Cast a Bright Shadow

by Tanith Lee

  ‘I’ll share your fire tonight with thanks, Guri. I’ll make on tomorrow, and let you be.’

  ‘Let me be?’ Shocked out of reticence and antipathy, Guri stared again. ‘I’m stuck here. So are you, unless you’ve got god-power enough to save yourself. Probably you have, but me – well. My past’s caught me up. I have to get on, too, in the morning. That way.’ He pointed east.

  Lionwolf said, ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Don’t you know where we are? What this place is?’

  ‘Some land come up from the sea—’

  ‘Land! Oh yes, land, some land—’ Guri gave a wild laugh, slapping his hands about in his braids. ‘It’s alive, this land. It lives. It swims far down, and surfaces when it chooses. We met before, it and I. It was a smaller one then, but still a monster.’

  Lionwolf breathed slowly out. ‘The great whale.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Abruptly, Lionwolf also laughed. ‘I thought I was walking out to the sea’s edge to find it.’

  ‘It’s saved you a walk.’

  ‘Perhaps. But it killed you, Guri. Why are you here?’

  ‘I said, it came back for me. It breached right under me, and I was taken up with it, away through the sea, over and under. You think I could just project myself away – wink out of that place, be some other place. I couldn’t. For a while I couldn’t move at all, then I could again. But only like a living man – only here. It’s my destiny, my doom: my span on this earth is finished. I’m not sorry, at least not much. I suppose I have to pay my own dues now, in Hell.’ He shrugged mournfully.

  Lionwolf said, ‘It’s his, this whale.’

  ‘The shit-god? Yes, I thought it was. In the end, I thought so. What did he do – put on whaleness and fiddle with its mother?’

  ‘As you say.’

  ‘Well, that sounds like him.’

  ‘He sent me to it, or it to me, so it can murder me for him. He didn’t wish to soil his divinity personally.’

  ‘It was his side failed you, Lion. Your mother, even if she was Rukar, was no bad woman. No – fit for Peb she would have been, but he doesn’t need her now.’

  The fire sank. It was not cold, but dank in the forest of bones and chains.

  Miles off, something rustled dimly, some other geography combed by the wind.

  ‘I have to keep on, you see,’ said Guri, ‘towards the head of it, this thing. That’s where I died. My bones must be up there. Its horn tore through me, but my body will have rotted off by now, dropped away, and the skeleton will have rolled down on to the horn-spurs. That’s where, when I meet my own self.’

  ‘I would have made for the head too, Guri. I’ll do what I can to damage it.’

  ‘Do you think you can? You’re not yourself, are you, not now?’

  ‘I never was – but less now. I can still work magecraft though, certain things. I mean to try. That’s all I have.’

  ‘We’ll go on together, then,’ said Guri.

  ‘Not if you don’t want.’ Sullen, yet resigned, adult.

  ‘What does it matter, Lion, what I want? Or what you want now?’

  Lionwolf glanced up. He said, almost in a whisper, ‘Look, three-in-one is joking again – Yyrot-Zeth-Ddir. Making things.’

  Both of them got to their feet.

  They stood staring up, through the forest on the back of the whale, at another whale, this one picked out in diamond stars across two thirds of the night sky.

  The next morning they went on together.

  They had travelled sufficiently together in the past for each of them to find this now equally familiar and uncomfortable.

  Once clear of the forest, it appeared to them the ‘land’ of the whale’s back was rising steeply. The filth here was thick and hardened. Cliffs and deep defiles channelled out of and through it. There were caves. Here inchoate creatures seemed to be shifting about, sometimes signalling to each other in curious, scarcely-to-be-heard caterwaulings. It might all only have been a trick of the light and the wind.

  ‘Is there other life abroad on this thing?’ Lionwolf asked. He learned it was oddly easy to return to the child’s way with Guri, asking questions.

  Guri nodded. ‘Have you seen the bird-things? Well, there are those. Up ahead there’ll be something else, something bigger. I’ve heard it now and then, by day and night, galloping about over the beast. Seen something, once, fly across the moon.’

  ‘Birds?’

  ‘Even the birds aren’t birds. Great Gods know what they are – something that lives properly under the sea, far down. But this whale is often on the surface, and then they sprout wings. Did you see, they hadn’t any eyes?’

  Lionwolf was silent.

  In the caves of filth, voices faintly resounded, arguing, yattering. A cry ripped up, like the scream of a hunting hawk. Nothing otherwise came out.

  ‘They’re parasites,’ said Lionwolf, ‘scavengers. By feeding off it, they’ve gained some of the whale’s supernal qualities, and adapted to do better for themselves.’

  ‘Do you have a knife, a sword?’ enquired Guri judiciously.

  ‘Both. Kraag weapons for food, or dancing with. But they’ll do, providing they’re real.’

  ‘We’ll reach the top, by the head, around sundown. I sense that: my bones are telling me.’

  ‘Truly a great whale, two days of travel to cover it. Worthy of the Faz storytellers.’

  ‘It’s lifting itself, Lion. So slow we can’t feel it, lifting up its head for us to find.’

  ‘It may just dive under the water.’

  ‘Too mediocre, don’t you think, to drown or freeze you – if that’s possible even now? And me, I’m already dead. It will be some other method.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How do I know? Maybe it doesn’t know.’

  ‘Maybe all of us know, but we forget.’

  ‘I’m thinking that could be so.’

  They took a rest at noon. Though the sky was leaden, a white sun scorched down icy-cold heat. Lionwolf coughed from thirst, and Guri recalled how this half-god had seemed about to die that time in his babyhood. Lionwolf could be made to die, oh yes. Guri regarded this prospect, frowning, but there was himself to consider too. He thought he did know how it would be for him.

  The bones – his bones – where they still lay, that was where—

  Another forest or jungle began soon after they went on. Dry seaweed creepers roped pillar-like stems that rose house-high towards the sun. It was in this region that the greater scavenger-horde of the whale attacked.

  They loped on four legs, like a wolf-pack, through the tree columns. Otherwise they were not like wolves but a gelatinous mass of blackest shadow, unlit by eyes – or teeth.

  It seemed these animals did not either fly or bite.

  Then they were there, swarming with shrill shrieks. In a few seconds, Lionwolf was covered by them. Their mere weight – considerable – felled him. He lay under the stenchful hot seethe of their slippery bodies, sticking sword and knife through and through. Blackish blood splashed him, and awful other fluids. From the narrowest holes of mouths, ribbon-like tongues extruded. Where they fastened on his flesh, they entered, unhurtful, hungry. They were a type of leech.

  Fighting them off, Lionwolf saw Guri, too, fighting. But Guri was undead – he could neither be harmed, nor could he harm. Yet Lionwolf beheld, through the chaos of disgusting battle, that this was no longer the case. Guri hacked and sawed, stabbed and wrenched with his Olchibe blades, with his hands, kicking with his feet. The leech-things died in vast quantities, but where they had attached to him, he streamed with wounds.

  The contest ended only when the last leech perished.

  Lionwolf, sloughing corpses, got up. He too streamed with blood.

  He was mortal now. If he had needed proof, here it was upon him.

  He knelt on the whale’s back, cursing and weeping in rage, blind with the pity of self which is the right of every living creature. He cursed god – the god who was his father.


  When he stood and strode on, Guri was already ahead of him by half a mile.

  Before the whale, picked out in constellations, reappeared at dusk, they had reached the gulch that lay before the head of Brightshade.

  There was no way to cross it unless they climbed down, then up again. There had been a time when either of them could have jumped the gulf with elegance. Maybe still they could have done that, but they had ceased to believe they could. The Kraag would have told them the lack of belief in powers preceded, and hurried, those powers’ end.

  Across the ravine, some way off, an extraordinary, slender, pale mountain soared upward and up from the blackness of the landscape. The horn of the whale.

  The ravine, when they got down into it, was a treasure-chest.

  A torrent of scummy water foamed through its very bottom, presumably coming in from the sea, miles away on one side, and departing via the miles-distant other side. In the ridges and banks that led down to the water, some ships lay broken in two or more pieces. Most were smaller vessels, carved reiver rafts, or the clinker-built boats of whalers and fishermen. One ship, which lay furthest off to the north, was of a design unknown to them. It had only three masts, but was huge, erected in galleries – so they asked each other how ever it had stayed upright on the sea.

  The cargos of these craft had spilt and settled in the sludge. Here and there, already Lionwolf had noticed the glint of gold-work or a jewel, but in this spot the spoils were thick on the ground. They turned in all directions to examine them.

  ‘Rubies. Amber. Look, Guri, chrysolites, beryls—’

  ‘Mother-of-pearl,’ added Guri grimly. ‘We’ll be rich. We can go and live in Sham, like kings of old.’

  Gold and silver chalices, and armour and weapons chased with these metals, vied in the mud with gemstones, necklaces and hair ornaments in extravagant designs. A loose cache of pearls lay scattered like sugar.

  There was, too, a vast quantity of picked bones.

  ‘Gnawed, you will see,’ said Guri.

  ‘This is a scavenger that hoards bright objects, and has fangs.’

  Something moved further up the gulch on its other side.

  Lionwolf turned back.

  Guri turned back and shouted.

  They were strong mortal men again, appalled, alarmed, for a forgetful moment nearly exhilarated.

  ‘A dragon. It’s a dragon,’ said Guri, deciding.

  It was not, though, a dragon of the proper serpentine construct, as described in tales and lays. It heaved itself up and up from the dense mud of the bank, worm-like yet with massive foreclaws like a crab’s. Its head was one with its body and, like all the other life forms of the whale’s back, it had no eyes. Then the jaws reamed open, and the teeth were to be viewed. What would it need eyes for, with such teeth? It was the size of a couple of the smaller ships together, and its dentition was long, pointed and strangely clean.

  Now all of it was out of the bank. It posed for them.

  ‘It’s smelling us through its open mouth,’ said Lionwolf.

  ‘Well,’ said Guri, ‘it’s here, and we’re here.’

  Something else shifted at the dragon’s far side, also forcing a way up from the mud.

  ‘Another one, much smaller – the thing’s young perhaps?’

  ‘No, Guri, see, it’s a woman.’

  They stared in paralysis as the woman dragged herself finally upright. She was clotted in the muck, but she raised her fists in the air, and then she squealed a sort of triumph. Her captor ignored her.

  ‘The burrow’s down there. It must have taken her there to eat later. Why didn’t she suffocate? Brave bitch to follow it back up here—’

  ‘Guri, there’s another one coming out.’

  The second figure did not manage as well as the first, but was also a woman, it seemed, though maybe much older and less able. The first escapee gave the second no help.

  The worm-dragon closed its jaws. The clash echoed all over the gulch. Taking no notice of errant former victims from the burrow, it sprang solidly off the bank. Lionwolf and Guri then saw that it too had developed wings. They opened wide, and the last sunlight underlined them with veins of garnet. It flew straight across and down the gulf, steering itself faultlessly for the two men.

  Lionwolf leapt to meet it. Two-handed, in the Jafn way, he swung the Kraagish sword and, as the creature descended to him, sheared off the front right claw.

  Gore sprayed from the blow. In a black-red rain, Lionwolf fought on, Guri now cleavering at the beast from the other direction.

  A wing was sliced. Losing momentum, the worm-dragon staggered into a landing. Grounded, it showed no sign of distress, however, lashing out at once with both the intact and dismembered claws.

  Lionwolf felt the scald as it raked his shoulders and chest. He dropped down and moved in again, crouching, to get up under the clashing jaws.

  A true mythic dragon would be armoured by scales, but this one was only tough and desensitized. The sword went in, and in.

  It was Guri who darted up the tail of the legless torso and pranced on the monster’s spine – if such it had. Here he drove in knives.

  Lionwolf struck the worm repeatedly under the jaw. Further blood poured.

  He rolled away before the teeth could have him. He quite unremembered he had probably come here to die.

  Presently the worm heaved itself up and down, and Guri was dislodged. He lost a knife in this manoeuvre, which exasperated him – as, more than a decade ago, it would have done.

  This thing was so witless it did not seem to know it was badly hurt, even dying perhaps.

  Again and again they struck it. It and they fought on in a welter of blood and debris, jewels and gold cups splashing up from the impact of their feet and bodies.

  At last the worm fell over. Its claws were by now both gone. The wings were useless. Yet, incredible and unthinkable, the jaws full of teeth clashed without pause, famished to bite human flesh.

  Eventually the sun was going: the blood seemed to have got into the dying light.

  As Lionwolf stepped away once more, seeing those clean and devilish fangs still blindly crashing and snapping at him from the bank, almost the only thing now of the worm which could move, a terrifying pity filled his mind.

  ‘It won’t die, Guri, it won’t die.’

  ‘It must,’ said Guri.

  ‘You must,’ said Lionwolf to the worm. ‘Go back, Guri. I can do this. I can’t heal – once I tried, it didn’t take – but I can kill.’

  Guri stood back, his face set.

  Lionwolf walked forward once more. The jaws reared to meet him, and Lionwolf drew in one long breath. Then he leant across, and merely touched the worm, a gentle touch between the places where, if it had had them, its eyes would have been.

  Just as he had seen many times in the past, with deer or with bear, Guri now saw the worm grow sleepy. All its frantic activity stopped. It lowered its head calmly to the mud. Lionwolf kept his hand caressively on the blob of skull. When he was sure, he took his hand away and drove the sword in and down and through. He stroked the creature as, sleeping, it died. It might have been a hound he had loved, or a lion.

  Silence filled the gulch. Then one of the women on the far bank began to screech again.

  Lionwolf straightened and looked at her in anger. Only then did he realize that she was … that both of them were – his mother, Saphay.

  Deep within his golden-eyed brain, Brightshade heard the beings trampling and talking, in the country of his back. Activity there seldom engaged the whale, but these people were different: he was highly conscious of them. Even the third – or fourth – addition, the undead man, had begun to impress Brightshade. The undead man seemed to have a meaning after all, though not such a telling one as the two aspects of the woman who had borne the god. As for Lionwolf, Brightshade had felt his every step like fire.

  The whale did not understand any of the languages they spoke. He did not especially understand their i
ntentions. Nevertheless, he read them like clearly written books.

  He lay immobile now, enough of his head above the water for them to scale it and visit his last, and best, collection of bones. The horn, which was a mountain, or a giant’s tower, ringed by spur-foothills or by an eccentric spur-palace, was catching on its tip the concluding ember of daylight.

  Up on the sky, the whale zodiac was already beginning to burn.

  They were not climbing to the pinnacle yet. They sat all together, but on the head side of the gulch, the men having clambered over there. The scavenger-worm’s death had made no impression at all on Brightshade. Such beasts came and went. They worked better in the sea depths, cleansing the whale – his servants and unnecessary guards.

  Brightshade cruised in motionless concentration. The sky darkened behind the star-whale.

  Clothed in congealed blood and filth, the four of them sat watching the constellation.

  Nearby, a grove of dead sailors the worm-dragon had also saved, rotted in fantastic, luminous colours. The smell had no importance among all the other effluvia.

  ‘Only harsh words then, Mother,’ said Lionwolf.

  ‘You deserve nothing else.’

  They had been like this since he reached her. There they had balanced, glaring at each other, she because she said he had wronged and deserted her, and everything therefore was his fault; he, because she said it.

  Guri paid them no – or not much – attention. Saphay made him uneasy, as so often before. Now there were two of her, besides. The older one was demented obviously, tattered and bent, her long broken nails scrabbling over each other. She muttered to herself, calling out names sometimes in the Rukar tongue, or Jafn, usually names that Guri did not want to hear uttered.

  ‘Can’t you make her keep quiet?’ he demanded of the other Saphay.

  ‘How I wish I could. She drove me out of my wits in the hole down there.’

  Did Saphay fully realize this other woman was herself?

  The first Saphay, the Saphay Guri had known, was – under the mud – much as he recalled. Even strands of her distinctive hair were visible.

  She seemed to know that Guri had, at least once, gone back to the snow-village, trying to find her. She treated him with chilly good manners. On her son she turned the barrage of her female rage.