Godbond (11 page)

The youngster swung his mare around and loped her away. Until he was very small on the distant Steppes I watched after him.

Finally I turned and wobbled away, afoot in a vast, arid plain.

There were fanged mares running loose. No use trying to catch one, I could tell merely by a look at their tossing heads and rolling eyes. I had no strength left to subdue one, and they wanted only to tear at the bodies of their former masters with their yellowbrown tusks, eat the sweet red meat and the sweeter guts. I staggered away and did not look back at them. All powers be willing, when they were done, and finished eating Muku as well, they would be too gorged to come looking for me to rend me and eat me in my turn. Yet they might come and stand around me, waiting like vultures until I died.

The thought enabled me to stumble a considerable distance down the Traders' Trail before I fell.

After that, all is clouded. I remember that the sunlight shimmered down far too hot, the night seemed too chill. I remember crawling on again from time to time, then giving it up and lying in the dirt. I remember thirst. I remember calling on Sakeema for succor—for I had not yet ceased to love my god, despite my dark thoughts—whispering his name with lips that would scarcely move.

Sometime, perhaps after only a day, I entered into a dream. It seemed to me that Kor was somewhere nearby, just around the hip of the mountain, but I was afraid, the Cragsmen were going to see him and slay him, I had to warn him, yet I could not shout.

Kor!
I shouted within my mind.

No answer. Odd, he had answered me that other time. It was how we had learned mindspeak.

Kor!

Where was he? He had to be nearby, within tongueshot and therefore within mindspeak's range. We had never been far apart since we had met.

Kor!

Was he already dead? No, Sakeema was dead. No, Sakeema was Kor. I had thought that once.

Sakeema, bond brother, answer me!

Something—something strange. No mindspoken answer, yet I felt, I sensed—a passion I could not name. Something.

Sakeema!

Moving warily, somewhere near.

Sakeema! Help me, help us all!

Even the Fanged Horse Folk? Yes, if the world were to remain, they would have to be on it. They also were his creatures.

Sakeema!

I felt presence, like a mind's skin lying next to mine … no, more like a frightened animal, shy but curious, snuffling the air, not yet daring to show itself, to see. Some animal with speaking eyes and warm fur.

World brother, come to me. It is all ending, I need comfort
.

Fear.

Yes. I, also, am afraid. Kor?

But Kor would not have been afraid to come to me. He was nowhere near. I began to weep, quietly, scarcely moving—perhaps it was only within my mind that I wept. But I remember a blur, as of tears. I remember lifting my head with great effort, trying to look around me, seeing nothing but flatness and the thunder cones in the distance. The mountains, my beloved snowpeaks, had been only in my dreams. Perhaps Sakeema had been only in my dreams, too, all this time.

Sakeema
, I mindspoke, not in pleas any longer but in heartache. And with great clarity and tenderness someone answered me.

Dan. Be still, I am coming
.

Voice I knew well, yet knew not at all … my mind spun, and vision faded into blackness.

Awakening came slowly. Aware that someone was with me, wondering who, yet I could not gather strength to open my eyes and see. Afraid, perhaps. So often I had seen the god in vision, or thought I had seen him in truth, and then heartbreak had followed.

Feel of furs under me, softening the hard ground, covering me, shielding me from chill air. Thirst, gone. Someone had given me water. Bindings—my wounds had been tended. Taste of food, bread and berries, in my mouth.

When at last I found strength, or daring, and opened my eyes, I saw only blackness. My hands jumped in alarm, my legs thrust at the ground, and I sent daggers of pain through myself even as I realized it was only the clean blackness of night. Eyes clenched shut against pain, but my gasp had brought someone to my side. Gentle hands felt my forehead, straightened the pelts that covered me.

“Kor?” I whispered.

But it was not Kor. I could feel the presence, the being of this person, and it was not the being of Kor. He was all loving courage, but in this person there was an edge like the edge of an eagle's wings in flight, and a distance, and a lonesome singing. And a bitter wound not yet healed, and a daring, a venturing, despite it. I felt it all, yet I had never been able to feel the being of any person other than Kor.…

I centered myself, opened my eyes again and looked. Warm glow of embers, the coals of a cooking fire, somewhere not far away. But the person bending over me was only a shadow in the night.

Who are you?
I mindspoke.

Fear, the other person's fear, I sensed it at once, though I myself felt no fear. I fumbled a hand out from under my covering, raised it to touch or comfort or try to keep the other by me, but the shadowy one edged away.

Too weary, or weak, to persist or wonder much longer, I drifted back into sleep.

I awoke to a feeling of peace and healing. Head and upper body, I lay not on furs but in someone's lap and arms. Warm glow over my still-lidded eyes told me it was daylight, and a sunlit day. I blinked my eyes open, squinting, and a hand appeared to shield them from the rays. Dark eyes looked down at me.

Dark eyes in a proud, fine-boned, handsome face. Tendrils of light brown hair curled down, taking the shape of hawk flight, around shoulders clothed in patched doeskin. I sighed with love and relief, laying the side of my face against a small, firm breast.

It was Tassida.

Chapter Eight

Hunger and my whip wounds had left me very weak, in need of nursing, though as always when Tassida was near I recovered far more quickly than seemed fair to expect. There was plenty of food, for (as she told me acidly) there had been quantities of it on the bodies of the Fanged Horse marauders I had killed and on their horses. Stoup's worth of oats and dried salmonberries. Glutton's share, and still Pajlat cried out that his people had not enough, and struck with his raiders to take from other folk.

“Lunkhead,” she told me, not as fondly as I would have liked, “if you had but stayed at the bloody place, there would have been food, and goatskins of water, and a mount for you.”

“I did not care to stay and watch the mares feed.” “They were well gorged and sluggish when I came upon them,” Tassida admitted, meaning that she had taken their baggage from them without danger.

“Also, there was the matter of the young brigand I had sent on his way.”

“A stripling with sharpened teeth in a dolt's mouth? I met with him and killed him.”

The turn of events struck me as wry, and I laughed, or tried to laugh, and Tassida must have thought I was laughing at her. She spoke sharply.

“He wanted to take my head to make up for yours he had missed! And I could not understand why he was alive, yet not cherishing your yellow hair. Why are you yet among the living? What happened?”

I told the tale to her, as best I was able. Briefly, for even after a day of her care I felt weak, and sitting up on my own to speak truly was an effort. But I sat and faced the evening's campfire, as is proper to the telling of tales. The last sunrays of the day still lingered when I was done.

“He could have killed me handily enough,” I mused. “I stood like a stump, I could not have lifted the sword. Why did he show me mercy, I wonder?” I would never know unless I met the man in the realm of the dead.

Tassida snorted, for Fanged Horse marauders were regarded as of somewhat less worth than vipers or Cragsmen by anyone of the other tribes. “Mercy!” she scoffed. “Fanged Horse Folk know nothing of mercy. The cub must have been parlous well frightened, that he would forego your pretty yellow-haired head.”

I expected small understanding of Tassida, and her scorn troubled me no more than Talu's would have. I shrugged, then grimaced at the pain that small movement gave me and lay down on my deerskin once again.

“How maidens will pursue you now,” Tass teased me, “with such a tale to tell, and a comely scar on your temple.”

“They will be disappointed,” I told her quietly, looking up at her from my bed of pelts. “I want no woman, any longer, but you.”

The words shook her. I saw her eyes widen hugely in the firelight.

Tass
, I mindspoke her. A solemn act, to mindspeak her by name. I had never done so with anyone but Kor.

“Don't!” Her hands went up to shield her head, and all her muscles hardened against that single silent word.

“Yet you answered me once,” I said softly.

“No!” A violent denial. Had it truly been the god, then? The thought made my heart pound. Or was Tass so frightened that she would lie to me?

“You are afraid? It will go away.” An odd quirk, that so fierce a warrior as Tassida could be so routed by the closeness of mind. But I remembered how terrified I had been of it at first. I remembered also, with a small pang, how Kor had not been afraid, but full of wonder, for all that mindspeak was as new to him as it was to me. “I, also, was afraid. We are more alike than we know, Kor has said.”

“Go to sleep,” Tass commanded me rudely. I smiled and did as she bade me.

The next day, though I could scarcely sit upright to ride on Calimir behind her, we traveled to the flanks of the thunder cones. Tass worried whether Pajlat's people might find the bodies of their dead patrol, or be alerted by the wandering mares, and she was afraid Fanged Horse raiders might pursue us for revenge. I felt no such fear, for the chances seemed remote. (Afterwit tells me that she wanted to take me to a certain place, and found reasons that hid her true reasons even from herself.) But certainly I was willing enough to go where she said. In the flanks of the thunder cones, she told me, there were folds and crannies where fire could not be seen, good hiding. And they would not think we had gone there, for no one went willingly to that bleak, black, sharp-stoned land where almost nothing grew. There were passages that would make my way to the Herders shorter. I accepted all this without question, for she spoke as one who knew.

Calimir moved like flowing water under us, shining black water, for he was black but for his white belly and mane and legs, and a marvel among horses in many other ways as well. What a steed, that one. Swifter than any fanged mare yet soft in his gaits, fierce in battle yet gentle and beautiful, generous, great of nostril and eye. His small ears pricked eagerly forward, his finely shaped head nodded with his swift, smooth walk. Even sitting behind Tassida, on his rump where the jarring of a horse's gait is the worst, I rode in comfort. But I was yet weak, I had to fold my arms around Tassida's waist for support, and before halfday my head rested against her back.

“Tass, why are you here?”

The warm sun, the rhythm of the walk, had lulled us both. She answered me without edge.

“I came to the Red Hart only two days after you. They were still preparing to travel to Seal Hold. Tyee told me which way you had gone.”

“You followed me? I am honored. But why?” Softly, gently, not wishing to press her. I knew that she loved me, in her way. But was there something more that she wanted of me than my love for her?

She sighed, and though she did not stiffen or bristle as was her wont, it was the span of many breaths before she spoke.

“Why do you seek Sakeema?” she said in a low voice, and it was not a question or a reproach, but an answer I could not quite encompass. I laid my cheek against the tough muscle and bone of her shoulder blade, and thought much but asked no more.

These were my thoughts: that she had last seen Kor and me quarreling, yet did not ask how it stood between us, but seemed to know. That she, unlike many others, had not asked me why I was not at my comrade's side. That she knew I sought Sakeema, but how did she know? Had Tyee told her? Or were there things about me that she knew in her soul, as if I were a part of her?

I put the thoughts away with the other mysteries in my mind.

Edau, Val, Rawnie were the names of the thunder cones. Fire, Redheaded Warrior, Wise Woman. And Senet, Keb, Methven, Catalin Du: Elder, Earth's Ire, Spirit Flame, Black Wizard. We rode up the skirts of Catalin, and the land lay all in black ripples and shining black edges sharp as knives—indeed, skirts like this one were where my people came to gather blackstone for their knives, though I had never done so. Above it the cone loomed, not as big as a mountain, but twice as forbidding. Drifts of gritty black brickle had gathered between sheets and swells of rock like black ocean waves—this place seemed far too much like Mahela's Mountains of Doom to suit me, nor was I comforted because a few hardy plants grew in the brickle. Looking down at the cindery talus, thinking what a place like this had once done to my bare feet, I winced.

“Calimir's hooves,” I murmured to Tassida, for it was much to be expected, that he should carry the two of us over such terrain.

“They are tough, and he chooses his footing with care.”

She rode him at the very loose rein, letting him find his own path, and Calimir held his comely head almost to the ground, studying every step he took. After a while, as the way grew even more treacherous, Tassida swung one foot over his lowered neck and slipped lithely to the ground, leaving me perched like a child on a led pony.

“His hooves are worn evenly, and only a little,” she reported, and she walked along beside the horse as the blackstone cut into her deerskin boots and the fiery sun beat down on us both. It would have been a fine, brave thing if I could have walked instead of her, but I knew I could not. Already I was bracing myself with a hand against the horse's withers just to stay upright. But I slipped off my boots of thick bisonhide and passed them down to her, and she put them on over her own, without comment.