I listened intently.
Kor said, “I saw her, just for a moment. She sat raised high above everything around her, on a seat all shining with pearl and—and sunstuff, like your great knife, but even brighter. And carved into shapes more fanciful than those of driftwood, and her clothing was such as I had never seen, dress and overdress floating and flowing and edged with pearl and fringed like—like a scallop, as if she were a great sea aster. But her head and neck were the head and neck of a cormorant. And at her feet, lying as a dog might lie, was a badger.”
“A badger?” I exclaimed. “In the sea?”
“Even so. And I think there were many creatures and people around her, but I remember only dimly, I saw it all too quickly. She was hearing petition, and the petitioner was my mother in her seal form.”
I sat up, seals lying all around me, opening and closing my mouth as if I were a fish.
“I knew her by her slenderness and the pattern of her dapplings,” he added.
“Kor,” I protested, “If you are trying to divert my mind with marvels—”
“I am telling you only what is true. My mother was Kela, daughter of Kebek, daughter of rulers of the Seal Kindred back to the time of our seal ancestor Sedna, a time before the coming of Sakeema. She had power to be a seal.”
“And do you have that power?” I challenged him.
“Not at this time. Perhaps someday it may come to me. I think—perhaps I am afraid. She lost her life—”
He was having difficulty, and yet he seemed compelled to tell the tale. I sat and let him continue.
“She lost her life through the usage of that power for my sake.”
He spoke so softly that I had to lean forward to hear him.
“I saw her only for a moment, saw her there at the feet of Mahela. I felt Mahela’s eyes on me, a glance like a blow. Then I remember nothing for a while. When I awoke, I was back in my own bed at Seal Hold, and my father was with me, and I was getting better. But it was some few weeks later before my mother came back.
“I was nearly well when she arrived, and she embraced me, she seemed quite placid and happy. Then she began to make her preparations. She had bargained for a year’s delay, it seemed. She explained nothing to me, and even my small knowledge was too much for a child to encompass, so I told myself—what I had seen—perhaps I had dreamed. Nor did my father understand what was happening, even as she gave away belongings and set the affairs of the Kindred in order. The seasons drifted around the cycle of four. And the very last night, as she made her way down to the sea, she awoke me from my sleep and told me what was happening, so that I would not feel that she had abandoned me. Then she kissed me and left, gone back to the realm of Mahela for good.”
“So she gave herself in trade for you,” I murmured.
“She gave her life for mine.”
He paused, then finished the tale starkly.
“My father was wild with grief. She had charged him to care for the people and for me, but within a season he left both in the hands of a regent and went after her. He took a coracle, but no food or fresh water, and sailed westward.… I did not expect him to return, and he has not.”
He exhaled a long breath, blowing away the past as a fighter blows away the pain of a wound, and for a while we sat in silence.
“Is your mother yet alive, Ar—Dannoc?” Kor asked softly.
“No.”
“How did she die?”
“I—” Suddenly I was deep in blackness again, I could remember nothing, and I was angry. “I don’t know!” I shouted at him, making the seals raise their heads. “Kor, will you stop trying to trick me! When I remember, I will—” I sagged, my anger gone as suddenly as it had come. “I will tell you,” I said wearily.
He was more distressed than I, then. “I was not trying to trick you into remembering,” he told me. “Or not that time. I learned better, this morning.”
“Enough,” I mumbled.
“I am sorry. I will never—”
“Let it go, I say!” The thought of the eerie knife was harrowing me. “I never question the reasons of kings. Why have you told me this strange, long tale?”
The telling of the tale had cost him somewhat, I sensed, for he did not seem wont to talk about himself.
“Because—since that time, there has been a—an odd thing about me. Since the time I was dead. I feel—call it a power if you like. I feel what other people are feeling. Joy, sometimes, or love, but also pain. I felt—I felt my parents’ grief the night I died, not only my own. I could tell the difference quite plainly. An adult’s grief is a more echoing thing than a child’s, a child’s passions are cleaner.… I felt my mother’s loving courage, a courage such as I had never known. And once I was back in the body, I felt the ambitions and petty angers of people all around me. My father’s grief after my mother went away nearly destroyed me. I was glad to see him leave, and hated my own joy.…”
His voice trailed off into a whisper, and he stopped, not looking at me but staring into the great eyes of a young seal pup.
“You can tell what other people are thinking?” I demanded. What a power for a king.
“Not thinking. Feeling. In my own body. Heartache, heart’s ease, the shiver of fear or the knot in the gut…”
“Everyone’s feelings?”
“No, no, not everyone, Sakeema be thanked!” He raised his hands as if in defense, and I began to understand what an agony this power might be. “Only those whom I know well, until lately. And only their higher peaks or lower valleys. But you, Dannoc—when you came, your passion beat me down with the force of a four-day storm.”
I stiffened, not wanting to hear about how I had come, not wanting to remember.
“Madman, they call you, my folk. But I was with you in the prison pit, and I know better. Dannoc, something terrible has been done to you, and it has driven you outside of self.”
His left hand reached over to touch me on the shoulder, and I drew back with such a jolt that I startled the seals. I would have wept if he had touched me, and there was something in me that would not weep. A hard, heavy feeling—
“Like a stone,” Kor said softly, “pressing down on your heart. Or a great, taut knot—”
“Go away!” I shouted at him, suddenly furious. “Let me alone!”
“Dannoc, if you could only—loosen the bonds—”
“Get out of here!” I screamed with a vehemence that set the seals in motion. They blundered out of the cave and plopped into the sea. Kor and I were left alone, I glaring and he pitying. Damn him with his gentle eyes, for all the world like a seal’s soft stare, I wanted to hit him, but I knew guiltily that I had hurt him already. I lay flat on the damp cave floor.
“Remembering cannot be much worse than what you already suffer,” Kor muttered.
“Kor,” I panted, “get out of this cave before I lose what little sense is left to me.”
“Well.” He moved toward the entrance with a sigh, giving up for the time. “We cannot stay here in any event. The tide is coming in.”
“I don’t care.” I put my face down against the wet stone.
He crouched in the white winter light of the entry, looking at me. If he had commanded me to come out, I think I would have defied him and died for the sake of my spleen. I think also that he knew it, or felt it, and he studied me before he spoke.
“Get out of the cave, and I will leave you. Otherwise, I will come back in and badger you some more.”
After a moment I crawled out. The sea was lapping at the lip of the cave, and we had to walk in the water, coming around the rocks. When we had reached the sand, I turned up the shore and sat atop the rocky pile. Kor nodded at me, unsmiling, then trudged down the strand toward his home, not speaking and not looking back. I watched him go—it was what I wanted, was it not, that he should go? Then I watched the tide come in and fill the cave. I watched the sun sink and darkness spread in the east. Finally I got stiffly down off my stony seat and walked back toward Seal Hol
d in my turn.
It was not that I had nowhere else to go. We of the Red Hart tribe knew the ways of survival, of hunting and foraging. Each of us, youth or maiden, was taken upon our coming of age to a distant mountain shoulder and left there for a month to find name and being. So I could have fended for myself in solitude well enough. But I never thought of it. I turned back toward the village of the Seal as if I had been born there. My being was with Korridun, for the time.
True dark came, but there was light enough to see by. The moon was bulging toward the full, shaped like a bowl heaped with millet. Even under the firs and spruces of the mountainside there was a faint gleam, and I thought I saw a gray owl—it looked white in the moonlight, but the white owls of Sakeema had not been seen since my great-grandfather’s time. I came out on the headland near Talu’s pen and looked at it wearily. One wall was broken wide open, but something moved within—it was the mare, bolting fish with an uncouth noise. She snorted loudly as I passed. “Same to you,” I said sourly, and I went on down to the Hold, leaving her at her liberty, no longer caring how she came or went.
I was not hungry. But the way to my chamber ran through the room with the firepit, so I walked that way.
And as I approached I saw that the place was all alight with a glow of a hundred lamps, and full of the Seal Kindred. Sakeema, no, I could not bear to see them shrink from me again, not at that time.… I stopped in the shadows, staring. Korridun was there, seated by the hearth, somewhat above the rest, and for the first time I saw him in gear such as kings should wear. Around his brow was a headband that shone with polished beads of shell, and on his upper arms were similar bands over a fine tunic of the most delicate leather I had ever seen, leather made of the skins of seabirds. Picked out on it in tiny beads of many colors were outlines of seals and whales, pelicans and grebes and shorebirds. Korridun held his head straight and steady as he sat, and he looked a worthy king. The thought troubled me, for in fact he looked much as he ever had, level gaze and all.
From somewhere came a thin sound of plucked strings. Music! That was the occasion, then. It was not often that one heard music. Minstrels had come—Herders, probably, for they were peaceful folk, they excelled in claywork and music. Herders, but as was the way of minstrels, they would sing the songs of their host tribe, the songs their hearers loved. A man’s high voice, along with the plucked strings—I moved forward half a step in my shadow, looking for the singer, and instead I found Istas’s cold eye on me, hard with hate. I matched her stare for a while, but my heart was not in it, and I turned my eyes and my mind back to the music.
It was a story-song from the days before all the Seal Kindred lived together, about a poor tribesman who went out to kill a seal for the sake of its oil, to help his wife’s aching-sickness. He carried his only prized possession, a well-made spear. And on the shore he found two seals and hurled his spear at the nearer of them, driving it deep into the beast’s side. But the seals dove into the surf and swam away, spear and all. The man went home and mourned the loss of his spear and wondered how he would now make his livelihood. After nightfall there came tapping at his door a woman, a stranger, beautiful, far too beautiful for mortal sort, with long hair the color of the wrack, wearing a cloak of sealskin. “Come with me,” she begged, “and save my husband from death. Only you can help him.” He was a brave man, and kindhearted, so he went. She led him down the dark shore, and there in a sea cave he found a fine, comely black-haired man moaning with the pain of a great wound in his side. “Touch it,” the weird woman said, and the tribesman did. Instantly the black-haired man was well and whole, and in another breathspan he and the woman were both seals, and away they lunged into the sea and away they swam. So the tribesman went home, feeling well enough off to be alive. But in the morning his spear was waiting for him on his doorstep.
Even more than we of the Red Hart cherished the deer, these folk of the Seal Kindred reverenced the seal, I sensed. We killed only as many deer as we needed, and wasted nothing. But Korridun’s people ate mainly fish and took each year only a few seals, then fasted and purified themselves as if they had done something shameful. And it was forbidden to kill a nursing cow seal or a pup, even in greatest need.
One of the minstrels brought out of his tunic a small clay flute, the sort that hangs by a thong around the neck, and there was a coracle song. And then—
Then a stocky man, a Seal, a man no longer young, made his way out from the crowd, stood near the king, and, as far as I could tell, requested the use of the harp. And it was given over to him. His voice was not fine, but it was deep and strong and it carried to every part of the room.
This is the song that he sang:
The Shaming of the King
“Deep in a night of the dark of the moon,
The young king kept his vigil,
And in winter’s sky the thunder boomed,
The very omen of evil.
And off to the west the lightning flamed,
And out of the east the rider came.
Sing shame! Shame! Put to shame
Was young Korridun the King.”
Startled, I shot a look at Kor. His face had not changed much—there was a hardness about it, but he had not moved. Then I felt the eyes of Istas on me again. Malice on her face, along with a peculiar pain.
“And in burst the rider to raid the place
Where the young king kept his vigil,
And in his hand a monstrous blade,
The very token of evil.
And pale as the lightning his long braids
streamed
—as for his guardsmen the young king
streamed.…
Sing shame! Shame—”
“Stop it!” I shouted, striding forward into the midst of the chamber.
The uproar that followed would have been sufficient to put a halt to the mocking music. But no one fled, for the presence of their king held them, and when Korridun rose to his feet, all uproar fell to sudden silence.
“Pay no heed, Dannoc,” Kor said to me across half the hearth hall, speaking to me as quietly and easily as if we were sitting together on a rock or log. “It has been a long time since Olpash has wished me well.”
“But did I do that? Did I attack you?”
“You did more than that,” the stocky man growled, still standing. “There are more verses to my song.”
“Silence, Olpash,” Kor commanded him, “or your life will pay for your noise.”
The man staggered half a step backward, pale. Evidently Kor was not much in the custom of making such threats. Plainly, also, Olpash could tell that the threat was meant. Korridun the king spoke with grim force. What he would not do to succor himself, it seemed, he would do for me.
On his neck a dark wound showed.
“Did I attack you?” I demanded. “That first night?”
“Why, yes. You broke my knife with your first blow.” On his face I saw a warm, quiet smile, and his eyes also were warm, looking at me. “What of it?”
“But—I have humiliated you in the eyes of your people—” It seemed monstrously unfair that such happenstance as an enormous knife made of something strange and sharp should have caused him dishonor. “Kor—I would never have done it—knowingly,” I faltered.
“Of course not! I know that. There is no need for speeches.”
No need? I could not meet his eyes. I turned abruptly away from him, facing the silent assemblage of his people.
“Listen to me, all of you!” I scolded them. “Korridun your king is worthy of your deepest loyalty. How often have you known anything but kindness from him? It is a shame on all of you that you let such mockeries be sung of him.”
Something was wrong. No one replied, no faces moved, even, but I could feel it. They had closed their ears against me.
I tried again. “Listen!” More entreaty, this time, than scolding. “I am Dannoc, third and youngest son of Tyonoc, he who is king of the Red Hart people—”
“King, and a val
iant warrior.” It was Kor, who had come up beside me.
“We rear our kings for valor.” I spoke to him, but I spoke also for his people to hear. “But I think, Kor, in your way you could match any of them.”
He snorted like Talu. “Give it up, Dannoc, and go to bed. These folk think I have betrayed them for your sake.” His voice grew softer. “And, I suppose, in a way I have.”
Something in the quality of his calm voice touched me with despair. I could do nothing to help him—I could only make the case worse for him. He wanted me to leave the gathering, but what if they should start to cry shame at him again? With my eyes I found the stocky man, and I sat down where I was and stared steadily at him. He would not dare to speak again while I was present, not after his king’s command.
“Give us a merry-go-sorry, you two,” Kor said to the musicians.
They played, but there was not much more music, one or two more songs, and then the folk scattered. Everyone was very silent, and some of the Seal Kindred looked distraught. For my own part, I sensed that it would not be well for me to stay. One of his own people might want to speak to Kor privately—no, blast it, better truth was that I did not know what to say to him. So as soon as Olpash had gone out, I also left, found my chamber, and settled on my bed of skins.
I was very tired and I slept. But sometime past the mid of night, when the world was at its very darkest, I had a harrowing dream. Black, drowning black and deep—that was all I could remember when I awoke, but I was awash head to foot with sweat of fear, and I was shouting—well, screaming, if truth be told. When I stopped screaming I started to shake. Seal Hold rang full of echoing voices, for I had roused the whole place, and in a moment a light showed in my passage. Birc held a torch, standing cautiously back of the entry, and Kor strode in.
He was buck naked but for a loincloth, having put off his finery to sleep. I saw scars on his arms and shoulders and a couple of ugly scars on his chest and ribs—it was as he had said, he had at some time taken wounds far worse than the one I had given him. He came straight over to me, but he seemed to know that I would not welcome his touch, not then.
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