by Tanith Lee
Thryfe trod up the slippery stair in the rain, not pausing to breathe though he had climbed the entire thousand treads without hesitation.
There was no longer any hint of a limp. His left hand flexed with ordinary strength as he wiped rain from his eagle’s eyes. ‘Good morning, Gargo.’
Bhorth, King Paramount, waited on his balcony, looking at Thryfe.
The balcony jutted from the King’s Hall of Kol Cataar, out over the glittering three-mile-deep abyss of sunlit rain and city.
For a moment Thryfe was caught by an eerie flinch of déjà vu. But this often happened, for the new city was deliberately so like Ru Karismi, and Bhorth was the last of the kings.
Thryfe anyway was always now at odds with himself. The god’s healing and revitalization of him left a strange dichotomy. Young and strong and fit as ten years before, Thryfe’s body contained the bitter and dissatisfied mind of an older and more damaged man. Was Bhorth too in this state? The god had touched him also. Yet straight and vital Bhorth carried the mind and heart of a man who had lost his son. And I, thought Thryfe, lost everything. But he struck the thought off at once.
‘The augurs that were taken, Bhorth, have reshaped their aspect.’
I choose similar words. He had recalled the former time this one reminded him of. Not déjà vu, only memory. It had been when first he warned them of the advent of the Lionwolf.
Bhorth did not remember. He said, ‘In what way?’
‘Your son is alive. This is now sure. But where he is is indecipherable.’
‘Then – it is death.’
‘No. I have said. He lives.’
‘So our wretched priests tell us we all continue to do, after dying.’
Thryfe felt the familiar impatience.
He had, delivering that first warning, foresensed the death of the Ruk, and of her kings and people. But Bhorth survived and the population of Kol Cataar had decidedly risen from the ashes. The recurrent influxes of Rukarians from all over the south, east and west disproved previous prophecy. The nation had seemed to re-emerge from beneath the very snows.
Thryfe chided himself as recently he often had to do.
Be kind to him. All that remained was duty. Besides Bhorth was a good king. And unhappy.
‘Sallusdon your son may return to you, Bhorth. But for now some other bond has claimed him.’
‘He’s trapped?’
‘Perhaps. Perhaps willingly.’
‘Is it the girl?’
‘Azulamni? No. There’s a hint of her presence somewhere in his life, that’s all. You know, Bhorth, don’t you, when the gods meddle in human affairs, these lacunas appear. Sometimes even they are physical. The problem of where Sallus is seems like that, a physical place, some inaccessible and unknown crag or island, maybe.’
‘Chillel,’ said Bhorth. ‘She has him.’
‘A goddess then. You have some hope from that. She was, I think you said, only very nice to you.’
Bhorth nodded at the irony. ‘Yes. Extravagantly nice. And saved my hide into the bargain. What goddess is she, do you guess, Thryfe, eh? If he’s the sun.’
The peculiar conversation was quite normal. Hundreds of persons must consider in this way, now deities wandered over the world in full view.
‘You told me she was black, like your son.’
‘Black as night. Stunning as the moon.’
Both men glanced again down the terraces of the city to where, in Ru Karismi, the River Palest would have shown, the entry to the Insularia under its ice.
‘Night then,’ said Thryfe.
‘There are a collection of gods of night in our temple-town,’ said Bhorth bleakly, ‘and have been for centuries. Why does night need another one?’
And they laughed quietly, angrily, these two elderly and impaired men, there on the glittering balcony in the warm sunshine and the smell of flowers, and their unlined, healthy skins.
Beyond the phoenix city, the fields and orchards had piece by piece extended. Banks of fog attended their outer limits, reaction to the warmth and chemical shifts of permafrost and soil. No wolves were seen here now, though in patches among the trees and vine-stocks sometimes a votive or shrine might have been put up. Most featured the Rukarian gods of agriculture. One or two had a small clumsy stone effigy that did depict a black dog or wolf. Winter had departed from the area, but blind instinct must have dictated a little insurance.
Where the hot-spring weather ended, outside the fog, icicles formed long skinny stalagmites growing a hundred feet or more from the ground.
After the stalagmite fence the Ice Age recommenced.
This plain of wind-riven white bore no sign of anything unusual. Here snow, when it fell, snowed.
From a distance out there nothing was visible of Kol Cataar. Even at sunrise or set no single ornament glinted on her heights. But as Thryfe had noted, this had not prevented thousands of refugees from seeking, discovering and entering the city.
The phenomenon of the phoenix Spring was equated wrongly but handily with those abrupt oases of heat and flora that now and then happened in the southern continent. All oases vanished in a period of time short or long. But as longer periods might last up to fifty years, the tales reported, better make hay while the sun shone. A man could be dead in much less.
The heat was not really intense. It would have killed them if it had been after such adaptation to cold. The plants, the grains and flowers too, had needed only the faintest tepidness to bring them on.
Oddly, the heat sometimes caused one curious mirage or hallucination, to the east of the foggy perimeters.
There a stone, tall as a man, appeared. It would seem to have been erected in a stand of sorry wheat that had tried to grow but, just too far outside the limit, had frozen in upright black bars. The statue looked real enough, and rough-hewn enough, a male figure of fierce and regal bearing. The face was the most finely carved, with even a short beard carefully delineated. But parts of all the rest of it, including forehead and hands, had not been fully excavated from the pitted native granite.
A sourceless cruel blue glow sometimes played about the statue when the sky was overcast. Then it looked ominous. But at other moments it was not uncheerful, and certainly the most interesting of the votary objects kept outside the city.
Then again the statue would disappear as regularly as it showed up.
Some had even gone out to visit it and witnessed its melting away in the air in front of them.
None had ever had physical contact with the stone.
A child who had strayed into the black wheat had told her mother that once she saw a young man standing there also. He had been studying the statue. The mother, aware of all the travellers who presently flocked to Kol Cataar in their wagons and slees, took no notice until the child insisted on description. ‘His hair was red – it was red as the red glass windows in the king’s high palace. His eyes were red too, inside. But then he smiled at me and his eyes were dark blue like—’ at which point the recital ended in a shriek. Mother had slapped child.
‘Sew up your tongue! Don’t tell lies! Don’t ever speak of him.’ For though they had, almost none of them, this time seen him, or even ever seen him in the past, the legend persisted of the demonic invader Vashdran, who had nearly brought history to an end.
Vashdran … Lionwolf … Nameless …
As he walks over the world the god memorizes himself, all he has been, all he must become, and those intersections where Before and To Be mingle.
When formerly dead in Hell, some of his first life had gone with him to help him make, from the material of his psyche, the country and cities there. But aspects from his future had also followed him, for in the kingdoms and republics of the fore and afterlife time existed/exists exotically or not at all.
So, for example, the mendicant priests from the original Kol Cataar had gone around in Hell, one of them singing too, if not as well as he would on earth.
Hell had been Lionwolf, and he his Hell. The King
of Hell, also Lionwolf, was a being hewn of mobile if obdurate stone. And now at the border of the place of Lionwolf’s third rebirth, the Hell King was an idol in the frozen wheat.
Lionwolf had indeed studied his statue, or granite alter-ego.
The addition of the beard – something grown – had beguiled Lionwolf. In Hell the stone King was hairless. The beard represented, rather firmly, the idea of age and wisdom, a mature and noble god less hard of heart than of fist, sinew and resolve. To Lionwolf he seemed far kinder than the smooth-shaven monarch who had smitten him with agony and dragons.
Did Vashdran recollect later the girl child who had ambled up to him that day? Yes.
She had glimpsed the scarlet crescent that lit his pupils from some angles, but was not afraid. When blue-eyed he smiled, she smiled too and he saw his smile sink into her. She would live now to be extremely ancient, without illness and frequently lucky. A shame her mother would hit her – he foresaw it like a tiny blotch on the snow. But such problems would become rare.
He loved to bless them. He loved to heal them. He loved it with such a savage and barely containable delight that he knew he must curb it in himself. It was not his task to refashion all humanity to perfection, as the army of gargolems had done with the city of Kol Cataar. Mortals grew another way. He tried to leave them alone, but occasionally – this indulgence.
When the child had darted off Lionwolf walked on.
That too was somewhat like the controlling of love. He could fly, levitate, dis- and re-integrate, simply be elsewhere. And so, he walked.
At first the boundary of fog, where it thickened, had been impassable to men – even to a mage like Thryfe. Now any could go in and out for the warmth of the magical Spring had consolidated itself and was secure. Once Lionwolf had walked beyond the loosened barrier, however, he might have expected to see no other except some approaching refugee.
Yet about three miles further along the plain he passed someone neither approaching nor going from the city.
It was Tirthen, the black wolf.
Lionwolf spared Tirthen a glance, without actually looking at him.
Dismissed, this lurid personification of Winter, Tirthen caught Lionwolf by the shoulder. Save it was not obviously the catching of a shoulder by a hand, not even quite a shoulder.
‘And?’ said Lionwolf.
Tirthen walked by him. He was handsome as before, clad now in black wolfskin that matched his wolf-black hair, and icy mail.
‘I slept too long,’ said Tirthen. ‘I missed your waking.’
‘But, well,’ said Lionwolf.
‘I met your mother once,’ said Tirthen. ‘Or twice. Among icebergs we fought. The second meeting was more civil.’ The golden god said nothing. The cold god said, ‘Perhaps Saphay and I will grow fond of one another. She’s a juicy piece.’
‘She is not,’ said Lionwolf, ‘exactly my mother.’
Even Tirthen, who seemed to have learned his dialogue hanging as icicles on the eaves of taverns, was shocked.
‘She conceived and bore you.’
‘She conceived and bore me. Next Wasfa did so. A while ago Jemhara also conceived and bore me, despite your artistic attempts to prevent it.’
‘Three mothers. I shall visit each of them. Compare succulence.’
Winter had lost much of his grandeur and his compelling in the snare of human-like impersonation. It was a complicated role to learn, that. Harder than bad dialogue. Yyrot had fallen in such a trap, but was not unhappy. But then Yyrot had given up his more strident side centuries ago.
Lionwolf anyway seemed unconcerned. They walked swiftly. Five or seven miles skidded by about them at each step.
Tirthen began to murmur in his beautiful voice.
After all, something up his wolfy sleeve?
‘Ice twilight,’ murmured Tirthen, ‘twice light. Ice twilight … twice light.’
‘A riddle.’
‘There are others. Who passes, asks the wolf. The wolf answers, I am you that passes. No, says the wolf, you are my shadow. Your shadow, says the wolf, is me.’
‘There’s another shadow and another wolf,’ said the other god. He sounded wholly like a man, Lionwolf, and in his tone was the identical intelligent impatience of his third father, Thryfe the magician.
‘Your first daddy, Zethzez.’
‘The Sun Wolf,’ said Lionwolf.
‘He is not greater than I. So much is self-evident. Is he greater than you?’
Lionwolf halted suddenly.
Ridiculous. Borne by his own supernatural speed Tirthen had steamed on over the horizon like a comet, and was gone. Then had to hurry back in an explosion of disturbed snow.
‘It gives you pause,’ tried Tirthen. Trying it seemed to cover his overshot.
Lionwolf smiled.
Even Winter personified could not help but produce in him a strand of compassion and care.
Besides you could just see some vestige of Yyrot in Tirthen now. Yyrot had left his job in the Rukar pantheon in order to spend more time with his family. Ddir, the other member of Zth’s trio, had done this ages before in order to spend more time with his stars. Debris, fall-out from Yyrot’s resignation, had partly enabled Tirthen no doubt to be coined. But Tirth was a god of Simisey initially. There was, if Lionwolf could detect it, a racial memento of Curjai to him.
‘We’ll be friends, you and I,’ said Lionwolf, smiling still. Tirthen writhed under the smile’s glory. It hurt him, it pierced his icy marble with golden veins. ‘Lalt and Tilan,’ said Lionwolf, flirtatious. They were the Simese heroes Curjai had told him of. He batted Tirthen gently across the cheek. He did not do more.
Tirthen might have thawed. Instead he vanished.
There was only pleasure in the god Lionwolf. All he kept with him was affection. Though his love and healing could be witty, cynical, potentially caustic, they were ambient. He loved his enemies too. To those who might hate him he was only too pleased to do good. He existed in light. He no longer cast any shadow at all.
On he walked. Places of the earth were passed. From his footsteps vines grew and streams of liquid water sprang. The dying revived at the distant whisper of his breath. The living prospered.
At last a night came when he dreamed of his first father, Zeth Zezeth.
By then Lionwolf was far from the Ruk. He had gone up into the southern mountains that divided the continent. Kraagparia had been across the border and in his first incarnation Lionwolf had entered it. The awful horror which had preceded the entering no longer troubled him, though it burned itself into his id and there lived with him, in harmony, but such things were only possible to gods.
Kraagparia conversely did not appear to be there now. Those people had learned long before the irrelevance of concrete blockades, the immovable shutness of flimsy things. Or, they were only serenely hiding.
In the dream Lionwolf, a god of love, unearthed sheer venom from the cellar of his essence. Everything that has life after all will cast a shadow. A sun more than most. A burned sun more even than most.
The dream.
Zth drives his chariot through the gaps between the stars, which are golden too, azure and amber and mauve.
Lionwolf flies towards him through the airless outer environment of space. Up here are the gateways, or so they say, to afterlives and astral planes and a medley of fascinating alternate venues.
A moon crests the black hills of the interstellarium.
Seen clear of the dark reflection of the earth, the moon is permanently full, round and blissfully white as the rounded bud of a white rose. A second moon pursues the first. Then comes another from around another space-hill. But two more rise next. Five moons?
Lionwolf to a large extent ignores this achievement.
He flies on, wingless and profound, straight against the meteor of Zth’s chariot.
The team of blue wolves leap from the traces.
Lionwolf is in the vehicle.
He grabs and manhandles – godhandles – Zth, who st
ruggles molten as a torch, evasive though grasped.
‘Let go of me,’ snarls Zth. ‘Do you want death? What do you want?’
‘He I have hold of,’ answers Lionwolf. ‘And I have hold of you.’
‘I shall punish you.’ Zth speaking like sparks. ‘Then let us see how you will be. To me you can do nothing.’
‘I will kill you.’
‘How?’ Zth relaxes. They poise in the chariot in space, clinging together like surprised lovers. ‘How will you kill me?’
‘I trapped you in my shadow. Only to kill you should be easy.’ Lionwolf is aware that both Zth and he repeat phrases already spoken. Yet even repeated the words are not what they were. Lionwolf says with a hate so velvet it puts the scratchy rasp of love to shame: ‘Your death is mine. I own it. It is all for me now.’
A light has begun, even as they have striven, even as they have become quiescent in each other’s incorrigible clasp.
Where the five – six? – white moons ascended in round plates, the solar frenzy comes as a disc so white it is a rainbow, and from its circle a billion spears, daggers, swords stick out, which are the rays it has extruded to rend and rip the fabric of the void. And the void too flames. All space is scarlet, scarlet and blue. Aureoled in the inferno the miniature ball of the earth so far down seems destined for cremation. But the earth only flushes mildly along one narrow curve. This boiling terror then is an old sun, an elderly, bitter old sun in a shallow sheath of healthy splendid fire.