Cast a Bright Shadow

by Tanith Lee

  He did indeed speak like a man, a very young one, slangy, arrogant, and fearless – and angry.

  Guri gazed at him. He was spear-straight and already lightly muscular. He had long legs, and a long mane of reddest hair. Handsome, too, he was, as one must expect.

  ‘And she’ll cry,’ the boy added. ‘I writhe at it when she cries.’

  ‘She never does much.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t hear it as I do. I hear her weeping on and on, inside herself, either that or shrieking for revenge. She’d kill that pig up there if she had the strength, or we had somewhere to go on to. Why didn’t you take us elsewhere, Uncle?’

  Hearing his avuncular title again, Guri was chastened.

  ‘All these dumping-grounds are the same.’

  ‘If you say so. How would I know? But look at what has happened to her. He porks her’ – Guri grinned, shovelled the grin hastily off – ‘and he slaps her. I can’t do as you do, I can make no impression yet on this world. Guri, I don’t want—’ The handsome face was suddenly changed. It was the face of a lost child. ‘Guri, don’t let me die here.’

  ‘Death’s good.’

  ‘No, not for me – not yet. Uncle, give me the world!’

  Guri stared. He said quietly, although he knew she could not hear, ‘The world hurts.’ And he considered, too, why he said such things, even as a ghost – just as he had been slightly wondering when he had lessoned Saphay on the nature of gods. ‘Maybe it’s too late,’ he added.

  ‘No, look there.’

  Guri looked. An unseen glimmer of something coiled off from the boy to his baby-self. And in the shadow, where the stove-light sent it down from the form of mother and child, there was a faint garnet flicker.

  The child was not yet physically dead, but what to do? Before Guri could think another thought, he heard fat Nabnish creaking out on to the ladder above.

  Saphay, too raised her head. Her eyes were knife-points.

  All three stood watching Nabnish ponderously descend – only one of the three visible.

  Saphay also had been over-frozen in the night, not by the cold but by a total collapse of her strength. As it died in her, another strength ran in. To herself she felt as if she had been encased in armour.

  ‘Get up, lazy glob of a bit. Water not boiled – where’s meal? Am I to house you and me go hungry? Is it you to go on fire to make my fast-breaking? Throw on baby, I’ll eat that. Why alive still? I tell you, put baby out in cold to die.’

  Saphay laid her son down on the floor. She did it with care, gently. Even so, as always, she seemed torn open wide with the letting go of him. In her hand she had a twig from the woodpile. She had been whittling it with a piece of a broken pan stolen from the village cooking-place. The wood was sharper than the dented metal.

  As Saphay lifted up this home-made dagger, a wind knocked her aside. In it somewhere she glimpsed the leopard man with braids, and amazed she fell against the wall.

  Guri drew up his psychic knack. He had never realized he could do what now he meant to, but like all the rest it came at the correct time.

  Nabnish was nearing the foot of the ladder, his mottles flushing puce. His little eyes were on Saphay, and so an interruption of the vista surprised him.

  What he saw was not Guri.

  It was a bear, tall as the ladder, with flaring horns and gaping jaws.

  The bear slashed Nabnish with its claws. Nabnish experienced the pain as they raked right through him, head to groin. There was no space for Nabnish to detect he had not been slaughtered. Instead the bear socked him in the belly, and Nabnish crashed through the ladder, disintegrating it. But where he tumbled, was against the scalding side of his own stove—

  The house was at the hem of the village-city. If any heard a fellow citizen howling, they took it for a wolf out on the plains, or a woman being justifiably beaten. It was a high-pitched, shrill noise.

  The boy danced about, laughing. He urged Saphay, ‘There, Mother, do you like that?’

  But Saphay had only picked up the baby again and pressed him to her breast, close as if to return him into her body.

  Then Guri was before her. She could see him in a sort of fashion, translucent as the thinnest membrane pane.

  ‘Sorcerer,’ she disdainfully said.

  Guri said, interested, ‘Your milk’s come back.’

  Saphay looked down at herself. She saw the baby was awake and suckling. She felt the sore-sweet string of the milk pulled out of her.

  Then she thought she saw a yellow bear go over and kick Nabnish in the testicles.

  A short while later, having put the replete child down once more, Saphay too walked across to her master.

  Nabnish was whimpering, burned, and throbbing from an assault that, though not corporeal, had psychically bruised him.

  Saphay bent down. She stabbed Nabnish in the cheek with her twig. He yelped. She spat in his eye and twisted his hair around her hand and yanked on it.

  ‘You are my bit now. Say it.’

  Nabnish could say nothing.

  Saphay poked the twig into his mouth and made his gums bleed. Then she stood up, leaving him at the bottom of his house in a puddle of his own wastes.

  ‘Now,’ she said, ‘you serve me.’

  The auric projection of the child had by then been ravelled back into the baby. Guri, ashamed of his prowess, had absconded. He was off over a hundred miles of snow, running after deer and singing.

  Vuldir’s daughter smiled. Taking her child, she climbed another ladder to the mattress room and crawled inside. Below, it was Nabnish who wept.

  At last Saphay questioned nothing. She threw down to her first defeated enemy only one last word. ‘Forcutcher.’

  Through the white architecture of the snow-forest flies moving colour. The forest knows it, has grown used to it: it lives here.

  The running figure is that of a child, but it changes – how fast it changes. Now about three years old, now about six, now taller and leaner, more shaped and sure, no longer a child – twelve years, fifteen, eighteen …

  How quickly they grow. One moment there is a babe-in-arms, next month it seems – toddling, striding, gaining opinions – an infant alters to a youth …

  To a man.

  It is a man running through the forest of fossilized snow. He is tall, strong and spare – straight as a new sword drawn for battle. He is also impossibly tanned. His hair is red as a banner and his eyes blue-black. There is none like him in these parts.

  The village-city of Ranjalla has been given a great deal to ponder. They will tell you this demonic male has matured two years for every one he has lived – they watched it happen. In ten years he has become a man of almost twenty. Look at his mother, no Ranjallan sibulla, yet she can summon and organize spirits. She has subdued an important village man and uses him now as a slave. Beware of that woman and that house! They warn off their girls who turn their heads at the glimpse of red hair by the snow-chimney houses. ‘He’s got no name, he. He demon’s get. Stay away, or whacked you’ll be.’

  What does he think of this? It is old news to him – just as it is that he has no name. Though, like a riddle, he does have one. The Ranjallans cannot get their mouths around the Rukarian to articulate it, but have their own version. In Rukarian or Ranjallan or Jafn, the unname Saphay attached to her son at his first birthday was, and is, Nameless.

  Nameless then, who matured in ten years to be nearly twenty, resides in a snow-house at the periphery of the village-city, surrounded by the ruins of other collapsing snow-houses which have long been deserted. All the neighbouring Ranjallans had quickly moved off along the forest, to give this weird family a wide space. But also they take care never to offend them. Nameless has grown up noting offerings of food and wood laid at the door.

  Otherwise, his home comprises a stove, a blonde mother like a queen, his periodically present ghost uncle, a feline, and a house-slave called Bit-Nabnish, who whines and cringes and is always attacked. That is actually Nabnish’s fun
ction, more than to assist with the domestic arrangements. He is there to be the recipient of cruelties, Saphay’s the most inventive. But Nameless is not immune to the ritual. One enters the house, greets one’s mother, strokes the cat, and kicks Bit-Nabnish.

  Meanwhile, aside from all of this, what truly is he, the red-haired man? He himself does not know.

  Through the white architecture …

  Nameless raced down an ice aisle and straight up a flight of steps, cut themselves from ice. Every step was roughened and set with shards to prevent slippage, but really he seemed not to need this precaution. At the top he slid, graceful and controlled, to a flawless standstill.

  There stood Ranjal herself, the goddess of wood. Many statues of her were to be found in these parts – all alike. Her two arms each ended in several pairs of long-fingered hands, resembling branches or antlers.

  Before her Nameless tossed blue flowers of the weed-of-light.

  Three of the old women, the sibullas who guarded the statue, had come out of their hut.

  Nameless smiled at them. It was the smile of a man, also of a wolf-like child, a beautiful feral smile, and it went unanswered.

  Then the goddess opened her wooden lips and spoke. ‘Is forest empty?’

  ‘Fat-full of emptiness, lady,’ assented Nameless.

  ‘Pleased I.’

  The old sibullas exchanged narrow glances. They had all heard the goddess speak before; they themselves could induce her to do so. But this one, this man-thing, he also could cause Ranjal to speak. He had been doing it since the dawn of adolescence.

  They were jealous.

  One said, ‘If the forest’s empty, where him get they flowers?’

  Another said, ‘He looks red-hot enough to burn you.’

  The one in the doorway said, in a hiss, ‘See there.’

  They knew where to turn their eyes. Behind the colourful young man, an extra set of footprints was briefly to be seen, scored in the snow. No one visible had made them.

  ‘His familiar.’

  ‘Why does our own lady speak him, if he with his demon?’

  ‘Go in. We go in. Let he alone.’

  The sibullas crowded back into their hut.

  ‘Ranjal,’ said the young man, ‘I want something, for the flowers.’

  ‘Ask.’ Her voice was like ice-wasps scratching in a frozen pine.

  Behind him another cursed.

  ‘Hush, Guri.’

  ‘You take risks. This thing is a god.’

  ‘No, Guri, it is a chunk of stonewood, ancient and warped; that one makes talk by will-power. That’s how the witch-sibullas do it. Don’t be credulous.’

  He had learned his method of speaking from his mother. He did not, though partially he used the Ranjallan language, sound like any man of theirs.

  Guri jumped two hundred feet up a tree. He sat in its cemented branches, observing his nephew far below connive with the statue for vast riches, three wives of surpassing loveliness, an army fully armed, and so on. She had told him stories, too, his mother; Guri had himself liked these. Now Nameless made a goddess do it.

  He was sophisticated beyond his years but also young, this young man.

  Guri sometimes felt the weariness of the adult who always companioned such a young person.

  He sealed his ghost eyes, dozed if that was what he did, and was in a hall where amorous maidens fed him feasts on plates of jewels – the ’tween-world at its most alluring. It burst.

  Guri unsealed his eyes again and found Nameless seated by him in the tree. Nameless had not jumped here. No, he had calmly walked.

  He was the son of a god, you forgot. Well, you forgot your own abilities and strangeness, too, thought the philosophical ghost.

  ‘You sleep more than the cat, Uncle.’

  ‘Ah?’

  ‘I’m bored with this place,’ said Nameless, turning his handsome face up towards the unseen sky.

  ‘I see you are. Come on, let’s have a joke with the village.’

  But Nameless did not respond. Only one year ago he would already have been bounding down the tree again, bough to bough. They would have dashed through the huddle of the village-city, Nameless laughing and Guri pinching bottoms and upturning pails.

  A man who was a child, a child who was a man; how did you entertain such a one? It had been so much more simple last year, last month, when he was still mostly a child.

  ‘I want to leave the forest, Uncle.’

  Guri had thought about this, too. Somehow they had outwitted the god who hated them all. But they were hidden here. It was more than physical: these snow walls, these snowed-in minds. Outside the barricades, scurrying on the ice plains, they must be spotted as clearly as fleeing deer.

  And she, she dreamed of that one still, and would then wake screaming, choking. At other times, Guri thought she dreamed of the dead Jafn, Athluan – but he was not sure.

  ‘Well?’ said Guri.

  ‘No matter,’ said Nameless. ‘Rest yourself, Uncle. I’ll see you at supper.’

  Guri watched him spring down through the tree. No longer in auric form, the body-locked Nameless was yet phenomenal. Not one mortal man could do this. He landed neat as a lion on the ice beneath, and sprinted away, fire-haired, into the labyrinth of snow.

  Saphay was sitting on the lip of one of her higher rooms, gazing down the ladders at Nabnish, refuelling the stove. She had thrown a stone at him, previously plucked from the wall, but her mind was not really on that.

  She smoothed the cat in her lap. It was warm and purring, heavy with sleep and food. It saw to the rats that crept heroically about the empty houses, but, more than this, was her pet.

  Saphay recalled how she had sat with the baby – next the infant – sleeping in her lap or on her breast. She adjusted the sleeping cat, and lay backwards.

  In ten years, Saphay had not aged perceptibly. She was twenty-seven, healthy and in her prime. There was a crimson flower twined in her hair, which her son had brought her. When he picked flowers from the vines, they lasted, from his touch, several Endhlefons before they faded.

  Sometimes in the evenings, he would still lie against her, humorous and telling her tales of the forest. It was then as if a thousand candles had been lit.

  In an hour the dark would begin to come. Then she would get up and go, the cat maybe prowling at her heels, to the cook-place. The village women, peering under their eyelids, would hand her dishes of the best food. Only once, at the very beginning, had something unnourishing been added. Guri had sussed the whiff of poison immediately and, going back with him, Saphay had screamed invective at the wives and bits, slapping their faces, while Guri distracted everyone by putting out the cooking fire and bringing other flames wastefully alive in the woodpile. After that the proffered dinners were always wholesome.

  She had not noticed Guri today. Normally now she could see him, if only in a vague or distorted manner. Now and then, too, he flashed on her sight, fleshed-in and bright yellow as a lemon.

  Her son would return for the evening meal. That was what Saphay looked forward to. She would be aware of his approach long before he undid the door. It seemed to her she was aware of him always. Although her intense connection to him – her sense of dislocation whenever she had had to let him go – had drained away during his first year, even now she felt some limitless and flexive rope uniting them. Even if they had been worlds apart, she would have felt it still.

  There was a sound at the door. Saphay sat up. The cat, securely fastened to the shoulder of her dress by its claws, looked round. Nabnish squirmed and squealed by the stove.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Saphay called in her Rukarian queen-tones. No one replied. ‘Open the door,’ said Saphay. Sometimes there were these infringements, safely settled. But when Bit-Nabnish hastily obeyed her, the door swung wide, and only the gloaming forest filled the doorway. Nothing, no one, was there.

  ‘Close it.’

  Nabnish closed the door. He gibbered.

  The cat’s ears, to
o, lay flat to its head; it growled and lashed its tail. Saphay felt only something like dust falling on her head. She spoke a charm she had learned among the Jafn, to see off unwanted unnatural visitants.

  She had thought it was one of the Ranjallans. Occasionally they lurked about the door, patting at it. One shout was enough to make them run. Her son too had had many of the village’s girls, despite village-parental warnings. These paramours would haunt the vicinity. They were wan and abstracted, hungry still for his favours. Yet none of them had ever conceived, through the four years of his sexual activities.

  But this evening something else had been there, it seemed. Saphay would ask Guri to search about, when he evolved.

  In the snow-dusk an hour later, the cat refused Saphay its company. Alone she walked between the deserted houses to the cooking-place and, as she did so, suddenly knew another was behind her.

  Extended close contact with the paranormal had only made her more pragmatic. She stopped and boldly turned.

  No one was there. However someone was there. As she stood waiting, he – the presence was masculine – drew near. He passed her like a silky wind, caressing her hair, tart-cold on her cheek. She glimpsed, unseen, a face she did not know, dark and remote, and mocking. She heard the words he spoke without a voice.

  ‘A fine Winter we are having, Saphay.’

  Second Volume

  THE STARS ARE DOGS

  Ask the snow what it is, ask ice, wind, sea and sky,

  Ask also the whale, the crait, the bear and the wolf,

  Ask wisely, not one will not tell you name and self …

  But what am I?

  Urrowiy song: Northland Gech

  ONE

  The Gargolem stood at the top of the Stair in Ru Karismi, looking down towards the River Palest. From here the river was slender as a silver necklace in the midday sun. Other objects, these truly of metal, shone throughout the city, and the metallic Gargolem itself shone golden-bronze.