by Tanith Lee
‘Your hand—’
‘It’s nothing, and serves me right. It happened from the punishment I gave myself in the Insularia. That jail from which you rescued me at such cost to yourself.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said.
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Perhaps come here, Jemhara. Perhaps come here and make certain I’m an illusion. Or a liar. Or a ghost. Or a lover. Could I be that? Come here, Jemhara.’
Exquisite, clad only in her body – bizarre to him as any garment from another earth – Jemhara rose. She crossed the room with slow, even steps. A few feet from him she halted. Thryfe, astonished, amused, aroused, reassured, felt his own clothing peel from him at the action of her will. He, now, naked as she. Jemhara laughed, her head tilted to one side.
‘Yes, my lord,’ she said, ‘this is you.’
I touch – I burn—
I burn – I touch—
FOUR
Distant by much more than miles, lands or seas: the Southern Continent again, but up under the handgrip of the hilt which forms the north extremity of its mass. Here is a terrain of snow and ice-jungle one day to be known as the Marginal Land. But not yet. Now it is a territory named Ol y’Chibe, which means We, the People.
Rather further north stands the golden city of Sham – whose name too has a meaning: None Greater.
Few are.
At Sham the terraces tower, the huge metallic gates lift the sky on their backs, idly holding it up to be helpful. There is the Silver Gate, the Golden Gate, the Iron and the Bronze and the Copper Gates. Great plazas lie inside Sham, linked by squirrelling roads made of hammered coal, where dazzling markets display the cunning of the Ol y’Chibe and their affiliate people the Ol y’Gech – We, the Cousins.
Beyond the Copper Gate of Sham-None-Greater spread icy lakes and swamps that frequently unfreeze, and home savage beasts used in the contests of Sham’s arenas.
The y’Gech are sallow-skinned like mature ivory. The y’Chibe are yellow as creamed gold.
Neither people has gods. They have never needed them, they say. They believe that always everything of theirs, once down, will rise up again unaided, just as the beautiful white ourths they rear and ride kneel down at a command, and stand up at another. The dead drop too, but the spirits of the dead stand up and come back in new flesh. What business is this of any god? Let gods go worship themselves.
South of Sham in what will, centuries on, become the Marginal, Ol y’Chibe forms its al fresco towns of sluhtins.
The cold surrounds all this in pallid blankets.
There have been two or three centuries of Winter so far. But what have the Chibe and the Gech to fear? The witches of their kind are well versed in magic. Crarrowin they call the women of this type, though in Gech they are known as Cruin. Both names are basically the same. Both mean four. This number is the most important among either people for it signifies Brain, Heart, Loins and Life-force, the four ruling features of a human body. The brain and heart and loins are of course physical, but dominated by the life-force – that which always stands up and returns. Every Crarrow or Cru coven comprises a girl child, an older girl who is a virgin, a woman who has had sex and borne a child or children, and a Crax or crone, their leader, who has been and done all these things and now, past child-bearing, knows too another deeper state.
In godless Ol y’Chibe then, among the crystal woods, a Crarrow girl is trotting to her sluhtin in the dusk, seeing a snowstorm brewing to the north. And having seen also something more curious, miraged there on the snow.
Amid the tented cave-town of the sluhtin Yedki sat before the Crax of her coven.
Of the four witches Yedki was yet the virgin member, though fifteen years of age. If not a Crarrow she might long ago have been wedded, and doubtless childed. As a Crarrow, with more autonomy than other women, she might have chosen a man for herself, either to marry or merely to bed. But Yedki preferred to hold her place in this particular coven, and so stayed sealed. The Crax was her favourite grandmother.
‘What then did you see in the snow?’ the Crax now asked her.
Yedki was not astonished the older woman read her mind. Such matters among their sort were regular enough.
‘I saw a kind of cart – but not quite that. It had great wheels. There was a crowd, perhaps – and men riding in the cart-thing, which was drawn by big, cat-like animals with long hair round their faces.’
The Crax looked down into the little fire-pot, at the charcoals. In the enclosure of the sluhts and sluht-towns, the y’Chibe always contained their fires; it saved on smoke pollution.
‘What kind of men were they? Gech or Chibe?’
‘Neither, Mother. They shone – one rather darker than the other. I couldn’t make out their faces – one too dark and one too bright. But there was a boy there too, and he was one of our own, yellow of skin, comely and bold. Too bold. He gave me such a look: impertinent – yet surprised.’
‘You say?’ Again the Crax paused. Then she bowed forward and breathed lightly on the fire-pot. A single thin flame rose out of it, became detached and hovered in the air.
Slowly the loose flame formed the symbolic shape of a female womb. Evident inside it something peacefully curled. A foetus.
‘You’ve foreseen your first son.’
‘But Gran – I’m not even undone yet!’
‘By this we behold you will be, and soon.’ The Crax saw fit to overlook the incorrect use of her house title.
Yedki stared sullenly at nothing. ‘Even when I was tempted I refused. I wanted to stay with you.’
‘So you shall, my girl. You’re gifted and sit well with this coven. Tibtin has finished her nubility and must leave us to make her own foursome as their Crax, or to retire from our work if she wants. So you will take Tibtin’s place. Ennuat is twelve now and may take the virgin’s place. And there are girls enough with skill to fill the child place Ennuat has had. So, you stay with me, coupled and seeded.’
‘Thank you, Mother,’ said Yedki, formal again with relief.
A man walked through the shadows by the door of the Crax’s cave. Yedki’s eyes inevitably followed him. Was he to be the father? Or that warrior she had looked at last year? Who would he be?
Yedki woke in the night.
Someone was sitting at the foot of her bed-place, a fine man of the y’Chibe.
Startled, Yedki sat up – remembering even as she did so what she had seen pictured on the snow, and what the Crax had told her.
This man seemed familiar, yet she knew she had never met him before. Did she like him? It was surely not proper he had crept in on her like this.
Yedki noticed his gleaming dark hair with its elegant long braids tastefully knotted through by bird and rodent skulls. He was tying a complex knot at his belt, impressively.
‘Good evening, lady,’ said the unknown warrior. He looked slightly bashful after all. But too he spoke not quite in the accent or with the phrases she would have expected. His teeth had been painted exquisitely, as only the Chibe leaders or their most heroic fighters were permitted to do. So many contrary elements.
‘Who are you?’ Yedki asked briskly.
‘You saw me earlier.’
‘Saw you where? I’m Crarrow,’ she prudently added. ‘Keep this fixed in mind.’
‘I assure you I do.’
‘You talk like a foreigner – yet in the language of the People.’
‘Always that,’ he said. ‘Olchibe always. It’s woven through my bones, even these bones now.’
‘Now? What are you meaning, rebirth?’
‘I lived,’ he said broodingly. ‘Now I live another way.’
‘You are some spell-fetch of the northern swamps beyond mighty Sham.’
‘I?’ He looked upset more than riled. ‘No, I’m not so bad. I’m no ghost. Not any more.’
The Crarrow girl hissed an incantation.
Wild waves of light went over the space. She and he watched them, she rather angrily, he with respectful interest. They cluster
ed round him in the end, then melted off. He seemed untouched. He said, wistfully, ‘A long while since I lay down with a woman of my own kind. No women so lovely as the women of Olchibe. No wise-women so wise as the Crarrowin.’ The tied knot also said something like this.
‘Flattery will get you nowhere save out of the door.’
‘Ah?’ He shrugged. ‘I’ll only come back. Come on, don’t you like me a little? I’m just as I was. Twenty-eight – or is it nine? – or so. And fierce as a wolverine. You should see me ride the mammoths.’
Yedki understood herself sufficiently to know that, though disturbed and perplexed by many aspects of this confrontation, she was excited. And when she looked at him she, like her magic, swirled to him and melted. She had felt nothing like this with any man before, even those she had liked.
‘What’s your name?’ she said.
‘You’ll know it – later. When the hour comes.’
Then, almost piteously, he leaned forward and put his hand on her knee.
At the connection, which was physical and, somehow, not, every tension and doubt ebbed from Yedki. She knew him. Had always known him. But too he was new as every dawn.
They stopped talking, save in sly, low, persuasive murmurs. Presently they stretched out side by side. He let her untie and then rebraid some of his beautiful hair. When she inquired, he spoke of battles he had fought, and she believed him, despite a continuing oddness in all he described. He mentioned living and dying, and reliving, in the gentlest and most ordinary terms. But y’Chibe accepted reincarnation. Such things were not outlandish.
In the end he covered her and she dragged him closer. Within a rushing tangling of pleasure she let him achieve in her the wound of her undoing, and nipped his shoulder hard at the pain.
After the climax of this amazing act she fell asleep, thinking he must only have drawn away so his weight did not inconvenience her.
Half waking near sunrise she recalled everything, and looked for him, but he was gone. She slept again. Then, at her second wakening, Yedki, the bed otherwise empty, thought she must have dreamed of mating with a charismatic stranger. As she got up and daylight filled the tent however, various twinges, and the shocking traces of her virginal blood, showed her this had been no dream.
A thrill coursed through her. A man had truly lain with her. He would be somewhere in the sluhtin now. She would soon see him again.
In that, of course, she was both right – and wrong.
Guri, former warrior of a vandal band and adopted uncle to the god Lionwolf, hunkered down on a snow-hill.
The camp-town below was much smaller than the last sluhtin of Guri’s former leader, Peb Yuve, had been – or rather would be. Guri shook his head, mournful and slightly irked. He had seduced a Crarrow, poured himself into her, left himself there, or that physical fleck of himself which was needed for a rebirth in flesh. For some reason which eluded him it was apparently necessary that he return in fleshly form, even if it was to be the fleshly form of a god.
Lionwolf had understood these things. Or, if not, irresponsibly cared nothing about them. Lionwolf had already got himself born once in flesh, died in flesh, come to in the cold blue Hell of his own personal punishment, died there etherically and so been reborn etherically, there. After which a kind of different death had expelled him from Hell and back towards the waiting world. Lionwolf’s third, earthly birth would finalize his processing.
To Guri, bewildered, nearly exasperated, the whole method seemed excessive. Especially since he himself had been born and died in the world, then persisted as a sort of ghost in it, then died again and landed in his own punishment cell of Hell. Eventually released from Hell he had been tossed back here.
With one major alteration. This now was the past.
It had stunned him when first he figured it out, hanging over the glamorous city of Sham.
Sham had been only a bitter remnant in Guri’s former earthly life. Long ago sacked and wrecked by conquerors from the southerly Ruk, Sham then was a jumble of debris and mud and ersatz slave-markets. Of all the legends of glorious gates just one, a Copper Gate, had partly stood. Here and now however there were five, and each of these in excellent repair. This Sham too had towers and terraced blocks and decorated squares and superb fighting-grounds.
Ambling through the air and over the landscape of the past for some while, Guri had observed the peoples of Olchibe and Gech, and incidentally discovered their lack of gods. In Guri’s original life the Great Gods of Olchibe were an accepted fact.
Knowing the inevitable format of his own return to flesh, a dire suspicion welled up in Guri then.
As for last night, no other way to put it: he had fathered himself.
Oh, he had never meant to. But he had seen the girl before he left the purlieus of Hell, a vision. The moment he was here and spotted her therefore, as she trotted back towards her sluhtin, an unavoidable attraction had enmeshed him. He had had to accost her.
What he had actually done certainly offended him. If he considered it, he had copulated with his own mother, although naturally at that point she was not his mother. One coming myth to hush up then, probably.
Irresistibly now Guri squinted through the early morning, through snow-mist and ice and the legs of frozen trees and rocks, and saw the girl whose name was Yedki examining her blood-stippled blanket. How complacent she looked. Women!
Guri braced himself and peered on, right through the slender curve of her belly. Within, a shape balanced among the branches of her inner organs, like a rosy pear. Yedki’s healthy youthful womb. And yes, deeply fastened was a tiny sequin, wiggling just a little; frightening, miraculous atomy, already flexing its amorphous muscles—
‘Me,’ said Guri.
Resigned, he closed the book of his potentially god-like brain and leapt instead straight up into the cloudless height above the mist. He might as well enjoy himself for the few mortal months of freedom he had left. For after that who knew what fresh horror and muddle would ensue?
FIVE
There was an eye in the sky. Visible only to a mage or a highly gifted psychic, it might have belonged to any number of deities. To vicious Zeth Zezeth whose name essentially rendered was Zzth, or to mild Ddir the artisan god, who rearranged the patterns of the stars. The eye might even have belonged to the yet unreborn floating godsoul of the Lionwolf.
The eye belonged to none of them.
It had more the ambience of an opaque window, something blind which was yet somehow watching.
Around the window too, gradually, a type of activity gathered. Ultimately this would come to be seen quite readily by anyone as weather.
Beneath sprawled the sweep of the Southern Continent, and there the shamble of Kandexa, fenced off in sectors by the hem of the frozen sea.
Streamers crossed the sky now. The hour was early but the light was deadening. A storm must be imminent. But there, storms happened. Nothing new in that.
He had been dreaming. He was two years old and his mother was going out to break ice for the water jars. He had had a premonition. He ran to her and begged her not to leave the house. Her face became serious and she nodded, and sat down by his side. A little later both of them saw a black wolf steal from the shadow by the tree. They shut the house door and were safe.
Thryfe had always hated wolves, even the less terrible white wolves of the south and east.
How different would his life have been if his mother had heeded his inarticulate screaming, and not died under the village ice-tree?
He opened his eyes and saw in front of him the sweet sleeping face of Jemhara …
Had she cured him at last of the nightmare?
She stirred. The smooth petals of her lids lifted. She gazed deeply into his face.
During the twenty-three days and nights they had been together here in Kandexa, she had quickly lost the look of fear and of perilous search which her first awakenings beside him had engendered.
The first few times he had taken her back into
his arms at once, kissing her hair. ‘All’s well, beautiful. Now all’s well.’
She had been recalling he knew that previous first time, there in his mansion at Stones, when he woke at last from the trance of their gorgeous mutual lust to remember his chastity, and Ru Karismi’s fatal error that he had been determined to prevent.
He could never have saved the city from itself. He was sure now. He would have died, that was all.
And so – missed this.
She roped his neck with her arms, her breasts pressed against him, all the slender curving warmth of her body.
For a while then once more all the dialogue between them was made of sex.
Spent, he held her closely. Over on the wall, he noted that the twig-hand of the bucolic goddess Ranjal seemed ridiculously wooden and over-motionless, as if clumsily concealing its alert involvement. A voyeur goddess?
‘Let me go,’ demanded Jemhara. ‘Let me heat some beer. Let me see if the apple’s grown back again.’
‘It always does.’
‘Perhaps,’ she murmured, ‘we shouldn’t eat it. It’s thau-maturgic. How do we know if it does us good?’
‘Highness Jema,’ he said with profound gravity, ‘don’t you think you would know if you were poisoned?’
He watched her as she went about the attic room, setting the buckled pan of beer over the brazier, placing the bread neatly on a platter. The green apple he had brought here always regrew when they had eaten it, providing they left it hidden under a bowl, as if to reform from its own core in plain sight was indecent. Why the apple did regrow he was unsure. But it was nourishingly wholesome and tasted always clean and fragrant – as this woman did, this beautiful woman made of alabaster skin and crow-wing hair.