by Tanith Lee
‘No matter. This shows them, the lords in Rukar, what we may do. It’s a symbol. As that it has worth for us to destroy these hovels and collect this rubbish for sale.’ Peb Yuve nodded. ‘Great Gods witness I have spoken.’
‘Amen,’ added Guri piously.
He put the cache of jewels and money into a pouch; then, like his prince, sat watching their raid’s aftermath.
All about, under the static boughs of frozen figs, the Olchibe mammoths stirred like ghosts.
‘The gods of these Rukar, they trouble me,’ said Guri. He pushed back his fur cap, scratching at his braids.
‘Why? They’re false gods.’
‘That’s so, but nevertheless … Each god of the Rukar is doubled, split in two – one cruel and one fair aspect – but is still the same god. Does that give them strength, or lessen them?’
Peb Yuve did not reply.
A war leader, he was also the priest of his band, which approximated five hundred men. He thought carefully, and Guri waited in humility.
‘Their gods are nothing – weak, as they themselves are. Once I knew a man among the sluhtins of Olchibe. His brain was this way, too. One hour he would be brave and glorious. Then the next he would turn, like milk, and was insolent, and vicious as a fleer-wolf.’
‘Ah?’
‘I shot him,’ said Peb Yuve, ‘with my woman bow, and with arrows for women.’ He nodded again. ‘I have no fear of the crack-brained gods of the Ruk.’
The coffle was upright once more. As it was dragged off, Guri visually selected for himself a woman he fancied. He knew Peb Yuve would have no interest in her. The Olchibe leader was saving his rapist skills for the near future, when they had taken the east-travelling caravan with the Rukar’s princess. She was only minor royalty but, like the village they had burned tonight, she was a symbol. She would have her worth.
In the pink dawn, the procession wound down from the city heights along the huge ramps beside the Stair. Sleekars and carriage-slees, with their teams of deer, moved under banners that ribboned scarlet and silver for the royal houses of Ruk Kar Is. On the wide avenues below, crowds came out to applaud. From balconies there dropped a few hothouse flowers, past their best, left over from the previous night.
This exodus was of small importance. It was the show of a minute. If any dedicatedly craned for a sight of the girl from the palace, sent off now to barbarians in the east, they were disappointed. Sheltered by the red silk half-shell of her slee, she was also concealed by furs. But she could mean very little to them. They had never seen her before, and probably never would again.
For herself, Saphay gazed about her through her mufflings. Ru Karismi, jewel of the ice plains, was almost as unknown to her as she to it. She saw it now for virtually the first time as she left it. Its glamour was already redundant.
The caravan departed from Kings Mile at the East Pillar. Passing the solitary pylon, it coursed away into the ice fields.
Already steaders were abroad, among the man-high channels and runnels in the packed snow, labouring on those crops which survived here. The lesser road took the caravan through plantations of dormant grain and dilf, past isolate brewing and smoking-towers, each with its plume of steam or smoulder, hothouses and wind-strafed cots. Stooping apple groves covered the country beyond, and vine trees, their fruit packed tight within deformed trunks.
Once they emerged on to the open plains, the road became less pleasant, cratered in parts or covered by old snowdrifts hard as rock. Only their accompanying mageia could deal with these. Meanwhile freezing wind gusts slashed at their faces. Visors were snapped down from helmets; masks with glass eye shields were raised. The teams of lashdeer had covered their eyes at once with their natural blinders of transparent membrane.
The two women who attended Saphay sat grumbling nervously among the cushions of the half-shell. They had not wanted to come but had no choice, just as Saphay had not. They were afraid of the Winter, the plains, their destination. Not wishing to talk to them, and eventually not to listen to them any more, she finally told them to be quiet. Then their scarcely veiled expressions of hate and fright were familiar, all now that was.
At midday there was a halt, and the mageia called fire. She was a tall woman from a town to the west of the city, with indigo hair woven with charms. Fire arrived and hot food and wine were served. In the evening, after a raw sunset, this procedure was repeated.
The party then slept, distributed among the bulbs of tents lit and heated by the arts of magic. Outside the wind yowled, or else eerie echoing silences, often filled with imagined sounds, rang over the sheet of the snow.
Saphay could not sleep. She heard one of her women weeping like the nurse, if for the opposite reason.
Why has anyone been sent with me? I never wanted them. I would rather be alone.
She thought, I am alone in any case.
They travelled in this way for an endless while. Nothing varied, even the weather very little. It was always Winter. There were ice-forests, ice-lakes, ice-hills and once, in the distance, a white volcano with a cloud on it. Usually the sky was overcast, and at night starless, the occluded moons like dirty lamps.
Sometimes a town or village appeared. Twice they dined and slept not in the tents, but in a rambling inn built of whole black trees smooth as polished coal, and then an inn paved with ice-bricks.
They saw a few animals, deer of several sorts, snow-hares, woolly elephant, and an enormous bear far off, itself like moving snow.
‘It isn’t lion country,’ the captain of the soldiers said to one of Saphay’s women. ‘Nothing like that here. In the east it’s different, but they have their ways of dealing with them there.’
There were thirteen guards, the auspicious number selected by a mage of Vuldir’s. Altogether, the caravan numbered only thirty-three persons, including the essential mageia and Saphay.
Saphay stopped telling her women to be quiet. She was learning more now of where she was going from their chatter, for they consorted with the drivers and guards at every possible juncture. So Saphay heard improbable things she assumed to be true: of the lion sleekar teams of the Jafn Klow, of their single God who lived beyond the world, and their plethora of sprites and spirits who lived in it; of their codes of honour and feud. She had been told already her husband was white-haired, but had never seen him nor anyone like that, except the elderly, yet it seemed white hair was common in the east.
The road finished at the town of Freyiz. This was civilization’s finish too. After Freyiz, the mageia stood in the caravan’s front chariot, constantly employed in the shifting of obstacles.
‘We move at a sen-snail’s pace,’ whined the women.
Saphay was glad of that, not wanting to reach journey’s end.
Next day, the sun smashed open the sky. A dome of coolest blue overhung the plains, unmarked by anything.
The terrain offered better going. Ice-jungles appeared to the north, and the wind had dropped. They made excellent speed.
At the noon halt, the captain of the guard came over to the fire. He addressed Saphay directly.
‘Madam, the mageia must have a word with you.’
Saphay stood up. When the mageia approached, Saphay bowed to her, as was customary. Behind her, the captain stood poised, unreadable. The woman nodded her charm-clinking head.
‘I’ve seen signs, unmistakable. Trouble is coming. From the north.’
‘Of what sort? Bad weather?’
‘No, Saphay. Men intent on harm. They were shown to me as a wolf-pack running – but aren’t wolves. Their muzzles were wet with blood.’
Saphay felt her heart stop. The captain stepped forward.
‘The mageia says they’re well over three hundred in number. A vandal band I’d guess, from Gech, or the Olchibe, though it’s far south for them. Filthy brutes.’
Even Saphay had heard of the hordes of Gech and Olchibe and their atrocities. Her heart leapt up again and began to race – but it had nowhere to go.
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sp; ‘We are thirteen, and your drivers and grooms armed only with knives. Our best course is to turn back,’ the captain said. His face now was grim enough. ‘There was a village we passed. It offers our nicest chance.’
Saphay was aware the village had been small and pitiful, and was anyway more than a day’s ride behind them.
Besides, the mageia shook her head.
‘You can’t outrun them. They are Fate.’
‘With respect, lady,’ said the captain, ‘we must try. And I hope you’ll help us.’
‘I’ll do all I can.’
She quenched the fire with a word. As it crumbled instantly into nothing, Saphay was appalled by the omen.
With the rest, she bolted to her vehicle. The whips cracked over the backs of the lashdeer, and they rushed towards the west.
Less than an hour later, the vandal band appeared from the jungle now to their right. The mageia had been dilatory or incompetent, but then she was not one of the Magikoy, only a witch from some town.
The vandals, spilling from the static dark of the jungle, were at first only a mobile dark, as if the trees had found legs. Then you saw the glint of mail, harness, weapons, and the wink of their yellow banners. They were Olchibe, and the top of every banner-staff would be crowned with a severed head – even Saphay knew this – in discrepant stages of freshness, decay or bare bone.
She was so afraid, she had no thoughts, but her women shrieked and screamed, writhing and clinging to the slee’s rail. The other slees and chariots tore forward. Where the emerging Olchibe horde looked dark to them, to the Olchibe they would be as clearly marked by a frenzy of thrown-up snow-spume.
The cursing of the drivers, Saphay’s among them, vied with the slap of whips and sluice of ice.
Yet, even running at full stretch, Saphay noted how that dark still oozed from the jungles alongside. The horde, as warned, comprised many hundred men, who all the while lurched nearer. Once free of the shadow of the trees, Saphay could see what they rode. Mammoths moved fast when trained to it. Larger in size even than the wild elephant herds, they would also trample men underfoot, or lift them in their trunks to spit on their curving tusks.
To try escape was futile. There was not one of the Rukarians who did not understand this, but there was no other choice. Olchibe took few prisoners, and those only as slaves.
Soon Saphay could make out individual patterns and savage images on the banners. Presently flaming arrows rained down on the vehicles.
Sleekar after sleekar skidded to avoid the started fires. Some two or three chariots had caught alight at once. The deer were screaming, and Saphay’s women, too, in a dreadful harmony.
The mageia, who had tied herself to her sleekar’s rail, howled her phrases to put out fire. But the Olchibe too, of course, had their witches, the eldritch Crarrowin of their sluht-camps, and these had evidently put on a preserving magic more effective than the mageia’s quenching. The burning vehicles burned on.
There was no more order. Saphay found herself trapped in a whirling wheel of fire and collision, where suddenly her driver must veer to the right to miss a tumbling chariot. Her women fell; she too was shaken to the floor. Next second, through spume and smoke and flame, the girl beheld the Olchibe looming up on their mammoths, high as stampeding towers, and so close she smelled the stench of them: men and beasts and dank wool.
Her driver plunged back nearly on top of her. She was soaked and covered in his blood. His throat was cut. She saw one of her women hauled bodily up from the half-shell by a trunk like a hairy corded serpent – screeching, she was gone suddenly into the air. The other woman, in her terror, threw herself from the slee. She landed beyond sight, among the spinning runners.
The Olchibe who had killed the driver sat backwards on the rump of one of the still-running lashdeer. He faced Saphay grinning, and she had space to study him. All the tales were exact: his skin was yellow as the banners, his teeth painted, his hair mammoth-colour whitish – perhaps as her eastern husband’s was. The husband that now she would never live to wed.
The Olchibe spoke, friendly, to her. Saphay did not know his language, as she knew so little. When he swung forward to take hold of her, she pulled the lifeless driver’s dagger from his belt and thrust upward.
It was a fluke. She did not, either, know enough to have grasped how to kill a man. But the blade, maybe assisted by the jolts of the slee, went straight through his windpipe. His look was one of shock as he crashed headfirst from the car.
Saphay remained crouched on the floor. The dead driver bounced against her. Everywhere around, the world heaved with the huge phantasmal jostle of blundering mammoths. Driverless and beyond control, the lashdeer galloped headlong. Any moment, the slee must hit something, overturn, and be taken. Then they would have her. Saphay shut her eyes.
It had not occurred to her that the driver’s body now hid her from the rampage. The Olchibe, tickled at such an easy conquest, for even with a minor princess a bigger retinue had been expected, paid no heed to the one runaway carriage, apparently empty save for a corpse. For the lashdeer, they had only contempt – the Olchibe scorned even to eat them.
Finally it was Peb Yuve himself, surveying the dead soldiers and frightened remains of the caravan, who turned and struck Guri across the face. ‘Where is she gone?’
‘The princess? There, Great One.’
‘No, that’s only some whore. She has gaudy hair, the Rukar royal.’
Distressed by his failure, Guri stared desperately about. Across milling mammoths, he spotted the now distant snow-spray of the slee. Oddly, it raced back towards the ice-jungle.
‘There, Great One,’ Guri announced again.
Peb Yuve did not even watch Guri and his group set out. Yuve was, for that moment, more interested in the Rukar witch who, having sealed herself in a globe of force, stood glaring, as Olchibe warriors took turns in trying to pry her loose. They were electrically flung several yards each time for their pains, which vastly amused the rest, Yuve with them.
The slee was well in under the noiseless caves of frozen jungle before Saphay heard the thunder of pursuit begin again.
She recognized the heavy tread of the ice-mammoths. Nevertheless, as the mageia had said, it had the note of Fate. She knew she was not strong or heavy enough to secure and manage the reins of the deer. Already their jolting progress had shaken out the corpse of the driver. As they rushed through the jungle’s knittings, the horns of the team dislodged the more brittle boughs. Creeper and cascades of black splinters showered the slee.
Saphay rose from the floor of the carriage. She gripped the rail. She had killed a man – was changed.
To her left she glimpsed an unexpected vista, a bizarrely wide and unimpeded stretch of ice bisecting the jungle like a city street. Though unable to hold the team, she knew the cry for a leftward turn, and gave it. The deer obeyed, careering across thickets and out on to the nature-built boulevard.
Their hoofs drummed on packed snow. But, at her back, the thunder of the mammoths rocked the ground. The Olchibe would not give her up. Should she, like her woman, jump out of the slee? But driverless and panicked, the deer went too fast, refused to slow, and would not maybe for an hour or more.
Ahead lay the Marginal Land, and at last the awful glass of the sea.
Saphay prayed, but her gods had been left behind.
Only the sky saw how the slee surged on, mile on mile along the open track. The sky saw also how Guri and his cohort of twenty men discovered the track, and thudded after. Their speed was less, but enduring. Guri even laughed. ‘She wants to warm us up for her!’ He knew, when Peb Yuve had had his fill, the favourite seconds would get their turn.
Then the sky above the open track began to purple. Inflamed claw marks went up it from the jungles to the left, where the sun would sink.
The Olchibe shouted to the girl to give in. ‘Let’s take you home,’ they cried, jocular. But the bitch could not speak their tongue.
Well into the Marginal now
, even so none of them anticipated the sea. But the sea had drawn near. The blue day had changed the nature of the snow a little, which other blue days had also done, unlidding an inner pocket of ocean. It was not liquid; it only shone like a mauve mirror fallen on its back. As the jungles broke away and the snow lay upheaved in chunks along the sides of the track, whose openness might have warned them, all at once they were on it.
The deer shot out on the rippled ice, their hoofs going from under them, the slee-runners spitting sparks. The pursuing twenty-one men and beasts had scarcely more time to judge their path. They were already skidding at the approach to the pocket of glass water before they knew it, coping far worse than deer trained to roads of ice.
A curious dance ensued: the sliding slee, the cavorting mammoths skating over the sea lake. Shouts hit the sunset, then came precarious stasis. Everything was stilled.
The first and second moons, rising tonight together, brilliantly showed the slee lying on its side, one runner broken, the silk half-shell dislodged, the lashdeer petrified. Closer to solid ground clustered the twenty-one mammoths, some kneeling, three fallen, wrecked and grunting. Men stood scattered on the ice.
The pursuers did not pound towards their quarry now. She did not fly, either. None of them dared move.
But something else was in motion.
As the white moons climbed the twilight, they began to reveal an unfathomable blackness deep down in the sea-pocket.
‘What’s that shadow, Guri?’
Guri looked. He dismissed it. ‘Ours, our shadow, from the moons.’
The whitened ice darkened further. The shadow spread like ink beneath their feet. Something black as moonless night was gliding by beneath.
Guri caught his breath. ‘Great Gods – Great Gods—’
Perched in the tilted slee, Saphay gazed, without Guri’s education, at the shadow-cloud under the ice. But she did not require tuition to know it.
Horror is infinite, and needs no time. There was no time. A roaring and groaning split both the quiet and the ice together. Dislocated walls of ice exploded through the air, moon-sparkling. A black crack commenced, displayed an artery of liquid blacker still, and then the liquid was obscured, and something filled the channel, filled and filled it to bursting, burst it – pure darkness came thrusting upward from the depths, behind a sallow pointing lance. It was an ice-whale, breaching.