Mindbond (28 page)

Talu bore me off eastward, any trail that would take her inland and away from the black storm of Mahela's sending. Panicked, up slopes so steep that her hooves slithered and clawed, over perilous rocks, past—laughter, and a grinning face in the lightning glare. Ytan was there, standing in the storm on the mountainside, laughing at me like a demon double of myself as Talu carried me by him. I shivered as if I had seen my own pale corpse in that green-tinged flesh. And Talu swept like a pounding tempest up the crags, and I closed my eyes—I was helpless, a nuisance clinging to her back, a gnat tangled in her mane. Sky was as vast as the sea, and storm filled the sky, and I was nothing.

Sakeema help me, I had left my bond brother lying under the lash of the storm.

Chapter Nineteen

Talu carried me until she was as spent as the day. Hard to remember that it was day, it seemed so dark.… When she slowed her pace and I stumbled off her at last, I was far up the flanks of the mountains, though I did not know just where. There was no food, nor did I try to set snares, for my mind was in a tempest worse than Mahela's storm. I sat through the night without a fire, keeping vigil as if for someone dead.

Cold.… I remembered the vigil on the Greenstones, for I felt nearly as cold as I had been then. And nearly as wet. Talu had carried me out of the rain, but a chill wind was blowing, and everything was sodden, for this was the region of cascades, where fogs and spring dew drenched the nights. Still, I might have been able to make a fire had I used skill and tried, but I did not try. I sat shivering, my back against cold rock, thinking back to yet another vigil, when I had sat through a night and held Kor while he slept, afraid to let go of him lest he turn dead again. He had died for my sake, and folk said I had wept him back to life.…

A hunchbacked moon swam above the spires of the firs. Off to the westward somewhere, thunder still rumbled. Within my mind I seemed again to see Kor lying on the headland, arms outstretched as if he were staked there for torture, under the greenish lightning, and I threw back my head and howled aloud in sorrow.

On toward dawn the tempest inside me slowed its whirling somewhat and I was able to think. Nor was I entirely startled when a gray, shimmering shadow moved in the night. Eyes glowed red. The wolf sat just at the limit of sight and looked at me, tongue lolling as if it had run hard.

“Old friend, wild brother,” I whispered, “I am in need of warmth. Let me borrow some from your fur. Come here to me, please.”

The wolf came closer, but not close enough. It sat down a small distance beyond my feet, near the edge of my rocky ledge, then turned around three times and lay down, curling so that the graysheen flow of its tail covered its nose. Wary eyes watched me, and I did not dare draw near. I sat trembling and thinking.

Dawn was a long time in reaching over the mountains. Somewhere, I knew, the sun shone as yellow as a catamount's eye, but I could not see it. Eastward the sky turned from black to gray, and then a lighter gloom. And that was all.

“I should go back,” I said to the wolf.

Head still flattened to the ground, it stared up at me with a look I could not comprehend. Something in that stare seemed to remember back to Sakeema's time, both warm and distant.

“I should go back,” I repeated. “Kor needs me more now than ever.”

A snorting noise, and the hollow clap of hoof on rock. Talu plodded along the ledge toward me, pink innards of something she had been eating trailing from her mouth. I got up in protest as she stood over me.

“I don't know what to do,” I told her.

She stared back flatly, chewing. The gray-pink length of gut slipped slowly up into her mouth and vanished. I had seen Calimir do the same, sometimes, with a stalk of something green. I looked into her large, blank eye, into the blue-tinged depths of it, as if into a abyss.

“I am Kor's friend,” I told her desperately. “More than friend. His bond brother. He needs me.…” And I knew with a pang, though I would not say it, that I wanted to be with him. More than anything I wanted that, except this: that I wanted my world to be well.

“But if I stay with him there in Seal Hold, then what hope is there for any of us?”

The wolf got up, shook its fur into place, tilted its head and eyed me in some sort of expectation. Anguished, I held my hand to my mouth, bit on my knuckles.

“Sakeema give me strength … I must go back.”

I dragged myself onto Talu, turned her toward the west, and closed my eyes, for going down this sort of terrain was even worse than coming up it. Easier to shut my eyes. They were swollen almost shut, anyway. Sometimes I opened them just a slit to look, then regretted it. Once I saw a graysheen flash. Off to one side, the wolf was trotting along with us.

It would take all day, I knew, to come to Seal Hold. I let my body rock to the jouncing of Talu's stiff-legged walk, hanging on, putting thought aside for the time. No use, now, thinking of the choice I would soon have to make: whether I was going back to stay, or only to say a decent farewell.…

Talu's head came up, jarring me alert. Her ears pricked forward, she blew through her nostrils and started into a pounding trot over scree. I was too startled to try to stop her. For at the same moment I had felt—

Kor!
I was so taken aback, I mindspoke him as of old,

Dan! Brother, I am here.

On Sora, he cantered around the hip of the mountain, meeting me at the edge of the scree. The two fanged mares stopped, head to head, whickering, and Kor and I sat on them in a foolish, staring trance.

He was sight enough to make anyone stare. His face was bruised and cut, a long, scraping cut running along one temple. The eye on that side was swollen almost shut. Worse than the bruises was the struggling look about him, the way he carried himself, as if he were burdened almost beyond bearing. But he was no longer utterly defeated, and no longer out of his mind with anger at me. Kor, my bond brother still, he was there.

“You are back,” I whispered.

“Great Sakeema,” he exclaimed at the same time, “your face!”

“No worse than yours,” I retorted. Only that quip kept me from weeping. I felt so weak with relief and sorrow that I had to lean forward and brace my hands against Talu's crest.

“It's far worse! You're all blood.” He slid off Sora, came over to stand by my knee. “Body of Sedna,” he murmured in awe, “I've broken your nose.”

“So you've changed my good looks,” I grumbled. “No more easy maidens for me.” I was shaking, and trying to hide it.

“Deep scats, Dan, you are an ass.”

I blundered off the horse and embraced him, staggering, trying not to lean against him. “You're another,” I told him fervently.

“You think I don't know it? Here, sit down before you fall down.”

He had brought food. Not much, but as much as Seal Hold could spare in those worst of all times: some bits of cold fish, last year's dried berries, a handful of precious oats. I sat under a massive blue pine and ate. My shaking stopped, though I think I drew strength more from his presence than from the meager food. He slung a pair of cedar bark bags off Sora while I ate, stripped the gear off the mare, and turned her loose to hunt snakes in the scree with Talu. He gathered some deadwood for a fire, scraped clear a space for it, and made a ring of stones. There would be no hurry, I saw, about leaving this place among the blue pines. Kor brought cones and punkwood, set to work with his firebow. When smoke had turned to sparks and flame, finally, he sat beside me.

“I should have brought you dry clothing,” he said.

“No need.” The food, the warmth of the fire, the warmth of his words were enough. We watched in silence as the flames took hold. I had been riding longer than I thought—already day was drawing on toward nightfall.

“You were right about Olpash,” Kor said after a while in a low voice. “His face troubles my sleep.”

“No need, Kor!”

“I would like to try to understand what happened.”

“About Olpash?” There was more, I knew, far more, but better to grapple with one thing at a time. “It was not wrong, Kor, that you killed him. Kings must protect their power from schemers. It was only—wrong for you.”

“Wrong for Sakeema?”

“Blasphemy!” I teased. “No. Wrong for you. Kor. My friend. Bond brother.” I reached out toward him. Fingertips met, and despite hunger, despite the world's desperation, despite the dark hand of Mahela looming in the distance, a deep sense of strength and well-being followed. I smiled. But Kor's eyes were misted.

“Dan, do you know how long it's been? Since your handbonded me willingly?”

Since that long night in Tincherel. Nothing had been the same since the sea had so roughly flung us back to the land. “My own folly,” I said. “I felt—betrayed.”

“By me?”

“By Sakeema.”

“But—”

“Don't say it.”

“That I am not Sakeema? You knew it by then.”

“I felt betrayed, even so. Kor, I have never laid much claim to good sense.”

He sighed and spoke very softly. “No holding back for you, Dan. Nothing by halves.”

“That is what my father used to say.” Thoughts of Tyonoc, still trapped in Mahela's realm, sent a sharp pang through me. Kor must have felt it, for he turned his head.

“I know we said were going to save him somehow. Dan, I did all that I could.”

“It was my quest. How did I come to lay it all on you, or on the god? It was I who failed.”

Ai, the harsh touch of truth. I had not wanted to know such truth. Less painful, I had thought, to blame Kor. The more fool, I. There was no misery worse, for me, than blaming Kor.

“Saying we failed means little under the finger of Mahela,” Kor mused. “She is as mighty as death or the sea. She always wins.”

We talked for a long time, as day shaded into dusk and twilight deepened into nightfall. Tall pines sheltered us, long needles shadowed against the bluedark sky. Somewhere an owl calling. Gray wolf came and lay near our feet. Kor got up to tend the fire, sat by me again, and talk went on. Our voices, very low, not for fear that anyone would hear us, but because we needed to be quiet, calm, soft with each other—neither of us wanted to hurt the other ever again. Tears on our faces sometimes, silent, shining in the firelight. Long pauses sometimes as we gathered courage. It took courage to speak of some things. Of Istas, lying dead, and Kor's grief, how I had failed to comfort him. Of too much dying, all around us. Of Tassida. Most of all, it took courage to speak of Tassida.

I
—
I could not help it, Dan. That night out by the Greenstones. Your love for her, so ardent
—
it awakened me.

Sometime, unawares, the weary murmur of our voices had slipped into mindspeak. Better understood, some things, in mindspeak.

But you have not ceased to love her
, I ventured. Best to face that now.

No. I love her well. Still
—
it must be love of a different sort, Dan. Yours
—
so passionate …

He let his thoughts trail off into silence, and I waited, almost able to sense how he braced himself. He had once said that my passions assaulted him with the force of a four-day storm.

I have never felt such love, Dan.

You—felt.
I understood. In our minds, he was telling me what was nearly unspeakable.

I felt all that you did.

In your body.

Yes.

Silence for perhaps the span of ten breaths—except that I could scarcely draw my breath. The darkness of night seemed to press down on me.

Never
—
never before, Dan. Or since. Only
—
that once with you and Tass.

“You frighten me,” I whispered aloud.

Yes. It frightened me, also. And made me wretched.

There was no answer to that. Misery upon misery had been his: Istas dying and Tass my lover and the whole deadly matter of Mahela weighing upon him. Small wonder that he, a mortal king, had given way beneath the strain.… A mortal king who had died three times, who healed, and mindspoke, and felt the passions of the people around him? I struggled against fear, my chest heavy with it.

So I struck out at you
, he thought to me, ashamed.
And at Tass.

Fear much like mine had been hers, had driven her off, sent her fleeing, when he had mindspoken her in his rage.

“What did you say to her?” I asked in a tight voice.

Kor shook his head. “I do not want to tell you. Something vicious. The substance of it was, Go away.”

He got up, kicked at the fire, and strode off into the benighted forest. I stayed where I was, hearkening, and the wolf raised its head and listened with me. We could hear Kor crashing about. After a time he returned with pine boughs to pile on the fire. Flames leaped up. I could see him again, bruises and all, and he could see my face. He settled himself beside me again and leveled a long look at me.

“There is no devourer in me, Dan,” he said abruptly.

“Of course, I know! That needs no saying.”

“But you are afraid.”

“Not any longer.” I thought I was not.

“Then why are we speaking aloud?”

“Because …” I fingered my cut lip. “Blast,” I muttered.

In rueful amusement he said, “You are more like Tassida than you know.”

It was true. I had not been afraid of him when I had thought he was a god who could never wrong me. But since I had seen he was but a poor, floundering mortal … Three times a mortal loved one had turned against me, and it was like dying: once would have been too often.

“You are afraid of coming too close to me.”

“I—I scarcely know you, Kor, you are so changed! You are …” I could no longer say defeated. I knew his courage. But somehow Mahela's touch lay on him yet. “You are darkened in a way I cannot understand.”