Cast a Bright Shadow

by Tanith Lee

  ‘None, lady. Full of men and war.’

  ‘What will have you of me?’

  Lionwolf smiled. Though so young, being equipped physically and mentally as a grown male, he had gained early many knacks for pleasing women.

  ‘Your presence here, lady, is enough.’

  Turning, he broke a bough from one of the sunken oaks, and tattled off the ice. Sombre green-brazen leaves, like fine-spun metal, gleamed in firelight. Lionwolf placed the green bough at the feet of the taller Ranjals.

  Guri sat cross-legged on the snow, looking on. None of them could detect him, even the Ranjals could not; they never had in the past.

  The Ranjals began to murmur. It was like twigs scratching at a window.

  ‘For the leaves, want you be tell story?’ asked the Ranjal voices.

  Lionwolf must have nodded. Without delay, the statues began to unfold the tale Lionwolf, in play, had long ago invented for them to tell him – one of Saphay’s stories adapted. The Ranjals promised to Lionwolf, as always in his childhood and later too, the same vast riches, the three wives of surpassing loveliness, the army fully armed, the world at his feet.

  These twiggy whisperings smoked down the slope; they sank into the camp. Everywhere they were heard, or partly heard, and repeated. They sprinkled men’s faces like a light sweat.

  ‘Amen,’ said Guri under his breath, seeing that something deeply supernormal, if absurd, had once more taken place.

  That night, the Ranjals stood before the tent of Lionwolf as he slept two hours of the allotted nocturnal. When everyone was awake again, the goddess-entity joined the march into the north.

  The Ranjals had become inert again, having achieved their goal. Accordingly they were mounted on a cart with runners, pulled by three rainbow-caparisoned hnowas. They travelled among the pole-raised Jafn icons.

  Every morning, Lionwolf was seen to offer the Ranjals titbits: flowers if found, such things.

  Sometimes they spoke again.

  They would actually speak to any man who addressed them courteously by their name. They would tell fortunes, always glamorous and encouraging. But they would accept no offering from any save Lionwolf. ‘Ask nothing, I,’ they said. Some of the men got in the way of it, setting a handful of nothing carefully before the Ranjal thicket in its cart, in return for a blessing or a tale of joys to come.

  The weather continued smooth and blue.

  A cobalt pre-dawn filled the sky, and Guri, who had been sleeping in the Otherwhere, woke with dim vestigial memories, to note an old woman prowling about. Women, even prostitutes or witches, were rare among Jafn on campaign. So the old woman bothered him instantly.

  It had not been a sleep night for anyone else, and the warriors, including their Chaiords and Lionwolf, were some way off along the sheet-ice, wrestling. Hunting parties were coming in and breakfasts being cooked. None saw the old woman, except Guri.

  But, then, much about her – for example, how the burgeoning glow of dawn showed through her rags, her hair, her back – indicated something else. She was like Guri himself: she was not alive.

  Guri blew down to where she had parked herself. This was beside the cart with the rainbow-fringed hnowas snoring in the shafts. The Ranjals were there in it, and a couple of men idling with them, listening to the predictable jolly news the Ranjals always gave. Nearby was posted Lionwolf’s standard.

  The old woman wailed.

  The petitioning men did not hear.

  Guri saw now her face was mottled, snake-like, even though partially translucent.

  He stood behind her and uttered loudly, for her ears only: ‘What?’

  She heard him, of course. She looked over her fragile old shoulder at him, her face puckered with unhappiness and rage.

  ‘She … she … why she here? She mine. Want her.’

  ‘You can’t have her, old girl. You’re one of the sibulls from the snow-village, aren’t you, ah? You must have died of loss, when this one left you.’

  ‘Died? Never died. Hold your tongue.’

  ‘You hold yours, you silly old crone.’ Guri startled himself with his vehemence. He was furious to be so spoken to by a woman, neither Olchibe mother nor Crarrow. Then he checked himself, realizing she riled him mostly because she was one of his own kind now.

  He stood there scowling fearsomely at her, ignored. He was at a loss. Then the sun rose, and with a despairing squeak she faded out like one of the stars. A feeble ghost, after all. Even so, he must look out for her, for even her sort could sometimes cause trouble, if legend was to be believed.

  By the end of that day, the host had penetrated the Marginal Land.

  Guri was prickly with anticipation. Soon he would be among his own. And his peoples must be won, or annexed bloodily, to the general scheme. Which?

  ‘Stir up the fire.’

  ‘Cast in the blood.’

  ‘Bear claw and wolf tongue …’

  ‘Bitter honey, sour wine …’

  Four in total, the deadliest and most fervent number of power in the North, the Crarrowin circled their bonfire, which was yellow as the eye of a cat, and less yellow than their skins.

  Night had been drawn like a curtain in that spot, the stars like spangles stitched on, meaningless.

  Round and round the women went.

  ‘Crushed bone from a battle …’

  ‘Cracked bone from a foe …’

  ‘Whale tusk and fish-hide …’

  ‘Spices, amber, and plucked-out hair.’

  As with all such covens, the four general ages and states of a woman were represented. One was a child still, about nine years; one a virgin girl of fourteen; the third was a woman capable of child-bearing who had borne, and indeed from the look of her she was now pregnant again. The fourth Crarrow, their Crax, was past reproduction, though in this case not yet old.

  Circling, they stared into the flames.

  All around, the huge night was not silent. Jungle forests massed in every direction. From these, things sometimes warbled, eerie accompaniment to the slush-slush of women’s feet, the chanting.

  Then motion and voices ceased. The four Crarrowin grouped about the fire. Nothing else happened. In the flames no shape occurred. Slowly the women turned their backs, and looked away to the world’s four corners: north towards Gech, south and west towards Rukar lands, east towards the Jafn.

  It was the youngest one who faced that way. She said, ‘From there.’

  ‘But also from here,’ said the pregnant woman who gazed southwards.

  ‘From this way, too,’ said the virgin girl, pointing a slender, butter-coloured finger at the west.

  The Crax stepped out of their cornered circle. She raised her left arm towards the sky and, with her right hand held low, indicated the earth as well. ‘Above – and beneath.’

  The fire, which had done apparently nothing save eat what had been tossed into it, rippled and furled up into the night, in a ball. It hung over the Crarrowin a moment, like a blazing canopy. Then you saw what the fire had been, for it separated into four streams, and oozed slowly back in at each woman’s abdomen, even that of the woman whose belly was swollen with child. The Crarrowin received the fire once again without agitation or comment. It was their personal incendiary, which they could draw out of their bodies at any juncture, to warm themselves or others.

  ‘We must go and tell the Great One,’ said the Crax.

  She awarded him that title as she considered him to be worthy among the several leaders of the Olchibe. Under his jurisdiction ran thirteen vandal bands, all told some five thousand men.

  The women pulled folds of their loose, black fur mantles up over their heads. Their faces shrank behind the fur. Gliding on foot across the snow, they resembled four black pillars, and all a similar height – for Olchibe young grew quickly, and full-grown examples of Olchibe women were seldom tall.

  Down from the upper ground of the clearing they went, and moved off into the jungle below. Here there was a narrow track made of cut l
ogs, which they followed for most of an hour. At the end of the track lay the sluhtin of Peb Yuve.

  This community was impressive in its size and standing. The individual sluhts clotted one against another, dispersed through many clearings, covering a stretch of three or four miles. The communal roof, multi-layered of wood, leather, feathers, ice and other materials, rose and fell geographically. Out of it poked countless chimneys. Above, the frozen arches of figs and pineapple stems were stained red and orange from years of sluhtin smokes.

  Men standing watch let the four Crarrowin through without a word. They were anyway expected.

  Beyond the entrance, the air fogged over. It was humid, and odorous too, from the blond mammoths which moved, phantasmal in shadow, at their indoor pickets, slowly champing from bins of dormant grass and grain. They were peaceful when at home. They shuffled hugely and softly out of the way of the coven, rather as the men had done outside.

  The sluhtin opened out. It was in reality a kind of enormous indoor camp, and everywhere throughout the clustered halls the fires burned in their clay ovens. The floor was mud, thawed from much continuous warmth, and here children played, rolling and hilarious. At the Crarrowin they only stared, too young yet to be properly impressed. But the women at the fires, and the stalking men, made gestures of respect.

  Yuve was in one of the central halls. He sat on a heap of pelts, involved in a game that used teeth knocked out of assorted enemy skulls, and decoratively painted. His favourite seconds, thirty warriors, crouched around, drinking, and ready to assist the game moves, when called on.

  But now that the Crarrowin were there, all that ended,

  Peb Yuve stood up. He touched his right fist to his forehead, and gestured about him, offering everything to the Crax, if she would take it. The formalities over, the Crax spoke.

  ‘He’s coming, Great One – almost here. He brings a large force with him: Jafn peoples, as we’ve heard. But it’s more than that, as we suspected, for he’s unhuman.’

  ‘Unhuman? How?’

  ‘Half god.’

  ‘Only half?’ said Yuve. His braids had greyed, but he was hale and strong. He looked at his seconds, and grinned his own healthy, painted teeth. ‘It’s one of the mad gods of the Rukar got him, so you say. There is only one order of Great Gods. Our own.’

  ‘Amen,’ chorused the seconds.

  ‘So,’ said Yuve, ‘this half-god. So.’

  ‘He will win you,’ said the Crax.

  ‘How? In a fight?’

  ‘In love,’ said the Crax.

  No other man, let alone woman, could have told Peb Yuve such a thing. But the Crarrowin did as they must.

  Peb drew his brows together. He said, ‘I don’t give my love to any living thing without it’s earned.’

  The Crax put back the fold of fur from her head. Peb looked at her levelly. She was one of his wives. It had not been etiquette to allow recognition of that before.

  ‘I know it,’ she said.

  ‘You know, but still you tell me I’ll be won. Is it then written somewhere, Wife?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Peb’s wife. ‘Written by a blue sun on a page of burning snow.’

  Before he entered the tent, Guri paused. He looked up at the stars. A strange nostalgia was on him, and he thought it was only for the past – and for his people. He had beheld them tonight, springing towards them through snow and landscape, space and time. For a brief instant that was also a day and a night, he had patrolled the border of their lives. Never till now had he gone back to Olchibe. It was as he recalled: the sluhtins, the contained starlike fires.

  On a bare hill of ice above jungles of basalt and chiming rime, Crarrowin had made, fed and reabsorbed their personal flames. Guri had offered to them the appropriate show of respect, even though it seemed he was invisible and it no longer mattered that he trespassed on their rite. They had not, evidently, sensed him. Or maybe the Crax alone had, somewhat. He had once known her as a coven woman of thirty – she had allowed Guri, then, to give her the first of her kiddlings. This time he had not gone close.

  Guri dropped the memory, like a cloak on the ice, and walked in through the tent wall.

  ‘Now you need me,’ Guri said.

  Lionwolf, who had been preparing his bow for a night hunt, looked up at him. He neither accepted nor denied the statement. Guri thought Lionwolf was beginning to learn magnificently well the gambit of lordly silence.

  Guri glanced sidelong. Over the lighted tent spread Lionwolf’s shadow. It seemed only mundane. And then Guri caught the ruby wink, tiny glints like eyes, little creatures hidden in the shadow’s folds.

  ‘I’ll tell you exactly what you must do among the Olchibe,’ said Guri. He stood very upright, clothed in pride; this was a mighty gift he gave the young man. To no other, ever, would Guri have given it. ‘The greatest leader among them now will be Peb Yuve, that I served when I lived. He’s gathered in many bands over these years, just as you have, now. It was only to be reckoned on – he’s a master among men.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Something shook itself in Guri’s a-physical blood. He said bluntly, ‘In only a few months you’ve changed your whistling. Do you scorn the Olchibe now? Is that your Jafn piss-idiot side, or your shit-idiot Rukar side? Ah?’

  Lionwolf came across to Guri. He put both hands on Guri’s shoulders, as few else would be able to. ‘Wait, Uncle, I only said Yes.’ His hands were warm, affectionate and consoling.

  Guri considered. He was not immune to Lionwolf’s exercise of charisma. Who was, or could be? Yet something in Guri moved aside now, glaring, angry. He reviewed in that moment how he had not informed Lionwolf about the old sibull who haunted the Ranjals.

  Guri knew that he was about to betray his former leader, Peb, whom Guri had called Great One – betray him to this Lionwolf that Guri had only just named.

  However, only women resorted to sullenness at such times. Guri straightened out his mind, and rendered his nephew the lessons he would need before the hunt began.

  Across the packed undulations of snow, from a backdrop of ice-jungle and in the dark of the moons, something roved that glowed pale in starlight.

  From the other direction ran something else, in a fizzing of snow-spritzed wheels and lion claws.

  Seated on the high back of his mount, Peb Yuve glowered at the horizon. ‘What’s there.’ It was not a question but an affirmation.

  The fifty mammoths trod to a halt.

  They stood like marble under the stars. As what came towards them came on.

  Lionwolf drove his own chariot. His sole visible companion in the car was the standard he had chosen for himself. It was hammered into the chariot floor, and fastened to its side by pins of steel. It had been thought no impediment to the hunting, not tonight, for they had known, all of them – from the precognitives among their mages – what they would meet.

  As he saw the bulk of the mammoths appear like other hills over the snowline, Lionwolf suddenly remembered a toy Guri had given him as a child.

  Judicially, Lionwolf compared the vast mound of each beast to that toy. He dismissed the toy.

  He was strongly excited but serene: this was often his dual condition. It happened like that because everything was still so new, yet he so confident and able – self-possessed.

  That was Peb Yuve, then, that man on the foremost mammoth. Like Guri, but unlike, Yuve had gone on ageing. The spray of braids was full of grey and white. On the dark ochre cheeks spun tattoos of authority.

  Lionwolf drove his chariot straight at the hillock of Yuve’s mammoth, and veered across the animal’s front, showering up at it the riven snow. The mammoth did not react: it towered, arrogant, above him.

  Lionwolf, with the mildest twitch of the reins, brought his team to stasis.

  ‘Greetings, Great One,’ Lionwolf called to the leader on the monstrously enlarged toy. ‘A lucky night for hunting – no moons. Let me entreat you, will you add your hunter’s cunning to our task? We’re strangers here.’
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  He spoke in Olchibe. It was flawless – Guri had taught him long ago. It was choice to employ the language, to see this ageing man crease his already age-pleated brow and stare down at him, and all his attendant warriors likewise.

  ‘Who are you?’ Peb Yuve said at last.

  ‘Myself.’

  The Olchibe men glanced from one to another. They saw that this ‘stranger’ grasped the value of the Riddle, and the secret thing.

  Peb Yuve nodded. ‘I was warned you were on your way.’

  ‘They warned me too,’ said Lionwolf, impeccable, ‘that a hero and leader waited on the road before me.’

  ‘What is it, your standard? What,’ said Peb Yuve, ‘does it mean? I’ve never seen the like of it.’

  ‘My Jafn father died before I was born,’ said Lionwolf. ‘For that reason the emblem is impossible.’

  ‘A blue sun of hammered metal,’ said Peb Yuve, ‘and rent silks fluttering below – fluttering red and yellow, like flames.’

  ‘My thanks to you, Great One, for noticing the rag.’

  Peb Yuve said, ‘There is a multitude of Jafn over the hills, but you ride out here with only twenty men?’

  ‘What use are twenty million men,’ said Lionwolf, ‘if the Great Gods desert them?’

  ‘You know our ways.’

  ‘I know some of your ways.’

  ‘How do you know them?’

  ‘My life was saved, when I was a child, by a warrior of the Olchibe.’

  ‘Yes, if you were a child, he would have saved you. His name?’

  ‘He let me call him Uncle.’

  ‘But what was his name?’

  ‘That of a brave man, father of many, killer of more.’

  ‘How was he known to other men?’

  Lionwolf showed obedience in the Olchibe fashion – fist to head, but head unbowed.

  ‘The Great One isn’t to be put off. He is, my Olchibe uncle, known as Guri.’

  Peb Yuve blinked once, that was all.

  He said, slow and quietly, ‘It’s a name not uncommon among the sluhtins. Do you have its meaning?’

  ‘Star Dog.’

  ‘Yes.’

  A slim white wind came spiralling along the top-snow. To the twenty Jafn the wind was crowded with sprites. To Peb Yuve the wind was the breath of Gods.