Daughter of Lir (9 page)

Minas stretched as Dias had done, but with far more
fortunate consequences. He had drunk less than most of the others, not so much
out of caution as out of desire for a certain pair of grey eyes, and a certain
lovely mouth and a certain ripe young body. She had been waiting for him
outside her father’s tent, and very willing indeed, too.

He smiled at the memory. Women were better than kumiss, by
far.

He said as much to Dias, who had come out behind him,
blinking and holding his head. Dias snarled in response.

Minas walked out of camp by the path that he had made, up
the long roll of land to the eastward, till he stood at the top of the world.
It dropped away before him, steeply down and down to the eastern plains. Their
plains—their world, that they had taken in force of arms, driving forever
toward the setting sun.

He laughed and spread his arms. The wind was keen, cutting
through his thin leather shirt, but it was his brother, his lover. None but he
had tasted it yet this morning. No lungs but his had drawn it in, no body felt
its clean cold touch. He was the first, the blessed one. He was the king’s heir
of the People, prince and chosen, beloved of the gods.

He sang the long clear note. The wind sustained it. The sun
rose on the strength of it.

Warmth wrapped him about. Dias grumbled and squinted, but he
had brought a mantle to wrap his brother in. “One of these mornings,” Dias
muttered, “you’ll catch your death.”

“Not I,” Minas said. “The gods love me.” He let his head
fall back. The wind caught his long loose hair and sent it streaming behind
him. He laughed and turned slowly about, making a dance of it, welcoming the
sun back to the camp of his people.

o0o

Aera heard that clear sustained note from the depths of
the king’s tent. It was a defiance so subtle and so exquisite that she paused
in her overseeing of the king’s youngest wives and let herself dream for a
moment that she stood on the world’s edge beside her son.

The king should have been there. He should have raised the
sun. Not a prince, not even the one whom he had named his heir.

But the king no longer performed that duty of his office.
There were many things that he no longer did. Rites of the sun and air,
celebrations of the daylight, daily judgments and smaller justice. When he
hunted, he hunted only lion and boar. He troubled himself with nothing that was
not, in his reckoning, kingly.

He was still abed with the newest of his wives. Her weeping
had stopped some while since. His grunting had paused; as Minas’ song died
away, Aera caught the soft rasp of the royal snore.

Her charges had fallen into disarray during her moment of
inattention. She brought them back to order with a sharp word. None of them was
weeping, at least. Even the twins, noted for their sullenness, were mending
tunics with reasonable application.

Aera’s jaw was aching again. Of all these children, every
one of them beautiful and every one of them the child of a man of influence
among the conquered tribes, not one went willingly to the king’s bed. Time was
when that had not been so; there were still a few who had come here in great
hopes of royal favor, dreaming of the power that a king’s wife could claim for
herself.

But all the power was in one woman’s hands, these days. That
woman was not Aera. And as for being wife to the king . . .

Some of them were whispering, off in the corner, but Aera’s
ears were keen. All their voices were muted to sameness, so that she could not
tell who spoke. Still the words were clear, their tone unmistakable. They were
speaking in trader-speech, which was all most of them had in common.

“I made myself a necklace of wild garlic,” one said, “and
said a spell over it, to keep him from me.”

“I’m going to provoke one of the older wives into beating
me, if he asks for me again,” said another. “I’ll make sure my lip is split.
Maybe, if she breaks my nose—”

“You’d go that far?” breathed a third.

“Wouldn’t you?”

There was a pause. Eyes gleamed, darting back and forth.
After a while the first said, “He smells like dead things. His rod is cold.
It’s like a stone inside me. Even the seed he spends—it’s like ice.”

“Maybe,” said the third hesitantly, “that’s what it’s
supposed to be like.”

The first scoffed. “What, are you an idiot? Haven’t you ever
played with the young men behind your father’s tent at night?”

“My father would never let me out of his sight.”

“Poor thing,” said the second. “Believe us, men are warm,
sometimes as warm as a good fire. And they may smell of many things, but death
is seldom one of them.”

“Sometimes,” said the first, “when he takes me, his eyes go
empty. There’s no man in there. There is . . . something else.”

“It’s that bitch Etena,” the second said, spitting out the
name. “I’ve seen her in the night sometimes, when the moon is dark. She dances
naked, and things dance with her. Dark things. She embraces them. She—does
things with them.”

“You think the king is—” the third began, but she could not
go on.

“We know the king is not as he used to be,” said the first.
“I forget, you come from the High River people. You never knew him before. He
was beautiful. He was a golden king, a sun-king.”

“Like his heir?”

“Very like. Though that one is a summer prince, all red and
gold. His father was paler, like winter sun, but warm. He used to laugh, and
sometimes he’d sing. He’d even be caught playing with children.”

“I can’t imagine that,” the third wife said.

“It was a long time ago,” said the first. “Before the king
conquered Etena’s people. Her father was a shaman, did you know that? Her
mother was a witch from the northern fells. She learned things from them, you
can lay wagers on it. Dark things. Terrible things.”

“Now she rules the king,” said the second, “and through him
the tribe. She has him thinking of nothing but the dark.”

“And war,” the first said. “Always war.”

“War is not so bad,” the third murmured. “Women stay home
then. Men ride out. Sometimes they’re even killed.”

Neither of the others hushed her as wives should do,
protecting their husband from the ill omen. Nor did Aera make a sign against
evil. Evil was already in this place, laired in the king.

She called Maia to take her place, which did not displease
that daughter of a war-chieftain. Maia was ambitious. She was eyeing Aera’s
position among the wives; but that, however fondly she might dream, was
unassailable. A woman needed sons in order to be mother to the king’s heir—and
Maia had only a pair of sickly daughters.

Aera slipped through the whispering dimness of the king’s
tent, past women who slept and women who tended children, past women and girls
chewing hides to soften them, or piecing them together into gowns or tunics or
leggings. There were women spinning wool into thread, and weaving that thread
on looms, and sewing the cloth into garments for the king and his favored sons—all
in the dimness of the tent. Some of them had not seen the sun in time out of
mind.

Aera could not live so trammeled. She passed the women’s
door, the flap that hid in a corner of the great tent. The sun was dazzling
even so early.

When her sight cleared, she made her way to the eastward
side. The cooks were tending the fires, grinding flour, baking bread, roasting
a newborn calf for the king’s breakfast. Its mother was lowing piteously in the
king’s herd, mourning her lost child.

Aera took little notice of them. Her eyes were on the two
figures that walked down from the world’s edge. The taller walked light and free,
wrapped in a bearskin, with his bright hair falling in tangles against the
black fur. The other, shorter by half a head, darker, broader, sturdier, trod
gingerly as if to keep his head from shattering.

Aera smiled, watching them. Minas and Dias, brothers of the
same father, one born in the morning, one born in the dark of the night, had
been inseparable from that first day. They had not shared a womb, but they had
shared Aera’s breast, for Dias’ mother Etena had had no milk, but Minas’ mother
Aera had had ample for both.

They never quarreled, those two, past the small squabbles of
brothers. In everything that mattered, they were as one heart. They fought in
battle together, sharing the same chariot, taking turn and turn about, now as
warrior, now as charioteer.

The sight of them warmed Aera’s spirit. It had been a long
night, full of shadows and whispers, and dim cold things creeping round the
edges of the light.

She hated to turn back into the tent’s darkness, but she had
duties, which she was shirking. As she steeled herself to abandon the sun, a
shadow crossed her path.

It was Etena, swathed in black, but she had not drawn the
veil over her face. Time had been less kind to her than to Aera. It had turned
her dark hair to ashes and stripped her skin of its youth, softening and
slackening it over the sturdy bones. But she was strong, and her eyes were as
grey as flint. They cut like edged blades.

Aera chose the same weapon as her son: the sweet brilliance
of a smile. It had no power to warm that bitter heart, nor had she expected
such a thing. But it bolstered her courage.

“You will undertake,” said Etena, “to restrain those
puppies. The king objects to being roused at dawn by the howling of wolf-cubs.”

Aera bit her tongue. She had learned long ago that argument
with Etena only ended in confusion. She bowed her head as if in submission.

“There will be no more of that caterwauling,” said Etena,
“by order of the king. Go, tell them. And bid them know that if they refuse,
the king will demand an accounting.”

Aera’s fists clenched. She was the Great Wife, mother to the
king’s heir. It was far beneath her to run errands for a mere royal favorite.

Still worse than that was the import of the errand. The
dawn-rite had sustained the world for time beyond reckoning. The king’s
defiance of it would have consequences. The gods were not mocked.

“I will go,” she said, soft and cool. “I will tell them. I
will make certain that the gods know who has commanded this.”

“The gods know,” Etena said. She turned her back on Aera—rudeness
heaped on insult—and disappeared into the shadows of the tent.

When she was gone, Aera drew a deep breath. The morning was
clear—splendid. She was briefly free. But she could take no joy in it. Not when
the tribe was ruled by such a creature.

The chariotmakers’ camp stood somewhat apart from the main
runs, a broad circle of tents on a rise to the north. The horse-herds grazed
beyond it, and sometimes round about it.

The others were there already, had been there, Minas did not
doubt, since it was light enough to see. They had three great war-cars begun,
and three more on their way to completion. The seventh stood whole on the far
edge of the circle, where it opened onto the horse-herds. It was one of the new
cars, broader and longer, so that two men could ride in it.

Minas’ grandfather knelt beside it, making a last adjustment
to the new yoke that he had made. He was all but bare in the morning’s chill.
His lean corded body was as strong as a young man’s. His eyes were as keen as a
falcon’s, his face sharp, his nose long and fiercely hooked.

As Minas paused, he sat back on his haunches, running his
hand distractedly through his cropped ash-and-copper hair. “That should do,” he
said in his harsh-sweet voice. “Will you be trying it for me?”

Minas bit back a grin. There were people who said Metos was
a god, or at least the son of one. He had eyes in the back of his head, they
said. He knew everything that anyone thought or did.

Minas was hardly inclined to dispute them. “Will you be
riding with me?” he asked.

His mother’s father did not dignify that with an answer.

One of the boys who looked after the herd was coming up from
the war-stallions’ pasture with Minas’ best pair, the golden duns who were so
swift and yet so light in the traces. At sight of Minas they pulled away from
the boy and ran to him, thrusting imperious noses into his hands, searching the
folds of his tunic.

He brought out bits of sweet cake for them, and the last of
the honeycomb that he had found on a hunt the day before. They devoured it all
greedily. But when he called them to order, they turned smartly and took their
places on either side of the chariot-pole.

Metos’ eyes were glinting. He lent a hand with yoke and
harness, adept as few others were. He had made the first chariot and wrought
the first harness: a madman, people had thought him then, when he was young,
before he was reckoned a god. Now he was old, as old as mountains, some said,
but he could still smile at a pair of good horses, and strap on their harness,
and spring into the car.

Minas was close on his heels, moving to the front of the
car, taking up the reins. The left-hand stallion tossed his head, uneasy, a
little, with the way the yoke sat on his neck. He on the right flattened ears
and nipped. A twitch of the fingers brought them both to order. “Now,” he said,
purring it. “Now, my beauties.”

He took them out past the edges of the herd, striking for
the open plain. The wind caught him there, stronger than it had been at
sunrise. The dun stallions snorted at it.

Horses never did like to run into the wind. Minas sent them
in a long arc round the herds of mares and the new foals. The chariot rocked
smoothly underfoot. It was balanced well, riding light on its wheels that Metos
had changed as he wrought them, making them larger, stronger, and yet less
heavy.

The yoke was marvelous. Once the horses had grown accustomed
to its feel, they liked the weight of it: they were lighter on their feet,
pulling more easily. Their turns were quicker, too, and their changes of pace
less harried.