Godbond (20 page)

The wolf leaped at him from the side.

It had been climbing toward a higher vantage, I think, to attack him from above and bear him down with the force of its leap and his weight, as it had done before. But seeing me in danger of being dead within the next few heartbeats, it leaped from the side and somewhat below him, growling like distant thunder, jaws agape and seeking for a grip on his arm or thigh, white teeth gleaming—

He dodged and met the wolf's throat with his booted foot, sending it over the edge of the crag with a single hard kick. I heard a sound as if a branch had snapped, and a deep-chested shriek, and then silence.

I leaped in my turn. The lance had wavered, and even had it not I think no lance could have stopped me any longer, for I was insane with anger and sorrow. Ytan's spearpoint left a red trail on my belly—I struck the weapon aside and rushed him. He gasped and tried to put the length of the spear shaft between us again, scrambling back and circling the narrow clearing atop the crag, and all the time my sword hunted him, hungry for his blood. And I was bellowing and roaring a cry of rage without words, for there were no words to tell the wrongs he had done me, the griefs I would avenge. The matter of the wolf was only his most recent evil. He had looked on Tassida with leering eyes and plotted to dishonor her. He had helped to kill my mother, he had schemed with my father to kill me, he had tried himself to kill me more times than I had fingers on one hand—

He could not escape me for all his dodging and circling. Alar pursued him like a vengeful eagle. Nor was there any quick way off the crag, that he could flee me. His death was at hand, and I could tell he knew it, for his face was pale, he panted, he had ceased to show his teeth in a warrior's grin. He tried to parry my blows with the shaft of his spear—Alar cut him lightly in the shoulder, the head. She was like a wildcat that day, cruel, taunting her prey. Or I was … was I cruel? I would not after all take long about killing him. Backing away from me, Ytan stumbled, fell hard to the stone on which we stood, and his hacked and ruined spear clattered away from him. Out of his belt he snatched a short knife of flint, a pitiful weapon, not even as fearsome as the blackstone one Tass had broken for him. In a final act of defiance he raised it, and I stood over him, sword lifted to strike the death blow. Alar hovered in air like a hawk stooping—

I could not kill him.

He was my brother, my shadowed double.

He was evil, and in a twisted way more dear to me than self. Had I not turned my back on Sakeema?

All my bloodthirst and my vengeful wrath left me in a moment, so that I stood weak and shaking and as pale as Ytan, and Alar bore my shaking arm down with her weight, hung heavy at my side, her light gone out. Ytan was … courageous in evil. Ytan was … a creature of Sakeema? What I saw before me was only shell, for Mahela's fell servant held in thrall what was more truly Ytan … but it did not matter. He could not be merely killed. He had somehow to be redeemed. I had somehow to be redeemed.

“Ytan,” I whispered. “My brother.”

And seeing what had happened, he grinned again, baring his teeth in a killer's snarl. Then he rose lightly to his feet and raised his stone knife to stab me. I stood planted like a tree, in a trance of disbelief, though I knew he was demon-possessed and deadly—but for a moment I had thought of him only as my brother, and all my love for him was in my voice, and I could not believe he was coming at me to kill me—and even then I could not lift my sword against him. Nor did I move to flee him until it should have been too late, until the knife was plunging at my heart—

A clashing, thundering sound, and a roaring, and with what must have been the last of her strength Talu came lurching and scrabbling across the rocks, charging Ytan.

He jerked round to face her, so that his knife missed my chest and merely grazed my shoulder. In the next heartbeat Talu was rearing over him, striking with her deadly forehooves, ready to bury her fangs in his back. Downward swing of her heavy head—fangs struck just below his shoulder blades, and Ytan howled in agony. But he was no laggard in battle, Ytan. With his puny stone blade he sliced the mare's throat open to the bone, and Talu thudded to the stone. Staggering, blood streaming, Ytan fled over the lip of the crag and out of my sight, and I let him go, standing very still and staring at the mutilated body of my ill-tempered fanged mare.

She had let her head rest against me, a few days before, and had not harmed me. Was it for affection, or merely because she was starved and weary? Had she attacked Ytan to save me, or to feed her own hunger? Had she loved me at all, in her own way? Did it matter? I had loved her, for all that she was wild as a wolf.…

The wolf.

Talu was dead. Later I would mourn her, but I could not help her. Hastily, half climbing, half sliding down the crag, I went to look for the one who might yet be living.

The wolf lay at the foot of the rock, whining and shivering, with one foreleg bent at an odd angle. “Broken,” I said aloud.

It looked back at me with dark eyes narrowed in pain.

“We must tend it, wild brother.” It was hard for me to think, dismayed as I was by the events of the day, so I thought aloud. “No sticks, up here above the tree line … my arrows, yes, we will use them.” I went and found them, chose four, and I walked back. But the wolf growled at me as I approached.

“I know it hurts, wild brother.” I sat and took the blackstone tips off the arrows, cutting the sinew bindings with my hunting knife. Then I pulled the rawhide lacings from my boots—they would do to tie the sticks with. “But if we can splint it, you will be able to hobble on it until it is healed, you might yet live. There is plenty of meat for you up above.” My throat tightened at that, but it was fitting that Talu's flesh should feed the wolf, as her death had been warlike and fitting for a fanged mare. “Steady, now.”

I reached to straighten the injured foreleg. But before I could touch it the wolf snarled at me most savagely and snapped in clear warning. Letting my hands stop where they were, I gave it a level look, meeting its troubled eyes. More fear than fierceness in those eyes.

“Little brother,” I said evenly, “Sakeema knows I am a stubborn dolt, and Mahela knows likewise, and it is of no use for you to argue with your teeth. You helped me when I needed you worst, and I will help you, even if you rend me for it. So much has gone wrong.…” I shook my head in a sort of muted vehemence, determined to save the wolf at whatever risk. It was the only comrade my journey had left to me. Perhaps the only wild creature left in the dryland world.

Again I moved my hands toward it, toward the injured limb, and the wolf snarled mightily, and snapped, and shrank away from me as far as it could move, but did not tear me open as it threatened to do. For the first time my fingers touched the graysheen fur—

Swirl as of wind-driven haze before my eyes, so that I blinked, wondering briefly if Ytan had hurt me more than I knew … and then all sensible thoughts left me. For under my hand lay Tassida, crouching as the wolf had crouched, naked and trembling and injured, with her wolfskin riding pelt huddled around her shoulders.

“Tass!”

“Dan,” she said to me in a voice scarcely louder than a whisper, “I am so ashamed.”

“Tass,” I repeated stupidly. It should not have astonished me so. Birc had turned to a deer, and I myself had been a seal for a season in order to swim with Kor to Mahela's undersea realm, so why then should Tass not be a wolf? But seeing her there before me, so suddenly, so eerily, when all hope of ever seeing her again had nearly left me—it stunned me. And what was she saying, something of shame?

“I saw how Talu was failing, I knew you needed Calimir, and he was not far away, he is never far away from me. Yet I am so frightened—I couldn't—make the change—”

“Hush,” I said, my mind still laboring. She had been with me, then, all the time? With me when Kor and I had quarreled, when we had mended the quarrel, when I had quested away from him? With me these past despairing days as I made my slow way back to him? She had guarded my sleep, fought to help me, broken her foreleg—no, arm.… “Talk later, Tass. You're hurt.”

“I have never been far from you,” she said as if in answer to my thoughts, “since the day I met you, except for the season when you and Kor ventured to the Mountains of Doom. There I could not follow.”

It was the chill mountaintop air on her bare skin, I thought, or hoped, that made her tremble. I ran and brought the deerskin I used for sleeping on and laid it over her. She still shook. She shivered and moaned as I eased her to a less cramped position on the stony ground, and she shivered and bit hard on the pebble I gave her, though she did not cry out, as I pulled her arm straight and splinted it with doubled arrows, bound them tight. All the time I longed to gather her to me and embrace her, stroke her scarred skin, warm and soothe her, and I knew I could not, I would only cause her pain and, maybe, fear … and I had to make my eyes slide over the sight of her small, comely breasts.

“Did Ytan hurt you?” I asked when I was done with her arm. “I mean, that night at your campfire. You looked ready to fall, I was sure you were wounded. But I see no marks on you.”

“No. He did not hurt me in any way you could see.”

She was still trembling, she must yet be cold. Trying to collect my wayward wits, I glanced around me. “Nothing to build a fire with,” I muttered.

“You—you yourself are the fire, Dan.”

This was fair speech indeed, from my Tass. “Will it burn you too badly,” I inquired tenderly, “if I hold you? I want—I hate to see you shaking.”

With a quiet gesture she welcomed me, and very gently I took up her head and shoulders into my arms, sitting by her and beneath her and warming her against my chest. I sat that way, with her lying half in my arms, the wolf pelt and the deerskin wrapped around the rest of her, I sat as if time did not matter, even world's end did not matter anymore, for I was with Tass. And in time her trembling stopped, her body softened against mine, her breathing grew deep and steady, her head lay at ease in the crook of my elbow.

“Is the pain gone?” I murmured to her.

“Very nearly,” she said. And then, in the silent twilight, her face half turned away from me, half hidden by the dusk, she told me the tale of herself, Tass to the center of her being, as if by making sense of herself she could make sense of the world's doom. And in so doing she told me why she had been afraid since the day she met me.

Chapter Fifteen

From her very earliest years she had visions.

“I felt that I was very old,” she told me, speaking into the cloth of my shirt. “Even when I was half grown I felt it, that I had lived long, long, that I had seen kingdoms rise and die, men fight their way around the cycles of time, the shapes of the islands and mountains change.”

Being reared by the red wolves on the bleak skirts of the thunder cones, she knew no other humans while she was growing, her thoughts were utterly her own, her visions were all she had of human truth, she had to trust them and remember them. Therefore, even before her wolf parents died and she joined the human tribe, she knew more than most grown warriors of self-will, but little enough of human love.

Her mother wolf had died at hunters' moon, had raised her muzzle to the swollen orange moon and sung, then laid it down and died. And as if by agreement, her father wolf died in the same way at the next full moon, the witches' moon. Then the halfgrown wolf girl who had no name was bereft, for she had nothing left. She stayed with her father's body, and starved—though she did not weep, for she did not yet know of the ways of weeping—and when the body began to bloat and smell, she took the pelt to keep, for she could not let him go. She huddled under the raw skin to sleep, and when she awoke, she was a wolf.

“I was a child, yet I was indeed old. My red pelt went gray with age.”

“You yourself are the seer you have sought,” I said softly.

“Yet there is no wisdom in me at all. I feel as if—as if the older I grow, the less I know. I weep, I stamp my feet in fits of anger, I am no better than a scantling, an idiot, I know nothing.”

“We're two fools together, then.” And holding her against my chest, I did not feel that I could have asked for anything better except that the world should be well.

“How old were you,” I asked her, “when your—when the wolves died?”

“How should I know? Young enough, in body.”

“Did you starve?” My belly pinched me. Hunger was always much on my mind, those days.

“Not in body. Dan, you know me. I have always fended for myself well enough. But I starved—I felt too much alone. I had never known the touch of humans, of my own kind. I feared them, and yet—there were not even any other wolves to be with me. I wore the skin of the very last.”

So alone did she feel that one day, seeing a few of the Herders searching for a lost ewe among the black rocks of the cinder slopes, she went human and sat, naked as she was, with a wolf pelt scarcely covering her, and let them find her.

“Was it something you decided, the change, or something that just happened?”

“Half of each. If I had willed it, I could have stayed a wolf. But human form calls to human form, it is a struggle to resist it, and sometimes.… I could never let you touch me when I was in wolf form, Dan, because of the love. It would have overpowered me utterly.”

I could not speak. She went on with the tale.

It had not taken her long to learn to love the Herders. They were good to her, perhaps the best tribe she could have gone to, for they were peaceable folk, forbearing with her wolfish ways, gentle in their attempts to tame her, patient as they taught her the human ways and the human speech, so strange to her. But they did not understand her, and even after she had learned the wonder of words, had become a storyteller and an adept with words, even after she had taken to herself human clothing and human customs she felt alone. Lonesome within herself, more so than ever, for was she not among humans like herself, yet not like herself at all?