White Mare's Daughter

by Judith Tarr

  “It is a strong herd,” Gauan said. And was off again like a colt with the bit in his teeth.

  She barely listened. The sun hung low. Of the Mare and the packhorse she saw and heard no sign. She could not escape yet; for all his endless blather, he never took his eyes from her.

  It was full dark before the deer was roasted, the bread made, the mead brought out in its leather-wrapped jars. Sarama might have thought to ask what kind of hunters carried mead enough for a feast. The same kind of hunters, she thought, who dressed as if they were riding to a festival. Somewhere amid Gauan’s babble she gathered that they were doing just that: riding to his wedding in fact. But he had ridden more swiftly than he meant, and must not, by the rite, show his face in the woman’s tribe before the new moon, which was a hand of days hence.

  “And so,” he said, “we hunt the runs just past theirs, and wait to make our entrance.”

  Tonight they dined on venison and antelope and honey mead, on bread and herbs and pungent cheese. It would have been a pleasant feast if Sarama had not felt like a rabbit among wolves.

  No, she told herself sternly. A she-wolf in the pack of the young males. She was not safe, no, but neither was she defenseless. She was armed with teeth and claws, and with the power of the goddess.

  She drank little of the mead: a sip only. She ate lightly, as one should before battle. The others knew no such restraint. They gorged happily, stuffing in the meat till the grease ran down their sparse young beards, and drank in great gulps, vying with one another to see who could down the most the fastest.

  Gauan could hardly do otherwise than be the best of them. It was a prince’s duty, one that he could not shirk. And yet, as a prince should be, he was no soft-headed man. He could eat hugely, drink hugely, and keep a steady eye on Sarama.

  The inevitable, when it came, was surprising in its gentleness. He reached in the firelight to trace the line of her cheek. “You are beautiful,” he said.

  She set her teeth and did not twitch away from him. The bow was out of its case, eased there by excruciating degrees. Four arrows lay beside it. The bow was unstrung; but she could string it at the run.

  A run she could not make. Not yet. Her other hand, her free hand, rested near the hilt of her longer knife, the one that was almost a sword.

  He swayed closer. She held her breath against the smell of him: mead, meat, leather and wool and unwashed male. He was vastly sure of himself. Softly, sweetly, he said, “I do not believe that there is a brother out there waiting to come to your rescue. If he exists at all, he’s gone alone to find his stallion—or to capture himself a tribe. He’d not be glad of a sister’s presence, not unless he hoped to trade her for power in the tribe.”

  Sarama smiled with sweetness to match his. “You don’t know my brother,” she said.

  “I know men,” said Gauan. “Come, beautiful lady. I’ll protect you. No harm will come to you while you live in my tent.”

  “Your wife might beg to differ,” Sarama said.

  He regarded her in honest amazement. “How can she do that? She is my wife.”

  Sarama shook her head. “I have never lived in a man’s tent. I never intend to.”

  “You are a woman,” Gauan said, as if that ended all discussion.

  “I am Horse Goddess’ servant,” said Sarama.

  He laughed as if at a glorious jest. “Are you now? And I serve Skyfather and Earth Mother and the Storm Gods and the Ones below. Can your one goddess stand against all of those?”

  “She can indeed,” said Sarama, “if she is the goddess in her own self, and not merely names in a braggart’s vaunt.”

  He sucked in breath, and temper with it. She rose above him. Her bow was in her hand: strung in a blur of motion, arrow nocked, aimed at his heart. She loosed a clear call. A second call came back: the full-throated neigh of a mare who finds that one of the herd is lost.

  The Mare came out of the night into the red glow of the firelight. In that light her grey coat was gleaming white, her eyes blood-red. Her hooves battered men too drunk or too slow to spring out of her path. She leaped the lesser fire, on which the bones of the antelope lay like an offering, scattering bones and embers, and thundered to a halt before Sarama.

  Sarama did not lower the bow nor shift her glare from Gauan’s face. “I am the goddess’ servant,” she said.

  Gauan was a fool, but not a blind one. He fell down before her—and all of his people who could, did as he did. “Lady,” he said. “Lady. I never—I didn’t—”

  She almost took pity on him. “I do in truth have a brother,” she said, “and he is in truth on quest for his stallion. Maybe he will find the herd you speak of. Maybe he’ll find another. As for me, I ride at my Lady’s bidding. She would not take it amiss if you were to ride with me to the edges of this country. But offer no insolence, and take no liberty. Surely you have seen how a stallion pays when he mounts a mare who has no desire for him.”

  Gauan blanched. The first gelding, it was said, had been made by a mare.

  Sarama smiled. “I see you understand. And now I shall sleep, and in the morning I shall ride, and you and your men will ride with me. And when I have passed out of this country, you will go to claim your wife, and dance at your wedding.”

  “Lady,” he said, bowing to her will. Or at least, to the power of the Mare, who had raised her head to snap teeth in his face.

  16

  Gauan was not an ill companion, for a man. His stream of chatter had well recovered by morning, and he seemed to have bowed to necessity. Not he nor any of his people had offered the slightest insolence to Sarama in the night, or cast a glance astray since.

  In their company she had no fear of meeting strangers. They were a large and strong riding, and they knew all the best ways of their own country, the springs and streams that her craft might have missed, the hunting-runs and the paths of the herds. They made her think not a little of her brother and his friends.

  But like her brother, Gauan could not follow her past his tribe’s borders. He had a wedding to ride to, a wife to take.

  “Be kind to her,” Sarama said the night before they came to the edge of his people’s country. “Listen to her when she speaks to you. She has a mind, too, and intelligence, though it’s been stunted in the walls of her father’s tent.”

  “But,” said Gauan, whose awe of her had grown rather than diminished in the days of their riding together—and goddess knew why that was, but there was no denying it. “Lady, she’s a woman. Everyone knows women are weak of wit as of strength, and sore in need of men’s protection.”

  “So too would you be weak,” she shot back, “if you were never let out of a tent nor allowed to ride or even walk.”

  “But women are weaker,” he said, “and smaller. Lady, are you as tall as I, or as broad?”

  “That is so,” Sarama said willingly enough, “but I’m no weaker than a man of my size. I can ride and shoot, and I hunt not badly. You will be amazed, I think, to find that your wife has wits and will of her own.”

  Gauan frowned. At least he was willing to listen; that was more than most men would have done. Sarama sighed a little and let be.

  oOo

  There was little more they could have said in any case. Gauan’s companions had conspired in a grand farewell, with the last of the mead, and dancing and singing and telling of tales. Some had music with them, pipe or drum, and one fine singer brought forth a tortoiseshell strung with horsehair that, plucked, sounded sweet and faintly sad.

  They danced and sang for her as if she had been a king. It was in Horse Goddess’ honor, of course. Sarama alone would have been raped or captured and carried off to Gauan’s tent. Nonetheless it was a fine thing, and some of the singing was very good indeed. The dances were men’s dances, with much stamping and shouting, exuberant as young stallions and quite as much inclined to fall into mock war.

  For honor’s sake Sarama must respond in kind. She waited till the dancers had dropped exhausted, and the sin
gers paused to cool their throats with mead. The player on the tortoiseshell continued, and one or two of those with pipes. They wove a wandering melody.

  Sarama rose from the place of honor beside their chieftain. One of the young men had laid his drum near her foot. She took it up. It was one of the small drums, easy to carry on a horse, skin stretched taut over a frame of supple wood. Its sound was rich for a drum so small. Sarama beat on it lightly with her fingers, striking a pulsebeat.

  With that she drew all eyes to her, and silenced the ripple of chatter round the fire’s circle. Still beating the drum, swaying slightly in time with the rhythm, she made her way to the cleared space. The grass was well beaten down by the dancers who had come before. She tested it with gliding steps, found it good.

  The musicians had found the beat and made themselves part of it. She flashed a smile at them. Perhaps they smiled back. She could not see. She was in light, the rest in darkness, a ring of shadows, a flicker of eyes.

  She danced slowly at first, little more than a step, a turn, a sway, over and over, round and round. The earth was firm and yet yielding underfoot. The stars arched overhead. She could feel the horses beyond the reach of the fire’s light, some on guard, some grazing, some sleeping within the ring of their herdmates.

  The fire cracked suddenly and shot sparks up to heaven. She leaped with it, and the music with her, swift as a startled mare. Like a mare she wheeled, stamped, veered.

  The music quickened. She matched it, swifter, swifter, till the long plait of hair whipped out behind her, and the stars spun, and the wind wailed in her ears.

  She danced the Mare. That first slow meander had been the horse at rest, grazing on the breast of Earth Mother. Then the leap into flight, the mad gallop, the startlement turned to delight in her own swiftness. And then, as the music bore her onward, little by little she eased her pace, to canter, to trot, to walk again, to slow meander in search of the sweet grass.

  The music softened and faded till it had sunk away beneath the wind’s whisper. There was a moment’s silence.

  Shouts shattered it, whoops and roars and the drumming of fists and feet. Sarama dropped down beside Gauan. The young men cheered her on for a while, for the sheer pleasure of making the stars ring.

  oOo

  Sarama rode westward again with a glad heart and a memory of the young men of Gauan’s following, the whole rank of them, standing at the edge of their camp and singing her on her way. Their song followed her long after they had sunk below the curve of the horizon, borne on a wind out of the morning.

  The wind carried her far before evening. As she rode she began to see a shadow in the west, like a low lie of cloud. At first she thought little of it. But it remained, motionless, while the sky shifted and changed, sun to swift scud of clouds to brief and startling spat of rain, and thence to sun again.

  By evening she knew what she had seen, and would see until she came to the edge of it: the wood that walled the world. With each day’s riding it loomed larger and seemed darker. Night never left there; the sun never touched it. She began to understand the fear that had held back the tribes of the west, that made the wood a wall more forbidding than mountain or river.

  In this season the tribes should be well scattered, seeking each its own lands. And yet as she rode she saw remnants of camps close together, signs of tribes moving as they did in the spring, as if to a gathering. It was not a war: in war, the women would not go, nor the herds. Something brought them together out of season.

  Their path lay westward as did hers. Caution bade her move carefully, and let none see her riding alone on the steppe. She could travel more quickly for that; could pass ahead of the clans with their herds, their laden beasts and women, their need to travel from water to water for the herds’ sake.

  She began to wonder—to fear—that they had determined, all of them, to venture the wood; to cross into that country to which Horse Goddess called her. If the goddess had willed such a thing, she spoke no word of it to Sarama. She was not mute—Sarama heard her voice in the wind, her blessing on the land; heard her song in the Mare’s footfalls, and her will in the rustle of the grass. But of these tribes moving westward, she said nothing at all.

  Perhaps, thought Sarama, it was Skyfather’s doing. She knew little of him. He was a younger god, a men’s god. Her people—her mother’s people—had naught to do with him, or he with them.

  She should go on, and take no notice of these tribes. They were none of hers, nor had the goddess bidden her trouble herself with them. But they held to much the same road, and their gathering would lie across her path. If they were preparing to brave the wood, their purpose well might run afoul of hers.

  She would not be caught as she had been by Gauan’s people. She rode as a hunter on the track of watchful prey. She pitched camp in carefully hidden places. She concealed her tracks as she might, passing like a wind through the grass.

  oOo

  The clans and the tribes came together perhaps a day’s ride from the wood, where they must gather in the spring: a wide well-watered place marked by a circle of stunted trees like an outrider of the wood that, now, filled the horizon. It was a holy place. Its earth had drunk deep of the blood of sacrifice.

  Sarama walked there boldly, concealing herself in plain sight. People saw what they expected to see. A broad-striding figure in trousers, bow and quiver at back, knife at side, could be no woman.

  Their dialect was odd, with words in it that she had not heard before, and cadences that made even the words she knew seem strange. And yet, listening on the edges of camps, just past the circles of men or boys, even, from a tree’s shadow, within the grove where the elders met, she understood enough.

  They spoke of the west. Of tribes pressing on them from east and south. Of clans growing, herds waxing, lands diminishing. “North,” said one of the elders in the circle of trees. “Why not north?”

  “North is Skyfather’s country,” the king said. He was a man of middle years, soft and thick about the belly, but the hands that gripped the haft of a spear were long-fingered and strong. The spear was his mark of office: its haft was painted red, its head of bone bound to the haft with an intricate weaving of cords. A black horsetail hung from it.

  A small wind played in the circle, stirring the hairs of the horsetail. “North promises us nothing,” said the king.

  “West promises less,” the elder said. “North are the tribes of the north wind, and the home of the winter snows. West is—that.”

  He lifted his hand and flicked a gesture that Sarama had not known before, but its import was plain. He averted evil from himself and his people.

  The king sat still, though other hands flicked round the circle. His own were motionless on the spearhaft. “What fools are we, that we remember old fears and forget what every trader and youth on walkabout knows? West is rich country, tents that never move, people born to serve the lords of creation, and no horses. They make wine. They make the pots for which we pay so dearly in furs and hides and cattle. And they make copper, which is the greatest wonder of them all. All ripe for us to take, waiting for our coming.”

  Just so had people spoken in the gathering of the White Horse, far away in the east of the world. But these tribes were closest. These tribes could, if they mustered their courage, pierce the wood like a sword, and take the soft country beyond.

  Their king clearly had thought long on this, and prepared himself against the elders’ fears. “The wood is full of demons—granted. Death walks there on its bony feet. Madness flits among the trees. But”—and that one word was like crack of thunder, snapping them all erect, even Sarama—“have we not Skyfather? Have we not our courage, and our horses? Are we not men? Men fear nothing while they work Skyfather’s will.”

  “If it is his will,” said the elder who seemed to speak for the rest. “What say the priests? Have they read the omens?”

  The king’s eyes flickered, perhaps. “The priests are as blind with fear as any of the rest
of you. Skyfather has opened my eyes. I can see—and what I see is splendor.”

  “So is the gods’ country splendid,” said the elder, “but before a man may go there, that man must die. The wood is death, my king. Would you kill us all?”

  “When,” the king demanded, “has any one of us died in the wood? The traders never have, nor any of the young men who dared to wander.”

  “They were few, or alone,” the elder said doggedly. “They were no temptation to demons. Our whole tribe and nation, leaving the lands that we have held since the dawn time—us they will not only see but lust after.”

  “They lived,” said the king, as dogged as he, and as unwearied in repetition. “So shall we.”

  Sarama could see that he was determined to have his way, but she could see with equal clarity that his elders would not hear him. A king was king, but without the elders his power was a shadow.

  Among the lesser tribesmen it was much the same. A few of the younger hotheads were ready to take horse and charge into the wood. Most of the men were as the elders were, set in fear and unswayed by accusations of cowardice. It was not cowardice, as Sarama heard one say, to refuse a certain death for no useful cause.

  She should have been comforted. The king had called this gathering to rouse his people to an advance on the west. But his people were not to be roused. It was a rich year. Their flocks and herds had pasture enough, though not as wide as in the days that their fathers remembered. They were glad of a gathering out of season, pleased to visit with kin and distant friends. They were not of a mind to venture a place of ancient horror, even for the hope of riches.

  Nonetheless their king had heard Skyfather’s will. On that he was adamant. Let the winter be harsh, the summer lean and poor of grass and hunting, and these tribes would forget their resistance; would turn toward the king’s will.

  Perhaps after all Horse Goddess had sent Sarama here and set this gathering in her path as both lesson and warning. If the tribes did not brave the west in this season, they would do it before too many seasons had passed. It was as inevitable as the breaking of a riverbank in a flood.