Godbond (28 page)

Kor?

Help me
—
help me lie down, Dan
.

Together Tassida and I eased him to the ground, and I slipped Zaneb into the sheath at his side. “Try again, Tass,” I urged her.

She cradled her broken arm in her left hand and laid her right hand on his chest, then placed the other beside it, and I watched, hand to my mouth. But there was small change. Kor lay and panted quietly in muted pain, and Tassida took up her arm in her hand again. Her pain, little less than his. Her pale face, very quiet, very beautiful, and in a low voice she said, “Dan, he will mend, given time. I seem to be a healer, as you have said, but I am not yet a god. It was at least partly your tears, before, when all wounds were sent away without a scar.”

“It might have been,” I told her. “I am Darran. But I know you, stonebearer, and you are indeed the god.”

She stared, too weary or too much in pain to shout at me as she would once have done. “No more than you are,” she averred.

Perhaps she understood, perhaps she said it to quarrel with me. But it was true. And she could have declared the same of Korridun.

“Look yonder,” said a voice tight with pain—Kor's. His sea-dark eyes were open, gazing into the distance.

I looked, and felt my blood chill. The snowpeaks were stirring, melting, sliding toward the sea. Beyond the edge of the cloud, sky was darkening. Somewhere the sun was dying.

“Mahela has seen you coming, Tass,” Kor added starkly.

“Tass,” I demanded, “are you ready?”

Kneeling, I gazed levelly at her. She stared back at me, and I saw the muscles of her jaw move, she had tightened it so.

Tass
, I mindspoke her, and then aloud I said softly but formally, “Tass. I am Darran, the seeker, and I have sought you long. Beside me is Korridun, the sea king. Have you also found self, and courage? If you are willing to venture, tell us now your true name.”

She moistened her lips with her tongue, then whispered, “Tass. The rider.”

For she also had misnamed herself, years before. She had called herself horseback rider, but she had been born to ride the stag.

Darran's inwit told me what to do. I took her right hand, the one that dangled helplessly below her splint, and I lifted Kor's bloodied right hand away from the wound in his side—he and Tass both cried out at me, I was hurting them both. And as gently as I could I guided their right hands together, sword scar to sword scar, so that they handbonded. Tassida's eyes opened wide with wonder.

“The arm,” she said. “It has stopped aching.”

The taut lines of Kor's face smoothed, and he made a small sound of amazement, for pain had left him. I wished I could let him rest, but there was no time. “Kor,” I said urgently, “you have to stand. We must face Mahela.”

Tassida's handbond gave him strength to do it. Together the two of them rose and stood side by side with reasonable steadiness, and I stumbled up to stand with them. Quickly I took her other hand in mine, sword scar pressed to sword scar. My whip cuts ceased to hurt me, ceased to bleed.

A soft glow from Alar, Marantha, Zaneb, from the three jewels, yellow, amaranthine, sundown red. Within the three of us, the stonebearers, a waiting hush. Nothing more.

A devourer swooped low overhead. On its back rode Mahela, gloriously gowned and silently laughing, as a cormorant will. “So, little daughter!” she called out, her voice wild and glad in the tempest wind, “I need not have feared you, after all! Your power is fit to save only yourself, it seems. Yourself and these two handsome cocks.”

The mountains were leveling, dying with a roar louder than Mahela's thunder. Numbly I saw Birc standing near us to guard us, blood glistening on the tips of his antlers like the red buds of springtime on a bare tree … the trees would never bloom again, they were dying with the world. The very sun, dying. In the air the sounds of dying, warriors still striving on the headland below, fighting as if under an evil spell, in thrall to demons, their screams rising with the stench of death on the wind.

“Nearly all those yet alive in the dryland world are on yon battlefield,” Mahela jeered, “and they can think of nothing but to kill each other! I will have them all before much longer, and you three may stand and watch, my chick and my cocks. And when all else is done, I will put out the stars as if they were slaves' eyes.”

It is because … because I am yet afraid, that she can do as she will
.

Tass, mindspeaking, she who had never willingly mind-spoken me before. And Kor also heard, as he should not have been able to hear, and he understood.
You are not so very much afraid
, he told her, and I could hear him as well, for we three were as of one mind.

I
am not afraid of yon gloating goddess. But—I am yet afraid of Dan
.

But why?
I burst in.
Tass, I love you
. She knew with what ardor I loved her, and with what wise compassion Kor loved us both.

Bold cock
, she thought to me wryly.

I
am not Ytan!

Dead, dead, far too much death and dying, all was dying … did she know he was dead? Yes, I felt it in her, how she had hated him, how she was glad I—I had killed him, I had killed my brother Ytan.… Grief twisted my heart as I mindspoke his name, and I sobbed.

Tassida tore her hands away from me, from Kor, and strode off.

“Tass!” Furious, thinking she was fleeing mindspeak or my sorrow, I ran after her. “Bolting again?” I shouted. “There is nowhere left to go, wanderer!”

She gave me a quelling look and strode on. After a moment I comprehended that she was looking for something. Amid the many and many lifeless bodies of the battlefield, looking for one—

She kneeled and laid hands on Ytan's ghastly, hollow corpse.

“Tass,” I breathed. It was a thing I would not have asked of her. Though indeed, once there had been a hacked and horribly mutilated body growing cold in my arms, and she had brought it back to warm and comely life.… Unsteadily, hands to his wound again, Kor came and stood beside me, perhaps remembering that same uncanny night. I put my arm around him to support him, and he stood as silent and awed as I.

Ytan did not move or breathe beneath Tassida's hands. Nothing happened, except that tears ran down her taut face and fell on his bloodied flesh.

“Tass,” I whispered, begging for I scarcely knew what. For Ytan to live and be well, for her to win the victory, for world's healing … it all depended on her. This one fierce, shy wild thing of a woman, it all depended on her.

She looked up at me with the tears clinging to her face. Then she closed her eyes, and her tears stopped as she centered herself. For the long span of ten breaths she crouched by Ytan's side.…

His body filled, his wound closed as if it had never been. He stirred and drew breath under her hands. Sighing as if waking from sleep, he opened his eyes.

“Lady wolf,” he murmured in wonder, seeing Tassida. Then he caught sight of me and struggled up, moisture in his eyes like rain in a blue sky.

“Dan—”

There was something he would have said to me, but there was a battlefield all around us, tempest screaming overhead, and beyond, the fir forests falling, the eversnow shaking and turning black under a darkening sky, and the crags crashing into the sea. Ytan looked wildly around him and burst out profanely at me, “Mahela take your cock, you jackass! Do something!”

“Well spoken, Ytan,” said Kor wryly. “Tass?”

She rose to her feet, and her flesh glowed with a dark fire, and she silently nodded.

We took our places to either side of her—she had always come between us in ways that seemed all for ill, so why not now, for good? Her head proudly raised, she opened to us her two scarred hands. The splint burst apart and fell away from her arm. In that moment I felt all my hurts heal, leaving no scars. Kor lifted his hand from his side, and his wound was gone.

Light blazed out that was not the light of the sun.

Jewels in our swords, shining, or—us, the three. A storm of light combating Mahela's black storm, clashing with her darkness. The few warriors left alive on the headland cried out, and some of them dropped their weapons and flung themselves to the ground, hiding their eyes against that light. Blaze of yellow lightning: that was Alar's doing, or mine. Sundown glory, Kor's, and the fiercest stormfire, Tassida's.… But storm was all outward. Within us, the three, was a calm. And in the calm, a nameless, peaceful passion I can scarcely describe—we were Kor, Tass, Dan, but we were one, we were all handbond, all mindspeak, mindbond, the thoughts of any one of us belonging to all, the feelings … shared by all three. We were specks swimming together in the sea of ourselves, we were as vast as the sea, and nearly as strong: in that stillness and that passion there was great power. Immense as the sea. But it was not the power that filled our hearts, it was—Kor, Tass, Dan. It was love.

Handbond is as nothing compared to this
. That was Kor, marveling.

Darran
. It was Tass, thinking to me.
You sought the
god, but he was always with us. We are all Sakeema. Is it not so?

Yes
, I told her. It was more than a reply—it was affirmation, pledge, vow. We were healer, seeker, visionary. Three in one and one in three.…

This wonder, the passion, needed a name. “Godbond,” I whispered aloud.

The black fist of Mahela, the stormcloud, swirled and vanished, gone like smoke, like fog, before a strong, clean wind of light. And the devourers turned as insubstantial as brume, glimmered greensheen for a moment and were gone as cleanly as the cloud. Even their stench was gone. Only a cormorant remained, a large bird, bigger than any seemly seafowl, flying where the tempest had been. It glided down over the headland and alighted below the rocks, near the shore. Bodies lay there, I knew, but even the taste of the air seemed sweet, as if the reek of death were gone from it, as sweet as if it had been washed by springtime rain. And the storm of our own making softly subsided into fireglow.

The sun
, Sakeema thought, the three of us all thought as one, and a glory of sunlight filled the sky.

“Mountains,” I murmured aloud. “I want the mountains again, the way they were.”

We all looked and felt each other's handbond tighten with joy, for there they were, beautiful in the sunlight, my beloved snowpeaks as they had ever been.

“Peace,” Kor breathed, and weapons fell down, snatched out of warrior hands as if knocked away by a god's unseen finger. Those who yet lived on the headland shouted in surprise and awe, then stood still and looked around them as if just awakened, as if aware for the first time that there was more to the world than death and war.

But another shout, Ytan's cry of horror, turned my head around.

In the sea a mountain of water was gathering, a peak far taller than my snowpeaks, a great, eerie wave that reached into sky and quenched the sun! Looming, frothing white and curling, it upgathered as we looked, a might of water fit to drown the dryland utterly. Just above the lip of it circled a speck, an overlarge cormorant, Mahela, spiraling ever higher and higher, eagle-high, and the wave followed her, growing, upraising, towering, until all the sea must have been taken into it. From the headland, cries rose thinly, like the mournful cries of birds, from those who stood and watched it forming, but the wave itself grew in grim silence, tall and massive and powerful beyond belief or reckoning. Then with a roar louder than Mahela's thunder, louder even than the roar of melting mountains, it started toward us.

And within a few heartbeats Sakeema had found, we had found, the three of us, that we could save ourselves, godbonded, but no more. Even Sakeema was no match for the might of the sea. What Mahela could not take unto herself she would destroy. Wretched, maddening thoughts spun through me. My brother Ytan, just saved, to be killed again. And Birc, and the sylkies … perhaps not the sylkies. But yes, the curly-haired ponies and the fanged mares, and Tyee's baby beyond the mountains somewhere, and even the Herders and their six-horned sheep beyond the thunder cones at the beginning of the plains, they would all be slain.

Of all the creatures of Sakeema, only we three might remain.…

Dan, Tass, forgive me
, Kor thought to us, and I felt a snap like a breaking bone.

He had sundered the bond! I cried out as the deed shattered through me, and my vision went black for a moment before I could see. By then he was arrow's flight away from me, running, swift as a hunted stag he was running down the headland toward the shore, onto the sand of the beach to meet the monstrous upgathering of the sea, and Tass and I could do nothing but cling to each other and watch.

Chapter Twenty-one

It would strike like a falling mountain, and then all would be black, black and drowning deep.… Nightmare, the demon that had ridden my sleep since I had been old enough to dream, I had known even then that it would end this way, but I had sweated in fear and cried out in the dark merely for self. Not … world's end. Not … Tass, not … Kor.…

He stood spear-straight and very still on the shore, head held proud in some mad defiance but arms uplifted as if to show that he bore no weapon in his hands—laughable, to think of raising sword against the sea. Curling, reaching, huge, mountain-high and heavy, the warrior's arm of ocean hung over him, upraised, fist clenched against all that yet lived on dryland. My hand tightened on Tassida's to tell her of love.
Kor!
mind cried to him to tell him the same. Less than a heartbeat and that black blow of doom would fall on all of us—

Ocean towered, peaked, shivered, shuddering like a strong captive put to torture who will not cry out. Then with a deep and hollow inrushing sound it laid itself down, crashing back into its vast basin. Swift, low waves ran up the shore and lapped at Kor's feet.