Morning was young and sweet-smelling, dewy. I breathed deeply, bracing myself with the sweet air, aware that my steps were unsteady. Then a glint of sun color in the grass drew my eyes down from the sky—it was my great knife, Alar, lying where I had dropped her. No one had dared to touch her, even to clean her, and my father’s blood still clotted her graceful body like dark flowers. I went to the sword, turned her over and over, then cleaned her in the forgiving grass and sheathed her.
Standing, I saw the place where my father had fallen. No body lay there.
Kor came up beside me and put an arm lightly around my shoulders. Had he, somehow, grown? His head was almost on a level with mine.
“What have they done with him?” I wondered aloud, meaning Tyonoc.
“They did not know what to do, Leotie tells me. They let the body lie. And during the night sometime, Tyee says, it disappeared as if it had never been. The searchers are out now, but I think they will not find anything.”
I stood for a while breathing the clean air and looking around me. In the main camp, some small distance away, folk were tending their cooking fires. There would be food for me there, and comfort, if I wanted them. For the rest of my life, if I wanted them.
Yet there was in me the thought of an impossible journey.…
“Kor,” I said finally, very softly, very low, “I must find him.”
“Your father.”
“Yes. I only now grieve for him, yet he has been gone for years. It is not as it should be. I must find him and make my peace with him. I must bring him back.”
He nodded as simply as if I were speaking of a journey past the thunder cones, perhaps, to the pit village of the Herders at the edge of the plains. “I have long thought I should seek my mother and my father,” he said. “I was afraid—that is why I did not seek my seal form, knowing it would let me venture.… But now I am no longer afraid. I will come with you.”
It was the most heady of gifts, what he gave me—his presence, his constant love. I turned and seized him by the hand. Then, moved beyond words, I embraced him.
“You are swaying where you stand,” he said. “You need food.”
Indeed, I was ravenous, and so spent I could scarcely totter the small distance to the nearest fire. But there my people gathered around me and gave me every sort of viand I could desire, and the children clustered around Kor, large-eyed. Their hair shone nearly as white as the sun, the little ones of my tribe. I looked at them and smiled. They knew Kor, who or what he was, as well as I did.
“Why is it that the children always come to you, Kor?” I teased.
“Because they know I like them. And why do I like them? Because their passions are clean, simple, and brief. Mercifully brief.” His tone matched mine, and he gave me an amused glance. “Are any of these little suntops yours, Dan?”
“Perhaps. How would I know, for certain? I have not been pledged.”
“Dan …” He looked at me in a sort of joyous despair and shook his head. “Go to sleep.”
The mist was burning away, the day turning clear and fine. I stretched out right where I was, in the sunlight. Kor took water and washed the caked blood from my arms and legs. Leotie brought bison grease and bandaging, and bound them up. Before she was done I fell asleep, and I slept the sleep of one blessed by Sakeema’s touch.
Chapter Nineteen
Two days later; after a vigil, Tyee stood before the assembled tribe and put on the ceremonial headgear, wearing the antlers of deer gone since the time of Sakeema, used only for the making of a new king. Tyee had sworn two things: to drive the Fanged Horse raiders back from the Demesne, and to restore the Herders to their rightful lands. These were pledges the people found fitting, for they wished to redeem their shame. They cheered Tyee riotously, gifting him with their heartfelt loyalty. He belonged to them, now.
And I belonged to—what? Kor? My quest? I was not unhappy. There had been time for talk with Tyee. We had walked out, he and I, to see the curly-haired ponies, my own fair sorrel Nolcha grazing among them with a half-grown colt at her side. “Take her,” my brother had told me. “Let the fanged mare run back to her steppes.” But I had left Nolcha with the brood herd, choosing yet to ride ill-tempered Talu.
I was not any more entirely a Red Hart.
And three days after the kingmaking, days full of much feasting and good friendship, Kor and I mounted our fanged mares and rode. My people sent us on our way with gifts of food and new clothing, with good wishes and more than a little doubt—we had no notion of how we were to accomplish the thing I had set before them. But we did not turn at once westward, toward Mahela’s realm beneath the sea, for there was another matter I wished to attend to. We rode southward, toward the headwaters of the Otter River.
We rode through the day in silence for the most part, but from time to time thoughts welled up and were spoken, breaking the surface as sweetly and cleanly as spring water welling out of the mountainsides.
“There is Tassida to be thought of,” I said to Kor near quarterday.
“I think of her often,” he replied.
“What will you do? Do you wish to find her?”
“That is as it comes.” He sighed. “I am no worse off than I was before. I yearned for someone, anyone, then, and I yearn for her now. If it is meant to be …”
He let the words trail away, and we rode silently for a while.
“I think I am better off when I do not see her,” he said finally.
“I loved Leotie,” I remarked.
He nodded, unsurprised.
“I did. I was too much of an ass to admit it at the time. There had been other maidens.… But I was heartbroken when she went to Tyee.”
“He needed her even more than you did.”
I grimaced at him. “Blast you, yes.”
“He suffered as much as you did from the change in your father.”
“More. We wanted his love, but we learned to court his smiles instead—and there were more smiles for me.”
Kor grew thoughtful. Talu nodded her head, trying to shake the flies away, and I reached forward and brushed one off her ear. The steady cadence of the horses’ hooves made me feel blessed, as if I were rocked in the embrace of the world.
“You were more of a threat,” Kor said after a while. “Tyee’s lack of spirit saved him.”
I stared at him, thinking it through. “Yes … Tyee could be managed, and Ytan—he had always been sour, but he grew hard, he began to smile in that same way—”
Looking back, it seemed as if it had all happened at once.
“What brought the broth to a boil?” Kor asked.
“I don’t know! I was so heedless, how should I know? What does Tyee say?”
“That your tribesfolk loved you too well.”
We rode until we were far up in the foothills to the west and southward, well out of the usual range of my people, though there was scarcely any place in these uplands where they did not sometimes come. At dusk we camped, and in the morning we rode on until I saw a certain mountainside, or knee of a mountain, all in points and pinnacles, jagged as a half-made spearhead. Then I cast about, searching, for I could not remember exactly the way we, my father and brother and I, had come.
“It was in the mid of winter,” I explained to Kor. “And he—” It was hard for me to call him Father. “—Tyonoc—and Ytan asked me to come out riding with them to study the movements of the game. Or, rather, more ordered me than asked—but I was glad enough to go with them. I was the youngest, and I felt honored, and there was always the chance of—well, a smile. So we took some dried meat and flatbread and rode. By sundown we were still riding through the snow, though we had not brought our sleeping robes with us, and I did not dare to ask why. And at dusk my father led us—there.”
I pointed. It lay below us. A tarn, a small pool hidden in a steep fold of the mountain’s flank, very dark, midnight dark even in the morning of a bright summer day. We rode slowly down to it, wary of it for no reason. When we d
ismounted we stood well back from the brink.
“It must be deep,” Kor said.
“It is, believe me.” I winced. “Very deep. So deep the ice had formed only at the edges of it. And the stars came out, they were shadowed on that black surface—the pool might as well have been a bit of sky, shining deep and black. The only light came from the stars. I could barely see even the white of the snow. It was the blackest of all nights.”
“Dark of the moon,” Kor murmured.
“Yes. And we built no fire. When full dark had fallen, my father spoke to me. ‘This is a pool where legends are said to live,’ he told me. ‘Look in it and tell me what you see.’ And I, young fool, I was so excited and honored that he thought I might be a visionary …”
Kor turned and faced me, steadying me with his eyes. I took a deep breath and went on.
“So I stood at the edge of the pool and looked. ‘Go closer,’ my father said, and with a hard blow he pushed me in.”
“Not just a nasty prank,” said Kor in a low voice. “Not in the wintertime.”
“No. The water was cold enough to freeze my blood, and they knew it. They stood on the verge, on opposite sides, he and Ytan, and mocked me, telling me how they had killed my mother, slitting her throat and bleeding her like a deer and hiding her bones under a nameless rock somewhere. Their voices came out of the night like the voices of demons. Standing over me, they were black places where the stars did not shine. And there was no bottom under my feet, not even close to the shore, so steeply did the pool drop away. And the water seemed to pull me down. I—may I never again feel so sickened, so helpless. I thrashed about and swallowed water and shouted, not believing what they were saying to me, and when I raised my hands to them for aid they struck at me with their knives.”
I paused, remembering how the stone knives had come at me black out of the blackness, so that I had not known until my arm was slashed, bleeding, had not believed—that I was meant to die. That he, my own father, Tyonoc, with my brother Ytan, had plotted to kill me. As they had killed Wyonet. And truth had chilled me worse than the wintry tarn water, that my father had held her by her honey-colored hair, placed his blackstone knife to her throat—
“Go on,” Kor urged gently.
I blinked at him. The sunny day seemed darkened, as if a shadow of that night lay over it.
“It was a long time,” I said numbly. “I went under—I do not know how many times. The cold water sapped my strength, and when I came up to gasp for air they kicked at my head—” My voice began to tremble. “They kicked at me, or stuck with their knives, and drove me down again, and waited for me to drown. I had always been afraid of drowning. As a child I had dreamed of drowning, bad dreams, they woke me shouting in the night.…”
“And he remembered,” said Kor softly. “Yes. I see.”
“It would have been so much simpler, faster, just to have stabbed me along the trail somewhere. But they needs must drown me, because they found that cruder.” My voice was shaking hard, but I did not bother to weep. I was done with weeping. “They laughed, they laughed and jeered at me, at my struggles.…”
I could barely speak. “Go on,” Kor said.
“I struggled for a long time.” I could feel the struggle, the pain in my chest, the panic, black water drowning deep—but this time it was a memory, not a madman’s dream. “Then—my strength was nearly gone. I wanted—I am not sure what. To defy them, somehow, or get away from them, hide from their mockery.… Perhaps I just gave up. I let myself sink. I forced myself down, deeper, deeper into the accursed tarn, searching for the bottom of it. Down until I was nearly insensible, and there seemed no end to it. But then there was a scrape, or presence, and somehow the hilt found its way into my hand.”
“The great knife,” Kor breathed, for I had not told him why I was bringing him to that pool. “The sword!”
“A weapon, was all I knew then. A way to save my life.”
“But of course.” His eyes were sparkling. “I see it now, what happened. How you must have put the fear of vengeance into them!”
“Yes, they cried out.” I had to smile at his fervor, though for me the memories were far from pleasant. “I shot up to the surface and came half out of the water, sword first, and I heard them yell with surprise and fear. I swung, and I broke Ytan’s knife off to the hilt in his hand. He backed away from me, and I clambered out on his side of the tarn.” I pointed at the very place, lying before me, bright with sunshine. “Over there. I stood up—”
“Where did you find the strength!” Kor murmured.
“I—I was enraged. I wanted to kill them both.” Even after all that had happened, the words shook me. “I wanted to behead Ytan, and—my father—you know what I wanted to do to—to Tyonoc. Ytan ran, but—Tyonoc—he came around the pool and lunged at me, trying to topple me back in, and I slashed at him—”
His face in the starlight. My father, whom I had loved, who had loved me once and later betrayed me. Grieving, as stricken as I had been that night, I could not go on, I could not think or speak. I stared at the tarn, my lips moving soundlessly.
Gently Kor took up the tale for me. “He gave you a gash on the chest,” he said.
Frozen where I stood … No, not so. That was all in the past. With an effort of will I nodded.
“And great heart that you are,” Kor said with a quiet passion in his voice, “you could not kill him or even strike back at him, though you badly wanted to cut him apart. You took a horse instead and fled, and came to me somehow over the mountains, half healed but still enraged.… Do you recall that journey? It must have been fearsome.”
I found my voice. “I do not remember much of it,” I admitted.
“I will be forever grateful to your father,” said Kor, “for having sent you to me. I only wish he could have done it more kindly.”
I sat down on the turf, laid Alar aside, started to strip off my leggings and boots. Kor crouched down and peered at me.
“Dan,” he chided, “is it not enough to come here and look and remember?”
I shook my head, stood up and stripped off my doeskin breeching, so that I was naked. I took a long breath and stepped to the verge of the tarn.
All lay very silent. No bird called. Looking at the dark, smooth surface of the water, very still, shadowed, I seemed to see the ghosts of stars.
Suddenly, though it seemed a simple enough task I had set myself, I was unaccountably terrified, and I whirled around to look behind me. Kor was standing where I had left him, watching me, and as usual he knew what I was feeling. “I will not push you in,” he told me. “You know that.”
Ashamed—no, there was no use in shame when I was with him, for he had always felt what folly was in me, and still there was that—that love such as I had once before lost. Lost. Ai, but I was afraid.
“Kor,” I pleaded, “what if a devourer were to find a way into you, too? How would I know?”
The question took his breath—I saw his face change. For a moment he stood as silent as the pool.
“Knives might be of some use after all, Dan,” he said slowly then. “I think I would kill myself before I would let that happen.”
Not much comforted, I turned and dove headfirst into the tarn.
Deep, deep, drowning deep, and so black that even in the daylight I could see nothing. And ice cold, even in summertime. And pressure, water pulling at me. It was all familiar, grim but no longer a cause for panic. I forced myself deeper, holding my breath and searching for the bottom—I did not find it. There was a singing and a pounding in my ears. When I felt as if I might faint, I faced upward and plunged back to the surface, breaking it with a gasp, thrashing—
Kor was there, kneeling at the verge, reaching out to help me. He caught me by the wrist with a strong grip. I smiled and let myself be borne up by him until my breathing quieted.
“Let me try again,” I said, and with a faint frown he released his grasp.
I pushed my way down more calmly this time, more
strongly, forcing my way hands first through the blackness, until at last my hands—touched. There were rocks on the bottom, but also other things, shapes I knew, blades and hilts, more than one. My hand closed around a hilt—and the sword jerked away, turned and cut me across my startled fingers. In a moment I realized how much worse it could have hurt me. Clearly, a gentle warning.
Back at the surface of the tarn, panting, I let Kor pull me out so that I sat on the bank beside him. I held up my right hand. A shallow slash cut neatly across the palm side of all four fingers. The chill of the water had not let it bleed, but as I looked it filled with bright red. Kor looked as well and went rigid.
“Your sword is down there,” I told him, “but she will not come to me.”
For once I had truly confounded him. He could scarcely move or speak for amazement. “Bind that,” he said finally, and he got up and pulled off his tunic and breeches and boots. His plunge cut cleanly into the surface of the pool. The seal in him, I thought sitting there.
I sat in the sunshine, shivering in spite of the midsummer warmth, for what seemed a long time. I did not bind my hand, but let it bleed. Just as fear took hold of me and brought me to my feet, Kor came surging up, shaking the water out of his hair and eyes, and in his right hand he held his sword. On the pommel shone a glittering stone of pure, true red, blood red.
When I had helped him clamber out he stood before me with a rapt and thinking look, staring at the sword and then at the cut on my hand.
“A beautiful thing, for all that it is a weapon of war,” he remarked, hefting it, lifting it to the level of our eyes. Sunlight gleamed on the soaring blade. “Very clean, that cut it gave you.”
“As clean as the one I put on your neck once.” I looked. “The scar is gone.” All scars had left him in his healing.
“Matching marks,” he whispered to himself, and his eyes shot up to meet mine. “Dan, you have brothers, but I have none.”
“You want one?” I asked softly.
He nodded. “Get Alar.”
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