Madbond

by Nancy Springer

  “It is nothing but your own shadow!” I scolded her, for there was nothing moving anywhere near, not even the snakes that she and Kor’s fanged mare hunted at night to sustain themselves. Asps liked the heat no more than we did. They went under rocks in the daytime, and sometimes when we stopped the mares would paw them out and munch them.… Calimir might shy from a serpent, but it would not be a snake that had frightened Talu.

  As if he had heard my thought, the gelding took up the same tune, snorting and leaping in his turn. And then Kor’s nameless mare. “Easy!” he exclaimed. He himself was not yet completely easy on horseback.

  “Something is wrong,” Tass said.

  Then finally, stupid as I was with the heat and my own perplexities, I comprehended what it might be and turned to look behind us. Kor did the same.

  The length of the horizon, something like a dark mist drifted into the sky.

  “Is that smoke?” Kor asked, not wishing to believe it.

  Still staring, I nodded.

  “But—but it is immense! The whole of the steppes must be on fire!”

  “Yes. Come, we must ride more quickly.” I put Talu into the lope. She wanted to break into a hard, panicky gallop, but I would not allow that, or not yet. The others rode with me.

  “The wind is swift,” I warned. “The fire may well travel as fast as we do.” Or faster. I had seen the charred carcasses of deer caught by such fires, but I did not speak that thought.

  “Did Pajlat plan it so, do you think?” Kor asked, his voice grim.

  I had not considered that. “Perhaps.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Tass in her clear voice. “Such fires chance all too often. The shadowlands are dry, any spark can cause one. Even a spark carried by this wind.”

  I glanced back. At a distance, flames shot up from a lone juniper.

  “Hotwind wildfire, folk call it,” I said.

  I turned Talu to place the wind behind my right shoulder. If we loped mostly southward, perhaps we would be able to outflank the fire. Perhaps not. We no longer rode directly away from it, and it drew closer behind us. I had no need to look back—I could smell the smoke, as Talu smelled it, snorting. But Kor looked back.

  “Let us ride faster,” he said in a voice carefully controlled. I heard the taut control. Such fire must have been as strange and fearsome to him as the rolling waves of the ocean were to me. Therefore he was afraid. For my own part I did not feel very much afraid, though there was no denying that we were in peril.

  “No,” I said, “save the steeds’ best strength for when we need it worst. This is apt to seem a long day, Kor.” We turned our backs to the wind again, cantering straight before the fire, and we did not gain on it.

  “Is there nothing to stop it?” he called to me over the dry noise of hooves. “A stream? A ditch, even?”

  “Not likely,” I said. “Tass?”

  She shook her head, riding silently, rocking as if she were a part of Calimir’s smooth canter, long legs pressed around his barrel and her hair rippling out in lovelocks behind her.

  We loped along for hours, sometimes veering southward, sometimes trotting straight before the wind to rest the horses, though they wanted little rest—they were plainly frightened, their ears tilted back toward the danger behind us, their eyes rolling whitely as they swung their heads from side to side, trying to watch it. But they loped on steadily and bravely, and from time to time Kor reached out to pat his mare on her sweaty neck—a gesture rare in him, for he was not much accustomed to horses.

  “She has a name now,” he told us. “Sora. The wildfire. She runs as swiftly as the flames.”

  “So we hope,” I said dourly, but Tass surprised us both with a smile.

  “Her legs are red, like the heart of fire, and the rest of her is yellow, her mane like the tips of flame. It is a good name for her.”

  “To be sure, she is a beauty,” I said, trying to jest, for Sora was every bit as ugly as Talu but for her color. May she carry you to safety, was my unspoken thought.

  The fire dogged our heels, relentless, hungry, until it drew so close we could hear it licking and gnawing at brush and bleached grass. I looked back to see flames leaping as high as the horses’ chests, flames scrabbling and hissing and swallowing blunderbrush in gulps, running toward us in bounds. If there were a gust in the wind, it might catch us all in a moment.

  “Time for a gallop, flat out,” Tass said.

  I nodded. The horses were tiring, but that was perhaps to the good. Perhaps their weariness would keep them from running out of control. I wanted no panic. If Kor could keep the leash on his fear yet a while longer—I looked over at him and saw his face bone white even in the witch wind heat, and he was staring forward.

  “But how—when—it cannot have gotten ahead of us!”

  At my left side I heard Tassida fervently cursing. Fire confronted us to eastward, and our every stride brought us closer to it! Fire just as fearsome as the one behind us, fire that leaped to devour junipers at a single swallow, that leaped to blacken the shadowlands. We were trapped in the narrowing span between the two.

  “It is not possible!” Tass railed. “Have we gone mad?”

  “No need to save water any longer!” I shouted, and, letting Talu’s reins lie on her neck, I untied the opening of my waterskin so that every drop of it spilled out and down my legs, down even to my feet, soaking them. Already Talu had lengthened her stride. I let her. By my side I saw Kor struggling with his goatskin, trying to do as I had done and not lose his seat, perhaps wishing that he had been reared a horseman. Ashen, he looked as wild as the fanged mares. Still I was not very frightened, for there was no time for fear. One fire lay a few strides before us, the other a few strides behind.… “Hang on by the mane!” I shouted at Kor, and with a yell of despair or bravado I kicked Talu to send her leaping through the flames before us.

  And just as she sprang I saw Kor fall.…

  Hard on his back he fell, his head snapping downward to hit against the rocky ground, and he lay still.

  Now truly I was afraid.

  Talu was through the fire and perhaps ten strides farther, long galloping strides, before I could wrestle her to a stop. And the whole world had gone mad: there were people scattering before me, people flailing blankets about, Herders, where the Herders ought not to be. And Talu was fully panicked at last, rearing and squealing and useless, and Kor’s mare Sora by her side, riderless and just as crazed with fear. I never thought of borrowing Calimir, though he and Tass stood quietly within arm’s reach. Intent only on saving Kor, I swung myself down by Talu’s neck, threw her reins at Tass and ran back the way we had come.

  “Dan! Don’t! Are you out of your mind?” I heard Tassida’s voice only faintly, and the words had no meaning to me. I reached the fire, threw my arms skyward to keep them out of the flames and ran in.

  The heat was searing, fearsome, reaching even to the indeeps of my lungs, so that I could scarcely breathe. Ai, if Kor was in this, lying in it, insensible, there was no hope for him.… I at least was upright, and my leather boots, my leather leggings, soaked with sweat and the last of our drinking water, saved me from the worst of it. Pain only speeded me. I leaped through the flames as the horses had.

  Kor lay—there was less than a man’s footpace of unburned ground to either side of him. He lay sprawled where he had fallen, the heat of the oncoming flames crisping his hair, his eyes closed and his face a frightened gray touched with orange flame light. If he had broken his neck—but there was no time to find out. I gathered him up quickly, if only to save his body for a fitting burial, and I hoisted him onto my shoulders, as far from the flames as I could manage. One step, and the fire closed around my legs.

  I could no longer run and leap, not with Kor on my back. I walked through the fire. For only a few moments, perhaps a dozen steps, truly, but it seemed an eternity that I walked through burning pain and an orange blindness. I could not breathe or see, I stumbled, no longer sure of my direction. It was n
o use, I would fall—

  I felt Kor stirring on my shoulders, felt the tremor as he groaned. He lived, and perhaps he would be well! Joy spurred me so that I staggered a few steps more, and before me I heard a clear call. Tass. In a moment I felt her hand on my arm, and the heat, the pain lessened, and I stopped and eased Kor to ground that, mercifully, did not burn. Then I also lay down, or perhaps I fell, and someone, the blessing of Sakeema on that someone, was pouring water all over me.

  “Open your eyes,” Tass ordered, wiping water away from them with her hand.

  I did so, and saw her blurrily, then more clearly, scowling down on me. Beyond her Herders clustered around, staring, and beyond them, the fire—I sat straight up in alarm.

  “Far better than you have any right to be,” Tass grumped.

  But fire was coming, I had to save Kor from the fire, I thought groggily. “Kor!” I cried.

  “Right here,” he said. His voice was labored, his face creased with pain, but he was lying by my side, looking up at me, speaking to me, and perhaps he would yet be well if the fire did not take us—

  “The fire!” I exclaimed.

  “You walked through it,” Kor muttered. “You walked through fire for me.” His eyes had closed, but his hand moved toward me before it fell to earth.

  “No!” I blurted, meaning that he had not understood, I had not yet saved him, I must shoulder him or drag him or lay him over a horse before the flames flowed around us again. I struggled to get up. Tass pushed me back none too gently.

  “Be still,” she commanded, and she went to Kor, feeling his head and neck with her fingertips, then lifting his head in her hands. I watched, wild with impatience—what did she think she was doing! There was no time—but in a moment Kor opened his eyes again, and in the same moment my poor mind, stupid with smoke and fear, comprehended that we were no longer in danger, that the fire was somehow held at bay by all the people around me, and I looked.

  A ditch of sorts had been scratched in the surface of the high shortgrass plain, and ranged along it stood Herders with blankets, beating back the flames that sometimes wandered across it. They had set a fire row to halt the wildfire, I later learned, but hotwind had roused their own small fire to wildfire as well, and it had turned on them, nearly rending them. Then wildfire had joined with wildfire in a burst, a storm, of flame. But the worst of the danger was past. Already the blaze leaped lower, for there was nothing any longer for it to feed on. I turned my head. At my back stood brown sheep, huddled into a dense, bleating flock, and gray burros, and the domed brushwood huts of the Herder village. Here, where it did not belong, with the thunder cones nowhere near.

  The crowd around me parted, and old Ayol, the longtime king of the Herders, stood before me, scowling down on me, the richly figured ceremonial blanket around his shoulders. Scowling. Tass was mettlesome always, but old Ayol was gentle—why was he frowning at me?

  “Tassida the Wanderer has ridden our way before, and we welcome her,” he stated with ritual dignity. “Korridun King of the Seal Kindred we welcome as an honored friend. To Dannoc of the Red Hart Tribe we extend the aid due to one in need, as Sakeema would have done, but we do not welcome him. The Red Hart people have betrayed the trust of the Herders.”

  “What?” Surprise and anger brought me to my feet, where I stood swaying, the charred remnants of my leggings hanging in wet draggles from my legs. If I moved again, I would find myself naked. Not a fitting showing for one confronting old Ayol.

  “Tyonoc of the Red Hart has turned against the ways of his forebears. Tyonoc of the Red Hart has violated the friendship of the Herders,” Ayol chanted, his yellow eyes not on me but on the sky, showing me in that way his contempt. “Why, then, should the Herders welcome his son?”

  I took a threatening step toward him, no longer caring if my clothing fell away and left me uncovered. “Tyonoc of the Red Hart has never showed you anything but honor!” I shouted. Unreasoning fury had hold of me, that he should speak evil of my father. It did not seem to matter, at the time, that I could not in fact remember what my father had lately done. Mind did not matter, for heart felt blindly and fervently certain that Tyonoc could do no wrong.

  “Dan,” said Tass coolly from behind me, “don’t be an ass. Ayol speaks but simple truth.”

  I turned on her in astonishment. “Not so!” I flared.

  “Tyonoc has driven the Herders from their lands,” Ayol stated darkly. “Dannoc did not know? Then look around you, and believe. Why do the Herders crouch on the unfriendly steppes, in the way of Fanged Horse raiders, of wildfires?”

  “You’ve gone mad, old man!” I raged at him. “You’re muddleheaded in your dotage.”

  I said to him many things more. Plainly, for all to see, I was a madman, shouting and tottering, flinging up my hands. Ayol said no more to me, but stubbornly he stood his ground before me, scowling yet more deeply, and his twelve clustered around him, weapons in hand. Only my own fear of my own weapon kept me from drawing the great sword and joining in fight with them. That, and Kor, who had struggled up somehow and managed the few steps to my side. He held onto my arm, as much for support as to restrain me.

  “Dan,” he said quietly, “let it go.”

  “Let it go?” I was outraged. “I cannot! You heard what he said—”

  “Dan, you walked through fire for me. It cannot be so much harder to grant me this one request. Let it go.”

  I stood panting with fury and staring at him. But I shouted no longer at Ayol, and when I spoke again my voice was soft and even. “Do you believe what he says of my father?”

  “It is not a matter of believing for me, Dan. For your own part, believe what you must.”

  “And count yourself mercifully received,” Tass put in crisply, “that you have not been killed, as many of Ayol’s people were killed, not long ago.”

  I ignored her, my gaze fixed on Kor. An awful fear had me in a choking grip. “Kor,” I insisted, “what he says of my father. Is it true?”

  “Ayol has said it is. So has Tassida.”

  “But if you tell me …” I could not go on. Fear had overpowered me, and I saw only black, black of scorched and smoking earth, black of my charred clothing, black of benighted water and a nightmare.

  “I will tell you nothing,” Kor said, his words traveling to me distantly, as if through water. “I will tell you nothing, ever again. You must find your own way to truth, Dan.”

  But not that day. It was not to be borne, and I could not begin to face it or encompass it. My heart would have broken. Mind clashed with heart, and both shrieked inwardly, and I swayed where I stood. Tass reached out to steady me—I fell to the ground at her feet, I fainted. When I awoke it was after nightfall, and I was lying in one of the brushwood huts of the Herders, naked under a blanket of fine wool.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Nothing ailed Kor except a banged head and bruises. For my own part, I had some painfully scorched skin, especially where lappet and leggings should have met. They had let the flames at my groin, and to my blushing shame I discovered that Tassida had rubbed it with some sort of unguent while I lay unconscious. But by the second day, well fed and rested, I was going about in a breechcloth made of lambswool, and I remarked to Kor that we ought to be on our way.

  “It seems to me,” he replied, “that we are both far better healed than is in reason. Why, I wonder?”

  I shrugged, for I shied away from thinking, those days. By mutual unspoken consent Ayol and I had said no more about the matter between us, as it was not in me to deal with it, not then, and he seemed content having had his say that first day. I dare say Kor or Tassida had talked with him about me. And if I remembered calling him foul names, it seemed part of a dark dream.

  We took leave of him courteously in the morning. He and his folk had not much provision to spare us, but we were only a few days’ journey from the hunting lands of my people, where I felt certain we would soon find food.

  We rode long and late that day and the da
ys that followed. The hot witch wind had at last abated, and once again we took joy in the journey as the land slowly turned from sere to faint green to the tall-grass green of the prairies where the badgers and blue hens lived.

  If Kor had done any courting of Tass at the Herder village, I did not know of it. And there was little chance now for any—we were always, the three of us, together. It would have been too dangerous to go separately even if I could have found an excuse. So I rode my dun gray Talu in the rear, and Kor took the fore on his homely Sora, the wildfire mare, and Tass rode between us for the most part, or beside Kor, on the handsome Calimir. Every day Kor rode more as a king might. And his passion for Tass sang in his voice when he spoke to her, showed in his glance and his gestures when he was near her, so that she must have seen it. I thought she could not help but love him when he was so afire with love for her, all warmth and beauty and comity as of gentle fire.… There had never been a more noble wooing. But if she saw it, she gave no sign. And it sometimes seemed to me that she spoke most often to me, though she had to call back over her shoulder to do so, for Talu would kick at Calimir if we rode abreast.

  “That sword of yours,” she called to me the first day out.

  “What of it?”

  “You are half afraid of it.”

  Kor looked around worriedly, knowing I did not much care to speak of the unaccountable weapon, but I grinned at him and at Tass. I quipped, “Indeed, I am entirely afraid of it.”

  “Why?” She swiveled on Calimir’s back to peer at me, placing a hand on the gelding’s rump. Her tunic tightened around her waist, her breasts tilted toward me, her thighs shifted, braced against the horse’s back. I felt a warm tide rising in me, and I had to swallow before I spoke. Then I spoke more truth than I had intended.

  “I am afraid—it might turn against someone I love.”