Madbond

by Nancy Springer

  “You two remind me of Chal and Vallart,” he remarked to Kor and me after watching us for a few days. The quiet glance of his eyes as he said it told us that it was meant as a good saying. He was giving us his friendship and trust. But we knew nothing of Chal and Vallart.

  “Who?”

  He blinked, seeming surprised that we did not know the names. “Legendary friends. Two heroes from the time when warriors wore the great metal swords.”

  “Wore what?”

  “Swords.” He spoke slowly now, as if uncertain whether he should have mentioned these strange things, whatever they were. “Great knives of bright metal, the glowing bronze, orichalc. There was a time, as long before Sakeema’s time as Sakeema’s time is long before ours, when warriors wore such swords, and robes of velvet cloth, and there were many other wonders, great fortresses of rock called castles, and large boats called ships that could carry many men across the ocean, far beyond the horizon, and return …” His voice trailed off as he saw the disbelief in our faces. “I thought you knew, Dannoc,” he said to me. “You wear such a sword.”

  I brought it out, though the sight of it still harrowed me, and held it in both my hands, and it flashed flame-bright in the firelight, the yellow stone in the hilt glowing like a coal. “This comes to us from the time before Sakeema?” Kor demanded.

  “Many generations of men before.”

  We could not dispute it with him, for I held the uncanny blade in my hands, but our minds were in a mighty uproar that stirred all our faces.

  “Who are you, Tass?” It was Birc, at once shy and brash as ever, asking what Kor and I would not. “Or what are you, that you can tell us such things? Where are you from?”

  The strange youth lowered his gaze to the ground. “Ask me anything but that,” he mumbled.

  “But—are there other tribes than the ones we know?” It was one of the older guardsmen this time, a fellow named Tohr, leaning almost into the fire with the force of his query.

  Tassida’s eyes came up. “No,” he said levelly. “There are none. In all this vast land—and it is vast beyond believing—there are only you six tribes left for Mahela’s maw.”

  Something in the ring of his voice spread silence over us all, a silence that echoed with questions we could not voice. We sat like a shaman’s dolls of clay around the fire, or like pebbles, like stones. Finally Kor stirred and spoke.

  “What of Chal and Vallart?” he asked mildly, taking the talk back to the former matter.

  “The legendary friends … There is a song that has come down to us. Chal is the prince, and Vallart, the comrade.”

  Tassida closed his eyes for a moment. The firelight flickered on his still face. As if I had never seen him before, I noticed how strange he was and how beautiful, strong brows and a firm chin and a mouth recurved like an antler-bow, strong features but so fine and even, unscarred, that I wondered how young he was, perhaps no more than a boy in spite of his cocksure air. Yet the seeming knowledge in him … Where could he have sprung from, his hair light brown and gently curling in spiral locks, his eyes startling and dark? Then he opened those eyes again, and they were both young and as deep as time itself.

  “‘Troth’ is the name of it,” he said.

  And in a boy’s high, strong voice he began to sing a song that echoed out of the depths of time, the intervals ranged in a mode so old I had never heard it.

  “Let me tell you a merry-go-sorry,

  Let me tell you a bittersweet tale

  Of a royal youth and his loyal companion

  Who pledged his friend his service and hand.

  ‘My lord,’ he said, ‘you are made of legend.

  I will follow you to the ends of the land.’

  ‘I have a quest to the Mountains of Doom,’

  Said the prince, ‘that lie beyond the dark tide.

  Will you follow me there?’ The other smiled.

  ‘You doubt it, Liege? How can that be?’

  ‘The way is long and the crossing strange.’

  ‘I will follow you if you walk into that sea.

  What is a friend?

  Troth without end.

  A light in the eyes,

  A touch of the hand—

  I would follow you even to death’s cold strand.’

  So they rode afar to the kingdom’s sea-reaches

  And came in the end to the sundering strait,

  And by that dim shore swam a ghost-gray ship

  Low in the water but nothing within

  Except shivering scent of fear insubstantial

  And mournful voices of folk unseen.

  ‘There is our vessel,’ the prince said soft,

  And toward it he strode. Then the follower blanched

  And his breath came tight and his knees would not

  hold him,

  He could not go on. Then, ‘Liege—help me,’

  He begged as he knelt on that far cold strand.

  ‘I am not of the stuff of legends,’ said he.

  A touch of the hand.

  ‘I understand.

  For all friends fail,

  All loyalties end

  When they reach the end of the living land.

  I will go alone. Now get you up,

  Go home, be happy, live long and die merry.’

  He kissed him, the kiss of forgiveness and love.

  Then he boarded the death-ship. The vessel set sail,

  The comrade stood still and watched it go.

  In his ears rang a single living farewell.

  For the prince yet lived where he stood inside.

  And the gray ship sailed on the cold dark tide

  Toward Mountains of Doom, harsh Mountains of

  Doom,

  Heavy and slow on the dim washing water,

  Then gone like a gray mist—how could that be?

  The comrade stood on the land looking after.

  Then he followed his prince—and walked into that

  sea.

  What is a friend?

  Troth without end.

  A light in the eyes,

  A touch of the hand—

  I would follow you even to death’s cold strand.

  To death’s—cold—strand.”

  None of us stirred or spoke when the song had ended. I sat deeply moved but afraid to meet Kor’s eyes. That Tassida had compared us to these comrades was daunting. Still—I had said I would walk through fire for Kor. Was it so much worse to walk into the sea?

  To me it was. Deep water, drowning deep …

  I lifted my head at last and looked up to find him huddled next to me with a bemusement on his face that might have matched my own. He glanced at me with a look of terror and laughter.

  “It is all very well that we’re heartbound together, Dan,” he said in most serious jest. “But if we are like Chal and Vallart, what is it to mean?”

  “Well enough for you, still,” I retorted in like wise. “The prince at least took the ship to his doom.”

  “Why do you say that? Which of us is the prince and which the follower?”

  I had thought quite surely that he was the king and I, the afterling. Yet it was my quest we journeyed on, his look told me, at least in part, and I who led the way. The thought struck me to silence—I could no longer jest.

  “They sank the dark mountains beneath the sea,” said Tass after a small while, “somehow, and came back to the land of the living. They were great kings. And they brought back with them some sort of secret, some magic, so that they kept living, they refused to stop. The story has it that somewhere they are living yet. Chal was killed.…”

  Tassida paused, thinking, and I knew the look on his face because I had so often seen it on my father’s face beside an evening campfire when I was a child. He was remembering another tale.

  “It was when they were battling the warriors from the east. Those who might well be the rootstock of our own dear Fanged Horse Folk.” Tassida quirked a wry smile at the fire, and we all grinned. �
�The enemy warriors had no swords, but they were many. Chal and Vallart and their people were few, but with their swords they fought mightily.

  “Indeed, their swords all but doubled their numbers, for each one was centered as if it were alive. Each had been shaped by its wielder and master and named while still infant, in the making, with a gift of the maker’s blood, so that a bond was between the swords and their heroes like the bond between blood brothers. And a sword so named and so bonded could never be turned by an enemy against someone the swordmaster loved, but would cleave to his hand, come to his hand from afar if need be, and follow the promptings of his heart.

  “Vallart surged a bit to the fore in the battle, and many enemy warriors faced him, pressing him on three sides, so that he was hard beset and in mortal danger, and he began to stagger. And when Chal saw his peril, though he was paces away from him, his heart went out to Vallart in fear for him, and where his heart went his sword went also, to Vallart’s defense. And the sword of its own accord, flying more swiftly than any warrior hand could wield it, beat back the foes that harried Vallart. Therefore, when the battle had ended, Vallart was standing, his forces victorious. But Chal, who had been left weaponless, lay dead of many wounds.

  “Then Vallart saw, and sank down by the side of his slain friend.” Tassida stared into the darkness above the horizon as he spoke, seeming almost to see the legendary friends of whom he told. “He took Chal’s bloody and lifeless body into his arms, and he wept, and could not be comforted. All the night he stayed that way, weeping, and no one could console him or persuade him to come away.

  “And with the next day’s dawning, Chal stirred and breathed, and at daybreak he was whole, and at sunrise he opened his eyes, sat up, and smiled. And he spoke, and got up and walked, and ate, and lived for many years more. Perhaps he yet lives somewhere. But no one knows how Vallart wrought the sorcery that gave Chal life after he was dead, or if he brought it back with him somehow from the Mountains of Doom.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  All those days on the Traders’ Trail we met scarcely any traders, and were too foolish to wonder why, but told ourselves it was because of the time of the year, spring just beginning in these uplands, the nights yet chill.

  Up near the timberline, where the trees began to grow short and twisted, where snow still lay in the shadows of rocks and stunted spruces, we encountered our first Cragsman.

  He was sitting on a ledge that overlooked our path, a great, bald-headed, slate-green lump of a man, naked, of course—they went naked always, even in the eversnow. We bare-chested Red Harts were mollycoddles compared to them. Their hair, when they grew any, resembled lichens, and their skin was of stone colors, gray, slate blue or green, dull red, and seemed as hard as the peaks. Folk said they were sprung from the stones, as indeed they might have been, for there were no women or children among them. Cragsmen were troublesome. Not evil, exactly, not as I later learned to know evil, but—feckless. As distant as sky. They did not care about those who dwelt below them, and they did not always act in ways we could expect, even of an enemy.

  There he sat, in any event, by the way we had to pass, and there was no telling what greeting he held in store for us. I motioned the others to stop and sent Talu forward to meet him, as I had sometimes spoken with Cragsmen before.

  “And what sort of traveler are you,” he challenged me, “who comes with the look of a Red Hart tribesman and the cropped head of those who call themselves cousins to seals and riding the steed of a Fanged Horse robber?”

  I grinned, for I knew the Cragsmen could sometimes be amused. “And would you love me any the better if you knew what sort of traveler I was?” I retorted. I had no desire to tell him my name. We of the Red Hart had not always been on good terms with the Cragsmen.

  He grunted, shifting his position slightly so that I had a glimpse of the huge blackwood club he carried. “What is your business in the Shappa Pass?” he demanded. The name of the pass meant “red thunder,” and the names of the peaks on either side were Shadzu and Coru, “red cougar” and “antelope.” So many places were named after the animals that no longer lived there, names that wrenched the heart.… What did he think I wanted in Shappa, to call up ghosts? Or slay them?

  “Only to cross,” I told him, treading as finely as I could the line of courtesy between arrogance and fear.

  He grunted again, but seemed somehow mollified. “You know that you will pay the toll in order to pass here,” he said.

  Kor had come up beside me. “And what is the toll?” he asked.

  “How should I know?” The Cragsman shrugged his giant gray-green shoulders at us. “But surely you will pay.” With a lazy gesture he waved us onward.

  By the next day we had made our way to the steep alps above the tree line. These high meadows have always seemed to me places of wonder, different from any other, full of small flowers of which I did not know the names, many sorts, very numerous, very beautiful, and strange mosses and herbs, they and the flowers all growing in low hummocks. Far above loomed the great slopes of sheer rock where the bearded mountain antelope had once lived, and the wild sheep yet did—we saw them sometimes, standing on the steepest cliffs, on tiny ledges of the steepest cliffs, as if they were on level ground. Above lay the eversnow, where even they did not venture. And above again lay sky that made Kor gasp, of such a deep, pure blue as he had never seen.

  “The highmountain sky where the black eagles fly,” I chanted, remembering a snatch of an old song. Then I frowned. “Where are they?” There were black butterflies encircling the low masses of flowers along with others of yellow and sable brown and blue, but there were no black eagles encircling the peaks. Nor did I see any in the days that followed.

  We traversed those high meadows slowly, very slowly, for the thin air made us all pant and strain with every uphill step. Kor and I got down off our horses and walked with the others, for the horses were puffing as well. But we all laid most of our gear on the beasts. A day passed this way. We slept huddled in every covering we had brought with us, even the horses’ riding pelts, and still shivered in the chill.

  “Deer!” Kor exclaimed as we set out in the morning. “Above the tree line?”

  Yes, I had known deer came to the highmountain meadows in the early summer to feed on the herbs. They were only ordinary red deer such as I had always known, hinds with fawns—calves, we called them, and we called the deer “Sakeema’s cattle.” And harts in velvet—but mist was steaming up from the meadows in the low morning light, the sunlight very white and slanting at that height, and in the mist and the brilliant light the deer looked like wraiths out of the eversnow. We all stood watching them.

  As we watched, one of them left the herd and trotted toward us.

  A shapely hind, very beautiful, white—I blinked. Yes, the hind truly was of a creamy white, the color of snow in a winter’s clear sunset, not merely whitened by mist and sheen. It trotted directly up to us as if to greet us or confer with us, the most comely of hinds, delicate head held high and its eyes steady upon us with no sign of fear—I felt my own sharp intake of breath. The eyes, herb green, looked very human, unlike any eyes of deer that I had ever seen.

  “’Ware! The thing’s not natural. Stay away!” I warned, and without looking away from it I reached out to make sure Kor was beside me—he was. Tass stood still. I heard the older men mutter darkly. But Birc, in that headlong boyish way of his, had already moved even as I spoke. Delighted, he had stepped forward, hand extended, and as I shouted his name he touched the hind, caressed it on its head, neck, and milky chest—

  It was as if mist swirled before our eyes, and more quickly than I can tell it the creature changed shape. A comely maiden stood there, a woman with a mane of hair the color of a red deer in sunlight, with delicate brows and softly curving lips, every feature very fair, but her purple-green eyes somehow no less strange in that human face. She was naked, and all over her well-formed body grew fine, pale fur like that of a fawn. And Birc was st
anding with his hand on her breast.

  “Birc,” I cried at him, “back!”

  The look on his face was rapt, smitten. He did not move except to place his other hand around her waist.

  I strode forward and snatched him away bodily—he struggled against me. With a whizzing noise someone hurled a knife—it was Tohr. The blow would have killed the deer maiden in her human shape. But on the instant she was a hind again, and she took the knife in the thick, meaty swelling of her neck. She bounded away, leaving splatters of blood bright on the herb leaves, and the knife went with her, stuck to the hilt in her flesh.

  “No!” Birc cried wildly, fighting to throw off my grip. “No, let her be, let me go! She is—mine, my lifelove, my destiny—”

  I tried to reason with him. “How can you say that? You have only just the once seen her.”

  “The thing’s a demon,” Tohr growled.

  “Let me go!” Birc started to sob. “Sakeema, she is running away, how will I find her again!”

  “Tie him up,” said Kor softly, reluctantly, “and sling him over one of the horses.”

  We did so, putting him on gentle Calimir, and Birc protested through the day, shouting, sobbing, and cursing us by turns, and refused to eat or drink. It was a wretched day. Even being among my own beloved peaks again did not much cheer me. Not far beyond the pass, just south of the shortgrass steppes, lay the high valley, the Demesne of my people. It did not matter. Nothing seemed to matter much while Birc lay crying. I had not realized how much I liked him.

  Kor walked by his head and tried to talk to him. It made no difference. After a while I remembered that the look on Kor’s face, a taut, pale look, was not merely the semblance of my own discomfort. Whatever anguish Birc was feeling, likely Kor felt as well. My heart sank, but I could not go to him to comfort him, not before the others, for they did not know his secret.

  By nightfall Birc had exhausted himself, and though he would not eat, we hoped he would sleep. Tohr spoke up for the first turn at guard, and the rest of us welcomed the mercy of slumber. We all slept numbly, deeply.