Godbond (23 page)

And intent only on coming to him, I leaped Calimir into it.

Squeal and screech of Fanged Horse war mares clashing against curly-haired, blue-eyed ponies—yes, my people were there, though I did not see Tyee, I was not looking for Tyee, I had to find Kor. And I had forgotten there ever was a time when I had stood with lowered weapon before a dangerous foe. My sword was out, uplifted and shining in my hand. I pressed recklessly toward the midst of the battle, where I sensed Kor, and I heard the excited shouts of the Red Hart warriors as they saw me, but I did not look at them. Dark, narrow-eyed Otter River fighters all around me, on foot—I kicked them out of the way, Calimir reared and scattered them. Alar took the head off a hulking blue-green Cragsman I myself had scarcely noticed—his club thudded to the ground beside me. A lash curled around my left arm—I caught hold of the ugly thing and pulled the man off his horse, then sent Calimir leaping onward, for there was a knot of the Fanged Horse brigands ahead, Pajlat himself among them.

And facing them, alone but for his mount, Kor.

Half mad with fear for him, I charged. And just as I reached his side, Calimir took a spear full in the chest, lunged forward beneath me a few strides, then fell.

Ai
, Calimir, horse without an equal, my haste had killed him! Tassida's steed lay killed, and how was she to come to us? Briefly, crazily, I thought of the battle I had once envisioned, in which I was a young warrior, disgraced for letting his horse be slain under him. This, then, should be the time when Sakeema would ride into the combat on his mighty-antlered stag, stilling the spears and arrows with the power of his hands. But he did not.

And I was standing on the ground in the midst of a hellstorm of battle, next to the legs of Kor's yellow-dun fanged mare, and Kor was looking down on me with his well-beloved face gone gray as death.
I
can't help you
, he mindspoke me faintly, and he swayed as Pajlak's lash embraced his back.

Help me! Blood brown on his tunic, blood clotted and matted on his temples, in his hair, he looked as if he had been fighting forever, and he thought of helping me. He was all goodness—the scum, how could they attack him so unfairly! Anger for his sake welled up in me and burst out in a shout, a yell of rage, as the stone in Alar's hilt flared with a blaze fit to dim the lightning in the black tempest overhead. I heard frightened curses all around me, and Pajlat and his men threw up their hands to shield their eyes from that glare. Pajlat was out of my reach, Mahela take him, I could not kill him yet—but already Alar had hewed her way through the closest one of his minions. I swung myself onto the fanged mare as the body fell off, turned the startled horse around and killed the next man. One more, then Pajlat—but my captured steed struggled against me, and in the next moment the Fanged Horse king had fled with what remained of his retinue pounding after him, down to their encampment along the sandy beach south of the headland.

Cheers rose behind me, but Kor did not cheer. “Dan,” he said hoarsely, “come with me.”

We rode back through the battle. The Otter were in confusion without their Fanged Horse allies, ready to break and scatter, and the Cragsmen were sullenly falling back. Kor had sheathed his sword, and he paid no heed to any of this. He sent his mare, Sora, at a lope up the headland into the forest, and by the stiff, swaying way he rode I knew that he was weary enough to fall, that only pride kept him upright. Or perhaps he was weakened and in pain, wounded.

“Kor, you ass, slow down!” I was trying to catch up with him, but the foul bitch of a fanged mare under me fought me at every stride, and Kor was riding recklessly fast. He took a sudden dodge toward the seat and sent Sora skittering down a shaly drop to a shingle beach between jutting points of rock. Then he started northward again, and I saw the blood trickling from his lower lip where he had bitten it.

“Kor, stop,” I begged, “before you fall!”

He stopped Sora so suddenly that he nearly pitched off her, saving himself only by bracing his hands against her withers, and at last I was able to ride up beside him. His sea-colored eyes were on me. “You are so thin, Dan,” he said to me, “it wrenches my heart. You have starved.”

“And you are hurt,” I said, staring at him. Wounded and going off, like a hurt hawk seeking a solitary place to heal—or die.… He honored me by allowing me to be with him.

“Help me down,” he whispered.

I slid off my useless mount and let the mare plunge away. Standing on the gravel and sand of the beach, I reached up toward him, but he stopped my hands by lifting his.

Scared
, he mindspoke, the single word, too spent to murmur it aloud, and as if mindspeak had opened a wellspring between us I suddenly felt the flow of his pain and terror, so stark that they stunned me for a moment. How had he borne it, all the seasons of feeling my passions and hurts as well as his own?

“Handbond,” I told him.

Right hands met, gripped, sword scar to sword scar, and I felt the familiar warm surge, strength and courage as of four heroes, and I blinked back tears—it had been too long since I had last touched him, since I had handbonded him. Odd, that for all his need, the grip should comfort and center me as much as it did him.

“If you had not thought to me when you did, I would have fallen,” he said in a rush, finding strength to speak. “If you had not come to me when you did—”

“Hush,” I told him, and lifted my hands to him again, and this time he let me grasp him under the shoulders.

“Steady.…”

I tried to ease him off the horse. But as his far leg slid over he gave a terrible groan and clutched at me—he could not stand, he nearly swooned. His knees gave way under him as his feet felt for the ground. I laid him down as gently as I could and kneeled beside him.

“All powers be thanked that you are here, Dan,” he breathed. “Seal Hold—full of eyes watching for weakness.…”

I was tugging at his clothing, trying to find the wound. There was so much blood on him, blood of enemies I had thought, that I could not tell what ailed him. “Where?” I demanded. “Where are you hurt?”

He gestured. “Spear thrust. The same bastard Otter who took Calimir.”

I tore open his trousers and felt pain stab me in the gut so that I could not move or speak or even weep. Kor was looking up into my face, and I think I had gone white with anguish for him.

“Tell me,” he said softly.

And since my dry mouth, my lips and tongue, would not obey me to form speech, I mindspoke him. Gentler that way, if such a terrible thing can in any way be said gently.
It took your manhood
, I told him, and I made my hands move to peel back the stiffened, bloodsoaked cloth from the wound. His member came away with the cloth and dropped onto the beach where he lay.

There was a small, stunned silence, and then he spoke. “No great loss,” he said bitterly. “Little use I ever made of it.”

This, then, was the fell fate I had always sensed for him—or part of it.… A mischance dreadful enough; why did I not feel doom was done with him?

“Kor.…” I murmured, aching for his sake, not knowing what to say, how to help him—there was no help for what had happened to him. “I am … sorry.…” I was all awkwardness, and my horror would not let me move my gaze from his bloody cock lying on the pebbles and sand. “What—what should I do with it?” I blurted, and he stared at me a moment, then suddenly barked with laughter, a hard laughter that made him moan as he drew breath, so that I laid a hand on his chest to stop him.

“Let Mahela have it, Dannoc!” He laughed anew, but more softly. “Fling it in the sea, and let the old hag have it. She wanted it badly enough before.”

So I took it in the palm of my right hand and went and gave it to the waves. When I came back, Kor was still softly laughing, a sound with heartbreak in it.

“Truly, it doesn't matter, Dan.” He sobered suddenly, weak and panting with the pain of his wound. “Most likely … we will all be dead ere long.”

So he knew. Or perhaps his despair spoke, but I knew how I had let Calimir be killed and doomed us. Therefore his despair had an equal in mine.

“I take it … you have not found Sakeema?”

I met his eyes, too wretched to be angry with him. “Sakeema is dead,” I said, “or a traitor.”

“It must … be true. If anyone … could have found him, it would have been you, Dan.”

I found water in the skin slung from his sealskin riding pelt, washed his wound and bound it with strips cut from his sleeve. He did not cry out—he seemed nearly indifferent to the pain. When I was done, I pulled his clothing back into place as best I could, then took the sealskin off his horse and covered his legs with it. Then I sat beside him, cross-legged, pillowing his head on my knee, and I took his right hand in handbond again. Westward, beneath black fingers of cloud, the sun was swimming blood-red at sea's edge. Without moving, Kor and I watched it until it sank. Sundown turned to twilight, a gloom scarcely to be called twilight, as dense as nightfall.

I felt numb, no pain in me, but at some time I had started quietly weeping, so that my eyes sent salt rain down on Kor's hand I held clasped in mine. After a while he noticed, and shifted his head slightly to look up at me, and gifted me with one of his rare smiles. “Heal me with your tears?” he said wistfully.

How I wished I could. “It wasn't me. That was Tassida.”

His brows went up in inquiry, his eyes grew keen. “It was Tassida? Why do you say that?”

“She is the healer, Kor, not I.” Too weary, and distraught, and starved, as he had said, to tell him much more.

“Well,” he murmured, mostly in jest, “may Tass come to me, then.”

“She is up at the Blue Bear Pass with a broken arm.…” She, the healer who could not heal herself. “And I have let Calimir be killed. How is she to come to us in time?”

“She is better off out of this hell,” he said gently. He did not understand, for he did not know about the three sundered stones, and I was in no fit fettle to tell the tale. I vehemently shook my head.

“Unless Tassida somehow comes to us, to make us three,” I told him starkly, “we might as well die now, and be done with it.”

Kor accepted that at my word. “We will send for her,” he said.

It was a simple thing to do, so forthright that I felt more than ever the fool for not having thought of it. My weeping ceased, and a sudden, frail hope tugged at my heart, lifting my head. With Kor lying so sorely wounded, it could not cheer me much, but my hand tightened on his. He spoke no more, but lay quietly, resting against me, handbonding as much for my strengthening as for his.

The night was full of noise, hollow noise with no life in it, surfs roar beneath the tempest, wind's keening, thunder groan. So I did not notice the splashings of seals hauling out of the sea onto the beach, seals in their half a hundred. In the gloom I saw their dark, recurved shapes moving against the faint greenish glow of the sea, and I straightened, blinked and looked again, stiffened, let go the handbond and reached for my sword. Kor struggled to sit up. But before he drew Zaneb, the seals had clambered up to us, and we saw what they were, and smiled.

“Welcome, my cousins,” Kor said softly. “But it is not your wont to be so tame! Is something amiss with you, as it is with us?”

One of them touched his face with its whiskered nose and changed within an eyeblink. There on the beach lay a sylkie, a man of the sea, one of Kor's distant kindred, his pale, hairless skin faintly glistening in the night as he came to a crouch on his long feet. He met Kor's gaze levelly, his eyes dark pools of shadow in his strange, fair face, and one slender, loose-jointed hand stretched out toward us in a gesture we could not understand, so wry was the slant of it.

Dan, what does he want?

I cannot tell
.

Others had crowded around Kor and their leader, touching them, touching each other, so that a ripple of change spread through the cluster of them like a swell through the sea until they all faced us in their human forms: tall sea men, small-breasted, lithe sea women, all crouching so that none of their heads rose above the level of Kor's. And they spoke to us with delicate, skewing gestures of their hands, as is the manner of this mute folk, and many of them laid their fingers softly on Kor, though not, I thought, in appeal or importunity. I sensed the gentlest of invitations.

Kor, I think they want you to go with them! For your healing
.

As they had once taken Sakeema into the sea to sleep and be healed. If one could trust the accounts of Sakeema.

“I must go back to Seal Hold,” Kor said aloud, and he began to struggle to his feet.

“Wait a moment, Kor, and think. They offer you rest, safety, in a place Mahela might not destroy.” But even as I spoke I felt his outrage, his defiance, and I smiled.

“I am not yet ready to hide from Mahela, Dan!” He was the king again, hard and keen. “Nor am I done fighting. Be of some use, would you, and help me get onto my horse.”

“You cannot ride!”

“How else am I to get back to the Hold? For a certainty I cannot walk.”

The sea folk had stood when Kor had stood, and they swirled like water, making way as I brought Sora and strapped the riding pelt onto her, yet crowding around so close at all times that I could see by the greenish seawater shimmer of their skins. I kneeled and boosted Kor onto his mare with my shoulders, seating him sideward, so that both his legs hung down by Sora's left shoulder. Then I vaulted up behind him, taking the reins myself. Still the sea folk watched us, holding their pelts in their strange, long hands, and as we saluted them and rode away they gazed after us like lovers wishing to remember, as if they might not see us again.

We rode slowly in the utter darkness, and before long Kor groaned and sagged against my chest, and I struggled to hold him from falling with one arm while I guided Sora with the other. I was afraid that I would have to lay him belly-down across the horse, and I did not want that. He would want to come to Seal Hold upright … his pride wanted it badly, for by the time we reached the Hold he had revived somewhat and braced himself enough so that he was able to walk in with his arm slung across my shoulders. It was very late. Few folk were about to see him or greet me. A few sleepy sentries looked at us without comment. Horses raised long heads to gawk in the torchlight—for the horses stood in a close herd in the great hall of the Hold for the night, so that raiders might not seize them.