by Judith Tarr
He glanced back once, at the ring of stones that seemed far smaller and less terrible in daylight than it had in the darkness, and at the men standing in a circle beyond it. The king had not moved since Agni left him. Agni’s friends and kinsmen leaped and whooped and sang him on his way.
He flung a grin at them, a flash of insouciance, and put a swagger in his seat on the dun mare’s back, keeping it till the earth bore him out of their sight.
oOo
Agni kept to the northward way, remembering what he had been told of a herd that ran on the northern plains. Where the others went, he did not know, nor was he permitted to know. Sometimes some of the initiates would hunt together, but they were not to do so until the herd was in sight. Until that time, each hunted alone.
He did not think any of the others had gone northward. There were other herds nearer, that were known to have colts of the age that was required. But Agni’s spirit yearned after something greater. Even knowing that his return could be delayed, that it might be days before he came near the northern herds, he determined to win his stallion from among them.
Often as he made his way across the steppe, as he hunted his dinner and as he lay in camp of a night, he pondered the things that his father had said. He had been aware of nothing that was not as always. His brothers vied for the king’s favor, as they had done since he could remember. Yama the eldest declared that he would be king. And yes, there had been rumblings that the old king should submit himself to the knife, and suffer a new king to rise in his place. But nothing greater than it ever was. Nothing to raise the hackles, to urge him to walk more warily.
Yet the king had seen fit to promise Agni that he would still be living when Agni came back. Agni’s hackles did rise at that. What did the king know? And why had Agni not known it?
What if—gods, what if Yama had discovered that his wife found greater pleasure with his brother? That would not serve Agni well among the men of the tribe. It would not serve him well at all.
It was useless to gnaw that same bone over and over, all alone with the steppe and the sky. Agni could not return until he had won his stallion. No more could he be king.
He must do this. It was not a thing that he could choose, or that he might delay. Until it was done, he had no other duty, and should have no thought apart from it.
He decided on that, his third night out from the tribe. It was easier in the thinking than in the doing, but the gods were kind, after their fashion. They sent a misery of wind and rain, which absorbed his attention rather completely for the days and nights that it lasted; then when he had thought never to be dry again, the rain blew away and the sun beat down.
He was dry then, dust-dry, and hot. The grass parched about him. Water he could find, but less of it, the farther he traveled; and what he could find, he offered first to the horses.
If he must go thirsty, so be it. He could not do what he needed to do if he was alone and afoot.
oOo
The steppe was a living thing. Bleak as it could seem, it was alive with creatures, from biting gnat to eagle on the zenith; from rabbit nibbling greenery to lion hunting the wild bull.
Men in companies could sweep the steppe and never know what creatures dwelt in the grass. A man alone in that immense sea of grass, even mounted and leading a pair of horses, was as much a part of it as the wolf wandering alone, or the bird feeding on seeds of the grasses.
A man alone was also prey, and his horses sore temptation for the great predators. Agni rode warily, veering wide from lion-sign and avoiding the herd-runs of the wild cattle. Wolves he feared less. In this season they had ample young of deer and cattle to feed on, and tender young rabbits for the cubs. But lionesses hunted greater prey to feed their offspring, and the lions, if they could be persuaded to forsake their lordly laziness, would reckon man-flesh a delicacy.
Of horse-herds he saw none. He did not fret, yet, that he had chosen the wrong path. He rode between the lion and the bull, soft as a wind in the grass, and trusted that the gods would guide him.
Sometimes he saw the great herds of wild cattle, the sweep of horns like the young moon, cows grazing and calves gamboling, and the herd bull keeping watch over them all. He would choose a cow, a young heifer perhaps, to be his favorite; would bear her company, guard her as she nibbled on the choicest of the grasses, mount her when she invited him, and make her all his own.
Each herd seemed to have its own pride of lions. Lesser herds of deer and gazelle gathered on the edges, fine prey for a lion, all gathered together and ripe for the choosing. Just so did the tribes of men keep their cattle, their sheep and goats: to serve their needs, and to thrive and to increase at their will.
Maybe the tame cattle were not so foolish, with men to guard them and see that they were fed. Men fought off lions, and chose carefully of those that they would slaughter. They gelded the he-calves, too, so that the bull would not kill them or drive them off. Perhaps the cattle would reckon themselves fortunate.
Agni was growing antic in his solitude. He dared not speak or sing, lest the lions find him, or the bulls take exception. He made his way in silence, traveling as swiftly as the land would allow; even into the night if there was a moon. Northward, as straight as the herds and their predators would allow.
Urgency began to grow in him. The moon died and was born again, then waxed to the full. He fed himself on fruits and on seeds of the wild grasses, on rabbits and ground-dwellers and even, one or twice, a lion’s leavings. His beard grew out again, itching ferociously as it did it, till his cheeks were protected from the sun once more, and his prettiness hidden as it well should be. Pretty was for a woman. A man should be strong.
The land began to change. It was a subtle change as were all such things on the steppe, but the hills were steeper, the air less fiercely warm.
Water flowed more freely here. There were springs and streams, even a river or two, and a lake bounded in reeds that took him a full day and part of another to circle.
The cattle were fewer in this part of the world. This was a land of birds, great flocks of them that blackened the sky.
Here with his bow he ate well, and could have eaten more than well, could he have paused. But he was summoned, north and ever northward, into a country of mists and soft rain, where the grass was rich and green, and rivers broadened into chains of lakes strung like bright stones on a thread.
oOo
There at last he found the first sign that there were horses, a scattering of prints in the mud of a lakeside, a few droppings, a day and more old. Mares, he thought, and foals: prints no more than two of his fingers wide, tiny and perfect, with a wobble in them that spoke of extreme youth.
A wolfpack was following them, in hopes of catching the newborn unawares. Of lions he saw no sign, nor had since he walked into the mist. Maybe their gods did not like this country which was so different from their high desert of grass.
For mares and foals he had no use, but where they were, the stallion could not be far. He had to pause for the first dawning of excitement, a catch in the breath, a quickening of the heart. But the track of a foal was not the foal itself, nor did it promise him a stallion. He forced himself to calm, gathered his wits together, and followed the tracks along the water’s edge.
39
Northward round the lake and deeper into the mist, Agni followed where the mares and their foals had gone. The wolves had kept their distance. A flurry of tracks told of one that had grown overbold and met the wrath of a mare. There was blood on the grass, and bits of grey fur, and the mark of a body dragging itself away to heal.
The most skittish of Agni’s mares snorted at it, but they were all sensible beasts. They were more interested in the horse-sign, as Agni himself was.
He smiled at it. That was a strong mare, and large of foot, too; which boded well for the size and quality of her stallion.
He rode swiftly now, but with great care, though the tracks were old. Others overlaid them as he went on. This was a herd�
��s grazing-ground, then, and the lakes were its watering place.
Smaller bands came and went within the larger one. He marked the bands of mares and foals, and the yearlings with their smaller feet and lighter traces, and the young stallions all together in a boisterous herd.
There, he thought. There.
The sun was sinking fast. He camped by the broadest of the lakes that he had found, where a ring of trees let him fashion an enclosure for the horses. A warren of rabbits provided him with dinner, and herbs grew wild along the shore, and fruit in the grass, red and sweet. They made a feast, he on the fruits of his hunt, the mares on sweet grass, as the stars came out and the moon rose.
oOo
Agni lay in a bed of fragrant grasses. The air was soft. He slid into a dream of moonlight and a woman’s face, a fall of moon-pale hair, and arms as white as snow and as warm as fire.
In his dream she was never his brother’s wife. She was all his own, sleekly compliant, everything that a man could dream of.
Just before he woke, as she rode him to the gods’ country for the third time, she swooped over him, laughing with delight; and her face was the face of a woman days dead.
He fell gasping into the chill dawn, shaking and gagging on the stench of her. Sweet grass and dew swept the stink away. He had spent himself in his sleep. The sweetness of the dream was all gone in horror and in humiliation.
As a wise man should, while he washed himself in the cold water of the lake, shivering and spluttering, he tried to make sense of the dream. A dream that a man remembered was the gods’ sending; that, every tribesman knew.
It was simple enough to find the fear; the truth that he was given to evading, that she belonged to his brother. That, by the laws of certain gods and of his own tribe, what he did with her was a betrayal. That he could be killed for it, and she too, or maimed for their lives long.
This was a warning, then. Strange that it came now, in this place, while he hunted his stallion. He should be dreaming of horses; not of a white-faced witchy woman whose gift of the gods was to drive a man mad.
He scrubbed himself until his skin stung, and turned his face to the east where the sun hid, shrouded in mist. “Skyfather,” he said. “Father Sun. Don’t deny me my stallion because of a thing that is—that must be—your will. Give me my king of horses, so that I can be a king of men.”
The air was still, the water flat, not a breath of wind. Birds had chittered and shrieked and sang; but for that moment they had gone silent. The horses were unwontedly still.
There was no sound at all but the hiss of his breath as he drew it in, and the beating of his heart. He might have been the only living, walking thing that was in the world.
Then he moved, and the world came alive again, whisper of wind in the reeds by the lakeside, cry of bird, and somewhere, somewhere not far at all, the shrill call of a stallion.
That was his answer. With lightened heart and hollow stomach, for he would not waste the time it would take to break his fast, he scrambled clothes and belongings together, gathered the horses, and went in search of the horse that had uttered the cry.
oOo
It was not an easy hunt or a brief one. He found where the herd had settled for the night, but it was some time gone from there, leaving trampled grass and droppings behind. Somewhere in the night, wolves had brought down a foal: a weakling from what was left of it, thin and small. But the tracks of its kin were large and their stride long. There would be good horses in this herd.
It was the herd of mares, from the evidence of the foal’s carcass, but the young stallions would not be far from it. Agni followed it away from that largest of the lakes, up a long and relentless slope, to a windy summit and a field of grass.
It was not the top of a hill as he had thought, but a lifting of the land itself, a new and higher plain. The grass was rich there, and streams ran through it, and some of them runneled down off the plain into the place of lakes below.
The sun came out as he stood on the height, burned away the mists and swept the dew from the grass. It was later than he had thought, nearly noon. He followed the track that had led him so far, narrow and well beaten and somewhat circuitous, as if generations of horses had made it on their quest for the best grazing.
Then at last, as the sun touched the zenith, he found the herd. He left his mares hobbled and grazing well apart from it, and crawled the last of it through the high grass, drawn by the sounds of horses at their ease: snortings, snufflings, the tearing of grass, the squeal of a mare.
There they were in a hollow just below him, in and out of a little river: mares and foals as he had known there would be, and their stallion mounted on a fine dun mare. He was a bay himself, rough-coated, heavy-boned, coarse and hammerheaded, and riddled with old scars. One eye was a puckered scar; his ears were torn. He had no beauty, but his strength was incontestable.
He was too old for Agni’s choosing, too long and incontestably the king. Just so was Agni’s own father. Agni, watching him, knew a stab of homesickness.
The stallion finished his duty, slid off the mare and shook himself and went calmly off to graze. She, who was young and a beauty, cried her protest; danced and tossed her head and curled her tail over her back, demanding that he pleasure her again.
He ignored her. He knew his strength, that one; and no importunate young mare was going to move him.
She, being a mare and in high heat, was not inclined to accept a refusal. She teased him. She tormented him. When he granted her no more than a lift of the head and a curl of the lip, she left him in disgust.
She did not, Agni took note, leave the herd, nor did she seek another stallion. That was strength, too; to so compel a mare. Mares did as they pleased. It took a strong stallion to master them.
Agni sighed a little. A hand of years ago, or two hands, this would have been a mount fit for a king.
And yet, thought Agni, such a sire would have sons. His mares were very fine, fat and sleek, and taller than the run of horses in the south. Most were duns and bays; a few were red chestnut.
There were no greys. One of the foals, a colt, might be black when he shed his foal-coat; he was the color of mist over dark water. He was very fine, and in a hand of years would make some tribesman a great war-stallion.
He had a brother. Agni knew it in his skin. Somewhere near, the young stallions would be grazing. Not all would be this stallion’s sons; some might have come from other herds, banded together in the safety of numbers, and one of them, perhaps, might be suffered to breed the old stallion’s daughters, since he would not do so himself.
But it was a son of this stallion that Agni wanted, somewhere between three and five summers old. Old enough to carry a man. Young enough to accept him, once he had won the battle of wills.
Some tribesmen chose younger horses, as smaller and perhaps more tractable. Yama had done that; had come home with a long yearling, and ridden him, too, and lamed him with bearing the weight of so big a man before the colt was strong enough to do it.
No law forbade such a thing. It only required that, in order to be reckoned a man, a tribesman must hunt and tame and ride home on a stallion from the wild herds.
Yama had a gift, Agni granted him that. He had blinded a startling number of people to the truth: that he was a weak man, a poor horseman, an indifferent hunter. Anyone else who returned with a yearling would have been laughed out of the tribe. But not Yama. Yama conducted himself as if he had won a king of stallions.
Agni meant to win such a one in truth. To ride into the camp on the back of a great lord of horses, a battle-mount for a king, a sire of herds that would be. He had dreamed death with a woman’s face—but he had not dreamed defeat at the hooves of a horse.
He circled the herd. With all the cunning that he had learned in hunting the shyest of prey—for he was a lord of hunters, as Yama was not—he made himself invisible, inaudible, without scent, not even as perceptible as a wind in the grass.
The old mare, the l
eader of the herd, raised her head and snorted at a rabbit underfoot, but not at Agni slipping past. He could have tugged at her tail, if he had been such a fool.
oOo
The hollow narrowed at its eastward end, and then widened again, growing shallow, till it was level with the plain. There on the slope, he found the young stallions.
They were a boisterous lot, racing one another up to the plain and back again, meeting in mock battle, rearing and striking and feinting for each other’s throats. They kept none of the order that one found in the herd of mares. They did much as they pleased, but in pairs and threes and handfuls.
No self-respecting wolf would trouble them, though a lion might, if he were hungry enough. The predators, and therefore the greatest wariness, went with the mares and the weakling foals.
Agni lay in comfort, chin on folded arms, and watched the stallions play. There were no yearlings here. Those would have their own herd, and a gaunt and scraggling thing it would be, too, as they learned to live in the great world apart from their mothers.
These had survived that terrible year. They were the strong ones, the princes who, if the gods were kind, would find their own mares and become kings in turn.
He found the one who must be the lesser sire, the one whom the old king permitted to breed his daughters. He was a handsome horse, tall and well made, but Agni did not like the set of his shoulder. Nor did he have the light on him that one looked for in a king.
He was a lesser creature, a favorite. He would not rule when the old king’s time came. He lacked the strength of will.
Agni searched among the others, looking for those who had a look of the old sire. The hammerhead was not common. The strong bones, the height, the deep slope of shoulder and the strong rounding of croup—those he found, and they were as fine as he had hoped.
One in particular drew his eye; caught it, then when it wandered away, drew it back with a toss of the head. This one was, perhaps, four summers old. He was young yet, less beautiful than he would be when he was grown; his feet were too big, his neck too snaky long. But there was a light in him, a promise of splendor.