White Mare's Daughter Read online

  “Of course he did,” someone else hissed back. “He knows he should be going to the altar with the horse. It’s his time, and past it. Did you see how he stumbled just now, and forgot the word he was about to say?”

  Agni stiffened. The king had hesitated, yes, but who would not? It was a long rite, and the words were difficult, some so old that their meaning was forgotten. And if he had misstepped slightly—well; and the ground was uneven, much trampled from the day before. The Bull had not gone quiet to his death. One of the priests would be a long while recovering. Another would be laid in the earth when all the sacrifices were done, with great reverence, for he had died on the horns of the Bull.

  The Stallion offered no such violence. And the king was not ready, not yet, to mount the back of the sacrifice, and to offer his own throat to the knife.

  “It is a Ninth Year,” said the hissing voice behind him. He could not turn to see who it was, but he had his suspicions. “Everyone forgets, or chooses to; but this is a year when a king should go with the Stallion into the earth. We’ll pay for that, you’ll see. The gods don’t like to be deprived of their due.”

  Agni, who had been born in a Ninth Year, the year his father had risen from prince to king, was well minded to whirl about and ask the one who was so eager to see the king die, whether he would offer himself instead, as the royal born well might. If it was Yama as he suspected, he would win naught but a glare for his pains.

  But he could not so disrupt the rite. The Stallion had nearly reached the altar. The scent of blood had roused him at last. He was sweating and snorting, stepping uneasily, but he did not stop, did not pull back rearing and fighting as the Bull had done the day before.

  Agni loved him for that courage. As he reached the ring of priests, the ring broke; the priests drew back.

  Agni did not need the stroke of the drum to know that it was time. He stepped forward from among the youths who were not yet men. His fingers were locked tight round the knife’s hilt. He could not have let it go even if he willed to.

  He was aware, keenly, of the eyes on him. He was the chosen one, the one blessed, the instrument of the sacrifice. None of them moved, none spoke. The wind blew away the sound of their breathing.

  The faceless priest stood in front of him, holding out the cord of braided leather with which he had led the Stallion. Agni took it blindly. His eyes were full of the beast. The proud head lifted, ears pricked, nostrils fluttering as they drew in his scent.

  He laid a hand on the soft muzzle. The Stallion breathed deep, feinted a nip, looked at him with eyes that laughed, stallion-laughter, as fierce as it was joyful.

  “Ah beautiful,” Agni sighed. “How the gods will love you!”

  The Stallion tossed his heavy mane and pawed.

  Yes, thought Agni. Yes. Get on with it. He could have wept for the beauty and bravery of this creature, this child of the gods, whom they called back to themselves.

  Perhaps it was the gods who spoke, bidding him do what he did. He dropped the cord over the Stallion’s neck, left him loose to come or to flee, as he willed; then walked forward through the broken circle, onto the holy ground before the altar.

  And the Stallion followed. Calmly, sweetly, as—yes, as the Mare followed Agni’s sister Sarama, he followed Agni to the altar of his sacrifice. Later Agni would marvel; would mark the omen as they all did. Now it was only as it should be, like the sun overhead, the grass underfoot, the wind in his face. He could smell the smell of the Stallion, the warm slightly pungent scent, and hear the soft thud of his footfalls.

  Before the altar Agni halted, and the Stallion halted with him. He took the cord then. He looked into the dark bright eye. “O beautiful,” he said, crooning the words. “O blessed.” And with no more words than that, though the priests were full of them, chanting the death-song all about him, he lifted the knife gripped still in his hand, and thrust it deep in the gleaming red throat.

  Blood was redder far than any stallion’s hide, even if he were the get of a god. It sprang forth in a fountain, flooding the dark stone of the altar. The Stallion sank down in it, slowly, as if lying down to sleep.

  Yet there was no sleep in his eyes. He was wide awake, seeing through the veils of the world, looking with wonder on the gods’ country. Almost Agni could see it, almost know the light of it, almost walk where the Stallion walked.

  Death took the Stallion as he touched the altar’s stone. The light in his eyes went out. The breath departed from him in a sigh. His soul fled away, bright airy thing, head up, tail up, galloping swifter than mortal horse could gallop, vanishing into the endless vault of the sky.

  3

  Agni’s half-dream shattered in a roar of sound: the shout of exultation at the Stallion’s sacrifice. He wobbled in his place, the knife slipping in slackened fingers, till he tightened them with a convulsive movement.

  He would remember, later, how very red the blood was, and how very different a red was the Stallion’s body; how the hair whorled on the broad brow beneath the tumbled forelock, first sunwise, then, above it, the opposite. There should be a white mark on that forehead, he thought, curved like a crescent moon. He did not know why it should be so; and yet it was.

  He fell back into himself all at once, into consciousness of the priests dancing and swirling about him, and the people calling out, and the rest of the young men, the hunters who would seek their horses between now and the summer’s end, running forward to finish the sacrifice.

  His part was done. He hated to see that beautiful body cut, the hide stripped off and carried away to be made into the king’s new year-seat, the flesh sundered from bones, the fire lit for the feast. And the head, the splendid head, cut off entire and buried in the holy place, to watch over the tribe until the year should return to its beginning.

  But he could stand apart from that, nor need he watch it unless he wished. People let him be. Maybe they could see the gods’ hand on him. He could feel it, strong as a stallion, heavy as worlds.

  He bowed and laid the knife on the altar’s edge and backed away as one did before the gods, letting the crowd of people surge past him to the conclusion of the rite. In a little while they were all gone ahead of him and he was alone on the trampled grass.

  He looked up. His sister was gone from the hill, and the Mare with her.

  He shed his robe of ceremony, let it fall on the grass. The trews underneath were all he wore. The wind was chill, but he barely felt it. He walked back slowly to the ring of tents, the women and the children and the blessing of quiet.

  oOo

  Sarama tended the Mare with her own hands. That was as it should be, and as it had always been. People knew better than to interfere, though children hung about and watched, fascinated as children always were by the sight of a woman in trousers tending a horse.

  Sometimes one of the boys would strut and fret and disapprove, though he never spoke directly to her. Rather he made sure that she could hear: “Look at that! A woman without a veil, and with a horse. Horses are for men. Women belong in tents.”

  Sarama never had to respond, even if she had been inclined. Another of the boys was always there to hush the arrogant one and warn him: “That’s not a woman like other women. That’s Horse Goddess’ servant. She lives to serve the goddess.”

  “Women live to serve men,” the arrogant one would often retort.

  Sarama had been angry at first, long ago when she was still a child. She had been the Old Mare’s lesser servant then, fetching and carrying for the Old Woman. Then it had mattered that she dressed more like a boy than a girl, and that the boys teased and tormented her behind the Old Woman’s back. Boys had no respect for the gods, or the goddess either.

  Since then she had learned to ignore them, and to resist the temptation to teach them manners. The gods would see that they learned proper respect, sooner or later.

  Today, even as she combed out the Mare’s long mane with her fingers and fed her bits of honeycake from breakfast, the loudest of the
arrogant ones tripped and fell over his own feet and split his lip on a stone.

  She happened to be watching him just then. He raised himself on shaky arms and happened, by the gods’ will, to catch her eye.

  She smiled sidewise. His face went white under the scarlet stain of blood. She was merciful: she looked away, and let him make his escape in peace.

  They left her alone after that. Boys were cowards, when it came to it. Girls could be bolder. It took great courage and no little ingenuity to escape the stifling confines of a tent and creep out to the horselines.

  There with hunter’s stealth they eluded the boys’ watchfulness and lurked in shadows. She would feel their yearning on her skin, their eyes fixed on her, wanting what she had: free air, white Mare, open sky. She never betrayed them, not even when their mothers or brothers came hunting them, cursing their impudence.

  There were two in shadows now, two pairs of eyes watching her. She could not acknowledge them, but she could teach as the Old Woman had taught her, by singing the songs that had come down from the time long ago. Today it was the Song of the Mare and the Woman, how the Mare had come to the Woman in the dawn time, spoken to her in the voice of the goddess and called her most beloved of servants.

  Men sang that the Stallion had come to the Man, that there had been no Mare, no Woman; that horses were men’s province and men’s alone from the long beginning. But the Mare and the Woman lived and endured, and proved them false. She sang that, too, how men had seized the power of horses, claimed the Stallion as if he and not the Mare were the lord of the herd, and wrought a whole world of clever lies to keep the Mare and the Woman forever bound and mute.

  It was terrible, that song, sung soft and sweet as a woman could sing it, as if she sang her child to sleep. It was never sung where man or boy could hear. It was a woman’s mystery, and a woman’s remembrance. Let the men remember as they please, she sang. We women—we remember as it truly was.

  Some girls fled then in fear, because in the world that they were bound to, the men’s world, it was blasphemy. But these were of a rarer, bolder sort. They lingered after the song had ended, silent in their patch of shadow, waiting to see what she would sing next. She considered for a while, but in the end chose silence. Leave them hungry, the Old Woman had taught her. Make them yearn for more. Then they come back. Then truly they begin to learn.

  Sarama hummed softly to herself as she made the Mare’s coat a smooth and shining thing, and stroked mane and tail till they ran like water. The Mare’s beauty was a great weapon in itself. Sarama did not wonder that men had seized on it and claimed it for their own.

  Somewhere, she thought, must be a world in which a woman could speak freely as a man, and not only because Horse Goddess had commanded it; where every woman walked free, nor had to creep and whisper and hide lest she be caught and shut up in the tents again. Such would be a marvelous world indeed. Then she could teach the girls and the young women what she best knew to teach, and no need to conceal the truth in riddles or in songs.

  Old Woman had known no such world, not in this age. “Long ago,” she had said, “such things were so. Now the gods will otherwise; and Horse Goddess in her wisdom permits it.”

  “But why?” Sarama had demanded. “Why does she allow it? It’s not fair.”

  “Nothing is fair,” Old Woman said, “nor simple, nor easily comprehensible. Particularly when there is a god in it. What is, is. That is the most that one can know.”

  “I would know more,” Sarama had said, but Old Woman had told her to hush and set to work peeling roots for dinner.

  When Old Woman spoke in that tone, Sarama had learned to obey. But the questions lingered, though she never gained an answer.

  A shout brought her about. The men were coming back from their feasting, bearing the head and hide of the Stallion, and well gone in kumiss, too.

  She whose sacrifices were secret things, who had laid the Old Mare to rest in clean bones and tanned hide, looked on the men’s poor likeness of the true sacrifice, and sighed. There was another incomprehensibility, another folly of the gods. Horse Goddess took no joy in stallion’s blood, though the milk of a mare and the caul of a newborn foal gladdened her greatly.

  Still, the men’s gods seemed pleased by the rite, as by the rites of Bull and Hound; and without them the tribes would suffer. Sarama had heard too how people whispered that more than beasts should have died in this festival, that the king held on past his proper time, that he should have offered his own throat to the knife, and ridden the Stallion into the gods’ country.

  And perhaps it was so. It was a Ninth Year. Horse Goddess had taken Old Woman and the Old Mare, had accepted their lives and blood as was her due. What the men’s gods wanted was not for Sarama to know.

  The Mare was clean, shining, and sulkily uncomfortable. She would roll in the grass when Sarama left her, staining her grey hide green.

  “Yes,” Sarama said to her, “and my sacrifice becomes your sacrifice, and all is well in the world.”

  The Mare snorted wetly. Sarama leaped back laughing, slapped her neck and let her go. She danced away with head and tail high, beautiful and knowing it, though beauty to a horse was dusty and filthy and thick with burrs and mud and tangles.

  oOo

  Yama the king’s eldest son set himself across Sarama’s path as she returned to the circle of tents. That they were begotten of the same father meant little to Sarama. The mother’s line was strongest, Old Woman had taught her. It was the mare who conceived and bore and raised the foal, not the stallion who mounted her when she came into season. But among the tribes the father meant much; and one’s father’s son was one’s brother, and if one was a woman one must yield to his will as if he were a god.

  Certainly Yama expected as much, though he should long since have known better. He was a big man, bigger than Agni but not as strong to look at. There was something soft about him, something not quite firm; a weakness that he concealed with bluster.

  The path was narrow but there was space enough on either side. Nonetheless she stopped, because clearly he expected her to. It was a form of contrariness.

  She was supposed to cower, she could see. She kept her head up, and though she was much smaller, she refused to be diminished by his lordly bulk.

  “Sister!” he boomed in his deep voice that sounded so well in the circle of the men. “Here, I’ve something for you. A returning-gift.”

  Sarama’s brows rose. Now that was something new. Yama had never tried to buy her before. He set in her hand a thing that, shaken out, showed itself to be a woman’s veil.

  She kept her expression still, her eyes level. “I thank you,” she said. She gave him no title, nor any name of kinship.

  Either he did not notice or he chose not to care. “You are welcome home,” he said, “where indeed you belong. Our father will have arranged for your housing, I’m sure, and your welcome among the people. Still, if you have need of hospitality, my wives have been instructed to welcome you into my tent.”

  Sarama inclined her head as she had seen Old Woman do. “You are generous,” she said. “Again I thank you.”

  “Remember,” he said, “that I offered this. It may serve you well.”

  “I shall not forget,” murmured Sarama.

  He nodded as if pleased, and went on his way.

  Sarama went on hers, somewhat less content within herself than she had been. Yama had not accosted her out of the goodness of his heart. Oh, indeed not. His gift was meant for a message, and his offer for a sign—and a warning.

  Some perhaps might have scorned him for a fool, to so insult Horse Goddess’ servant: to give her a gift that was proper to a woman, and to imply that she would enter the tents as a woman of ordinary lineage should. Sarama was no veiled or tentbound creature, nor would ever be, by the goddess’ will.

  Yama knew what he did. He was telling her somewhat that Old Woman had warned her of long since. Sarama was the last of Horse Goddess’ lineage, last of what had
in the old time been a great tribe. After her, if Yama had his way, would come no other—not of her likeness.

  She was rather surprised that he had not offered to find her a husband. That would come later, she had no doubt. Yama meant to be king, he had told her as clear as words. And when Yama was king, such oddities as Sarama would be disposed of, made a proper part of the people.

  “Lady,” she said to the bright depths of the sky, “whatever you will, I obey; but it would serve us very well if yonder bullcalf failed of his ambition.”

  She received no answer. She had not asked for one. It was enough to know that she was heard.

  4

  After the third of the three great sacrifices, the clans and tribes lingered yet a while in the place of gathering. Spring, which could be capricious, showed one day a blast of winter in chill rain and a spit of snow; the next, a coy face of summer in warm breezes and cloudless sky. The herds were yet content though they had wandered somewhat afield in search of grazing. When they had gone a day’s journey, then the people would disperse to their summer runs.

  They were not so far out yet, and the people, freed of the obligations of the high festival, mingled freely among the tents. Then marriages were made, alliances promised, feuds made and broken. One of Agni’s brothers by a mother of the Spotted Bull took to wife a woman of the Dun Cow—and not a madwoman either, that Agni could determine. She seemed a meek enough creature, demure in her veils, with wide-set brown eyes like a doe, and a voice like a dove’s call.

  She was said to be beautiful. Muriadni would know for certain this night; and he was eager for it, between kumiss and his brothers’ teasing. He had been kept away from any woman through the gathering, particularly in the dances on the days of sacrifice, housed in a tent apart and kept under strict if laughing guard. He looked, Agni thought, like a young stallion kept penned during the mares’ season: ready to batter down the walls and leap on the first mare he saw.