by Judith Tarr
She could not help but notice him. What she thought, she was not telling.
She happened by on her own, sometimes when he was resting in the house that had been her Mother’s, more often when he sat on the horsehide and settled affairs for his men. Her people never came to him. His came often, as they properly should, to pay their respects, to bring him word of his people who had gone far afield, to bid him settle quarrels and confirm alliances.
She would come in the midst of this, hovering about the edges, not seeming to watch, but inescapably present. She was testing her skill in their language, she would say if anyone asked.
Agni made sure that someone did ask—and he laughed at the answer. That might have driven a tribesman away, but she stayed where she was. She had pride and to spare, but it was a different kind of pride. She would face even laughter, before she would retreat.
They danced around one another. There were other broad-hipped beauties casting eyes on Agni, but he was in no mood for them. He wanted Tilia. He wanted her, he realized, very much.
oOo
He dreamed on a night of thunder and of rain, between the crashing of the thunder and the pounding of the rain. It was different inside a house, under a roof. He kept waking, or dreaming that he waked, and falling fast asleep again.
Somewhere between waking and sleep, on the edge of the dream-country, he stood in a field of grass the color of mist and rain. The sky was the soft sky of morning, casting a grey veil across the sun.
Someone walked toward him through the colorless grass under the colorless sky. No more color was in the stranger than in the rest of the world. It was a shrouded shape, a woman’s perhaps, for that was a woman’s veil and mantle. It seemed not quite solid; it shimmered a little as it moved, as mist will when the wind scatters it.
Agni waited for it. He was bound to the earth, still and solid as a stone. A stone’s weight dragged at his shoulders, his arms and legs. He could not have moved even if he had willed to.
As the shape drew closer he saw more clearly that it was a woman’s. The face was hidden altogether in veils, but the wind molded the mantle to the unmistakable curve of hip and breast.
He could see it very clearly, even the taut nipples, and the navel in the smooth rounded belly, and the soft mound at the meeting of the thighs. It was no such goddess-glory as the women here, more slender by far though womanly enough. It was, he thought with the detachment of dream, a woman of the tribes: taller, narrower, more quick and yet less strong in its movements.
It stopped just out of his reach. He could not see its face at all. Veils and mist obscured it.
It stretched out its arms. Its hands were white, white as bone, with long restless fingers. They made him think of the roots of trees, or of weeds reaching up through water, weaving and swaying. And yet there was something about them that made him think of death, of the worms that prey on carrion, and of bleached bone.
Dreams were great magic and great portents. One did not contest a dream. And yet Agni yearned to escape from this one. Thrice now he had dreamed a white horror of a woman. Thrice he had been given this omen, warning, whatever it was.
He could not move at all. His skin shuddered at the approach of those unearthly fingers. They never touched him, never quite.
A voice spoke to him out of the veils. It was a woman’s voice, clear, not unpleasant: eerie coming from such strangeness. He knew it very well, and knowing it, searched the veils for sign of Rudira’s face. But there was only grey blankness.
“Agni,” she said. “King of the outcast people, lord of the tribes that went into the west. Did you hope that none would follow you?”
The dream compelled him; it roused his tongue to answer. “I hoped for nothing. I went where the gods led.”
She laughed, her old familiar laugh, sweet and lilting. “You went where I made you go. I wanted to be a king’s wife. Through you I won it.”
“And it tastes of ashes?” Agni could not help but ask.
She laughed again, a ripple like bright water, but with shadows stirring beneath. “It tastes of honey from the comb. Did I harm you, after all? We both have what we wanted. You are a king, and I am a king’s wife.”
“You betrayed me,” said Agni.
“I gave you into the gods’ hands.” She swayed closer. Her veils melted as such things will in dreams. She was all as he remembered her, skin as white as new milk, hair as pale as moonlight, eyes like rain on clear water. She who had seemed richly curved among the women of the tribes, now seemed slight and even fragile, with her high round breasts and her narrow waist and her hips hardly wider than a boy’s.
Yet still he could not see her face. Her body he remembered vividly. So many days, such a stretch of seasons since he had held her in his arms, and he remembered every line of her. Her scent, her softness, even the way her hair grew on her forehead—everything was as clear as if he had lain with her just this morning.
She took him into her as she had always done, with a kind of breathless leap and cling, wrapping legs about him, holding him tight when he would have recoiled in startlement. Her grip was soft but very strong, stronger than it had ever been in the waking world.
Resistance only made her cling the closer. She roused him as only she had ever been able to do, and warmed him to burning.
There was no woman like her. Even as he knew with perfect clarity what she was, that she had no honor nor knew the meaning of loyalty—still he wanted her. Even when she had drained him dry, milked him of his seed and left him gasping, her body made his blood sing.
It was a madness, a demon in him. A demon with her face.
He covered her with kisses—with, he thought, clever intent. But she arched away as he drew near to her face, swayed and wove and turned, so that he never touched her lips or her cheeks. Her hands were as light as kisses, as strong as blows. She shaped him as Earth Mother shaped the world, molded of clay, soft and malleable in her fingers.
He did not want to be molded. He wanted to take her as one can in dreams, again and again, no weariness, no need to rest. But she held all the power. Her strong white hands, her drifting veils, were image and trappings of great magic.
The Rudira of the waking world was rumored to be a witch of a line of witches; and for a certainty she had power to drive a man mad. But she had never been as this dream-Rudira was. This was the earth’s own power, goddess-power. It thrummed in his bones.
“You would take the woman of the Lady’s people in the Great Marriage,” she said, cooing the words as if to a loved child. “Do you believe that the Lady would approve of such a thing?”
“Skyfather wills it,” Agni said.
“Ah,” she said. “He is her son. They are all her sons, the gods, or her sons’ sons. She let them loose when they were born, let them run as they pleased. But she will bring them back to hand.”
“Not through me,” Agni said.
“If you take the Mother’s heir to wife, she will hold you in the palm of her hand.”
“Skyfather holds his hand over me,” Agni said.
She swayed closer. “You want her?” Her voice was a whisper. “You lust after her?”
“I want her country,” he said. “I want her people’s loyalty.”
“And you want her,” said Rudira.
He could not lie to a dream. “She is beautiful,” he said.
“More beautiful than I?”
“No one is more beautiful than you,” he said, and he meant it. But when he had said it, he remembered a smooth brown face, a pair of eyes as great as a doe’s but never as gentle, a tumble of blue-black hair.
Beside that, this woman of the tribes seemed thin and bloodless. Her body that had seemed so ripely curved was pared to the bone, her breasts shrunken, her ribs sharp-caned beneath the skin.
He reached again for the veil; looked again to be thwarted. But before she slipped away, his hand caught at fabric as softly yielding as mist.
It shredded and tore. He looked into her face
.
No flesh at all. White bone, black pits of eyes, the ceaseless, relentless grin of the death’s-head. Laughter echoed from the hollow skull. “Am I not beautiful?” her voice demanded, sweet as ever. “Am I not the fairest of all the living?”
It was sweet, that voice, and yet it was not Rudira’s. For a stretching while he did not know it. But it did not mean him to escape so easily.
In the shadows on the naked bone, he saw another face than Rudira’s. A face less beautiful and less sleekly sure of itself. The face of a woman of the Red Deer, a woman who died because of the child that he had set in her.
“You are dead,” he said. “You were laid to rest. Begone! You have no power over me.”
She laughed at him, sweet and terrible. Her laughter followed him all the way out of the dream-place and into the land of the living. He woke with the memory of it echoing in his skull.
72
The coming of the horsemen changed everything. And yet if one lived from moment to moment, the Lady’s world was much as it had always been. Then one looked up and met eyes that were blue or grey or green or even, occasionally, amber, set in a narrow blade-nosed face.
The women thought them handsome, these tall narrow men with their pale skin and their odd-colored hair. In Danu’s eyes they were frankly ugly.
He did not know why he disliked them so intensely. They had not brought the horrors of his dreams. They were here, that was all, eating what they were fed, filling the fields with their camp. The harvest promised to be rich enough to feed these extra mouths; no one expected a lean winter after all, though it would not be as fat or the storehouses as full as in other good years.
So far the horsemen had taken little that was not given them, nor shown aught worse than bad manners and ignorance of proper courtesy. Sarama had warned the women to expect rudeness beyond their easy belief, and there had been some of that. But nothing so grievous as to require the Lady’s mercy.
Catin and the Mother and the people of Larchwood were gone. They had left as the horsemen drew near to Three Birds, gone away westward to, they said, warn the cities beyond.
Tilia had not been charitable in her opinion of their departure. “We won’t see them again,” she had said after the last straggler climbed the hill to the west and disappeared.
“I think we will,” Danu said. “Catin will come back. She won’t be able to help herself. She has to face this dream, face it and let it make her stronger.”
“She’s not strong enough to begin with,” said Tilia, “to think of being stronger.”
Danu did not argue with her. She believed what she believed. He knew what he knew. And the horsemen came, and they forgot that they had come near a quarrel over Catin.
Now, with the horsemen here and showing no sign of going on, Danu understood a little how Catin could so dislike Sarama. Danu loved the Mare’s servant. But Sarama’s brother—now there was a man who made him bristle and snarl.
oOo
Sarama did not see why they should so dislike one another. “You could be friends,” she said. “He’s not a ruthless warmonger as some are; mostly he’s like me, though he’d be hard pressed to admit it. He can tell you all the stories, what I teethed on and how I used to quarrel, and what I was like before my breasts budded. All the things a brother knows.”
“I don’t need to know them,” Danu said.
It was a rare quiet moment at midday. She had come back to the house they were living in, for what reason he had not happened to ask. He was bringing in the washing, overseeing the line of servants and acolytes and some of his brothers and sisters as they brought up new-dried armloads from the field by the river. The outer room of this smaller, crowded house was full of the scent of sun and grass and new-washed cloth.
Sarama pressed against the wall to let Beki pass with a billowing heap of bedding. Danu’s second in the house warmed her with a smile. She returned it somewhat abstractedly. “I think you’re jealous,” she said to Danu.
“Probably,” he said. “I know he is. What is his trouble? Is he angry because you didn’t ask his leave before you chose me?”
Her glance was a little surprised, a little pleased—and it stung a little, because of what else it said. He had startled her by understanding this thing about the tribes; as if he had neither wits nor perception, nor could learn her customs as she had learned his.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, he’s unhappy—more with me than with you. If he were other than he is, he could have killed you and flogged me, and so preserved the honor of the tribe.”
“He is generous, then,” Danu said. “And merciful.”
“And you dislike him as much as ever.”
He shrugged uncomfortably. “He makes me feel as if I’m less than I am.”
“All,” she said, as if that explained it all. She did not linger much longer; she went out while he was settling the disposal of a great amount of bedding in a house somewhat too small for as many people as were living in it. Which, he reflected uncharitably, was another cause to dislike the king of the horsemen, for displacing them all and never acting as if he understood the sacrifice.
It was all very petty. He should master himself and practice discipline, grow strong enough in his spirit to be, if not friendly, then suitably amiable toward Sarama’s brother. Even if the man had gone so far as to ask for Tilia as a wife.
oOo
Not long after Sarama left, when the washing was put away as best it might be and Danu was considering the prospect of a few moments to himself, Tilia came in as Sarama had, as women had a way of doing: taking no notice of the bustle around them, aiming straight for Danu and bidding him wait on their pleasure. Which, with Tilia, was to take refuge in the kitchen garden. There among the lettuces and the peas on their vines and the beans growing up over the wall, she said, “I’m going to give the horseman what he wants.”
Danu had no words to say to that.
“Don’t look so flattened,” she said. “You had to have known I’d give in. He won’t let go till he has what he’s asking for.”
“He’s asking for you,” Danu said. His tongue stumbled a bit still, but it did his bidding.
“Yes,” she said. “He wants me.”
“Do you want him?”
She narrowed her eyes—as if she had any need, now, to think on her answer. “If he were passing through as he did elsewhere, and if he were behaving himself with reasonable propriety, I’d have taken him to my bed long since.”
“You like him,” Danu said. He did not mean his voice to sound so flat.
“He interests me,” she said.
“Enough to bind yourself to him in the Great Marriage?”
“There,” she said. “There, you see? You can think like him. Think like me. He will bind himself to me. That may be more than he bargained for.”
“And he can’t escape it once it’s done.” Danu felt his lips stretch in a slow smile. “You are wicked.”
She stooped and plucked a lettuce and nibbled on it reflectively. “That’s what the Mother said.”
Danu raised a brow. “Does she disapprove?”
“Not at all,” Tilia said. “She says the horsemen will learn to understand a different kind of power. I’m to teach it to that one first—since he reckons himself higher than a Mother.”
“He could kill you,” said Danu, “if he became very angry.”
“So will any animal if it’s mishandled,” she said, as calm as ever. “I’ll remember what he is. Don’t fret for me on that account.”
“Maybe I’ll spare a little fret for him,” Danu said. “He’s a proud man. You’ll break his pride.”
“If that’s the way of it,” she said, “then so be it.”
Tilia went away as Sarama had, with precious little pause for farewell. Danu considered indulging in resentment, but none of them—for he reckoned Agni with the rest—would trouble to notice or to care. They would all do what they pleased to do. His wanting or not wanting meant nothing to them.
oOo
In that mood, and rather inevitably, he came on Agni himself near the hayfield that had become a camp. Danu was going to ride the horse he had been given, a bit of generosity that he understood all too well: he must not embarrass Sarama’s kin by failing in that essential art.
Agni also was afoot, and seemed to be going to find his own horse, the red stallion that ruled the herds as Agni ruled the men who had followed him. He greeted Danu with a nod, amiable enough if not precisely warm; but these tribesmen were always cool with strangers. It was because, Sarama had told Danu once, any stranger might be bent on killing.
“Animals are like that,” Danu had said then. “Not humans.”
She had shrugged and gone on thinking thoughts that no one of the Lady’s country could bear to think.
Agni’s greeting was warm enough for what it was. He seemed to bear Danu no enmity.
Danu said it straight out, without preamble and without embellishment. “My sister is going to give you what you ask for.”
Agni stopped short. Danu was gratified to see the shock that came first, and to see how long it took him to ease back into his usual insouciance.
“Is she?” he asked at last, with a touch of breathlessness still. “What price is she going to put on it?”
“Price?” Danu did not need to pretend incomprehension. He honestly did not understand.
“Price,” Agni said with carefully nurtured patience. “What she expects in return, if she gives me what I ask for.”
“She’ll get your promise to hold off the horsemen who come after, and your voice in their counsels—while she goes on as she always has, being the heir of Three Birds.”
“So,” said Agni. “She expects to go on. What if she discovers that our wives live in the tents and never go out?”
“You’ll not ask that of her,” Danu said, and hoped he sounded as if he believed it. “She’s no caged bird, nor ever will be.”
“And you,” Agni said. “Are you?”