Cast a Bright Shadow

by Tanith Lee

  Guri sprang up, aiming himself back at the inland shore.

  Too late.

  ‘Since you ask about your death, I will tell you. I shall not see to it. It is my son who will kill you.’

  ‘I am your son.’

  ‘Yes, that is why you are to be punished – for daring to be my son. But I have another.’

  Lionwolf, walking through gold light, fixes his eyes only on the mirror-face of the god.

  ‘I do not mean to sully myself,’ says Zeth Zezeth Zzth, ‘with the bother of it – your partly human debris strewn and scattered.’

  ‘Why then did you create me?’ says Lionwolf.

  ‘Did you not coerce me into making you?’

  Lionwolf checks, but goes on walking. The god seems amiable. His face is not blue: this is his benign side.

  ‘How could I have done anything? I wasn’t even alive—’

  ‘Oh, you were there. There in her, a seed already planted, waiting only for me to quicken you. Do you think a silly human woman, drowning in her yellow hair in the cold ocean, could tempt me? Your benighted mother – it was your power that drew me to her. Poor Zezeth, helpless in her clutches – yours.’ The god grins. He is tickled by this absurdity. No doubt, too, he lies, like the compulsive lie of reality the Kraag described, worse when found but.

  ‘I put myself into her,’ says the god, grinning on. The grin is hideous, yet does not mar his beauty. ‘Truly, Nameless One, I put myself into her. I was trapped there in her, in you. How else could you be made in flesh? Oh, I had better be precise, as you grew up among barbarians. Have you seen two wolves when they mate, or foxes? Sometimes the male becomes enmeshed in the female’s sexual passage. I mean nothing like that. I was drawn entire into the body of your mother, into her womb, and so into the being you became through me. That is why your shadow had fire in it, little Nameless One. I was in your shadow. The red gems of my spilled and special blood. But my other selves stayed active. A woman was created from snow and called after night – your counterbalance. Others lay down with her and were improved. You she emptied, as you know, of your prisoner – myself. Sex is an ancient magic among every kind. And now, lacking me, what is there for you? Though I have made you so strong, I will have you put out like the blown flame on the candle.’

  ‘Because I trapped you … in my shadow?’

  ‘Just that. It is, boy, enough.’

  ‘And your other son will kill me.’

  ‘I took another shape once, and possessed another mortal creature of similar shape, in the sea. Supernaturals do such things, as any of your Jafn songs will tell you. She gave birth, this animal, but not requiring to burgle and absorb my essence. Even so, her child is half deity. It is he who will be the agent of your death. He would have killed your mother already, before ever I consorted with her. Being what he is, he was cognizant, and could foretell somewhat the events to come. He grew jealous – so, you see, he has too his own score to settle with you.’

  They have approached no nearer, Lionwolf, Zzth, walking on and on, together and towards—

  Something in Lionwolf kicks at him under the heart.

  ‘Where is Saphay?’ he asks.

  ‘Are you interested? What shall I offer you? She is somewhere, waiting – not for you.’

  ‘For you?’ Lionwolf says.

  ‘For me. It is all for me now.’

  The god’s hair turns the colour of salt and ash. His eyes are black. Bars of dark blue mask his face. The wolves pacing with him are black, and white fire flutters in their pelts.

  This is to be the malign side, after all.

  Lionwolf recalls a child, not even born, screaming for Guri. But Guri will not come to him now. That is all over.

  ‘Then let’s get on,’ he says to his father. ‘I never heard any man talk so much. I never knew the gods chattered.’

  Zzth strikes him.

  It is painless, like the condition of death. But death is to come, apparently.

  Lionwolf falls through something – downwards, forwards, upwards. The gold light spins and whirls. He wishes only he had been able to kill the god, but the next best thing is obviously to die himself.

  Lionwolf opened his eyes. He was neither dead nor in a room of golden light. Instead, he was seated by the brutish altar, below the stairs into the god’s tower. It was night and the temple was pitch black, and not one stray flicker of lightning now moved across it. He could just perceive the statues, but they were ruinous, missing limbs and some their heads.

  The temple smelled of cold stone – cold.

  ‘Face of God—’ The Jafn oath came out of him, taking him by surprise. He pushed himself up and away from the altar. He felt a type of exhaustion new to him.

  A cold, cold light was beginning to trickle in along the floor from two of the doorless entries. A moon must be rising.

  Lionwolf glanced towards the stairway. It was, he now saw, also mostly down, blasted by something – perhaps some blow of a peevish deity.

  Had the events he had undergone been one more dream induced by Zezeth?

  Why had the god spoken at such length, so elaborately, like some old soldier determined to mull over all his former battles?

  If none of this had been real, then, by Kraag statute, it was more real than anything else.

  Lionwolf crossed the temple floor and reached one of the moonlit doormouths.

  Summer had ended.

  Beyond Zeth’s temple, the snow lay in spotless white carpets. Ice-jungles glittered hard as daggers under the single winter moon.

  There were peculiar shapes along the terrace, partly under the snow. They were human, and it seemed they had lain down there and wrapped the snow about themselves for warmth. Their clothing had been red, but the moon, weather and time had bleached it.

  He bent over them, one by one. The visors still covered their eyes, the hoods their faces. Removing some of these, Lionwolf learned that the processional pilgrims were all dead; only the freezing of the land had kept them whole.

  Moon, weather, time …

  Time, then, had passed, days and nights, even a year, during that long fruitless walk towards the god.

  As for the Kraag, believing in any rebirth of Summer had been, it seemed, hasty.

  The valley was no longer properly like a cup; it had a different geography and, now the moon was high, from the terrace Lionwolf could see clear away to the east. The ocean was there, in its rims and shelves of shore ice.

  Already he was descending the hill stair from the temple, heading off towards the sea. That was where the god intended Lionwolf to go, to meet the ordained assassin.

  There was no point any more in avoidance. It gave a curious sense of freedom, this giving up.

  Later, when the moon was sinking, Lionwolf looked back. The ruinous tower leant like a crooked chimney, and its windows were unlit.

  He understood what it was, the vengeance Zezeth would employ. What else could it be but that first death which had seized Saphay – and Guri – had evicted them only against its will, and now longed to retrieve them. It was the horned whale.

  Lionwolf ran along the snow of the valley towards the sea and the whale. He had never felt his own life so vitally. He was almost happy, eager for another fight. He would meet the whale, which the god had somehow also fathered – and indeed the Jafn songs, as well as legends of the Rukarians, were full of such antics. Having met him, he would harm this bestial half-brother, he would visit on him – on it – all the wrath that he could not bludgeon Zezeth with. The whale would kill Lionwolf anyway.

  After that, Lionwolf had no concrete plans. This was probably the reason for his sensation of lightness.

  The landscape channelled down. Hills mobbed up, cliffs of ice and snow. Daylight returned: the sky was blue.

  He dreamed somewhere, sleeping a couple of minutes as he travelled, that the god drove over the sky in a chariot drawn by fiery wolves. In mockery, Zezeth sliced from the blue heavens a blue sun, and threw it down to Lionwolf to replace
his war-standard. But where the blue sun hit the ground it smashed, while in the sky the cut-omission it had left behind bruised, and from its edges ran drops of gore. About it the rest of the sky looked poisoned.

  Some days after this dream, Lionwolf stopped running. He stayed motionless a brief time there on the snow waste. There was one cloud in the sky that did not seem to move either. Soon he resumed running.

  That evening he reached the shoreline. Phosphorus sparkled on the flat breakers, and up against the shore the ice had rifted. An iceberg, transparent like a phantom, was sailing slowly along, miles off. Yes, there had been heat in this region, but not for many months.

  Lionwolf stationed himself on the shore and fished in the tricky Olchibe way, tapping along the broken ice floes. He ate the fish he caught, not cooking them. All his thoughts were for other things, memories, and among them he constantly saw Saphay. He reminisced to himself about his childhood with her, and how he could make her laugh, and how they bullied Bit-Nabnish, and then Guri bounded into Lionwolf’s thoughts, and even the little toy mammoth … and then the live mammoth Peb Yuve had given him, and the lion teams and the armies, and Lionwolf stared rigidly away from memory, out towards the sea from which violence and death would come to deliver him.

  On that night, men’s voices were heard cheerily calling and shouting along the shore, a small way inland. Not wanting to be disturbed. Lionwolf blended against the slopes, and witnessed a group of men in lion chariots driving along.

  They were Jafn warriors, and what they were doing here was incomprehensible, for the Jafn lands lay most of a continent off, in the north and east, and anyway Jafn was gone.

  A white-haired man led the others. He had an ice-hawk perched on his shoulder, as he guided the chariot. Once he had drawn closer, he turned his head and looked at Lionwolf, spotting him without delay.

  Lionwolf knew this man, but had never seen him before. That was, he had never seen him after Lionwolf was born. Those memories, from that pre-advent era, were normally unsure and disorderly.

  What was the man’s name? Who was he?

  The Jafn turned his chariot now. The lions were magnificent, leaping on physical strings, manes alight with ornaments.

  ‘Greetings in peace, good evening. Do you speak the Jafn tongue?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lionwolf.

  ‘I am Athluan,’ said the man, ‘Chaiord of the Klow.’

  ‘You’re dead,’ replied Lionwolf. Having said that, he blushed like an adolescent who has uttered the worst faux pas.

  But Athluan said, ‘So I gather. But nevertheless I’m here, and some of my warriors with me. Not my brother – Rothger I did not bring.’

  ‘Rothger I slew for you,’ said Lionwolf. He laughed all at once at his own immaturity. He was always, so far, both a man and a child.

  ‘My thanks,’ said Athluan. ‘I should have done it. It was owed to me. He did his very best to make me do it, but I failed.’

  Behind Athluan, Chaiord of the Klow, and his chariot, lions and hawk, a campfire was now burning a welcome on the snow.

  ‘Come and dine with us,’ said Athluan. Lionwolf gazed at him. ‘Aren’t you hungry yet? What’s a pair of uncooked fish? Come on, sir, I tell you, now.’

  ‘You tell me?’

  ‘Why not? You owe me some obedience. I’m your father.’

  The Lionwolf, child and man, widened his eyes, amazed, and stared transfixed. He said softly, ‘I would, by Great God, you were.’

  ‘Hush. Your mother was my wife. If I’d lived, no man would have troubled a hair of her head, nor of yours.’

  From the glow of the fire, a warrior called merrily, ‘Come eat, Chaiord. Lionwolf, come and eat.’

  ‘They know me?’

  ‘We’re the dead, and know very much.’

  ‘In a while, I’ll be one with your company.’

  ‘No, forgive me, Lionwolf, our paths are different.’

  ‘Yes, I thought that might be it. Where, then, for me?’

  ‘Whatever, it will find you. No man can be stripped of his soul, not even the son of a god. Perhaps your human spirit is greater than the fire of the god that he gave you.’

  ‘Gave me – then snatched back.’

  ‘Did he tell you that? Rothger was a liar, too. The god of the Ruk took back himself. What was yours, he couldn’t take. Be conscious of this, Lionwolf. And now we go to dinner.’

  There was broiled venison, and baked fish, and beer. Lionwolf thought of Darhana, who had brought cooked food from nothingness. The dead, though, could always eat well if they wanted to – so Guri had assured him.

  When they had eaten they did not, of course, sleep. They shot at marks stuck in the snow – Athluan lent Lionwolf his bow. They told stories as the stars spiralled towards the morning. The stories were all ones Lionwolf already knew from his sojourn among the Jafn and from the Gullahammer. No one, however, mentioned recent war or last Endhlefon’s history.

  He thought, If he had been my father, what then could I have been, myself?

  But that chance was gone. He did not even know if Athluan were one of the undead, like Guri, or a true ghost – or an illusion, a dream, a figment of belief.

  He had begun to think the procession in the Summer valley had been something of that sort, some ghost ritual recorded on the air and made visible through the whim of the god. The corpses mummified in ice had been there since long ago – so long that even an interval of Summer had not thawed them.

  He thought too, as he sat among the dead Jafn warriors, that conceivably he the Lionwolf had not been told a single thing by Zezeth. The god had merely, unforgivably, worked Lionwolf’s own mind like a puppet to make the explanation. And when Zeth struck him, less than a reprimand, it was a scornful punctuation mark.

  All this meditation dulled Lionwolf. He hid that from his uncanny hosts, used to making a fine display among men. Lionwolf too told stories, asked riddles. He splintered the marks with the bow and arrows they lent him, shooting in the Olchibe way, on which none of them now commented. There was, after the first, very little personal conversation between them. Nobody harked back to any other place – or life.

  When the sun rose, all the men – and their guest – jumped into the sea, yelling at the icy water. They drank the last of the beer.

  Athluan embraced Lionwolf, and Lionwolf felt pressed on his body every physical muscle, every sinew and bone of Athluan’s. The white hair smelled of frosty fire-smoke, as Lionwolf had scented it on others after a hunting camp.

  ‘I go that way,’ said Athluan. He pointed inland, maybe northerly. ‘Kiss your mother for me, when you see her again.’

  ‘I may never—’

  ‘Oh yes, my son, oh, yes. Till then.’

  They parted. The chariots rode off with the springing lions and laughter of the warriors. You would have thought they were simply going home.

  When they had gone from sight, unexpectedly Athluan’s hawk came circling back. It stooped quickly to Lionwolf and lighted on his shoulder. He smoothed its striped feathers and, before it lifted away once more, the fierce beak pecked him and drew a fleck of blood. Watching the bird vanish again into the morning, he knew it had returned to bid him farewell.

  That next night, from the upper room of the Holas House, Nirri was searching the sky beyond her window.

  She had seen a meteor, and knew it was an arrow fired from behind the static constellations – out of the Other Place. This might be the token of a coming death or a coming life. It was the second, she hoped, for she was large with Arok’s child: a son, the House Mage had told her.

  The Holas had made Arok Chaiord in the Holasan-garth, for he had been nearest kin to the slain Chaiord. There were so few grown males, Arok had, on being told Nirri carried a male, married her, though she was a fishwife from a whaler village and just possibly her lawful spouse was yet alive.

  Pregnant, and a queen, Nirri grew younger and better looking. Despite the garth’s being now a sad and echoing citadel, nevertheless she found
it hard to mourn, for where others had lost so much, she had only gained. With her former husband, besides, she had never been able to conceive. But she had known her destiny was now assured when they escaped the whale and the wall of sea.

  Below, in the joyhall, there was a faint mutter of carouse from the group of elderly men and youths. They did their utmost to make the rafters ring. But Nirri had been sent up to sleep, as she was in her eighth month. Soon enough she got into the bed, only a straw mattress here, but nicer than any she had ever known. She slept quickly; she was not uneasy, had nothing to be frightened of. These people were hers, and she had come up in the world.

  Below again, deep down in the area under the hall and the House cellars, Arok was standing with the faceless, formless Jafn statue of God.

  He did not pray or speak, but waited with his hands on the statue, thinking. Tonight the House Mage had approached him and drawn him aside, which was easy to do in such a barely inhabited dwelling.

  ‘Arok, I’ve glimpsed your son in the belly of its mother. God cherishes us and sends us a hero. I mean no idle compliment. A great and terrific phenomenon has occurred.’

  ‘What?’ Arok demanded.

  Now he poised here, digesting what. For his Mage had informed him that the son of Arok and Nirri was black – black as coal – as black as Chillel, though this the Mage did not mention, for he did not know of the penultimate woman Arok had cutched.

  All the ice had come down.

  The pyramids Yyrot built or annexed were in bits. Saphay wandered disconsolately among them, the cat – returned from some elsewhere – prowling after her, looking to see if any mice or rats might explode out of the demolition.

  Saphay was aware that the cold did not reduce her and, though she had not eaten or drunk anything for a long while, she was healthy and clear-headed.

  It was the disdain of her she minded the most, the indifference she had always endured.