Madbond (16 page)

“And now she does,” I remarked.

“Thanks to your good services.”

He spoke in jest, to tease me into a lighter mood. And he meant only that she had tested her mercy upon my back. But my mind shot at once beyond, back to—

Rowalt, and that first night in the lightning, the surge of storm. Crazed horse between my knees, lunging and floundering and glistening with sweat. Kor's staring face before me as he dodged out of the way, and the sweep of the great knife, and the feeling—nothing in the memory frightened me as much as that feeling, and I could not yet put a name to it. And the scream, Kor shouting for his twelve. And they were dragging me from my horse at the same time as it fell, but they could not hold me, for I was as powerful as the storm. A head flew off, a hand, and then—
ai,
so pity me Sakeema, I remembered the face of the man as I sliced open his gut—

An honest, homely face.

I gasped for breath, doubled over with shock and pain, clinging to something hard for support, sick unto death, as if I had taken the knife in my own gut. So that was Rowalt, and that was what I had done to him. The memory was clear enough, but the feeling about it all dreamlike, untoward, as if out of otherness, as if I had been someone else.

I came to myself in a moment to find myself clutching the resinous trunk of a pine, my face in the moss, holding onto the tree so hard that I shook, and Kor standing by me, watchful.

“My—my horse,” I stammered. “It was a roan.”

“Yes.” He reached over and started to peel my locked fingers loose from the tree. “Dan, ease up.”

I could not manage more than the single word, to explain to him. “Rowalt,” I said.

“You remember?”

I nodded, letting my forehead sag against the pine, my arms loosen. Tears would have been a relief, then, and I would not have swallowed them any longer, not for pride's sake, not with Kor. I closed my eyes, they burned so. But there was something in me that was too heavy and knotted to let me weep.

“It will come,” Kor said quietly.

“How am I going to face Istas?” I muttered.

“I think it might be better to say nothing to Istas. Anything you could tell her would only distress her. And my news will distract her from the look on your face.”

His mercy was perhaps more for me than for Istas, but I did not argue. I straightened, let go of the tree, picked up my stick. We walked on again.

“Better?” Kor asked after a while.

“Not too poorly. It would have been worse a month ago.”

“You grow stronger every day. The memories come back as you are able to bear them.”

“May the worst of them come soon,” I told him. “The sooner the better, for both of us.”

“We will see to it,” he said.

Chapter Eleven

Kor had intended that he and I should go off by ourselves. He hated to take folk away from the tribe—everyone was needed. But Istas would not hear of the scheme unless he took with him at least half a dozen guardsmen. And, as Istas was at the center of the venture, her will prevailed. Kor chose Birc, among others, to go with us.

Ten days went by in preparation. There was business to be settled. It could have taken far longer, but Kor was determined to be on his way before the time came for another vigil.

“Will Istas stand the vigils?” I asked him privately.

“Not on your life!” He grinned with delight.

“Leave my life out of it,” I told him, “where Istas is concerned.”

“What?” He pretended shock, knowing quite well that I was joking. “Why, Dan, bite your tongue. She adores you.”

Winewa happened by just as he spoke. “Who?” she asked suspiciously, and we both teased her and refused to tell her until we were laughing giddily, like striplings.

I was often dizzy with excitement and joy, those days. Soon I would be seeing my father again! I thought of him as I finished my arrows and bow, as I cut a thick deerskin sleeping pelt into a riding pelt, padded it between layers with moss, fitted it with tie-thongs for bags and bedroll and with a surcingle measured to span Talu's girth. My foot was not yet sufficiently healed for walking the distance of our journey, though I walked strongly about Seal Hold and had given away my stick. Of necessity, I would ride the mare.

“Good riddance,” grumbled Istas—she grumbled often those days, even more so than usual. “Get the monstrosity away from here. One less greedy mouth for me to feed.”

But there was a problem, to my way of thinking. There were no other steeds, for the Seal kept none, and I hated to ride while Kor walked. When I mentioned my unease to him, he told me cheerily not to be an ass. We would be keeping to a foot pace in any event, what with all the blasted retainers, and he had walked with his men all his life. Privately I hoped Talu would carry him along with me, at least part of the time. But it would be slow going. A pox on Istas and the blasted guardsmen. A pox on people who kept no horses.

The Otter River folk came for their dried fish. But they had no beasts, we knew that already.

There was a great bustle of provisioning that seemed endless. Sometimes I dreamed of my father, sometimes of showing Kor the mountains. Sometimes I paced and fumed, for I could have made ready for myself in a quarter the time. But I could not be always ill-tempered. There were gifts for me. From Winewa, a leather case for my arrows. Warm woolen blankets smelling of the cedar in which they had been kept, a bride's blankets never used, from Istas.

On the eve of the journey Kor and I sat high on the headland by Talu's empty pen to watch the sunset.

It had merely happened so, that sunset had found us there. We had walked out to talk of routes, the mountain passes—there were three main trails across the mountains, not counting the White Eagle Way, which ran along the Otter River. There was the Blackstone Path, southerly, leading to the land of my people, and the Traders' Trail and the Raiders' Trail, farther north. The Raiders' Trail led only to the steppes, where Pajlat and his people roamed. Our problem was in choosing between the Traders' Trail and the Blackstone Path. The latter was rough, harsh, longwinding over the high Blue Bear Pass. It took its source in the midst of the Red Hart Demesne. The Traders' Trail ran through the Shappa Pass, a low pass that would be less arduous for Kor and his followers, lowlanders all, not accustomed to the thin highmountain air—though to him I said only that the pass was the one better suited to a horseback rider. He took pause that the Traders' Trail gave onto the southern fringes of the Fanged Horse shadowlands. Very true, but my father's warriors should have pressed Pajlat's raiders back from those fringes. Just southward lay my people's hunting grounds where the red deer roamed.

We came to no agreement and did not care, and did not speak long of it. Instead we reveled in the day. It was a glorious day, one of the rare fine days of that misty coastal holding. A worthy wind had sprung up from somewhere and polished the sky so that the air was as clear as mountain springwater, and at last I could truly see the vast ocean, the blazing sheen of it and the changing colors, green-brown-blue out to a clean distant line nearly the color of the alpine violets that grow in the snowmelt when spring finally comes to the highmountain meadows. The sun set in glory over that sea, turning sky the color of aspen leaves in autumn, growing ever more splendid, like a fire butterfly spreading from the cocoon, but vast—I had never seen such vastness of sky, even from the ever-winter crags.

In silence Kor and I sat and watched the great bloom of color in the sky, the sun like a bright prairie poppy at the center of it, dipping lower over the endless water. The sea lay very calm, and the sun sank into it with great calm and sweet-scented peace, a floating flower. Sky darkened from yellow into orange and lavender, all the colors of a wood duck's wing.

“Time was,” Korridun said wistfully, “when the seafaring otters would have been sporting yonder, in the kelp, and when the white whales swam past this coast. One could see them from this headland, my mother told me.”

Time was Sakeema's time. He-whom-all-we-seek. A remnant of dream turned like a honeyed knife in my heart. Sun sinking, a poppy the color of blood …

And just as the last petal of it disappeared—it was a vision, an omen, I can only describe it so. A flash went up from the lost sun of the most impossible color, too red to be called violet, yet utterly unlike the blood-red of the sun that had just been, unlike any earthly color I had ever seen, all light and shine, so pure and lovely I ached at the sight of it, I felt my eyes sting with unshed tears,
ai,
Sakeema—it was the clearshining red-purple color of the amaranth, the lost flower of the god, if I remembered my vision aright. Like a shimmering bubble of amaranthine light it came up and burst and was as quickly gone all in an instant, and Kor and I turned and looked at each other, stunned.

“The blessing of Sakeema!” Kor exclaimed. “That bodes well for our journey!”

“Have you ever seen it before?”

“Never! Few folk have. Istas did, once, when she was young. She will be comforted—”

When he told her, he meant to say, but he fell silent and stared. A solitary rider was approaching the headland, walking his mount along the hard sand of the strand.

We looked at each other again, then got up and strode down toward the great lodge to meet him.

Already the shout had gone up, and nearly everyone in the village turned out to gawk. A visitor was not a common event. But it was the horse that held my eye as the stranger rode up. I had never seen such a horse, neither fanged and ugly like the steeds of Pajlat's tribe, nor small and nimble and curly of hair like the ponies of the Red Hart. This horse was as large as Talu but entirely different, small of head with a fine eye both dark and large, small of hoof but surefooted, flat-legged, deep-chested, well-sprung, sleek of skin, with a neck deeply curved like that of a brant—no, a neck such as a wild swan must have had, days gone by—and flanks well filled out, every part of the steed as pleasing to look at as a handsome woman. And its color, unheard-of in horses, pure shining black, but white surged up its legs and splashed its belly and its long, full tail. And the mane lay on its arched neck like snow on a willow.

“Peace,” said the stranger. It was not a plea, so firmly spoken, but a greeting.

“Peace go with you wherever you travel,” Kor replied with the courtesy that cannot be learned, the comity born in him. “Welcome, and will you eat with us?”

“Gladly.” The visitor slid down to the ground, and I noted with a small shock that his riding pelt was a wolfskin of shining gray. Not so very strange, for there were wolfskins yet to be found in the belongings of kings, but it was a boasting thing to ride on one, as the Fanged Horse warriors rode on the pelts of bears long dead.… What sort of man might this stranger be?

Then I looked at him instead of at the horse and saw that he was scarcely more than a boy. A beardless youth, comely of face, slender but so cocksure of bearing that I did not note his slenderness until later. He wore his hair falling loose in long, tangled locks like the wild tails of my people's ponies, and I gazed doubtfully at him, for his eyes were dark, his hair too light for him to be of the Otter River Clan or the Seal Kindred. Nor did he have the look of those tribes, and much less did he look like one of the hulking men of Pajlat's folk. He wore a tunic of soft, fringed doeskin—the Herders did not dress so, or ride anything but burros. As for the Cragsmen, their skins were stone red or granite gray or slate blue.

And he stood staring at me, straight at me and no other, as foolishly as we were all gawking at him, and though his fine face scarcely moved he seemed somehow shaken, his cocksure air lost, until he regained it with a proud lift of his head, his eyes still intently on me.

I had not thought how peculiar a thing it must have seemed, a single tall Red Hart oaf standing crop-headed amidst all the Seal Kindred, and I felt heat touch my face as I knew myself for the oddling that I was.

“Of what tribe are you?” asked Istas sharply, and for a startled moment I thought she spoke to me. But she was glaring at the stranger.

The newcomer blinked and seemed to take a moment to come back to self. “No tribe,” he said after a pause.

This was a statement nearly impossible to deal with. A babble of voices started up at his words. “And what is your name?” Kor put in far more courteously, before the uproar could take over. Folk fell to silence to hear.

“Tassida.” The name meant simply, “horseback rider.” Coolly, almost haughtily, the stranger regarded Kor, looking him up and down as if he were an adversary. “You are Korridun, the king here.”

“Yes.”

“If you pay me,” Tassida said abruptly, “I will be one of your followers for a while, and fight for you.”

The uproar redoubled. To fight, not out of loyalty, but for payment! Istas looked ready to take back the hospitality Kor had offered, but I had another thought.

“Kor,” I told him eagerly, “see if you can buy the horse.”

The newcomer heard me. “No,” he said at once, with a hint of edge, “the horse stays with me.” He was looking at me once again in a closed way, so that I could not tell if he was puzzled, or hostile, or afraid.

“If you stay with me,” Kor asked, “might I have the use of the steed? For the sake of Dan's compunction?”

“Korridun!” Istas stood aghast. Kor, Tassida, and I all ignored her. Kor was giving me a slight, teasing smile, and the stranger was regarding him, appraising again, and what he saw must not have entirely displeased him.

“If you will accept my guidance concerning the riding of him, perhaps yes,” Tassida said slowly. “I will not let him be abused.”

Him? But the steed did not have the swelling neck of a stallion. Istas stooped in her forthright way for a look underneath the horse. “A gelding!” she shrieked.