Cast a Bright Shadow

by Tanith Lee

  In a way he was not utterly sure the meras existed in her universe at all. They were more projections, reflections out of the ’tween-world. Even the fish they ate might therefore be reflected or illusory. Guri had glimpsed banquets in that place, and other things that could not be, yet were.

  Saphay, after she had seen the meras which were seals, began to change. Her mind started to pull itself into a saner shape which rejected elementals and visions, even while intellectually crediting them. Her mind took a firm hand with her. Rather as Guri had yearned to, her mind slapped her. Leave this alone, said the slappy mind. You are alive. The living of your race do not see such things unless gifted and trained by Magikoy. As for the Jafn, they are crazy, filthful and to be forgotten.

  Saphay determined to forget the Jafn. Her spite she kept aside for Rothger. Sometimes she thought, for a minute, of some man or animal attacking Rothger, tearing out his intestines. She had never known she could foster these kinds of thoughts – but she was Vuldir’s daughter after all. Athluan haunted her in another way: she dreamed of him. Following the magic apparition the coal had caused, she dreamed of lovemaking with Athluan, and in sleep her body spasmed so violently it woke her. Saphay told herself, guided by her mind, that Athluan was of no consequence. She could not find the coal that morning – Guri’s fire had consumed it, as the sending flames had not. Athluan should be like that coal – all gone.

  For the god – for all of that – she found another method. Maybe Guri’s teaching had influenced her. No sooner did the bewildered limitless horror enter her awareness than she thrust shut some inner door against it. I will not think of it. How else could she survive? I will not … and did not. Vague as ashes he grew, shut out, from her thoughts – the blazing Zezeth, Sun Wolf under the sea.

  As for the child, she adored him. Naturally he was the best and most astonishing boy ever born.

  Her eyes, though open, were closing again in self-defence against so much.

  Even Guri grew less present to her. Sometimes she saw through him, then she reasoned ably: He is some uncouth sorcerer of the wastes.

  The sky was often blue, as Guri the Wasteland Sorcerer carried her through it. Strange flying reptiles, scaled and with the wings of bats, flew over. Saphay decided these were birds – kadi or large ravens.

  That night they followed, on foot now to accommodate Saphay, a wide avenue of snow that led up through an ice-forest of enormous height, width and depths. Ice-spiders spun through its upper tiers. Their nets dripped with tangled dying moths, out of which Saphay, with sudden uncanny sight, saw psyches escaping in misty streams.

  Then the forest altered. It closed over and there was no exit upwards to the sky. Guri naturally would not be hampered by this, yet he was – for neither of the others could flash non-corporeally from one physical dimension to another. Even the clever child could not, being trapped now with his baby form.

  Guri made fire. They did not eat. Guri had caught a fat white squirrelor, which Saphay adamantly refused to brain. There was an argument. The squirrelor made off up the nearest, hugest tree. Everyone sat sulking.

  When dawn came, it barely penetrated the forest save in pockets. A dim half-light was all they had.

  They went on.

  Guri noted regretfully that the baby now seemed laying a firmer grip on its soul, forcing it more often to remain inside him. Coax as he would, Guri could not raise the auric child out of the flesh. Only sometimes it would manifest, tweaking his braids, scrambling up his shoulders – then be gone before Guri could even greet it. The toy mammoth, once so played with, had vanished somewhere.

  Since the child did not converse with him now, Guri had no one to talk to. Women were not talking companions.

  At evening, instead of darkness asserting itself, the forest began to glow. It was the snow itself, which was now more dense, filling up the majority of spaces between the trees, making snow-lanes between and frozen in plates across them, and across the roof of boughs, with only holes left like dully shining coins.

  There was a colossal silence here, different from the outer silence of the plains. This was like deafness.

  Contrary to all this, Guri sensed that for the first time on the journey they were approaching humankind.

  Night came. The coin-holes went purple, and some glistened from moonlight, rays and needles running down the snow into the earth. All the trees were sheathed in ice and snow. The forest came fully internally alight, like a milky lamp.

  Saphay sat down, with the baby, then she began to sob.

  Again, from this very display, Guri felt they were near journey’s end.

  ‘Shush you now,’ said Guri automatically.

  But Saphay had already abandoned her weeping. She fed the child and so did he. Guri was always careful not to look at her breast – it might affect him, which could be dangerous. Even so, he guessed her milk was less abundant. The child, at first eager and involved, now tossed, dissatisfied and snivelling like all babies miserable at being in the world in such a wretched, helpless state.

  ‘Stay here. I’ll search around a bit.’

  ‘No squirrels.’

  Guri swore, and bounded off through the trees, using the lanes and gaps until out of her sight.

  She had never entirely accepted his ghostliness. But then neither did Guri.

  He went some distance before he found the statue.

  It was of petrified wood, black amid the white. The image was of a hideous woman with lots of hands and claws and the carved coarse hair of a badger.

  Guri made sure she was not supernatural, or alive in some way, before he genuflected to her courteously.

  As he straightened up, some men came out of the heart of the trees.

  They were heavy, their skins, visible between their furs, mottled greyish and brownish like a snake’s.

  Knowing himself now invisible, Guri observed them.

  They passed within inches of him. They smelled to him nostalgically of unwashed bodies, fires and meals and the shut, smug indoors. Going by the statue, each man put something down at its foot without pausing. Guri looked to see what these things were. Then he looked again: there was nothing there. The men from the snow-forest had offered nothing to their goddess, each time in a measured handful.

  Guri did not bother to track the men, nor to find their village. He went back to Saphay, and told her the good news.

  She gazed at him as if afraid, then obscured her expression as he had seen her do before.

  ‘Do you know this place?’

  ‘No. Some heap, but it will do. You must have food, and the child must.’

  The rill of fear went through her eyes again. She had been sent among barbarians once before, and look where it had got her.

  They walked up through the trees, then the curious thing happened. Perhaps Guri should have predicted it. The ugly statue came into view. Saphay saw it and exclaimed in disgust. Then, turning to Guri, she glared right at him, her eyes widened, and she cried out in an awful scream: ‘Where are you? Don’t leave me here—’

  Though not predicting it, he understood. He knew she could no longer see him, nor would she hear him. It was due to the potential for contact with her own species, he thought, with the living.

  Guri shrugged. He hunkered down on the snow, watching Saphay screaming in fright and fury, watching her grow still and turn away, and go by the statue unerringly in the right direction.

  The men stood staring at her. It was like the other time, in the joyhall. But contrary, for these were considering taking her on.

  She fathomed their speech, she began to make out certain words, sentences. It was a little like one of the more glottal languages the Jafn spoke. As she had in the garth, Saphay started to comprehend.

  They were saying she had come from nowhere – that was true enough. They were saying it was not believable, under such circumstances, that she was innocent. Either some party of travellers had thrown her out for some crime, or she was demonic in some form, and therefore
went alone about the snow waste as she wanted, impervious to it, and causing trouble.

  Apparently they had a test for demon qualities.

  A woman came in and offered Saphay a bowl of something. When Saphay would not accept the bowl, the woman threw the contents over her.

  Saphay, too startled to make a fuss, brushed the loose grains off herself and off the child. Hatred for these people, perhaps all people other than her son, filled Saphay in slow, steep waves.

  But it transpired that she and the child had passed the test, the grains being magical, blessed by the village’s witch-woman.

  She had entered the village without quite knowing it at first. The dwellings and snow-walled corridors were all part of the trees, the forest, the Winter, it had seemed. Only the lights among them revealed gradually what they were, and by then men were on the thoroughfare. None of them touched her. Only the grain had done so.

  Their mottled skins were disquieting, she thought; they were worse than yellow Olchibe skins. The deserting sorcerer had also had a yellow skin – but had she therefore imagined him, like the fireworks in the sky, the mermaids … and the other thing, long ago, which must never be thought of.

  A village man was saying something now. She abruptly understood most of the words, as if finally she had to.

  ‘Nabnish have her. He not bother even if she felon. Nabnish can do with bit-girl keep house for him, since last bit died. Serve her right.’

  Something dragged inside Saphay like a weighted chain.

  Fifteen days Saphay was the property of Nabnish, there in the snow-forest.

  She was not, at this period, Saphay – like her child, she had no name. Nabnish called her solely Bit. To these people this word represented three things: one, a possession; two, a congenital fool; three, something which had been created to work.

  She beheld him first up in the top of his house. The building lay at the edge of the village. It was formed of trunks and snow, a sort of chimney, more to it upward than across, breached by wobbling ladders, rungs and steps, off which doorways opened like crevices in a hive. Nabnish sat in one of them.

  He came out of his crevice in the end, and squeezed areas of her body. Guri at his most informal had never been so rough or graceless, but Nabnish was concerned to learn if she was fleshly. He said – and she grasped every word – that he made sure too she would be worth broiling and eating, if ever he had the need.

  The baby he dismissed.

  Put it over there, on that shelf. It would die, then they could sling it out.

  Saphay made a noise – for no purpose, it simply burst from her like vomit.

  Nabnish struck her. Saphay went toppling backwards. She somehow kept the child pressed to her breast, herself taking all the slam of the floor, to which she plummeted from the ladder, onto her spine.

  For a moment she thought she was dead. Then she recalled she did not die.

  Nabnish snapped at her to get up. She obeyed, and found she had not been smashed in half. The child, also undamaged, gazed up at her with eyes like a wolf’s, and also deep blue as the face of a god’s wrath.

  All those fifteen days and nights, something kept coming up to the windows, the lower and the high upper ones, and squinting in. It scowled, this something, enough to tear the membrane window panes in shreds.

  Guri.

  He spied on Nabnish, sleeping and eating, and having a game with coloured counters, usually by himself. And Guri spied on Saphay, toiling in the snow-house.

  A large stove lurked on the lowest floor, like a spider, its looped metal arms reaching up the house, and around the ladders, to warm it. It was one of Saphay’s tasks to keep the stove plied with wood from the store. When the store got low, another task for her was to go along to a communal woodpile in the street, lug off and break up more. She managed badly at this, her hands blistered and bleeding from the axe left by the pile, and from stove scorches. Soon her face was burned red, and all of her to some degree black with soot and dirt. Her greasy hair was the shade of badly smoked herring.

  There were additional things she had to do. She must fetch Nabnish’s food from the cookfire place. Here she was pushed and cursed by women, both village wives and even other bits who were more experienced and scorned her. In the house meanwhile there was always the sweeping away and mopping up of debris sloughed from the walls, the cleaning of floors, stairs, ladders and pipes. She must bring in snow and ice from the outer limit of the village, for water, and as a kind of plaster to shore everything up.

  By the fifth day, when she had grown – as Guri supposed – dirty and unkempt enough to be alluring to Nabnish, he hauled her into his mattress room, a hole only large enough for the mattress and the man. He raped her twice, then thrust her out and went to sleep. Saphay, who had made no protest, sat on the ladder, shaking so vigorously that Guri saw it. Still she did not cry, and presently went to the baby, lifted it off the shelf and fed it. She did this whenever she could, Guri noted, even though now her milk seemed to have dried up.

  Neglected perforce, the child did not die, as another must have done. Nor did it roll off the shelf. That was mainly due to Saphay’s rearrangement of the rubbish left there, but also to Guri’s vigilance.

  After the fifth day, he came in sometimes, unseen by any of them, except perhaps the half-dead child. Guri stood over Saphay. He had never doubted an Olchibe man’s right to possess a woman, but Nabnish was no Olchibe. ‘Tackle him, girl.’

  She answered under her breath, but evidently without realizing she heard any voice save in her own head. ‘How can I do anything to him? The village is full of such as he. And where else can I go?’

  But Guri had noticed a metallic hardness in her whisper, which might have come instead from her eyes.

  Guri said, ‘I shouldn’t be here. I should be off.’

  This she did not hear at all.

  Guri went to the child. He stroked the child’s forehead, and the boy turned in his fever-sleep, as if worried by an insect or a draught.

  ‘You’ve forgotten your old uncle. Come out and let him give you a ride on his back. You’ll feel well and finely out of that sickly body.’

  But the baby now would not let its physical soul come out to play with Guri.

  Where is the father? Guri asked himself, aggrieved at the mess. And he did not refer to Athluan. If that one came, he could spin this turd-tip at the stars. A rotten god – brutal to his own.

  Guri went back to the outside of the snow-house. He took a stroll through the thoroughfares of the village which, he knew by now, the mottled people called a city.

  Guri did a few things to upset them. He overturned standing thawed water, and pails of urine kept for bleach. He put out fires – and lit others where they were unwanted. Where they instabled their animals, Guri undid the gates and the grazing channels. Bucket-hipped cows shambled lowing through the lanes; the long-necked sheep ate fruit from house vines.

  But all this was petty, and the fun soon levelled off. Leaving the village-city squealing, Guri returned to spy on Nabnish’s house.

  Nabnish was busy on Saphay again. Guri, even through the house steam, saw her eyes. If looks could kill … but she was no Crarrow. Nabnish was a big fat man – and besides, as she had said, after murder what would come next?

  That night Guri went and milked one of the cows. He brought the milk back in a crock. The child was off the shelf, with his mother in the corner. He let Guri trickle the milk slowly into his mouth, then swallowed it and kept it down. Again, Guri did not think any ordinary child could, at this stage, have done that. The girl was more awkward. She ate most days from scraps Nabnish left her, but never much, not liking the village cuisine. Guri marvelled at her princessly spoiledness – admired it too. He left her a fruit, trusting she would have the sense to eat it secretly and without questions. She did so, but he could not read what went on in her mind. Each night then he brought them something, while the village snored and honked in stinking sleep. Yet even so he let their suffering go on
, undecided, ten more days. He kept waiting for something else to happen and make the decision for him. And years after, when Guri, still loitering intently on the physical plane, reminisced on that, he could say, ‘But you will see, I had been a second to Peb Yuve, never leader of a vandal band. I was waiting for him’ – he meant the child – ‘to settle it. That was my way.’

  Of course, he had been wise, Guri. The child did settle it. The child who was to be the Leader.

  An intense freezing marked that fifteenth night. Moonless, the snow-forest greyly shone, and Guri wandered under the stiff silver blades of palm trees, fretting and retying his braids.

  When, at dawn, he dived straight into Nabnish’s house through the wall, he saw this. Saphay was sitting by the stove. She had the baby in her lap. There was nothing new in that: she nursed him off and on, or simply kept him by her until morning when she could.

  But the baby, which last night had refused to suck up the milk Guri brought, looked as rigid to Guri as the over-frozen snow.

  A clutch of fear rattled round in Guri’s a-physical blood. Also he felt guilty – to be dead was nothing, the boy would be better off. Had this made Guri give up on any proper action?

  Exactly then, the other version of the child came into view. He was swinging hand over hand, back and forth across the chimney of the house, from the wooden ladders and the pipes. Though weightless, he looked happy and fit, and he was now at least twelve years of age – to Olchibe or Gech, a man.

  ‘Great Gods’ tails,’ said Guri. ‘Amen.’

  The child cast him an ironic glance. He swung off into air, drifted and landed by Saphay.

  ‘That’s almost dead,’ said the boy-man to Guri, pointing at the baby – himself – in Saphay’s arms. Probably he had only got out for that reason.

  ‘Can you die?’ asked Guri, suddenly unsure.

  ‘Why not? Because of my da, you mean, old sointy Blue-Face?’ Guri was astounded not only by the boy’s different use of syntax, but by this name-calling of a deity – worse than mere aggression, for you knew gods might forgive that sometimes, but never a rude name. That was blasphemy. But the boy continued, ‘I’m half mortal. The mortal half can die. Without it what use would I be?’