Godbond

by Nancy Springer

  “I am glad of it,” I told him. “But I deem the pit was of Mahela’s making.”

  “Scarcely, Dan. She did not make me pity myself, nor can any adversary, no matter how strong. It was of my own doing.”

  His honesty silenced me. He went on, he told me more.

  His days had been spent in preparation for the war and siege that he knew must come. Even though he drove himself every day, working his people hard and himself even harder, so that he should have been lost in exhaustion by sundown, he often found that he could not sleep. And even though no vigil was any longer required of him, he often walked the headland during the night.

  Kor said, “There was no time by day to think of anything but food and the fighting to come and the squabbling within the tribe. But at night there was a plenitude of time to think, and room. At first the thoughts were dark. And when my mind turned to you, none too kind.” I felt rather than saw his smile, his quiet amusement. “But in the course of many such nighttimes, hard work by day and wandering by night, something began to happen. There is a—a wisdom in the night.

  “It came to me as if out of the dark spaces between the stars. I felt very small beneath that vast sky, and it was a comfort in a way, that I felt myself not at the center of things. But sometimes I felt myself—I can scarcely describe it. I became part of the night, I was as vast as sky, as immense as sea, I was at one with the washings of the sea, and I was—yet myself. And in a dim way I began to understand what I am, both things at once. Small, yet vast. Fragile, yet—deathless. Dan, can you at all understand? Saying it, I feel mad.”

  I told him, “You’re no more a madman than I am.”

  “That’s dubious comfort, Dan!” Teasing, he moved to strike me lightly with his fist, then caught his breath and cursed. “Bloody hell! But I am stiff.” At my side I heard his stirrings as he lifted himself and changed position to ease the ache of his wound.

  “I will go back,” I offered, “and get a cloak, a pelt, something for you to sit on.”

  “No. I am all right. It is a great thing, Dan, not to need too much softness any longer.”

  A quirk in his voice like the quirk of his wry half smile.

  “Dan, you are so good to me—if you had stayed by me, you would have let me weep on your shoulder forever. Truly, you did me a favor by going away for a while and making me be strong. And an even greater one by coming back to me again.”

  He meant it. My heart ached so that I could not speak. After a moment he went on.

  “I was not without companionship in the nights. Vallart came to me sometimes, out of the shadow-stars in the tidal pools.”

  “Alone,” I murmured, remembering how I had seen Chal alone at Sableenaleb.

  “Yes, alone. It felt nearly—he must have been very much like you, Dan. It felt as if you were here with me, in a way, all the time.”

  I said huskily, “I am grateful to him.”

  A long silence. I sensed Kor had more to say, and waited for it, and in time it came.

  “One moonlit night I walked far down the beaches toward the greenstones and found a queer sort of living creature lying in the sand. It was a white-breasted cormorant—I saw it first by the flash of those white feathers, and then saw the glossy black of the rest of it glimmering in the moonlight. But it was far larger than any cormorant should be, nearly as large and heavy as a man, with a mighty beak the size of my sword. And though it darted its weapon of a beak at me and hissed at me to warn me away, it had no strength to move from where it lay. In the moonlight I could see the dark blot of the wound on its white breast.”

  “Kor,” I said in horror, “it was Mahela!” Horror, because already I knew what he had done.

  “Yes,” he said with just a hint of his faint half smile in his voice, “I know. I knew it from the first, but pretended I did not, and I stood in the surf and netted fish for her to eat. But I would not let her have them until she grew civil and accepted them from my hand, instead of driving that heavy hooked beak of hers at me.”

  “By great Sakeema’s blood,” I groaned, “why did you not kill her when you had her at your mercy, and finish the task I had begun?”

  “Only once since I have known you have I ever killed when I could offer mercy, and you may recall we both regretted it bitterly.”

  “Will Mahela have mercy,” I demanded, “when she comes to make captives of us all?”

  “For the matter of that, it is not Mahela seeking to capture us or slay us, but mortal warriors of the six tribes.”

  “But Mahela—”

  “Let it go, Dan, please. It is the one thing in the world I do not expect you to understand.”

  Something—fated—in his voice, for all that he tried to keep his tone mild and wry. I said nothing more, but sat and listened to his tale.

  After a while, after eating many fish, the large cormorant grew tame enough that he could stroke its glossy green-black feathers without fear. And as he touched it, of course, it changed, and there in the sand lay Mahela, naked, with a horrible wound marring one white breast, looking up at him in a way that was both piteous and seductive. But when she saw he was not surprised she was furious, and clawed at him, leaving bloody welts on his skin. After her fury had passed—when dawn made green streaks on the eastward sky—Kor carried her away to a sea cave, the same one where he and I had hidden our swords for a season while we quested to Tincherel.

  “And she was too heavy for me to carry in any way but by slinging her over my shoulders, with her white buttocks to the sky, like earth’s answer to the moon,” he said. “And very little she liked it, but she had small choice in the matter, for she was not strong enough to walk, not even with my help.” An odd, dark clash in his voice, a combat, of two things: his hatred for her, and his—

  Mercy, I told myself, the mercy that made him help all who needed his aid.

  He had carried her away and hidden her in the cave, hidden her from sun’s burning rays and from his own people, others who might find her, who might not tender her such mercy as he did. He gave her his cloak to cover herself with, and left her, and was back before sunrise with food for her—food not much better than the raw fish he had already given her. “Little enough to spare at Seal Hold,” he told her gravely. Then he left her alone to rest and mend through the day. But that night and every night to follow he returned to her, and sat and talked with her.

  “Nothing but talk, Dan. And even that, none too agreeable. Mahela’s tongue is even sharper than Tassida’s.”

  “Then why talk with her?” I grumbled.

  “There was wisdom in her, Dan, like the wisdom in the dark voids of the night. Much worth learning, only—bent awry. The same dim sense I had felt before, coming clearer. But before it was more than a whisper in my mind, like a distant song, she grew strong enough to fly, and she left me. I came to the cave one nightfall, and she was gone.”

  “Left with no thanks and no promise,” I muttered.

  “Of course not. She is the goddess.”

  Still, in the course of the long summer’s wearing on, no storms had attacked the frail coracles with his people in them fishing on the sea. The season had favored in every way. No lives had been lost, many fish had been brought in and few had rotted in the drying. Gentle rains had fallen on the oat crop at fitting intervals, and many baskets of oats had been gathered and stored in Seal Hold.

  Then, when all was ready for them, as if they had been summoned, the attackers had come, and the black tempest of Mahela’s making.

  “She has been toying with you, biding her time,” I said bitterly. “Letting you bring in the fish, the oats. She wanted a worthy battle to watch.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “You know what she is, yet you do not entirely hate her?”

  “How can either of us know surely what she is? There are depths to her, Dan, like the depths of sky. Deeper than greendeep. I have talked through the nights with her, and learned from her as I learned from darkness.”

  That odd battl
e in his voice again.… I knew I should ask what he had learned from her, but bowed my head to my knees instead, for I also was no stranger to the self-dug pit. Whatever knowledge he had found, whatever he thought Mahela had given him, or the night, it was to no avail, I deemed.

  “All that you have learned, then, what can it matter if she yet lives? She will swallow us.”

  “It matters. Even if Mahela should take us both this moment, it matters still. And you, Dan—do you not yet know what your quest has gained you? Gained us all?”

  I gave no answer, as suited the name of nothing.

  A quiet. Off in the darkness somewhere, a warrior screamed as his wound was dressed. Overhead, a mutter of thunder. This was not the clean darkness of starry night. It was dense, and seemed to smother the world.

  With a faint prodding edge to his tone, Kor said, “Dan. A tenday’s night after you left me, last spring, I had a strange dream, so real I would have put my hand in fire for it. You came to me and sat by me where I lay sleeping—it was you, I could feel it to my heart of hearts, to the center of my being, but I could not see your face. There was a sort of sunsheen lightning playing about your head, and leaning over me as you were your face was darkened against that light. I badly wanted to see you more clearly, but I could not.” His voice faltered, then steadied again. “It seemed the worst of mischance. But you were yourself, utterly, but also something more, and your name was Dan but yet something more, something uncanny, and it alone of all that I dreamed I could not remember when I awoke.”

  The strange name—I had nearly forgotten it. I had seldom thought of it since leaving the Herders, since turning back toward Kor, and the sound of it came dimly to my mind, like a distant voice. “The seeker,” it meant. But the quest had failed. I had renounced the name, I had turned away from seeking.

  “It’s parlous dark, Dan,” Kor said. “I cannot see you. Say your true name, Dan,” he gently dared me, “and I warrant you there will be light for us to see by.”

  Though I could not have clearly said why, though moments before I would not have believed it of myself, that there was anything I would not do for Kor—it was a thing I felt I could not do, even for him. “Stop it,” I whispered.

  “I seem to remember a time,” he remarked, “when a certain muttonhead kept calling me Sakeema, little as I liked it.”

  My head came up in protest. “And I was wrong,” I flared at him, “was I not?”

  Were you?

  He mindspoke because he was trying to tell me something scarcely to be encompassed in mere words grumbled in the dark. A glance, the deep sea-changing glance of his eyes would have helped, but as I could not see him he touched me with his mind, as if he had reached out to lay a hand on my shoulder, and as I felt the touch I sensed a vast quietude, something within him more immense than the sea, as limitless as the nameless god. For a moment I stopped breathing. I could not speak, not even to mindspeak.

  Dan, he thought to me with a hint of plea, know yourself, and you will know me, what I am.

  He was Sakeema after all. Jnwit knew, had always known. Yet not Sakeema, or not entirely. I felt the pain, the heart-deep ache of his wound. He was Kor. He was—god, yet going down to defeat.…

  My mind was swirling like Mahela’s accursed cloud.

  Dan, name yourself by your true name to me, accept it, and you will understand!

  I could not. “I am not what you think I am,” I whispered, though I scarcely knew what that was, except to deny it.

  You called me Sakeema again and again—you, my dreamwit, and I should have known it was in some wise true. But I fought it and denied it with all my strength, did I not, Dan?

  “Please,” I begged.

  You had no mercy on me when you went off and left me alone with my denying.

  “I am sorry!” I cried out, though there had been no anger in his mind, no desire for my contrition. Only the bare, blunt truth.

  But there is no need for sorrow. I suffered, it is true, but I found my way through it. I could have spared myself all the suffering if I had not been afraid to—to accept. Dan.…

  “What?” I whispered, and my hand went out into the darkness, met his and gripped. Warm touch of his mind thanked me for the handbond.

  Dan, it was—so simple. There was—something required of me, and I did not like that thought. A sacrifice. Perhaps it has already been taken.

  His cock, he meant. Though in fact all his life had been but one sacrifice after another, for his people, for me.… The torments Sakeema had suffered at his death could not have been much worse than those Kor had suffered for my sake.

  It is simple, Dan, truly. In your own time you would come to it, I would not need to urge you. But there is not much time, so I must ask you: Who are you? What is your name?

  I bit my lip until I tasted blood. The name he meant, I knew it well, knew the word, the shape and the sound of it. A few times I had taken it into my mouth and spoken it. But to take it unto myself—it was an enormity. Every part of me feared it.

  For Kor’s sake.… I struggled. There was a—a monstrous, nameless darkness that I had to face and accept. A dark agony, an ordeal, a price that had to be paid just for being … what I was.… And I had never wished to be anything but a hunter and a dreamer, a wanderer in the forests. What could be more glorious, I had asked Kor once, than to be a god and save a dying world? Why did he fight it? Now I knew why. It was worse than fearsome, it was—unthinkable. And even his hand-bond could not help me, my mind turned away from it like averted eyes, fled like a coney in the grass, I tried to see his face but everything was darkness, and I could not—remember.…

  I was failing him yet once again. My head bowed, I groaned and I felt his left arm around my shoulders.

  It is something you have to do for yourself, Dan! Not for me, or for the world, but because you must, to be—what you are, who you are. Whole.

  But I could not, I truly could not. Despair lay too heavy on me, that night.

  I was shaking, not with strain but with utter defeat, and Kor felt it, tightened his embrace around me, held me against his chest. “Never mind, Dan,” he murmured. “Let it go. It doesn’t matter.”

  I thought to him, But you know—it does. And I—I am such a coward—

  “Hush. No. It truly doesn’t matter, because of this: I will always love you. Beyond world’s end, if need be.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  At first light battle was joined again.

  The memory of that dawn reeks in my nostrils with the stench of dead horses piled below the cliff, Calimir somewhere among them. Who would have thought that the death of so mastered, so mute a thing as a horse could have doomed us? Yet I felt that all my hopes had fallen to ruin in the moment that Calimir died.

  Always that reek, that stench of dead hope, when I think of the beginning of that day. That, and the taste of blood-thirst in me. I wanted to kill. I went to the battle bare-chested, with rage and defiance in my eyes. But I had no chance, that dawn, to aim an arrow at Pajlat’s neck. Mounted on the mouse-colored fanged mare, I faced his minions but a spear’s length away, with Kor at my side, while they were still no more than shadows in the murk, and already warriors were grappling almost before it was light enough to see.

  Kor and I met each other’s gaze in silence for a moment, handbonded in silence. We both felt that this would be the day we died, but it was not a good thing to say. Our grim comfort was that we would go together.

  With a wordless shout we charged the mass of the enemy.

  Sun rose red as blood over the eversnow, then disappeared behind Mahela’s black hand. And blood splattered red on the headland below, and Zaneb and Alar shed much of it. Blood of Otters, the treacherous former friends of the Seal Kindred. Blood of Fanged Horse raiders. Kor and I were hard beset, but for a while we seemed scarcely to know it. If we had to die, we would take with us as many of the scum as we could, and to Mahela with us all. It annoyed us that we could not force our way to Pajlat, whom we chiefly wish
ed to kill. Why could we not at least kill Pajlat? It seemed a cruel injustice that too many Cragsmen stood in the way. Alar seemed to grow wings in my hand, and the stone in her hilt burned yellow with her bloodthirsty joy, for there was nothing she loved better than to lop hands off Cragsmen, and that day she lopped many.

  And Korridun’s people of the Seal surged along with him, with me, wielding their shell-tipped spears. And not far away Karu, mounted on a slain comrade’s pony, shrilled her warrior’s yell. But they were too few, the Red Hart warriors, the Seal Kindred on foot led by dry-eyed, dark-faced Winewa who thought always of her lost child as she fought. They were perhaps half the number they once had been. And though we charged again and again, in the course of that long morning we were pressed relentlessly back.

  Back. We would be forced back to the Hold, and the old women and little children cowering within it would flee to the deepest chambers, and some of the Seal warriors would go within and defend them for a while from behind barriers of stone. But not Kor and I. We would make our stand and die at the entry, side by side.…

  And then somehow the swirl of combat came between Kor and me, forcing us apart. And slash and struggle as I might, I could not make my way back to him. There had been nothing left to us but to die together, and even that stark solace, it seemed, Mahela wished to take from us.… Like sea tide the battle washed between us, bearing us ever farther away from each other, and I began to be afraid. But I would not mindspeak Kor, for he was weakened by his wound, and I would not weaken him further with my own fear.

  Mahela, the old meddler. I knew she had done this to us somehow—I seemed to feel the dark touch of her hand. And then her devourers, circling overhead, ever circling overhead, began from time to time to lash down with tails longer and thicker and more deadly than any whip of Pajlat’s had ever been, knocking warriors dead with a single blow. Kor’s warriors, always.

  “To the Hold,” I ordered the Red Harts who fought nearest me. “Tip arrows with fire, shoot yon monsters through the slots in the stone.” I felt grimly certain that the devourers would not like fire.