by Tanith Lee
Lionwolf had led them into the city, driving straight through Ruk soldiery and straight at the gate, taking invulnerably blows on every side, for once his chariot-team being also unscathed. He killed personally so many men in the gateway that they provided a barricade – but not for very long. Then he left the chariot, impatient as always. He flung himself, running, into the city, the colossal riot of an army roistering after him.
He killed there, too. Those that witnessed it had always said he slaughtered women as simply as men. It was as if he saw no difference. Only the young he spared – his Olchibe indoctrination.
Under his blue sun banner, soon Sofora was put physically to the torch.
In the mage tower, the last remaining mage cast off his sending of the horrible scene below. This done, like the solitary unused cannon, he dashed himself from the height, and died on the stones in blood, fire and darkness.
After Sofora, Or Tash, the one city now left standing between the Gullahammer and the capital, sent to the King Paramount for aid.
Vuldir shook his head at this. ‘They must go without our help,’ he said. ‘It seems this business is serious. We will keep all our soldiery here.’
Bhorth, the foolish weak King Accessorate, pounced round on his heel and left the noiseless chamber. Descending from the palaces, he took his guard, rode at once for his nearest estate, and called up every able-bodied male. Furnished with two thousand men, armoured, and in fighting-sleekars from Bhorth’s royal possession, they sheered northward and west towards Or Tash. No Magikoy accompanied them. At a small deserted town a blizzard began, and shored them up for days and nights. Not one sending percolated through the sheeting snow. When eventually they could get on, and reached Or Tash, the Gullahammer had already taken it, and done so as the wolf or leopard took a deer.
As if by magecraft then, too, Bhorth and his appalled makeshift troops, were themselves surrounded by the horde.
Bhorth, wielding his war-axe and engraved sword, beheld men of the Jafn shoulder to shoulder with Olchibe and the blue-faced rabble of the outer seas. If he had not had to keep his wits, his mouth would have fallen open.
Then he himself was felled.
Reviving, he learned that they knew him. This was not hard, for he had put on the traditional steel helm of a lesser king, circled with its golden crown. They let Bhorth retain just three of his guard, all hurt. The barbarians conducted them over the smoking hem of Or Tash, where men, chariots, deer and lions waded through a river of slowly freezing blood.
Bhorth pig-headedly thought they meant to make a death-spectacle also of him. He glowered on them all. He was a king.
However, they were taking him instead to meet their own leader.
The tent, pitched by the city’s ruin, was nothing. Ruk splendours these savages only destroyed. Outside it, though, the weird standard added to Bhorth’s foreboding. And he noticed as well, down the slope, some kind of dishevelled cart full of wooden things like broomsticks, which seemed to be speaking supernaturally to a crowd of laughing, blood-drunk warriors.
Bhorth, King Accessorate, was ushered into the tent itself.
He saw a mixed group of men like those who had fought, white-haired Jafn and yellow-skinned Gech or Olchibe. A Vormish reiver, with purple-striped cheeks, had come out as Bhorth entered. Bhorth had thought all the reivers off at the coast, bouncing on the rubble of Thase.
Then something happened. It was the way a wind changed direction over the ice fields.
Bhorth was staring suddenly between or through all the men in the tent, to one man standing washing his hands and face in a basin of snow. The man shook back his hair, and wiped his face with a towel one of the Jafn handed him.
Bhorth had heard the dislocated rumours of red hair, and not credited them. Here it was.
He was not, Bhorth, a man who had sexual or romantic feelings for men. Nor was he at all aesthetic in his appreciation. But once, when a boy, he had seen a sunset, heart-red jointed with gold, and never mislaid its marvel. This man – this creature – was like that, a phenomenon. It might not be overlooked – or only at one’s peril. And this thought came from Bhorth, reckoned to be a fool.
The phenomenon walked towards him. A lion padded doglike at the phenomenon’s heels – there was blood in its grey mane.
‘Good evening, sir,’ said Lionwolf in impeccable aristocratic Rukarian. ‘I expect you don’t know, but we are related.’
Bhorth’s mouth did as it wished, it dropped open. He spoke after several moments. ‘How’s that?’
‘My mother is Saphay, daughter to Vuldir, King Paramount. Since you’re my grandfather Vuldir’s brother, I greet you as my great-uncle.’
‘I remember no daughter of that name.’
‘You must trust me to know my own birth-line,’ said Lionwolf. He held out his hand. It had been cleaned of blood, like his extraordinary face. The rest of him was still dyed with it, though he had no smell of that, and his skin was not Olchibe yellow, as Bhorth had first thought, but a clear brown. Though there were Jafn about, and Fazions, with bluish eyes, they were not his blue. The eyes of this one matched the sun of his standard. There is ONE among them …
‘What are you?’ said Bhorth, not grasping Lionwolf’s proffered hand. But Lionwolf held out his hand still, unabashed, composed, only waiting. To take that hand must be inevitable. Bhorth shivered under his fat. He was tired, and a captive, yet still he had asked his question. He was not aware of how many had already asked it.
‘What am I? Like you, my lord Bhorth, a king.’
Maybe it was the first time the Lionwolf had ever called himself that, but no man in the tent protested. Oh, he was king – King Forever – over all.
‘You’re a barbarian,’ said Bhorth, ‘that’s what you are.’
Lionwolf smiled at him.
‘Am I? Perhaps, sir, before God and gods, we are all barbarians. But won’t you accept my hand? I won’t burn you.’
‘I will not,’ said Bhorth.
‘Ah, then,’ said the Lionwolf softly, ‘I must take yours.’
Just as a mother did, gentle with a child, before Bhorth knew what would happen, the young man’s hand, strong and warm, had taken Bhorth’s hand, which was battered from the haft of the axe, knuckles bruised from the hilt of the sword. The strong warm hand was itself callused but not battle-marked – yet he fought like a fiend, they said. His flesh, it seemed, accepted only those scars which would be helpful.
Bhorth did not want to let go the hand of the Lionwolf, who was King Forever Over All. In a dislodged world, this hand alone was likely to hold him up.
‘You’re courageous, Great-Uncle,’ said the king. ‘You, and no other prince, to come out against us.’
‘I and my men.’
‘I regret your men. But I offer no harm to you. You shall be honoured.’ Swansdown could not be as delicate: ‘When Vuldir and his capital are in shreds, you, Bhorth, can live.’
Hours after, Bhorth felt himself ashamed of this conversation. By then he was in another tent. His wounds, and those of his three guards, had been washed by some witch with herbals. Bhorth was sitting on the ground, and they had brought him black Jafn wine and some food. If he was a prisoner he did not know or care. Anyway, it would not matter. He was done for, like all of them.
When Vuldir and his capital are in shreds …
Somewhere in Bhorth’s brain memory nagged, reminding him both he and Vuldir had been warned of all this long ago. And now it was too late.
Shouting filled the one upright dwelling left in Or Tash. It was Lionwolf’s habit sometimes to keep a single building whole, and celebrate with his captains inside it. Somehow this had been begun at the Klowan-garth, where he had given Lokesh and Rothger over to their hideous feast. The building chosen in Or Tash was a rough-hewn palace on a platform, where royalty had never stayed.
The feast-fire pranced high. Jafn mages had filled it with gyrating shapes of lions and bears, and women. No other woman, of whom anyway there were few about t
he war camp, came to these junketings.
All the chieftains and leaders were present. The most favoured sat nearest to Lionwolf – Peb Yuve and some of his seconds, three or four other Olchibe commanders, and Gech premiers from the swamps. The chiefs of all the Jafn clans, their sons and kin had their correct places. No one tried for precedence – formerly feuds had started over much less. The two jalee captains of the Fazions, those not still at Thase and Kandexa, sat on the fur-piled wooden benches. There were beasts besides. Jafn brought their best lions to a feast, and now the three Vorm ship-lords wished to bring in their horsazin. This Lionwolf allowed, despite Jafn complaints that the dinners now tasted always of fish.
Tonight the third Vorm entered late with his son, and with his horse – a horned fish out of water, painted stem to stern in magenta stripes. Behind the men and the horsaz, walked the Vorm’s woman.
Every other man in the room stared, for the Vorm’s woman this evening was black Chillel.
She wore by now a fortune in trinkets and baubles, spangling on her darkness, given her by her endless succession of lovers.
Only Arok of the Jafn Holas turned his look instantly aside. He was at the feast because he was kin to the Holas Chaiord, and had divorced Chillel by now, in her absence, by the swift Jafn method. Not all men who had once had her fretted when she was gone. But, then, she had publicly chosen Arok, and he had wed her; that was different.
If Lionwolf looked with the rest, he also looked away soon enough. He seemed to pay no special attention to Chillel, yet no man there, if he had had her or not, seemed quite able to ignore her. She was like a subtle sound vibrating in the air. Always in your ear, you grew used to its being there.
The shouts rose again, the rafters of the hall rang. Outside, the flattened city showed its corpse to a couple of high, narrow moons.
Peb Yuve leaned over to Lionwolf. ‘That woman should not live.’
Lionwolf glanced at him. ‘Which woman?’
Stonily, Peb said, ‘I wish I had my Crarrow wife with me. She’d tell you.’
‘A Crarrow, yes – but what is there to fear from an ordinary woman, sir?’
Just then the third Vorm ship-lord stood up and clouted his own son across the head. The younger man went down.
The Vorm did not sit. His face, paint-striped like his horse, was hard to read, but every man there read his action. The son too had had Chillel, it appeared.
To Lionwolf, the Vorm bowed, banging his head down on his fists in the Vormish way. In the language and syntax of the north sea, he muttered, ‘Pardon this me that struck out by your eating-hearth. Shall I go die, young father?’
Lionwolf laughed. ‘No, sit down. Make it up with your son. He’s a fine warrior, nearly as fine as you are.’
‘You are faultless in judgement, young father.’
The Vorm bent over his son – knocked out by the hefty paternal smack – and began to soothe him.
Peb Yuve said to Lionwolf, ‘He’ll kill her now.’
‘Who will he kill?’
‘The Night-Woman.’
‘Doesn’t he know she lies down with any man who asks …’ As Lionwolf paused, his lips formed silently, in Rukarian, the words, ‘Excepting myself.’
Vormish father and son were now sitting back on their bench. Chillel, who had been sitting by them on a low stool, the Vorm ship-lord now kicked, with a sudden movement, away on to the floor.
All sound ended in the hall, apart from the eternal whisper of Chillel’s own music of presence. That did not alter.
It was the oddest thing. However graceful, how could any woman maintain her grace when kicked away like that?
To Lionwolf himself, Chillel’s kicking-away and fall were as if a swathe of liquid water had sprung outwards, changing but not letting go its form – and then, as immediately, recoiled. With amazement, he gazed at her. She was already standing up, unharmed, unmarred, as if nothing had been done to her.
Was she like this during lovemaking? Yes, it must be so.
Lionwolf got to his feet.
The other men stared rapt – now at the woman, now at their man-god.
Everything was briefly as it had been on the ice road by Sham, when Chillel was first brought to them.
‘Come and sit here,’ said Lionwolf to Chillel.
With miraculous normalcy, she obeyed.
Peb Yuve now stood, and moved away as she approached. His seconds followed him. The nearest Jafn chieftains shifted. Lionwolf pointed to the bench beside him. Chillel, without a word, sat there. Then Lionwolf resumed his seat.
He spoke to her low, but others heard him: ‘You’d better stay by me a while.’
Chillel regarded him with uncluttered acceptance.
Was she now another plaything to him – one more untried, intriguing item? He did not know, but he desired her. That was what he was most conscious of, the organ of his sex, over which he could exercise great control, striving against his will, so finally he allowed it to expand and crane as it wished.
He said to her, again very low, ‘What will you do for me?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Ah, like last time, then.’
Both of them looked back at the hall. No one overhearing believed either her rejection or his wooing. How could two things like he and she deal in such ordinary currency?
He gave her wine to drink. She drank it. Lionwolf drank, like all his men, copiously, though was never drunk. But she did not drink much, always putting the cup down after a sip. She was the same with the food.
The rest – even the Olchibe men apart from Peb Yuve – became hot and high as the moons. They began to vie and wrestle with each other, then the story-telling commenced.
All through this, the two of them sat there like two statues made of amber and jet.
Night crossed towards morning. At dawn, the Gullahammer would be on its war road again, flowing towards Ru Karismi.
His captains, who might soon die for Lionwolf, banged cups on the benches and called for a story from him.
Lionwolf looked over his shoulder, seeing no one was there. Guri was seldom with him, now. He had, obviously, offended Guri – and the living Peb Yuve too. But Lionwolf could charm them back. ‘What story shall it be?’
Peb Yuve said across the feast-fire to him, ‘Let the woman tell a story.’
Lionwolf shrugged. Among Jafn and Northlanders alike women did not tell tales in hall, not even the Crarrowin.
‘Do you know a story?’ Lionwolf enquired of Chillel.
On the other bench, the Vorm who had struck his son lowered his face in anger like a bull, but kept still.
Chillel had risen, as the storyteller must. One supposed she had seen others recite bardic lays.
Peb Yuve’s face was granite.
Chillel picked up the cup she had been drinking from. It was three-quarters full. Leaving Lionwolf, she went unhurriedly about between the benches and the fire. She offered the cup to every man she came to, whether chief or second or their kin. Most drank from the cup.
This was not servile, it was a mystic, priestly act. And those who refused – not actually the Vorm or his son, but Arok, Peb, two or three more – she passed away from like a moon-moved shadow.
After this, she came back to the spot below Lionwolf’s bench.
The feast-fire was low now. As she spoke across it, her quiet voice filled the last hall in Or Tash, as clear as a chime.
‘I am this cup. If you will drink, you will drink. If you will not drink, I will not be drunk by you.’
Not a man there did not feel the hairs crawl on his neck and scalp. Even Peb Yuve felt it, and thought: She’s Crarrow, after all. Then let her be, Great Gods witness me.
Chillel spoke: ‘From nothing I was made – from night and snow. I am the vessel of what made me, who are three gods, or one god that has three persons. For this, and to be this, I was created and am. He that sits there in the king’s place, he was made also by a god, who is three, though in another way. Once,’ said Chil
lel, ‘it was Summer in the world. The sun dropped down into the sea one night, and never rose any more. Only the ghost of the sun rose, and gave no heat. Winter slunk into the world.’
Peb Yuve thought, She speaks good Olchibe.
Jafn – even wretched Arok – thought, She speaks the Jafn tongue. I taught her well.
Lionwolf knew Chillel could, as could he, speak any language she must, and simultaneously if needed.
He wanted to end her words. She talked about gods: the gods of his mother Saphay, and so of him – about Zeth Zezeth.
‘Be quiet, Chillel,’ said Lionwolf. He had heard the name bandied around very often. ‘This isn’t a story.’
Chillel ceased to speak.
Lionwolf said, ‘Enough of this. Let’s go and cool our heads outside. There are marks set up on the wreck of the city for shooting at.’
Men ran whooping out into the snow. Others, Gech and Olchibe, saluted Lionwolf and left the hall to snatch some sleep.
As he walked by Chillel towards the open doors, Lionwolf took the cup from her hand to drink. It was empty.
‘Later, I’ll come in again to see you.’
Chillel said, ‘I am not for you. You have no need of me.’
‘Yes, I’ll fuck you, girl. In here, at sunrise, before my army leaves.’
What language did they use now? All they had ever heard, perhaps some they had not.
But still she replied, ‘No, I am not for you.’
Lionwolf gave her back the cup. He bent to kiss her forehead, but somehow he did not reach her skin. She smelled fragrant and cold, just as he smelled clean and flame-like.
Outside, the Lionwolf shot through the sticks and broke them, as he had broken Or Tash and Sofora. He did not bother to go to see if the woman had waited. She had not.
Sunset lit Ru Karismi of the Kings. So often the city had glowed in this same light. Now it resembled something burning.