My right hand found his, gripped, warm. For a single, still moment, Mahela’s rage meant nothing, the men swarming toward us were of no consequence. Then they tore us apart.
I flung off the bearded fellow who had hold of me, plunged to my knees by Mahela’s feet.
“Take me, mighty lady! I can bear it better. You will destroy him!”
Not so, Dan. Stone hard and strong, Kor’s resolve. No heartbreak in him any longer.
“Hence!” And even as she shrieked at me Mahela turned cormorant-headed again, hurling herself forward from her massive seat, her finery wildly swirling, neck snaking, her wicked, hooked bill shooting toward my midriff. Stupid with sorrow, I knelt without moving, meaning to argue further, even though I heard Kor shout. But a hand closed on my shoulder and pulled me back, out of danger.
I—knew—that grip—
Kor stood in the clutches of four stocky men, staring over at me with his mouth half-open, the look on his face wavering between hope and fear. They would take him away now.… I struggled, meaning to plead again with Mahela for his sake, but the two-handed grasp on my shoulders tightened.
“No, lad, no!” That voice in my ear, I knew it, but I did not dare to believe.… “Do not face her, do not strive against her! She is far stronger, she always wins.”
“Get him hence,” Mahela raged, “before I tear out his innards and eat them.”
Go, Dan, but not too far. Wait for me.
I went, and saved my innards, because I was dazed. Underfoot, sharp black rocks in odd shapes, clinkers, as if from a cinder cone. If they cut my bare feet, I did not care. The touch on my shoulder guided me through the crowd. People stared at me, made way. Children gazed emptily. Women turned to watch after me with more shock than welcome, for I was still naked, and they were gloriously arrayed. I paid no heed. Down steep trails between dark crags … Only when we had reached a level, sheltered glen did I dare to stop, and turn, and face him.
Long braids the color of bleached prairie grass in winter, and at the braid tips the blue-gray peregrine feathers of a king. Tall and straight he stood, as tall as I, his lean face browned by weather, scarred by battle, and the scars of hunting and battle showed whitely on his bare, hard chest, his strong arms. The headband of a king lay on his brow, and the armbands did not slip from their place above the muscles of his arm. His lappet and leggings were of finest white doeskin, his boots of white bisonhide. His knife bore a handle of rare elk antler. A short cloak of sable fringed with white weasel tails was flung back proudly from his shoulders. Still, he did not seem entirely a king. A bleakness had made its dwelling in his face, as if something had defeated him.
Tyonoc, my father.
“Yes, I remember,” he said with a taut calm, taut as a strung bow. “Dan, my son, I remember all that I did to you and to your comrade. Mahela is not kind. She wishes me to remember.”
“But it was not you,” I told him.
“In a sense not. But this mind schemed and remembers. These arms struck the blows, these eyes—saw you suffer.…”
Eyes the color of a deep sky over eversnow, but now clouded like the ocean skies … I went to him and took him into a tight embrace, and then I knew that he was indeed my father, wholly my father, heart and all, for his proud body acceded to the embrace, his arms came up across my back and held me, his head bowed. I felt the tautness go away from him as an arrow flies from the bow, leaving him shaking.
“You do not hate me,” he whispered.
“Do you hate me?” I challenged, trying to rouse him to ire or a smile, either one. “Do you not remember how I slew you?”
“Yes. I am grateful to you.”
That staggered me, and I dropped my arms from around his shoulders so that he would not feel it in me. He let me go, and we walked on in silence. Too long a silence. After I had regained a noggin’s worth of calm, I looked at him and saw that the straight line of his mouth was tugged askew, his eyes nearly closed. He felt my startled stare and pulled half his face into a crooked smile.
“The only thing I like about this place,” he said, “is that no one notices weeping. It is all salt water here, and tears do not show.” A bitter edge in his voice, almost as if he wanted my pity. He, Tyonoc of the Red Hart!
I stopped where I was, at the foot of a black crag, and stared at him. “You never used to be ashamed to weep,” I said slowly.
“I did it more seldom those days. Now it comes too often, it grows wearing.”
I wanted to knock courage back into him. “Mahela take it!” I cursed instead.
“Truly, she will, if she wants it.” His small jest seemed to cheer him, and he straightened. “Come, this way.”
He led me to a place in a hollow of the alps where a skin tent was pitched amid trees, for all the world as if we were back in the Red Hart Demesne except that the trees were of a sort I had never seen and their limp leaves floated in the currents. Also, no cooking fire burned at the entry, and no meat hung nearby. Nor were there any others of my people about. Once within, my father found me a lappet and leggings of yellow buckskin and sat on the ground to watch as I put them on.
“Your hair,” he said, “it is long enough to braid again.”
I shrugged, feeling at it with the fingers of one hand. Braids were of small concern to me any longer. Somewhere on distant uplands my people thought of hunting food, stitching deerskins into clothing, but I had ridden away from them on a fanged mare, full of a mystic notion, my thoughts not their thoughts anymore, and I would never be entirely a Red Hart again. Standing in the realm of death and breathing green water, I could not have felt farther from them.
“I had thought that you would wear the peregrine feathers, now that I am gone,” my father said.
“Tyee does.”
“Tyee! Ai, he is a good and gentle man, but he does not have the strength of will to lead our people aright!”
“He does now. He fought Ytan, that—the night you last remember, and drove him away. You did not see?”
“No.” His gaze slid down to the cinders by his feet. “I was busy … torturing Korridun, and through him, you.”
I reached down and shook him by the shoulders until he raised his eyes to me. “Father, that is laid to Mahela’s account,” I told him fiercely. “And it is past, gone, done with. Think more of what is now.”
“Now?” He blinked at me, gave me a wry smile. “But here there is no now. We have nothing but the past. We do not live here, we merely wash with the tides of Mahela’s making. The water sustains us. We pay court to her. There is nothing else.”
He, my father, who had once ridden a swift pony through the forests and shot the fleet deer, he who had a dozen times fought against Pajlat’s raiders, they with their vicious long whips of bisonhide, and driven them off. He who had carried a roused hawk on his hand as he led the magic dancers around the autumn soulfires—that he should sit so limply, so—deadened …
“Where is my mother?” I asked him harshly. She should have been here with him. Her ardor might have stung him to something like manhood again.
He stared at me, rose slowly to his feet, yet he was terribly calm. “Did I not tell you, when I was taunting you? I killed her to stop her from—from pestering me with love.”
“Yes, I know! But where is she now?”
He gazed at me as if to say, What does it matter? What could it possibly change? “She was murdered, unavenged,” he said. “She roams with the restless spirits, the green-shades.”
“I thought all the dead were under Mahela’s charge.”
“They are, and she makes an indifferent keeper for most of them. We, here, her special pets”—his face quirked again into a half smile—“we are dead in a different way.”
“A foul way, and wrong,” I told him quietly. “Kor and I have come to take you back to the living land.”
His smile faded into horror. “You—but I thought Mahela had summoned you.”
“No. We came of our own accord.”
“A
nd on my account,” he whispered. “Ai, Dan, every sight of you will break my heart.” He covered his face with his hands, curled in on himself and sank to the ground.
“We will take you away from this place!” I declared to him. Moaning, his knees pressed tight to his chest, he seemed not to hear me. Tyonoc, my father, king of the Red Hart, he had no right to be so weak! Furious, I got hold of him and pulled him none too gently to his feet.
“Stop feeding on wretchedness!” I raged. “You have let her make a worm of you!”
“Let? But there is no letting about it.” He looked back at me with a bleak sureness and no shame. “She will make a worm of you, too, if she so chooses.”
“I do not plan to stay so long.”
“A foolish plan, Dannoc. No one leaves this place.”
I could not answer him. His dead and settled tone chilled me. After a moment he turned away from me, went and sat on the ground again. He had worn a hollow in that spot, from sitting.
“She has been annoyed with me, because she had to wait a few years for my body to take its place in her assemblage here, and because I nearly spoiled Korridun for her by sending him to her maimed. She collects kings, that one. Handsome folk of all sorts, and many pretty children, but her favorites are men, kings and warriors. They, and the comeliest creatures of Sakeema.”
Silence. I sat down opposite him, in a rocky place. Over the endless years my rump would smooth and hollow it.… No. I would not think the thoughts of despair.
“She has been annoyed with Korridun, also, for she has wanted him badly, and he thwarted her again and again. He is a marvel, that one. She will make a worm of him, too. In a singular way.”
The act of love, used as a weapon to enthrall him. How had she come to know him so well, to take such sure aim at the place where he might soonest break and bleed? Or was she wont to enslave by such means, Mahela?
“Does she often take lovers?” I asked.
“Such as Korridun? No.” My father sat up with a small show of interest. “She dallies from time to time, as who would not? But this passion for Korridun, unabated over the years, this is ardor such as she shows for none other. And there are those who have been here far longer than I who recall nothing like it of her within their memories.”
I rose and went outside.
It was nighttime, as far as I could tell, though the sea was filled always with a faint gleam. The crags loomed stark, for all the folk and creatures had long since gone their ways. I could see only a hard and jagged blackness against fluid green, and atop the dark mountains the form of Mahela’s strange dwelling, flat of platform and rounded of base, with the bare trees jutting out of it like narrow spires. Moon-shaped holes had been pierced along the length of it, to let in light, though now light issued out of them instead, as bright as any firelight, but chill, blue-white, like the ghost lights sometimes seen dancing over snow during a hard winter, when folk are starving.
Kor? I mindspoke softly, wondering whether he could hear me from such a distance. I need not have doubted.
Dan! Joy in his tone. Are you all right?
Of course. I miss my supper.
My mind did, though my stomach did not. But I meant to amuse him, and I succeeded—I felt the warm mirth stir his mind. Food, here, is a mark of honor, he told me mischievously. They are plying me with great lavishings of it.
You bastard.
Yes. And I intend to eat quantities of it. Many many fish. Then, surfeited, I shall become very sleepy and unable to perform.
I nearly laughed out loud, but I quickly sobered. I hope you sleep well. Kor …?
What?
If you must—to save yourself—will you be able?
Yes. He mindspoke me with a settled certainty, a stone-hard resolve, as when he had silently vowed to me that Mahela would not destroy him. Fate be damned. Not it, nor any goddess will have the victory over me.
I felt my spine straighten, my chin lift. Sakeema be with you, I told him.
With us both, Dan.
Yes. Fervor deserted me. Kor …?
What?
All the many times I wished you would bed a woman—I never dreamed it could be to your peril.
Want to take my place? He was trying to tease.
No. Thought I would if she would let me. Kor, it’s no laughing matter.
He knew it. How is your father? he asked after a moment.
Ill.
Chapter Eleven
Sleep was deep in that place Mahela called Tincherel, I found, but did no good. Such rest was not needful after a day spent with no purpose, not even the routine of foraging and eating. Sleep served only as a way to pass the dark hours. My father awoke from sleep feeling no abatement of his hopelessness—I could see as much by the clouded glance of his eyes. And I awoke to feel myself slipping into the same despair. We were not much accustomed to being trapped and helpless, we of the Red Hart. Though perhaps all of Mahela’s captives greeted despair upon awakening.
We talked for a while of our people, our homeland, the wide sweep of the uplands, the names of the many mountains. I had hoped it would comfort him, having me there to talk to. But the pangs I myself felt told me otherwise. We were a torment to each other, Tyonoc and I. We fell silent.
Kor?
No answer. He was still asleep, I sensed. Startled by how surely I sensed it—startled, and somewhat afraid. Being dead was doing odd things to me. This place, uncanny. Mahela, unloved yet obeyed. If indeed we were dead, what punishment could she threaten that was worse, what could she do to Kor if he failed to satisfy her? Yet I sensed surely again, as I seemed to sense too many things now, that he would be in more than mortal peril.
Thinking of Kor made me wonder whether he had seen his mother, Kela. Perhaps I could find her. Glad of something to do, I got up and went out of the tent, walking at random around the crag. Though I had said nothing to him of coming with me, my father trailed along after me as if he were afraid I might somehow come to woe—or perhaps because there was nothing else for him to do. I hated to think of that. For one like him, idleness was worse than pitched battle.
He had neighbors closer than I had thought in the silence of the night. Everywhere, set amidst the black rocks or spreading at their base, were small dwellings, though none except his in the manner of my people. Some were built of stone, some of split wood, even a few of brushwood in the manner of the Herders, though as of yet I saw none built of spearpine poles like the lodges of Kor’s people. All were large enough to sleep in, nothing more. People sat at the low doorways, most of them alone and silent. There were few families in this place. Even children sat alone and silent at the doorways of tiny shelters. They did not gather into groups or play with one another. Nor did their elders come together for talk, for there was nothing to be spoken of. No wonder the night had been quiet even amidst this multitude. As quiet as death.
The place was dismally clean. No cooking fires, no ashes or smoke, for no one ate or drank—the water we breathed sustained us. No need, then, for cuckpots. No stench. No pits for the emptying of cuckpots, no midden heaps, no offal. And no butchering, either, or skins being tanned or stitched, or fish being dried. No berry baskets, no planted fields, no making of spears or arrows. Nothing. The people I saw stood or sat like so many clay dolls around a shaman’s hand.
I strode up to one of them, a robed and bearded man by a hut of stone. “Kela, daughter of Kebek,” I asked him, “she who was Seal king when she lived—where might I find her?”
He stared back at me without answering, almost as if he had not heard, except that his eyes grew hard. Then he turned away. My father came up beside me.
“Bowels of Sakeema, lad! Can you not see that these folk are not in fit humor to chat?”
Dan?
I smiled. My father was speaking, telling me the ways of the place, asking me why I had not taken my query to him. I scarcely knew. Nor did I much care, nor was I listening to him. I heard only my brother, I spoke only with him.
Kor! W
ere you sleeping?
Yes. I just awoke. So I had been right. Mahela is being patient with me, for the time.
May her patience last forever.
Not likely. I heard fear, or despair. So he also was touched by it, even upon awakening. Dan, you should see this place. It daunts me. The walls writhing with vines and flowers and many creatures, all made of sunstuff, like the throne—
Throne? I had always wondered, what was a throne. An old song I knew made mention of Sakeema’s having no throne.
Mahela’s seat of honor. And all staring with those eyes of cut stone. And a smooth substance amid all the sunstuff, to give back the glitter. I have seen myself in it as if in a bowl of still water, but far more clearly. Have you ever seen yourself so truly, Dan? It is fearsome.
Enough to frighten anyone, I agreed.
Are you speaking for yourself? Laughter in his tone of mind for a moment, and I was glad. But then a chill, a horror, came into him again—I heard it. But the bed, Dan.
Silence. Sometime my father had stopped speaking and started walking, and I was following him somewhere down the crags. To see Kela, yes, he had said he would take me to her.
The bed. A huge clamshell, it nearly fills the chamber.
A clamshell?
Yes. Thick and fluted, chalk-white striped with Mahela’s colors of choice. Pink. Watery purple. Pale blue. Polished stones like a scallop’s eyes set around the ruffled edge of it. And within it a great sort of cushion, and mantles and coverings, all the dark pink color of raw flesh.
Lovely.
Yes. And all—perhaps it is the seawater. But there is no warmth to this bed. The coverings slither like snakes, and they are all chill and smooth as slime.
Slime of Mahela. I echoed Istas’s favorite curse.
Dan? A small note of panic in his mind. He had not heard me.
Here!
He heard. Are you walking farther away from me, is that it?
Yes!
Where are you going? Fear in him, held under control.
Never mind! I’ll talk with you later, Kor.
But there was no answer, and I was not sure whether he had heard me.
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