Read Online Godbond by Nancy Springer - Free Book Online Page B

faintly aglow and greenly wavering in the night, as if seen through the darkened waters of Mahela’s hell.
    â€œShe punished you,” I muttered, staring at him. “The old bitch. Stinking carrion bird.” Mahela had indeed taken her revenge on him and on Kor’s mother, Kela, after Kor and I had escaped.
    â€œSo I am unbodied. But I am a warrior again, Dan, and no worm.” Tyonoc’s voice came to me clear and strong, and his face wore the fierce warmth of a king. Though he roamed with the restless dead, yet in a way he was my father again as I remembered him, and like a stripling I turned to him with my trouble. I sank to my knees, facing him. “Is Korridun well?” I blurted.
    â€œHow would I know? But he is not numbered among the dead.” A dark significance came into his voice. “No more than Sakeema is.”
    I cared less for Sakeema than for my bond brother, at that moment. “Father, please,” I begged, “you shades, you travel like birds. Go, bring me news of Kor.”
    â€œPlague take it, have I reared this oaf for nothing?” My father sounded far less patient than he had of old. “Dannoc, heed what I have said! I tell you quite surely, Sakeema is alive, somewhere! Have you forgotten your quest?”
    I gave him no answer, but looked at the ground, and when I looked up again, he was gone, no more than a mote in the wind. And though I listened long, I did not hear his voice again, and I did not know if he would do as I had asked.
    I turned back to the tarn. Once again the shadow-stars drifted on its chill surface. I sat and watched them with no expectation, and sometimes, very weary, I dozed. The night slowly passed.
    â€œWhere is Sakeema?” I softly asked the pool of vision in the darkness before daybreak, but there was no answer.

Chapter Five
    Watching from the lookout at sunrise, I saw the smokes coming up from the cooking fires of my fair-haired, wandering people—it could be no other people than my kindred of the Red Hart Tribe. Like wisps of horsehair shining in the slantwise light, the smokes rose far off to the east and somewhat southward, in the region of beaver waters.
    I readied Talu, mounted her and traveled to take council with my brother Tyee.
    I had thought, until that sunrise, that I would travel in haste to the thunder cones and search their skirts for the blackstone cave where the Herders believed Sakeema had been taken by his foster brothers, the wolves. But perhaps Tyee knew more nearly than I where it might be. Perhaps he knew the legends of the Otter and the Fanged Horse Folk regarding the place where Sakeema lay and slept, he or one of my folk.
    Better truth was, I had felt my soul yearn at the sight of those smokes.
    Urgently I journeyed, sometimes late into the night under the light of the waxing moon, and every day’s riding tugged at my heart.
    It was perhaps the last time I would see this place, if Mahela had her way. And I seemed to know it more clearly, more sweetly, more deeply than ever before. As if always halfway into vigil I rode, every sense heightened, seeing every young unfurling leaf on each red-barked cherry tree, smelling each crescent of warm loam turned up by Talu’s hooves, feeling sunlight.… This was my homeland, which I had roamed all my life until I had gone to Kor, and the beauty of it was like no other beauty to me, the shaggy hemlocks and the small winding streams, the meadows yellow with mallow flowers—but for all my hearkening, I rode it in silence. No birds sang at dawn. No grouse whurred away from my passing, or hawks shrilled overhead. No doves called. No coneys rustled in the laurel, or squirrels in the lindens. No deer leaped.
    I did not utterly starve, for forage was somewhat easier to find in the lush upland valleys of the Red Hart Demesne that it had been in the mountains. There were groundnut and late sparrowgrass, and mushrooms like white moons in the grass. But I