by Judith Tarr
He greeted her with the flicker of a smile, and tilted his head toward the table, where her breakfast lay safe under a cloth.
She realized that she was ravenous. She had eaten nothing since yesterday morning, nor noticed the lack.
When the edge was off her hunger, she looked up to find him standing over her. “Now tell me what hunting has to do with fighting,” he said.
He was not going to be merciful. That was a good thing. A warrior needed to be relentless.
She lacked the words to say that. Instead she said, “Hunting and fighting are much the same. But in war, you kill men. And even weep for them, if your heart is soft.”
“So you think me soft,” he said. He seemed more amused than not.
She shrugged. “You need to be hard.”
“That will come when it must,” he said, “but I’ll do my best to fight it.”
“See? You can fight.”
He snorted. She thought he might be annoyed. Or perhaps not. He could laugh, even when the laughter was at himself.
It struck her that she rather liked him. He was a bright spirit, and strong. He carried himself like a prince, light and proud—except when he was bowing his head to a woman. The tribes would never understand that, or him.
Somewhere amid this was a way to do what the Lady willed of her. A way to make these people strong as the tribes would perceive it.
She spoke rather abruptly, but she knew no other way. “What do you do when a—an animal attacks you? Do you fight?”
“We defend ourselves,” he said. “But we never attack each other.”
“Still,” said Sarama. “If men attack, you can defend. Yes?”
He frowned. “You should know what Catin thinks. She thinks that you haven’t come to protect us. You’ve opened the way. You’ll bring the war that you say you come to prevent.”
Sarama stared at him. She did not want to understand him.
“She says,” said Danu, “that you came to lead your people against us. That your men’s gods have overwhelmed the Lady, and therefore you, and sent you ahead in order to weaken us with fear.”
“Catin thinks like a man of my people,” Sarama said. “Where did she learn to think like that? She has never known war.”
“She’s afraid,” Danu said. “Her fear speaks for her. That’s what war is, isn’t it? War is fear first of all.”
“War is fear,” said Sarama, nodding. “She is afraid. That is good. But I bring no war. War is coming without me.”
“She says it follows you,” said Danu.
“I do not lead it,” she said. “The Lady leads me. The gods—the gods are angry. They talk to Catin. Fear opens the spirit to them. She listens.”
Danu’s brows had gone up. “Men’s gods talk to a woman?”
“The Lady talks to you,” Sarama said.
“So,” he said. He went back to his hide-scraping, but not to shut her out. It seemed to help him think. “You know what this could mean.”
“People kill for fear,” said Sarama. “If she makes people afraid of me—maybe they learn to kill.”
“My people don’t—” He broke off. “She’d say the same of you.”
“I am not what she says,” Sarama insisted. “I come to help, not to hurt. Listen to the Lady! She told you. Do you forget?”
“I remember,” Danu said. He sighed heavily. “The Mother will remember. But Catin is the Mother’s heir. How can she be deceived? People will say, maybe you think you came to help, but the gods are using you.”
“The gods are using Catin.”
“I don’t know these gods,” Danu said. “I barely know you. The others don’t know you at all.”
“You must tell them,” Sarama said.
He straightened, arching his back as if it pained him. “I’m a stranger here, almost as much as you. I come from another city. They’ll not listen to me.”
“They listen,” Sarama said. “You hear the Lady.”
He shook his head. “They won’t want to listen.”
Sarama could not contest that. She had seen how he was when she told him of war. If Catin had turned against her, then the people would follow. People followed those set over them. It was the way of the world.
She mustered all the words she could, though her head was aching with the effort. “You must tell Catin,” she said. “Wake her up. Win her away from the voices she hears. They lie to her. She must not listen.”
“What makes you think I can do any such thing?”
She touched his arm. She never had before, not of her own will. His warmth startled her; his solidity, strong as the earth under her hand. “You and she—” she said. It was too difficult. She did not have the words. “When a man and a woman are—like that—a man will listen to a woman. Sometimes. She might listen to you.”
He looked from her hand to her face. “She says,” he said, “that I would turn from her in a moment, if you but lifted your hand. I told her that she was jealous. She sent me away for that.”
“When was this?” she demanded.
“This morning,” he said. “She came while you slept. You were sleeping deep.”
“Then she did not send you away.”
He hissed; then snorted in the way he had, that made her think of the colt. “She went away. But she told me not to come seeking her.”
“Ah,” said Sarama. “We would say, she put you away. When a man grows tired of a woman, or she has no sons for him—he puts her away.”
“No,” he said. “No, it wasn’t—she was angry, that was all. She’ll come back when her temper cools. But I am not to go looking for her.”
“Ah,” said Sarama. She did not think he liked the tone of that. He bent to the hide again and attacked it fiercely.
She had been sorry when he slipped from beneath her hand. She did not try to touch him again. He was not happy to have been put aside—even if that was not exactly what it was.
She wondered anew what there was between those two. As far as she understood, a woman chose a man here. “Why did Catin take you?” she asked him.
He froze. For a moment she thought that he would get up and stalk out, which she would have done if he had been as impertinent as that.
He was too polite in the way of his people. He answered without looking at her, which was also courtesy, but might have held a hint of defiance. “I was the Mother’s son of Three Birds. I dreamed the same dreams that tormented her. And maybe she thought that I was good to look at.”
That last would have been cause enough for a man of the tribes. Sarama tried to imagine seeing a man so, as a man would see a woman. It was not difficult. Only strange.
“If you were a woman,” Sarama asked him, “would you choose her?”
“I am not a woman,” Danu said.
“If you were,” she persisted, “would you?”
His eyes flashed up. “Why do you ask? What is it to you?”
She flushed—and that, she had not expected at all. “I want to understand.”
“Understand this,” he said with great care. “You are the Lady’s child, and a woman, and she speaks to you. She has made you her voice in her country. This I believe. But what I am to Catin, or what she is to me—that is between the two of us and the Lady. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she said. “You wouldn’t, would you? You’d rather be in—Three Birches?”
“Three Birds.” She heard the sound of gritted teeth in that. “The Lady sent me here.”
“Not Catin,” said Sarama.
If he had been a man of war, he would have struck her long since. Because he was what he was, he stripped the hide with blinding swiftness and left it shining clean. She thought he might take it to the tanner then, but he chose to wait. Consciously chose.
A thought had been growing for a while. It was preposterous. Of course she would never utter it. Unless he provoked her.
Which he did, by insisting that today of all days he must scour the house inside and out, air the bedding,
scrub down the floor, clear away the evidence of the stag’s butchery. Not that Sarama had any objection to hard work and plenty of it, but he seemed to be flinging it in her face.
oOo
As they put the bed back together, with his strength and her balancing hand, she asked him, “What would you do if I chose you?”
He barely hesitated. The bedding settled onto the frame. He smoothed it with his big deft hands. “Would you do that?” he asked in return.
Of course not, she had meant to say. But her tongue ran on ahead of her. “I might,” she said. “But it would have to be your will, too.”
“What does my will matter?”
“Much,” she said.
“You don’t even like me.”
“No,” she said.
He faced her across the broad expanse of the bed. She had not thought till then what she had done in choosing this moment to speak.
“Then why choose me?” he demanded.
“Because you hunt well,” she said.
He snorted. “That’s a poor enough cause to choose a man.”
“Why? We’ll always eat well, and be warm, and have needles to sew with and hides to trade and—”
“You’re laughing at me,” he said.
She was, but not as he meant. It was a dizzy laughter, as if she stood on the edge of a steep riverbank and contemplated the leap into the water below. “I never chose a man before,” she said.
“Did a man choose you?” He said it as if he did not quite believe such a thing could be; but she had said it, therefore he indulged her fancy.
She shook her head. “I was not—I belong to the Mare. They were afraid.”
“Should I be?”
She blinked, frowned. “Only if you force me.”
“Force?” She saw the incomprehension, but before she could enlighten it, he understood. “To—make war on you? You alone?”
His horror was sweet to see. Nor was it feigned. “Yes, that is war, too. It can happen in war. Or a man can take a woman when she does not want it.”
“And the Lady does not destroy him?”
“The gods help him. The gods love such things.”
“Your—the men’s gods are terrible creatures,” Danu said after a pause. “I think we would call them demons.”
“I do not love them,” Sarama said.
Her head was throbbing. She had not been using so many words, but she had used nearly every one she knew, over and over, to say things that would have been hard in her own familiar tongue. She reached across the bed and seized his hands, both of them. He did not resist. “Show me why Catin is jealous,” she said.
He could refuse. She knew that. Perhaps he considered it. But if he did, it was only briefly. His fingers tightened. He drew her to him lightly, easily, as if she had weighed no more than one of the blankets.
So, she thought. The man could take, when the time came; if he was given leave. Even here. And the woman could refuse to be taken.
She did not want to refuse. At all. And how she had come to this, from barely tolerating his presence, she could not at the moment understand.
He had somehow disposed of his garments while she knelt on the bed with her mind a-wandering. She had seen men before. How not? But not a man so close, with his dark eyes on her, and the lower part of him stallion-rampant, but never so very rampant as a stallion.
He would never forgive her if she laughed. She bit her lip. He was waiting for something. For her.
She knew a moment of piercing shyness, and ice-cold fear. If she turned and ran now, he would never mock her. Not he.
Which was, in the simplest of senses, why she was here, in this predicament, and determined after all to continue.
She scrambled out of her clothes and knelt shivering, bare and pebble-skinned like a plucked bird. No sleek brown-skinned beauty she, and no warmth of curly black hair, either.
Yet he did not seem repulsed. He wrapped arms about her, enfolding her, shutting out the cold. His scent was pleasant, more musky than pungent, overlaid with something sweet: herbs and a suggestion of honey.
She was keenly, almost painfully aware of his body against hers. And, with more than pain, of the thing that pressed hard and hot between her belly and his.
Any man she knew would have thrust it into her and had done. He simply held her, master even, it seemed, of that.
She did not know what to do. Her arms were more comfortable linked behind him, her hands stroking the smoothness of his back. There was a whorl of down in the hollow of it, soft as a foal’s muzzle.
Her head fit tidily on his shoulder. They were precisely of a height. He was broader, much; of course. Had she been thinking of this, of standing like this, from the moment she saw him?
She had thought then that he would force her; had been astonished when he did not. She was still astonished. Such strength—such discipline.
His breath came a little quick, she thought. And he was very hard. He must be in discomfort. But he made no move to take her.
Her hands explored what they could reach: shoulders, back, buttocks. He liked it when she ran her nails lightly down his back. She ran them back up again, and found the pin that knotted his hair at his nape. She tugged it free.
His hair tumbled down, all the curling richness of it, softer than it had looked, and wonderfully thick. She wound her fingers in it.
He sighed. She stroked her cheek along his shoulder. Then, because it seemed worthy of the trial, she traced its line with kisses, tasting it, salt and warm flesh and that suggestion of honey.
No man that she had ever heard of would let a woman explore him so, and make no move to hasten the ending. And yet, as with the rest of him, it was not weakness. It was great strength.
He was hers to do with as she pleased. She lifted her head from his shoulder, tilted it back to meet his gaze. No mute endurance there. He did this willingly. Gladly? She rather thought so.
He was younger than she had thought. No older than she. His bulk and the richness of his beard, and the way he carried himself, had deceived her. The face so close to hers was little more than a boy’s, still with a suggestion of the child that he must have been.
Beautiful child, full-lipped and soft-cheeked, as lovely as a girl. Had he been glad to grow into a man, to lose that prettiness? Or had he been sorry for it?
Later, maybe, she would ask. He was beautiful now, as a man is, and as a bull, and as a strong young stallion. She had learned to see that beauty, day after day in this city of broad-built brown people.
“O beautiful,” she murmured in her own tongue. “O splendid.” She swooped with great bravery, set a kiss on his lips. They opened for her. He tasted of honey and fire.
She burned herself, a white heat that burned without consuming. Her breasts were exquisitely tender, pressed against his broad black-furred chest. But the heart of it throbbed between her thighs. She had never—she had not imagined—
She gasped, half in impatience, half in protest; slid up the rock-solidity of his body; found the tip of his shaft—his gasp echoed hers—gritted her teeth and impaled herself on it.
It hurt. Oh, dear Lady, it hurt. She was too small. He was too—
But there was pleasure on the edge of pain. A whisper of something else that should be, if she passed this gate, if she endured this rite. It was no worse than fasting on the steppe, than suffering the numbing bite of cold, than riding till her tender parts were raw, all in the goddess’ name.
He rocked gently against her, a rhythm she knew. She had danced it. The sensation of him inside her, sliding against her, was unutterably strange.
He was holding her up. She locked legs about his middle, sighing a little, for it made the pain a little less, the pleasure a little more.
He betrayed no sign of distress. His face was intent, abstracted, but he smiled and set a kiss on her lips.
For him, it seemed, this was indeed a dance. An art. A thing that he did as he hunted the red deer, or as he set his house in ord
er: for the joy of it, and for the pride of a task well done.
Irritation pricked. She did not want to be a task. She wanted to be—by the goddess, she wanted to be the world to him.
There was another rhythm like this, another rhythmic rocking motion, as familiar as the breath in her body. A horse at the canter, long and easy, smooth, untiring. Once she had found that, she found the limit of pain, and passed it. It lingered, and more than a whisper of it, too; but it ceased to matter.
He had great endurance. Not that she knew much of this, but she had heard enough. Men came, took, left again. They did not go on and on.
This one did. But not forever. Not even he. His stroke quickened, his breath with it. She rode it, not quite comprehending, until he stiffened, gripping her tight enough to startle the breath out of her. There was something, a glimmer . . .
It was gone. A long sigh escaped him. She loosened her grip on him and slipped free. He sank to his knees on the bed. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“What ever for?” Her own voice was if anything more breathless than his.
“I failed to pleasure you,” he said. “I could not—I lacked discipline.”
“Stop that,” she said.
He was trained to a woman’s voice: he stopped. She bore him back and down, flat on the bed, and sat on him. “You were beautiful,” she said.
“I didn’t—”
“Stop!”
He shut his mouth with a click. She pressed her finger to it, to keep it so.
“Do not ever say sorry,” she said.
His eyes begged to differ, but his voice was silenced, even after she had reclaimed her hand.
She was aware, then, of the ache inside. She pulled herself somewhat stiffly to her feet.
There was blood on her thighs, and on him, too. He was staring at it—not appalled. But faintly horrified.
“You have never taken a man before,” he said, as if it were an accusation. “Where was your mother when it was time to teach you? How could she allow you to suffer this?”
“My mother is dead,” Sarama said. “I was born, she died.”