by Judith Tarr
It was only sensible to accept the inevitable; to greet him as their king. To let him be what he should have been from the beginning.
Fortunes of war. Agni drank down the last of the wine. People were hovering, not quite trying to draw his attention. Some were familiar: elders and warleaders, clan-chieftains and lesser kings. A few bore the marks of wounds.
They were his. He had conquered them. Now they waited on his pleasure.
A king could let them wait about for most of the day, then suffer them to approach him as he sat in the circle of judgment. But Agni was not a particularly kingly king.
He tilted his head. First one, then another, then the lot of them came to sit round the fire. No one needed its warmth, for the day was hot even so early, but what it signified was greater than simple comfort.
They were vanquished, and he had not yet spoken his judgment over them. Until he did, they could only speak if he spoke first. But no words came to him. He sat, feeling faintly like a fool, while the silence stretched.
As he sat there, others came. Those indeed he knew, and by name. Patir his yearbrother, Tillu with his terribly scarred face. Elders of the western tribes, young men and battle-captains of Agni’s own eastern people.
They claimed places nearest Agni, and no one dared contest it. Kings and elders who had been displaced, moved aside without protest. That too was the fortune of war.
Patir settled on one side of Agni, Tillu on the other. Patir said, “All’s done on the field. The healers have the wounded in the city. They’re expected to live, the gods and the Lady willing.”
Agni bowed his head. “Thanks be,” he said. “And the dead?”
“All sent to their rest,” Patir answered. He yawned cavernously and stretched. “Ah! I could use a little myself.”
“You haven’t slept?”
“A little,” Patir said. “When this is over I’ll sleep from new moon to new moon, and let the work look after itself.”
“So shall we all.” Agni looked round the circle of faces. To his own people he was an easy burden, their own king and friend, whom they had chosen of their free will. As far as he knew, they were content with the choice.
The strangers who had come to take this country now found themselves taken instead, and no certainty of what he would do to them. He might kill them. Blood-feud did not touch a conquering king. Or he might restore them to all that they had had before.
He finished his bread and cheese, drank the last of his wine. When he rose, some made as if to rise with him. He waved them down. “Stay,” he said.
They stayed. They obeyed. It came to him then, the full force of it, breaking at last through the wall of numbness that had been about him. What he had done. What he had won.
And could he hold it?
No doubts. No weakness. He held himself erect as he walked away.
oOo
He did not go far. He only wanted a little peace. When he went back, he must judge them all, all the men who had come from the east.
He was not going to kill them. He never had intended to. But what else he might do . . .
He walked out past the camp’s edge, up the hill that sheltered it from the battlefield. That was as Patir had said, cleared as much as it could be. Two mounds rose on it, one crowned with spears, one with flowers. Dead of the horsemen, dead of the Lady’s people. Carrion birds squabbled over scraps, remnants that had been forgotten.
The grass was all trampled and torn and stained dark with blood and mud. It would grow back richer than ever. That great gift the gods had given, that Earth Mother grew most fruitful on the field of death.
Agni sat on the hillside. The sun beat down, but the wind eased the strength of it. His body was a pattern of aches, bruises and small wounds.
None of them mattered. Nor did the ache in his loins. But the memory of Rudira’s hands on his skin—
At first he thought he was dreaming it. Someone had come up beside him and sat there in silence; and when he looked, he saw that it was Tilia.
She neither touched him nor spoke to him, and yet her presence warmed him through. After a while he said, “I thought you had to stay in the city. Until—”
“I came where I was needed,” she said.
“But the Mother—”
“She sleeps,” said Tilia.
Agni shut his mouth carefully. Her words were gentle, but they were as firm as a slap. The Mother was dead. Her story was ended.
After a moment Agni said, “You hold her place now.”
She nodded.
“Will that—”
“No,” she said.
“I hate when you do that.”
Her glance was as unrepentant as it had ever been, and as brightly wicked, too. It comforted him. “And you’re king now,” she said. “Really king.”
“That won’t change me,” he said.
Her brow arched. “Did I ask if it would?”
Maddening. Wonderful. He smiled; but memory intruded, like the rake of nails down his back. “Gods,” he said. “I should have killed her.”
“You should not,” said Tilia.
“I can’t keep her here. She’s like a child or an animal. She’s as treacherous as a spring wind. She’ll kill you if it suits her whim, or kill me, or betray us both.”
“Leave her to us,” Tilia said.
Agni shook his head. “No. I can’t do that.”
“Why not? You people talk of the men’s side, the women’s side. This is a thing of the women’s side. We’ll deal with her. You go, do what men do, be king.”
“But she is my mistake.”
“How arrogant,” said Tilia, “and how perfectly like you. She is a whole world’s mistake. Your world made her. Let my world heal her.”
“But—”
Her dark glance silenced him. “Go,” she said. “They’re waiting for you.”
Certainly they were. Agni had bound them to it. He bent toward her, kissed her lightly.
She looked a little startled, and a little pleased. He leaped up lightly and held out his hand.
She let him draw her to her feet. Hand in hand they walked down the hill into the camp.
96
Agni the king sat in judgment over the men from the east. It was a sight the tribes had never seen before. Not only the king under his golden standard with his golden torque about his neck, but the woman who sat beside him and the women who sat and stood where elders should. Women unveiled, unconstrained, conducting themselves as equals in the council of the tribes.
Tilia sat on the black horsehide, upright and still. Her gown was of the finest weaving, a pattern of red and green and white, and her ornaments were gold.
Agni’s coat was of the same weft as her gown, but his belt and trousers and boots were a tribesman’s. He wore a weapon as a horseman should, a long knife sheathed in leather and hafted in carved bone. Its blade was copper, forged in Three Birds.
He was of both worlds. So must his people be, if they were to live as the gods ordained.
Agni’s own people had settled themselves among the women with a kind of cocky defiance. Patir was one of the last of them to appear. He would have taken a place close to Agni but somewhat away from the elders; but Agni caught his eye.
His brow rose. Agni nodded slightly. With a careful lack of expression but a spring in his step, he took the place of honor, the place given to the captain of the king’s warband, standing at his right hand and upholding the golden standard.
The lords and chieftains of the invading tribes advanced to stand before the king. They eyed the Mother and elders of Three Birds with little liking, and the elders and chieftains of Agni’s following with little greater pleasure. Those that were of their own people were the young, the reckless, the outcast; and now they sat in judgment over their own fathers, brothers, princes.
It should not have been so. If they had chosen another king, Agni might have been standing before them, waiting as they waited, compelled by custom and the laws of the
tribes to abide by their sentence.
He let them wait for it. He knew already what he would say, but he wanted to study their faces, to see who and what they were.
Some he knew, men of the White Horse and its brother tribes. Others came from farther away, north and south perhaps, even east. They had all come in search of wealth, gold and copper, fine weavings, willing women. And yes, war.
War they had had. The rest . . .
He spoke at last in the murmurous silence. “Men of the tribes,” he said. “Dreamers of riches. Slayers of women and children, destroyers of cities. You belong to me now. I am your king by right of conquest. Do you accept me?”
Silence.
Agni would not repeat what he had said. To do so would have been weakness. He sat as a king sits, gleaming in gold, with his wife of the Great Marriage beside him and his yearbrother on guard at his right hand.
He let them see that. He let them remember what he could do if they refused him.
It would be a brief fight. His own men were few, and theirs a multitude.
But custom held them. Law bound them. First one, then another came slowly forward, dropped stiffly to his knees, bowed on his face.
Not one refused. Not even those of the White Horse, though they came late and slow. When each man of the White Horse rose, he looked into Agni’s face, looked hard and long.
He bore their scrutiny. He had no shame of what he was or had done. Nor had he committed the crime for which his people had cast him out.
Maybe they saw that. Maybe they simply accepted the inevitable. He had defeated their king. He had won them and all that was theirs.
Before he was outcast, he had been their prince, their king who would be. He watched them remember. He watched them choose. To follow him. To take him as their king.
When they had risen and drawn back, a great tension drained out of him. It had been there, if he had known it, since he was driven from the tribe. He had made his own tribe and people, but these were his kin. That they accepted him—it mattered. It mattered very much indeed.
oOo
When Agni had received the last of their tribute, he rose. He spread his arms. He called them all—every one—to the festival. Victors and vanquished mingled; enemies that had been were transformed into allies. Even blood- feuds were laid aside.
In the morning the feuds would come back. Enemies would remember that they hated one another. But they would be one army, one great gathering of tribes. Then Agni must see that they were given places to camp, grazing for their herds, occupation for their men.
The Lady’s country was wide. It could sustain them. As for what they could do: all that they had burned and broken, they could mend, and whatever they had destroyed, they could build anew.
That would be the work of years. Then when war came again from the steppe, they would be ready. There would never again be such easy conquest as Agni had found, or as Yama had met in his turn.
All that would come when it came. For this day, they kept festival.
But Agni was not quite done with his judging. There was still a matter that he would not leave to the women.
oOo
Yama-diti had secluded herself with her daughters in a tent beside the king’s tent. It was small and rather tattered: such a tent as a poor relation would claim, or a discredited wife.
Agni did not succumb to the pathos of it. That Yama-diti was deeply bereaved, he did not doubt. But she was never either poor or powerless.
He had her summoned to him in the king’s tent, because a king did not go to a woman unless it was her bed he sought. He waited where his father the old king had been accustomed to receive his wives and daughters, in the common space, the high wide center of the tent. It was brighter and airier than he remembered, with the tentflap fastened back and banks of lamps lit—more lamps than they had ever had in the old time.
He was not in the least surprised to see Rudira enter with the woman and her daughters. In front of them Yama’s widow at least observed an appearance of circumspection.
When they had been brought in, Patir who had been his messenger, and Tillu who had attached himself to the company, both stood on guard at Agni’s back. Agni had not asked them to do that, but neither did he forbid. He did not particularly wish to be alone with these of all women.
At a gesture from Agni, the women sat. Yama-diti and her daughters were modestly attired in the manner of the tribes, but Rudira wore fabric of this country woven as thin and pale as mist. She kept her eyes lowered, her hands in her lap. He elected not to see how her nipples tightened under the gown, or how she arched ever so subtly so that he would be sure to notice.
The tentflap was lifted still. Taditi came to stand in it, half blocking the bright flood of light from without, but not so much that it failed to shine full on the unveiled faces of Yama-diti and her companions.
Rudira blinked and cowered, shielding her eyes. Agni did not recall that he had ever seen her in full daylight. Only in dim places, in shadows, or under stars or moon.
The sun did not destroy her as they said it would destroy a witch, but neither did she bask in it. Not as Yama-diti did, like an old serpent coiled at ease on a stone, fixing Agni with a flat glittering stare.
Agni could not speak the words that would have been proper to a woman whose son had died. Not when it had been Agni who killed him. Agni could muster no grief, no regret that he had done it. Brother in blood Yama had been, but in the spirit he had never been aught but an enemy.
This woman had borne him, raised him, taught him bitter and envious hatred of any who had what he had not. Agni they had hated above all, because though he was younger born, he was the firstborn son of Rama the king. Yama was eldest of the princes, but Agni was the heir, who would be king in his turn.
Yama had never been the enemy. Not truly. The mind that ruled him, the will that bent him, was here. Rudira wanted to be a king’s wife, would do anything at all to gain it. Yama-diti wanted to be a king’s mother: to hold power as a woman must among the tribes; to rule through the son of her body.
Agni had pardoned the men who fought against him. This one he could not pardon. She had not merely fought. She had conspired to destroy him.
When he spoke, he spoke to the point. “I can’t let you live,” he said.
Yama-diti neither stirred nor flinched. One of the daughters began to weep softly, the easy tears of a woman who hopes to melt a man’s heart.
But Agni’s was set in stone. “You may choose,” he said. “Poison in the cup, or the spears of my warband under the sky.”
“The spear is a man’s death,” Yama-diti said.
“You were a king’s wife. That honor is allowed you, to die like a man.”
“And if I choose neither?”
“I choose,” Agni said.
“Poison,” said Yama-diti without hesitation. “I do not wish to die like a man.”
Agni inclined his head.
“But,” said Yama-diti, “I ask a thing of you. My daughters had nothing to do with what was done to you. They are your sisters, the children of your father. Let them live.”
“Why?” Agni asked. “They’re your creatures. They have no minds or will apart from you.”
“Then give them to a man who can master them.” Yama-diti’s eyes glittered, stabbing the air in back of Agni’s shoulder. “Give them to him.”
Agni glanced back at Tillu. Yama-diti’s eyes, the force of her regard, shook him out of comfort and away from familiarity. For a moment he saw Tillu as a stranger would: the terrible scars in a face that had never been beautiful, even in youth and unmarred.
It was the face of a forest man overlaid with a faint cast of the tribes, strong as old stone. A blade had cloven it in a fight long ago, Tillu had told him. It had healed, but he would never lose the marks, the nose broken and split, the lip twisted in a perpetual snarl.
Agni blinked, and his sight cleared again. He saw the eyes above the scars, and the spirit in them. A good man, a m
an wise after his fashion, and loyal to the king whom he had chosen to follow.
Agni raised his brows. Tillu lowered his. “Your choice,” Agni said.
Tillu nodded. “They’re a king’s daughters,” he said, “and a king’s sisters. Their breeding is good. I’m less sure of their tempers—but my eldest wife is a strong woman. She’ll teach them manners.”
Agni watched the sisters. The one who had wept was sitting narrow-eyed, her tears forgotten. The other regarded Tillu in a kind of horror.
Idiots. If they reckoned it punishment to be given to a good and loyal man who would treat them far better than they deserved, then so be it. “Watch your back,” he said to Tillu, “and eat nothing that either of them serves you. And give their children to other women to raise.”
“I’ll tame them,” Tillu said, “never you fear. They’ll be eating from my hand.”
“Biting it, rather,” Agni muttered, but Tillu only laughed. He was not at all unhappy with this prize that he had been given. He might be a little less than pleased with their faces; they were sour creatures, with their mother’s strong chin and her hawk’s nose. But faces mattered little when a man was getting sons, and blood mattered much. In one stroke of an old woman’s mockery, Tillu had become kinsman to the king.
Yama-diti’s expression betrayed nothing. If she had hoped to be denied, to take her daughters into death with her, she had been disappointed. Yet Agni rather suspected that she had hoped for this. It would be like her to bind her daughters to a man so ugly that few women would go to him willingly, but whose heart was good and who would treat them well.
He would get sons on them, and daughters. She was dead by her own choice, but she would live on in her children’s children.
Taditi was waiting. Agni caught her eye. She came forward with the cup and set it in his hand. He caught the strong sweet scent of wine, and the other thing beneath it, both bitter and pungent.
Yama-diti’s eyes fixed on it. Had she expected him to wait, to send her away, to give her time to work more mischief? Or had it simply come home to her that this was the reckoning?
