White Mare's Daughter Read online

  Still he was comforted by the sound of her rising, the soft pad of her bare feet on the floor, the opening and shutting of the door as she went out to the Lady’s place. Sometimes he would rise from his bed and stand in his doorway and watch her go. She would smile then, beautiful and serene, with her great breasts that had nourished a round dozen children, and her ample belly, and her huge round thighs. And he would smile back, content with the ordered round of his world.

  On this morning, a clear morning of spring with the promise of summer in it, Danu woke gasping from a dream of fire. Fire and shouting, and thunder, and a bright river of blood. He lay for a long while, struggling to breathe, to fit the world about him again. Dark world, gentle world, cry of a night bird, rustle of the Mother’s pallet as she rose to greet the sun.

  There was no haste in her movements, no tremor of fear, no sign that she had dreamed as he had dreamed. It had beset him with the force of a true-dream, or such as he had heard they were. But the Mother had not dreamed it. How then could it be true? Men did not see past the veils of the world. That gift was given to women.

  He wished that he could be surer of that; that he could thrust aside the conviction that this dream came not from the night spirits but from the Lady herself. It was terrible arrogance, to think such a thing.

  He stumbled to his feet. His skin felt too thin, as if a breath would tear it.

  The Mother passed by, soft padding of feet, faint ripple in the door-curtain. Danu moved without thought, softer even than she, following her out into the chill of the morning.

  oOo

  The light was dim and grey yet oddly clear. The stars were fading. Light glimmered along the eastern horizon, over the walls and roofs of the city. It was the greatest city of the Lady’s country, where one could stand atop a roof and see a city on every side. Her people were rich in cities, rich in copper and gold, in fine weavings and work of hands, in songs and magic. This was the richest of them all; and the Mother was lady of it, in the Lady’s name.

  She walked down the street from her house to the Lady’s shrine, that stood higher and prouder than any other. Its walls were painted with holy things, wings and eyes of birds, fishes, shapes of women and does, she-goats and ewes, and over and over, the image of the Spiral Dance.

  Strangers grew dizzy at sight of it. Danu had been born inside it, had grown up with it before him. To him it was merely itself.

  The Mother entered through the lesser door. Danu was a man grown; he could not follow. He sat on the doorstep, shivering slightly with the morning’s chill, clasped his knees and rocked and waited till she should ascend the tower.

  Then it came, the thing that he had waited for. The high clear call like the cry of a bird, and the ripple of pure notes thereafter.

  Words grew out of them. They were older than anyone living could remember, as old, some said, as the world. The meaning was all worn away from them.

  But not the power. That was strong with the strength of ages. It rang in her voice. It hummed through Danu’s bones and thence into the earth. It called the sun into the sky.

  The blaze of it, the pure daily glory, made Danu weep. It washed away the memory of fire, and stripped the dream of its terror.

  The Mother’s voice fell silent. Danu sighed faintly. Well before she came out of the temple, he was gone.

  oOo

  His sister was waiting for him, sitting on his rumpled bed in her fine red skirt and her striped shawl. She had been gone the night long—dancing the dance with Kosti-the-Bull, Danu could well guess. Women always had that look of creamy contentment after a night with Kosti.

  Danu ignored her in his quest for a clean tunic. She was sitting on the one he had wanted, but he had another, if he could remember where he had put it.

  “In the chest,” Tilia said. “Under the cloak with the hole in it.”

  Danu shot her a burning glance. Of course the tunic was where she had said it was. “You’ve been in my things again,” he said.

  She shrugged, unrepentant. “I was looking for a shawl to wear to the Planting Dance. What did you do with the one Mother made for you, with the birds woven on it?”

  Danu showed her his teeth. “I hid it,” he said. “I’m keeping it for a morning-gift.”

  “Oh!” she said brightly. “Are you going to get Chana to ask for you, then?”

  He flushed hotly but kept his head up. “Chana doesn’t want me. She’s after Kosti.”

  That was nasty, but Tilia only laughed. “Oh, is she? Poor Chana. Such a stick of a girl, and Kosti, as everybody knows, prefers a woman with substance.”

  Danu thought Chana lovely as a willow is lovely, lissome and slender, but he was not going to say so to Tilia. Tilia was beautiful as a woman well should be, as the Mother was beautiful, great-breasted and broad-hipped, with wonderfully potent thighs. She would be Mother in her own time, would speak before the goddess for the people of this city, and the Mothers of the lesser cities would look to her for wisdom.

  But that was far away in the round of years. She was young yet, and neither as wise nor as imposing as she fancied she was. Danu pulled the tunic over his head and raked fingers through his wild curly hair, taming it somewhat with a bit of leather wound and knotted at his nape.

  Tilia watched with frank appreciation. “You really are a pretty thing,” she said. “Why would you want to waste yourself on Chana? You could have yourself a woman of worth in the world. It’s only right, after all, since you’re the Mother’s son. You owe it to her name.”

  Danu had not the faintest intention of wasting himself on Chana, who was pretty to look at but dull to listen to—unless one was fascinated by minutiae of trading in fine clay pots. Chana meant to be very rich, and likely would be, though her family was nothing in particular.

  Because it would drive Tilia wild, Danu said, “Chana will be richer than the lot of us. Wait and see. Shouldn’t I be looking for a woman with ambition?”

  Tilia snorted in disgust. “Oh, you men are always thinking—with your manly parts. It’s well women speak first to the goddess; if it were left to men, there’d be nothing in the world but mating and squabbling.”

  “You mate well, I’m told,” Danu said sweetly, “and you squabble famously.” He ducked the blow she aimed at him, laughed and danced aside and out the door, and left her cursing his impudence.

  oOo

  In some parts of the Lady’s country, young men were given nothing to do, or were cast out to run in packs like dogs. Not so in the Mother’s city. There everyone, even the least regarded boychild, had a task and a place. Danu’s was to tend the Mother’s house and to run her errands as she required of him. It was a great task, and a great trust. He was well aware of the honor she did him.

  This morning there was considerable to do: it was a washing-day and a baking-day, and later a guest would come, the Mother of a city to the westward. Danu roused the Mother’s acolytes: new since the Planting Dance, awkward and sullen, resentful that they must do the bidding of anyone but the Mother herself. The menservants were at their tasks already and long since.

  The last of the ill dream faded beyond recall, lost in the day’s brightness. When the washing had been brought up from the river smelling of sun and of the grass it had been spread on to dry, and the bread and honeycakes and the guest-cakes were made and set to cool, Danu sent the acolytes to wait on the Mother, and the menservants to take an hour’s leisure, and set himself free to wander down to the market.

  It was, after all, a duty of his. He brought a little wool to trade, a bead or two, even a bit of copper if he should find something irresistible.

  At this hour, just after noon of a fair day in spring, the market was humming. A trading party had come in from the east, bringing furs and tanned leather and ivory; there were weavers with fine wool of the northern cities; and it was a day for the livestock market, a tumult of lowing and bleating, haggling and crying of wares. Danu loved the liveliness of it, the babble of voices, the unexpectedness of a ne
w thing and the familiarity of an old one side by side in the broad market square.

  He bought a thing or two that he or the house had needed, and a frippery for Chana, mostly to spite his sister; then in a fit of remorse he bought another for Tilia.

  Some others of the young men were out and about, freed or on errands. Danu wandered past a favorite place of theirs, a stall that offered middling bad wine for a middling decent exchange. A twist of wool gained him a cup and a sop of bread to dip in it, and a place on the bench between that stall and the next.

  One or two others were there already. They slid down to make room for him, smiling or lifting a cup in greeting. He settled into their companionship, which was mostly silence, with lowered eyes when a woman walked past. Sometimes she would stare, and they would try not to look as if they noticed.

  Danu ate his bread and drank his wine, and sat for a little while, enjoying the contentment of full stomach, warm sun, leisure that must end soon—but not yet.

  Others had come while he ate, till there was a fair gathering of them, the sons of the elders and such of the weavers and potters who could escape for a little while from their labors. With so many, the silence could not last; ripples of chatter ran down the line, rumors, gossip, snatches of stories. Of late it had too often been the same story, one that had come out of the east.

  A stranger had come to the city called Running Waters, near the wood that rimmed the world. He had come through the wood, he said in signs and gestures and snatches of traders’ speech, he in his leather and furs, with his stone knives and his bold manners. The people of the wood had let him pass, as sometimes they did, on a whim or for curiosity: to see what the cities would make of him.

  He was a savage, ignorant of true speech, and he reeked like an ill-kept animal. But savages were not as uncommon as that, though mostly they came from north or south rather than from the east. Strangest and most wonderful were the beasts that he brought with him, huge creatures, hooved like cattle but shaped to carry a man on their backs. Horses, he called them.

  “Great as a bull,” Kosti was saying; and he would know, since he was himself. “Strong as one, too, but fast—faster than any man can run. Whole tribes of them ride on these horses, the savage said, racing the wind across their plains of grass.”

  “I think they’re the dead,” said Shuai, whose mother was one of the singers before the goddess. “Only the dead can outrun the wind. That was a ghost come to trouble us all.”

  “Ghost or dark spirit,” someone else said; Danu did not see who it was. People murmured, agreeing, disagreeing.

  No one argued. They did that in less public places, where the women could not hear and disapprove.

  Everyone was full of this story of the stranger and his beasts. Ghosts at least one could believe in. Savages, surely. But horses? What sort of animal was as tall as the temple, as swift as light on water, with a hide like living copper?

  “Like fire,” Kosti said. Kosti had not seen the horses, but he had been sopping up stories as bread sops wine, and remembering them all. It gave him something to do, Danu thought uncharitably, between flexing his muscles in the smithy and being a bull for the women. “Red as fire, and gleaming like copper in the forge. They’re gods, it’s said, or the children of gods.”

  “Goddess,” Rami said. “That’s what I heard. He said Horse Goddess.”

  “How could he say that,” Shuai demanded, “if he didn’t speak any language of the living?”

  “He had a few words,” said Rami. “Traders’ words. He saw an image of the Lady, and he kept pointing to it and saying Horse, and then a word nobody knew. Why not Goddess?”

  “She is everywhere,” Kosti said. People nodded, agreeing with him, as was proper piety.

  Danu stood up abruptly. “I believe there was a stranger,” he said. “I believe he came out of the wood, and the people of the wood let him pass. I do not believe he brought anything with him but a cow or two, or maybe a deer. A tame deer—my sister had one once. What’s so remarkable about that?”

  They stared at him. He was not given to sudden speech or to outbursts of temper. But something about this story, endlessly repeated, put him straight out of patience. “It’s a story,” he said, “told and retold till there’s no telling truth from wild rumor. Ghosts!” he snorted. “Spirits—yes, spirits of folly. What does any of it have to do with us? What should we care?”

  He left them still staring, with a new tale to tell among themselves: how the Mother’s son had lost his temper over nothing at all. They would wonder, he had no doubt, which woman had provoked it, and laugh behind their hands, and look to see who singled him out at the next fire-dance. Then they would think they knew why he had been so unwontedly cross-grained.

  It was nothing to do with women. He disliked the story, that was all, and the monotony of its repetition. There was something else, a memory that fled before he could grasp it, a flicker of fear from nowhere that he could discern.

  “Savages,” he muttered. “Horses. Who dreamed such a word? It doesn’t mean anything. It’s air and nothing.”

  He did not feel better for having said it. But duty—that calmed him.

  He had delayed unconscionably. The Mother from Larchwood city would be here, and nothing would be ready for her. He quickened his pace even as he stilled his mind, putting aside both temper and fear. By the time he came to the Mother’s house, he was almost his quiet self again.

  9

  The Mother from Larchwood city arrived in state, well before sundown but well after the Mother of Three Birds was ready for her. She did great honor in the size of her company: not only a fair handful of her daughters but even a few of her sons, with acolytes and servants, friends and companions, and a flock of sheep and goats to aid in feeding them all.

  The Mother of Three Birds received her guest at the edge of her city, where the last houses looked over the green swell of the fields. She had her daughters with her, and her acolytes, and such of the elders as could be spared from duties about the city.

  Tilia held the place of honor at the Mother’s left hand, her heart-hand, as befit the one who would be Mother in her time. She had not met the Mother from Larchwood before. Larchwood was far away, almost to the eastern edge of the world.

  It was a remarkable thing for a Mother to come so far simply, as the messengers had said, to visit and pay respect to the greatest of the Mothers in the heart of the world. Remarkable but not, thought Tilia, incomprehensible. Everyone knew that Three Birds was the greatest city in the world.

  She kept her place and a properly respectful silence, but her eyes and mind were well occupied. The stranger-Mother was older than her own, and never so vastly beautiful.

  Nor were her daughters as lovely as the daughters of Three Birds. The one who stood in the heir’s place was a slender whip of a thing, hardly more substance to her than there was to Chana. Surely a Mother’s heir should be an image of the Mother, not of the young larch-tree from which her city took its name.

  The stranger was eyeing Tilia, too—admiring Tilia’s beauty, surely, and judging her fitness to rule. Mothers’ heirs must do such things. It was their duty.

  Tilia smiled at her, because that also was duty. She barely smiled back. Either she was a sour-faced creature by nature, or something troubled her almost beyond the bounds of politeness.

  Mother embraced Mother with much ceremony. They blessed one another in the goddess’ name, spoke the words of greeting and of welcome. The Mother of Three Birds took the Mother from Larchwood by the hand then and led her into the city, a gesture that made her free of it, and named her friend and sister.

  Tilia took the daughter’s hand in turn. It was thin and rather cold. Tilia could read nothing from it or from the face beside hers, except that this Catin’s mind was troubled.

  There would be time to ask. Now was time for ceremony, for procession through the city to the Goddess’ house, for the blessing and the solemn dance that would bind Larchwood and Three Birds in amit
y thereafter.

  One might converse in the processional, but Catin appeared to have no conversation. She walked mute at Tilia’s side, hand limp in Tilia’s.

  If Tilia had been a bit of a fool, she might have thought that Catin did not want to be here. But that was ridiculous. Who would not want to be a guest in Three Birds?

  oOo

  From the eastward side of the city one walked past the Mother’s house to reach the shrine. Tilia saw her brother standing in the door as the procession passed by. As idle as he was managing to look, as if he had leisure to hang about in doorways and stare at strangers, she did not doubt that he had everything in hand within.

  Danu was an admirable keeper of the household, though Tilia would never have told him she thought so. It was best to keep a young man humble. Otherwise he got too full of himself.

  He was in very good looks today. He never seemed to be aware of his fine dark eyes or his fine olive skin, or his lovely broad shoulders and his long clever hands. Women could never forget; they were all a little in love with him.

  Tilia watched Catin out of the corner of her eye, to see if she noticed how beautiful the young man was. Indeed she must have seen him: her eyes passed right over him. Passed, and went on. They never even paused.

  Tilia’s own eyes narrowed. Ignore him, would she? Tilia would see about that. This was a Mother’s daughter: she was worthy of him. Quite unlike that little nobody he was chasing after.

  Then they were past, and Tilia could not in propriety crane over her shoulder to see if he stayed to watch the rest. Catin, she was deciding, was an odd and anxious creature—quite alien to the serenity that a Mother was supposed to cultivate. And she had no taste in men at all.

  oOo

  The Lady’s house was full of birds. They came at her will, some to nest, some to eat the fruits of her garden or to be fed at morning and evening by the Mother’s acolytes, some even and occasionally to die.