Mindbond

by Nancy Springer

  I put it into the part of my mind where I kept the things I wondered about—many things, and none of them were going to find me my way any sooner to the god. Or so I thought. I leaned back against the scab-barked trunk of a yellow pine and tried at least to rest, though I knew I would sleep no more that night.

  At dawn I got up stiffly and looked around me for the wolf, and called for it once more, and waited a while, then turned to Talu and began readying her for travel. As I worked I talked to her for want of the wolf.

  “Ytan has done us a left-handed favor, telling us of Cragsmen to be found on these lower slopes,” I said to her, for sometime during the tumult of the night it had come clear to me what I must next do and where I must go. “I must seek them to parley with them.”

  She swung her fanged head and sourly looked at me as if to say, Fool, Most Reckless and Wrongheaded of Fools. Parleying with Cragsmen was not an undertaking for a prudent mortal. But my way seemed quite clear to me. I was no longer a Red Hart, so why had I thought Sakeema must lie in the cave of which Red Hart legend told? There were other tribes, other legends. Some I knew. The Herders said that the god had been reared by red wolves in a blackstone cave in the skirts of the thunder cones, and the wolves his foster brothers had come to take him back to that birthplace after his death. The Seal said Sakeema had gone out to sea in a gray coracle. If it were so I would never find him, but the Otter River Clan surely had such a saying also, and the Fanged Horse Folk, and—even the uncouth Cragsmen.

  I would take a path toward the thunder cones and the Herders. More than likely Cragsmen would bar my way. To be true to my quest, I had to hope so. If a feeling so mixed with fear can be called hope.

  “Keep your thoughts to yourself,” I said in retort to Talu’s sour look, and I mounted her and rode.

  For a day I rode with nothing to eat but wild onion and cresses. The pathless way was rough, and often I went afoot, letting Talu trail after me through jumbled boulders and under the low boughs of aspen and spearpine. And more than once I cursed and doubted my own wisdom in coming this way. I saved many miles by attempting the wild slopes rather than backtracking to the Blackstone Path, but the maddening tangle of rocks and steep drops, trees and fallen trunks and crags looming overhead slowed me so that I cursed my own beloved mountains by all the dark attributes of Mahela.

  It was just such a place the next day, as I led Talu between towering stones, that the Cragsmen surprised me.

  I heard a sound as of rocks splitting and sliding down a mountainpeak in a rumble of snow—but I had made my way far below the snowpeaks. It was the sound of their laughter. And feeling fear crawl through my back and ribs and take hiding in my chest, I looked up and saw them.

  Nearly a twelve of them, though any one of them would have been enough to give me pause, for Cragsmen are half again as tall as a man, even a tall man such as I, and hard as the crags, all the stone colors of skin, and stony of heart. Standing spraddle-legged atop the outcroppings all around me, they seemed huge, they loomed, their grinning mouths like ice-fanged caves in their boulder heads. What did Cragsmen eat, I wondered, that their hulking bodies seemed so hale when I felt so weak from hunger? They seemed scarcely human. Perhaps they feasted on the very peaks themselves.

  I felt Alar stirring in her scabbard with her eagerness to taste their strange brownsheen blood, but I did not move my hand to meet her pommel. I felt no such eagerness to fight them.

  “World brothers,” I hailed them, “well met.”

  The one who seemed to be their leader, a slate-blue fellow with chest and head greenfurred as if by moss, ceased roaring with laughter and instead roared even more loudly with rage.

  “You,” he bellowed, “who have sent my comrades to Mahela, you dare to call me brother?”

  Though truly, I had seen no Cragsmen in Mahela’s undersea realm. The louts, they must not have been among her choice of pretty things to enslave.

  “It was you who attacked,” I reminded him mildly. It is wise to speak softly to Cragsmen and keep them talking as long as possible. “Men of the mountains, what know you of Sakeema?”

  At once they all began again to laugh, a deafening sound. I had never been more glad to be thought a fool. Cragsmen became less dangerous when they were amused. Talu’s reins in hand, I began to edge forward in the narrow space between rocks where I was trapped.

  The blue Cragsman roared, and with a single swipe of his blackwood cudgel he toppled the several spearpines that stood between him and me. He spun the cudgel over my head. He could as handily have lifted me and spun me by the feet, for the club and I were of nearly the same size. “Be still!” he commanded, though there was no need—I was fairly cowering amid the boulders, like a pika cowering in the scree.

  “But I must find Sakeema before it is too late,” I said earnestly, trying to amuse them again. “Before Mahela swallows it all. Are there any wild sheep left on the peaks?”

  “You cannot go through here,” the leader growled.

  “What do we care, meat-eater?” taunted another at the same time. “It is nothing to us that the sheep are gone like the wild antelope of the peaks.”

  “Yes,” I said softly, “but surely you feel heart’s hunger even to think of the white antelope of the peaks.” They stared at me with faint frowns as their slow wits tried to comprehend what I was saying, and in a sort of trance created by my own words I turned and got quietly onto Talu, even though the horse could scarcely move in the strait place where I had led her. I mounted her just so that I would be able to gaze off toward the snowpeaks. “Where is Sakeema?” I asked again. “I must find him while the mountains still stand for you to tread upon.”

  A babble went up of a sort I was not expecting. “He is not here!” blurted a huge granite-gray Cragsman who loomed to my left.

  “He’s gone!” agreed another.

  “The place is empty except for—”

  “Silence!” thundered the slate-blue leader, furious, his shout echoing away in the quiet that at once followed. He turned on me and pointed his cudgel at my head, enraged but uncertain, shifting his great weight from foot to massive foot in annoyance or unease. “Who are you,” he demanded, “that we should bandy words with you?”

  It was time to show mettle. “Who is my brother Ytan,” I retorted, “that you should obey him? Is it not he who sent you here to waylay me?”

  “No!” bawled the granite-gray Cragsman. “We always guard this place!”

  The blue one swung toward him in menace—I saw a rivalry there. “Be silent!” he bellowed at the other Cragsman, and to me he said fiercely, “Who are you?”

  I had told them Ytan was my brother, so they had to know I was a son of Tyonoc. They had seen me and fought against me before. Why, then, did they ask who I was? And what was I to tell them? That my name was Dannoc, or Darran, whatever? Blast and confound them, what would be the use of telling them either?

  I did not know how to answer, not with the mighty blackwood club nearly grazing my face and wonder spinning along with the fear in my mind. A guarded place, just beyond them? Of what sort? What did they mean, saying Sakeema was gone from that place? Some sign of him there, perhaps? “Sakeema,” I breathed aloud in wonder or in plea, and to my astonishment the Cragsmen stepped a pace back from me. Even their slate-blue leader stepped back, and his club wavered. On the Cragsmen’s hard faces came a look of doubt and awe.

  “No!” I exclaimed. They thought I was taking the name of Sakeema—how could that be? Why did they not laugh? It was laughable, or it was blasphemy, and even for the sake of saving my skin I could not let it happen. “No, I mean—people of the peaks, what are the tales you tell of the coming of Sakeema?” I was pleading, eager. “Where do you say is his resting place?”

  Roars of anger answered me. Anger, glaring in their faces along with a plain disappointment. They surged toward me. “Bah! Kill him,” the granite-colored one shouted. Clubs swung up.

  But the blue leader, who stood nearest me, turned on the
m furiously. “We kill him when I say!” he thundered.

  “When you say! We’ll be here all day, waiting till you say!”

  They quarreled and tussled, taking sides, their roars and rumblings echoing off the mountainpeaks, their blows and shovings shaking the rocks—I heard the name of Sakeema shouted in tones fit to make the mountains shudder. The rivals were bludgeoning each other, some of the other Cragsmen doing the same and the rest of them clustering around like so many gawking stones, gray, greenish, tan, rimrock red. Few of them fixed their hard eyes on me any longer. When their uproar had reached a hopeful height I sent Talu quietly forward—

  A club came smashing down across my path, the slate-blue leader’s glare met me, and within an eyeblink the commotion, which I had considered to be at its height, redoubled. By my mother’s bones, but it must have been a precious thing they guarded! I had not thought they could come out of their quarrel so quickly to turn on me. One more breath and I would be dead—I could feel rage hot as blood in the air. But Talu, as terrified as I, reared high. Teetering on her hind legs, she somehow managed to turn in the narrow space between rocks, and at a plunging, panicky gallop she took me back the way we had come.

  I was in nearly as much danger from her as I had been from the Cragsmen. I could not have stopped her if I had tried—and, mindful of wrathful enemies not far behind me, I did not try—but Talu’s every wild leap threatened to throw me against a boulder, or smash my knee against one, or my head against a tree, or send us both crashing down when she snapped a leg between stones. Her hooves slipped and scrabbled on dizzying slopes—this was terrain that scarcely should have been ridden at a slow walk! I held onto her by clinging to her mane until she took a man-tall drop at a leap, but then I considered that I had had enough. Moreover, there was a thought in me that I did not wish to be carried too far from the place the Cragsmen so fervidly guarded. So I swung down by her neck and took my chances with a landing on hard rock. Then I lay, the breath knocked out of me, and watched her plunge crazily away, and took accounting of my bodily harm. Bruises, nothing worse.

  Behind me, out of sight but not yet out of tongueshot, I heard the noise of the Cragsmen, who were quarreling still. I lay where I was until their uproar had quieted, that and my ragged breathing and the thumping of my heart. Talu had careered out of sight and hearing. I rose cautiously and walked away from the direction she had gone, back toward the Cragsmen but to one side of them.

  It was not hard for a Red Hart hunter on foot to elude Cragsmen. I stalked softly past them, and they knew nothing of it. I dare say they thought I was yet on Talu, blundering back up the mountain. Few travelers are foolish enough to let themselves be separated from horse and gear. But being a fool, and afoot, I found the many boulders more to my liking than I had when they threatened to break my neck. They gave me good cover as I stalked, and though the Cragsmen ceased their scuffling and moved back to lines of guard once again, I eluded them easily enough. I crept between rocks until I had left them behind, and then I softly walked, looking, searching. Even though I did not know for what.

  But there was no doubt in me once I saw it.

  Boulders ended suddenly, spearpines thinned, sky showed. Underfoot lay a smooth, flat place made of many small stones—I noted that later, for at the time my seeing was all taken up by the crag. An odd sort of tall, jagged crag, very steep, very aspiring, loomed ahead. And in its side opened a most peculiar cave. As I drew nearer, step by slow, cautious step, I noticed that the rock wall around the entry was all networked with small lines, like cracks—they were cracks. With a shock I realized that the crag was no crag, nor the cave a cave.

  Name of the god, it was a place made by the long-ago kings whose powers I scarcely understood, a place left from time lost in time.

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  Glossary

  afterlings: followers, usually on foot.

  afterwit: hindsight.

  amaranth: a healing flower, disappeared when Sakeema was killed.

  awk: leftward.

  blackstone: obsidian.

  brownsheen: copper-colored.

  brume: dense, gray fog.

  cachalot: sperm whale.

  carrageen: a dark purplish seaweed.

  chough: a small, insolent crow.

  comity: innate courtesy.

  craking rail: a short-billed landrail of drab plumage, shy habits, and excruciating vocal abilities.

  dreamwit: a visionary person, a mystic.

  dryland: the opposite of ocean. Refers to any land above water, not necessarily arid.

  dulse: an edible seaweed.

  erne: a sea eagle.

  eye of sky: the dispassionate gaze of the nameless god.

  fire true: true enough to be sworn to by putting one’s hand in fire.

  fogwater: condensation.

  fry: recently hatched salmon just emerging from the gravel, the length of the first joint of a man’s index finger.

  fulmar: a stiff-winged, gliding seabird.

  gair fowl: the great auk, a sort of northern penguin.

  gannet: a large, white seabird.

  glimmerstones: agates.

  graymaw: a shark.

  graysheen: silver-colored.

  greendeep: ocean.

  grilse: salmon returning from the sea to their native river; “summer salmon.”

  gudgeon: a rather stupid-looking freshwater fish.

  gutknot: navel.

  highmountain: alpine (as, highmountain meadow).

  indeeps: penetralia.

  inwit: instinct.

  jannock: unleavened oatmeal bread.

  king: a tribal ruler of either sex.

  kittiwake: a small, short-legged, gentle-faced gull.

  lappet: a breechclout.

  lovelocks: curling tendrils of hair.

  merkin: a woman’s pubic hair.

  moonstuff: silver.

  moon-mad: temporarily passionate or out of control, with emotions running high, as if influenced, like tides, by the phase of the moon.

  nagsback: a shallow mountain pass.

  noggin’s worth: a little.

  orichalc: a hard, golden bronze.

  parr: young salmon still in the brown freshwater stage.

  peal: salmon returning from the sea to their native river, turning from silver to red.

  pickthank: a flatterer.

  rampick: a tree whose top is dead or broken off by wind.

  roughlands: the shadowlands.

  scantling: a toddler, a very young specimen of whatever species.

  scarrow: high, thin cloud.

  scarrow-fog: a thin haze high in the sky that lets the sun show as a white spot.

  scooning: skipping over the surface of water as a flat stone does when properly thrown.

  shadowlands: the arid high plains beyond the mountains, the steppes or shortgrass prairie.

  slowcome: a slow-witted person or one who is slow to act, sometimes with a sexual connotation.

  smellfungus: a grumbler.

  smolt: salmon in the final freshwater stage, turning from brown to silver.

  smurr: drizzle.

  snow mote: snowflake.

  stone-boiled: cooked in liquid into which hot stones are dropped to heat it.

  stoup’s worth: a lot.

  sunstuff: gold.

  swordmaster: maker, namer, and wielder of his or her sword.

  sylkies: undersea folk who can take the form of humans or seals.

  thunder cones: volcanoes.

  tongueshot: the distance a voice will carry.

  troating: bleating, as of a deer in rut.

  tumblestone: a rock washed smooth by the action of water.

  wanhope: a person who continues to hope against all common sense.

  whimbrel: a brown wading bird, related to dowitchers, godwits, curlews, willets, and snipe.

  whurr: to burst from cover with a loud flapping of wings, as a partridge or a grouse.

  witch wind: hot wind that blows down from t
he landward side of mountains.

  About the Author

  Nancy Springer is the award-winning author of more than fifty books, including the Enola Holmes and Rowan Hood series and a plethora of novels for all ages, spanning fantasy, mystery, magic realism, and more. She received the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for Larque on the Wing and the Edgar Award for her juvenile mysteries Toughing It and Looking for Jamie Bridger, and she has been nominated for numerous other honors. Springer currently lives in the Florida Panhandle, where she rescues feral cats and enjoys the vibrant wildlife of the wetlands.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1987 by Nancy Springer

  Cover design by Drew Padrutt

  ISBN: 978-1-4532-4850-8

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

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