by Tanith Lee
‘Shush,’ said one of the five to the other four. ‘Can’t you see?’
‘What’s to see?’
‘Highness,’ said the fifth man, ‘my father was from the capital. I believe—’ The stranger did not speak. The fifth man asked in crumbled tones, ‘You are Magikoy?’
‘No.’
‘But sir – sir – I’ve heard of you – my father, he sent me away just before the Vashdran horde besieged Ru Karismi, before the White Death brought down plague into the city—But I’d heard him talk of you, though never myself had I seen you—He would say, If Thryfe had been here none of this—’
‘I am not Thryfe,’ said the stranger at the gate of Wise-Home to the refugee from Ru Karismi.
‘Forgive me, sir.’
‘My forgiveness is only a question.’
The men muttered. The fifth man said, ‘Ask it.’
‘You mistook me for one of the Magikoy. Perhaps others of the order are here in Kandexa?’
All five stared at him.
Another of them said, ‘Here? Do you think we’d live like this, like frozen rats, if we had Magikoy to help us? They’re dead. They died too in the White Death. Serve them right. It was their fault, their filthy weapons—Curse them.’
The stranger appeared unimpressed. He said, ‘You know of none, then.’
The fifth man, he who had been tender almost with admiring love, spat on the snow. ‘Get on your way, whoever – whatever – in Hell you are.’
Shadows moved, refolded.
The stranger was gone.
Jemhara had been for a moment distracted. She had felt something like a bird’s great wing brush coldly over her hair, the shoulders of her cloak.
She did not turn to see. The sensation might indicate several events, perhaps ominous, but none of them occurred inside the room. Instead the scene there had turned to stone, the contortionist girl seated on the floor, Aglin sitting forward, eyes wide.
To Beebit Jemhara said, ‘Do you know then how it was you survived at Ru Karismi?’
‘No, Highness.’
‘Had you had some dealings with the Magikoy beforehand?’
‘No. How would I? I was the Kelp’s slave and trech, and chained up otherwise. Even when I had to walk behind the army – their precious Gullahammer – I was on a chain with one or two others. Not every woman wanted to keep the army company.’
‘A mystery then,’ said Jemhara silkenly. ‘Or else you’re lying.’
Beebit did not react.
‘Or else,’ said Aglin, ‘something proofed her against death. I heard a story that some of the men survived too – a handful compared to the whole huge horde of them – thirty, fifty, sixty men. Some witch had done it. That’s all I ever heard.’
Beebit finished her drink and put the cup down. She swung her feet careless from her shoulders, stood up on her hands and walked round the fire-basket. From this position she said, ‘I came back to Kandexa to find my father’s bones, if I can. Bury them nicely. Then I’ll work at my trade.’
‘Your whoring,’ nodded the mageia.
‘Just so. All places need a good whore.’
Jemhara, despite herself, gave a low laugh. Aglin joined her. ‘She’s got the right of it there.’
Jemhara said, ‘But why then did you seek my friend the mageia?’
‘Because of my daughter,’ said Beebit, lilting over to her feet. ‘You see, ladies, I thought she might have the magic power.’
‘Oh, why’s that?’ crisply asked Aglin. ‘What can she do?’
‘Nothing, yet.’
‘I suppose she is still young,’ said Jemhara.
‘About two years.’
‘Two years,’ snapped Aglin. ‘What can they do at that age but squeak and shriek and fall over?’
Beebit smiled her impertinent smile. ‘Shall I call her in? I left her in the street—’
‘You unfeeling cow!’ yelled Aglin, darting up. ‘A kitty of two years left in the cold alley – the gods know what’ll have happened—’
‘Oh, it’s fine as sunlight, lady. Just you see.’
Beebit flowed to the window, lifted aside the heavy leather hanging, and sent out a fluting whistle.
‘Calls her like a dog too—’
‘Gently, Aglin. Wait and see.’ Jemhara had also got to her feet.
The three women stood, once more in silence, and there came the light patter of feet running along the passage beyond the room. The door opened and through it stepped another young girl, about the same age as Beebit, although her colouring was, or had been made to be, rather different. Her skin was a light smoky fawn, while from a central parting her long thick curling hair was, on her left side, pale brown, on the right side black as coal. Jemhara noted that her eyes too were unalike, which must surely be natural. Her left eye however was the dark one, shining black, the right eye a pale clear hazel.
‘This isn’t any daughter of yours,’ said Aglin. ‘Unless you’re a great deal older than you look.’
‘It’s that she is a great deal younger than she looks,’ said Beebit.
Aglin fizzled on the boil and Jemhara held up her hand to quieten her.
‘What is your name, little girl?’ said Jemhara to the newcomer.
‘Azulamni,’ she said. She had a very beautiful voice. Indeed, apart from her weird colours, she was strikingly beautiful.
‘Your mother’s previous name.’
‘She named me for her past,’ said the girl.
Jemhara said, ‘And who was your father? Was it the Kelpish man?’
Beebit threw back her head and wailed with laughter.
‘Him? He fired his bow without arrows. Most of them do. Or, to be fair, maybe I have no target.’
‘This one time you did. And you do know the father,’ Jemhara said.
Beebit stopped laughing.
‘Her father, lady, was a woman.’
He had travelled for a vast while, so it seemed to him. And yet his intellect knew it had not been so extended a journey.
That night he went away, he had seen the Stones, those immeasurable, indecipherable obelisks, looming at the stars. Two half-moons stood over them like guardian spirits. And the Stones, which had always taken colour after dark, flooding with blue, grey, silver, rose and white – at the last with brilliant green – were unlit and empty. He left them behind him yet felt for a space a kind of leash around his ribs, paying out from their core. It was not detaining him, rather going with him. Then he forgot it for it was only an illusion. It was she, the woman he had loved, then hated, then come to love again, it was she who had cured him of his despair and woken him back into the pragmatic agony of life.
Thryfe, magus of the Highest Order of the Magikoy, had stridden over the lambent desolation of the snows.
He had turned his back on almost everything that upheld his former existence. Rigorously trained in the occult Insularia at Ru Karismi, he had become the warden of the royal court, disliking his post, wanting to serve mankind not the engoldened hollowness of kings. At the final test, when the horde of the Lionwolf’s Gullahammer swept in to destroy the Ruk, Thryfe had been unaware, knotted with Jemhara in the throes of oblivious lust. For this mistake of his he had not forgiven himself, or her. The self-dealt torture he subsequently underwent she had freed him from. Only after he had once more driven her away did he grasp her innocence of all wrong in his affairs. And – more terribly – her genuine power. For she was as much a Magikoy as any that the Ruk had trained, her natural gifts polished by adversity – the trite truth of the School of Life. And, of love.
Ru Karismi, the Ruk, were lost by then. The Lionwolf too, and all his legions.
The steel-white snows Thryfe had trodden had covered huddles of ruins, abandoned villages and little towns, steads where wild elephant fed among the neglected runnels of dormant grain.
The mage mirror, the oculum, which Thryfe had rebuilt in his house at Stones, had been able to show him all Jemhara’s past, but nothing of her present. Armed
with her own new-minted powers, had she veiled herself from him deliberately? At first he thought that must be so, or that her pain at leaving him – for she had surely proved she loved him more than her life – had wiped the superior scrying glass with ink.
Now he began to think that some other mad force perhaps abroad on the ice-locked earth had got between them.
He could therefore only use deduction to seek her.
At first he went towards the small city-town of Sofora.
Jemhara had grown to her twelfth or thirteenth year in some impoverished village not far from there. But of the village he could find no trace. He entered the town compelled by aversion more than will.
Sofora it was which had, on viewing the advance of Lion-wolf’s horde, sent word to the capital. They are too many. And later the perilous warning: There is ONE among them …
Not much remained after the attentions of those that were too many, or that One.
A single magical cannon of Magikoy design lay smashed below the walls. Neither landscape nor weather had been able to absorb it. Instead it had become like those curiosities of the Jafn coasts, their Thing meeting places, where some object was frozen in ice – a mammoth, a pylon or a bizarre ship. The dragon head of the cannon’s mouth snarled its verdigris jaws. It had never been fired. He had learned, those psychic cannon which had been used at Thase Jyr had blown up and helped obliterate the city.
Further off a parcel of bones were inside the snow. He could not see but only sense them. Some strong mage then had died there.
After Sofora he wandered back and forth, searching.
As she had done if he had known, and in some manner he did, Thryfe came to settlements where men remained, and where needed he helped them. He rebuilt by sorcery their walls and homes, healed them, secured their husbandry and assisted their beasts. Perhaps curiously they took him only for a talented mage, some minor intelligent magician with no one else left to care for. In Jemhara’s case as he had learned, she had been instantly taken for a Magikoy. This amused him. He was both glad and sorry, paternally proud of her, and ashamed of his own descent – not from pride but because it showed him, he thought, he had been too sure of himself in the past.
There were nights seated in the open against some scarp or rock, protected from the cold only by his craft, when he dreamed of her. These dreams were never sexual. Sexuality, now he had again accepted it as inherent in him, lashed him with its thorns and fires during his conscious hours. Asleep Jemhara was his mother, the young woman he had as a boy seen torn apart and eaten by a wolf. Or else she was his daughter. A little child, he led her by the hand, astonished by that hand’s smallness, while she looked up at him with shining, happy eyes.
She is what I missed. All that I missed. Or never allowed myself to have.
The Magikoy had no stricture against the sexual act. Even union was possible, providing it never clashed with the role of magus. Celibacy had been Thryfe’s choice. He had fought ferociously with his own self to achieve it. Letting celibacy go he was bereft. He no longer knew himself or what he was. He had never been, he supposed, what he reckoned.
Aside from that the Magikoy were mostly gone. The White Death had proved impartial in its sentence.
Only his idea that he, had he returned to Ru Karismi at the proper time as he had meant to, might have prevented use of the pan-destructive weapons – only this still nagged at him. Yet even there he was no longer certain. For who was he to assume he alone might have altered destiny? If the weapons had remained unleashed, instead Vashdran, that demonic bi-bred of god and mortal, would have sacked the city and razed it, exactly like Sofora and the rest.
Thryfe’s physical search continued. Which way then to seek?
North lay the Marginal Land; within and beyond that the lairs of the Olchibe nation, what was left of it. Further north Gech opened, long spoiled from ancient wars. Ice swamps, mountains and ice desert tumbled eventually back into an ice-plated sea. East was Jafn territory. But again Jafn was depopulated after the Death. All north and east had joined with the Lionwolf to consume the Ruk, and so perished.
Thryfe had on his travels nevertheless heard some talk of a new Ruk capital in the far west. Kl Ctaar it seemed to be called: Phoenix Risen from Ash. He was ignorant of where it lay precisely. He tended to think it a legend quickly invented to salve the horror of aftermath. One of the royal line too was said to be in charge there, and that also convinced Thryfe it was a fable. All the kings of Ru Karismi, one way or another, were unrisen ashes.
He wondered now and then if Jemhara had made her way southward towards the unknown country of Kraagparia. There every man, woman and child had thaumaturgic ability … it was said. Elder writings spoke of the Kraag but no one from the northern end of the continent, reportedly, had met with them for centuries. The Kraag dictum was that reality was unreal, unreality real. Maybe such a thought would have tempted Jemhara as she had come to be.
One night there was a blizzard. The wind raced by visible as silver lances. Thryfe strode through this wind, which widely parted either side of him.
His power was yet very mighty. Reminded, he sat humbly on the ground with the torrent searing past, smoothed the ice beneath the snow to a primitive mirror and gazed into it. ‘Show me her and where she is.’
Where the oculum, Magikoy master-glass, had failed him, after an hour the ice sheet obeyed.
It had needed only something simple.
Almost a year back Thryfe had dreamed of the Lionwolf. The creature was a beautiful and couth young man, a sun god. Yes, a god of the sun, for Thryfe himself saw as much, and in the dream told Vashdran so. This delusion Thryfe had since filed far off in his mind. It was illustrative of illusory things, and irrational. And yet in moments of inspiration it returned to him.
Now too it had done so. And for a second a golden-red flicker stirred in the ice-glass.
Only for a second even so. And the picture of Jemhara standing at the centre of a small dark orb had faded. Yet he knew by then where he could find her. The blizzard flagged as he turned due west, towards the coastal junk-heap of Kandexa.
‘No two human female things can make a baby.’
‘Lady mageia, they can, and they did.’
‘It was your crap of a Kelp,’ grated Aglin.
‘Never. He’d lost his interest in me long before, gone off with some other girl. He kindly told me he kept me alive as he might have a use for me after the war was won – and he didn’t want to see me killed after all the joy I’d given him.’
‘Maybe he didn’t,’ said Jemhara.
‘Am I to care? He still kept me fettered too. Except … one evening, as the army drew near the capital Ru Karismi … that was odd. He went off to his other bint, gods help her, and he forgot to chain me up. I pretended the chain was locked tight, of course. I was thinking I might get away. But then, she came by.’
‘She?’ Even the exasperated Aglin had lowered her voice.
‘Well, I’d seen her in the distance. Half the men in the war camp had fucked her. That was sure. Well, they said so, you know what men are like. But they said that Vashdran wanted her as well. Just wanted and went without. He’d ride into a battle without armour, laughing. They said the only time any man saw him tremble was if she was by.’
‘She.’
‘She drifted over the ground like a black unfrozen leaf. I saw one once, in old Kandexa before. It fell from a richman’s hot-house door. A black leaf off a fig tree. Like that. I had seen her in the distance, the way I’d seen the Lionwolf. At first I thought she painted herself all over to seem so dark. But – it was real.’
‘The Kraag say,’ Jemhara murmured, ‘what is unreal is real.’
‘She was black,’ said Beebit. She shut her eyes for the fraction of a second. ‘Only not – inside.’
‘The Jafn peoples have a god or hero who was black,’ said the mageia surprisingly. ‘Only the inside of his mouth was red like a man’s. And the balls of his eyes were white – and his teeth
.’
‘And she was like that. But inside her – I mean, in there. Like a dark pink rose.’
Hushed, the women now. This silence was unlike the others.
Beebit’s daughter-if-she-was seemed unworried by Beebit’s words. She had, the girl, a smooth and almost emotionless face. There was truly a look of something not wholly ordinary about her; even if her hair and eyes had been normal and her skin pale, this look would remain.
Beebit was remembering, and now she told only a little of it. The black woman was called Chillel, and she came walking quietly through the huge camp, where men turned always to stare at her. Beebit saw her draw nearer and nearer, until she was crossing among the carts. If a man had stepped out and spoken to Chillel of wanting her, she would have gone away with him at once. This was what she did. She had apparently told a kind of parable about herself. She said she was a cup the gods had made and filled. Whoever wanted might drink from the cup. But tonight no man approached her. Their minds perhaps were all on the important battle soon to come, the jewelled capital bursting with riches. If they went with any woman tonight it would have to be a more average one. Nobody else was near the place where Beebit had been tethered or rather left untethered. Suddenly Beebit, not knowing she would, had got up.
‘It was never that she was looking at me,’ said Beebit in the mageia’s room; ‘she wasn’t aware of me at all. Her eyes were far away. But I looked at her. You couldn’t not look at her.’
Beebit’s life, she said, had made her discount all men but her father – the only one who had not molested, bought or raped her. But now and then she had made love with women, usually her fellow harlots.
Chillel drew level with Beebit, and only then she turned, as if Beebit had called out to her, which the girl would never have dared to do. ‘Perhaps,’ Beebit observed, ‘my look called out to her. Her beautiful eyes fixed on my face. They were like the night sky, blackness and stars. She said, Is it that you want me? What could I say? I shook all over and stammered, Yes. Then I am yours, she said. And held out her hand to me.’ Stunned by memory Beebit paused again. She thought of the texture of the hand of Chillel – silken, slender, not soft, more like a wonderful weapon of some sort, sheathed in costly material. Beebit finished, ‘We went into one of the little tents. Two Gech girls had put it up then gone off with some Jafn. I didn’t think they might come back. They didn’t until later. It was over by then.’