Godbond Read online

  He touched his bond brother’s hand, but I willed Dannoc deeper into sleep.

  “Ai, but you are exhausted,” Kor murmured. “And small wonder. You ventured … you came so close.…” The tumult in his face stilled as he gazed at Dan, remembering something of which I knew nothing. “Mindbond,” he whispered, and his eyes had grown calm and full of courage.

  He took Dannoc’s quiet hand in his and passed the grip of their bond brotherhood, kneeling by his sleeping brother’s side, as still as the sleeper, and in their stillness I sensed mindspeaking. Then Korridun laid his brother’s hand softly down. He bent and kissed Dan on the brow, the kiss of a king. Then, letting his touch not linger, he got up, mounted his horse and rode away, bound toward Seal Hold.

  He had come to the mountains to find his brother and bid him a fitting farewell. That done, he went back the way he had come, to the place where his duty lay, where his people and their quarrels awaited him.

  I watched after him, knowing I would not allow myself to look on him secretly again. I lost all strength, all resolve, all warrior hardness, doing so.

  Then I waited where I was. The sun rose high before Dannoc awoke, looked around him, then got up and moved about softly, silently, as if remembering a good dream.

  In truth, he was very comely, even with his blackened eyes and broken nose, for he was tall and strong of bone, nobly browed and fair of face and goodly, like the mountains he loved, and I could not entirely hate him, though I wished to. We were too much alike, he and I. Like me, he loved only one thing more than Korridun, and that was—the world itself.

  And I would have it, and I would fight for it, and I would kill him if need be, to take it.

  He rode away, upmountain, eastward, his back to the way Korridun had taken, and I watched after him, and saw a flash of silver amid the blue pines: the wolf, keeping its distance from him, yet trotting along with him.

  It was as well, perhaps, that Korridun’s people were quarreling with the Otter River Clan, and that the Fanged Horse Folk would come raiding. It was as well that Dannoc would face starvation and the enmity of the Cragsmen. It was as well that Tassida would face mortal dangers as well. My fiery Tassida, wherever she had gone.

  It was well that—that other enemies might kill them, that I might not have to slay—these three whom I loved.…

  For slay them I would, I vowed within myself, if they came in the way of my plan.

  I flew away seaward, swiftly, and plunged to my undersea realm, and took my proper shape as goddess of Tincherel, and sent my fell servants forth to harry the swordbearers, all three of them, but especially Tassida, should they find her, for she needed to be kept afraid. Dannoc and Korridun might meet again, it would not surprise me, but if Tassida joined them, I would have no choice.…

  And as an afterthought, I bade the servants bring me the wolf.

  Chapter One

  I am a madman, a murderer, a mystic, and above all, Sakeema’s fool. Always, Sakeema’s fool. I am he whom folk called Dannoc, the dreamwit who left his bond brother in search of the god.

  And I found him soon, in a way. I starved, those early days of the journey, for there was scant food to be found on the mountainpeaks, and at the Blue Bear Pass, as I lay weak from hunger and chilled by the thin air off the eversnow, he came to me.

  His head crowned in skyfire glory, he looked down on me. Lying on stony ground, blinking up at him, I could not see his face.

  “Sakeema?” I mumbled. I had seen him so once before, in vision.

  “Don’t call me Sakeema, Dannoc!” A well-beloved voice, annoyed as always when I addressed him by that name. For a time I had thought he was the god. It was my bond brother, Kor.

  But when he kneeled beside me, helping me to struggle up and sit with him, still I could not see his face. I badly wanted to see again his quiet, dark-eyed face. But it was hidden by the blaze of light around his head, and I felt as if the god held my shoulders in his hands.

  “Are you sure?” I murmured. “You look so much like him.”

  “Dannoc, you are lightheaded.” And no wonder, after the many days without sufficient food. “Come on. I will take you back to Seal Hold.”

  Only the world’s peril could have made me leave him as I had done. The vast, wild world, mountainpeaks, meadows, pine forests, plains, all dying, falling bit by bit into Mahela’s maw. To my soul’s center I wanted to go back and be with him again, yet I could not. “Must go find Sakeema,” I muttered, and his hands sagged away from me.

  Seeker, he mindspoke me, how do you expect to find Sakeema until you have truly found yourself?

  He cast aside a king’s distance, mindspeaking me, he was all candor, his soul bared to mine. Though there was never less than truth in Kor, ever.… But I did not heed him, I snorted in scorn, deeming that I knew myself well enough. What was there to know? That I was the only one in the six tribes crazed and foolish enough to go off in search of the god?

  Kor—if it was Kor—the one with the face I could not see against skybright glow—he lifted one hand and touched my forehead in answer to my scoffing.

  “What is your name?” he asked aloud.

  And I could not remember. I was madman, murderer, once again in the prison pit and utterly at his mercy, but unafraid. And I could not remember my own name.

  “Of what age were you when you took your name vigil?”

  The same question he had asked me once before, but this time I remembered the answer. I had been thirteen, and my father had braided my sunbleached hair for me into the two braids of a Red Hart adult and warrior. How I had loved him in those days, my father, king of the Red Hart Tribe.… He had turned back and embraced me yet one time more before he had left me. I remembered clearly enough the days alone on the crags up amid the eversnow, where the air was thin and nothing came but wild sheep and the black eagles soaring. I remembered the fasting, the lightheaded weakness that had come over me, the same hunger-weakness that I had felt all too much of late.… And I remembered, or relived, the vision:

  A hunter, a proud Red Hart hunter in deerskin lappet and leggings, bare-chested, with the yellow braids lying long on his weather-browned, battle-scarred shoulders. His head high, his blue eyes keen. Myself, when I grew older, I had thought or hoped as a stripling of thirteen summers. The hunter kneeled to study the ground, finding his way along a faint trail. Then he stood and scanned the land intently, and I saw that he had ventured to a mountain-peak, and that his blue eyes, deep as highmountain sky, searched crag and eversnow and meadow, spruce forest and pine forest and fir forest and distant shortgrass steppe, hilly uplands and river valleys and even the vast plains and the vast sea—all the world he scanned, searching. He carried a well-curved bow, and he raised it and shot a redfletched arrow, far, far, so far I could scarcely follow its flight. I lost sight of the hunter and saw only the arrowbut no, the hunter was the arrow, its sharp stone head wore his keen-eyed face, his long braids streamed in the wind of its passing. It pointed sometimes downward toward the belly of the earth and sometimes upward toward the sky, but it never fell to earth, and its red feathers beat like the wings of a red bird. And it shone like the sun, its seeking head and feathered shaft aglow with sunyellow glory, and then, as if it had just seen me, it shot straight at me to bury its sharp stone head in my heart, or so I thought. It sped toward me, the face of the hunter turned eagerly toward me—but I gasped for breath, seeming already to feel that bolt in my gut, and I blinked, ending the vision.

  Dannoc, Dannoc, Dannoc. My name was Dannoc, “the arrow.”

  I looked at the shining head and shadowed face of the one next to me. “Dannoc is my name,” I told him.

  “Are you certain?”

  Such nonsense. It had been my name for years. How could I be less than certain? The image of the arrow had filled my sight. “Of course I am certain.”

  “Of course. Are you ever less than sure?” Affection along with the gentle mockery in his voice. “But I think it is not your true name. Call yourself,
rather, Darran, ‘the seeker.’ The hunter, the one who follows the faint trail.”

  I gazed with caught breath, struggling to understand what he was saying.

  “Luckily, ‘Dan’ will do for both,” he added in a voice both tender and oddly aloof. “Farewell, Dan, my friend. Seek well. I will miss you while you are parted from me.”

  “Kor! No!”

  Like the arrow in my vision he took flight, soaring skyward and away from me, shining like the sun.

  “Wait! Kor!” I cried out, struggling to rise, falling back on the ground instead. Odd, that I was so weak I could not stand. Hunger had not yet made me so weak.… In desperation I mindcalled him. Kor! By all the bonds that join us—

  It was no use. Mindspeak carried no farther than tongueshot, in my experience, and already he had dwindled to a light like a daytime star, and then he was gone. Far, far away from me.

  I must have been weeping. My face, wet with tears—but tears did not rub so. Something warm and wet scraping my face.…

  I came to myself and cursed myself for a wanhope. It was the wolf, my companion, licking my face to rouse me from my sleep, my dreaming. As soon as it saw I was awake, it backed away from me so that I would not touch it.

  Shakily I got to my feet. Chill, rocky mountainpeak and eversnow all around. Anything else had been all dream, or vision brought on by my starvation, like that name vision years before.… Of course Kor had not been with me, no matter how much I longed for him. He was with his people in Seal Hold. I, a willful blunderhead, had left him there.

  “I was dreaming of Kor,” I said to the wolf, my voice trembling like my legs.

  I bent as slowly as an old woman to pick up my bow and arrowcase, so weak with hunger and longing that I had to steady myself with a hand against the ground.

  “What a halfwit I am,” I told the wolf after I had straightened. “Kor would never hide his face from me. He does not—he does not fly like a god.…”

  Yet the things he had said had seemed so true, I would have put my hand in fire for them. I had walked through fire once for his sake.

  “The dreamer in me wants to say it was Sakeema,” I muttered to the wolf.

  It listened solemnly. I noted, with the pang I felt anew every day, how thin it had grown under its graysheen fur. Sakeema in vision was of no use to me or to my dying world; I had to find him in flesh and in fact, alive and waking.

  I slung my arrowcase onto my shoulder. Alar, my blade, rode in her leather sheath on my hip. At no great distance stood my fanged mare, Talu, pawing at the scree and butting with her oversized nose, hunting for something good to eat, an adder perhaps. She swung her bony rump toward me in a bored way when I walked toward her, threatening to kick or make me chase her, but on that day she let me take hold of her readily enough. A good thing, for I could not have caught her otherwise. I had to steady myself by her headstall as I led her to the place where my riding pelt lay, and she gave me a contemptuous look.

  “Fathead,” I accused her, though in fact her head and all parts of her were anything but fat. She was rawboned and slab-sided, my Talu, her hide scarred by many battles, her fangs sharp and her temper sour. Ugly as the Fanged Horse tribesmen who had reared her. I slung the riding pelt and my empty food bags on her back, fastened the surcingle, and struggled onto her.

  Eastward I rode, on a horse the color of dry dirt and thunder-cone grit, with a wolf by my side, down the mountain flanks toward the place where I judged Sakeema’s cave might lie if the legends of my tribe spoke truth.

  Heartbreaking, how beautiful it all was still. The very rocks, lovely with gaywings and doveflower twining down. Spring was at its wild, dewdrenched height, and the wrens and warblers should have been trilling as loud as waterfalls leaping with snowmelt. But I heard no song of any bird except the whimper of sorrowdoves and, once, the dark calling of a raven. All the way up the Blackstone Path from Seal Hold I had seen no creatures moving, I had ridden through silence except for the rush of cascades. No chirring of squirrels in the blue pines and firs, no whistle of marmot or squeal of pika from the rocks, no thrush’s song. Not even so much as a wretched sparrow was to be heard any longer. Mahela had taken all the creatures into her maw.

  I had learned to eat grubs from rotting logs, potherbs, sparrow grass, even the lichens off the rocks. I had eaten vipers as my fanged mare did, stealing them from her after she had killed them. Talu would munch nests of asps, not minding the stings. Perhaps it was the poison that made her temper so vile.… In the highmountain meadow there had been nothing to eat, not even snakes, for the horse and the wolf and me.

  The nature of the land changed as I rode down the eastern slopes of the mountain called Shaman. No cataracts any longer, no spruce and blue pine. I rode through spearpine and towering yellow pine, saw the grass growing thick between the thin-branched, spice-dry trees. These were the reaches of the Red Hart Demesne. My people came here to hunt the deer. But I saw no herds fattening on the lush grass. I had seen no deer, not so much as a solitary stag, since the year before.

  I left the trail and rode aside, casting about, searching for a certain cave, which I had never seen except in a vision, which no one had ever seen, the cave where legend said Sakeema lay. Looking for the cave, or for those who could show it to me. The folds and steeps of the mountain flanks went on and in and up, vast beyond thinking, so vast that generations of my people had not explored half their indeeps. Even I was not fool enough to think I could find the secret place by myself.

  But once in Seal Hold I had dreamed of a white hind, and I had dreamed of her again on the journey since.

  In the dream I had heard the howling of wolves and the lamenting of birds, all the creatures of Sakeema mourning because Sakeema was dead. And I had seen the cave, a tall crevice in some wild mountainside, the entry shaped like a narrow fir tree, aspiring upward, with a cataract pooling by the threshold. And I had seen Sakeema’s body borne up the mountainside on the backs of stags. The deer were bringing his maimed body home from the hands of the torturers, home to his birthplace. Somewhere the kings who had killed him rejoiced, but every creature in the world hung its head in mourning.

  Hinds stood in a trembling cluster before the cave. And when the bier approached them, they went to Sakeema, and their soft muzzles touched the body of Sakeema, and they turned human, naked but covered with soft fur like that of fawns. And they wept. Weeping, they carried the body within the cave and laid it there. Then the white hind, she who had suckled Sakeema as a baby, the white hind in her deer form stood over the dead god and wept through the day and the night. And with sunrise Sakeema lay healed, alive and whole. But all the deer’s nuzzlings could not awaken him.

  His face—I knew it well, we had met before, yet I could not remember it when I awoke.

  Therefore I searched for the white hind or for the cave I had seen in the dream.

  I found nothing, neither cave nor hind and least of all the god. Or food. Nightfall came, and I slept while the wolf watched over me and hunted by turns. Perhaps it found itself a toad or a lizard lurking in the dark. I hoped so. At sunrise I groaned and got up and mounted Talu. I had scarcely strength to struggle onto her. If it were not for the horse, I would have been able to go no farther. But once on her, I rode grimly. Until sunset I searched, riding in broad zigzags across the mountainside, and I rode on into the dusk, for it is at dawn and dusk that deer are mainly to be seen.

  “Look,” I whispered suddenly, gladly, to the wolf trotting by my side.

  It was a deer. Not the white hind, but a red deer, a mere yearling, scarcely more than a fawn, standing at the verge of a thicket and watching me with slender legs drawn under it, poised for flight. I stopped Talu and looked, for the sight of the young creature, stare of dark eyes, great quivering ears, smooth flanks and the creamy fur of neck and belly—the sight of it gave me a dim sense of hope, however witless. Hungrily I gazed—it was heart hunger. I had no thought of food for my belly, and though my bow hung close by my hand I made no move
to use it. In that twilight moment I knew that I would gladly have eaten greens for my life’s time just to keep one such beautiful creature alive.

  For the span of a few precious breaths the deer stared at me as I sat Talu. Then a shadow came slipping over my head, out of the west, and even before I looked up I flinched and cowered, knowing what I would see.

  Devourer!

  No matter how often I saw the cold, foul brutes, I could never constrain that first panicky jolt of terror. Or—sheerest loathing as much as terror. Even at the distance and in the sweet, open air I seemed to smell the thing’s reek, that most horrible of all odors to me, smell of—woman, of lovemaking, turned to slime and decay. Even at the distance I seemed to feel the monstrous breasts at my face.

  Rippling wings of fish-gray flesh swooped overhead, huge, blocking out the day’s dying light. The single eye peered whitely just above the headless thing’s hard dugs. I saw the—clam, the cleft, swollen like that of a bitch in heat, just beneath the monster’s thrashing tail, and in the midst of that vast bulk, the maw, ringed with spearpoint teeth, wide open to take in whatever the mindless thing’s cold mistress had commanded.

  Alar sprang out of the scabbard to meet my hand, her pommel stone blazing, for she liked the minions of Mahela no better than I did.

  Scudding over me, the devourer bellied down on the deer.

  I shouted and sent Talu leaping forward, lifting my sword, more enraged than if the monster had attacked me. I should have known its errand was not to me. It would attempt me in the dark of night, sometime when I had moved in my sleep and my hand lay far from my sword. The mindless thing, it yet had cleverness enough to fear my sword. And by Alar’s soul, she and I would not let it take a yearling deer!

  But all was over even as I shouted. The deer had only time to bleat once and take a single leap before it was gone.