Godbond (2 page)

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?”

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.