by Tanith Lee
Eventually they were more used to each other. He began to fathom now and then in turn what the snake ‘said’ to him, by its body movements, and symbols it ‘drew’ in the ashes of the fire. Sometimes it went with him when he walked about, but they were not always together. Fenzi would go off by himself, or the snake would. Once he saw it mate with a long slender lizard. Could offspring be possible? He never learned, nor did the chaze ever tell him. But Fenzi gave the snake the name Fron. This, in fisher-Jafn, approximately meant your best team-fellow on a boat. The chaze accepted the name and would, when in the vicinity, come to it when called.
Occasionally too it went up again to the slope where Azula’s bothy had been. The shelter had collapsed long ago, but the tree into which the snake insinuated itself had only flourished. Here the snake would lie upright in the embrace of branches.
One evening, put out by the singing birds and a little drunk on some berry liquor he had managed to ferment, Fenzi copied Fron. Wriggling his own way into another larger tree he cautiously wound back the branches to try to make them support him. He fell asleep at this and roused aggrieved, because it really was not a sleep night and he had behaved in a totally unJafn way. Then he found his tree had made a cocoon for him and held him firm. Only when he attempted to leave did it mellifluously unwind and let him go.
There had been mystic dreams during the forbidden sleep in the tree. One showed him that he felt the scars on his ribs to be like the strings of a harp, able to make melody. He only recollected these surrealisms gradually. When ten nights later he, and Fron, went back and repeated the procedure, other mystical dreams informed Fenzi’s sleep. He discovered after about twenty similar experiences that he began to understand the speech of birds and beasts, and of the trees and plants themselves. It was the initiation of his magicianship, the beginning of the enormous genius of thaumaturgy that would come to him. And it was also the end of his aloneness and his sorrow.
TWO
Meeting a blue sky, a green land. Between the two lay Kol Cataar, the Phoenix city. The magician stared unblinking at the scene. At noon the city had that look it always had, and was intended always to have perhaps. Every wall and tower, every terrace and roof seemed designed as jewelry. But between this luminosity and his mansion, a discrepancy occurred.
He had kept the snows about his southern house. Where the fertile fields and pastures ceased his acres of Winter began. Only three miles further south beyond his house did the frazzle of blowing wheat and corn, dilf and barley blondly resume.
Thryfe’s estate had become an island.
‘Highness.’
Thryfe turned. Lalath was there, the female Magikoy who retained her own accommodation in the city as he did not.
‘Thank you, Lalath.’
She had brought a letter from the king and other impedimenta of the court.
He was aware, with his refurbished instinct for such stuff, that Lalath believed she loved him. He felt regret for her when he remembered this. He would – could – never return even the slightest of her feelings. Being Magikoy she too would know this. She approached him where needful as one did a magus of an august order. Otherwise she never intruded herself. Had there been gods Thryfe would have thanked them for that. He did not want to be cruel.
Yet she turned like a shadow of drooping wings. And when gone she left a remnant of her frustrated desolation in his room.
Aglin was better, he thought. The mageia who had been Jemhara’s friend was by now attached to the royal household, a favourite with Queen Tireh and her daughters. Aglin did not seem distrait but she had made a private shrine it was said to her Magikoy tutor, and brought offerings there to Jemhara as if to a goddess. He had not chided her for this though he believed Jema would not have liked it – perhaps she would only have laughed. People sought consolation in various ways. To Thryfe, if she should encounter him, Aglin was scrupulous in forms of respect, but she did not meet his eyes. She blamed him in some oblique manner for the loss of Jemhara. In that she was like Thryfe himself. He did not see what he could have done finally. Yet he would never quite forgive, as Aglin would not, his ultimate incompetence, his inadequacy in the grip of fate.
He vacated the room and climbed the three hundred stairs to the towery.
Some huge old books brought from the former capital rested on stands. He prowled among them, turning a page, reading a few lines, moving to another volume. Outside the windows as below, the distant twinkle of Kol Cataar.
At sunset he must go there. Bhorth had requested it.
And I would rather do anything than go, thought Thryfe with weary wryness. But it was not to be avoided. He was still Magikoy and had been detailed to serve the court of the King Paramount.
Swift as an arrow a bird flew over the casement.
It was of a sort he had not seen before in his life, though his books recorded it from the past. It had a brown body but an orange breast and flicks of azure on its wings. A novel bird of the world’s Spring.
How quickly the newborn season raced. Whole forests, jungles, cast off their mail of ice, their foliage expanding to blot out the sky. Weeds and briars pierced the crevices of streets and houses. From the coast came word of splitting ice and high waters that now and then flooded inland. Their ingress was always leisurely and heralded by warnings. The fisher villages and even the small disorderly cities to the north – Thase, the enduring Kandexa – took heed and had no casualties. There was a tale too of a giant wave to the south-east which had been halted and blown away by the god that none of them ever called Vashdran – Lionwolf. In fact, like the Jafn, they had taken to calling him only God. For he was the sun and the sun was God at last. The sun had been resurrected out of the cold ocean, or the colder Hell. He rose to nourish the earth.
Thryfe’s mind obstinately shifted.
He shut his eyes and thought of her.
To the deluge of pain that struck him what was a tidal wave? He reprimanded himself. He shut himself in the iron of self-control. But nevertheless, he thought on. Of her.
Long ago, not so long ago, when he pursued her to Kandexa, he had believed he could find her and save her, if needed, from whatever had encompassed her. And yet over there in that now glinting city, he had known in conquering rushes of despair that she was lost.
A god had stolen her. Another myth? A true one … Whatever it was, he was himself helpless. He had known, he knew, he would not see her again in life. And if the condition only of physical life were real, which he dreaded and trusted it was, in the nothing which followed he would not see her either.
Lionwolf – his son – had healed Thryfe of all maladies, all damage. Lionwolf, or God, had told Thryfe Jemhara lived. And Thryfe had disbelieved him. For he knew she did not. But—There came another hour.
What had Thryfe been doing in that hour? Did he recall? He did not. For the revelation wiped everything else of it away. The revelation assured him that Jemhara had in some sense lived till then. But now, now in that exact moment she died.
He felt her die. It was so fast. Like a flower that vanished suddenly in sourceless flame. Ashes, pollen, falling. That was all. That was Jemhara. Silvery pollen falling, fading.
And he remembered then the words the god God had said to him. Thryfe had imagined Lionwolf spoke of himself, but saw that he had spoken of her. ‘Destiny may sometimes be immovable. The parts we play, gods and men, may be written out for us before we are born. And in that writing we too may have colluded.’ The god had meant Jemhara. And now truly the page had closed on her.
Thryfe, having he noted learned nothing after all from the tedious wicked lessons of existence, had been so sure she was already dead. But now she was. Now and for ever she … was.
Beyond that hour he had not progressed. He did not want to. Where else was there to go?
He served the court and the people of the city. He performed the tasks, studies and rituals essential to his vocation and his Wardenship. He even slept some spaces of each night. He even noticed spe
cial birds that flew, or the name of the Sun God. Or Kol Cataar’s twinkling. But he did not leave the hour of Jemhara’s dying or the words of her fate. Her fate had become his fate. Her death had become his life.
Over Southgate in the dusk the torches were blazoned. The gate stood wide – they had seen him arriving. He glimpsed the salutes of the guards. He walked through and along the streeted slopes of the city.
He climbed without pausing the thousand-stepped staircase, paying no attention to its statues.
Tonight no Gargolem manifested from an alcove. Although it had come back, it was not often in evidence here.
Other guards saluted him into the marble maw of the palace. Beyond in lamplit air lay the starry halls of the king whose complacence Thryfe had not come to spoil.
Bhorth it was who strode out of the throng to greet him.
He had grown fat again and there was grey finally in his fair hair and creases in his face, even though the God had touched him. He kept the authority of his recent years nevertheless, and his strength, one thought. Bhorth stayed honourable. Besides, he was happy now; all of them were. Sallusdon his son had come home some months ago.
‘I am present,’ said Thryfe placidly. ‘How can I assist?’
‘Ah, Magus. Well. Let’s go aside into that room there, where the best wine is.’
In the room, elegantly panelled and adorned, the servers brought glass goblets of wine then removed themselves.
Through the doorway king and mage watched the court dancing to music. Tireh the queen was dancing too, with a well-clad old man. The little girl princesses were there. They were growing up. The younger had topaz hair, like the hair of Saphay, Bhorth’s niece, mother of God.
‘Do you see?’ asked Bhorth quietly.
‘Yes.’ For now the king’s black son went dancing by. He did not seem as he had when he returned. Now he looked almost happy too, though in his eyes age waited as it did not even in the eyes of the queen’s old courtier.
‘Sallus is better,’ said Bhorth. ‘When first he came back he wasn’t like this. The gods – God – knew what had happened to him. He wouldn’t and will not say, even to his mother. I mean, to Tireh. We discussed him then, did we not, you and I?’
‘Yes, Bhorth.’
‘And even the Oculum couldn’t show you what he’d suffered.’
‘That is so.’
‘But now, now look at him. The change in him.’
‘Very definitely.’
‘Guess what it is.’
Thryfe watched the young prince. It did not really require magecraft.
A tall young woman danced with Sallus. Not Azula; she had not returned. This was a more average Rukarian girl, brunette and pale-skinned. She was pliant but not fragile, a little heavy perhaps but well formed. She had gold wound in her hair. Some daughter of high family.
But, ‘Not royal,’ said Bhorth, surprising him slightly, ‘Sallus found her on the street, in a manner of saying. She’s from the Ruk east outland, one of the villages there, a farmer family. Worships some goddess made of broomsticks, Rajel or something like that, who ruts with a star.’
He gossips now, Thryfe thought. ‘And she has revived your son.’
‘Yes. And his mother. Some women get jealous, don’t they, of their son’s choice. But Tireh’s only glad to see him glad. A fine woman, my queen. As for peasant blood in the royal house, it will build us up. God’ – he had got it right this time – ‘knows we need it.’
They watched the dancers changing partners and weaving through another measure. How nimbly they did that. Just so they accepted the God, and the gold rats that rambled in the alleys.
‘Then what troubles you, Bhorth?’
Bhorth looked away. He stared through a window of the room into the clear and star-tipped night.
‘Not myself. Sallus. And this he has told me. Of course he can’t be like the rest, and it’s what he is – how long he may live—None of us know our length of days, especially at his age, but for him, with the blood of the black woman, the goddess, in his veins—He said to me, Mage, he said he may live for ever, at least till those stars go out.’
‘And she, his lover, is mortal and will die.’
To Thryfe his own words had the sound of a baleful curse. He grew ice-cold from them, but the king only nodded.
‘Just so. Naturally she loves him, but he can’t bring himself to confirm it. He won’t have her, won’t let himself take up with her though anyone can see he rattles with wanting to. Because she will die and he will go on. We’ll all die and he will go on. How can he bear it?’
‘I don’t know, Bhorth.’
I should tell him that twenty-three days and nights of love are better than an existence without it, let alone immortality without.
I can’t tell him.
It is not true.
We are better left alone inside our cells of granite.
Something odd took place in the atmosphere of the room. Beyond the door the lights went on glowing. In here a tinsel of frost seemed to form. And from some shadow another server glided out and came to them and filled their goblets from a ewer of wine.
A woman, very graceful, but she retained the shadow. She had a sombre skin. Was she black? No black women were at this court or in this city. None had ever been in these lands but one.
The servant woman murmured.
No one could have caught her words.
Thryfe did so.
‘Tell Sallusdon to recall the snake which bit him.’
‘Magus,’ said Bhorth, ‘what is it?’
There was no servant present. The cups had not been refilled. The room was hot and lit by candles.
‘Some message has come to you,’ said Thryfe flatly, ‘or for your son. Was he ever bitten by a snake?’
‘Yes, by – yes. Had no one told you? When he was a child. A chaze bit him. He killed it with his own bare hands though he was an infant. I sucked the poison from him. A little while after the snake appeared, alive and well. Did you never see it with him? Biting him I’ve always believed did the damn reptile good.’
Thryfe said, ‘Tell your son to remember that. He must draw his own conclusion.’
‘If – you say so, Magus.’
Another more frisky dance had been kindled. The participants whirled along under the latticed golden lamps.
Thryfe spoke from the past. ‘Be aware, if I say to you it is, then you know I speak the truth.’
Bhorth checked. He did not analyse the reprise but it flew home in his mind. He would tell Sallus.
He tried then to tempt Thryfe out to the feast, where poor Magikoy Lalath stood in her feast dress, lovelorn as any girl. But Thryfe stayed less than ten minutes more. He never would.
In bed that night with Tireh, panting after their extremely rewarding exertion, the king planned how he would reveal the Magikoy message tomorrow to Sallus. He trusted Thryfe. He trusted luck too. How else had they flourished?
Lilting asleep to the lullaby of Tireh’s low purring snores, Bhorth asked himself again one never answered question. Why had Chillel chosen him to lie with? All men otherwise had gone to her; so much was evident from some knowledge rooted deep within himself. All men. But he – and one other man of whom Bhorth knew nothing but that fact – were selected by the goddess herself. He did not argue at being chosen. Yet the why of it he never comprehended. He was a king, but at that time a prisoner. The other man, had he been a king too?
It would not suggest itself for many more decades to long-lived Bhorth that perhaps he and that other man, whose name Bhorth would never know to be Arok, had simply been ‘chosen’ because either Chillel must choose, or there had been no other free to be chosen. Luck had been the factor for both of them. It had had no other reason. Not all things must have singular purpose, even in an era of the miraculous.
But Chillel’s message, if such it was, did have purpose.
Sallus was informed of it and grew pale in his darkness. Soon he drew the Ranjallan girl aside. He offer
ed her his love, his heirdom, but also his blood to drink. If she gazed at him in revolt or transport none has ever described. Both? But it seems she accepted everything.
Like all his brothers and his sisters he did live for ever, or for that for ever, seeing that times change and their geometry with them, and even infinity may be finite. But a white queen they say ruled with him all that while. Her name was from the Ruk royal house: it was Yazmey. But she worshipped Ranjal goddess of wood. And to the consternation of Kol Cataar she refused ever to make her a single offering.
Near dawn there was an urgent hammering on the door of the mansion.
The house of a Magikoy could be concealed, and few but those Magikoy-trained would find it. Only infrequently persons stumbled on the spot, locating it by accident where a search would be useless. Thryfe’s suburban house was not concealed. It glared from its island of snow among the ripening fields. There was one oddness by the door if any got close: a thriving shrub with fat dark flowers striped over white. A local legend insisted the hand of a woods goddess had been planted there. But as a rule none saw, for none called. Sensibly one left the magus alone.
A jinan appeared before Thryfe.
He had had less than an hour’s sleep, but inquired what was wanted.
The jinan explained, by jinanic methods, that three men were below. Yet the jinan was unable to indicate their need or intention.
Thryfe threw on his clothes and went down.
Among the snow-drifts and against the widening arch of predawn sky, one man waited by the cavernous entrance. Another, possibly awkward, stood a short way off, and yet another a dozen feet further along.
From the look of them they were labourers or itinerant farm workers. Plenty such had come to Kol Cataar. Their garments were rough and too thermal for the Spring climate, if not for Thryfe’s snow.
‘Highness Thryfe,’ said the man by the door, and he bowed. In the muffle of his hood a square weather-beaten face was partly visible. He looked shy and in awe but steadfastly determined. He carried something small too, inside a sack in his arms. The other men were more nondescript. The nearer had a fur hood, the farthest off hung a head of shaggy black hair and studied his black nails.
