Godbond

by Nancy Springer

  “Lunkhead,” she told me, not as fondly as I would have liked, “if you had but stayed at the bloody place, there would have been food, and goatskins of water, and a mount for you.”

  “I did not care to stay and watch the mares feed.” “They were well gorged and sluggish when I came upon them,” Tassida admitted, meaning that she had taken their baggage from them without danger.

  “Also, there was the matter of the young brigand I had sent on his way.”

  “A stripling with sharpened teeth in a dolt’s mouth? I met with him and killed him.”

  The turn of events struck me as wry, and I laughed, or tried to laugh, and Tassida must have thought I was laughing at her. She spoke sharply.

  “He wanted to take my head to make up for yours he had missed! And I could not understand why he was alive, yet not cherishing your yellow hair. Why are you yet among the living? What happened?”

  I told the tale to her, as best I was able. Briefly, for even after a day of her care I felt weak, and sitting up on my own to speak truly was an effort. But I sat and faced the evening’s campfire, as is proper to the telling of tales. The last sunrays of the day still lingered when I was done.

  “He could have killed me handily enough,” I mused. “I stood like a stump, I could not have lifted the sword. Why did he show me mercy, I wonder?” I would never know unless I met the man in the realm of the dead.

  Tassida snorted, for Fanged Horse marauders were regarded as of somewhat less worth than vipers or Cragsmen by anyone of the other tribes. “Mercy!” she scoffed. “Fanged Horse Folk know nothing of mercy. The cub must have been parlous well frightened, that he would forego your pretty yellow-haired head.”

  I expected small understanding of Tassida, and her scorn troubled me no more than Talu’s would have. I shrugged, then grimaced at the pain that small movement gave me and lay down on my deerskin once again.

  “How maidens will pursue you now,” Tass teased me, “with such a tale to tell, and a comely scar on your temple.”

  “They will be disappointed,” I told her quietly, looking up at her from my bed of pelts. “I want no woman, any longer, but you.”

  The words shook her. I saw her eyes widen hugely in the firelight.

  Tass, I mindspoke her. A solemn act, to mindspeak her by name. I had never done so with anyone but Kor.

  “Don’t!” Her hands went up to shield her head, and all her muscles hardened against that single silent word.

  “Yet you answered me once,” I said softly.

  “No!” A violent denial. Had it truly been the god, then? The thought made my heart pound. Or was Tass so frightened that she would lie to me?

  “You are afraid? It will go away.” An odd quirk, that so fierce a warrior as Tassida could be so routed by the closeness of mind. But I remembered how terrified I had been of it at first. I remembered also, with a small pang, how Kor had not been afraid, but full of wonder, for all that mindspeak was as new to him as it was to me. “I, also, was afraid. We are more alike than we know, Kor has said.”

  “Go to sleep,” Tass commanded me rudely. I smiled and did as she bade me.

  The next day, though I could scarcely sit upright to ride on Calimir behind her, we traveled to the flanks of the thunder cones. Tass worried whether Pajlat’s people might find the bodies of their dead patrol, or be alerted by the wandering mares, and she was afraid Fanged Horse raiders might pursue us for revenge. I felt no such fear, for the chances seemed remote. (Afterwit tells me that she wanted to take me to a certain place, and found reasons that hid her true reasons even from herself.) But certainly I was willing enough to go where she said. In the flanks of the thunder cones, she told me, there were folds and crannies where fire could not be seen, good hiding. And they would not think we had gone there, for no one went willingly to that bleak, black, sharp-stoned land where almost nothing grew. There were passages that would make my way to the Herders shorter. I accepted all this without question, for she spoke as one who knew.

  Calimir moved like flowing water under us, shining black water, for he was black but for his white belly and mane and legs, and a marvel among horses in many other ways as well. What a steed, that one. Swifter than any fanged mare yet soft in his gaits, fierce in battle yet gentle and beautiful, generous, great of nostril and eye. His small ears pricked eagerly forward, his finely shaped head nodded with his swift, smooth walk. Even sitting behind Tassida, on his rump where the jarring of a horse’s gait is the worst, I rode in comfort. But I was yet weak, I had to fold my arms around Tassida’s waist for support, and before halfday my head rested against her back.

  “Tass, why are you here?”

  The warm sun, the rhythm of the walk, had lulled us both. She answered me without edge.

  “I came to the Red Hart only two days after you. They were still preparing to travel to Seal Hold. Tyee told me which way you had gone.”

  “You followed me? I am honored. But why?” Softly, gently, not wishing to press her. I knew that she loved me, in her way. But was there something more that she wanted of me than my love for her?

  She sighed, and though she did not stiffen or bristle as was her wont, it was the span of many breaths before she spoke.

  “Why do you seek Sakeema?” she said in a low voice, and it was not a question or a reproach, but an answer I could not quite encompass. I laid my cheek against the tough muscle and bone of her shoulder blade, and thought much but asked no more.

  These were my thoughts: that she had last seen Kor and me quarreling, yet did not ask how it stood between us, but seemed to know. That she, unlike many others, had not asked me why I was not at my comrade’s side. That she knew I sought Sakeema, but how did she know? Had Tyee told her? Or were there things about me that she knew in her soul, as if I were a part of her?

  I put the thoughts away with the other mysteries in my mind.

  Edau, Val, Rawnie were the names of the thunder cones. Fire, Redheaded Warrior, Wise Woman. And Senet, Keb, Methven, Catalin Du: Elder, Earth’s Ire, Spirit Flame, Black Wizard. We rode up the skirts of Catalin, and the land lay all in black ripples and shining black edges sharp as knives—indeed, skirts like this one were where my people came to gather blackstone for their knives, though I had never done so. Above it the cone loomed, not as big as a mountain, but twice as forbidding. Drifts of gritty black brickle had gathered between sheets and swells of rock like black ocean waves—this place seemed far too much like Mahela’s Mountains of Doom to suit me, nor was I comforted because a few hardy plants grew in the brickle. Looking down at the cindery talus, thinking what a place like this had once done to my bare feet, I winced.

  “Calimir’s hooves,” I murmured to Tassida, for it was much to be expected, that he should carry the two of us over such terrain.

  “They are tough, and he chooses his footing with care.”

  She rode him at the very loose rein, letting him find his own path, and Calimir held his comely head almost to the ground, studying every step he took. After a while, as the way grew even more treacherous, Tassida swung one foot over his lowered neck and slipped lithely to the ground, leaving me perched like a child on a led pony.

  “His hooves are worn evenly, and only a little,” she reported, and she walked along beside the horse as the blackstone cut into her deerskin boots and the fiery sun beat down on us both. It would have been a fine, brave thing if I could have walked instead of her, but I knew I could not. Already I was bracing myself with a hand against the horse’s withers just to stay upright. But I slipped off my boots of thick bisonhide and passed them down to her, and she put them on over her own, without comment.

  On toward evening she pointed out a hollow blackness under a billow of shining black rock. A cave. When she stopped Calimir beside it, I blundered down without waiting for my boots and collapsed under that stone roof, in cool shadow.

  It was a cave like no other I had ever seen, I found when I had rested awhile and sat up to look. It went on and on, like a mole burro
w or the hollow under a curling ocean wave, and somewhere in its depths ran a trickle of water, for I could hear it. And like the stone lodge on the mountainside above the pool of vision, it was full of bones. Animals had once lived here, animals now all too bitterly gone.

  Tassida had stripped Calimir of his gear, poured water in a hollow of rock for him and turned him loose to eat the tough cinderslope plants. Our bags lay stacked within the cave, along the curving wall. When the sun had set, in that brief twilight span between day’s blazing heat and night’s chill, I crawled out and sat at the entry of the blackstone burrow-cave, and Tass came and sat beside me. We ate oat cakes and dried berries. Tassida ate a few ends of dried meat—for the Fanged Horse Folk yet had dried meat, it seemed. How they must have hoarded. She offered me some, but I refused it. We made no fire.

  Twilight darkened into night. Small clouds swam half-seen in a liquid, starlit sky. There should have been the barking of great-eared foxes beneath that sky, and the stirrings of pika and mice. There should have been owl’s call or the long note of a desert wolf. Instead, there was silence. Nor had there been any bird twitter in the twilight, any flash of swallows’ wings.

  “Mahela’s hand is heavy,” I said softly, for the place, the silence, oppressed me with thoughts of her.

  And as if I had summoned her, she appeared.

  She was a greenish gleam, at first, far off to the westward. I thought at first of the shades of the dead, dancing in air. But Tassida gasped and leaped to her feet, hand on the pommel of her sword.

  “Devourers!”

  Rippling like the face of the ocean, yet flying more swiftly than hawks, they drew nearer, Mahela’s twelve less one less the four Tassida had killed. I had forgotten, or willed myself to forget, how at night they glowed with the same fishy-shining, eerie gleam as seawater. And I had not known they could be ridden—indeed, I had once been overweening enough to think that I could capture one by sitting on it. Now, to my dismay, I knew better. Flying in a wedge, like cormorants or brants, the devourers swooped nearer, and on the one in the lead sat the goddess, naked and proud in her nakedness, her flesh shimmering whitely. Nor did I find myself any the less afraid of her because she was unclothed. Her hard white face, the haughty lift of her head, prevented that, and the sight of her pale breasts chilled me, for they moved no more than two rocks might have. I struggled up to stand beside Tass, drawing my sword, though I swayed on my feet.

  “Is that—she?” Tass whispered to me, her own blade at the ready.

  “Mahela. Yes.”

  The sound of Mahela’s laughter floated through the sky to us, uncanny laughter, for even in that clear night it sounded as if it writhed to us like a sea snake through water. Even though she and her foul retinue flew quite close, within a stone’s throw away, her voice sounded chill, distant.

  “Dannoc!” she hailed me gaily. “My renegade storyteller, well met! Or is it my rascal Ytan?”

  The venomous joy in that cold voice! Like a snake-dazzled bird, I could not take my eyes from her. And one of the devourers, swooping past me, struck me a glancing blow with its heavy eel-like tail, sending me sprawling. Tassida’s sword Marantha flashed, and the tail lay beside me, thrashing horribly as greenish blood gouted the cinders. I edged away, though I could not yet rise, and Mahela laughed again, circling her greensheen steed so that she could watch us.

  “There, Dannoc, you long for something living, and now you have it! You want the creatures back? Here are some more!” Snakes issued from her mouth as she spoke, writhing like the severed tail, falling to the ground and twisting and coiling in their agony as they hit the hard, black stones. I could see the convulsing of their pale underbellies in the night, and though I staggered to my feet I found I could not stand without leaning on my sword, half bent over, as if it were an old man’s stick. Alar was angry. Her pommel jewel shone a fierce yellow, and Marantha’s blazed as angrily, a clear red-purple hue like that of the healing flower of Sakeema after which she took her name. Wry, to see that hue in so deadly a weapon. The sword, as uncanny as the one who lifted her.

  “Hag!” Tassida breathed between bared teeth, though I had thought Mahela was too comely, too ageless, to be called hag. “Filthy corpse-eating shitbag! Come closer, and I will cut you open!”

  “Put away your sword, little daughter!” Mahela sang in reply, her voice far too glad for anyone’s comfort who knew her. “My fell servants will not take you tonight.”

  “Indeed so, for you know I would slash them to pieces.” Tassida laughed, a grim laugh nearly like Mahela’s. “Where are the others of your twelve, old goddess?”

  “Do not overween, upstart.” Mahela’s voice had gone dark. “You will be mine soon enough. You and all the others.”

  The dark tone of her threat did not chill me nearly as much as her laughter, for Mahela did not often need to threaten—she merely took what she wanted, with boredom or joy. I straightened, finding some of my strength. Eyes on the goddess, Tassida muttered at me aside, “Darinoc, be of some use! Where is your bow?”

  Atop our bags of provision, it was, within the shadow of the cave. Tassida had brought it to me from the place where I had dropped it along the Traders’ Trail. I tottered toward the cave, crawled into it, hoping Mahela would think I was fleeing. She must have, for I heard her laugh again.

  “Old coward,” Tassida taunted. “You call me upstart? Is there anything in your belly but snakes? Come closer, show me this much-vaunted power of yours.”

  “There will be time enough for that, little daughter.” Mahela’s laughter had faded, she sounded merely bored, she turned her head away as if to give her foul steed the signal to leave. Within the shadow of the cave, I had strung my bow and was frantically seeking an arrow. Mahela was not a creature of Sakeema, that I should hesitate to kill her, but more like a demon, she herself the demon of death. All powers, let Tass keep her just a moment more—

  “Why do you call me daughter?”

  In Tass’s voice, not so much challenge as a desperate plea. Mahela’s head came around in a wordless answer, and in her still, hard face no laughter showed any longer. The devourer she rode grew as still as her face, seeming almost to hover on air, and I took aim. This one time I would not risk the mercy bolt to the neck. This one time, thinking of the world’s dying throes, I aimed for the heart.

  “Sakeema guide it,” I whispered, and I loosed the arrow.

  It sped through stillness and the night and buried itself to the feathers in her breast.

  Oddly, neither Tass nor I shouted in triumph. We stared, and the only cry was Mahela’s, and she cried horribly in pain, making me feel as much the monster as she. A bird-like scream as she toppled from her mount—she was a bird. Changing as she fell, her wings beating the air, she was a cormorant the size of a hart, feathers as black and greenly shining as her hair had been, and with her strong, bone-colored beak she tugged the arrow from her breast and let it drop. Her white-ringed eyes glared at us. Then, heavily, with her wedge of devourers following her, she flew away westward. I blinked, watching the flight of that great cormorant in the night, feeling a vague stirring as of something not remembered, something I had once seen.

  Tass stood with Marantha dangling from her lowered hand, swordlight fading. I sheathed Alar and went to her, staggering as I walked.

  “It was a good shot, Dan,” she whispered, staring off the way Mahela had gone. “Yon beldam should have been dead.”

  “Yet she is no demon,” I said shakily. “She was hurt. The blood, dark on her breast, and she cried out—”

  “She should have been dead,” Tass insisted.

  “She is the goddess,” I said, hearing in my own words an echo of other words: She is far stronger. She always wins.

  “She must be,” said Tass. “I am trembling.”

  I put my arms around her, for all the good it would do. I was no steadier than she, and she was quivering like an aspen leaf.

  “Tass,” I queried gently, “who is your mother?”
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br />   She shook her head and buried her face against my shoulder, not answering. That did not surprise me, for she had scarcely ever answered any of my questions about herself. What touched me was that she refused me with so little fire. Her fist, lying clenched against my chest, a hard knot—I smoothed it with my right hand until it eased, felt fingers touch fingers as her hand turned to meet mine—

  An unaccountable tide of strength surged through me, and a feeling I could not name.

  I knew that strength. It was handbond, yet not the same as handbond with Kor. Not touch of comrade, friend, bond brother, but—something other. Strength not of four heroes, but better, strength of—I could not name it, or the passion, the exaltation I felt. Not even the name of love encompassed it. Though love pulsed in me, warm and strong in me.

  Tass had stopped shaking. For a moment, I think, we had both stopped breathing. “Sakeema,” she murmured in awe, “what is it?”

  “Don’t be frightened,” I whispered to her, keeping the handbond, and I kissed her on her temple. Her face turned upward, and her seeking mouth found mine.

  Hands softly slipped apart, quested elsewhere—we no longer needed handbond. Together we were very strong. Somewhere in the darkness lay a devourer’s severed tail, dead or dying serpents. We paid them no heed, we laid aside our swords and paid no heed to dying, we defied the world’s dying. We placed pelts within the shelter of the cave, soft brown furs, all that we had left of the creatures of Sakeema, and we lay on them and made, maybe, a new life, attempted it in the old, old way and yet all was new, all was Tass, Tass, and I would never again lie with any other. My mouth pressed against the side of her face and I whispered her name, felt her hands and her loins answer me, and I was strong, deft, I was mountainpeak and she was sky, and—how she welcomed me.…

  Her tough young body lay all night close to mine, and I could scarcely sleep for love of her.