Godbond by Nancy Springer Page A

entry. The place, as I thought, was hollow, like a great hut. It was indeed a dwelling—though the men of those times must have been giants, I thought, to need such a lofty dwelling. Their powers that had raised this great dwelling made of the very bone of the mountain, that had cut the stones and featly fitted them together, had been lost in the many passing seasons. I could feel the weight of deep time, standing in that place. Dim light filtered down through cracks and through the distant top of a tall place, where there had once been, I supposed, a roof.
    There were bones strewn about. Something had denned in there since the long-ago people had gone. An animal nearly as lost in time, perhaps a catamount? More likely many sorts of animals. Likely the small squirrels had nested between the rocks of the walls. They were all gone, the creatures, leaving only the ghost, that lived in my mind, as starkly gone as the people who had once lived in this place.
    Not much trace of them, the people. Thrones and harps of wood, hangings of cloth had long since rotted into dirt, if such things had been left. I stared around, looking for something, I was not sure what. Surely something lay in this place if the Cragsmen so guarded it, so reverenced it as to leave none of their own clumsy marks there. Something had to be yet left to us of these strange, long-dead people who had sailed on the sea in great ships and built such huge lodges that they could keep fruit trees within them over the winter. People who had painted a strange magic on thin-stretched sheepskins, a potent magic they put in hinged boxes called books .… It was such magic I wanted of them, though sheepskins also would have long since rotted away. These folk had been mighty in power and knowledge. Had there been any seers among them, I wondered, any dreamwits, any visionaries? I needed a sign such as no shaman could give me.
    â€œWhere is Sakeema?” I whispered aloud to the inside of the silent dwelling of the dead.
    The yellow stone in the pommel of my sword began softly to glow. Alar was alert, nearly as alive as I.
    Swordlight fell on a stone fallen from the archway of the door, and I saw—no, it was nothing. Only a carving in the stone, an ornament, a trefoil.… Alar’s light shone on bare walls, a raised platform of stone, debris, nothing more. But I felt a tremor in her, an urgency, perhaps a longing to match my own. As old as this place was, she might be as old, she, the sword. Perhaps she would show some sign to me.
    Drifting, as silent as a leaf on the wind, and trying to be as yielding, as random, I wandered that dim place. There were stone steps to climb, but I felt no urging that way. I turned back toward the center of the great room, where the knee-deep pile of bones and branches lay under the open roof, and I circled it and turned back toward it again, and a third time I found myself facing it. Then I began to think.
    Even Cragsmen, if they reverenced a place, would they not have cleaned it of leaf litter and bones and things that stank? Unless, perhaps, they wished to hide something under them.
    â€œAll right, Alar,” I murmured, and I strode into the rubbish heap.
    Dead things in there, and stench, and a squishy feeling as of wet leaves underfoot. Perhaps something worse. No sane person would have gone into that muck of his own will. “Slime of Mahela!” I protested, and nearly turned to go back. But then I recalled that I was no sane person, but a madman, Mahela’s buffoon, and certainly I had not been daintily reared. Standing in the very center of the foul heap, I felt a waiting stillness in the sword, and blithely I dropped to all fours, my hands wrist-deep in filth, and began to scrabble like a badger, sending dirt and branches, bones and scats and bits of dead mouse flying. But I dug to what felt like hard, flat stone, and found nothing.
    â€œWhat now?” I sourly addressed the sword. “Have you a