Godbond (7 page)

The place seemed very dim after that. But I remembered where I had seen steps to climb, along the inside of the wall, steps in the stone. I felt my way to them and clambered up. There were lofts and ledges and the remnants of rooms above. There were yet more steps to a higher, lighter place where a lookout might once have stood, or where a king had perhaps stood to overlook his demesne. I stood there and looked, blinking into bright sunlight.

Far, I could see far, nearly as far as the hunter of my name vision. Behind me and above me, the vast snowpeaks. Far to one side, northward, the blue sweep of the tallgrass prairie, a goodly land where few folk went because north of it again lay the bleak steppes where the warring Fanged Horse Folk roamed. Straight in front of me, but far to the eastward, no more than obsidian glints in the sunlight, the thunder cones. On their flanks somewhere might be a blackstone cave where red wolves had once denned.… Somewhat nearer, spread out like the rich mantle of some long-ago king, my homeland, the Red Hart Demesne. I studied its treegreen folds as if one of them might hide the god. I scanned the hills to southward where the Otter River began. Nowhere, no matter how far I looked, could I see anything that might lead me to Sakeema.

But for one thing, much closer at hand. Nearly straight below my feet, a deep mountain tarn, glinting like an eye of earth.

And I felt suddenly glad, eager, and pensive, all at once, for I knew the place where I was. Below me winked the pool of vision, the uncanny tarn where Kor and I had found our swords and formed our bond of blood brotherhood. He had looked up, and seen the strange pinnacles and spires on the mountainside above us, and he had said, “Men made that.”

I left the platform where princes out of the past had once stood. I walked down the stone steps, through the dim great hall and out the gaping entry feeling lightheaded, not so much from lack of food as because I had walked out of legend.

And at the entry I found Talu standing tied by her reins to a young spearpine, as if I were the king of the place and someone had brought her and left her there to wait for me.

Like a colt I shied, and I leaped away like a startled deer into the shelter of the nearest thicket. Who had brought Talu back to me? Who could it have been but some enemy? For a friend would have found me and spoken to me.

Cragsmen? But it was not like them to be so clever. Had they known where I was, they would have come bellowing in and smashed my head into the stones of the floor. At their very wittiest they would have laughed while I stared at my horse, then flattened me. But if not Cragsmen, then who? Ytan? I would have heard his laugh half a heartbeat before my heart stopped forever, pierced by his arrow.

Moving with a hunter's silent skill, and with sweat of fear trickling down my all-too-naked ribs, I scouted around the great stone lodge in every direction upmountain—for downmountain of that place lay sheer slopes and the barren country around the tarn, and no one could have gone that way without my seeing him. Ever wider half-circles I made, until I came within sight of the backs of the sullen Cragsmen guarding the place. Nothing had disturbed them.

Who had brought Talu to me? Though still puzzled, I lost my fear. An enemy would have killed me by now, or tried to. But if it were a friend, why had he or she not stayed to greet me?

The sun was standing at halfday when I started my search, and brushing the snowpeaks when I gave it up, put away thoughts of it, untied the horse and led her off by the reins, for the mountain's ribs sloped down to the tarn too steeply for riding.

Despite whatever danger from Cragsmen, I would spend the night beside that pool of vision, I would see what it could tell me of my quest.

I let Talu drink at the tarn, then tethered her nearby for fear that Cragsmen might see her if she roamed and hunted snakes as was her wont. She would have to be as hungry as I, my Talu. I turned away from her peevish glance and went softly down to the verge of the tarn.

There I washed myself, silently, somberly, hoping it was not unseemly to cleanse myself in this place. I felt a need to be clean for those whom I hoped to petition.

I sat on the verge of the pool, waiting for nightfall, keeping a vigil, glad that I had not eaten that day. In former times it might have been necessary for me to sit and starve myself for several days, but so little had I eaten for so long that already the vigil weakness was on me.

Night came, clear and full of stars, as I had hoped. I sat and blinked at the shadow-stars floating on the surface of the deep, black pool. A wind whispered down the mountainside, out of the west, and the shadow-stars shifted, rose and drifted in air like dimly shining snow motes, took shape of—a tree like the one on the sunstuff panel? No. White starwisps still swirled, and I blinked again and saw—it was he, gloriously robed, he, the prince out of the past, regal face turned toward me as he gazed across the abyss of time.

The night we had camped here, Kor and I, we had seen two legendary warriors, they who had sailed to Mahela's realm and perhaps not been entirely bested. They whose swords we wore. And we had trembled in terror of them, and learned the comfort of handbond.

I was not very much afraid, this time. Too much had happened for me to be very much afraid. Indeed, like an ass, I was merely surprised, and before I recalled myself I blurted out loud, “Where is your comrade?”

He did not move or answer, he, Chal, if it was Chal. His eyes that looked on me so steadily seemed shadowed and saddened, his ageless face very grave. His was a somber, seeing gaze that shamed me, though I did not understand why.

“Can you hear me?” I asked more softly. “Can you speak to me?”

He did not answer. I saw a slight stirring, as if a wind had troubled the starlight folds of his robes.

“Where is Sakeema?” I begged him. “Please. For the sake of the world's healing.”

Still he stared at me without a sign or an answer, and suddenly I recognized the sorrow in his face. It was reproach.

“I am sorry,” I whispered. “Though I don't know what I have done.” And suddenly, though nothing had changed, I seemed to see another kingly face instead of Chal's—it was Kor! Truly, it was he, the short fur-cut hair, the simple clothing his own, and storm raged all around him, sending his sealskin cloak lashing across his face like a whip. The surface on which he stood tossed unsteadily. It was the pool of vision, and it seethed and churned like the sea in storm, rose in towering waves, opened a black maw and—took him. He sank. Only his stark face remained, filling my sight, filling the stormy, tossing surface of the sea—Kor was as vast as sea, as sky. Ocean swells were his tears, whitecaps the glimmer of his sea-deep eyes, and out of the waves he gazed at me, looking as though I had hurt him to his heart's heart, as if I had put a knife in him and turned the blade. With a wordless shout I leaped to my feet. The vision vanished.

“No!” I shouted to the black pool, which lay as still and dark as before.

Always, since I had known him, I had sensed something fated about Kor, some shadowed, uncanny end awaiting him, some dire price he would have to pay; why, I did not know.… And though in the past I had felt that his doom had somehow to do with women, at this despairing time my muddled mind leaped straight to the thought I feared the most. “No, Kor cannot be dead!” I pleaded to the faceless pool. “He can't be!”

There was no answer, and for a crazed moment I felt certain that I had killed my bond brother, I, the murderer, for I had killed men once, unknowing. No amount of water could cleanse me of their blood. I would have to drown myself, as my father had once tried to drown me in this very pool. He, Tyonoc, demon-possessed, he had been a murderer too. Now I was the same, and I had killed Kor—

“No!” I roared at the night.

“Peace, my son.”

I grew very still, for I knew that voice. My dead father's voice, coming to me on the breath of wind.

“Prince Chal cannot answer you.”

I saw my father's shade drifting in the warm wind that summerlong blew down the landward side of the mountains, drifting nearly within my reach, had I cared to reach. His wraith, faintly aglow and greenly wavering in the night, as if seen through the darkened waters of Mahela's hell.

“She punished you,” I muttered, staring at him. “The old bitch. Stinking carrion bird.” Mahela had indeed taken her revenge on him and on Kor's mother, Kela, after Kor and I had escaped.

“So I am unbodied. But I am a warrior again, Dan, and no worm.” Tyonoc's voice came to me clear and strong, and his face wore the fierce warmth of a king. Though he roamed with the restless dead, yet in a way he was my father again as I remembered him, and like a stripling I turned to him with my trouble. I sank to my knees, facing him. “Is Korridun well?” I blurted.

“How would I know? But he is not numbered among the dead.” A dark significance came into his voice. “No more than Sakeema is.”

I cared less for Sakeema than for my bond brother, at that moment. “Father, please,” I begged, “you shades, you travel like birds. Go, bring me news of Kor.”

“Plague take it, have I reared this oaf for nothing?” My father sounded far less patient than he had of old. “Dannoc, heed what I have said! I tell you quite surely, Sakeema is alive, somewhere! Have you forgotten your quest?”

I gave him no answer, but looked at the ground, and when I looked up again, he was gone, no more than a mote in the wind. And though I listened long, I did not hear his voice again, and I did not know if he would do as I had asked.

I turned back to the tarn. Once again the shadow-stars drifted on its chill surface. I sat and watched them with no expectation, and sometimes, very weary, I dozed. The night slowly passed.

“Where is Sakeema?” I softly asked the pool of vision in the darkness before daybreak, but there was no answer.

Chapter Five

Watching from the lookout at sunrise, I saw the smokes coming up from the cooking fires of my fair-haired, wandering people—it could be no other people than my kindred of the Red Hart Tribe. Like wisps of horsehair shining in the slantwise light, the smokes rose far off to the east and somewhat southward, in the region of beaver waters.

I readied Talu, mounted her and traveled to take council with my brother Tyee.

I had thought, until that sunrise, that I would travel in haste to the thunder cones and search their skirts for the blackstone cave where the Herders believed Sakeema had been taken by his foster brothers, the wolves. But perhaps Tyee knew more nearly than I where it might be. Perhaps he knew the legends of the Otter and the Fanged Horse Folk regarding the place where Sakeema lay and slept, he or one of my folk.

Better truth was, I had felt my soul yearn at the sight of those smokes.

Urgently I journeyed, sometimes late into the night under the light of the waxing moon, and every day's riding tugged at my heart.

It was perhaps the last time I would see this place, if Mahela had her way. And I seemed to know it more clearly, more sweetly, more deeply than ever before. As if always halfway into vigil I rode, every sense heightened, seeing every young unfurling leaf on each red-barked cherry tree, smelling each crescent of warm loam turned up by Talu's hooves, feeling sunlight.… This was my homeland, which I had roamed all my life until I had gone to Kor, and the beauty of it was like no other beauty to me, the shaggy hemlocks and the small winding streams, the meadows yellow with mallow flowers—but for all my hearkening, I rode it in silence. No birds sang at dawn. No grouse whurred away from my passing, or hawks shrilled overhead. No doves called. No coneys rustled in the laurel, or squirrels in the lindens. No deer leaped.

I did not utterly starve, for forage was somewhat easier to find in the lush upland valleys of the Red Hart Demesne that it had been in the mountains. There were groundnut and late sparrowgrass, and mushrooms like white moons in the grass. But I felt forever starved, hunger as much of soul as of body. Talu starved worse than I, kicked apart rotten logs, ate the grubs and worms. She grew thin, and I took to walking to spare her when our pace was slow, when the brush was dense.

The fifth day after I had left the pool of vision, as I struggled through one such thicket with my fanged mare at my side, something scuttled out of the cover at my feet, clucking. “Ridge chicken,” I muttered, standing dumbfounded because I had not seen a living wild creature in so long. And before I could think my mouth began to water at the thought of the roasted flesh. Ridge chickens made easy hunting, so stupid that a child could walk up to them and knock them on the head. The one I had flushed had stopped at a small distance. There it stood, complaining through its beak. As if of its own accord my hand drew the stone hunting knife from its leather sheath at my belt. I let go of Talu's reins, prepared to grasp and kill.

But my heart stopped my hands. The dimwitted, rackety creature, probably it lived only because not even gluttonous Mahela wanted it, as she seemed not to want the asps and worms. But it was a creature of Sakeema even so. One of the few remaining. I could not kill it. With a fierce, joyous resolve I knew that I would never eat flesh again, and I stood rapt, watching its small eyes amid their pink wrinkles of wattle, the fussy stirrings of its dust-colored feathers—

And Talu, who had grown tired of waiting for me to dispatch the hen and give her her share, pushed past me, shouldering me out of her way and sending me sprawling into a thorn bush. She bore down on the ridge chicken in two strides, bit off its head and devourer it, bones and all. After a moment I swallowed my vexation, got up out of my thorny seat and turned away from watching.

“Well,” I muttered, kicking at the loam as if I could find myself something tasty there, “better you than I. Pity we can give none to our friend the wolf.”

Talu walked on with satisfied grunts thereafter, and we made good time that day.

I came to my people of the Red Hart some few days later, quietly, in the hush of dusk. When I saw the signs of their nearby encampment I left Talu in the brush and made my way afoot, skulking forward as silently as a thief, for I wanted no commotion until I had had a chance to greet Tyee. At the time of day he would be in his tent, I thought. But I was wrong.