Mindbond

by Nancy Springer

  “Where is Sakeema?” I bawled out, my voice echoing around my ears in that closed space, so that I sounded like a hundred wounded bison. Nor did I give Ytan time to answer, but charged him as if he might somehow be hiding the god behind his back. I attacked him furiously with the sword. If I had not been too distraught for any proper skill, I am sure I would have killed him without a second thought. But I swung as if hewing trees, and never struck him. He slipped under my crazed blows and darted out the entry. I blundered around the walls of the cave, snatching at the shreds of my hope, thinking vaguely, frantically, that there might be some passageway, some recess, some cranny where the god had lodged like a windblown seed. There was none. The place was small, and quite empty. If ever Sakeema had been there, he was gone.

  I plunged outside. The deer people were gone, had scattered, and in a heartbeat I saw why. Ytan stood on a low crag, near at hand but out of reach of my sword, and though his spear still lay in the cave, he had found—

  I dove, and heard the faint whirr as an arrow skimmed over my back, the thwock as it lodged in the resinous trunk of a yellow pine. I snatched a glimpse of it teetering there, a crude shaft, poorly fletched, as I landed on the ground, rolled, and scrambled for shelter. Even as I came to my knees behind the pine another arrow thudded into it, and I heard Ytan laughing again.

  “Where is Sakeema?” I bellowed at him. The more fool, I. As if Ytan would tell me, even if he could.

  “Whose face did you see, Dannoc, when you stood shaking and found me?” he replied, and then he shouted with laughter, yell after yell of mocking, moon-mad laughter. He stood on his crag nearly helpless with laughter. I set my teeth, slipped my own bow off my shoulder, made shift to ready it without standing up.

  “Who has knocked your nose askew, my brother?” Ytan cried crazily.

  There on his vantage he stood, with the mighty peaks looming behind him, shining in sundown light—seemingly as tall and goodly as the mountains he stood in deerskin leggings and bisonhide boots, bare-chested and mighty-shouldered, his drygrass-yellow braids hanging long, as befits a Red Hart warrior. And a Red Hart’s strong, beardless, fair-browed face.… But for the braids, Kor had once told me, I looked enough like Ytan to be his twin. And all the more so, Ytan seemed to be saying, now that my broken nose had skewed my face, making me resemble the bent-from-true, leftward thing he was.

  “Tell me who has hurt you! I will avenge you, brother mine.”

  “Mahela take you,” I muttered, setting arrow to my bowstring.

  “It was Korridun, was it not? Why are you not with your beloved Kor?” He needs must taunt me by those I loved.… “And where is that dark-browed warrior maiden? The haughty rider on the pied black gelding? Castrated it herself, she did. How proud of her you must be. What is it you call her? Tassida My Love?”

  I felt my throat close with a spasm, more in heartache than in rage any longer. How had he come to know so much? The devourer in him, it had taken his cleverness and turned it dark, evil.

  I had let a devourer out of my father’s body with my sword. Mind had often told me to do the same unkind favor for Ytan. But first, I had to get near him.

  I had nocked an arrow to my bowstring. Rising, I took aim. “This is meant for a feather in your hair, Ytan,” I shouted as I let fly, for I wanted him to know that my aim was true.

  He jumped aside, but the arrow was far more swift. It stopped his laughter, piercing the braid by his ear, as I had intended it to do. With an angry yell he broke it and pulled it out, and I stepped forward, another shaft at the ready.

  “You should have kept that, Ytan,” I mocked. His arrows were crude things, likely to fly astray, for he had never been much of a craftsman, Ytan. His bow, I saw, was made of bent ashwood, less powerful than my sinew-and-hartshorn one. He was not unskilled as an archer, and I knew it, but I had the better weapons.

  He knew it too, and let fly with words instead of bolts. “Has Tassida left you, Dan? The rotbottom wench, how could she? Yet I thought I saw her galloping off like a hellkite, one night in a storm.”

  The piss-proud cock, spying on me.… My jaw hardened, and I eased closer to him. Seeing me coming, he grinned anew.

  “I have a plan, Dannoc,” he told me in a friendly way. “I know what I am going to do. I am going to find her before you do, that proud Tassida. And I am going to lie with her. If I let my hair hang loose, and come to her in the dusk and whisper her name, she will think my name is Dan.”

  My fingers jumped on the bowstring. He saw it and barked aloud with laughter.

  “Go ahead, kill me! Why are you waiting? I will kill you as soon as I can. Then your doughty Tassida will be mine for as long as I choose to keep her.”

  “By Sakeema’s blood,” I told him between clenched teeth, “I would like to kill you.”

  “But, dolt that you are, you will not.” Smiling, he raised his bow. “I will kill you and go to Tassida. When I abandon her, she will say it was Dannoc who brought her low.”

  I stood close enough to him to see his eyes, blue as highmountain sky over eversnow, to clearly see his face, very comely, straight brows and a strong chin, and only his leer showing how shadowed was his soul.… And I knew I had been badly mistaken to count on the might of my weapons to cow him, for mine was an empty threat. I could not kill him, and he knew it. I had loved him too much, the good days gone by.… My hands shook so badly that I could not let fly even to maim him. I stood in the clear, nothing nearby to dodge behind. Like the dolt he said I was, like a deer drawn to the deer of straw, I had put myself in deadly peril.

  I saw his blue eyes, so much like mine, like our father’s, saw them glint and narrow to slits as he pulled back his bowstring—

  A growl fit to chill the blood, a graysheen blur, and from the laurel thicket that flanked the crag the wolf leaped, a flash, teeth shining. Fangs struck. Jaws fit to fell an elk closed on Ytan’s right arm, and the wolf snarled into his flesh, tearing at him. The force of the attack nearly knocked him off his feet, wolfs weight pulling him downward, but Ytan was strong. He yelled with fury, flung up his arm—it took the wolf wholly off the ground, but still the creature hung on, eyes blazing, Ytan’s blood splattering its fur. Ytan struck with bow and booted foot to no avail. Then he dropped the bow and fumbled for the stone knife at his belt, left-handed. He found it—

  My own leap had carried me up the crag, and before he could strike I toppled him, laid him prone on the rock, kicked the knife away and held the point of my sword at his throat. The wolf loosed its grip, shook itself, ran its pink tongue around its muzzle, then began hungrily to lap at Ytan’s blood. He cursed it and glared at me, but I would not let him move until the wolf had supped its fill. My brother knew I would not kill him, but by Sakeema he could see it in my eyes that I had in my heart to hurt him exceedingly if he vexed me.… When the wolf turned away, I stepped back, taking care to tread on Ytan’s wooden bow and break it.

  “No need, Dannoc.” He spoke with nothing in his hard blue stare but hatred, poison of Mahela. “I will no longer try to kill you. There are ways to hurt you worse. When I find the woman I will slit her nostrils with my knife, and notch her ears to match yours, and slash her breasts. All this before I have had my way with her. Then—”

  My sword moved in my hand, and for a moment he must have seen something in me that truly frightened him, for with a sharp intake of breath he stopped speaking.

  “No such bold boasts, Ytan,” I told him. “It is true, I am loath to slay you, for I remember the days when we tamed the curly-haired ponies together and scouted the deer. But I might not be so slow to cut off a hand or two, if you menace. Or lop off other parts of you and feed them to my friend here.”

  The wolf panted in wordless approval. But Ytan grinned as toothily as the wolf, for already my bloodthirst had left me, and he could see that. It is a terrible thing to have a brother for an enemy. Always Ytan had been sour and clearseeing. He knew me all too well.

  “When you threaten, you do not act,”
he remarked. “I will threaten no more, as it displeases you, my brother, but quite surely I will act if I find bold Tassida before you do. So prepare to grieve.” He lithely got up and started to walk away, not even cradling his bitten arm—he let it hang and bleed. But at the forest’s verge he paused. “Give my greeting to Sakeema,” he mocked.

  “Sakeema help you,” I whispered, so softly that perhaps Ytan did not hear me. “Sakeema help us all.”

  “’Ware Cragsmen farther down,” Ytan added with poisoned calm. Then he left me, gone in the dusk.

  Numbly I made my way back down the hard, cutting rocks of the ravine, the light rapidly failing me. Talu was waiting for me where I had left her, and she greeted me with a scornful huffing and a rolling of her eyes, as if to say, Fool.

  “Hold your tongue,” I grumbled at her. “Bighead.”

  We traveled until nightfall and past. I wanted to put distance between myself and Ytan. But riding under the thin light of a scantling moon, sending Talu stumbling through the shadows for no better reason than to get away from him, I seemed still to hear Ytan’s laughter.

  Chapter Three

  “Now truly I do not know what to do,” I said to the wolf lying not far from my feet.

  When we stopped at last I sat in the night like an oaf, without a fire, gnawing at the last of the seedcakes the deer people had given me. Head flattened to the ground, my companion the wolf looked back at me without moving, and I frowned in sympathy.

  “You are hungry? I am sorry you do not eat seedcakes, wild brother. There has been bad hunting for you, has there not? Even the lemmings are scarce, and the mice and the voles. No pika in the rocks. We must find Sakeema.… But what if my heartless lout of a brother comes to Tassida meanwhile?”

  Perhaps he was somewhere in the darkness near at hand, listening and taking pleasure in my unease. I had tried to leave him far behind, but it was possible that he had followed. And there I sat, speaking to a wolf as if it could help me more than already it had, and it gave no reply but to raise its head and yawn, showing bone-white teeth and a pink expanse of gullet and tongue, shadowy in the moonlight. Suddenly I felt how very much alone I was. The night hung dark, and talking to this indifferent creature made a poor substitute for talking with Kor.

  Powers help me, every time I thought of my bond brother I felt as if half of me had been torn away. And if Ytan was to be believed, the other mortal whom I chiefly loved was in danger as well. A long-limbed, knife-twirling, wild-haired, bold-riding, mettlesome mystery of a warrior woman named Tassida.

  “Blast,” I whispered between clenched teeth. The wolf looked at me blankly.

  “I feel as if I am torn in three parts, Kor and Tass and Sakeema. But I have forsaken Kor, and I am going to have to forsake Tass, too, until this quest is done.… The world, wolf, the whole ill-wished world is dwindling down to ruin! I cannot be thinking of one comely woman overmuch.”

  Not even when she was threatened with that most dishonorable of torments, the abomination called rape.

  “Tassida is well able to take care of herself,” I muttered.

  The wolf grinned hugely.

  “More able than I, perhaps, to deal with Ytan. She will take her sword to him, while I cannot. I must find Sakeema.”

  Far away an owl cried softly, darkly, perhaps bewailing its own hunger. My hunger was not of the body.

  “I cannot go to Tass, any more than I can go back to Kor. I must find … our savior. Why does it feel so wrong?”

  The wolf yawned again, laid down its head and went to sleep. A sensible creature. I did likewise.

  It seemed a small while that I slept. Then sense of something wrong jarred me awake, and I could not tell whether it was moonset or sunrise or the end of the world, for a cold, crushing weight lay atop me, shutting off light and air.

  A devourer had me in its grim embrace.

  Ai! I fought to throw it off. Hard, seawater-chill breasts against my face, thick serpentine tail binding my legs, fish-gray folds holding the rest of me, I knew them all too well, and I knew struggling was of no use, and yet I struggled. I kicked, I strained against the weight of the boneless flesh that pinned me to the ground, my chest tightened, I could not breathe … I had to calm myself. My fear, my despair only let the creature’s spearhead teeth bite deeper into my gut.

  The very fitting emblems of Mahela’s mindless greed, the devourers were. They had no heads, their maws were in their bellies, and like hers their whole will was to take, grasp, possess. The creatures of small self-will, the doves, the deer, the children, they took at a single gulp. Kings and warriors they found harder to bear away to Mahela, but they had the persistence of madwomen. Even the most valiant of warriors they could overpower in the course of a single long night. Seldom they found a king, such as Korridun, with the strength to defy them. Then they turned to an abomination worse than rape. The brutes could change shape by shooting out cold seawater, flattening their dugs, furling themselves into a sort of huge phallus. With serpent tail thrashing in air they could pin a strong victim to the ground and bore like a leech until they found their way within, where they took hold of heart and soul. Ytan was such a victim, unsouled because of his own strength, with only his body left to him, his own body and a keen mind to do evil.

  I could not let that happen to me. I had vowed to Kor once that I would kill myself first—but then who would quest for the god?

  By an effort of will I steadied myself, made my frantic body lie still. The cold, slimy breasts, large and hard as the melons the Herders grew, pressed against my face-no matter. If I stopped struggling and breathed shallowly and slowly, I could yet breathe. The capelike wings of the thing pinning my arms to my sides so that I could not reach my sword. No matter. When I centered myself there would be no need of the sword. The eely tail tightening around my legs, the maw sucking at my belly, strong as sea tide, working to take me in—none of it mattered, for the monster could not have me. I was bullheaded, my tribefellows had always said. I would be stubborn in defiance, more stubborn than any minion of Mahela, once well centered in self.

  I was—a Red Hart? But no, not entirely, not since I had gone away. I did not braid my hair, I had eaten fish with the Seal Kindred, I had changed shape into a seal and traveled the greendeep to Mahela’s realm. I wore woolens like the Herders, or furs, or whatever came to hand. Sometimes I even slept in a shirt. I was no longer at one with my tribe, and my thoughts were no longer their thoughts.

  I was—a hunter? But hunters killed the creatures of Sakeema. Did I wish to kill the creatures of Sakeema any longer? Unsure, I let my thoughts speed on. I was—a warrior? But I had left my bond brother to face war alone. No proper warrior, I. A storyteller, yes—but I could sense no ending but doom to my tale. I was—was—

  I could not remember my name. Chill of fear crept up my backbone.

  Distantly I sensed the flow of my own warm blood. The teeth had pierced, perhaps to my innards. Sakeema, I silently begged, help me. Help the dolt who cannot remember his own name. Sakeema, please! Confound the god, no face to him, no place, no tribe, where was he?

  Sakeema.

  I was—one who yearned for the god. I was—seeker. I was—Darran?

  The name felt strange. I thought it uncertainly. But as I held it in my mind, not sure whether to keep it or send it away, I felt the devourer falter in its worrying at me, I felt the grip of its wings weaken. My right hand shot out, reaching for Alar, the sword lying beside me in the grass.

  The devourer knew what swords were for. It lifted off me in haste, and though a moment before I had been desperate, I was now full of gleeful daring, and my left hand darted upward, grasping the flange of one strong, rippling wing. The creature pulled me upright in its surge to get away. “Yah! Wait a moment, my beauty!” I implored it as Alar flashed in air, blazing, eager. “My mare likes fish, perhaps she would care to eat you!”

  Alar slashed deep. But the monster gave me a buffet with its other wing and tore away from my grasp, and I do not
know how badly I wounded it, for I was staring like a fool at—a second one, another devourer, only a stride away from me, just lifting off—off my comrade, the wolf!

  Both devourers sped away in the night, and I did not see them go. I was gawking at the wolf. “Are you all right!” I exclaimed at it, though I scarcely thought it possible.

  But the wolf got to its feet without so much as a stagger, and sneezed strongly and rubbed its muzzle in the grass and rolled, trying to clean the slime from its fur. And I stood thinking of Korridun, of the time he had slept beside me in the night and a devourer had lain on him and one on me, and we had handbonded to help each other. And I had been nearly killed, but Korridun had gotten up without a mark on him.

  I stood with blood trickling down from the welts on my belly and said to the wolf, my voice shaking, “By my body, wild brother, you must have the soul of a strong warrior! Is that how you have survived all these years? By having the will of a human and a king?”

  The wolf stopped rubbing its graysheen fur against the grass and froze in a crouch, looking at me very much as if it had understood me. I saw a moon-white glint in its eyes and stepped back, half afraid that it would attack me. But the next moment it flashed away, gone in the night.

  “Wild brother! Wait! Come back!” I called after it, knowing it would not. For the wolf in no sense belonged to me, not even so much as the horse did. Wild-fanged mare though she was, Talu balkily came to my call and obeyed me with ill grace when I rode her. But the wolf traveled with me or not, aided me or not; just as it chose. Nor had I ever presumed to give a name to it.

  I sighed and sat down in the dark and thought about the wolf, wondering why it had looked so enraged and afraid, why it had left me so abruptly, how it had withstood the devourer. Then, as I rubbed the feel of the devourer from my face and smelled its stench still on my hands, my thoughts turned to the other, even more eerie and urgent matter: that of my name. I remembered it well enough now that the pressing need had passed: it was Dannoc. But that other name, Darran … it had helped me. It must in some wise be true.…