I was in nearly as much danger from her as I had been from the Cragsmen. I could not have stopped her if I had tried—and, mindful of wrathful enemies not far behind me, I did not try—but Talu’s every wild leap threatened to throw me against a boulder, or smash my knee against one, or my head against a tree, or send us both crashing down when she snapped a leg between stones. Her hooves slipped and scrabbled on dizzying slopes—this was terrain that scarcely should have been ridden at a slow walk! I held onto her by clinging to her mane until she took a man-tall drop at a leap, but then I considered that I had had enough. Moreover, there was a thought in me that I did not wish to be carried too far from the place the Cragsmen so fervidly guarded. So I swung down by her neck and took my chances with a landing on hard rock. Then I lay, the breath knocked out of me, and watched her plunge crazily away, and took accounting of my bodily harm. Bruises, nothing worse.
Behind me, out of sight but not yet out of tongueshot, I heard the noise of the Cragsmen, who were quarreling still. I lay where I was until their uproar had quieted, that and my ragged breathing and the thumping of my heart. Talu had careered out of sight and hearing. I rose cautiously and walked away from the direction she had gone, back toward the Cragsmen but to one side of them.
It was not hard for a Red Hart hunter on foot to elude Cragsmen. I stalked softly past them, and they knew nothing of it. I dare say they thought I was yet on Talu, blundering back up the mountain. Few travelers are foolish enough to let themselves be separated from horse and gear. But being a fool, and afoot, I found the many boulders more to my liking than I had when they threatened to break my neck. They gave me good cover as I stalked, and though the Cragsmen ceased their scuffling and moved back to lines of guard once again, I eluded them easily enough. I crept between rocks until I had left them behind, and then I softly walked, looking, searching. Even though I did not know for what.
But there was no doubt in me once I saw it.
Boulders ended suddenly, spearpines thinned, sky showed. Underfoot lay a smooth, flat place made of many small stones—I noted that later, for at the time my seeing was all taken up by the crag. An odd sort of tall, jagged crag, very steep, very aspiring, loomed ahead. And in its side opened a most peculiar cave. As I drew nearer, step by slow, cautious step, I noticed that the rock wall around the entry was all networked with small lines, like cracks—they were cracks. With a shock I realized that the crag was no crag, nor the cave a cave.
Name of the god, it was a place made by the long-ago kings whose powers I scarcely understood, a place left from time lost in time.
Chapter Four
Times so long ago, they had been forgptten even in Sakeema’s time. Their kings and peoples, unknown even in legend. Even I, a storyteller, had never known of such times and such people until Tassida had told me of them. How she remembered them, I did not know, for there was much I did not know of her. But I had since seen such lodges, though much smaller, standing in Mahela’s sad undersea realm.
A strange word Tassida had once told to me: castle. This, then, a castle? Awesome, even though silent, empty, ruined.
Gazing, scarcely breathing, I stepped within the shadow of the entry. The place, as I thought, was hollow, like a great hut. It was indeed a dwelling—though the men of those times must have been giants, I thought, to need such a lofty dwelling. Their powers that had raised this great dwelling made of the very bone of the mountain, that had cut the stones and featly fitted them together, had been lost in the many passing seasons. I could feel the weight of deep time, standing in that place. Dim light filtered down through cracks and through the distant top of a tall place, where there had once been, I supposed, a roof.
There were bones strewn about. Something had denned in there since the long-ago people had gone. An animal nearly as lost in time, perhaps a catamount? More likely many sorts of animals. Likely the small squirrels had nested between the rocks of the walls. They were all gone, the creatures, leaving only the ghost, that lived in my mind, as starkly gone as the people who had once lived in this place.
Not much trace of them, the people. Thrones and harps of wood, hangings of cloth had long since rotted into dirt, if such things had been left. I stared around, looking for something, I was not sure what. Surely something lay in this place if the Cragsmen so guarded it, so reverenced it as to leave none of their own clumsy marks there. Something had to be yet left to us of these strange, long-dead people who had sailed on the sea in great ships and built such huge lodges that they could keep fruit trees within them over the winter. People who had painted a strange magic on thin-stretched sheepskins, a potent magic they put in hinged boxes called books.… It was such magic I wanted of them, though sheepskins also would have long since rotted away. These folk had been mighty in power and knowledge. Had there been any seers among them, I wondered, any dreamwits, any visionaries? I needed a sign such as no shaman could give me.
“Where is Sakeema?” I whispered aloud to the inside of the silent dwelling of the dead.
The yellow stone in the pommel of my sword began softly to glow. Alar was alert, nearly as alive as I.
Swordlight fell on a stone fallen from the archway of the door, and I saw—no, it was nothing. Only a carving in the stone, an ornament, a trefoil.… Alar’s light shone on bare walls, a raised platform of stone, debris, nothing more. But I felt a tremor in her, an urgency, perhaps a longing to match my own. As old as this place was, she might be as old, she, the sword. Perhaps she would show some sign to me.
Drifting, as silent as a leaf on the wind, and trying to be as yielding, as random, I wandered that dim place. There were stone steps to climb, but I felt no urging that way. I turned back toward the center of the great room, where the knee-deep pile of bones and branches lay under the open roof, and I circled it and turned back toward it again, and a third time I found myself facing it. Then I began to think.
Even Cragsmen, if they reverenced a place, would they not have cleaned it of leaf litter and bones and things that stank? Unless, perhaps, they wished to hide something under them.
“All right, Alar,” I murmured, and I strode into the rubbish heap.
Dead things in there, and stench, and a squishy feeling as of wet leaves underfoot. Perhaps something worse. No sane person would have gone into that muck of his own will. “Slime of Mahela!” I protested, and nearly turned to go back. But then I recalled that I was no sane person, but a madman, Mahela’s buffoon, and certainly I had not been daintily reared. Standing in the very center of the foul heap, I felt a waiting stillness in the sword, and blithely I dropped to all fours, my hands wrist-deep in filth, and began to scrabble like a badger, sending dirt and branches, bones and scats and bits of dead mouse flying. But I dug to what felt like hard, flat stone, and found nothing.
“What now?” I sourly addressed the sword. “Have you a cuckpot for me to play in, perhaps?”
Alar’s jewel flared more brightly, and I saw.
Sunstuff.
Right under me, lying beneath my hands, a glint of that strange, bright, uncommonly beautiful stuff that Tassida called gold, which I had never seen except in Mahela’s dwelling beneath far too much green seawater.
Not only the one small glint of it, I discovered as I rooted and scraped and shoved offal to one side. It was a large panel, perhaps as long as my arm and a little less wide than it was long, wrought into some pattern I could not yet see. Once it had been placed on the wall behind the throne, perhaps, or perhaps it had been part of the throne itself. I pulled it gently from its mucky bed and traced the bright curves with my filthy finger, gouging away the dirt.
Trefoil pattern in the corners, the same as I had just seen carved on a stone. But also, in the center of the panel, something more.
There was little enough cloth on me anywhere. I wiped my hands on my deerskin leggings, then worked at the panel again with my fingers, my fingernails, my spittle. Dirt was maddeningly slow to yield, and all I could see beneath it were bright bits of sunstuff in
which I could not sense a wholeness. Sitting in some god’s midden, cuckpot of sky, I had to scrub and clean my prize with my skin and my hair before I could comprehend. And then I understood nothing.
The middle of the panel bore the emblem of a tree, not a forest tree but some sort of round, tame tree covered with trefoil blossoms. And a long-necked bird of some sort was flying away from the tree, carrying a fruit in its beak. But the fruit was falling into three fragments that scattered to the mountains, the plains, and the sea.
I scarcely looked at the bird, the fruit. My gaze was caught on the tree, for the trunk and some branches of it were made up of three swords crossed in the shape of a six-pointed star, swords just such as Korridun and Tassida and I wore.
But it was overweening, I told myself, to believe that this emblem showed the very same swords. Many such swords must have been made in those forgotten days. Still, I touched the sunstuff swords curiously, tracing their shapes with my fingers. And as I did so, Alar blazed so brightly that I could scarcely see for the sword glory and the glory of the strange substance in my hands.
I looked long at the panel by Alar’s warm glow, so long that I could close my eyes and yet see it, shadowed. But nowhere in it could I see Sakeema or a place where I might find him.
Finally, when I began to feel stiff with sitting amid a pile of old bones, I got up, awkwardly hefting the heavy thing I had found. “What am I to do with this?” I muttered. It was too large to take with me, even on horseback, should I ever be so fortunate as to find my horse again. Moreover, I did not want a twelve of Cragsmen pursuing me. And I had a feeling about the sunstuff panel, that people would think it beautiful, that some people would deem it a thing not merely to look at with pleasure but to have, to win, the way the Fanged Horse Folk win slaves and trophies of battle. I did not much like that way of having things, and in the end I put the sunstuff back where I had found it. I carefully covered it up again, making the stinking heap look almost as if it had never been disturbed. And when I had done so, Alar’s light faded and went out.
The place seemed very dim after that. But I remembered where I had seen steps to climb, along the inside of the wall, steps in the stone. I felt my way to them and clambered up. There were lofts and ledges and the remnants of rooms above. There were yet more steps to a higher, lighter place where a lookout might once have stood, or where a king had perhaps stood to overlook his demesne. I stood there and looked, blinking into bright sunlight.
Far, I could see far, nearly as far as the hunter of my name vision. Behind me and above me, the vast snowpeaks. Far to one side, northward, the blue sweep of the tallgrass prairie, a goodly land where few folk went because north of it again lay the bleak steppes where the warring Fanged Horse Folk roamed. Straight in front of me, but far to the eastward, no more than obsidian glints in the sunlight, the thunder cones. On their flanks somewhere might be a blackstone cave where red wolves had once denned.… Somewhat nearer, spread out like the rich mantle of some long-ago king, my homeland, the Red Hart Demesne. I studied its treegreen folds as if one of them might hide the god. I scanned the hills to southward where the Otter River began. Nowhere, no matter how far I looked, could I see anything that might lead me to Sakeema.
But for one thing, much closer at hand. Nearly straight below my feet, a deep mountain tarn, glinting like an eye of earth.
And I felt suddenly glad, eager, and pensive, all at once, for I knew the place where I was. Below me winked the pool of vision, the uncanny tarn where Kor and I had found our swords and formed our bond of blood brotherhood. He had looked up, and seen the strange pinnacles and spires on the mountainside above us, and he had said, “Men made that.”
I left the platform where princes out of the past had once stood. I walked down the stone steps, through the dim great hall and out the gaping entry feeling lightheaded, not so much from lack of food as because I had walked out of legend.
And at the entry I found Talu standing tied by her reins to a young spearpine, as if I were the king of the place and someone had brought her and left her there to wait for me.
Like a colt I shied, and I leaped away like a startled deer into the shelter of the nearest thicket. Who had brought Talu back to me? Who could it have been but some enemy? For a friend would have found me and spoken to me.
Cragsmen? But it was not like them to be so clever. Had they known where I was, they would have come bellowing in and smashed my head into the stones of the floor. At their very wittiest they would have laughed while I stared at my horse, then flattened me. But if not Cragsmen, then who? Ytan? I would have heard his laugh half a heartbeat before my heart stopped forever, pierced by his arrow.
Moving with a hunter’s silent skill, and with sweat of fear trickling down my all-too-naked ribs, I scouted around the great stone lodge in every direction upmountain—for downmountain of that place lay sheer slopes and the barren country around the tarn, and no one could have gone that way without my seeing him. Ever wider half-circles I made, until I came within sight of the backs of the sullen Cragsmen guarding the place. Nothing had disturbed them.
Who had brought Talu to me? Though still puzzled, I lost my fear. An enemy would have killed me by now, or tried to. But if it were a friend, why had he or she not stayed to greet me?
The sun was standing at halfday when I started my search, and brushing the snowpeaks when I gave it up, put away thoughts of it, untied the horse and led her off by the reins, for the mountain’s ribs sloped down to the tarn too steeply for riding.
Despite whatever danger from Cragsmen, I would spend the night beside that pool of vision, I would see what it could tell me of my quest.
I let Talu drink at the tarn, then tethered her nearby for fear that Cragsmen might see her if she roamed and hunted snakes as was her wont. She would have to be as hungry as I, my Talu. I turned away from her peevish glance and went softly down to the verge of the tarn.
There I washed myself, silently, somberly, hoping it was not unseemly to cleanse myself in this place. I felt a need to be clean for those whom I hoped to petition.
I sat on the verge of the pool, waiting for nightfall, keeping a vigil, glad that I had not eaten that day. In former times it might have been necessary for me to sit and starve myself for several days, but so little had I eaten for so long that already the vigil weakness was on me.
Night came, clear and full of stars, as I had hoped. I sat and blinked at the shadow-stars floating on the surface of the deep, black pool. A wind whispered down the mountainside, out of the west, and the shadow-stars shifted, rose and drifted in air like dimly shining snow motes, took shape of—a tree like the one on the sunstuff panel? No. White starwisps still swirled, and I blinked again and saw—it was he, gloriously robed, he, the prince out of the past, regal face turned toward me as he gazed across the abyss of time.
The night we had camped here, Kor and I, we had seen two legendary warriors, they who had sailed to Mahela’s realm and perhaps not been entirely bested. They whose swords we wore. And we had trembled in terror of them, and learned the comfort of handbond.
I was not very much afraid, this time. Too much had happened for me to be very much afraid. Indeed, like an ass, I was merely surprised, and before I recalled myself I blurted out loud, “Where is your comrade?”
He did not move or answer, he, Chal, if it was Chal. His eyes that looked on me so steadily seemed shadowed and saddened, his ageless face very grave. His was a somber, seeing gaze that shamed me, though I did not understand why.
“Can you hear me?” I asked more softly. “Can you speak to me?”
He did not answer. I saw a slight stirring, as if a wind had troubled the starlight folds of his robes.
“Where is Sakeema?” I begged him. “Please. For the sake of the world’s healing.”
Still he stared at me without a sign or an answer, and suddenly I recognized the sorrow in his face. It was reproach.
“I am sorry,” I whispered. “Though I don’t know what I have don
e.” And suddenly, though nothing had changed, I seemed to see another kingly face instead of Chal’s—it was Kor! Truly, it was he, the short fur-cut hair, the simple clothing his own, and storm raged all around him, sending his sealskin cloak lashing across his face like a whip. The surface on which he stood tossed unsteadily. It was the pool of vision, and it seethed and churned like the sea in storm, rose in towering waves, opened a black maw and—took him. He sank. Only his stark face remained, filling my sight, filling the stormy, tossing surface of the sea—Kor was as vast as sea, as sky. Ocean swells were his tears, whitecaps the glimmer of his sea-deep eyes, and out of the waves he gazed at me, looking as though I had hurt him to his heart’s heart, as if I had put a knife in him and turned the blade. With a wordless shout I leaped to my feet. The vision vanished.
“No!” I shouted to the black pool, which lay as still and dark as before.
Always, since I had known him, I had sensed something fated about Kor, some shadowed, uncanny end awaiting him, some dire price he would have to pay; why, I did not know.… And though in the past I had felt that his doom had somehow to do with women, at this despairing time my muddled mind leaped straight to the thought I feared the most. “No, Kor cannot be dead!” I pleaded to the faceless pool. “He can’t be!”
There was no answer, and for a crazed moment I felt certain that I had killed my bond brother, I, the murderer, for I had killed men once, unknowing. No amount of water could cleanse me of their blood. I would have to drown myself, as my father had once tried to drown me in this very pool. He, Tyonoc, demon-possessed, he had been a murderer too. Now I was the same, and I had killed Kor—
“No!” I roared at the night.
“Peace, my son.”
I grew very still, for I knew that voice. My dead father’s voice, coming to me on the breath of wind.
Godbond Page 5
