Cast a Bright Shadow

by Tanith Lee

  But where was the cart? She was not a goddess, Ranjal – not a real goddess. Even though she had once taken wing like a hornet, she would have been struck to stone and salt like everything else.

  Something poked Guri hard in the back ribs.

  He jumped round.

  He almost sat down, fell over, from surprise.

  One Ranjal was standing in the salt desert, on the sour, discoloured ice. She was no longer wooden or inanimate. As he recollected from her images, her untidy rough hair streamed down her back like a badger’s pelt. Multi-handed, her fingers and nails were branch-like claws, with one of which she had stabbed at his back. Her eyes were black and brilliant.

  ‘Ranjal-Narnifa, I,’ she said. She had a young voice now. ‘Bow me, man-ghost.’

  What had slain so many things of every type had done with the sibull and her goddess something else. Neither had been fleshly-living. They had become an amalgam, and alive.

  Guri wanted to kick her, this two-in-one undeserving refugee. But he was sensible. Who knew now what she was capable of? He bowed and put at her feet, with a fawning word, several handfuls of nothing.

  Over Ru Karismi, true night had passed. The new day was sunny, but the blue sky curiously and unevenly shaded, as if stained.

  They looked at it in fear, now the blindfolds were off.

  The following day, the sky showed clean again. This, however, was the day on which illness and dying began.

  A child sank down on a street by the Great Markets, where some effort at commerce was again being made. Picking the child up, its mother learned it was already dead. As the sun went over, others sank and perished. The malaise was swift – a tiredness, a pallor, a state between fainting and slumber. The weakest were swept up in minutes; the very strong lasted between one and seven days.

  Some were immune, apparently. Again, occasionally some, rather than sicken went mad, and dashed howling through the city, striking out, biting and wailing gibberish. There seemed no logic to these ailments. Often the frail did not sicken, and instead the young and healthy were dispatched.

  They said a plague had been brought to the city with the enemy horde. Only the medicinal weapons of the Magikoy had disinfected it, if not quite in time.

  Naturally, though, it was those same weapons which had seeded the plague. Gradually some became aware of that.

  Those inside the city had seldom glanced beyond it – what had ever been outside to intrigue them? Now, forbidden for safety’s sake to leave the metropolis for the salt-yard outside, claustrophobia erupted among the people. Riots ensued: they were put down harshly, and at once, by the surviving soldiery and guards.

  The shrines of the temple-town grew full to overflowing, then drained to emptiness.

  Above, the beautiful clarity of the skies went on, washed and burnished by the hands of heartless gods.

  Many of the Magikoy were also dead. Intent on helping the citizens, they had come out from the fastness of their Insularia inside an hour, and so were also exposed to the creeping death.

  Now, of the formerly unknown number of these magicians, only eleven men and two women remained in Ru Karismi.

  They stood in a half circle and gazed at Vuldir, King Paramount, seated on his carved chair.

  ‘Tonight, Vuldir, you will die.’

  Vuldir, who had been allowed to keep his elegant garments and jewels, but not the crown of king, did not deign to reply.

  That evening, under a triple moonrise of searing brightness, Vuldir was burned alive at the foot of the great Stair.

  This the city watched in voiceless malice, and dread. He had not tried to escape, did not beg for mercy, excuse himself, rant or even cry out as the flames ate him. It was said he had been given an opiate to spare him the pain of the fire.

  Later, crowds roamed the thoroughfares, climbed the thousand steps to gaze transfixed at the palace walls. There were no longer guards. Anyone who wanted entered the citadel of their kings, and wandered around unlit palaces and pavilions, beneath sculptures of ice and marble.

  Law and the everyday rituals were finished.

  The Magikoy called the Gargolem, but it never came. It had not even come out when the crowds climbed up the Stair.

  Winds blew soft. Colourless dust coated the city. The citizens were now accustomed to it. Ashes rested in the hair and on the lips of those wandering in the gardens of kings, tasting of white.

  ‘No other way. There was no other way to defend ourselves. Lives will be lost, now and through the coming months; perhaps one third of those inside the walls will sicken and die. But if the barbarians of the north and east had got in, all of us would have died. We saw their mercy, that god-driven mob, at Or Tash—’

  Bhorth turned on his bed, troubled by the voice he heard. Then he thought it was his own voice, lecturing in his brain.

  He sat upright. He was not on a pallet in the enemy tent, but lying on the ground. Yes, lying on the salt-dust – which was corpses.

  Bhorth got up. He brushed himself off, spat. He was naked – his clothes had gone with everything else in the white second. Oddly, what had heatlessly scorched them from him had not harmed a hair of his head or body. He did not feel cold.

  He remembered now, back before the world ended, he had been in the tent after the woman was gone. That was a funny business. Had the Lionwolf-king sent her to him as some sort of treat or trial? She was black all over – Bhorth had never seen such a woman, so beautiful, perfect. She had offered herself without preamble, and Bhorth accepted.

  The tent having been pitched for him among the baggage and stores, his three guards went off with two of the witch-girls, Gech creatures with green-dyed hair. Neither these girls nor Bhorth had been, though captive, shackled or restrained in any way.

  Bhorth had known the city was just along the ice fields, but he was by then one man alone, without an army. He had done his best. After the black woman left him, he lay there listening grumpily to the noises of battle, cursing. He would not go out to see. What point? Then whiteness came, and sound that was without sound.

  For a scatter of days since, Bhorth, once King Accessorate, had been blundering about the salty heaps, looking for his past – or some reason. The city was hidden from him now by a kind of haze, which shone by day and in moonlight – the fog of the death-dust catching light. Bhorth could not make himself go towards the hidden city.

  He asked himself what he meant to do, and could not answer himself. He kept forgetting anyway what had happened, dropping asleep, then waking and freshly remembering. He knew this was what he did. What he had said to himself just now, that too he had said before. He, as a minor king, had known about the ultimate weapons under the city. He had thought they were a lie. But lies, it seemed, coming true were more forceful than mere truth. Probably the Magikoy had said what Bhorth kept on repeating to himself. Somehow he had heard it blown to him on the wind of aftermath, only rephrasing it in his own words.

  Going around a chunk of salt-death, Bhorth stopped. A man was there – another man like himself, if of a different race. Yellow-skinned, he too was naked, but kept his hair on body and head.

  Bhorth was madly happy to find him. He bounded forward and grabbed the man and hugged him close as a long-lost son.

  The man hugged him back. In some outlandish tongue he murmured to Bhorth.

  Bhorth thought perhaps he could understand it – Gech, yes it was Gech, from the furthest North.

  ‘Name – give me your name,’ demanded Bhorth, wanting to know everything, rationing himself.

  ‘Ipeyek.’

  Bhorth was thankful his grasp of the Gech language was so much better than he recalled.

  ‘I am Bhorth—’ About to say something of kingship, Bhorth grunted. ‘Are there others – like us?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the man called Ipeyek. ‘Some alive.’

  ‘Only the gods know how. The blast must have missed us—’

  He and Ipeyek stepped apart.

  Ipeyek said seriously, ‘No,
but protection on us.’

  Bhorth thought of this. He was a king, but apparently he had not been elected to survive through that, for here was this Gech nomad – had he said he was a nomad? – but he too. It seemed to Bhorth he himself spoke Rukarian after all, yet the Gech followed, as he, Bhorth, followed the Gech tongue the nomad spoke.

  ‘What protection?’

  ‘Through wife,’ said Ipeyek.

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘Wife of me.’

  ‘Your wife then is a mageia? She must have vast powers. Have I met your wife?’

  Ipeyek modestly lowered his eyes. There was dust thick on his lashes.

  The wind blew. When it lay down, both men spat filth from their mouths.

  It was then that Bhorth saw two other live ones, Jafn tribals from their white hair, aimlessly meandering along maybe half a mile away, between the stacks of salt.

  ‘See!’ Bhorth shouted. Waving his arms, he began to gallop towards these further fellow survivors, wanting to hug them, love them, where a dozen days back he would have spitted them on a sword.

  Thirty men sat together on the ground. They were all unarmed, naked, their bodies clad only in hair. They did not seem to feel the cold, even in the pith of night.

  Sometimes they talked. Now one would say this, now another would say it, or something very similar. They were in agreement, and could each understand exactly what every man there said, though the languages were several, and the dialects diverse. A band of brothers, now and then they would put a hand on another man’s shoulder, or jokingly cuff him.

  Only Arok stood outside the fellowship, morose and bereft.

  It was hot that he could not also fathom the languages, or make himself clear. It was not that he was unwelcomed.

  At the start he had been, like all of them, wild with joy at the prospect of company. But slowly, going about in the dust with them, sitting down with them in an untidy circle as if about an unlit invisible hearth, Arok had seen, he believed, his difference.

  He was in fact not even the first with her – with Chillel. Ipeyek had been first. Then there was Arok. Then all the others, only some of whom were represented here tonight. It would seem, however, the rest of the others must be somewhere about. For whoever Chillel had cutched, he had lived through the Magikoy weapon-death. They had not changed to pillars of salt, which the wind whittled away.

  None of them could rationalize it. She had not even selected them, but allowed them to select her. If they had been in doubt, her anecdote about the cup of drink – which tale had travelled the war camp after Or Tash – made so much obvious. Arok, though, she had chosen.

  Why had she chosen Arok?

  Perturbed, he moved around the edges of the circle, his bare feet scuffing the dust. His own insidious importance riled him, and the unawareness of it among the twenty-nine other men. He had never had much authority, Arok. Kin to the Holas Chaiord, he had had no prospects of more than kinship. He lived in hall with the other Holas warriors, took women when they were avilable, and fought when his chief said so.

  It nagged at Arok, now, that there was something he must do.

  ‘She chose me,’ he said to the circle.

  None of them registered his words.

  Arok realized he had not spoken them aloud.

  Turning, he gazed away through night towards the area where the Rukar city went on standing. It should have been rubble, but was not. Also, by night, in dust-fog without moonlight, it vanished.

  Arok considered going off that way. That man over there, he was one of the lower kings of the city – either this had been told to Arok, or Arok had guessed it, in the way they correctly guessed each other’s languages. But this man, Bhorth, showed no sign of going back to his city.

  Arok decided he would go.

  ‘Farewell,’ he said.

  No one heard him. Obviously, his individuality had shut him from their notice.

  As he set out, loping through the dust, Arok pondered if Chillel herself had lived. Perhaps she was not anyway real – simply some antidote God made for men to take against the Magikoy weapons. Of the fate of the Lionwolf, Arok did not think. Not one of them had. It was as if he, the being who had caused all this, had been erased from memory.

  The night was very dark. Arok did not judge it properly. The way the ice was now, hard as a petrified drum, and the dust … they misled him, too.

  He was running in the wrong direction, not south, but east. He was running back towards Jafn lands. His body did maybe know this, even if the compass of his mind was out.

  Presently he smelled something other than the white smell of the powdered dead. It was the scent of ice and snow stretching away and away, and even conceivably the frigid tang of the sea. Running yet, Arok assessed these aromas and knew he went the wrong – or right – way.

  Two or three hours after, moons rose in the east in front of him. By then he was well into his stride. He loped on, steady as a wolf, towards the moons.

  Third Intervolumen

  God forgive me for ever having lived.

  Bardic Lay of the Hero Kind Heart: Jafn

  Vashdran … Lionwolf … Nameless.

  If birds had been in the sky – and there were none – they would have seen him. He was a solitary figure, mythic in its incongruity, a naked man walking southwards. His head was down: he looked, it seemed, only at the waste of the snow, as if it were chancy here to take a step. The ice road, Kings Mile, had vanished but anyway, by now, he had left it far behind. The landscape was featureless. Above was a wan sky and a pastel sun that seemed hooded in its own smoke. Probably he had been walking for many days, also during many nights. There was no living thing there but for himself. Once there was an ice-forest to the west – or to the east. It gleamed, that was all. Later it too was left behind.

  No birds then to see this. Perhaps therefore only the sun could see, being so much higher, what came walking after the naked red-haired man, maybe half a day at his back. This second walker was like … his shadow.

  The land went upwards. Still peering at his feet, the man climbed unerringly up with it, taking no notice of it or of anything.

  Somehow – in fact quite easily, for the waste was wide – he had passed no familiar landmark, nothing he had ever been told of, either by his Rukarian mother or by earth-bounding Uncle Guri. If he had seen anything like that, recognizable, might it have slowed him or focused his thoughts in a new way? If he had seen the Shadow, would he have noted that?

  Really, it could not be his shadow at all. His shadow was full of lights, and this one coal-black. Also, its shape was not masculine but distinctly female.

  When the long slope of the land had gone up for centuries into the sky, and another night came, the man dropped on his face without any warning, even to himself. Flat on the ice, he appeared to sleep, his head turned across one arm. Hour on hour he slept, as he had not done since babyhood. And so, in the dusk of dawn, she, Chillel, at last caught up with him.

  He woke to find her seated by him. She was a figure of supreme remoteness, and naked as he apart from her long, long hair. She turned and gazed at him. She said, ‘Now I am yours.’

  Lionwolf took no notice of this. Yet, perhaps he did, for he turned his head the other way from her.

  While he returned to sleep, Chillel sat beside him. She seemed comfortable in the snow, where he had only seemed enduring. Of course, snow was her mother.

  The sun rose. The sky blued.

  Then he woke up again. Lionwolf pulled himself to his feet. He acted awkwardly a moment, like a boy of ten or eleven, then haughtily he moved off a short space and urinated, side on to Chillel, sitting unconcerned down the hill. She watched in silence.

  Lionwolf came back. He sat next to her.

  ‘I’ve no use for you now.’

  She said nothing.

  After an hour, Lionwolf got up again without glancing at the woman, and walked off along the snow-ridge southwards.

  Chillel also got up. She followed him as
before, but now keeping only a Jafn spear-length behind him.

  Below the ridge lay more of the white desert, with nothing on it but frozen ridges and runnels, some quite large.

  The lands south of the borders of the Ruk had been reckoned savage by all and sundry. For incalculable distances they were vacant, even their forests virtually unpopulated. Eventually there began ice-locked rocky crags. Hollow tunnels, maybe natural, led through, among emerald caves, to a region the Magikoy and other sages had sparsely written of, Kraagparia – the country of the Kraag. Who or what these people were had been a matter of uninterested debate in the Ruk, of indifference only to other races north and east. Saphay, and therefore Lionwolf, knew nothing of them, though she and he had heard their name.

  If Chillel knew anything of them – or of anything at all – only the god who made her could say.

  Lionwolf walked, and Chillel walked behind him. The sun walked over above and, when dark came back, the moons.

  Near the last quarter of the night, again Lionwolf stopped. Now he did not drop down to sleep. He stood looking up at the stars – the moons had sunk by then.

  In the end, he spoke to her once more.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘What you will give me.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I must wait and see.’

  ‘I told you what I’d give you, and you wouldn’t take it then. Now, though you’re naked as a knife, I couldn’t care less for you. Don’t you know, woman, something happened – back where the city was, and the battle. Don’t you know?’

  She did not speak.

  Lionwolf said, ‘Where do I go to talk of this? I call Guri – he doesn’t answer. Is it possible he too … Where am I to go?’

  Chillel said, ‘You walk southwards.’

  ‘I don’t know why. Away – that’s all. I walk away from that.’ He hunkered down on the ground, as Guri had done. Lionwolf said, ‘What must I do?’

  Did he ask her?