by Tanith Lee
No other can hear this, or see. The Mage trembled. We are locked in a moment frozen solid as any ice. And yes I know, and no I do not know, what he is.
‘I’ve no knowledge of what you are.’
‘Then I must learn for myself.’
‘Must you sharpen yourself on us?’
‘On everything, perhaps.’ Regretful, mild, Nameless rose.
The Mage sank back in his chair. And then the Thaumary was vacant of all of them save Lokesh, who stood there grinning, his bat-wing ears flushed with good humour and alcohol. ‘You see, Mage, I said he’d show us he was worthy.’
What had gone on, some further hallucination or trick? The Mage thought: He showed nothing. Had Nameless altered sight and hearing, time itself? The rest believed the examination had been drawn to a more than satisfactory conclusion. Only I sense this, and what can I do? Where … where does his power begin, or end?
In Hell, the Mage thought. In Hell.
Outside the shut door of the snow-house, where she had thrust him at sunfall, Saphay could hear Bit-Nabnish howling and pawing at the timbers. There were no windows here, as would be in the Ruk or even among the Jafn, or she would have tossed hot charcoal down on him from the stove. Or maybe not, for that might have kept him warm.
I am cruel, she thought, caught between self-approval and astonishment. Had she never debated on that before?
Later she would let him in, before he froze to death. But she did not want the slave to hear her weeping as now she did, sobbing and spasming, turning inside out with grief on her mattress above the ladder.
Cruel? She was not cruel. Her son was cruel. Let him cruelly suffer then, among the detritus of humanity he preferred to her.
Or no, let him be safe.
She had given him no gods, had never dared. To every child born in the cities of Ruk Kar Is were awarded three gods, two from the father or paternal side, one from the mother. Vuldir, Saphay’s father, had given her Zezeth. Who should she then have awarded to her son? With cause, she had come to fear them all.
She would now let in the moronic slave. That should be her offering to the gods, largesse to the wretched ‘bit’.
As she descended the ladder in the stove-lit gloaming, she heard a frightful outcry go up beyond the house, worse than any of the servant’s howls.
She sprang off the ladder and ran to fling open the door.
‘Why are you shrieking like that, you fool, as if you’re being torn apart by fleer-wolves?’
Bit-Nabnish lurked cowering and shivering before her, foul and repulsive as ever.
‘Come in, then. Get to your undeserved hole in the corner.’
The slave slouched, gibbering, into the snow-house, obeying her.
Saphay did not notice the spark in his eye. She did not know that Nabnish had actually finally been put down under the snow, and that what now scuttled away across the the floor of her house was not Bit-Nabnish any longer.
THREE
Guri sat cross-legged on the ground, facing his nephew called Nameless, sitting also cross-legged on the other side of the fire one or other of them had summoned.
‘And now you can manage their cat chariots,’ said Guri. ‘You learn fast, as I remember. I recall your first bow which I made you. You mastered it at four years – and in five minutes.’
‘The old Mage was troubled by my Olchibe bow. Lokesh himself instructed me in handling the chariot. Lokesh is dross. Rothger’s the one I want.’
They brooded on their fire. Nameless made provocative girls appear to dance among the flames, shaking their unbraided hair. Guri cackled, then, seated here about a mile from the Kreean-garth, they returned into mutual noiselessness.
Nameless had lived among the Kree for two Endhlefons, twenty-two days. They were now his: the men, the women for that matter, even the mages. Even the old Mage in some way, for he had taken to his bed with a racking cough. Lokesh, around twenty years the young man’s senior, hung on him like an enamoured friend of his own age. None thought less of the Chaiord for that, since they themselves were also besotted. They smelled the god in his blood. Guri smelled it too; it made him uneasy now sometimes. For he knew which god it was – that fiend under the sea.
Guri had helped herd the fire-glimmered deer towards the Kreean-garth. And long ago he had lessoned Nameless in those masculine accomplishments so necessary to everyday human survival: how to hunt, to fish, to kill and skin and cook a beast, the making of bows and other weapons. He had even tutored Nameless in the correct riding of a mammoth. But all this had gone on under the lid of the snow-forest; and to it, almost at once, Nameless had added the knack of a sorcerer.
Proud of him, yet feeling shut out in some form, Guri recollected he had not been able to teach him sleekars or chariots, as they were beneath the attention of an Olchibe; he was ignorant of them.
Nameless also stared on into the fire, from which the dancing harlots had departed. He seemed composed, as usually.
Nameless knew what Rothger had done, all of it. Or at least he knew Rothger had murdered Athluan. The deduction was facile enough, given all the circumstances. Lokesh too, Nameless could sense, had lent his clumsy aid to Athluan’s destruction. But Nameless did not hate Lokesh, only despised him. And, anyway, Athluan was not the father of Nameless.
The boy and his mother had already sufficient grudge of their own.
There had been girls in the Kree House. There were apparently always nooks in a garth where you could take a girl – a byre, a shed, a little orchard of iced trees where apples grew under ice-glass. The girls were so thrilled, swiftly his caresses brought them to readiness. Their helpless cries of delirium cracked the ice. Apples snowed down. One evening he had called an ugly ageing woman away from the House pots. He had had her, too. He did not mind her: her body was much better than her riven face. Nameless had done this almost from desperation. It had been, so far, all too easy, while, conversely, the other thing, the thing which haunted and filled him with terror – that thing, the god – was beyond his scope, his will, even beyond his ability to live. Nameless could not bear it. He pushed it far away – Zeth, Zeth Zezeth, his true father.
Guri was now asleep. Once this occurred, he would gradually vanish. In childhood Nameless had disliked this. He would fly to his uncle and punch and claw at him – or the space he had mostly left – to bring him back. And Guri always returned for him. Now, despondent, Nameless let Guri go.
Nameless sat thinking of himself. He did this as if he pondered on another man, one alien to himself. He had no urge, this alien being, to sleep. As a rule, he never felt the need of it – which stood him in good stead with the Jafn. And yet when he decided on it, he could fall asleep instantly, like a cat. Did he dream? Now and then. Nameless did not want to think of his dreams.
Eventually, sitting here, he began to contemplate Saphay. His face grew by turns sad and adamantine; perhaps he did not even realize this. He knew, as he said, so little of himself.
Dawn undid the pale dark. The forest, packed with snow and chimney-houses, dulled then rekindled, and the five sibullas came out of their hut, along the ice-platform, to honour their lady Ranjal, goddess of wood.
There were many statues of her through the trees, but this one was the guardian of the village-city. Or it had been.
‘Where she?’ screeched the sibullas.
‘Stolen she is … stealed away …’
The platform was empty. The goddess with antler hands and a badger’s pelt no longer posed there for their adoration.
Given over to her at the age of six or seven, the decrepit sibullas were bereft and frantic, ancient children abandoned by their mother.
They skidded and squawked along the ice, peering over and down the ice-steps into the forest, which had only the normal things in it. Ranjal was not to be seen.
By then they were crying. Wizened babies, they clung to each other; but then let go, knowing they could not help each other. Only the goddess could help them.
Then one ras
ped, ‘He tooken her … went away, he … he, that fire-hair … tooken her away.’
Their mottled skin seared from grey and fawn through to a drained and deadly pallor. They ceased to move.
Another said, ‘None know where he go. She that were with him … never come back.’
‘Never, never,’ they keened, standing alone on the platform, clad in tears.
Blue light dripping on her eyelids had made Saphay incoherently think in a dream of her son. She woke with anger.
Getting up from the bed, she drew the tattered fur coverlet around her, and crawled to the ladder’s head.
There was no smell to the house this morning. Though the holy scent of the other person was gone, there should have been others – aromas of broth heating, with grain in it, for breakfast; the accustomed tang of the snow-walls giving way to indoor heat.
Today the house was not even warm.
Her slave had let the stove go out.
Saphay slid down the ladder and discovered Nabnish curled up in his corner.
‘You gop ninny!’
Leaning over him like the viper she had become, Saphay raised her hand, her small clenched fist hard as bones could make it, and still with Jafn rings on it to render the blow more telling.
Nabnish uncoiled, also snake-like. Amazing her, he rolled upright and caught her wrist, all before the blow fell.
A warning sparkled in her mind. She thought of the talisman Guri had left her, whereby to call for assistance. Meanwhile she kicked Nabnish on the shin. She had put on her boots before descending, and it should have hurt.
But Bit-Nabnigh laughed, waving at her her own hand still in his clutch. ‘That’s enough now, madam.’
Truly astounded, Saphay gaped in his face. Nabnish had spoken in the language of the Ruk, in the most genteel of the accents prevalant at the court of Ru Karismi.
Making no sense of this, she could only wait. Nabnish allowed this, looking at her solemnly, without either the fear she had grown used to from him or the sluggish malevolence he had offered her in the beginning.
Then he changed. It was as if he had shrugged off a garment. But what Bit-Nabnish shrugged off was his own head and body, which crumpled and fell untidily on to the floor. There they faded away, but Saphay did not see that. She was transfixed by what had now emerged.
‘Do you know me?’ he enquired at last.
‘You are … the one … who spoke to me – in the snow.’
‘And the dog at which your cat spits.’
‘I – I don’t … know you.’
‘Uneducated woman. You knew the other one, and named him. Name me now or I shall be aggrieved.’
Saphay shook. Merciless, the figure still held her wrist and observed her shaking. He was the colour of a poreless grey twilight, and his eyes were black as the outer sea. Black hair coursed over his head, down to his shoulders. The hair, even his lashes, were rimed with a kind of silvery frost. And he was dressed in a mail of ice-plates.
He was, too, very icy to the touch – her wrist was already numb. She shivered not only with fright but impending hypothermia.
‘You are …’
‘Yes?’
‘You are he that …’
‘He that?’
‘Winter’s Lover – Yyrot. You’re a god. The second god I was given to.’ Saphay threw back her head and stared with dread and fury at him. ‘More abuse then, more injustice …’ There in his grip she screamed at him in a sort of mania: ‘Kill me now! Do what you want! How can I prevent you – you and your kind?’
He let her go. He turned impossibly, like a spun coin, and was across the room, seated on a ladder. But Saphay had seen her son do such things, and Guri too, whenever she could make him out. She wondered if Guri’s psychic talisman would have any effect, then decided Guri too would be disempowered before this apparition. While to her son, Yyrot might prove as dangerous as the other – Zezeth.
Her legs gave way and she slipped down on to the rugs. Yyrot had put out the stove. He liked coldness, of course.
Should she try to placate him? What did he want?
The cat, which had been hunting, entered through a loose slat in the door. It had a dead rat in its jaws, bringing the feast inside to devour in comfort. Seeing Yyrot, though, the cat let the rat go. Belly lowered, the cat bared its teeth.
‘Woof, woof,’ said Yyrot flatly.
The cat ran away behind the ladders and chill pipes, with its tail three times its general size.
Saphay glanced at the rat, uneasily. As she had suspected, it was starting to come alive again, shaking off its terminal wounds, just as Yyrot had shaken off the simulacrum of Nabnish. Fully restored, it sidled to the door and darted out by the loose slat left there for the cat.
Conversely, the god probably meant to kill Saphay slowly, through freezing, for there was no guarantee this was his beneficent aspect. She sat on the floor, shuddering.
‘What must I do?’
‘I have not decided,’ said Yyrot. ‘The disturbance in the fabric of this physical plane, which your son has caused – that brought me here. I suppose I have a reason.’
‘My son has been alive for years. Why did you wait so long?’ Saphay snapped, startling herself.
But the cold god only replied, ‘They were not years for me. My time is not like yours. Meanwhile,’ he added, ‘you do nothing correctly. You should at least make me an offering.’
‘So I have, in the past.’
‘The past is past.’
Saphay pushed herself upright. She reached into a cubby in the wall and pulled out a jar of the root beer brewed in Ranjalla. Already it was partly congealed. She dragged it over to Yyrot, still seated on the ladder, and spilled it wantonly at his ice-shod feet.
Then, straightening up, she glared at him. He too was icing over. It was like looking at a man trapped in a mirror. He sighed and white mist, burning with coldness, laved over her.
‘I am too warm here. I have noted your offering.’
Something shifted the room. One moment she saw him, then the space he had occupied was bare – only a few flickers of ice falling down, and the puddle of frozen beer on the floor.
Every safeguard left on the snow-house had withered. The signalling talisman – a smooth stone with a hole in it through which Guri had told Saphay she must call – lay in pieces. She found it there and knew that Yyrot, doubtless not even intending to, had done this damage. He was like a hurricane, his passage fraught with mindless incidental destruction.
So here she was then, deserted and alone, stalked by another god, the stove out, no wood or food to hand, her slave – the original Nabnish – also presumably destroyed in passing.
Saphay had dressed. She now put on her Jafn cloak of fur. She opened the door and noted the cat came after her, sure indication Yyrot was no longer about. They walked through the snow lanes, into the village.
Not a door was ajar, not a light showed, though the day was dusky. No one was on the streets or by the woodpiles.
Something else was no longer there. A tiny crudely made statue of the goddess Ranjal, kept by the largest of the woodpiles – that too was gone.
Some gloom or doom seemed evident. Saphay had no patience with the village’s stupid little jinxes. She struck a door with her fist.
Nobody came to see, the door was not undone. None had reacted to the knock, even with an oath. She tried other doors, each the same as the first. By then she had noticed that the second statue of Ranjal, kept near the cook-place, whose fire was out, had, like the other, disappeared. There was also nothing cooked or cooking.
Had Yyrot, weirdly jealous of such a provincial and non-actual deity as Ranjal, obliterated her effigies and put out the fires in envy?
The cold depressed Saphay. No warmth seemed to lift from the usually muggy village.
She thought of her former eviction by the Jafn into the snows, trudging through ice and torrents of wind, and of dying, and Guri, and of the child at her breast …
Damn
him, to leave me here to this.
Saphay did not refer to Guri.
The cat yowled mournfully. Then, suddenly flattening down, it shook its haunches, watching something at work in the woodpile.
Saphay spoke to the cat. ‘Bring any rats you find to the house. I’ll share them with you.’ She turned back the way she had come and, going by, grabbed some wood off the pile, as she had not been forced to do for ten years.
It was not until she re-entered the house that Saphay realized one further item. Though the village fires were hidden or put out, her stove along with them, she had herself no means to create fire. To Guri, or her son, it had been easy. She had lost the habit therefore of self-reliance, and was no mageia. She dropped the wood, and sat down in the cold with iron eyes, waiting for her cat and their raw rat dinner to come in.
The ice oasis lay on Kree lands, but they did not claim it.
Being what it was, any might shelter there. It had come into existence only seven years before, during a time of lethal thaws, when ice cracked everywhere and snow heaps tumbled for miles around.
‘Have you seen such a place ever?’ Lokesh asked vaingloriously.
‘Never,’ said Nameless, ‘in this world.’ It was a fact. In dreams, perhaps, he had glimpsed such things, but then there was always another matter on his mind.
Hot springs had erupted from miles down inside the frigid earth. From cliffs of ice, thinned transparent as glass, they fell in clouds of steam to form three long, bean-shaped ponds. The edges of these ponds were a ripe, unlikely green. Live grass had come up there, tall as a man, though it maintained itself only a foot or so before turning a rich black. The black grass then extended outwards for the length of ten shields – about fifty feet. The most bizarre trees rose from this grass, and out of the pools, also carapaced in black, exploding into high-coloured coronas, rose rust-red willows, palms dark as malachite. On branches, fruit grew with skins thick as an ox’s hide, but the flesh was honeyed and firm when once the shells were cut open – apples, damsons, limes, dates and nectarines.