Cast a Bright Shadow

by Tanith Lee

  The snow must grow living and warm. It must reverse its nature. Ddir opened his artisanic hands, and night poured down through them, and turned the wonderful woman in the snow as black as the blackest jet.

  Either Ddir had heard legends outside the Ruk, or many gods simply did these things – and the former legends were true.

  A hirdiy of nomads had drawn up at the foot of three mesas. The night had gained an elastic clarity that often came before an ice storm. They had duly tethered the traces of their dog-teams to the ground with spikes, and tied protective bags around the animals’ eyes, ears and genitals. Most of the dogs were used to this procedure. Only one young one caused a little bother. The men, women and children got into the hide tents and shut the tent-flaps with metal stays. Four men sat out by the fire to keep watch, their own protection ready.

  As yet the weather was glassy, but the moons were up and each had a blurred brownish halo.

  ‘This night for something,’ said one of the four watchers. His name was Ipeyek. Though no magician, sometimes he knew things. Lacking either mage or Crarrow, his hirdiy listened to him.

  When he said nothing further, another man said, ‘More than storm then?’

  ‘Maybe not storm. Only something else.’

  That second there was the wind. It started from nothing, nowhere; it rushed over the plateau of the Uaarb. Though not the spinning stinging whirlwind of ice storm, laced with killing ice-grain needles, yet it made the tents tremble. Even the mesas of solid ice seemed to shake.

  Then the wind had passed. It had come and it was gone. It did not come again.

  The men lifted their heads. Their fire had been blown out.

  Ipeyek said, ‘Like single breath.’

  ‘God’s breath,’ they said.

  The four men got up and looked in the four directions of the world, to see what would approach next. But it was Ipeyek’s ninth son who saw it first.

  Only the youngest of the kiddles whimpered when the great wind blew over – like the inexperienced young dog, they had not yet learned you must take precautions, but complaint was valueless. Ipeyek’s ninth son, at three years old, was well versed in the lesson. As his two mothers comforted the babies, the child, hearing before the others did that the wind was gone, and curious, poked his head out of a slit in the tent.

  So he saw her.

  Even the night now was not so dark. It was, however, as if actual Night walked naked over the plateau, clad only in a waterfall of hair. And her eyes were stars.

  They called her Night. That was their name for her. In the subtext of nomadic language, which avoided both verbs and similarly redundant words such as a or the, Night meant also coldness, and beauty, and a bell-like sound which was composed of silence, distance and eternity. Their word for Night was Chillel.

  She lived in the hirdiy temple. The temple was the house not of God – for they believed the sky and the earth were all one house to God – but of their ancestors’ bones. It was a kind of hard tent, made of lacquered hide, with carven pillar-ribs of fossilized wood. The temple rode on a cart drawn by a team of six dogs, just as the home-tents all did, while other dogs ran alongside carrying packs and utensils, as everywhere among the hirdiy.

  By day, she would leave the temple door-flap open as they journeyed. The nomads could see her, Night, sitting among the lacquer caskets of skeletons.

  She said nothing. She had never spoken to them, or made any noise. They did not know if she had a voice. Perhaps, then, neither did she.

  Yet the faintest music came from her. There was the rustle of her long hair, which was smoky black, and curling like the finest wool of a lamascep, and fell to her feet; there was the silken rasp of her skin, mirror-smooth, against itself, or against her hair, or presently against the garments they gave her. Also she breathed, in and out – but they knew her first breath had come from the lips and nostrils of God.

  Night – Chillel – was impervious to cold. She had been fashioned out of snow – it was the fireside she avoided, standing far off, or staying poised in the mouth of the temple.

  Seeing she had come from God, the hirdiy did half expect her to tell them something. When she did not speak, they thought she would instruct them by example. They watched her for signals.

  The garments they brought her were those they would have given a Crarrow, if ever one had offered to join them. Most hirdiys kept such clothing by. The long shift was lined with spun dormant grass bartered for from the swampland further south, and top-covered by black-striped wolverine fur from the same area. The mantle was of woven black wool with eye-like patterns of marigold, azure and mauve braided in. They gave her hairpins of antique whaletooth to control her hair, earrings of gold, and a necklet of silver-washed brass, all from some place they could no longer identify.

  Chillel dressed herself, having been shown by the women how to do so. Like the nomads, she never thereafter removed her garments, nor washed her body. This was common enough. In her case, rather than the bready, self-muting staleness of mankind, Chillel’s scent was cool and not of flesh.

  Although she did take a token amount of food, they thought she had no bodily functions. At night, if they had stopped, she would leave the temple and pace slowly about the camp’s edges. One dusk then Ipeyek glimpsed Chillel squatting like any ordinary woman behind a dune. Urine trickled along the ground, but it was as silvery as her necklet, caused no heat, and smelled of fresh snow.

  She did not teach them, even by example. She had no facial expressions, not even of bewilderment or animosity. Her features were very still, her body also. Yet her eyes looked about, she blinked and could shut them. Her coordinated movements were sublime.

  Just as the balls of her eyes were white, and her teeth – perhaps her bones, too – they had noted that the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet were slightly paler and rosier than the rest of her skin, and that inside her mouth a human colour existed. Her blood – if she had blood – would be red, then, even though she was made by God out of night.

  Ipeyek told none of them about the personal thing he had seen.

  The hirdiy did not know the Jafn legend of Star Black, the warrior hero formed from snow. They had nothing to guide them but religious esteem.

  All this time, the nomads were not specifically travelling anywhere. They always went up and down the Uaarb, though seldom to its brinks: of mountains in the north, or the sea. Sometimes even they travelled in circles. They were like Magikoy clockwork. Once set in motion, they persisted in it – but for them it had no purpose save itself.

  Then came a night of triple moonrise.

  That was when they would take the bones out of the temple, and ask them questions.

  The ritual was explained to Chillel. She did not so much as nod, but they had come to think she now understood their speech. She had. She left the temple with its door-flap wide, and stood by, far off from the fires.

  The hirdiy brought out the caskets, and slid the bones down in the square which emphasized all four directions. Offerings were made to the bones.

  Above, the three moons hung like three white stares. It was as bright as midday.

  Occasionally, the hirdiy bones would answer.

  Tonight the bones got up. They made a palisade. Filmy lights squirmed among them. Then they began to swim counter-sunwise, along the unseen line that described a square.

  The hirdiy observed, awe-stricken. Such an event had not happened in living memory. But more was to come. The eddying bones shot suddenly from the square. They dashed upward and rained down like spears, unmistakably making now a fence. It lay between the hirdiy and the woman they had named Chillel.

  Stuck upright in this fence, the bones were again stationary. Crackling voices filtered into the air.

  ‘Out,’ they prattled, ‘out – away. She – no. Out of Uaarb. Out she – off she.’

  Behind the abrupt partition of bones, the hirdiy stood dumb. But the other voices nagged on, growing ever more shrill and ghastly.

&
nbsp; Ipeyek, corralled with his people, murmured, ‘But to us, she—’

  At that the bones spat off a stuff like fiery phlegm.

  Some of the nomads pushed Ipeyek to the earth. They stuffed ice in his mouth to shut him up, his mage credentials set aside.

  As the bones spat and screamed, the hirdiy turned in frenzy, and picking up clods of cold-baked ice-sand, hurled them over the bone-fence at the woman they had clothed and roomed in their temple.

  They drove Chillel out, as they had taken her in, as they would take in anything useful and drive out anything inimical. Though God had constructed her, the ancestors would not have her. At least no one imagined she would run from them. She did not. She only paced further and further away from the flung clods, until she vanished over the dunes.

  Her face had shown nothing. Her eyes were open wide, yet relaxed. She did not look back. Only Ipeyek noted that she moved towards the south, and recalled she had been going that way to begin with, since it was from the north she came to them.

  Days later, he was following her, or the trail of her narrow, high-arched feet, across the dunes.

  Ipeyek had left his family of two wives and dozen children, left his tent-house and cart, his dog-team, and three burden-carrying dogs. He took only his fight-and-hunting weapons, and the clothes he always wore. No one remonstrated, though the wives were solemn and some of the youngest children cried. It was the way of the Northland, generally, not to debate.

  Why did he go after the woman called Chillel?

  The simplest cause: he had fallen in love with her. And he had done this sufficiently to be able to give up everything else.

  Most often, his quarry was herself out of sight. Sometimes he saw her in the distance, but she moved on too, after sunset. In Gech lands, to sleep by night was the norm, but Ipeyek rationed sleep now.

  He hunted as he went across the ice desert. Game was scarce, yet he had grown up with the scarcity and the country, and knew their secrets. The infrequent hares fell to his sling. Once he saw the tracks of a tattarope, found its hole in the dunes, and dragged the snake out. He ate all food raw, as he walked after Chillel, and for drink chipped ice off the mesas with a razor-like flint knife.

  Chillel, he thought, ate nothing. Possibly she had only accepted small portions of the hirdiy food from a bizarre courtesy – because eating was one more thing that humans seemed to do?

  Ipeyek wondered, startled, if she had only urinated for the same reason.

  He did not ever attempt to catch up. Not even when he could see her there a long way ahead of him, like a solitary black finger moving over the bleached sand, writing something on the sky he could not read.

  Ipeyek did not measure time as he crossed the Uaarb. Presumably neither did Chillel.

  One morning, after he had been striding monotonously for hours, Ipeyek grew aware that he approached the plateau’s end.

  Here the external mountains became involved again with the flat terrain. The land dipped, crumbled. As it gave way more and more, Ipeyek came to see the slopes reeling off below, down to the lower sweeps of the northern Gech wilderness. He had never been so many miles towards the south.

  All that day he never saw Chillel, and the rockier ground hid her footprints. Persistent, single-minded, he kept doggedly on.

  That evening he made, unmagically, a fire in the lee of a rock, striking up sparks from his flint. Darkness came, and only emptiness was there – but night and unsound were also Chillel.

  Next day he found her. She was about twenty feet from him. She had halted confronting the massive final drop, as the plateau plunged over towards the wilderness far, far below. He did not think it was fear that had stayed her. She was perplexed.

  ‘I and you down mountain,’ he said. ‘I able. You easy with me.’

  She could not fly. That was odd, but fortunate, or else he might then not have caught up to her at all.

  He had scaled and descended mountain outcrops along the Uaarb, even the slippery mesas of ice. Ipeyek therefore went first, picking the safest path. Without a protest or query, now she followed him.

  They were two days on the mountainside, getting down. The second night, with the lower wilderness quite near enough to reach tomorrow, Ipeyek sling-shot a wild grey rat-pig. He peeled it of its fur, cut it up, and grilled the meat. When he offered some to Chillel, she accepted a mouthful, as she had among the hirdiy. Afterwards, he lay down by her, then put his head into her lap. She did not deny this.

  Her smell was still fragrant and remote. He supposed she never slept; he had never seen it. There were other races like that. He put up a quiet hand and cupped one of her delicious breasts inside the shift. Nor did Chillel deny him that.

  ‘I on you?’ Ipeyek asked her. Among the nomads, that was enough of a request. He pondered if she comprehended. It appeared that she did.

  Expressionless, unresisting, she spread herself back against the slope.

  Ipeyek embraced her, sliding his hands inside the shift, burying his face in her breasts, her hair, her loins. Her centre was glamorous. When he penetrated it, she seemed cooler than any woman he had ever known, yet firm and lush. She was not a virgin. Ipeyek did not know the god who made her had dispensed with all such silly impediments – or had forgotten, as he had almost forgotten her navel.

  ‘No hurt,’ Ipeyek whispered in a while. ‘Wife.’

  They were married.

  The hirdiy of the Uaarb evolved no word for happiness. He slept against her, holding her to him – his.

  Man and wife then, Ipeyek and Chillel journeyed over the wilderness, going south towards the swamps of Gech. He assumed she still wished to go that way, and if she changed her mind would somehow indicate as much.

  Every night, once or twice, he would copulate with her. She never refused, nor did she show any enjoyment – yet there was nothing off-putting or angering in her lack of participation. It seemed in fact she did participate, offering her body so immediately, in all its loveliness. Her black and shining unshut eyes transported him to ever sharper pleasures. Fertile, he considered if he would make her pregnant. He decided it was unlikely. He was correct.

  The opaque neutrality of the weather ceased as they neared south Gech.

  Swamp began, leaden mud under cracked glazings of ice. The hideous spidered mangroves frostily enclosed them, with boles and tentacles. Overhead the sky tore to storm and uncanny lightning in wheels and bolts.

  They forged on across the swamps. Under semi-transparent ice channels, things lay imprisoned: big saurians that in other parts had escaped and scuttled over the land. They were armoured, these beasts, with heads that nearly split on fangs, but almost sightless. Ipeyek, who had heard of south Gech, ushered Chillel up into the safety of palm trees by climbing rungs of ice. There were apes, too, several of which intended to assault them, but Ipeyek killed three with his sling and, uttering bellowing screams, the others fled.

  Leeches fastened on Ipeyek whenever they moved through the softer mud. He rubbed ice on them to dislodge them. They did not attach themselves ever to Chillel.

  Going further south, they arrived among the haunts of men. In villages of beehive houses, the doors remained closed. No one would come out. Once a lone Crarrow emerged. She asked Ipeyek, in another language of Gech, what he did there. When he could not grasp her meaning, the Crarrow shook her head. Her hair was dyed green. Demonstrating no craft, she slunk back into her house. Chillel she had strictly ignored.

  They saw no wolves. The storms abated.

  Ipeyek spoke to his wife of the Copper Gate that marked the termination of all Gech lands. This was like the ends of the earth to Ipeyek, even though he had always known about it.

  They saw the Gate at last, through heavy mist and frozen willows, over a wide expanse of mud and active saurians. It was soon after dawn. Formerly the Gate had been wide and high – twenty chariots might have passed through together. Now, though its size was still impressive, much was fallen, and the shining copper plates of history had changed t
o a sickly verdigris.

  Beyond the Gate stretched more mud, right to the shambles of Sham.

  The city’s walls were gone. Its architecture was centuries down and sunk in the frigid mud. On top of and out of this muck-heap, like insects, men had put up buildings of a kind. Sham was a warren of alleys and fighting arenas, slave markets, brothels, dens of ethnic vice.

  The out-city Olchibe bands still talked of Sham. They brought to Sham any Rukar slaves they kept alive, as offerings to its disgrace.

  Today life stirred quite busily in its sink. Smokes hung on it in a rich pall.

  Ipeyek and Chillel went through the Gate, listening to the grunting of the swamp alligators, gradually hearing another sound which rang round and round. Ipeyek of course did not know Sham was not always this vocal, smoky, or full of life.

  So very far they had come. To a nomad, the travel in itself was nothing, but Ipeyek had left his world behind. He tied Chillel to him by a protective leash before they went into the city.

  This had been well advised, though ultimately not effective.

  In the alleys almost instantly they were among crowds. Most gaped at Chillel – there were no black skins in any of these regions. Ipeyek caught the title Crarrow, as he thrust to get them through.

  It was bad enough among the Olchibe and the Gech who were in Sham, and who did not necessarily know the myth of Star Black. However, now there were Jafn peoples present too, a thing that had seldom occurred. The first of these white-skinned warriors Ipeyek had ever actually seen came milling along over the hills of sunken buildings in their chariots. Olchibe stepped mildly out of their road, for Olchibe at this time tolerated, indeed made friends with, Jafn.

  That in itself surprised Ipeyek. Then several chariots had hemmed him in, and lions.

  Chillel stood at the end of her leash, which Ipeyek had fastened round her waist. She might have been a slave, but made of jet. Ipeyek had deduced she wished to go into Sham. He had never tried to learn why.

  He waited, sling in hand, for what might come. He knew about the Jafn, they were warlike and irascible.