Godbond

  Godbond

  Sea King Trilogy, Book Three

  Nancy Springer

  (One there was, the enemy,

  Who bore away the tree.

  Two there came who sundered the fruit

  Amid earth and sky and sea.)

  Two there were who came before

  To brave the deep for three:

  The rider who flees,

  The seeker who yearns,

  And he who is king by the sea.

  Two there were who came before

  To forge the swords for three:

  The warrior who heals,

  The hunter who dreams,

  And he who is master of mercy,

  He who has captured the heart of hell,

  He who is king by the sea.

  TASSIDA’S SONG

  Prologue

  I am she, the enemy, the cormorant goddess in the depths of the sea; but in the days of which I speak I arose from the sea, I flew. I am she whom men called great glutton bird, all-devourer, destroyer: Mahela. Even the wisest of them all, my beautiful young Korridun, knew me by no other name.

  My weapons were potent, but few enough. I could hurl the sea against the land. I could reach forth with black hand of storm. At the time I had seven of the devourers still. They were stupid, clumsy brutes, fit only for the taking of soft-willed creatures one by one, but loyal, as befit my creations. I had made the devourers myself, out of lonesome sleep and the stuff of my thwarted dreams, when my fertile time had long since passed and I had thought I could make living things no longer. They themselves were as ugly as my bitterness, but many were the pretty pets they had brought me, gleaning the world for me. Mortals feared them worse than waking nightmare. Puny human weapons, knives of stone and bone and shell and obsidian, were of no use against a devourer’s cold, gray flesh, nearly as fluid as seawater. Nor were spears and arrows tipped with bone or blackstone.

  But Korridun and Dannoc and my winsome Tassida feared the devourers no longer, for those three bore the three swords and had learned the courage to use them. Against those three I had to bring forth my only remaining weapon, the one that hurt me worst: despair.

  Of the ways of despair, I knew far more than they.

  For I was once one, like Korridun King of the Seal Kindred, who could feel what moved in the hearts of my people. But I was far older than he, I remembered back to legendary times, the days when the sensate swords were forged, when kings wore crowns and ruled kingdoms, when people swarmed the world with their numbers, building cities of stone and tall-masted ships and evermore-clever weapons of war; and the knowledge of the hatreds, the shames and pettiness and greeds and perfidies of mortals had long since driven me to desperation. Feeling their envies and their needfulness as my own, as I did—it would have driven me to death. So, to survive, I had learned to harden my heart, to turn those passion-spears away from me. Now it was I who pierced the hearts and minds of others with my own pain.

  All the more pain, since Korridun had forsaken me.

  Roused, I flew forth. In black cloak of storm and wrath and desolation I flew to Seal Hold, where Korridun had gone.

  He and Dannoc, always Dannoc. How it smote me with jealousy, the way the two of them cleaved together, friends who would be remembered in legend, should the world live so long. They had bonded each other to brotherhood in blood. Together they had fought Cragsmen and Fanged Horse raiders and devourers and heartache. They had faced torture and hotwind wildfire and the passionfires within. They had ventured to the greendeep in seal form and brought each other back from the realm of the dead—my realm. Korridun loved Dan above anything, nearly above self and certainly far above me. I had to part them.

  They had grown too powerful, I told myself.

  And Tassida. Worse yet, Tassida had been with them since their return from the sea, though she loved them both, heart torn between them, and always before she had fled from their passion for her. Tassida, Korridun, Dannoc, all three together … it could not be suffered.

  I laid my cold touch heavy on the minds of all of them, to sunder them. I made them feel my own jealousy and despair. And amid storm and lightning flash and the coming of night I flew over them where they stood. Battered by wind and lashed by rain on the rocky headland of Seal Hold they stood, while all others cowered within the cave.

  Dannoc demanded of his bond brother, “Why did you not kill her, the great glutton who eats us all, while she lay sleeping under your hand?”

  And Korridun gave a low, hard laugh, more dangerous than a shout. “What, slay the only woman who has ever preferred me to you?”

  Korridun, king by the sea, my fair young bedmate, in sealskin breeches and faded tunic of wool, not even an armband on him for glory, yet fairer to me than the jeweled and crowned kings whom only I remembered. Korridun, my passion, the smooth skin of his face shell-tan, his hair seal-dark, his eyes dark and ever-changing, like the wash of the sea. Korridun, who had died three times and found his way back to life; not even I who ruled death could keep him close to me. Korridun, sea king, master of mercy. I had dared to hope that in his mercy vast as the sea he could love me. But after the one night in my bed—and by our bliss I had thought us forever wedded—he had left me. Looking on him again, I hated my own stubborn hope.

  And close by him, Tassida, my willful Tassida with the lean, tough body of a warrior, the farseeing gaze of a visionary, the proud, dark-browed face. Face like mine. Tassida, my little daughter, how I loathed her. Had I not taught her, as a mother ought, to stay far from men? Had I not taught her fear? Yet there she stood between Korridun and Dannoc, one of her hands reaching toward each. She had taken Dannoc as her bedmate, and Korridun knew it, and I battered his heart with jealousy, with hatred for them both, with my own misery—for I knew that at his center Korridun yet loved her as he refused to love me.

  Dannoc. Spear-tall, spear-straight and stormwindstrong, he was all a spear-point of seeking and vision and desire. Many were the men who called him mad, but had any woman ever looked on his hair the color of lightning, his bare shoulders and his dreaming blue eyes without wanting him? He had done murder, yet he loved Korridun better than a brother, and he had heart in him to love a lifemate unto world’s end. I preferred Korridun, for the sake of his mercy, but I knew to my center why Tassida had chosen Dan, and the knowledge troubled me. They were strong, far too strong, together.

  How much stronger, then, the three of them together?

  I pierced their hearts and minds with knives of my own embittered passion, twisted the blades, and Dan and Korridun broke out in bitter quarrel.

  “You defeated king!” Dannoc railed. “All the great things I had thought of you, and now you have given up! You coward, fleeing Mahela’s realm like a kicked cur! You left your own mother there, whom we had come to save, and my—my father, there, in that deathly place, forever!” Dan panted with fury and struck out at Korridun with his fist; Tassida caught his arm to prevent him. She came between the two of them, pleading, but I was still stronger than she.

  Kor said, “I should have left you there as well.”

  Korridun’s anger, quieter, more silent, more brooding and lasting than Dan’s, always. Quarreling was in the two of them, I could not have made it out of nothing, but I urged Kor’s hard words out of him amid stormwind, I lashed Dan’s rage with stinging rain.

  “Betrayer! You limp thing, flattened to the sand by a storm! Rad Korridun, noble king, what is the good of you?” Dannoc mocked, or begged. “The whole mortal world is dying around us, and will you not lift a hand to save it?”

  And in terrible sorrow Korridun cried out, “I am not Sakeema!”

  The god Dannoc had been seeking all his life. The god he deemed could save his dwindling world. For a brief while, a season or two, he had thought h
e had found his god in Kor.

  “I know that now!” he shouted amid the shrieking of stormwind, and Korridun felt his heartache, felt it in his own body, as always, and the force of it staggered Kor and turned him white under the flare of lightning. Dannoc saw, and then there was no anger in him any longer, only a deathly weariness.

  Tassida put one of her arms around his shoulders, one around Korridun’s. “Leave it,” she urged. “Come in, before you are swept away.” And Dannoc would have gone with her.

  But there was bitterness aplenty left in Kor. “Go ahead, Dan,” he said, his voice low, grim. “Take her to your chamber. Tass, the only woman I have ever loved. Whisper her name in the darkness and wish you could see her face—”

  Dannoc’s head snapped up, his hair flying lightning-pale around his face first pale with rage, then flushed dark. “Draw!” he commanded, and he crouched and reached for his weapon. Kor did the same, but Tassida stepped between and pushed the two of them apart so that they staggered backward.

  “No!” she cried, her proud face full of horror. Kor glanced at her, a single angry look, and something passed between them—I did not at the time understand mindspeak, to know that Tassida had just suffered what she feared worst in the world: invasion by force. But I saw her dark eyes open wide with terror, and I was glad. She turned and ran, found her horse and rode away at a reckless gallop amid night and storm.

  Dannoc swore. “Son of a whore!” he raged at Korridun. “You piss-proud, jealous worm! You might as kindly have raped her, and had it done with!” He lunged at his bond brother, and the two of them grappled beneath the black sky.

  They had not, after all, drawn weapons on each other. They fought like impassioned children, sprawling on the rocks, trying to hurt each other with fists, knees, heads, bloodying each other’s faces. After a while they staggered to their feet, panting and glaring at each other.

  “Sakeema!” Dan shouted, not so much at Kor as at earth and sea and sky. “The whole world is coming apart in shards, and can you do nothing?” His voice rose so high that like a stripling’s it cracked.

  Kor raised a curled fist and struck his bond brother full force on his nose, breaking it. Blood rushed down amid the rain. And the water on Korridun’s face, not rain entirely; he was sobbing. “If you have thought I was a god, it was your own folly!” he screamed at Dannoc. “I have told you a hundred times, I am not—our savior.”

  Then I saw tears trembling in Dannoc’s eyes, and I knew the quarrel was over, for I felt the love in them, and I thought surely I had failed. They would embrace, now. Nothing could ever part them. But Dan did not move toward his brother.

  “Then I had better go find the god and awaken him, wherever he sleeps.” Dannoc’s voice trembled. “For no one less can save us now.”

  And he went away, took horse and rode into the mountains without touching Kor even with the glance of his eyes. And Kor sank down on the rocks and lay where he was, under a black cloud of my making.

  I shouted in the tempest, triumphant. The three swordbearers had gone their separate ways. The innocent fools, they had let my stormwinds sunder them, scatter them like three dry leaves. Together, they could have resisted me. Even—no. I would not say that I could be defeated.

  I returned to the sea, I rested. Storm abated. But within the turning of the day, a longing grew in me again to see the land. The one brief sight of the storm-lashed rocks and twisted spruces of Korridun’s headland had not been enough. I took form of a bird, a petrel, swift and strong and light as a swallow, and I flew far over the dryland world.

  Heartbreaking, how beautiful it all was. Because of the heartbreak I had kept myself away for so long, hiding myself in the greendeep.… How beautiful, the seaside cliffs where the cascades sang, wild with springtime snowmelt, amid crags greenfurred with moss, where the Otter River ran down its canyon, shouting, to the sea. I had forgotten how lovely, I pressed on, I had to see more.… Beyond, beyond, up in the highmountain meadows where the deer had once grazed, the pale spikes of dwarf willow still pushed up through the skirts of the eversnow. And down the mountain flanks, the way that greathearted fool Dannoc would go, the forest floor was a froth of windflower and white violets and larkspur amid bracken. And the aspens, putting forth yellowgreen leaf, and the bright branch tips on the blue pines.… Seeing was no longer enough for me. I set my feet on the damp earth, I touched twig and leaf, I stooped to smell the small yellow springlilies. And I remembered all that lay beyond the snowpeaks: the austere sweep of the steppes, the tallgrass prairie, the rumpled uplands thick with hemlock and glinting with shallow lakes, the blackstone thunder cones. On the cindery flanks of the thunder cones, the tiny flowers with stems no thicker than a hair would be blooming, as they did once a year, covering that harsh rubble with an amaranthine mist. I knew, though I did not go there to see. How well I knew.

  And beyond the thunder cones, the plains vast as the sea.… What lay beyond them, I knew, though no mortal knew. But it did not matter. The six dwindling tribes all huddled between the plains and the sea, and no other folk trembled anywhere, any longer. It was with these six tribes of wretched, stubborn humans that my business lay, and with seacliffs, river, snowpeaks, steppe, upland demesne and plain. Except for humans, the creatures were already gone, or nearly all. My devouring servants had brought them all to me.

  Night spread like a dark flower in the dome of the sky. I circled back toward the sea.

  Below me on the mountain’s flank, a spark of light, a campfire. I darted low to see. Men, by the fire—

  Korridun, my Korridun, and Dan, together again. And lying at their feet, a silver wolf.

  A wolf! There could be no wolf. There had been none for three generations of mortal life. I had them all. Folding my wings, I glided to a perch in a blue pine, my heart shaking my feathered breast with its pounding. I would castigate my servants and send them forthwith to take this handsome silver oversight—

  But as my eyes caught on Korridun, I forgot the wolf. Tears on the sea king’s bruised face, shining in the firelight, nor did he turn aside to hide them, or trouble to brush them away. On Dannoc’s face also, tears, unashamed. Their right hands, clasped, passing the grip of their bond brotherhood. Their heads high, their eyes meeting, and I knew for certain, watching, what I had sometimes suspected: they were speaking to each other without words, mind to mind. Dannoc’s eyes, blackened by blows, swollen almost shut; he closed them, let his head lie for a moment on his bond brother’s shoulder.

  My own heartsore longing for Korridun made me feel weak and sick as no wound had ever done. Ai, how I wanted that closeness with him, the tears on his face, the touch of his hand, the touch of—his mind. Lovesickness left me no more strength than a winterstarved dove. I could not drive Dannoc away; yet I could not bear to see him stay. Sleep, I willed him. I am the goddess of death, and sleep is a portal to my realm; I have that power.

  Exhausted, he did not combat me. He lay back where he was and slept. Korridun got up and brought a riding pelt to cover his naked shoulders, and Dannoc stirred drowsily under it. “Heartbond came first,” he murmured.

  “I know, my brother,” Kor answered him softly. “Rest well.”

  Kor rested by his side, sleeping not quite so deeply, and the fire burned low, embers blackening into ashes, and the wolf slipped away, a shadow in the night, to do its useless hunting. Useless, for few mice rustled in that night, few pika squeaked, few rockchucks quarreled, few voles crept. I am the goddess, and what I will, I do; with my loyal servants I was taking them all. And in the trees of that place no birds stirred but I, where I perched as if tethered by the leg.

  Go to him, I willed myself.

  If I had taken my human form, I would have been a naked woman, my body warm, comely, I knew how comely. Fit to show him—tenderness.…

  Tenderness would have been surrender. I could not move.

  Go to him, I told myself fiercely. Or else go away, and make war on him, and cease looking on his face.

  I
could not do either that night.

  He stirred restlessly in his sleep, my Kor, he moaned, and all night, small and winged and hidden in darkness, I looked on him and could neither go to him nor go away. And before first light he came fully awake, sat up and put his head in his hands as if he could not face the day.

  Then he got up, moving about quietly so as not to awaken his sleeping brother, and divided Dannoc’s gear from his, leaving Dannoc’s on the ground. He readied his own horse for travel. When he was done, he stood and looked at Dannoc’s face, the bruised and lidded eyes very still in sleep.

  “I will endure, apart from you,” he said, aloud but softly so that he would not awaken the one to whom he spoke. “I have made myself a pact to be strong. But I cannot bear this leave-taking.”

  They had come together, then, only to part again? In the stillness before dawn, perched very small amid towering mountains, in that hush and chill I clearly knew the truth. It was not force of my spleen that was sending Dan away from Kor; it was the power of his own yearning dream.

  Kor said to him, very softly, “If any mortal can find and awaken the god, it will be you. Seek well, great heart.”

  He seemed about to turn away, but did not move, and in the gray breaking of day I saw the struggle in his face, and I fiercely willed Dannoc to slumber soundly, not to awaken.

  Kor said, “So—so much I never told you.” He wished Dan to hear, in a sense, I felt sure of that. He more than half wished to wake him. “My brother, I remember the first time I saw you, stark mad, riding into the lodge on a lathered horse, your great knife raised to slay me—and I betrayed all my promises to my people, I wanted your love even then. It was as if I had found something that had been lost since before I was born. As if I had found a part of myself.”

  Though I would not let him wake, Dannoc stirred in his sleep, turning toward Kor, stretching a hand toward him for a moment before it stilled and lay slack on the ground.

  Kor went and kneeled beside him. Intensely he said, “Have you not felt it too, Dan, how there is something odd, fated, about us? The two of us, and Tass. Dan, remember how she stared when she first came to us? As if she recognized us, though she had never seen us before?”