Madbond (2 page)

“Korridun son of Kela?” I whispered. “Seal king?”

He did not answer me except to nod. “Birc,” he said, annoyed, “there is no need to be afraid. Go do as I told you—oh, blast it to Mahela, I suppose you had better help me here.”

Birc was scarcely more than a boy, and plainly terrified. Of what, I wondered. Only later did I discover how truly loyal and courageous he was. He came to do his king's bidding, and with one of them on either side of me we walked down the steep mountainside to the headland where the lodges stood.

Long, low huts of pine timber they were, thatched with reeds. I stared at them all the while we approached them. This was the strangest of tribes to me, these Seals who ate fish and lived in fixed dwellings within sight of the snarling sea. My folk were upland hunters, woodsfaring with the wandering of the deer.… The lodges were built atop the rock, overlooking the sea cliff where the waves beat themselves to foam. In a high storm, spray might have clawed the log walls. Nothing else stood atop that cliff but a few contorted pines, and it was all, rocks, trees, and huts, thickly greenfurred with moss from the damp. The sky hung fishy white, breathing a cold, white fog. It chilled me—I, who walked bare-chested in the eversnow. I wondered why anyone would live within reach of that fog, that surf, so much under the eye of sky. But perhaps there was nowhere else to camp. The mountain slopes came down sheer to the sea.

“Look,” said Korridun to me with a slight quirk in his voice. “My cousins are hauled out.”

Even though he pointed down toward the sea I could not tell what he meant. I saw no people, only rocks mottled with lichen and weed. Then one of the rocks moved, and I blinked: there were seals lying at the base of the sea cliff, a throng of them, half a hundred or more.

“So many,” said Korridun. “My cousins prosper.”

Of all the tribes, only his people, the Seal Kindred, claimed such kinship with a creature of Sakeema. We of the Red Hart cherished the deer, but we knew our shortcoming, that we could not like them leap out of bowshot with a single bound.… But the Seal Kindred claimed a seal ancestor, Sedna, from whom sprang their royal line. They called seals “cousins,” as I had many times heard my people grumbling around a campfire—my people of the Red Hart, but I could not remember their faces. Danger, if I remembered their faces.

Korridun guided me by the arm. We were drawing near the lodges, threading our way along steep shelving rock, and the chill air had braced me so that I walked more strongly, without much help. But we did not enter any lodge. Instead, Birc left us and, running ahead, brought back a torch. Rad Korridun guided me under an overhang, and I stood in such a cave as I had never seen.

Eerie, it seemed to me at the time, the smoothness of the rock walls, as if a sleek giant of an otter had made the place to slide in, had made tunnels everywhere running off at all levels, no pattern to them that I could discern. And the floor, if it might be called a floor, lay all in swells, like the surface of a quiet sea. I had experienced the jagged mountain caves where the mountain cats once denned, but this was of a different sort of stone, brown and polished, and far more open, so that a man could walk upright in it. But what man could have built it, or would have fashioned it so askew?

“The sea made this Hold, we think, ages past, and has since withdrawn,” Korridun said, as if I had asked him. “Perhaps one day it will take a notion to surge up again. There is no telling.”

I did not understand him, how the sea could make caves. Still less, how its level could change. I knew but little then of the ways of that vast, cold greendeep.

We came to a room, or rather a large hollow, which glowed warm and red with fire. There was a stone firepit built against an upward crevice, which made a smoke hole for it. Much food stood by the fire, and there were places for many people, timber stumps topped with thick pelts for sitting on and long, flat, timbers laid between supports for the placing of food. But there were no folk. Birc threw his torch in the fire and left the place, nearly running, and Korridun motioned me to a seat on one of the fur-topped stumps. But I settled myself cross-legged on the floor instead, as is the Red Hart custom, picking with my hands at the rushes that strewed it. Korridun dipped me food out of a basket of spruce roots, tight-woven and sealed with pitch to make a vessel fit for cooking in. It was a thick soup made of fish, boiled in the basket with stones heated in the fire, much as my folk would have made a venison stew and used the stomach of the deer to hold it. Korridun brought the food to me in a bowl of red clay, and I felt all the honor of that. Vessels of clay had to be traded from the Herders, from the far plains beyond the thunder cones. Most Seal folk, I thought, would eat from dishes of wood or shell. But perhaps Korridun himself was accustomed to clay. He was the king.

He handed me the bowl and a bone spoon. “Eat slowly,” he cautioned me.

I was ravenous, as hungry as I had been after the days of my name vigil, but I was not much accustomed to fish, and the odd, oily taste kept me from gulping it too quickly. Korridun got some of the stuff for himself and sat on a sort of bench, setting his bowl on a flat timber. I eyed him, holding my own bowl on my lap, and we ate in silence. There were many questions I was not asking—how I had come into the prison pit, and when, and why I had been bound, and why were the marks of the thongs on my limbs, as if I had fought most fiercely, and why was he, Korridun King, attending me. For the most part, I did not want to know the answers. But when I had taken the edge from my hunger, silence began to press on me again, and I spoke.

“If you are king here,” I said to Korridun, “how is it that no one waits on you?”

He gave me a look so wry it might have been a smile, though in fact he did not smile. “It is the custom of the Seal Kindred to humble their kings,” he said.

I ate, and regarded him curiously. He was half a head shorter than I, and perhaps too slender to be very strong—so I thought at the time. But he was trimly thewed in a way that I never would be, with a centered look about him, a control. It was in his face, too, a quietness. Something about the glance of his eyes, as if Sakeema's time looked out of them, deep time, creature time, the always now. And his face comely enough so that no woman, I thought, would scorn him. But for all that, he hardly seemed a proper king to me. A young shaman, perhaps, but a king should be thewed for war. I bore in my mind the image of a king—

And as I thought it, the fell arrow of fear pierced me again, and all seemed black.

“Archer?” Korridun inquired, seeing pain in me. So I supposed.

“Nothing. A cramp in my gut.” I straightened and faced him. A smoldering, reasonless anger started in me because he dared to be kind to me, so quaint are the ways of petty pride. And I decided that he might be king to others, but he was no king of mine. I would not call him by the king's name, Korridun, an ancestral name of his royal line. Nor would I call him Rad, as his loved ones might. I would take his kingly name and make it smaller, as I felt myself lessened. I would call him Kor.

“Kor,” I tried it on my tongue.

His head turned to me, his face grave, courteous. “Yes?”

He was all comity, the courtesy so inborn that he was likely not himself aware of it. I ducked my head in angry discomfort, blundering for something to say. “Does—does no one call you Kor?”

“You may, if you like.” He got up and found me a slab of jannock, a sort of oatmeal bread. “Do you yet remember your own name?” he asked as he handed it to me.

“No.”

“A terrible loss. Your very self.”

It troubled me no whit, as it kept the blackness at bay. I did not answer.

“What do you know of yourself, then?”

I shrugged. “I am of the Red Hart.” Of course, with my hair as yellow as bleached prairie grass, the braids of it lying long on my bare shoulders—men of my people seldom wore much above the waist. Deerskin below, lappet and leggings. Boots of thick bison leather on my feet. These were gear such as Red Hart hunters wore. “I have shot the deer in the highmountain meadows, and I shoot them well.” Deer were the food and warmth of my people, but I hated to cause them pain, deer or any of the creatures of Sakeema, so I had shot my bolts at deer of straw through the hot suns of many summers until I had learned to kill cleanly with a single swift arrow to break the neck. This mercy lay close to my heart, and I remembered it. “I have hunted with the hawk also, and the hawks fly well for me. I have fought against the Otter River Clan when they held the Blackstone Path.” Again, I had tried always to kill with mercy, and I remembered that I had not liked that killing. “I have ridden against the Fanged Horse Folk when they raided us, and I have fought against the Cragsmen.”

“Do you remember your tribesfellows who fought at your side?”

“I remember in a general way only.”

“What are you doing in my Holding?”

“I do not know.”

“Did you come here to fight?”

For the first time I felt some small qualm, not knowing who I was or why I was there in the land of his people. As a shield, I turned the question back on him. “Have you given me reason to fight you?”

“No.” Soberly he studied me. “You look not much older than I,” he said after a moment. “Twenty, twenty-two … Of what age were you when you made your name vigil?”

Days alone on the crags where only the wild sheep came, my straight, yellow hair newly braided, waiting for the vision that would give me my name—that much I remembered. But even the thought of a name of my own hurt me with a black pain, and I could not answer. I felt my shoulders sag, and I could not look any longer at Kor. My eyes shifted; I stared beyond him. And there, in the shadows of one of the several entrances, stood a stocky old woman, listening. Her head jutted forward from her stooped shoulders, her jaw thrusting at me like a weapon. Even as I saw her she strode toward me, hands knotted as if she would strike me, and I stiffened where I sat, for her creased and weathered face bore a look of such outrage as I had never seen.

Korridun turned on his seat to look where I was looking and saw her. “Istas!” he barked at her.

His tone must have served to warn her off, for she stopped. She spat at me some word I could not understand—such fury was in her, it twisted her speech as it twisted her face. I think even one of her own people might not have been able to understand her that day. Then she swung around and strode out with the hurried, scuttling stride of a strong old woman, and I heard her huffing as she left.

“That is Istas,” Kor told me, “my most valued counselor.” His voice seemed low, and there was no smile on his face, such as there might have been if her rage were a matter of no moment. I chose not to ask what it was that Istas had called me, for I felt very tired, and there was a deadness in me. Kor saw it at once.

“Come,” he said, rising, “let us find you a place to sleep.”

The place was a small chamber in the hollowed rock. A reed wick lighted it, burning dimly in a shallow stone lamp. I wrinkled my nose at the smell of fish oil, but only for a moment, for I had not been daintily reared. Moreover, the sweet rushes strewn on the floor offset that odor nicely. On a sort of wooden platform lay my linden-bark mat and a thick bed of pelts—I recognized them from the pit. Birc, perhaps, had brought them in here. I made for them wearily.

“Wait but a moment,” Korridun said, and he left me.

I lay down but did not close my eyes. A chamber of my own to sleep in—I could not help but feel honored. In the deerskin tents of my people we slept six and eight together, jostling each other, and only the king … but I would not think of the king. I got up, pacing like a spotted wild dog. Perhaps the wolves had once paced in that same way. I had never seen any.

Korridun came back, carrying things for me: a furred doeskin by way of covering—or perhaps to make me feel at home, a clay basin of water for washing or drinking, a wooden cuckpot.

Perverse anger welled up in me. “Why are you nurse-maiding me?” I demanded. “You are supposed to be a king! Do you not have people?”

He set the load down—he must have been stronger than I had thought, to carry the heavy cuckpot, the pottery, the water. Then he stood and faced me, seeming not at all taken aback.

“I will not order my people to go where I would not go myself,” he said. I scarcely heard him. I was raving.

“Do you not have servingfolk? A king who carries a cuckpot!”

“The cuckpot is an improvement,” he said mildly. “I cleaned your ass many a time, up there in the pit.”

I doubled over as if I had been hit in the gut and sank down on my bed, the anger gone with my wind. Voiceless, I stared up at him.

“I will not command my folk to do the thing they fear unless I am willing to do it as well.… You do not remember why they are frightened of you?”

I shook my head, remembering nothing of the days, the weeks before I had awakened under his care. It seemed very quaint that folk should be afraid of me when I was myself so terrified—no, I would not think of that fear. I had to speak, quickly.

“Why was I kept in the prison pit?” I whispered.

Thongs binding my wrists, padded, the cuts of them on my arms even so … He stood silent for the span of a long breath, and I would not look at him for fear that I should see pity in his eyes.

“I do not call you madman, Archer,” he said finally, “but there are those who do.”

Madman! I was no madman—but how could I say that, I who could not remember my own name?

“Is that what Istas called me?”

“No.”

Silence. A merciful exhaustion had numbed me, so that silence no longer troubled me.

“Will you sleep now?” Kor asked at last.

“I think so,” I muttered, still not meeting his eyes.

“Rest in Sakeema, then,” he said, and he went out and left me.