by Judith Tarr
Tilia watched her, too, and with fair perception. “What’s she smelling? All the stallions?”
“Hundreds of them,” Sarama agreed.
“And no mares? What foolishness. How can they make more horses?”
“They don’t,” Sarama said. “On the steppe they raid for more, or go home to the tribe and turn them out with the mares in season.”
“They won’t be raiding for more here,” Tilia said, “and there’s only one Mare. That’s not very provident of them.”
“War is not about providence,” said Sarama.
“I can see that it isn’t.” Tilia strode through the tall grass of the easternmost field, moving light and fast.
She was one of the better fighters, when she deigned to be. She had a keen eye and a strong arm, and a fine aim with the bow. Sarama thought she might be ruthless in a battle; might well bring herself to kill, for her people’s sake.
Danu, Sarama was less sure of. He walked behind his sister, lighter than she and quicker, with an effortless strength; but he lacked her edge. He was a gentler creature.
Most men were, when they did not egg each other on. Women in the tribes kept secret what was open knowledge here: that for sheer relentless ferocity, there was nothing like a woman.
The border was quiet. Tilia went back to the city to see that the fighters were ready and in their places. Sarama lingered for a little while, looking out across peaceful country, rolling green hills, little rivers flowing into the greater one that rolled past Three Birds, and a scattering of towns and villages in the hollows and along the rivers. Hereafter, if war stayed in this place, they would learn to build on hilltops and in places that could be defended.
Maybe war would not stay. Maybe the tribesmen would be driven out. Sarama had prayed for it in the temple this morning. She belonged to the Lady now, and to the Lady’s country. She wished peace on it, and freedom from war.
It might never have either, now that war had followed her here. But she could pray. The Lady might see fit to listen.
oOo
The day stretched ahead of them. The sun reached its zenith and hung there. When after an endless while it began to sink, a runner came with the word they had been waiting for.
“Horsemen! They’ve passed the Mother-hill. There are hundreds of them—they’re thick as locusts.”
Three Birds maintained its calm. Its fighters, ranked behind the ditch that warded the eastern road, sat or lounged at ease. They had taken a little bread and cheese, and drunk a wine made of fruits and flowers that was supposed to make them strong. It made them a little giddy, but no one seemed far gone in it.
They had heard the tales of the city that had fought. They were better prepared by far, and they knew how to fight. They were still, and wisely, on guard.
Sarama had let the Mare loose to graze along the ditch. But something, somewhat past noon, led her to call the Mare to her.
They came on slowly for a band of marauders, hardly faster than a walk. They were not as thick as locusts, but they were numerous; more than Sarama had expected. She saw banners and tokens of a great gathering of tribes, some that she knew, many that she did not. Someone—Agni?—had swept the steppe, and brought in every young rakehell that had ever vexed a tribe.
Not all of them were so very young, at that. There was a grizzled beard here and there, the face of priest or elder or a warrior who had outlived his battle-brothers.
She came to him last, the one she had been aware of from the moment the first rank of horsemen came over the hill.
He had grown. His shoulders were broader, his beard thicker. He rode the stallion who must have come to him at the Lady’s bidding, a tall red beauty with a crescent moon on his brow.
She had forgotten how tall a man could be, or how keenly carved her people’s faces were. Even their pale skin, their eyes blue or grey or green or Agni’s rare amber, their hair yellow or red or fair brown, were strange after brown faces, dark eyes, blue-black curling hair. Did she look as odd as that to the people here?
The horsemen rode down the hill, spreading out across the fields, trampling the grain that was near to harvest. Maybe they did not know that it was planted with care and great labor, and its loss would mean a lean winter. Certainly they did not care.
When the earth opened in front of them they stopped, the foremost starting, shying, tangling the ranks behind. The line bent like a bow, recoiling. But Agni sat his red stallion on the edge of the ditch, staring down at the stakes as Tilia had not so long ago.
His expression was difficult to read. Maybe it was surprise. Maybe, even, admiration.
He looked up. Sarama met his glance.
His eyes widened slightly: not surprise, that. Greeting, of a sort. Gladness? Maybe. Neither could escape the fact that they faced one another across a deep ditch filled with sharpened stakes.
He was the enemy. And yet he was her brother. The sight of him was like cool water in summer’s heat. She had been a stranger among strangers, even those she had come to love. This was her own blood, her own kin.
She doubted that he felt the same. He was a man, after all. He was, she could see, a king—and of more tribes than the one that he had been born to rule.
She spoke across the barrier, not loudly, but loud enough for him to hear. “Good day, brother. Have you come to conquer us?”
“‘Us’?” He raised his brows. “Are you their king, then?”
“Not likely,” said Sarama.
“Good,” he said, “because I’d not like to fight you for it.”
“Would you do that?”
He nodded. “This is the place the gods have led me to. I saw it in dreams every night as I rode here. It’s just as I dreamed.”
“Even this?” Sarama tilted her head toward the ditch.
“No,” he said. “But there was fire and war in my dream, and a rattling of spears. Did you muster these fighters? Can they actually fight?”
“We can fight.”
Sarama started. Danu’s voice was deep and deceptively soft, pitched to carry. It was utterly unlike him to put himself forward, still less to speak as if he were, by his lights, a woman.
But then this was a man who faced them. Danu must find him unbearably presumptuous.
Agni looked him up and down. “So. Do they all speak a decent human language here?”
“Only some of us,” Danu said. He had stepped out of the line of fighters, spear in hand. He leaned on it with ease that was insolence, hip cocked, chin up, and such a look about him that Sarama wished for a leash and a whip, to bring him to heel.
Agni was no better. There was no mistaking the challenge in his glance. Young males—hounds, bulls, or stallions; they were all the same. “And who are you? Are you anyone of note among these people?”
“Probably not,” said Danu. “I’m the Mother’s son.”
“Ah,” said Agni. “A prince.”
“A man,” Danu said. “No more, if no less.”
Sarama rode the Mare between them, treading delicately on the edge of the ditch. “Enough,” she said. “Take your men away, brother. Find another city to be king in. This one is not for you.”
“But it is,” Agni said. “I’m going to take it.”
“You may try,” said Sarama.
“You’d fight me?”
“Yes,” Sarama said. Her heart was not as steady as her voice, but that was stone, and sufficient.
“You’d betray your own kin?”
“Yes,” she said again.
His eyes narrowed. He was a stranger then, a man she knew and yet did not know at all.
He had seen at last the shape of her in the enveloping coat. He could not fail to see how Danu stood, how he glared across that barbed space.
“So,” he said. “That’s the way of it. If he’s the Mother’s son here, will you be Mother when the old one dies? Is that how it’s done?”
“No,” she said.
“No?” He arched a brow. “I don’t believe you. I
think we’re rivals here. Aren’t we?”
“We are whatever you force us to be.” Sarama backed the Mare away from the edge, holding his gaze, half wishing he might follow it and tumble into the ditch. But he did not move.
Not so the men behind him. They were shifting, restlessly as it seemed, but as she focused on them she saw a method in it. Spearmen to the front. Archers to the rear, stringing bows, fitting arrow to string.
They would fight. Agni might weaken in the last instant, but Sarama doubted that he would try to overrule them. They would call him fool and coward, words that no man could bear to hear.
She flicked her hand in the signal that she had agreed on with her own fighters. She did not look back to see what they did. They would be readying spears, stringing bows in their own turn. Hand to hand it could not be, not across three manlengths’ width of bristling trench, but thrown spears and well-aimed arrows could wound and kill well enough.
The moment stretched. The air had a taste of heated copper, of blood and fire. Neither would give the signal that would loose the arrows.
Strings could only stretch so long; archers’ arms were strong, but not strong enough to hold arrow nocked to string forever. And yet Sarama could not find in her the word that would begin the fight. No more, it seemed, could Agni.
A stir behind her almost—but not quite—brought her about. She would not turn her back on the horsemen.
They were staring at something in back of her, something that began in the distance and drew steadily closer. Sarama heard a flutter as of birds’ wrings, and the voices of birds.
The horsemen wore such a look of blank astonishment that Sarama dared to look over her shoulder.
It was only the Mother of Three Birds with the flock of her daughters. Her acolytes preceded them. A few of her sons followed, and others of the people behind. But what had struck the horsemen dumb was the escort that went with them: a shifting, twittering flock of bright-winged birds.
The birds had come out of the Lady’s wood to follow the Mother. Three white doves circled above her. She walked in stately calm, as if she went about every day in a cloud of wings.
Sarama’s fighters parted before her. Sarama half expected her to walk right over the ditch, to float on air or to sprout wings and fly like one of the birds, but her daughters set hand and shoulder to the bridge of wood that had been made to lie across the trench, swung it up and round and over to the other side. Then, as calmly as ever, the Mother walked across and stood in front of Agni.
He sat tall on his tall horse, and she was not a particularly tall woman. Still she towered before him. She said clearly in the language of his own people, that Sarama had not even known she knew, “Be welcome, king of the horsemen, in Three Birds.”
Sarama swayed on the Mare’s back. No one else seemed stunned, but most on this side could not understand the language of the tribes. The horsemen wore expressions half of smugness, half of disappointment. They had been hoping for a fight, but they had been too wise, their faces said, to honestly expect one.
And there was the Mother face to face with Agni, for he had slid from his stallion’s back. He was still much taller than she. She admired his height openly, as women did here. They were never circumspect about a man’s attractions.
“Come,” she said to him, and led him back across the bridge.
His men hesitated briefly, much too briefly for Sarama to persuade anyone to overset the bridge. It was wide enough for two to ride abreast, or for three to walk leading their horses. And so they did, all of them, leaving no one behind. They were not fools, to be trapped on the far side of a city’s defenses, with no way to come through if the people of the city chose to cut them off.
So much, thought Sarama, for the defending of Three Birds. In but a moment’s time, the Mother had set it all at naught, had given up the city without so much as a murmur.
Her people said nothing against her. Even Sarama’s fighters, even Danu, bowed their heads and acquiesced. A Mother could not choose wrongly, could not betray her people to an enemy. There was no space in their minds for such a thing.
69
Agni would never confess even to Sarama—especially to Sarama—how truly astonished he was, to be given this of all cities as a gift. He looked for a trap, for a subterfuge that would destroy him and all his men, but there was none. The city was open to him. The Mother led him through the circles and the curving ways, to her house that was the largest he had yet seen.
A great tribe of people lived in it, filling its many rooms. They broke camp and shifted elsewhere with all apparent willingness, to make space for him and for as many of his people as could be persuaded to sleep under a roof. The rest camped in a field just outside the city, on the westward side, where no ditch had been dug or defenses raised.
She was a great personage, this Mother of Three Birds. Her house was richer than Agni could have imagined, back on the steppe. There were even copper vessels, and in the room that he was given, there was an image of the goddess of these people, and it was made of gold.
They feasted in the fashion of this country, with a richness and a variety that were almost too much to conceive of. There were different kinds of wine, he discovered, and different ways to bake bread, and an art to herbs and sweetness that made every bite a novelty and a marvel. And yet for those who needed the refuge of simplicity, there was a whole ox roasted without embellishment, and bread very like that which they made on the steppe from the ground seeds of the wild grasses.
Sarama must have taught them to do that. Agni did not see or speak to her. For that matter, there were not as many women about the Mother as he remembered from the field. The servants were men, as they had been elsewhere.
The one who had stood so close to Sarama was rather excessively in evidence. He was, Agni began to understand, the chief of the Mother’s servants—what in a king’s tent would have been the first of his wives or the foremost of his daughters.
He did not carry himself like a woman, or like an effeminate, either. He was respectful without servility to the Mother and to the others of the women. To the guests he was perfectly and pointedly polite.
Agni studied him beneath lowered lids. Something about him must be extraordinary, if Sarama had let him take her to his bed. Agni could see nothing but a man of these people, pleasanter to look at than most, with shoulders as broad as the span of an aurochs’ horns, and a curly black beard. He spoke the language of the tribes well, better than Mika did. But then he had had better teaching.
Agni disliked him intensely. He must know what Agni was, not only the king of the horsemen but Sarama’s own brother, but he treated Agni as he did all the rest. The same courtesy. The same distance. He offered nothing that he did not give to every other guest in his mother’s house.
A tribesman would never have been so calm. A man who filled a woman’s belly without her kinsmen’s consent was either a gelding or dead. Here, it appeared, such things were of no consequence. Certainly this man had no shame of it, and no fear of the kinsman, either.
oOo
When the feast was done, when they were all filled to bursting and awash in wine, Agni went to a solitary bed. No woman presented herself to him or to any other. The women were gone.
Agni struggled with that understanding, through a haze of wine. Women gone. Only men in a silent house, and children from the sound of it: somewhere not too far away, a baby cried. No woman’s voice or presence.
This was the thing he had half dreaded. This was the reckoning. The women would come, would—
He walked, he thought, not badly, with steps only a little uncertain, out of the room with its golden goddess-image. He stepped carefully over fallen bodies of his men. Some were upright, if one were charitable.
One was full awake, aware, and behind him. And he had companions. Patir had kept his head.
So too Mika, and Taditi whom Agni had not remembered as staying with them in that house at all. He had thought her with the baggage as she
had chosen to be since—when? At least since the city that offered them a fight. Wild Rose, that was its name: now crushed and trodden underfoot.
Still Taditi was here, dressed as a rider but decently veiled. With such an escort he could venture the halls of the Lord of Skulls himself, the dark god who danced on the field of war. Was that his face, grinning out of the moon’s blind eye?
oOo
Agni walked in the moonlit city. It was quieter here than it would ever be in a camp of the tribes. Few people in this country kept dogs, and most of those herdsmen and hunters. City folk as a race had little use for them.
Therefore there was no barking and yapping to herald his passage, nor anyone out or about so late. He did not know where to go, precisely, but the temple in the city’s heart seemed a useful beginning.
It was dark and empty. He thought briefly of going within, of breaking the ban on men in the goddess’ place; but as more than once before, he lacked the stomach for it. He wandered on past to the darkness of trees that stood, of all places, in this city’s heart. It was as broad as the camp of a tribe, thick-woven with branches.
Through the branches Agni saw a glimmer of light. He followed it, and the others followed him, soft-footed on the leafmold. The ways were twisting and narrow, but no more so than they had been in the great wood between the steppe and the Lady’s country.
It was not so very far through this wall of trees. Its center was a broad open space, a circle of moonlit grass.
There were the women, all of them surely, a circle within the circle. His breath caught at the sight of them. They were all as near naked as made no matter, hair flowing loose over moon-whitened shoulders. They moved in a slow dance to no music that he could hear, breasts swaying, hips swinging, till the cords of their skirts rippled and swirled.
It was the most purely sensual dance that he had ever looked on, and yet there was nothing lascivious about it. It was pure female, pure worship of the goddess who had wrought women and men and all the pleasures of the flesh.
This was no sight that they meant man to see. They were making a great magic, women’s magic: drawing down the moon. It shivered in his blood.