by Judith Tarr
But Sarama would not hear of his refusing. “He’s your stallion,” she said. “It’s your duty to ride him.”
Therefore he was standing in the field, in the new green grass, and eyeing the colt. The colt, who was now a young stallion, had been taking liberties with the mares, and had the scars to show for it. He approached Danu with his head up and his ears back, with intent that was clear to read. If he could not win a mare with his charming manners, he would overwhelm a man with his strength.
Danu faced him down. He was a brave spirit, but not brave enough to tempt fortune. He lowered his head, with a snake and snap to see if after all he might still win; but Danu was ready for him. He backed down swiftly then, and yielded to the inevitable.
Sarama was grinning. So was her brother, whom Danu had not heard coming, and a gathering of people from both city and tribes. By the Lady; did they think this was a festival?
He could walk away. But if he did that, he would only have it to face again. He straightened his shoulders resolutely and made himself think only and wholly of the colt. The colt never took much notice of people apart from Danu and, on occasion, Sarama.
Once Danu had begun, it grew easier. The bridle with its bit of leather and bone, the saddle fleece, were familiar; the colt had worn them both before. Sarama was there to hold the bridle. And there was that broad back, and the colt standing still, waiting.
He knew what he was doing. He was wondering, from the tilt of his ears, what was taking Danu so long.
Danu took a deep breath, grasped mane, and mounted. The colt staggered a little; Danu was not a small man. But the colt steadied. He even, after a pause, essayed a step, then two. And thus, with remarkable ease and no fuss, he carried a rider.
Danu’s cheeks ached. He was, he discovered, grinning like a fool.
Sarama was smiling. “You see?” she said.
oOo
Just as Danu was ending his first ride on his own stallion—and being applauded for it, too, by tribesmen who had much to say of a man becoming a man at last—Catin appeared, bareback on the mouse-colored mare. The colt was full of himself, strutting before the rest, because he was, at last, a man’s own stallion. The arrival of a mare raised his tail over his back and set him to trumpeting.
When he had loosed the last peal, Catin lowered her hands from her ears. “That’s well,” she said as if they had all been conversing for some little while. “You’ll need him when you fight the men from the steppe.”
She was talking to Danu. He saw the gods crowding in her eyes. Because of that, and because, as Sarama too often said, he was much too polite a creature, he did not roar out in protest. He said mildly, “I have no intention of fighting any man, horseman or otherwise.”
“And yet you will,” said Catin. She turned those eyes on Agni. “And you, my king. You will fail when the horsemen come. Unless you learn to think like a woman.”
“And how is that?” asked Agni with remarkable aplomb.
“If you need to ask, you need badly to know.” She clapped heels to the mare’s sides. The mare wheeled and leaped into a gallop.
There was an enormous silence. Agni drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then he said, “Well, brother. If I do your fighting for you, will you do my thinking for me?”
Danu met those eyes that were, at the moment, so much like a lion’s. Agni was jesting, but Danu had no mirth in him. “You should ask that of Tilia,” he said. “Or your sister.”
“Or Catin?” Agni was not to be quelled by such a dullard as Danu was. He wheeled about, as full of strut as a stallion, and said to all of those who watched and listened, “Ah! But you see, we don’t know which god is speaking through her.”
“It’s all of them,” Danu said. “At once.”
“Then no wonder she’s mad.” Agni vaulted onto his stallion’s back. Mitani was not at all reluctant to show them his paces.
Danu watched. He had grown past envy, which pleased him rather. He could take in the pure pleasure of it, the man and the horse moving together like one being. Danu would never be so splendid on a horse. He had come too late to it.
And yet he had won his stallion. He would take his man next, he supposed, and be a perfect mockery of a tribesman.
oOo
He did not plan it or even want it, but he rode back to the city with Agni, he on the gelding that he had been riding for so long—and his colt was not pleased with that, either. But however proud of himself the horse might be, he was very young still, and his back was weak.
“He’ll grow,” Agni said, “and be strong. You have a horseman’s wisdom, you know.”
“Almost as if I’d been born to it?”
Agni slanted a glance at Danu. “I’m not making fun of you.”
“No,” said Danu. “It is the truth, isn’t it? And yet our children will grow up knowing both the Lady of the Birds and the Lady of Horses.”
“And thinking like women?”
“That troubles you, doesn’t it?”
Agni did not try to deny it. “Some say I already do. If I didn’t, I’d have taken this country with fire and sword, and never tried to speak its language or marry one of its women.”
“There’s more to it than that,” Danu said.
“I’m sure,” said Agni. They had mounted the long hill that looked down on the city. He paused there, and Danu paused with him.
“Look,” Agni said. “What do you sec?”
“Home,” said Danu.
Agni nodded. “Yes. I—I see strangeness grown familiar, and a place that belongs to me, but I’m not sure yet that I belong to it. But the steppe is mine no longer. I can’t go back to it. I have no place that I can, beyond all doubt, call home.”
“This is home,” Danu said. “Where your kin are. Where Tilia is.” He thought for a moment. It was not his to say, not really, but it seemed necessary, just then. He could say that the Lady commanded him. He said, “Tilia is going to be a mother, you know.”
“Yes, I know that,” Agni said a little sharply. “She’s going to be a Mother. She’s the Mother’s heir.”
“No,” said Danu. “She’s going to be a mother. To bear a child. To make you—I suppose—a father. Since that is the way you think.”
At last he had managed to evoke astonishment in the king of the horsemen. “She never told me!”
“Need she have?”
Agni looked like a horse about to bite. But he held himself still.
Danu looked down, a little ashamed. “No. I shouldn’t have said that. Sarama was surprised, too, that I knew and she hadn’t told me. I could see. As could you, if you knew how. They don’t teach you that, do they, among the tribes?”
“It’s a thing of the women’s side,” Agni said with the hint of a growl.
“Not here,” Danu said.
He watched Agni ponder that, and watched the rest of it dawn on him at last: what Danu had told him. What it meant.
It was a while before he spoke. When he did, it was to say a thing that Danu had never expected from a tribesman. “She hasn’t before. Has she?”
Danu understood, but widened his eyes nonetheless.
“Had a child,” Agni said. “She hasn’t been a mother before. Has she?”
“No,” said Danu.
“Why?”
Danu shrugged. “The Lady knows.”
“Did she think she was barren?”
Danu could not lie, and he had little talent for prevarication. He nodded.
“Would that stop her from being Mother in her time?”
Danu nodded again.
There was no telling what Agni was thinking. He perceived more than Danu had given him credit for, but what he thought of it, how it felt and tasted to him, Danu could not tell.
After what seemed a long while, Agni said, “She knew, didn’t she? Or hoped. What the Great Marriage would do.”
“What you would do,” said Danu. “There was a foreseeing, I’ve heard. A whisper among the elders: that the Mother’s heir would get no chi
ldren save by a man of another people.”
Agni laughed. There was little mirth in it. “So that’s what I was meant for. To be stud-horse to the Mother’s heir.”
“Isn’t that what a king takes wives for? To be his broodmares and bear his sons?”
“Then we’re well matched,” Agni said.
“You’re resentful. Why? You should be glad.”
“Yes,” said Agni. He touched heel to Mitani’s side. The stallion moved forward, down the long slope.
Danu’s gelding followed with no prompting. Agni spoke to the air ahead of him, but the words were meant for Danu. “Why did you tell me this?”
“Because it was laid on me.”
Mitani halted. Agni turned on his back. “Would she have told me?”
“It becomes obvious,” Danu said.
“And I have to learn to think like that?” Agni snorted in disgust.
“Ah,” said Danu mildly. “One must learn to see. To observe. And to understand. I suppose that’s difficult.”
“Not as difficult as keeping myself from thumping you.” Agni wheeled Mitani full about and sent him curvetting in a circle around Danu on his mercifully calm gelding.
Danu should be apprehensive, he supposed, and wondering if this was the battle that Catin had foretold for him: face to face already with this man from the steppe. But Agni was a little less angry than, however unwillingly, amused. With a whoop that startled Danu nigh out of his skin, he whirled again and plunged at the gallop toward the city.
He was going to confront Tilia. Danu might not come alive or unflayed from his own encounter with her, but he was not sorry he had said what he had said. He had caught the shock; Tilia, he hoped, would have all the joy.
86
With Tilia carrying his child—which she stubbornly persisted in calling hers and hers alone, but he had some hope of waking her to greater sense—Agni understood at last what made a man fight most fiercely. It was more than glory, and more than the exhilaration of danger. It was the heart-deep, bone-solid certainty that he would do anything, anything at all, to keep his own blood safe.
The woman he had taken in earnest of this land, the child within her who was his own, his flesh, were all the world. And everything that was his or hers, he would protect to the death.
Somehow, without his noticing it, she had become a necessity. If duty kept him in the camp, he caught himself looking about for her, or reaching for her in the night, or looking for her beside him when he woke in the morning. He only breathed truly easily when she was in his sight.
She did not seem to respond in kind. Her farewells were light, her greetings calm, as if she had not missed him at all. She had much to do, not only in Three Birds but in the towns to the eastward: calling their people together, seeing that they were provisioned, and even making sure that they tended to the defenses, the walls and the ditches and the troops of fighters.
She was gone as often as she was present, refusing to ride—that was not her fate, she said firmly—but accepting a guard of horsemen or mounted women. Often it was Sarama and Taditi and their archers; sometimes it was a company of young men from the camp. They vied to be chosen to ride with the king’s wife. It was a great honor and a great trust.
Agni found himself bound to Three Birds. If he contemplated riding about, or for that matter accompanying Tilia on her travels, he ran afoul of this duty or that, or someone had a dispute for him to judge, or a deputation had arrived from one of the cities with messages that only he could answer.
He never managed to escape. Even when he tried to slip away at dawn with a small company of horsemen, there was the Mother of Two Rivers waiting for him outside his tent, bidding him judge a quarrel between one of her elders and a clan-chieftain.
He did that to the evident satisfaction of the Mother and the elder, if not of the chieftain against whom Agni had laid down the judgment. He had taken a store of gold that was not his to take, and from the temple yet. Agni could hardly find him innocent of wrongdoing.
oOo
When they were gone and with them most of the day, Agni sat for a while on his black horsehide. The others were gone away, both elders and hangers-on. He was, for once, alone.
He was king at last of the Lady’s people as well as the horsemen. This was not the first judgment he had been asked to make for people from the cities, but it was the first that had come between a Mother and a lord of the tribes. And they had asked him to judge, not the Mother of Three Birds or the council of the Mothers. They had come to him as king, and accepted his judgment.
He was not fool enough to think that it would have gone so well if he had found in favor of the chieftain. But the gods and the Lady had been kind. It had not even been a difficult verdict.
There would be grumblings in the camp tonight, but he was not afraid of those. He was strong enough to quell them. And that too was the mark of his kingship.
He rose at last, stretched and sighed. Everyone else was free to come and go, but the king must stay. For the first time he felt what his father must have felt, the weight of the burden, the strain of being the center.
Tilia was somewhere off to the eastward, sublimely unconcerned by the danger to herself or her child. Sarama was with her, but Sarama at least had left her daughter behind. Rani stayed with her father, as safe as child could be.
oOo
It was an absurd thing to do, maybe, but Agni went in search of his sister’s lover. He found there an uncritical welcome, the open hospitality of all these people, and even a little rest. People still came to him, but not as easily or as quickly as in the camp.
He ate his dinner in the garden of the Mother’s house, in the fading light of evening, with his sister’s daughter in his lap. Several of the Mother’s daughters and sons were there, and a great crowd of children. But Rani wanted her uncle. She was very firm about it, and objected loudly to the suggestion that she play with her agemates.
Agni was content with her presence. She was warm and clean, and she patently adored him. He had no doubt that she would grow up to be as contrary as her mother, but in her youth she was a perfect and worshipful female.
oOo
He slept in that house, in the bed that smelled of Tilia. He dreamed of her. She was not making love to him, or even paying much attention to him at all, and yet he was greatly comforted. Tilia flinging herself at him and begging him to love her, love her till she cried for mercy, would have discomfited him sorely.
Far better to see her in the dream-country as she was when awake, weaving a fabric of all the colors of earth and sky, and conversing with Sarama and Taditi and a shadowy company of women. He never quite heard what they spoke of, but he knew no pressing need to hear it. The comfort was in the sound of her voice, the sight of her face, the perfect dailiness of it all.
Such a dull creature he had become, that he could be so warmed by a dream of nothing in particular. If she had walked out of it just as he woke, he would have taken her by storm.
oOo
He woke alone, washed and dressed and ate. As he sat in the Mother’s garden as he had the night before, warmed by the rising sun, he contemplated the day’s duties and sighed. He was greatly, almost irresistibly tempted to cast them all aside and escape to a daylong hunt. But he was too irrevocably a king. The royal horsehide called him, and the royal burden.
He would have gone to them somewhat since, except that Rani had come out in the arms of one of her father’s youngest brothers, and she had insisted anew that Agni and only Agni be her resting place in the sun.
He had fed himself; now he fed her. She was still nursing from whichever of her aunts was convenient, but she had begun to demand richer meat. She took bread and fruit and cheese in such bites as her few teeth would allow, and made a great mess of it, too; then laughed uproariously as her father swooped down to sponge her clean.
Agni was hard pressed to keep a grip on the damp wriggle of her. As she came nigh to leaping out of his arms, he looked up at the shift
of a shadow, into Tilia’s face.
She leaped to catch Rani. Their hands touched. A spark leaped, starting Agni but not, it seemed, Tilia. She swung Rani deftly into her arms.
With the child between them, there was no seizing her as he sorely wanted to do, and kissing her till they both were dizzy. Agni discovered that he was smiling, blinking like an idiot in the sun, warmed through by her simple presence.
Part of him wanted to rise up and bolt, run far away from such a sickness. The rest was too deeply content to move. She had come back. She was safe. And tonight . . .
oOo
The night came none too soon. Agni left the camp rather more quickly than some of his men would have liked, but still too late to share the dinner in the Mother’s house. Nonetheless they were all still gathered in the common room, with the shutters open to let in the sweet air of a summer’s evening, and twists of herbs burning in the windows to keep the biting insects at bay.
Tilia and the Mother were sitting side by side. Agni had not seen them look so very like before. The child had deepened Tilia’s presence as well as her body. She was coming to the serenity that the Mother wore as easily as her own skin.
A place opened for him near but not beside them, between Sarama and Danu. Rani, half asleep in her father’s lap, crawled into Agni’s.
It was a strange council of war. And yet that was indubitably what it was. Tilia had come back with word from farther east. Messengers had brought news from the forest people.
The horsemen were coming. They had gathered on the forest’s westward edge; their kin among the secret people had done as kin could not but do, and made pact to guide them. Just so had the westward kin, the kin who shared blood with the Lady’s people, brought word where it could best be heeded.
“They’ll be guided toward Larchwood,” Tilia said. “It has the best defenses, and is the most ready.”
She had learned to think like a warrior. So had they all, however much against their will.
“We could,” said Agni, “discard this waiting. If I gathered all my forces from the cities as well as the camps, and sent them into the east, caught the tribes unguarded, and waged our war there—”
