Mindbond (15 page)

Anger gave me courage. “Will you take the mountains, then?” I demanded. “And the sun?” But she did not answer me. She looked only at Kor.

“But nothing so comely as you, young Korridun,” she said in a way that might have been gentle were it not so gloating. “Welcome to Tincherel.”

I blinked, and had I not felt so daunted I would have bitterly laughed. The haven, the name meant. Tincherel: a sheltered place, a refuge. Mahela so named her deathly realm? But of course she would not call it the Mountains of Doom, as we mortals did.

“Young scoundrel, you have made me wait long for you.” Her cormorant eye on Korridun, hard, as a bird's eye is always. Yet, something more than hardness in her voice.…

He held his head high and steady, his gaze level. “My comrade and I,” he said, “have come to make petition—”

“Since first I caught sight of you,” she went on as if she had not heard him, “when you were but a sweet ten-year-old with a gaze wise beyond your years. Ah, the dark, staring eyes of you! I love to have children by me, but for you I made exception. You were not old enough, then, to provide me with what I craved from you. So I acceded to your mother's bargain, and waited until the sap had risen in you, and sent one of my minions to bring you to me after a few years had gone by.”

“Devourer,” Kor whispered. For the first time he looked shaken. As well he might.

Time, I decided, for me to try my wiles. I bowed, and as I had hoped, the movement brought her gaze to me. “Most gracious lady,” I said in as even a voice as I could manage, “King Korridun and I have come here to petition you for the sake of my father, Tyonoc of the Red Hart, and for Korridun's mother, Kela of the Seal Kindred, and for their lifemates, Wyonet and Pavaton, if you hold them here.”

“Petition?” She eyed me vaguely, too bored with me even to laugh at me. “But I hear petitions only if it suits my purpose. As it suited me to grant a further span of life to Kela's son here.” Her glance darted fondly back to Kor.

“You wanted me to live, and took my mother even so?” he demanded.

“I gave her what she asked, took what she offered.”

“You hag,” Kor breathed.

Kor, be careful!

“And you, my scamp, you have proved far stronger than I ever would have believed possible of any mortal.” She seemed not to have heard him, or had chosen not to hear.

“I will have to be stronger yet, it seems,” said Kor between clenched teeth.

“Why? You do not like this visage?” Mahela laughed carelessly, and changed with a watery swirl. She was wholly a woman now, a hard-eyed woman with a white face and hair as glossy black as a cormorant's wings. Her features were fair enough, finer, indeed, than those of any earthly maiden I had ever seen, except perhaps for Tass. But her lineless face was daunting with vast age, as if it had been smoothed by the workings of water and time. It was like a face of white rock, or ice, rising oddly from the floating, tender-colored gown with its many flutings and ruffles, its fringes tipped with pearls. And though her beauty could not be faulted, and though I had never been one to refuse a woman's offer, I think had Mahela been looking at me I would have backed away from her.

She was looking at Kor, and he stood hard-jawed.

“Nearly ten years you have thwarted me,” she said, letting her gaze caress his limbs, skim his shoulders. “But you are all the better grown for the delay.”

“Look at Dan,” said Kor in a grim voice. “He would like it better than I do.”

Kor!
I protested.

Not so?

No!

“Dannoc is good enough for most women.” Mahela glanced at me briefly, and I felt all the peril of her regard. “A bold cock and a ready smile, that is all they want. But you, Korridun …”

She paused, and it seemed as if the sea paused with her. Even its washings grew still as she pondered.

“You are very fair, though you smile seldom. And very strong, but there is a gentleness about you. You are full of wisdom and dreaming. All runs deep in you, beneath a still surface. When you make love to me, your mind will touch me, and your soul, and your heart, not merely your body. You will be mine entirely.”

Her words chilled me. Ai, but she knew him well! “Bold cock” though I was, I could scarcely have borne what was promised him. How was he to endure it? And it was my folly that had brought him before her.

“Mighty lady, you are mistaken.” How could he speak so firmly, with such stark calm? “I can never belong to you.”

“No, my prize, you are mistaken.” Not even an edge to her voice, just a callous certainty. “I know you are not pledged. I know you are yet virginal. As for Tassida, I have sent my servants to dispose of her.”

He staggered as if he would fall. I felt as stricken as he, but also somehow to blame. Forgoing modesty, I reached out to support him, my arms around his shoulders.

“Separate them!” Mahela commanded, jealous, angry.

Handbond, Dan. It may be
—
the last time.…

My right hand found his, gripped, warm. For a single, still moment, Mahela's rage meant nothing, the men swarming toward us were of no consequence. Then they tore us apart.

I flung off the bearded fellow who had hold of me, plunged to my knees by Mahela's feet.

“Take me, mighty lady! I can bear it better. You will destroy him!”

Not so, Dan.
Stone hard and strong, Kor's resolve. No heartbreak in him any longer.

“Hence!” And even as she shrieked at me Mahela turned cormorant-headed again, hurling herself forward from her massive seat, her finery wildly swirling, neck snaking, her wicked, hooked bill shooting toward my midriff. Stupid with sorrow, I knelt without moving, meaning to argue further, even though I heard Kor shout. But a hand closed on my shoulder and pulled me back, out of danger.

I—knew—that grip—

Kor stood in the clutches of four stocky men, staring over at me with his mouth half-open, the look on his face wavering between hope and fear. They would take him away now.… I struggled, meaning to plead again with Mahela for his sake, but the two-handed grasp on my shoulders tightened.

“No, lad, no!” That voice in my ear, I knew it, but I did not dare to believe.… “Do not face her, do not strive against her! She is far stronger, she always wins.”

“Get him hence,” Mahela raged, “before I tear out his innards and eat them.”

Go, Dan, but not too far. Wait for me.

I went, and saved my innards, because I was dazed. Underfoot, sharp black rocks in odd shapes, clinkers, as if from a cinder cone. If they cut my bare feet, I did not care. The touch on my shoulder guided me through the crowd. People stared at me, made way. Children gazed emptily. Women turned to watch after me with more shock than welcome, for I was still naked, and they were gloriously arrayed. I paid no heed. Down steep trails between dark crags … Only when we had reached a level, sheltered glen did I dare to stop, and turn, and face him.

Long braids the color of bleached prairie grass in winter, and at the braid tips the blue-gray peregrine feathers of a king. Tall and straight he stood, as tall as I, his lean face browned by weather, scarred by battle, and the scars of hunting and battle showed whitely on his bare, hard chest, his strong arms. The headband of a king lay on his brow, and the armbands did not slip from their place above the muscles of his arm. His lappet and leggings were of finest white doeskin, his boots of white bisonhide. His knife bore a handle of rare elk antler. A short cloak of sable fringed with white weasel tails was flung back proudly from his shoulders. Still, he did not seem entirely a king. A bleakness had made its dwelling in his face, as if something had defeated him.

Tyonoc, my father.

“Yes, I remember,” he said with a taut calm, taut as a strung bow. “Dan, my son, I remember all that I did to you and to your comrade. Mahela is not kind. She wishes me to remember.”

“But it was not you,” I told him.

“In a sense not. But this mind schemed and remembers. These arms struck the blows, these eyes—saw you suffer.…”

Eyes the color of a deep sky over eversnow, but now clouded like the ocean skies … I went to him and took him into a tight embrace, and then I knew that he was indeed my father, wholly my father, heart and all, for his proud body acceded to the embrace, his arms came up across my back and held me, his head bowed. I felt the tautness go away from him as an arrow flies from the bow, leaving him shaking.

“You do not hate me,” he whispered.

“Do you hate me?” I challenged, trying to rouse him to ire or a smile, either one. “Do you not remember how I slew you?”

“Yes. I am grateful to you.”

That staggered me, and I dropped my arms from around his shoulders so that he would not feel it in me. He let me go, and we walked on in silence. Too long a silence. After I had regained a noggin's worth of calm, I looked at him and saw that the straight line of his mouth was tugged askew, his eyes nearly closed. He felt my startled stare and pulled half his face into a crooked smile.

“The only thing I like about this place,” he said, “is that no one notices weeping. It is all salt water here, and tears do not show.” A bitter edge in his voice, almost as if he wanted my pity. He, Tyonoc of the Red Hart!

I stopped where I was, at the foot of a black crag, and stared at him. “You never used to be ashamed to weep,” I said slowly.

“I did it more seldom those days. Now it comes too often, it grows wearing.”

I wanted to knock courage back into him. “Mahela take it!” I cursed instead.

“Truly, she will, if she wants it.” His small jest seemed to cheer him, and he straightened. “Come, this way.”

He led me to a place in a hollow of the alps where a skin tent was pitched amid trees, for all the world as if we were back in the Red Hart Demesne except that the trees were of a sort I had never seen and their limp leaves floated in the currents. Also, no cooking fire burned at the entry, and no meat hung nearby. Nor were there any others of my people about. Once within, my father found me a lappet and leggings of yellow buckskin and sat on the ground to watch as I put them on.

“Your hair,” he said, “it is long enough to braid again.”

I shrugged, feeling at it with the fingers of one hand. Braids were of small concern to me any longer. Somewhere on distant uplands my people thought of hunting food, stitching deerskins into clothing, but I had ridden away from them on a fanged mare, full of a mystic notion, my thoughts not their thoughts anymore, and I would never be entirely a Red Hart again. Standing in the realm of death and breathing green water, I could not have felt farther from them.

“I had thought that you would wear the peregrine feathers, now that I am gone,” my father said.

“Tyee does.”

“Tyee! Ai, he is a good and gentle man, but he does not have the strength of will to lead our people aright!”

“He does now. He fought Ytan, that—the night you last remember, and drove him away. You did not see?”

“No.” His gaze slid down to the cinders by his feet. “I was busy … torturing Korridun, and through him, you.”

I reached down and shook him by the shoulders until he raised his eyes to me. “Father, that is laid to Mahela's account,” I told him fiercely. “And it is past, gone, done with. Think more of what is now.”

“Now?” He blinked at me, gave me a wry smile. “But here there is no now. We have nothing but the past. We do not live here, we merely wash with the tides of Mahela's making. The water sustains us. We pay court to her. There is nothing else.”

He, my father, who had once ridden a swift pony through the forests and shot the fleet deer, he who had a dozen times fought against Pajlat's raiders, they with their vicious long whips of bisonhide, and driven them off. He who had carried a roused hawk on his hand as he led the magic dancers around the autumn soulfires—that he should sit so limply, so—deadened …

“Where is my mother?” I asked him harshly. She should have been here with him. Her ardor might have stung him to something like manhood again.

He stared at me, rose slowly to his feet, yet he was terribly calm. “Did I not tell you, when I was taunting you? I killed her to stop her from—from pestering me with love.”

“Yes, I know! But where is she now?”

He gazed at me as if to say, What does it matter? What could it possibly change? “She was murdered, unavenged,” he said. “She roams with the restless spirits, the green-shades.”

“I thought all the dead were under Mahela's charge.”

“They are, and she makes an indifferent keeper for most of them. We, here, her special pets”—his face quirked again into a half smile—“we are dead in a different way.”

“A foul way, and wrong,” I told him quietly. “Kor and I have come to take you back to the living land.”

His smile faded into horror. “You—but I thought Mahela had summoned you.”

“No. We came of our own accord.”

“And on my account,” he whispered. “Ai, Dan, every sight of you will break my heart.” He covered his face with his hands, curled in on himself and sank to the ground.

“We will take you away from this place!” I declared to him. Moaning, his knees pressed tight to his chest, he seemed not to hear me. Tyonoc, my father, king of the Red Hart, he had no right to be so weak! Furious, I got hold of him and pulled him none too gently to his feet.

“Stop feeding on wretchedness!” I raged. “You have let her make a worm of you!”

“Let? But there is no letting about it.” He looked back at me with a bleak sureness and no shame. “She will make a worm of you, too, if she so chooses.”

“I do not plan to stay so long.”

“A foolish plan, Dannoc. No one leaves this place.”

I could not answer him. His dead and settled tone chilled me. After a moment he turned away from me, went and sat on the ground again. He had worn a hollow in that spot, from sitting.