by Tanith Lee
As if I’d spoken, he added, ‘I don’t say much about her, you’ll have noticed. I mean Ustareth. What is there to say?’
‘But you think about her,’ said Dengwi. ‘It seems you must.’
‘Yes. I hate thinking of her. But as you say, I must.’
They were sitting in the flowers, sharing a leaf-plate of apricots and nuts, the shells of which Venn was cracking with his teeth, before handing them to Dengwi like a gentleman.
They look as if they’ve known each other years.
When he sighs, she rubs his arm once, twice, gentle, with the back of her hand. They sit close.
She likes him then, after all. He likes her.
It’s awful. I feel resentful. Am I envious? Even though … It’s just – being alone.
I turn away and the blue eyes go out.
As for Winter and Ngarbo—
They’re lying on their backs with some wine, laughing and telling each other funny stories, and looking up at the stars. ‘Look, is that the Empress?’ she asks, pointing at a particularly bright lemon star low down. ‘Power mad, you,’ he says. And they laugh again, and Winter says, ‘It’s crazy, isn’t it, but this isn’t bad, is it?’ ‘No, not bad,’ he says. And I see him smile to himself, which Winter doesn’t, craning now after another royally-powerful star. (They’ve rowed so often, it seems, they can throw the rows away at once.)
And again, I turn my head, and the blue eyes close.
I think, They’re doing fine.
And again I’m jealous. Because they are together.
While I—
And Argul.
I look at the last statue, standing waiting to show me my best and only love riding alone and grim and forgetful of me through the night, to reach Her faster.
Thanks, no.’ And it shuts its eyes.
‘Come on, Thu,’ I say, ‘let’s get on.’
I mount up, and we walk, Mirreen, Thu and I, through the swishing grasses, across the soft and coolly whispering starlit night.
Next day in the afternoon, we were charging along. (I’d definitely seen the forest by now. It lay there, black-dark, massive and quite forbidding. (Like a fairy tale forest in a story.) Also, it stretches for miles. Beyond it I couldn’t see. Except that faint sketch of something much farther off still, and up in the air, which must be those colossal mountains. Unless clouds really stand still for days here, which maybe they do.)
Anyway, in mid-charge, I heard thunder.
And I said to Thu and Mirreen,’ So much for the perfect weather.’
Then I realized it probably wasn’t thunder, because it was going on and on, and getting louder and louder.
I reined in, and turned and looked behind me.
And saw the most utterly terrifying sight.
Perhaps you’ve noticed, the rivers here aren’t normal. A normal river flows out towards the sea. This one (and any others?) flow inwards, towards the land’s centre.
And now, somehow – for there hadn’t been any rain I’d seen – this river had turned into a raging torrent. It was so full and rushing, it had come up over the banks and also stood up in the sky in a kind of bubbling wave—
It was some way off, but all the time getting closer very fast – and it looked about twelve feet high, that standing-up water—
It was heading straight towards us.
Could we outrun it?
We’d have to.
‘Thu – go!’ I yelled. And he stared at me in fright, then shot away leftwards, running like mad. The ground was already rumbling, and there was this electric smell like lightning – and the awful noise and – Mirreen and I plunged after Thu.
And then – the real horror—
Like a nightmare.
The lush and flowery grass – it started rearing up in front of us, growing before our eyes into high tussocks and tall tangled clumps, no longer attractive, a jungle. First it slowed us, next it was strangling Mirreen’s legs so I thought she’d fall – and Thu actually was falling, all knotted up in the writhing fronds and ghastly ropes of flowers—
We staggered to a halt and I looked and the water was now a wall that looked fifty feet high, veering, roaring towards us so the beaming sky was hidden.
I slid down from Mirreen. I slapped her to make her take off as fast as she could, unhampered by me. I grabbed at Thu and ripped him out of his grass net. I screamed at him again to run—
I said he wasn’t very obedient – no, he’s loyal – he wouldn’t leave me now – barking at the water to scare it off – and anyway it was hopeless.
Then the river just came.
One minute we were there and then – it was like a huge hand that punched me into the air, turning me over – like the storm that tossed Venn and Winter and Ngarbo – like – it was like nothing I can describe.
I was too frightened to think. I sort of heard and felt and saw this happening to me from far off. And I saw Thu flung up with me, and Mirreen, tossed like a straw. I didn’t cry out. My mouth was too full of water. It tasted fresh and clean. I bathed in it, this enemy, only yesterday—
When I broke through into the open air, I thought (without thinking) the strength of the water had simply thrown me a moment up above itself. Then Thu was there with me, and Mirreen came spinning up kicking – and her hoof hit my head – only
Only it didn’t.
I hadn’t been touched, even though I knew she’d just accidentally brained me—
And we were all floating there, coughing and spitting, in the air.
For a while I just gawped at them, and at the wave of water tearing past below, and trees uprooted and being whirled along by the wave, though that wouldn’t matter, once it let go they’d just get up and put down their roots again or walk off somewhere else—
But why were we in the sky?
Why didn’t Mirreen hurt me when she kicked me in the head?
‘Thu, here boy. It’s fine. Well done.’
Thu turned a somersault not meaning to at all, and looked as if he blamed me for everything. I grabbed his collar. I got hold of Mirreen too. ‘There girl, there, there.’
We sailed lazily high above the water, cleared it, came down on a small hill. Mirreen and Thu shook themselves.
I sat down. I thought, It’s the ring—
I didn’t know how, I didn’t, right then, care, but somehow the diamond Power ring had recharged itself. It was working again and had saved our lives, lifting not just me but my companions into the air to safety.
Down over there, in the race of water, I saw a huge pearly fish, about the size of a wagon, haring along. Was it this super-fish which had caused the boiling tidal-wave in the river?
I sit here, drying out, thinking.
I keep looking at my ring.
Ustareth made it, so perhaps being so near her now, the forcefield itself, which first knocked out the Power, has energized it again.
That seems a silly explanation. And, too, there was no flash of light, not even when the ring saved me from Mirreen’s flailing hoof.
It does explain other things, though.
Why the trees seem to come and feed us, rather than us having to find them. Why the statues carried us down to the valleys and now provide me with a way to watch the others.
The ring affected the statues in the first place, and must have drawn them after me. If so, it wasn’t, isn’t Her.
Although, I wonder if the flood-wave was.
I mean, nothing like that ever happens here. Even the most man-eating animals aren’t apparently dangerous. And everything else is heavenly. So why a sudden rampaging river that could have killed me?
Does Ustareth in fact want me dead?
The water settled, and sank back in the earth and into the river-bed inside an hour. Fresh flowers came prancing up, pretty and innocent as if they hadn’t recently tried to get us all drowned.
Thu and Mirreen seem all right. Thu is still shaking water out of his ears (as I am).
Mirreen eats grass. Yes, eat it before it attacks us
again!
Night’s coming.
I was going to give us a rest, but I won’t sleep.
Even though the ring protects us, I keep thinking She made the ring, and may find some way to cancel it again—
Twilight Star tried to kill me. Didn’t manage to.
This lady is much more clever and capable than Twilight.
And as the shadows form, so She seems to fill the land with the shadows, Ustareth.
I’ve decided, since we can, we’re going to ‘fly’.
I’ve practised with Mirreen. I mounted, then even before I’d pictured us rising, up we went. Not too high, about ten feet off the ground. We stayed together. (The ring responded, just as it always did, to unspoken wishes.)
M was brilliant, a remarkable horse. At first she shied rather, but I kept her steady. Then she got the hang of it. So I took her on a gallop through the air. She sort of swims – she can swim, I saw her doing it in the sea when the Sharkians got us—
So, Mirreen swims through the sky, and I ride on her back, and the rising moon gapes at us in astonishment.
Thu was more difficult.
I kept lifting him up by ring Power, only a couple of feet, and he whined and snarled and kept rolling head-over-heels.
Then it struck me neither Mirreen nor I seem to weigh much in the air. So Thu doesn’t either. I got him on to her saddle in front of me, and took us all up that way.
At first he was very unhappy. And then he saw a bird – an owl perhaps – flying by in the night sky.
Thu forgot he didn’t like air-travel. He was off Mirreen’s back, out of my grabbing hands, and away.
‘Thu!’ I shrieked, ‘leave it alone!’
But he didn’t stop until the owl out-flew him into the upper sky. Then I saw him standing there in the air, panting and crestfallen, an odd sight, with a little moon-white cloud passing under his feet.
When I next called to him, he bounded back to me, and sprang up on to Mirreen. Sky? he asked, grinning and thumping his tail. Oh, sky’s all right.
I’m impressed.
How long it would have taken to cross the rest of Ustareth’s world of Summer I don’t know – a month, two months, or more – Not this way. Now I can go faster than any of the others – unless of course their Power jewels have also recovered. Yet – I don’t think that’s happened. Mostly because this ring has always been the most Powerful of all the jewels. Wasn’t meant for me, after all, was it, but for Twilight’s daughter, Winter Raven, long ago.
Now of course too, I could go and try to find the others. But what’s the point, if they can’t do what I’m doing now? Argul though – no, Argul least of all. I am – I’m afraid to find him, now. He’s wrapped up in his Ustareth-quest.
And if I’m honest, She’s become my quest too.
EARTH AND FIRE
We crossed the forest in a night.
In the darkness, its darkness expanded. Yet it seemed full of sudden half-seen gleams – like eyes – probably water catching the moon.
The trees were huge, pines and firs, and great towering unknown tents of boughs, and other trees like colossal hollyhocks – only black.
Sometimes the tree-tops brushed Mirreen’s hoofs.
Thu stared down (no longer afraid) and once he barked, and from there below (four hundred feet down?) something barked back.
When dawn came, the trees were drawing apart. In their planting, I mean, I hadn’t noticed any moving.
Then we were over a rocky landscape, shambles of granite hillsides and ravines, with gorses burning in them like stretches of yellow flame. It was beautiful, this, in its own way. Waterfalls burst from rocks where mists rose like smoke.
Everything was still in vast curving rings, and this area took most of the day to cross. (Travelling on the ground, it would have taken ages. Would the gorse have produced sandwiches or something?)
Then there was a very large lake, or inland sea.
On it lay islands small as green pebbles.
We saw a whale surface. (I think it was a whale.)
We came down on one of the islands to rest. And there was an orchard of pears and cherries blossoming, and pineapple trees, and they all put out fruit, and some produced fountains of wine, or little sweets, and if to prove we were still in Ustareth-country.
No sails moved on the lake or sea. As no wagons, chariots, carts or people had moved anywhere in this round land. So it was an empty heaven. Except for us (the six of us) and – Her.
It was nice by the lake. The water stayed calm. Didn’t come rushing up the shore to get me or anything.
If she had tried that, maybe she’d seen it was useless, at least for now.
I wondered if the statues would appear, but they don’t, I think, unless the ring calls them because I really want something they can do. Like looking at the others. And now – I shan’t. It’s spying, after all. It’s what she does. Wolf Tower stuff.
I could go on about everything I’ve seen from the air. The swarm of dragonflies like flying gems. The blue-black bear standing on that hill. It looked as if it were waving to us. Well, here, it could have been, couldn’t it? So – er, well, I waved back.
Sunset, and the sky and water were fire.
Up here too, I sort of begin to see properly the effect of circles inside circles … but even so, it’s still too vast to see the other side—
Beyond the lake, there’s a desert!!
I’d realized that she seemed to have put lots of different types of landscape together in this world of hers. And no doubt all partly experimental or changed. Meadows, woods, deep forest, rocky heaths, sea-lake, and miles off what had even looked liked jungles beginning, rising from the lake-shores, those orchid-hung trees and creepery over-growings, thick with green rain, like at the Rise. But – why a desert? Desert wastes are what she always makes into something else.
We flew on, and the desert went on below, silvery by then in darkness.
When I thought we should take a break we went down, though a desert wasn’t the place I felt I’d have chosen to spend part of the night. (And not a dinner tree in sight.)
However.
No sooner were we on the sand than more magical things started to happen. And frankly it was exasperating. Can nothing be normally unhelpful, here?
Anyway. The sand started to light up softly from within. And by this light, having seen the desert was real sand, not grit and dust, I had to notice the sands were all rainbow colours. Then there came a small sandstorm, buzzing along, only it was of course a helpful sandstorm, which circled to our feet, despite Thu’s snorting and yacking at it. Then it scattered down and became all sorts of food and drink, tastefully arranged on a sort of glassy table-cloth the sand formed just there. (I think it’s the sheer style of all this that makes you sick.) But we ate the dinner. There was even some fresh grass for Mirreen.
When the moon had gone over and I’d slept for a while, we went on. Flying as we do it takes very little effort. And by now I could even get off Mirreen to rest her, and let her swim on alone.
Then, we came straight down again. Because a deep red flash had gone off in the sky to the south, where the land’s centre is.
It was high, high up. Almost up where the moon had been at its highest. Or so it looked.
Lightning?
Then again. A magenta flash now.
I heard a quiver of sound, so faint as to be more feeling than noise.
We waited on the sand. I was alarmed. Despite the ring, and everything.
But after those two fireworks, nothing else. I waited about half an hour. When we took off again, all was still. As the lit sand again lost its glow, deepest darkness arrived.
And so, though nothing else happened, I didn’t keep us up in the sky too long. I was afraid we might run right into – something. Something stuck up high in the air and not lighting up, except now and then with a scarlet or purple explosion. Also, the desert ended.
Where we next came down was in some hills. They were very
garden-like. Next morning I’d see trees and shrubs either cut or self-growing in ornamental shapes. Smell of roses. The rest of that night though, we slept.
Most of two days, and part of a night between to cross the garden-hills, even going by air.
This land is vast. How did I see so much from the marble terrace-plateau? Is that some trick too, some science-magic?
I can see the mountains now.
They are up there, across the hills, and a plain that lies beyond.
I have never seen anything so giant-size. They’re – impossible, really. They must touch the sky – or would, if the sky were solid.
They’re blue, and at the tops are ghost-white snows. The sun catches them one side at dawn, the other at sunfall, and they flower with red.
Without ‘flight’, how could anyone climb them?
Perhaps no one is meant to.
Well, Ustareth, hard luck.
It’s the mountains which breathe fire, despite their snows. They’re volcanoes?
Last night we had another brief fireworks display.
Will they erupt? That’s what volcanoes do, isn’t it? Is this her plan, the eruption, to warn me off?
The plain below the volcanoes was smooth, nearly unmarked snow, with healthy leafy trees growing out of it, and other trees that seem to be made of snow, with crystal-ice leaves. White foxes run about, and I saw a white bear – which didn’t wave.
But I’ve had enough. I said before I wouldn’t say anything else about this place. And look, I’ve covered pages. No more.
Tomorrow, at first light, we start the flight up the snow-volcanoes. Can we get over them?
If I’d had any doubts she was there, inside the last ring of mountains, the volcano part has told me she is.
I’m nervous. Didn’t even let Thu eat all his chops that the ice-leaf tree, which had joined us, gave him for dinner.
By the way, I have to say this – wouldn’t you know it, the snow here is warm.
Up the mountains we rose, thousands of feet.
Below, a million tons of rock-stone built in such crags. Shelves, rifts, chasms of peacock-blue ice. The long clawings of the cake-icing snow.
And there – a volcanic crater, sulphur-yellow rimmed, a faint glow pulsing in it once, like a sleepy eye – then gone.