by Tanith Lee
Tomorrow they would all be dead, presumably. Why not be friends? But women held on to grudges. In all the worst feuds, so you heard, they were the ones who would never let go.
Now and then too, by the corpse-light, Guri saw her gazing sidelong at her son. Her eyes softened then with love, with sadness. Once she said, as if she could not contain it, ‘You’ve grown to be a fine man, tall and strong. But I never saw that happen. It happened away from me. You never let me see it. No, I was nothing to you.’
And Lionwolf sat sulking, scowling. Guri asked the Great Gods if only he, dead Guri, had yet the sense he was born with.
They had nothing to eat or drink. Only Lionwolf seemed to miss these luxuries. Psychic impairment, now common to all of them, perhaps made the lack worse. Lionwolf had taken to sucking the hilt of the Kraag knife, though it was dirty beyond nightmares, to bring moisture into his mouth. Another man, of course, would already have collapsed or gone insane from dehydration after such physical exploits.
In the end, Guri asked Saphay how she had come to the whale. He thought she might have been compelled to it, as he had, and though what she said was evasive – icebergs, some lover she rejected, her cat, who also apparently was disloyal – what she answered did not change that thought. The monster had swum in close to shore and swept her up like a pebble under a broom.
‘I remember nothing then. Sometimes, I think, we were under the water – but I survived. When I woke I was in this hell-land. At first I never knew I was on the creature’s back. I still expected to die at every second.’ Her face was mask-like with self-deception. Then her look grew troubled. ‘It’s death anyway. The death I had before, returned.’ She glanced at Guri. He did not say anything. Saphay said, ‘As I wandered about here, I met her.’
On her cue, the other oldish woman started to bleat. ‘Zeth,’ she quavered. Saphay leant over and slapped her. Yes, Guri thought with tolerance, she was still a bitch. But it did shut the old fool up.
‘She is called Saffi,’ announced Saphay wilfully, it seemed, not attaching significance to the likeness of this name to her own. ‘She told me so, in a lucid moment – as if I should have any need or wish to know.’ She hesitated, then she said, ‘No one else is alive here but for repulsive things that feed and fly or run about.’
‘Did none of them attack you?’ Guri was curious.
‘Only that last one – that attacked. I’d come among all the jewels and the wreckage of ships, and the ground threw up that crab-worm.’ Saphay shook back her mat of unspeakable hair. ‘It didn’t kill me. It made a sort of pet of me – and of her, that one.’
‘Perhaps it loathed only men,’ said Lionwolf. ‘Perhaps it was female.’
Even in the weird light and under the dirt, Guri saw her cheeks flame.
‘Yes, we have some cause, don’t we. Oh, if you had known—’ Suddenly she fell dumb. A minute passed. She sat looking at him. ‘My son,’ she said, ‘my son.’ Then she cried, and the tears washed her face. Beside her the old one began to sob too.
Guri got up. ‘Well, I’m off.’
None of them made a move, the women howling, Lionwolf downcast, unable now to be charismatic and sweet to them.
Guri climbed laboriously up the slope of the whale’s bulbous head, up and up until the three figures below disappeared behind ridges of polluted matter.
Higher up, though, the terrain levelled. Here the whale’s architectural improvements were fewer.
Ahead, the spike of the horn showed black on the starry sky. From this point it would be, Guri imagined, an hour’s stroll in the morning – that was all. The women would take longer over it. There was always that, to delay the end.
Should he simply go on alone, get it done with? Guri guessed it was no use to make the attempt. Somehow, as with leaving, he would be prevented – just as he had not drowned yet, nor she. As before, he and she had to be destroyed approximately at the same time or it could not happen. He was dead anyway – why bother about doing it over?
Beyond the headland of the whale, he thought he could make out now the sea far down, coldly tangling.
Guri stamped on the whale’s head. He doubted it could feel him.
‘What have you got planned for him, black whale? For me it’s the spiking again, that I can tell. For her, too, the same; the cold and the water-death, under ice. But for him – for Lionwolf – what?’ Up here, Guri became aware of the faintest tremor. He thought the whale was beginning at long last to move out into the wide sea. ‘He’s a god, black whale – even reduced as he is – invulnerable once, and even now his wounds heal in minutes. Throttled by thirst, he’s alive, aware, can still speak, fine as bronze. What is it to be?’
Brightshade spoke to Guri.
Guri had not expected a reply, and fell over. He lay sprawled on the whale’s headland, and heard the song Brightshade sang to him from courtesy and matchless wickedness.
And although the polite and wicked song had no words, yet Guri’s mental arena was flooded by its shape.
When it was finished, Guri lay without moving a long while.
‘I shan’t tell him of it,’ he said. He bit his lip, the inside of his mouth. Guri too began to cry. Near to dawn he raised his head and shouted at the sky, not in words but in shapes: panic, terror, the fury of thirteen years and more.
Then he went down again, and found Lionwolf asleep with his head on the knees of his young sleeping mother, and the older mother also asleep, held tight in one of his arms.
‘You I forgive, Lion,’ said Guri. ‘It is the Great Gods I never will.’
The Lionwolf was dreaming. As nearly always, he knew that he was. Some clever mage stood before him, one of the Magikoy he believed, but he was unsure, for details of dress and speech were not clear, only the ritual the man performed.
It was, it seemed, a spell of unmaking. Spellbound by the periphery energies, Lionwolf watched.
Even here, he could not be sure what he was seeing. The mage subtracted amorphous elements from a vessel, and gradually a light that shone in the vessel went out.
‘So it is,’ said the unknown mage, ‘when what has caused it to be is cancelled by precise sorcerous formulae. A magic of symbol – you will find it effective.’
Lionwolf opened his eyes. The old Saffi simpered at him. She had sat up and was combing her hair with her claws. Saphay was smoothing his own hair. He thought of Darhana, and a hundred women who had done this. But a man’s mother, of course, had usually been the first.
He was glad they were reconciled. He was sorry he could not save her from this second death – Guri too. For himself he felt only the familiar bewilderment, the newly met despair.
Had the dream been intended to alert some rescuer’s scheme in him? It had not done so.
Guri stood waiting as everyone got up, and the women tidied themselves in the meagre and only ways they could. Guri noted, however, that not one of them now required to exercise any bodily function.
Saphay was stern today, but collected. She helped her crone-self along as they went up to the headland. Once she called the old one ‘Nurse’, then clicked her tongue at the error.
Guri and Lionwolf walked in front. They did not speak.
Then, reaching the top, Lionwolf stared out. The sun was rising, and it was plain they were now at sea, the great whale coursing along, smooth as butter. It was misty but sunlight sprinkled the waves so many miles below, as they parted at the animal’s astonishing progress.
‘Guri—’
‘No more,’ said Guri. ‘We’ve done too much in this world to talk about it. It talks loud enough for itself.’
‘Agreed.’
‘I’ll see you in Hell, Lion,’ said Guri. ‘Only, my hell may not be the same as yours.’
‘Great Gods grant your hell is far better than mine.’
Again, neither man said Amen. Guri was done with his gods. Lionwolf had yet to find some.
The women toiled on over the crest of the dirt banks, and came walking together along th
e head of the whale.
‘A pretty morning,’ said Saphay.
Her tear-sponged face was already skeletal with fear. Of them all, she was the most frightened. She had hoped for immortality, but the weight of death was on her here. She knew she would not escape one more time. But she had been trained as royal once. To Guri, haughtily she said, ‘Where must we go now?’
‘Up to the spurs and the horn of it.’
‘Very well.’
Now Lionwolf walked between the women, with one on each arm, as if at the royal court in wasted Ru Karismi.
Guri marched behind, their bodyguard.
What a bloody day to die on. But, then, would he have liked it better if there was a gale?
The palace that was spurs became larger and more miraculous, and the spike above too towering now to judge or analyse its size.
Saphay thought, Perhaps nothing will happen. Perhaps it only wants this: for us to behave as if we go to die—
They stood under the colossus of the spurs. Here the real skeletons were, festooning spears of ivory. Too excessive in numbers to seem even like a boneyard, yet Saphay glimpsed the skulls of horned lashdeer draped in a garland about a string of human bones that ended in a human skull. These were hers, she knew instantly, totally. So did her other self, old Saffi, who hid her eyes – then, absurdly, uncovered them, beamed, broke away and ran smiling towards the skeleton, as if to a beloved relative.
Guri also detected his skeleton at once. It was a noble effort, he thought, still whitish in bits, and the head on the right way.
The breeze of passage laced their lips with salt. He remembered the ash plain by the city. Probably Lionwolf did too.
Saphay thought, Surely, then, this is all—
But, before she could speak, the butter-smoothness of the ride was over.
Abruptly the whale had flung itself upward, in a kind of bound.
Lionwolf reached out to grab hold of Saphay. But she was gone. He saw her stricken face sliding away from him; and Guri lifted as if in unseen hands, yelling, snarling a war-chant—
Lionwolf, slung against the spurs, found himself pinned there, anchored and tied in place. The old woman mouthed up at him. ‘Goodbye,’ she said kindly.
The world of the whale cracked apart, the sea smashed like a million mirrors.
Water covered Lionwolf, beating him down flat, but trapped still by his clothing caught on the jagged edge of a spur.
He heard Saphay screaming. Guri’s borjiy roar was done; he had been tossed skyward, turned over in the air. High as the sun he looked now, Guri, impaled on the razor tip of the impossible horn of the whale. He was dead again. His red blood trickled resinous down the horn-side, like honey.
Saphay had been thrown off into the ocean. Lionwolf had not seen this either, only the result – her absence. The older Saphay had vanished, too, without a protest.
Only Lionwolf now, clutched by native bone on to the back of Brightshade, the god’s assassin.
And to Lionwolf came in another tide – which was one of time and measurement.
Unmaking. The god, through his votary the whale, had unmade them: the mother who had conceived and borne Lionwolf, Guri who had saved him from Zezeth’s wrath. This had been committed, the unmaking, in a flawless copy of the first death of each. One to the spike, one to the water under deepest submarine ice. They were erased. History was dismantled, Zeth victorious.
Lionwolf felt the tide wash over him, that was not water.
He tried to stand against the spur, to free himself of it, of everything.
He was weak. His hands … were too small.
If any had seen, if Brightshade had, and perhaps he alone could, Lionwolf the man was melted down in those moments. A red-haired boy struggled against the spur, then, even the boy—
A red-haired child of four or five years clung on the back of the whale, not struggling but shrieking for his dead mother and for his dead uncle—
A child.
But then, even the child—
He was dissolved all away. It was a baby shrieking there—
And then it is only a wisp of a thing, an embryo outside a womb. A seed.
Spell of symbols. History expunged, as if … he had never been. Unconceived, unborn. Unmaking, unmade.
It is nothing.
Nothing.
He is nothing.
Gone—
But oh his soul, the soul of the Lionwolf, that falls on and on into the deepest sea of all, and to the Battle Gates of Hell.
TWO
Nine Vormish men witnessed her nascence on their coast. They would become her priesthood.
There had been an apocalypse of death, far far to the south. The lands of all the north sea peoples had been decimated. Such swathes of their sons had been cut down, but they had suffered not as terribly, even so, as the peoples of the continent itself, and already Vorms, Kelps and Fazions prepared to sail against the helpless landmass. They had been reivers, snatchers, for centuries. Now, despite tragedy, it was an epoch for great gain.
And thus the birth of a goddess out of the ocean was to their taste.
Jord and his brother, Majord, were with their ship under the bluff. They were organizing the scouring of the gut of the ship, and her rowers’ benches.
The seven other men were drunk still from a funeral wake the previous night – the brothers, too, but they were intent on denying it. Amid the arguments and horseplay, Jord looked up and saw.
‘What is that, there, on our water?’
Nine men left their work, their everyday lives. They grouped on the stony shore, and stared.
A long wave, green as apples, was spurling around the coast. Up in the pleated curve of it, which never shattered, stood a snow-white woman in a second wave of topaz hair.
Sea-birthed, she rode into the harbour of the Vormish island, showing no trace of any other world, nor of her mortal royalty, nor of her double drowning in a frigid sea. No, the sea was her lover and handmaiden. It brought her gloriously to landfall.
When the wave creamed down on the beach, and the woman stepped from it as if out of a green shell, the Vormish men, knowing she was divine, dropped at her naked feet.
All of her was naked. All of her was beautiful. But, then, she was a goddess.
He had made sure of it – just as the other made sure of patterns in the stars. Whether actually an individual – or only the third aspect of the three who comprised that god fragmentedly known as Yyrot, Ddir, Zeth – Yyrot had energized and altered Saphay. By means she never noticed, he had somehow given her the godhead he warned of or promised. Zezeth wanted her dead; Yyrot took care she lived, but in the ultimate unassailable form, all mortal dross thrown away. Her second death in the sea had ensured as much.
Not only schizophrenic then, the individuals of this god-triad, but a composite of threefold personality.
Saphay did not, just then, recollect any of them.
She stepped ashore, fresh as a cucumber, delicious as a flower.
She laughed as the human men obeised themselves, and Majord, their bard, praised her.
It was only later, in the wooden hall like an upside-down boat, seated in a shrine and worshipped, that Saphay’s goddess eyes darkened. Then – and for this the Vormland would adore her – she spoke as did countless Vormish women in that year of sorrow and wars. It was in Vormish, too. She was, after all, a god, and multilingual. ‘My son,’ she wept. ‘My son.’
… Unended …
Turn the page to continue reading from the Lionwolf Trilogy
ONE
The sun was blue.
He lay staring up at it, because it did not dazzle him; yet it gave light.
After a while he turned his head a little on the hard, smarting surface, to see what the sun gave light to.
Stones, shards and flints lay all around him, save in one direction where, about four shield-lengths off perhaps, they ended in dull and viscous water. That was the open sea. He thought so. But it did not really move,
there were no waves, only an occasional sluggish rippling.
So cold. So cold …
He had been deep inside the sea, which was like a deadly beating womb. Then he must have been cast ashore. A ship – he must have been on a ship, which had foundered.
He could not remember any ship, except one with seventeen masts stuck in ice and grounded. And even the ice – not so cold – as this.
The man lying on the long broken beach closed his eyes, but his hand reached out emptily across the stones, and closed inadvertently on something that was of a different, smoother shape. At first he examined it only by touch. What was it? Was it his? He drew it in and held it to his face to look. But he was still unsure what it was. Nevertheless, for some reason his hand shut tighter on it and tears ran out of his eyes.
The next time he woke it was because a baleful sound, like that of a mooing beast or of a trumpet, was echoing out across the vast space inland, behind him.
Slowly now he sat up, and gazed inland, but it was a sort of nothingness, the beach of shards stretching for ever, and in the distance clouds, maybe, slowly moving, low against the earth.
He put the unknown wooden thing he had found inside his shirt, under his heavier outer clothing, which seemed made of leather and wool.
Just then terror came, glittering and wild, into his mind and he thrust it away.
Where was this country? He did not know.
Who am I? He did not know.
The trumpet or beast mournfully called again, inland.
His shadow fell from him, transparent in the sapphire sunlight.
When he stood up, it was because a disturbance started in the sea-pond. Unlike the pure fear which had to do with confusion, no alarm rose in him at the twisting waters. Actually he was quite glad to see it. It might give him something to do.
He put his right arm across his body and located a sheathed knife thrust in at his belt.
The water parted, thick as soup. A dark round object rose from it. A seal? But the roundness gave way to a head containing features, a mane of hair, a pillar of neck and wide shoulders – a muscular man of some height and girth was striking up now from the depths. Swiftly he stood clear of the sea and stepped out on the beach.