Mindbond

by Nancy Springer

  But I remember that it was nighttime, and the seals were dancing. In the sea, where they were graceful as they could never be on land, in a great circle they danced the fire dance and whipped the waves to green flame with their treading, their leaping. How lovely were their scoonings and swayings, their circle of green shimmering fire. How lovely the sinuous movements of their heads when they raised them. One of the seals, moon-colored, seemed to glow, left a bright trail in the water. I had seen seals of many colors, so I took no pause that one was white. How lovely, the white seal, as one after another they leaped entirely free of the sea and sank again in great waterflames, green, touched white with foam and moonlight.…

  Kor got up stiffly, fumble-footed, and made his way down the stack to where the water lapped. Swaying, he walked slowly, intently, without turning, the sealskin trailing from one hand. I watched him without moving or speaking, for it was only right, fitting, that he should go to join the dance.

  He waded into the sea until it reached his thighs, placed the seal cloak around his shoulders, and dove cleanly, vanished, leaving a swirl of green on the surface of the black water.

  I watched as if in a dream, accepting. Then suddenly, as the watcher in the mind decides to wake from a dream, I no longer sat, but struggled up as if arising from nightmare, as if I were thrashing my way out of dark water. I was Dannoc, weak from cold and hunger, and Kor was gone. I wanted him, and I feared for him, even worse than I had longed for him and feared for him on the mountainside when the Cragsmen had walked past. Kor! I called.

  No answer. Had another seal joined the bright, shadowy dance? I could not tell.

  I staggered where I stood. “Kor!” I shouted out loud.

  Every seal splashed beneath the surface of the sea and dove. Green flame turned into a shining blackness with specks of waterglow in it, glinting like hard eyes.

  I shouted until I was hoarse, sent my mind searching and calling to no avail. Kor was gone as if he had never been.

  Chapter Eight

  Wyonet, my mother, had left me without warning, without a word or a trace, never to be seen again. Tyonoc, my father, had been taken by a demon, gone years before I knew. Kor … I would not think it. He had to come back to me. Sakeema, beloved king, prithee come back to us.… No. Not generations hence. Kor, soon. Come soon.

  Thirsty pain in my throat … I could not call any longer, not even with my mind. My feet had brought me down the stack, closer to the sea, almost within reach of the tide, but I did not care. I sank down where I was and sat with and ache in my throat, not all thirst, with a harsh pain spreading through my chest and shoulders and a hurtful dryness about my eyes so that I had to close them against the dim and hazy dawn as if it were snowglare. I needed the flow of tears, but to weep would have meant defeat, the end of hope. Or perhaps I was merely too proud. A pox on vigils, I decided, and I lay down where I was, on the cold, wet stone, weary beyond shivering, to sleep. But whenever I dozed a spasm took hold of me, a silent, dry sobbing that tore at my throat, awakening me. When I slept at last, it was more as if I had fainted.

  Splash of cold seawater startled me awake. The tide was coming in. I edged up the rock a small distance, not bothering to rise, up to a ledge just out of tide’s reach, and I lay there, indifferent to the grasping water that groped so near me. Except for the slapping of the water, the day seemed very silent, and after a while I sat up and looked around. The whitish patch of haze that hid the sun stood overhead. No seals anywhere in sight, none swimming, none hauled out along the rocks to bask or rest—with a pang I wondered where they were. Not even many birds about. I was alone with my shivering self and the vastness of sea and sky.

  I sat, not thinking, too tired and dismayed to think. Whatever tides flowed in my mind were too slow and wordless to be called thought. After what might have been half the halfday I turned, as slowly and stupidly as a great turtle, and peered toward the shore. It was the first time since the beginning of the vigil that I had looked landward. Beyond seal-form spires and humps, beyond a white blur of surf, I could make out a wavering band of dark green through the mist—spruce forest on steep, rocky slopes that jutted toward snowpeaks. But the peaks themselves, my beloved mountains, I could not see.

  Just as oafishly I turned back toward the ocean.

  Let the waves carry you back to shore, he had said. You do not belong here. But something sullen and stubborn was stirring in me. Here I was, and here I would stay, and I would wait for Kor until I died, which happy event might not be long in coming. And Mahela take him, the ingrate. Likely I would die anyway, in the surf, should I venture toward shore. I would be drowned or smashed against a rock, weak as I had become, starving myself for his sake. So let me rot where he could find my bleached bones and weep. I sat scowling and blinking my dry, stinging eyes against the shell-gray day—

  A glint of brighter, fishy-flashing gray, far off near the hidden edge of sea. I had seen such a flash once before over the far sea, rising above the water, too large at the distance to be any fish or even a bird. And much too high. But that time there had been only the one, and this time there were—three, seven, ten, more. A full twelve less one, rippling and shimmering and drawing nearer, wingtip to tip of capelike wing. Devourers.

  “Mahela’s twelve,” I breathed, suddenly absurdly sure of it. Kings of our tribes kept each a twelve of retainers. Why not, then, the ruler of death, she who held court beneath the endless water?

  A twelve of devourers, less only the one that possessed Ytan … The size of them, the weight and swiftness, the gleaming sheen as they parted the fog—I shrank back against the rock, holding my breath in awe and fear, feeling very exposed and no longer nearly so ready to die. As I surely would, die or worse, should one of them choose to take me. I was weak from fasting, no match for a devourer in body or will, lying on a rock far out in the ocean, with not even so much as a flint knife by me—nothing to kill myself with should one of them best me to make a demon out of me. Sick with terror, my gaze frozen on the monsters, I groped about me with both hands, searching for a rock, a driftwood stick by way of weapon, but I could find nothing. The sea carried all such oddments away. One is meant to be helpless, like a newborn babe, on vigil. I was helpless.

  Perhaps Sakeema was with me after all. The devourers’ errand was not with me, and, mindless things, they did not see me with their single eyes. They veered off and flew by me at some distance, bound landward, north toward Seal Hold.

  All my anger had left me with a rush like that of retreating water. Sitting upright once again, shaking with a sense of danger, I began calling again, with my hoarse, choking voice and with my mind, Kor! Until nightfall I called. But there was no answer.

  Somehow, soon after, the tide in me turned, and instead of yearning for Kor to come back to me, I began to long to go to him. Sometime during that same night, perhaps. I remember that I got up unsteadily and walked to the sea, wading into it until the water had me as far as my waist. Tide was rising, calm and chill. There I stood, aching and waiting, whispering to Sakeema, pleading for something, somehow, to happen so that I might enter the sea and search for my bond brother without drowning. Calling to Sakeema—for still, hidden in my secret thoughts, was the belief that Kor was he. But there was no change, no answer, nothing gained—and when the icy water had crept up to my chest and turned my legs and feet to dead wood, I gave it up with a curse and stumbled again onto the rock. There I lay on my clammy ledge, and there was no hope left in me. I deemed myself bereft, betrayed, defeated.

  There is no telling how long I lay there. That time on the Greenstone is a blur of wretchedness to me. But when I sat up again it was no longer night.

  Haze of vigil was on me, all those days, like the bright sea-haze that hid the sun yet let me see without shadow every leaf of the tangleweed, every small wriggling creature in the shallow pools the tide left on the rocks. So I remember the passing of time only as a haze and a flow, but some moments, dropping through time like a feather from the sky, I r
emember with a clearness that pierces me like an arrow. The fire dance in the night had been one such span.

  The coming of the white seal was another.

  It was twilight. The sea seemed very silent, the reaches of it purple and gray, the sky like the inside of a shell, like abalone, streaked the color of lavender. With scarcely a ripple she raised her head above the surface of the violet water and looked at me, and even at the distance I was caught by her glance. As I watched, she swam to the Greenstone stack where I sat, clambered onto it, crawling toward me. With no hurry, but no pause either, she dragged herself up to me over the wave-smoothed rock and did not stop until she had reached my side. There she stood on the heels of her hands, her flippers, with her face turned toward mine, and below her great, seeking eyes I saw the tracks of tears, dark in the white fur. And her eyes wrenched my heart, for they reminded me of Kor’s. Like his they were a nameless dusky color made up of all the colors of the sea.

  No sooner had she come to me than I reached out to touch her—she was alive, warm, she was there by me, and I had been so alone. I thought nothing more of it than that, but even had I thought to wonder why she had come to me, even had I known, I think still I would have done the same. It was not merely to pat her, as one would pat a dog, stroke her fur. I wanted comfort, and perhaps she did also. Trembling with the vigil weakness, I put my arms around her shoulders and laid my head against the round curve of her neck.

  I felt rather than saw the change, for my eyes had closed.… A slight shifting. Bone under the skin. Wet fur, gone. I lifted my head and looked.

  She still balanced on the heels of her hands, her feet stretched out behind her. Sea maiden, a face of eerie beauty, delicate as a thin seashell, unsmiling, intent. The salt water still on her—no, there truly were tears clinging below her eyes. A slender body, very pale in the twilight, as naked as mine except for her long, fair hair, which rippled down like water to partly cover her. She made a supple movement and came to her knees—her body was all a graceful flow, her breasts very small but very beautiful. She reached out toward me—if her hands were cold, like Sedna’s, I did not feel it. All the love-longing that was in me turned like a spear point toward her. As I moved to meet her embrace I felt no longer weak and chilled, but strong, hot, full.

  We lay—not furred like a deer maiden, she, for the fur lay beneath us, her white-furred seal pelt lay beneath us, somehow dry and warm. Her skin, soft, smooth, cool to my touch. Her arms took me in. We kissed. Teeth pointed and sharp beneath her lips, but I was not afraid, not even when she nibbled at the skin of my neck and shoulder, bit gently at my cheekbone.

  “What is your name?” I asked her tenderly. “Can you speak to me?”

  Her face, great-eyed and beautiful in the twilight, gave me no sign.

  “Why do you weep?” I murmured.

  She did not answer, but nipped me, as if to say, Do not dally. Her long hands urged my mouth toward her breasts. Then lower.… Ai, the hot tide goes through me to think of that lovemaking. She was as lithe as a seal in water, and hungry. I was all ardor. Once was not enough for either of us.… I hope I pleased her as greatly as she did me. I know that I remember her with longing and awe, for she left me slack and nearly weeping with pleasure, my eyes awash in mist. Or perhaps I was at last warm enough to weep for Kor.… I slept warm afterward, and soundly, with her nestled by my side, her arm over me and her breath stirring the hairs of my chest, nor did I mind the fishy reek of it, or the way she twitched while she slumbered.

  When I awoke, she was still lying next to me, her flipper touching mine. I nuzzled her with my snout to rouse her, then rolled over, scrabbling my way with haste toward the sea. Fervidly I wanted to swim in the uplifting salt water, free of the heavy awkwardness my body suffered on land. Also, I had become aware that I was ravenous. I wanted fish.

  Crawling, clambering down over the rock, thinking I would never reach the water, wondering why I had climbed so high on the Greenstone …

  Home at last, I dove with force, leaving a splash and a swirl behind me, and at once I was in ecstasy.

  Swimming. If ever there was another joy to compare with swimming, I could not recall it. Weightless, flying in water as a bird flies in air, streak of bubbles marking my passing, my body so strong, so supple, so graceful, sideward curving. I seemed to remember having been cold and stiff—how could that be? I was warm, my fur so thick that water never touched my skin, and my skin itself was dense against the ocean coldness. Only my flippers felt the chill, and they were leathery, they did not mind it. My ear slots and nostril slots closed of their own doing—seawater could not invade me, but I could make free of it as a deer makes free of meadows. Sinuous but arrow swift, I headed away from the Greenstones, toward the open sea.

  Twice I surfaced for air. Below, I encountered currents, the many crossing ocean currents, and on one I tasted the smell of fish. I followed it. A school of herring, countless small, bright bodies swimming as one—I saw the flash of them from yet far away. In a green rush I caught the stragglers and gulped them one after another, swallowing them whole. Struggle and flutter though they might, they could not escape the trap my pointed teeth made for them. Ah, fish, belly-filling fish, food and drink in one! I followed the herring and gulped till I was gorged. Dimly I recalled, or seemed to recall, that I had once been a two-legged upright creature who sputtered in seawater and detested the taste of fish—had I dreamed that? It scarcely seemed possible that it could be true.

  There were other seals feeding on the herring. I saw them as distant shadows, no more, for the school was vast, and seals are solitary animals except when they are on land to breed or bask or molt. So I was the more surprised, though well pleased, when the white seal came slipping up to me in a wash of yellow-green waterglow and bumped me with her whiskery nose. We fed side by side for a while, until she nipped me and I chased her. Then she led me shooting to the surface, where she leaped clear of the water. I found that I knew how to do the same. We circled down and leaped again and again, splashing mightily, making our own small fire dance.

  My sense of time had left me, even more so than during the vigil. Time made small difference under the sea. I noticed only in passing that it seemed to be night again, that fishes were no longer greenish flashes, but black shadows surrounded by trailing moon-colored streaks. Some of the larger sorts were rising to the upper eddies to prey for their food. Lazing along on my back beneath them, looking up at the surface from underneath, at the wave patterns and the way the crescent moon so crazily spun and jumped, I felt the hunter’s urge: how large a fish could I kill? I was no longer very hungry, but I chose one as swift and heavy as a slim fighting cock or a diving hawk, gathered myself, and struck with force. The thing shook itself like a thunderbolt in my mouth, sending up a blaze of waterflame, but it only hastened its own doom. I took it up to the surface, tossed it in the air, and ripped it to bits, gulping them, coughing up the large bones, swallowing the rest. A score of tiny fish gathered around me, feeding on the scraps. The white female rejoined me, stealing a chunk of my kill, speeding away playfully. Utterly delighted, I pursued her, trail of tiny bubbles in my face and the moon-white glow of her soft fur ahead of me—

  Dan!

  An odd urging, very far away yet warmly within my mind. Something that made my heart leap, though I could not remember why. Featly I bent myself at a slingshot angle and veered off toward it.

  Dannoc, you blubberhead, where are you?

  Here, I mindcalled.

  Now I remembered, my name was Dan, and it was Kor, Kor, my pod brother, my comrade since we had been pups on the Greenstones together. When our mothers had gone off fishing for days on end and left us, so it seemed, to starve, we had lain side by side on the smooth-worn rocks and sucked each other’s flippers and soft weanling fur to comfort each other. Other young males had fought, but we had never fought—

  There he was, up ahead, swimming toward me at his best speed from the sea stacks. Pod brother! I hailed him, and I met him
in a swirl of water, bumping flippers, touching noses—his whiskers jutted sharply toward mine. Ai, the goodly smell of him, the goodly sight! He was of a rich brown color, with a curling mane and flippers so dark they were nearly black. His mind was yelping with joy and astonishment. The joy I shared, but why the surprise?

  Dan, how—when—where have you been?

  I was very hungry, and I caught many many fish.

  With a flick of her wrists the white seal drifted to my side, hanging back somewhat, her sea-colored eyes very human in her round face.

  A sea maiden. He sounded less baffled now. You lay with her? Dan, I should have known.

  Having been a seal all my life, I did not yet understand. Should have known what?

  That if there was a creature of womanly form within a day’s journey— Something sharp in his tone of mind, even when he gave up the thought and started another. So she has made a handsome, sun-colored seal of you. Could you not have waited for me? I called and called—