Godbond by Nancy Springer Read Free Book Online Page A

after his death. The Seal said Sakeema had gone out to sea in a gray coracle. If it were so I would never find him, but the Otter River Clan surely had such a saying also, and the Fanged Horse Folk, and—even the uncouth Cragsmen.
    I would take a path toward the thunder cones and the Herders. More than likely Cragsmen would bar my way. To be true to my quest, I had to hope so. If a feeling so mixed with fear can be called hope.
    â€œKeep your thoughts to yourself,” I said in retort to Talu’s sour look, and I mounted her and rode.
    For a day I rode with nothing to eat but wild onion and cresses. The pathless way was rough, and often I went afoot, letting Talu trail after me through jumbled boulders and under the low boughs of aspen and spearpine. And more than once I cursed and doubted my own wisdom in coming this way. I saved many miles by attempting the wild slopes rather than backtracking to the Blackstone Path, but the maddening tangle of rocks and steep drops, trees and fallen trunks and crags looming overhead slowed me so that I cursed my own beloved mountains by all the dark attributes of Mahela.
    It was just such a place the next day, as I led Talu between towering stones, that the Cragsmen surprised me.
    I heard a sound as of rocks splitting and sliding down a mountainpeak in a rumble of snow—but I had made my way far below the snowpeaks. It was the sound of their laughter. And feeling fear crawl through my back and ribs and take hiding in my chest, I looked up and saw them.
    Nearly a twelve of them, though any one of them would have been enough to give me pause, for Cragsmen are half again as tall as a man, even a tall man such as I, and hard as the crags, all the stone colors of skin, and stony of heart. Standing spraddle-legged atop the outcroppings all around me, they seemed huge, they loomed, their grinning mouths like ice-fanged caves in their boulder heads. What did Cragsmen eat, I wondered, that their hulking bodies seemed so hale when I felt so weak from hunger? They seemed scarcely human. Perhaps they feasted on the very peaks themselves.
    I felt Alar stirring in her scabbard with her eagerness to taste their strange brownsheen blood, but I did not move my hand to meet her pommel. I felt no such eagerness to fight them.
    â€œWorld brothers,” I hailed them, “well met.”
    The one who seemed to be their leader, a slate-blue fellow with chest and head greenfurred as if by moss, ceased roaring with laughter and instead roared even more loudly with rage.
    â€œYou,” he bellowed, “who have sent my comrades to Mahela, you dare to call me brother?”
    Though truly, I had seen no Cragsmen in Mahela’s undersea realm. The louts, they must not have been among her choice of pretty things to enslave.
    â€œIt was you who attacked,” I reminded him mildly. It is wise to speak softly to Cragsmen and keep them talking as long as possible. “Men of the mountains, what know you of Sakeema?”
    At once they all began again to laugh, a deafening sound. I had never been more glad to be thought a fool. Cragsmen became less dangerous when they were amused. Talu’s reins in hand, I began to edge forward in the narrow space between rocks where I was trapped.
    The blue Cragsman roared, and with a single swipe of his blackwood cudgel he toppled the several spearpines that stood between him and me. He spun the cudgel over my head. He could as handily have lifted me and spun me by the feet, for the club and I were of nearly the same size. “Be still!” he commanded, though there was no need—I was fairly cowering amid the boulders, like a pika cowering in the scree.
    â€œBut I must find Sakeema before it is too late,” I said earnestly, trying to amuse them again. “Before Mahela swallows it all. Are there any wild sheep left on the peaks?”
    â€œYou cannot go through here,” the leader growled.
    â€œWhat do we care, meat-eater?”