Godbond

by Nancy Springer

  Chapter Nine

  We stayed two more days at the blackstone cave, though it could no longer be said that I needed to regain strength. But Tass seemed to like the place, for all that the thunder cones stood bleak and black-smoking beneath a stark sky, and after the first night I looked around me with new eyes, for she had turned it into a place for me to love. In the springtime, she told me, tiny sunset-purple flowers, the most frail and winsome of flowers, no more than a finger tall, sprang out of the cinders in great numbers so that they lay like a red-purple mist all over the slopes, then were gone again within a few days.

  Then she fell silent, as if to wonder, would she ever see them again … would they ever be, again?

  On the third day, early, before heat and nearly before light, we filled all our waterskins and set out to travel to the Herders, riding Calimir by turns.

  Picking our way between the thunder cones Methven and Catalin Du, wearing our boots to tatters on the sharp stones, wrapping our feet with my buckskin leggings and wearing them to rags as well, all in the fierce heat of midsummer—it seemed a long, hard journey and yet far too short, for I was alone with Tass, her comrade during the day’s toil, her lover in the cool and pleasant nights. Food and water were nearly gone at the last, and we sustained each other with touch and glance when we stumbled, when our tongues and lips swelled and the sun blistered us. And in six days we came through the blackstone lands to the red-earth plains where the Herders roamed with their goats and donkeys and their brown sheep. Then we both rode Calimir, and came swiftly to the place where they had dug their dwellings.

  I did not understand, at first, when I saw the smokes issuing from the ground in the evening shadows of Methven, the Spirit Flame. I thought that they were perhaps his tiny children, nestling there at his feet, that someday black rock would spread over that place as well, or a new cone rise. For I had seen the brushwood huts of the wandering Herders often enough, the traders and those who followed the flocks, but never this place where they came to die, where they had dug their red clay and made their pit homes. The smokes came up from their cooking fires, of course, and but for a few children keeping watch over the small herds close at hand there was no one in sight above ground.

  “Smarter than us,” Tass said wearily. “They keep out of the heat when they can.”

  She was riding in front of me. I looked at her, sweat streaking her lean face and the lovelocks curling and clinging with damp, and I felt the sweat of her back against my chest, and smelled the scent of her skin, and in that moment I knew more of loving than I had known since the day I was born. Finally, love lay under my sun-scorched hand, and the world was ending.… Before I could give her more than the glance, one of the far-off children spied us and lifted a shout. Small spotted dogs began to bark, and folk swarmed out of the pits, blinking and squinting as they peered at us. We must have been but looming shadows in sunset light to them at first. Then Tassida lifted a hand in greeting, and the glad cry went up.

  “Tassida! The wanderer has returned!”

  “It’s the wayfarer, the wandering wolf!”

  “Welcome, Tassida! What news?”

  “It is Tassida! And who is that with her?”

  Silence fell, and there were whisperings. Then old gray-bearded Ayol stepped forward with the ceremonial blanket of many colors circling his shoulders, to give us king’s greeting, and I got down off Calimir to face him levelly. His look was stern, for he and I had quarreled the last time we had met.

  “You both wear those strange, bright weapons now,” he said. “Do you come in peace?”

  He did not lack for bluntness, Ayol! Tassida huffed. But before she could answer hotly, I spoke. “I come to take council with you, Ayol. And if you will forget the rantings of a certain mad fool, I will be grateful to you.”

  “And I come to cut off your beard, Ayol,” Tassida said, very much on her mettle. “With a hundred warriors at my back. Do you not see them? Where in this merry hell is the water?”

  Ayol gave her a dour look, for he had known her years longer than I and perhaps was as accustomed to the rough side of her tongue. “Come within,” he said briefly, and turning his back on us he stumped off to his pit.

  I very nearly blundered into the fire, following him. The entry was the smoke hole, and the fire stood just below it, under the slant of the notched pole that I descended. First I choked in the smoke, then baked my belly, then nearly charred my foot. But it was well worth it, to enter into the shady coolness of that place after the sunblazing heat above. Here in the ground would be complete shelter from icy winter winds as well. Small wonder that the Herders were called wise.

  “Sit,” Ayol said curtly.

  A year before, perhaps, I would have taken offense at his tone. But it seemed of small importance to me anymore how folk spoke to me. I sat where I was, on the cool floor of dirt or clay. This place strongly reminded me of Kor, of the prison pit where he had first befriended me, and I felt a hot ache of longing at the thought. To send it away, I peered around me, my eyes slowly seeing more of what was in that dim dwelling. An old woman working with a finger loom, not looking at me. Hanks of wool hanging overhead. Clay pots and bowls in plenty, larger and better than any that had ever come westward along the Traders’ Trail. Something baking in the coals of the cooking fire—

  And then, as I looked near the fire, my throat tightened and tears stung my eyes worse than the smoke.

  For there, standing on the stones that ringed the fire, there were the creatures in their many, clay creatures, small, frail, very much like the wooden ones my folk of the Red Hart had taken to carving. Silent, great-eyed, lifeless, they faced me, red clay in the red glow of the fire. There were antelope and prairie falcons and bison, skylarks and songbirds, deer, gophers, badgers and ferrets. There were great-eared foxes. There were even figures of wildcats and wolves, though the meat-eaters could not have been much beloved by these sheep-herding folk. Yet there they stood, the yellow clay cats and red wolves, in plenty.

  There was a small sound, and, blinking, I looked up at Ayol. He squatted before me, offering a goatskin of water, and he must have seen my burning eyes, for his voice, when he spoke to me, had turned very gentle.

  “Drink water, Dannoc. I think I cannot give you what you more truly want.”

  “Water is a good gift,” I whispered, and I drank deeply. The old woman left her finger weaving, climbed up the pole and out the entry. Ayol sat across the fire from me, and his weathered old hands, as if of themselves, sought out a lump of clay from the pot by his side. He began to shape another creature, an owl, all the while speaking in a soft old voice, as if he did not much care whether I listened to him or not, his yellow eyes half lidded.

  “My folk say, some of them, that we can live, for we have never been hunters. We have the goats for milk and leather, the sheep for mutton and wool. We plant beans and corn. But I cannot believe that anything can ever again be well without the wild creatures, the creatures of Sakeema.”

  With a scraping of her weary feet Tassida came down the entry pole, avoiding the fire more gracefully than I had managed, taking the waterskin from me without ceremony, gulping at it. “The well water is brown,” she accused Ayol after she was done. Or perhaps she said it merely to explain why she had not drunk there when she had watered Calimir and turned him loose to graze with the donkeys. Her inner fire made everything she said sound contentious. But Ayol only looked up mildly at her, pale old eyes amid soft folds of skin.

  “The well is low,” he said, his voice even and steady and throaty through phlegm. “There is not enough water for us to pour on the beans, the corn, and they are dying. The ewes dropped mostly dead lambs this year, and the goats have not freshened with milk. All who are older than I, and many who are younger, died in the winter past. This winter, if all does not end before winter, we will eat the corn and beans that should be saved for seed, and the ewes that should be saved for breeding, or we will starve.”

  Tassida sat down silentl
y by my side.

  “Small use in keeping them for the morrow,” Ayol remarked, “when all the signs say there will be no morrow. I am surprised the Fanged Horse Folk have not been here ere this, to kill us all while bellowing that they have not enough.”

  “They are hosting to the westward,” I told him, “to attack the Seal Kindred.” Pain pierced my heart like a lance, as always when I thought of Kor. And Ayol gave me a surprised look, peering at me through the wavering smoke above the fire.

  “Then why are you not with Korridun? I know you are not a coward.” A fool, maybe, his tone said, but not a coward. Or perhaps I only heard the thought, Fool, in him. And suddenly, in the presence of this gruff old man, all my doubt burst from me.

  “May all the powers help me, I am not sure any longer!” I stood up, needing to pace, though there was not room enough for pacing and my head nearly brushed the beams of the earthen ceiling. “I left him to go seeking Sakeema. Just find the god, I thought, give him a hearty shake, and all our troubles would well-come-hell be over. Sakeema would save us when nothing else could. Sakeema, the god who has died.…” The bitterness in my own voice startled me, and I sank to a cross-legged seat on the clay floor again, glad of the dimness that somewhat shielded my face.

  “A worthy quest,” Ayol said, his voice as dry as the plains but without mockery.

  “I could not have left Kor for any lesser cause. But now it seems to me that I have left him for no cause at all! And the quest feels as awk and awry as the world.… Ayol, does Sakeema yet live, think you? For if he does, how can he be letting these things happen?”

  “These are weighty questions,” Ayol said, and he slowly set down his owl of clay beside the fire, took more clay and started another. We all three of us sat in silence. The old woman, perhaps Ayol’s pledgemate, came down the pole carrying strips of dried mutton, poured water in a clay basin, put the meat in it to soften and went out again. Meat, in our honor, when the world was ending.

  “Questions without answers,” Tassida said at last, a hard edge in her voice—despair?

  “Ayol,” I urged, “my brother Tyee has told me that the elders of the Herders are wise.”

  “I am the eldest now, and I am not so very wise. I know only the ordinary things of Sakeema: that he was good, and loved peace, and all the creatures loved him, that he made marvelous new creatures out of clay and by the power of his hands. The many-colored wolves of wonder he made. When he died, or went away, my people say, the wolves carried him away across the great plain, into the sunrise.”

  I had thought that the wolves had taken him back to the blackstone cave where he had been suckled. Hearing what Ayol said, I grew somber, for I had seen that plain spreading away from the skirts of the thunder cones, and it looked as vast as the sea. “How am I ever to find him?” I asked.

  “I do not know. Is Sakeema to be found in such a bodily sense? My inwit tells me not. But you are a dreamwit, Dannoc, and I am not. You must decide.”

  The old woman came back with mint leaves for us to chew, and she kneeled near the fire, scraping coals aside, pulling bread of some sort out of them. In order to show respect for the king, she had not spoken, but suddenly she turned her face toward me and said, “When I was a child, it was a saying of the elders that he who sought Sakeema must seek the tree that grows in the sea.”

  Ayol stared at her in astonishment, we all stared at her, and she became abashed. “Eat,” she muttered, thrusting bread and strips of meat at us.

  “Not yet, Yola. First tell us more of this thing you have remembered,” Ayol said.

  The old woman shrugged. “It is nothing. It was a way for them to say, do not attempt the fool’s task. There are no trees that grow in the sea.”

  “But there are,” I told her. “I have seen them, hanging heavy with red fruit. I have seen the captive tree that grows by Mahela’s throne, the round blue fruits bending its branches. But Sakeema was not there.”

  “It was pomegranate, in the song,” Yola said. “If it was the same tree.”

  We all stared, and Ayol said drily, “I had forgotten there is yet one here more elder than I. One who pays attention to foolish things. What is a pomegranate, Yola?”

  “I do not know.”

  Ayol sighed. “What song, then, my sister?” he asked with pointed patience.

  I should have known when I heard her name that she was his sister. The Herders gave lifelong names to their newborn babes, and sometimes named them much alike.

  “Just a chant we sang as children, for the treading out of the corn.”

  “Say it,” I begged.

  So in her whispery old-woman’s voice, with hesitation, she recited it:

  Three in one and one in three,

  The pomegranate on the tree.

  And what lies in the heart of it

  No mortal eye can see.

  Return to us, Sakeema,

  In sunset days we beg thee.

  Sunset days. Had they felt the world ending, even then?

  “We were allowed to make small birds of the corn hulls, as an offering,” old Yola added in a voice like the voice of a spirit speaking on the wind. And with a flat, hardened look on his weathered face, Ayol set down the clay bird he had been fashioning in his hand.

  We all sat in silence. And with my mind on the tree in the sea, I did not think of the sunstuff panel I had seen.

  Some moments later Yola again offered the strips of meat she had prepared, and Tass took some gladly, but I refused, explaining, so as not to give offense, that since I had started my quest I could no longer eat the flesh of any creature of Sakeema.

  “It is only mutton!” Tass grumbled at me.

  “That is meat, of a sort, which you hold in your hand,” Ayol added.

  I looked down at the bread, astonished. The flavor was unfamiliar to me, some sort of root, I had thought.

  “Grasshoppers,” Ayol explained. “In hard times we catch them in trenches by the tens of hundreds, then grind them up to cook them.”

  In silent bewilderment I ate the grasshopper bread. Meat that was not meat. God who was and was not. Sakeema was asleep in a cave somewhere, he was in the sunrise, in the sunset, in the sea, in a tree whose name was strange to me. Where was I to search for him, if he was everywhere? Or nowhere. Dead.… I pushed away the bread. I could not eat.

  “Though it is not likely to help,” Ayol said to me, “let me tell you the Herders’ tale of Sakeema.”

  We all gazed into the low flames, as was customary for the telling of tales. When he had centered himself, Ayol began.

  “Sakeema was born, so my people say, in one of the serpent holes, the long, low caves, in the midst of the blackstone barrens, somewhere in the skirts of the thunder cones.”

  “So was I, most likely,” Tassida interrupted the tale, “yet no one calls me savior.”

  I gaped at her, for it was unlike her to speak of herself, and this was a greatly strange way of doing so, and a strange saying. But Ayol only glanced at her in mild annoyance.

  “It has been many years, Tassida, since we of the Herders decided that you would not make a likely god for us.”

  She laughed out loud in perverse delight, laughed so long and so merrily that even Ayol broke his dignity with a grin that showed his brown teeth and the wide gaps in them. And I smiled broadly, savoring the jest, for indeed Tass could scarcely have been less like Sakeema. For all that I would love her until I died, I could not gainsay that her courage, though great, was all outward. Within, she was as needful as an abandoned child, and her needfulness, or the need to shield it, made her arrogant, willful, mettlesome.

  “And were you suckled by wolves, as the Herders say Sakeema was?” I asked her, half jesting, when she had quieted somewhat. But she grew suddenly as still as stone, looking hard at me.

  “Yes,” she told me levelly, “I was.”

  I gaped anew, but Ayol seemed far less astonished. “Red wolves,” he said in his phlegm-thickened voice. “The large-eared, thin-furred
red wolves of the plains and barren hotlands, and it might have been the very last pair.”

  “When they died, I was bereft.” Tass had lifted her chin, and her dark eyes dared me to pity her, or disbelieve her, or do anything but silently listen to her. “I lived wild among the rocks until the Herders found me and tamed me.”

  “No more than half tamed,” Ayol admitted with regret. “We did our best.”

  “I hate Sakeema, Dan,” Tass blazed suddenly.

  Though I had sometimes of late thought the same, coming from her this was a shock. “In the mighty name,” I exclaimed, “why?”

  “All the tales of him reproach me. He was everything that I am not: gentle, peaceful, loving, and a man. I sometimes feel that I was made by a demon, left in that cave only to be a mockery of him, just as your brother Ytan is a mockery of you.”

  My head swirled as if I had been fasting and had gone into a visionary trance. All seems plain to see in a tale, but in life it is not so. I was in a riddle place, a confusion, the hold of Mahela’s sunstuff ship, the innards of the dark stone lodge where I had seen a tree of sunstuff, three crossed swords. I was lost, my own name in doubt, a riddle, and somewhere close at hand Sakeema was hiding from me, I could nearly see his face … I blinked, and it was gone. The face before me was Tassida’s, startling in its beauty. She, as much of a riddle as my name or Sakeema.

  I blurted, “You—you do not know your human mother.”

  “I do not know her, or any human father, or any name that either of them might have given me.”

  Her name, Tassida, “the horseback rider”—she must have taken it for herself. I gazed back at her, the proud bearing of her head at once defying me and imploring me, and I fiercely wished that she would let me mindspeak her, for I had begun to have a faint sense of the Tass within, of how to love her, and no spoken words could be as soft, as gentle, as that silent touch of mind … and in front of gruff old Ayol, yet …

  Nevertheless, I tried it aloud, softly, gently, and let Ayol listen all he liked and watch with his pale yellow eyes. “The cave … where you were born … it is the one where we—”