by Tanith Lee
‘Oh, sweetheart. The gods know. The thing lies there like a balnakalf – big and solid. Two years you might port it about.’
‘Don’t say so.’ Apple took a breath. Her squinting eyes were pulled earthward at the corners, her unkissable mouth was a crescent moon upside down.
‘No, no, it won’t take so long, sweetheart. How could it? But it’s comfortably lodged. It’s biding its damned moment.’
Ten months. Eleven months.
Now was the festival of the Rose Star.
No star was visible over Kol Cataar, only the antimony night sky of triple moonrise.
Bonfires on the streets, and firecrackers let off in emerald and magenta flights, which descended over-suddenly, starting one or two small house fires, so illuminating a corner of the rancid shack.
Now?
The arson nights of the Rose Star passed.
Twelve months.
It was a year.
Then more. Thirteen months.
Apple stared into a tiny slice of glass, careful not to scry.
She was a mountain of flesh, her eyes two lines scratched deep inside the blubber. No longer was any padding needed, and not much of an illusion. As well. This lonely magery of concealment was becoming too much for her to perform. She could not wear his ring. It hung on a string about her neck.
Confused and circling her thoughts. Even her constant trepidation over Thryfe had muddied and grown vague. She had been condemned at last, as before, to care only about herself.
That morning she did not bother to drag her body from the mattress. The previous night someone had come with food, and a salve for the blistered inflammation of her hands and legs that would not heal.
She had not eaten the food but thought of eating the salve to poison herself. Then of simply reiterating her own power, blasting herself to bits and, if she could, the fiend inside her too. She did not upbraid fate, demanding why this had happened to her. She wanted only release.
About noon, when the slum market bell rang, Apple heard the boy priest, the one who sang so well, fluting some hymn tune as he walked through the area. Eventually he stopped by her door, having presumably discovered it behind the refuse tip. She glimpsed him through an unmended slat. By himself the boy begged only with the song. He did not knock let alone hold out his palm as the blue priests of Kol Cataar always did.
‘I’ve nothing,’ Apple panted. ‘Go away.’
The boy turned and as he did so Apple – or Jemhara – felt something break inside her, as if a goblet of white glass took the full crack of a hammer.
She expected immediate agony. There was none.
An abstract energy flew her up into the high tower of her mind, and there again she sat and saw, astonished and appalled and ultimately dismally uninterested, a tunnel opening in her physical core. Out of it flowed a swimming creature most like a smooth silken flame.
I’ll die now. That’s good.
Beautiful again, and herself, though only in the surreal mind-tower, she was aware something bent over her and touched her forehead lightly with one finger. She saw him. His red hair lay around them like a cloud of fire. She heard him speak. ‘Forgive me,’ he said.
The words, the voice, went on echoing over and over, through and through. He did not sound sorry, only kind.
Her body thrummed like harp strings, that harp someone had mentioned in the palace, shaped like a butterfly and brought from Ru Karismi where once she must have heard and seen it played.
The god, so like Zeth Zezeth, so unlike, stood above her, perfect, distant, near, kind and regretful, yet smiling. A smile of cruelty? Or some promise—
He shook his head.
Then came a falling flutter of butterflies, ruby and golden, bronze and pearl and opal. Their exquisite otherness settled over her, sank through her. She was crystal and filled by a dance of wings.
If this is death then death – is wonderful.
She remembered Thryfe and her tears poured inward, themselves turning to winged insects, these made of mirror.
Long distances away a door which had opened was closing. Miles off a baby lamented shrilly. The last she saw was the crying of the newborn child, which crying had also turned to butterflies, blue as lapis lazuli, silver as clean knives.
Going out after supper Bhorth found his son once again on the terrace, staring up at the sky. Nearby the very young woman from Kandexa also stood, circumspect perhaps, her shaven head covered by a fur hood and the pet snake round her waist. She was a liaison that one should not instantly try to detach. If one did probably it would only grow more intense. A sister, Sallus had declared. Bhorth was not happy with that. But then he was scarcely happy with anything. Jemhara had incredibly not yet given birth to the abomination Vashdran. Bhorth’s spies watched her, by now reporting hourly. He had just heard the latest report. She was sick. Perhaps then she might die, crushing the monstrosity inside her? Why had he never tried to have her seen off? Fear of her power, or of Thryfe’s? He thought distractedly it was as if, in some cell of his reason, he had wished to protect her and what she carried. But that could not be so.
‘No stars tonight,’ said Bhorth. He felt now he wanted to discuss with Sallus, alone, the problem of the impending devil child, its removal.
‘The stars can’t be seen,’ said Sallusdon.
‘Nor for months,’ acknowledged Bhorth. As yet he was not at a loss. He parted his lips to suggest privacy, nicely, so as not to annoy his gallant son.
But Sallus spoke again. ‘Let me show you, Father.’
Bhorth saw Sallus had a small hunting bow from the more primitive Ruk. The young man fitted an arrow. The arrow seemed gilded with some luminous stuff. What joke was this, then?
Quirkily Sallus leaned back and fired straight up into the night sky.
Sallus seldom acted randomly, did not clown about. Bhorth therefore patiently watched the arrow’s shining ascent, waiting for it to reach its apex and so prove the point, whatever that might be. All that could happen of course was that it would arc over and drop back to earth.
But it did not.
Instead the arrow raced into the vault of foggy heaven, which one isolated full moon had barely lit, reached the peak of its flight and struck the upper air. Struck it and stayed. Quivering and minuscule, three hundred feet overhead, the arrow trembled but did not return. Very clearly it had pierced the roof of the sky, and stuck.
Eleventh Volume
THE WOLF REGARDS THE SUN
This place I have returned to is unfamiliar to me. Before I came here I lay in a grave. That grave, though unremembered, was better known and greatly more comfortable.
Part of an untitled tract woven in cloth:
Antique Ol y’Chibe and y’Gech (translation approximate)
ONE
His dream had been horrible. Waking, he moved to seize and destroy it, as he would have done a physical enemy. But already the nightmare wavered, subsided.
He could not recall detail, only the dread and anguish that spread over him like a mountain of black stone.
Yet its colour had not been black. It had been smoulder-red, warm, like fire beneath the sea.
In itself even so the colour was not favourable.
Thought-shapes bubbled through the psychic blowhole of Brightshade’s exquisitely hamfisted inner mind.
Even unremembering he knew what this input meant.
Lionwolf.
Ah, since the first awareness of that unique other being, his half-brother, the whale Brightshade had floundered. His ideal and virtually brainless path of unmitigated living and enjoyment had been soiled. But striking out, made into an assassin by their father, Zeth, Brightshade had ultimately failed at murder more than once. Thereafter the vicious insane assaults of Zzth had slung the whale to the floor of this north-eastern ocean. Here beneath an element frozen and un, someone now forgotten had come unheralded to comfort him.
Brightshade laboured to recapture the strange sense of gentleness. What had it been? Two different things happened
. His eyes opened and a sore itching physical pain made itself known. All the other hurts the god-dad had inflicted seemed cured. Not a trace of them remained. Only this thin and intruding strand of – less pain than honed feeling.
Something had pierced Brightshade, right through from outer hide to within the inner left wall of his stupendous gut.
Muddled, he flexed his vast form. Nothing worse occurred. No dangerous twangs of crippled tissue alerted him. He was healed. Yet had been penetrated.
He did not need to consider why.
Brightshade’s back was always to some extent landscaped by a terrain of wreckage, marine flora and bones. But his most creative, or destructive, principle was the ingesting of things. Even now a swift sweep of his belly-contents consoled him with the knowledge of hundreds of interesting bits still stored there. They included ships, antique and modern, treasure of various sorts, freakish plant life resultant from all the above. Nevertheless, one unidentified item he could not even picture had been removed. Though he had mislaid its nature, obviously it had been most valuable. Of this he had been robbed.
Brightshade lay in the neverness of ocean. His waking eyes followed the flights of blind black fish that found their way by other senses.
Dainty as the undoing of a small door the whale’s endless jaws cracked. The black fish were whirled inside.
Brightshade swallowed.
Better?
Was he safe here in all this utter dark? Zzth his persecutor was a sun god, albeit a defunct one. Zzth could still burn under the sea when the mood took him. It was down here after all he had begotten both sons, Brightshade, unarguably on a female whale, and Lionwolf on a drowning woman.
Deep depression lowered itself over Brightshade.
A great deal had happened he did not understand but two awful thought-shapes stayed staring in his not-mind. First the worldly rebirth of the loathed half-brother whom he had failed to eradicate. Secondly the fact of Zeth Zezeth who inevitably must return to harm and mutilate.
The human thoughts I am in despair – where shall I turn – there is nowhere blew inside the leviathan’s intellect.
Poor child sang memory in another voice. Once it had been dulcet. Now it was spiteful, mocking, taunting.
Brightshade realized. It was the former comforter, now this taunter, who had operated the penetrative stab of robbery and hurt in his side.
Brightshade on the ocean floor wept. His tears were white iron. The streamers of blind fish goggled at them with their sightless optics. Indifferent, the submarine ice floes snored.
And the watcher watches.
Large eyes, not even open perhaps, see everything.
If the giant whale has been aware of scrutiny he fails consciously to know it. He is busy with himself and his own grief.
In any event the condition of Brightshade is soon logged, and the watcher turns from him. The eyes open or closed move like two midnight lamps, away. And then – far off into the unformed past.
Though Crarrow, the young girl was not as experienced as others of her calling. She had carried her offspring for three months only, her belly swelling up like a loaf in an oven. At two months she had seemed six months gone, and at three it was obvious she was ready. Yedki was outraged by this, and even her grandmother the Crax’s reassurances had not done much good. The grandmother anyway was still plainly troubled, conceal it from non-officiates though she did. She had guessed from the first something bizarre was going on.
Now Yedki shrieked. She did not have the knowledge to detach her spirit from her body and spare herself the excruciation of childbirth. Her labour had lasted three hours. Already Yedki shouted that she could not bear it. When the pains came she kicked and wailed, begging to be killed.
The other members of the coven exchanged glances.
Apart from the grandmother Crax, Ennuat the virgin was thirteen, and the child member eight. All had witnessed and all in some form assisted at a birthing act earlier. Never had any heard a woman carry on like this. Doubtless they had been lucky.
‘There, there, Yedki,’ Ennuat soothed, frowning, ‘it will soon be over.’
‘You – told me that – a day ago—’ Yedki screechingly exaggerated.
‘I never! You’ve only been in the throes this past hour or so.’
‘Quiet,’ said the Crax. ‘Yedki, all’s well. Bear up.’
But another surge enveloped Yedki who screamed, punching the ground as if to knock it out.
‘I will never,’ she grated in the aftermath, ‘endure this hell again. Gran – kill me – kill me!’
But ‘Your baby!’ squeaked the little girl Crarrow.
‘Befuck the baby! No more of this!’
The Crax now frowned. She leaned suddenly over Yedki and tapped her on the forehead.
Yedki gave a yelp and her head lolled. She was senseless.
‘Stand away,’ said the Crax. She stood up straight as a black tree in her mantle, locking her feet to the earth, releasing her own inner life-force.
Swirling outward this incorporeal element nearly collided with a non-corporeal young man of the Ol y’Chibe, who was abruptly present, buzzing round the prone Yedki like a worried insect.
The Crax deduced instantly what he must be: the reincarnating soul that claimed the baby and would become it, once it was delivered; that is, the expectant son.
‘Out of the way, boy,’ the Crax cried. ‘Leave this to me.’
The man respectfully fell back. ‘Yes, Mother.’
As she darted forward the Crax became aware also of a curious rupture in the air. She thought she glimpsed something watching her and believed it might be female. It did not seem malign but apart from that she could tell nothing about it. She had no time to waste.
Guri, transfixed by dismay, saw the Crax seat herself on the writhing belly of his unconscious mother.
Squeamishly he crept away.
The baby-body was leaving the womb. He felt now no connection to it. It was like a symbol, a corpse even, something modelled on or redeemed from a living entity, and really quite unusable.
Did he honestly wish to reoccupy a fleshly form? To lie helpless, dumb and half blind, at the mercy of all?
Like Yedki Guri contemplated the possible escape route, even if only temporary, of another death.
But he had delayed too long.
Out squeezed the newborn child in a veil of crimson, anchored briefly by a starry umbilical cord.
Released to breathe, the baby sucked in air to sneeze. And in that fatal second Guri too was sucked right in. What thereafter sneezed was Guri. His follow-up yodel of regret and rage was taken for a healthy kiddling’s bellow.
Only Ennuat, holding him fondly, staring down into his eyes, noted for a moment something else that glared up at her – something alien and annoyed – but sinking, already overpowered. The Guri-baby loudly grizzled.
Yekdi awoke also in that instant and began to sob. Upset, the child Crarrow broke down too. Ennuat and the Crax balanced, grimly cheerful, amid the uproar of howling, hiccuping misery that welcomed to life a new god.
The other child did not appear to have faced such a bold dilemma. He was a mature infant, and lay inside an upper room, in a house of wood and stone with a horizontal sword hung over the main entrance, and a formless unvisited statue of God in the cellar.
The upper room had a large bed in it, but the child did not lie there. He was in a cot, or had been. The vague outline of it persisted, but mostly it seemed to have burned away, as had presumably any clothing the child might have worn. Now the child slept suspended inside a ball of flickering flame. Washes of red and gold passed continually over him, shading his whiteness, for he was a very white child, complexion and hair light as snow. In fact, if one observed closely – one did, but also many already had – the fire washes might be thought to be running about under his skin as well as across its surface.
A woman of the Jafn, a queen called Nirri, poised in the doorway at the top of the ladder-stair. Her face was a
study in strain. She did not enter the room.
The great bed was unslept in too. For almost a month Nirri had instead been lying down on a mattress in a specially constructed room of screens below.
She was not allowed, she had been told, to break the sorcerous web of fire.
‘Athluan,’ Nirri murmured.
The child did not respond.
Nor did the shining thing that sat there on a chair. The shining thing – the goddess Saphay also known as Saftri – merely stared at the child. And shone.
‘Lady,’ said Nirri with toneless formality, ‘can I or my women bring you anything?’
‘Nothing,’ said the shiner.
‘And he …?’
Nirri asked herself, blinking at the fluctuation of the fire, if her son was much bigger, far older – six years, seven?
‘Go away, queen,’ the shiner said. Her musical voice was not even ungracious, certainly not maleficent. Simply remote, shiny.
Nirri went back down the stair. In the hall below the warriors still present, the women and other children averted their gaze from her face. Outside a filthy snow-thatched gale was blowing. Arok the Chaiord had not returned. By now it seemed fairly sure he and the other men who had gone hunting must be lost. The goddess upstairs doubtless could have settled the question, but she never did. No man either had been elected to take Arok’s place. The coronation of a makeshift king was pointless probably, given the rest of this scenario.
Nirri walked out of the hall and into the room of screens. She sat by her brazier, whose firelight was not anything like the fireball upstairs.
Carefully breathing she slowed the beat of her heart. She thought, Arok lives. I would know if he didn’t. I knew in my own way with the other one I wed. And the child’s well. The child will grow and be a hero – a god – as She seemed to promise.
Nirri thought, Or I am wrong.
Very bad weather had started almost as soon as they left the capital.
As they descended to the snow plain, winds had come at the party from north and east, lashing and driving the top-snow before them. The dromaz mounts that every man rode made not so much of this. They lowered their heads, snake-like, and the riders too bowed forward, turning each compendium of beast and man into one humpy arrow on four racing legs.