I am not afraid of yon gloating goddess. But—I am yet afraid of Dan.
But why? I burst in. Tass, I love you. She knew with what ardor I loved her, and with what wise compassion Kor loved us both.
Bold cock, she thought to me wryly.
I am not Ytan!
Dead, dead, far too much death and dying, all was dying … did she know he was dead? Yes, I felt it in her, how she had hated him, how she was glad I—I had killed him, I had killed my brother Ytan.… Grief twisted my heart as I mindspoke his name, and I sobbed.
Tassida tore her hands away from me, from Kor, and strode off.
“Tass!” Furious, thinking she was fleeing mindspeak or my sorrow, I ran after her. “Bolting again?” I shouted. “There is nowhere left to go, wanderer!”
She gave me a quelling look and strode on. After a moment I comprehended that she was looking for something. Amid the many and many lifeless bodies of the battlefield, looking for one—
She kneeled and laid hands on Ytan’s ghastly, hollow corpse.
“Tass,” I breathed. It was a thing I would not have asked of her. Though indeed, once there had been a hacked and horribly mutilated body growing cold in my arms, and she had brought it back to warm and comely life.… Unsteadily, hands to his wound again, Kor came and stood beside me, perhaps remembering that same uncanny night. I put my arm around him to support him, and he stood as silent and awed as I.
Ytan did not move or breathe beneath Tassida’s hands. Nothing happened, except that tears ran down her taut face and fell on his bloodied flesh.
“Tass,” I whispered, begging for I scarcely knew what. For Ytan to live and be well, for her to win the victory, for world’s healing … it all depended on her. This one fierce, shy wild thing of a woman, it all depended on her.
She looked up at me with the tears clinging to her face. Then she closed her eyes, and her tears stopped as she centered herself. For the long span of ten breaths she crouched by Ytan’s side.…
His body filled, his wound closed as if it had never been. He stirred and drew breath under her hands. Sighing as if waking from sleep, he opened his eyes.
“Lady wolf,” he murmured in wonder, seeing Tassida. Then he caught sight of me and struggled up, moisture in his eyes like rain in a blue sky.
“Dan—”
There was something he would have said to me, but there was a battlefield all around us, tempest screaming overhead, and beyond, the fir forests falling, the eversnow shaking and turning black under a darkening sky, and the crags crashing into the sea. Ytan looked wildly around him and burst out profanely at me, “Mahela take your cock, you jackass! Do something!”
“Well spoken, Ytan,” said Kor wryly. “Tass?”
She rose to her feet, and her flesh glowed with a dark fire, and she silently nodded.
We took our places to either side of her—she had always come between us in ways that seemed all for ill, so why not now, for good? Her head proudly raised, she opened to us her two scarred hands. The splint burst apart and fell away from her arm. In that moment I felt all my hurts heal, leaving no scars. Kor lifted his hand from his side, and his wound was gone.
Light blazed out that was not the light of the sun.
Jewels in our swords, shining, or—us, the three. A storm of light combating Mahela’s black storm, clashing with her darkness. The few warriors left alive on the headland cried out, and some of them dropped their weapons and flung themselves to the ground, hiding their eyes against that light. Blaze of yellow lightning: that was Alar’s doing, or mine. Sundown glory, Kor’s, and the fiercest stormfire, Tassida’s.… But storm was all outward. Within us, the three, was a calm. And in the calm, a nameless, peaceful passion I can scarcely describe—we were Kor, Tass, Dan, but we were one, we were all handbond, all mindspeak, mindbond, the thoughts of any one of us belonging to all, the feelings … shared by all three. We were specks swimming together in the sea of ourselves, we were as vast as the sea, and nearly as strong: in that stillness and that passion there was great power. Immense as the sea. But it was not the power that filled our hearts, it was—Kor, Tass, Dan. It was love.
Handbond is as nothing compared to this. That was Kor, marveling.
Darran. It was Tass, thinking to me. You sought the god, but he was always with us. We are all Sakeema. Is it not so?
Yes, I told her. It was more than a reply—it was affirmation, pledge, vow. We were healer, seeker, visionary. Three in one and one in three.…
This wonder, the passion, needed a name. “Godbond,” I whispered aloud.
The black fist of Mahela, the stormcloud, swirled and vanished, gone like smoke, like fog, before a strong, clean wind of light. And the devourers turned as insubstantial as brume, glimmered greensheen for a moment and were gone as cleanly as the cloud. Even their stench was gone. Only a cormorant remained, a large bird, bigger than any seemly seafowl, flying where the tempest had been. It glided down over the headland and alighted below the rocks, near the shore. Bodies lay there, I knew, but even the taste of the air seemed sweet, as if the reek of death were gone from it, as sweet as if it had been washed by springtime rain. And the storm of our own making softly subsided into fireglow.
The sun, Sakeema thought, the three of us all thought as one, and a glory of sunlight filled the sky.
“Mountains,” I murmured aloud. “I want the mountains again, the way they were.”
We all looked and felt each other’s handbond tighten with joy, for there they were, beautiful in the sunlight, my beloved snowpeaks as they had ever been.
“Peace,” Kor breathed, and weapons fell down, snatched out of warrior hands as if knocked away by a god’s unseen finger. Those who yet lived on the headland shouted in surprise and awe, then stood still and looked around them as if just awakened, as if aware for the first time that there was more to the world than death and war.
But another shout, Ytan’s cry of horror, turned my head around.
In the sea a mountain of water was gathering, a peak far taller than my snowpeaks, a great, eerie wave that reached into sky and quenched the sun! Looming, frothing white and curling, it upgathered as we looked, a might of water fit to drown the dryland utterly. Just above the lip of it circled a speck, an overlarge cormorant, Mahela, spiraling ever higher and higher, eagle-high, and the wave followed her, growing, upraising, towering, until all the sea must have been taken into it. From the headland, cries rose thinly, like the mournful cries of birds, from those who stood and watched it forming, but the wave itself grew in grim silence, tall and massive and powerful beyond belief or reckoning. Then with a roar louder than Mahela’s thunder, louder even than the roar of melting mountains, it started toward us.
And within a few heartbeats Sakeema had found, we had found, the three of us, that we could save ourselves, godbonded, but no more. Even Sakeema was no match for the might of the sea. What Mahela could not take unto herself she would destroy. Wretched, maddening thoughts spun through me. My brother Ytan, just saved, to be killed again. And Birc, and the sylkies … perhaps not the sylkies. But yes, the curly-haired ponies and the fanged mares, and Tyee’s baby beyond the mountains somewhere, and even the Herders and their six-horned sheep beyond the thunder cones at the beginning of the plains, they would all be slain.
Of all the creatures of Sakeema, only we three might remain.…
Dan, Tass, forgive me, Kor thought to us, and I felt a snap like a breaking bone.
He had sundered the bond! I cried out as the deed shattered through me, and my vision went black for a moment before I could see. By then he was arrow’s flight away from me, running, swift as a hunted stag he was running down the headland toward the shore, onto the sand of the beach to meet the monstrous upgathering of the sea, and Tass and I could do nothing but cling to each other and watch.
Chapter Twenty-one
It would strike like a falling mountain, and then all would be black, black and drowning deep.… Nightmare, the demon that had ridden my sleep since I h
ad been old enough to dream, I had known even then that it would end this way, but I had sweated in fear and cried out in the dark merely for self. Not … world’s end. Not … Tass, not … Kor.…
He stood spear-straight and very still on the shore, head held proud in some mad defiance but arms uplifted as if to show that he bore no weapon in his hands—laughable, to think of raising sword against the sea. Curling, reaching, huge, mountain-high and heavy, the warrior’s arm of ocean hung over him, upraised, fist clenched against all that yet lived on dryland. My hand tightened on Tassida’s to tell her of love. Kor! mind cried to him to tell him the same. Less than a heartbeat and that black blow of doom would fall on all of us—
Ocean towered, peaked, shivered, shuddering like a strong captive put to torture who will not cry out. Then with a deep and hollow inrushing sound it laid itself down, crashing back into its vast basin. Swift, low waves ran up the shore and lapped at Kor’s feet.
And Mahela came skimming over the waves, her black wingtips nearly touching the water, until she stood in fair, womanly form by Kor’s side on the shore, and I saw him reach out briefly, with one hand, to touch her.
For a moment Tassida and I could find no strength. Then with panic’s whip lashing us we ran headlong, half falling, down slope and steep rock to Kor, where he faced the goddess.
Odd, Mahela’s aspect. A bleak quietness in her, as if she had been defeated. Her shimmering green gown was gone. She wore a dead man’s cloak picked up from the ground, merely a rag to cover her nakedness, and her bare feet showed beneath it, as if she were a captive. Yet something about the proud lift of her everpale face, also, as of victory. She looked only at Kor, and her gaze was rapt. She spoke only to him. “It is settled, then,” she was saying to him as we came near. Her tone was calm, level yet tender, as if she spoke with a pledgemate.
“Not entirely, mighty lady. We must talk.” In him, also, that same calmness and an ardent strength. No desperation in him any longer. Striving, yes, but not struggling against unthinkable odds. Something had indeed been settled.
“What can there be to talk about?” asked the goddess.
“There is much to be spoken of. You have a tale to tell us, Mahela. Say on. Speak to Tassida.”
I tried to keep my jaw from slackening in an uncouth way. He commanded her?
The glance with which she answered him was that of an equal, challenging. She would not always obey him, that one! But this time she chose to do so. She turned her head. “Greetings, my little daughter,” she said. “Greetings, Darran.” She spoke to us with easy courtesy, as if we were tribemates meeting after a short absence, though I sensed that she had not wanted to take her gaze from Korridun.
I mindspoke, Kor! What is going on?
Later, Dan.
Are you all right? He, standing near me straight as a lance, looking as well in body as I had ever seen him. Godbond had done that for him. But for some reason I felt afraid.
As well as you are. Or nearly. Hush, Dan, listen to her.
And by my other side stood Tassida. “Why do you call me daughter?” she asked the goddess, her head lifted arrogantly, and I saw what I had many times seen but not wanted to know. Her face, which some inner struggle had made as pale as Mahela’s but for the the faint brown sheen put on it by weather: face as like to Mahela’s as Ytan’s was to mine.
“My fiery little one,” answered Mahela with an odd, stark tenderness, “I birthed you, just as I did Sakeema some small time before.”
Tass stood as if another word could topple her. I took her hand to give her strength.
“Do you not yet know me, you three?” Mahela complained. “I am she who mothers all.” Her smile, hard, as always, yet there was little edge in her. Her wrath seemed gone, blown out like stormwind, quelled like the sea. “Before dryland was, I was old, and I grow only younger. I shaped the mountains, I wove the grasses and gave milk to the sky. I—”
“All-Mother?” I blurted, too astonished to be silent.
“Why should that so surprise you, Darran? You, my bold cock and murderer? Of course the one who makes life must rule death. What is life without death? Yes, I am she whose name men have forgotten, but to curse by it.”
More like the All-Mother’s halfwitted sister, I thought. All awkward, askew, awry. Yet.…
Yet who was I to call her evil? I, with the lightning storm in me that I scarcely understood? Dan the murderer, son of a murderer, brother of another?
There was small need of strength in Tass. She had long known dark things of herself, and I felt her wry acceptance as she thought to me, It is better, perhaps, than being the get of a whore. Her words when she spoke were bitterly amused.
“Did you fly down to the plains then, O mighty gluttonbird, and lay the egg that hatched me?”
“I birthed you in human form, daughter! As I had to, though I fought it as long as I could. There is great power in my creation, for what is beauty without power? The pomegranate, it does nothing but mutely speak of Sakeema, and by its mere being it is very puissant. The sundered fruit I could resist many years longer than the whole one, but when those two scoundrels stole them away to dryland, my thoughts followed perforce.” Mahela shrugged, a whimsical action in that haughty goddess. The soiled cloak swayed around her naked shoulders.
“Who is my father?” Tassida asked.
“You have none. I needed the aid of no man to make you. You are nearly my double, little wolf. Nearly my self as I might have been.”
I saw Kor intently watching the goddess. “Speak to Dan,” he ordered when Tassida asked nothing more.
Mahela’s eyes turned on me, eyes deep as the sea. “You are Darran. I know what you are, and I dare say I know what your question will be.”
Kor, what was happening to Kor? But I sensed he did not yet want me to know. And there was something else, the one thing I cared about even more.
“All-Mother, why were you trying to destroy the world you have made?”
“I wanted at first only to take it away to my undersea realm.”
“Is it not fairer,” I asked with courtesy, more courtesy than I had ever showed to her, “much fairer, here under the sun?”
“Perhaps. You think so. You mortals, so willful.”
Mahela was struggling to speak. Perhaps never before had she tried to explain to anyone why she had done what she had done.
“Too striving, too clever,” she said. “Even while the world was yet young, you mortals grew to be too many, too mighty, crowding out the wild creatures, you with your castles and cities and your many weapons, sharp tools for cutting the forests, sharp plows for tilling the earth, ships for sailing the seas and killing the great whales. Shamans even drew plans for ships to sail the skies and drive away the birds. Nothing was ever enough. It is you who are the gluttons, not I.”
I stood keenly listening. Mahela spoke of the time remembered only by Tassida, the time when Chal and Vallart had lived, generations before Sakeema.
“So you started to take away the kings,” Tass said softly.
“Yes, and managed a sort of balance, for a while. But humans.…”
The life-giver shook her head in despair, and I began to see what it had done to her, the long struggle with this creature of all her creation most clever, most willful, most like her.
“Time and again I brought them low,” she told us. “Human kind, they are so wrongheaded, so greedy, it breaks my heart. They must always be making war. The time came when they themselves helped me lower their great stone cities to the ground. Booklore and the ways of making metal weapons were forgotten, only you six small tribes remained, and I had taken away the tree of the god. But I knew well enough that in time the tribes would grow, and learn, and threaten again. I made myself servants—”
“To help you take it all,” I said. I no longer hated her, but I saw she was a desperate, twisted thing.
She looked straight at me. “Darran, hear me: I never wished to destroy. I took into safekeeping what would have bee
n destroyed if left here under sky for people to find a way to.”
How was I to believe her, my longtime enemy, Mahela? Yet how not? I had never heard her speak so earnestly.
“It would have been better to take the humans, but even with the fell servants I could never gather them all, for they are willful. And always their numbers returned.” Weariness in her voice when she spoke of that long combat. “I made up my mind that I would settle it for all time: safeguard my world, or destroy it, or accept my defeat. And I have been defeated.” In some wise she had, and in some wise, she had not, inwit told me. I stood watching her uncertainly.
“You three would have lived, for you are Sakeema. But when Korridun broke the bond and confronted me …” Her proud head bent so that her black hair flowed down. Her shoulders sagged beneath her bedraggled cloak. “I could not strike. I could not kill him.” She lifted her eyes and looked at him, a look of such naked need that I winced. “Or you, little daughter.” Her glance turned to Tassida, still full of longing. “Or even, Darran, my bold cock, you.”
A long, awkward silence.
“There is the matter of my cock to be spoken of,” Kor said at last.
Kor! Dismay jolted me. Did it not heal, like the rest of you?
“I am healed, yes,” he answered me aloud. “Whole, no. I am maimed. No better than a castrate.” He turned to face Mahela, meeting her stricken eyes with a long, searching look. “Will you stand by your bargain, mighty lady?”
I let that go by me with only a faint pang of unease, thinking only of—Kor, so unmanned, it could not be, I could not let it be! “But you must be made whole!” I stammered. “We must try again. Tass—”
One look at Tassida’s ashen face and I saw that it was no use. What godbond had not done, no power of hers could do for Kor.
He mindspoke me, Dan, let be! Perhaps it is a blessing. Mahela can never again attempt to take self from me by that means.
Like someone drowning in deep water, helpless, I felt the strong downward tug of doom. My breath came short, my eyes saw black.
Godbond Page 22
