White Mare's Daughter

by Judith Tarr

  But Taditi’s tale of women and their fashions had set his mind on a track as daring as it was strange. All things began somewhere—even festivals. Surely those had begun in the dawn time, or so it was said.

  But was this not a dawn of its own? There had never been horsemen in this country before. They were changing the world. If the world changed—might not custom change also?

  He clasped his knees and rocked. People would object. People objected to changes; and changes in sacred things were, to most, unthinkable.

  It must be the Mare’s blood in Agni that made him so different. If people objected strongly enough, they well might kill him. Or they would refuse to follow him, to perform the rites as he had altered them. He was but a king, after all, and the gods’ servant. He was not a god himself.

  oOo

  “There is a way,” said Danu.

  Agni did not know how it happened that he had told Danu, of all people, what he was thinking of. He had gone in search of Sarama or Tilia or even the Mother, and found the Mother’s son looking after the baby.

  It was a warm morning, almost summer-warm, and Danu had brought his daughter out onto the doorstep. She was tiny still, but not as wizened as she had been when she was born.

  Agni peered into her face. She startled him: she peered back.

  He grimaced at her. She smiled as sweetly as her mother ever could, and with much the same air of distraction, too.

  “Here,” Danu said.

  Agni found himself with an armful of baby. For lack of greater inspiration, he cradled her as he had seen her father do, and rocked her. She sighed and smacked her lips and went to sleep.

  “Amazing,” Danu said. “She howls for everyone else but me.”

  “She knows her kin,” said Agni.

  Danu smiled, leaning back against the house-wall. It was always a little startling to see him with baby in arms or spoon in hand, doing women’s work. That strong face, those heavy shoulders, should have marked a great warrior. Nor was he at all an ill hand with bow or boar-spear; but it was obvious that he preferred this gentler occupation.

  And Agni found himself unburdening to this man whom he did not like and whom he most certainly did not admire. Danu heard him out with evident attention. When Agni was done he said, “There is a way. If you make your sacrifice and we make ours, and we all come together after and dance till dawn, might not both sides be satisfied?”

  “That’s not a mingling,” Agni said.

  “It’s as much as anybody will accept. You know that or you’d not have asked me.”

  Sometimes Agni could not fathom these people’s logic. The men thought like women, and the women thought like nothing he could put a name to. And yet, rather to his dismay, Danu made perfect sense. “You don’t think we can make a new rite.”

  “I think time can change much,” Danu said, “but there hasn’t been enough of it yet. If we dance together—that’s enough. For now.”

  The baby stirred in Agni’s arms, annoyed that he had stopped rocking her to talk to her father. He did as she clearly bade, watching her face, seeing Sarama in the shape of the chin, the molding of the brow; but the rest was Danu. “Our children will make a rite of their own,” he said.

  “I think so.” Danu seemed calm about it. He walked close to the Lady always; probably he had seen it all already, and schooled himself to accept it.

  Agni had had the answer he was looking for, but he lingered for a while. It was pleasant here, warm in the sun, with the baby asleep and her father humming softly to himself. The world and its troubles seemed far away.

  This must be what it was to be one of the Lady’s children. Sunlit peace. Never any doubts, and few fears. Their nights were moonlit and full of stars. Dark things never walked there.

  Agni shook himself, lightly lest he wake the baby. Nothing was ever as simple as that, even here.

  He handed Rani to her father, who took her smoothly, so that she never stirred.

  Danu smiled. Agni found himself smiling back, and still smiling as he walked away.

  He did not like Danu at all. And yet the man was wise in his way, and he was pleasant company. All things considered.

  80

  Camp and city held their festivals on the same days, by agreement between Agni and the Mother. Great Sacrifice and Spring Planting, sacrifice of blood and sacrifice of wine and seed, one in the camp, one in the city—and dancing all together after.

  That was the pact they made. Agni was reasonably certain that the rites would go as they should go. But the dancing might be more difficult. He made sure that word was spread: any man caught taking a woman against her will, no matter how mild the protest, would be seized and punished according to the magnitude of his crime. Even to gelding or death, if the offense warranted.

  “And if one of the women takes one of us against his will?” one wag wanted to know.

  “They’ll pray over her,” said someone else, “and make her live in his tent for a month.”

  The men who were near seemed to find that vastly funny. Agni failed to see the humor in it. There was nothing amusing about rape. Rahim had died for it. Agni had been outcast for an accusation of it.

  Memories were short, and it had been a fair while since anyone enjoyed a festival. Agni hoped that his prohibition would be enough—and that the Mother would bid her women be cautious.

  oOo

  The first sacrifice, sacrifice of the Hound, went as it should go. The Hound died well. His blood flowed red on this alien earth. And in the dancing after, there was no trouble that Agni could discern.

  So too the second day, the sacrifice of the Bull, and the second dance. As freely as the wine flowed, as easily as the people went back and forth from camp to city, still no one ventured beyond the limits that had been set.

  Last year Agni had been an exile in search of a dream that the gods had laid on him. There had been no Great Sacrifice in his camp. The year before . . . Sarama had come back on the day of the Bull, this day indeed, and Agni had looked ahead to the taking of his stallion and the gaining of the kingship.

  Now he sat on the royal horsehide in the circle of elders, and it was not as dull as he remembered. He could have risen and joined the dance; the king was not forbidden.

  In a little while he would. At the moment he was content to sit as a king sits, and to watch the dance wind its skein through the camp and out into the city.

  They danced too, the Lady’s people, a spiral dance remarkably like the dance of the Sacrifice. There was the beginning of a common rite. He saw how it was, men and women dancing together, dark heads and fair, hand linked with hand under the waxing moon.

  Here, he thought. Here it began. And maybe someday their rites would mingle, too, as they mingled in the dance.

  Somewhere in the city, Tilia and the Mother sat as Agni was sitting, or so he supposed. Agni wondered if Tilia found it as dull as he had when he was the heir and not the king. Or maybe they performed a rite in the temple, one of their women’s rites that no man was allowed to see. There were a great many of those. He would be surprised, after all, if there was not one tonight.

  He rose at last when the moon rode high overhead, but he did not go to join the dancers. He wandered off instead, first to relieve himself, then simply to walk along the river. The air was soft, no touch of frost—much softer than it would be on the steppe, this early in the year. Scents of tilled earth, new grass, spring flowers, rose up with the dewfall, strong enough to dizzy him.

  He wandered out past the horse-herds, past the pen where the Stallion waited, the one who had been chosen for tomorrow’s sacrifice. The priests—and Agni among them—had chosen a black this year, night-dark without glimmer of white. He was a shadow on shadow in the night, a soft snort, the stamp of a hoof on the yielding ground.

  Agni bowed low to him. He pawed restlessly, begging to be let out, to run with his fellows under the moon.

  “Tomorrow,” Agni said to him, “O blessed, you’ll run the fields in the god
s’ country. Then you’ll never be bound again.”

  oOo

  “So that is a royal sacrifice.”

  Agni caught himself before he wheeled and bolted. Tilia was standing next to him as if she had been there from the beginning. She wore what women wore here in festivals, the skirt that was their sacred garment, that they won when they came to womanhood; she was bare else, as they always were before their goddess, with her hair loose and her breasts like twin moons, round and full.

  She slipped her arm through his, leaning her head against his shoulder, as beautifully trusting as a child. But that was no child’s body pressed lightly against his, and no child’s voice either that said, “Come worship the Lady with me.”

  Agni was more than glad to oblige, but he paused. “In the fields? In the—the burrows?”

  “Furrows,” she said with a ripple of laughter. “Where we’ll sow the seeds of the harvest in the morning. Tonight we’ll sow another kind of seed.”

  He caught himself blushing. Thank the gods, it was too dark for her to see. “You people are so—close to the earth.”

  “Earthy,” she said. “How not? We’re Earth Mother’s own.”

  She tugged at him. Agni followed. “You came for me,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You didn’t have to. Did you? You could have taken anyone you pleased.”

  “I wanted you.”

  Agni drew a slow breath. He did not want her to know how dizzily happy she had made him. Of course she had come to him. She was his wife. And yet . . .

  And yet her custom had not required it, and she would not have cared if Agni had objected to her taking another man. She had chosen Agni because she wanted him, not because she was required to do it.

  Such a world this was, that he should be trying not to grin like a mad thing because his own wife wanted him in her bed.

  Or, as it happened, in a furrow near the river, in the rich scent of turned earth, under the high vault of the stars. She lay in the furrow, all mingled with the earth, and bade him take her so.

  He remembered a day on a high hilltop, not long after he took Three Birds; how Earth Mother had come to him and bidden him love her. This was Earth Mother’s child, warm flesh and welcoming arms, mortal beyond a doubt, and yet all the sweeter for it.

  Her body that he had come to know so well, her scent with its hint of spices, wrapped him about. He held himself above her, looking down at her. So beautiful, so perfectly matched and mated, body joined to body in the moon’s glimmer.

  She arched under him, taking him deep into herself. He gasped. Of its own accord, his body quickened its pace.

  The end of it took him by surprise; seized him and shook him and left him limp on the earth.

  The night air was cool on his fevered skin. He rolled onto his back, baring his body to the moon.

  Tilia lay propped on her elbow beside him, drinking in the sight of him. Her smile was rich and warm, like cream. “I wanted you,” she said as if their conversation had not been interrupted. And then: “I want to watch your sacrifice tomorrow.”

  His stomach clenched. The warmth of release vanished. He was cold, cold and baffled. “What? Why? Don’t you have rites of your own?”

  “They don’t require my presence,” she said.

  “So why?”

  “I want to see,” she said.

  “There’s blood,” he said. “There’s killing.”

  “I know,” said Tilia.

  “I have to do the killing. I’m the priest of the sacrifice. It has to be the king, you see. Or the king’s heir.”

  “I know,” she said. “Your sister told me.”

  “Why? So that you can hate me?”

  She answered that with silence, which maybe was the best that it deserved.

  He drew a deep and calming breath. “Did she also tell you that women don’t attend the sacrifice?”

  “Women from the tents,” she said. “The Lady’s servants are another matter.”

  “Then I may attend the rite in the temple?”

  She bridled. “No man attends—” She broke off. “That’s different.”

  “How is it different?”

  “Because it’s a women’s rite,” she said.

  “This is a men’s rite,” said Agni.

  She hissed. She was not going to see it. But Agni was not going to give in, either.

  “A bargain,” he said. “You come to the sacrifice of the Stallion. I go to the Lady’s rite.”

  “We could just come,” she said.

  “So could I,” said Agni.

  There: impasse.

  She sat up suddenly, curling into a knot. “You don’t make anything easy,” she said.

  He widened his eyes. “Well then. Who’d have thought it? Here you’ve been wearing us away like water on stone, and now the stone seems a little hard. This is what a bargain is. A trade. If you give, I give. If you take, I take something else. You come to the sacrifice, I go to the temple.”

  “I can’t give you that,” she said.

  “Then who can? The Mother?”

  “If the Lady speaks through her.”

  “Then I’ll ask the Mother,” he said, “in the morning.”

  She unknotted. “And if she says no?”

  “No bargain,” he said.

  “You are a hard man,” said Tilia.

  “No,” he said. “I’m as soft as water, for a tribesman. It’s your men who are softer yet.”

  “Men should be soft,” she said. “If they’re not . . . they have so little strength of will, and so much strength of body. They do whatever they take it into their heads to do. Steal, rape, kill.”

  He shook his head, not to deny what she said, but to shake it out of his mind. He must not grow angry. Not now. What she said, he had heard before, from her, from others of these women. For all he knew or cared, it was the perfect truth.

  But he was making a world here. He had to remember that. There was no little pride, too, in proving that a man could be as strong in spirit as a woman.

  Therefore he held his peace except to say, “I’ll speak with the Mother.”

  She nodded. The little distance between them might have been as broad as the steppe.

  He rose and gathered his clothes together. She watched him but did not try to stop him.

  He would sleep in his tent tonight. She would come there, or she would not. That was hers to choose.

  Maybe he was a hard man after all. Good, then. He was a proper tribesman.

  oOo

  Agni approached the Mother with something very close to trepidation. She heard him out with that air of hers, as if nothing had ever surprised her or could surprise her. And when he was done, she said, “Yes.”

  His teeth clicked together. “Yes?”

  “Yes, you may watch the rite.”

  “But—”

  She sat in unruffled serenity, sitting as she-king over the planting as Agni had sat as king over the dancing. “You may watch,” she said, “from the door. You may not speak. You would be advised not to move. Be eyes only. Be nothing else.”

  “I won’t go blind? I won’t be struck dead?”

  “Does that happen in your country?”

  Her eyes were not even on Agni. He followed the line of her gaze, out over the southern field, the Lady’s field, where row after row of people—men, women, children—sowed seed in the tilled earth. The day before, they had harrowed it; and the day before that, broken the sods, plowed and turned it. They had made a rite of it, made this field sacred, the first field and the field that would make the pattern for all the others.

  He watched the sowers in the lead, the people behind them closing the furrows, and the children with great fans of leaves or sheets of cloth, driving the birds away.

  Just after a chattering flock erupted into the air, Agni answered the Mother’s question. “It doesn’t happen here? There’s no punishment for the man who trespasses on the Lady’s rite?”

  �
�No man would do such a thing.”

  “Not even for temptation? To see what is so secret that he’s never to be part of it?”

  “No,” said the Mother.

  “And you say that men are undisciplined.”

  “We teach them to control themselves,” the Mother said.

  “But you won’t let them stand face to face with the Lady.”

  Her smile, though faint, reminded him distinctly of Tilia at her most recalcitrant. “The Lady is wherever her children are. Male children as much as female.”

  “But only women may enter her most sacred places.”

  “And only a man may enter a woman’s most secret places. Should we alter that, too? Or object to it?”

  “Yet you will allow me in the temple,” Agni said before matters got any more out of hand. He hoped that she could not see how he blushed; though that was a vain hope, with his fair skin.

  She forbore to remark on it, which was a mercy. She said, “The world changes. A man sets foot in the temple, and women see blood sacrifice in a field that was once theirs. The Lady wills this; for what reason, no one mortal knows.”

  “And you never fail to do as the Lady wills.”

  “That is my duty and my office,” she said.

  “Do you never doubt? Ever? At all?”

  “Does it matter if I do?”

  “To me it does.”

  She regarded him for a moment. He watched her reflect that to his people he was as she was: first of them all, leader and guide, and sacrifice too if need be. She did not approve of his holding such an office, male that he was and ill-schooled in the arts of serenity, but she could hardly deny that he held it.

  When she spoke, it was to the office and not to the man. “Yes. Yes, I doubt, and I fear, too. The Lady speaks to me, but not always in ways that I can understand. I must interpret her signs and omens, and hope that I interpret them rightly. And always I must preserve the image of calm, because if a Mother is frightened, her people will be terrified.”

  “Yes,” Agni said. “Except that for us, it’s not calm we cultivate; it’s stern authority, and the image of strength.”

  “Will you look stronger if you see how we worship the Lady?”