut his mouth tight.

  She nodded, approving. “Yes, be sensible. I was. As soon as the word came, we did what was necessary.”

  “We gathered everything,” said Patir, “and took our horses and rode out while the people were in disarray. We found you where she said we would, blue with cold but burning with fever, and brought you here.”

  “You should never have done it,” Agni said.

  “That’s gratitude,” said Taditi to the others. “When are you going to tell him how many of the people wouldn’t follow Yama?”

  Agni sat bolt upright. He gasped, he reeled, but he stayed there. “How many—”

  “It’s only the hunting party,” Rahim said. “And some of their brothers and cousins.”

  “Rather many of their brothers and cousins,” Taditi said. “With such of the herds as they could claim for themselves, and tents and belongings, weapons, horses, whatever they were able to ride away with. You can thank the gods this new king is a fool, or he’d have thought of ways to stop them.”

  Agni sat with his body jangling, stabbing with pain, and tried to fit his mind around both his exile and the number of men who had gone to it with him. So terrible a thing, the ruin of everything that he was—and yet, by the gods’ will and the will of his friends, he found himself chieftain of a tribe.

  Nor was it a lie, a false comfort lest he will himself to death. He insisted till they surrendered, struggled to his feet and stumbled out of the tent, leaning on Rahim and Patir.

  There was a camp of goodly size, campfires, herds of cattle, horses, men performing duties as they must in a camp of warriors, since there were no women to do it for them. Taditi was the only one.

  “I had no desire to live in a tent that was ruled by Yama-diti,” she said.

  He looked out over this camp that, without even knowing it, he had made. His eyes brimmed and overflowed. One stroke, one lie, had cast him out of the tribe; yet here was a tribe that had chosen him, that had left its own in order to follow him.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “What’s difficult?” said Rahim. “They made Yama king.”

  “But the people,” Agni said. “Your honor, your name, your kin—”

  “There’s no honor in a lie sworn as truth,” Patir said.

  “It could be true,” said Agni.

  Patir shook his head. “Most men, yes. Not you. Because . . .”

  “Because,” Taditi said when Patir could not say it, “you’ve never in your life taken a woman who was not willing, nor had any need. And you’ve had eyes for only one, this past year and more. She’s a shallow, spiteful thing, and she wanted to be married to a king. She told her husband’s mother of you, of what you’d done that she reckoned a betrayal. All the rest came of that.”

  Agni opened his mouth, shut it again.r />
  Taditi shook her head. “There’s no fool like a fool in love. It was an open secret, puppy. All the women knew. Even a few of the men.”

  “I saw you,” Rahim confessed, “creeping out to meet her once.”

  “He told me,” said Patir, “and one way and another the others had wind of it. We agreed to keep it a secret, but to keep a watch on her. None of us trusted her. Her kin have a name for treachery.”

  “I feel,” said Agni after a stretching while, “as if I must be the only fool in the world.”

  “All young men are fools,” Taditi said. “Now come back in and lie down. You’ve a bit of mending to do yet.”

  Agni did not want to go back into the smoky dimness of the tent, but they were stronger than he, and he was wobbling on his feet. Taditi fed him, though what it was he did not afterward recall. Somewhere between bite and sip he fell into a heavy sleep.

  oOo

  His dreams were dark: fire and shouting, grim faces circling, voices repeating the rite of his exile. Rudira came in her glimmering white nakedness, and took him as a man takes a woman, headlong, and no pause to ask his leave.

  He struggled, but she was too strong. As she held him, as she drained him dry, her face shifted and changed, until he looked into a face he had nearly forgotten. The face of the woman of the Red Deer. She grinned at him, and her grin was the grin of a skull.

  He woke gasping, battling the furs that wrapped him. He fought his way out of them and lay on the icy floor of the tent and struggled to breathe calmly. These were not true dreams. Only fear-dreams. So he told himself.

  He crawled back into the furs, shivering as if he would never be warm again. Somewhere in his sleep it had all come home to him. The numbness was gone. He was cast out of the tribe, his kingship taken from him before he could properly lay hand on it. Everything that he was and had been was gone.

  He should have been dead. And yet he lay here in comfort, looked after by the aunt who had tended him when he was small, and a whole pack of idiots camped around him, waiting for him to tell them what to do. That could not be at all to Yama’s liking.

  Yama could do nothing. Unless Agni took the army that had followed him and led it against the people, Yama was powerless. Agni had been made as nothing, was invisible, did not exist. The tribe could not go to war against nothingness.

  Agni was not comforted. The heart of him, the indissoluble center, was gone. He had been born and raised in the White Horse people. When he named himself, he was Agni son of Rama of the White Horse.

  Now that was taken away. He was outcast. He had no family, no tribe. Even his name had been taken away, though that clung stubbornly and refused to go—like the friends and allies who had followed him and so destroyed themselves.

  His fault. He did not know how or understand why, but somehow he had bound them to him beyond the dissolution of his bonds to tribe and kin.

  It was not supposed to have happened. When a man was cast out, he lost everything. His friends, his allies, shut him out of mind and memory. They were not supposed to follow him.

  He must have cast a spell on them. Maybe it was as some people had whispered, that his mother had been a sorcerer of great power; and maybe after all he, and not only Sarama, had inherited that power.

  He snorted in his wrapping of furs, and sneezed. That was nonsense. He had no power but what any man had.

  oOo

  “Then why?”

  He asked it of Taditi, whom he found in the other half of the tent, behind a curtain, grinding grain into flour. She had come away with riches, a whole packtrain worth from the look of it.

  She looked up when he lifted the curtain, and at first did not answer his question. When she did, she did it sidewise. “Have you ever wondered why Yama of all your brothers reckoned himself most fit to be king?”

  “He’s the eldest,” Agni said promptly, “even if he was begotten of a prince and not a ruling king. And he’s a fool.”

  “He has a strong-willed mother.” She bent her back to the grinding of stone on stone. “And a wife who wants to be a king’s wife.”

  Agni scowled. His head ached. Strangely, for a moment he heard Sarama’s voice, observing acidly that yes, indeed, thinking was a difficult thing. “Yama’s a weakling. I knew that. But even with such a man as king, the tribe is the tribe. No one simply leaves it.”

  “There was nothing simple about our leaving,” Taditi said.

  “You shouldn’t have done it,” he said.

  “Probably not,” she said. She swept flour from the stone into a jar, spread a new handful of grain, set to grinding it again. “It’s as well you don’t understand why people follow you. If you did, it might go to your head.”

  He blinked.

  She ground the grain, stroke by steady stroke. Her body in the coat and the well-worn skirt, her greying hair plaited and wound tight about her head, had no beauty in them.

  She never had been beautiful. And yet she was the strongest human creature Agni knew. Stronger than his father had ever been.

  In the west, if the traveler’s tale was true, a woman could be a king. It was outrageous and preposterous, but the rumor of it had sent Sarama into the sunset countries. If there were or could be such people, Taditi might have been king. What sort of king she might have made—

  Agni had lost his wits with his tribe. Men ruled the tribe. So had the gods ordained. Women ruled men. So people said, but softly, and not where too many could hear.

  “You didn’t want to live in a tent ruled by Yama-diti,” Agni said. “You said that. But the others—”

  “The others made a choice,” she said.

  “Did you encourage them to make it?”

  She brushed another heap of flour into the jar and wiped the stone clean. She sat on her heels, staring down at it, as if she could read signs there, or omens, or the answers to his questions. “They didn’t need any encouragement,” she said. “They had already considered what the tribe would be under Yama as king. You would have to leave, they all knew that. They weren’t prepared for an outcasting; but when it fell on us all, they held to their choice.”

  “They should not have,” Agni said.

  “It was rather a wild impulse,” she granted him, “when it came to it. Patir and Rahim would have done it regardless, for love of you. The rest were caught up in the heat of the moment. None of them believed that you of all people would have to force a woman. Not with so many both willing and eager. They were in a fine and tearing rage.”

  “Now they would have cooled down,” Agni said, “and it will be dawning on them that they can’t go back.”

  “There is that,” Taditi said.

  “I have to go out,” he said. “Do I have a mantle? Or a coat?”

  “You have both,” she said. She rose stiffly and stretched. He waited with carefully schooled patience, and with courtesy that she herself had taught him.

  He won no praise for it. It was expected.

  She brought him his own mantle of bearskin, and his good leather coat, too. He needed both. It was rawly cold, the sky heavy, lowering, threatening snow. His loyal tribesmen kept somewhat of a raffish air, like a pack of boys on a raid, but there was an aimlessness to them, a kind of prowling restlessness, that did not bode well.

  It was no more than Agni had expected. Though his body creaked as badly as Taditi’s, he circled the camp, and visited each fire, and each tent, too, if he was invited; and he nearly always was.

  Most of their names he knew, or their kin. Their number rather took him aback. There were nearly two score of them, which would be nigh every man of the tribe at or about the age of hunting his stallion, and some younger, too, no more than boys; even a few who were older, men who for one reason or another had had nothing to bind them to the tribe. All gathered here for Agni’s sake, and looked to him as their chieftain.

  Food they had, for a while, for both man and beast. There was hunting round about. No tribe claimed this country, though both the White Horse and
the Dun Cow hunted in it in the spring. It was well chosen.

  There was even a sheltered place for the horses, a bowl of a valley with a stream running through it, its center unfrozen despite the cold. There was grass beneath the snow, and tender saplings to nibble on.

  Agni found Mitani there, and somewhat to his surprise, the mares that Mitani had claimed for his own. The stallion’s peal of welcome deafened him, and for some unfathomable reason made him burst into tears.

  Mitani roared up to him in a stinging spray of snow. He caught mane as the stallion wheeled, let the force of the motion swing him onto the warm back.

  Mitani neither started nor bucked, though Agni had not done such a thing before—should not do it now, either, but a spirit of wildness was in him. He was making no more sense than anyone else, than anything that had happened since the kingmaking that had gone so terribly awry.

  oOo

  He circled the camp as the first flakes of snow began to fall. Mitani was fresh, lively, snorting and dancing: making himself beautiful for people to marvel at.

  As Agni rode, as the snow thickened, as he bound the camp tightly in the circle of his riding, it came to him with the strength of a true dream: what it was that the gods wanted of him. Why they had caused him to be cast out. Why so many strong young warriors had followed him.

  The west. The sunset countries. The place where a woman could be king. Where Sarama had gone—and where she had forbidden Agni to go.

  That had been before he was cast out, when their father was still alive and whole, when Agni had place and kin and kingship. Now that was all gone. Agni was free. He could go where he chose, unless he chose to go back to the White Horse people.

  With the tribe that had gathered about him, a tribe of fighting men, he could do whatever he pleased. Raid, wage war, conquer tribes, take their women, carve out a kingdom for himself.

  The gods had given him the means. Yet now, as the snow flew about him, blinding him with whiteness, he knew that they had not given it to him for any simple purpose. They had sent his sister before him into the west. Now he must follow.