by Judith Tarr
No one moved to stop her. The elders and the chiefs would drink tribute to the Old Woman, but after that they would forget her. She had served a goddess, but she had only been a woman after all. Men had little to do with the likes of her.
oOo
Sarama was rather too glad to leave the old men’s circle. It had always been the Old Woman’s part to enter it when rite or the Mare’s will ordained; doing that, walking where and as the Old Woman had walked, brought back the grief and some of the chill of winter, the black days of the Old Woman’s sickness and the blacker ones of her death and consecration to the goddess. Alone in the freezing cold, Sarama had performed the rite, all of it, every step and word and gesture, no matter how terrible, no matter how grim the task.
Clean white bones lay under the earth in the Mare’s Place, half a moon’s ride from the place of gathering; the Old Mare’s white tail fluttered from the summit of her hill. Other, far older bones lay beneath those that Sarama had laid there, bones on bones from time before time, mares’ bones and women’s bones laid one atop the other till together they had made a high and sacred hill.
“You are the last,” the Old Woman had said before she died. “You, and she”—tilting her age-ravaged chin toward the Young Mare. “Her blood continues in certain of the herds, but of her servants are none left, save only you. Once we were a tribe, a great throng of us. Then the tribes of men ran over us, outnumbered us, diminished us into veiled and feeble women. Your line we kept pure, as pure as it could be; but it dwindled and faded, and now there is but one. Be strong, my child. Be mindful. Remember.”
Sarama had promised to remember. She had made other promises, too, promises that she must keep or her soul would die.
But now, this moment, having done her duty by the old man her father, she was free to be a part of the tribe again. The Mare nipped lightly at her shoulder, bidding Sarama recall her presence. Might she not go now? The wind was calling her.
“The stallions, rather,” Sarama said. The Mare flattened her little lean ears and snapped with temper. Sarama laughed, which made her wheel and lash out with a wicked heel; but Sarama was too quick for her.
She went to torment the stallions in their tethered lines. Sarama lingered till her brother came loping up beside her, all long limbs and young male arrogance. He made her think of a stallion himself; but she was not minded just then to torment him.
He dropped an arm about her shoulders, easily, as if they had been parted only yesterday and not a year and more ago, and swept her toward the tents of the White Horse. “You’ll be hungry,” he said, “and thirsty—Aiiii! such a thirst as must be on you. We have a new thing that came from the sunrise countries, a drink that the gods must drink in the houses above the sky. Come, I’ll fill you a cup.”
Sarama had no desire to dizzy and fuddle herself with strong drink, but she let him have his way. With Agni, as with the fire he was named for, that was always a wise thing.
Their father’s tent was kingly broad, housing as it did all the wives that he had won in battle or in debts of honor, with their daughters and their youngest sons, and such of the grown sons as were either unmarried or unbound to one of the companies of young men. It surprised Sarama, somewhat, to find that Agni had not gone off to run with a pack.
He did not explain or excuse himself. All the brothers were gone, and many of the sisters, too, on this night of all the year; but the wives were there still. They could go nowhere, do nothing, till their husband gave them leave.
Sarama’s arrival sent them into a flurry. She had never understood them, never comprehended minds and spirits so utterly encompassed by the walls of a tent. That there were factions among them she knew; she had been subjected to no few of those in the times when she was sent to visit her father’s tent. But she was part of none of them. In time and with her silent persistence, they had learned to keep a respectful distance; to conceal either envy or rancor, and never to bid her choose sides in one of their wrangles.
They knew in their bellies what she had had to tell their husband in raw half-shaped words. The women always knew. Each met her eyes boldly or looked circumspectly away, as her character dictated. No one fell in worship at her feet. Such was not done in the tents among the women.
They brought her the new thing that Agni had spoken of, the thing called wine: dark and potent and richly sweet, almost too sweet, and headier by far than kumiss. Sarama was not sure what she thought of it. It was too strong, maybe. Too full of the spirit that reft men of their wits.
Agni drank as little as she did, she noticed, though he had made great vaunt of its excellence. Agni was not the toplofty young fool he too often liked to seem.
He caught her staring at him; stared back hard, eyes gleaming amber beneath ruddy brows, and laughed for gladness. “Ah, sister,” he said. “It’s good to have you here again.”
Sarama could not say that it was good to be in this place; not with such tidings as she had brought. Still she could say, and say truly, “I’m glad to rest eyes on you again, my brother. Even if I do have to crane my neck to do it.”
He grinned, inordinately proud of himself.
He might be as tall as the sky, but she knew a trick or two. She fell on him while he basked in his own grandeur, toppled him with gratifying ease, and sat on him till he cried for mercy. Which he did soon enough: and that was all as it used to be, as it well should be. Even he, in the end, was persuaded to admit to that.
2
Sarama woke with a sour taste in her mouth and a sour scent in her nostrils: the scent of too many people crowded too closely into too small a space. Instinct bade her leap up and flee; but awareness dawned, holding her still. She lay in the camp of the gathering, in her father’s tent, surrounded by her blood kin. No one pressed up against her, for a marvel; even if the grownfolk would not do it, the children always seemed to pile like puppies wherever a newcomer was. Maybe the goddess had protected her, for once. Or maybe they had chosen another instead.
She did not know why that should irk her as strongly as it did. She hated to be roused by the weight of a bare-bottomed infant bouncing on her breast, choking the breath out of her. She was glad to wake of her own accord, in a quiet place near the tent’s wall. Still she felt alone and oddly bereft, left to herself.
Two of her father’s wives were whispering nearby, giggling over ripe fruits of gossip. Sarama did not will to listen, but she could hardly avoid it, not with them so close. The names and scandals were much the same as always. This wife caught with that young bull, and ah! such a shocking thing, the husband had been so preoccupied with tupping his neighbor’s wife that he had never even known of the transgression. “Not but that her brothers would have killed her for it, such dishonor as it was,” the teller of the tale said, “but with him being caught and gelded by the husband he’d wronged in his own turn, and dying of it, they were all a little distracted.”
“I heard,” said her sister—and they were sisters; women of the Running Wolf brought from far away as gift and tribute to the lord of the White Horse: “I heard tell that after all that, she flung herself screaming on his body, and found his knife, and cut her own throat with it.”
They shook their heads and clicked their tongues. “Ah well,” said the first, “all the Dun Cow people are mad.”
“And White Horse people?” the other whispered, furtive but not furtive enough.
“Ah!” said her sister. “Well. But they are prettier than Dun Cow people. All that red hair. Did you see the prince last night? Wasn’t he lovely? That face. Those shoulders. Those yellow eyes. Now if I’d been married to him instead of . . .”
“Hush!” the other said, clapping a hand over her mouth. “Someone said to someone who said to me . . . but that’s a dreadful thing, if it’s true: that someone else thinks the same as you, but she does something about it.”
“I wish I dared,” her sister sighed. “It’s said he’ll be king when the old one goes to the knife.”
“It’s
also said,” said the other, “that Lord Yama will make sure that doesn’t happen—and the other princes are eyeing the king’s place, too. Remember when our king died? He wasn’t even particularly old, but he had brothers and cousins enough to get a good war going.”
“Prince Agni will win,” her sister said.
“Ah, to be so certain,” said the other with a touch of mockery. “Here, sister, did you hear what Dissa did with her hair? Can you believe it? By the Mare, washing it in henna to see what it would do!”
“She wanted to look like a White Horse woman,” her sister said, “and maybe get Prince Agni to come and visit her during the Bull Dance.”
“Then she should whiten her hair with lime and make herself all pale in the face,” the other said. Her sister widened eyes as if at a scandal, but then, as if shocked into it, she giggled.
Sarama would have loved to rise up and knock their heads together, but war in the women’s tent was hardly a fit beginning for her return to the White Horse people. She yawned instead and stretched, waking for the world to see. The sisters fell abruptly silent. Sarama smiled impartially round the tent, and went to make her morning toilet.
oOo
It was a fine morning, the sun still below the horizon but the sky full of light. A scud of clouds ran away westward before a fair wind, with a flock of birds in close pursuit. Geese, she thought, flying on some errand of the gods.
The camp woke around her. Veiled women tended cookfires. Their little children played at their feet, and older children ran in packs like the camp dogs. She could hear the lowing and snorting of cattle in the herds beyond the tents, the cry of a stallion, the shrill angry squeal of a mare. Scents of dung and spilled kumiss, grass and horses and humanity, roasting meat and baking bread, wrapped her about in warm familiarity. Home was the steppe, the Mare’s back, the Hill of the Goddess under the sky, but this was a place she knew, and knew well.
She paused at the privy-pit and passed on down to the river, with a mind to bathe though the air was cool and the water would still be snow-cold. Horse Goddess enjoined cleanliness on her servants, whatever its cost. Sarama had grown accustomed to the shock of icy water on warm skin, till she could not wake fully without it, nor confront the day unwashed and unblessed.
No one else was so bold or so bound by duty to the goddess, although women came down to draw water, and once a gangling boy who saw her bathing there, went stark white, and bolted as if from a demon.
She laughed at that. Women in the tribes were never seen naked, not even, if they were proper, by their husbands. Out on the steppe, in the company of the Old Woman and the Mares, one had no need of such foolishness. Did a mare go clothed, after all, while she grazed on the hillside?
Poor women, thought Sarama as she rubbed herself dry, eyed her too-well-worn clothes and marked them for washing, and hoped that someone in her father’s tent would have garments to lend her while they dried. For the moment she put them back on. They were men’s clothes, or near enough; practical if one lived as she lived, on the back of the Mare. She had never worn the skirts and shawls that so trammeled a woman.
It was not likely she would find what she needed among her father’s wives and daughters. Agni however, Agni her womb-brother, would have clothes that she could borrow: gods knew he must have outgrown no few of them since she saw him last.
He was still asleep, the lazy great oaf, but he woke quickly enough once she wrung water from the river onto his face. He woke fighting, too, but she had expected that. She danced back laughing, undismayed by the terror of his glare. “Wake up, brother!” she said brightly. “Greet the sun. It’s a fair morning, and I need a new shirt and a tunic, and trousers, too. Do you still have the red tunic I liked so much?”
He growled, but he answered her almost civilly. “I still have it. I thought you’d want it. It’s over there.” He tipped his chin toward the bag of dun horsehide that had housed his belongings for as long as Sarama could remember.
With his leave freely if not joyously given, Sarama dived into the bag. The red tunic was there, a wonderful thing, made as it was of cloth woven in the sunrise countries and brought far out into the steppe to clothe a prince. She found leather trousers, too, that fit not badly, and boots, and a belt with a clasp of bone carved in the shape of a running horse. She put them all on, wrapped her old clothes into a bundle and thrust it into his hands while he stood swaying, still half asleep. “See that these are cleaned,” she said.
That woke him to indignation. “Am I your servant?”
“I am the goddess’ servant,” she said, “and all men are mine. Go on, see who’ll do the cleaning. Then we’ll find someone to feed us breakfast.”
He growled again. She grinned. He stalked off to do her bidding, as she had known he would.
oOo
They made the sacrifice of the Stallion as the sun touched its zenith, all gathered on the plain beyond the camp. Herdsmen kept the lesser horses and the cattle and the goats well away. The women and girls kept to the tents, for it was an ill thing to see a woman’s face in the rite of the Stallion.
Unless that woman was Sarama. She was the Mare’s child: not a man, no, never, but not a woman either, not as other women were. It was not given her to speak or perform in that rite, but neither was she forbidden the sight of it. Her place was just outside of it, on a sudden rise of ground, sitting the Mare without bridle or saddle. The two of them were preternaturally still.
Agni could see them from where he stood, again and by his father’s will in a place of honor. He had begun to wonder if the old man might not be playing a game, taunting the sons of other mothers with this one who had no womb-brothers, only the sister who belonged to the Mare.
Their mother had been a strange one by all accounts, born to the tribe and yet outside of it, suckled it was said by the Mare herself. She had died bearing her children, as a mare might die in bearing twins.
He had never known her. Other wives had suckled the two of them, passing them from hand to hand till the Old Woman came and took his sister away.
He had not understood then why she must go and he must stay. He had been furiously angry. He had screamed, he remembered. Screamed till he had no voice left. But the goddess had never cared for mere male rage.
Odd, he thought now, and yet wonderful, that they had grown up as close as they had, though parted so often and for so long. The womb was a potent place. Sarama said she could remember it: dark and warm and close. He was less blessed, or perhaps less cursed. His first memory was of her being taken away, and of his fury—not that she was going, but that he could not go with her.
She sat on her hilltop, mounted on the moon-dappled Mare, high and remote. He down below, hemmed in by the men of the tribes, wondered if she was happy; if she knew what it was to be part of the people.
He would ask her later. Not now. Now was the chanting of the priests in their tall horsehead masks, the beating of the drums like the thunder of hooves on the earth, the dip and sway of the dance. He as an initiate, new come into man’s place, might wear the horsehide tunic but not the mask—not yet. Not till he passed the test of the hunt, caught a stallion wild on the steppe, tamed him and conquered him and brought him home to be his mount.
He shivered a little, thinking of that. After the gathering, when the tribes had gone on the summer wanderings, each apart from the other on the broad breast of the world, he would go out. This was his consecration, this sacrifice.
The tunic was heavy on him, heated by the sun, chafing the bare body beneath. His palm was slippery on the haft of the knife that he must carry, the black stone dagger honed and polished till it gleamed, its edge so keen that it could draw blood from air.
He was terrified; exhilarated. Excitement raised his shaft as it had risen for Rudira, hard and aching, yearning toward a woman.
And there was none here, none but Sarama.
He sighed faintly. Tonight, yes. Rudira would be waiting for him. Maybe even she would come to him, impossibl
e boldness, but utterly like her. His breath came a little quicker, thinking of it.
The priests’ chant wound on, now deep as the drums, now shrill as a stallion’s call. Their dance had drawn in close to the altar, the sacred stone that the gods had laid down, high as a man’s waist, level as if smoothed by a monstrous hand. They linked hands in a circle and stamped, beating the earth, now with this foot, now that. The drum pounded with them.
Down the way that the men had left open, treading the trampled grass, the Stallion came in his glory. A priest led him, a man without a face, masked and clothed in undyed horsehide. The eyes behind the mask were hidden in shadow, as if he had none at all; as if the mask and the garments were empty, and inside them naught but air. Nameless, faceless, silent, he led the Stallion toward the circle.
It was a red Stallion always, unblemished, unscarred, with no mark of white upon him. Agni’s father, as chief of the priests, had chosen and blessed him, and whispered in his ear the secret name, the name that he would bear before the gods.
Sometimes the beast did not go willingly to his sacrifice. Then, Agni knew, the priests fed him herbs to calm him. It was not a thing anyone talked of, but everyone knew it was done, and knew the look, too, the slight stumble in the gait, the slight clouding of the eyes.
This one had been fed no herb. He walked calmly, head up, alert, looking about him with interest but no fear. The scent of blood was sunk deep in earth and altar. His nostrils flared; he snorted, but did not shy away.
He was bold, this one, and beautiful, as red almost as the tunic that Sarama wore on her hilltop—Agni’s tunic that had been, that she had made hers. The gods would love him; he would speak well for the tribes, and his strong back would bear the weight of their prosperity in the year that would come.
No wise man spoke as the Stallion approached the altar, yet Agni heard the hiss of a whisper behind him. “That’s a fine one, that is. The Old Man chose well.”