by Judith Tarr
“That’s what your brother thinks, isn’t it?”
“Wouldn’t anyone?”
“Yes,” said Taditi. “Except that if she was prevailed on to lie even to swearing a great oath, could you possibly expect anything else to be true, either?”
“I . . . suppose not,” said Sarama.
Taditi nodded briskly. “I wasn’t thinking, either. The more fool I. I had my suspicions, but I never thought . . . well.” She drew herself up short, took a breath, said it direct. “Yama’s mother and his youngest wife had word of this woman among the Red Deer, how she was married to a eunuch and restless in it. They prevailed on her to seduce your brother, spun a great tale of his desire for her, and promised her that he would marry her if she disposed of her husband. But after she’d done what she’d agreed to do, two things happened. She saw your brother walk away from her, and she followed him. She saw him go to another assignation that he clearly liked much better, and knew how she’d been lied to about his love and loyalty. And as she stumbled away from that, Yama came on her and gave her honest reason to tell her husband that a prince of the White Horse had taken her by force.”
Sarama was not surprised. Agni had suspected as much, though he had only said so under the influence of a great deal of wine. “So the rest of it was like a mountain falling: a few small stones gathered other, larger ones, till my brother was buried in an avalanche. But,” she said, “why swear against him? Why not against the one who actually raped her?”
“Jealousy,” Taditi said. “Anger. Who knows what she was thinking, there at the last? She might have blamed him for being the cause of it all, as people will when they’re pushed to the edge. She had nothing left to gain then, and nothing to lose. There’s a great freedom in that, you know. You can do anything then. Anything at all.”
There was a silence. Sarama thought of Agni, how he had known all that, or guessed it, and still kept the brightness of his spirit. “He’s a strong man,” she said.
“For a man,” Taditi agreed, “he is.” She paused. Her eyes on Sarama were sharp. “You don’t know the rest of it, do you?”
Sarama frowned. “What are you saying?”
“You know what I’m saying.”
“No,” said Sarama. “I want you to tell me.”
“Very well,” said Taditi with a snap of annoyance. “Agni your brother and Yama’s wife Rudira were lovers for a year before Agni was cast out.”
“A year?” Sarama could not say she was shocked; it made sense when she thought on it, from things that Agni had said, glances he had cast. So too did all the rest make sense: Yama, Yama-diti, and yes, that sad child of the Red Deer. Poor Agni, she almost said, but stopped herself. No; there was nothing poor about her brother, great fool that he had been, and great price that he had paid. “They must have begun on the night she was married to Yama.”
“Very nearly,” Taditi said. “She cast eyes on Agni at the wedding, and claimed him when it was over. He never protested too strongly. Why would he? She’s a beauty.”
“He might have considered what would have happened if Yama had caught him at it.”
Taditi snorted. “You think he didn’t? She was like a drug to him; like wine. She has a name in some quarters as a witch, though I never noticed any particular talents in that direction. All the witchery she ever needed was her body.”
“And her face,” said Sarama. “I remember her now. A white-faced woman, with eyes as pale as water. She was with the king when I was last in the camp, when I decided to go away. She stared at me.”
“Looking to see your brother in you, I suppose,” Taditi said.
“Is she that besotted with him?”
“Maybe,” Taditi said. “It’s known she wanted to be a king’s wife—and she never stopped for an instant in betraying your brother.”
“But she never accused him of the thing that would have killed him. She let another woman accuse him. A woman of another tribe, so that he’d be exiled but he wouldn’t be put to death. Maybe in her mind that was a kindness.”
“What, she did it for his own good?” Taditi shook her head. “She might even see it that way. She’s a strange one. Rather stupid really, but very clever when she sees something that she wants. Mostly what she wants is a man, the prettier the better. Or if not a man, then something pretty to wear. She’s found her element here. She was dripping gold and trying on gowns when I saw her.”
“You were in Yama’s tent?”
Taditi laughed at her alarm. “There, there! The tent is enormous—it’s your father’s old one—and no one saw me at all.”
“You don’t know that,” Sarama said. She suppressed an urge to leap up and begin striking camp. It was dark enough and the camp well enough hidden that it was hardly likely a hunter would find them before morning.
They would leave as soon as it was light. For the rest of the night, there was nothing they could do that they had not done, either posting guards or concealing their camp from passing eyes.
oOo
She rested as she could. The night was dark, no moon to brighten it. The trees concealed the stars.
More than once she woke with a start, certain that she was in the wood again, and all the rest—Danu, their daughter, the horsemen and their conquest—no more than a dream. Then a horse would snort or a woman murmur in her sleep, and Sarama would sigh and relax slowly. It was no dream. It was real. And even with blood and battle ahead of her, she would far rather this than the endless shadows of the wood.
88
Even with the fear of discovery knotting in her belly, Sarama turned aside from the straight road home to ride through one of the towns that the horsemen had sacked and abandoned. It was emptied of the living, and yet it was grimly alive with beasts and birds, fattening on the flesh of the slain.
The stink of it struck the riders well out in the fields, and thickened as they rode closer. Their horses, bred in the tribes, snorted and skittered but did not turn and bolt.
Only Sarama’s will held most of the archers behind her. She heard retching, but would not turn to see who it was. It spared the woman’s pride, and it spared her own.
Fire had leveled much of the town and been a pyre for many of the dead: the sweet-savory stink of roasting flesh overlaid the smell of death and burning. Sarama rode with her eyes open, seeing but unseeing, as one learned to do in war.
So these women would learn, as she undertook to teach them. They must know what was coming; why they had trained so long and so hard, and what they must defend against. Charred and blackened walls, blackened and twisted bodies, the white gleam of bone in a flyblown face. Women, children, men flung together and heaped like firewood, half burned, half rotted, abandoned without mercy and without pity.
“They are not human, who did this,” said one of the boldest of the archers, stocky outspoken Galia who could draw as strong a bow as a man. Nothing had ever frightened her, that Sarama knew of, nor was she weak in the stomach. Yet this sickened her.
“They’re all too human,” Taditi said.
“This is what happens when men are allowed to rule,” said Galia.
Sarama could not argue with that, and Taditi chose not to. They passed through the rest of the ruins in silence, the silence of grief overlaid with the simmer of anger.
The archers would take this memory home with them. It would make them stronger when the battle came. Sarama caught herself grieving for innocence. Even the brightest spirits had gone all dark. It was a long while, and a long way in the sunlight, before any of them smiled again.
oOo
It was no longer the fashion in Three Birds for women to play at being women of the tribes. Some stayed in the tents because they had conceived a fondness for the men they had chosen, but most returned to the city and to the companies that would stand to its defense. Tales of horror told by people fleeing westward were dismaying, but little more. Tales told by their own people, people they had known from childhood, struck fiercely home.
Agni still doubted that the Lady’s children could learn to kill. They would turn tail and run, he was unhappily certain, once they had a sight of blood.
But he had a deeper trouble than that. “You were sure?” he asked his sister and his aunt, over and over. “It was Yama riding as king?”
Over and over Taditi said, “Yes. It was Yama. You don’t think I’d know him?” And on the dozenth repetition, she added acidly, “Don’t tell me you don’t know how your own kind think. He’s their puppet on a stick.”
“He’s coming for me,” Agni said. He heard her, but her words had little meaning. “Whatever people are saying, whatever their reason for raising him up—he persuaded them to do it because I did it. I gathered the tribes, too. I led them westward.”
“They were looking to the sunset countries long before you ever dreamed of coming here,” Taditi said.
“Yes, but why should Yama trouble with it? White Horse lands are—were—far enough east that the people need never pass the wood. They could simply inherit the lands that the western tribes left behind.”
“Not if it’s as bad on the steppe as people say,” Sarama said. “What would they eat? How would they live? No; they had to come here. The gods scoured the steppe clean, so that they’d not be tempted to linger.”
“What, even the gods?” Agni’s mouth twisted. “You know what that makes me, don’t you? I’m the lure sent ahead of the hunt. I’ve drawn the whole pack to the quarry.”
“Don’t wallow in it,” Taditi said. “You don’t have time. They can’t be far behind us, even at the speed they must be making, as loaded down with spoils as they are.”
“Someone in the army will come to his senses,” Agni said, “and command people to leave their booty lying; they’ll get more and far better here.”
“Here is where we want them,” Sarama said. She did not sound excessively happy, but neither did she seem cast down. “And we were worried that they might not come to the bait.”
“I didn’t expect that I would be the bait,” Agni muttered.
oOo
All that any of them could do, they had done. They had only to wait.
Agni had never waited well. Everyone else had ample to do to shore up the defenses and hone the skills that battle would call for; or just as important as those, carry on the daily tasks that kept people in comfort: baking bread, washing clothes, tending children. But Agni had wrought too well. His own task had been to apportion each task as it best might be; once that was done, there was nothing to do but sit and look kingly, and wait for the enemy to come.
Too many of the elders took open pleasure in sitting and being looked after, but Agni was not an elder yet. He was young still—very young, if truth be told—and he had a great need to be up and doing.
He found occupation at last in a rather unexpected place: in a smith’s workshop, tending the bellows to her terse instructions. She was not in the least impressed that the king of the horsemen himself was laboring in her forge. Her apprentice was gone, galloping about on the back of a horse, as she put it. It was only fair that the man whose fault it was should have taken the girl’s place, if only for an hour.
She was working gold that day, not copper as one might have expected. There was a row of copper knives awaiting the finishing polish, beautiful things, sharp and deadly, but her chief concern was with the spinning of a gleaming golden wire. It was simple work, quite tedious, and yet it absorbed the mind.
She spun the golden wire as the gods might spin the fate of the world, stretching it impossibly long, winding it round a spool as Agni had seen weavers wind the thread of their spinning. Such thread had never clothed a human body. This would be for beauty’s sake, and no more—if never any less.
Patir found him there, to the smith’s visible disgust. “Just when he showed signs of learning how,” she said.
But she could not keep him with her, not with the news that Patir brought. “Scouts are in. They’re coming.”
Agni had no need to ask his meaning. It was the matter of a moment to lay down the bellows, bow politely to the smith, and bolt into the sunlight.
oOo
It was still a long while before the enemy could reach Three Birds. They had been seen west of Two Rivers, had passed by it without turning aside to take it.
Danu was not sorry to hear that. He was fond of the Mother of Two Rivers, whom he had known since they were children. If she and her people were safe, then a little more of the world was as it should be.
That night everyone was advised to sleep, but almost no one could. One of the few was Rani, whom Danu had dosed with a little mead mixed in goat’s milk. She might have been fretful to be put to bed in the temple, as unfamiliar as that place would be, but as safe as any in the city; but she was nodding as he carried her there, and sound asleep when one of the Lady’s acolytes took her from him to carry her within.
“Even for this, they won’t let a man in the temple,” Sarama said.
He had heard her coming, felt her on his skin. As he turned, she stepped into his arms and clung tight. It was brief, and nigh squeezed the breath out of him. Then she was gone again, standing at a little distance, seeming remote and rather cold. “You still won’t do the sensible thing and take her to the Long Bridge?”
“No,” he said as he had been saying for days now. “If she isn’t safe here, she’ll be safe nowhere that the horsemen can reach. And they will reach as far as the sunset itself, unless we stop them now.”
“But she might—” Sarama stopped, and bit her lip. He had heard that, too; that Rani might at least live a little longer—as if she could live without ever knowing her mother; for Sarama would not leave this place until the battle was fought.
“Let’s not quarrel now,” she said. “Not now. Let’s go—let’s go somewhere—”
“Yes,” he said, since she could not finish. She made no move to go; he led her therefore, not far, but far enough to rest her spirit a little.
The house into which he led her was empty. The people who had lived in it had gone westward, except two of the daughters, who rode and camped with the archers. Everything within was clean, tidy, ready for its owners to return. They would not mind that he took refuge here for Sarama’s sake.
She looked as if she might protest, but he silenced her with a finger on her lips. There was wine stored in a jar, and a cheese wrapped close in a cloth, even a round of the bread that people made for journeys, made of nuts and dried fruit and grains both crushed and whole. It was not new made, but it was the better for that, rich and sweet.
They made a feast in that empty house, with the long light of the day’s end slanting through the opened shutters. The quiet, startling at first after the hum and tumult of a city preparing for attack, grew until it filled them as it filled the house. Danu watched the tension ease in Sarama, the stiffness fade from her body, the taut lines smooth from her face.
She was never pretty as anyone would reckon it—as her brother was, if one admitted the truth; features that in him were drawn as clean as the edge of a blade, seemed too strong for her woman’s face. And yet she was beautiful, an odd fierce beauty that only grew the stronger, the more the years touched her. She was not a pretty woman, nor had been a pretty child; but when she was old, none of that would matter. Only the beauty would remain.
They had not said a word since they came into the house, or needed any. Danu left the place where he had been sitting, knelt at her feet and laid his head in her lap, and sighed as she bent to close him within her arms. In that space, not so long ago, her daughter had slept coiled in the womb. Now Rani slept in the temple, safe in the Lady’s arms, with the rest of the children.
Danu had never minded before that he was forbidden to enter the temple. It was the women’s place, their sanctuary. But they had taken Sarama’s daughter—his daughter. He wanted her back.
Foolishness. Sarama slipped down from the bench to her knees, arms still about him. Her breathing had quickened, but it was no quicker th
an his own.
They were alone here, as they never were; all alone in a house empty of people. Anything they did or said, no one else would hear. No one even knew where they were. It was wonderful; wicked.
She laughed as he took her—he took her, which was just as she wished it. Such a strange language, hers was, to say he took, when in truth it was he who gave and she who took.
He rose above her; she lay beneath, all joyfully open to him, and laughing that sweet wild laughter. It sounded as the wind must sound on the steppe, or the rain on the endless expanses of grass.
She did not want him to be gentle. She dared him to be as a stallion is, as the stag in his season.
He was trained to gentleness as a tribesman trained for war. Yet he had learned to fight. He could seize her, too, and drive deep, and impale her as if on a spear.
She gasped; but before he could recoil, she clutched him tight. He could move nowhere but within her.
He remembered what the tribesmen never did: that it was the mare who accepted the stallion, and the doe who allowed the stag to fall upon her. With the faintest of sighs, he let his body do what it clamored to do. To take her swift and hard, no measure to it, no long slow ascent into pleasure. He went up like a burning brand, in a shower of sparks.
When they were gone, he lay beside her, cold and ashamed. She lifted herself over him as a little before he had risen over her.
She was smiling, the same warm rich smile as when they had loved all night. She kissed the corner of his mouth. “There, there. Why so glum?”
“I—” he said. “I didn’t—”
“What? Love me long enough? Are you as proud as that?”
“I didn’t please you,” he said. There: the truth. And the shame of it, too.
She seemed remarkably unperturbed. “You are that proud. No, my beloved, you did not fail to please me. Not in the slightest.”
“But—”
“Hush,” she said. And he obeyed, because he was raised to obey. She knew that, too: she began to laugh again, irresistibly. Even he could not cling to his pride in the face of such mirth.
