Godbond by Nancy Springer Page B

cuckpot for me to play in, perhaps?”
    Alar’s jewel flared more brightly, and I saw.
    Sunstuff.
    Right under me, lying beneath my hands, a glint of that strange, bright, uncommonly beautiful stuff that Tassida called gold, which I had never seen except in Mahela’s dwelling beneath far too much green seawater.
    Not only the one small glint of it, I discovered as I rooted and scraped and shoved offal to one side. It was a large panel, perhaps as long as my arm and a little less wide than it was long, wrought into some pattern I could not yet see. Once it had been placed on the wall behind the throne, perhaps, or perhaps it had been part of the throne itself. I pulled it gently from its mucky bed and traced the bright curves with my filthy finger, gouging away the dirt.
    Trefoil pattern in the corners, the same as I had just seen carved on a stone. But also, in the center of the panel, something more.
    There was little enough cloth on me anywhere. I wiped my hands on my deerskin leggings, then worked at the panel again with my fingers, my fingernails, my spittle. Dirt was maddeningly slow to yield, and all I could see beneath it were bright bits of sunstuff in which I could not sense a wholeness. Sitting in some god’s midden, cuckpot of sky, I had to scrub and clean my prize with my skin and my hair before I could comprehend. And then I understood nothing.
    The middle of the panel bore the emblem of a tree, not a forest tree but some sort of round, tame tree covered with trefoil blossoms. And a long-necked bird of some sort was flying away from the tree, carrying a fruit in its beak. But the fruit was falling into three fragments that scattered to the mountains, the plains, and the sea.
    I scarcely looked at the bird, the fruit. My gaze was caught on the tree, for the trunk and some branches of it were made up of three swords crossed in the shape of a six-pointed star, swords just such as Korridun and Tassida and I wore.
    But it was overweening, I told myself, to believe that this emblem showed the very same swords. Many such swords must have been made in those forgotten days. Still, I touched the sunstuff swords curiously, tracing their shapes with my fingers. And as I did so, Alar blazed so brightly that I could scarcely see for the sword glory and the glory of the strange substance in my hands.
    I looked long at the panel by Alar’s warm glow, so long that I could close my eyes and yet see it, shadowed. But nowhere in it could I see Sakeema or a place where I might find him.
    Finally, when I began to feel stiff with sitting amid a pile of old bones, I got up, awkwardly hefting the heavy thing I had found. “What am I to do with this?” I muttered. It was too large to take with me, even on horseback, should I ever be so fortunate as to find my horse again. Moreover, I did not want a twelve of Cragsmen pursuing me. And I had a feeling about the sunstuff panel, that people would think it beautiful, that some people would deem it a thing not merely to look at with pleasure but to have, to win, the way the Fanged Horse Folk win slaves and trophies of battle. I did not much like that way of having things, and in the end I put the sunstuff back where I had found it. I carefully covered it up again, making the stinking heap look almost as if it had never been disturbed. And when I had done so, Alar’s light faded and went out.
    The place seemed very dim after that. But I remembered where I had seen steps to climb, along the inside of the wall, steps in the stone. I felt my way to them and clambered up. There were lofts and ledges and the remnants of rooms above. There were yet more steps to a higher, lighter place where a lookout might once have stood, or where a king had perhaps stood to overlook his demesne. I stood there and looked, blinking into bright sunlight.
    Far, I could see far, nearly as far as the hunter of my name vision. Behind me and above me, the vast snowpeaks. Far to one side,