Shadowfire

by Tanith Lee

  My first book, I thought, might be some trouble to me. I had learned only the crude tribal script, but with my occult gift for the city tongue, I gambled I should master their writing, too. Yet I put it off, only fingering the books, till I saw a man smiling—he was masked; you learned to tell a facial action by the movement of the eyes—and I lifted up the book and opened it, and found I could read, clear as day, what was put down there. I turned about with it, and read out to the sneering bronze a line or two, as it took my fancy. Only later, I wondered. It seemed to me these things were too marvelous. But, having no control over them, I adapted myself once more to my abilities, putting questions and doubts aside, as I had with my new life.

  I learned to play music, too, at Eshkorek, and discovered I had some ear for it. Their songs were strange, the melody could go where you did not look for it, yet somehow the effect was pleasing. The girl who taught me this skill taught me other things also. Sometimes, looking at me under her lids, she would fashion chords on the silver-stringed neck of some instrument, winding up the bone pegs, then striking her narrow fingers over the sound box as a cat scratches at a ray of sunlight, to produce a high-pitched, delicate, silver trembling note that was like the music she herself would make in bed. I had much choice in girls that winter, but her I liked very well. Her name meant Sparrow, and she had a little mauve mark on her left breast, like a butterfly.

  Other than girls, I had few companions, and no individual to trust.

  Erran’s gold and silver men gazed askance at the cuckoo in their nest. One second they would mean to treat me as an inferior, a slave like the Dark People, to be despised, that they might kick end to end of the palace and not be called to account for. Next moment they would recollect I had Erran’s protection, his special favor. I was in his store cupboard for future need, and therefore I must not be hurt.

  Despite this stamp of immunity, I had myself tutored in Eshkorian swordplay, and found the lessons useful, since once in a while a gang of soldiers would seek me out for discord. There were always bronzes, my supposed class equals, who resented the promotion to their midst of a bastard tribesman—none I think believed I was Uastis’ progeny, though many agreed I might have begun in the loins of Vazkor. There would be caterwaulings, spittings, and presently a merry dance, during which they would learn that, whatever else they do mistakenly, the tribes breed men hard. At length, all of us bloody, and I alone upright, a scatter of silver captains, having observed the fray, would clap me on the back and boot their officers in the breeches, and I should be thankful for the poison-taster at dinner that evening. I managed, after the first, to derive entertainment from these scenes and from the silvers’ condescension. You are the man’s dog, thought I, so be his dog. Bark, snarl, and bite, then wag your tail when the lords pat you. The bones are juicy, are they not? And inside your doggy hide you are still a man, and the son of a greater man than all this pack of curs together.

  Erran set a guard around me, day and night. Not only the four bronzes who rode with me about the city or the cloth-masks who tested my liquor and meat—none of whom died; their presence was enough to deter the bane—but in addition certain others, infrequently seen yet ever-present, that I had guessed to be Erran’s spies.

  One day, when I was riding to the horse-park with my four guards and some fifteen others, down a narrow street generally acknowledged Erran’s territory, an arrow with a silver flight shot from the sky. I had not fought krarl wars without some sagacity coming of it; I was from my horse as soon as my ears picked up the whine of the shaft. As well. The thing parted my hair; another second and it would have combed my brains.

  Two heartbeats later a swarm of men dashed over the walls.

  There is no nicer place for an ambush than a ruined snowy street.

  I had been permitted a sword, of Erran’s bounty, and cut around with it to reasonable effect. Then I saw our trouble. The attackers were mostly silver men, and although plainly an enemy, there was a stigma to the bronzes involved in mowing down a superior class. Generally, only captain fought captain, mere soldier fought mere soldier. Although Erran must have tried to hammer the dogma out of them, yet he still expected bronze to kowtow to silver and to gold in his own palace, and so undermined the teaching at its source. True, they rallied, and true their swords slit up the guts of many a silver-mask, yet their hearts were not in it, and I could foresee a black future as the ambushers were easily twice our number.

  Then from over the same walls the ambushers had scaled came bounding city slaves, the Dark Men with their indigo-stubbled pates and their wood-knob faces, like animated ugly effigies set going by some demented magician. Without a battle cry or a death moan they plunged into the silver-masks’ swords and finished them. The flight concluded, the slaves slunk away.

  That night I approached Erran and asked for a guard of Dark Slaves. He told me I had always had one, and who else did I suppose the reinforcements were?

  The futile attack, I heard meanwhile, had been set by Orek, Kortis’ man, the kinsman and worshiper of Demizdor. Erran launched no reprisal. I lived, Kortis had lost men he could ill afford, and no doubt Orek would be made to regret his impulse.

  Three city months passed, near four of the tribal calendar. Deep in the upper valleys, far east of Eshkorek, the krarls would be waiting out the snows in their tents. That other world, with which I had done forever, seemed like a story I had read in one of the Eshkorian books. Only in my dreams did I go back there, fight again in their battles, and live again by their codes. I dreamed of slaying Ettook, not as I had, with a power that came only once like lightning, but with my hands or my knife. Over and over I would wring his fatty neck or drive my blade in his belly; over and over he would rise, laughing blood, and I must grapple him again. There was another nightmare also, one I would start up from in a sweat. In this I saw Tathra, all black, in her dark robe and shireen and her black hair that never, even to the last day of her life, showed any gray. She was standing above a well when behind her, stark white against her blackness and the gray gloaming of the dream, would come a woman like a ghoul, white robed, white haired, and with a white cloth over her face. For a long time, or so it would seem, this woman would remain motionless at my mother’s back, and Tathra would not see her. Then, quite slowly, the white woman would draw down the veil from her face, and she would have no face at all, but a silver skull, and that not even of a woman, but of a great cat, a lynx. And at that moment I would understand that Tathra did not stand above a well, but above a grave.

  The strength of dreams is very strange. Explain away these symbols as trite and childish as I might, I could not get free of them, and every twenty days or so I would frighten the girls who shared my couch by shouting and striking out as if an army were upon me.

  At length there was a night that the dream came in the old way and I began to shake and shudder in my sleep, when suddenly everything was changed. The veil fell from the white woman’s face, and revealed only the blurred, weather-chipped features of a statue under it, mossy and harmless, while my mother Tathra bent to the well, and when she straightened, she was beautiful, as in my boyhood.

  That was the exorcism of this dream. I never had it after. The priest who saved me from it was none other than my music girl, the Sparrow. She told me in the morning I had been crying out in the dark, and she leaned to my ear, and whispered to me all was well, without waking me. It was a trick she had learned long before to calm the nightmares of a sister when they slept together in one poor little bed in the lower quarter of Eshkorek.

  Despite Erran’s proposals, as far as I know no girl conceived by me in his palace, nor by any other man, for that matter; I never saw a lifted girdle in all my days there, though plenty of lifted skirts to account for it, and there were few children. I suspect the city women grew barren, their wombs shriveled like the brains of their men, by legends and excessive glorious poverty.

  The snow broke and the winds came.
They roared like ghostly cannon through the city.

  The fierce horses liked to race the wind. You could see them do it any day, when they were out on the flats of the park. Tathra had told me in my infancy that to her own tribe the wind god was a black horse; sometimes he would sweep down the slopes and get the mares in foal. It seemed all the Eshkir horses were children of the wind god, and roused at his passing to pursue and follow him.

  The So-Essian equerry, Blue-Sleeve, said we should be going on the spring horse-catching through the northern mountain valleys once mild weather had laid hold. He leaned on a thin black cedar tree and whistled after the horses as they ran madly up and down the landscape of brown-bleeding thaw snow, the speed and the gusts fraying out their manes and tails.

  Over to our left, the cluster of grooms disbanded and pointed along an avenue of rotting green statuary; Erran was coming on a crimson trapped horse, about thirty of his silvers around him, and a group of golds. There were women, too, their veils and wrappings billowing in the wind.

  Every man on the flats doffed his mask save for those already unmasked, as I was. I scarcely ever bothered with my metal skin—some artisan’s shaping of a falcon’s head—but wore it fastened on my shoulder as others did when going bare-faced.

  Even some of the horses ceased running, as if they sensed the lord was near, and froze, intently staring sideways through the smoky afternoon.

  Erran rode out onto the flats, his company trotting behind, and reined up, looking about with his golden leopard-head.

  “Blue-Sleeve,” he called to the equerry.

  Blue-Sleeve hurried to Erran. He bowed, and stood answering questions with nods and brief humble sentences. Like all Erran’s dogs, he was well trained.

  I glanced at the silver people, in particular the women. I had not seen many females of that class. Generally they did not eat at the evening meal with the captains. Not a face was on show. Even the round breasts and arms so frequently offered to view in the palace were muffled from the cold. Then I saw the deer-mask of Demizdor.

  I had not laid eyes on her for fifty or sixty days, and on the last occasion I had glimpsed her, it was from a distance. She was walking to and fro on a high gallery in her yellow gown, but becoming aware of me, she had quickened her step and gone away.

  Today she wore a black fur hood, and though her face was silver still, her dress was fringed with gold and her velvet sleeves ringed with it. However, she was not with Erran but with a stocky golden bear. He fondled her wrist in its velvet gauntlet, but she was staring straight at me.

  Erran called a second time, my name, or the name I had been given here.

  “Vazkor.”

  I went to him, more leisurely than the equerry. I put my hand on his horse’s neck; it knew me, I had had a part of its training a month before.

  “My lord.”

  A few of the ladies murmured that I had not bowed to him (I never did), and I heard some man say, “This is the proud tribal dog of the mixed blood.”

  “I have been telling Blue-Sleeve,” Erran said, “that we should like his best riders to put the horses through their paces for us. He has recommended you, Vazkor, above all the rest. There is none to match you, he says.”

  “Ah, yes, my lord,” I said, “that is no doubt because of my tribal pride and my mixed blood.”

  The man whose sentence I had borrowed swore. I nodded to him politely and went away to do my tricks for Erran’s brainless court.

  There were three others picked beside me. It was the equerry’s compliment to us, rather than an effort to please Erran. Still, it rankled, and for the thousandth time I must recite to myself the old spell: Act his dog, for you are not his dog; it is worth the play for the bone. I had not yet learned the lesson that when you are forever telling yourself that such and such is worth the price, then the price is too high and has been paid too often.

  The grooms led the animals over. We mounted up and had them do the usual things that show a horse’s mettle, and please any gentlemen and ladies who happen to be watching: standing jumps, and jumping over obstacles of various heights, and a mock fight, horse with horse and rider with rider. This bout, having been chosen for it, I won. I was not sorry to knock my opponent out of his saddle; he was an imbecile I had had dealings with before.

  Presently, when it was all done and we were walking the horses to cool them, three golds came up to me with their silver women, and one of these princes was the bear who escorted Demizdor. Partly I had forgotten her in the hard exercise, and that she had changed hands.

  The golden bear put his palm on my elbow and another finger under my chin to halt me, for all the world as if I were some serving girl he fancied. I stopped and looked at him, and felt stupidly like a boy who had been touched up by one of his father’s guests and must keep quiet about it when he would prefer to answer with his fist.

  “Excellent. I applaud your skill,” Demizdor’s new master said. “Do you lie with the mares to make them so cooperative?”

  I pulled my wits together, smiled courteously, and asked him with deferential interest, “Do you recommend it, sir? Is it good?”

  His friends laughed. I was a dog who could crack jokes as well as ride horses. The golden bear, however, was not finished.

  “Well,” he said, “we’ve seen the fancy dancing, but not how you break a horse to your lord’s service. That I should like to witness indeed.” Whereat he turned about and shouted to Erran, “My lord Leopard, have I your permission to get this breaker of yours to tame a beast of mine?”

  Erran had been talking with Blue-Sleeve; he left off and crossed to join us. Behind the eye-holes of his mask his eyes were bright with piercing interest, and, more than any other thing, Erran’s eyes told me I should beware.

  “Tame a horse of yours, my lord? I believed your beasts were tame already.”

  “Every one, save for the red stallion.”

  “The red? But you won him at four-headed dice a month back.”

  “So I did, my lord. And he has been a curse to me.”

  “Surely you exaggerate,” Erran said smoothly, enjoying the dialogue with unmistakable razored anticipation. “That gentle stallion is softer than your lady there, damask Demizdor.”

  If he had meant to warn me—to this hour, I am not certain—he could have done it no more plainly.

  “Yet, my lord Leopard, I beg your permission,” the bear said.

  “Well, then, if you are reduced to beggary, sir, you had better have it. You will not object to exercising this gentleman’s animal, will you, Vazkor?”

  “Ask me again, my lord,” I said, “when I have done so.”

  The bear had slapped one of his silver men on the shoulder, and the man had gone off down the avenue of statues. After half a minute, a closed-in horse box of black metal was brought at an even pace up the avenue and onto the flats.

  The box was a sort of prison-on-wheels, a city object I had never taken to. Now I and the whole company could hear there was some need of it.

  Something inside the box was kicking and lashing and bellowing to get out.

  Erran’s eyes currently conveyed entire surprise and mystification.

  “Why, my lord,” he said to the gold bear, “can your passive beast have grown into a demon overnight? I think we had better withdraw before the creature is let loose. My Vazkor, do you judge you can handle this horse?”

  I looked the bear in the face, and said, “I should say this horse had been handled somewhat already.”

  Surely a babe yet warm from the crib could have guessed the facts. If they could not doctor my food, they could doctor the food of their horses. From the noise of it, my lord Prince Bear had stoked his animal with the seeds of death for both the steed and whoever should happen in its path.

  I had never been so angry since I had been a boy in Ettook’s krarl. Anger that he should waste a fine be
ast for his wretched villainy, anger that I must risk my life to make theater for them, and a darker, sicker anger for the woman I knew had been behind his scheming.

  I stood there on the flats while the lords and ladies of the leopard’s court drew off to safe harbors, and the mad horse screamed and lunged in his jail. Even the grooms ran, leaving just one poor cloth-rank boy with a bare face like gray suet, who slipped the bolt on the box door and pelted for safety.

  This time I thought, If I survive this show, it shall be the last. By the sow-harlot-bitch-whore goddess who grunted me forth from her belly, this hound has offered his last trick.

  Then he was out, and I stopped thinking neatly in words.

  He was not like a horse. If I had been remembering the legends of the wind god of Tathra’s tribe, this was surely he, not black but red, not wind but whirlwind.

  He shot from confinement like ball from cannon, smoking foam, and came right at me with his eyes on fire.

  I had reckoned on that. My legs and entrails said, Fly him. But instead I ran to him as he to me, and leaped for his great blazing horse’s head.

  I got his breast, hard as rock, in my side; the impact almost winded me, save I had been ready. I swung over his neck and landed on his back like a gasping fish slung down on some heaving ship’s deck, and grabbed the foam-sticky mane.

  He squealed, from pain or panic or his madness, and reared up, kicking the sky. He was slick with sweat. I clung as I could, and slipped and clung again.

  I had believed I could only hope to hang on him like a mountain cat, till he died of the poison or dislodged me and tore out my vitals with his teeth. Suddenly something else swarmed through me. It was like the bite of strong liquor, like lust even. It was the notion I could mend him.

  There had been one earlier day, long past, when I had kneeled over two does by a winter pool, and I had known it was life I took, the possession of another. And now, hugging the plunging stallion, washed by his pain, snowed by his bloody foam, I felt his life and his right. Both to die for the whim of a pusillanimous fool, or both to live?