White Mare's Daughter Page 18

  If he had been a woman she would have said that he was keeping her company, watching her in some concern, gratified that she ate and drank so well and yet so sensibly. But how could a man be that simple, and demand nothing of a woman whom he could so easily have seized and taken at his will?

  There was no desire in his eyes at all. When she had stood in front of him with her breasts bare and nothing to cover her but a scrap of loincloth, he had shown no sign of lusting after her then, either.

  She began to grow angry. Was she that ugly to him? Did she attract him so little?

  That was folly. She should be glad. Unless of course he was preparing her for another, some greater prince or king.

  Yes, that was it. He was the errand-runner. When she was done with her dinner, he would do as indeed he did: beckon her to follow.

  She considered resistance. But the room was small and its walls closing in. Even if she had to fight for it, she would welcome a broader space.

  He led her out into a larger room, and thence through a door into sunlight. She reeled and fell against the first thing that would hold her up: his warm and solid body. He caught her but did not do the rest of what a man might do. He held her till her feet were steady under her. Then he let her go.

  There were people about. They did not crowd close or weigh her down with stares, but they were watching, murmuring to one another, offering commentary on the stranger. There were a good number of women among them, and none crept or hid or bent her head lest a man think her haughty. They strode about like men, with bold eyes and proud carriage. It was the men who looked down when she tried to meet their stares, turned their faces and refused to confront her.

  Sorely baffled but beginning to wonder if there had been some truth in the traveller’s tales after all, Sarama followed her guide, guardian, jailer, whatever he was. He led her down and round by a way that was like the arc of a circle defined by the patterning of trees and houses; then inward to a place that was taller than any of the others about it, two tall stories high, and made taller yet by the carved peak of its roof.

  They did not go in, though the door was open. They went round to a curving wall of stone, and through a gate into a circle of green.

  There were more trees growing here, and flowers, ordered as she had never seen them. Hands had set them here, not simply allowed them to grow. They made a pattern of interwoven spirals, ringed on the outside with trees. In the center grew a single slender white sapling, ghostly and beautiful, bearing a crown of golden leaves. Under the tree sat a woman.

  There were other women with her. Sarama perceived them and dismissed them. This was the one whose attention mattered, this elderly woman with her thickened body and her sagging breasts, whose face could never have been beautiful. She sat as a king would sit in the center of his tribe, erect and imperturbably calm.

  A woman king. Sarama had not realized she was holding her breath till it cried to be let out. After all, a king who was a woman. The tales were true.

  Then what was the man who had brought her here? He had not followed her into the walled place. She glanced back. He stood in the gate, arms folded, as if on guard.

  There were no men here. They were all women.

  Their king spoke. At first Sarama thought the words were addressed to her, but the man answered from behind her.

  His reply seemed to interest the king: her brows rose. She spoke again. Their conversation went on for a while, with Sarama in the middle, uncomprehending, and beginning to lose her temper.

  At much too long last, the king turned her dark eyes on Sarama. She inclined her head. Sarama inclined her own in response. The king’s lips curved slightly. She glanced toward the man in the gateway, and beckoned with the arch of a brow.

  Not only he was astonished to be so summoned. The women about the king seemed shocked, and one or two protested.

  The king ignored them. She spoke a word. Come, that must be.

  The man moved stiffly, walking as if the grass were edged blades, or as if the sky would crack and swallow him. He came to face the king, went down on his knees and bowed his head and seemed to wait for it to be struck from his shoulders.

  The king laid her hand on it and said something soft, with a smile in it. It did not comfort him overmuch, but it did bring his head up. She glanced again at Sarama, and signed with her hand: at Sarama, at the man. She tapped him briskly on the shoulder. “Danu,” she said.

  Sarama frowned.

  He tapped his own breast. “Danu,” he said. And reached, and not quite touched her, lifting his brow as the king had.

  Name, she thought. That was a name. “Sarama,” she said.

  “Sarama,” said the man, twisting it oddly but not unpleasantly.

  The old woman nodded and smiled, raised her arms and waved them away. The audience, it was clear, was ended.

  oOo

  Sarama did not think to object until she had been swept in the man—in Danu’s wake, out of the green place and into the street again, to his manifest relief.

  Someone else was waiting there. The Mare, clean and brushed and evidently fed, and queenly glad to see Sarama again. Sarama had not known how lonely she was, until she wrapped arms about that warm horse-scented neck and buried her face in the Mare’s mane.

  Too quickly the Mare wearied of such foolishness, pulled away and went in search of grass. Sarama followed. Danu trailed behind.

  He had been confirmed as her guardian: that much Sarama understood. That she neither wanted nor needed a guardian, nor intended to submit to one, seemed to have occurred to no one. She kept her back turned to him, shutting him out, but there was no escaping the awareness of his presence.

  The Mare led them through the circles of the city, past more dwellings than Sarama had ever seen, even in the gathering of tribes. All the people here were like the man, shortish and solid, though he was more solid than some. The women dressed in weavings that would have done justice to kings’ wives at a festival. The men were if anything more handsomely adorned.

  Many wore ornaments of copper, or wore colored beads or bright stones in their ears or about their necks or on their fingers. None but Danu wore gold. By which she was certain again that he was a prince, or a man of importance at least—though why he would be relegated to caring for a stranger, and a woman at that, she could not imagine.

  They passed the last of the houses, and the people who stared or smiled but did not interfere. Sarama looked down a long green slope to a slow roll of river; and then up to the blessed sky. No trees here, just where she stood. Not even one.

  The Mare had not paused with Sarama. She strode down a path that led to a house, the outermost of those that ringed the city, and rounded it, and found there, at last, the patch of grass that she had been seeking.

  A soft snort of laughter brought Sarama about. The man Danu was watching the Mare with an expression of wry amusement, as if she had done something that he had not expected, but that did not surprise him.

  He caught Sarama’s eye on him. Did he flush faintly? She could not tell.

  His laughter died. He pointed to the Mare. “Horse,” he said.

  It was mangled and slurred, but there was no mistaking the meaning of the word.

  Sarama set her lips together.

  He pointed to her. “Sarama.” To himself: “Danu.” Stamped the earth. “Earth,” he said; and plucked a blade of grass. “Grass.”

  So that was what the king had commanded him to do. Teach the outlander a civilized tongue.

  Sarama could admit the wisdom of it, but a wicked spirit was in her, a spirit of contrariness. She did not want to learn his language. Let him learn hers.

  She stabbed her finger where he had pointed: “Sarama. Danu.” And in her own tongue: “Earth, grass, horse, river, hill, tree, sky.”

  “Earth, grass, horse, river, hill, tree, sky,” Danu said as rapidly as she had, and with a spark in his eye that told her how well he understood what she was doing.

  She narrowed her
eyes at him. “So,” she said. “You’re a bard, or a singer of stories. Or do they have such, in this place?”

  He did not echo that—somewhat to her disappointment. He listened intently, and no doubt committed the sounds to memory, but he was too canny to take them for aught but acid commentary. When she had finished, he said deliberately, in her language with his barbarous accent, “Earth, tree, sky.” And turned his back on her and went into the house.

  She stood staring at the space where he had been. Was she free, then? Could she go?

  Where? She had come here at the goddess’ bidding. Now that she was here, she must do what the goddess willed—whatever that was to be.

  She set her teeth and squared her shoulders, and followed him through the high rounded door.

  23

  Danu did not like the stranger at all. He had been less than delighted to be given charge of her; but the Mother’s logic had been incontestable. “She came with a horse. You speak the language of horses. Learn her language, too, and discover what she is and what she intends.”

  “I know what she is,” he had said with a kind of grand defiance, because she was standing next to him, listening and, he hoped, comprehending nothing that he said. “She intends something terrible. Haven’t you dreamed of it?”

  “I dream men on horses,” the Mother said. “This is a woman. You will look after her.”

  This was not Danu’s Mother, but he was living in her city, by his own Mother’s will. He bowed his head in submission.

  It was not he who had brought the two of them, and her grey horse, too, to the house that he had decided to take for himself and the colt. The horse made her way unerringly there, and the others followed.

  Danu had no doubt that the stranger resented his guardianship as much as he resented his charge. That she was quick-witted he could see, but he was just as quick. He had always been able to remember words when they were spoken to him. He took her aback with that, he suspected.

  He had had enough of it and of her. He went to the work that he had set himself, cleaning and repairing the lower story of the house for the horses’ habitation. Tomorrow some of the people of Larchwood would come to help him repair the pen outside.

  He rather hoped that the stranger would go away, or at least occupy herself with her horse. Of course she did no such thing. She followed him into the house. She gaped about at the stone walls and the deep-set windows, stamped her foot on the packed earth floor, found the ladder and clambered up it and vanished into the rooms above.

  He sighed faintly. Good; she was out of his way. He bent to the sweeping and scouring, clearing and tidying.

  Just as he tackled a spiderweb as large as a Mother’s cloak, with the spider crouched furious in it, her voice rang out above him, calling his name.

  “Danu! Danu!”

  He started, tangling himself in sticky web. The spider scuttled up his body, scaled the crags of his face, and leaped for the safety of her torn and mangled weaving.

  He bit back a shriek that would have done his people no justice, and extricated himself with taut-strung patience. She was still calling, and curse her for it, too. If she was dying, he could not come to her any quicker.

  At last he was free. He ran for the ladder.

  She was not in the outer room above. He strode toward the inner.

  She was not lying dead or caught in a fit, nor had she met some enemy, ill spirit or living beast. She had flung open the shutters of the window and leaned precariously out.

  He peered past her. The meadow ran down to the river, mellow with autumn gold. The grey horse stood in it, chest-deep in grass. The colt, who was nigh the same gold as the grass, stood nose to nose with her.

  The tightness in Danu’s throat eased abruptly. “Colt,” he said. “Horse.”

  The stranger—her name, he reminded himself, was Sarama—wheeled on him as if he had uttered a blasphemy. “Colt!” She loosed a spate of words, too swift and too many to follow. The burden of it seemed to be that she was not pleased to see another horse in this place—or perhaps, a male horse. A young bull among the cattle, a yearling ram among the ewes . . .

  A piercing squeal snapped Danu erect. The grey horse had put the colt in his place, and handily too.

  Danu could not help himself. He laughed.

  He was still grinning as Sarama rounded on him. She was fierce: she scowled as terribly as his sister Tilia ever had.

  That perhaps made him less cautious than he should have been. He did not wipe the grin from his face in the teeth of her evident indignation. “Colt,” he said.

  Sarama muttered something that he doubted was complimentary. She pushed past him and out of the room, down the ladder faster than he was inclined to follow, and out into the sunlight.

  He pursued her at his own pace. When his eyes had settled to the brightness, he found her beside her horse, glowering at the colt.

  The colt regarded her with interest but no fear. The grey horse was busily ignoring him. He approached her again with every appearance of care, and did an odd thing: mouthed at her as if about to break into human speech.

  She flattened ears and snapped. He retreated hastily, settled to snatching bits of grass, but watching her all the while.

  Sarama glared at him, but he would not let her near. They danced a pretty dance round the grey horse and the field, while the grey horse grazed in conspicuous contentment.

  Danu watched until it began to pall on him. He stepped in then, held out his hand and said to the colt, “Come.”

  The colt considered disobedience. But he was a sweet-tempered creature despite his fondness for testing anything and everything with his teeth. Nor did it hurt matters that Danu had taken to keeping bits of fruit or sweet cake about him, for such moments. He stepped lightly up to Danu and thrust a soft nose into Danu’s hand, demanding his bit of cake.

  Sarama’s renewed glare was gratifying. Danu smiled at her. The colt was in comfort; the grey horse seemed undismayed. Danu left them to return to his scouring of the colt’s winter quarters—and the horse’s, too, as it would seem.

  oOo

  The grey horse’s name was Mare. Or rather, her kind and sex was called a mare, and her rider called her the Mare, as one might call a woman the Mother.

  Sarama seemed insistent that Danu understand this. She was also unduly agitated about the colt, as if his presence might somehow defile her precious Mare.

  The colt, whom Danu had not presumed to give a name, showed no sign of being a great burden to the Mare. If anything she seemed fond of him. She tolerated him near her, let him graze beside her.

  He was allowed no insolence: if he offered any, she fell on him with hooves and teeth and beat him into submission. He learned quickly to mind his manners, as a male should.

  Well before the sun sank on that first day of the Mare’s meeting the colt, Danu could see clearly that the two of them would do well together. Sarama however seemed convinced that something dire was going to happen. He caught her trying to drive the colt off, without notable success; and while the colt watched, not at all dismayed by her leaping and yelling and whirling her belt about her head, the Mare shouldered in front of her and moved her firmly and irresistibly away from the colt.

  Sarama was taken off guard. She stared at the Mare. She spoke: a few words in a tone of disbelief. The Mare shook off a fly and went back to grazing—standing exactly between Sarama and the colt.

  Even Sarama could understand that. She hissed, but she retreated.

  Danu went back hastily to his task of sweeping out the house. When he thought she might not be looking, he let the grin loose. It was not at all proper of him, but he was glad to see this haughty stranger so neatly put in her place.

  oOo

  By the third day of his guardianship, Danu was ready to hand it on to a stronger spirit. Sarama just barely tolerated his presence. She might not have done that much if her Mare had not insisted on living in the meadow by the river, next to the house that Danu had taken and
was making ready for the winter. He kept on with that, particularly once it was evident that Sarama was not going to join with him in the task of teaching each the other’s language.

  He persisted doggedly: naming things as they came to hand, making brief stories of them, repeating the small words, the important words, over and over. If she listened at all, he doubted that she troubled to remember. She would not teach him in return, except sometimes to flood him with a spate of words; then to curl her lip in disgust when he did not leap to obey whatever command she had laid on him.

  He was beginning, perhaps, to understand some of it: come, go, stop, look, go away. In time it would be clearer.

  He would never, for the pride of his people, show the temper she tried so hard to rouse. It infuriated her if he smiled blandly after she had tried to drown him in words, or if he walked away calmly from some tantrum, some foot-stamping refusal to do somewhat that would have been helpful to his readying of house and horse-pen. He knew better than to ask her, ever, to lend a hand. But a glance, the tilt of his head toward whatever it was she might have done, would send her flouncing off in a snit.

  She was indeed very like Tilia in the spirit, though nothing like her in face or body. Danu had grown up contending with Tilia. He could continue with this stranger, he supposed, since the Mother of Larchwood had laid it on him.

  The Mare at least was no trouble, and the colt, though occasionally impertinent, seemed glad of another of his kind, and delighted with his new pen and his big stone house. The pen was handsome, the work of the people of Larchwood, who were greatly skilled with stakes of wood and woven withies. They offered of themselves to bring in fodder from the river-meadow, to cut it and cure it and store it in a little byre that they made, while the sun shone and the Lady held off the rain.

  Danu thanked the Lady as he thanked the people who worked so hard for him in her name. She was a warmth in his belly. They were shyly pleased.

  “We’ll help as you need us,” they said. “It’s for the Lady, after all, and the Mother.”

  “And maybe a little for you,” Catin said to him as they lay together the night that the hay-byre was done.