by Tanith Lee
When the fight was quickly finished, anger at a Chaiord slain lending the Jafn vigour, the men from the five allied chariots stood above Athluan’s body.
‘Battle-death is always best. No man can avoid his bed for ever. Even the stars are only dogs in the hand of night.’
FIVE
Saphay had been flung from an abyss of nightmares into a bath of excruciation. Then, discarded on some mindless plateau, she saw what had caused all this, now elevated in front of her.
With the going of the pain, so she saw him: a golden child on a platinum cord. She had given birth to the sun.
‘Here, lady, here you are. Here’s your boy – flawless.’
He was hers.
Never had anything been hers. Even those things they had informed her were hers – her tiny royalty, her barbarian husband – she had never chosen them.
She had not chosen this one either.
But, oh – oh, if she had been given to choose, this one she would have chosen over all others.
Hers.
As they pressed the last debris from her body, and washed her, he lay on her breast. Miraculously, the eager milk came in a stream.
The attendants nodded. At last, this unJafn woman was behaving as a true woman should.
But how else? He was such a comely child, and a boy.
As Athluan had promised her, two Endhlefons went by. The people in the House remarked that their warriors must be chasing Fazions still. After the fight, they and their allies would feast; there was help necessary for the rescued villagers, too, who had been robbed of everything.
Erdif the steward stalked about the House. He was a man late in years, over-temperate and stern, who prided himself that he took less sleep than a Faz reiver. Erdif also rated his position highly. He fretted that no news had been sent him.
The House Mage declared that severe snowstorms raged along The Spear, and such things could deflect sendings.
On the twenty-third day, a sentry posted on the upper walls saw the men of the Klow returning over the ice.
Rowah came to Saphay in the makeshift room. The young woman was nursing her child, with every appropriate look of absorption and serenity.
When Rowah gave her announcement, Saphay seemed bewildered.
‘You must come out, lady, to welcome your husband. That’s how it’s done in a garth.’
Saphay frowned. She let the child finish his drink – he was at once asleep. She laid him down in the wooden cradle, not wanting to let him go. When she had done so, as always she felt out of balance, fragile and bereft, as if he were still attached to her and to put him down meant pulling away part of her own body. Normally she held him on her lap or walked about with him in her arms, all day and sections of every night. She too had now learned to go without much slumber, in the Jafn manner. The child had taught her with his demands, his sudden loud cries or slight stirrings. When she slept in the bed, he lay with her on the pillows. The women did not like this. They said she would roll on him – like some cow in a byre, she thought – and suffocate him. Saphay paid no attention to them.
Her love for this creature, barely alive but not yet human, not yet anything she comprehended, was blinding and total. She knew she would no more roll on him in unaware sleep than she would cut her own throat.
She must not take him into the cold – he was too new for the severity of the outdoors – so Saphay went out alone, already aching for her missing, intrinsic part. Insecure, she waited on the garth wall among the people and banners, swathed in her furs. And in this way she saw them bring back Athluan, and that Rothger now was Chaiord of the Klow.
Rothger entered the Klowan-garth, driving the chariot which had been his brother’s. The lions knew him. He had been their frequent charioteer for several years. Athluan stood in the chariot’s back as usual. Frozen solid, the corpse was strapped to the vehicle’s side. It was Jafn tradition, when such war-deaths occurred, that if possible a lord returned to his hearth standing.
In garth and House the period of mourning commenced. White clothing was donned to signify the snows that finally devoured all things. The mages visited the fires of every dwelling, turning them, by magic, black to demonstrate the starless night of a king’s overthrow.
Saphay, walking up and down in her prison-like chamber of screens, the child resting on her breast, wondered what she would have to do next. Rowah had mentioned the cropping of hair, an offering to go down into the grave with her husband – also days of fasting. For a long while the morning and evening meal had been the only times, aside from her ascent of the wall to see the dead brought in, that Saphay had left this awful little room. She was a foreigner among them and, though they had tolerated her while Athluan lived, the women intimated it was now her station to be circumspect.
What did she feel anyway about Athluan’s death? She had despised and feared him, lusted after him, begun to doubt him again. He had never been unkind to her – she thought of his efforts to explain and amuse her before their bedding on the marriage night, his tale of the hero Star Black. Yet he had distrusted her too. They had gained no enduring intimacy; sex had not unified but rather separated further, for it had brought the child.
She had been concerned how he would greet her son. She had worried over it. Surely he should have been glad? Somehow she knew he would not. Yes, even though with the Jafn a son especially was prized. But something had interposed between them. Now death concluded all.
For Rothger, she grasped he hated her, found her perhaps actually repulsive. She was an outlander, effete and nearly worthless. She sensed already what would happen next, although in her conscious mind it was unthinkable.
When Rowah entered, five days after the warriors’ home-coming, Saphay turned, holding the child firmly in her arms. He had no name: only the father could name a male child. As the father was dead, the child stayed nameless.
‘The Chaiord says you’re to go to hall.’
Rowah seemed troubled. She, too, perhaps found it difficult to call Rothger lord.
‘Then I must.’
‘He is still … in his chair. You know the custom, lady.’
Saphay nodded. For nine days and nights, Athluan would remain seated in his carved chair in the coldest area of the joyhall. Despite the cold, it was warmer indoors. Already he had begun to thaw, and to reek. The smell of it, and the camouflaging perfumes, stole into the room of screens.
She walked out into the hall, and Rowah followed. No other women attended her.
Rothger sat in the Chaiord’s place, but on an ordinary bench – his nobles, such as they were, grouped about him. There had been drinking, and some games to entertain the dead – another outlandish custom. Along the room the mages sat, twenty-five of them today. Now all eyes fixed on Saphay.
Never, in the term of her lonely life, had she felt more solitary, more unsafe. But the child shone on her breast like a live coal.
‘Now,’ said Rothger. He held out his cup, the one which was black jade, and it was filled for him. ‘This woman of the Rukar country.’
Saphay accepted they would speak of but not to her. That was what they did. They began to discuss her merit among themselves, any value she might have. That she be present was not, she thought, in order that she might hear or speak out in her own defence, but that assessing her might be made more easy for them.
‘She’s young,’ one of them said grudgingly, ‘and she can bear. Another could wed her. The law says that’s the best way. Even the next Chaiord sometimes takes on his brother’s woman. Then he may choose again elsewhere: two wives offer some advantages.’
‘Do you mean me?’ asked Rothger.
The other looked abashed.
A second man said, ‘Or she can stay a widow among us.’
‘So she can,’ said Rothger. ‘There are the alliance rights we have from her people.’ The men assented. All cups were refilled. Smoke and stench and scent bothered the child, who raised his head and gazed around.
At this, some of
the men took note of him.
‘He’s a fine-looking boy.’
‘His father was of the finest.’
‘Ah,’ said Rothger. ‘Yes. There it is.’
Silence clamoured. Just the fire made a noise, like teeth crunching bones.
Not meaning to, Saphay turned to see Athluan’s corpse. His face was changing in decay to a blue mask—
Rothger had got up. He poised, playing with the precious cup.
‘My father,’ said Rothger, ‘made three legal sons: there was Conas, there was Athluan, there was myself. Down through our line there was no man, not even in a story, and there is no man now, who has hair the colour of the hair of that child, nor skin like the colour of that child’s skin. He looks as if he’s been tanned at a fire. Red hair? A brown skin? Now, to my mind comes the idea of Olchibe.’
‘They’re yellow!’
‘Yes, true, yellow like this woman’s fleece. Perhaps her hair and their skin produced such a boy.’
‘His hair may alter. He’s not so many days old.’
‘Well,’ said Rothger, ‘I’ll tell you something now. You recall Athluan moved this woman’s bedchamber out of the upper room. Why? Because ghosts and vrixes haunted it. Once I went up there to find my brother, and I came on him struck to stone, unable to stir hand or foot. And this woman, she sat talking to this very child we see here, which was then inside her – but its spirit was out. It was older in appearance than now it is. The hair of it was red as copper.’
Down the hall swept the House Mage. He was grave, and the uproar fell away before him.
‘This I will confirm,’ said the Mage. ‘Rothger told me of it that very day. And the room where this woman slept, hour on hour, was so choked by foul magics that we took her out of it. Even Athluan, we all remember, thereafter slept mostly in hall.’
‘She’s not a witch,’ said Rothger, ‘to deal with supernatural things. It isn’t her calling. No, she is instead a magnet for such mucky stuff. And look what it’s produced. Let go the rights of alliance, I say. Do you think the Ruk will honour them? They sent us tainted goods and, as Athluan himself suspected, tried to lose her on the way in case we learned as much. Remember how my brother found this whore, sealed up in ice and yet alive. She is herself some kind of demon. She arrived here with that thing already in her belly – it’s no sowing of my brother’s. You’ve seen his children: there are only girls, and white as snow.’
Over a blurring vortex – the hall itself – Saphay saw the rotting violet face looking at her with eyes of nothingness.
Without warning or prelude, she remembered.
She remembered the sea, the dreams, the fire, the blueness of horror – everything. She remembered the god.
If she had been in some other spot, she would have screamed worse than at the birth of her child. Here, blasted into bits, she was rigid and noiseless as her husband had been in his death chariot.
Rothger was quite right: she had attracted to her something terrible. It had done with her as it wished, and she had gloried in her use. And here she was, clutching the fruit of the horror and hell and lighted darkness. Athluan had seen what she would not. No surprise he had ceased to like her. She stared at the baby in her arms.
All about her, the men shouted and argued, saying the Ruk alliance was worth something, saying it was not, talking of wickedness and evil craft. None of this meant anything.
She stared on into the face of the child. ‘Oh, you …’ she whispered.
The heart of Saphay broke in her breast and instantly fused together again, hard as granite, cold as ice. She put her hand over the child’s head, with its down of faintest hair, and bowed her own head to shield it. In some other universe she stood then, and waited now, with her one love, for the judgement of a paltry world.
It was night. No female had come near her; now one did. A green-haired witch, like a Jafn torch of meeting and sending, slid into the lamplight.
‘He’s merciful. He lets you keep your life.’
To Saphay these words were idiocy. She sat and still held the child.
‘However,’ said the torch-witch, ‘they will sling you out of their clean garth. I’m to make them safe for that – from you and your get.’ She meant, presumably, the child. ‘Behold,’ said the witch, ‘I see its shadow on the wall. Never have I seen such a shadow cast by a human thing, not even a Magikoy of the Ruk.’
Saphay glanced. She detected nothing unusual.
The witch began her work. Hurricanes and tintinnabulation filled the screened room. Saphay believed that otherwise no one had stayed inside the whole House. They were out in the yard and the streets. Even the corpse of her husband would be there.
What the witch did was exhausting, indecipherable, and it took away all energy or any scrap of optimism that might have been left to her. Saphay felt herself drift asleep, as the child had, from boredom and enervation.
When she opened her eyes, Green-hair was gone. Some men were there. They were Jafn, she deduced, but they had covered themselves in the pelts and heads of animals.
They instructed her to get up. One dropped her cloak of fur across her shoulders. Another thrust against her a flask that slopped with some liquid and a small bag that contained something. It was awkward for her to take these, supporting the child as she was.
After this she had to go out.
The night was black and starless like the mourning fires. One narrow moon had been dropped like litter on the horizon.
A man in a bear’s mask spoke, and she recognized the tones of the House Mage.
‘Keep your life. We’re blameless of your death. Leave this House and these walls. Go from our habitation and let your own familiars care for you.’
Saphay looked up. It came to her at last – they were going to exile her, not only from the House but from the walled garth. They were going to push her out into the ice waste.
They hustled her now through the yard gate, down through the wending streets, among the spirit icons and white-clad silence of snow and humanity. It was businesslike; no one spoke again.
For a moment, Saphay wanted to shriek out, not only from panic but with frustration and boiling anger. But then she seemed to see back along her life, and how she had been always at the command of others, how her life had never been her own. She had a memory of how she was brought here. Her exodus was more swift.
Over the door of the House, the sword lay peacefully horizontal once more. On the platform above the ice plain, outside the walls of the garth, Saphay gazed back at this and, though far off, she noted every detail.
The high wall-gate was by that time barred from within against her. The people had withdrawn, not merely into the garth but into their houses. One by one all the lights inside the wall went out. They filled their savage town with darkness including even the House, which also doused its torches and upper windows one by one. It was as if they concealed themselves from her, to show her – and God – the settlement was now empty, and therefore had no one in it who might assist her.
At a loss, Saphay looked in the only other direction. The snowscape was bleak and featureless, the sky almost featureless. Then even the sliver of moon slipped away. Heaven too had put out its lights against her.
Because there was nowhere to go, for a while she loitered outside the garth. But eventually, and for that same reason, Saphay moved down the platform by one of its treacherous ramps.
In the flask they had given her she was to find watered beer, and in the bag a burnt loaf. Thus they had guiltlessly provided her with covering, food and drink.
At first she walked not uncomfortably and not slowly on the packed snow. She might have been going somewhere – that was how she walked, and the child peered from his shawl, quiet in this vast and ringing shell of cold.
But the garth grew small and the waste grew enormous. It was an alabaster desert vacant of everything but herself and the nameless child.
Saphay wept, the tears freezing to her face. She ripped them away. Onl
y the child gave her warmth. All courage, all terror, all anger, were gone. All things were gone. She walked.
‘She doesn’t see me at all,’ said Guri, trotting in mortal mode to keep up, for the woman was fierce as she strode along in her boots, her eyes blank. ‘But you do, my lion, don’t you? You see your Olchibe uncle?’ Guri, who had for now shelved his plans to harm her, quite admired Saphay at this point. She was not whining: she got on with her fate. She would, he thought, after all have made a fine consort for Peb Yuve, albeit a minor one. But Guri had not been able to see to that, and the time was past. Peb though would have valued her, once she proved herself worthy of not being killed. He would have valued her more than the Jafn did. Besides, Guri perceived how well she guarded her child. And one further thing there was: though she had no psychic vision, plainly the child still did, even now it was born and in the flesh. He made signs to Guri, this baby, in some non-physical manner. But you should expect nothing less. Certainly the child was more than mortal. ‘You see your uncle and he sees you. And he sees that shadow of yours too. On the wall, in the lamplight, when that green trull was at her ravings. And from the moon before it went down. But in sunlight it’s best of all, your shadow. All those sparkles in it, my lion. All those sparkles like fire.’
First Intervolumen
The barrier between reality and the unreal is thin as light, denser than a mountain; less penetrable than diamond, more easily shattered than a glass; the most absolute Truth, the first and final Lie.
Kraag saying: Southlands
For a time there was only day and night and elongate snow. Then there came to be weather also. The winds churned along the waste, empty of any matter but powerful as elephants. The woman, as she walked, fought them with every step she took. Before the winds, she had not stopped very often, only now and then, leaning perhaps against an upright drift, sleeping a few minutes as the child fed. She was still able to feed the child, but the flat ale and bread for herself were gone. Sometimes she put a pebble of snow into her mouth; that was by now her food and drink. The child had ceased to feel heavy, although briefly he had weighed like a heavy stone. Yet, in some way, out here he and she had grown back together, and he was now once more a joined part of her body. When the winds came, every hour or so, they threw her over. Then she must kneel, crouching across the baby, her back to the onslaught, letting her own frame take all the force of the wind’s fists and knives. She did not cry; she was too cold for tears, and soon she felt nothing. She was burning down into the snow plains. She had ceased to care, and would next cease to exist.