Madbond

by Nancy Springer

  In the morning, when we awoke, Tohr lay dead, his own knife sheathed to the hilt in his chest, and Birc was gone.

  The six of us who remained stared at each other for a time. I privately thought of the Cragsman’s words concerning a toll and hoped that this was the total of it. It was not a thought to be spoken. Kor finally broke silence.

  “Well,” he said heavily, “I cannot just let him go. Can you track him, Dan?”

  I circled our camp. The only trail, leading back the way we had come, was that of a deer. The pointed marks of the hooves were deeply pressed.

  “He rode her,” I murmured in wonder.

  The trail was plain enough to follow, and after we had raised a cairn over Tohr we spent the better part of the day tracing it back. Birc’s mount was swift. If they had kept going we would never have caught up to them, afoot. But they had stopped and undertaken mounting of a different sort, in human form. When we found them they lay pressed together and deeply asleep in a mossy dell between rocks. My heart misgave me to see them so, naked, like two innocents, at our mercy. Kor and I crept up and laid hands on Birc as gently as we could without losing him, and the deer maiden sprang up, took her hind form and fled. No one offered to harm her this time. A crust of blood stood brown on her neck, and I flinched at the sight of it.

  Birc wept, but he no longer cursed us. Indeed, he seemed to have lost the power of speech. Hands bound behind him, he walked with us through what was left of the day, silent except for his sobbing, no matter how gently Kor spoke to him. That night, though we had bound Birc hand and foot, we all kept vigil, forming a circle around him, and all night Birc bleated out soft troating cries, like the cries of a rutting hart. Those cries pierced my heart. Next to me I felt Kor trembling, and from time to time I would reach over and touch his shoulder, trying to comfort him.

  At the first light of dawn we could see the hind standing at a small distance, very fair, very white and spiritlike in the dim break of day. Birc saw her as well and sat up, sending to her his bleating call.

  “Kor,” I said, “look.”

  I went to Birc and parted his forelock, showing Kor what I had seen. Just at the hairline above either eye stood a bony knob, and growing from each one, the beginnings of an antler in velvet.

  All the men gathered around and saw, and their faces turned bleak. Birc gave his troating call. From out of the dawn the hind bleated in answer, stepping delicately closer.

  Kor loosened Birc’s bindings, slipping them off his arms and legs. Birc stood up eagerly, but Kor detained him yet a moment longer, embracing him and giving him the kiss of a king.

  “Farewell,” he muttered, releasing him, and Birc bounded away.

  With a single vaulting leap he was on the hind’s back, his feet hanging down over her shoulders. Then with a high, joyous, springing stride she carried him off, not fleeing but rather, I thought, delighting in his weight. Up the slope to the beginning of the naked rock they went, and as the hind paused for a moment there, looking behind her, the sun reached over the shoulder of the mountain and touched her. I have always remembered that sheen of light on her, on Birc, like fire of passion.… Kor lifted his hand, and the hind raised her head, but Birc made no gesture of salute, sitting entranced on her back. Then around the angle of the rock they went, and we lost sight of them against the blaze of the eversnow.

  We who remained went on with our journey, and for the full day no one spoke.

  We crossed the high pass, then descended nearly to the tree line, and our breathing grew easier. The next day we put away our sorrow and started talking to each other again. The trees comforted us, though they were not spruce and fir but the great yellow pines that grew on arid slopes—for we were on the shadowland side of the mountains now. They were spaced far apart, making glades and parks where deer might graze. That night, once again amidst trees and mountainside meadows, we made ourselves a blazing fire of deadwood pine.

  “Do not think too badly of the deer people,” I told the company. “We of the Red Hart call them blessed. Perilous, yes, but very beautiful, and blessed. There is a tale of the deer people and Sakeema.”

  “Tell it,” Kor said.

  It was only a small tale.

  “When Sakeema lay dying, all the creatures of forest and meadow came to him and pleaded with him to live, but he had given up all the life that was in him. He died. Then, as he lay dead, the creatures stayed by him and mourned him, among them the deer he had cherished, the red deer and also the great elk and the spotted deer, the yellow deer with spreading antlers, the blue deer of Sakeema’s making, and all the many other kinds now gone. They kept vigil as women washed the body and prepared it for burial. Then the deer wept. Real tears welled out of their eyes and crept down the fine fur of their cheeks, and the people, the few people who were brave enough to be there, saw this and gave way, and the deer gathered close around Sakeema as he lay dead. And as the tears fell on his still body Sakeema started to breathe, and his body grew warm. Then the deer wept anew for joy. But no one could awaken Sakeema as he lay still and slept. So some of the deer took human form and placed Sakeema on the backs of some others, and the deer bore him away to the mountain cave where he had been born. He sleeps there yet, and some time when we need him worst, it is said, he will awaken and come back to us in a way we least expect.… But ever since they wept over Sakeema the deer take human form from time to time, my people say, though they never speak to us.”

  “If they could speak to us,” someone remarked, “they could tell us where Sakeema lies.”

  “Yes,” I said heavily, “but they cannot.” Yearning for Sakeema burned hot in me, for I was remembering remnants of a vision.

  “The Herders tell a tale of the mother of Sakeema,” said Tassida.

  “Mother of Sakeema!” It was one of the guardsmen. “What tale can be told of her, the bitch?”

  “Bitch, indeed, but also the goddess. It was the All-Mother, they say, the old goddess whose name has been forgotten, she who spun out the wool of which the world is made and dyed it in colors too many to name and wove out the world on her loom of sky, she who gave the Herders their sheep as brown as earth with the six horns to signify the six tribes, her children. She who gave the Herders clay to form and red stone to carve and burros gray as mountains. This goddess looked down where the world spread out like a great blanket to meet the sky, saw the greens and browns and grays and yellows of it, saw men moving on the surface of it and knew that all was not entirely right. There were some angry things she had done and some things of wonder she had not made, and thus men had forgotten her name. So she sat down on the plains far beyond the thunder cones—for only the grassy plains were vast enough to hold her—and she conceived Sakeema from white of cloud and blue of sky, and she gave birth. And she gave the babe over to the keeping of a she-wolf, one of the red she-wolves of the prairie, and she, the All-Mother, went away again and left the righting of the world to Sakeema. So it was that Sakeema loved creatures always, and when his powers came to him he created creatures not in the blanket colors only but also in blues and whites, as of cloud and sky.”

  We all glanced at each other, thinking of the blue bears of Sakeema, the blue deer, the white sea eagles. The tale rang true, but because it came from the Herders some of us wished to fault it.

  “These men with the great knives, the swords, of whom you once spoke,” someone asked, “were they also the get of this goddess?”

  “Ah,” said Tassida, “that is another matter.” And he leaned back, looked up at the sky above the treetops and told us tale after tale of the wonders of the time long before Sakeema. In that time, he said, all people wore glorious robes, all woven, not of wool only but of a shining substance called silk, and of a plant fiber called linen. And their tools and weapons were made of metal, a substance unknown to us, and those who remembered these people said they were full of magic and constantly performed marvels. They hewed the solid stone and raised great dwellings of it, all towers and walls, castles
, and they built cairns like small mountains over their dead. He himself had seen on the plains the ruins of such dwellings and monuments, Tassida told us.

  “Were these people like you?” Kor asked him. “Light of hair and dark of eyes?”

  “They were of many sorts of coloring, for there were as many sorts of people as there were many tribes: colorings and kinds of people you have never heard of. And the tribes were not tribes as you know them, Korridun King. The people of one small tribe might number a hundred villages or more. Such a king as you are would be reckoned only a petty chieftain of one small village by the kings of that time.”

  “You mean—” Kor struggled with this. “You mean the people of a king were so numerous that they could not all live in one village?”

  “Even so.”

  “But then how could he or she know them, to rule them properly?”

  “These kings ruled by law, not by knowing. And there were no women among them.”

  Kor shook his head in speechless bewilderment. “But how many tribes of this sort were there?” one of the guardsmen asked.

  “Many. Enough so that there were few places in all the vast land that did not have people to hunt them or till them or fish them.”

  “But these diverse people must have been as many as the stars of the sky,” I protested.

  “They were more numerous than the stars of the sky,” said Tass.

  None of us believed much of this, except perhaps Tassida, but it made a good tale and a way to beguile the evening.

  “They made great boats of wood, boats great enough to carry a village,” Tass went on, “and they put tall trees on them to take great sails, and they sailed them on the ocean. They sailed to distant islands, places we can no longer name or find, and they returned with strange creatures and marvelous fruits. And they grew the fruits in warm places inside their great stone houses, in courtyards covered with a roof clear as air, so that the sun could shine in and they could have fruits in the wintertime.”

  “A roof of air,” someone mocked.

  “Yes,” said Tass fiercely. “Clear as air, but hard, and not letting in the cold. And they had boxes of stone, hot from the hearth, to cook their bread in. And they played music on great harps so large they sat on legs on the floor. Their homes were full of music. And they covered their floors and their walls with pictures made out of colored stones. I know this to be true, for I have seen the ruins of them. Other stones they wrought into shining shapes called jewels. Not the soft red stones such as the Herders carve, but hard, shining stones fit to cut with, such bright stones as the one in your knife hilt, Dannoc. And they had a stuff the color of the sun and nearly as shining: gold, they called it, and it was the most precious of all things to them. They made headbands of it called crowns, headbands with jewels set in, and their kings wore them with their shining clothing. And armbands and rings, finely wrought things of all sorts they made out of it. They raised tame songbirds, kept them in cages of the sunstuff called gold, and they fashioned gardens meant only for beauty, where flowers grew and swans swam.”

  “And I suppose they raised beautiful horses,” said Kor quite softly.

  Tass gave him a startled glance and half opened his mouth as if to speak, but did not.

  “What has become of these wondrous folk, Tassida?” asked Kor, his voice no louder than a breath of wind. “They who tamed stone and sea, even the birds of the air?”

  “They dwindled, as all has dwindled,” answered Tassida just as softly, “and their stone dwellings fell to ruin, and their horses ran wild, and their great boats bleached into firewood on the shore. They are gone. Gone. I have searched and searched for them and I have found only their empty houses, open to wind and rain.”

  “And a certain horse,” Kor mused. “And now a sword.”

  Tassida gathered a pelt around himself as if he were cold, and did not answer. Kor sat staring at the boy’s fair, strange face.

  We did not question him any further, for we were weary of mysteries. We sat long by the fire that night, talked much—though not of Birc—and grew warm and merry, for who or what was there to hurt us anymore? On the morrow, after we had passed the final rocky ridge, we would be at the reaches of the high plateau, the steppes, and just southward lay the fringes of the hunting lands, the Demesne, of my people.

  Chapter Fourteen

  In the morning Kor took the lead. Talu was in heat and, bitch of a fanged mare that she was, she kicked at the gelding when he walked behind her, though Calimir was as gentle and courteous as he was beautiful. So the mare and I brought up the rear. A hot wind was blowing down from the mountains, as hot as the mare’s temper, and I knew it could go on for days, sapping our strength. Witch winds, we hunters called such hot and relentless winds out of the west, and they were enough to make lifelong friends come to blows—the Herders said they made the sheep abort their lambs. But I did not tell the others this, letting them hope that it would quickly abate. Soon enough, in a day or two, they would be downhearted.

  As it turned out, sooner than I knew.

  We came to the last ridge, lower than the true peaks, and climbed to a rocky pass. Up on the alps we had been most of the time above cloud, but from this lower nagsback we could see the world spread out before us like a cloak trailing from the shoulders of the mountains, and the cloak was sand-brown and pebble-gray and patched with the dull green of blunderbrush—we hunters called it that because woe to the one who blundered into it, he would be bloody from brown thorns. Nearly everything was brown or yellow-brown on the steppes, even the grass—but there was more sand and rock than grass, which grew sparse and short. The yellow pines ended at the ridge, but a few twisted junipers grew beyond, looking no larger than brush balls in the great distances of the expanse that lay before us. The reaches of the sere plateau looked oddly pale against the darker blue sky.

  “Drink sparingly of your water,” I told the others, for although the rippling line of the greener hills to southward did not look far, perhaps a day’s journey, I knew it might be much farther. Where there were no trees, there was no telling.

  Still gazing, more in shock than in wonder, Kor felt for the goatskin full of water that hung at his knee. “But what has happened!” he exclaimed. “A day ago all was verdant.”

  “We have left the snowfields, where the snowmelt feeds the meadows,” I told him. “And here little rain falls. These are the lands that lie in the shadow of the tall peaks. Water falls to the seaward side of the mountains and does not carry inland.”

  “But the upland valleys of your people—” He pointed east and southward, where he judged the place lay. “—they also lie on the landward side of the peaks.”

  I shrugged. “We bear Sakeema’s blessing, and the rain finds its way to us.”

  Near my shoulder, Tassida snorted. “The line of the mountains curves away from the sea,” he said rather too curtly for courtesy, “and the passes channel the clouds to you.”

  “Is that not Sakeema’s blessing?” I retorted. “It is as well for us,” I added before he could speak, “that we roam there and the Fanged Horse Folk here on the shadowlands.”

  “And the Herders,” said Kor.

  “Sometimes. But much farther eastward.” I pointed, though I could see nothing but a low rise looming yellow-gray against the blue sky. “For the most part they stay near the thunder cones.” The oddly shaped mountains that sometimes rumbled and vomited fire, that wore skirts of blackstone around their feet. “Sometimes they venture to the edges of the great plain that lies beyond. But that is a vast flatness even more arid than this. There no one goes.”

  “Am I no one?” asked Tass bitterly.

  “Tell us the tale in the evening,” said Kor. “For now, spare talking to spare water.” He squared his shoulders and led us down from the ridge, between the last of the yellow pines.

  Downward, into the open—

  The Fanged Horse warriors struck out of the woods with a rush like storm, galloping at us from three side
s, and Pajlat himself rode at their head, his black hair streaming like oily smoke and all his teeth bared in a killer’s smile.

  “Ho! Korridun, little king!” he greeted, his heavy whip of bisonhide already upraised.

  “Calimir!” Tass shouted to the horse. “Fight!”

  The gelding reared, striking out with his forehooves at Pajlat’s vicious fanged mare, and Kor took the whip on his shoulder instead of his face, where it had been aimed. I saw how he was shaken by the force of the blow, but he kept his seat, clinging to Calimir’s mane. Pajlat’s warriors went at the men on foot, intent on trophies—the heads of victims dangled by the hair from their bearskin riding pelts. Kor had his knife out, but such a small blade would avail him little against the long reach of Pajlat’s weapon, even less against the stone-headed clubs and spears of the others. And he knew nothing of how to use his horse in battle, for the Seal were not horseback riders. Calimir whirled and darted, keeping foes to the fore, but the fangs of the enemy steeds were coming at him, the mares roaring like their masters, deadly as so many horned bison—

  And under me Talu was roaring as well, and springing forward, and slashing with her fangs, opening a path to take me to Kor’s side, and the great knife, the sword, was ablaze in my hand.

  I felt odd, very odd, as if there were two of me. It was the only way I could manage to do what I had to do, I was so deeply afraid. Terrified—not of death and battle, but of my own weapon, the great knife, the strange sword, and of the murderer it might awaken in me, and of memory. But for Kor’s sake … And so it was that I saw the battle as if I sat aside and watched, and all the while my arm, my sword, and my steed did destruction.

  But there were too many of them in the way, the raiding scum, too many between me and Pajlat’s filthy face. There must have been a dozen or more of them against our six! They trampled down the men on foot as if they were so much grass. And I could not soon enough get to Korridun’s side, and I could have cried out as I saw Pajlat’s sickening whip curl around his back. So far Calimir had kept the lash away from Kor’s face, but if Kor weakened under those blows he would fall—