White Mare's Daughter Read online

  WHITE MARE’S DAUGHTER

  The Epona Sequence, Book 1

  Judith Tarr

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Publishing Cooperative

  January 28, 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-356-0

  Copyright © 1998 Judith Tarr

  DEDICATION

  This book could not have been written without the help, advice, suggestions, and plain old aid-and-comfort of the following:

  Professor David W. Anthony of the Institute for Ancient Equestrian Studies, whose work on the very early history of riding was the original impetus for this book, and who suggested a time and place in which it might be set;

  Joanne Bertin and Sam Gailey, who trekked through a blizzard to hear and record a lecture that was critical to the background of the book;

  Beth Meacham, who asked for it and, I hope, got it;

  Jane Butler and Danny Baror, who leaned on me till it was done;

  Russ Galen, who picked it up and carried it on;

  the members of the Internet mailing lists Equine-L and Dressage-L, for daily, hands-on assistance and research;

  the Internet “coven” who held my hand during the final throes;

  and of course the three White Ladies and the famous Keed, and all the rest of the horses who provided the original and ongoing inspiration for the book.

  THE SEEKER

  I: HORSE GODDESS’ SERVANT

  1

  From far away she heard them, echoing across the steppe: the drums beating, swift as a frightened heart. The voices were too far, too thin to carry above the shrilling of the wind, and yet in her belly she knew them, deep voices and high, strong and wild.

  Blood and fire! Blood and fire! Fire and water and stone and blood!

  They had made the year-sacrifice, one of many that they would make in the gathering of the tribes. On this day, from the rhythm of the drums, it would be the Bull. Yesterday, the Hound; tomorrow, the Stallion, with his proud neck red like blood.

  She laid a hand on the Mare’s neck. In the rolling of years it would be white, like milk. Now it was the grey of the rain that had fallen in the morning, shot with dapples like flecks of snow. The Mare snorted lightly and tossed her head. She could smell the stallions. It was her season, the strong one that waxed with the moon in spring, and would wax and wane slowly with each moon all the summer long, and in winter sleep.

  She snorted again and pawed, impatient to be going. Her rider eased a little on the broad grey back, freeing her to spring forward. The wind tangled in thick grey mane and silver tail; caught the long thick braid that hung to the rider’s buttocks and sent it streaming out behind. The pounding of hooves blotted out the drumbeats. They raced the wind then, swift over the new grass, into the westering sun.

  oOo

  The gathering of the people spread wide in a hollow of the steppe, where a river ran through a cutting that deepened with the years. Winter’s storms brought down the banks nonetheless, and the herds of horses and cattle made broad paths to the water.

  The herds were the girdle that bound the camp. The center, the soft body, divided into circles of camps, each with the staff and banner of its tribe: black horsetail, red horsetail, spotted bull’s hide, white bull’s horns, and three whole handfuls of others; and in the center, in the king-place, the white mare’s tail catching the strong wind of spring.

  Agni was on his way to the king’s circle, but taking his time about it. The dancing, that had begun where the hill of sacrifice rose dark with blood, had wound away toward the river. He had been part of it when it began, before the king’s summons brought him back in toward the white horsetail. His father was entertaining the chiefs of tribe and clan in the feast of the Bull, and had called on Agni to stand at his right hand. Rumor had it among the tribes that the old man was going to name an heir at last; and he had called for Agni, the avowed favorite of all his sons.

  Agni was sensible of the honor, and of what it meant—how could he not be? But he dearly loved the dance, and the delights that came with it. He was none too eager to forsake it for the dull dignity of the elders in their circle.

  As he made his somewhat desultory way past the tents in the center, a hiss brought him about. Someone had lifted the back of a tent. A white hand beckoned from beneath, and a slender arm heavy with ornaments: carved bone and stone, beads strung on leather, and one woven of horsehair that he knew very well.

  His breath quickened. Completely without thinking, he dropped down and slithered into the tent.

  It was black dark to his day-accustomed eyes, heavy with scents of musk and sweat and tanned hides. Strong slender arms circled his neck. A supple body pressed against his. Warm lips fastened on his own. They fell in a dizzy whirl.

  She was as naked as she was born, slick with sweat, white glimmering body coming clear in the gloom; and her hair, her wonderful hair, like a pale fall of sunlight. He could drown himself in the stream of it.

  For the dance one wore nothing but a kilt of fine-tanned leather—very fine, if one were a prince. It was no barrier to a woman’s urgency, least of all if it were this one. She did not even wait for him to shed it. She flicked it up and opened her thighs and took him where they lay entangled. She was burning hot, as hill of the god as any man, and imperious in her urgency.

  He had brought with him the heat of the dance. The Bull was in him, driving deep. She gasped; then laughed. “Again! O beautiful! Again!”

  He was the Bull, the god’s own. He heeded no woman’s bidding. But the god in her—that one he was glad to obey. He took her as the bull takes the heifer, but with a man’s strength, and a man’s endurance, too, riding her till her breath shuddered and a cry burst out of her—muted swiftly, but sharp enough for all of that.

  He let it go then, with a gasp but no cry; for he was more circumspect than she. She locked arms and legs about him, took him as deep as ever she could, draining him of every drop of seed.

  When he was all empty, she let him go. He rolled on his back, gulping air, quivering still.

  She lifted herself over him, white breasts swaying. They were the color of milk, the nipples pale, like the sky at morning. She teased him with them, tormenting him, brushing his face and his sweating breast, knowing full well that he had no strength left to rouse. “O beautiful,” she said. “O prince. Be like a god. Love me again.”

  He looked past her breasts to her laughing, mocking face. She was beautiful in everything, with her white skin and her delicate bones and her eyes the color of a winter sky. She could drive a man mad. Indeed she often had.

  His eye followed the line of her shoulder to her arm, and down it to the wrist, to the one ornament of them all that mattered: the bracelet woven from the hair of a white mare and a red stallion, woven on her living arm, intricate and strong, to last lifelong. “The god is gone from me,” he said, “and the king is waiting.”

  “Ah,” she said without contrition. “Have you kept him standing about? For shame!”

  “Sitting,” said Agni, “in his circle as he always is, with my brothers on the edges, vying to catch his eye.”

  “But only you ever truly catch it,” she said.

  “You should have married me, then,” said Agni, “and not my brother Yama.”

  Her face twisted delightfully, a moue of disgust. “That was my idiot of a father, insisting on giving me to the eldest, and not the one who would be king. I would have waited, and made him ask the king for you, once you were a man. I want to be a king’s wife.”

  “You should be a king’s wife,” Agni said with sudden fierceness, seizing her and holding her tight. She laughed, fearless. Her hips rocked against him. He was reviving; but not enough to matter. Not yet. “When I’m king, I’ll
make my brother give you up.”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “That would only be dishonor. I’d have to go back to my father; and I could never be the king’s wife then. You’ll have to kill your brother, my prince. Then I can be your wife.”

  Agni’s stomach clenched round a small cold knot. But he managed to laugh. “Oh, you are a fierce creature! Come, give me a kiss, and let me go. I have to stand beside the king.”

  “Oh yes,” she said sulkily. “Leave me for that smelly old man. And make me lie here waiting for my so-noble husband to remember that I exist.”

  “I don’t see how he can forget,” Agni said. Her kiss nearly broke his resolve; and her breasts rising as her back arched; and the hot moist valley of her sex, coaxing him to lose himself in it.

  But the king was waiting, and Agni had dallied more than long enough. He slipped out the way he had come, biting back the smile that kept breaking out in spite of him. If he came flushed and disheveled to the king—well, and the dance was wild, and he had come straight from it. Had he not?

  He glanced back once, half expecting to see her peering through the gap in the tent’s wall. But the gap had vanished. She nursed her sulks in solitude.

  oOo

  If the king had grown impatient, he did not show it. Agni presented himself in the circle of elders, bowed as was proper, and received the gesture that he had looked for: bidding him come in, even to the center, and wait on his father. His brothers were where Agni had known they would be, relegated to places unhappily distant, except for the lighthearted few who had gone off with the dancers.

  Yama in particular glared poison at him. Yama was the eldest, though begotten of a mere prince and not a ruling king, and fancied himself greatly; but he was never the hunter or the fighter that Agni was, and everyone but Yama knew it. No more did he know what was between Agni and the youngest and fairest of his three wives. That was a secret that Agni meant to keep—for Rudira’s sake if not for his own. She could die for what she did.

  Agni liked to think that what they had was in some way blessed, though the priests would have been appalled to hear it. Was he not the king’s heir? Was she not the fairest woman in the tribes?

  He would have been glad to be with her now, or with the dancers who had reached the river and begun the circle back. He could not help a longing glance or six toward the leaping, yelling skein of men and boys. They would dance round and round and inabout, weaving together every strand of the camp, till it was all bound up and blessed of the Bull; and then they would drink the strong dizzying kumiss till the moon went down, and fall insensible on the ground, and so bless that. Agni was not so enamored of the headache afterward, but he did love the dance and the drinking, the laughter and singing, and maybe, if one was lucky, a willing girl creeping out of a tent to lie, as they said, with the Bull—meaning any young man full of drink and the god.

  Not, thought Agni, that he had failed to give the gods their due. Maybe Rudira would quicken from this night—and maybe Yama would claim the son that came of it, but Agni would know, and she would know, whose it truly was.

  He sighed and did his best not to look bored. The elders and the chieftains had little to say. Their mouths were too full of the Bull, their faces slick with grease. Their cups were kept well filled with kumiss that he as servant was not permitted, and for the few who held to the oldest ways, the Bull’s own blood caught fresh from the cutting of his throat.

  “You! Boy!”

  Agni started to attention. The old man glowered up at him—his wonted expression, and no more eloquent of disapproval than it ever was. “You, boy,” he said in a somewhat milder tone. “Go on, go and play, I’ll share a cupbearer with old Muti here.”

  Old Muti was, as far as anyone knew, some considerable number of seasons younger than his king; but it was true, he did look older, with his toothless grin and rheumy eyes. The man who waited on him had the same face, albeit much younger—and already gaptoothed when he grinned at Agni.

  Agni’s face flushed. Bored he might be, and desperate to be gone, but his brothers were watching. They would call it dishonor, to be sent away before the sun had touched the horizon. They would laugh among themselves and reckon that Agni the arrogant had had his comeuppance, summoned from the dance to be set above them all, but after a bare hour of such honor, sent off to play like a weanling child.

  But one did not argue with one’s father. No matter how one longed to cry a protest, one bowed low and kissed one’s father’s hand and went as one was bidden.

  Agni put a swagger in his stride, lifted his chin and straightened his shoulders and took his leave as a proper prince should.

  And by the gods, he was glad—though he should be stiff with shame. “Gods,” he said when he was well away, “how crashingly dull!”

  No one was near to remind him that he did, after all, want to be king when the old man gave himself up to the gods; then it would be his place to sit on the royal horsehide and be fed the flesh of the Bull and forswear the pleasures of the dance.

  oOo

  The dancers had passed the Red Stallion and the Black, and wound now through the Spotted Bull. That was not so far to go, if Agni would join the dance again.

  The tightness of shame eased in his belly. He was smiling as he strode in the dancers’ wake.

  A girl of the Dun Mare leaned against a tentpole, her face wantonly bare, and smiled at him. But his mind saw another face altogether. He smiled because yes, this one was pretty, though never beautiful as Rudira was; and went on toward the line of the dancers. He did not look back to see if she shrugged and waited for the next handsome passerby, or if she stuck out her tongue and cursed him.

  Between the tents of the Brindled Hound and the outriders of the Red Deer, a commotion brought Agni veering about. The dancers were close now, just beyond the next line of tents, invisible for the moment but clearly audible until a nearer clamor drowned them out. “Sarama! Sarama! The White Mare! Ai, she comes, the White Mare! Sarama!”

  Sarama was not the name of the White Mare, who carried naught but her title and, on suitable occasion, her servant: but that servant’s name, indeed, was Sarama. Agni forgot even Rudira the beautiful in a surge of pure and ringing joy. Of beautiful women the world had a sufficiency—but he had only one sister of the same mother, and they twinborn, blessed of the gods.

  And there she was riding the Mare who was not yet white but dappled like the moon, with her hair as dark as blood under the moon, and her narrow witchy face. It lit with her broad white smile as she caught sight of him standing tall above the boys and women who flocked to her coming.

  That smile soothed the last of the tightness in his belly, and healed a wound he had not known was there: an old oozing scar like the stump of a severed limb. He thrust his way through crowding bodies into her opened arms and the familiar weight and smell of her, wind and grass and smoke and horses, slipping down from the Mare’s back and standing—

  “Little sister! You’ve shrunk.”

  They who had been eye to eye when she went away were sore unbalanced now. She tilted her head back and laughed. “No,” she said in a voice as new as her smallness, “you’ve shot up like a tree on a hilltop. And your voice—what bull did you steal it from, eh, little brother?”

  “What Bull but one, O elder sister?” he answered her, great daring on this day of all days, but Sarama was never shocked as other girls might be. Sarama was not at all as other girls were; not now, nor had she ever been. Sarama was the White Mare’s child. She laughed at him and linked her arm through his, and with the Mare following in a ring of awe and quiet, went back the way he had come.

  oOo

  No woman but one might set foot in the feast of the Bull. That one had no delicacy, nor any hesitation. Even Agni was not so bold as to walk with her through the circle of chieftains, but hung back on the fringes.

  The Mare, unled, unbound, moved slightly ahead of her servant, so that it was the beast who led the woman before her father. No man presume
d to lift a hand to the Mare, which was well: one who did not move aside swiftly enough had to scramble away from the lash of an outraged heel.

  The old king’s glower lightened as his daughter came to stand in front of him. She did not kneel as a woman should; she knelt to none but the Mare. Nonetheless she bent her head in respect as a son might in the privacy of the tent, and held up what she must have carried all this way in the fold of her coat: a cup of polished bone, the cup of a skull, carved with something that Agni could not see, but must be a skein of galloping horses.

  “The Old Woman is dead,” she said in her voice that was deeper than he remembered, deeper and more still, as if the silence of the steppe had sunk into it. “The Old Mare has borne her into the place beyond the sun. Now I come back to you, I and the Young Mare, to take the place that they have left behind.”

  There was a silence. It was deep within the circle, thinning without, till far away one heard the dancers singing and stamping their feet. No one could have failed to expect it; the Old Woman had been failing at the last gathering, and the Old Mare had been thin and worn and lank of coat. And yet it shocked them, as the death of a goddess can; it shook the world a little. Not even the oldest of the old men could remember another servant of the White Mare than the Old Woman.

  Now there was a Young Mare, and Sarama her servant, holding the cup that had been the Old Woman’s skull. What had become of the rest of her, what had happened to the cup that she had carried in her turn, that had been the skull of the Mare’s Servant before her, was a mystery. A shiver walked down Agni’s spine, a chill of awe.

  Sarama looked no different than she ever had. Thinner, perhaps, and finer-drawn, but she was herself still. There had always been a god in her, a strangeness that to Agni was as familiar as the wayward curl of her hair.

  She lowered the cup and secreted it in the folds of her coat, took the old king’s hands and kissed them, and received a kiss on the brow. Then she turned, and the Mare turned with her, departing from the circle as she had entered it, with the aplomb of one who may go wherever she pleases.