Mindbond Page 19

  “Tassida?”

  “I touched you, to bring you out of your seal form. I thought it was you, shining like sunset, Kor lying beside you, the devourers coming from all directions. I touched you to be sure, helped you both to make the change, and now—”

  I understood. My way of becoming a seal had been different from Kor’s. “You desire me, as Birc once desired a deer maiden.”

  “It is more than that. I have always wanted you.”

  My heart, leaping like wildfire.

  “Dan, please. Lie with me. Now, before—before my courage fails me.”

  “Tass,” I breathed, and I did not ask her whether she loved me, then or ever. My love for her filled the night and left no room for any want of my own, except that I wished I could see her.

  My Tass, my love. Beloved like no other. A warrior’s muscles beneath her smooth skin, but she trembled like a dove under my hand. My Tass, with the brow of a hero and sweet virgin breasts … Not since I had been a callow young oaf, myself untried, had I taken a girl’s maidenhead, and I had hurt her. This time I must do better, far better, for Tass.

  Ai, that night. Moment by warm pressing moment I led her along the soft, venturing ways of love, and when she hung back I waited for her, I coaxed her. I was the salmon tide, she, the river. I was rainstorm and she the meadow. And learning not to be afraid she welcomed me, her quivering ceased, she gave me her trust, her lips moved against mine, her hands moved to caress me. She was shy, bold, awkward, passionate. She was all the world, my Tass. I could have wept. She was amaranth, the flower of Sakeema, blossoming for me.… I think I have never been so gentle in lovemaking, so careful yet so ardent. I played upon her as she might have played upon a harp, I brought her to song’s height, hands on her breasts, she arched her strong back under me, and when I melted into her any pain she might have felt was magicked into ecstasy—

  Kor was there, with us.

  His presence, in my mind. The three of us, together. I laid my face down on Tassida’s shoulder, tears and sweat on my face, her fingers twined into my hair, my chest heaving against hers. And now that it was over, I wondered if she truly loved me, but I could not ask, for Kor’s sake. I ached.

  “Tass …” It was a plea, I hardly knew for what.

  “I love you, Dan. Since those first days, I always have.” A catch in her voice that caught at my heart. “I love you … because of the way you love Kor.”

  His presence, there with us, though his body still lay on the beach where we had left him, I felt sure of it. We did not speak further of him, Tass and I, because he was a tale to which we did not know the ending, a song half-remembered, a face in the dark.

  “So much I love you … I am afraid.”

  For the first time I began to understand her.

  “And I love you, I am half-mad with fighting my love for you,” I whispered to her. “And I also am afraid. Of you. Of Kor. Tass, what are we going to do?”

  Her silence gave me the answer, that there was no answer. I withdrew from her gently and found my clothing, wrapped on my lappet and leggings.

  “Dan, stay. Where are you going?” A quiet edge came into her voice. “Are you afraid to sleep here with me?”

  There had been no thought in me until then of the matter of Calimir, of how Kor and I had once joked that she was likely to alter a lover in the night.

  “Do you wish me to give you my knife?” she asked bitterly. “For safekeeping?”

  My hands froze in their motions, and more starkly than ever I wished I could see her face, and she mine. Looking at me, she could have seen better truth.

  “Tass,” I told her softly, “as far as I am able, I must spare Kor.”

  “But it is no use trying to hide this from him,” she said just as softly. “He will know. I think he knows already. Have you not felt it?”

  Her words frightened me anew. “Yes,” I said, fear or anger roughening my voice. “Yes, blast it, I felt him. But I am not going to flaunt anything before him.”

  “Dan—”

  “Tass, do not quarrel with me, please!” All seemed to be quarreling, those days, quarreling with the others, quarreling within myself. In my own plea I heard the echo of a madman’s roar.

  “I will quarrel with you all I want!” she retorted. Then, as if she no longer wanted to be close to me, she found her breeches, her ragged tunic, and slipped outside to put them on. By the time I lifted the leather flap to follow her, she was already striding back toward the beach.

  The moon had dropped far down the sky. Night was dying, and seemed very chill after the warmth of her bed. In silence I walked back to our campsite. Tassida was sitting by the embers of the fire and would not look at me. Kor lay wrapped in furs as if asleep. But I knew quite surely that he was not asleep, for I felt his waking presence, as I had sometimes felt it in Mahela’s realm. I did not speak to him, or mindspeak, but let him think he was deceiving me. I lay in my bed, huddled in my furs, and did not sleep any more than he did.

  In the morning we all three moved about as if in a waking dream, breaking camp. Tassida hailed Calimir with a whistle, and our two mares came loping in after him. They were not pleased to see us, wild things that they were, and we had to offer them cooked meat in order to lay hands on them. We ourselves did not eat. We put leather thongs to the mouths of the mares and rode them bareback, and without much talk we made the short journey to Seal Hold, where Istas lay dying.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Istas lay rotting away even as she lived.

  The reek was awful in her small chamber within the rock. I have a steady stomach for most things, but I could scarcely bear it, or bear to look at her. Trying not to retch, I turned away. Tassida had not come in—she was seeing to the horses. As for Kor, he stood stricken by Istas’s deathbed, his face chalk white beneath the bruises. This was the old woman who had mothered and badgered him through his youth, counseled him in his kingship, put on the regent’s cap for his sake. She was like parent or grandparent to him, and she was the backbone of Seal Hold. Seeing her laid low staggered him so that he bent as if under a blow.

  Dan!

  The mindcry was jolted out of him. And though I had been ready to flee the stench of sickness, I could not flee that summons. I reached out to him at once, handbonding, putting my other arm around him to support him. I knew that it was not only the sickroom smell that had made me turn away, that I had been ready to flee his heartache as well, and I was ashamed.

  I am sorry, I told him, meaning everything that I could say in so few words—that Tass and I had hurt him, and the death of Istas would hurt him, and there was some dark anger in me bent on hurting him yet more, and for all that and whatever pain might ever befall him I sorrowed. But I think he did not hear what I was saying. He was staring at Istas, stunned, struggling for breath.

  She looked back at us with blind, whitened eyes. “No fish,” she rasped.

  Kor made a wordless, panting noise, which she must have taken for protest. Her head rolled from side to side, the sagging muscles of her neck strained as she tried to lift it from its fleece pillow.

  “No fish!” she repeated hoarsely. “No fish for the shitbottom Otters. Ten day—storm …”

  Her old head lolled back, and her eyes closed, as far as they were able. Even the eyelids were eaten away by the disease, as if Mahela were feeding on her, great glutton, could not wait …

  “Istas!” Kor pleaded in a choked voice, and leaving my handbond, my steadying arm, he went to her and touched her twisted fingers, then her brow. Istas lay fish-belly pale in the dim chamber, and did not seem to feel him near her. Not yet dead, for I could see her labored breathing, but drawing nearer to death. I could not follow Kor to comfort him. I could not bear to stand so close to her, more horrible than any corpse. But he stayed by her until I felt faint from drowning in her stench. When he left her at last and came with me, we walked back to the hearth hall in a sickened stupor.

  Most of Kor’s people were there, waiting to speak wi
th us, their numbers fewer than they should have been, their faces somber. Our greeting this time had been tearful, an overgrateful gladness mixed with sorrow.

  “How is she?” asked a woman, going back to take up the nursing of Istas. Kor stared dumbly, for how could he answer?

  “Now that she has seen you, Korridun King, she will die soon,” said another, as if it would be better so. “Now that she knows you have returned, she will let go.”

  “What has she told you?” someone asked.

  Kor sat woodenly in the king’s place of honor by the hearth, without answering at once. “She speaks of fish,” he said finally, and many voices spoke, vying to tell him what Istas could not.

  It had been a hard winter in many ways. Cold—the deadly, ice-laden fog that chills the lungs had moved in from the sea and hung over Seal Hold, killing the weakly young and the old who were infirm. And to add to the burden of grief, three sturdy babies had been taken without a trace, snatched away by demons in the night. My glance found Winewa in the crowd, but she would not meet my eyes.… And then Istas had grown weak and taken to her bed.

  “And then the storm,” said Kor, his voice low.

  Yes, had she spoken of the storm? An unaccountable storm, faster than birdflight it had swooped in from the sea, catching the men out fishing in their coracles, drowning many. Every family of the clan had suffered a loss or losses, this grim winter. And the storm had stayed through days and days, tempest of wind and rain, strange green lightning, fearsome noise, hail the size of hand-flung stones. Those within the stone caves of the Hold had been safe, but there had been no fishing done, only oats to eat and those soon gone, for the crop had been poorly. No peace offering of oats for the Fanged Horse Folk this year. No dried fish for the Otter River Clan.

  “Have they asked?”

  “They will not dare.”

  Heads nodded, and many voices agreed, grim. The salmon run had been sparse, they told us. As always. For years within living memory the salmon had been each year less than the last, until the days when the salmon had crowded the banks with their red-flashing numbers belonged to the realm of tales and legend. But this year for the first time the Otter River clanspeople had rebelled against their lot. In their long raiding boats made of hollowed logs they had skimmed the rapids of the river and shot down to the sea. And there, daring each other on with shouts of anger, they had taken clubs and killed the seals on the rocks, nursing mothers and pups. A single night they had feasted on the meat, but they had not been able to take much back with them. They had taken the skins, and the carcasses had been left to rot, to draw flies, to draw the wrath of the Seal fishermen who had found them.

  “Brave Otters!” It was a young woman I remembered, Lumai, speaking with bitter contempt. “They might as courageously have killed suckling infants and women helpless in childbed.”

  It was true. Seals were all but helpless on the rocks, unable to run, their slashing teeth easily avoided. And the killing of the white-furred cubs was an abomination.

  “You who have been seals, tell us,” someone else asked harshly, “do seals kill so many salmon that the Otter clansfolk should kill them?”

  Kor seemed stupefied, as if by too many blows. I answered, “No. Seals eat mainly the small fish that school, the large fish seldom, and salmon no more than the others.”

  “It was us they killed,” said Kor in a low voice.

  Everyone looked at him.

  “It was us, the Seals, that the Otters killed, do you not see? Because for so many years we have fed them. They hate us.”

  “If they hate us, my king, it is because of the fosterlings who were slain, Voss and Taditu.” A deep, strong man’s voice. Olpash. The greedy bastard, get of Mahela, would he never give up trying to best Kor? It was like him, to bring back the matter of the guardsmen I had killed when I was not in my right mind. There had been bitter feelings against Kor because he had shown mercy to me. Olpash, playing for power, would have liked to bring back those feelings.

  Kor straightened where he sat, and though he did not raise his voice his words struck like stones.

  “Already sharpening your knife, Olpash?” He speared the stocky man with his gaze. There was not a sound in the hall, not even from children. Everyone heard. “Can you not wait a few weeks to kill me and take my place? I have only just returned, after all. Istas still lies dying, and she is my regent. If she does not die in time for you, will you feel obliged to kill her too?”

  Olpash rose with a showing of stiff dignity and wrath restrained. With a mind, also, I thought, to displaying his bearlike bulk before all present. Standing, he hoped to make the seated king look smaller. “A question not deserving of an answer,” he growled. “I—”

  “You are a strutting scoundrel. And you are going to be disappointed, Olpash.” Kor also got to his feet, and the smoldering fire of his wrath showed Olpash’s bluster for what it was: a schemer’s ploy. But Kor spoke from the heart. “No longer will I bear with your mutterings, my people. No longer will I be a king for you to humble when it pleases you. You must be led, and follow with one heart, if we are to survive the time that faces us. And I will no longer keep the vigil you have heretofore required of me. I have ventured to Mahela’s realm and returned, and that is proving enough for anyone. Even a Seal king.”

  Some few hundred still faces turned toward him, eyes on him, no sound from any of them, not even a murmur, not even from Olpash.

  Tassida had come in while he spoke, and stood at his side, by his right hand. And seeing her, I had risen to stand at his left.

  “The Fanged Horse Folk will raid us for what little we have left,” Kor said, speaking to his people, ignoring Olpash. “And likely the Otter River Clan will make war on us as well. But we will withstand them all.”

  His face, battered, lean from hardship, his eyes, keen and weary and hard, the eyes of a war leader—he was a king. I had forgotten how he could be a king to die for, to walk through fire for.

  He drew his sword, and as if at one with him Tass and I drew ours.

  “We will withstand them all, and Mahela’s hell, and whatever evils may befall. Together.” Kor spoke so fiercely, I knew he held back tears.

  He raised his blade high above his head. We two, his comrades, raised ours and touched them to his. And where the three swords crossed, starform, there blazed out a light fit to dim the rising sun, white as starlight and dartling, giving off spears of white sheen. The stones in the pommels shone as well, red and sun-yellow and amaranthine. Faces gaped up, pallid. Olpash staggered back and sank down, missing his seat, falling to the stone floor.

  “We three together make a multitude,” Kor said.

  Swordlight flared once so brightly that people hid their faces with their hands. Even Kor narrowed his eyes, and I blinked. Then light dimmed, and shakily I lowered my blade like the others and sheathed her.

  Fear showed in the eyes of the Seal people, but also wonder and a hesitant hope. They went out to their many tasks, mending their broken boats and building new coracles for fishing in, trying to gather some sort of food to subsist on meanwhile. And they went the more readily now that they had much to talk of. Tassida watched them with a small frown.

  “Your folk are like great children, Kor,” she said softly. “I love them as if they were my own children. They think we have come to save them from whatever threatens them. They dream that not even Mahela can harm them so long as they shelter under your sword.”

  He let out his breath between his teeth, turning away from both of us. “Just so they do what we say,” he muttered, and he strode out. I was left looking at Tassida.

  “Something is wrong,” I said to her, “and I do not know the name of it.” She nodded, but she gave me no answer.

  I found my arrows and bow and went up through the blue pines to hunt meat for the horses and for Kor’s people. By my mother’s bones, but it was good to be back in a place of sunlight and trees and sweet air again. The tiny nodding lilies of many colors were struggl
ing up in the cracks of the rocks, amidst moss and ferns, their stems so slender they made my heart ache. Looking at them, I walked for a goodly distance before I missed birdsong. Then I stopped and listened. I heard nothing but choughs and sorrowdoves. The day was chill for springtime, but more birds should have been singing.… And I had seen no game, or any sign of game. And already I was tired.

  I went on nevertheless, much farther, and at last I found a small herd of wild pigs, foul, fierce creatures, and shot more than I could well carry. I set two on my shoulders and dragged the others. By the time I came back to Seal Hold it was nearly dark, and I was ready to fall and dripping with sweat even in the chill. Kor’s folk made much of me, as if I had saved their lives, forsooth! The pigs were butchered, and the offal went to the horses.

  “Game is scarce,” I told Kor.

  “So my people say.” His voice sounded dead.

  I ate little, and left the hearth hall early, found my chamber and fell asleep at once, I was so spent. When I awoke in the morning Tassida lay beside me.

  “Where is your knife?” I teased her.

  “I have had no need of it. You were too tired.”

  Had she forgiven me? I could scarcely tell. But I kissed her, held her close to me for a while, and then we went out, for there was much to be done.

  Kor had gathered his people on the windy, rocky brow of the headland, and he was dividing them into groups: the old men and boys who must go fish in the remaining boats, the matrons and children who could cook and gather and nurse Istas, the youths who must prepare for war. He himself would drill them.

  “Dan, if you could bring in more game … I hate to send you off by yourself, but I can spare no one to go with you.”

  I nodded.

  “And make us some babies, Dannoc,” some youth from the crowd called, “to increase our number.”

  A quick splash of laughter—even Winewa smiled. But Kor did not smile. And conscious of Tassida, I may have winced.

  “Tass,” Kor said.

  He put her in charge of the maidens and younger women, to teach them the ways of weapons. A murmur of dismay rose from the grayheads at that. Young women of the Otter and Red Hart fought and hunted beside their men, but not those of the Seal, forsooth! Still, they turned away, and there would have been no more said had not Olpash, always on the lookout for advantage, thrust himself forward.