Mindbond (29 page)

“Dan,” he said intensely, “if only you could feel what I feel—”

It had nearly happened, that night in Mahela's domain. “That frightens me worst of all,” I whispered.

Why? If you felt what is in me, if you truly felt all that is in me, knew what
—
what I have undergone, what has made me be the way I have become, then you would see, you would be sure of me again.

“You want me to—to enter into your being?” Spoken words were clumsy, but stubbornly I kept to them until I saw my path clearly.

“Yes. Will you try it? Dan?”

I swallowed at my fear, knowing that things would never again be right between us until I braved it. “Very well,” I said. “But how?”

“That is for you to say. Dan, you showed me the way to my sword, to handbond. You taught me mindspeak.”

“But this—this other thing,” I protested, “you have been doing it half your life.”

“Since I went to the Mountains of Doom the first time. Now you have been there, too. Dan, I know—you came close, that night when I lay with Mahela and nearly drowned in her.”

Terror, just remembering. I swallowed again. “Handbond came first,” I muttered.

His hand met mine, the sword scars met. We passed the grip, warm, steadying. Strength as of four heroes, mine, and I felt I would need it all. “Don't let go,” I told Kor.

“Dan, is it such an ordeal? Don't do it, then.”

“Hush. Keep the handbond.” He had once died in torment for my sake—it would be my shame if I could not do this thing for him. I closed my eyes, centering myself. Courage …

Mindbond came next.

Very true, Dan.

Closeness. I heard his mood in his words, hopeful in the midst of despair but trying not to hope overmuch. I felt, as I often did, his presence as a bodiless thing, as if his mind lay against mine. But still that thin barrier, like a skin …

I had to risk.

Kor's grip, warm, constant—I took strength from it, then ventured. I was no longer aware that my eyes were closed, for I had none. Or if I could not see, it was because I was all inward. Handbond still with me, as I knew well enough, but I no longer felt it. I was a swimming, flying thing, a spirit, swimming in sky or flying in sea—no, more. I was sky, I was sea, the indeeps of me as endless as the sea, formless, melting into—other, as tears melt into the sea. I knew my name, it was Dan. And I knew the name of the place where I was, the warm sea. It was Kor. And I also was fluid, warm, we were as one, and other was so much a part of me, I could no longer tell—the boundary, there was none. And I felt—

Something so vast I could not name it.

Then terror. My own terror, my very own.

It struck like a graymaw, tossed me as a seal tosses a salmon, tore me so that I seemed to feel blood splattering, I wanted to scream but I had no mouth. Fleeing, I was fleeing in terror because I had no skin, no mouth, no edge. Because I had been almost, for an instant, someone else. I seemed to remember a bloody dead body, mangled—my own. I had died, and I did not want to die, ever—

Arm around my shoulders, hand gripping mine. Eyes again, open to see a bruised and well-beloved face. I could scream now. Perhaps I already had, for Kor looked frightened. I let my head sag to the warm cloth at his shoulder and sobbed. Kor held me tightly, as if he could somehow stop my shaking.

“Failed,” I moaned.

Dan, I am so sorry! I should never have asked it of you.

Hush.

I didn't think it could be so hard for you.

I do everything the hard way, Kor.

I raised my head to look at him, already knowing: I had thought this was a thing I had needed to do for him, and had failed to do. But it was all his gift to me. What he had given me in that half a moment before I fled …

Grave dark eyes the color of the sea met mine. Burdened he might be, but there was something in him that could never be defeated.

“You scamp,” I told him huskily.

I was not the only one who could love forever. Love without end, boundless as the sea.

“You forgot,” Kor whispered. “Heartbond came first of all.”

No need for handbond any longer. Strength enough in me, now, for any hundred heroes. Both arms around his shoulders, I embraced him.

I dried my face with my hands. Together we sat in silence as the fire blackened into embers. Dying, like our world, falling ashmeal into nothingness … In the morning Kor would go back to lead his people, and I, on a fool's quest, seeking a sleeping god.

We must have slept, for we were both exhausted.

I awoke to gray daylight, full of fog. Alone. Kor was gone, leaving me gear and food. I readied my horse in silence, remembering a vivid dream: Kor had mindspoken me in my sleep, telling me he would be steadfast and await my return, bidding me gentle journey, sparing us both the impossible parting, leaving us both with a better farewell to remember.

Heartbond came first.… The words pulsed in me like heart's blood as I rode eastward, toward the far slopes of the mountains, toward the unknown place where the sleeping god might lie.

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Chapter One

I am a madman, a murderer, a mystic, and above all, Sakeema's fool. Always, Sakeema's fool. I am he whom folk called Dannoc, the dreamwit who left his bond brother in search of the god.

And I found him soon, in a way. I starved, those early days of the journey, for there was scant food to be found on the mountainpeaks, and at the Blue Bear Pass, as I lay weak from hunger and chilled by the thin air off the eversnow, he came to me.

His head crowned in skyfire glory, he looked down on me. Lying on stony ground, blinking up at him, I could not see his face.

“Sakeema?” I mumbled. I had seen him so once before, in vision.

“Don't call me Sakeema, Dannoc!” A well-beloved voice, annoyed as always when I addressed him by that name. For a time I had thought he was the god. It was my bond brother, Kor.

But when he kneeled beside me, helping me to struggle up and sit with him, still I could not see his face. I badly wanted to see again his quiet, dark-eyed face. But it was hidden by the blaze of light around his head, and I felt as if the god held my shoulders in his hands.

“Are you sure?” I murmured. “You look so much like him.”

“Dannoc, you are lightheaded.” And no wonder, after the many days without sufficient food. “Come on. I will take you back to Seal Hold.”

Only the world's peril could have made me leave him as I had done. The vast, wild world, mountainpeaks, meadows, pine forests, plains, all dying, falling bit by bit into Mahela's maw. To my soul's center I wanted to go back and be with him again, yet I could not. “Must go find Sakeema,” I muttered, and his hands sagged away from me.

Seeker
, he mindspoke me,
how do you expect to find Sakeema until you have truly found yourself?

He cast aside a king's distance, mindspeaking me, he was all candor, his soul bared to mine. Though there was never less than truth in Kor, ever.… But I did not heed him, I snorted in scorn, deeming that I knew myself well enough. What was there to know? That I was the only one in the six tribes crazed and foolish enough to go off in search of the god?

Kor—if it was Kor—the one with the face I could not see against skybright glow—he lifted one hand and touched my forehead in answer to my scoffing.

“What is your name?” he asked aloud.

And I could not remember. I was madman, murderer, once again in the prison pit and utterly at his mercy, but unafraid. And I could not remember my own name.

“Of what age were you when you took your name vigil?”

The same question he had asked me once before, but this time I remembered the answer. I had been thirteen, and my father had braided my sunbleached hair for me into the two braids of a Red Hart adult and warrior. How I had loved him in those days, my father, king of the Red Hart Tribe.… He had turned back and embraced me yet one time more before he had left me. I remembered clearly enough the days alone on the crags up amid the eversnow, where the air was thin and nothing came but wild sheep and the black eagles soaring. I remembered the fasting, the lightheaded weakness that had come over me, the same hunger-weakness that I had felt all too much of late.… And I remembered, or relived, the vision:

A hunter, a proud Red Hart hunter in deerskin lappet and leggings, bare-chested, with the yellow braids lying long on his weather-browned, battle-scarred shoulders. His head high, his blue eyes keen. Myself, when I grew older, I had thought or hoped as a stripling of thirteen summers. The hunter kneeled to study the ground, finding his way along a faint trail. Then he stood and scanned the land intently, and I saw that he had ventured to a mountain-peak, and that his blue eyes, deep as highmountain sky, searched crag and eversnow and meadow, spruce forest and pine forest and fir forest and distant shortgrass steppe, hilly uplands and river valleys and even the vast plains and the vast sea—all the world he scanned, searching. He carried a well-curved bow, and he raised it and shot a redfletched arrow, far, far, so far I could scarcely follow its flight. I lost sight of the hunter and saw only the arrowbut no, the hunter was the arrow, its sharp stone head wore his keen-eyed face, his long braids streamed in the wind of its passing. It pointed sometimes downward toward the belly of the earth and sometimes upward toward the sky, but it never fell to earth, and its red feathers beat like the wings of a red bird. And it shone like the sun, its seeking head and feathered shaft aglow with sunyellow glory, and then, as if it had just seen me, it shot straight at me to bury its sharp stone head in my heart, or so I thought. It sped toward me, the face of the hunter turned eagerly toward me—but I gasped for breath, seeming already to feel that bolt in my gut, and I blinked, ending the vision.

Dannoc, Dannoc, Dannoc. My name was Dannoc, “the arrow.”

I looked at the shining head and shadowed face of the one next to me. “Dannoc is my name,” I told him.

“Are you certain?”

Such nonsense. It had been my name for years. How could I be less than certain? The image of the arrow had filled my sight. “Of course I am certain.”

“Of course. Are you ever less than sure?” Affection along with the gentle mockery in his voice. “But I think it is not your true name. Call yourself, rather, Darran, ‘the seeker.' The hunter, the one who follows the faint trail.”

I gazed with caught breath, struggling to understand what he was saying.

“Luckily, ‘Dan' will do for both,” he added in a voice both tender and oddly aloof. “Farewell, Dan, my friend. Seek well. I will miss you while you are parted from me.”

“Kor! No!”

Like the arrow in my vision he took flight, soaring skyward and away from me, shining like the sun.

“Wait! Kor!” I cried out, struggling to rise, falling back on the ground instead. Odd, that I was so weak I could not stand. Hunger had not yet made me so weak.… In desperation I mindcalled him.
Kor! By all the bonds that join us
—

It was no use. Mindspeak carried no farther than tongueshot, in my experience, and already he had dwindled to a light like a daytime star, and then he was gone. Far, far away from me.

I must have been weeping. My face, wet with tears—but tears did not rub so. Something warm and wet scraping my face.…

I came to myself and cursed myself for a wanhope. It was the wolf, my companion, licking my face to rouse me from my sleep, my dreaming. As soon as it saw I was awake, it backed away from me so that I would not touch it.

Shakily I got to my feet. Chill, rocky mountainpeak and eversnow all around. Anything else had been all dream, or vision brought on by my starvation, like that name vision years before.… Of course Kor had not been with me, no matter how much I longed for him. He was with his people in Seal Hold. I, a willful blunderhead, had left him there.

“I was dreaming of Kor,” I said to the wolf, my voice trembling like my legs.

I bent as slowly as an old woman to pick up my bow and arrowcase, so weak with hunger and longing that I had to steady myself with a hand against the ground.

“What a halfwit I am,” I told the wolf after I had straightened. “Kor would never hide his face from me. He does not—he does not fly like a god.…”

Yet the things he had said had seemed so true, I would have put my hand in fire for them. I had walked through fire once for his sake.

“The dreamer in me wants to say it was Sakeema,” I muttered to the wolf.

It listened solemnly. I noted, with the pang I felt anew every day, how thin it had grown under its graysheen fur. Sakeema in vision was of no use to me or to my dying world; I had to find him in flesh and in fact, alive and waking.

I slung my arrowcase onto my shoulder. Alar, my blade, rode in her leather sheath on my hip. At no great distance stood my fanged mare, Talu, pawing at the scree and butting with her oversized nose, hunting for something good to eat, an adder perhaps. She swung her bony rump toward me in a bored way when I walked toward her, threatening to kick or make me chase her, but on that day she let me take hold of her readily enough. A good thing, for I could not have caught her otherwise. I had to steady myself by her headstall as I led her to the place where my riding pelt lay, and she gave me a contemptuous look.