by Tanith Lee
He thought of Chillel and of Ru Karismi. Like a book he must learn by heart and, even now he had learned it, must go on learning and learning, he read over the story of his life. A few years – it seemed to have been a millennium. He hated it but, despite all he had said, believed in it incorrigibly, and so it stayed entirely real.
Snow that melts in fire will refreeze.
It may even take on again its former shape.
Lionwolf dreamed – lying by Darhana above the melted sea – of a place far to the north of them.
Shepherds had climbed up the crags, taking their more agile sheep to pastures of dormant grass among the rocks. These sheep were the long-necked, lion-faced kind that Lionwolf recollected from the village of Ranjalla. Under the white peaks, the men sat in the middle of their flock, sharing a drink about their fire. In that venue there were no storms. The stars wheeled slowly by overhead.
Then, from a cave mouth above, something came out.
The men turned and looked. They got to their feet. He heard them grunting. They raised their staves to beat it off, this night-blackness gliding down the cliffside towards their bivouac.
Chillel came walking through the flock, which was not at all nervous of her, and nuzzled her hands.
She came walking, clothed in all the beauty of the night, and fragrance hung on her, and the faint wonderful melodies of her naked skin brushed by armoured grass and her own long hair that swept the ground.
She had done her creator’s will, the three-in-one Ddir, Yyrot, Zeth. She had disembowelled the astral body of Lionwolf of the essence of the god. That heat had transmuted her to transparent water. But sheer cold had brought her back again from some psychic mould, and in her own perfect image.
Lionwolf watched the shepherds, who slid from alarm to fascination, and wrapped her in a fleece, and drew her to their fire. She had, it seemed, no aversion to flames now. She sat with her new court. He guessed she would perhaps tell them a story – of the sun dying in the sea.
It seemed to him she was not evil, not a destroyer. Only in his case had she worked against … He wondered a moment, insanely in his sleep, if rather than perfect wrongness, she was an example of perfect thoughtless good. Had he not deserved punishment after all?
Dreaming, he knew he did not dream. Of course, whatever she was, Chillel could come back to life. For himself, half mortal, thieved of the wellspring of his powers, there would be no such guarantee.
Despite what Darhana had said, days and nights advanced swiftly with the cart, the inlet of sea fell behind, but no extraordinary scene of Summer arrived.
‘We’ll drive on for ever,’ he said. ‘That’s all right. Shall I marry you, Darhana?’
‘No, Kraag don’t marry. We only love.’
‘Do you love me?’
‘Yes – and others.’
‘Faithless.’
‘Faith-full.’
No storms now, the sky was a deep blue. Ice-lakes were to be seen on all sides as they went on along the eastern brink of the land, still going south. These lakes glimmered blue from sun and sky, as if full of liquid water, but it was only an effect. The shore too, where they saw it, was now solid with ice, with only the most far-off lines of moving waves.
She had been wrong about the inlet. There must be some hotness there, under the ground and water, to keep it fluid. That had nothing to do with any episode of Summer.
‘Tomorrow, you will see,’ she said.
‘Will I?’
‘I must leave you here.’
He thought he could manage to reach some derelict tower in the snow without difficulty. And if the god did wait for him there, better Darhana was gone as many miles off as she could get.
They had not eaten for some days. This evening she made the fire, and next set before him a dish of roast meat with braised roots and squares of boiled salted dough. At his elbow she put a wooden cup with wine, the black wine he had downed among the Jafn. He said nothing to her. There had been no food till now, and she had not been cooking.
He ate the food. The cup, when he had drained it, each time became full again.
‘If it’s so easy, Darhana, why can’t all mankind do this?’
‘All could. And some can.’
That night birds flew over, flocks of them – winds of them. A lonely moon prettied them with gilt.
‘You see,’ she said, ‘I’m not really here with you. Neither I nor the cart nor the deer. I made you believe I was. And so I was. We journeyed fast, didn’t we? But believe I love you.’
The night felt tepid to him, like the caves where he had wandered after Chillel. When he woke, Darhana was not there. The cart and the deer were not. The snow was soft enough to take the imprint of his boots and evidence the tracks of hares and icenvels. There were no tracks of anything else. No cart runners had disturbed the surfaces. The deer, who had marked every halt with steaming dung, had left none.
As the sun began to come up he saw, across the plain below, two hills, one slightly behind the other. There was a mist on them, the mist of heat. One had a lilac sheen over it, the other bluish green. The sun slid up between these hills. On the cool still air, Lionwolf smelled grass, sweet as the body of a young girl, and flowers as if from Jafn hothouses and indoor vines.
Then the sun lifted, and where it had left space, between the mauve hill and the green, a thing stood dark and looked at him like a beast with three golden eyes.
THREE
Purple irises grew up through the snow and ice of the first hill. Tall green grasses speared up through the second. A dipping pass divided the two hills. You looked over into a cup of land which was also green and ribbed with many other colours. A traveller on the hills might assess its diameter as several hundred miles. But the third hill, where the tower rose, was comparatively near.
Nameless stood there, looking over into the Summer.
It was afternoon by then; it had been a longish distance down – and then climb up – even for him.
The flowers and grass seemed real enough, and from the wide, rounded valley pulsed the rich scents of growth. He was reminded of the Faz and Vorm shamans, who had smelled the city. Of what did the tower smell? Great heat, perhaps.
Why pretend? He was still the Lionwolf. Changing his name backwards could not remove his repugnant guilt.
Lionwolf walked down into the cup of Summer, towards the third hill and the tower that, even by day, had windows that burned gold.
In the hour before the sun set, the heat of the Summer’s day boiled. The air shimmered, and sunlight lay like blisters, blinding and unbearable. Flowers flamed in the grasses. Even where clumps of jungle appeared in islands standing out of the plain, heat waited, wetly terrible, smoking, dripping. It lay leaden on him, gargantuan hands pushing his body towards the ground. Where he could, he kept to the shade. For he did not sweat like other men: he could not get cool. At first it made him angry, the heat of the mad Summer sun. Then he had nothing to spare for anger.
Approaching that final pre-sunset hour, he stopped and sat down under a massive tree. Its leaves were green – the world was green, green and boiling, slashed with white. The shade itself was hot-red like copper on an anvil. But Lionwolf had sat down in it, and he stared away, to where the sun seemed glancing back from the windows of the high tower. Perhaps, since the sun sank now behind him and the tree, only reflected light made the tower windows burn so brightly. Or perhaps not, for they had burned like that all day.
The tower was not, he could see quite well now, any sort of ruin but solid and many storeys high.
He had got closer to it, very close now, but in the firehaze of Summer, distances deceived.
Night would come soon. Then it must be cooler. Lionwolf had never encountered the agony of such a heat. He wished idly he were in Hell, where the Gech said it was even colder than the cold Winter earth.
Lionwolf fell asleep. He slept a hundred minutes. He woke cursing himself, and what he had lost, what he had destroyed.
And
then he saw the serpent – the dragon – uncoiling out and out in front of him, glittering and red. He got up slowly. His eyes cleared.
No, it was not a mythical snake. That had been an optical illusion – or else Kraag laws operated again, and it had only altered. For what he saw now was a procession of maybe a thousand persons, covered by scarlet garments, and in their hands were fragments of the sun held up on sticks: torches. The procession wound towards the tower, beginning to ascend the third hill, vanishing there into forest, its torch fires glimpsing between the trees. Where the procession had had its origin he could not be sure.
Lionwolf breathed the deadly air as if gulping wine. Then he ran; he was still fast as a leopard.
As he did this, the hurt of heat dropped from him like a discarded mantle. It came to him that he could do more than he thought, and was still largely himself, whoever that self was.
Swiftly Lionwolf gained on, and joined the stragglers at the procession’s back. Then he ceased to run.
Under their torches faces were hooded over, probably against the sun’s rays. Where the hoods were cut to expose eyes, visors had been put on. Of course, they were Kraag. They were going to the tower, which, by willpower it seemed, they had put right, just as they had made Summer here. They were going to worship the sun.
Lionwolf strode among them now. He did not speak to them. His hair had something in it of their red, that was all. They did not either resist or acknowledge him.
The tower loomed directly ahead, craning at a strange angle above the forest’s juicy foliage. The windows were like the torches, dazzling from inside. He thought of the cities which had burned, and of the Klowan-garth – but there the fire had consumed, and here it did not. Fire only lived in the tower.
How many storeys high was it? Certainly higher than the highest roof of Ru Karismi. The windows which ringed the top of it were immensely long, and oval in shape – three, four, five were visible, as the procession went on into the wood. Then the tower was concealed behind the boughs.
Birds sang. He had never heard this before, for in the Winter lands they only made sounds, and then not always. The bird-song disturbed him; he did not like it.
The wood soaked Lionwolf in its scalding wet shadows, its scents filled his head. He felt an unpleasant drunkenness from that, such as he had heard described, but never known.
At a glade, the tower appeared again. As before, it seemed leaning over, watching with all its eyes.
They reached a stairway carved into the hill. The steps were steep and covered in mosses, creepers, other things.
The procession climbed, spread out along a vast terrace above. It was paved, and might have been finished only yesterday. The stones were pristine.
The tower rose from the terrace. Its base was a box of columns, this alone some seventy or eighty feet in height. Dim openings led into it, unfathomable. From the centre of the box, the tower pushed up like the head of a snake.
The procession was no longer impressive, dwarfed by the building and the tower. Lionwolf decided what he saw. This was a temple, the house of a god.
Something flickered then in the dimness of the box, some energy coming alert.
Behind them all, the sun was crushed out on the horizon. Blood washed up the sky. The temple turned to cinnabar.
All of them stood, the faceless Kraag pilgrims and Lionwolf, while the sunglow faded and dusk moved up the hill. Stars split the seams of the dark.
As night approached, the energy in the lower building strengthened. It was a kind of lightning, intermittent, growing brilliant. But nothing emerged, and no one entered.
Lionwolf felt the first welcome coolness of evening. He recalled how the god had hunted him in dreams. The god was here, the god lived with fire in his house – Zeth Zezeth, Sun Wolf.
The highest windows continued to flash. They gave out no actual light, lit nothing. All that they kept inside.
Lionwolf went forward.
As had always happened among the Jafn, the army of the Gullahammer, the people on the terrace parted to let him go by.
Curtained in blackness, the aisles among the columns revealed little except at a lightning flare. However, Lionwolf saw in the dark: even between lightnings, he caught sight of big stone figures; then, when the flares came, he noted they were statues of the god.
Eventually he reached the place where the way opened into the tower. Here an altar – he guessed it was an altar – bulked ready for some sacrifice or apparition, or other numinous drama.
Lionwolf put his hand down flat on the stone. It was hot as a hearth. He spat on the altar. His spit sizzled, sparked, went out.
A noise like a great wing opening, spreading, folding back, hushed through the temple.
Now, when the lightning came, it showed another statue standing behind the altar, at the entry to the tower. It had not been there a moment ago.
‘I made you wait,’ said Lionwolf. ‘My regrets.’
The lightning came again. There was no figure there at all. Instead, the way up into the tower was shown, a flight of curling steps.
Lionwolf shook off, as he had the Summer heat, his trepidation, his misery of terror that had now no meaning, though he had felt it so long. It dropped from him.
Hollow, he climbed the twining steps.
The light from the windows was now at the stair’s head. Without shining down on the stair, where only an animal – or one like Lionwolf – could have seen, it hung ahead and above him. At first he could detect nothing in it.
Lionwolf gained the upper room of the tower after half an hour. Then the light enveloped him. It was warm but not violently so, far less than the day had been. Now inside, Lionwolf saw what else was there.
Three wolves padded to and fro. Their hides were like gold leaf, and their hair ran with crackling flames. Their eyes were jewelry, hiding everything, even their animality. In the fire too, as if underwater, objects seemed to move about, but – unlike the wolves – were not clearly visible.
The man who stood at the room’s central point was Lionwolf himself. He was not one month older, not one inch taller, not one pound lighter or more heavy.
His face was Lionwolf’s, and Lionwolf’s face was his.
Unlike Lionwolf, only, his silvery laval mane and his eyes of gold.
Though formed himself of the precise material of the golden light, he was to be seen more definitely than anything else.
He was the light. The window-eyes of the tower blazed because of him.
The wolves padded about his feet.
‘Do you walk up here armed?’ Zezeth asked, in a courtly voice. He did not speak Rukarian, or any tongue Lionwolf knew, but Lionwolf knew it.
‘Yes, Kraag weapons – no doubt unreal and useless.’
‘Even should they be useful, they could do nothing to me. And so then how,’ said Zezeth, ‘will you do it?’
‘Kill you? I don’t know. How will you kill me?’
The god smiled. It was Lionwolf’s smile. It charmed and enticed, and now turned the blood to ice, there in the Summer warmth.
Zezeth walked towards Lionwolf. It seemed the god would reach him after some twenty paces through the room. But the god took those paces and was no nearer.
Lionwolf too had started to walk towards the god. The advance was unsuppressible. He did not think they would meet for many hours, maybe not for days and nights … a year. But he could not turn back, could not run away. There was nowhere else to go.
For days and nights Guri had been running along the top-snow. Earth’s night had fallen, and he found himself once more at the sea’s edge.
He sat down on the ice, and undid his pale braids. The tiny beast skulls threaded into them were as intact as ten, twelve years ago. He looked at them with an odd wonder. Nothing had changed; everything did.
Far out within the depths of night and ocean, Guri sensed again the tug and pull of some great, separate force.
He rose and skimmed out along the ice, then along the fluid wav
es, squinting down at them.
He was lonely. He experienced something like a raw open wound. They were all gone, his people – like the Jafn and the rest. A few women and children were left – what would become of them? Probably the last of the Fazions and Kelps and Vorms, and other crazed boors of the northern seas, would sweep in on those depleted lands, in the manner the Gullahammer had already demonstrated. There could be no resistance. Even the cities of the Rukar south and west, ravaged, could hardly resist now. Although he had not gone back to that desert of salt and ash, Guri knew. The Rukar magicians, too, had died – the precious Magikoy. Guri could feel the news of all this as if it had been written for him on the snow.
Even the Ranjal-goddess flew off.
‘And here I am,’ Guri said aloud, ‘looking for the doorway. Where’s the door, ah?’
He meant the exit from existence.
Then he thought of the Lionwolf, and Guri spat on the sea; as Lionwolf, if Guri had known – maybe he did – spat on the altar of Zeth Zezeth.
But Guri too was a ghost haunted by other things. They had crept up on him unawares. In the ’tween-world now, when he tried it, he would meet again with villagers he had burned – and with women he had raped, who stood in groups and looked at him with baleful anguished eyes.
He had not intended to hurt them. Did they really mind it so much: rape, torture and death? He had somehow never thought so. Only Olchibe had profound feelings, only children were worth saving – surely?
Guri’s heart fogged over with bewildered, unwilling grief at all the pain he had personally added to the fortunes of life.
Then it came again – that lunge which seemed to grip his psychic roots. There, down there, under the moving water—
He could dive deep, and try to discover it.
‘I’m feared to,’ he told the night. ‘Guri’s afraid.’
Miles, aeons down, something thrummed the darkness like a harp.
Guri’s mind somersaulted over itself. It landed, stared head on into the apex of the past.
Then he knew – his fear, his connection – why this entity could pull on him. It was the whale. It was the horned whale on whose back he had scrambled, on whose sword of horn he had died. Still his bones must lie there, knotted round those spikes. Not only the whale but his own mortal remains were summoning Guri.