Mindbond (6 page)

After the fire had made embers, I scraped a pit to one side and pushed some of the coals into it with a green stick. Then I put in the small carcasses wrapped in leaves. Presently they started to roast, and their aroma filled the air.

“Meat!” I breathed. It seemed the greatest of blessings compared to the seedcakes.

Kor awoke, stirred, and groaned. Then, catching a waft of the good cooking smell, he turned away his face and tried to vomit, though there was nothing in his stomach, not even water. In compunction I went over and knelt beside him, laid my hands on his shoulders as if that could somehow heal him. “You will feel better soon, Kor, truly,” I assured him.

“So you say,” he muttered.

“But I have had this same malady more than once myself. I know you will soon be well.”

He gave me a look fit to turn a knife between my ribs. I could not keep from smiling.

“Handbond,” I offered.

He answered only with a fervent curse and a slur on my parentage. I forbore from laughing at him, but only until I was out of his sight and earshot.

Later I ate, burning my fingers on the hot meat—perhaps there is justice of a sort in such small events. Kor lay still and ignored me, and I sat watching the rising moon, round and orange, like a mushroom cap floating in the twilight sky.

After dark the naked deer maidens came again, bringing seedcakes, the fire's glow flashing off their glossy, rippling hair, off their moon-round breasts that swayed softly with their movements.… I was less starved for the food this time, and therefore all the more hungry for the damsels—or perhaps it was the moonlight that put foolishness into me, yellow-red light amidst darkness, autumn moon. Though it was not yet the time of witchcraft—hunters' moon came first. On the mountains, perhaps time ran differently. Or witchcraft. Something happened in me, I felt darkness swirl around me, my vision narrowed, my heart grew hot and swollen in my chest, I felt my manhood stand hot and hard beneath my lappet, and my hands were moving as if of their own will—toward doom—

“Kor!” I called hoarsely.

He was up on the instant, even weak as he was, wobbling over to me, almost falling, and he caught my lifting hands in his own. The deer maidens stood gazing at me in innocent wonder, like fawns seen in the thickets. None of them had made any move to seduce me, but if I had embraced one, I felt sure she would have willingly answered the kiss. Or more than one—ai, thinking made it worse.

“Kor,” I panted, “tie me.”

“What!”

“I mean it! Tie me stoutly, if either of us is to have any peace this night.”

“Are you—in thrall?” he asked in a low voice.

‘As Birc was? No, I am not yet bleating.” I lost patience. “Would you tie my wrists before I lose what small sense is left to me and overpower you?” I clung to a tree while he went to get the rawhide thongs.

He padded my wrists with bandaging before he bound them, and then I began to comprehend his reluctance. Once before he had bound me like this, when I lay in a prison pit, a madman, raving and dangerous. When I had ceased to rave I had been unable to remember even my own name. But that had been my father's doing. Nothing less than his betrayal could have driven me so out of self.

Or it was devoutly to be hoped, that nothing other could do that to me.… Kor tied me, and the naked damsels watched curiously, setting out seedcakes on willow mats.

“Behind me,” I directed Kor, holding my hands there. “Then you can go back to your bed.”

He shook his head. “In front. I've no desire to make you ache. Dan, think better of me!” Fiercely. “How could I sleep? I'll be here.”

His hands, forming the knots, were unsteady. “But you are not well. You have no strength,” I told him.

“I will find strength.”

Knowing him, I could not but believe him. “Handbond, then,” I told him.

We passed the grip hastily. I hoped it would help him, but it served only to strengthen the stark longing in me. Then Kor tied my ankles loosely to a treetrunk. Once I felt myself secured I gave in to the dark whirlings that seemed to surround me, the hot yearning within me, the despair. I lunged against my bonds and howled—a long-drawn, wailing sound that I had not known was in me, that shivered in my throat. The deer maidens raised their heads rigidly at that sound and came to their feet, sensing for the first time that something was wrong, that these odd mortals did not always play at games of binding each other to trees. They left the viands but hastily gathered up their willow ware, their lovely bodies poised as if alert for flight. Still, the look on their faces was as much puzzled as frightened.

Kor had his arms around my chest from behind, trying to restrain me and calm me. He had indeed from somewhere found strength. “Dan—”

I howled again, and a third time. And as I drew breath an answering howl floated across the distance of the night from somewhere far off on the flank of the mountain.

The damsels bleated and fled in great leaps, turning to deer in the midst of their leaping. Willow ware lay scattered. I sat still, my passion for white hind and deer women forgotten—that eerie sound seemed still to drift in the darkened air.

“An echo?” Kor whispered.

I howled again, not so strongly this time—my voice quavered. But the answer came across the night promptly. A chill, thin wail the color of moonlight, a sound that reminded me of the call of the wandering wild geese, that sang of the same yearnings. Longings such as I felt when I told the tales of Sakeema.… But strength was in this voice, and a warning.

Urgency in his touch, Kor began to undo my bonds. “No,” I protested.

“Trust yourself more, Dan.” He drew away the thongs from my legs, started untying those on my wrists. “Something moves in the night. You may need the use of your limbs.”

Something that called to me and frightened me. At the same time I felt a reckless daring, perhaps because I was already disgraced by my own passions, with not much pride left to lose.… At the reaches of the firelight something stirred. Eyes shone green, regarding us, unblinking. Kor's hands stopped in their movements as he stared.

“Come closer, wild brother,” I softly invited. “We cannot see you.”

A few slow paces nearer the fire … Kingly head lifted to catch our scent on the air. Power, all was power, the great bone of legs and feet, the thick, coarse pelt, the mighty jaws—but beauty too, the smooth brow, short ears, sheen of fur in the firelight, and all that was wild and lonesome in the steady gaze of shadowed eyes.

“A wolf?” Kor breathed, dumbfounded.

I could not believe it either. No wolf had been seen by anyone of my tribe since my grandfather's time, and few then. Bring back the wolves of wonder.… I felt a surge of surpassing gratitude. I was blessed, even if our visitor should rend me apart in the next moment.

“Perhaps it is the very last one,” murmured Kor.

The wolf whined and shifted its weight from side to side, plainly uncomfortable in the presence of our small fire. The whites showed around its dark eyes, giving it a fearsome look, for a frightened beast is more dangerous than a calm one. Still, it neither attacked nor retreated, but looked from Kor to me in some sort of expectation.

Orange moonlight had touched me—I can explain my boldness no other way. I whimpered at the wolf in greeting, whined aloud, and it lifted its ears, turning its head toward me in eager interest. I wriggled my hands free of their remaining bonds and started toward the wolf, on all fours, soft sounds in my throat.

“Dannoc,” Kor called after me, a low, tense call, “what are you doing?”

“There is a human look about his eyes,” I said, not raising my voice, not looking back at him. “Perhaps he needs but a touch to be one of us.” If the deer had human forms, some of them, why not this visitor?

“How can you tell? Perhaps all wolves have such speaking eyes. We have never seen another.”

The wolf trembled and gathered itself into a crouch as I approached, but held its ground. Nearly on my belly, reaching from a distance, I eased my hand toward the tips of the thick fur on its neck. An instant, a finger's span more, and I would touch.… But before my fingertips met fur, the wolf flashed away into the darkness. I got up slowly, brushing dirt and wood duff off myself. Kor stood facing the way the wolf had gone, a keen look in his eyes, sickness forgotten.

“He is very old,” he said.

I nodded. I, too, had seen the white hairs about the wolf's mouth and muzzle. The rest of the wolf's fur was of a graysheen color, subtle and shimmering. I felt suddenly immensely tired, and sagged back to the ground.

“Are you all right?” asked Kor.

“Yes,” I mumbled, though in fact I was not sure. “Go back to your bed, go to sleep.”

“You go to sleep. I have slept all day.”

“You are feeling better?”

“Feeble yet, but well enough to keep a watch.” He sat down by the fire, his back to a stone. “Go to sleep, Dan.”

“But … you have not eaten.…”

I would have said more, but I was already sleeping, and as I wished to think that he was well, I dreamed that I saw him eat. I slept deeply, but sometime in the mid of night I was roused by the sound of Kor's voice.

“Welcome, wild brother,” he was saying. “Stay, rest yourself, be easy. It is not on your account that I am keeping guard. It's for the sake of yon half-naked blunder-head and his fondness for deerflesh.”

Insulted, I stirred drowsily, opened my eyes, and blinked them clear. Kor was still sitting at the fire, and on the far side of it, well back in the shadows but facing him, sat the wolf.

In the morning, when Birc came back, the wolf was lying at the roots of the nearest pine.

Birc ran in so swiftly, so silently, deerlike, that we were hardly aware of him before he stood before us. Glistening with sweat all over, as if he had done a long run—and in fact I think he had been running since the day before, for our sakes. Nor had he yet seen the hinds, his companions, or yet heard of the wolf. He stopped short when he scented and saw it, all atremble, so that I expected him to be a hart, and bleat and flee. But he did not. Since I had known him, Birc had always owned a peculiar sort of courage: he quaked, but he stood fast. Even in his human days as Kor's guardsman he had been that way.

The wolf scarcely looked up at him. I dragged myself out of sleep and sat up groggily. But Kor strode over to Birc with reasonable steadiness and gave him once again the embrace of a king.

“I think it is time we were going,” Kor said, and Birc nodded.

Chapter Five

I gathered the snares, brought back pika aplenty, walked to within a cautious distance of the wolf, and offered it three brace, leaving them on the ground. With dignity the wolf took them, carried them off one by one, then tore them apart and gulped them in a moment's time.

It took us far more time to find the horses, for they had strayed a goodly distance—or perhaps they had scented wolf and fled. Talu snorted at even the ghost of wolf smell about me, and it required my sternest command to make her stand still and let herself be approached. That, and an offering of cooked meat. We would never have caught her and Sora if the wolf had come with us, but it had melted away into the spruces somewhere. Even so, the sun stood high before we were on our way.

Kor sat straight on Sora as we rode. I glanced at him from time to time, for he had eaten nothing, and the shell-tan skin of his face had gone a shade paler. But water, at least, he had taken, and if he did not speak, his was a strong silence. His eyes, when he caught me looking at him, dared me to pity him.

The pass took us above the tree line, over the highmountain meadow. All the plants grow small and low there, but very thick, delightful in the ways they nestle together. In summertime that place would have been aflutter with tiny blue and yellow flowers and butterflies of the same hues. But in the mountaintop's early autumn every small leaf had turned red or purple or yellow, achingly bright in the strong mountain sunlight. And the sky a deeper, purer blue than any flower, and the eversnow blazing white—even the gray crags of the alps shone. There was nowhere I could look without a sweet pain. Not even at Kor. He caught my glance, answered it with a slow smile—he felt it, too.

A flash of living white in the distance. The fair white hind, Birc's mate, leaped off toward the eversnow. I saluted her.

But I saw no black eagles, nor any antelope. Great catamounts once lived in the crags, I had been told, but they had been many years gone, since before my grandfather's time.

We kept the horses to the walk, sparing them in the thin air, and after halfday we ourselves got down and walked beside them for a while. We camped early for Kor's sake, and ate what the deer folk had given us, and Kor ate cold pika meat. There was not even a stone for shelter. We kept watch by turns—for what, we were not sure, but we felt very exposed on that open, windy place.

Sheep roamed the crags. They are wary, keeping to the open rock where they can see whatever comes. I could never have gotten near one in daylight, but in the darkness before dawn I crept to the place where they huddled in the chill mountain night. And when the first one stood up at daybreak, I killed it cleanly. So there was meat for Kor and me, and offal for the horses, and we left a portion behind us, lying on the ground, in case a newfound friend should travel that way.

Walking, panting in the thin air, resting often, we crossed the top of the pass to Kor's side of the great mountains, and he lifted his head, looking homeward.

Our path lay downward now. We reached the tree line the next day and breathed more easily. Kor seemed well and strong by then. We slept amid stunted spruces, some of them bent to the ground and crawling along the slope from the blast of winter wind.

The next morning the horses were missing.

“Ungrateful mares,” Kor grumbled.