by Judith Tarr
They clung tightly, flesh on sweat-slicked flesh. He was still inside her. She held him as long as she could, as if she could bind them into one creature.
But the world could never stand still, or even pause for long. He slipped out of her and lay beside her, breathing a little quickly even yet. She kissed him wherever she could reach.
He laughed at that, with a touch of breathlessness. “Will you eat me alive?” he asked her.
“Every bite,” she said. He had spoken in her language. She spoke in his. It was a game they played, to sharpen their wits. She was better at it than he was.
He never stopped trying to best her. She rather liked that. It was good for a man to try to match a woman. Not that he ever could, but the trying helped strengthen his spirit.
He lay a little apart from her but still in her arms as she was in his, the better to see her face. She traced with a finger the line of his cheekbone, the sharp clean line of his jaw. His beard was soft, a young man’s beard. He kept it clipped close, as if he reckoned it somewhat of a nuisance; though he would have been greatly angry if she had said such a thing.
These horsemen were inordinately proud of the things they had that no woman did. Beards. No breasts. And the great thrusting thing that was a man’s most useful possession—of that, they made an enormous fuss. As if a woman lacked something because her parts were tucked safely away, and as if it were an advantage to have it all hanging in front of them, dangling and bulging and getting in the way.
He was, for a man, a lovely creature. She said as much. He growled, but he had learned not to grow angry when she reminded him of his proper place in the world. He liked to dream that she would submit to him, or at least allow him to impose his will on her. Sometimes it was amusing to indulge him. Other times, as now, she chose the truth instead.
“Sometimes,” he said, “I wonder why you trouble with men at all. You could keep them in villages of their own, and go there in season, and get daughters from them and leave the sons, and never be vexed by them else.”
She traced the Lady’s symbols on his breast, circle and spiral and narrow oval and, for him if he only knew, the shape that meant man. She laid her hand on that, where she had drawn it over his heart, and said, “What a marvelous idea, to set the men apart. Is that what your people do? Especially the young men? Like the horses? We live all tangled together here. It’s untidy, but it does seem to suit us.”
“You’ll never be in awe of me, will you?”
She raised herself on her arms. His eyes widened. He was always a little taken aback by her beauty. She swooped to steal a kiss, and hovered over him, smiling with great contentment. “No man will ever awe me. Even you. But if any could come close . . .”
“You’re just saying that.”
“What, sulking?” She teased him with her breasts, brushing them across his chest, slipping away when he tried to catch her. “Beautiful man,” she said.
He leaped, taking her by surprise, and overset her. She laughed. These men were ridiculously proud of their strength; as if the force of a man’s arm were all he needed in the world. She yielded like water, made herself all soft, gave him nothing to fight against; so that when they had tumbled to a halt, she was as she had been before, and he was flat on his back, winded, glowering at her.
“Admit it,” she said. “You’ll never overcome me. But you might—indeed you might—learn to stand beside me.”
“Or behind you?”
“Not you,” she said.
“A man should stand above a woman.”
She had argued that with him before. He wanted to argue it again, but she had no intention of letting him. She diverted him instead. She settled herself comfortably beside him. She let him hold her, which he loved to do. She said, “Tell me what’s troubling you.”
He sputtered a little, but this was not the first time she had caught him sidewise. He answered her sensibly enough, considering. “How do you know something’s troubling me?”
“I know you,” she said.
“You know too much.” He was growling. She waited him out. At length he said, “All right then. It’s the tribes—the westerners mainly. They want to go home.”
“Yes,” she said.
“You knew?”
She shrugged. “One could see. They’ve been leaving in ones and twos and threes. The winter stopped them, but one finds them in the fields to the eastward, yearning unmistakably. Are you surprised?”
“No,” he said. “Of course not. I was expecting this. It’s only . . . I was hoping it would take a while longer.”
“Patience doesn’t appear to be a great virtue in the tribes.”
“Usually we can wait till spring,” Agni said a little dryly.
“You think they’ll all go back?”
“No,” he said. “I think that some will go, and they’ll find the aftermath of a hard winter, and everyone will see how fat and rich they are, and by full summer the tribes will be overrunning this country again.”
“You won’t stop them,” she said. It was not a question.
“I don’t think I can.” She lifted her head from his breast. He was staring into the dark beyond the lamp’s glow. “It’s not going to stop now. It’s going to go on and on. There’s been no escaping it since that traveler brought his mare to Larchwood, then went back to the steppe with his copper knife and his stories.”
“You followed the stories,” she said.
“So will the others.”
She laid her head on his breast again and took his rod in her hand. It swelled to fill her grasp. She stroked it, smiling as he twitched and caught his breath. But there was no smile in the words she spoke. “This time it will be war.”
“Yes,” he said.
“You aren’t eager for it?”
He stiffened. She stroked a little harder. He sighed. The tension stayed in him, but transmuted. His speech was a little breathless. “I’m not as bloodthirsty as some.”
She set herself to pleasuring him, because it was her pleasure, and because she needed to think about what he had said. Nothing in it was startling or unexpected. But that he saw it and spoke of it—that made it real. That gave it power.
In the last moment, she took him into herself, that none of him be spent. She wondered if he knew how completely he had given himself to her. Most likely not. He must always fancy that he was the stronger, that he was lord and master and she must, in the end, defer to him.
One could become adept at catering to such delusions. Tilia thought about that while he slept, snoring softly. She could feel him inside her still. Warmth; a kind of presence. Maybe—maybe at last—
Maybe. It was not the best of times to bring a child into the world, but it was all the time she had. Fitting that it should begin now, so soon after his sister had borne a daughter before the Lady. They were all making a new world, mingling the blood of the cities and the steppe, the Lady’s children and the Mare’s children and the children of the wild horsemen.
79
After a winter that was reckoned harsh in this gentle country came a mild spring: warm days, chilly nights, soft rain to wash away the snow and wake the sleeping earth. Tribesmen began to take horse and ride eastward. Fewer went than the elders had predicted, but somewhat more than Agni had hoped.
They did not all go at once. They left alone or in bands of three or four. They took as much wealth as they could carry; nor did Agni try to prevent them, though he forbade them to take more than two remounts apiece.
“There’s our trouble,” he said to Sarama on a brisk morning after a night of rain. He had gone to survey the horse-herds, and met her on her way to ride with Taditi’s archers. She was riding one of the stallions from the White Horse herds; for the Mare was great with foal, holding court among the herds like a king’s first wife, and doing no work but that of waiting for the birth.
Agni paused with Sarama on a rise above the long field in which the horses grazed. She nodded at his observation, looking out o
ver what seemed to be, what was, a great number of horses. “Too many stallions and geldings. Too few mares.”
“It’s not anything people think of,” he said. “On the steppe, when one raids, one captures the enemy’s wealth, his women, his horses. Here—there are no horses.”
“Your mares are in foal, yes?” she said.
“All three of them,” he said. “And there’s the Mare, too; and a few others here and there. But not enough. If we’re to live here, we have to have horses.”
“Yes,” she said. She had not taken her eyes from the herd. The stallion fretted under her. He was young and not well disciplined, and he did not suffer Mitani well at all. Mitani, like the king he was, ignored the young fool and busied himself with a clump of grass.
The young stallion squealed, bucked, skittered sideways. Sarama made no effort to stop him.
Agni opened his mouth to say more, but shut it again. She hardly noticed. Her mind was gone already, riding with Taditi and the archers. Her body was not slow to follow it.
Agni let her go. He knew better than to think that his trouble concerned her more than a little. The world she lived in touched only occasionally on anyone else’s, and even more seldom since Rani was born.
He shrugged, sighed. He had not honestly expected Sarama to solve his problem for him. The answer was obvious in any case. There were no mares here. There were mares on the steppe.
“Someone should go and bring back a herd of mares,” said a voice behind him, shaping his thought into words.
He looked over his shoulder at Patir. His friend sat easily on the back of his spotted stallion, surveying the herd as Sarama had done. But his eyes were alert, keen, taking count of the mares, the foals, even the three yearlings who had been born in the conquest of the Lady’s country.
“A raid,” he said, “as great as any I’ve heard of in stories. Not just to seize a few horses, but to take and bring back a great wealth of them.”
“Would you go?” Agni asked him.
Patir’s glance lit with eagerness, but he hesitated. Agni’s brows went up. “Ah,” he said. “Who is she?”
Patir the insouciant, Patir the unshakably composed, was blushing like a girl. “What makes you think—”
“What’s her name?” Agni asked.
Patir looked down in remarkable contusion. “All right,” he muttered. “All right. Her name is Chana.”
“Ah,” said Agni.
Patir shot him a blazing glance. “Fine one you are to laugh at me, with what you’ve got filling your bed.”
“I could kill you for that,” Agni said mildly.
“You could. And then you’d have to find someone else to round up your mares for you.”
“So you’ll do it,” Agni said. “Even if Chana objects?”
“Does it matter if she does?”
“She may think so.”
Patir shook his head. “Chana won’t. Chana is different. She likes it when I command her as a man should command a woman. It’s tiresome, she says, to rule the world. She finds it restful to let me do it.”
“And you believe her?”
“She’d never lie to me.”
Agni could hardly contest that, since he had never met the woman. But that any female of this country would willingly submit herself to a man, even a man as pleasant to the eye and the spirit as Patir, taxed his credulity sorely.
Nevertheless he had noticed a number of dark-eyed women in the camp, rather a large number when he stopped to think. It seemed that there had been none all through the autumn and much of the winter. Now suddenly there were a dozen or two. Or three. Four?
oOo
Agni rode as he had intended, then sat on his bay horsehide for his day’s stint of being formally king. And as he rode and judged and listened, he watched. He counted.
There were women everywhere, or nearly. Some were rather obviously living in tents. Others seemed to be visiting, or to be indulging curiosity. They were tending fires, mending garments, even looking after the cattle. All things that women or children would do in any camp of a tribe.
And yet these were women of the Lady’s country, dark-eyed, dark-haired, more often plump than not. The one standing framed by the flap of Patir’s tent was a beauty, small-boned and delicate—striking among these sturdy people. She did not conceal her face behind a veil as a tribeswoman would have done, nor did she duck her head and vanish when she felt his eyes on her. She smiled, dazzling him.
Shocking. Bold beyond belief. Agni wondered what she would do if he grinned back at her. Not that he intended to try. Not from the king’s horsehide, and not in front of Patir.
He ended the hour of judgment rather short of its full span, and sought out Taditi, whom he had seen walking back from the horselines with her bow in her hand. He found her in the tent, putting bow and arrows away, and rubbing the string with fat to keep it supple before she coiled it and laid it in its case.
She glanced at him but did not pause. He squatted near the flap, where the sun slanted in to warm him, and waited till she came and sat on her heels beside him.
From where he was, he could see a fair arc of camp, and the women coming and going, and men, too. “How long has this been going on?” he demanded abruptly.
“What?” said Taditi, rather reasonably in the circumstances. “My riding and shooting? I thought you knew I’d been doing it since the winter.”
“Of course I knew,” he said. “I don’t mean that. I mean this. All these women. Where are they coming from? When did they start coming here?”
“Ah,” said Taditi, reminding him somewhat forcibly of how exasperated Tilia could be when he used the same expression. It could make one feel a right fool.
Taditi ignored his scowl. “So you finally noticed. Some of the men have a wager. It’s been going on since winter—since a little after your sister’s baby was born.”
“Why? Why just then?”
“Who knows?” said Taditi. “Suddenly it’s a fashion. Leave the city, find a tribesman, look after his tent. I expect we’ll see a good number of dark-eyed babies come winter.”
Agni seized on the one thing that honestly mattered. “It’s a fashion? That’s all it is?”
“It seems so,” she said.
Agni sank back onto his heels. “Does that fashion also partake of the woman’s submitting her will to the man’s? Simply for the novelty of it?”
“My,” she said. “You are perceptive.”
Agni had learned long ago not to lose his temper when Taditi spoke to sting. “I suppose it’s all the rage to have one’s own tribesman, just like the Mother’s heir.”
“That should bother you?” said Taditi. “It serves you well, I should think. It binds these women to your men, and mingles our blood with theirs.”
“I’m not bothered,” he said. “I’m wondering how long it will last.”
“A long while,” said Taditi, “if your men have any wits at all. Has it struck you yet that if these women learn to act like women of the tribes, they might come to think like proper women, too? And then they’re yours, bound to you and to the gods.”
Agni shivered a little. Sometimes Taditi spoke as if the gods were in her, too; or maybe Earth Mother spoke to her as if she had been a Mother of this country.
“Fashion can become custom,” Taditi said as if to herself. “I remember when I was a girl, how we all wore our hair loose as they still do in the dancing at festivals. Then someone took it into her head to wear a crown of braids—because, she said, it got her hair up out of the way. In no time at all, every unmarried girl was wearing her hair up except in the dancing. Now it’s custom, as if from the dawn time: braids wound around the head for young women without husbands, and braids down the back or coiled at the nape for married women. All because of a fashion that everyone thought would be gone in a season.”
“Obviously it was practical,” Agni said. “Now tell me what’s practical about one of these women giving up her power in the world.”
“That’s what Patir said. That they’re finding it restful.”
Taditi nodded. “Just so. A mind is like a body, as you know perfectly well. It has to keep working, or it grows fat and slow. This that they’re doing—it’s easy. It lets them be lazy. And it gives you the power you need to make this country yours beyond any doubt. If you win its women, if their children grow up in the ways of the tribes—you’ve won, not only for this little hour in the sun, but for the generations after you.”
“And you,” said Agni. “You don’t approve.”
“I don’t approve or disapprove. I see what is. This is a greater victory than any in battle.”
“If we can hold it. If they don’t all get tired of the game and go back to their own ways. And,” said Agni, “if they don’t conquer us while we preen ourselves for conquering them.”
Taditi shrugged. “There is that. I think, if you stay here, you’ll end up winning as much as you lose. Particularly if you keep the advantage over these innocents.”
“I don’t know how innocent they are,” Agni said darkly. “They’re only learning to fight—but they can twist a man in knots.”
“Really? I should study them.” Taditi straightened—creaking less than Agni did, which was a little distressing—and set to filling the pot for the daymeal.
oOo
Agni stayed where he was. He had much to think on. Horses, and women. War. Warriors. Spring and all that it meant: festival and sacrifices, dancing and feasting. These people had a festival of their own; that much he had discovered from listening here and there. It seemed to have something to do with planting the fields and making the grain grow, and eating a great deal, and women choosing men and going off with them to make a sacrifice of themselves to Earth Mother.
He began to wonder as he sat there, whether there might be a way to mingle the festivals. It was a peculiar thought, and disturbing. The festivals were the festivals, and had been since the dawn time. It was a great ill thing to change them.
