“There may be dreaming and doing, and wonders without number, yet it all falls down into ashes again, always! I am young, yet I have seen it too many times. Has it not always been so, since the beginning of the world?” A plea in my voice, for him to tell me No, I was wrong.
But instead he said, “Listen to me, son of earth.” All his great heart in his voice, for he was trying to teach me and comfort me, as he had taught and comforted so many. Yet he would not tell me other than truth. “Yes, it has always been so, turnings upon turnings. But think also of the things you cannot see. When the All-Mother carved stone and made mountains, when she took many colors of wool and wove the coverings of earth, when she wept and set her shining tears in the sky, she wept for love. When she took clay and made humankind and set us free for the wandering of this place, she wept the oceans for love of us. But there is a love farther away, which we cannot see, and next to it the love of the All-Mother is as hatred.”
He spoke of the All-Mother as if he knew her, as if he had sat by her side and talked with her, as I now talked with him. But the rest of what he was saying was utterly new to me. “What love?” I whispered.
“A love greater than sky, a love without ending, which you can scarcely understand, in the heart of the god who broods half a hundred worlds under one great starry wing. He is too vast for us to see or name, and so also is his brother, whom he loves as much as he does us.”
“Brother?”
“His half-witted brother. You have known such folk? They put all to awk and awry, meaning no evil, no more than a toddling child means evil. The god’s half-witted brother often grows angry and jealous, as such folk do, and in his rages he sometimes destroys what the god wishes only to cherish.”
“He should be punished,” I muttered.
“But the one who will never cease to love us, should he then cease to love his own brother?”
I had no answer.
“Haply,” Sakeema added with a warm smile, “the brother must sometimes sleep.”
He could jest? With his mother’s house looming in the distance, within which the council of kings waited?
“And the god,” I said in a low voice. “Does he also sleep?”
Sakeema did not cease to smile, but he said softly, “This is a time, I think, when the god is sleeping.”
The woman who called herself his mother, she also deserved punishment, to my way of thinking. The charges against her were just—I had seen enough to know that. Though charges might never have been brought had she not been meddlesome as well, or had certain power-craving kings not desired to strike down Sakeema through her. For Sakeema gazed on me in farewell, and I knew well enough that his was the blood that would be shed. He loved and honored his mother, and he would not stray from justice. In only one way could he serve both justice and love: by taking her punishment upon himself.
The penatly was death.
Still faintly smiling, Sakeema rose, and I sprang up to stand before him, grasping at him in a panic. My sudden movement startled the deer, sending them bounding away into the forest beyond the lodge.
The den where death waited, sharp of tooth and claw.
“Do not go in there!” I begged, though I knew well enough that he must, and I did not take pause for him to say it. I swallowed instead, squared my shoulders, trying to still my own quaking. “I will come with you,” I said.
He shook his head—not to forbid me, but because he knew, even then, that I could not. “Set yourself no such task, son of earth. You will fail.”
“I would never fail you!”
“I ask nothing. It is yourself you would fail, saying so. Mortal courage has limits.”
“You—you cannot face them alone!” For his mother had long since fled, westward, somewhere.
His face went bleak. He looked around him, taking in all the world with that look. I remember white wool of clouds in the sky, flicker of birdflight, somewhere the hoarse song of frogs. Mountains. Treetops. Somewhere there were small hiding creatures, and roots deep in earth.…
His gaze returned and was for me alone.
“Do not be so willing to give up life. The plenum of life, it is all I can give you. Life in beauty, in plenty—it is the only gift, but love, and it is love, the very gift of love. Son of earth, as you love me …”
“Yes,” I whispered, though I could barely speak for sorrow.
“Cherish the deer. Cherish all creatures, all things that live, even the earthworms … and you will cherish me. I live—in all creatures. Be still sometimes and see the creatures and know that I am yet with you … if you feel so much as the flying of a midge in the night, I am yet with you.”
Mutely I nodded. He looked at me, then bent and brought up loam with his fingers, offering it to me in cupped hands, as he had on the first day we met. “For you, my friend,” he said softly. And it turned into a songbird as red as his blood, and flew away.
And he walked away after he had embraced me, toward his doom. Toward the doorway that opened on darkness.
I could not bear it. I let out a sound that was half shout, half sob, and ran after him. But he was right, of course. My courage failed me at that entry—I could go no farther. I stood outside and wept, and railed at myself.
Time jumped, as it will, in visions. Perhaps a quarterday had passed, and somehow I had shamed and threatened myself into moving, or in my despair I no longer cared about my own life. I went in, found the inner chamber where the council sat in a wide circle. They looked like six figures of dark clay, sitting there in the gloom. At the center of their circle stood Sakeema, naked except for a breechclout, hands tied to shame him. Blood on his back—he had been flogged. On his face, nothing yet but calm.
“This man has done nothing to deserve punishment!” My voice shook like my knees, yet I managed to say the words and make them be heard. “He is blameless, as innocent as a rainbow. What charge can you make against him?” And I strode into the circle to stand beside him.
Then truly my courage was gone. For the kings looked at me, and their faces showed that they saw only more meat for their killing. The giant Blue Akabu of the Cragsmen grinned like a skull. The Fanged Horse king smiled in his sooty-black beard, and even my own king of the Red Hart stirred like a hawk rousing to stoop on its prey. The young fools who ruled the Herders and the Seal Kindred lifted their chins, on their mettle. Only the female king of the Otter looked uneasy, for she had started this game, and it had gone far beyond what she had wanted or expected.
And Sakeema, gazing at me—his face did not move, but tears ran down it like freshets down the mountains in the springtime. Tears of love and joy, and not because I had saved him, forsooth. There was no way of saving him. Somehow, even with his hands bound, he had saved me.
I had intended to demand his right to lay his case before the people. Though likely, led by their jealous kings they would have condemned him as well.… It did not matter. Nothing mattered but that Sakeema spoke to me with glowing eyes.
“Go, live,” he said, his voice so low it was a breath, a whisper, like woodland breeze. “Have many children. And because you have come to me … I give you this promise, that I will come to you when you need me worst.”
Already his enemies, the six, had called for guards. I had to leave his side or die. So I sprang away, my heart breaking, and fled through the guards, and escaped.
They killed him by the cruel ways while I lay in hiding on the mountainside. And when they let his body be brought out at last, I went with the others to look on it, stood by the bier with the creatures, the foxes, the wolves and wild dogs, the deer, for few people dared to come there. And in my grief it seemed to me that I would never need him more than then. Like a madman I shouted his name aloud to the wind.
“Sakeema!”
There was no answer.
“Sakeema!”
Nothing but the sighing of the wind.
“Sakeema!”
Again and again I called for him, with sobs that roared in my ches
t. He was gone, gone, my god was gone and did not heed my cry. I felt bereft, betrayed, fit to die with sorrow, and I was lying on hard ground, weeping and shouting his name.…
Someone shaking me. I looked up, blinking. A man, bending over me, his face darkened and unseen against a white and shining scarrow-sky, his head banded in that glory … My heart leaped like a courting deer.
“Archer? Are you all right?”
I groaned and closed my eyes in disgust. It was only Kor.
Sakeema, Sakeema, Sakeema, he-whom-all-we-seek … The dream had been so bright, so true, and now it was leaving me. I had said … I had said I would search for him unto the end of the world. If he had not yet come back to me, I must find him.… But I could not remember his face!
Though I clenched my jaw and pressed my palms against my eyes, I could not remember his face. With a whispered curse of fury I flung myself away from Kor and pounded the rocky ground with my fist.
“You were calling on Sakeema,” Kor explained softly. “You sounded as if you were in agony. Archer, what did you see?”
Giving it up, beyond words, I opened my eyes to look at him again. Over his head, between him and sky, a speeding shadow passed. All the small birds in the seaside forest fell suddenly silent, cowering until the hawk was gone.
“Talu,” I said suddenly, a word in the old language of my people, from the time before Sakeema. I felt weary but blessed. A name had come from my god, a name very fitting for the mare.
Kor made a wordless noise of inquiry. I caught hold of him and stiffly rose.
“Harrier,” I explained. “Hellkite.” A drab bird, ugly even, but swift and fierce.
“It suits her,” Kor agreed.
I wobbled when I turned to salute the mare. “Talu,” I told her, “good night.” And she merely glanced at me, without striking.
Korridun had to support me as I walked. I went with him into his sea-carved home and ate what he gave me and slept in my chamber there. But my dreams were full of longing.
Chapter Four
Though I could not remember Sakeema’s face, I remembered the dream, or at least broken shards of it, bright and strange. A sense of longing stayed with me, a restlessness, a yearning—folly. Only children yearned for the moon, and only a fool for Sakeema, the harsh old saying went. Yet there was a murmur of hope in me, for he had said he would return when I needed him most, or when his world needed him most.… It was folly, it sifted to the bottom of my mind. There were many other things to be thought of, things to be done. But the bright dreaming sense, longing and hope, murmured through my days, hidden, like snowmelt running beneath talus, almost beyond hearing, but constant, like the burden of a song.
There was the fanged mare to be attended to.
Three days later, when I asked him for the things I needed to run the mare, Korridun found me a long line of braided seal gut, such as the sea hunters made fast to their weapons when they speared the great fish, the cachalot, very strong. Also he brought me mitts of leather such as the fisherfolk of his tribe wore to protect their palms from the lines, and long withes of basket willow from which I plaited myself a stinging whip. In the morning, early, before there were many folk about to be trampled, I took the things and went out to the pen where the fanged mare was tearing at her fish.
“Hail the day, Talu,” I greeted her. She kicked at me with her hind hooves, almost absently, never lifting her head from the ravening of her food.
I waited until she had finished, hoping she would be more sluggish on a full stomach. Then I climbed the corner and dropped a loop of my line over her head.
She shot up with a surge that stopped my heart and left me feeling as if I were trying to tame the surf. But at the same time her passion did something odd to me: deep, within an inward darkness, I felt a kindred rage move, washing up in waves that threatened to engulf me. I smothered it. Not the foremost danger—the mare nearly took the wall down, and me with it. I snubbed the rope around the topmost log and strained to keep it taut so that she would not tangle herself in slack and snap a leg, struggling. “Talu,” I shouted at her, “calm down! I don’t want to hurt you!”
She only fought me the harder. Korridun came walking up behind me, trying to look as if he had just happened by. The mare’s breath was rasping and rattling in her throat. I eased the rope from around the log, but the loop that had tightened around her neck did not loosen. Squeaking, bound to self, it kept its deathgrip on her.
“She’s strangling!” I exclaimed to the air or Korridun.
The mare’s eyes rolled back so that the whites showed, and she went limp, crashing to the ground. Like a wantwit, knowing I could be killed, I jumped down into the pen with her.
There was no way out—
“Kor!” I shouted wildly. “Get that gate open!” But he was already at work, tearing off the poles that closed the entry. Whether he intended to come in after me, or what he intended, I am not sure. I kneeled by the mare’s bony head—aaaii, those fangs. Sharp as a woodmaster’s adz. Gingerly I loosened the loop from around her neck and, knowing I had maybe the span of three breaths to work in, I brought it up to her ears, passed leather through leather and made of it a sort of headstall with the trailing end coming down between her eyes, where her tearing teeth could not reach it.… Blue-brown eyes fluttered open. I sprang back.
“Kor! Get out of the way!”
I snatched up my willow whip, ready to lash the mare across the soft flesh of her nose if she attacked me. Though truly, there would not have been much chance for me if she had been intent on killing me. I hoped she would be more intent on her freedom, and, as luck would have it, she was. With a shrilling neigh she leaped for the square of light that had opened in the wall of her prison. Korridun had most of the poles down, and she splintered the rest, surging out at the gallop. I trailed along, stumbling, at the end of the rope behind her.
That was my mistake, to let her get ahead of me. If I had gone out before her and kept her head turned toward me I would have had a hope of controlling her. As it was, I was only a nuisance attached to her, and she commanded the whole forward force of her body with which to throw me off. She careered wildly across the mossy rock, kicking her hind heels high into the air, bucking, throwing her head, trying to snap the rope, and I was dragged after her, staggering in a wild run on my feet at first and a moment later down, dragged on my belly, my back—only the moss saved me from being totally flayed.
“Archer, you fool, let go!” I heard Korridun shout.
“Not on your life,” I muttered between clenched teeth. My will was given over to the combat, my grip locked on the rope.
The fanged mare reared up against her headstall, almost snatching the lead out of my hands. Sprawling, I caught a glimpse of her ungainly belly and her flailing forehooves as she teetered on her hind legs—then another jolt hit the rope. Korridun. I had not known he was so strong. He flung himself against the taut line, planted his feet and pulled. Taking her off balance as she was, he nearly pulled the mare down! She came to all fours, and in half a moment she leaped away again, but it had been respite enough. I was on my feet, shortening up on the rope, and her head was toward me.
“Kor,” I panted, “thanks. Now get out of here before—”
Before he became tangled in the line. He saw the danger as plainly as I did, dropped to the rock and flattened himself as the rope passed over him, then sprinted for the nearest vantage of safety, a twisted pine, and swung himself up. The mare circled and circled around me at the dead run, still pulling against me with her neck and heavy head while I braced my heels against the rock and pulled back, knowing that if she started away from me again I would lose her. Sometimes, trying to take advantage of me, she would suddenly switch about and change directions, snatching at the rope, trying to reach it with her fangs. But the advantage was all mine, for I shortened up on the line of seal gut each time and refused to give back what I had gained, no matter how she tugged. She was streaming with sweat, wet and foamy as the sea,
and for my own part I could feel the salt trickle stinging my bloodied skin, bathing me, though the day was chill. This quiet, constant battle went on for half the day, Kor told me later. I had no thought for time. The circling movement of the mare blurred my sight, dizzying me, and I had long since passed from a screaming agony of my every muscle to a sort of trance. Nor had the mare slowed much in her running that I could tell—
Without warning of any sort she turned and hurtled toward me. The sudden slackening of the rope staggered me. I nearly fell, and before I knew what was happening she was on me, her head flung up and the muscles on the underside of her neck bulging, her fangs slicing down at me, and only then did she give forth her battle scream of fury.
I had forgotten about my futile whip. Moreover, there was no time for it. I dodged—I had just that much wit left—I let the force of her charge carry her past me, and as her shoulder hit me I grasped her mane at the withers and leaped, swinging myself up onto her back. You will think that I am boasting, but I am not. There was no bravado left in me. I merely leaped to the only half-safe place left to me, the place where her fangs could not reach me, her back—and it was all slippery with sweat.
I locked my heels around her barrel and hung on to her mane. I remember she spun like a dust devil, reared and came down stiff-legged. Then I do not remember much more, which is perhaps a mercy, for the ride is all a blur of jolting motion, confusion and pain. Talu’s bony spine culminated in a withers hard, jutting, and agonizingly high, such a knife edge that I felt she would make a castrate of me, or kill me—the one fate seemed as bad as the other. There were cliffs all around, and they seemed not to concern her. She careered wildly down between the lodges toward the sheer drop to the sea—I came out of my daze of pain long enough to get hold of the trailing line, jerk her head around, kick her hard in the ribs with my boots. Up the headland again we went. I could hear someone shouting something at me, some warning—it must have been Kor. But I could scarcely see for the sweat in my eyes, or exhaustion, whatever. Fearful of trampling someone, I pulled the mare’s head around again. She slashed at my leg with her fangs, and I kicked at her nose. Angry, in pain, I no longer cared if she hurt me, and I kept her head pulled tight around, nearly to her shoulder—let her slice herself with those fangs if she liked. She blundered onward for a while, unable to see where she was going, and then she spun. Then—it is not clear to me whether she tangled herself in the trailing rope, or dizzied herself, or simply fell from exhaustion, but all in a moment she was down, and I was off her. Kor seemed to think afterward that I had kicked myself free so as to save my leg from being crushed, but I think that was not true. I had been losing my seat when she spun, and I think I fell when she did.
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