Cast a Bright Shadow

by Tanith Lee

  Chillel did not answer. Nothing did.

  Like a child, Lionwolf thought, Let me forget all this. Like a man, he thought, I can never be free of this, what I did and caused. He had no one to pray to, no friend to consult. His own self he did not know except as an alluring stranger.

  He sprang up and now he ran, coordinated and light as an animal or a machine, leaping over the runnels of snow – southwards still southwards. Chillel walked after him. When he was a mile off, due to the now downward slope of the terrain she continued to see him without difficulty.

  Very close to sunrise, a white icenvel broke from its burrow under the snow and bolted across Lionwolf’s path. Stooping even as he ran, without loss of momentum, Lionwolf pulled a shard out of the top-snow. He shaped it in seconds, and flung it, and brought the thick-furred, rat-like creature down, dead with the blow.

  Then he halted. He stood over the icenvel, marvelling at how sudden death always was. He had had some vague idea that he had killed it for food, but he had now no wish or need to eat. He had done this out of fear of what he could do. The pointless slaughter of the icenvel thrilled him to a terror beyond thought. It ranked level for him, in its own minor, total way, with the death of thirty or forty thousand human things.

  Chillel reached him when the sun was lifting over the horizon, for he had stayed there, staring at the icenvel.

  Then she performed a peculiar act. He believed it peculiar, turning to watch her.

  She buried the icenvel under the ice and snow, using her hands to make the little grave. Then she fashioned, from the same snow, three flower-like shapes, letting them perch there on the mound.

  ‘Is that,’ he asked her, ‘some custom of Gech?’

  Chillel smiled her mysterious smile, and shook her head.

  Lionwolf moved off again, only striding now, not running.

  For a minute, Chillel did not yet follow. She paused to observe the rays of the sun melting the glassy edges of the flowers she had made. The unusual phenomenon seemed to involve her, but it was hard to tell.

  The land stumbled down into an ice-lake. It was broad, almost to the sky’s edge. When they too descended and began to cross its surface, they were able to see big slaty fish imprisoned under and in its mirror. A day was necessary in crossing the lake.

  On its south shore, a band of primitive hutters lived, the first live creatures – aside from Chillel, and the icenvel – that Lionwolf had beheld since Ru Karismi.

  The hutters were not afraid, nor benign. They rushed out of their low thin ice-huts, brandishing ice-spears, the grips bound in fish-skin. A low thin people, to match their huts, they scudded along the shore, ululating.

  Lionwolf said, ‘What shall I do? Shall I kill them too?’

  Chillel said nothing.

  Lionwolf growled and spat on the lake. Then he plunged forward. Meeting the first three men, he smashed their spears, and next their skulls, with his fists. The rest separated into two groups, one of which stayed motionless while the other swarmed in over Lionwolf.

  He slew them all, breaking them in pieces. Not a cut or thrust of theirs harmed him, as usual.

  The remaining group, once the others were dead, flew round and dived back shorewards and into the huts, blocking up the doors with door-shapes of ice that had been standing ready.

  Lionwolf stripped the dead of their fish-skin and furs. These he threw before Chillel.

  ‘Dress yourself,’ he said, ‘you whore.’ Then he laughed.

  Having himself donned a selection of the stinking garments, Lionwolf strode off again. Chillel, having obeyed him and also dressed, followed.

  The foul smell of the improvised clothes soon dispersed, rinsed away by their two supernatural bodies.

  After this meeting, they met no others. But the next day an ice-jungle appeared, spread all across the route.

  Once they had reached and entered it, they found after all that game existed there. Presently, using an ice-spear retained from the huts, Lionwolf killed a deer. This he skinned, bled, jointed and ate raw, sitting on the ground. Chillel did not eat, but she drew a single bone out of the flesh, cleaning it in the snow.

  ‘Why do you want that?’

  ‘I have never properly seen a bone just then taken outside the body.’

  ‘What are you?’ said Lionwolf.

  It was again the question most often asked of him.

  ‘I am Chillel.’

  He shrugged but his eyes narrowed, watching her in the silvery jungle dimness. ‘What does your name mean?’

  ‘Cold,’ she said. ‘Darkness,’ she said. ‘The nomads named me.’

  He must, with his command of language, already have known that.

  ‘Who was your mother?’

  Chillel said, ‘I was not born.’

  ‘No? How then? You spoke before about three gods.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You know.’

  ‘Then I know but have forgotten.’

  ‘Make me forget, Chillel,’ he said. ‘Come here.’

  ‘Soon,’ she said.

  ‘What, are you putting me off again – after all this?’

  They sat several feet apart while saying these things. He had not reached towards her. Even his sexual organ did not stir at the prospect of her, though the furs concealed it.

  Lionwolf lay down, then he turned over on his face. He began to beat on the icy ground, and to shout and scream in the bell-like way of stags, and men.

  When the seizure of his anguish, which he did not grasp, and so could neither accept nor dismiss, left him, he fell asleep again.

  Further along in the night, he got up and stood in the jungle clearing, calling loudly for Guri. But Guri never came.

  The woman did nothing either time. She sat there all night, turning a deer-bone in her hand.

  Forests, jungles met them, disbanded. Twice more they saw other beings at large in the world – once a caravan of an ungainly sort, with woolly elephants as drays; once a village, a shambles of hovels and smokes. To neither of these human manifestations was Lionwolf drawn. He had now anyway an utter basic contempt for humanity. By outwitting and charming it, by besting it, he had come mostly to this overpowering scorn; although by destroying it he had given it another power over him – but that he had not yet understood.

  Once too there was what looked like a ruinous city or town marooned in the midst of the ice plain. They did not go near. Perhaps it was only a weird formation of rocks and ice.

  The southern ice-crags themselves were visible by now. They climbed them, he striding up horizontally, as he had not done since Ru Karismi. He flaunted himself, all his glamour and cleverness, before Chillel. Perhaps he did not realise this.

  At night, sitting on the ground, she would tell him stories. He had started to like them, to rely on them – a familiar consolation. Saphay had story-told in the past, and Guri, and even Ranjal, goddess of wood.

  Chillel’s stories he did not fathom, not quite. They were, as in the hall at Or Tash, oblique.

  She spoke often of the dying of the sun. She spoke of the Age of Ice, the Winter of five centuries and more.

  One time she did tell a sort of actual story. It concerned the creation of beasts out of stars, painted on the heavens and then let go to fill the earth.

  Every night, he coaxed her to lie down with him and make love. ‘Soon,’ she said.

  ‘Always it’s soon, never now. Suppose I force you.’

  Chillel said, in a voice like the faintest shimmer on the ice, ‘It would be no good.’

  ‘How do you know? Perhaps I should just try.’

  But the slight heat in his eyes – red, blue – went out. He was thinking, to put him off she need only remind him of that place – the place of salt – of two lions made of black or white clinker that crumbled in a breeze—

  ‘There is a tower,’ said Chillel, story-telling. ‘It is the sun’s tower. Men know it by its windows. It was, now is not, but will be. A hero always goes to such a tower
, the tower of a god, even if he is only a man and a warrior. There are others: one,’ said Chillel, ‘is a tower of ice, and one a tower of cloud. But this one is a tower with fiery windows.’

  When she was silent, Lionwolf said to her, ‘Which hero is it that always goes there?’ He wanted to name the heroes, and their races: Jafn, Gech, Olchibe – but he could not name them. They were done.

  He lay with his unabating pain a terrible while, watching moons and stars, and the south crags. He thought now it was a failing in him, because he was not human, that he could not deal with despair, agony and guilt – not knowing it was the human part of him which could not, and therefore how much stronger it had become.

  Only sometimes did she speak in an informal way to him. She did it when they reached the first cave system tunnelling the crags. ‘It’s here – here we go in, don’t we?’

  ‘Why not,’ he said. He had no notion where he went, or why. He had been trying to outstride horror which kept pace.

  The caves were like grape-green jacinth.

  ‘Do you know this cave?’ he asked her.

  ‘No.’

  He believed she talked more now, perhaps the stories had got her used to it. Also he thought she lied more.

  He did not like her. He wanted her – also more and more, the more she spoke. And he felt alone when with her, as he had never felt even when alone and feeling alone. As with so much, he did not comprehend what he felt.

  They entered the green jacinth caves.

  It was warm in there: cryotites blazed like sulphurous fangs. Even in the night, light loitered in the caves, and strange songs were sung by air or winds blowing through holes and crevices.

  ‘We could build our house here,’ he said. ‘Why travel on?’

  That night she made fire, not calling it out of herself as the Crarrowin had, or from the atmosphere as mages had in the Ruk or the garths of the Jafn. She simply pulled a bit of flint out of the hutter fur, rasped it on a rock, and when the flame came, shook it off on the floor. It took, and burned. And she the one who had always avoided closeness to a fireside.

  ‘Is it now, Chillel? Have we arrived at soon?’

  Lionwolf’s eyes lit red in the green caves, his shadow on the green wall pointed with garnets.

  She said, ‘Soon is now, now is soon.’

  ‘By God, you’ve made me wait.’

  All of him stood up then, his body to its feet and his phallic weapon to its height. Like a human man, he had sworn by God. And she, like a human woman, hospitable, lay back and her garments fell from her like mist.

  As his mouth touched hers, and his hands her flesh, he sensed without prologue what she must be. It was already too late. Not only had she drawn him to her, but she had in turn been magnetized to him.

  ‘We’re one,’ he heard himself say. It was a Jafn expression. Men now and then employed it in the garths – for to make yourself one with a woman was to her a great compliment. Athluan had apparently said this, too, to Saphay on the first occasion.

  Yet Lionwolf and Chillel – now he had pierced her, entered her body – were one.

  Her eyes were full of the waking flood he had glimpsed in so many women’s eyes – but with her it was not the same.

  He stared into her eyes – reflective ice, mirrors, black as liquid seas – then bent to her lips again.

  He had never had such pleasure with a woman. He had expected that – she was supernatural, as was he. It had always come off her anyway, the spice of a promised special sexual joy.

  That he gave her fierce pleasure in return was revealed by every inch of her body, even its swimming textures – and by her eyes. She murmured to him. Her tongue wrote out curious languages in his mouth—

  But—

  At first he takes no time to be aware of what he has just seen in her eyes, and felt written on his own tongue. Even so, he becomes aware. As they couple – couple. Then—

  And—

  It is the god that Lionwolf discovers there deep down in the black mirror eyes of Chillel – Zezeth, he is there. Nor is he any part of her, but the mirrored reflection of Lionwolf himself.

  Though Lionwolf has seen, yet this now cannot be stopped.

  Not only hunger, and the victory of possession, drive them on, he and she each clinging to the other, each crying out – it is this, though never before, the foregone conclusion of Fate. For now Zezeth will retrieve what once – profligate and by this very act – he gave away.

  Three in one, one in three, Yyrot, Ddir, Zezeth. So they were, or had become. Zezeth had fashioned Lionwolf, perhaps inadvertently, in the womb of a mortal woman. So then Yyrot copied him, irrelevantly through a skewed bestiality. Then Ddir created Chillel. Of all these three makings, only the first had stolen from its creator.

  In the cave, skin ebbed over skin, flesh drove with flesh like an engine of eternity. Stars fell, burst, scattered in her eyes, in his.

  For other men she had been able to perform a miracle. She had inoculated them against thaumaturgic death. On Lionwolf she would work differently.

  It is he who shouts aloud. He feels himself split, as a snake does, rearing from its skin. As the heat spears from him, the rest of the fire that has always been in him, that too erupts from every psychic pore of his body.

  Lacerated and aborted, he feels this other fire as it births itself away from him, a coruscating sheet which for an instant flares to mountainous size, and bathes the walls of the caves with scarlet … It is done.

  He lies on the earth, knowing nothing at all. He lies there reasonless, stricken, and at peace.

  But of course such a peace will not last.

  ‘Chillel …’

  Chillel does not answer – so often her way.

  And then Lionwolf stares over his shoulder, behind him, and looks where his shadow, more awful than he or any have ever seen it, enormously glows and bubbles with its fire-hearts of jewels.

  The shadow no longer imitates Lionwolf. It does not now do as he does.

  It is separate and free of him.

  Meanwhile, in mockery, a human shadow such as any man might cast, spreads away from him on the wall instead.

  Slowly Lionwolf pulls himself round, to confront what has happened, but does not digest what it is. His body, though, tells him: it twangs and cracks with rage – and sudden weaknesses. It – if not he – knows what it has been robbed of.

  The independent bright shadow hangs there a moment more, like a giant insect folded in gem-stitched wings. Then it dazzles entirely away. This leaves a great darkness.

  Shuddering, Lionwolf tries to find Chillel. But he cannot find her. His hands meet only the hard rock and ice of the cave.

  Sex between them has evicted the fire of the god – the essence of Zezeth from Lionwolf. She – a woman made of snow – it has melted.

  Wandering, both physically and in his mind, the man stumbles through the green caves of ice.

  He experiences the numbing cold, and the debility of malnutrition, for he has been there an age, perhaps one of months. Deprived of the essence of the god, is he now mortal? Not as any ordinary man, certainly, but still crippled in a way unknown to him, and horrible. He is frightened of himself and what has become of him, frightened of being in the labyrinth of caves. Sometimes he lies down to sleep. Distressing dreams rouse him up again. He has forgotten his name, and who he is, but after all who he is – is no longer who he is … A riddle worthy of Olchibe.

  Sometimes he does sleep and does dream, but then the dreams do not wake him. He sees cities blazing and blown white dust and a woman flowing away under his body like a liquid river by night. His dreams are all of dissolutions.

  One day, daylight filters through to the cave where he is wandering. It takes him several hours to clamber up the wall to it. He had attempted to walk up the wall, fallen, suffered from the ground’s impact and been bruised.

  He squeezes out through a funnel of ice. The sun is over on the right hand, low and streaked with cruel colours. He watches it, re
gisters it is going down and, guided by that, trudges along the cragside, keeping to a southerly direction. That night, after sunset, snow comes.

  Noon parasoled the deep valley, which was full of the stalks of frozen wheat. The crags which made a solid barrier to the north threw no shade there as yet. Everything glistened from the new snow, like the ringing of bells.

  Four women were dancing in a wide clearing among the grain. There was a floor there of flat scored snow.

  They wore white, so for a while it might have been hard to see them. But some had wine-yellow hair and some dark brown, you could spot this quickly – also the flash of the four swords in their hands as they smote them together in the dance. The sound of that rose, too: it was like metal barking.

  Their eyes were masked in visors of blackish glass which gave off rainbows.

  The man who had shambled down along the snows had halted, looking at this.

  It seemed the women did not themselves see him.

  Clack went the swords.

  Nameless, who had been Lionwolf, sat down on the slope, and gradually the noon sun, cold-hot after the cave tunnel, made him sleep.

  ‘Darhana, who is this?’

  The youngest of the women, malt-haired, bent over Nameless. She considered him.

  Then she turned her head to look at her companions, the other three dancers. She did this turning of the head without shifting the rest of her body about.

  It was the same in the dance. At one juncture she would position herself, this Darhana, her head facing north, her body south, one foot with toes to the west, one foot toes to the east. Without changing her arms at all, she could rotate her hands. This she now did – it helped her to think.

  ‘No enemy,’ said Darhana.

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘Partly. But not all.’

  ‘He’s tall, and heavier than he looks with muscle,’ said one. ‘Are you able to carry him?’

  Darhana nodded. She was a young girl, but she leant right over now and drew the red-haired stranger up from the snow in one solitary lift, as if he were a boneless cloth.

  Then she carried him in her arms, stepping without awkwardness between the white wheat, the three others moving after.