Mindbond (11 page)

And Vallart's words to Chal throbbed like a heartbeat in my head: I will follow you if you walk into the sea.…

“Kor,” I whispered, echoing the song, “I am not of the stuff of legend.”

I do not think he heard me, not above the surf's roar. I would have needed to shout to be heard. But I am sure he felt my fear. He reached over and handbonded me.

Come
, he mindspoke,
it is only to go out to the Greenstones, the farthest stack, for now.

What then, neither of us could say. But how could I hold back, whatever might befall? It was my quest, my father, Tyonoc, whom we sought—was it not? Who was the leader and who was the led?

“Come on,” I said fiercely, for the handbond had given me courage. Letting go, but staying close by him, I strode forward to do battle with the surf.

Battering water—it blinded me, burned my lungs, knocked me backward, filled me with terror and rage. I had been reared where the upland streams run knee-deep, and I was not accustomed to the ways of mighty water. It angered me that water should mob, overrun, best me. I strove against it, and it beat on me worse than giant fists, worse than a Cragsman's cudgel. Where was Kor? I could not see—

His grasp closed on my wrist, and he was pulling me downward. Panicked, I fought him too. Was he my betrayer now, like the father and brother who had kicked at my head to drown me in the black tarn?

Dan, stop thrashing.
The easing contact of his mind, once so frightening to me, now felt as steadying as handbond. I let him draw me down under the breakers.

No one can fight Mother Sea. She is mighty and larger than the mountains, she always wins. One must slip through her lines.

He brought me up in the quieter water beyond the surf, where I took in air with ragged gasps. Even here waves tossed me and slapped at my face, stinging my nostrils with salt. Disgusted, wanting only to gain the solid footing of the rocks and be out of this foul-tasting smother, I tried to churn my way forward. My hands threw up splashes of green light from the black water. The rocks were black hulks against a sky milky with stars, their verges awash with faint light. At my side, Kor floated at his ease, stretched out on the surface of the ocean, his path limned with dim green, the sealskin swimming like a living thing beside him.

Slip, Dan, slip! Edgewise.

I tried. Sometimes I got on better, but I could not entirely manage it. Kor reached out from time to time and gave me a tug, helping me flounder forward. More often, Mother Sea gave me a hefty blow and threw me back, or I sank, choking, to blunder against the rocky bottom or feel Kor's grasp again on my wrist. Coming up, I gasped or gulped or spat like a cat. It was time past forever before I finally reached the rocky sea stack where we were to keep our vigil, and I had so exhausted myself that I lay flat on the wet rock, scarcely out of the spray.

Kor helped me up to the rounded top after a while, where it was dry and the rock gave back the warmth of the day's sun. He kept silence for some time, until I was done panting.

“You hate it,” he said finally.

“Mahela, yes.” I was still coughing up salt spume from time to time.

“Go back. The waves will carry you to shore.”

“No.”

I did not want another dunking, he thought. “I will come with you, and swim out again.”

“No! Kor, don't talk like a fool. I'm staying.”

“Pigheaded,” he muttered.

“Speak for yourself,” I retorted.

“But that's just it! Dan, don't you see I am at fault for bringing you here? How can it be right? You are not made for this. If—” He stopped. Something unspeakable lay in his mind, making my own fear anger me.

“I'm past needing a nursemaid,” I told him savagely. “You tend to your vigil and your life. I'll tend to mine.”

Warmth was leaving the rock. I sat up, shivering in the chill sea breeze. We Red Hart, we go bare-chested into blizzards, but the ocean damp makes us quake. I would be shivering for the most part of the next several days.

Kor sat by me, silent and still, legs folded, hands clasped. But I was not deceived. Not until all was right between us would he be able truly to begin his vigil.

I mindspoke him, but not with words, just a touch, as if I had reached over to touch his arm. Gentle, but he was somewhat startled and turned toward me with a quick intake of breath. Then, delighted, he smiled. Nor were such smiles commonplace in him.

“How did you do that?”

“I—I don't know. I just—” Words would not come, and I puffed my lips in exasperation. “I had to tell you, or show you,” I blurted at last. “Kor, pay no attention to my spleen. Our lives are bound, I know that.”

“Heartbound, handbound, mindbound,” he said softly, moved.

“But, Sakeema be my witness, Kor, I am here of my own will. I seek my father to save him, remember? If I fail, it will be of my own doing, not yours.”

Maybe he did not believe me entirely. In my heart I did not believe it myself, deeming of him what I did. But it served, for the time, to free him, and he nodded, reaching over to me. We clasped hands firmly and in silence.

“Look,” he said after a while, letting his grip drift away from mine, “the starlight on the whitecaps and the green swirls between, is it not beautiful?”

He was not one to say such things idly. I knew he wanted me to see beauty in the black water so that I would be able to enter it with more ease. But I could not reply to him, and those were the last words he spoke to me for the many days of the vigil.

I shivered through the night, sitting by his side, and saw the morning dawn all too slowly through fog. Nor did the fog burn away, all the next day. I sat bone-chilled and cramped with cold, longing for the sun, but I suppose it was as well that the haze hid it, or our naked skin would have been scorched—sun rays fall strongly at sea. Though at the time I scarcely considered myself blessed. Alone in gray brume, Kor and I sat without eating or speaking or sleeping, as is the custom for the keeping of vigil. We moved only to relieve ourselves into the sea on the far side of the stack or to drink the fogwater that gathered in small pools atop the rock, water that tasted rank and was never enough. I sucked the dew that dripped from the ends of my hair. Other than that, we sat. Kor sat atop his sealskin cloak. I had nothing but the hard rock under me, but I did not complain, not even to myself, for I knew he had not brought the pelt along for his comfort.

Even the second night neither of us slept, though I for one would sorely have liked to, if it were not for the wintry cold. Kor, I think, had already gone into a sort of trance. Alert and tranquil, he faced the sea as if he were only waiting for a beckoning, a sign.

We saw seals from time to time. Some came and lay at the base of the very sea stack on which we sat. We saw many things: cormorants flying, low to the water and as silent as the mist, and some sort of large fish leaping in the distance, and fulmars on the rocks, and the third night, when the mist cleared, a skein of geese across the moon, their piping very faint—the sound of that faraway flock wrenched my heart with a sorrow and longing I could not explain. And the cries of birds, gulls, sanderlings, whimbrels, kittiwakes, every day, as constant as the soughing of the water, and the vigil had taken its course as a vigil should, for I had passed beyond impatience and hunger and cold into something other, and time had ceased to hold meaning for me. The trance was in a way better than sleeping. I suppose I dozed from time to time, still upright, but I do not recall doing so—I remember only that everything seemed very clear and bright, as if in a mist made of sunshine, in which there were no shadows. I saw every tan leaf of the kelp that swam by the knees of the rocks, every bladder and stem. I saw a small feather that dropped from the breast of a passing bird. My breathing, so it seemed, was as slow and steady as the rhythm of the tides. I do not know how long we sat, Kor and I, after the skein of wild geese crossed the moon with a sound as of a distant clay flute.

But I remember that it was nighttime, and the seals were dancing. In the sea, where they were graceful as they could never be on land, in a great circle they danced the fire dance and whipped the waves to green flame with their treading, their leaping. How lovely were their scoonings and swayings, their circle of green shimmering fire. How lovely the sinuous movements of their heads when they raised them. One of the seals, moon-colored, seemed to glow, left a bright trail in the water. I had seen seals of many colors, so I took no pause that one was white. How lovely, the white seal, as one after another they leaped entirely free of the sea and sank again in great waterflames, green, touched white with foam and moonlight.…

Kor got up stiffly, fumble-footed, and made his way down the stack to where the water lapped. Swaying, he walked slowly, intently, without turning, the sealskin trailing from one hand. I watched him without moving or speaking, for it was only right, fitting, that he should go to join the dance.

He waded into the sea until it reached his thighs, placed the seal cloak around his shoulders, and dove cleanly, vanished, leaving a swirl of green on the surface of the black water.

I watched as if in a dream, accepting. Then suddenly, as the watcher in the mind decides to wake from a dream, I no longer sat, but struggled up as if arising from nightmare, as if I were thrashing my way out of dark water. I was Dannoc, weak from cold and hunger, and Kor was gone. I wanted him, and I feared for him, even worse than I had longed for him and feared for him on the mountainside when the Cragsmen had walked past.
Kor!
I called.

No answer. Had another seal joined the bright, shadowy dance? I could not tell.

I staggered where I stood. “Kor!” I shouted out loud.

Every seal splashed beneath the surface of the sea and dove. Green flame turned into a shining blackness with specks of waterglow in it, glinting like hard eyes.

I shouted until I was hoarse, sent my mind searching and calling to no avail. Kor was gone as if he had never been.

Chapter Eight

Wyonet, my mother, had left me without warning, without a word or a trace, never to be seen again. Tyonoc, my father, had been taken by a demon, gone years before I knew. Kor … I would not think it. He had to come back to me. Sakeema, beloved king, prithee come back to us.… No. Not generations hence.
Kor, soon. Come soon.

Thirsty pain in my throat … I could not call any longer, not even with my mind. My feet had brought me down the stack, closer to the sea, almost within reach of the tide, but I did not care. I sank down where I was and sat with and ache in my throat, not all thirst, with a harsh pain spreading through my chest and shoulders and a hurtful dryness about my eyes so that I had to close them against the dim and hazy dawn as if it were snowglare. I needed the flow of tears, but to weep would have meant defeat, the end of hope. Or perhaps I was merely too proud. A pox on vigils, I decided, and I lay down where I was, on the cold, wet stone, weary beyond shivering, to sleep. But whenever I dozed a spasm took hold of me, a silent, dry sobbing that tore at my throat, awakening me. When I slept at last, it was more as if I had fainted.

Splash of cold seawater startled me awake. The tide was coming in. I edged up the rock a small distance, not bothering to rise, up to a ledge just out of tide's reach, and I lay there, indifferent to the grasping water that groped so near me. Except for the slapping of the water, the day seemed very silent, and after a while I sat up and looked around. The whitish patch of haze that hid the sun stood overhead. No seals anywhere in sight, none swimming, none hauled out along the rocks to bask or rest—with a pang I wondered where they were. Not even many birds about. I was alone with my shivering self and the vastness of sea and sky.

I sat, not thinking, too tired and dismayed to think. Whatever tides flowed in my mind were too slow and wordless to be called thought. After what might have been half the halfday I turned, as slowly and stupidly as a great turtle, and peered toward the shore. It was the first time since the beginning of the vigil that I had looked landward. Beyond seal-form spires and humps, beyond a white blur of surf, I could make out a wavering band of dark green through the mist—spruce forest on steep, rocky slopes that jutted toward snowpeaks. But the peaks themselves, my beloved mountains, I could not see.

Just as oafishly I turned back toward the ocean.

Let the waves carry you back to shore, he had said. You do not belong here. But something sullen and stubborn was stirring in me. Here I was, and here I would stay, and I would wait for Kor until I died, which happy event might not be long in coming. And Mahela take him, the ingrate. Likely I would die anyway, in the surf, should I venture toward shore. I would be drowned or smashed against a rock, weak as I had become, starving myself for his sake. So let me rot where he could find my bleached bones and weep. I sat scowling and blinking my dry, stinging eyes against the shell-gray day—

A glint of brighter, fishy-flashing gray, far off near the hidden edge of sea. I had seen such a flash once before over the far sea, rising above the water, too large at the distance to be any fish or even a bird. And much too high. But that time there had been only the one, and this time there were—three, seven, ten, more. A full twelve less one, rippling and shimmering and drawing nearer, wingtip to tip of capelike wing. Devourers.

“Mahela's twelve,” I breathed, suddenly absurdly sure of it. Kings of our tribes kept each a twelve of retainers. Why not, then, the ruler of death, she who held court beneath the endless water?

A twelve of devourers, less only the one that possessed Ytan … The size of them, the weight and swiftness, the gleaming sheen as they parted the fog—I shrank back against the rock, holding my breath in awe and fear, feeling very exposed and no longer nearly so ready to die. As I surely would, die or worse, should one of them choose to take me. I was weak from fasting, no match for a devourer in body or will, lying on a rock far out in the ocean, with not even so much as a flint knife by me—nothing to kill myself with should one of them best me to make a demon out of me. Sick with terror, my gaze frozen on the monsters, I groped about me with both hands, searching for a rock, a driftwood stick by way of weapon, but I could find nothing. The sea carried all such oddments away. One is meant to be helpless, like a newborn babe, on vigil. I was helpless.