He was in his chamber, beset by a trio of maidens. They were ministering to him with sharp clam shells, cutting his hair short and fur-fashion, as was the custom of his people, and he looked annoyed. He raised his hands in a gesture of despair when he saw me.
“I told Istas, there is no need—”
“Were you going to let it grow yet longer,” one of the maidens teased, “and braid it, like Dannoc’s when he first came here?”
I felt at my hair, hanging near my shoulders, almost long enough to braid again. In my tribe, braids are the selfhood of a person. A youngster’s hair is braided when he or she goes out to keep vigil for a name. All Red Harts but children wear braids. Istas had cut mine off the day she had taken her revenge on me. Sakeema be thanked, mercy had stopped her before she had taken my manhood as well.
“So,” I teased Kor in my turn, “you have not yet grown so strong that you can command yon old woman.”
“Not without drawing my sword. You must second me at the feast tonight.”
I laughed and went off to wait in the hearth hall. The place was full of bustle and good cooking smells. No span of living with Kor’s folk could make me truly fond of fish, but that night I was willing to eat whatever they put before me. My stomach was swooning with hunger.
Many were those who came and sat with me awhile and wanted to know the tale of my journey. Even Olpash, a council member and former enemy, came and asked questions. Except for telling them how Kor’s retainers had died fighting the Fanged Horse Folk, and something of Birc and the deer people, there was little I could say to them. Our story, Kor’s and mine, was all too inward, too uncanny. Though among my own people I was reckoned a great teller of the true tales, this one I could not yet encompass.
Kor’s preparations took some time. When he came forth at last, he wore the raiment of a Seal king, the headband beaded with rings of polished shell, each piece tiny and perfectly shaped—years of labor had gone into the making of that band. And armbands of like sort, and a sleeveless tunic of fine, soft leather, and the ornaments of a king, strings of tusk shell, centered on his chest. And over his shoulders there rippled down a short cape of glossy brown sealskin. An odd pang went through me at the sight of him in cape and headband, as if I were losing him to kingship and his own people. He sat by me with a wry look.
What was that? he asked me, mindspeaking.
Pettiness. Pay no heed.
Have less fear, then. I cannot wait to be out of this smother of ceremony and away, Dan.
Some maiden saw me smiling broadly and touched me on the shoulder as she passed me with a basket of bread. I would have a bedmate that night.… Istas, the regent, came and took her seat by Kor’s other side. Olpash stood, silencing the babble of voices with his chill stare. When all was still enough to suit him, he began a lengthy speech, welcoming the king back to his people.
Pompous old pickthank, Kor mindspoke me. Olpash was a petty seeker after power, a longtime enemy, though seldom openly so, more of an annoyance than a danger. I glanced over at Kor, barely hiding my amusement. Whatever his thoughts might be, he was keeping his face perfectly sober.
Olpash made an end at last. Feasting began.
It was more formal than any feast of my Red Hart Tribe would ever be. These Seal folk had the large hall, a lofty stone chamber within the Hold, which replaced the great lodge I had ruined. And they had planks set up for placing the food on, and logs covered with seal pelts for seating. Still, the chatter and chewing, the greasy fingers and mumbling of bones, were the same. Fish made a pale changeling for venison, but there were strong old mead, and perry, and sour berry wines.
I ate contentedly and drank whatever came my way. Kor kept silence, ate less than I. Istas watched the progress of the feast with a piercing gaze like that of an osprey, and from time to time she shrilled orders at the servers. The time came when everyone was well fed, the noise at a height, and the mess as well.
“Now, Istas,” Kor said to her abruptly, “there is nothing to be attended to for a while. Are you free to listen to me?”
His tone of voice alerted her. She turned to him with a searching look.
“Do not put off your regent’s cap yet awhile,” he told her. “I will not be here for another day before I go away again.”
Only the presence of the entire tribe kept her from shouting. Outrage creased her face.
“Rad Korridun, you must be stark mad! Have you no honor? These are your people! You are needed here!”
“What could possibly happen here,” Kor retorted, “that you could not tend to?”
“What could happen.…” Istas startled us both by beginning to laugh, leaning back against the stone of the hearth, letting her clothes be smudged black with soot. It was not a good laugh, but more like the hoarse baying of a banhound, and Kor frowned, hearing it.
“What?” he repeated.
“Hunger, for one.” Istas sat up, wiping her streaming eyes, and there was no merriment in the hard set of her face. “The oat crop is meager. Pajlat will want a share, and so will the Otter River folk.”
“This game we have played out many a time before.”
“But never so sharply before! The forage is sparse on the high plains, sparser than it has ever been before. Pajlat and his gentle minions will be in a fit mood to take what we do not wish to give them. And if the salmon are less again—and they are always less—”
“The Otter River Clan will request our aid,” Kor finished for her, impatient. “What of it? Izu is our friend. We have always given them what we could.”
“Izu is no longer very much your friend.…” Istas paused, hesitating as to how to go on.
“Out with it,” Kor said in a resigned tone, and he turned to me. “This is the ploy Istas uses, Dan, when she has something unpleasant to say and wishes the other to ask her to say it.”
“I truly do not wish to speak of it, not before you, Dannoc.” Istas’s watery old eyes met mine—what matter was this? “The two you killed—besides Rowalt.” She sounded sorrowful but calm, for there was no longer any hatred in her for me. “The fosterlings.”
“I see,” Kor said.
“I don’t,” I told him.
“They were Otter River Clansmen. My father was an Otter king’s younger son, you know, and the Otter sent those youths to me for fostering. I became their adoptive sire, and I chose not to avenge their deaths. The Otter have no recourse, they had given them up to me, but I should have known there would be bitterness.”
I did not speak. There was nothing I could say.
“The more so as they must bear with my kindness,” Kor added dryly.
It was an understanding I had not expected of him, and it made me smile. Istas scowled and went on.
“Izu and her people are filled with bitterness. There are no thanks in them, anymore, that we try to help feed them. They say that it is our doing that the salmon are less. That the seals eat them, that we let too many seals live. That they will have themselves a feast of seals, that they will club the nursing mothers and the cubs on the Greenstones.”
This was abomination, worse than attack against the Hold itself. I saw anger stir Kor’s shoulders, but he would not openly rouse, not yet. “Where have you heard this?” he demanded.
“From our people, reporting what has been heard from theirs. They have been here three times since you left, begging aid with surly looks. Nothing goes well with them these days.”
“Nor with any of the tribes!” Kor said hotly, as if he had somehow been accused.
“You think I have not seen?” Istas allowed herself to raise her voice—amidst the babble of talk and the clatter of pottery few folk noticed. “All falls to ruin. I am old, I remember when the white whales swam past the coast and the wild swans flew overhead and the sea eagles nested just beyond the Hold. I remember when the salmon ran so thick a child could wade in and catch one in her hands, and there were great bears feasting on them, and wolves, and even wildcats. I remember! Do you think I cannot
see how all the world is dwindling and dwindling away like a wretched old woman with a wasting illness? Even the herring swam thin in the surf this year. The Herders grow a little corn, some beans—have you heard, did they do well?”
I snorted aloud, and Kor gave a single bark of laughter. The Herders had grown no crops at all this year, for they had been driven off their lands, chivvied about between my father’s greed and Pajlat’s.
“Of course they did not, and how could they, on the poor, dying land? And you, Korridun, at this most terrible of times, you speak of going away?”
And he had not yet told her of Ytan, or of the devourers, or of the Cragsmen’s anger.
“Off on another—another jaunt?” Istas fairly growled the word, her deep-etched face flushed with passion but hard, controlled. She was like a rock for strength, was Istas. “When your people need you worst? The Fanged Horse raiders on the one side threatening, and the Otter River folk on the other, and hunger just beneath the horizon—”
“And if that is so, which I deem it is,” Kor blazed back with passion that matched hers, “what is the worthiness of my biding here and waiting for the end, as if I were a barnacle on a beached log? When there might yet be time—”
For what, I never heard, for there was the sound of plucked strings and flute notes, and a shout went up. Music was a rare treat, even if it was only the efforts of fellow tribesmen, sometime minstrels, such as we were to hear. Everyone fell silent to listen, even Kor and Istas.
And it was as if the singers had heard of what we had been speaking. Or perhaps the same sadness weighed much on all minds. The first song was a lament for Sakeema, gone over the western sea in a coracle made of moonlight and shadow. The lay told how the strange maidens came out of the sea and took him away, how the seals wept as they watched him go. (For the Seal Kindred say that Sakeema was born in a cave by the sea and suckled by a cow seal, even as the Red Hart say that he was fostered among the deer, and the Fanged Horse Folk, that he was suckled on mare’s milk.) The seals still weep for his return, the song said. When times are hard, tracks of tears stain the soft fur below their eyes.
“A weeping seal has been seen on the beaches to northward,” Istas muttered darkly to Kor.
There followed a longer story-song about one of Kor’s distant ancestors, relating how the seal blood had come to be in the Seal Kindred.
In times long past, it seemed, before there were tribes, a youth was walking the shoreline after a storm, searching for glimmerstones and ivory, when he found a woman of extraordinary beauty lying naked on a brown seal pelt amidst the rocks, bruised and senseless, as if she had been beaten. Yet she was no woman such as he had ever seen. He lifted her up, sealskin and all, and carried her home to his lodge, where he and his mother warmed her before the fire and nursed her anxiously. She soon recovered, and moved about and ate, but she never spoke. She only gazed about her with eyes the color of carrageen. And as she could not tell them her name, they called her simply Sedna, “the seal.”
She never smiled. Nor did she care to wear much clothing, though her hands and feet seemed always to be cold. None of this mattered, for the youth had fallen helplessly in love with her, and for her part, she never tried to leave him. Unsmiling but serene, she did the things for him that a woman does for the man whom she loves. She bore him children, two sons and a daughter. The seal pelt lined their cradle. The babies were beautiful, with hair thick as fur and large, dark eyes. She raised them tenderly, and the children were loving and merry, but they spoke only to their father.
A day came of strange storm, when the sky grew green and purple far to the westward, and lightning flared even as snow fell, and ice filled the sky like fog, with hard rainbows glittering in it. Folk cowered within doors, for the air of that day seared the lungs, and those who were frail died of it months afterward. But the strange woman Sedna became restless to the point of frenzy, pacing and whirling within her pledgemate’s lodge, whether from fear or some strange ecstasy he could not tell. And snatching the brown seal pelt out of the cradle she ran out into the storm, toward the sea. He ran after her, shouting, but of course she did not answer him, and the storm had reached the height of its fury, so that he could not see. He was battered and knocked down and dragged by wind, nearly killed before he reached his lodge once again and huddled within it, trying to comfort his children.
Nothing more was ever seen of his beautiful lifelove. But the next day, when the storm had abated, he went to the shore, looking for some sign of her. And he found a slender cow seal of a soft brown color lying dead on the rocks, beached and beaten by the storm. Though such a seal was a thing of value, he did not take it home to skin it or butcher it, for a prickling feeling was in him, and he raised a cairn of stone over it so that the gulls would not pick out its eyes. Lovely eyes the color of carrageen.
His children grew tall and strong. His eldest, a son, reached vigil age. And a strange urging took hold of that son, now a stripling, so that he went out and opened the cairn on the shore. There lay the seal, perfectly preserved. And the son took his knife and skinned it and closed the cairn over the remains. He made the pelt into a shortcloak for his shoulders. A year later, when he looked once again in the cairn, the seal’s body had rotted completely away.
The name that came to that son in vigil was Korridun: “king by the sea.” He was the first Korridun, from whom my friend and bond brother had taken his own name. First Korridun and first king of the Seal Kindred, for his kinsmen and brothers and sisters had many children, the ancestors of the tribe. Strong and tall, though often strange and not always wise, that elsewhen king had ruled them.
Kor sat so still beside me that I glanced at him as if he had spoken, but he did not notice me. Intently he listened to the song, shoulders thrust forward, though he must have heard it many times before. And the cape of brown sealskin lay soft on his back.
Your cloak, Kor—Sedna’s skin?
He looked over at me, startled, and nodded. “My mother’s pelt,” he said aloud, briefly stroking the sleek brown fur. “When she went down to the sea that last time, she left it for me, laid it on my bed. She found her way to Mahela—by other means.”
I sat back, letting the song echo in my mind. Ai, but Kor’s people were daring in their settled way! Even the fishermen, venturing far out on the sea in their tiny boats, hunting the cachalot … There was a small stirring, a murmur of voices. The harp changed hands—
A minstrel had come for our feasting, after all. Sitting before us, beautiful and uncanny in the firelight, strumming the harp. I half rose from my seat.
“Tass!” I exclaimed hoarsely.
She’s being a youth again, Kor mindspoke me, a warning. Tass would take it ill if I revealed her secret in my fervor. I sank back in my place, staring at her numbly. She had not returned my greeting, but sat smiling at Kor or me across the shadows of the firelit hall, picking out chords and song-notes on the harp. A strange melody, strong and surging yet eerie. In a moment she started to sing in her clear voice, low for a woman, not too high for a boy or a young man. It was a new song she sang, one I had never heard.
“Let me sing you a song of a seeking,
Let me sing you a song of a quest,
Of Dannoc, the king’s son who did not remember,
And Korridun Sea King, who could not rest.
Which is the leader and which is the led?
‘I would walk through fire for you, Kor,’ Dannoc said.”
A stirring of surprise and excitement rippled around the room, as if tall prairie grass had rippled in a sudden wind. And I sat stunned, remembering the vigil night I had spoken those words to Kor, feeling warm with mead and the memory and with love of the singer, but uneasy about the song.
“Dannoc rode homeward and Kor rode beside him,
Braved Cragsmen and sorcery and Fanged Horse raiders,
With Dannoc the madman who did not remember
How Tyonoc his sire had betrayed him to slay him.
Which is
the lord, which the afterling?
‘We’re heartbound together,’ said Kor Sea King.”
A murmur of wonder rose through the feasting hall—these folk were hearing my tale, mine and Kor’s, for the first time. I felt Istas’s glance search me, but I would not look at her. My eyes were misting at Kor’s remembered words.
“And witch wind, Mahela’s breath, sparked high plain wildfire.
As fast as a horse can flee, faster it ran,
Panting hot, drawing near, as a hound hunts the deer—
And fire blazed before them! Kor’s mare leapt in fear.
He fell hard, lay senseless. Then afoot back came Dan,
And took up his comrade and walked through the flames.
“Dannoc rode homeward and Kor rode beside him,
Dannoc his friend who had walked through the fire.
And coming at dusk to the Red Hart encampment,
Dannoc faced and embraced there King Tyonoc, his sire.
And Tyonoc smiled. Then ‘Seize them!’ he bade.
And Dannoc was bound, and Kor put to—”
“No!” I shouted, stumbling to my feet, sending trencher planks and pottery crashing over. I did not care, I could not bear it, for I knew too well what had been done to Kor. “Tassida, why! Were not the torments of the time terrible enough? Why have you made this song!”
Except for the noise I had made, the hall was as silent as a hundred spirits waiting. Tassida’s answer sounded to the farthest listener.
“Because these people do not know by half how fearsome and how powerful you two have become! Kor died. Tyonoc all but cut him to pieces. And when you broke free you let a demon out of your father’s body with your sword. Then you held Kor, cradled him and wept—”
He was standing beside me, one arm around my shoulders, and only his presence kept me from weeping anew or shouting at her again.
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