by Judith Tarr
“I will look stronger if I trade what your daughter asked, for a favor of equal value.”
“Ah,” said the Mother. “It’s all bargains and trade. And seeming strength.”
“Isn’t that what ruling is?”
“Some of it,” she said. And after a pause: “We gather in the temple at moonrise.”
“We sacrifice the Stallion at noon,” he said.
She nodded. He nodded. It was not perfect amity, but it was agreement. It would do.
81
The Stallion died as the sun touched its zenith. He did not come quietly, but struggled and fought; he made a war of his sacrifice.
Agni hardly needed an omen so clear, but it seemed the gods were determined to leave no doubt. This bloodless conquest would not endure. Blood would come, and battle.
The Stallion died as an enemy dies, fighting his death. Agni conquered because he must; because he could do no other.
He earned this new and royal horsehide. When it was taken and the sacrifice all completed, the old hide, the hide of the stallion that had been Rahim’s, was folded and blessed and given to the gods on the pyre of the sacrifice. The smoke of it was rank, rising to blue heaven.
Even an ill sacrifice was sweet to the gods. Some of the tribesmen were afraid; Agni saw the rolling of eyes and the flicking of fingers in signs against evil. They were blaming the women who stood apart, raised on a hilltop, watching. Ill luck, the men said, and the gods’ curse, that a company of females should lay eyes on the men’s rite.
It was not the women’s fault that the gods were driving all the tribes into the west. They were no more to be blamed for it than the grass that catches the lightning and sets the steppe afire.
oOo
He did what he could to calm his people, by spreading word that the omens were never as ill as they seemed; that they were simply a promise of war. Had not they all been hoping for just such a thing? Some believed him, he could hope. The rest would be quiet for fear of seeming cowardly.
Wine soothed them soon enough, wine and sunlight and the heat of the dancing. There were women in the dancing, more of them even than Agni remembered, and every one seemed eager to find herself a tribesman to play wife to. That was the fashion, the thing that all the young women were doing this season, for the novelty of it.
Let fashion become custom; then let them all become one people. Agni did not make a prayer of that, not exactly. But if the gods chose to take it so, then he would not object.
oOo
Somewhat before moonrise, when the dancing and the feasting were in full cry, Agni slipped away from his place in the king’s circle.
He put off his festival garments, his beautiful coat, his ornaments of beads and feathers. The torque of gold and amber he kept, because he was seldom without it. He put on riding clothes, plain and meant for use, and plaited his hair tightly behind him. No one was in his tent to help him, not even Taditi. He was completely alone.
But when he came out, blinking in the light of torches, he found Patir and Taditi both, and somewhat to his surprise, the westerner Tillu. And, keeping to the shadows but not carefully enough, the boy Mika.
“I don’t think I’m to go in company,” Agni said.
“The women did,” said Taditi. “There must have been three hands of women on that hill—ruining the sacrifice, if you ask the odd fool.”
Agni considered that, and considered forbidding them all to venture past the camp. But Taditi had the right of it. The women had come in force to see the Stallion die. Why should he not attend their rite with his small company? One of whom, he could not help but reflect, was a woman.
He nodded curtly. Taditi did not weaken into an expression, and Tillu’s scars did not allow much of one at all, but Patir was biting back a grin. He always had loved to see Agni bested by his aunt.
Agni showed Patir a fine set of teeth, and set his face toward the city and the temple. They followed. He would have been astonished if they had not.
oOo
It was daylight still, the hour between sunset and dark, when the light is too clear almost for earth, when the west is stained with blood but the stars have begun to glimmer in the vault of heaven. Agni walked down silent streets, past closed doors and shuttered windows. The city had shut itself up tight—as if none of its people dared walk abroad for fear of the Lady’s wrath.
How very strange to keep a festival by shutting oneself in one’s house and hiding from the moon. How like a city of women.
Lights glimmered outside the temple: lamps hung from the beams and set on the steps, shedding a soft glow into the street. They looked from a distance like a fall of stars.
So many beauties here; so many strange things. Agni stepped into the circle of light.
The door of the temple was open, an oblong of darkness. He thrust down a stab of fear, the terror of descent into night. There was light inside—there must be.
There was not. It was blind dark and full of whispers. Agni stopped just inside the door, still within reach of the lamps. His following did not even go so far. The edge of his glance caught Mika’s face, stark white. How much courage it took a manchild of this country to come here for this purpose, Agni could well imagine.
Agni held his ground just inside the door. His hand had gone to his belt where his knife hung, and clenched tight round the hilt.
The whispers grew louder, imperceptibly, until he realized that he did not have to strain to hear them. There were words in them, a rhythm like a chant.
Slowly it swelled. Women’s voices, low and sweet. A chittering as of birds. The thin wailing of a pipe. A sound of plucked strings, and the beating of a drum.
As subtly as the silence had lifted, the darkness faded away. Lamps shone within as they shone without. They illumined nothing more mysterious than a room of wooden walls floored with stone.
The Lady sat at the end as the Mother sat in her house, squat and holy. There were heaped pots about her, the most beautiful that the potters made, and the first flowers of the spring, and a sower’s bag bulging with seed, and other things that Agni could not quite see.
The temple was full of women. They were all masked as they had been in the Lady’s wood, that day when he trespassed on their rite. Now, no longer a trespasser, he saw them again in the garb of their goddess, faceless and nameless. Their bodies were painted in black and red and white, a dizzying pattern of spirals round breast and belly and thighs.
They did nothing to allure him, did not move, did not acknowledge his presence. And yet his rod was hard and painful against his belly. His breath came short, his heart beat fast. The air thrummed. They were raising the powers, the same powers that woke the earth in spring. Their bodies were full of it, burgeoning with it.
Women’s rite. Women’s magic. Small wonder that they had suffered him to see it: no little power of his could weaken this of theirs. Was it mercy, that they forbade their men to enter the temple or share in its rites?
No; the men knew already what weaklings they were.
Agni had not meant the thought to be so bitter. He must remember—must keep in mind the glare of the sunlight, the bright red of blood, the strength of the Stallion as he fought his death. That too was power, as strong in the daylight as was this one under the moon.
Two faces. Two powers. Two sides of the world.
The women danced, stately as trees in the wind; dipped, swayed, circled. He remembered that dance from the Lady’s grove, though it was smaller here, constrained within walls. It wound its spirals before the goddess’ image, round and round, tighter and tighter, till it burst in a flurry of sound: music and voices both.
So they sealed the planting and blessed the harvest that was to come. But as yet they were not done. Each woman whirled alone, spinning in a kind of divine abandon, and none ever touched another, nor collided, nor stumbled into the walls.
One spun from altar to door. Her hand caught Agni as he stood all unwary, caught and held him fast, and spun him with her in
to the temple itself.
The dance bred its own force. He could not stop it. He spun as the stars spun, as the sun wheeled on his daily course. Round and round, and irresistible.
It was Tilia gripping his hands, her body that he knew so well, the feel of her skin, the scent of her, the way she held herself as she danced. They whirled together from end to end of the temple, from side to side and round in a great circle. He was aware, dimly, that the others had stopped; that they had linked hands round the walls and left Agni with Tilia in the middle.
This could not be the common rite. If no man could enter the temple . . .
oOo
“It’s the Great Marriage,” Tilia said. “It changes everything.”
“So it’s not a new thing or even very unusual,” Agni said.
They had gone from the rite to an astonishing and quite splendid festival. For when the women came out of the temple, the city came alive with light: lamps and torches everywhere, in every street, round about every house. The city was lit almost as if it were day. Its people came out with dancing and singing, with laughter and merrymaking. Dark and quiet shattered as if they had never been.
Agni sat next to Tilia in the garden of the Mother’s house, in a blaze of torches, and ate things of marvelous complexity, for which he had no name. But wine he knew, and roast lamb, and bread fresh from the baking, and cakes made with honey. Tilia fed him because it suited her fancy, pressing on him both the strangely delicious and the merely strange.
She explained it, too, after her fashion. “The Great Marriage is rare and wonderful. It gives a man rights and powers that he would never otherwise have. It makes the rite of the planting stronger, if he dances the dance with the woman whom the Lady has bound to him.”
“What if I hadn’t asked to come?” Agni demanded. “What then?”
“We’d have gone on as we always have,” she said. “Your presence was a great gift.”
“I meant it to be a bargain. A kind of defiance.”
“That, too,” she said. Her eyes glinted. She was laughing at him.
He was too tired and too mellow with wine to be angry. He spared a snarl, for pride, but no more than that.
She dipped a bit of bread in honey and offered it to him. He had to take it or have a lapful of honey. She pursued it with a kiss, sipping honey from his lips.
Here, in front of her kin, her brothers, even her mother. Agni had seldom been so mortified. And she never knew or seemed to notice.
Mercifully she drew back, distracted by somewhat or other, some word that one of her sisters spoke. Then Danu came in with the servants, bearing yet another course in this endless feast.
Agni’s embarrassment faded a little. No one after all had so much as looked askance. People here were not modest as they were among the tribes. Nor were they shy of touching one another in public. This thing that man and woman did together, they had no shame of it. It was a sacred thing, a rite of their goddess.
Agni was a more modest creature. He could not help it. He kept a little distance, held himself somewhat apart, and Tilia let him be. He doubted that she noticed particularly; she was distracted with some of the children.
Women, he thought. Even women of the tribes could never let men get the better of them. He began to wonder, rather dangerously, whether women kept to the tents of their own will because it pleased them, and not because their men required it. Just as the young women were doing in his own camp: following a fashion, fashion become firm custom, but among themselves they had nothing but mockery for the men who imagined that they ruled the world.
Bitter thoughts again; women’s magic, twisting his perceptions. He hoped that the Sacrifice had unbalanced the women as badly as they had unbalanced him. Somehow he doubted it.
oOo
Tilia did not even give him the satisfaction of conquering her in their bed. It was full of children doing things that no child among the tribes would dare to do, and laughing while they did it; when they were caught, they only laughed the harder.
Agni turned away from them in disgust. His tent was safe—was sanctuary, deep among his own people. He was so dismayed, and so shaken, that he did not notice till he was in the tent, that Tilia had not followed him. For all he knew, she had leaped into bed with the children, and joined in the revelry.
Agni lay alone in the chill of the late night. His body was cold, but his temper warmed him. He had not been ill advised to go to the temple. He told himself that, sternly. But it had done strange things to him, had made him see in ways that were not comfortable. Not in the least.
Here was peace. Here was the world as he had always known it, walled in leather, with the smell and sound of horses close by. This was his world. Not that other. He might rule it, he might name himself king of it, but he was no true part of it. Nor, here in the dark, did he believe that he ever could be.
82
Patir left on the morning after the Stallion’s sacrifice. He took with him a dozen young men of the White Horse, strong horsemen all and intrepid raiders. They would bring back mares for Agni—“Safe, sound, and in foal,” Patir promised.
They took with them the memory of an omen. In the night, while Agni nursed his bitterness and Tilia did whatever Tilia did, the Mare had foaled of a filly. Then, to everyone’s profound astonishment—even Sarama’s—of a colt.
Twins were rarer by far among horses than among men, and twins that were born alive, that lived and thrived, were rarer yet. These were small but they were strong, and stood and nursed as quickly almost as if each had been born alone.
That was a great portent, a gift of the gods. It heartened Patir and his men enormously. It roused the spirits of the camp, that had been dampened by the Stallion’s resistance to his sacrifice. War, and fruitful herds—those were joyful omens to a tribesman.
oOo
Agni saw Patir off and lingered on the camp’s edge, watching the riders dwindle into distance and vanish over the long hill to the eastward.
Then for a while longer he stood there. He had a whole mingled tribe at his back, and some of the elders close by, and Tillu, who was, when it came to it, a friend, but his brother in spirit, the friend of his youth, was gone; gone to hunt mares as they both had gone in search of stallions. And Agni must stay behind, must strengthen the defenses in this country, and prepare it to face the war that the gods had promised.
It was a great charge. Agni would have given it all to be riding with Patir, back to the steppe. Back home.
This was home. He stiffened his back, turned on his heel and walked firmly away from the eastward road. That was his no longer. He had made his choice. He was bound here. He would live and die here.
That was the omen he saw in the Mare’s foals. He sought them out, and found them in a sheltered valley. Sarama was with them, and Danu, and somewhat to Agni’s surprise, Tilia. The Mare grazed as placidly as Agni had ever seen her, while her offspring discovered the delights of the world.
The filly would be grey, Agni thought; she had the signs, a salting of white about the eyes. But the colt might not. They were both duns, as far as one could tell: striped backs, mouse-colored coats, manes that might be black when they were older.
Agni caught Sarama eyeing Danu’s young stallion balefully. She could hardly have failed to know who had sired these foals. At the time when the Mare could have been bred, there was only the colt in all this country. But knowing and seeing were different things.
“They’re fine foals,” Agni said, and not simply because he felt compelled to defend the colt.
They were indeed, as their father was. Maybe he was not goddess-born, and maybe his mother had been a mere traveller’s mount, but he was well made and strong. If a tribesman had come back from his hunt with such a stallion, he would have been reckoned fortunate.
All of which Sarama knew perfectly well, but she had never been a reasonable creature. She was rather proud of it, too, as a woman could be: ever contrary.
Such unreason let her dote o
penly on the offspring while glaring at the sire. “After all,” she said, “they’re their mother’s children.”
“Indeed,” Agni said gravely.
She knew he was mocking her: her glance was burning cold. But she did not choose to go to war with him.
He was glad. There was war enough coming, without his being at daggers drawn with his own sister.
oOo
The year began with rites and omens. It went on in a kind of clenched-teeth quiet.
Those tribesmen who had yearned to go home were gone. The rest stayed, which was well; there was much to do.
Agni had consulted with his elders and with the Mother and elders of Three Birds, and from those councils he came to a greater one, a gathering of Mothers from the towns and cities as far eastward as Larchwood itself. The Mother of Larchwood was gone, vanished into the west, but Mothers who had looked to her looked now to the Mother of Three Birds and, inevitably, to the king of the horsemen.
Agni told them what he, and they, would do. They would make their cities strong. They would dig moats such as Sarama had dug here, made deadly to horse and horseman.
Most would line the pits with sharpened stakes. One or two, suitably situated, could divert streams into the moat, and build a wall of water between themselves and the war.
No one argued with him, or rebuked him for presumption. All those who might have done that were gone, fled out of reach of the horsemen. And so they would be, as long as Agni and his people stood in the way.
After they had taken counsel together in the Lady’s grove, they gathered in the field between the camp and the city for a festival of welcome.
There had been a great number of festivals in Three Birds that year. Agni never ceased to marvel at the ease with which this country gave of its bounty. Even in the depths of winter, when times were as lean as they ever were, no one was hungry. No one suffered.
oOo
Now as summer swelled about them, even the camp dogs were fat, lolling in the sun. Agni had had to command his men to practice their riding and shooting and fighting, to send them on hunts and drive them like cattle, to keep them from becoming as lazy as the dogs.