Madbond

by Nancy Springer

  I ate, and regarded him curiously. He was half a head shorter than I, and perhaps too slender to be very strong—so I thought at the time. But he was trimly thewed in a way that I never would be, with a centered look about him, a control. It was in his face, too, a quietness. Something about the glance of his eyes, as if Sakeema’s time looked out of them, deep time, creature time, the always now. And his face comely enough so that no woman, I thought, would scorn him. But for all that, he hardly seemed a proper king to me. A young shaman, perhaps, but a king should be thewed for war. I bore in my mind the image of a king—

  And as I thought it, the fell arrow of fear pierced me again, and all seemed black.

  “Archer?” Korridun inquired, seeing pain in me. So I supposed.

  “Nothing. A cramp in my gut.” I straightened and faced him. A smoldering, reasonless anger started in me because he dared to be kind to me, so quaint are the ways of petty pride. And I decided that he might be king to others, but he was no king of mine. I would not call him by the king’s name, Korridun, an ancestral name of his royal line. Nor would I call him Rad, as his loved ones might. I would take his kingly name and make it smaller, as I felt myself lessened. I would call him Kor.

  “Kor,” I tried it on my tongue.

  His head turned to me, his face grave, courteous. “Yes?”

  He was all comity, the courtesy so inborn that he was likely not himself aware of it. I ducked my head in angry discomfort, blundering for something to say. “Does—does no one call you Kor?”

  “You may, if you like.” He got up and found me a slab of jannock, a sort of oatmeal bread. “Do you yet remember your own name?” he asked as he handed it to me.

  “No.”

  “A terrible loss. Your very self.”

  It troubled me no whit, as it kept the blackness at bay. I did not answer.

  “What do you know of yourself, then?”

  I shrugged. “I am of the Red Hart.” Of course, with my hair as yellow as bleached prairie grass, the braids of it lying long on my bare shoulders—men of my people seldom wore much above the waist. Deerskin below, lappet and leggings. Boots of thick bison leather on my feet. These were gear such as Red Hart hunters wore. “I have shot the deer in the highmountain meadows, and I shoot them well.” Deer were the food and warmth of my people, but I hated to cause them pain, deer or any of the creatures of Sakeema, so I had shot my bolts at deer of straw through the hot suns of many summers until I had learned to kill cleanly with a single swift arrow to break the neck. This mercy lay close to my heart, and I remembered it. “I have hunted with the hawk also, and the hawks fly well for me. I have fought against the Otter River Clan when they held the Blackstone Path.” Again, I had tried always to kill with mercy, and I remembered that I had not liked that killing. “I have ridden against the Fanged Horse Folk when they raided us, and I have fought against the Cragsmen.”

  “Do you remember your tribesfellows who fought at your side?”

  “I remember in a general way only.”

  “What are you doing in my Holding?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Did you come here to fight?”

  For the first time I felt some small qualm, not knowing who I was or why I was there in the land of his people. As a shield, I turned the question back on him. “Have you given me reason to fight you?”

  “No.” Soberly he studied me. “You look not much older than I,” he said after a moment. “Twenty, twenty-two … Of what age were you when you made your name vigil?”

  Days alone on the crags where only the wild sheep came, my straight, yellow hair newly braided, waiting for the vision that would give me my name—that much I remembered. But even the thought of a name of my own hurt me with a black pain, and I could not answer. I felt my shoulders sag, and I could not look any longer at Kor. My eyes shifted; I stared beyond him. And there, in the shadows of one of the several entrances, stood a stocky old woman, listening. Her head jutted forward from her stooped shoulders, her jaw thrusting at me like a weapon. Even as I saw her she strode toward me, hands knotted as if she would strike me, and I stiffened where I sat, for her creased and weathered face bore a look of such outrage as I had never seen.

  Korridun turned on his seat to look where I was looking and saw her. “Istas!” he barked at her.

  His tone must have served to warn her off, for she stopped. She spat at me some word I could not understand—such fury was in her, it twisted her speech as it twisted her face. I think even one of her own people might not have been able to understand her that day. Then she swung around and strode out with the hurried, scuttling stride of a strong old woman, and I heard her huffing as she left.

  “That is Istas,” Kor told me, “my most valued counselor.” His voice seemed low, and there was no smile on his face, such as there might have been if her rage were a matter of no moment. I chose not to ask what it was that Istas had called me, for I felt very tired, and there was a deadness in me. Kor saw it at once.

  “Come,” he said, rising, “let us find you a place to sleep.”

  The place was a small chamber in the hollowed rock. A reed wick lighted it, burning dimly in a shallow stone lamp. I wrinkled my nose at the smell of fish oil, but only for a moment, for I had not been daintily reared. Moreover, the sweet rushes strewn on the floor offset that odor nicely. On a sort of wooden platform lay my linden-bark mat and a thick bed of pelts—I recognized them from the pit. Birc, perhaps, had brought them in here. I made for them wearily.

  “Wait but a moment,” Korridun said, and he left me.

  I lay down but did not close my eyes. A chamber of my own to sleep in—I could not help but feel honored. In the deerskin tents of my people we slept six and eight together, jostling each other, and only the king … but I would not think of the king. I got up, pacing like a spotted wild dog. Perhaps the wolves had once paced in that same way. I had never seen any.

  Korridun came back, carrying things for me: a furred doeskin by way of covering—or perhaps to make me feel at home, a clay basin of water for washing or drinking, a wooden cuckpot.

  Perverse anger welled up in me. “Why are you nurse-maiding me?” I demanded. “You are supposed to be a king! Do you not have people?”

  He set the load down—he must have been stronger than I had thought, to carry the heavy cuckpot, the pottery, the water. Then he stood and faced me, seeming not at all taken aback.

  “I will not order my people to go where I would not go myself,” he said. I scarcely heard him. I was raving.

  “Do you not have servingfolk? A king who carries a cuckpot!”

  “The cuckpot is an improvement,” he said mildly. “I cleaned your ass many a time, up there in the pit.”

  I doubled over as if I had been hit in the gut and sank down on my bed, the anger gone with my wind. Voiceless, I stared up at him.

  “I will not command my folk to do the thing they fear unless I am willing to do it as well.… You do not remember why they are frightened of you?”

  I shook my head, remembering nothing of the days, the weeks before I had awakened under his care. It seemed very quaint that folk should be afraid of me when I was myself so terrified—no, I would not think of that fear. I had to speak, quickly.

  “Why was I kept in the prison pit?” I whispered.

  Thongs binding my wrists, padded, the cuts of them on my arms even so … He stood silent for the span of a long breath, and I would not look at him for fear that I should see pity in his eyes.

  “I do not call you madman, Archer,” he said finally, “but there are those who do.”

  Madman! I was no madman—but how could I say that, I who could not remember my own name?

  “Is that what Istas called me?”

  “No.”

  Silence. A merciful exhaustion had numbed me, so that silence no longer troubled me.

  “Will you sleep now?” Kor asked at last.

  “I think so,” I muttered, still not meeting his eyes.

&
nbsp; “Rest in Sakeema, then,” he said, and he went out and left me.

  Chapter Two

  Sometime after the lamp had started to flicker and smoke I awoke and used the accursed cuckpot, and scowled at it. Then I blundered out. Sometime past dawn, for faint daylight filtered down into the passageway from fissures and from weapon slots fashioned in the rock where the walls were thin. Birc lay dozing just beyond the entry to my chamber. He jumped up when he heard me and pointed his spear at my gutknot, shaking so badly he could not hold it steady—the shaft wobbled crazily. But the flint head was chipped to a keen edge, fit to tear my innards out, not to be meddled with. And a scared man who stands his ground is as dangerous as a frightened horse. I stopped and leveled a look at him.

  “I am going to get something to eat,” I told him, speaking slowly and hoping he could understand me. “I will no longer have your king playing the manservant.” I waited, watching the spearhead waver. “What, am I a prisoner after all?”

  Losing patience, I sidestepped and pushed the spear away with my hand, then shoved past him. He could have attacked me from behind, but he did not. Instead, he trailed after me as I found my way back to the room with the cooking fire. It was full of people taking their morning meal, and for the first time I saw how the folk of the Seal Kindred looked. I liked them at once, for something about them made me think of Sakeema’s creatures, of trim-thewed animals with gentle dark eyes. Their faces were round and smooth, shell-brown with a pink tinge, their hair brown and soft and cropped short, man and woman alike, except that the maidens wore theirs in a long cloud. I saw several maidens whom I fancied, even at a glance, though they were clothed too modestly for me to see much. These people chose to keep warm, it seemed, and they had been trading with the Herders, for they all wore woolens as well as furs. This much I saw in a breathspan, and then they spied me and scattered with a noise and rush like that of startled quail, snatching up their babies and young children and crowding out of the several entries.

  One of them did not run: Istas. She stood her ground and glared at me with a look of black hatred. But she did not speak, and in a moment she turned and followed stiffly after the others. I was left alone except for Birc, behind me. I looked around at him. He was keeping a cautious distance.

  “Kor spoke to her, bidding her hold her tongue,” I said to him, guessing, and after a long pause he curtly nodded.

  It gave me a peculiar feeling, that she hated me, that the others ran from me. But I shrugged and went to the fire. There was millet gruel. I got myself some in a clamshell, picked up an oat cake as well, nodded at Birc, and sat down on the rush-strewn floor to eat. Plying a shell spoon, I took my time, ignoring the half-finished food spilled or abandoned all around me, feeling, without looking up, Birc’s scrutiny and that of others who peeped from the entries. If they did not want to abide me, then they could well-come-hell wait until I was done. I ate stolidly. There was a heavy, knotted feeling in me that I did not yet recognize as anger. But I had to force the food down around it, as if a stone sat in me, and after all I could not eat much. I left it finally and went outside, hearing footfalls fleeing before me.

  It was a foggy morning, with a fine rain drizzling out of a fishbelly-white sky hanging so low over the mountains that the steep flanks of them, dark with spruce and fir, faded into cloud and seemed to rise forever. I hearkened. Words echoed in the fog, and voices carried.

  “Not fog. Smurr,” a fisherman said somewhere down on the narrow beach below the cliff. I could not see him, but from his tone he must have been instructing a youngster. “Smurr, when it makes small rain. Brume, the gray fog. Mist, the thin fog. Haze, thinner yet. Scarrow-fog, the high, white haze that makes a blurred spot of the sun.”

  I smiled, feeling a goodness, as if something had centered for me. So the Seal Kindred knew many names for fog. And the Otter River Clan named the salmon with many names: the tiny fry struggling out of the gravel, then parr, the length of a man’s small finger, then smolt, turning from brown to graysheen before going to the sea. And then the great salmon, returning, the grilse, the peal, turning from graysheen to red and the jaws of the males growing into great hooks. A trader from the Otter had told me those things once, sometime when I was small.…

  Blurred memories, hazy as the sun through scarrow. Myself, a child, my hair yet hanging loose, sitting cross-legged by someone far taller, reciting the many names of the mountains, north from the Sorry Horse Pass on south. Old Pogonip. Mika, the cold maiden. Coru, Shadzu, Shaman, Chital, Warrior, White Wolf, Ouzel. And the passes between them, the Blue Bear, the Shappa, the White Eagle Way along the Otter River. And the parts of mountains, as if they were great sleeping horses, dun or gray, furred with pine, maned with eversnow, their polls and crests, their brows where the icefields fell like forelocks, the high passes we called nagsbacks, where the trade trails wound through.

  I stared eastward. Mountains stood there, somewhere, behind the fog—no, smurr, blast it. There, the great peaks, not even so far away, but I could not see them. I could not—remember my own name.…

  I strode off at random, fleeing my thoughts, scouting the strange place where I found myself.

  Some distance downshore I found the inlet where folk emptied their cuckpots, and I went back to fetch mine. No king was going to do that chore for me if I could prevent it. When I had returned the foul thing to my chamber I walked toward the sea. The tide was out. Waves crashed and foamed against the rocks far below me, and wind blew hard in my face, such wind as an eagle would joy to front. Once the ernes, the great white sea eagles, had lived on rocky headlands such as this. But that was in Sakeema’s time.… There was a dark, homely, long-necked bird, a cormorant, the glutton among birds, perched to dry its wings on the rocks bared by the tide. There were people down there as well, some of the middling children, gathering mussels or sea lettuce or whatever they could find among the rocks. Nearly naked, their furs and woolens left in a lump on the shore, they splashed in and out of the sea, not minding whether they were wet or dry or doused by waves, though I shivered as I watched. Seawater looked very cold to me, gray beneath white wintry sky, and the day was chill. But the children shouted and left work for play, plunging into the surf and chasing each other out again just as quickly, running along the beach, their wet bodies shining brown, rubbing their numbed arms and legs with driftwood sticks.

  Far out on the sea their elders fished from coracles, pitiful little boats made of sealskins stretched over willow frames, tiny with distance, on waves that looked high and tossing to me. I shivered again and turned away.

  Wandering, I took stock of Kor’s Holding. People had been going about their work, but they hid from me as I walked, darting into Seal Hold or skulking within lodges. I paid no attention. There were several lodges, one twice as large as the rest but damaged, perhaps by some storm. Out in the open there were stones for the sharpening of shells into knives, for women of the Seal used such knives to prepare food. There were stones for the grinding of oats or millet into meal. I saw the lodge where the spearmaker worked, where shafts lay in readiness for tips of bone or shell, or of flint or blackstone traded from my own people, inland. I saw many racks for the drying of fish, most of them empty and waiting for summertime. There were even pens for the keeping of fowl. It was strange to me, this settled way of living in one place, the men doing one thing, women another, and everyone eating together for the most part. In my tribe each pair, man and woman, fashioned their own bows of stagshorn and sinew, fletched arrows by the wintertime campfire, and hunted and gathered and fended for themselves and their little ones. The Seal Kindred’s ways were very different. Still, these Seals did not lack for toughness, not when their children frolicked in the wintertime surf.

  Back among the stunted spruce trees, behind and above Seal Hold, I found the place where Kor’s folk got their drinking water. Springs ran in cascades down the steep mountainside, lying on the rocks like a net, but fine as spiderweb. Basins had been carved in the stone to catch their f
low. Many years must have gone into the carving of those pools. I stared a long while before I walked on, for my people wandered and never left their mark anywhere.

  At the farthest distance of the headland from the Hold there stood a sort of pen with tall walls built sturdily of large spearpine. So densely were the timbers pegged together that only a handsbreadth of space showed between them. Something large and dark was moving in there, larger than the great maned elk that had once grazed the upland valleys in the time before my grandfather’s time. I walked over to see what it was—

  Before I could put my eye to a gap between logs there was a scream louder and more wild than the scream of a goshawk, and a thundercrack blow against the inside of the pen that shook the walls. I glimpsed a hoof flashing nearly in my face. My eye would have been gone if I had come closer, or my skull smashed. The thought made me peevishly more determined—by Sakeema, I would see inside! I ran to a corner, where the logs jutted out, overlapping, and like a young bear, so my grandfather would have said, I climbed them.

  By the mighty peaks.

  It was a wild horse with fangs longer than my finger, fangs stained brown at the base but keen white at their chisel tips, fit to tear a heart out. A mare, it had to be a mare. Nothing else is as fierce as a fanged mare. Warriors value them above all other mounts for their staying strength and their will to kill—though when they are in heat they will kill their own masters as readily as they will an enemy. And there, glaring up at me, stood an ugly, hammer-headed, straight-necked, slab-hipped mare the dun gray color of the short-grass steppes in winter, sparse black mane and tail, and even as I saw her, saw the deep circle she had worn in the narrow pen with her spinning, saw the heavy bones showing gaunt through her scarred hide, she attacked me, rearing to strike at me with her deadly forehooves. Her prison was built high enough to keep me out of her reach, but she startled me so that I fell back anyway, hearing her crash into the log wall as I landed on my ass on the rocky ground.