by Tanith Lee
But the men in the chariots stared – they stared at Chillel. Some made signs over their bodies to things in the air Ipeyek could not make out.
Then a Jafn started to speak to Ipeyek himself.
Ipeyek spoke back.
Neither understood the other.
Out of the press of people slipped a wiry one-eyed man covered in scars. He was a Gech, a fighter of alligators in the pits here. But he knew both the tongue of the Uaarb and a little Jafn. Electing himself their interpreter, he soon informed Ipeyek that though she might be his wife, the black woman must go with the Jafn now. They wished to take her to their Special One – so the Gech translated – who would be interested to see her.
‘No. She with me,’ cried Ipeyek, fruitlessly, as white-haired Jafn left their chariots, held Ipeyek still, gave him to the alligator-fighter to hold, slashed the tether from Chillel, and led her up the mud-hills and away.
The skies cleared again and were a dense concrete violet. A few clouds loitered, one of which never moved at all, or altered its shape.
Was Ddir responsible for what went on below? Was it only an inevitable result of colliding legend and reality?
Among the cloud mass, no creature was active.
Having set so much in motion, had Ddir lost interest?
Where Sham subsided back towards the south, an ice road of sorts remained. It was here that the mass of the allied force, All-Jafn and much of Olchibe, had settled. The army, and its tents, were like a hawkery: bustling and savage. To this, Gech was adding itself. Parties of men had stridden from the swamplands under totem banners prettied for battles: mummified animal heads and skulls – saurian, wolfish, wolverine, ape – Gech, unlike Olchibe, did not often raise the heads of men on sticks. Gech and Olchibe both exuded volunteers from Sham. There were beast-fighters, thieves, absconding captives who had somehow bribed someone, and would rather fight the Rukar than die aboard a Vorm or Fazion Mother Ship shackled to an oar.
Ipeyek might not have been remarked upon, if he had not brought the supernal with him on a lead.
The camp was loud with singing and hammering, the snort, roar and trample of mammoths, lions and dogs mingling. Men play-fought, practising for more serious affairs. The atmosphere also twanged to the note of bowstrings and the zing of mark-flung spears.
As the Jafn warriors carried her up through the encampment, heads were turned. Smith after smith hesitated between one moulding blow and another, the sword or knife cooling on the anvil. Olchibe after Olchibe, cooking something at his portable oven, let go chunks of meat into the fire.
Outside story, there had been none like her. She walked like royalty, a royalty they had, none of them, ever known yet recognized at once. Black as night, fair as the sun.
If the Jafn warriors thought themselves her jailers, by her mere presence she had made them her bodyguards as she had made Ipeyek not husband but slave.
Gradually a hush spread about her progress.
They saw how she held herself, how her hair brushed her footsteps, saw her eyes, and they grew immobile.
He was among the mammoths now. He had a trick, which was to go up on to the back of the mammoth Peb Yuve had given him, with the two lions from his Jafn chariot. They were all up there now, he and the lions on the mammoth’s back. Because it was what he wanted, he had charmed the mammoth not to mind; the lions seemed also glad enough, sunning themselves high in the icy brilliant daylight, kneading the mammoth’s tangle of hair with their paws, as cats do when content.
It was one of Peb’s men who came running, Olchibe, young.
‘Hey! Hey!’
None of them addressed Lionwolf as a king or leader – they put all that into his name.
‘Lionwolf, look what your whitehaireds found for you!’
Lionwolf looked down the mile of the mammoth’s back, and saw Chillel, created of snow and night, walking towards him through the war camp.
Like a liquid, curving river … like the flight of a bird out of the heart.
Her beauty was not of the earth, though she had been made from what lay upon the ground.
In the Olchibe tongue, Lionwolf said quietly, ‘What’s there.’ Not a question: an affirmation.
With a series of bounds, his feet weightlessly striking off its side, he dropped from the mammoth, leaving the purring lions in possession. Anticipating the manoeuvre, the assembled army nodded. They had seen this often. They accepted that he, the Lionwolf, was a god – yes, for the mortal half of him had become to them slowly irrelevant.
And the woman, what could she be but god-created? The Jafn accepted too that the Great God had made her, for she was like Star Black, the hero of Jafn Klow and Kree.
So they had brought her to their hero.
He and she.
It was a foregone conclusion.
Heaven had sent her here, for him. But did he think that?
What did he think? Only half god, despite Jafn amnesia, Lionwolf had a mind; he thought like a man – if sometimes like a boy. He beheld the beauty of Chillel, as familiar to him as his own, just a fact.
For the camp, those that watched, this was how they were: Lionwolf was a statue of amber, red hair burning over his head and shoulders and back, as if the rising or setting sun bloomed secretly in his skull. And his blue eyes – that were like eyes never seen in Gech, in Olchibe, and rarely among the Jafn peoples – were sapphire.
They had remarked and received much proof of his vitality, magecraft and warlike abilities. He did not even smell as other men did. He had the scent of light and newness, never unclean.
And to this she, the woman, was the counterpoise. Though they had seen black eyes, yet none like hers; black hair – the same. Her skin was midnight, the perfume that hung on her – as his was – heaven sent.
How could she be for any, then, save for him?
How could even he, with his erratic mercurial brain, think otherwise?
‘Who are you?’ Lionwolf said to the black woman, conversational there in the middle of his warrior host.
It was what many had said to himself, on meeting.
Lionwolf did not know this woman had never spoken before in her short, short life – nor that she was even younger than he, and had had even less of an infancy.
When she answered him, none of them were amazed. Only Ipeyek would have been, and his hirdiy, but they were not present. Her voice was soft as distance, clear as silence.
‘I Chillel,’ said the woman. She used the syntax of the Northland.
But Lionwolf, who had spoken to her only in Shamish Olchibe, did not baulk that she understood him, while he himself knew by now all the languages of Gech. They had long said, you had only to speak a couple of words of any tongue to him for him to become fluent.
So he said to her now attentively, in Northlandish, ‘You Chillel. Why here?’
None of them knew either she had never smiled, till then. She did it beautifully. It was not feasible for Chillel, after all, to do anything in any ugly way. Even her urination had been a deed of fastidious flair.
When she smiled, they noticed Lionwolf smiled back at her.
‘Here as wife,’ said Chillel.
‘Whose?’ he said.
She might have answered, Ipeyek. Chillel did not.
‘Now I choose,’ said Chillel.
This was not modest. How could she, though, goddess as she was, be modest?
Those hundreds of men grouped there, close enough to see and hear, did not expect modesty. Only the Northland Gech among them were offended, for she had employed a verb.
Lionwolf must have noted that too. He changed to southern Gech, to see what she would do with that. ‘You’ll choose? Well, look about. Who will you have?’
No, she had no difficulty with a switch of language. She gazed smiling into the face of Lionwolf which, smiling back at her, was shadowy sun to her sunlit shadow.
As if eventually willing to be modest, Chillel lowered her eyes. She turned her head, and next her body, and pointed
straight away towards the tallest of the four white-haired Jafn who had arrested her.
‘That man,’ said Chillel. ‘I choose that man as husband. His name is Arok.’
The wheat flamed golden.
Saphay stood gazing at it, puzzled and dejected. It was not what she had ever known before.
In the end, she walked forward through the wheat. She had done this before. Stalk on stalk bent with a dancer’s sway away from her, and sprang back when she had passed. The tasselled heads were taller than her own, though in colour not unlike her hair.
Beyond the wheat field lay an apple grove. Red fruit glowed as gaudily as the ruby windows of Ru Karismi.
She reached an area where there was nothing, and sat down in relief on a blunt spur of ice.
Looking up, she saw the tapering ceiling of the iceberg, itself colourless and deathly – familiar. It was high as sky.
These pyramids were Yyrot’s. There were three or four of them. One led into another by large cave-like doorways in the ice. They were full of forests, fields, vineyards – but not of the type that Saphay was comfortable with, for every blade of grass or grain, every bough and frond and fruit, had come alive, woken by the heat of Yyrot’s persisting malign side.
Here the god had put Saphay. She had come to under green leaves and, stretching out her hand, touched a grapevine with beads of jade. At first she had been thrilled at this land of plenty. Crops and vegetables were never of this sort – or at least she had never seen them. In the magnificent farming regions about Ruk cities, all was dormant, held in tight husk or vitreous stem, or sealed in cryogenic globules.
This pyramidal bounty palled after she had made herself puke on purple plums and dates.
She was also lonely. It was the loneliness of the prisoner, worse than that of the free.
Wandering about in the pyramids of ice, in the shining pearly twilight that was there by day or night, now and then Saphay saw Yyrot himself. He was in dog mode, and sporting always with Saphay’s feline.
Saphay thought in fury that she had been cheated sexually. Her lovers turned on her as murderers, or selfishly got themselves slain, and now this one, who might have been a lover, preferred to be a hound and fornicate with her cat.
The craziness of having such annoyances too, that upset her nerves.
Once or twice, she had come up against the inner walls of the icebergs. She was generally unable to peer out through them. Only one time did she, having climbed some species of ramp, seem to see through a semi-transparent patch like a frosted window pane. It was the night sky before her then. The stars were very bright out in the world, and in the veils of them she believed she detected a constellation shaped like a huge toad.
Yyrot had sat on a toad for a chair, before he brought her here. He was fond of animals? Not of her, certainly – though she was a sort of mother-by-law to him, since his liaison with the cat.
Sitting oh the ice-spur, Saphay felt again the tugging ache under her heart. That was for the other faithless one, her son. Had she dreamed of him? She thought she had. She had been jealous in the dream of some other woman to whom he paid attention, despite never before being affected by any of his numerous erotic exploits. This female, however, in the dream – an unrecollected alien – had filled Saphay with envy and an added sense of powerlessness.
Thinking of dreaming, Saphay’s eyelids drooped. The environ made her sleepy.
Someone stood in front of her.
Yyrot as a man? No, not he. It was … it was her son, Nameless.
No.
Saphay tried to wake up. So long since this had happened – eleven years – her guard had slipped. Too late now.
He was with her – Zeth Zezeth, who in her girlhood shrine had had his name written in Rukarian characters only as Zzth. The same noise a dagger made, slicing cloth.
‘What,’ he said, ‘did you suppose I was done with you? Your punishment I keep for you in a box of agate. At last we shall savour it, you and I.’
‘When?’ she whispered.
Laval silver, his hair; his breathtaking face was masked in indigo. With this ignition of vitriol she had lain in ecstasy.
‘There is none like you,’ she said.
She feared him still. There was no fear left on earth for her, after she had known his wrath. He had toughened her, and cured her of true terror over any but himself.
She thought he smiled, but it was the mouthing of a feeding wolf before its teeth meet.
‘None,’ he agreed.
Vain – he was still that.
Saphay kneeled down on the ice before him.
She wondered dizzily why he had not manifested to her through all this time, and why he did so now.
‘Your son,’ said Zeth Zezeth.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Ask me in a while. Ask me when I bring the agate box and flay your skin off your soul’s blood with the agonies I keep for you. Into eternity I will take you, Saphay, shrieking. It is owed.’
Saphay raised her head. Ashamed, she murmured, ‘Is there nothing else possible? Why … why …?’
Yyrot stood in front of her, and not the other one. She was not kneeling, but slumped on the spur. The cat sat nearby, sleek, her belly heavy with Yyrot’s young. But Yyrot was back to his insane benign side, a sullen man garbed in icicles. The wheat was already shrivelling. Cold griped in Saphay as the plums had done in her intestines.
Without a word to Yyrot, Saphay rose, contemptuous, and went away. Presently the cat, aware of some unwanted change in her paramour, went trotting after her.
Saphay walked now, weeping. Despite all things, she had come to see what love was worth. She had come to see why she had loved her son so much, and Athluan not at all. That was not virtue; it was because she had loved him, the monstrous one who would have killed her and would do it yet. Him, Zezeth.
‘She’s sobbing, poor thing, look, crying in her dream. Best leave her be. God knows what I should do.’
The woman, whose village lay along the east-north shore, in the land of the Jafn Holas, had trouble enough. Her man had recently gone off to join the alliance of armies – up towards Olchibe, they said, and next back and away into the foreign south and west.
She talked to herself, the village fishwife. There was no one else to chatter to. The poor deranged woman, who had been dragged ashore that day – eleven years back – out of the liquid sea and reefs of ice, had grown a little older but not more lucid.
She had been, this wreck, good-looking once, or so the fishwife thought: a girl then with garish yellow hair, like hothouse wine.
There had never been a life story she could get out of the girl. Even the village witch could not, though the witch had seemed not to like being here in the hut, once the girl was there.
Fishermen had found her. She had got snagged in their nets. Sometimes the Holas woman wished the men had then borne their catch further along, to some other house. Maybe even they should have left her to die, as the fisher-husband had said. He had never been keen on their enforced guest. Perhaps, now off to a war, he would not come back, instead take up with some Olchibe bitch or Rukar bitch …
Then the only company the fishwife would ever have was the rescued woman. And she ate very little.
‘Nameless!’ cried the demented one from her heap of rags. She often cried out this un-name – sometimes quite angrily. She used Jafn speech by now, though in the beginning had rambled in some outland tongue. The fishwife believed the woman had somehow learned Jafn through hearing talk in the hut. But now, just as frequently, the other stranger words came out – Yyr-something, and something else that sounded like a knife slicing through cloth. Her own name they had never been sure of, Saffi being the nearest they could reckon.
Saphay, weeping far off on Yyrot’s dead wheat, did not know her body lay also here. She did not know that, on the day Athluan had released her from one ice pyramid, part of herself had also come out of the sea at another spot. Which then was the real Saphay? She that had
been Athluan’s consort and borne the son of a god, who had trekked over the ice waste, sat in the snow-house? Or this one, this wretched bundle, ageing before its time, in the fisher-hut – as if Saphay’s dress had also taken on her life in that fatal hour of Zezeth’s undersea lovemaking, and subsequently been washed up here, knowing no better.
Third Volume
IN THE HAND OF NIGHT
It is sometimes possible to outwit one’s Fate, but in doing so the Fates of others in proximity may also be fatally disturbed – as fire blackens the hearth it burns on.
Magikoy saying: Ruk Kar Is
ONE
Funeral rites for Sallusdon, King Paramount, had continued for months, as was customary. During the first twenty days, the cities of Ruk Kar Is, especially the capital Ru Karismi, came to a standstill. Death alone moved along the ice river called Palest, robed and mailed in black and blackest crimson. After this, with the embalmed corpse buried in the Place of Sepulchres at the Palest’s end, though the rituals did not cease, yet they diminished. The streets and markets lost their immobility. On the fiftieth day, at noon, the new King Paramount, clad in mourning clothes, walked up the steps to his throne, high above the city: Vuldir the arch-conniver. One King Accessorate stood at the throne’s foot, and that was Bhorth the fool.
There had been no problem over Vuldir’s ascension; he had been elected by due process. Ru Karismi rang with bells and paeans of loyalty. Vuldir sat on the marble seat, looking on, garments impeccable, demeanour calm.
That evening Thryfe the magician left the city for his southern house.
It was a moonless night. Emerging from the glassy woods, he saw the windows of his mansion, still far off, flashing at him vivid white, for danger. Thryfe spoke to the lashdeer of his sleekar. In a blur of speed, he reached the house in minutes.
Many gargolem servants stood sentinel out on the snow.
‘What has happened?’
One of the servants answered in its slow mechanical voice, ‘We are not knowing, Highness. Something is about.’
Thryfe gave the chariot to the non-human grooms. He waited a while out on the snow, staring miles across the countryside. Eagle-sighted was Thryfe, but he could detect nothing. Nevertheless there was a slight electric tremor in the air, more than the cold or the sheer darkness. Aware of his return, the windows were fading down, and lamps lit inside.
