by Tanith Lee
Arok’s brain began to congeal. His blood was already frozen he imagined, dark uncut garnets tight-packed under his skin.
There was no point in praying to anything, or begging for any respite. He was betrayed by a Power he had believed in, that did not exist. There was only this to pray to, and you could not pray to this.
‘Where were you going?’ asked Tirthen.
‘My – garth,’ mouthed Arok. The answer meant nothing to him.
‘I shall go there instead.’
Arok shuddered. Like a drunkard he enunciated with strict emphasis, ‘I’m dead.’
When he said this the dromaz on which he still sat began slowly to go down, collapsing like a huge boned cushion into the snow, that had itself frozen by now to a sheet of steel.
A screen clicked shut across consciousness. There was no space for resistance, anger, panic or regret. He had always hoped to die in battle. This was like uncontrolled sleep. And he had reckoned death would be like that. Vaguely, as all slipped from him, he remembered Nirri with apology, for he should have thought of her properly, and next of his sons. But he could not, though he remembered who, remember what they were. Titles – wife, son – were meaningless. How stingy death was. It cheated. He had not died as he should.
Nirri raised her head. She had been sewing with her women in the improvised chamber. Now the wool lay flaccid on her lap.
Something had passed from her. What had it been?
She did not know. For a brief while she wondered if she had felt the first threat of her approaching death. She had supposed herself healthy, but anyone might be mistaken. She was troubled by the notion mostly in a practical way. If she was soon due to become ill and die, many aspects of the garth would need to be organized. Her husband was absent and might not come back, otherwise there would have been less to bother her. On the other hand the mystic and exclusive spell that trapped the upper room must be addressed.
Though she sat abruptly motionless, her face full of inner thought, her girls let her be. They liked her. She was kind and pleasant and brave, and knew what she was about. So what, she had been a fishwife. She was also Holas and had borne the Chaiord two sons. If one was lost the other was being polished up into a hero by a mighty wise-woman.
Nirri put the needle once more into the cloth. As she did so it caught the light of the candles and glittered. The glitter was strangely like a tear falling. She regarded the single new stitch. It was the Olchibe and Gech who wove their writing into cloth, yet now this stitch seemed to have become writing of another sort that she could understand. And in it Nirri read the death, not of herself but of Arok.
The woollen cloth slid to the floor as she rose straight up from the chair.
‘Nirri-lady, what is it?’
Whether she would have replied she never did know, for at that instant knocking thundered against the House door.
The men grouped on the yard. Behind them bulked the monstrous animals they had ridden, which none in the garth had ever seen before. Were they tall deformed sheep? Khursp was the first to step forward. ‘Let us in – in the name of God.’
At the gate of the garth below there had been a similar procedure. The watchman had known them, despite their mounts. A gathering of urgent weather brought lancing snow on pelting wind. Let in, up through the garth the men had travelled, and from the dwellings people came out to see though by now the daylight was blotted up. Malted lights behind membrane-shuttered windows patterned the path, at once familiar and alien.
Khursp entered the hall of the Holas House, under the horizontal sword of peacetime.
In fireglint, faces lifted.
Khursp thought, Where’s the wise-women and the werloka? Hiding probably. He scanned the faces. How few of us anywhere. We are done, he thought. And cast the thought from him like a broken blade.
‘Where is Arok’s queen?’ said Khursp.
Behind him the others who had outraced the ice-devil from the north stayed in abject and desperate union. On the yard outside the dromazi lurched, pulling their pads from the fresh snow, snuffling, too big and too unknown to be approached. Men and women and children gathered.
‘Where is Nirri?’
‘Here I am.’
There she was. A plain woman, not young, lovely in her courage. But Khursp had only once looked at her before and seen such agony in her eyes. That had been after Dayadin was taken. Incongruous, the glory of her hair gushing about her; only its sleek vitality gave him the answering courage to announce what he knew.
‘He—’ Khursp began, wanting poetry, dry of it.
She said, coolly, considerately, smiling slightly to help him, ‘The Chaiord is dead?’
Khursp sank on his knees before her.
Nirri recalled how Arok had done this when she had persuaded him to come to this land of his death.
Elbar thrust nearer, intruding.
‘A Hell thing is after us. It’s some Winter demon of the corrupt people here. Summon the werloka, lady – maybe he—’
The others pressed in.
‘No werloka can help. This is some crappish ungod – rubbish from a midden but dangerous—’
‘We must close up the garth.’
The last man murmured in metaphysical sorrow, ‘The sky is full of murder.’
Despite everything the day before, the excessive snow-gale they had tried to outrun had caged them. The six men and the demigod, and the total god Curjai, had taken refuge in a sort of tunnel through a cliff. Curjai had melted the way in with a bolt of heat. Inside he lit a fire on the floor of the ice-cave. He did not even call the fire; he never did. Curjai entered and the fire was there waving its flames. He had aged: all of them saw this in the firelight. About eighteen he seemed to be now. Although they had become used to his maturing, never had it come on quite this fast. They considered why – if so powerful and a god of fire – Curjai could not combat a bit of severe weather. Surely he had often done so at Padgish. Curjai glanced at them. He said, as if he had heard the doubt in their heads as maybe he had, ‘We must wait. Something very strong is out there running amok.’ He did not sound afraid, only practical, like a father who said, ‘Don’t play with that snake, lads. It will bite.’
Beyond the mile-long cave the tempest belled. Slabs of snow the size of villages that had clasped the heights for decades chipped off and detonated on the valley floors. Booming ice-spouts spat back into the whirlwind.
The cave thrummed. Slender cryotites flew from the rock-roof and squalled in the fire.
Men swore and dusted ice off themselves. The animals had been picketed further in. They could, between the gusts, be heard stamping sluggishly.
‘I never knew a storm this savage,’ someone remarked.
‘It isn’t just a storm,’ said Curjai. He was lightly offhand. From somewhere, nowhere, he had produced red wine rich with spices that glimmered in a pot on the fire.
The assembly waited for the next comment.
Curjai said, ‘It’s only Tirthen rampaging about. He’s got a flea in his ear.’
Some of the Simese made gestures against uncanny malice.
Curjai looked at Fenzi.
Fenzi said, ‘That’s your Winter god.’
Curjai said quietly, for Fenzi alone, ‘He isn’t like Attajos. He was never active before. Things are waking up.’ He seemed not to mind this, yet had dropped his tone not to upset the others.
Beyond the cave a grisly bang betokened what might be the top of an entire mountain plunging down. The tunnel quaked.
‘We’re safe here,’ said Curjai generally. ‘It isn’t us he wants.’
‘Who then?’ said Fenzi.
Curjai did not reply directly. Another man said, ‘Pity the poor creatures whoever they are.’
And Curjai amended, ‘Truly. But if Winter’s in a mood it – he – senses his time is coming to an end.’
None of them understood this. Even Fenzi did not. This world was Winter, the earth a globe of ice. Curjai himself looked slightly puzzl
ed the moment he had said it. One did not often see him discomposed.
That would change. A figure with a dog entered through the mouth of the cave.
All of them gaped at it – and at the dog. Curjai too gaped.
‘Oh,’ she said.
That was all.
She was clad in radiance and luminously pale, stately though so young. The dog was blue. But she, and the dog, stood there. And all she said was Oh.
But it was worse than that.
Curjai stared at her and then – he blushed.
In the name of Attajos his sire, he, this god Curjai, for one monumental heartbeat was an adolescent.
He had got up.
The blue dog wagged its blue tail but was demonstrably too well trained to leave the girl and pounce at him.
‘Ruxendra?’ asked Curjai.
In this alone they all heard the vocal crack of breaking boyhood.
The woman said, ‘Something went by overhead. It was a deity, or so I believe. A nasty little deity, yet grown colossal.’ She had matured also, Ruxendra. She was now about sixteen or seventeen. Her stint in Hell had apparently enabled her to become more adult.
Her eyes were large, stretched to take in the image of Curjai.
And he had conquered his confusion.
‘Tirthen,’ he told her.
Ruxendra looked down. Rather prissily she walked on into the cave. ‘There is a man with a riding-animal some miles up the slope. He’s frosted over. I think this god Tirthen froze him as he passed. But he should not have died.’
‘How do you know?’
‘How can one not know such things,’ snapped Ruxendra.
A wealth of honest post-human anger lay behind the remark. But also a new-found non-human knowledge. Neither he nor she now, luckily, used any language either Simese or Jafn could understand.
Curjai glanced at the others.
In Simese he said, ‘Wait here.’
The blue dog led the way back out of the tunnel.
The tempest had shifted. Even the snow-cladding left on the heights only trembled. The sky was washed. The stars peered.
When he got near Curjai could see the dromaz was dead. It had been turned to ice as well. He felt pity for it and an instant’s mortal ire at the waste.
The man lay beside the beast. He was white-haired so Curjai knew him for a Jafn. And then for Arok.
How was he here? He must have evaded the court of the king.
‘He has died before his hour,’ pronounced the girl.
Curjai had abandoned his gaucheness. He could recall holding her in his arms in the blue Hell. For a year they had moved by each other, always on the brink of alchemical sex and emotional love. Then he had left her and so forgotten.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘I was Magikoy. Such displacing events are readable by various signs. They dislodge other things.’
‘Really.’
‘A man’s fate is decided. But that fate is sometimes improved, or pre-empted. I, for example, died too young myself. As you may dimly remember.’
Miles over to the south a white thunder-sheet of lightning fleered in the sky. That was where Tirthen had taken himself. That way too Arok’s garth must lie.
Everything was out of kilter.
Curjai knelt, set his face against the dead man’s and called softly in through his mouth: ‘Arok. Arok.’
The body had been dead less than a day. The spirit essence might be reclaimable if it had not journeyed too far off. Any shaman of Simisey could tell you this.
Warmth lit the dead eyes and frost crisped off from Arok’s face. Yet nothing replied from the depths within, nor from anywhere around.
‘He’s gone, Ruxendra.’
‘You give up too quickly.’ Frowning she also knelt on the snow and began some sort of – perhaps improvised – ritual.
Curjai watched, pleased with the way her arms lifted and her hands gestured, and the flow of her dark hair. The blue dog scratched itself. Curjai thought it was one of the jatchas from Lionwolf’s Hell, in fact Lionwolf’s own hound. Curjai was returning into his more ordinary state, that of self-knowledge and godness. Inevitably he moved apart, enjoying, compassionate, but no longer fully committed.
She though, Ruxendra, laboured away at the corpse, moaning Rukarian in her appealing voice, conjuring abilities from her previous if unfinished training as a mage.
The dead man jerked his head away without warning. It seemed he did not want to hear.
Then Ruxendra was inexorable. She went mad, dancing about, singing and clapping her hands, garlanding the cadaver with energies.
Finally Arok sat up. He put his hands to his head as if he had drunk too much or slept too long, and was unsure what he must do, let alone if he could do it.
‘Rise!’ cried imperious Ruxendra. ‘You are safely back in the world. I have brought you intact to your interrupted life. Fear nothing.’ She squinted at Curjai. He was fascinated. Did she become cross-eyed always at such moments? ‘What did you say his name was?’
‘Arok.’ Curjai shrugged.
‘Who calls me?’ said Arok. ‘Who are you? Where have I been?’ He stood, not entirely steady but at once reaching for his knife. ‘Where are … men?’
Across the night sky another purge of thunder and flap of light raised the horizon’s roof.
‘I must – go there,’ said Arok. ‘My – a woman’s there. A son.’ He too did not sound committed, only alarmingly duty bound.
‘You see,’ said Ruxendra, ‘he had things to do.’
That elemental force which had been channelled into Tirthen had gained the Holasan-garth. The zones of time were out. Chronology had been dismissed. This would not save anyone.
Up on its platform the garth had walls and gates but was ringed too by a hedge of something else. This was a combination defence, including human self-belief, but having too some of the same unusual matter as Tirthen himself.
Yet it was far more flimsy. He flicked it and the protective aura split.
Along the winding lanes of the garth the thing Tirthen roared. For those who heard he was like more of the freak storm wind that already beat the vicinity, and streaming white. As he went by huge caps of snow formed on the houses. The shuttered window-places were shuttered again by ice. Anything stranded in the path of his advance turned instantly to solid crystal death.
But most of the people here were either clamped to their hearths or had gone up to the House.
Just before he got to the House Tirthen altered. He became again what could be taken for a man. He was vain, too. His male beauty was awesome and his garments kingly. Despite only recently becoming self-aware some piece of him, or it, must have been studying the human microbes that were his victims. He – it – had made them die under Winter’s lash, the Ice Age that was its personality, realm and soul. But it had also seen how they adapted and so survived, and their world of flora and fauna with them. Their success in that balanced maybe their eternal transience, and kept his or its rancour at bay. But not now. This being, now male and passing itself off as a god, foresaw the future and took affront.
For amusement or contrariety too, Tirthen toned down his attributes, the bludgeons of freezing. What fun was there in knocking on a door or heart that immediately broke or ceased to beat? He was learning the dreadful sport of gods.
In the yard outside the House, the Jafn gawked at him far more avidly than at the Padgish dromazi. Children with round eyes stared; maidens caught their breath, not completely from fright.
Every dromaz however, arbiter of taste, shat and averted its head.
Tirthen blew gently on the House door.
Above, the peace sword of the Jafn gave a tinny whine. A mark ran up the blade, but that was all. Not everyone saw. The door undid.
In real time what was this moment? It was precisely two seconds after the last of Arok’s warriors, returning, had exclaimed, The sky is full of murder.
Tirthen knew what had been said. He knew much of wh
at he did not witness, all languages. Presumably he was now a true god. How else did they form save from the demanding worship, terror and pleading of mortals, sacrifice, circumstance, and their own sheer egomaniacal bloody-mindedness?
‘The sky is full of murder.’
‘No,’ said Tirthen, ‘murder is here.’
Godly eyes absorbed the Jafn hall. Hunting birds on rafters, a dog or two, a quartet of old lions, both genders ruffed, lying growling under a bench. Human components consisted of such ordinary models as already met with. A woman with some little authority or other, men of the expected castes, fighters or decrepit or too young. But then—
Winter Tirthen picked up the glow of something that came down a ladder-stair and entered the room at its other end.
Did he recall? He had not been then as now he was, yet in an obscure if definite way this and he had met, face to face, hand to hand, fury to fury, once or twice before.
On those occasions he had had no face or hand, only the fury. She had changed a little, but nothing to his changes. Would she recollect him?
Across a crowded room two strangers who have met and hated and striven but incredibly mislaid both the name and the appearance of the other stand briefly at a loss: Tirthen and Saphay.
Whatever else the disguise she had till now mostly worn here fell off her like a carelessly pinned cloak. The looks of an elderly hag-witch curled round her feet and faded.
Tensed like near-snapping bowstrings, the Holas in and out of the hall took in this pale girl adorned with saffron tresses and a royal gown.
Tirthen spoke.
Such a beautiful voice. Among so many gods his was among the best, or the best. He must have been training it away from its original coarse accent of screaming winds and grating glaciers.
‘I see you have arrived ahead of me.’
Yyrot? she asked herself. Was this Yyrot, Winter’s Lover, in his most gorgeous guise, with some fresh charisma never before put on? Yyrot …
Saphay glared. Flame moved in her yellow hair. She raised one hand and it was the paw of a golden lioness.
‘Ah.’ Tirthen had identified her. He inclined his head.
