by Tanith Lee
In the east the sky was saffron, the shade of her hair. Sunrise indicated the land beyond the shallow ice-shelves where the pyramids had been anchored. But how could she bridge the rocky, unsafe ice?
Something else must happen; she did not know what. Even in the gentle dawn, the sea had a threatening aspect.
‘You,’ she said to the cat, ‘you slut.’
The cat ignored her. One final hallucination of a rat was scurrying over the spoilt ice. The cat set off in pursuit.
That was the moment when the sea undid itself behind Saphay and, looking round, she screamed and heard her own voice like the cry of a bird in the sky, nothing to do with her at all.
A horned tower soared from the water and the ice, that was crowned with bright dawn on ivory, and also black as a shadow – its eyes small and searing, two tiny molten suns.
Fifth Volume
BRIGHTSHADE
Even the stars are dogs – only dogs – in the Hand of Night.
Bardic Death Lay of the Hero Star Black: Jafn
ONE
This hero was unlike others.
He was a world.
Perhaps it had been fifteen years before that his mother followed her own designs beneath the blackness of the sea. Above her, that day, the ice-shelf was thin; even if it had been otherwise, she had no fear of entrapment under the ice. Needing to rise from the water every several hours to take air, her race, the whales, had long ago developed their clutching forelimbs, and a piercing unitary horn.
The female whale was of great size, forty-five or fifty feet in length, a celebrity of her people.
For a while she grazed along the ocean floor, rubbing her body there to clean it. She was in search of food, not a prospective mate, but when he came to her through the water, a leviathan greater in size even than she, he brought her, in his mouth, a feast. Three fresh-killed sharks and another, smaller, whale were laid before her, all garnished by torrents of fish.
She and he fed together. When he nudged against her she did not resist.
Clasping each other with their agile forelimbs, he possessed her and she consented to possession.
He did not stay to escort her after, though that was the normal habit of a mating pair. Pregnant, she soon forgot him.
She carried the kalfi one year and three months before birthing it. Then she nurtured her young, a male, suckling him another whole year, teaching him, persuading him to the surface to take his own at first more frequently needed breaths.
If she was in any way aware this kalfi was the child of a god who had capriciously taken on the appearance of her kind, she never vocalized it in her songs under the ocean.
Her son grew great as she was, then great as his father, greater and more great, until he became too big to be remembered by her. By then, anyway, she had mated elsewhere and had other kalfis to replace him.
But he – he knew what he was. He left her without thought – yes, thought, for in his manner he did think almost in a human fashion. He surged away through the deeps, rising up, when he wished, to burst the ice far inshore. Still growing, he was already a titan among his race. He feared nothing, no predator, no destiny. He had never met his father or earned that father’s disapproval.
There was a certain telepathy among the whale kind. They communicated not merely by physical sound. The kalfi of the god was not immune to these skills and, as he grew to adolescence, he too began to hear and receive information.
Some trace reached him of the thoughts of his father; some desire or – worse – compulsion.
Without knowing what it was in any absolute terms, for to a whale these concepts had no meaning, Zezeth’s first son grasped that his own uniqueness was under threat. Like many a first-born child, he did not like the idea of the arrival of another. He grew jealous, so Zezeth had seemed to say. And so it was.
Yet this rival sibling had not at that point been conceived. It was still to happen.
Zezeth’s first-born strayed inland, far in among the ice-locked channels that partitioned the Marginal north.
By his telepathy too, which in his case extended beyond genus to include the very masses of the land, the very air mankind and whalekind must breathe, the great mammal sensed and understood what came towards him, and saw how he must strike at it.
Those twelve or thirteen years before, Saphay, pursued by the Olchibe vandal band among the snow lanes, was driven towards her true executioner: the whale. And so he rose out of the ice beneath her, shattering, breaching, leaping. He slew uncaringly those animal and human things which for him had no importance. Even Guri had been one of those. It was the woman the whale meant to destroy, she alone, before she could be made the vessel of an unwanted half-brother.
He got her almost inadvertently. For the young whale god it was too simple.
Into the depths of the sea then he plunged with her. He would drown her before she could annoy. But the sea had stayed the domain of Zezeth. As in so many myths, the very deed meant to avert some chance had caused it.
The young whale now knew this also: he had killed Saphay – yet she lived. As for the rival son, he lived too; they were competitors.
He had a name, the whale. It had come to him through the currents of sea and thought, like most notions he received. It evolved from the vision of a shadow which held light and fire inside it. In the language of whales this name had neither characters nor sound, but it had a shape. The shape, in the tongues of men, was spelled Brightshade.
A long while – or a little while, for his judgement of time was unlike a man’s – Brightshade experienced his whale life in the deeps. He hunted and fed, slept, fought and copulated. That he had produced no offspring he never knew, for like his father he never continued to escort the females he united with. Sometimes he drew near the land, playing like an animate mountain in the semi-solid white surf. Or, dancing upwards from the lowest ocean, he sank the ship-packs and jalees of men.
In the belly of the whale called Brightshade lay whole cargos, whole vessels smashed in chunks or – very few – peculiarly intact, along with skeletons of beasts and men. None of these items bothered him. He was comfortable with them inside, never felt them. However, he had picked up remnants not only inside but out.
Those who had seen him close – and in recent years any who had did not survive to tell the story – beheld on the back of this astronomic whale, an environment.
Into that, if they outlasted the initial onslaught, they were tossed or floundered – into a dank miasma of the horrifically organic, of cold stinking abysms and gulches, crags of filth bricked in by flotsam and jetsam.
Again, the landscape on his back posed no difficulty for the whale. Brightshade felt nothing of it, or nothing urgent. If it ever itched him, he rolled against something hard and scratched it off.
While he swam along the surface, men had often wandered about on the continent of the whale’s back, sometimes for as much as a month, for he could breach and breathe, as with all else, an abnormal stretch of time. In the end, he would go down again. Then they were taken too.
But even his external dead victims did not always leave him. The horrorland of his back was augmented, like his guts, with bones.
For some while he had been making his way along the outlying waters of this coast. He had picked up, on his journey, various extras, but usually without any purpose. Only two acquisitions had recently pleased him. A collector in his own right, he had meant to have these two particular pieces a long while. There was a third piece he had already kept for years, waiting patiently, and now the set was complete. One further thing had come his way. Because his biology was mixed, and he approximated human thought, this one had briefly puzzled him. But he lost interest in it quickly. Brightshade was intent now on his own heroic quest.
Like his brother Lionwolf once, the gargantuan whale was hot for revenge. On this occasion, Brightshade’s paramount enemy would die. He would make sure of it.
On the night he reached the place, infallibly he knew.
He coasted in towards the shore, unconcerned at beaching himself. His bottomless strength was a match for any strip of land.
The night sea broke on his back, broke and ran from him.
Brightshade, who could spring minute on minute for the sun, and crash back, his ascent, his dive causing a tidal wave, eased in against the coast, subtle as a lover.
It was the hour before sunrise. The sky was paling, cruel fingers stubbing out the stars.
Something had changed. What was it?
The sea wrinkled, ebbed and flowed. The ice lay further in. Something spread between the outer sea and the frozen inner, that was all.
The scene was peaceful.
After his other father had gone away along the shore, Lionwolf sat and watched the sea. Morning flew up, noon and afternoon went after it. The sun set at his back; two crescent moons lifted like boats on the distant liquid waterline.
Lionwolf was watching for the coming of his adversary, his father’s agent sent to slaughter him. The whale.
Saphay had told her son of her escape from it, though he did not remember quite when she had. Now, therefore, he anticipated something very large and awesome, but was in ignorance, of course, of what this creature had finally become.
In the night Lionwolf slept. That was his mortal Rukarian blood, so he believed. A god would never need to sleep.
Dawn woke him. He lay gazing. The sea was no longer there. The shore had extended.
The ice ran out, then the country altered. Not ice, snow or open water, it seemed part of a landmass which had thawed overnight. Some new variant of Summer?
Lionwolf stood up. He looked far out and saw no sign at all of the sea. Instead, a swarthy silty terrain lay there, with tall black reed-beds; and a mile off, a sort of hill rose, not snowed in but also dark in colour. It seemed to him there was some type of palisade running along the top of this hill. It glittered murkily in the early sun.
There were tales of sunken islands that pushed up again out of the sea. Was this one of them?
Whatever it was, it had come between him and his meeting with his enemy. Lionwolf must travel over the barrier, in order once more to reach the coast.
He walked out on to the ice, towards the verges of the ugly and curious land.
At no time since the White Death at Ru Karismi had Lionwolf been entirely gathered together inside himself. Even before Chillel thieved half his soul – so he still phrased it, when he considered it – he had been diminished. Never knowing what he was, never coming to grips with his own persona, now he was only an incomplete group of fragments hitting against each other with an empty noise.
With Athluan, for a little while Lionwolf had played at being who he had been – or reckoned he was obliged to be. But now no one else was there.
He wanted the whale also for this reason. To fight against and try to kill it, even to be killed by it, gave Lionwolf back a part to act.
He walked doggedly off the ice on to the surface of the bizarre island.
The ground was abnormal. It felt both greasy and turgid and pulled at his Kraagish boots. An eerie fishy smell rose from the ground, too, that turned his stomach. But going on, after a time he grew accustomed to its stink. Nor did the smell alert him. This area had been submerged in ocean.
Presently the reed banks began. They were tall, the reeds, in many spots reaching over his head, enclosing him.
He thought they were a kind of seaweed which had mutated, grown upright and stiff as leather treated for war.
When a light cold wind blew inwards from the direction of the unseen water, the reeds rattled against each other. Things were caught in them, too: he saw other weeds and pods he recognized from marine trophies of the Vorms. Even fish had been trapped there; some had become bones, others only withered to brown husks like the dead leaves pared from orchards. Then other material came to Lionwolf’s notice. He saw a rusted dagger lying there, down in the sludge that nourished the reeds, later some spears and a weighted net. Again none of this amazed him. Ships sank, and so had this island, once. Although the place was so dismal, he started almost to be interested in it.
By now he had walked about an hour, and was seeing that the land sloped always slightly upward.
Next, stepping out from the reeds, he confronted the hill he had seen from the shore.
It was high as the platform of a garth. It had, too, its own ranker stink, primal and somehow alcoholic. As he had thought, it was mostly black in colour but, seen close to, patched and gullied with other unlikely shades – reddish ochre, puce, yellow. On the top, right where the upper walls of a garth would have been, the palisade ran round.
Lionwolf climbed up the reeking mound. It was not easy to scale, even by the supernatural horizonal means he could still access. It offered hand and foot holds, but also it was in parts soft and treacherous, trying to swallow his boots, legs, all of him.
When he gained the summit, the going was more firm. He found the palisade was made of the etched and sharpened bones of some great sea-being, which had become stranded there. They poked up at the grey sky.
He walked through them, again quite interested at their largeness, thinking of yarns of the Vorms and Fazions about sea monsters and giant whales. Perhaps this skeleton was the remains of one. It did not occur to him, even mistaken as he was, that his whale could ever have met such a fate.
On the far side of the bones, he found other similar hills. They mounded away to, and formed, a shut horizon. This was less interesting, for these hills were all very alike.
Lionwolf ran, putting on incredible speed. He did it only to outwit the suction of the muck, and to get over the dull hills and see what was on their other side. As he ran, he marvelled vaguely at himself, that he was still capable of such speed, or of desiring to use it.
The hills, though, went on and on. He thought he would never be shot of them.
Hours into the afternoon, he raced down the last stretch, and was in a marsh.
He had seen a little of Gech, but the ice swamps there were not like this. Here the tepid thaw persisted. Glaucous water oozed in runnels and pools between more of the reed banks. In addition, trees of sallow fungus grew here, with branching crowns.
As Lionwolf forged on through this waterland, he was stalled momentarily when flocks of weird, tattered black birds erupted from deep inside the fungus woods. They had been feeding on things rotting there, and he disturbed them, but not for long. He became accustomed to having scores of these birds whirr up ahead of him, falling back like a fractured night when he had passed. He did not know what they were. Presumably they had opportunistically flown out from some region inland, and yet he could not shake the suspicion he soon had that in fact they had evolved spontaneously out of the island – as worms did, the Jafn said, in a too-warm corpse.
When the sun set in cloud behind the island, Lionwolf grew conscious of thirst.
It was his mortal side winning over his depleted superpowers. On the mainland, thirst would have caused no problem. Ice was everywhere, and snow that might be heated or at worst sucked for moisture. Here there were only the unclean marsh pools. Lionwolf, fastidious, would not turn to those. He thrust the idea of thirst away. Soon enough, he knew, it would not matter.
Evening drew in. In the gloaming the territory reorganized itself again.
The waterways had drained off into a sort of forest. The trees now were stalks, more poles than anything, but sticky. They had snagged in their glue new articles which swung and clattered at Lionwolf’s passage through them. He glimpsed metal mesh, iron chains green with barnacles and slime, and formations of loose hanging bones that, as the dark intensified, shone.
And from this forest of bones and chains, instead of birds bursting up, a man’s figure suddenly materialized.
Before Lionwolf could spring at it, or away, his body faltered. His body, before his brain, exactly remembered the physique of this man. It was Guri.
Guri, too, was taken aback.
They stood there in
the luminous dusk, staring at each other, astounded by their meeting.
Guri spoke first. ‘Before the Great Gods, what are you at here?’
‘What are you at here, Guri?’
‘I had no choice.’
‘I believed I was the one who had no choice – or so you told me once.’
‘Yes … that was different. Great Gods,’ said Guri again. He did not add the respectful Amen, nor did Lionwolf.
The bones and chains swung, creaking like gibbets.
A ghastly white moon came stalking up from the east, where the sea was, somewhere.
The men sat down, at a cleaner drier place, further into the forest, that Guri had located and it seemed made his camp for the night.
He had been foraging, he said, and found a semi-intact clay pot. In this he now put fire, which he did not summon in the original manner learned as an undead. He rubbed bits of fossilized stuff together till they took a spark. No, in all ways, Guri looked to be attempting his ordinary previous life.
They sat there then, by the potted Olchibe fire. Above, through the stalk poles and swinging things, the moon blazed. Around it too, in the diluted dark of the sky, some other strangeness seemed to be going on.
Having spoken of his reconnoitring and shopping expeditions about the local countryside, Guri ceased talking.
Lionwolf said at last, ‘Where are you making for? It’s not like you to stop about, once you start off.’
‘Ah, isn’t it? I thought it was you that likes to get on.’
‘You’re no longer my friend, I think, Guri – no longer my uncle.’
‘No.’
‘Because of Ru Karismi.’
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ said Guri glumly. ‘The bloody Rukar soint Magikoy did it. Too big for their boots to carry. They’ve paid for it now. Even so, it was because of you.’
‘I know.’
‘I’ve nothing to forgive you, Lion. But I never will forgive you.’
‘No.’
The moon moved off into the higher sky. Where it had been, stars appeared, looking too bright.