Cast a Bright Shadow

by Tanith Lee

  The alliance of four Jafn peoples with the Klow was therefore smashed before a second moon came up. That night they feasted along the shore, and Nameless told them a story of a hero of the Vantry, and one of the Shaiy, and one of the Irhon. If they did not recognize the names or the deeds of these heroes, it scarcely mattered. They were glorious, and the tales well told. Chaiords passed around the skulls of other enemies long defeated, or former lords, patched with hot jewels and full of wine.

  In the morning, they swam in the freezing hiss of liquid sea, to clear their heads. Then every man went home to call out the warriors.

  He was sitting, the Chaiord of the Klow, at breakfast, when the sending came.

  Nor was it done politely, mage to mage, inserted into the seclusion of the Thaumary.

  There in the joyhall of the Klow, as men sat about eating, readying only for another hunt, a ball of crimson fire flashed down, burst, and revealed a colossal sword – taller than a man and upright for conflict – dressed in blood. It seemed to be stuck in the floor and to quiver, as if thrown by a giant hand.

  Men started to their feet. Women let out a few wild cries. Although battle-accustomed, the Klow were not used to such sudden declarations of war, flung into their midst by their own kind.

  They could hardly miss who had sent the token either, for the illusory sword in the floor had been tied with four sigils – the Raven of the Vantry, the Arrow-In-Circle of the Shaiy, the Irhon’s Crested Lizard, and the Snow-Ox of the Kree.

  Rothger rose more slowly from behind his pile of dishes. He kept his cup in hand, and quipped stupidly: ‘What’s this? What are they at?’ And then, as if returning to the conscious world, ‘They want a fight, do they? They shall have one …’

  Perhaps those in the joyhall looking at this dundering lump, as if for the first time, confronted at last what he had brought them to. What body could prosper, when the head was rotten? But there was no time now to brood. The former allies had been even ruder than anticipated. They had not waited. Even as the Klow ran about, gathering their weapons and their chariots, across the plains of snow, under a sky of daylight darkness, the attacking horde came bounding.

  Rothger, staring from the garth walls down at the massed clutter on the snow’s white cloth, shrivelled. His lip drooped like that of a bullying child unexpectedly threatened.

  He knew he must go back in, find the witch Taeb that no one else could now discover, and call to his familiars, the lurking elementals of the waste – none of whom, he secretly guessed, would come.

  ‘There are too many of them,’ the warriors of the Klow said to each other. Yet they shouldered on their armours of metal and leather; they honed their axes and swords against the whetstones grimly.

  Rothger, wilting in the midst of them, still wore his hunting clothes. It was as if someone must convince him that this now was real.

  Men hurried to help Rothger arm himself. His previous mail was then found to be a size too small. Between the last fray and this, he had increased his girth. Rothger pushed the useless breastplate away. Abruptly he was roaring, snorting like a beast that faces fire. Bring me this … Bring me that … They dashed about, trying to assist him. He was their Chaiord.

  Down on the plain the shadow gathered, sparkling with steel, burning with the flames of battle-standards.

  Lokesh rode forward through the Kree chariots. His own vehicle was not today crewed by his vow-brother, Nameless, but by one of Lokesh’s own bastard sons, a boy of sixteen – older than Nameless, if not in appearance or skill. It was a pity this, but Nameless had said he must ride by himself, on this occasion.

  Lokesh had forgotten he had ever been the close ally of Rothger. Nameless, and the Thing Meet, and the sinews of Lokesh’s own unrest, had all made him forget that. Rothger had tricked him and was outcast of God, a monster. Lokesh looked about, saw the readiness of his people and the vastness of the whole force. He wished he had drunk a little more wine. But war, after all, was wine enough for a man on such a day.

  He called to his warriors: ‘Tonight I’ll feast in the Klow House!’

  Nameless occupied the chariot Lokesh had gifted him. It was well made, and the lions two of the best. Nameless had won them over at once. Nameless did what no other man there did in war, either Chaiord or warrior: he managed his chariot alone. He had knotted the reins about his waist, and drove solely by flexing his body, a procedure his lion-team seemed already perfectly to understand. Meanwhile he had armed himself, along with his Olchibe bow, with a single long-tongued Jafn sword. No one had been able to argue Nameless away from this plan. Nor had he put on any of the protective leathers or mail. His only concession had been to tie back his hair, like the incendiary tail of a comet.

  ‘There!’ Lokesh cried.

  Up on the walls of the Klowan-garth, assembled mages were letting loose preparatory rays. They shot across the dull sky, reflecting on the snow.

  The men of Kree and Irhon, Vantry and Shaiy laughed loud and mockingly, to let those up on the walls hear them.

  ‘They say Rothger’s lost his favourite witch,’ said Lokesh, his chariot at ease by the chariot of Nameless. ‘I found her for him. She has green hair and is very clever, but word has it she ran away when her witchcraft told her what was coming – us.’

  Nameless did not reply. The slightest frown passed over his face. Lokesh assumed Nameless was angry, just a touch, that the green witch, Taeb, had not returned to her former master, Lokesh himself. But Nameless – had Lokesh realized – was simply irritated by Lokesh standing there close by him in his own chariot, buzzing like a hive-bee. Nameless did not want, at that moment, to be bothered with him, but it was not quite yet the hour to say it.

  A fresh ray opened the cloud, shaped like a fishbone, searing yellow. It spread not from the garth, but from the mage-positions of the allies on the plain.

  Spectacular, terrifying, it curled over miles of sky and caught the Klowan-garth in a loop of incandescence.

  Those below heard the cries and shouts worsen on the walls. This made the allies laugh again. But for all that, the fishbone ray, though frightful to observe, seemed to do little more than alarm. Anyway, the Klow mages soon blasted it in bits, which scattered like brightest snow.

  By then, the Klow were coming out of their gate.

  The mass of them was substantial, but not against the cluster of allies which awaited it. The Klow were outnumbered, and had had no space to send for assistance from any other source – if any would have responded.

  Lokesh sneered, contemptuous. ‘We’ll crush them between us like shells under a boot.’

  Just then, he saw Nameless’s eyes veer round at him. Lokesh noticed the eyes of Nameless were like the reddest rubies. They were full of red – and of utter, utter scorn.

  Then Nameless was gone, in a rush of bronze, iron and steel – the chariot pounding forward over the plain.

  Seeing him take off like a hawk in flight, the Kree chariots behind broke loose to follow him. Almost instantly, the whole force erupted and poured towards the enemy garth. Lokesh found himself swirling in their midst, for a second nearly overturned and left behind.

  Surely he must have mistaken the look Nameless gave him. Nameless and he, they were the stuff of stories – brothers, lovers – and that look was only for their adversaries.

  He clouted his sixteen-year-old charioteer across the spine. ‘Get on, you oaf!’

  They too fled forward.

  The ground rumbled at the surge, as if the sea were coming in. Snow-spume rose high, like whitest smoke. Through the heart of it the metal chariots careered, pulled by the sprinting engines of their lions. Arrows began to tear over in a hail.

  Rothger, if he rode at the head of his people, was not to be distinguished. For the other force, it was Nameless who plunged out across the expanse of snow, the rest of them striving to keep up with him.

  Quills and arrows clattered all around him. To any that studied him from either side, he appeared to evade every shaft. Now and the
n, one parted the long tail of his hair, singing through it. Then he had the Olchibe bow, had primed it, and let lose three male arrows in a single cast. They dived before him as if they bore his soul, and thunked home, unspiritually conclusive. Three Klow warriors fell dead, pierced to the quick of life.

  Nameless, they all saw now, was a borjiy, a berserker, one who took on the cloak of battle-madness; Lokesh was afraid his darling would, due to his own recklessness, be killed. The Chaiord scrambled his chariot through the crowd, losing control, hitting unmercifully the boy who drove him, like some hapless beast of burden. You heard that a borjiy might fight on even when dead, unaware for some while that he was so.

  The red-haired man was almost up to the sprawled front rank of his foes when the left-hand lion of his team was skewered through the forehead by a Klowan dart. The cat dropped lifeless. The chariot, still at racing speed, plunged and jumped across its corpse, snapping the waist-tied reins in two before Nameless could himself do so. Tilting now, the car turning sidelong, but Nameless remained standing yet on the floor of it, horizontal, – as he managed to stay when climbing up the trunks of trees. Instantaneously he had slashed the debris of reins from his waist, and jumped forward on to the back of the remaining lion, just as the yoke-pole gave way.

  Now, fully ahead of his Jafn army, still lumbering along in chariots, Nameless sped, unencumbered by any vehicle, arrow-like against the Klow. He was standing on the lion’s back, as it plummeted forward, its limbs stretched to incredible length. He was standing there, his arms outheld and his beautiful head thrown back, laughing not with mockery or pleasure, but with violence. And the sword was switched and held, glittering, now in his right hand, now the left.

  Nonplussed, the Klow banked up before him. They had one split second for their turmoil.

  Then the lion sprang right upward.

  Ten years ago Nameless had seen none of these men, he had been new-born, too young. Yet he had seen all of them, his astral awareness being at large in the Klow House, unwitnessed but witnessing.

  Whether it was a physical memory or merely instinct made no odds to this fire-arrow creature standing on a lion’s leaping back.

  He struck the Klow like a missile, crossing over their teams, their vehicles, hitting the breast of their fleshly human wall.

  His own lion was the first with them. Combat-trained, crazed with the spirit of what rode it, its claws gouged, teeth sheared through a wrist, a shoulder, a throat. Nameless too was no longer arrow, but hammer, club and cleaving steel.

  In a deluge of shattering and blood, among the screaming carnage, single-handed he ripped open the heart of the Klow vanguard. While behind him, swiftly the Kree came sweeping on to carve out their own share, and at their heels the greedy Shaiy and Irhon, and the Vantry with their Raven wings.

  Lokesh, somewhere in the tumult, saw Nameless standing on his lion, raised on a welter of howling dying death. Even then, Lokesh, a ninny, did not grasp with what he had sworn brotherhood.

  For the others, many were by now also battle-mad – borjiy. Among the Klow alone, true fear woke stinking. They were crumbling. They cried for rescue, for their mothers and their wives, and flaked off under the chariot-runners.

  Not so many saw the sequel. The one who did, half disbelieving, took his chance.

  The second lion too had been slain. Nameless walked off its shuddering skin, and jumped lightly down on to the muddled floor of battle. Through the hacking of swords and axes, Nameless walked, he strolled. He was dyed with blood. His blood-shade hair had escaped from its ring. He was scarlet, all of him, even his eyes still, without any strange angle of light to account for it.

  Strolling, he went between the riot of runners and blades, and as men blindly smote at him on every side, he felt the sting of their weapons, which did not last on him.

  Then Nameless reached a chariot wedged in at the rear of the host. It was Rothger’s chariot, and it was stranded, because the man who had driven it, some distant kinsman from the garth, lay dead, and its lion-team lay dead, and Rothger balanced there, looking round and looking round.

  Brown Rothger, Rothger the Fat – who had once been thin and cunning, and cold of heart. He saw what was redly strolling up to him, through that whirlpool of war, swords and knives crashing all around it, and itself somehow missing each of them. Out of the side of his chariot, Rothger hauled his unused axe. He had killed things once, and enjoyed doing so. Did he recollect that now? No, he was only afraid. Yet he who had been able to shoot so ably at a mark, and pike the horsazin of the Fazions with shafts, now raised the axe in both fists and swung it over, all his lumpen strength behind the haft.

  Rothger saw, and felt, the axe-head slam home into the body of the scarlet man. He put so much into the feat that the axe left Rothger’s hands.

  Rothger did not know who this man was, only that he must be seen to. And Rothger experienced a moment’s gushing near-infantile happiness at the impact of his blow. He was positive he had settled something.

  The man in blood still stood there. The axe had entered his upper torso, at the place between neck and left shoulder. It must have met his heart. There was no way in the world a man could live, not even a borjiy, with such a wound.

  ‘Die then,’ said Rothger, his own voice soothing him. He had not done much else in the fighting, but this might well be enough. ‘Go along now, fall over and finish.’

  Nameless looked up at Rothger. Nameless had known him at once.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Nameless, ‘thank you, Uncle Roth. I’m not ready to die today. It was the same last time, out on the snow where you sent me. I wasn’t ready then either.’

  Rothger watched how Nameless lifted the axe gently free of his own body, with just one momentary little wince, as if he had stubbed a toe not badly, or burnt his fingers on his meat.

  A mage. He was a mage, even though he fought among the warriors … The mage in blood stepped up into Rothger’s chariot, next to him.

  On every side, the fighting raged on. But here these two were in an oasis of deadly calm. There had been something like this before, Rothger thought. Ah, yes, when he removed Athluan from existence, in the hollow of the ice-wind.

  This mage, who was he? How had he made the illusion with the axe, so it had not harmed him but had seemed to?

  ‘All alone,’ said Nameless kindly. ‘No witch, no seef, no sweet one to love you. Only unloving Nameless, who doesn’t die.’

  Rothger heard himself gibber. The sound shocked him, he did not know why he had made it, and then the being in his chariot punched him, only as one man will another, hard on the temple. Slumping down into the first darkness, Rothger bleated for help. No one heard. The little atrocious war was nearly done.

  Wreckage, as if a ship had smashed herself on some sea-cliff of ice, lay all about the plain beneath the walls of the Klowangarth.

  Ignoring it, men rushed towards one focal point. They ran from everywhere around, abandoning their chariots and teams, even their comrades and kin. They ran to the man who was Nameless and, embracing him, some of the blood that covered him rubbed off on them like glory.

  He was not insane now, nor out of his skull and wandering, as often a borjiy might be in the aftermath. Under the blood he was cool yet amiable, smiling at their enthusiasm, even it seemed at his own. As if he had tried a boyish prank, and it had been successful. There was not a scratch on him.

  ‘The Klow are no more.’ The shout went round the noisy plain.

  ‘The Klow are wiped off the earth’s belly.’

  They looked towards the garth, whose platform and walls they could now breach so easily, for only women and children guarded this Jafn citadel finally, and a handful of old men.

  Lokesh had meanwhile arrived in his chariot. The boy who drove it was black and blue from Lokesh’s blows, and had an arrow through his arm, of which he had not yet been given time to break off the flight.

  ‘Well, my vow-brother,’ said Lokesh, ‘we’ve gained a victory. But I think if we hadn�
��t been quick, you would have done it alone, all by yourself, and left us no work.’

  The men about them – Kree, Shaiy, Vantry, Irhon – cheered. They banged sword-hilts on armour and on the metal chariot-rails. ‘Nameless!’ The howl rose into the air, replacing the vanished mage-lights. Four Chaiords shouted out Nameless’s name. A true hero must be vaunted.

  Lokesh had left his chariot. He put his possessive arm about his vow-brother’s shoulders. ‘The Klowan-garth is yours, brother, and everything in it now. For Rothger’s dead.’

  ‘He’s not dead,’ said Nameless.

  They stared, expectant. What was this?

  Nameless said, ‘A clean death in battle is too nice for such a man.’

  A different noise began suddenly to go up. Heads turned, and Nameless leapt into Lokesh’s vacated chariot, to get a better view. Lokesh’s driver, exhausted and in pain, drew away from Nameless and, unnoticed, fainted on to the chariot’s floor.

  From the Klowan-garth a procession of sorts was now coming out by one of the lesser gates.

  The allied Jafn started to jeer.

  ‘Erdif Greybeard and all the old crank-shanks, come to beg for mercy.’

  Nameless had the reins of the chariot. The lion-team moved forward, and the allied ranks opened a path for their borjiy hero to drive through.

  He met the old men from the garth the first, just as he had been the first meeting the garth warriors. While Lokesh, unlike the other three Chaiords, took the notion to run panting behind his own chariot, as if he were Nameless’s dog.

  Erdif stood on the plain, gazing up at a being of shining red silence that looked at him with two blue eyes.

  Did Erdif remember the child born during his stewardship of the Klow House? Did he remember the casting out of the child and its mother, the alien woman from the Ruk, to die?

  Mentally limited, strait-laced and sour, ten years had made Erdif only harder and more brittle. He lifted his nose at the red warrior hero, whether he recalled his origins or not.

  ‘We offer you no harm,’ declared Erdif in ringing yet cracked tones. ‘We’re old men, too bowed to raise a sword or swing an axe. You must, for tradition and honour, preserve us, and also the women and children in the garth. If you desist from rape and vandalism, the better will your praises be sung.’