“Birc, well met!”
His face flushed with pleasure, and in his excitement he made little bleating, troating noises, such as the deer speak among themselves. Though he had been one of Kor’s people of the Seal Kindred, and they were not a hairy folk, I saw that his naked body was covered with a fine, reddish fur.
“You cannot speak?”
He shook his head. Small spike antlers jutted from his forehead just at the browline, revealed by the stirring of his hair.
“No matter,” I said. “Come see Kor. He will shout for joy.”
The white hind stood by Birc’s side, she, the most lovely of hinds, her fearless eyes of a purplish herb green and very human in her dainty head. Her I would not touch. I was afraid of her, for I knew what had happened to Birc through embracing her.
She walked with us back to camp. Kor sat working bow and bore to make a fire. The sticks clattered down forgotten when he saw my companion.
“Birc!” I was right—it was a shout. In two strides Kor had reached him, embracing him with the hard clasp of a king. Birc gave a soft, bleating cry of happiness.
“By our ancestor Sedna, but I am glad to see you well! Sit down, eat with us—oh, blast it to Mahela. Dan, I suppose there is not anything to eat.”
I shook my head. It seemed out of the question now to shoot a deer. But Birc reached over with casual ease and touched the white hind along her level back. For a moment my vision seemed to blur, and then she stood there also in her human form, a maiden with those eerie green eyes, a glorious mane of russet hair and white skin covered with pale fawn-colored fur. My breath tightened at the sight of her, she was so beautiful and so strange. Still standing with his hand on her back, Birc spoke softly into her ear, as deer speak, nuzzling her with his lips. Then she turned and went away upslope, and Birc sat down by our fire-yet-to-be.
Kor went back to his plying of bow and bore. “I suppose I ought to set some snares,” I said without much fervor. Snares took time. A day might go by before a pika or a whistling marmot chose to hang itself in one, and not much more than a mouthful when one did. Meanwhile we were miserable with hunger.
Birc spread his palms at me in a gesture as if to say, Do not worry.
“Just think,” I told him with mock annoyance, “we could be butchering your haunches right now.” I went to my pack to get the lengths of rawhide I needed—
Without the sound of a single footfall the white hind came back to our campsite, she in her womanly form, and with her came a retinue that made me drop snares and forget hunger: half a twelve of other deer women, their beauty such that I stared. They were of a richer fawn brown than she, their manes of glossy hair as red as a red deer’s flanks in springtime, their eyes brown or green or yellow-brown, like resin, all depth and glow. And of course they were naked, their breasts brown-tipped, full but not overfull, as dainty as their delicate way of stepping. And the soft swelling beneath their merkins—ai, but I lusted. Their strangeness, the fine fur that covered them, no longer served to put me off. I felt hot and watery with longing.
“Kor,” I said hoarsely, clenching my fists, “do not touch them unless you wish to grow antlers.”
“Speak for yourself, Dan,” he replied with some amusement in his voice. “I feel no desire to touch them.”
He had the fire going at last and was feeding it with pine needle and bits of dry rot and deadwood. I looked down at him in amazement, wondering if he might not be jesting, and saw that he spoke, as usual, merest truth. Quite at ease, he rose to greet the deer maidens, gave them a grave and courtly bow of welcome, then gazed at them much as I had gazed on the white-misted meadow, with the same sort of love. Certainly not with any will to possess.
The deer maidens carried rude baskets of willow and were laying out mats of woven willow. On them they placed what looked like the oat cakes Kor’s people called jannock, or perhaps a sort of scone.
“Bread!” I exclaimed, all other desires forgotten for the time, and Kor softly laughed at me.
We sat and ate greedily. The cakes were made of wild seed, I decided after a while, coarsely ground and mixed with honey. Only a starving stomach could have thought them good. That, or the tastes of a bark-stripping deer. There were roots of some sort, also, baking like earthapples near the fire, and a basket of late berries, most of them bitter. I ate them anyway. The viands and Kor’s demeanor had served to cool my cock somewhat, and while I ate whatever one of the lovely damsels laid before me, I made sure I never touched any of them, even so much as to brush finger against finger when they offered me food.
When dusk had deepened nearly into nighttime, the white hind and her deer maidens left the roots baking in the embers of our fire, gathered up their willow baskets, and left us as silently as they had come. I looked after them with longing and relief quaintly mingled in me. Birc smiled crookedly at me in what might have been sympathy of a sort and slipped away into twilight like the others. Kor and I were left with fireglow and shadows.
We lay back on our blankets. Somewhere a mallow thrush sang.
“Are you going to be all right?” Kor asked. “Through the night?”
“If not, I will shout.”
“Not bolt, like a roused stallion?”
“I give you my word, I will bide.” I looked across firelight at him with some annoyance, more wonder. “I cannot believe you do not long for them,” I said.
“How can I, since I have seen Tassida?”
I stared. “You are joking,” I said, though I knew better.
“No jest. I have never wanted to lie with any woman since I have known her. I think I shall never want any except her.”
The hopelessness of his love, and mine … I felt hollow, aching. “That’s a drawback,” I muttered, “in any case except this.”
“It is,” he admitted, for his faithfulness was nothing to boast of, to a tribesman’s way of thinking.
Silence for a while. He shifted his bed so that he lay back against a rounded boulder. Darkness hid our faces, a comforting darkness, letting us speak of secret things.
“Dan, I never told you. The nights we stayed with your tribe, a maiden of your people came to me. Karu, they called her.”
The flower of the Red Hart, she. Tall, straight, and fair, skin like a clear sunrise and her yellow braids hanging below her waist. She had gone to Kor, when to my knowledge she had never gone to any other! I sat up and stared at him.
“You should feel honored,” I said with more awe than jealousy.
“I felt greatly honored, and I told her so. But I had no heart to lie with her. And I told her that as well, and why.”
“But why!” I protested, astonished.
“I have just told you! I—”
“But how can you be so sure? It takes much searching to find a lifelove. Two come together and then, if the bond does not hold, they part to try again with others. How else is one to know but by trying?”
“I know my lifelove,” he declared.
“Kor—”
“Were you so willing to hurt and be hurt when Leotie left you?”
She who had taken my brother Tyee as pledgemate. Hurt, yes, it had hurt indeed, as did Kor’s thrust. I winced, but before I could parry he cursed between his teeth and rolled over so that he lay facedown, his voice muffled in his blanket.
“Sorry, Dan. Truth is, I—Mahela’s bowels, perhaps I am a coward. I think—I could not play this game you describe to me. I have always dreamed of—a special one.…”
“We all do,” I said softly, forgetting anger.
“And I have thought that once I have given myself to a woman I will be hers forever. I will not be able to help that.”
I could not gainsay him. Had I not often sensed something fated in him?
“The maidens of my own people—we were good comrades as children, but often now they seem to me as strange and cold as—as devourers. And less willing.” He sat up, shaking his head. “Bah! I am whimpering. Forget it.”
“No. Tell me,”
I said, gazing at him across low flames. “I was starting to understand.”
His shoulders sagged, his face turned toward the ground. “Perhaps I am deceiving myself,” he muttered. “Perhaps the devourers have made me afraid.”
I knew by then, but I blurted it out anyway. “You have not—you’ve never—”
“I am yet a virgin, Dan.” He lifted his face and gifted me with one of his rare smiles, as if he felt suddenly lighthearted, telling me. “The fishy-flapping demons have given me my only bedding.”
“Damn them,” I breathed, growing angry with a wrath as sudden as his gladness. “Damn the demons, and damn the prick-me-dainty wenches who would not come to you! The birdwits, how could they have been so stupid! Damn it to Mahela, Kor, it’s not your fault!”
He shrugged, abashed by my fervor but faintly smiling. “I think it is the pattern of my life,” he said.
“Skewed,” I grumbled, and did not know how truly I had spoken.
Chapter Four
In the night I heard Kor moving about restlessly without fully awakening to ask him why. The next morning when I spoke to him he answered me with sour silence. It took me a moment to recognize ill humor in him, for I saw it seldom enough. Once in a tenweek, perhaps, and then it often took the form of silence. He would not shout, most times, unless he was prodded.
“What ails you?” I prodded.
Silence, and a sullen frown. I pulled cold cooked roots out of the ashes of the fire for our breakfast, offered him one to eat. He shook his head. But when he turned away his face and coughed as I bit into mine, I knew what the trouble was.
“Mountain sickness,” I said, laying the food aside.
He scowled back at me in dismal inquiry.
“There seems to be a live lizard in your stomach and a Cragsman pounding on your head? Cramps in your limbs? A brawling in your chest?”
With a wan look he nodded.
“It is nothing,” I explained. “Only a sickness because of the thin air. Already we have climbed higher than you have been before. It is not dangerous—it will pass in a day or two, three at the most. I have seen it in some of the younger members of my tribe, the very young and untraveled.”
“Thanks,” he said sulkily, the first word he had spoken.
“They suffer worst. They become parlous ill-humored as well,” I remarked. Because his sour look roused mischief in me, I did not tell him that I was one who had suffered this same ailment, often and noisily. I merely motioned him toward his blanket.
“We should go on,” he said, his mouth moving stiffly with his misery. But he got up and started gathering gear, though the commotion in his gut bent him like a bowed sapling. I abandoned my know-all air.
“Kor, you ass, lie down!” I got up and wrestled the things away from him. “You are not riding today. Lie down, or I will eat in front of you!”
At the very thought he retched, a dry sound without result. But stubbornly he continued his attempts to break camp, and when Birc ambled in I was still struggling with him. I had him by the arms, trying to make him sit and listen to reason, and Birc raised his brows at both of us.
“He’s sick,” I complained.
“Birc,” Kor demanded thickly, “do Cragsmen come here?”
Brows still arched, Birc nodded.
“Often?” I put in.
He shook his head.
“Kor ran afoul of a Cragsman two days ago. Have you heard, are they roused?”
Birc shook his head. The stony-hearted louts were not arming for war? Or he had not heard? He looked somber.
“We have to go on,” Kor said, though he was staggering where he stood.
Birc shook his head and gestured at us with palms down, telling us to stay where we were. Then he set off at a graceful, swinging trot. He had disappeared behind trees within a moment.
“Kor, truly you are in no fit fettle to travel,” I told him. “Birc wants us to stay, and these woods feel sheltered—do you not sense it?”
He straightened somewhat and looked about him. We were camped in the hollow of a lee, and spruces ringed it as if to shield us with their thickest needles. As if the place were protected. Even the smoke of our fire seemed to thin before it reached the top of the stunted evergreens, and the horses for some reason seemed content to wander within the woods, pawing for marmots beneath the ledges, though the highmountain meadow with its many voles and lemmings lay scarcely a stone’s throw away.
Kor gave me an appraising look. “You are not saying that,” he muttered, “just to argue with me?”
“I feel at peril here,” I admitted, “from my own lusts. But it is a peril I can withstand. In a larger way I feel safe, as if in a haven.”
Yielding, he lay down in his bed again, and I covered him with my blankets as well. I went off into the woods, set snares, ate my wild carrot roots safely out of his sight. When I returned he was dozing, and I did likewise. After halfday I went to check the snares, and gathered far more pika than I expected. I skinned them well away from our campsite, then carried them back and built up the fire to cook them. I would have liked to have boiled broth for Kor, but we had no deer gut to hold the water, nor any cedar box or basket of spruce roots such as his kindred used.
After the fire had made embers, I scraped a pit to one side and pushed some of the coals into it with a green stick. Then I put in the small carcasses wrapped in leaves. Presently they started to roast, and their aroma filled the air.
“Meat!” I breathed. It seemed the greatest of blessings compared to the seedcakes.
Kor awoke, stirred, and groaned. Then, catching a waft of the good cooking smell, he turned away his face and tried to vomit, though there was nothing in his stomach, not even water. In compunction I went over and knelt beside him, laid my hands on his shoulders as if that could somehow heal him. “You will feel better soon, Kor, truly,” I assured him.
“So you say,” he muttered.
“But I have had this same malady more than once myself. I know you will soon be well.”
He gave me a look fit to turn a knife between my ribs. I could not keep from smiling.
“Handbond,” I offered.
He answered only with a fervent curse and a slur on my parentage. I forbore from laughing at him, but only until I was out of his sight and earshot.
Later I ate, burning my fingers on the hot meat—perhaps there is justice of a sort in such small events. Kor lay still and ignored me, and I sat watching the rising moon, round and orange, like a mushroom cap floating in the twilight sky.
After dark the naked deer maidens came again, bringing seedcakes, the fire’s glow flashing off their glossy, rippling hair, off their moon-round breasts that swayed softly with their movements.… I was less starved for the food this time, and therefore all the more hungry for the damsels—or perhaps it was the moonlight that put foolishness into me, yellow-red light amidst darkness, autumn moon. Though it was not yet the time of witchcraft—hunters’ moon came first. On the mountains, perhaps time ran differently. Or witchcraft. Something happened in me, I felt darkness swirl around me, my vision narrowed, my heart grew hot and swollen in my chest, I felt my manhood stand hot and hard beneath my lappet, and my hands were moving as if of their own will—toward doom—
“Kor!” I called hoarsely.
He was up on the instant, even weak as he was, wobbling over to me, almost falling, and he caught my lifting hands in his own. The deer maidens stood gazing at me in innocent wonder, like fawns seen in the thickets. None of them had made any move to seduce me, but if I had embraced one, I felt sure she would have willingly answered the kiss. Or more than one—ai, thinking made it worse.
“Kor,” I panted, “tie me.”
“What!”
“I mean it! Tie me stoutly, if either of us is to have any peace this night.”
“Are you—in thrall?” he asked in a low voice.
‘As Birc was? No, I am not yet bleating.” I lost patience. “Would you tie my wrists before I lose what sm
all sense is left to me and overpower you?” I clung to a tree while he went to get the rawhide thongs.
He padded my wrists with bandaging before he bound them, and then I began to comprehend his reluctance. Once before he had bound me like this, when I lay in a prison pit, a madman, raving and dangerous. When I had ceased to rave I had been unable to remember even my own name. But that had been my father’s doing. Nothing less than his betrayal could have driven me so out of self.
Or it was devoutly to be hoped, that nothing other could do that to me.… Kor tied me, and the naked damsels watched curiously, setting out seedcakes on willow mats.
“Behind me,” I directed Kor, holding my hands there. “Then you can go back to your bed.”
He shook his head. “In front. I’ve no desire to make you ache. Dan, think better of me!” Fiercely. “How could I sleep? I’ll be here.”
His hands, forming the knots, were unsteady. “But you are not well. You have no strength,” I told him.
“I will find strength.”
Knowing him, I could not but believe him. “Handbond, then,” I told him.
We passed the grip hastily. I hoped it would help him, but it served only to strengthen the stark longing in me. Then Kor tied my ankles loosely to a treetrunk. Once I felt myself secured I gave in to the dark whirlings that seemed to surround me, the hot yearning within me, the despair. I lunged against my bonds and howled—a long-drawn, wailing sound that I had not known was in me, that shivered in my throat. The deer maidens raised their heads rigidly at that sound and came to their feet, sensing for the first time that something was wrong, that these odd mortals did not always play at games of binding each other to trees. They left the viands but hastily gathered up their willow ware, their lovely bodies poised as if alert for flight. Still, the look on their faces was as much puzzled as frightened.
Kor had his arms around my chest from behind, trying to restrain me and calm me. He had indeed from somewhere found strength. “Dan—”
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