by Tanith Lee
Lokesh cleared his throat. He was better for the wine; he was used to it – it had cheered him up.
‘In those days of our fathers, a creature burst out of the snows …’
Everyone knew the story, save perhaps the very young, hearing it for the first. It seemed even the stranger, the son of Athluan, whom Athluan had not had time to name, even he knew it, although he was Klow not Kree.
Telling the old tale, blushed with the strong black wine, Lokesh heard his own voice ring against the rafters, where the hawks ruffled their feathers. Beside his chair lay his best lion, and all around him all was his. He was vain tonight, vain of what he had got for himself. Lokesh, oddly, wanted to boast and to show off before the stranger who, like the stranger’s Uncle Rothger it seemed, was such a clever mage.
‘Four nights this thing came into the Kree House. No one could keep it out. It took men at their meal. It ripped them limb from limb. When the House Mage rose against it, before his craft could be of any use, the thing snapped off his head.’
Lokesh described what the monster was like: its hide like armour and its gigantic size, its fangs that were green with filth, polished only by blood.
‘Four nights in a row it came. Hardly any were left alive. The mages and the Chaiord and half the warriors were dead. The women and the children had fled to safety over the ice.’
Lokesh lost his place in the tale. He fumbled up his cup and drank, as if thirsty – though he was. And, as he did that, he recalled drinking, some Endhlefons since, from the cup that was Athluan’s skull. As the wine snagged in Lokesh’s throat, he coughed and beheld the peculiar eyes of Athluan’s son, if so he really was, fixed on him.
Nameless reached across, and with no ceremony, royal to royal, thumped the Chaiord on the back.
The hall of people stared at the Nameless one. Many had seen from the garth how he had arrived. They had seen what he could do with the deer before he killed them. Only the greatest of the mages could do that, for any animal would sense its death in those moments, and resist. And he had not stunned them with his sorcery, but charmed them peaceably asleep. They said the Magikoy had this talent. But Nameless was Jafn, in his way. He spoke their languages and in the proper manner. He knew their customs. As they had stood in their streets while he climbed the garth to the Kree House, some had seen how his blue eyes, catching the lights from various angles, now and then shone for an instant with smoky crimson.
‘Lokesh,’ said Nameless, when the choking was benignly concluded, ‘I’m a guest in the House. Will you grant me the happiness of telling the rest of this important story?’
A murmuring crossed the joyhall – then it died.
It was the Mage who spoke, as before. ‘It is the business of the Chaiord to tell this tale on this fifth night.’
‘So it is,’ agreed the young man nicely. ‘Then I’m content, sir.’
But when Lokesh tried to resume the tale, his voice was hoarse. He looked across at Nameless – and Nameless smiled at him. They were old friends, or might become old friends; all this Lokesh saw now in Nameless’s curious face. Athluan had been a just man, but slow and naive. Rothger, that Lokesh had relied on, was a pervert and a sot who grew more trustless every hour. This boy had the best of both of them, however: Athluan’s good looks and generosity, Rothger’s psychic ability and brains.
Lokesh cleared his throat again. He sounded better now, but never mind that.
‘Yes, for Athluan’s sake, I’m glad to let his son speak for me. The hero who saved the Kree in those far days is current in Klow legend, too.’
There was a lacuna. Nameless looked around. His magnetic beauty unsettled, yet contrastingly soothed. He was something special in the firelight – like the heroes of the past indeed, some of whom had been very strange to look at yet blessed and powerful.
No one had objected to Lokesh’s words. It was in a Chaiord’s gift to lend his task – like his bow or his wine cup – to any he chose. It honoured them very much, and Nameless was plainly honoured. He got up and saluted Lokesh in the Jafn way, his right fist to his left shoulder above the heart.
Lokesh had told them all Nameless was Athluan’s son. Probably Nameless had given him, in private, proofs of that. The hall accepted this, and sat back for the rest of the tale of the Five Nights.
‘On the fifth night, at sundown,’ said Nameless, ‘the scatter of men left watching for the Kreean-garth saw a fearsome image in the sky. Piece by piece a shape formed there. No cloud nor other ordinary thing, it went on shining long after the sun had fallen. The warriors called to each other, Don’t attend to that – as soon as the dark comes so will the creature out of the ice. But nevertheless they marked the shining shape in the sky. There, on the dusk, they saw it was nothing but a vast and supernatural hand, which gradually turned itself and pointed down its fingers at the snow.’
Nameless told the tale as Saphay had once told it to him; he had all of it from her. She had learned so quickly in the Klow House, learned more than she thought as, leaden with pregnancy, she lay in her chair in the hall, listening to the legends of the Jafn. Maybe, too, he had listened, as he drifted, anchored by her and his physical self in her womb.
He rendered the story simply, without histrionics, and he employed the antique words. Standing there, he seemed to speak to each man and woman individually, his eyes looking into theirs very often. Most felt he had singled them out particularly. He made them see the pictures in their heads, so they knew him for a mighty bard as well as a genius among mages.
The hand which pointed at the snows was the Hand of God. It had presently fashioned, from the snows themselves, a man of snow, tall and muscular, with all his mail and armour upon him. Then came a wind, perhaps the Breath of God. It blew, and blew away, and the man of snow had come alive – but he was not white, but black as jet – his skin, his hair, his eyes. Only the balls of his eyes were white, and his teeth; and in his mouth and under his nails and in the palms of his hands it was just possible to see the coral colour of his blood within the darkness.
Of course, in changing so utterly to its opposite from something inert, frozen and unhuman, the snow had also changed colour to its opposite. This was easy to comprehend. White must be black. Nameless mentioned this fact of the myth with such humour and sense, the hall laughed and nodded. Perhaps that was when they began to see a hero might be of another shade, his skin and hair and eyes.
The Hand of the Great God withdrew. The hero Star Black remained poised alone on the snow. The brave Kree warriors were clamouring to go down and join him in the fight, but Star Black shook his head. And then, anyway, the thing came shouldering up out of the ice.
‘At that,’ said Nameless casually, skilfully, ‘what do you know? The invincible God-made hero turned and ran from it.’
The Kree guards were shocked. They watched in dismay as the jet-black man raced away around the walls of the garth. The monster, bellowing and slavering, rushed after him. It was twice his size, though Star Black was tall and strongly made. But a coward?
Round and round the walls of the Kree garth pelted Star Black, with the hell creature in pursuit. The Kree on the walls fell quiet and began to pray.
‘Round the walls, once round, and twice round, and three times round, ran Star Black. He ran fast, faster than any mortal man, so fast the monster could not gain on him, though it stayed only the length of two shields behind him. Three times round, and four times round, and then five times round the walls. On the fifth circuit, as he was coming back level with the main gate of the garth, Star Black, losing neither balance nor momentum, spun about. In each of his hands was a great sword of blackest metal that gleamed like suns and, raising them up, the hero threw himself for the first – and last – against the creature from the ice. By now hypnotized from the circling and tired from the race, and too witless to anticipate a snare, the monster dashed, straight as a spear, on to both swords. One snapped in two at the impact. The other clove up through belly and ribs, and broke the stenc
hful heart of it.’
As Nameless stood there, cheers sprang from the Kree joyhall, and on the rafters the hawks flared their wings. How many years was it, how many decades, since old Lokinda had been able to rouse them up with this elder story?
‘That was the end then,’ said Nameless, after the cheering fell, ‘of that thing which so afflicted the Kree.’
And the child, Lokesh’s son, spoke on his cue, not to his father, but to the young man who burned before him.
‘What then was the fate of Star Black?’
Nameless answered gravely, as if never before had any asked such a question, and never before had it been answered.
‘Why, they made him king for his valour, a Chaiord of the Kree. He was adopted – and had adoptive uncles and brothers among them. But he ruled for a hundred years. And every year, on the Five Nights, he and nine of his men would circle the walls, not running, but at their leisure now, and make libations to thank the Great God who had so cared for his people. But,’ said Nameless, ‘after the hundred years, God took Star Black home again, into the Other Place. And lying on his bed of death, while his adopted family wailed, he was humble and he said this: Even the stars are dogs – only dogs – in the hand of night. He submitted to God, as must all men, but they say that, under his black skin, his bones were white as snow.’
In the silence now, Lokesh got up. He went to Nameless and embraced him as his brother.
Chaiord Lokesh was in love, but he did not know this of himself. How could he? It was not like any love he had ever felt before.
The whole House was beglamoured.
Could they have said quite how it happened – why it had? Their visitor was handsome and could tell stories like a bard, and he was an accomplished magician. Yet he seemed, if not exactly modest, then civil and, in his fashion, discreet.
The warriors toasted him, and when he – Jafn Klow and Athluan’s son as he had announced – kept blithely awake in their company all night, they were as pleased with him as if they had found him for themselves. The women, elderly or young, looked at him with another sense of acquisition.
But the Kree House Mage drew Lokesh aside.
‘Lokesh, you know I must examine this man.’
‘Surely, Mage, of course.’
‘He has come from nowhere, out of the wastes.’
‘He’s told me how, in his infancy, he and his mother were thrust into the waste by the Klow.’
‘Has he told you why?’
This dialogue took place in the morning, as preparation was going on for a hunt, and the Nameless one was preparing to go with the rest, easy as if he had always been among them.
‘He said to me …’ Lokesh appeared confused for a second. After all, Rothger had never told Lokesh anything of the expulsion of Athluan’s widow and son. Or if he had – could it be that he had? – Lokesh had paid no heed to it. ‘Athluan’s son,’ said Lokesh more firmly, ‘has said to me that there was bad feeling in the Klow for his mother, a woman of the Rukar. Athluan himself was just then only freshly killed in battle.’ Lokesh did not stumble over this sentence. He had talked about Athluan’s death times without number, just as he had needed to with the death of his own father, Lokinda.
Lokinda had taken too long to quit the world. Lokesh had been almost Athluan’s own age of thirty, and still no sign of the old fellow setting off. No people could flourish with a decaying tree at their head. Lokesh had cut Lokinda down with an uncanny weapon given him from Rothger’s bounty – a weapon that left no mark.
‘It seems there’s more to it than that,’ said the Mage. He meant more than any Klow bad feeling in the matter of driving a woman and infant out on the snows. But Lokesh winced as if something, if only very small, had stabbed into him.
‘This man is my guest, for Athluan’s sake,’ said Lokesh. He thought of how Athluan had died, slain in full sight by witchery and malice. He thought of Rothger and quailed, but it did not show.
‘I shall examine him tonight,’ said the Mage, ‘when you come in from your hunting.’
Turning then, the Mage squinted down the length of the room. Many had seen an oddity of the young man’s eyes: how, in certain passes of light, the black centres of their unusual blueness seemed changed to garnet. But there was another thing. There, suddenly the Mage saw it again – saw it, lost it. His shadow?
He himself was an old man, the House Mage of the Kree. Three days before the Festival of the Five Nights, he had beheld his own death painted before him in a dream. He did not have long. He had known all these years – from a similar source, his craft – of Lokesh’s villainy. But the Mage had said nothing, for he had seen the ruination of the Kree lie there, either way, whatever was done, And, even ten years before, the Mage had not wanted to hurry an apocalypse.
There were fewer under-mages among the Kree. Only six others came in to sit about the Thaumary, their eyes on the House Mage, on Lokesh and on the visitor who called himself Nameless. They were none of them as wary as the House Mage. Younger men, they too had been excited by Nameless’s advent. He had come among them like a new hero – perhaps he might be. Although they must now help effect the examination of any penetrating outsider, they had not got rid of an overriding interest and partiality.
‘You acknowledge,’ said the House Mage to the guest, ‘we’re bound to make sure of you.’
‘I’m Jafn, respected Mage. My mother educated me in the proper customs.’
‘But are you Jafn?’
The candid eyes met his; there was no guile in them. They were flawlessly clear and still. ‘Yes.’
He lies, the Mage thought.
‘And you are the son of the Chaiord Athluan?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your proofs of this?’
Nameless sat at the room’s centre, graceful and unaggressive.
‘I’ve none at all, sir – nothing. My father’s enemies were mine and my mother’s too, not surprisingly. They threw us out like their garbage, on the snow. We were meant to die, and they gave us nothing of my father’s, doubtless not wanting to waste it on us.’
‘You haven’t any look of Athluan.’
Then Nameless smiled. It appeared always wonderful, that smile of his. But not to the House Mage of the Kree.
‘My mother might remark differently, sir. Perhaps she knew him more thoroughly. She was his wife.’
‘And I am Mage of the Kree House. Do you think I’m blind?’
Nameless replied, ‘Isn’t it the Magikoy who say the clearest sight will sometimes miss what a cloudy eye makes out?’
‘They may say so. You’d know about the Magikoy from your mother.’
‘So I do. And that being established, maybe you see she’s the Rukarian princess, Saphay, that all Klow’s allies know was married to Athluan.’
The Mage said, with no emphasis, ‘I don’t doubt she’s your dam. But I’ve heard a little rumour that, nevertheless, her husband did not sire you.’
A hissing gasp went up around the Thaumary. Lokesh led that gasp. To impugn bastardy, particularly on hearsay, was grounds for feud, and a Mage might choose his words more politely.
Lokesh started, ‘This—’
‘Let him answer,’ rapped the Mage.
Lokesh lapsed back. Nameless seemed neither enraged nor distressed. Rather, he looked entertained.
‘Wrong,’ was all he said.
‘Today,’ said the Mage, ‘you hunted with the Kree along the ice. You rode in the chariot of the Chaiord Lokesh. You can slaughter deer by mesmerizing them, yet you elected to use a bow and arrows in the hunt.’
‘The preference of my hosts.’ Nameless bowed to Lokesh.
‘At which he excelled,’ exclaimed Lokesh instantly.
‘Very possibly,’ said the Mage, ‘yet it was a bow this young man had in his possession. And it’s not Jafn work – more like the male bows of Olchibe. And how it was put to use, that too was in the Olchibe style.’
‘There was an Olchibe man in the snows who befriended us
in my childhood. He was kind to us,’ said Nameless, conversational.
‘Perhaps kinder to your mother – and that nine or so months before you were born. You are, by my reckoning – whether from that seed or the seed of Athluan – not eleven years old. You’ve grown fast. Only magic can explain it. You said this Olchibe helped you in the snows. Was he a sorcerer? If so, how should I compare the facts of that and your swift growing?’
‘I see,’ said Nameless. He glanced down, not put out of countenance, only musing. Then his eyes lifted up again. ‘Actually, the Olchibe was not a sorcerer, nor was he my father. For my age, as with my powers which it seems you think someone taught me, God gave me both, perhaps in recompense for the ill-treatment I had received from men. Otherwise, what you have said is very like the lies Rothger spread: his reason for evicting us from the Klowan-garth – and preferably into the Other Place for safe keeping. Do I seem, besides, like an Olchibe to you?’
‘You seem like no man of these countries.’
‘From the Ruk, then. Are there none like me there?’
‘I don’t know enough about them to speak of that.’
‘Then, sir,’ said Nameless, ‘put your vast skills to work, and look.’
No one made a sound at this pure insolence. The Mage did not falter, neither did Nameless. Glaring in the red-blue guileless eyes, the old man beheld the razor’s edge: it was there, blatant as a shark in the sea. Yet you could not fish it out, nor come at it to get rid of.
‘Listen to me,’ said the Mage. ‘Only I and you grasp what you are.’ It seemed to him they were now alone there in that room of magic and of drawn pictures of spells and rites, alone in the Kree House – or in the whole wide Winter land.
Nameless looked into the Mage’s eyes and, sliding there on the gleaming razor, the Mage saw a terrible pity – a compassion. And he thought of how Nameless had killed the two deer with his quiet touch and accurate knife.
‘What am I, then?’ Nameless asked him. ‘Tell me. For, of the many things I know, that I never have.’