by Tanith Lee
The vision muddied and was gone. Now a world hung there. Jemhara did not know what this was, this greenish-bluish globe panelled over with white. Thryfe had come to know, for he had been shown the sight before by this oculum. The earth looked back at him like the pupil-less iris of an eye. The pupil instead might be the black of space that stretched about it.
As one looked, some of the whiteness went from the iris. Thawed lands and seas flowered out in green and blue.
He had not decoded what the apparition of the earth said. Only that, with the coming of another sun god, things might be freed from the ice. In itself that was a dangerous prophecy. The change would be vast and violent and might cause the end of the world.
Presently the earth dissolved in the glass. On the dark background Jemhara stood in the oculum.
Thryfe caught his breath. Jemhara also.
The portrait was exact, even to the gown of tissue given her by Zth.
‘Good evening, my love,’ said the Jemhara in the mirror.
Thryfe waited unspeaking, like iron.
The Jemhara who held him shed sudden tears. In the oculum, that Jemhara too shed tears.
Thryfe said woodenly, ‘Don’t cry. Why are you crying? Is death – so harsh?’
‘I am not dead.’ Both Jemharas spoke together. Their crying stopped. ‘I am here in the room with you. But you refuse to see me.’
Inside his iron case she felt him, the Jemhara who held him, turn to rock. ‘You are nowhere. Oculum. Cancel this false image. Do it. Or I shall smash the glass.’
The external Jemhara let her lover go.
The internal Jemhara in the mirror, like the earth – dissolved.
She positioned herself in a corner. She watched Thryfe as he investigated the oculum, with a jinan summoned to assist. Nothing was found wrong with the mechanism.
Then Thryfe paced the chamber a couple of circuits. She was afraid he would pass through her and drew back to avoid the possibility. Even the jinan had not seemed to pick up any indication of her at all.
‘She’s dead,’ Thryfe said aloud, at last. ‘I know this with my intellect but not with my mind. I must school myself. I must let her rest. All I have is this unwanted house, this unwanted and unmerited honour given me by a demoralized king. This unwanted work – gods help me – my duty of care among mankind. And I care nothing for any of them. Did I ever? I doubt I did. I degrade my training. I am dross. And he, that shining demon, has ensured I shall survive and live long to know my worthlessness and my just punishment so well deserved. She’s dead, Thryfe, your Jemhara. One day you’ll join her in oblivion. Pray for that to whatever rootless spirit will listen. Till then, this.’ He went from the room. After which, so did she.
The stubborn shards of ice had been hacked away from the garth, like the carapace.
Daybreak had hacked off the residue of night.
The settlement had a damaged look, though it was almost intact. Something in its persona perhaps had been vandalized.
In the Holas House Arok the Chaiord had sat down, or been organized into sitting, in his carved chair. His face seemed drawn and elderly. He had aged by thirty years they said, his people, loitering about the lean lanes, or in the House yard. His warriors did not know what to do with or for him.
Nirri tended to him in a collected manner. She had the women mull beer with ginger stalks from the hothouse, and then served him this in the bronze flagon kept for him that only he, or his favourites or son, could drink from. The true favourite had gone, of course, Fenzi, lost Dayad’s stand-in. Some had seen him merely stride off over the snow. Others muttered that it had been his phantom anyway, he was already dead; as Arok was. The other son of Arok’s body they said nothing of. They knew the Saffi-goddess witch-hag had done something, made some mad sorcery. They had no mages to counteract her mischief. The wise-women had refused to come out of their house. As for the werloka, he was cunning at drinking and gambling, but not worth much at anything else.
‘How are you, sir?’ asked Nirri of Arok, in the most civil and accommodating way. Her eyes, some said, looked more sunken than Arok’s own.
Arok said in a low crust of a voice, ‘Don’t bother me with how I am.’ And he drank a mouthful of the hot beer and put it from him.
Those warriors who had been with Arok at Padgish had informed Nirri of all the circumstances. The Winter god she had seen herself. She had not faltered. Only her eyes – sunken.
Upstairs something burned and froze at the same moment.
No one dared go to see. Once Arok had come in neither had Nirri.
Outside the garth still the handsome foreign prince Curjai lingered with the blonde witch-woman. Let them go off together for all the good they did now.
The werloka stumped from the Holasan-garth, leaning on his staff, ignoring all those who ignored him. His grizzled mane was uncombed and the tousled tatty wolfskin he wore to keep him warm he also slept in. He knew their opinion of him in the garth, as in the village from which, back on the other continent, he had been ousted by a talentless numbskull. Despite all that the werloka had confidence in his own ability.
Although the ice had been shattered and the garth seemed full of walking dead, not to mention glers saying they were gods, something else irritated on the perimeter of sight and hearing. It was just over there, beyond the fields of dormant crops. It needed seeing to. The werloka knew that none other here, for whatever reason, was remotely capable of that. He hoisted himself along. He was unsure if he was. He meant to try.
Half an hour on from leaving the garth he crested a slope and saw what he had come to face.
He halted, and leered at it.
Winter sat on the adjoining hill in a carven chair, not unlike the Chaiord’s. Doubtless he had glimpsed it in the House and now inadvertently copied. While Winter was eternal and presently universal, Tirthen-as-Winter was a rather untried god.
To the werloka however Winter-Tirthen was only one more gler.
‘Be off, you!’ shouted the werloka, and went at once into an unshaven rampaging jig, flexing his staff. This had been effective, sometimes, in evicting malignant Jafn sprites. Bewitcheried lights littered the vicinity.
Tirthen looked down his long, chiselled nose.
He had been already in many places in his adopted guise. Back to Simisey to bluster and remind those who tended his altars; across the ocean to Kol Cataar where they did not know his name but, drawn by the crisp of heat, he had been a wolf and snarled and new altars had risen. He had also circled this insignificant dunghill, patrolling the hull of ice that kept it in. When the ice was breached he was offended. He was a jealous god made in the image of man, beautiful, envious and insecure.
It would be a minor deed to freeze this cavorting idiot with the wolfskin and staff. But Tirthen had made that fatal error when, an elemental, he had assumed human characteristics. The greater gods went the other way about, human to deity. Childhood normally works best by coming first.
‘Oh, desist,’ said Tirthen, foppishly. ‘Do you fail to know who I am?’
His words filmed the werloka with ice.
But the grumpy old warlock was not overcome. Inside his slovenly muddle something burned.
‘Gler you are. I name you gler. Begone. Bugger off!’
Tirthen rose. But the werloka had by now entered an orgy of contrasuggestiveness. The atmosphere turned scintillant purple as he whirled and exorcised.
Tirthen started to come down from his hill.
The ice-domes at Kol Cataar and here, the attacking icebergs out at sea, the storm of hail and lightning in Kandexa, the splitting glaciers beyond Kol Cataar, all those and other epic stratagems had been due to Winter’s jealous and instinctive murderousness. Ignite a flame, he would blow it out. Mindless then, and without either personality or outer form, he-it had laboured to prevent the renewal of the fire. But the fire had returned. Winter had lost the game, though irrelevant moves would continue for centuries. A new order began. Only in little things now could this fi
end find triumph.
From the hill a giant black wolf launched itself. Icicles fringed its coat. Its teeth were like the broken edges of some gate to death.
With a howl the werloka flung down his staff. He did not himself wear wolfskin for nothing. In his youth he had been borjiy, a berserker, and his inner guide animal, savage and hot, was also wolf.
His bundle of body toppled off. He pummelled out of it. A grey old wolf with a hoary snout parted its jaws on yellow fangs. The werloka hurled himself in turn to meet the god. As he went he roared the blood-joy of the borjiy, and meeting the substance of Tirth plunged in his claws with the boiling glory of berserk fury.
The goddess Ruxendra, flying across the snow towards the garth, discovered she must haul her hound back. He was eager to join the fight below. Crossly she bit his ear. ‘Leave it, Star-Dog. They’re not worth it.’
While for a mile around the young morning went deep red, as if laved in blood.
FOUR
During the night, and she had not been, was not now, quite sure which night that was following her return to the earthly plane, Ruxendra had seen some of her shrines. She had had a sensation of being tugged many ways at once. To begin with this panicked her. But then she learned she could move in several directions and be in them, and yet also stay together all in one place. It was, she concluded, what the liquid sea must experience, or even the driven snow.
This had happened because people were regularly praying to her, and making her offerings. Ruxendra wafted through the air of a small fane in Kol Cataar’s new temple-town. Her shrine here was entrancing, gold and pink. Women were hanging little trinkets there. The statue was like her – but not like. They have made my hair too light. It seemed she was a dawn goddess, and one of the very, very few Rukarian female deities. Even so, like other Ruk gods, she had two sides. One was lively, valiant and caring, tearing through the ramparts of cold night. The other side was dead. How frightful! A dead dawn. This side, a lesser image, looked grey and had been veiled.
Ruxendra was both flattered and upset. She wondered how they had known she died, or how they knew her Hell-coined dawn name.
But soon she was in the ruin of Ru Karismi, and drawn to another shrine, a poor little one near the river. It was made of loose stones and set out of the way of the winds. One of the stones was her actual memorial from the burial Morsonesta of the defunct Insularia. Someone had dared that forbidden and previously impenetrable region and dug up the marker. She spotted a similar plaque far off over the ruin, that of Flazis, another Magikoy who like herself had perished of the White Death. What god was he supposed to be then? A god of mending broken bones, it seemed. But his shrine was neglected. Hers had been kept up. A fresh rose lay on it, turning black from frost. How had a rose grown outside a hothouse in this ravaged pile? Vashdran – Lionwolf, she thought. He must have passed by.
Although she was no longer enraged at Lionwolf, she did not like to recall their last encounter.
No one was about in Ru Karismi that she could see. Steel prongs of freezing weather searched it like heartless surgical fingers. She felt the reverse of nostalgia; a dread of remaining.
Another shrine showed up at a miniature village, far into the north-east sliver of land known as the Spear. That was in Jafn territory.
She was confused by this. The Jafn did not worship gods, only, barbarically, one God. How then did they come to claim her?
But in Hell there had been men from many countries, not all of them ever identified. And the shrine she now saw was less to a goddess than to a sprite. It had food offerings. From certain accessory items there, a lamp, a piece of glass fixed to reflect the sky, she assumed they took her as a spirit of radiance.
Eventually Ruxendra seemed to find herself and be in such a lot of areas she lost track of them. A compendium of altars, vessels, votives, demonstrated her as dawn or first light. In a handful of these ideas she was even fierce, a scarlet gull: Dawn Red-Winged. This was the memory of her time as a vengeance in Hell, a fifteen-year-old at her most militant. Yet there was another shrine in the Marginal Land beyond the Ruk, where she had been depicted as a goddess of love.
The far-flung mosaic of her consciousness flew back together.
She had by then also dodged the fighting wolves, and lugging her hound with her landed inside the Holasan-garth at the House door.
She had anticipated she would find Curjai again. But he was not there. Instead a Rukarian princess sat on an upturned bucket by the doorway.
Saphay. Ruxendra had never seen her, but knew her. Gods knew things.
With stilted Rukarian etiquette Ruxendra gave the female bow needed if still they had both been ordinarily alive. With matching starchiness Saphay inclined her head.
Ruxendra was aching with the wish to recover Curjai. Saphay was gurning with recollections of a dead beloved whom, even though reborn, she must either wait for – Athluan – or could never meet – Lionwolf.
As if just in off the avenue Ruxendra fastidiously complained, ‘There is a vile wolfish minor god brawling up the slope with a stupid man who has changed into a wolf. They’re biting slices from each other. They nearly splashed my dress. And my dog here, well, I had to pull him away.’
Saphay said, ‘Males.’ That was all. It summed up male gods, male witches and male dogs. It contained great condemnation.
‘Oh, naturally.’
A frightful bang, as if thunder had cleavered open the sky, shook everything. Snow gushed off the House roof and crashed around them, missing them completely but swamping other things. The clouds above burned up blister-red, then faded back to paleness.
The rest of the garth had gone to earth.
No one, nothing non-supernal, was to be seen.
‘My former companion,’ began Ruxendra, ‘a young foreign prince—’
‘He has left,’ said Saphay. ‘Some awful act happened. He said they had killed his mother … Something in him reminded me of my own—’ She stopped. She said, ‘I doubt though if he would notice if I were killed. But then he knows I can never be killed. It is,’ she said falteringly, ‘very hard on a mother. To lose – in whatever manner – her only—’ and stopped again. Stopped as if struck dead as she never could be, now or ever.
The dog, who had sat peaceably through all this, even the cosmic bang and crashing snow, raised his nose and let forth a long, dismal howl.
Instantly every other dog, but also every cat and lion and hawk of the garth, began a complementary wail.
Saphay rose. She clapped her hands angrily. ‘Be quiet!’
With an impatient violence she clutched her mantle round her, and omitting another word glided off, not walking but slightly levitating, towards the distant slopes beyond the garth.
Ruxendra watched her a moment then leapt airward. The dog, silenced with the rest, pounced after her. Knowing where the town-city of Padgish was merely because she wished to know Ruxendra blew towards it. Escurjai must be – was – there. Ruxendra had matured. She was done with waiting. And her lover had been hurt.
Saphay however ascended the hills and soon found herself about six feet clear of the earth, above the bizarre statue of a gnarled old wolf. It seemed made of snow, glazed very dark. It was the remnant of the werewolf werloka.
Out of a tall snow-drift something turned and was Tirthen.
‘You are like Zth,’ blurted Saphay.
In her voice was the purest horror and allergy and anger, but also some other element. She stared at the god, his raven hair and eyes and coldness, and contrasted him to the laval Zeth fiery in the womb of the ocean.
‘And you,’ said Tirthen. ‘Whom do you resemble?’
‘They are my people, over there.’ She found she had de-levitated. Her feet were on the ground.
‘That muck-heap? That anthill?’
‘Once before you damaged the humans in my care—’
‘Your care. You care nothing for them.’ A flare lit in her mind. He read it apparently. ‘Very well. One you care for. A
child – or no, a man now. I remember. You sealed him in fire. But I sealed him in ice. What is he? He does not count.’
‘You can’t harm him. I’ve made him immortal.’
‘But you have not made him a god.’
Saphay became flame and lioness.
Tirthen became silver and giant wolf.
They slammed together like two doors kept apart for centuries and now breaking free of restraints.
As god-flesh clashed on god-flesh the whole surrounding landscape gave a groan. But it was not like any note of pain.
The cloud-bloated sky darkened to untimely night. A transparent image writhed on it. It copied the long-lost vision of the mage coal, thrown skyward years before, a lioness and a wolf locked in battle, but a battle which was foreplay.
Saphay did not know what she did.
Her brain and nerves were full of the past conflict among the icebergs, raw energy flailing from her. Through this thrust other sensations. She smote ice, she whirled and sank among it, and there was a jewel of fire, not in ocean now but in the crux of her body. The coldness was weight and heat. It scorched the length and depth of her.
Realigned with the human aspect of her divinity the day goddess found herself clinging to a god of Winter and unlight. In a pyramid of frozen glass they were coupling, breast to breast and mouth to mouth. And as he struck through into her core he was not cold at all and she grappled him closer, until they might become one single thing that galloped on the spot, atoms splitting everywhere about it in rainbow radiation.
Breakage sped every which way.
A noiseless shrieking made the vicinity into a crystal bell that presently disintegrated on three rocking buffets of noiselessness.
The dark sky drooped. Clouds seemed likely to fall off its surface. Snow skulked down.
At the garth nothing moved. Live creatures kept motionless. Some enormous miracle of happening had shaken all to bits – yet nothing came down.
But in the upper room of the Holas House—
This too produced no sound effect.
A kind of tingling slap, only one, inside every skull.