Godbond

by Nancy Springer

  Cheers rose behind me, but Kor did not cheer. “Dan,” he said hoarsely, “come with me.”

  We rode back through the battle. The Otter were in confusion without their Fanged Horse allies, ready to break and scatter, and the Cragsmen were sullenly falling back. Kor had sheathed his sword, and he paid no heed to any of this. He sent his mare, Sora, at a lope up the headland into the forest, and by the stiff, swaying way he rode I knew that he was weary enough to fall, that only pride kept him upright. Or perhaps he was weakened and in pain, wounded.

  “Kor, you ass, slow down!” I was trying to catch up with him, but the foul bitch of a fanged mare under me fought me at every stride, and Kor was riding recklessly fast. He took a sudden dodge toward the seat and sent Sora skittering down a shaly drop to a shingle beach between jutting points of rock. Then he started northward again, and I saw the blood trickling from his lower lip where he had bitten it.

  “Kor, stop,” I begged, “before you fall!”

  He stopped Sora so suddenly that he nearly pitched off her, saving himself only by bracing his hands against her withers, and at last I was able to ride up beside him. His sea-colored eyes were on me. “You are so thin, Dan,” he said to me, “it wrenches my heart. You have starved.”

  “And you are hurt,” I said, staring at him. Wounded and going off, like a hurt hawk seeking a solitary place to heal—or die.… He honored me by allowing me to be with him.

  “Help me down,” he whispered.

  I slid off my useless mount and let the mare plunge away. Standing on the gravel and sand of the beach, I reached up toward him, but he stopped my hands by lifting his.

  Scared, he mindspoke, the single word, too spent to murmur it aloud, and as if mindspeak had opened a wellspring between us I suddenly felt the flow of his pain and terror, so stark that they stunned me for a moment. How had he borne it, all the seasons of feeling my passions and hurts as well as his own?

  “Handbond,” I told him.

  Right hands met, gripped, sword scar to sword scar, and I felt the familiar warm surge, strength and courage as of four heroes, and I blinked back tears—it had been too long since I had last touched him, since I had handbonded him. Odd, that for all his need, the grip should comfort and center me as much as it did him.

  “If you had not thought to me when you did, I would have fallen,” he said in a rush, finding strength to speak. “If you had not come to me when you did—”

  “Hush,” I told him, and lifted my hands to him again, and this time he let me grasp him under the shoulders.

  “Steady.…”

  I tried to ease him off the horse. But as his far leg slid over he gave a terrible groan and clutched at me—he could not stand, he nearly swooned. His knees gave way under him as his feet felt for the ground. I laid him down as gently as I could and kneeled beside him.

  “All powers be thanked that you are here, Dan,” he breathed. “Seal Hold—full of eyes watching for weakness.…”

  I was tugging at his clothing, trying to find the wound. There was so much blood on him, blood of enemies I had thought, that I could not tell what ailed him. “Where?” I demanded. “Where are you hurt?”

  He gestured. “Spear thrust. The same bastard Otter who took Calimir.”

  I tore open his trousers and felt pain stab me in the gut so that I could not move or speak or even weep. Kor was looking up into my face, and I think I had gone white with anguish for him.

  “Tell me,” he said softly.

  And since my dry mouth, my lips and tongue, would not obey me to form speech, I mindspoke him. Gentler that way, if such a terrible thing can in any way be said gently. It took your manhood, I told him, and I made my hands move to peel back the stiffened, bloodsoaked cloth from the wound. His member came away with the cloth and dropped onto the beach where he lay.

  There was a small, stunned silence, and then he spoke. “No great loss,” he said bitterly. “Little use I ever made of it.”

  This, then, was the fell fate I had always sensed for him—or part of it.… A mischance dreadful enough; why did I not feel doom was done with him?

  “Kor.…” I murmured, aching for his sake, not knowing what to say, how to help him—there was no help for what had happened to him. “I am … sorry.…” I was all awkwardness, and my horror would not let me move my gaze from his bloody cock lying on the pebbles and sand. “What—what should I do with it?” I blurted, and he stared at me a moment, then suddenly barked with laughter, a hard laughter that made him moan as he drew breath, so that I laid a hand on his chest to stop him.

  “Let Mahela have it, Dannoc!” He laughed anew, but more softly. “Fling it in the sea, and let the old hag have it. She wanted it badly enough before.”

  So I took it in the palm of my right hand and went and gave it to the waves. When I came back, Kor was still softly laughing, a sound with heartbreak in it.

  “Truly, it doesn’t matter, Dan.” He sobered suddenly, weak and panting with the pain of his wound. “Most likely … we will all be dead ere long.”

  So he knew. Or perhaps his despair spoke, but I knew how I had let Calimir be killed and doomed us. Therefore his despair had an equal in mine.

  “I take it … you have not found Sakeema?”

  I met his eyes, too wretched to be angry with him. “Sakeema is dead,” I said, “or a traitor.”

  “It must … be true. If anyone … could have found him, it would have been you, Dan.”

  I found water in the skin slung from his sealskin riding pelt, washed his wound and bound it with strips cut from his sleeve. He did not cry out—he seemed nearly indifferent to the pain. When I was done, I pulled his clothing back into place as best I could, then took the sealskin off his horse and covered his legs with it. Then I sat beside him, cross-legged, pillowing his head on my knee, and I took his right hand in handbond again. Westward, beneath black fingers of cloud, the sun was swimming blood-red at sea’s edge. Without moving, Kor and I watched it until it sank. Sundown turned to twilight, a gloom scarcely to be called twilight, as dense as nightfall.

  I felt numb, no pain in me, but at some time I had started quietly weeping, so that my eyes sent salt rain down on Kor’s hand I held clasped in mine. After a while he noticed, and shifted his head slightly to look up at me, and gifted me with one of his rare smiles. “Heal me with your tears?” he said wistfully.

  How I wished I could. “It wasn’t me. That was Tassida.”

  His brows went up in inquiry, his eyes grew keen. “It was Tassida? Why do you say that?”

  “She is the healer, Kor, not I.” Too weary, and distraught, and starved, as he had said, to tell him much more.

  “Well,” he murmured, mostly in jest, “may Tass come to me, then.”

  “She is up at the Blue Bear Pass with a broken arm.…” She, the healer who could not heal herself. “And I have let Calimir be killed. How is she to come to us in time?”

  “She is better off out of this hell,” he said gently. He did not understand, for he did not know about the three sundered stones, and I was in no fit fettle to tell the tale. I vehemently shook my head.

  “Unless Tassida somehow comes to us, to make us three,” I told him starkly, “we might as well die now, and be done with it.”

  Kor accepted that at my word. “We will send for her,” he said.

  It was a simple thing to do, so forthright that I felt more than ever the fool for not having thought of it. My weeping ceased, and a sudden, frail hope tugged at my heart, lifting my head. With Kor lying so sorely wounded, it could not cheer me much, but my hand tightened on his. He spoke no more, but lay quietly, resting against me, handbonding as much for my strengthening as for his.

  The night was full of noise, hollow noise with no life in it, surfs roar beneath the tempest, wind’s keening, thunder groan. So I did not notice the splashings of seals hauling out of the sea onto the beach, seals in their half a hundred. In the gloom I saw their dark, recurved shapes moving against the faint greenis
h glow of the sea, and I straightened, blinked and looked again, stiffened, let go the handbond and reached for my sword. Kor struggled to sit up. But before he drew Zaneb, the seals had clambered up to us, and we saw what they were, and smiled.

  “Welcome, my cousins,” Kor said softly. “But it is not your wont to be so tame! Is something amiss with you, as it is with us?”

  One of them touched his face with its whiskered nose and changed within an eyeblink. There on the beach lay a sylkie, a man of the sea, one of Kor’s distant kindred, his pale, hairless skin faintly glistening in the night as he came to a crouch on his long feet. He met Kor’s gaze levelly, his eyes dark pools of shadow in his strange, fair face, and one slender, loose-jointed hand stretched out toward us in a gesture we could not understand, so wry was the slant of it.

  Dan, what does he want?

  I cannot tell.

  Others had crowded around Kor and their leader, touching them, touching each other, so that a ripple of change spread through the cluster of them like a swell through the sea until they all faced us in their human forms: tall sea men, small-breasted, lithe sea women, all crouching so that none of their heads rose above the level of Kor’s. And they spoke to us with delicate, skewing gestures of their hands, as is the manner of this mute folk, and many of them laid their fingers softly on Kor, though not, I thought, in appeal or importunity. I sensed the gentlest of invitations.

  Kor, I think they want you to go with them! For your healing.

  As they had once taken Sakeema into the sea to sleep and be healed. If one could trust the accounts of Sakeema.

  “I must go back to Seal Hold,” Kor said aloud, and he began to struggle to his feet.

  “Wait a moment, Kor, and think. They offer you rest, safety, in a place Mahela might not destroy.” But even as I spoke I felt his outrage, his defiance, and I smiled.

  “I am not yet ready to hide from Mahela, Dan!” He was the king again, hard and keen. “Nor am I done fighting. Be of some use, would you, and help me get onto my horse.”

  “You cannot ride!”

  “How else am I to get back to the Hold? For a certainty I cannot walk.”

  The sea folk had stood when Kor had stood, and they swirled like water, making way as I brought Sora and strapped the riding pelt onto her, yet crowding around so close at all times that I could see by the greenish seawater shimmer of their skins. I kneeled and boosted Kor onto his mare with my shoulders, seating him sideward, so that both his legs hung down by Sora’s left shoulder. Then I vaulted up behind him, taking the reins myself. Still the sea folk watched us, holding their pelts in their strange, long hands, and as we saluted them and rode away they gazed after us like lovers wishing to remember, as if they might not see us again.

  We rode slowly in the utter darkness, and before long Kor groaned and sagged against my chest, and I struggled to hold him from falling with one arm while I guided Sora with the other. I was afraid that I would have to lay him belly-down across the horse, and I did not want that. He would want to come to Seal Hold upright … his pride wanted it badly, for by the time we reached the Hold he had revived somewhat and braced himself enough so that he was able to walk in with his arm slung across my shoulders. It was very late. Few folk were about to see him or greet me. A few sleepy sentries looked at us without comment. Horses raised long heads to gawk in the torchlight—for the horses stood in a close herd in the great hall of the Hold for the night, so that raiders might not seize them.

  I went at once with Kor to his chamber, to stay there with him, and he had a boy bring me food—seaweed, forsooth, and fish, and mussels pried from the rocks. Not food such as I would have savored a few seasons before, but I was grateful for it, and grateful that not even Pajlat with his Fanged Horse minions and his Otter River allies could cut Kor’s folk off from Mother Sea entirely. They had tried, at first, to besiege Seal Hold, biding their time between the raids that burned the lodges. But since my people of the Red Hart had come to aid Kor, Pajlat had camped on one side of the headland only so as not to divide his force, freeing the way down to the sea. Also, he had attacked more fiercely. Times were hard at Seal Hold. But there was more food for me there than I had seen in many a starving day.

  I ate hungrily, then lay down beside Kor and slept, for I was much in need of sleep. Even in my slumber I sensed that Kor was lying awake in pain, and more than once in that night I sat up and silently handbonded him, then went to sleep again. A haunted sleep, for Mahela’s black cloud lay heavily on the night, and my dreams were troubled.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The shouting seemed at first to rise out of the troubled dreams. Then I jolted awake. The Hold was full of echoing yells and footfalls.

  “Raid,” Kor mumbled, struggling to rise from his bed. The shock of his wound had made him weak, and he had managed only to prop himself on his elbows when I sprang up and pushed against his chest to make him lie down again.

  “Stay,” I ordered him. “Tyee and I will see to it!” I snatched up my weapons.

  “Dan!” Kor exclaimed, something of moment in his voice—but there was no time. I ran out with the other warriors awakened out of slumber. In the haze of my dreams I had thought at first that the enemies were raiding the Hold itself, but not so. Sentries had given the alarm, and the sounds I had heard were those of Seal and Red Hart warriors running to answer it. I ran with them. Someone at my side, a fair young Red Hart, cried, “The water!”

  Karu. I could see her in the dim light outside, daybreak’s light just graying the edges of the sky. And of course Pajlat would be raiding against the water supply, the cliff just back of the Hold where the rivulets trickled down into the stone troughs carved to catch them. If he could keep us from water, in a few days he would have defeated us. I ran that way, and Alar found her own way to my hand, and her light blazed far brighter than the clouded dawn. Something in her seemed to move me out of self, as often happened. I was no longer mere Dan, but I was Vallart, the hero out of that long-ago time of swords and glory, or even—something more, I was not sure what, and there was no time to think on it. Dawn was all shout and thrust and cut, batter, beating the enemies back. Close work, a confusion of knives and spears—I leaped to a stance atop the rim of one of the stone troughs, where I could slash at any enemy who came near, and from there I could see all who struggled. The raiders were mostly Otter. For the sake of stealth they had left Cragsmen and mounted Fanged Horse warriors behind. And stealth had taken them almost to their goal, but the Seal and my yellow-headed tribefellows of the Red Hart were pushing them back—

  I came back to self at the thought of my tribemates, I was once more Dan, Sakeema’s fool, looking out over the fair-haired warriors I had sent to this fray, some of them hard beset, and one—not there.…

  Something had shaken Kor’s voice.…

  And then I heard the coarse roars and the cracking of whips as the Fanged Horse charged the headland, and I saw how Mahela’s cloud lay like a black hand of doom over us all, and looking up, I saw flying just beneath the cloud a dark, sharp-winged bird. And I knew that all my nightmares had been better than this day.

  The longest of days. Some of the old Seal women inside the Hold managed to bridle the horses and bring them to us, or we might not have survived. A few at a time, scurrying, they brought them out. One brought Sora to me—the only aid Kor could give me, that day.

  After the enemy had tired of lashing and beating and stabbing at us and had at last gone away, on toward sundown, I walked into the Hold and went to look at Kor.

  Lightheaded, I felt afloat in weariness and hunger and—grief. I found Kor where he lay in his bed, saw the fever-sweat glistening on his pale face, saw him open his eyes to look back at me.

  “I wanted you to eat, and sleep, and eat again, Dan,” he said softly to me, “before I told you.”

  And though it should not have surprised me—for many people die in fighting, and why not, then, my brother?—my knees gave way beneath me, and I sank down to crouch at
Kor’s side.

  Tyee was dead.

  Kor handbonded me and told me the tale. More than once he told it to me, speaking it softly, almost chanting it as shamans sometimes whisper-chant the legendary tales, and at last it came clear to me that it was Tyee, my brother the shaman and seer, Tyee the Red Hart king, for whom the thunder cones had spent their fire.

  He had met death not in battle but on the trail to Seal Hold, not far from the Demesne, two days’ journey up the Blackstone Path on the flanks of Chital. My people, rising at first light, found their king lying under a devourer, swaddled in its gray fleshy folds, completely hidden and very still.

  They attacked the fell servant of Mahela with their blackstone knives—which did no good, for devourers are not hurt by knives of stone, no more than water is. And they tugged and wrestled at the monster with their hands. Perhaps because it was annoyed, or perhaps because it disliked daylight, the devourer lifted off Tyee, and he moved, groaned and came shakily to his feet—he had withstood it, for he was a worthy king, and in a night’s long, silent battle Mahela’s minion had not been able to take him into its maw. He stood straight and pale to watch it go. But whether out of ill humor, or because it had orders, the devourer swiftly circled back and struck him a blow with its thrashing tail, thicker than a man’s thigh and far stronger than any warrior’s arm. A heavy blow, an attack, it knocked him ten paces away from the place where he stood, over the trail’s edge, over the lip of a crag and down the sheer mountainside, falling without a scream—perhaps the blow itself had killed him, had crushed his chest. My people had found his body on the rocks far below.