by Paula Guran
I felt a strange conviction from his calm utterance, which I resisted. “Does this danger come from you yourself, Sir, or from some other quarter?”
“Another quarter. It comes from Gothol, who is, in a manner of speaking, my half-brother.”
Again his deep resonance somehow invited my trust against my will. But indeed his words were full of somber implications which, as I sorted them out, prickled along my spine.
“If it comes from Gothol, it also comes, then, from . . . ”—my throat, for a moment, would not give passage to the name. The deformed giant courteously waited, despite an air of growing unease. “Ahem . . . Comes also, then, from Zan-Kirk, who begot Gothol on the demon Heka-Tong.”
“Just so, my friend. That great mage indeed did sire Gothol thus, down in the sub-World.”
“So . . . if you speak of him as your half-brother,” I ventured to continue, “then might you not, Sir, be born of Zan-Kirk’s consort, Hylanais . . . ?” I stood in some suspense, fearing that perhaps my mouth had outrun my wit. I had asked, in effect, if he had not been born of the witch’s defiant coupling with a nameless vagabond abroad in the wilderness, done in vengeance for her mighty consort’s sub-World dalliance with the demon Heka-Tong . . .
“Born of Hylanais, yes, and named by her Yanîn—but truly, hark me, Sir—”
“Delighted. My name is Nifft, called the Lean, of Karkmahn-Ra.”
“I greet you, Nifft, but in all truth we stand in danger even now. For Gothol is at hand. And Zan-Kirk—even now quite near to us—will himself follow hard upon Gothol’s coming!
“In fact, good Nifft, we have no time to flee. If you’ll permit me, I will take the liberty of hiding you. We truly have no time—see there?”
His gnarled arm swept up-flume. Up at the fractured Rainbowl Crater—up from behind the low rampart that repaired the lowest fraction of its gaping wound—a golden star had risen . . .
Or comet? It moved at a steady, easy pace down . . . down towards us, sinking smoothly through the night sky in an arc that arched along the Flume’s great lanterned length. This gliding, golden star looked likely to alight quite near us. Urgently, the deformed brute asked me: “To preserve your safety, Sir, would you permit me a rather brusque liberty with your person?”
The comet sank nearer and nearer—now there was no doubt it would alight near where we stood. “Well,” I said, “I suppose if you think it—”
“Thank you Sir!” His huge arm plucked me from my punt and hurled me into the air, hurled me high into the branches of the great tree shadowing us.
I was plunged into the black cloud of its leaves, where I bruisingly impacted with its boughs, which I desperately embraced. My launcher’s voice rose after me, soft but distinct:
“I’ll be at hand my friend, but we must not be seen. A dire work which we cannot prevent is to be done here, and witnesses will surround us who must not see you. You must lie still, and watch, and harken. On our lives, don’t betray our presence here!”
II
But my dear Shag, let us leave me—I assure you I don’t mind—leave me up in those boughs for a moment, up in the tree where Yanîn has just tossed me. Because it occurs to me that just now you might be wondering, “Hylanais? Zan-Kirk? And who might these be?”
They were long faithful lovers, these two mages. In the use of their powers they were beneficent, and their thaumaturgies were often helpful to the cities of that coast, for their powers were wielded in controversion of all mishap or malevolence that might befall Kolodria.
Their concord was Lebanoi’s blessing, as was their discord nearly Lebanoi’s undoing.
They were faithful to one another, these two, until Zan-Kirk’s ambition urged him to an exploit that could truly test his power. And thus it was, in a moment fatal to Lebanoi’s peace, that Zan-Kirk resolved to descend to the Sub-World, and there to couple with the Demoness Heka-Tong. This would be an eroto-chthonic feat unequaled in thaumaturgy’s annals, and it may actually be the case that the sorcerer fatuously expected his mate’s approval of this exploit for its daring.
Instead, her wrath and reproach are well chronicled in Shallows ballads. In one, the sorceress most movingly expostulates:
Ah Zan-Kirk, had we not a vow
That all-encircled us as now
This sky, these green-clad mountains do?
Thour’t all to me—not I to you?
Go then—rut as suits thy will!
But know, therewith our vow dost kill.
Thereafter, from unplighted troth,
I fly bird-free, and nothing loath
To try the love of any man
That please mine eye, where-ere it scan.
And should I choose conceive, I shall,
And so, of all we’ve shared, ends all!
Thus a Chilite lay reports her rage. Zan-Kirk answered this with equal rage. This was to be an exploit, in no way erotic. It was a Feat, to which he, as a hero, had a right. At her threatened infidelity, he thundered,
Shouldst thou do me adultery
What spawn thou hast in bastardy
Shall choke its life out in my grip,
And I thy bitch’s bowels shall rip!
—spoke thus, and wheeled his dragon-mount up and away through the dawn-lit sky, south to Magor Ingens, the hell-vent through which he descended to his infernal exploit upon the vast, fuliginous body of the Narn Heka-Tong. This was a coupling that required seven years for its accomplishment, and at the end of that term Gothol—who at present bestrides the sky above us—was born full-grown in all his power.
In these years of betrayal Hylanais embraced a nomad’s path. Cloaked or cowled, she appears here and there in the popular record of song and penny-sheet poetry, from which it seems she wandered up and down through the length of Kolodria, and even across the Narrows into Lulume, and in the course of these peregrinations she committed a retaliatory infidelity with a hulking rural simpleton chance-met on a country lane.
However impregnated, she bore a man-child some few years before Zan-Kirk accomplished his swiving of the Narn Heka-Tong. The warlock must perforce abide with the Narn as she lay in brood, but Zan-Kirk’s rage at Hylanais caused him to leave the Narn-son, Gothol, too abruptly, before that potent nursling had been molded to the mage’s will.
Rumors winged with terror flocked ahead of Zan-Kirk’s return to Lebanoi, for he came to destroy his “faithless” mate. He raised a demon army and led it up from the Sub-World through the Taarg Vortex. The march of this subworld army through our world—through Sordon Head, and thence across Kolodria’s southern tip—left a wake of slaughter and nightmare still traceable seven generations later. Perhaps to still the panic his advent might spread, he sent ahead nuncios to Lebanoi to proclaim that it was Rainbowl Crater he came to “protect,” and the city itself had naught to fear from him if it offered him no opposition.
Hylanais was amply forewarned. She scorned to draw her forces from the sub-Worlds. Those she recruited were warriors who had proven their greatness in their dying. She went to the Cidril Steppes and raised the Orange Brotherhood from the plains where they’d fallen, holding off the K’ouri Hordes. These she called up from the blanketing earth where they’d lain three hundred years. In Lulume she raised the Seven Thousand from their tombs in Halasspa, which they saved from the Siege of Giants by their valiant but fatal sortie from that city’s walls.
She rushed her forces overland. Her dead army’s march still echoes eerily in the mountain folks’ traditions, but of physical scars they left none. All passions were quelled in them but the soul-fire of warriors. They advanced without hungers, or hurtfulness.
Hylanais arrived just before her wrathful mate. Her forces took the high ground just beneath the crater’s wall. Rainbowl is closely flanked by neighboring peaks, but sea-ward the crater presents an almost sculpted rim, like an immense chalice of glossy stone. Beautifully carven by nature, it had spillways cut from its base to feed the Flume, which like a titanic wooden nursling suckled from the
crater’s mother waters.
Shortly after the witch had deployed, the warlock drew his forces up below her. Her lich army’s shadowy sockets stared down into the Subworld legion’s sulfurous orbs.
Rainbowl Crater’s catastrophe is almost universally ascribed to Zan-Kirk’s ungoverned fury, for it seems he was one of those men who thinks fidelity their mate’s sacred duty, not his own. Raging upslope he came, in his fury conjuring a lightning-storm so ill-controlled as to wildly overleap his hated consort, and strike great Rainbowl’s wall instead.
Thus, battle was never joined. A thunderous din of broken stone deafened half the world, and the crater’s towering rim fragmented. Colossal shards of stone hung in the air, then thundered down the slope, just ahead of the down-rushing waters unpent by the blast.
The avalanching rubble entombed those martial legions of the dead. The great wave swept the demons down, and drowned Upflume Valley and half its population in a demon-clogged flood.
Though no direct witness is recorded, the Elder Fiske’s lines are surely close to the truth as best we can reconstruct it:
Now Rainbowl, a chalice with moon-silvered rim
Gigantically balanced above the mad din
Of up-swarming demons and down-swarming dead—
Now Rainbowl is ambushed by black thunder-heads.
White tridents of lightning lash Rainbowl’s curved wall,
And the stone is all fractures, is starting to fall . . .
The wall is all fragments hung loose in the sky
Thrust out by a water-wall half a mile high.
On the dead who so long in their first tombs have lain
The stone crashes down and entombs them again,
And the following wave smites the demon array
And washes them wheeling and wailing away.
And thus it came to be that under the landslide of Rainbowl’s broken wall, the witch’s army of the Raised Dead lay once more entombed, and that downslope a great swamp was created in Upflume Valley, and buried in the muck of that swamp, a host of demons lay ensorcelled. The subsequently famed “swamp-spice” which flourished in that fen—the herbs and weeds and worts of various and subtle potencies—sprang from the sub-World nimbus that corona’d those drowned demons.
III
I hope you will not have forgotten, Shag, that we left me hugging the high branches of a tree in that same swamp, on a torchlit night with the full moon at zenith, nor have forgotten the slow-sinking golden comet that was descending, arching down towards us.
I hugged the boughs and peered up through the foliage. The comet slowed and slowed still more as it sank, sank nearer . . . until it paused midair perhaps two hundred feet above the swamp, about of a height with the top of the Flume.
And, coming to rest in the air, it was a comet no more, but an airborne raft of carven logs with cressets blazing all around its rim. Amidships stood a man of more than human stature, half again a tall man’s height, heroically muscled, and clad in a golden corselet and brazen greaves.
So regal seemed his ownership of the very air he stood on! Already he’d conjured a rapt multitude, for atop the Flume a torch-bearing crowd gazed up at him, while all the rooftops and stairways of the under-Flume city had sprouted hundreds more folk, all clutching lights and lanterns.
A sorcery breathed from this giant. Though he hung so high above us, his face blazed eerily visible. His carven features, the leonine curlings of his golden mane, and his eyes! His eyes beamed down a radiant tenderness upon our upturned faces.
He seemed to behold his enraptured worshipers with a rapture of his own. His voice filled the sky in tones of tenderness—it plucked our spines like lute-strings, and woke plangent melodies within our minds, even though, for me at least, what he uttered was the most brazen inversion of historical truth that it would be possible to speak.
“Beloved Lebanites! Dear friends! My sisters and my brothers! When Rainbowl burst two hundred years ago, a dire vandalism was done against you! Zan-Kirk—my Sire, and still beloved by me—was cut down by his traitorous consort Hylanais, as he was in the very act of bringing back to Lebanoi her greatness and her ancient grandeur!
“Oh Hylanais! Thou misguided witch! You were self-ensorceled by your spite against my father, who was your loving mate! Just when our city was to taste of greatness, you struck the chalice from her hand—you or your bastard spawn! You shattered Rainbowl and our hope, and sealed Zan-Kirk within this boggy tomb where he now lies with his doomed army . . .
“But hear me now, O Lebanites! Even this, the Rainbowl’s breakage, was not the true loss of your greatness, not the whole loss. After all, your mills perhaps produce less wealth, but still you have sufficiency of trade!
“No! Lebanoi lost her true greatness far longer ago than the shattering of Rainbowl! Lebanoi’s true greatness fled with the Rainbowl’s creation! Lebanoi lost her strength and glory half a millennium ago! Her greatness fled when the Sojourners in their fiery vessel departed. For it was the flame of their star-seeking craft that melted great Rainbowl from the mountain’s living stone! That created Rainbowl for our lasting benefit! But that boon, though great, was too little recompense for the loss of the Sojourners themselves—our loss of them amidst the distant stars!”
Ah Shag, even I—crouched like a lemur in my tree—was moved by the vision he conjured, for I had heard of the Sojourners, those grand Ancients, those bold travelers who in their daring had leapt off the earth itself and out into the vastness of the star-fields . . . The Narn-son spoke on:
“But note well, my friends! The Sojourners left us with the means to our reunion with them! The Rainbowl is a beacon, my people! It is a bell! When it is sounded, it will call the Sojourners back to us! And—oh hear me, my countrymen—the art of its sounding is now known to us.
“For my great Sire, Zan-Kirk, descended to the subworld because only in those sulfurous deeps could the lore be found to send a summons that might reach the stars, and call our mighty forebears home. Call them home to share with us their harvest of star-spanning lore, of trans-galactic discovery!”
The Narn-son was eloquent, I can’t deny it. His tones were pure and plangent. My heart cried assent: A beacon! A bell! Yes, kindle it, sound it! Bring those starry navigators back home to us!
At the same time, I sensed there was a reason that he was using the sorcery of his voice up here, in the swamp, instead of down in Lebanoi proper, where he could have swayed far more folk just as powerfully. I began to realize there was something in the swamp itself he wanted. Uneasiness began to crawl up my back on tiny ants’ feet.
And now the Narn-son gazed down upon the swamp below. He spread his hands towards the waters, and apostrophized the murky pools in their beds of black growth:
“My father, I have come for you!”
He brought his torch-rimmed raft down now, gently descending towards the swamp itself, until it hung hovering just above the largest pond—a small black lake in truth, that opened out beside the tree I crouched in. And as Gothol sank towards this tarn, he reached out his fist and opened it palm-down. A white spark drifted down from his hand, and when it touched the water, a dim, pale light overspread the pool, and seemed—so faintly!—to thin the utter blackness of the deep.
The Narn-son’s raft settled onto the surface. He was below me now, and I could see that at the raft’s center sat a low golden chair, like a squat throne. Under the raft’s weight the water flexed like crawling skin, and chuckled and muttered in the mucky marges of the fen.
Gothol solemnly addressed the tarn, speaking as if to the water itself, or to someone in it. His voice was mellow and tender, but by its sheer size it made the swamp seem smaller:
Father who art sunk in sleep,
Who art shepherd of the drowned—
Bestir thy flock to quit the deep!
Come sound the Bell thou sought’st to sound.
Ascend the lofty shrine of stone
Whence giants of our race adjourned!
W
hat seas of stars have they o’erflown?
What whirling worlds of wonders learned?
Their ark sailed incandescent floods
Past archipelagos of flame!
Unto what power have these, our blood,
In all their wanderings attained?
Unto what wisdom have they grown
That left with wisdoms we have lost?
What rescues might to them be known
Whom vast galactic gales have tossed?
Long hast thou lain in dreams of war—
Lift from the dark your eyeless gaze!
Stand beneath the sky once more
Where seas of suns spill all ablaze!
And call, with me, those sailors home
Whose ships those seas of suns have roamed!
The waters’ blackness relented further. Moonlight in spiderweb filaments lay like glowing nets on bulky shapes upon the silty bottom.
Gothol cast a torch into the water. Its flame—undimmed—shrank to a blood-rose of light as it sank. Deep in the smoky muck it settled by one of those shapes, beside its head, the red glow revealing an eyeless face of leather and stark teeth.
The Narn-son spoke a syllable. That blind face stirred. The gaunt jaw moved.
Gothol gestured at the water. A circle of foam began to spin, and a vortex sank from this, sharp-tipped—a whirling foam-fang that struck and somehow seized the sodden lich.
A gangly stick-figure was plucked up to the surface, to lie spinning on a slow wheel of foam. It was the black, shriveled form of a man in loose-hung armor. Gothol, with a slight lift of his head and his right hand, made it rise dripping from the wheeling foam, and hang in the air before him. He reached out his arms, and embraced it.
It lay, a crooked black swamp-rotted root, against the giant’s burnished corselet. He carried it to the low golden chair, and enthroned it. The dripping mummy lay slack against the carven gold.
“Father,” the Narn-son said.
Torchlit, he was a dreadful object, this bony remnant of a big-framed man, though dwarfed by him who’d called him Father. The trellis of his ribs showed through his rusted mail. His crusted sword hung from his caved-in loins. His knob-kneed legs rose from his rotted boots like dead saplings from old pots. He wore a helmet with the beaver up, swamp-weed dangling from its rusted hinges.
