Daughter of Lir (55 page)

“But she never lets the baby out of her sight,” said Gerent.
“Even when it nurses, she’s there; she snatches it as soon as it’s done.”

“She’s taking no chances,” Minas said. “This one she’ll be
sure to raise as her creature—since she failed so notably with the last.”

“It won’t matter,” said Gerent. “It’s only the daughter of a
son, and if the omens are lacking, it can’t be Mother.”

“Can you be sure of that?” Rhian drew up her knees and
clasped them. There was an odd deep warmth in her middle. It was not rounding
yet, and yet she knew what was there, what grew in her day by day, till in the
spring it would be seeking its own omens.

None of these men knew, not even Minas. She would tell him—soon.
But he would fret, because she rode out and about, and drove chariots, and
tamed horses. He would want her shut in walls and protected from every ill of
the world; and she could not bear that, or the battle it would be to convince
him of the fact.

Gerent answered her question. “They didn’t invent omens,” he
said. “If they meant to do what she wants of them, they would have done that.”

“I wouldn’t put it past them,” Minas said.

“But they didn’t,” said Gerent. “They gave us silence. She
may not know what that means—she’s a foreigner, after all. She can go on
dreaming, and by the time she learns what they’ve failed to tell her, it will
be too late to change it.”

“That is devious,” said Minas with approval.

Rhian let her eyes linger on him. The charioteers, that
summer, had taken to wearing a light kilt for comfort in the heat. It had
become a fashion, and a mark of honor, that simple garment of plain linen,
broad-belted with leather and bronze.

He was well suited to the fashion, with his smooth fair skin
and his lean grace. She would have loved to touch him, and more than that, but
he was horribly shy about such things where anyone could see. She settled for
the lesser pleasure of the eyes, and for reflecting on what they would do
later, in the king’s house, when the lamps were lit and the rest of the world
had gone to its rest.

This was a well-traveled road, the road that ran southward
from Lir. Many of those who passed, paused to stare at the chariots, though by
now the sight of them was familiar to people from the city and the towns about
it.

They were still a curiosity, and charioteers were the envy
of every headstrong child. Companies of them had taken to appearing in Lir,
begging for a place among the chariots. Those that were willing, the king took
on as servants; those that were talented, Minas set to work among the makers.

The road was full of wagons today, rolling slowly toward the
autumn festival in Lir. A year ago, Rhian thought, they had been in Larchwood,
guests of its Mother; and the king’s urgency had brought her, with Minas,
headlong to the city. But that urgency had dissipated. No war had come. The
steppe was quiet. The king built his forts in peace, troubled only by the
temple’s disapproval. Now autumn was on them, and winter would follow, with a
good harvest and storehouses full.

One wagon slowed to a crawl as it approached them. It was
not like others that Rhian had seen. It was elaborately painted in a strange
fashion, with a tasseled canopy and gilded wheels. The oxen that drew it were
the color of cream, and their horns, like the wheels, gleamed with gold.

People walked with it—all men, dressed in heavy, strange
garments, wrappings and swathings of thick fabric. They were dark men, not as
tall as the people here, but thickset, with thick black hair, and beards to the
breast, but their upper lips were shaved: an odd thing, and very foreign. They
were armed with spears and swords and heavy curved bows. None of them rode on
horses.

Rhian understood from that what these men must be. Men of
the cities far to the south, cities of mud and water as the traders called
them. They were strange but very rich, and they wrought fine things in gold.

The wagon was the first of several. The others were laden
with bundles—baggage, Rhian supposed, or trade-goods. That in the lead carried
a man who must be a lord: he was weighed down with ornaments of gold, and he
had no weapon about him. He rode with his hands folded in his lap: plump soft
hands, ringed with gold.

The caravan halted. Bronwy sat up, staring. The others
stayed deliberately where they were. Gerent looked merely lazy. Minas, without
moving a muscle, looked profoundly insolent.

Rhian smiled at the foreigner. “I welcome you to Lir,” she
said in the traders’ speech.

The foreigner answered smile with smile. His eyes admired
her without shyness, but without giving offense, either. That was an art she
had thought unknown outside of the Goddess’ country.

He stepped down from the wagon to stand on sturdy feet. He
was very thick and short, but surprisingly graceful. He bowed to Rhian with
elaborate ceremony, and to the others with a fine edge of mirth, and inspected
the chariots in open fascination. “So this is the great thing we heard of, even
we in the cities by the two rivers,” he said.

Minas roused at that. “Two rivers? Where are they?”

“Far to the south,” the stranger answered, “beyond the
lesser sea of grass.”

“You have no horses?”

“They are rare in my country,” the stranger said. “And you—would
you be a tribesman from the east? A charioteer?”

Minas inclined his head slightly. He never admitted it, but
it pleased him to see awe in people’s faces when they realized what he was.
This stranger’s response must have been gratifying: wide eyes, slight gasp, and
markedly greater interest.

“Even from so far away,” said the stranger, “we have heard
of you and your terrible new thing, your weapon of war. Many said it was legend
or myth, a tale to frighten children, but I reckoned it true. I came to see—to
know if it could be so.”

“It is so,” Minas said.

The stranger might not understand the odd tilt of his smile,
but Rhian understood it very well. Wherever chariots were, the curious came—and
spies, too. This pleasant man had not come on a whim, any more than she or Emry
had gone to the steppe.

She smiled at him and said, “Come, sir. We’ll take you to
our king.”

“Not to your Mother?”

She met his eyes. The question seemed innocent, but in these
matters she trusted nothing and no one. “The king is the master of all that has
to do with war,” she said, still smiling. She held out her hand. “Come with
us.”

He looked from her to Bronwy, who had brought up the duns
with their chariot. His expression was comical in its astonishment. Terror
warred with childlike eagerness. He flushed and then paled. “In—in—
that
?”

“In this,” she said, as sweetly as ever.

He was a brave man, for all his seeming softness. When she
had ascended and taken the reins, he climbed up behind her, catching his breath
and clutching the sides as the chariot rocked under his weight. She half
expected him to retreat then, but he was stronger of spirit than that. He held
his ground.

She did not spare him. The horses were refreshed and ready
to run, and their stable was waiting. She let them choose their own pace. The
stranger clung for dear life, but made no sound. Perhaps he could not. A glance
back showed her a stark white face and open mouth and eyes perfectly round.

Minas was following with Gerent. Bronwy, still in disgrace
after his mishap with the duns, would be condemned to walk with the stranger’s
escort, to guide them to the city. He was a better guide than charioteer, that
was certain.

She smiled to herself. Her mood was bright today, barely
shadowed by the child in the temple, or by the quiet but continual war between
the priestesses and the king. Once she had settled the stranger in the king’s house,
she would take the mare and ride out for a day or a hand of days. The
horse-herds needed settling for the winter, and the new chariot-teams needed
testing, to see which of them should come to Lir before the snow fell. There
were rites, too, and festivals of the mare, to which she should devote herself.

Maybe Minas would come with her. His chariotmakers were able
to work without him now, and he had a look about him that spoke of too much
confinement. He was a wild thing; he could survive for a while in a cage, but
then he needed to run free.

“Stranger,” she said over her shoulder as they flew down the
side of the road, scattering passersby too startled to understand that they
were in no danger, “what name may we call you?”

At first she thought him incapable of answering. Then,
faintly, he said, “My name is long and difficult for your people to pronounce.
Most often they call me by part of it: Eresh.”

“Eresh,” she said. “I am Rhian, and yonder redhead is Minas,
and that is Gerent the king’s son riding behind him.”

“Are you the king’s daughter?” he asked.

She raised a brow, though not so that he could see. Nor did
she answer him. The Goddess provided a convenient distraction: a wagonload of
cut and bound fodder for the horses in the city, that barred the road and part
of the verge. The chariot could scrape past, but had to slow greatly to do it.

Thereafter the road widened and its verge narrowed on the
way to the city. They had to proceed at a much more stately pace, at which the
horses fretted, but Eresh the foreigner was visibly glad. He began to breathe
again, though he barely loosened his deathgrip on the chariot’s rim.

o0o

It was market-day in Lir, the last of the autumn. In the
lowing of cattle and the bleating of goats and sheep and the babble of bargaining,
Rhian brought Eresh to the king’s house. Truly he was a man of cities: the more
crowded and noisy the street was, the greater his ease.

He had to be helped down in the court of the king’s house.
And yet he was smiling, an almost hectic grin. “That,” he said, “will be the
dream of every wild youth between the rivers. To race the wind—to fly. But I,”
he admitted ruefully, “am incurably earthbound. I thank you for this, with all
my heart, but I think I’ll keep to my oxcart hereafter.”

Rhian grinned back at him. “An honest man is a delight to
the Goddess,” she said.

She heard a soft snort behind her that might be one of the
horses, or might be Minas. She kindly ignored it. “Come to the king,” she said,
“and again, be welcome in Lir.”

“And someday maybe,” he said, as if on impulse, “you may be
welcome between the rivers.”

She paused. His smile had changed. He was thinking, she
could see, of what his world and people could do with this terrible and
wonderful thing. Just as she had done on the steppe, he was seeing what could
be.

The world was a much wider place than she had ever imagined
when she was a potter’s child in Long Ford. In these bright dark eyes she saw
how wide it truly was—wider than any single spirit. It frightened her. And yet
it struck her with a strange wild joy.

The king was in a rage. It was not obvious. He was
shooting at targets with some of the warband; he greeted the arrivals with
courtesy, even smiled, and was gracious in escorting Eresh back to his house.
But Rhian saw the tightness in him, a whitening of the nostrils, a quickening
of the step as he left the field.

Eresh offered no more of his purpose in Lir than he had
given Rhian, though he did it in many more words. He had come to trade and to
see chariots. To spy, as the boys had thought—there could be little doubt of
that.

Lir had nothing to hide. Eresh, with his following when at
last they made their slow way to the city, was given a house near the king’s
house, and servants, and whatever else they had need of. That day they feasted
with the king, sharing the fruits of the harvest: richness that widened their
eyes, though Rhian could see that they too came from a rich city.

“You are a legend to us,” Eresh told her over wine, as the
lamps grew bright in the dusk. “The land of women, where goddesses walk living
on the earth. And now there is this engine of war, but the legend proclaims
that you never wage war—that when war comes to you, you fight it, but you do
not ride out to conquer.”

“That is true,” Rhian said. “We defend. We protect. We
worship our Goddess. We need no more than we have, nor want more. It is
enough.”

“It is said in our country that for men, nothing is ever
enough.”

“For men,” she said with a tilt of the brow.

He bowed slightly. “That is so. And yet you have a king.
It’s clear that he rules; that he fights and leads fighters. Has none of them
ever pressed for more—more land, more wealth, more power?”

“I don’t doubt it,” she said. “There will be fools in every
part of the world. But sometimes there is enough wisdom to keep the fools in
check.”

“Your country is fortunate,” said Eresh.

o0o

Often when Rhian was in the city, she rose at dawn and
went out to the mare, and rode wherever fancy took them. The morning after
Eresh came to Lir, Rhian came down in the grey light. Minas was still asleep.
So should the rest of the king’s people have been, but as she crossed the hall,
a stirring by the hearth brought her up short.

The king sat in his tall carved chair, long legs stretched
out, beard on breast, glowering at the embers. He looked as if he had been all
night there: he was still in the fine coat that he had worn at dinner, now worn
and rumpled.

Between Eresh and later, more delightful distractions with
Minas, Rhian had forgotten the anger she had seen in the king’s face when she
brought the stranger to him. The ashes of it were still there, the fire all but
cold.

Rhian sat at his feet and looked into his eyes. “Tell me,”
she said.

He started slightly, as if he had been sleeping awake and
had just now roused to her presence. His smile was quick, almost too quick to
see before it vanished into the rich curls of his beard. “You think there’s
something to tell?”