by Tanith Lee
Slurring his words, he told her the facts. ‘This is my angry side, Saphay.’
Despite everything, Saphay jumped backward. She had been shown the angry side of a god already – Zezeth. And that had been enough.
Yyrot stood there, indolently shaking his sleeves, and waves of warmth flew off them, smelling of pine resin and balsam.
The cat stared from Saphay’s shoulder, where it had climbed. Eyes shining with approval, it purred.
Then – cold Yyrot’s angry side had brought rescue? It made him hot.
Saphay began to giggle. She was hysterical. The cat launched itself from her and landed at Yyrot’s feet, which were sheathed in boots of, or like, soft leather. There the animal rolled about in delight.
‘Why are you … angry? Your lovely, comforting anger – why?’ Saphay quavered, stretching her body into this miniature Summer. The snow was shimmering and cascading in released water down the walls. The house would melt, but she did not care.
‘Oh, sometimes I lose my temper.’ The god Yyrot let out an abrupt yack of laughter. He caught up the cat in long warm fingers, caressing it. The cat was ecstatic. Saphay, jealous, watched her feline revel in so much extra warmth.
He, this god, must also be amenable – when angry? The cat, which had been afraid of and hated him, seemed now to believe Yyrot was a friend.
Saphay said, ‘The beer froze but, look, it’s come back.’
She knelt and with her hand scooped liquid from the small pond of beer, forgetful of the seef-dream that had reflected in it. Now the alcohol went straight to her head, its potence restored.
After a while, she looked up. Yyrot had disappeared, and the cat, too, but the snow-house went on beaming with heat, and whole chunks were showering off the walls. Two or three ladders leant at precarious angles. One fell suddenly, with a splash.
Outside, she heard Yyrot laugh again, and then a dog barked.
Saphay undid the door.
The snow beyond the house, solid for decades, maybe for centuries, was a sea of quaggy mud out of which fast-growing mosses, weeds and salads were already thrusting, thin and yellow-green with newness. Ice-irises starred the vegetation, black flowers with veins of purplish blue.
There, on this carpet, Saphay’s cat was coupling with the dog, which had pinned it, apparently quite willingly, to the earth. The dog was Yyrot-as-a-dog, grey and slender, exactly as Saphay and the once-disapproving cat had seen him before.
That was like something else Saphay had seen too: some vision of lights in the sky, a wolf which mated with a lion …
Transfixed, Saphay the voyeuse spied on this latest peculiar union. She felt her own loins tingle. Animal amorousness had never moved her before, but she had been so long without congress, and this dog was also a deity who took the persona of a youngish man.
They concluded, the cat squalling. As the dog Yyrot pulled away, the cat turned on him, as cats do with their ordinary mates, and slashed him across the muzzle with her claws. Dog-Yyrot suffered the attack stoically.
Saphay, inebriated and daft, wandered about picking the salad and the irises from the mud.
‘I shall wake properly soon. Then all this will be as it was.’
But when she ambled back into the subsiding house, she thought better of it and moved out again. She sat under a tree whose black trunk had emerged steaming, carved like a pillar and garlanded with red buds. Here she started to nibble the fresh salad. She put the irises into her long and unwashed hair.
Presently she saw Yyrot again in his man-form, seated across from her on the back of what she took to be a black obsidian frog of unusual size.
‘Will you kill me now?’ asked beer-and-warmth feisty Saphay.
Yyrot considered. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I shall make you what he made you – or began to.’
‘What did he …?’ She did not need to question, he meant the other one, Zeth. ‘What did he begin to make of me?’
‘One of his own kind,’ said Yyrot. He sighed, and a wild apricot vine sprayed out a bough of tawny ripening fruits. Before things could alter, Saphay snatched several and crammed them in her mouth. She had become properly opportunistic.
For that reason, too, she did not remonstrate with Yyrot.
All the gods of Ruk Kar Is were insane – one knew this from childhood. Had she ever believed in them, until forced to?
Yyrot said, ‘I mean one of his kind, one of my kind.’
‘A god.’ No shyness was in her voice.
‘By what he did to you,’ said Yyrot, ominously frowning now, so the apricots on the vine went black, and she was glad to have seized and eaten those she had. ‘By that, it started in you. Your son is something else of another sort. But you, you are damaged enough by your rapist’s divine intervention to be remade in our image.’
Men evaded, or promised things, and normally lied. Saphay thought of her father Vuldir, of Athluan. The god Zezeth had raped her certainly. She was changed.
She sat on the warm mud under the trees, put back her head and fell asleep.
There was a body lying on the plains, spoiling the snow’s pristine quality. It had been, before fleers found it, the cadaver of an old woman. She had not had the stamina to complete her journey as, with suitable etheric help, a younger woman might have. But neither had that sort of help occurred.
When living, she had been a sibulla of Ranjal, goddess of wood. Her name, when she had had a name, had been Narnifa. She alone, of her group of priestesses in Ranjalla, was prepared to set out in pursuit of her vanished goddess, whom she had served nearly since infancy. Ranjal had run off after the horrid Red-Hair boy called Nameless. The sibulla had felt it her duty – and her only recourse – to run after Ranjal.
Her sisters had tried to dissuade her. She had tried to persuade them to go with her. They would not, knowing their limitations. Even the village-city’s witch had arrived, saying she had seen in her house-stove fire the hopelessness of any such endeavour. But Narnifa did not pay attention. She could think of nothing else to do save die at once.
She did not foresee that, anyway, the desertion of the village-city by its goddess would destroy Ranjalla’s equilibrium. If she had only waited, there might have been other deserters to go with her on her quest. But she did not wait.
Old and worn down, Narnifa was not the stuff of epic heroines. Yet from her psychic ability she knew which direction to take. Off she went, hobbling on the white waste, now and then mouthing up gruel from a bottle, never acknowledging the onslaught of the cold.
One night, after she had been travelling incredibly many days and the gruel was frozen, and she had slept here and there as she trudged, Narnifa had seen Ranjal, flying above and ahead of her, on a moon-luminous dusk, like a swarm of hornets that comprised all the different Ranjal-statues from the village.
When had the goddess learned to fly? Perhaps she had learned it from watching Nameless walk up trees and then bound from one bough to another. Or it was inherent, and only just realized.
Narnifa perceived why the goddess had abandoned her worshippers, oh yes. Nothing was what Ranjal demanded. So Ranjalla had offered her gifts of nothing, measured out in handfuls and, on certain festival days, carried to her shrines in large empty vessels. But he, Nameless, he had given her things. He had corrupted her. Seduced, the goddess had fallen in love with him and left her people behind.
When she saw the swarm of Ranjals flying ahead of her, Narnifa had burst into a gallop. It was this which killed her. Her worn-out body, already scaled with frostbite on its serpentine mottles, got only a negligible distance before she toppled. She felt no pain, but then no pain could have been worse to her than losing her god.
That night, as Narnifa’s dead body lay in the snow, wolves approached and, later, fleers. In the air nearby any Jafn would have noted that a pair of sihpps hung, feeding on the feeding.
Narnifa, being dead, had no say in that. The Ranjals anyway were already far off. On the very evening that Nameless received from his adopti
ve Uncle Guri the name of Lionwolf, all the statues were swarming in over the last lap of the sky, their long-nailed many-handed arms outstretched. The subsequent meeting, Narnifa was spared from seeing. At least she had never heard the abhorred Nameless remark that her goddess herself was only a lump of wood.
As Lionwolf, who had been Nameless, rode along the coast, his supernatural Uncle Guri rode behind him in the chariot. The Jafn did not see Guri, but they sensed him. And now and then they saw things he did – a windless ruffling of a tent-side, a single footprint artistically planted in the snow.
The weather had put on another garment. The skies were clear, a sheer silvery blue. The men and their vehicles moved under the face of the sun by day, and at night beneath three clean moons of varying sizes and forms, and clouds only of corruscating stars of many colours.
They tended westerly. Wherever a Thing Place stood, they made a camp, and the mages of the allied Jafn sent to those others whose holdings lay inland along the route. Not one of the warriors who had fought against the Klow and razed the Klowan-garth went home to his own stronghold. Instead, more of those who had remained behind were called out to join this ride beside the sea’s edge.
During blue days, they heard the ice floes that elongated the shore cracking sometimes. Channels opened, frequently very deep. These they bridged with trees felled at the brink of the handy ice-forests which also edged the shoreline of the land. Men ran across whooping, chariots were driven over behind the impervious, leaping lion-teams. He, Nameless – the one they were now coming to name Lionwolf – careered his own chariot across, silent and careless – the beasts, the car, himself, all in equipoise, like some athletic work in bronze.
The Things – where meetings were made with other peoples of the Jafn – were as curious as the antique, seventeen-masted ship where four Jafn peoples had allied already against Rothger’s Klow. One Thing was a mammoth which had frozen in a foundered berg of glass-green ice; another was a mystic pole of petrified wood that rose to a height of a hundred feet, twenty shield-lengths or more.
At one of the first of these stops, the Kree had chosen for themselves their new Chaiord in dead foul Lokesh’s stead. Once elected, this chieftain had gone over to Lionwolf. Lionwolf had embraced him like the brother he had lost when Lokesh was found culpable. The Kree shouted their approval – but it was more than affection or manners. Lionwolf’s embrace of the new Kree Chaiord had given him Lionwolf’s approval, which was that of a hero, and would soon be that of an overlord. Not a man who did not guess or know this, not one who felt inclined to protest.
He, the red-haired Borjiy, held them in the palm of his hand, as he had held the mage-coal that demonstrated his destiny – and had rendered him his proper name.
Lionwolf. They took to the name, too. It was right for him. They liked it.
He had by then acquired his own standard. They had already offered him the Lion banner of the Jafn Klow. He had reminded them the Klow were gone, their identity expunged from the world. In the end, after he had told them his other name, he chose for himself a standard. It had a look of Olchibe, slightly. It had a look of nothing quite like that which had been used in the west, east or north.
Village women from the forests made it, and a smith attached to the march.
The bulk of the Jafn horde, his allied army under all its own banners, swelled. Informal in some ways, yet they had their own methods of establishing hierarchy – and that was beyond the titles ‘Chaiord’ or ‘Borjiy’. By shooting at marks, wrestling, fighting with swords, jumping obstacles, racing man against man, chariot against chariot – these playful recreations indulged in when another nation would have snatched a few hours’ sleep – lit up for them who was best among them.
They began to say that this era had been especially forged by God. And for this era, He had, in the furnace of His ineffable Consciousness, also coined Lionwolf.
There had been a notion, a future-myth, time out of mind, that one among them might unify the Jafn as a single body, and lead them on to conquer the earth.
And though they did not ceremoniously make Lionwolf their king, though they had, each clan, their own leader, though they called this marching now an adventure not a war, and addressed Lionwolf only by his name. Yet …
Yet he was lord, by then, of all.
And yet, too, they were hungry for conquest. Their numbers were now vast. At every Thing Meet these increased, and after too, as never-ending crowds of men came coursing in, in chariots and on the backs of riding-hnowas. With them they brought also their war mages, their best witches; and from the fisher huts and steads, too, men took off like bolting foxes to add themselves to this onrush. Those left behind to guard the garths and villages had been picked by lot, unwillingly. No one wished to stay home.
Seen from above, as sun, moon and stars – as their God – saw them, the host was now seemingly beyond measure. A shadow tipped with points of metal, and by night of fire, it crept forward with a deceptive slowness, turned the corner of the shore, and crawled on into the Marginal Land, towards Olchibe, Gech, and the furthest North.
Having regarded the mammoth in the ice, dead obviously and only preserved by cold – not as Saphay had been, living, in her berg – Guri was unsettled.
An invisible presence, he whirled about the march and the camps, vaguely troubling to them, like a sort of mild psychic indigestion in the army’s viscera.
Though Guri would still absent himself in his unearthly, vanishing sleeps, awake he took no time for himself. He left the ’tween-world alone. It seemed to him his nephew emotionally needed him. This had not, of course, been the case with his former leader, Peb Yuve. But, then, this boy was in some ways so young, still ten or eleven. You forgot that. Then, again, Peb had been only seventeen or so when Guri, a boy himself of ten, had aspired to add himself to Peb’s vandal band.
It was not that Lionwolf was unconfident – rather the reverse. However, Guri stayed about.
Also it was the idea of Olchibe.
As they neared the Marginal Land, something in Guri – some type of heart – beat rapidly.
That evening he was standing up on an escarpment of snow, pushed into a curved shape by the recent tepid days. From there he looked towards the north.
For miles spread curded ice-jungle. The sea now was distant on the right hand, opalescent black under two thin moons.
Guri glanced at the sky. This was when he saw the squadron of Ranjals coming in on the twilight.
Guri recognized them as the wooden images from the village-city. Even so, to be sure, he dived upward, peered, slewed and zoomed away.
The Jafn had lighted their fires and put up tents for the night, since it was a sleep nocturnal. Lionwolf’s tent was the same as all the rest, but set to one side, up the escarpment, where snow-oaks, three-quarters buried in the drifts, lifted their daggered crowns.
Not looking about, Lionwolf spoke to Guri the instant he arrived.
‘What makes the gods of the Ruk mad?’
Often such questions, out of nowhere.
‘Being a god’s enough to send any of us mad,’ said Guri.
‘You mean me?’
‘No, not you. You’re half mortal. But there’s something outside, flying in—’
Beyond the tent, men had begun yelling. A concerted rumble of lions came like thunder, and to this was added the shocking sizzle of bowstrings and released spears.
‘Useless,’ said Guri. ‘What do they think that can do?’
Lionwolf sprang from the tent. They stood together, as spectators.
Personally, Guri had been surprised for some time that Saphay had not signalled either her son or Guri himself. It was always a woman’s way to go after or call out to you when you were busy. That Saphay had not done so was rather odd, but this now was just what Guri expected of females. Although the statues were a goddess, she was a female too. Rather than call after Lionwolf, she had pursued him.
Spears, arrows, a thrown knife or two flashed unavailin
gly around the swarm, which now was flying in very low. Men threw themselves flat.
The several shes landed in a bundle on the slope above the camp, below Lionwolf’s tent.
The Jafn were mewling all kinds of stuff: prayers, imprecations.
Mages were emerging from the camp, shaking up threatening fires.
‘Good evening, lady,’ said Lionwolf.
Below, all that was visible of the great Jafn assembly gawped up at him, fire-bright under closing darkness.
The Ranjals did not now move.
There were, you thought, about fifteen or so of them. Some were the height of a tall man, and some a woman’s height, some were a child’s height. Yet others were small, some as little as a squirrel, and these sheltered there among the bigger ones in a way that was ridiculous, nearly touching – if they had not also looked so macabre, like a thicket full of broomsticks and talons.
Lionwolf strode down the slope. He stopped by the Ranjals and bowed, careless and graceful, rather as he had been when crossing the tree-bridges over chasms.
He indicated the camp. ‘These are my Jafn kindred, lady,’ he said to the Ranjals, ‘my warriors.’ Then he glanced down the escarpment to the men, seeming as usual to look – for all of them that could see him – a moment in their eyes. ‘This is the goddess of my boyhood, sirs. Under God there are many such deities.’
Uncertain, the Jafn host regarded the thicket on the slope. Then some far back, not having heard, not seeing fully what went on but sensing as ever Lionwolf could do no wrong, began to call and bang sword and knife hilts on chariot-rails and armour. The rollicking cheer spread up through the lines in waves.
All the mages had stalled, letting their mage-fires soften and drift, or go out.
Lionwolf – when Nameless – had claimed it was he made Ranjal talk. But it appeared she had learned from that, for now she independently addressed him – and in fifteen or so combined voices.
‘No emptiness, this?’