Godbond (4 page)

Something moved white in the night. The fair white hind, Birc's mate, walked up to him on dainty cloven hooves, nuzzled his ear, and changed with the touch into her human form, the fine fur of her body creamy pale, her glorious mane of hair the color of a red deer in sunset. She gazed at me with herb-purple eyes. I had once been afraid of her, for men turned mute and grew antlers for love of her. But whether from desperation or folly, I feared her no longer.

“Can you help me find Sakeema?” I asked her, the first time I had spoken directly to her. “Can you guide me to his cave?”

She and Birc looked at each other, then tried to tell me with gestures something that I could not understand. They were anxious, they made small bleating noises such as deer do. I asked again to be taken to the cave, and again they looked at each other, conferring, and this time they nodded me a grave-faced agreement.

With the dawn they set out to take me there—the wolf was nowhere to be seen, for it was a courteous creature and knew that these strange deer-humans could not abide it, nor were they to be hunted. And they were all in deer form, my friend and his eerie bride and all their retinue. Birc made a magnificent hart, his dark eyes flashing, kingly even though his antlers were only in their first springtime growth. The white hind and her maidens leaped and darted, all aquiver, taking every step airily, and Talu plodded sourly along the ways they led us. It was a hard, two days' journey over rough, craggy mountainside, and my winsome mount took every step of it with her ears flattened back in ill humor. Perhaps the beauty of the deer annoyed her.

The pathless way led southward and westward, into a fold of some nameless mountain's flank, a fold that led on and inward, bend upon bend and crag after crag, until I was well out of any demesne I had ever explored, in unknown land somewhere near the headwaters of the Otter River. The second day we climbed a dry gorge so steep and rough that I had to leave Talu and go afoot, though the deer folk leaped up nimbly enough. And I was glad that I had been eating their foul seedcakes all the way, for I would never have found strength to manage it otherwise. Sometimes when the sunset had turned sky and snowpeaks blood red, when I was streaming sweat despite the chill air crawling down from the icefields, I looked up and saw what made me forget any weariness, any hunger except the hunger for Sakeema.

The crevice, pointing skyward. The very cave I had seen more than once in a dream.

Birc and the damsels, still in deer form, awaited me near the threshold as I came panting up. They looked at me with eyes that seemed ready to weep—but then, the great dark eyes of deer seemed always like pools of deep water, or jewels made of tears. I walked past them and stood at the entry, quieting my breathing, trying to center myself, trying to calm my heart's wild clamoring, Sakeema, Sakeema, Sakeema.… Be still, the god had said to me once in a vision, and if you feel even so much as the flying of a midge in the night, I am yet with you. I stood until I found the stillness of Sakeema, the quiet made of leaf rustle and insect voice and breath of—

Breath of my god. Someone breathing, inside the cave.

Awed, trembling, with slow steps I entered.

I could see—shape, shadow, in the dim indeeps of that place a man's form. Not asleep, but erect, silent, awaiting me. I stood shaking and gawking like a dolt. I could not—I could not see his face. Sakeema, my god, if only I could see your face, I would remember, I would know you.…

He moved a step toward me, into the dying light from the doorway, and raised his spear in his hand, and grinned.

My demon-possessed brother Ytan.

“Scum of Mahela!” I roared at him, and he laughed aloud.

He expected surprise and fear to freeze me a moment so that he could gloat—for Ytan must gloat, always, or he could featly have killed me from the shadows. He deemed he would kill me now, within a breathspan. His strong hand drew back the spear—

I had been so much in hope that the sight of him drove me wild. I had not even sense enough to be afraid. I bellowed, and Alar leaped to my hand, and I charged him, slashing with the sword. He let fly his spear at the moment I moved—its blackstone head parted my loose hair, then chimed against the wall. Facing me good as weaponless—for no stone knife can withstand Alar—Ytan hissed in breath between his grinning teeth and ducked away from in front of me, dodging back into the shadows.

“Where is Sakeema?” I bawled out, my voice echoing around my ears in that closed space, so that I sounded like a hundred wounded bison. Nor did I give Ytan time to answer, but charged him as if he might somehow be hiding the god behind his back. I attacked him furiously with the sword. If I had not been too distraught for any proper skill, I am sure I would have killed him without a second thought. But I swung as if hewing trees, and never struck him. He slipped under my crazed blows and darted out the entry. I blundered around the walls of the cave, snatching at the shreds of my hope, thinking vaguely, frantically, that there might be some passageway, some recess, some cranny where the god had lodged like a windblown seed. There was none. The place was small, and quite empty. If ever Sakeema had been there, he was gone.

I plunged outside. The deer people were gone, had scattered, and in a heartbeat I saw why. Ytan stood on a low crag, near at hand but out of reach of my sword, and though his spear still lay in the cave, he had found—

I dove, and heard the faint whirr as an arrow skimmed over my back, the
thwock
as it lodged in the resinous trunk of a yellow pine. I snatched a glimpse of it teetering there, a crude shaft, poorly fletched, as I landed on the ground, rolled, and scrambled for shelter. Even as I came to my knees behind the pine another arrow thudded into it, and I heard Ytan laughing again.

“Where is Sakeema?” I bellowed at him. The more fool, I. As if Ytan would tell me, even if he could.

“Whose face did you see, Dannoc, when you stood shaking and found me?” he replied, and then he shouted with laughter, yell after yell of mocking, moon-mad laughter. He stood on his crag nearly helpless with laughter. I set my teeth, slipped my own bow off my shoulder, made shift to ready it without standing up.

“Who has knocked your nose askew, my brother?” Ytan cried crazily.

There on his vantage he stood, with the mighty peaks looming behind him, shining in sundown light—seemingly as tall and goodly as the mountains he stood in deerskin leggings and bisonhide boots, bare-chested and mighty-shouldered, his drygrass-yellow braids hanging long, as befits a Red Hart warrior. And a Red Hart's strong, beardless, fair-browed face.… But for the braids, Kor had once told me, I looked enough like Ytan to be his twin. And all the more so, Ytan seemed to be saying, now that my broken nose had skewed my face, making me resemble the bent-from-true, leftward thing he was.

“Tell me who has hurt you! I will avenge you, brother mine.”

“Mahela take you,” I muttered, setting arrow to my bowstring.

“It was Korridun, was it not? Why are you not with your beloved Kor?” He needs must taunt me by those I loved.… “And where is that dark-browed warrior maiden? The haughty rider on the pied black gelding? Castrated it herself, she did. How proud of her you must be. What is it you call her? Tassida My Love?”

I felt my throat close with a spasm, more in heartache than in rage any longer. How had he come to know so much? The devourer in him, it had taken his cleverness and turned it dark, evil.

I had let a devourer out of my father's body with my sword. Mind had often told me to do the same unkind favor for Ytan. But first, I had to get near him.

I had nocked an arrow to my bowstring. Rising, I took aim. “This is meant for a feather in your hair, Ytan,” I shouted as I let fly, for I wanted him to know that my aim was true.

He jumped aside, but the arrow was far more swift. It stopped his laughter, piercing the braid by his ear, as I had intended it to do. With an angry yell he broke it and pulled it out, and I stepped forward, another shaft at the ready.

“You should have kept that, Ytan,” I mocked. His arrows were crude things, likely to fly astray, for he had never been much of a craftsman, Ytan. His bow, I saw, was made of bent ashwood, less powerful than my sinew-and-hartshorn one. He was not unskilled as an archer, and I knew it, but I had the better weapons.

He knew it too, and let fly with words instead of bolts. “Has Tassida left you, Dan? The rotbottom wench, how could she? Yet I thought I saw her galloping off like a hellkite, one night in a storm.”

The piss-proud cock, spying on me.… My jaw hardened, and I eased closer to him. Seeing me coming, he grinned anew.

“I have a plan, Dannoc,” he told me in a friendly way. “I know what I am going to do. I am going to find her before you do, that proud Tassida. And I am going to lie with her. If I let my hair hang loose, and come to her in the dusk and whisper her name, she will think my name is Dan.”

My fingers jumped on the bowstring. He saw it and barked aloud with laughter.

“Go ahead, kill me! Why are you waiting? I will kill you as soon as I can. Then your doughty Tassida will be mine for as long as I choose to keep her.”

“By Sakeema's blood,” I told him between clenched teeth, “I would like to kill you.”

“But, dolt that you are, you will not.” Smiling, he raised his bow. “I will kill you and go to Tassida. When I abandon her, she will say it was Dannoc who brought her low.”

I stood close enough to him to see his eyes, blue as highmountain sky over eversnow, to clearly see his face, very comely, straight brows and a strong chin, and only his leer showing how shadowed was his soul.… And I knew I had been badly mistaken to count on the might of my weapons to cow him, for mine was an empty threat. I could not kill him, and he knew it. I had loved him too much, the good days gone by.… My hands shook so badly that I could not let fly even to maim him. I stood in the clear, nothing nearby to dodge behind. Like the dolt he said I was, like a deer drawn to the deer of straw, I had put myself in deadly peril.

I saw his blue eyes, so much like mine, like our father's, saw them glint and narrow to slits as he pulled back his bowstring—

A growl fit to chill the blood, a graysheen blur, and from the laurel thicket that flanked the crag the wolf leaped, a flash, teeth shining. Fangs struck. Jaws fit to fell an elk closed on Ytan's right arm, and the wolf snarled into his flesh, tearing at him. The force of the attack nearly knocked him off his feet, wolfs weight pulling him downward, but Ytan was strong. He yelled with fury, flung up his arm—it took the wolf wholly off the ground, but still the creature hung on, eyes blazing, Ytan's blood splattering its fur. Ytan struck with bow and booted foot to no avail. Then he dropped the bow and fumbled for the stone knife at his belt, left-handed. He found it—

My own leap had carried me up the crag, and before he could strike I toppled him, laid him prone on the rock, kicked the knife away and held the point of my sword at his throat. The wolf loosed its grip, shook itself, ran its pink tongue around its muzzle, then began hungrily to lap at Ytan's blood. He cursed it and glared at me, but I would not let him move until the wolf had supped its fill. My brother knew I would not kill him, but by Sakeema he could see it in my eyes that I had in my heart to hurt him exceedingly if he vexed me.… When the wolf turned away, I stepped back, taking care to tread on Ytan's wooden bow and break it.

“No need, Dannoc.” He spoke with nothing in his hard blue stare but hatred, poison of Mahela. “I will no longer try to kill you. There are ways to hurt you worse. When I find the woman I will slit her nostrils with my knife, and notch her ears to match yours, and slash her breasts. All this before I have had my way with her. Then—”

My sword moved in my hand, and for a moment he must have seen something in me that truly frightened him, for with a sharp intake of breath he stopped speaking.

“No such bold boasts, Ytan,” I told him. “It is true, I am loath to slay you, for I remember the days when we tamed the curly-haired ponies together and scouted the deer. But I might not be so slow to cut off a hand or two, if you menace. Or lop off other parts of you and feed them to my friend here.”

The wolf panted in wordless approval. But Ytan grinned as toothily as the wolf, for already my bloodthirst had left me, and he could see that. It is a terrible thing to have a brother for an enemy. Always Ytan had been sour and clearseeing. He knew me all too well.

“When you threaten, you do not act,” he remarked. “I will threaten no more, as it displeases you, my brother, but quite surely I will act if I find bold Tassida before you do. So prepare to grieve.” He lithely got up and started to walk away, not even cradling his bitten arm—he let it hang and bleed. But at the forest's verge he paused. “Give my greeting to Sakeema,” he mocked.

“Sakeema help you,” I whispered, so softly that perhaps Ytan did not hear me. “Sakeema help us all.”

“'Ware Cragsmen farther down,” Ytan added with poisoned calm. Then he left me, gone in the dusk.

Numbly I made my way back down the hard, cutting rocks of the ravine, the light rapidly failing me. Talu was waiting for me where I had left her, and she greeted me with a scornful huffing and a rolling of her eyes, as if to say, Fool.

“Hold your tongue,” I grumbled at her. “Bighead.”

We traveled until nightfall and past. I wanted to put distance between myself and Ytan. But riding under the thin light of a scantling moon, sending Talu stumbling through the shadows for no better reason than to get away from him, I seemed still to hear Ytan's laughter.

Chapter Three

“Now truly I do not know what to do,” I said to the wolf lying not far from my feet.

When we stopped at last I sat in the night like an oaf, without a fire, gnawing at the last of the seedcakes the deer people had given me. Head flattened to the ground, my companion the wolf looked back at me without moving, and I frowned in sympathy.