by Judith Tarr
The stallion reared, wheeled, lashed out with his hind feet.
But Agni was not there. Agni was well out of reach—and the stallion found himself caught with a rope about his neck, tightening as he flung himself backward. Agni wound it swiftly round the stout sapling that he had left near the middle of the circle, secured it, and stood back.
A horse could kill himself, could break his neck, fighting such confinement. But Agni had trusted in this one’s good sense, and in the game that they had played—and, yes, in the complaisance of exhaustion, though that was not perhaps as strong as it might have been.
As he had hoped, the stallion did not fight long. He learned soon that if he ceased to pull back, if he moved forward, the tightness round his throat eased. Then he tried another thing, a lunge and twist, to free himself; but Agni was there, and by the gods’ grace the rope held.
The stallion stood still. His eyes were fixed on Agni. Agni could not see hate in them, which rather surprised him. Wariness, yes. Anger. But something—respect? interest? Something else that almost made him smile.
By careful degrees he worked his way along the rope, keeping it firm but not tight, till again he could touch the stallion’s neck. The stallion flinched a little, but did not recoil.
Slowly, cautiously, Agni ran his hand down toward the shoulder. The stallion snorted but did not turn to snap.
Agni rubbed the joining of neck to shoulder, which ran like a cliff’s edge between a low plain and a higher one. The stallion did not give to it as a tamed horse might, but he did not pull away. Agni stroked the big flat shoulder and drew back.
The stallion watched him. He sighed a little. With a tamed horse he would end here; but if he let this one go, recapturing him would be deadly difficult. He had to press on, had to finish it.
From the breast of his coat he slipped the headstall that he had made of good leather, sturdy but supple. He slipped it on before the horse could resist, and stood back, braced for war.
But the stallion only shook his head a little, eyes still fixed on him, weighing him as it seemed, taking his measure. Agni returned to stroking neck and shoulder, moving back a little now, toward the deep curve of the barrel. The stallion’s coat was sleek, gleaming like copper. His mane was thick and matted. Agni rubbed the roots of it. Did the rigidity of that neck ease a little? It was difficult to tell.
Agni went on slowly, accustoming this wild thing to his touch. He had won something in the game. It was not submission. It was a kind of wary trust, a lessening of anger, a rousing of interest in what this strange creature was doing.
When Agni slipped on the hobbles, the battle was brief. The stallion had learned. Fighting only bound him tighter. Stillness gained him a kind of relief. He did venture to snap at Agni then, in annoyance; but not in the rage that had possessed him before.
Once he was hobbled and haltered, Agni loosed the rope that bound him by the neck. He reared in triumph, lunged—and nearly fell as the hobbles caught him. Agni stood back, quiet, while he regained his balance. He shook his head in frustration, rubbing and rubbing it on his foreleg, but the halter would not come off.
“Ah, brother,” Agni said. “It’s a defeat, but it needn’t break you. The goddess meant you for this—else why did she make you so wise? I’ve seen horses kill themselves rather than do what you’ve learned to do almost willingly.”
The stallion pricked his ears. He was listening.
Agni babbled on at him, it did not greatly matter what. It was the sound of his voice that had caught the stallion’s attention, the cadences and the timbre of it, and the thought behind it, willing calm, willing reassurance, willing him to yield to this that, after all, was his destiny.
The shadows had grown long. Agni ended the lesson at last, slipped out of the pen, went to fetch the leather buckets that he had brought, filled with water. He hung them on the pen’s wall and flung cut fodder over, the best of the tall grass from the valley’s far end. Then, deliberately, he went to wash and eat and rest himself.
oOo
He heard the stallion moving in the pen, from where he lay just outside of it; heard him drink, heard him nibble at the cut grass. He tried more than once to scrape the halter off, but failed. The hobbles he could not break, nor did he waste his strength in fighting them. That was a wise creature indeed, the goddess’ own and no mistake.
At last Agni let himself fall into sleep. No alarm woke him. He roused once at the sound of hoofbeats, but it was only one of the mares. She came up close, blew warm breath in his hair, wandered off.
Morning found the stallion still in the pen, the water nigh all drunk and the cut fodder gone. Agni renewed them both under the stallion’s eye, and left him to them while he broke his own fast. But then, when he had eaten, drunk, dressed, tidied the camp, gathered and regathered his belongings, and seen the sun full into the sky, he returned to the enclosure and to the game that he had played on the day before.
The stallion remembered. He fought at first, fresh with the morning, and angry, too; but the hobbles slowed him markedly. When he ceased to fight, when he moved where Agni bade him, Agni let the hobbles go, and held his breath.
But the stallion did not burst out in his freedom. He stood until Agni bade him move. He played the game still as he had learned, with a look that, had he been a man, would have told Agni that he understood.
Agni hobbled him again, met only slight resistance. Unhobbled him. Again restored the hobbles. The stallion nipped lightly at his hair, but did not fight him.
He sighed faintly and went to the fence and lifted the thing that he had left there, the fleece that was his saddle.
The stallion shied at it, but not badly; and once he met the end of the rope that bound his halter, he stopped. Agni let him sniff the thing, showed it to him, stroked it along his neck. He followed it with a rolling eye, but suffered it.
Agni stroked him all over with it. Then at last, with no great ado, settled it in its proper place on his back. He twitched his skin at it, but Agni’s hand held it lest it fall and startle him.
When he had calmed to it, Agni drew up the girth. Little by little, degree by degree; stopping if he flinched, stroking him, soothing him with voice and hand. And when he was girthed, and had not lost his wits or his calm, Agni played the game again, accustoming him to moving with that light burden strapped to his back.
“Brother,” Agni said to him, “if every tamed horse were as sensible as you, there’d be no need of whips or hobbles.”
The stallion snorted lightly at that—and discovered, on examination, that a bit of honeycomb in a man’s hand could have a bridle-bit hidden in it. He half-reared, threw his head about, loosed a flare of his former temper; but Agni’s return to the game, and the taste of honey on his tongue, won him over yet again.
He was discovering that the game went on and on; that each new thing was more alarming than the last, but that none of it caused him pain. None did harm to aught but his freedom—and that he had lost when he followed the spotted mare into a valley that, before the man came, had been open for his coming and going.
Toward evening, as the sun sank low, Agni crowned the game with the thing for which the rest had been but prelude. He slipped onto the stallion’s back.
He had not intended to do it. He had climbed up on the fence, intending simply to accustom the stallion to the sight of him up so high, and to fetch his laden pack and lay it on the saddle. But the stallion stood just so, as if he knew what to do; and Agni’s leg was there; and it was the matter of a moment to slip it over the waiting back, to settle into the saddle, to pick up reins and a solid hank of mane, and to wait for what would come.
At first, nothing, except a blank astonishment.
Then the world went up in flames.
Agni rode it out. Horse Goddess held him in the palm of her hand: more than once he knew that he had lost the battle, that he must go flying. But the stallion failed to make that one last move, that twist or that lowering of the neck or that s
udden veer, which would have flung Agni from his back.
Agni clung for grim life. And at last, after an eternity in the midst of the whirlwind, the stallion stopped. Agni nearly fell for sheer surprise; but caught himself, and sat breathless, still in the saddle, on the back of the stallion that he had won for his own.
Agni wondered if the stallion was as astonished as he was. He would have wagered that the beast was not as dizzily happy.
Or perhaps he was. His ears flicked back and forth, but less uneasy than intense, focused, learning this new thing as he had learned all the others.
He was not, Agni well knew by now, a mere mute beast. He thought about things. He learned. He liked learning. It was as if he had been shaped for it. And yet Agni did not think that he or any of his forebears had ever borne a man’s weight on his back. He was the first.
He would not be compelled. Persuaded, asked politely, he gave with a glad heart. Force he met with force; he was strong, stronger than any man could be.
He was like nothing so much as the Mare and her kin. And that did not surprise Agni at all. Was not he, as much as they, the goddess’ own?
oOo
After those first grueling days, they settled to a greater ease. The stallion learned to be groomed; to be fed from the hand; to be bridled and saddled without fuss; and to heed the will of his rider in walk and trot, canter and gallop, turn, stop, bend and wheel and dance sidewise, little by little, briefly, day by day.
When he was sure of himself in the pen, he was let out in the larger valley. Bridled at first, ridden, under Agni’s will. Then free among the mares, and it was with beating heart that, after he had set the stallion loose, Agni went to fetch him to be ridden.
He shied, but when Agni called he came, set his nose in Agni’s hand and took up the piece of honeycomb from the palm, and let himself be haltered and groomed, bridled and saddled and ridden.
After a handful of days in which he was so tractable, Agni knew. At last it was time.
None too soon, either. It was summer still, and hotter than ever, but the trees that were left had begun to the show the first glimmerings of red and gold. The nights though mild began to have the whisper of a chill near morning. The stars were shifting, wheeling from summer into autumn.
On the night of the new moon Agni knew that he must go. He ate and rested for the last time in that camp. The horses, who had now to seek grazing far up the valley, on some whim had come down to watch him, all four, mares and stallion. Under their calm regard he finished his supper.
He looked up from the last of it to find the stallion standing over him. The stars were out, though the west was rimmed still with light. He looked into that calm dark eye, that somehow had lost none of its pride even as it submitted to his will, and saw in it what he had not consciously been looking for.
“Mitani,” he said. That was a name in the language of the Mare’s people, that his sister had taught him when they were small, to give them a secret tongue to share between the two of them. Goddess-blessed, it meant, and Son of the New Moon; for the Mare’s people had said many things in few words.
“Mitani,” he said again.
The stallion’s ears pricked as if he recognized the name. Agni lifted his hand. The stallion lowered his nose into it and blew softly.
“Mitani,” Agni said, sealing it, binding it to the one who owned it.
42
In the time between the new moon and the full moon of autumn, Agni rode into the outer camp of the White Horse people.
This was like nothing so much as the young stallions’ herd from which he had won his Mitani. Here the young men had come leading or riding their stallions. The first who had come there had found a camp set up for them by the boys who, next year and the year after, would seek their own stallions. These had raised tents and built a campfire in the place where it had been from time out of mind, in the shallow grassy bowl near a stream that ran yearlong.
A hill watched over it, crowned by a cairn of stones. An old king was buried there, or a god. He was said to guard the place, and to look after the new-made men who camped there waiting for the night of the full moon, when they would ride back together to the tribe.
Agni was one of the last to come. He rode in as he had dreamed of doing, as he had seen his elders do for the past pair of autumns, riding his stallion and leading his mares. It might be more glorious to show himself so before the whole of the tribe, but it was wonderfully sweet to hear the whoops and cheers of his agemates; to see how they came running or galloping, the latter mounted on their own stallions. Rahim had a fine bay, and Patir a spotted colt, and little Chukri had won himself a great tall heavy-bodied creature with a mild eye and an extraordinary set of stones, as big as a man’s head and seeming as weighty, too.
None was as fine as Mitani, nor did any bear the new moon on his brow. Agni held himself the taller for that, and let the horse dance a little, flagging his tail and calling challenge to all these strange new stallions. My mares! he cried. My world!
Agni laughed for the joy of it. There was a place for his horses among the lines, and a strong pen for the stallion, to keep him apart from the others; for stallions would fight if they could, and not every one of them was as well won to his master’s will as Mitani.
Mitani was not glad to see his prison, but he endured it. He had his mares, though none of them would permit him any liberties—they were all in foal, Agni had reason to suspect. He was reasonably content.
oOo
Agni was still smiling as his friends and kinsmen showed him the tent that had been pitched for him, with the signs of his family painted on it, and gifts within: furs to sleep in, honey mead to drink, fine new clothes and ornaments to make him beautiful, and everything that was fitting for a prince returned to his people. There was even a servant for him: a shy and tongue-tied youth whom he last recalled as a plump-faced infant with his thumb perpetually in his mouth. The infant had grown into a gangling colt of a boy with a patchy growth of new beard, who had outgrown his thumb and taken to biting his nails instead.
The drums were beating, the dance begun. A brace of fat red deer roasted over the central fire. While the meat sizzled and the fat streamed off it and the scent of it wreathed the camp, the young men danced in an exuberant skein, out and around and inabout.
So they would dance when they returned to the tribe; but this was freer, and noisier too. They succeeded, with a whoop and a roar, in circling the fire just as the deer were done. Each dropped down where he stood, sweating and grinning, and the boys brought the makings of a feast.
Agni half sat, half lay on the sunset side of the circle, warm with the dance and the welcome. Someone passed him a horn of mead. It was strong and fiery-sweet. Rahim on his right hand and Patir on his left dropped arms about his neck and shared the horn.
Nevertheless, amid all this brightness, he had to know. He had counted the number of those who were here. “Sekhar? Dushiri? Natan?” he asked.
Rahim drank deep from the horn and did not answer. Patir leaned against Agni and sighed. “Sekhar died. The stallion he was trying for kicked him in the head. Dushiri’s stallion broke out of the pen he’d made for it and couldn’t be caught again. Natan nobody’s seen or heard from.”
“He may come back,” Rahim said, emerging from the depths of the drinking horn.
“The gods willing,” said Patir.
Agni granted that a few moments of silence. Sekhar had been a bit of a fool, but charming in it. Dushiri’s luck—ill and worse than ill—struck him as if it had been a blow. Dushiri he had been fond of. Dushiri he had ridden with, hunted with, danced with in the festivals.
And now Dushiri was gone. He could not come back to the tribe. He had failed to win his stallion. To the people of the White Horse, and therefore to the man who would be their king, he was as dead as Sekhar.
Everyone knew what happened to young men who failed to win a stallion. No tribe would receive them. They went away. They died alone.
He shivered, though the sun was still in the sky and the air was mild.
He too could have failed. His stallion could have hurt or maimed him. His pen could have broken. Anything at all could have happened, if the gods had willed it.
Yet they had not. He sat here between his two dear friends, because the gods had chosen to favor them all. Two of ten—three perhaps—was not as ill an omen as it seemed. The gods exacted a price for every gift they gave. For this one, for the joy of the man who had found his stallion, they took their share; took some of the young men in sacrifice.
It was a hard thing, but so was the world. A man learned this young, or he never learned it at all. Agni would grieve for the dead and remember them as they had been, but they were gone. No word or act of his could bring them back.
He plucked the horn from Rahim’s hand and found it still half-full of mead. He drank the lot of it, though it dizzied his head and cloyed in his throat. In the warm sweet haze he fell to the rest of the feast.
oOo
Natan did not come back. The moon waxed to the full. On the day when it would rise round and white and whole from the eastern horizon, the new-made men of the White Horse made ready to enter the tribe.
They bathed and groomed their stallions—with much uproariousness as some of the less thoroughly tamed, objecting to indignity, flung their masters in the mud—and made them beautiful with plaited manes and daubs of paint and fine new caparisons. Then they did the same for themselves.
It was a noisy thing, yet there was a hush in the heart of it, a breathless stillness. Agni plaited Rahim’s thin pale hair in the many braids he insisted on, while Patir plaited Agni’s own ruddy mane into a single thick braid.
“You’ll be the prettiest of us,” Patir said without envy. He was pleasant enough to look at, and knew it, but it had never mattered greatly to him that others were handsomer than he.