Madbond (10 page)

“My knife lay close at hand—at least that much sense had been left in me. And my right hand lay at the breasts; I was able to free it. I snatched up the weapon and stabbed. But I might as well have been stabbing seawater for all the effect it had. I tried to wrestle the thing off, but I might as well have been fighting the surf.”

He was making me half sick, speaking of it. “What did you do?” I asked.

“I lay very still, and there was a sort of—a defiance in me, a stubbornness, that I was I, myself, and I would not be devoured and become something else, food for its ghastly maw. I lay there, and the power of the thought filled my body and made me hard. The struggle was to keep hold of the thought, not giving in to horror. The devourer did not give up easily, either. It curled ever tighter around me, like a starfish on a clam. Until dawn I lay under it, and then it loosened itself, lifted and flew away seaward.”

“Flew?”

“Flew—or swam through the gray air. Cloak of flesh out to either side like blunt wings, or maybe sails, with the wind sending ripples back along the length of them. It shone like a salmon—it was very nearly beautiful. Then from a height it plunged into the waves.”

“Great Sakeema,” I muttered.

“Yes, I wished he were with me.”

So Kor knew that yearning, too! He was silent a moment before he spoke on.

“Twice since then such a devourer has come to attack me, but they have not found me asleep since then. Not that it makes much difference,” Kor added dourly. “They can all the better wrap around me when I am standing. But it is less—less humiliating to meet them so.”

He laughed softly, with no mirth.

“When they found I would not let them make me part of them,” he said almost as an afterthought, “they tried something different. They let go of me and folded back, leaving the mouth foremost, then bored, like leeches. They tried to become part of me.”

“Kor,” I burst out, “that is horrible! It cannot be true, any of it!” But even as I spoke I remembered the scars on his chest.

He looked at me in some small surprise. “I do not often lie,” he said mildly.

“There are no such creatures! Death is not a horror, it is a mercy, given to us by—the god whose name has been forgotten, older than the All-Mother, greater than Sakeema, so that we might know joy of birth and grief of parting, lo—love.…” Odd, that I found it hard to say the name of love.

“Who has told you that there are no devourers?” Korridun asked me quietly.

“My father!” The words came out sounding hard, though I had not intended them so.

“Ah.” He looked away from me as if I had answered many questions. “Well, say I have dreamed it all, then, Dannoc,” he told me quite softly. “Believe what you like. But now you know why I watch the sea.”

“I thought it was because you reverence the sea, you Seal folk,” I muttered.

“I do, I love the sea!” Even in the low light of the setting moon I could see how his eyes shone. “There are marvels in the sea, beauties we can only guess at. Empty shells thrown up on the shore are only echoes, whispers of it. Fish drawn to the surface grow dull and die in the air. If my seal form would come to me, I could more than dream and guess.…” His smile waned. “But I suppose I am secretly afraid of that, as of so many other things.”

Secret. Fear.

“There are terrors, also,” he said, “hidden in the sea.”

Hidden. Under water. Black, black and drowning deep … I felt the weight, pressure, presence, by now familiar, rising up around me or within me, and I shook my head to drive it away. It was not to be sent away so easily—I could scarcely breathe or see. But I could feel Kor watching me.

“Enemy,” I gasped.

“There is no one. I have looked.” I felt his hand on my arm, warm and firm, and I did not resist that touch. After a moment the panic left me, I could see him again. Nor was the sight unpleasant. I no longer scorned his concern.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I don't know. What is the secret about me, Kor, that makes your people shun me? Tell me.” I sagged wearily toward the stony ground.

“I would rather you remembered it yourself,” he said, his voice low and taut.

“I am too much of a coward to remember.”

“No more coward than I.” He raised his head, glancing around. “Look, it is dawn.”

“Kor,” I demanded, “tell me!”

“Not now. Not tonight. Vigils are times of danger and ill omen. Ask me again in three days if you have not found your own way to truth before then.” His face looked bleak, reluctant. “Go in, now, before someone sees you here with me.”

I got up and stood looking at him.

“And try to sleep,” he added.

“I cannot sleep,” I murmured. The terror lay too near the surface of my sleep. But he was right, what he had said some days before: remembering could not be much worse than what was happening to me meanwhile.

I went and lay in my chamber, eyes open, and planned a means of finding my way to some truth while sparing him the telling of it to me.

Chapter Seven

It was from the children that I found out.

Not the tiny children, the ones who clutched at Kor's knees, too small to understand, nor yet the striplings, old enough to be clever. I chose the children just old enough to spend some time off on their own, but not old enough to lie very readily, and I sat by Talu's pen and watched them, aware of other watching eyes from the Hold—children sometimes unaccountably disappeared, seldom but often enough to chill the blood, and they were being guarded even when it seemed they were not.

The second day I chose my moment. It was low tide, and the lot of them swarmed down to one of the pools left behind in the rocks by the sea, down below the cliff. Their elders could not see them from the lodges or the open spaces of the headland, and no coracles floated very near. I lazed down over the side of the headland in a different direction, then came around the base of it to where they were playing, picking my way as if at random down through the mossy rocks and those thick with lichens to where the limpets and barnacles clung between bunches of sea lettuce, down to where the red wrack and the dark purple carrageen grew. The rock pool lay just above the lowest level of low tide, that of the tangleweed, and it was rich with mussels. I sat amidst wet wrack and watched as the children tried to prod a crab from under a rock.

They were, as I had said, no longer afraid of me, but they were not supposed to speak to me either. I hoped they would forget.

“Look,” I remarked after a while, “a sea star.”

They left the crab to pursue the starfish, then remembered they were supposed to shun me and stopped. To keep them near, I came over and clumsily started to gather mussels and the great sea snails called winkles. Sea asters shrank closed as my shadow fell on them.

“In the summer, are there prawns in this pool?”

The youngsters would not answer me, though they stood clustered around me, watching what I was doing. I sighed.

“Why is it that you will not talk with me? What have I done?”

They glanced sidelong at each other but stood silent. I spoke as if half to myself.

“I dare say you do not even know why it is that you are not to speak to me.”

“We do so know!” It was a small girl, shouting out with a proud lift of her chin.

“Alu, be quiet!” someone warned, perhaps an older brother or sister.

“Why should I? He thinks we don't know, and we all know how he killed Rowalt.”

The shock nearly toppled me. I dropped the mussels and clutched at the rocks, then slowly stood up, hearing a vast silence, more than the silence of the children, and then an odd buzzing in my ears, as if of poisonous insects. If they had said “You killed a man” it would have been bad enough, for I killed nothing lightly. But that it should have been Rowalt—

Now I knew what it was that Istas had called me.
Hrauth
. Murderer.

The children were suddenly afraid of me again, though I had not moved from the place where I stood. They ran, scattering like young quail. In a moment I also ran, plunging up the rocks toward Seal Hold.

I knew the chamber where Kor spent portions of the days in council with those who helped him rule. I ran to it and in straightway, not caring what I interrupted. They were all there in their places on wooden seats in a circle, Kor and Olpash and Istas and some others, and I leaped to the space at their center, facing Korridun, plunging to my knees in front of him so that the level of my head would not be above his.

“Kor—”

There was a commotion of indignation all around me, and before I could speak further Olpash's voice rose above the others. “Show some respect, madman! Address the king by his full name and title.”

“I am the more highly honored,” Kor said quietly, “that Dannoc names me as a friend.”

“A friend!” Istas shrilled, her voice rising so high it cracked. In her hatred I heard heartbreak.

“He who ought to be your worst enemy!” Olpash boomed.

“You dare speak to me of enemies?” Korridun's words were low, but at his tone all his counselors fell to stricken silence. He rose to his feet, spear-straight and shaking with a bitter passion. “You, who have come at night to kill me with a mask on your face? Not man enough to face me plainly—you think I do not know, but I know you well enough. You, and all you others.” His glance raked the circle. There was not a sound. “My mercy gives you life this day. So do not begrudge me mercy.” He stared them all down a moment more, then took a deep breath and sat down with a sigh, letting go of wrath.

“Of all my assailants, Dan,” he said to me with whimsical calm, “you are the only one who has bested me, and the only one with honor.”

“Kor,” I blurted out, “they say I killed Rowalt.”

Silence for the space of ten breaths. “Who has said this to you?” Kor asked in a low voice at last.

“The little ones. Please do not blame them. I asked.”

“But you do not remember.”

“If you tell me, I will know it is true.”

“Tell him, my king. Tell him how he slew my brother and two others.” It was Istas, sharp, poignant, cruel.

Two others! “Is it true?” I demanded of Kor—I hope I did not beg.

Pain in his sea-dark eyes, and he could not or would not speak. He merely nodded. My head spun, and I pressed my cold hands to my temples to clear it.

“How
did I kill them?” I whispered.

“Tell him, King.” It was Istas again, malevolent.

“Silence,” he told her. But he could not threaten her to enforce it, and she knew it. She had lost a brother, and she had never come against Korridun in the night.

“How,” I pleaded, plainly begging now. Kor could no longer deny me.

“One, you sliced off his hand, and he bled to death soon afterward. One, you beheaded. Rowalt”—he had to force himself to speak on—“you disemboweled.”

It was a hideous thing to have done, an ugly thing, of all ways the last way that Dannoc, son of Tyonoc, would have chosen to slay an enemy. I hid my face in shame. “Mahela must have hold of my soul,” I breathed.

“You were out of your mind with grief,” Kor said.

“It doesn't matter.” I raised my face, and, though they burned as if on fire, my eyes were dry. “What is the penalty?”

“It does matter! You were not in self. You cannot remember doing these things. In a sense, it was not you who did—”

“The penalty, Kor.”

Something in my tone defeated him. Or perhaps he knew, even then, in what way healing must come to me. It seemed that I chose hard ways, always.… He was silent for some time, and when he spoke his voice was very low.

“The younger two, Voss and Taditu, were fosterlings with no kin to seek revenge for them except me, their foster sire, and I waive revenge. As for Rowalt: the bloodright belongs to Istas.”

Before him I had knelt to face him as a petitioner—though in fact I found that I fronted him levelly, as a friend. To face her I stood, a prisoner, and I met her gaze steadily, though it was a hard thing to do—her black eyes glittered with hatred.

“And with my own hand I will take it,” she said softly, far too softly, “and at my sweet leisure.”

It did not comfort me any that a woman would have the killing of me. In my tribe, as in the Otter, women ride to war alongside the men, and I knew how women, though not as strongly thewed as men, could be relentless when men gave in.

Istas pulled out the thong that laced her sealskin boots, came to me and tied my hands behind me, pulling the knots hard and tight. This was to dishonor me, saying, in effect, that I was a coward who would run away were I given the chance. Spiteful old woman. She slit my boots with her stone knife and stripped me of them and my clothing, then and there—she, flinty old beldam, there was no modesty left in her. Then she herself elbowed me up the headland, with half the Kindred trailing along to watch, and sent me crashing down into the prison pit.

There I stayed the rest of the day and the night, and not even Kor was allowed to bring food to me.

Or perhaps he could not bear to come.

No one came near me. The waiting was to make me miserable, I knew, and to give Istas time to smack her lips and make her plans. Strangely, I was not as miserable as she would have liked. Though the night was cold and I had no covering, though my arms ached and Istas's thongs bit into my wrists until my hands were numb, still I slept deeply and soundly, without a dream. It was quite settled that I was going to die, so of what use was dreaming?

Therefore, I was strong and steadfast when she came for me in the morning, and I had made up my mind not to speak to her lest folk should construe it as pleading, but to go out with honor.

There was a problem for Istas and her followers—I found it very nearly laughable. I could not climb the notched pole with my hands tied behind me, so they had no way of getting me out of the pit without approaching me, and they were afraid. Also, there must have been some shame in them, for they would not send for Kor. They sent for Birc, finally, and he climbed down the pole, came over to me and cut the thongs. My wrists were so swollen by then that he sliced my skin in doing it, and I noticed that he would not meet my eyes. I centered myself and climbed up the ladder on my own. Istas did not attempt to bind me again—they were all afraid to touch me. So of my own accord I followed her to the great lodge, and no one afterward could deny it.