by Judith Tarr
“I am going to tame her,” Agni said.
“She’ll tame you first,” said Mika.
“We’ll see about that,” Agni said. Mika clearly did not believe him; equally clearly he decided not to argue with such a perfection of folly.
Maybe it was folly. Maybe, by the gods, it was not.
oOo
Patir said nothing at all, which proved to Agni that he was of Mika’s mind: Agni was mad to press this thing. Taditi however made her opinion known in words as cutting as they were clear. “You marry that woman, you’ll never be the same again. She’ll have you bitted and bridled and broken to saddle.”
Agni did his best to be reasonable. “She will only do that if I let her.”
“She’ll see to it that you do the letting.” Taditi folded her arms and set her chin and looked terrifyingly grim. “It’s one thing to take the chieftain’s daughter—that’s tradition, and wisdom mostly, if a man wants to be king. But this isn’t the steppe. These people have no such customs, and no mind to adopt them. You think you want to take this woman in order to make you one of them—to win their acceptance. You’ll win nothing but the gelding’s portion, once she gets her claws in you.”
Agni shook his head stubbornly. “She’ll come round. You’ll see. After all, she gave in. She swore she’d do no such thing. I’ll be her master yet. Be sure of it.”
Taditi went off muttering about arrogance and young idiocy. Agni forbore to take her to task for it. She had always been outspoken. Here, in this country of outspoken women, she seemed if anything rather subdued.
She was not altogether comfortable here. Agni had been surprised to realize that. He would have thought that she would be at ease among people who were so much like her; but she had tired of the gentle, complaisant men, and the women irritated her with their boldness that far outmatched her own.
Still she had to endure, because Agni had no intention of leaving. Where would he go, after all? His tribe was barred to him. He had no mind to battle for a kingship on the steppe. This place, this title that he held—yes, this woman whom he meant to make his own—all were as they should be. He knew it in his belly, where one knew the deepest certainties.
The others would acquiesce in the end, because he was king, and because the gods were moving in him. Even Tilia knew it, and Tilia was the Lady’s child.
74
They made the Great Marriage under the first moon of autumn, a slender crescent hanging in the sky at sunset. Agni’s tribesmen, the people of Three Birds, traders who had come by the roads and on the river, everyone who had heard of the thing that was to be done, all came to see the king of the horsemen swear the great vows with the Mother’s heir of Three Birds.
Agni wore the coat that had been made for him when he was to be king of the White Horse people. Taditi had taken it when she left the tribe, and kept it for him—at what cost, she refused to tell him. She brought it out as he prepared to dress, and put aside the much lesser garment that he had meant to wear, and clothed him in the coat that was fit for a king. “Now we’ll make you beautiful,” she said.
She did her best. He went out scrubbed clean, his beard clipped close, his hair plaited tight and wound with beads and thread-thin strands of copper. There was a gift waiting for him from the Mother herself: a glorious thing, a collar of gold, heavy and gleaming, and an armlet of the same metal. They, with the torque that he had been given in that first of his conquered cities, weighed him down with splendor.
He was to wear no weapon. On that, the Mother had been most firm. No spear in his hand, no bow at his back, not even a knife at his belt. He must go to the Lady as one of her children, washed clean of blood.
If it would make him truly king in Three Birds, he would do it. The price was not too high. No one would threaten him here.
He walked out of the house that had been the Mother’s, into the long light of evening. The circles of the city were empty. They were all by the river, gathered in a great throng beside the curl and glisten of the water.
Agni had thought to ride there, but these were not horsemen. They asked that he come afoot. He did it because he was too proud to refuse, walking gingerly in his boots that were made to ride in.
He was aware of Taditi behind him, following him as she would never have done in the camp of a tribe. She was freer here by far, though she was quiet about it.
So escorted, he came with the last light of sunset to the field by the river. It was black and teeming with people, and set with torches like stars. A line of these guided him inward down a path left open for him. Eyes gleamed on him, catching the torchlight. Pale blurs of faces turned to follow him.
Under all those eyes he strode out as a man should. He walked alone: Taditi had slipped away amid the crowd.
Where he walked was light. The rest was darkness. His back prickled with the consciousness of it; of being utterly exposed, clear to any eye that saw, but of the people who surrounded him, he saw only shadows.
It was a test, he told himself. A proof of his courage. To do as he had been raised and trained never to do; to make himself vulnerable, and not flinch at it.
A murmur of voices had greeted and followed him, but as he walked on it subsided into silence. In that silence he became aware all at once of the beating of his heart, the hiss of his breath, the sound of his feet striking the ground.
Somewhere deep in it, a new sound grew. At first it seemed to come from the blood, a faint high singing, but as it grew in intensity, he knew it was no part of his body. It was a pipe, thin and high and twittering as a bird’s call. Just as he recognized it, another joined it, deeper, like a woman’s voice crooning wordlessly to a sleeping child. A drum wove into it, echoing the beat of Agni’s own pulse, but with a roll as of thunder. Then amid the thunder came a sound like the falling of rain, drop by drop tinkling into a pool: the music of plucked strings.
Birdcall and woman’s croon, thunder and rain: all the spirit of Three Birds caught and held in that mingled music. It carried him to the riverbank, to a half-moon of torches that sprang suddenly alight, blinding him.
When he could see again, he saw the shapes standing among the torches. Broad shadow-shapes like stones set in the turf by the roll of water: heavy shoulders, heavy breasts—for they were naked but for the blood-red skirts that women wore here. Their faces were blank, smooth oval masks, long slits of eyes.
Agni quelled the shudder of fear. Priests—priestesses—here went masked as they did among the tribes, masks that transformed their wearers into blank images of divinity.
It was eerie and strangely arousing to see those naked and powerfully female bodies and those sexless, featureless faces. Their skirts clothed them, not as women’s gowns did on the steppe, to protect their modesty, but to draw the eye to their sex. Not for concealment, but to flaunt their beauty. All of it, even its most secret places.
The masked women had stood still as the light first fell on them, but as Agni approached they began to move in a slow swaying dance. Their circle opened, swaying outward till it had taken Agni into itself and drawn him to its center.
There at last, stepping from deep shadow into the ruddy golden light of the torches, was Tilia. Agni looked for the Mother, but there was only Tilia, and no way to tell which of the dancers was the ruler of Three Birds. If any of them was.
Tilia was dressed, or not dressed, as the others were. But she wore no mask. Her hair flowed free down her back and over her breasts and shoulders, framing the broad oval of her face. It was unmistakably her face, unmasked and unconcealed, and yet it was as blank as one of the masks. No joy, no resentment. Not even welcome, though when he had paused in front of her, she took his hands in hers.
Her grip was warm and firm, no tremor in it. Agni fought to achieve the same.
The dancers circled them, flickering from shadow into light and from light into shadow. How anyone beyond could see, Agni could not imagine.
Even as the thought touched him, the circle spun outward, wheelin
g like a flock of birds, scattering in the rolling of drums and the sudden shrilling of the pipes. Agni stood alone with Tilia under the starlit sky, and a circle of open grass about them, but beyond it the great dark ring of people, thick as trees in the forest.
Then at last the Mother came forward, surrounded by acolytes with lamps that cast a gentler light than the torches. Each lamp was shaped like a bird. The young girls held them as if they had been birds indeed, cradling them, cherishing each fragile flame.
In that soft light, the Mother was as perfectly herself, as unmistakably human as the dancers had been inhuman. She wore the same skirt, flaunted the same bare breasts, but her face was bare, her hair as free as her daughter’s, and her head was crowned with woven stalks of grain.
Her eyes on Agni were warm, the first warmth that he had seen in any of them since he came down to the river. She even smiled, which made his heart quiver unaccountably.
Agni’s hands were joined to Tilia’s even yet across a space of stillness. The Mother laid her own over them.
Her hands were light; yet Agni felt the force of them as he could feel the sun’s strength on his face at midday. Just so had he seen a smith in the city, smelting copper in a forge. Fire had melted the lumpen ingot as ice melts into water. Then the smith had added another ingot, and it had melted into the first, till there was a single pool of molten copper.
Agni met Tilia’s eyes. They were wider than usual, and fixed on his face. Did he look as wild as that?
Still there was no word spoken. Only the music, and that had faded to a murmur.
The Mother’s voice rippled over it, rich and sweet. Tilia murmured the words in Agni’s own tongue, or as much of it as she had: a gift, and a great one. “My children,” the Mother said, with Tilia as her echo, “look at one another. See what you see. Look deep. Look long. And look well. This you must see with every day that passes, from now until your death.”
Agni’s belly tightened. To take, to hold, to be master of a woman—that, he knew. This—it bound them both. As the Mother had said: until death.
“Look,” she said. “Know this one beside whom you will walk, with whom you will bear and raise children, whose life will be your life, whose heart your heart. Look, and understand.”
Agni looked. He could not have done otherwise, even had he willed to. He saw a face limned in lamplight, the arch of dark brows, and eyes too dark to read. He saw beauty of a kind that his people never knew; darker, smoother, broader. He saw the night in her eyes, and stars caught in her hair. He saw himself reflected as in a dark pool: narrow face, blade of nose, sunburnt cheeks and ruddy hair and eyes the color of amber, like a lion’s, or like a goat’s.
He did not want to see how she saw him, even with a noble arc of horns and a fine long beard. He peered past that so-mocking image, far into the shadows where thoughts darted like fishes in a pool. He hunted her as he would hunt the red deer in a deep wood.
He found her in a singing silence, not sitting as he had expected, motionless as the image of a goddess, but standing erect, on guard, with a bow in her hand, and an arrow ready to nock to the string.
So warlike. So bold, and yet so much afraid.
Within him too she must find much the same; he on his tall red horse with spear and bow and long wicked knife. Marriage was a kind of war, he supposed: the Great Marriage more than most.
The Mother’s voice sounded soft in his ears. “See,” she said. “How different, and how very like. Such is my creation. Such is beauty, twofold: sun and moon, dark and light, woman and man. Be two now. Be two who are one.”
Hand locked in hand. Eye locked on eye. Heart beating—not quite together. Agni’s breath shuddered as his heart leaped, wavered, steadied. Beating as hers beat, stroke for stroke.
Words slipped away. The music, that had gone on unnoticed, swelled to fill the world. Voices wove into it, voices of women, voices of men, singing in no language that he knew, perhaps in no language at all: a ripple of pure sound. This was the song the stars sang; the song that swelled with the waters in spring, and fell silent with them under the weight of winter’s cold. But even in silence it went on, more beautiful than anything of earth.
This was like no rite he had ever known. It bound without oaths. It asked nothing of him, and yet it asked everything. To be one. No word of master or servant, man or woman, husband or wife. Simply—one.
He was not asked to accept or reject what was laid on him. Gods did not ask such things. They commanded. Mortals obeyed.
If he could have escaped, he should have done it long ago. His presence here was binding enough, and his hand in hers was all the oath that he was expected to swear. He was breathing as hard as he was, and her hands were no longer quite so steady.
“So mote it be,” said the Mother, spreading her arms to embrace them both.
Agni’s instinct cried to him to shrink and bolt. But he was stronger than that. He stood his ground.
The Mother’s warmth wrapped him about. Her breath was sweet. She smiled and kissed his brow, and kissed her daughter’s, and gently but irresistibly turned them to face one another.
There could be no doubt of what she wanted. Agni had never kissed a woman in the light before, in front of strangers. It froze him with shyness.
Tilia had no such scruples. She moved almost too quick to see, caught him and held him and kissed him till he gasped.
When she would have let him go, he caught her as she had caught him, and kissed her with all his art and passion. Her eyes were wide. He laughed as he drew back, laughed and embraced her and spun her about in sudden, wild elation.
It came from nowhere and everywhere, like the music. It was probably terror, but it felt like mad glee.
Everyone was laughing, singing, whirling in the same dance, the whole great crowd of them under the stars. All that had been solemn was suddenly wild with joy. They crowned Agni and Tilia with flowers, wound them with garlands about necks and arms and bodies; took them up and carried them, singing, far along the line of the river to a place as new as this morning.
It was a house made of green boughs, built under the branches of a great tree, with a smaller river flowing past it. From the greater river one could see only the loom of the tree’s crown. The house one could not see at all, nor the stream, nor the field of grass about it. It was a lovely place, and secret, and it was clear what Agni was expected to do here.
The throng did not linger as it would have on the steppe, though from what Agni could gather, their songs were quite as bawdy. They danced in a long winding skein, an endless line of them, round and round about the hut of branches, down along the stream, and back the way they had come.
75
Silence came slowly in the fading sounds of voices, pipes and drums and stamping of feet. The acolytes had left their lamps behind, a half-circle of them outside the house, and one glimmering within. Agni stood wrapped in flowers, feeling hot and rather tired.
He gathered his wits about him and mustered strength to step over the lamp in front of him and explore the house. Tilia caught him with his foot in midair.
“No,” she said. “Not that way.”
He lowered his foot. He had a brief, rebellious thought of entering the circle regardless, but he had sworn to undergo the rite in its proper form.
Tilia took his hand. “Now,” she said. “Jump.”
Agni felt a perfect fool, but jump he did, hand in hand with her, as high and far as they both could go. Right over the lamp, from darkness into light, from the great world to the shelter of the house. They came down lightly, still handlinked, turning face to face in the ring of light.
Tilia was smiling. At last. And at him, too, with no constraint that he could perceive. She looked him up and down with every appearance of pleasure. “Such a beautiful man,” she said.
Agni flushed. “And you,” he managed to say. “So beautiful.”
“Yes,” she said. There was no modesty in her. She tugged him with her into the fragrant dimness
of the hut. It was all bark-brown and leafy green within. The bed was of sweet grasses under a woven coverlet. Jars along the wall yielded wine and mead, fruits cured in honey, cheeses, dried fish and cured meat.
Agni looked round from tasting the last. “How long are we supposed to stay here?”
Tilia shrugged. “Until it’s time to leave,” she said.
“What, days? Months? Years?”
“As long as we need,” she said.
These people were like that. Vague; frustrating.
Agni did not mean to be frustrated on this of all nights. He shrugged as she had, and tried to mimic her calm. “Well then,” he said. Which was all he could think of to say.
“Indeed,” said Tilia.
He drew a breath, let it go. Did she do the same? He stepped toward her, just as she moved toward him. They nearly collided: a snort of laughter, quickly suppressed. Her eyes were dancing with it.
She was nothing like Rudira, not in any slightest respect. Even the heat of her was different. Cleaner, somehow. Lighter. She had washed herself in a mingling of scents, herb-green, flower-sweet.
Her skin was as soft as a child’s. He ran his finger down the line of her cheek, her shoulder, her breast.
Her nipples were large and dark, like her eyes. He traced the spiral of the dance about them. She shivered a little with pleasure, and caught his hands when they would have withdrawn. Her back arched. Her breasts flowed over his palms, soft and yet surprisingly firm.
All the while he was lost in her and she should have been lost in the things that he did to her, she was finding and loosing the fastenings of his clothing, freeing him from it, all of it. The air was soft on his skin.
Her hands were light, tickling and teasing. They had no need to stroke his shaft erect. It was raised long since, straight as a spear.
She circled it with her fingers. He quivered. Her grip tightened: soft, soft, but with a promise of strength.
He stilled. Her fingers loosened. She smiled.