Shadowfire

by Tanith Lee

  I had begun thinking of Tathra, too, my mother—I could not call her otherwise—whose body they would have thrown into the cavity of earth, for there was no bright burial of flame for the women, and that done while I lay on the hill.

  Gradually, all of it became a great chaos of lights and sounds to me, my mother’s corpse and Demizdor’s imagined spread-eagled body, the actual fire gusts and the black sky, the yells and bawlings of the krarl. And into this dream came riding the ghosts of Sihharn Night, because no man had kept watch for them.

  Of everything, they were the most clear. Black as the Black Place they came from, mounted on horses black as themselves or white as bone, and their faces silver skulls from which the pale hair still grew. I recall I knew myself dreaming at this point, never having credited this legend of Sihharn’s undead, and I jerked myself awake. And saw them still.

  The krarl was seeing them also.

  The clamor had died on the wind, just the sinking fire spattering now, the striking of shod hooves on the ground as the riders came between the tents, and the faint jingle of bells from their bridles.

  Like figures in a tapestry, the braves and their women kept motionless. Only those nearest to where the skull-heads passed drew aside, walking backward as if half asleep. Somewhere, about a mile off over the hill, the dogs of a neighboring camp had set up a howling. It was in another world, that noise.

  Near me, Seel breathed raucously through his mouth, and out of his stench came the sharp new stench of his urine, spilled from him in terror. I could have laughed at that, if I had had the health for it. I had already grasped who the riders were, and where they hailed from. Not the pit, but Eshkir. Their black was tawdry, and the skulls were masks.

  The foremost of the horsemen held up his black gauntleted hand, and halted the column. Then he spoke, in the language of the tribes but arrogantly, as if it soiled his mouth to use it.

  “You have one fettered there, on the ground, the black-haired. You will give him to us.”

  It was not a request, nor even a demand. It was an assumption. The krarl merely rustled and quivered, and Seel’s body clattered, his teeth and the teeth of his robe rattling with his fright.

  “You have also a gentlelady of Eshkorek among your tents. You will bring her. If she has been harmed, your krarl shall be burned. If she is dead, we shall kill your women and your children.”

  The horseman’s voice was like dry silver. I wanted to answer him.

  Before I could form a sentence or get it to my lips, the wooden pole was heaved suddenly upright.

  Sky ran together with land. I slid the length of the wood before the thongs bit and held me, and it was as though a tower crashed downward into my head.

  The sky raced, and then the sky was still. I had been stitched into a sack of pain. When I breathed, a knife between my ribs gored at my life’s blood.

  “For all his spear-brothers’ kind attentions, he will live till Eshkorek,” one said.

  “That is his misfortune,” another answered, and laughed gently. “See, Demizdor.”

  And, against the sky that just then was still, I discovered the face of a silver deer with eyes of green glass, and behind, a fall of hair like golden frost.

  “Yes,” she said, “I see him.” Her tone was not as I recollected.

  “He shall sing a new song in Eshkorek,” the man said.

  “He shall die there,” she said.

  There was blood in my mouth and I could not have spoken, even if I had had words. But I had no words, for they were speaking in the city tongue, and somehow I could follow but not use it.

  Then she leaned near, the deer-faced woman who was no longer quite Demizdor, and she raked my face with the nails of her hand.

  “Be happy, oh king,” she whispered. “You shall have a sweet welcome in Eshkorek Arnor.”

  Book Two

  Part I: Yellow City

  1

  DEMIZDOR HAD WARRIOR kin among the Eshkiri; she had never told me of them, and I had never considered it. Her former life had seemed to die from her when she entered mine. That was my blindness, as well as hers, for which both of us would pay, and heavily.

  Her mother, the gold-mask’s mistress, had also a sister, and the sister two sons, the cousins of Demizdor, like her of the silver rank, and proud and jealous of the much or little they had.

  The raid on the Dagkta spring gathering to get slaves had been a wild notion—a bet between princes, for so they did things in the cities, gambling with men’s lives and liberty. A force of eighty mask-faces set out on the sport, and, with the cannon, they expected no hindrance, and indeed received none to begin with. Having captured their slaves, they camped at the ruined fortress, but eighteen men rode on ahead to Eshkorek, traveling light, to bring the news home. When the bulk of the force did not follow, presently, some went back to seek the missing princes and their soldiery. Going to the ruin, the searchers quickly found all that I and the Dagkta braves—and after us, the ravens and the foxes—had left of them. Then there was an uproar. It had never before been dreamed that the dregs of the world, the inferior clay of the tribes, should master gold and silver lords and feed them to carrion eaters.

  At length they formed a vengeance party, and in the party were the male cousins of Demizdor. That a high-woman of their blood should become the drab of a krarl had them in a hot and cold rage.

  It took them most of the summer to achieve their goal. They greatly demeaned themselves to do it, sometimes journeying as ordinary humans among the trader Moi who, blond as they were, had ever been close with them as sheath with sword. Going about in this manner, they eventually imbibed the myth that had sprung up, as tall stories do, from a small grain of truth. The myth said that one warrior alone had taken the fort-camp of the Eshkiri slavers. He slew them all, and left them unburied and took away a city woman as his whore. The warrior of course was black-haired, and without tattoo, unique among the red tribes. I had occasion to recollect, when I learned this, how Moka had babbled to Moi traders of her handsome husband and his new flaxen slave-wife. There were no Eshkiri in the Moi band, but gradually the word ran through the yellow krarls and reached the right ears.

  In the end, I was sop enough for their vengeance, since another value had been added to me. Somewhere a red man had spoken of the fight in the ruin, mentioning the bizarre name the city men cried out as they offered themselves to my knife. The Moi had caught this chat, or even the Eshkiri themselves had heard it. They knew the name, of course. It was not bizarre to them. And, in the prosaic daylight, unenamored of their deities as they were, they never reckoned me, as the dead men did, a risen god-magician.

  Even before I had learned my origin, they had been piecing it out. They determined the black-haired man was the bastard of Vazkor, a by-blow on some tribal she-goat, wrought in the last months of his life.

  They hated Vazkor. I was to discover how faithfully they hated him.

  Eshkorek had been the first city to shatter at his fall. He had pulled her after him, for the shadow of his ambition had lain dark on her. His tokens still crammed her, to keep the Eshkiri to remembrance. Even the silver skull-masks had been the sigil once of Vazkor’s own guard.

  They could not reach the dead; he had cheated them, dying. But they had me, my father by proxy trapped in the hide of a subhuman barbarian.

  I can reconstruct Demizdor’s part, for she told me after, during the last hour we ever spent together.

  While I had attended the Dagkta council, Demizdor had been alone in the krarl. Boredom was her enemy at such times; scorning the women’s tasks, yet with none of the books or music or game-pieces of her own people to hand, she would sleep through the day to be done with it, or else take the black horse and go riding. Intent on my own business, I had not thought she might be afraid, alone in the warren that had treated her ill before. Certainly, she never let me see it, or them, I imagine. The braves mocked
her on her horse, but she rode better than they. The women muttered and stared, but none dared harm her, now that she was the chief’s son’s wife. My other two wives, Moka and Asua, had not loved Chula. They waited on her successor like handmaidens, the same way they looked after my gear and war-spoil. Embroidering my shirts and brushing the hair of Demizdor were all one. Yet they would giggle behind their veils at her mannerisms, or gape open-mouthed. She was rare and curious, like a brightly colored singing bird I had brought back from a raid.

  Two days Demizdor bore this, perforce. The third day she looked for me home. Maybe she had some word that Tathra was in labor; certainly she had heard later that I had gone to Tathra in preference to her. The day passed, the sun went down. She would have heard the death-wail of the women. No doubt she asked Moka, and Moka told her what it was, that Tathra had died. For sure, Demizdor looked for me after that, afraid, perhaps, how I should be. But still I did not return to my tent.

  The last word that came concerning me was a babble of Ettook’s slaughter and my sorcery, and how Seel had matched his power with mine, and bested me, so that I lay tethered and half-dead myself on the hill. Then she knew herself alone indeed.

  As once before, it seemed to her the world had gone mad. She must have doubted her grasp of krarl-talk.

  Ready to run to find me, she was ready, too, to run away. She had her horse; she could chance the wild, long way westward. Yet, like many a woman, part of her was nailed on her man’s fortunes still. So she hesitated.

  Asua was screaming with fright, asking the gods what would become of Tuvek’s household. Moka was trying to comfort her to quiet, knowing clamor would draw trouble quicker than silence. But the babies were squealing, and the dogs, catching fear like sickness, set up their own din.

  At midnight the men came. They put Moka and Asua on one side, and there was some altercation about whether my miniature sons and daughters should be slain, seeing the evil was in them from their daddy’s loins. However, the braves quickly lost interest in these precautionary measures, being more interested in the war-spoils I had accumulated. Chests were tipped over and ransacked, beer tapped, dogs dragged snapping away and a couple knifed, horses loosed, mounted, and crazily ridden about like a market. With the magician safely subdued, any of his goods were fair game.

  Soon, four of them pushed into my hearth tent, and found Demizdor. The four grinned, and said the things men say at such a moment. One of them was Urm Crook Leg, hobbling on his grudge for me. He unhesitatingly went up to her, for she waited there as if she were frozen. I could have warned him of her tricks, had I been there and his friend. She stabbed Urm in the throat, a clever, swift blow, but she had never killed a man before. She took him by surprise, but herself too. As she stood, letting the weapon go, paralyzed by what she had done, the three others came for her, and she was easy work for them.

  Each had her, and would have had her again, for they were lusty that night, but Seel called the warriors to krarl council. Learning of this, they bound her to the tent-pole, and with pegs hammered the rope at her ankles in the earthen floor. They did it with much laughter, for they had enjoyed her company and planned on more of it. Urm they hauled outside and gave a rough woman’s burial, since he was lame and girl-slain into the bargain.

  Ettook lay in the painted tent, cold as rotten meat. They were saying that when they made the pyre for him—and killed his dogs and horses to go with him—Demizdor should be strangled, and sent to be the chief’s pleasurer in the Black Place.

  That was the first night.

  The next day the seer was busy with Ettook’s body, painting it for cremation, and Ettook’s bastards, each hopeful and bright-eyed now that I was from the race, were dressing him, and Seel’s daughter plaiting his beard.

  The warriors meanwhile stood death-guard around the tent, though occasionally some would seek me up the hill, or Demizdor in my tent. The unavoidable intervals between these visits apparently saved my life, and hers.

  What went through her head as she lay there in my tent is all too clear. The men who used her were every one like a facet of myself, and she blamed me—that I had left her to them, that I had grown from their stock. She wanted to die, and expected death. She meant to cheat them if she could. Gradually her mental strivings concentrated only on this, how she might free her hands and steal the knife of some brave as he grunted and jerked inside her, or how she must snatch a blade when they came to take her out.

  In the acid sunset of Sihharn she heard the shout as they pulled me down from the hill on the wooden pole. She was glad I should suffer, fiercely glad, yet she was chilled as if with death already.

  There was some deal of noise, and no more braves came to pay her court. The sounds kept up for an hour or more.

  Then there was a silence.

  She lay in the silence, with the dark plastered over her eyes so thick that she could not even see her own bruised limbs, or the dull wink of the iron pegs that held her bindings. Suddenly the tent flap was thrown open.

  My wife’s heart lurched, and for an instant she was blinded by an insane weak confusion. When she could see again, she saw the unbelievable: her own people there in the doormouth, one of whom removed his silver skull-mask, showing her the face of her kinsman, Orek.

  The skull-masks did not, despite their threat, raze the krarl or slay its women, or even the several warriors who had raped Demizdor.

  Truth to tell, their party of reprisal had lost its strength during the months of searching, and was now thirty in number, and they had no cannon and were aware of the neighboring Dagkta campments across the slopes to east and north. Besides, they had me, the only warrior they actually yearned to harm, and they had got their lady back. And plainly, to her, all the faces of the braves who came in her had amalgamated into one face, and that one mine. I, the man who had forced her from her own life into his, and thereby brought the rest to pass on her.

  She had lost no honor with her kin. More, they gave her back her honor and her pride in minutes. They dressed her in a yellow robe that the younger cousin, Orek, had carried with him all the way from the old city. It was rich, of silk, beaded with crystal. I was to note later that despite the apparently masculine qualities many city women possessed, they were generally treated as fragile and precious by their men. Next, the silver deer-mask was found for her—because it was her own. (I picture Chula, barely conscious with terror, despoiled of that last treasure by a skull-headed demon of Sihharn.)

  Thus they remade Demizdor into the goddess-girl I had encountered in the ruined fort. Immediately she knew, intuitively, that the structure of her self-respect depended on her hate and loathing for me. Women are wiser in these matters, or they try to be. A man could not give up his dream so readily. Yet, having shut such a door with a great and tormented effort, he would entirely forget, and Demizdor could not.

  Presently, I was brought—or what was left of me.

  They tied me on a horse (I was senseless and did not complain), and soon they were riding west along the sloping land, slow for her sake, but fast enough that the krarl was far behind by moonrise.

  They halted at midnight in order that Demizdor should rest. She was pale and ill, yet buoyant, feverish with emotion. Orek held her arm. He was a boy, a year or two younger than she, and more than half in love with her, and with more than half a look of her, too, blond and green-eyed, with her slenderness, and not much of the man in his appearance at all. The elder brother, Zrenn, was different metal. His hair was the texture of rats’ skins, and dark, a thing not common among the cities. By contrast his eyes were a porcelain white-blue that looked as if the sight had been burned from them by a pale fire.

  I woke when the halt was called, and I saw them both, though not steadily, bending near me, and the silver deer behind. She was the only one of the three confronting me masked, for she was the only one with something to hide.

  It was Zrenn who laughed and m
urmured that it was my bad luck I had not died. His mouth smiled, but his eyes ate, feeding on pain and prophecies of pain.

  They were speaking the city tongue and could not guess I grasped it. Only she spoke krarl-talk, wanting me to be aware how our lives were altered and our loving done. When she scratched my face, Zrenn laughed again. I was to come to know his laugh perfectly.

  2

  The krarls take forty days or more to achieve that trek from the mountains to the eastern pasture, or from pasture back to mountains, stopping as they do each sunfall to camp, and many days by water or when they fight their wars, and slow with women on foot, their herds and their bickering. With the fast horses of Eshkir, tough despite their thin bellies, and the short camps and few diversions, we were in sight of the rock walls in thirteen days and climbing them in fifteen, and came to the outposts of the city in twenty.

  Demizdor seemed recovered, though she was not, and rode consistently as any of the men. For me the journey was less uneventful. A broken rib had pierced my right lung; I was choking up blood, and finally they began to believe with chagrin that their prize would expire before they got him home. So they took the space to bind my ribs, and fed me, as they always did, like a sick animal that disgusted them. I healed quickly enough to be surprising to them, and soon rode upright, bound in my saddle.

  “This is Vazkor’s, no doubt of it,” Zrenn said. “I have heard stories that he recovered from a slit throat on a certain occasion.”

  A couple of the men declined to accept the tale. They were all of the silver rank, comrades and not master and hirelings.

  Zrenn only glanced at me, and said for my benefit in slurred krarl speech, “If it heals so well from wounds, it will be able to endure a good deal of wounding before it dies. Poor puppy-dog. It would like to bite and cannot find its teeth.”

  Indeed, some of my marrow was returning into me. I had been near gone, and not lamenting, but as my ribs knit and the pain and debility left me, life burned up, and I could have howled like a dog in earnest to get out of the ropes they had locked me into, and caress Zrenn’s gullet with my boot. Then I would glimpse Demizdor, and the lead would sink in me again.