Godbond (16 page)

Run and walk again, walk and trot, walk and trot, through the day.… Mind hazy with weariness and longing, I thought of my strange vision in a drifting way, without much comprehension. Only when I saw the sunset spreading in the western sky did one shard of understanding come to me, came like the point of a knife, for I had not much wanted to think of Tassida.

The amaranthine stone that had healed Chal now glowed in the pommel of her sword. I had seen the fierce blaze of that jewel, and I felt certain of it.

Tass.… She was like the sword, an edge that cut and a touch that healed. The thought slowed my steps to a faltering walk, as if something tugged me to turn and stagger back to her. Instead, I stumbled to my knees, then thudded to the hard, rocky ground, and I lay there until the nighttime chill roused me with my own shivering. Then I groaned and got up and went on.

At dawn I saw that Catalin Du was beginning to fall behind me at last.

Hasten, hasten.… My sense of urgency had not abated. My feet, rubbed raw and bleeding from the borrowed, ill-fitting boots, moved as fast as I could drag them. I leaned forward so that I reeled along, half falling with every frantic step. It was the only way I could go on except for crawling. And I believe I crawled sometimes, also. I do not remember clearly. The three or four days after I passed Catalin Du and turned westward are a blur. I knew only that I had to go to Kor, and that if no mount were waiting for me along the Traders' Trail I would fail him.

No mount awaited me.

No living creature met my sight across the flat Steppes in any direction when I reached the place where the bleached bones of my former enemies lay. Perhaps the mares had run back to their herdmates, to the westward hosting. More likely they had gone feral and were feeding on asps in some of the dry, steep-sided streambeds that gouged the high plain. Hidden from my sight in such a scar, they might be not even very far away, but I was exhausted, in no condition to track them or wander the Steppes in search of them. I had come the distance from the Herder village in less than a tenday, as fast as a horse and rider would have done it at middling speed, and to no avail.

I lay down, or fell down, on the hard ground by the skeletal bodies and went to sleep. Or swooned.

Perhaps a day passed, for it was daylight again when I awoke. Perhaps not. I was in no fit fettle to reckon. I sat up and drank water. One goatskin of water was left to me, and one bag of dried berries, cheese and grasshopper bread. My burden of food and water had lightened all the way to the place where I sat, or perhaps I might not have been able to make it so far. But even so lightly laden, even had I left the things and walked away without them, I could not go on. I was emptied, like the flattened water-skins I had hurled aside. I was spent.

Numbly I sat staring westward, not even hoping any longer for a horse, not hoping for anything, not even that someone might come this way and find me. No one would be stirring on this trade trail in these ominous end-time days full of the rumor of war. I sat and stared, not knowing what it was that I looked for. It might have been the better part of a day I sat that way, and in time, as seemed to happen to me more easily with every passing day, my awareness faded into vision, as if I had been fasting and keeping a vigil.

I saw sky first, and wind blowing the high clouds into long strands and wisps like horsehair, like the scant tail of a fanged mare. Then I saw two men fronting the wind, their hair blown back from their foreheads, their eyes narrowed and the bones keen in their faces, so that they made me think of eagles. Indeed they had been eagles, at least once, for I knew them. They were Chal and Vallart, the rich and heavy cloaks of kings whipping about their shoulders. Older, yet I would not have known it except that whiteness lay like frost on their hair. And they were splendid, they in their broidered robes, the sunstuff glinting at their necks and chests and sleeves. Chal wore a circlet of sunstuff on his head—a crown. So that was a crown such as kings had worn in those long-gone times. I had only heard of crowns from Tassida—I had never before seen one. Chal had the look of a king followers would die for, glorious, but Vallart stood no less glorious.

“The cycle speeds downward toward doom,” Chal said softly, staring off into the distance somewhere.

Silence. I could see the wild sky and snowpeaks behind the two of them, and a low wall of stone that seemed to encircle them. Somewhere there was a low rumbling sound.

“Feel the earth quiver, even here,” said Chal, and then I began to understand, for I stood with them, and I could see the thunder cones in the far distance, eastward, all seven of them flinging blood-red flame and black rock skyward. And I knew the place where I stood, it was the tower on the mountainside above the—the—I could not think of the deep tarn's name except to call it a strange name, Sableenaleb, “dark eye of earth.” And with a shock I realized that I was seeing through Vallart's eyes and mind, that I knew the things he knew and felt the things he felt, that somewhere on the far plains to the eastward kingdoms were warring in a fateful war, and kings, friends and sons of old friends, were dying in anguish by the lance and sword—

Frightened, I wrenched myself away, but not before I had felt the stone platform shake under his feet.

“We had better go down,” Chal said.

They descended the narrow stone steps in a numb silence, and I went with them, or my spirit did, hanging back so as not to come too close again. Very much at one with them, I felt, too much at one with them—but that was an old, useless fear, the terror of being lost and drowned. I ignored it.

No folk were about in the great hall. Perhaps they had all fled somewhere. Tremors were causing the hangings to swing—long, beautifully wrought hangings in some rich cloth, they showed Chal and Vallart sailing away in a high-headed ship, and Chal confronting Mahela and being imprisoned, and Vallart coming after him to rescue him. Then they showed the rescue of the mystic fruit, and the flight, and the sundering of the fruit into its three colors. The banners hung three on each side of the throne—a modest throne, as I knew from having seen Mahela's—and the panel of sunstuff, which I had seen before, hung on the stone wall above and behind it. I stared, for now I knew the bird thieving the fruit from the tree. It was a cormorant. It was Mahela. She must have thieved the tree itself, in some distant time past, for I had seen it in its pot by her throne.

Head bowed, Vallart settled himself on the step at the foot of the throne, and Chal sat beside him.

“I must return to the Mountains of Doom,” Vallart said to his hands. “In time, there will be another pomegranate of our god on the tree. I must bring it hither. Round, perfect and whole.”

Chal was gazing at him quizzically, and Vallart must have felt the look, for he raised his eyes. But they were narrowed in pain.

“I am old and due to die soon in any event,” he said to Chal. “I cannot expect to go there and live another time, I know that. And it is not dying that troubles me. It is the thought of leaving you.”

“No need,” said Chal quietly. “I will go with you.”

“No! I must go alone.”

“I seem to recall,” said Chal with a sort of tender amusement, “that I once thought I would go alone.”

“Chal, do not dispute with me! Old friend.…” Vallart's hand came up to meet Chal's hand, and his voice faltered. “Myself I can sacrifice. But if you were wounded … the same thing would happen all over again.”

“Nor could I bear it if you were hurt.” Chal's grip tightened on his comrade's hand, but his voice was steady. “Therefore it follows, Vallart, that we must both be dead to start with.”

Vallart's eyes widened, met his king's. Gazing levelly at each other, the two of them came to some wordless agreement. Then the stone walls around them shook again, the hangings swung wildly, the wooden door splintered and the arch of the doorway cracked. With a crash the trefoil stone at its peak fell down to the floor below.

“Let us go,” said Chal, getting up as if it were no more than to walk a small distance to a neighboring lodge. “
Ai
, my poor old bones, they ache with the damp.”

“The swords,” Vallart blurted, far less calmly. “What are we to do with the swords?”

“Leave them for the three who may yet come.”

Marantha, Tassida's sword, hung on the wall behind the throne, the gem in her pommel blazing. Vallart went to her in haste and made as if to grasp her by the hilt, but with a swift, fierce movement she cut at his hand. He jumped back, swearing.

“Bitch!”

“It is of no use to speak to her in that way,” said Chal mildly. “Address her courteously.”

“You get her, then.”

“We both forged her. We must both go to her.”

And they did so, standing before her like humble petitioners, each with a hand outstretched, coaxing her by name, “Marantha.” And the sword came softly down off the wall and nestled in their hands.

Then Chal and Vallart made their way out under the ruined archway and down the rumbling mountainside to the pool they called Sableenaleb.

They presented Marantha gently to the dark water. She left their hands of her own will, slipped into the tarn as if into a sheath, point and blade, then vanished. Chal wore Zaneb at his waist, and Vallart wore Alar, each weapon housed in a scabbard of
bronze
—Vallart's mind had joined with mine again, or I would not have remembered the strange words Tassida had once told me. No matter. I withdrew a little and watched as they unbuckled their swords. The stones, red and yellow, were blazing. For a moment the heroes stood holding the weapons in silent farewell, and then Zaneb and Alar sprang from their scabbards and followed Marantha. Without a ripple the pool of vision closed over the three of them.

Chal and Vallart looked at each other for the span of several breaths. Then they dropped the empty scabbards to the shore and turned away. Up the mountainside they strode, past the shaking towers of their outpost castle, onward, westward, toward the sea. The wild wind still blew, bringing smoke, spreading it like a corpse-cover over the world. Before long the king and the afterling disappeared from my sight, gone into shadows, like the swords.

I wanted to follow them, I wanted to be with them, but earth was shaking under me, my whole body was being roughly shaken—

“Dannoc! You pigheaded fool, wake up!”

I blinked and looked up. It was a dark figure seen against a swirl of sunlit smoke or cloud, a head crowned in light. I could not see the face.

“Sakeema,” I whispered. But I had forgotten, the god was dead, or a villain. Less painful to blame Sakeema than to blame myself for failing to find him.

“Confound it, don't ‘Sakeema' me.” She sounded disgusted and more than a little annoyed. I knew that voice.

“Tass!” I scrambled up, wincing as my sore feet found the ground. “What are you doing here?”

For a moment she seemed quite speechless, and I thought I saw dew in her eyes, a tremor as of aspen leaves about her lips. Then her fists bunched, and I believed she was going to strike me. Tottering as I was, she could have knocked me over easily.

“Balls of Mahela!” she shouted at last. “Would you come and get on the horse, you who were so frantic to be on your way?”

Calimir stood close at hand. She vaulted onto him, took my hand and heaved me up behind her, none too gently. Then with a leap we were off westward, the lovelocks of her wild hair lashing my face in the wind of our passing.

Chapter Twelve

South and westward. That way lay water. We were not so desperate that we chose to use the Fanged Horse Folk's wells or ride into their encampments. We would ride to the Demesne, cross the mountains by the Blackstone Path, perhaps join forces with Tyee. But that would be days, tens of days hence. Even the upland forests of my fair-haired Red Hart people, days hence. Calimir carried us swiftly across billowing, treeless grassland, and I let my head rest for a moment against Tassida's back.

“What of the Herders?” I asked after perhaps half a day had passed.

“They seemed not as badly off as I had thought.” Her voice came back to me muffled, indistinct. “Many dead, and everyone grieving. But those who lived seemed not too badly hurt.”

“Because you were there,” I muttered into her shirt, a vague understanding sharpening into words in me.

“I left after four days,” Tassida said, not hearing me, “and you had so outstripped me that it took me four more, at speed, to find you.” Awe tinged her voice. “You frighten me, Dannoc.”

“Because you were there,” I said more loudly, not replying to her fear. “It was because you were there with them that the Herders seemed not too badly hurt. Because you had touched them. You are a healer, Tass.”

She stiffened, and the sudden tightening of her legs sent Calimir leaping forward. “Dan, stop talking like a halfwit!” she said harshly.

“There is healing in your touch, there always has been!” I insisted, intent on the new knowledge. “I am a fool not to have seen it before. Kor and I, however we were hurt, we always healed far more rapidly than seemed likely when you were near.”

“You are indeed a fool! It is because—because you—” She broke off the thought and suddenly burst out in anger, “I, who am always filled with bitterness and vexation, a healer? I, who have not even nurture enough in me to laugh at you, as I ought?”

“The jewel in your pommel, in Marantha,” I told her earnestly, “it is the stone that healed Chal after he came back from Mahela's realm. Just as you healed Kor and me.”

She pulled Calimir to a sliding stop, jerked him to a halt so roughly that he flung up his head and half reared in protest, and I was nearly unseated from my undignified place on his rump. I grabbed at Tass to keep from falling, and knew at once that was a mistake—her every muscle was sword-hard, stone-hard, under her ragged tunic. Perhaps she had wanted me to fall.