Mindbond (32 page)

A devourer had me in its grim embrace.

Ai!
I fought to throw it off. Hard, seawater-chill breasts against my face, thick serpentine tail binding my legs, fish-gray folds holding the rest of me, I knew them all too well, and I knew struggling was of no use, and yet I struggled. I kicked, I strained against the weight of the boneless flesh that pinned me to the ground, my chest tightened, I could not breathe … I had to calm myself. My fear, my despair only let the creature's spearhead teeth bite deeper into my gut.

The very fitting emblems of Mahela's mindless greed, the devourers were. They had no heads, their maws were in their bellies, and like hers their whole will was to take, grasp, possess. The creatures of small self-will, the doves, the deer, the children, they took at a single gulp. Kings and warriors they found harder to bear away to Mahela, but they had the persistence of madwomen. Even the most valiant of warriors they could overpower in the course of a single long night. Seldom they found a king, such as Korridun, with the strength to defy them. Then they turned to an abomination worse than rape. The brutes could change shape by shooting out cold seawater, flattening their dugs, furling themselves into a sort of huge phallus. With serpent tail thrashing in air they could pin a strong victim to the ground and bore like a leech until they found their way within, where they took hold of heart and soul. Ytan was such a victim, unsouled because of his own strength, with only his body left to him, his own body and a keen mind to do evil.

I could not let that happen to me. I had vowed to Kor once that I would kill myself first—but then who would quest for the god?

By an effort of will I steadied myself, made my frantic body lie still. The cold, slimy breasts, large and hard as the melons the Herders grew, pressed against my face-no matter. If I stopped struggling and breathed shallowly and slowly, I could yet breathe. The capelike wings of the thing pinning my arms to my sides so that I could not reach my sword. No matter. When I centered myself there would be no need of the sword. The eely tail tightening around my legs, the maw sucking at my belly, strong as sea tide, working to take me in—none of it mattered, for the monster could not have me. I was bullheaded, my tribefellows had always said. I would be stubborn in defiance, more stubborn than any minion of Mahela, once well centered in self.

I was—a Red Hart? But no, not entirely, not since I had gone away. I did not braid my hair, I had eaten fish with the Seal Kindred, I had changed shape into a seal and traveled the greendeep to Mahela's realm. I wore woolens like the Herders, or furs, or whatever came to hand. Sometimes I even slept in a shirt. I was no longer at one with my tribe, and my thoughts were no longer their thoughts.

I was—a hunter? But hunters killed the creatures of Sakeema. Did I wish to kill the creatures of Sakeema any longer? Unsure, I let my thoughts speed on. I was—a warrior? But I had left my bond brother to face war alone. No proper warrior, I. A storyteller, yes—but I could sense no ending but doom to my tale. I was—was—

I could not remember my name. Chill of fear crept up my backbone.

Distantly I sensed the flow of my own warm blood. The teeth had pierced, perhaps to my innards. Sakeema, I silently begged, help me. Help the dolt who cannot remember his own name. Sakeema, please! Confound the god, no face to him, no place, no tribe, where was he?

Sakeema.

I was—one who yearned for the god. I was—seeker. I was—Darran?

The name felt strange. I thought it uncertainly. But as I held it in my mind, not sure whether to keep it or send it away, I felt the devourer falter in its worrying at me, I felt the grip of its wings weaken. My right hand shot out, reaching for Alar, the sword lying beside me in the grass.

The devourer knew what swords were for. It lifted off me in haste, and though a moment before I had been desperate, I was now full of gleeful daring, and my left hand darted upward, grasping the flange of one strong, rippling wing. The creature pulled me upright in its surge to get away. “Yah! Wait a moment, my beauty!” I implored it as Alar flashed in air, blazing, eager. “My mare likes fish, perhaps she would care to eat you!”

Alar slashed deep. But the monster gave me a buffet with its other wing and tore away from my grasp, and I do not know how badly I wounded it, for I was staring like a fool at—a second one, another devourer, only a stride away from me, just lifting off—off my comrade, the wolf!

Both devourers sped away in the night, and I did not see them go. I was gawking at the wolf. “Are you all right!” I exclaimed at it, though I scarcely thought it possible.

But the wolf got to its feet without so much as a stagger, and sneezed strongly and rubbed its muzzle in the grass and rolled, trying to clean the slime from its fur. And I stood thinking of Korridun, of the time he had slept beside me in the night and a devourer had lain on him and one on me, and we had handbonded to help each other. And I had been nearly killed, but Korridun had gotten up without a mark on him.

I stood with blood trickling down from the welts on my belly and said to the wolf, my voice shaking, “By my body, wild brother, you must have the soul of a strong warrior! Is that how you have survived all these years? By having the will of a human and a king?”

The wolf stopped rubbing its graysheen fur against the grass and froze in a crouch, looking at me very much as if it had understood me. I saw a moon-white glint in its eyes and stepped back, half afraid that it would attack me. But the next moment it flashed away, gone in the night.

“Wild brother! Wait! Come back!” I called after it, knowing it would not. For the wolf in no sense belonged to me, not even so much as the horse did. Wild-fanged mare though she was, Talu balkily came to my call and obeyed me with ill grace when I rode her. But the wolf traveled with me or not, aided me or not; just as it chose. Nor had I ever presumed to give a name to it.

I sighed and sat down in the dark and thought about the wolf, wondering why it had looked so enraged and afraid, why it had left me so abruptly, how it had withstood the devourer. Then, as I rubbed the feel of the devourer from my face and smelled its stench still on my hands, my thoughts turned to the other, even more eerie and urgent matter: that of my name. I remembered it well enough now that the pressing need had passed: it was Dannoc. But that other name, Darran … it had helped me. It must in some wise be true.…

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?”