Mindbond

by Nancy Springer

  “What, slay the only woman who has ever preferred me to you?” Kor gave a low, hard laugh, more dangerous than a shout. “Jealous still, Dan? Still wishing you had taken her?”

  He had nearly passed into nothingness, bedding her. An image flickered like lightning through my mind of how he had looked after coming back from the Mountains of Doom, bruised face, bleak eyes—it agonized me, and made me cruel.

  “Coward! Could not wait to flee! You left your own mother there, whom we had come to save, and my—my father, there, in that deathly place, forever! You betrayer—” I broke off, sobbing with fury, but Kor was as cold as Mahela’s chill sea.

  “I should have left you there as well.”

  I struck out at him with my fist, but someone caught hold of my arm—it was Tass. I shook her off, raging at Kor.

  “Thrice a betrayer, then! And you would have done it, if it were not for Kela!”

  “Yes!” Heat, now, and words like a sword’s edge. “I would have. To survive.”

  Words not spoken merely to hurt me, but fire true—I could sense that, a truth that stunned me. That at the time had hurt him to the heart. But he had built his barriers now, and found himself a hard shield. Tass was trying to speak to me—I could not hear her.

  “If you were not so pitiful, I would kill you, Kor!” I could not believe what I was saying, but anger was shattering my heart, words flying like wildfire spark. “Betrayer, you—you limp thing, flattened to the sand by a storm! You wretch! Creeping into your dim den, licking your wounds! No use, you say, Mahela is stronger! Do you not have the courage to defy Mahela, old cormorant, old glutton woman? You, the great Rad Korridun, noble king, full of wisdom and mercy! Korridun, who comes back from the dead! What is the good of you? Survive, you say! The whole mortal world is dying around us, and will you not lift a hand to save it?”

  I had broken through his flinty shield. His face was contorted, mouth curled in rage and a terrible sorrow. “I am not Sakeema!” he cried.

  “I know that now!”

  I spent all my anger and bitterness in that last, and in half a breathspan I would have called it back if I could have, for it hit him hard—I could see that by the way he became suddenly very still as the storm loomed over us, lightning flaring. Tassida stood beside us, a hand on either of us, trying to coax us into the Hold. But we were not moving. Rumble of thunder, and far below us I could hear the roaring of the surf.

  “All the time we were seals together,” Kor said softly, so softly I could scarcely hear him above the wash of wind, “all the time we were in the sea, and in Mahela’s realm, and storm-beaten on the way back, I was heartsore, Dan, fearing you would be bound by your sea-maiden lover and would never again be able to speak aloud. When you left the sea and spoke and came with me again as my comrade, it was—it was the only right thing happening in the world. And now I wish you had been made mute.”

  My heart hurt so, I would have said nothing more. Tassida stood with one arm across my shoulders, one across Kor’s. “Leave it,” she urged. “Come in, before you are swept away.” And I would have been glad enough to go with her. But Kor could be as cruel as I.

  “Go ahead, Dan,” he said, his voice very low. “Take her to your chamber. Tass, the only woman I have ever loved. Or perhaps, if the Hold is too crowded for your sport, you could entice her back to her hut near the Greenstones. You could whisper her name and wish you could see her face—”

  He had been there. Inside my mind.

  Time seemed to flow together for me. A year was gone as if it had never been. I was a wounded youth again, bereft, betrayed, maddened by the one who stood before me.

  “Draw!” I commanded, my voice grating. “Draw your weapon!” My hand grasped at the pommel of my own sword.

  “Gladly!” Kor reached for his. Tassida stepped between us and pushed us apart so that we staggered backward.

  “No!” she cried, her beautiful face full of horror. But then she stared, turning from one of us to the other, and then she began to laugh.

  Our swords would not obey us.

  Kor and I stood struggling with the stubborn hilts, red-faced and enraged, grimacing with rage. The weapons would not let themselves be drawn from the scabbards. Tass stood laughing, too loud a laugh, too shrill, as if the strain had been too great for her, and she started to say what Kor and I both knew and would not admit. The words came out choked by her frantic laughter.

  “They will not strike—the ones you love—”

  Kor glanced at her, a single angry look, and something passed between them. Her laughter left her within a breath—terror took its place, opening her dark eyes wide with terror, pulling her lovely boyish face taut with a terrible fear. Without a word she turned and ran to the ruined lodge where Calimir awaited her. I heard the hoofbeats as she rode the gelding away at the hard gallop, leaving us, as she had sworn she would never leave us again. She would be back, I thought. She had always come back to us before.

  “What did you do to her?” I shouted at Kor.

  “I mindspoke her.” Stonily. I could imagine what he had called her, but the mindspeaking itself was worse, to one like Tass.

  “Son of a whore! You piss-proud, jealous worm! You might as kindly have raped her, and had it done with!” I lunged at him.

  He met me without so much as a side step. The clash sent us both thudding down, sprawling beneath a black sky. We grappled, bruising each other against rocks, slipping on moss. A lashing rain had started down, the wind howled like a demon dream, and I was intent on hurting my bond brother—atop him, cuffing the side of his face, fervid. In the next moment he had his hands to my throat, pushing me back, and his knee caught me in the gut.

  In no way can it be said that I thrashed Kor that day—he gave as good as he got, blast him. Whatever advantage of weight and rage I had, I met something just as strong and desperate in him.… He blackened both my eyes. He nearly broke my arm. I freed myself with a swinging fist, blow fit to fell a horse had it landed—he ducked beneath it. Frustration only angered me the more. He rammed his head into my ribs. Pain only angered me the more.

  No combat of speed and wit, this one, not much like Kor’s fight with Olpash. We could not keep our footing, we slithered about like undersea creatures, Kor and I, as wind screamed and the rain streamed down. We strained against each other, and cursed each other by names unthought-of before the day, and all seemed dimmed and blurred by storm, or perhaps by sweat and blood and tears drowned in storm.… I remember my elbow, my fist thudding into Kor’s face. I wanted to punish him—I thought I wanted to kill him, but why then did I not draw the stone hunting knife at my belt? Was honor such a great thing to a madman, that I would not draw because he wore none? He had worn none since the day Olpash died.

  I had Kor down, I was jerking his head back by his forelock of sodden brown hair, and instead of kneeing me in the gut again he reached across me and drew the stone knife from its sheath, held it before my crazed eyes, gravely offering it to me.

  “Slice me open,” he challenged, “and see what my insides are made of.”

  “Do it yourself!” I snapped. I banged his head against the rock, then got up, reaching for his torn tunic to drag him up after me—he scrambled away and got to his feet before I could touch him. At the crest of the headland he stood, under a sky gone mad, gripping the knife and glaring at me.

  “Go ahead!” I called across the small distance, over the raging of the storm. “Stick it into yourself! Poor thing, you!” I was panting with passion and the rigors of the fight, and if there were tears on my face it did not matter, he would not see them, I was awash with rain. “Go ahead!” I urged. “Where is your own knife? You have put it away somewhere? Are you afraid of what you might do to yourself with it, wretch that you have become?”

  He stood too still—for a moment I was truly afraid. Then with a wordless yell of fury he coiled and threw the thing at me. Or by me—it flew far wide.

  Out of the black mouth of the storm above us came t
he sound of a woman’s wild laughter, fit for a cormorant if the ugly things could laugh. I gaped upward into a sky nearly as dark as nightfall. Glimmer and ripple of gray amidst the gloom—devourers there, snaking with the wind.

  “Sakeema!” I shouted toward the sky, the name half a blasphemous curse, half a plea. “The whole world is coming apart in shards, and can you do nothing?” My voice had gone so high that like a stripling’s it cracked.

  Kor stood before me, and with a blow of his curled fist he struck my nose, hard, breaking it. Blood splattered down—even the pouring rain could not wash away all of it.

  “If you have thought I was a god, it was your own folly!” he screamed at me. Truly screamed, his face was twisted awry, he was sobbing. “I have told you a hundred times, I am not—our savior.”

  I stood and let the blood thicken on my face, too weary any longer to strike back at him. Weariness not of body. After a moment I turned away, went and found my knife, sheathed it. Devourers circled overhead. I cared nothing for them.

  “I am not Sakeema,” Kor said. That same utter weariness in him now, deadening his voice—he was done with weeping. I faced him.

  “Then I had better go find him and awaken him, wherever he sleeps.” Curse my betraying voice, that needs must shake. “For no one less can save us now. Even the peeping frogs, gone. The whole world sucked toward Mahela’s maw,”

  No longer would I lament and plead, “Sakeema, come back to me.” I would go to him, seek him until I had found him, shake him into wakefulness, cudgel him awake if need be.

  As for Kor—I had to leave him. To survive.

  I started toward the makeshift pen where Talu was kept, then stopped and looked around for Kor. He had sunk down on the rocky brow of the headland and lay there on his back, legs together and arms outspread, straight and still, facing the glare of green lightning in the sky.

  “Get into the Hold,” I called to him.

  He did not answer. I walked over to him, and his eyes stared up at me, stubborn, unblinking.

  “Get into the Hold,” I told him. “Mahela’s minions are out here.”

  “I don’t care,” he said.

  “Some others care!”

  “So drag me there if you like.” His face, like the rest of him, lay very hard and still. Only a distant smoldering showed in his eyes. Then he closed them as if to rest. “Go away. I am tired.”

  I stood, angry again, wanting to jerk him to his feet and shake him, wanting to drag him into the Hold as he had said, my hands trembling with the force of my desire to make him care, make him be Kor again, and a hero—and knowing full well, as he knew also, that if I touched him I would stay with him.

  Sharply I turned away from him and strode toward Talu.

  The fanged mares were wild with fear of the storm, thunder fit to crack stone, lightning close as sparrowflight overhead. They were lathered like the sea, crashing around the narrow pen. I could not constrain Talu to stand for me—I caught hold of her as she spun by, and only by reckless risk was I able to get on her and out of the ruined lodge where she was kept. Then in great leaps she fled like the wild thing she was, and I clung to her thin mane. No sort of headstall on her—there had not been time for that, or time to fetch my bow, or a deerskin to sleep in, or food, or gear of any kind. If I had stayed a moment longer, time to see Kor’s face once more, I would not have been able to leave, perhaps not ever.

  Talu bore me off eastward, any trail that would take her inland and away from the black storm of Mahela’s sending. Panicked, up slopes so steep that her hooves slithered and clawed, over perilous rocks, past—laughter, and a grinning face in the lightning glare. Ytan was there, standing in the storm on the mountainside, laughing at me like a demon double of myself as Talu carried me by him. I shivered as if I had seen my own pale corpse in that green-tinged flesh. And Talu swept like a pounding tempest up the crags, and I closed my eyes—I was helpless, a nuisance clinging to her back, a gnat tangled in her mane. Sky was as vast as the sea, and storm filled the sky, and I was nothing.

  Sakeema help me, I had left my bond brother lying under the lash of the storm.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Talu carried me until she was as spent as the day. Hard to remember that it was day, it seemed so dark.… When she slowed her pace and I stumbled off her at last, I was far up the flanks of the mountains, though I did not know just where. There was no food, nor did I try to set snares, for my mind was in a tempest worse than Mahela’s storm. I sat through the night without a fire, keeping vigil as if for someone dead.

  Cold.… I remembered the vigil on the Greenstones, for I felt nearly as cold as I had been then. And nearly as wet. Talu had carried me out of the rain, but a chill wind was blowing, and everything was sodden, for this was the region of cascades, where fogs and spring dew drenched the nights. Still, I might have been able to make a fire had I used skill and tried, but I did not try. I sat shivering, my back against cold rock, thinking back to yet another vigil, when I had sat through a night and held Kor while he slept, afraid to let go of him lest he turn dead again. He had died for my sake, and folk said I had wept him back to life.…

  A hunchbacked moon swam above the spires of the firs. Off to the westward somewhere, thunder still rumbled. Within my mind I seemed again to see Kor lying on the headland, arms outstretched as if he were staked there for torture, under the greenish lightning, and I threw back my head and howled aloud in sorrow.

  On toward dawn the tempest inside me slowed its whirling somewhat and I was able to think. Nor was I entirely startled when a gray, shimmering shadow moved in the night. Eyes glowed red. The wolf sat just at the limit of sight and looked at me, tongue lolling as if it had run hard.

  “Old friend, wild brother,” I whispered, “I am in need of warmth. Let me borrow some from your fur. Come here to me, please.”

  The wolf came closer, but not close enough. It sat down a small distance beyond my feet, near the edge of my rocky ledge, then turned around three times and lay down, curling so that the graysheen flow of its tail covered its nose. Wary eyes watched me, and I did not dare draw near. I sat trembling and thinking.

  Dawn was a long time in reaching over the mountains. Somewhere, I knew, the sun shone as yellow as a catamount’s eye, but I could not see it. Eastward the sky turned from black to gray, and then a lighter gloom. And that was all.

  “I should go back,” I said to the wolf.

  Head still flattened to the ground, it stared up at me with a look I could not comprehend. Something in that stare seemed to remember back to Sakeema’s time, both warm and distant.

  “I should go back,” I repeated. “Kor needs me more now than ever.”

  A snorting noise, and the hollow clap of hoof on rock. Talu plodded along the ledge toward me, pink innards of something she had been eating trailing from her mouth. I got up in protest as she stood over me.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I told her.

  She stared back flatly, chewing. The gray-pink length of gut slipped slowly up into her mouth and vanished. I had seen Calimir do the same, sometimes, with a stalk of something green. I looked into her large, blank eye, into the blue-tinged depths of it, as if into a abyss.

  “I am Kor’s friend,” I told her desperately. “More than friend. His bond brother. He needs me.…” And I knew with a pang, though I would not say it, that I wanted to be with him. More than anything I wanted that, except this: that I wanted my world to be well.

  “But if I stay with him there in Seal Hold, then what hope is there for any of us?”

  The wolf got up, shook its fur into place, tilted its head and eyed me in some sort of expectation. Anguished, I held my hand to my mouth, bit on my knuckles.

  “Sakeema give me strength … I must go back.”

  I dragged myself onto Talu, turned her toward the west, and closed my eyes, for going down this sort of terrain was even worse than coming up it. Easier to shut my eyes. They were swollen almost shut, anyway. Sometimes I opened them
just a slit to look, then regretted it. Once I saw a graysheen flash. Off to one side, the wolf was trotting along with us.

  It would take all day, I knew, to come to Seal Hold. I let my body rock to the jouncing of Talu’s stiff-legged walk, hanging on, putting thought aside for the time. No use, now, thinking of the choice I would soon have to make: whether I was going back to stay, or only to say a decent farewell.…

  Talu’s head came up, jarring me alert. Her ears pricked forward, she blew through her nostrils and started into a pounding trot over scree. I was too startled to try to stop her. For at the same moment I had felt—

  Kor! I was so taken aback, I mindspoke him as of old,

  Dan! Brother, I am here.

  On Sora, he cantered around the hip of the mountain, meeting me at the edge of the scree. The two fanged mares stopped, head to head, whickering, and Kor and I sat on them in a foolish, staring trance.

  He was sight enough to make anyone stare. His face was bruised and cut, a long, scraping cut running along one temple. The eye on that side was swollen almost shut. Worse than the bruises was the struggling look about him, the way he carried himself, as if he were burdened almost beyond bearing. But he was no longer utterly defeated, and no longer out of his mind with anger at me. Kor, my bond brother still, he was there.

  “You are back,” I whispered.

  “Great Sakeema,” he exclaimed at the same time, “your face!”

  “No worse than yours,” I retorted. Only that quip kept me from weeping. I felt so weak with relief and sorrow that I had to lean forward and brace my hands against Talu’s crest.

  “It’s far worse! You’re all blood.” He slid off Sora, came over to stand by my knee. “Body of Sedna,” he murmured in awe, “I’ve broken your nose.”

  “So you’ve changed my good looks,” I grumbled. “No more easy maidens for me.” I was shaking, and trying to hide it.

  “Deep scats, Dan, you are an ass.”

  I blundered off the horse and embraced him, staggering, trying not to lean against him. “You’re another,” I told him fervently.