Madbond (3 page)

Chapter Two

Sometime after the lamp had started to flicker and smoke I awoke and used the accursed cuckpot, and scowled at it. Then I blundered out. Sometime past dawn, for faint daylight filtered down into the passageway from fissures and from weapon slots fashioned in the rock where the walls were thin. Birc lay dozing just beyond the entry to my chamber. He jumped up when he heard me and pointed his spear at my gutknot, shaking so badly he could not hold it steady—the shaft wobbled crazily. But the flint head was chipped to a keen edge, fit to tear my innards out, not to be meddled with. And a scared man who stands his ground is as dangerous as a frightened horse. I stopped and leveled a look at him.

“I am going to get something to eat,” I told him, speaking slowly and hoping he could understand me. “I will no longer have your king playing the manservant.” I waited, watching the spearhead waver. “What, am I a prisoner after all?”

Losing patience, I sidestepped and pushed the spear away with my hand, then shoved past him. He could have attacked me from behind, but he did not. Instead, he trailed after me as I found my way back to the room with the cooking fire. It was full of people taking their morning meal, and for the first time I saw how the folk of the Seal Kindred looked. I liked them at once, for something about them made me think of Sakeema's creatures, of trim-thewed animals with gentle dark eyes. Their faces were round and smooth, shell-brown with a pink tinge, their hair brown and soft and cropped short, man and woman alike, except that the maidens wore theirs in a long cloud. I saw several maidens whom I fancied, even at a glance, though they were clothed too modestly for me to see much. These people chose to keep warm, it seemed, and they had been trading with the Herders, for they all wore woolens as well as furs. This much I saw in a breathspan, and then they spied me and scattered with a noise and rush like that of startled quail, snatching up their babies and young children and crowding out of the several entries.

One of them did not run: Istas. She stood her ground and glared at me with a look of black hatred. But she did not speak, and in a moment she turned and followed stiffly after the others. I was left alone except for Birc, behind me. I looked around at him. He was keeping a cautious distance.

“Kor spoke to her, bidding her hold her tongue,” I said to him, guessing, and after a long pause he curtly nodded.

It gave me a peculiar feeling, that she hated me, that the others ran from me. But I shrugged and went to the fire. There was millet gruel. I got myself some in a clamshell, picked up an oat cake as well, nodded at Birc, and sat down on the rush-strewn floor to eat. Plying a shell spoon, I took my time, ignoring the half-finished food spilled or abandoned all around me, feeling, without looking up, Birc's scrutiny and that of others who peeped from the entries. If they did not want to abide me, then they could well-come-hell wait until I was done. I ate stolidly. There was a heavy, knotted feeling in me that I did not yet recognize as anger. But I had to force the food down around it, as if a stone sat in me, and after all I could not eat much. I left it finally and went outside, hearing footfalls fleeing before me.

It was a foggy morning, with a fine rain drizzling out of a fishbelly-white sky hanging so low over the mountains that the steep flanks of them, dark with spruce and fir, faded into cloud and seemed to rise forever. I hearkened. Words echoed in the fog, and voices carried.

“Not fog. Smurr,” a fisherman said somewhere down on the narrow beach below the cliff. I could not see him, but from his tone he must have been instructing a youngster. “Smurr, when it makes small rain. Brume, the gray fog. Mist, the thin fog. Haze, thinner yet. Scarrow-fog, the high, white haze that makes a blurred spot of the sun.”

I smiled, feeling a goodness, as if something had centered for me. So the Seal Kindred knew many names for fog. And the Otter River Clan named the salmon with many names: the tiny fry struggling out of the gravel, then parr, the length of a man's small finger, then smolt, turning from brown to graysheen before going to the sea. And then the great salmon, returning, the grilse, the peal, turning from graysheen to red and the jaws of the males growing into great hooks. A trader from the Otter had told me those things once, sometime when I was small.…

Blurred memories, hazy as the sun through scarrow. Myself, a child, my hair yet hanging loose, sitting cross-legged by someone far taller, reciting the many names of the mountains, north from the Sorry Horse Pass on south. Old Pogonip. Mika, the cold maiden. Coru, Shadzu, Shaman, Chital, Warrior, White Wolf, Ouzel. And the passes between them, the Blue Bear, the Shappa, the White Eagle Way along the Otter River. And the parts of mountains, as if they were great sleeping horses, dun or gray, furred with pine, maned with eversnow, their polls and crests, their brows where the icefields fell like forelocks, the high passes we called nagsbacks, where the trade trails wound through.

I stared eastward. Mountains stood there, somewhere, behind the fog—no, smurr, blast it. There, the great peaks, not even so far away, but I could not see them. I could not—remember my own name.…

I strode off at random, fleeing my thoughts, scouting the strange place where I found myself.

Some distance downshore I found the inlet where folk emptied their cuckpots, and I went back to fetch mine. No king was going to do that chore for me if I could prevent it. When I had returned the foul thing to my chamber I walked toward the sea. The tide was out. Waves crashed and foamed against the rocks far below me, and wind blew hard in my face, such wind as an eagle would joy to front. Once the ernes, the great white sea eagles, had lived on rocky headlands such as this. But that was in Sakeema's time.… There was a dark, homely, long-necked bird, a cormorant, the glutton among birds, perched to dry its wings on the rocks bared by the tide. There were people down there as well, some of the middling children, gathering mussels or sea lettuce or whatever they could find among the rocks. Nearly naked, their furs and woolens left in a lump on the shore, they splashed in and out of the sea, not minding whether they were wet or dry or doused by waves, though I shivered as I watched. Seawater looked very cold to me, gray beneath white wintry sky, and the day was chill. But the children shouted and left work for play, plunging into the surf and chasing each other out again just as quickly, running along the beach, their wet bodies shining brown, rubbing their numbed arms and legs with driftwood sticks.

Far out on the sea their elders fished from coracles, pitiful little boats made of sealskins stretched over willow frames, tiny with distance, on waves that looked high and tossing to me. I shivered again and turned away.

Wandering, I took stock of Kor's Holding. People had been going about their work, but they hid from me as I walked, darting into Seal Hold or skulking within lodges. I paid no attention. There were several lodges, one twice as large as the rest but damaged, perhaps by some storm. Out in the open there were stones for the sharpening of shells into knives, for women of the Seal used such knives to prepare food. There were stones for the grinding of oats or millet into meal. I saw the lodge where the spearmaker worked, where shafts lay in readiness for tips of bone or shell, or of flint or blackstone traded from my own people, inland. I saw many racks for the drying of fish, most of them empty and waiting for summertime. There were even pens for the keeping of fowl. It was strange to me, this settled way of living in one place, the men doing one thing, women another, and everyone eating together for the most part. In my tribe each pair, man and woman, fashioned their own bows of stagshorn and sinew, fletched arrows by the wintertime campfire, and hunted and gathered and fended for themselves and their little ones. The Seal Kindred's ways were very different. Still, these Seals did not lack for toughness, not when their children frolicked in the wintertime surf.

Back among the stunted spruce trees, behind and above Seal Hold, I found the place where Kor's folk got their drinking water. Springs ran in cascades down the steep mountainside, lying on the rocks like a net, but fine as spiderweb. Basins had been carved in the stone to catch their flow. Many years must have gone into the carving of those pools. I stared a long while before I walked on, for my people wandered and never left their mark anywhere.

At the farthest distance of the headland from the Hold there stood a sort of pen with tall walls built sturdily of large spearpine. So densely were the timbers pegged together that only a handsbreadth of space showed between them. Something large and dark was moving in there, larger than the great maned elk that had once grazed the upland valleys in the time before my grandfather's time. I walked over to see what it was—

Before I could put my eye to a gap between logs there was a scream louder and more wild than the scream of a goshawk, and a thundercrack blow against the inside of the pen that shook the walls. I glimpsed a hoof flashing nearly in my face. My eye would have been gone if I had come closer, or my skull smashed. The thought made me peevishly more determined—by Sakeema, I would see inside! I ran to a corner, where the logs jutted out, overlapping, and like a young bear, so my grandfather would have said, I climbed them.

By the mighty peaks.

It was a wild horse with fangs longer than my finger, fangs stained brown at the base but keen white at their chisel tips, fit to tear a heart out. A mare, it had to be a mare. Nothing else is as fierce as a fanged mare. Warriors value them above all other mounts for their staying strength and their will to kill—though when they are in heat they will kill their own masters as readily as they will an enemy. And there, glaring up at me, stood an ugly, hammer-headed, straight-necked, slab-hipped mare the dun gray color of the short-grass steppes in winter, sparse black mane and tail, and even as I saw her, saw the deep circle she had worn in the narrow pen with her spinning, saw the heavy bones showing gaunt through her scarred hide, she attacked me, rearing to strike at me with her deadly forehooves. Her prison was built high enough to keep me out of her reach, but she startled me so that I fell back anyway, hearing her crash into the log wall as I landed on my ass on the rocky ground.

I could not get up at once—the breath was knocked out of me. Confound it, and someone had seen me. It was Korridun, coming up the headland with a large willow basket on his arm and, of all things, children, six or seven very small children swarming around his heels like so many weanling pups. Strings of limpet shell hung around their pudgy necks to ward off ill luck, the demons that take children in the night. Kor walked slowly for the sake of the children, and he looked as if he was going to ask me whether I had hurt myself. I hated him. Forgetting the pain in my nates, I jumped up and strode to confront him.

“Kor!” I shouted at him. “Why is that horse in that miserable pen?”

“Lower your voice,” he told me without raising his own. “You'll frighten the little ones.”

They did look frightened of me, somewhat, but deemed that Korridun provided sufficient protection and clustered behind him, clinging to his legs, looking up with large eyes of dark brown. I lowered my voice.

“She has worn herself to the bone with her frenzy in there. It is too small. She was born to have the breadth of the steppes for running on.”

“I know it,” Kor said with a faint note of sorrow in his voice but no shame. “We built the enclosure as ample as we could. We had to go far inland for the logs.”

It was true, all the trees on coast and headland were blown into shapes as of tattered cloaks by the constant sea wind. Some crouched and crept along the very rock, like the spruces at the tree line up on the highmountain passes. Rampicks, we of the uplands called those half-dead trees broken off by wind. There was another thing with a name. Unlike me.

The fanged mare squealed out an angry challenge.

“She is never let out of there, I suppose,” I said curtly.

“Never. No one can go near her without being attacked.”

“But of what use is the steed to you, so wild?”

“None whatsoever.”

“Then why not make shift to set her free? Failing that, even killing her would be kinder.” My voice was rising again. Kor's quietness maddened me.

“Pajlat would take offense,” he said.

I stood and stared at him. Pajlat was the fierce king of the Fanged Horse Folk.

“Pajlat thinks more of his own scheming than of the creatures of Sakeema,” Korridun added. “The poor beast is his gift to me.”

“Why would Pajlat give you such a gift?” I burst out.

“To humiliate me,” said Kor. “He knows I cannot ride it.”

He spoke quite levelly, and he was right, of course. There seemed to be something in him that spoke truth always, that did not sway to winds of pride or anger, a sureness that stunned me.

Seeing that I was done with him for the time, he loosened the children from around his legs and sent them back down the headland toward the lodges. The little ones rolled about like ducks as they walked, their legs were so short. A thought came to me, why the children might be with him. Kings were expected to augment the numbers of their people.

“Yours?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I am not yet pledged.”

No more was I, but I suspected I had fathered a few such scantlings.… Great Sakeema, what sort of a king was this one? I watched silently as he walked the rest of the way to the fanged mare's pen. The horse shrilled and kicked the logs as he approached. Paying her no heed, Korridun climbed up the corner as I had done and emptied his basket of fish into the feeding trough ten feet below.

“On the high plain, I know, they eat snakes,” he remarked to me. “But she has taken to the fish well enough. She would be fat if she did not wear it all off with her fretting.”

The horse's charge set the barrier to shuddering, and Kor climbed down, unhurried. I watched him in a sort of despair.