Godbond (14 page)

I blurted, “You—you do not know your human mother.”

“I do not know her, or any human father, or any name that either of them might have given me.”

Her name, Tassida, “the horseback rider”—she must have taken it for herself. I gazed back at her, the proud bearing of her head at once defying me and imploring me, and I fiercely wished that she would let me mindspeak her, for I had begun to have a faint sense of the Tass within, of how to love her, and no spoken words could be as soft, as gentle, as that silent touch of mind … and in front of gruff old Ayol, yet …

Nevertheless, I tried it aloud, softly, gently, and let Ayol listen all he liked and watch with his pale yellow eyes. “The cave … where you were born … it is the one where we—”

“Where we stayed. Yes.” The hush in her voice told me that she had heard my hidden message, of love, of acceptance.

But still I did not know which way I would ride when it came time for me to leave this place.

Chapter Ten

When sunset had lengthened the shadow of Spirit Flame so that it shaded the Herder village, Tass and I went outside to wander. All the Herders were out and about now, and we exchanged greetings with many of them, but none of them knew any more than we did of Sakeema—indeed, many of them angrily did not wish to speak of him. When twilight was deepening and stars were springing forth like frost flowers in the eastern sky, when the sudden nighttime coolness lay on the land, Tass and I walked apart from the others and talked until long after dark.

She told me of her many travels. Telling me of her beginnings seemed to have tapped a wellspring of talk in her. She told me how far she had ventured, searching for the tribe, the parents she did not know: far to the north into the unknown mountains without names, far southward to where the coastline was no longer rock but flattened sand, far eastward onto the plains that seemed never to end. Northward and southward, she had found nothing. Eastward, nothing but the ruins of great stone villages that must once have been ten tens of times larger than ours.

“The fortress above the pool of vision,” she told me, “I think must have been an outpost.”

Those words were strange to me,
fortress, outpost
. She had learned them in vision, as she had learned other things she had taught us of, Kor and me, things long forgotten. Swords, sailing ships, castles, crowns, thrones, kingdoms, jewels. Tass made a poet and minstrel and visionary such as none other in the dying world.

“What did you see in the pool of vision,” I asked her, since she was in a mood to talk, “the day you brought forth your sword?” But she fell silent. We walked on across the level land in a long silence.

“Ask me anything else, Dan,” she replied at last, far more tamely than was her wont.

We spoke of Ytan, of his threats, a peril far smaller than the other perils that faced us, threats nearly laughable compared to threat of world's end. And we spoke of Kor. Long and softly we spoke of Kor, turning and turning him in our minds, as if he were a part that had to be pieced together with the two of us, a shard made to fit into the pattern of our lives somehow. But we could not comprehend Kor, or the pattern, for we scarcely understood ourselves. The longer we talked, the stranger everything seemed. Love, our love for each other, for Kor, should have been simple, but there was something uncanny.… And there was the feeling I could not name, the passion that had filled me when Tassida's fingers had touched mine in handbond, a feeling so awesome that I was afraid to touch her hand again. Since we had talked I knew more of Tass than ever before, yet I seemed to know less. Indeed I scarcely knew her at all, and I scarcely knew myself anymore, and I did not know how to pursue my quest.

And though I felt an unreasoning hope just being with Tass, there was small hope for me in her words. The world, so vast—I had known that a solitary rider was small and the world so vast, yet I had not truly known. Tassida had searched most of her life and found nothing. To the north, nothing, to the south, nothing but wilderness, to the east, nothing but empty plains and ruins. To the west, world's end, or edge, and Kor, and Mahela's greendeep. How, then, could I expect to find the god?

Tassida and I talked quietly and wandered a great circle on the level plain until we came back to the Herder pit village again. Except for the soft movements of livestock, all was silent. The Herders had long since gone to their beds. We found our pelts, heaped with Calimir's gear where Tass had piled it, and lay on the open ground under the stars, and defied death in the leisurely ways, pleasuring each other for a long time. Later, still naked and pressed closely together, we eased into warm, sweet sleep.

It was the last such sleep we were to know for a long time.

In the lifting darkness just before dawn a sound like thunder started in the earth, jarring us out of slumber, a moving thunder within earth itself, like a stampede of a hundred hundred great bison running swiftly nearer, and the ground shook as the earth-storm passed under us. Then more, again, waves and tides of the ground thunder, like ocean swell breaking again and again, so that I could not tell the coming from the going of them, and the ground shook constantly. I tried to stand up, Tass and I clinging together tried to stand up, but every time we tried we were knocked down before we had more than struggled to our knees, and all around us rose the screams of the Herders from their houses below the ground, screams that we could hear even above the earth's roaring.

“Powers, they are being killed!” Tass exclaimed, her fingers digging into my shoulder, her voice near enough to my ear so that I could hear her above the uproar, could hear the sobbing in her throat. “They cannot get out. Ayol.…”

We could not even stand up to help them.

And with a thundering louder than any clamor of storm or ocean surf, with a hollow bellowing more fearsome than any tens of hundreds of bison trampling, with a jolt that sent us thudding hard to the ground, as if earth had twitched her hide to throw us off like so many flies, with a vehement roar Methven the Spirit Flame sent up a mighty spurt of red fire and a black shadowy hurling of stones. And to the northward I saw the wrathful blaze of Catalin Du, less fearsome only because farther away. And to the southward, Keb raised a tower of flame in the same way, and Senet—I could see no farther, but for all I knew every thunder cone was shuddering forth bloody blazing rock, earth's innards gone mad. A choking stench filled the air, and overhead the sky was utterly black.

All seemed dim and heavy after that, and slow, as if done under water. Tass and I did unaccountable things. We could not stand up for the earth's shaking, so we sat and pulled on clothing, I my lappet, she her tunic and trousers of wool, as if it would matter whether we were naked once we were dead. A slow flow of red fire was edging down Methven's shoulders, like a courtier's bright cape, and at last the tremors had calmed, but still we could not stand upright because of the stinging smoke. We crawled across ground cracked and pitted, roof timbers jutting out of an awful silence, no weeping of mothers, no wailing of children, it was all too deadly for that. In the bloody glow we could see a few Herders pulling themselves out of half-collapsed dwellings, then lying on the ground. Crawling past them, Tassida found the hole she wanted and went down it headfirst, like a rockchuck, and instead of helping her I lay and waited numbly. A while later she came up dragging Ayol by his shirt. The old Herder still lived, though I did not see how he could do so much longer, for his breath rattled and bubbled in his broken chest as he breathed. Yola lay dead below.

“Something—terrible—is happening,” Ayol wheezed when he caught sight of me, and I sat up and solemnly agreed with him.

“Yes, it is terrible.”

“No!” His smoke-bleared eyes flashed with annoyance, red in the glare of Spirit Flame. “Not—here. Somewhere. Something terrible.”

“Hush,” Tassida told him, her hand lying lightly on his injured chest, and he quieted under her touch and seemed to breathe more easily.

“Will the fire flow come here?” I asked her. “Must we move him?”

“I don't know,” she said.

The wooden weariness in her voice awakened what small courage was left in me. Keeping my head low and coughing in the stinking smoke, I blundered off until I found another pit not utterly destroyed, heaved up the timbers and clambered down to bring the folk up from underneath. Some of them yet lived, and there was a child who seemed hardly to be hurt at all, only stunned. I laid them down and found another dwelling. Haste, haste, my mind was crying out for haste now, lest folk smother because I had been such a slowcome. I labored until the sweat ran down my body as the streams of fire ran down Methven, wrestling bodies and sometimes living Herders from every pit in that place, and not until full daylight had come did I look up long enough to notice that the smoke had spread and thinned somewhat, making a thin gray blanket fit to lay over a corpse. Dawn sun on it turned the whole sky to a blood-colored haze.

And Herders were walking about, some of them whole, some of them wounded but strong enough to walk, tending those who were wounded worse than they. And at a distance I saw Ayol sitting up to drink the water Tassida offered him.

I lurched over and sat, or slumped, beside him. “What terrible thing?” I asked him as if we had only just spoken of it.

“I do not know.” His voice was far stronger—how could he still be alive, at his age, with his chest crushed in? Yet be seemed almost well again. “I do not know. But the thunder cones do not send forth fire unless dire events are afoot. Methven has not done so since Sakeema died.”

“Sakeema,” I muttered bitterly. The god's name meant little to me any longer.

Suddenly knowing that I was exhausted, I lay back where I was, my eyes closed against the stinging smoke. Gray ash was falling out of the air, settling on my face. I lay that way, drowsing but too weary to truly sleep, until I seemed to hear a voice coming to me on the thick and foul-smelling air.

“Dannoc.”

Spent, I ignored it.

“Dannoc! Sakeema help us all, what is the use of this lummox?”

Startled, I opened my reddened eyes and looked. At some distance to the westward of me a greenshade shimmered in air, drifting amid the gray smoke and ash and the red glow off the thunder cone's fiery slopes.

“My father!” I cried, scrambling to my feet, for once I had hearkened to it I knew that voice to my bones.

Ayol, blanket-wrapped and sitting at my feet, glowered up at me as if I were a madman. “He's lightheaded,” I heard Tassida say to the old man, and then to me, “Dan—”

“Do you not see him?” I exclaimed without looking around at her. “My sire! Hush, he speaks!”

“Pajlat and his minions have come to Seal Hold,” Tyonoc was telling me, his voice hollow and toneless on the wind. “Izu and the Otter River Clan have thrown in their lot with him, and the Cragsmen have come down from the crags to avenge their slain comrades. Korridun and his Kindred will face hard battle. Only Tyee goes to aid him, he and his warriors, and they have not yet topped the Blue Bear Pass.”

Though there had been no edge of reproach in his voice, in his words I heard nothing but most bitter reproach that I was not at Korridun's side. Bitter reproach, and cause for bitter fear. Dry-mouthed, I asked, “What means this fire out of the thunder cones?”

“First blows, perhaps, or first blood. I do not know.”

Such a cold fear lay heavy on me, crushing me like a devourer, that I could scarcely speak. At last I whispered, “The seven black peaks do not roar and flame every time men strike blows.”

“It may be that a king has died.”

And suddenly instead of my father's spirit it seemed to me that in the swirling of the smoke I saw Kor's face, the quiet quirk of his mouth that was as close as he most often came to a smile, his sober, dark eyes looking on me with love. But his dark hair was damp and matted with blood, and blood ran down the smooth shell-tan skin of his face.

I must have staggered, for in a stride Tassida was at my side, shoving a none-too-gentle hand under my elbow. “Dan,” she demanded, “what in Sakeema's name is going on? You are talking to air.”

“Kor,” I breathed, and I could make no more sense than that, for mountainpeaks were splitting asunder inside me, the sky had slipped upside down, earth cracking apart under my feet, all was falling to pieces, and in a single uncanny moment, with a feeling as if my own sword had found its way to my heart, I knew to my center of being the true meaning of despair. For I had a choice that was no choice, to pursue the quest that had once seemed so right, or to go to Kor—and I knew I would go to Kor, let the world writhe and die as it must. Let Sakeema sleep on, or laugh, the betrayer, for I would never find him. Let Mahela laugh as she surely would. Who had called me Darran, “the seeker”? I would seek no longer. I would go and die with my bond brother—if he was not dead already. Fool that I was, I should never have left his side.

“Kor is not here!” Tass snapped, and I flung off her hand.

“Do you think I do not know that?” I shouted at her as if it had somehow been her fault. “By my great, stupid body, what am I doing here? I must go to him! Small thanks to me if he is not already slain!”

“Go sleep,” Tass ordered. “You are raving.”

Nothing in the sky but ashes and gloom. My father's spirit was gone, and it seemed that Tass could not see it even had it stayed. And in a sense I was, indeed, raving, for I was in a frenzy to be off, with small sense and no patience left in me to explain to her that I was—what? Giving up, turning back, failing yet once again, yes. And likely I would fail to come to Kor in time to be of any good to him, for in all the lands of the six tribes I could not have come much farther from him than I was that dawn. Wrongheaded, thrice-accursed wantwit that I was.