Madbond

by Nancy Springer

  “The blessing of Sakeema!” Kor exclaimed. “That bodes well for our journey!”

  “Have you ever seen it before?”

  “Never! Few folk have. Istas did, once, when she was young. She will be comforted—”

  When he told her, he meant to say, but he fell silent and stared. A solitary rider was approaching the headland, walking his mount along the hard sand of the strand.

  We looked at each other again, then got up and strode down toward the great lodge to meet him.

  Already the shout had gone up, and nearly everyone in the village turned out to gawk. A visitor was not a common event. But it was the horse that held my eye as the stranger rode up. I had never seen such a horse, neither fanged and ugly like the steeds of Pajlat’s tribe, nor small and nimble and curly of hair like the ponies of the Red Hart. This horse was as large as Talu but entirely different, small of head with a fine eye both dark and large, small of hoof but surefooted, flat-legged, deep-chested, well-sprung, sleek of skin, with a neck deeply curved like that of a brant—no, a neck such as a wild swan must have had, days gone by—and flanks well filled out, every part of the steed as pleasing to look at as a handsome woman. And its color, unheard-of in horses, pure shining black, but white surged up its legs and splashed its belly and its long, full tail. And the mane lay on its arched neck like snow on a willow.

  “Peace,” said the stranger. It was not a plea, so firmly spoken, but a greeting.

  “Peace go with you wherever you travel,” Kor replied with the courtesy that cannot be learned, the comity born in him. “Welcome, and will you eat with us?”

  “Gladly.” The visitor slid down to the ground, and I noted with a small shock that his riding pelt was a wolfskin of shining gray. Not so very strange, for there were wolfskins yet to be found in the belongings of kings, but it was a boasting thing to ride on one, as the Fanged Horse warriors rode on the pelts of bears long dead.… What sort of man might this stranger be?

  Then I looked at him instead of at the horse and saw that he was scarcely more than a boy. A beardless youth, comely of face, slender but so cocksure of bearing that I did not note his slenderness until later. He wore his hair falling loose in long, tangled locks like the wild tails of my people’s ponies, and I gazed doubtfully at him, for his eyes were dark, his hair too light for him to be of the Otter River Clan or the Seal Kindred. Nor did he have the look of those tribes, and much less did he look like one of the hulking men of Pajlat’s folk. He wore a tunic of soft, fringed doeskin—the Herders did not dress so, or ride anything but burros. As for the Cragsmen, their skins were stone red or granite gray or slate blue.

  And he stood staring at me, straight at me and no other, as foolishly as we were all gawking at him, and though his fine face scarcely moved he seemed somehow shaken, his cocksure air lost, until he regained it with a proud lift of his head, his eyes still intently on me.

  I had not thought how peculiar a thing it must have seemed, a single tall Red Hart oaf standing crop-headed amidst all the Seal Kindred, and I felt heat touch my face as I knew myself for the oddling that I was.

  “Of what tribe are you?” asked Istas sharply, and for a startled moment I thought she spoke to me. But she was glaring at the stranger.

  The newcomer blinked and seemed to take a moment to come back to self. “No tribe,” he said after a pause.

  This was a statement nearly impossible to deal with. A babble of voices started up at his words. “And what is your name?” Kor put in far more courteously, before the uproar could take over. Folk fell to silence to hear.

  “Tassida.” The name meant simply, “horseback rider.” Coolly, almost haughtily, the stranger regarded Kor, looking him up and down as if he were an adversary. “You are Korridun, the king here.”

  “Yes.”

  “If you pay me,” Tassida said abruptly, “I will be one of your followers for a while, and fight for you.”

  The uproar redoubled. To fight, not out of loyalty, but for payment! Istas looked ready to take back the hospitality Kor had offered, but I had another thought.

  “Kor,” I told him eagerly, “see if you can buy the horse.”

  The newcomer heard me. “No,” he said at once, with a hint of edge, “the horse stays with me.” He was looking at me once again in a closed way, so that I could not tell if he was puzzled, or hostile, or afraid.

  “If you stay with me,” Kor asked, “might I have the use of the steed? For the sake of Dan’s compunction?”

  “Korridun!” Istas stood aghast. Kor, Tassida, and I all ignored her. Kor was giving me a slight, teasing smile, and the stranger was regarding him, appraising again, and what he saw must not have entirely displeased him.

  “If you will accept my guidance concerning the riding of him, perhaps yes,” Tassida said slowly. “I will not let him be abused.”

  Him? But the steed did not have the swelling neck of a stallion. Istas stooped in her forthright way for a look underneath the horse. “A gelding!” she shrieked.

  It was another shock. No proper warrior would ride anything but a fierce mare, or, failing that, a stallion. Gelding was a shameful thing, fit only for beasts of burden. At Istas’s news, the noise from the Seal tribesfolk reached new heights of outcry. Parents gathered their children and retreated a few steps, as if to protect them from something unwholesome, but stayed, held by their desire to see what happened next. Guardsmen shoved forward, strutting.

  “His name is Calimir,” Tassida said, speaking of the horse to Kor, as if nothing had happened.

  Kor stepped forward and laid his hand against the horse’s nose. The steed generously yielded to him. The name meant “peace.” Hardly a warrior’s steed, however comely, but Kor seemed quite satisfied.

  “We are going on a journey,” he told Tassida. “Will you come with us, then? I am not sure how I will be able to pay you when all is done.”

  “I will come,” said the stranger, but his reply was drowned by a shout from Istas.

  “Rad Korridun, son of Kela, you have lost your senses entirely! This settles it—I will have nothing more to do with your mad scheme! Let you stay here where you belong! I’ll be blasted by Mahela if—”

  “Istas,” Kor cut in. The firm tone of his voice silenced her for the time, but there was amusement in him as well. “All can not be too far wrong. We have seen the blessing of Sakeema in the sunset, Dan and I.”

  That gave her pause. She stood with her mouth open and a wide-eyed, almost girlish look on her face. But others had not heard. Guardsmen were crowding up, looking belligerent.

  “This stranger has only said he can fight!” Birc challenged. He was within his rights, and showed no disrespect to Korridun by so doing. The twelve always tested their new comrades. They needed to be sure of one who might sometime stand beside them in battle.

  Tassida pulled a blackstone knife from its bisonhide case by his belt, tossed it up in the air—a circle quickly widened around him, even Kor stepped back—deftly caught it by the hilt across a finger and twirled it, then let it slip as of its own accord into his palm. He crouched and feinted at Birc, who could have been killed featly enough if it had been a fight and not just a practice match—he was standing stupidly, dazzled by the spinning of the knife like a deer dazzled by a fluttering lure. Half a moment too late he came to himself and parried. Then he and the stranger scuffled and circled and pricked at each other. It was a quiet, constrained bout, sufficient to show that the newcomer was not unskilled.

  “That reminds me,” Kor said to me absently, standing at my side and watching the mock fight. “Your knife.”

  I groaned in wordless complaint. It was true, I would need a knife, but I did not like the thought of the one of which he spoke.

  “I have made you a sheath for it. Carry it. We are likely to need it if the Fanged Horse Folk sight us.”

  “It will be the Shappa, then?” I had favored the Traders’ Trail, the Shappa Pass, but suddenly I favored it no longer, not if I had to carry my fearso
me weapon upon it. “There would be little risk of either robbers or raiders along the Blackstone Path,” I said.

  “Dan, have you not told me again and again that the Blackstone is rough and treacherous, hard going for a horseback rider?” Kor peered at me in puzzled annoyance. “And do you not want me to ride? You know I am no horsemaster.”

  I could not tell whether he was outsmarting me or taking me at my word, but either way I was defeated, and fully by my own doing. I nodded. “The Shappa, then,” I muttered.

  Tassida and Birc had concluded their bout, and Tassida was talking with him and the other guardsmen. No longer annoyed, Kor watched, and nodded with satisfaction.

  “I am well pleased,” he said. “Now one more of my own folk may stay at home, if I have my way with Istas.”

  It took him until long after dark to convince her, but he had set his mind to the task, and he was king, after all. And so it was that we set out the morrow dawn, with two steeds and six retainers, including the stranger, Tassida.

  It was a quiet leave-taking. Winewa kissed me with affection but no fuss—we both knew she would be bedding with another before I was many nights gone. Istas was not inclined to kiss anyone, but she surprised me with a long, appraising stare. “There is something that you are not telling me,” she said. “A sadness when you look at me.”

  I decided she deserved to know. “Rowalt,” I told her simply. “I remember.”

  “Ah,” she breathed.

  “His face takes its revenge on me from time to time in my dreams. But still, I think, it is better to remember.”

  “Ah,” she said in a more settled tone, and she narrowed her bright black eyes at me. “Do you yet remember what sent you here?”

  I shook my head.

  She surprised me anew. “Sakeema’s peace come to you soon, outlander,” she said, and she grasped my hand—such strength in her old, gnarled grip! As soon as she released me we started on our journey, I on Talu and Kor on the sleek gelding Calimir and the six afterlings at our heels. But Istas stood and watched us a long way up the mountainside. Looking back from time to time, we could see her, a stumpy shape on the headland, until the mist of low-lying clouds hid her from our sight.

  “Out of earshot,” Kor whispered, and then without warning he let out an uncouth, unconstrained shout of joy, such a shout that it sent Talu skipping and dancing along the ledges. His men gave him sidelong looks, but I saw Tassida grin.

  Chapter Twelve

  Those were the days of joy, as we followed the zigzag folds of the great peaks ever higher and farther—farther inland from the sea. With every dawn Kor’s delight and amazement redoubled. Up on those slopes the blue pines grew tall and straight, so tall that it dizzied us to study the tops of them. Nor were they furred with moss, but grew clean, with not much except a thick covering of tan needles on the ground between them. A wanderer could see and breathe in this forest. Each breath was piercingly chill and sweet.

  “The air!” Kor exclaimed some few days after we had left his village. “Different.”

  “No salt,” I told him, and he blinked, for he had never been out of the scent-reach of the ocean. But the mountain air seemed Sakeema-blessed even to me. All the freshwater wet, thrusting green smells of spring and snowmelt were in it.

  And the mountainside meadows, where the snow still lay under the spruces and the violets grew by the streams and the small yellow lilies bloomed everywhere amid the grass, curling their petals back so avidly that they spread their delicate innards like a sunburst … I felt as besotted with delight as Kor. And the purple bellflowers, their stalks curving and stirring like Calimir’s graceful neck, and the deer grazing in the meadows even at mid of day—I put my bow to use. We did not lack for meat.

  Once gone a day or two we traveled easily, not pressing the pace of those afoot, feeling no urgency. I think neither Kor nor I wanted that journey ever to end.

  I felt like a child for gladness, being back in my mountains. More than once, turning to gaze around me, I caught Tassida staring at me as he had stared the first time he had seen me, and so great was my happiness that I did not care how much he gawked or what he was thinking. Only after several days did I begin to wonder what ailed him.

  At night the stars seemed to cluster like daisies just above the treetops, so clear was the air, and I would lie back and look at them.… But one such night, some days after the start of the journey, when Tassida got up and left our cooking fire to go off by himself for some reason, I got up also and followed.

  I was silent—Red Hart born, I was always silent when I walked, though I was not stalking after him, or did not think I was. After we were well away from camp, just as he stopped to make water or whatever he may have been about, I called softly to him, “Tass!” giving him a friend’s name, as we all did, for we all liked him. I liked him even though he stared at me.

  He must not have heard me walking after him, for he jumped when I hailed him, badly startled, and crouched for a moment in the fighter’s stance, a black shape in the dim starlit forest, before straightening as I came up to him.

  “What do you want?” he greeted me sharply through the darkness, and if there was fear behind the edge in his voice I laid it to my having taken him unawares.

  “I am sorry,” I told him. “I did not mean to startle you.”

  “No harm,” he said, though the bite of the words said otherwise. “You wish to speak with me?”

  “Yes. I want to know why it is that you look at me.” Though if he had questioned me I would have been hard put to describe the look, whether there was dislike in it, or dismay. There was much that was hidden in him, in Tassida.

  But he did not question, or deny, or pretend not to understand. He stood silent, and when he spoke again, some few moments later, all the edge was gone from his voice and he spoke to me as quietly as I had spoken to him.

  “Sometimes I think that I recognize you. That we have met before. Other times I am not sure.”

  I heard truth in the words and smiled, comprehending the doubtful look I had seen on him. “Have you visited my people, perhaps,” I asked eagerly, “and seen me with them? But no, that cannot be. I would remember you.” Oddity that he was.

  “No. It has never been my honor to travel with the Red Hart Tribe.”

  “Where do you think you have seen me, then? When?”

  “On these very mountains,” he said with something secreted in his soft voice. “Last winter.”

  The trunks of pines in starlight appear black against air of misty dark gray. I noted it anew, turning my head away and staring off among the trunks of a hundred hundred such trees.

  “The men tell me you do not remember,” Tassida said.

  “They speak truth. Though I would have sworn till now that if ever I had seen you, I would know it.”

  “It might not have been you. Are there many others such as you in your tribe?”

  “One yellow-headed oaf is scarcely to be told from another, you mean?” Unfair of me to speak so harshly to him, for he was trying to be kind, but there was something very bitter in me. “Blood of Sakeema, it had to be me, the madman! No one in my tribe goes to the high peaks in the wintertime. What did I do?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Tassida, too evenly.

  “Some misdeed; I have done some untoward thing. I heard it in your voice. What was it?”

  “Nothing,” said Tass in a tone that warned me off. Whether for my sake or for his, he would not tell, and though he seemed scarcely more than a boy, his voice as high as a boy’s voice, I heard such strong will in him that I knew I could never argue it out of him. So I did not try, but stood facing the night as if it were a barrier, wishing I could see his face, for he was like the pines in the night, a black shape, a blank, telling me nothing.

  “I am not at all sure it was you,” he added.

  “Who else?” I muttered sourly, but he went on as if he had not heard me.

  “No matter what you say, I am not sure. The looks were
the same, but—you are so different, Dannoc, I—”

  “Cold comfort,” I cut in, “if it is in me to be so different.”

  “Think what you like, then.” He was suddenly annoyed, the sharp edge back in his voice, as if to say, Go away with your complaining and let me cuck in peace. The matter is not worth being overly kind about. His vexation released me so that I grinned and left him to his business, making my way back through the dark pines, guided by the light of the fire where Kor waited. Nor did Kor ask me, then or later, what my errand with Tass had been, though he had seen me follow the boy into the darkness. He was youthful and wise, Kor.

  So also was Tassida, wise beyond his years in his dealings with me. I sometimes regarded him curiously during the days that followed, wondering what he was, this youthful, homeless, tribeless wanderer, and I felt strangely drawn to him, liking him in spite of whatever secret lay between us. For his own part, he gave me a faint smile whenever he looked at me, and if he watched me, he also watched Kor, and all the others, with dark eyes that saw everything.

  We climbed higher on the mountain slopes daily, until we reached heights where the clear mountain air was colder than cold had ever been in Seal Hold all winter long—and Shappa was the easy pass, lower than the rest. But my followers from Seal Hold shivered, for freezing cold seldom came to their home by the sea; they were not accustomed to it. In the starry nights we would have a blazing fire and gather around it with our pelts for sitting on and the thick blankets of good wool around our shoulders—even I would wrap myself in the blankets Istas had given me, so as not to be unlike the others, though under them my chest was as unclad as ever. And we would tell tales. And Tassida was our best storyteller, as it turned out, though among my people I was known as an ardent storyteller as well. But Tass knew tales I had never heard of. None of us had.