by Judith Tarr
“They know how to make the grain grow,” Sarama said, “so that they have bread whenever they want it. As for the women . . . warn your men. The women are willing, yes, but if a woman says no, no is what she means. And the penalty for rape is death.”
Buran swallowed visibly. “We . . . heard that the king killed his own brother for taking a woman that he’d won in battle. So that’s true?”
“True enough,” Sarama said. “Watch well. And bid your men take care. This is a land of riches, but it has its laws. Any who breaks them must pay the penalty.”
Not only Buran had heard. The others were listening. She hoped they were heeding it. Agni would not thank her for bringing in trouble. And trouble it would be, if these strangers did not keep discipline.
They were only the beginning. “More will come,” Buran said, “some from far away. The winter was hard, and there’s been little rain this summer. The rivers run low. There was wildfire in Stormwolf country, and a plague among the cattle of the Golden Aurochs. The gods have cursed the steppe, it’s said. They’re driving the people westward.”
“It’s something in the sunrise country,” one of the others said. “Something’s driving tribes into the west. Drought, it’s said. Plague. It gets worse the farther eastward you go.”
“The gods want us to come here,” said Buran. “This is the country that they’ve made for us.”
Sarama refrained from comment. She could not help reflecting that if tribe after tribe came westward, there would be no room for all of them. They would heap like waves, rise up and crash down and shatter everything in their path.
She had seen the floods in the spring, when the rivers broke their bonds of ice: great walls of water and flotsam, roaring with terrible force. As often as not they overflowed their banks and spread out onto the steppe. The unwary could drown, their tents and camps swept away.
That was the gods’ power, too. And far too much like what she saw in this one young man with his wide eyes and his head full of legends.
One did what one could. If one could. One moved away from the water, raised a wall against it if there was time, fought it as one could, and prayed that that would be enough.
84
It had been a rich summer, not the richest that anyone could remember, but rich enough that no one had any great fears of feeding herself through the winter. Even with the trickle of tribesmen coming in search of the sunset king, there was grain enough in the storehouses. The cattle were fat, the goats and sheep plentiful, and a great store of fodder laid in with the harvest.
Nevertheless the omens were bad. Birds flocked early, gathered and flew—fled, some thought—into the south. The people brought in the harvest just ahead of a great storm.
Even the tribesmen were pressed into service, grumbling and snarling about grubbing in the dirt, but Agni flogged them on with words and mockery—the same words and the same mockery with which Sarama, and then Taditi, had prevailed on him to command his proud horsemen to turn farmer. The last baskets of threshed emmer wheat went into the storehouse amid a spatter of cold rain.
The harvest festival was a wet and foreshortened thing. The women held the full rite in the temple, but the dancing and feasting were all washed away in the rain.
Agni had threatened to do his sulking in his tent, and nurse the blisters, too, from wielding a sickle day and night. Tilia was hardly surprised to find him in their room in the Mother’s house, the room behind the kitchen that though tiny, airless, and ghastly hot in the summer, was undisputably their own.
It was pleasant tonight, with the lamps lit and fresh coverlets on the bed, and warmth from the kitchen fire driving away the rain’s damp. Agni had even managed to wash himself somehow, probably by standing in the rain. He would have been terribly angry if she had remarked on it, but he had become a fastidious man.
She had shaken rain from her mantle already when she entered the house, but still it dripped on the floor. She spread it over the chest that took up all of the room that was not filled with bed, and laughed at his expression.
He never grew accustomed to the Lady’s garment, the skirt that marked a woman—and marked her very well, too. Sometimes she liked to take him while she wore it, and laugh at his mingled shock and excitement. He was very shy when it came to women.
Tonight she unwound the skirt, which was as wet as her mantle, and spread it to dry, and leaped into the bed’s warmth.
He yowled. “Ai! Woman, you’re freezing!”
Brilliant observation; she was shivering convulsively, and her teeth were chattering.
She clung tightly. After his first yelp of outrage, he remembered what a bold brave tribesman he was, and clasped her close, rubbing warmth into her body.
In a little while, not only his hands performed the office. She rocked with him, not too slowly, not too quickly; an easy rhythm, like one of his horses in the gait that he called canter.
Someday maybe she would ride one. Others of the women were making a great fashion of it. It was better, Tilia allowed, than that other fashion, to play at being women of the tribes, complete with meek submission and confinement to the tents.
Though not much better. Riding was part of fighting; of learning the ways of war.
She shut her mind away from that, and let her body be her world. The Lady’s gift swelled slowly. She prolonged it as much as she might, because while it went on she need not think.
But he was only a man, and his strength had its limits. She took the last of the gift just as his breath caught.
Her whoop of glee covered any sound he might have made, but he was never a noisy lover. He had learned to be silent. It was a necessity in a tent, she supposed, with the walls so thin and everyone living on top of one another.
He slept soon after, which to his credit he did not often do. Tilia was content to lie warm beside him, with her body thrumming still, and his breathing soft in her ear.
Her hand had come to rest over her belly. The Mother had said—a woman could know. Tilia never had, though she had conceived before, and lost the child before it was real enough to do more than interrupt her courses.
This time she knew. Deep inside her, the seed was taking root. She shaped a prayer to the Lady, a prayer without words. It was pure will. Let this one live. Let it be born. Let it grow up and grow strong.
oOo
Tilia was happy therefore, a happiness too deep to speak of, while the rain fell and the river rose—unheard of in this season—and the fields turned to mud and the roads to mire, and tempers shortened to snapping. Then came the sun, but with it the cold. Water turned to ice, mud to something remarkably like stone.
The trickle of tribesmen had slowed and then stopped. Then on the wings of a new storm, a storm that blackened the whole of the northern horizon, came a new and very great riding. Men, two dozen and more. And horses.
Horses in hundreds: mares, foals, a stallion or two that would not be left behind.
Patir who had gone out from the Lady’s country in the spring—Patir had come back, bringing with him the mares that he had promised. There were more than Agni had dared to hope, more maybe than the land could support. But he would find a way. There were cities enough, and there would be fodder enough, particularly if he sent the horses to winter pastures.
As he watched them come in under a lowering sky, he was aware that another watched with him. Sarama had ridden out of the city to see the arrival that had been so long awaited.
Just as Agni turned to greet her, the Mare’s head flew up. She loosed a peal that drowned any sound he might have uttered.
An echo came back, manifold. Among the oncoming herds, one band of mares had held itself somewhat apart. Agni was not aware of it until his eye was drawn to it.
His breath caught. They were all greys, from very young and nearly black to snow-white with age. They were not so greatly different from the rest in shape or size, and yet there was a fineness to them, a clarity of line that one found only in the best of horses.<
br />
The Mare’s kin had come into the west of the world. They had left the Goddess’ hill, perhaps for all of time, and come to their sister, and to their sister’s servant.
“How in the world—?” Agni wondered aloud.
“Not for him,” Sarama said, tilting her head at Patir where he oversaw the drovers. “For Horse Goddess. And for her.” She stroked the Mare’s neck, smoothing the long smoke-grey mane.
The Mare ignored her. She was fixed, intent on her sisters and aunts and cousins. She tossed her head and snorted lightly.
“Yes,” Sarama said in the tone she reserved for the Mare and maybe—though Agni rather doubted it—for Danu when they were alone together, “yes, beloved.”
The Mare sprang into a gallop, with Sarama clinging, laughing, to her neck. Agni watched them go, and watched the reunion, the mares calling to the Mare, and the Mare running, mane and tail streaming, to be reunited with her kin.
When they were all gone, the mares and the Mare lost among the herds again, Agni drew a faint sigh. He had given no thought at all to the Mare’s people, no more than any horseman did; they were no thing of man or of men’s concerns. But to have them here, in this country that he had taken, was a blessing, and a great one. Horse Goddess had sent her own children to swell his herds. Maybe, after all, she had some care for him, for the younger born, the mere and unregarded male.
He laughed shortly. No, of course not. The herd had come for the Mare, as Sarama had said. It had never come for him, nor for any of his doing.
Still it was a great thing, and he was glad of it. It rounded out the world. It made his conquest complete.
oOo
For this day and for the days after, however long the storm lasted, Agni saw the mares settled in Three Birds’ own winter pasture, in the sheltered valley with its stream that ran too swift to freeze, and its grass that grew all winter long, green beneath the snow. Agni rode back with the others who had ridden to help, in the teeth of a gale. By the time he came to his tent, it had begun to snow.
Taditi was looking after Patir, feeding him from the pot and plying him with wine. She had always been fond of Patir. He was wrapped in one of Agni’s coats, with Agni’s bearskin over it.
He grinned as Agni ducked into the tent. His grin seemed enormous, too large for his face. He was thinned to the bone. There were new scars on his arms, knife-cuts from the look of them, and more probably where coat and mantle covered him.
He walked with a hitch in his step. But it was a jaunty gait nonetheless. He was greatly pleased with himself.
“Hard battles?” Agni asked him.
He shrugged. “A few. Most seemed glad to have fewer mouths to feed.”
“Is it bad?”
Patir’s face sobered. “Not—as bad as it could be. But close. Last winter was cruel. The spring rains didn’t come. Then it was a dry summer. There was a fire on the steppe—you heard of that?”
Agni nodded.
“Well,” said Patir. “So you know the most of it. All portents are for a winter worse than the last one. People are dreaming of the west. They call you the sunset king, and some are starting to talk as if you’re a god.”
“I’ve gathered that,” Agni said. “We’ve had our own invasion, boys from the tribes, looking for legends. I disappoint them, I think. I’m too young. And I don’t tower up to heaven.”
Behind them, where she was putting together their dinner, Taditi snorted. “That’s not what I’m hearing. They’ll make a hero-god out of anyone. You have the same air that horse of yours does: you know how pretty you are. Young males are remarkably easily swayed by such things.”
Patir laughed at Agni’s expression. “See! I believe her, too.”
“The more fool you,” muttered Agni.
He was glad for the reprieve of dinner. Patir fell to it with singleminded determination. He had not, he professed between the bread and the venison, eaten so well since he left Three Birds in the spring.
Agni wondered if he had eaten much at all. A man could live on mares’ milk and bootleather, but he was hardly likely to thrive on it.
Agni, well-fleshed and comfortable, dressed in the rich weavings of this country and ornamented with gold, began to feel soft, as he had not felt in a while. He would eat less, he promised himself, and spend more time in the practice-field, even when the weather was dismal. War did not wait upon clear skies and gentle sunlight. A wise chieftain waged it in snow and in bitter rain, when the enemy was most off guard.
Not that there would be any riding or fighting tonight. A wind had come up with the evening, tugging at the tent’s walls, making them billow and sway. The storm was on them.
oOo
It raged for three days. The tents held against it, most of them; those that did not were old or worn or ill secured.
In the city the houses stood fast, but one of the storehouses, and one of the largest at that, had the mishap to stand in the shade of a tree. Under the weight of wind and snow, the tree shattered, and took the storehouse with it—and a great store of grain and fodder, fruit and wine and provender laid by against the winter.
It was not a terrible disaster, but it promised a leaner season than they had hoped for, with so many people in city and camp. They salvaged what they could, once they could make their way through the snow. It heaped and drifted to the rafters of the houses, covered over the tents and would have taken them down had not the tribesmen or the women who lived with them labored to keep the tent-roofs clear.
That was only the first storm of the winter. None thereafter was quite so long or so fierce, but they came hard on one another, storm after storm, with seldom a respite between.
The flocks and herds began to suffer. Not only the herdsmen made camp in the winter pastures, but such of the people—tribesmen as well as people of the city—who had the will or the skill to look after the animals.
After the storms came cold so fierce it snapped trees in two and turned even the swiftest-running streams to ice. Beasts of the wild and birds froze where they slept.
Then followed a thaw, which would have been a great relief, except that it brought with it a wave of sickness. What snow and cold had been unable to do, the sickness did: it laid low both man and beast.
Some died, though not as many as might have died on the steppe. The healers were strong here, and their art greater than it was among the tribes. Their herbs and simples, their potions and prayers, did what good any mortal remedies could. And yet there was death, in the city, in the camp, and in the pastures among the herds.
It was a cruel winter, the most cruel in memory. And when the spring came, warm with sweetness, came also the first new travelers from the tribes; and they brought the word that been so long awaited.
War.
The tribes were gathering. The steppe had killed the weak and convinced the strong. Their way was westward. Their fate was to conquer, to overrun the Lady’s country and take it for their own.
Just so had the gods spoken to Agni, and just so had he done. But now he was king in the Lady’s country, and it had, inevitably, become his own. He was the one whom the tribes would conquer. He was the focus of their war.
He was as ready as he could ever be. Now he must wait, and hold fast, and pray to his own gods and to the goddess of these people, that he would have the victory.
II: WAR
85
Catin had come and gone from Three Birds throughout all of that year, even into the winter, when no one else was mad enough to venture the roads. She even came, once, walking on the snow-laden ice of the river, stayed for a day or two, left again without a word.
The tribes knew her like, as did the cities: one of the Lady’s children, wandering and mad. People listened to her ramblings, because they were holy, and some were omens. Many were not; but that was the task and challenge, to tell which was which.
When she was in Three Birds, she liked to ride with the women who were meant to be fighters. She would not take up a weapon. “Tha
t’s not for me,” she said. But she rode as well as a tribesman—even Taditi admitted as much.
She had a way with horses; she could speak to them and they would seem to listen. Even the Mare had some little use for her, for whom all the world but Sarama was an endless nuisance.
In the spring after that grim winter, when the snow still lurked in the hollows but the grass had begun to grow green, Catin came back to Three Birds. The first anyone saw of her was on the back of a mare who had lost her foal in the winter. The mare had recovered well enough, but had been much cast down. Now, under Catin, she arched her neck and danced a little, and taunted the stallions.
oOo
One of those stallions was Danu’s colt, or so people persisted in calling him. He was well grown now, somewhat gawky still but solid and strong. The winter had not troubled him enough to notice, though he was ribby as they all were, men as well as beasts. He was not as tall as Agni’s Mitani, but he promised to be somewhat larger, with his deep chest and his broad hindquarters.
Sarama had informed Danu that it was time. The colt was ready to be ridden, and Danu would ride him. Danu had too ingrained a habit of obedience. He tried to argue, to protest that he was no fit rider for a horse so young, but Sarama overrode him.
“He is your stallion. You will ride him. If you fall, we’ll be there to catch you.”
Danu was not afraid of falling. He was afraid of ruining an innocent. But Sarama would never understand that. She had grown up in a world full of horses. She could not imagine what it was like to have discovered the beasts when one was already grown, and to have learned to ride after one’s bones and muscles were fully formed.
All the things that she did without thinking, that were honed to instinct, he had to remember, one by one. If he forgot one, it might be the most important, the crucial thing that, undone, would destroy the rest.
