by Judith Tarr
It was an untidy, unlovely melee, no order or reason in it, but blood enough. Patir was down—off his horse but on his feet, staggering, bleeding from a wound in his forehead. Past him Gauan lay unmoving, his yellow hair stained scarlet.
Dead. Agni sat Mitani above him, staring down at his bruised and broken face. Someone must have had a stone and smitten him with it. His expression, what there was of it, was enormously surprised.
Agni bent low, leaning far out of Mitani’s saddle, and trailed his fingers in Gauan’s blood. He tasted it, the sweet strong taste.
He straightened. His mind was very clear. He called to as many of his people as could hear, and beckoned them to him, away from that travesty of a battle. “Come,” he called. “Come with me!”
They took the town with fire and blood, swept over it and devoured it. They took its women and children. Any who fought them, they killed. They made war in the Lady’s country, made a sacrifice of blood to the red gods, the war-gods. They poured it out on the earth in Earth Mother’s name, that the grass grow rich and the rains fall steady, and make the people strong.
oOo
Agni sat in the Mother’s house. She was dead, killed in the fight on the road. Her daughter, her heir, lay badly wounded, with women tending her. Agni did not mean for her to die, unless the gods willed it. His heart was all cleansed, all empty. Blood had washed it clean.
In a little while he must see to Gauan’s burial. No other horseman had died; only the prince of the Stormwolf people, that amiable man who had ridden so often at Agni’s side. Friends they had not been, not as he and Patir were, or as he had been with Rahim. But they had ridden far together, and shared many a campfire of an evening. Agni would miss his familiar presence, his light touch with a jest, the way he had of coaxing people to smile when they were inclined to be surly.
It should be easier than losing Rahim. Rahim he had killed with his own hand. But dead was dead. There was no calling Gauan back. He was gone.
Agni looked around him at this house so like every other Mother’s house, as if, like the temples of the Lady, Mothers’ houses were prescribed by rite and custom. The hangings just so, the carpets thus, the furnishings in this order and no other. All Mothers, these people believed, were faces of the Lady. And she, it seemed, liked all her houses to be alike.
He was tired of that sameness. If he ever paused long enough to do it, he would remake a Mother’s house into a king’s tent. He would cast out the furnishings, pull down the hangings, hide the harsh wooden walls behind softer walls of leather or woven cloth.
Tonight he endured it as it was, because there was no time to change it. Outside, in the town, his men celebrated noisily. They had all been spoiling for a fight. This easy victory suited them well. They had women, willing or unwilling, and wine and mead, and here and there a wound to brag of. This was war as they had been raised to wage it.
He had caught some of them hoping that there would be more armed townspeople farther on; that this would not be the only fight or the only honest victory in this strange conquest.
oOo
“Where are we going?” Patir asked Agni over the remains of a dinner prepared and served by silent, tight-lipped men. “Will we just keep riding westward till we find the edge of the world?”
Agni had not honestly thought about it. “I suppose we could do that,” he said. “Or we could find a city that suits us and take it to live in as if it were our summer hunting lands; and in the winter we’ll go elsewhere—maybe back to Larchwood, maybe farther west, wherever we please to go.”
“We could,” said Patir, “take what we’ve won and go back to the steppe.”
“Where would we go?” Agni asked him. “We’re outcast from the White Horse. Everywhere else we’re likely to go, some tribe or clan has claimed it. We’d have to wage war, conquer a tribe. Wouldn’t you rather stay here, where no one knows how to fight, and the whole country’s ours for the taking?”
“It’s settled country,” Patir said. “Cities everywhere you look. You can’t ride half a day without coming across half a dozen villages. There’s no room to breathe.”
“There’s hardly room on the steppe,” said Agni, “particularly in the westward lands. The world’s filling up with people.”
“It’s too full here.” Patir stretched out, propped up on his elbow, and sighed.
“Are you asking to go back?” Agni asked.
“No,” said Patir. “You like it here.”
“I do not,” Agni said.
“You do.” Patir grinned at Agni’s glare. “You like a country full of women who talk back to you.”
“So does Taditi,” Agni said. “If I go, she’ll stay. She’s already told me that.”
Patir did not ask how Agni could let her be so insolent. He knew Taditi. “Have you ever wondered if she’s warming her bed with fine young things while we take our pick of the women?”
Agni sucked in a breath. It was supposed to be a word, but none came out. Taditi? Disporting herself with doe-eyed youths?
“She’s a woman,” Patir said, “and she’s not as old as all that. Mika told me the men rather like her looks. She’s too thin by far, they think, but they admire her strength, and her seat on a horse.”
“These men are all like women,” Agni said. “They giggle and simper like girls. I’m surprised none of them has asked me into his bed.”
“They are weaklings.” Patir lay flat and stretched, arching his back and yawning loudly. “Ah! I could sleep till winter.”
“You can’t,” Agni said. “We have to bury Gauan.”
That sobered Patir, for a little while. “His kin want to declare blood feud against this whole country.”
“They’ll settle for taking their revenge on this town,” Agni said.
“Why?” Patir asked. And when Agni lifted a brow, not certain of the meaning: “Why are you so easy on these people? We’ve found we can provoke them into a fight. That makes this honorable war. Why won’t you let it happen as it happens?”
“Because I want to rule this country, not destroy it,” Agni said.
“You are a strange one,” said Patir. He sprang to his feet. “Come. We’ve a barrow to raise.”
Agni rose more slowly. Sometimes it seemed that whatever Patir said was only half of it; that Rahim should be there to complete it. And now Gauan was gone. More would go if these hotheads had their way; till this country with its crowding people and its relentless refusal to fight overwhelmed and consumed the last of them.
He considered explaining that to Patir, but Patir was nigh gone already. He held his peace instead, and went to lay Gauan on Earth Mother’s breast.
66
Of course it was Catin who had the news first. A town called Wild Rose had given way to its fear and determined to stand against the horsemen. They had killed a horseman, and for that a whole dozen of them had died and many more been wounded, and their town taken as a prize of war.
“You see?” cried Catin to the assembled people of Three Birds. “This is what comes upon you. This is what comes of fighting.”
“If you don’t fight,” Sarama said, raising her voice only a little, but enough to carry, “they’ll only go on until they find someone who will.”
“So they’ll stop,” said someone from among the crowd. “They’ve taken Wild Rose. They’ll be content.”
“No,” said Sarama. “Wild Rose is little more than a village. A king of the horsemen will want a city worthy of his presence. He’ll take whatever comes between himself and such a city, but he won’t let it turn him aside. Once he comes to that mother of cities—then he’ll stop.”
“Three Birds is the mother of cities in this part of the world,” Danu said.
“We can make sure that he stops here,” Sarama said. “We may even turn him back. He can’t have many men with him. Everyone agrees, these are men, not tribes with women and children. He’ll be stretched thin, so far from the steppe, and with so many towns and cities in back of him f
or him to hold. If we stand fast—”
“If we stand fast,” said Catin, “we die, and he runs over us. Why not just give him what he wants? Then he’ll go away.”
“I don’t think so,” Sarama said.
“You don’t make sense,” said Catin.
Sarama bared her teeth. Danu spoke smoothly and easily in her silence. “I think she means that the horsemen will come to Three Birds because no city is greater—and if we fight them they’ll cut us apart, but if we don’t fight them they’ll take us and break us. They’ll stop here whatever we do. If we can push them back, maybe they’ll give up their war.”
“It won’t be that easy,” Sarama said, “but the rest is true enough. He may look for us to be cowed because of what he did to Wild Rose. He may meet further resistance as he comes toward us, but it won’t stop or even slow him. It will give his men something to do—and that he’ll regard as a blessing.”
“Why bless him?” Catin demanded. “Let’s offer him nothing. No fight. No bribes to go away.”
“Then he’ll simply take what he pleases,” said Sarama. She turned away from Catin. “You may dream as you like. I’m going to see that our fighters are ready for whatever comes.”
oOo
They were ready; but what came first was a wave of the Lady’s people. Townsfolk and villagers, struck to horror by the killing in Wild Rose, fled the horsemen’s advance. There was a little resistance, they said, a few of the younger women and men refusing to run away, but wise people gathered their belongings and set off westward.
They did not mean to stop in Three Birds. Like Sarama they had seen that it was the greatest of the cities and the most likely to draw the horsemen’s eye. They would rest there for a night or a day, but they would go on; would travel westward until their fear was gone away, or until they came to the edge of the world.
People in Three Birds, Sarama was pleased to note, did not run away. Some elected to go on trading ventures or to visit kin in cities well away from the horsemen’s advance, but no one actually, openly fled.
The same could not be said of the people from Larchwood. As seemed to be their ancestral way, once they had clear sight of danger, they set themselves as far away from it as they could go.
Catin professed that someone must bring warning to the west, as if every trader and traveler could not have done it as well as she. Her Mother was weary, though she insisted that she was not ill. She was content to go wherever her daughter led her.
Good riddance, Sarama thought. Let them take their fear and their doomsaying elsewhere, and leave Three Birds to fight its battle as it had long prepared to do.
The fighters whom she had labored so long to train were as ready as they would ever be. She had raised such defenses as the Mother and the elders would allow: had set a mob of young men and women to digging a ditch on the sunrise side, all around the edges of the fields, deep enough and wide enough to give a horseman pause. At the bottom of it she had them set sharpened stakes.
It was an ugly thing, but then, as she said to Tilia, war was ugly. Since the city could not pick itself up and move, and since the people on foot could never match the pace of men on horseback, there had to be some way to stop the horsemen; some barrier that they could not cross.
“Therefore,” Sarama said, standing on the edge of it, “this.”
Tilia peered down at the stakes with an expression half of awe and half of horror. “If anyone falls on these . . .”
“Yes,” said Sarama.
“I think I hate this thing called war,” Tilia said.
“Most women do,” said Sarama. “The men reckon it a grand game. No man is a man unless he’s won his stallion and proved himself in war.”
“Is that what they’re doing?” Tilia asked. “Proving themselves?”
Sarama nodded.
Tilia snorted. “All they prove to me is that they’re savages.”
“They don’t care what you think,” Sarama said. “You’re a woman.”
“Then they should care very much indeed,” said Tilia.
Sarama bit her tongue. It was going to be interesting when Tilia and Agni stood face to face. Each so sure of the world’s admiration. Each raised from birth to rule over the people. And each convinced that the other’s race and sex were by far the lesser.
oOo
Danu seemed unruffled, impervious to the fog of fear that hung over the city. And yet it was he who said to the Mother of a morning, when the horsemen were no more than two days’ ride outside of Three Birds, “It’s too dark in the soul here. Let’s hold a festival. Let’s dance the dark away.”
It was a mad thing to do, as if they celebrated a victory before the battle was even fought; and foolish, too, if the horsemen came on quicker than expected, and found them all drowned in wine. But the Mother gave it her blessing, and the city flung itself into the doing of it.
There was desperation in their eagerness, but an honest pleasure, too. They had not had a festival since spring. It was time and more than time to build the Lady-fires, prepare a feast, put on their best clothes and ornaments and come out as the sun rode low, late in the long summer day.
For tonight they forgot fear. They forgot the war. They sang and danced together. Some sooner, some later, disappeared two by two into the shadows, all of them who were old enough and some whom Sarama would have thought too young to think of such things. Even the Mother, that placid mountain of a woman, beckoned to the one called Kosti-the-Bull, and went away with him.
Sarama did not see what anyone saw in Kosti. He was a gentle soul, soft-handed with the children, but much too much like his namesake the bull for Sarama’s taste. Danu beside him seemed almost lightly built, and beautiful in it.
He had thrown himself into preparations for the festival as if no one else could do as much or as well as he. Sarama had expected him to bury himself among the cooks and the servants, but when the feast was spread and the wine had begun to go round, he came out among the dancers. In the sweet skirling of the pipes and the beating of drums, he stamped out a rhythm that set all their hearts to pounding.
Sarama’s had had a fair beginning at the sight of him. People here were modest as they should be, except in festivals. In festivals, one’s best clothes were the ones that came off most quickly—or that never went on at all.
He had on a kind of kilt, a skirt like those the women wore under their gowns, with long fringes from which hung bright beads and bits of carved wood and bone, and copper bells that chimed sweetly in the lulls of the music. The rest of him was bare, the Lady’s signs painted on his arms and breast and legs, long sweeping curves and spirals, dizzying and holy. When he began his hair was knotted tight at his nape, but as he leaped and whirled, stamped and spun, it escaped its bindings and tumbled down his back.
He was beautiful, beautiful and wild. He had half-masked his face, flat curve of white, dark wells of eyes. So the people of the Lady’s country signified their gods or their strong spirits. This was a young god, swift and light of foot, wooing the earth with his dancing.
Wooing Sarama, too. The turn of his head, the breadth of his shoulders limned in firelight, made her breath come quick, her heart beat hard. She wanted to run her hand down that strong smooth back, and kiss the furrow of it, and taste the salt of his sweat.
She drew a shuddering breath. He danced, tireless, to the beating of the drums.
He was dancing defiance. He mimed the horsemen, their horses galloping, curvetting, tossing their manes. He mimed battle as Sarama had taught him, leap, thrust, retreat. He mimed the strut of the conqueror, the arrogant lift of the chin, the thrust and roll of the hips that made Sarama choke on laughter. He was more like a tribesman drunk on his own splendor than maybe he knew: exact, to the life, who had never seen a man of the tribes in the flesh.
He ended the dance with that wicked thrust, on a single, bone-jarring beat of the drum. The fire flared suddenly, startling them all. When their eyes cleared, he was gone.
oOo<
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Sarama found him where she had expected, down by the river washing the sweat and the paint from his body. Moonlight and starlight and a faint light from the fire turned him to a shape of glimmer and darkness. The night was caught in his hair, shadow deeper than shadow.
She watched him with great satisfaction. He had dropped his kilt to bathe. He took his time about it, long lazy strokes, sweetening himself with a potion of herbs and sand and somewhat else that she did not know, that was a marvel for making a body clean. Its scent, sharp and sweet, drifted to Sarama.
She followed it as if it had been a wishing laid on her, a yearning for the warmth of his skin.
It was as warm as she could wish it to be, damp and fragrant. He turned in her arms, still a little breathless, laughing as she ate him alive with kisses.
She pulled back. “You did that to drive me wild.”
“I did it to wake you up,” he conceded, “but I did it for the people, too. So they’ll remember.”
“I don’t want to remember,” she said. “Not tonight. Make me forget.”
“I want to remember,” he said.
“I don’t.”
“Then I’ll remember,” said Danu, “and you can forget.”
“Women are supposed to be this accommodating among the tribes,” Sarama said. “Men are supposed to be intransigent.”
“I am being intransigent,” he said. “I’m exasperating you to no end.”
She peered at him in the moonlight. He was not feigning his antic mood. His eyes were bright, his teeth glinting as he laughed.
He was exasperating. Indeed.
She pulled away. “Go pleasure yourself tonight. I’ll be dreaming of war.”
He caught her before she had gone a step, and held her with that effortless strength of his.
She stared at him. She had not expected him to do so manly a thing.
“You will dream,” he said, “if you dream at all, of sunlight and quiet. And maybe, a little, of me. Now come here.”
A command. How startling. Sarama was already, perforce, in obedience. He drew her closer, folded his arms about her, and said softly in her ear, “Hold on now. Hold tight. Remember nothing but moonlight and starlight and the dance that the Lady taught me.”