Madbond (19 page)

“'Ware! The thing's not natural. Stay away!” I warned, and without looking away from it I reached out to make sure Kor was beside me—he was. Tass stood still. I heard the older men mutter darkly. But Birc, in that headlong boyish way of his, had already moved even as I spoke. Delighted, he had stepped forward, hand extended, and as I shouted his name he touched the hind, caressed it on its head, neck, and milky chest—

It was as if mist swirled before our eyes, and more quickly than I can tell it the creature changed shape. A comely maiden stood there, a woman with a mane of hair the color of a red deer in sunlight, with delicate brows and softly curving lips, every feature very fair, but her purple-green eyes somehow no less strange in that human face. She was naked, and all over her well-formed body grew fine, pale fur like that of a fawn. And Birc was standing with his hand on her breast.

“Birc,” I cried at him, “back!”

The look on his face was rapt, smitten. He did not move except to place his other hand around her waist.

I strode forward and snatched him away bodily—he struggled against me. With a whizzing noise someone hurled a knife—it was Tohr. The blow would have killed the deer maiden in her human shape. But on the instant she was a hind again, and she took the knife in the thick, meaty swelling of her neck. She bounded away, leaving splatters of blood bright on the herb leaves, and the knife went with her, stuck to the hilt in her flesh.

“No!” Birc cried wildly, fighting to throw off my grip. “No, let her be, let me go! She is—mine, my lifelove, my destiny—”

I tried to reason with him. “How can you say that? You have only just the once seen her.”

“The thing's a demon,” Tohr growled.

“Let me go!” Birc started to sob. “Sakeema, she is running away, how will I find her again!”

“Tie him up,” said Kor softly, reluctantly, “and sling him over one of the horses.”

We did so, putting him on gentle Calimir, and Birc protested through the day, shouting, sobbing, and cursing us by turns, and refused to eat or drink. It was a wretched day. Even being among my own beloved peaks again did not much cheer me. Not far beyond the pass, just south of the shortgrass steppes, lay the high valley, the Demesne of my people. It did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter much while Birc lay crying. I had not realized how much I liked him.

Kor walked by his head and tried to talk to him. It made no difference. After a while I remembered that the look on Kor's face, a taut, pale look, was not merely the semblance of my own discomfort. Whatever anguish Birc was feeling, likely Kor felt as well. My heart sank, but I could not go to him to comfort him, not before the others, for they did not know his secret.

By nightfall Birc had exhausted himself, and though he would not eat, we hoped he would sleep. Tohr spoke up for the first turn at guard, and the rest of us welcomed the mercy of slumber. We all slept numbly, deeply.

In the morning, when we awoke, Tohr lay dead, his own knife sheathed to the hilt in his chest, and Birc was gone.

The six of us who remained stared at each other for a time. I privately thought of the Cragsman's words concerning a toll and hoped that this was the total of it. It was not a thought to be spoken. Kor finally broke silence.

“Well,” he said heavily, “I cannot just let him go. Can you track him, Dan?”

I circled our camp. The only trail, leading back the way we had come, was that of a deer. The pointed marks of the hooves were deeply pressed.

“He rode her,” I murmured in wonder.

The trail was plain enough to follow, and after we had raised a cairn over Tohr we spent the better part of the day tracing it back. Birc's mount was swift. If they had kept going we would never have caught up to them, afoot. But they had stopped and undertaken mounting of a different sort, in human form. When we found them they lay pressed together and deeply asleep in a mossy dell between rocks. My heart misgave me to see them so, naked, like two innocents, at our mercy. Kor and I crept up and laid hands on Birc as gently as we could without losing him, and the deer maiden sprang up, took her hind form and fled. No one offered to harm her this time. A crust of blood stood brown on her neck, and I flinched at the sight of it.

Birc wept, but he no longer cursed us. Indeed, he seemed to have lost the power of speech. Hands bound behind him, he walked with us through what was left of the day, silent except for his sobbing, no matter how gently Kor spoke to him. That night, though we had bound Birc hand and foot, we all kept vigil, forming a circle around him, and all night Birc bleated out soft troating cries, like the cries of a rutting hart. Those cries pierced my heart. Next to me I felt Kor trembling, and from time to time I would reach over and touch his shoulder, trying to comfort him.

At the first light of dawn we could see the hind standing at a small distance, very fair, very white and spiritlike in the dim break of day. Birc saw her as well and sat up, sending to her his bleating call.

“Kor,” I said, “look.”

I went to Birc and parted his forelock, showing Kor what I had seen. Just at the hairline above either eye stood a bony knob, and growing from each one, the beginnings of an antler in velvet.

All the men gathered around and saw, and their faces turned bleak. Birc gave his troating call. From out of the dawn the hind bleated in answer, stepping delicately closer.

Kor loosened Birc's bindings, slipping them off his arms and legs. Birc stood up eagerly, but Kor detained him yet a moment longer, embracing him and giving him the kiss of a king.

“Farewell,” he muttered, releasing him, and Birc bounded away.

With a single vaulting leap he was on the hind's back, his feet hanging down over her shoulders. Then with a high, joyous, springing stride she carried him off, not fleeing but rather, I thought, delighting in his weight. Up the slope to the beginning of the naked rock they went, and as the hind paused for a moment there, looking behind her, the sun reached over the shoulder of the mountain and touched her. I have always remembered that sheen of light on her, on Birc, like fire of passion.… Kor lifted his hand, and the hind raised her head, but Birc made no gesture of salute, sitting entranced on her back. Then around the angle of the rock they went, and we lost sight of them against the blaze of the eversnow.

We who remained went on with our journey, and for the full day no one spoke.

We crossed the high pass, then descended nearly to the tree line, and our breathing grew easier. The next day we put away our sorrow and started talking to each other again. The trees comforted us, though they were not spruce and fir but the great yellow pines that grew on arid slopes—for we were on the shadowland side of the mountains now. They were spaced far apart, making glades and parks where deer might graze. That night, once again amidst trees and mountainside meadows, we made ourselves a blazing fire of deadwood pine.

“Do not think too badly of the deer people,” I told the company. “We of the Red Hart call them blessed. Perilous, yes, but very beautiful, and blessed. There is a tale of the deer people and Sakeema.”

“Tell it,” Kor said.

It was only a small tale.

“When Sakeema lay dying, all the creatures of forest and meadow came to him and pleaded with him to live, but he had given up all the life that was in him. He died. Then, as he lay dead, the creatures stayed by him and mourned him, among them the deer he had cherished, the red deer and also the great elk and the spotted deer, the yellow deer with spreading antlers, the blue deer of Sakeema's making, and all the many other kinds now gone. They kept vigil as women washed the body and prepared it for burial. Then the deer wept. Real tears welled out of their eyes and crept down the fine fur of their cheeks, and the people, the few people who were brave enough to be there, saw this and gave way, and the deer gathered close around Sakeema as he lay dead. And as the tears fell on his still body Sakeema started to breathe, and his body grew warm. Then the deer wept anew for joy. But no one could awaken Sakeema as he lay still and slept. So some of the deer took human form and placed Sakeema on the backs of some others, and the deer bore him away to the mountain cave where he had been born. He sleeps there yet, and some time when we need him worst, it is said, he will awaken and come back to us in a way we least expect.… But ever since they wept over Sakeema the deer take human form from time to time, my people say, though they never speak to us.”

“If they could speak to us,” someone remarked, “they could tell us where Sakeema lies.”

“Yes,” I said heavily, “but they cannot.” Yearning for Sakeema burned hot in me, for I was remembering remnants of a vision.

“The Herders tell a tale of the mother of Sakeema,” said Tassida.

“Mother of Sakeema!” It was one of the guardsmen. “What tale can be told of her, the bitch?”

“Bitch, indeed, but also the goddess. It was the All-Mother, they say, the old goddess whose name has been forgotten, she who spun out the wool of which the world is made and dyed it in colors too many to name and wove out the world on her loom of sky, she who gave the Herders their sheep as brown as earth with the six horns to signify the six tribes, her children. She who gave the Herders clay to form and red stone to carve and burros gray as mountains. This goddess looked down where the world spread out like a great blanket to meet the sky, saw the greens and browns and grays and yellows of it, saw men moving on the surface of it and knew that all was not entirely right. There were some angry things she had done and some things of wonder she had not made, and thus men had forgotten her name. So she sat down on the plains far beyond the thunder cones—for only the grassy plains were vast enough to hold her—and she conceived Sakeema from white of cloud and blue of sky, and she gave birth. And she gave the babe over to the keeping of a she-wolf, one of the red she-wolves of the prairie, and she, the All-Mother, went away again and left the righting of the world to Sakeema. So it was that Sakeema loved creatures always, and when his powers came to him he created creatures not in the blanket colors only but also in blues and whites, as of cloud and sky.”

We all glanced at each other, thinking of the blue bears of Sakeema, the blue deer, the white sea eagles. The tale rang true, but because it came from the Herders some of us wished to fault it.

“These men with the great knives, the swords, of whom you once spoke,” someone asked, “were they also the get of this goddess?”

“Ah,” said Tassida, “that is another matter.” And he leaned back, looked up at the sky above the treetops and told us tale after tale of the wonders of the time long before Sakeema. In that time, he said, all people wore glorious robes, all woven, not of wool only but of a shining substance called silk, and of a plant fiber called linen. And their tools and weapons were made of metal, a substance unknown to us, and those who remembered these people said they were full of magic and constantly performed marvels. They hewed the solid stone and raised great dwellings of it, all towers and walls, castles, and they built cairns like small mountains over their dead. He himself had seen on the plains the ruins of such dwellings and monuments, Tassida told us.

“Were these people like you?” Kor asked him. “Light of hair and dark of eyes?”

“They were of many sorts of coloring, for there were as many sorts of people as there were many tribes: colorings and kinds of people you have never heard of. And the tribes were not tribes as you know them, Korridun King. The people of one small tribe might number a hundred villages or more. Such a king as you are would be reckoned only a petty chieftain of one small village by the kings of that time.”

“You mean—” Kor struggled with this. “You mean the people of a king were so numerous that they could not all live in one village?”

“Even so.”

“But then how could he or she know them, to rule them properly?”

“These kings ruled by law, not by knowing. And there were no women among them.”

Kor shook his head in speechless bewilderment. “But how many tribes of this sort were there?” one of the guardsmen asked.

“Many. Enough so that there were few places in all the vast land that did not have people to hunt them or till them or fish them.”

“But these diverse people must have been as many as the stars of the sky,” I protested.

“They were more numerous than the stars of the sky,” said Tass.

None of us believed much of this, except perhaps Tassida, but it made a good tale and a way to beguile the evening.

“They made great boats of wood, boats great enough to carry a village,” Tass went on, “and they put tall trees on them to take great sails, and they sailed them on the ocean. They sailed to distant islands, places we can no longer name or find, and they returned with strange creatures and marvelous fruits. And they grew the fruits in warm places inside their great stone houses, in courtyards covered with a roof clear as air, so that the sun could shine in and they could have fruits in the wintertime.”

“A roof of air,” someone mocked.

“Yes,” said Tass fiercely. “Clear as air, but hard, and not letting in the cold. And they had boxes of stone, hot from the hearth, to cook their bread in. And they played music on great harps so large they sat on legs on the floor. Their homes were full of music. And they covered their floors and their walls with pictures made out of colored stones. I know this to be true, for I have seen the ruins of them. Other stones they wrought into shining shapes called jewels. Not the soft red stones such as the Herders carve, but hard, shining stones fit to cut with, such bright stones as the one in your knife hilt, Dannoc. And they had a stuff the color of the sun and nearly as shining: gold, they called it, and it was the most precious of all things to them. They made headbands of it called crowns, headbands with jewels set in, and their kings wore them with their shining clothing. And armbands and rings, finely wrought things of all sorts they made out of it. They raised tame songbirds, kept them in cages of the sunstuff called gold, and they fashioned gardens meant only for beauty, where flowers grew and swans swam.”