by Tanith Lee
The King of Hell, if so he was, stood taller than most and was heavily built. His bare arms showed chunks and plates of muscle, as did the column of his neck. A loose dark hood covered his head. He was the colour of Hell, bluish-grey, and the skin that covered him had cracked a little, but did not move.
‘Is he …’ whispered Kuul, ‘is—’
‘He’s made of stone,’ said Vashdran. ‘That’s novel.’
It was. The stone King could, unlike his skin, move fluently. His mouth had somehow looped into a thin smiling, and his eyes, black as the river and, like the river, spangled with the lights, passed across all the men clustered above and around him.
He said nothing, the Stone. Only looked at them all, in silence. Then he went back to his chair under the awning, and she, the woman who must be his consort, walked out into the prow instead.
She was not stone. She was like the liquid curving river … like the flight of a bird …
Vashdran started as if someone had stuck a red-hot dagger into him.
‘What?’ asked Kuul. ‘Don’t you like her? She’s—’
‘Quiet,’ said Vashdran. When they obeyed him, even the other men standing near who had been murmuring over her, Vashdran merely forgot them.
He knew the woman. He did not know how, or from where. He did not know her name. Or did he?
She was slimly yet voluptuously curved, and her long hair, curling like a fleece, hung to the hem of her golden-white clothing. Her hair was black, and her eyes, but her skin blackest of all – black as night.
‘Like Star Black,’ Kuul risked muttering.
‘Then,’ said Vashdran, ‘she too must have been made from snow.’
The woman did not smile as her partner had done. She appeared impassive, perhaps slightly quizzical. For a queen she had few ornaments, only the faint dust of gold across her dress and hair.
She raised her arms. They were like the stems of black irises, the kind that broke sometimes from channels in the ice fields after a harvest of dormant grains.
Vashdran paid no attention to this flicker of memory. He could not look away from the woman, not even inside his mind.
Then the moon came, the moon of Hell.
It came because the black woman summoned it. So much was obvious.
Preceded by a blazing white radiance that dulled the torches, the round orb swam into the sky above the high walls. At first it seemed to come swiftly, but once in view it grew motionless. It had a likeness to other moons Vashdran had seen, full and blinding bright. Brighter than the sun of Hell-day perhaps.
The woman lowered her arms. As she turned to go back to her chair, some small groups of the men shouted to her, surprisingly couthly, asking her to remain. If this was impertinent, or could at all matter, was unsure. But no reprimand was issued, nor did she heed the shouts. Back under the awning she went, and sat down beside her lord, the Stone.
The awful disparate singing began again from the floating platform, which now was drawn up and away. The boat rowed itself forward downriver.
Not one man did not stare after the boat. Until, as the last glimpse of it blended with distance, a whistling roar jerked them from their trance. Out of the moonlit sky something, some huge black thunderbolt, arrowed towards them. Next second it smashed into the river, sending torrents of non-wet, freezing liquid up the banks and walls. But the river closed over the missile, and it might never have been.
Vashdran, who was Nameless, and Lionwolf, roved through the labyrinth of Hell.
Far off, yet for a long while, he heard the feasthall bellowing on with drink and boasts. In his head lay a sharp-edged fragment, Kuul’s murmur to Yorrin, ‘Let him go. He’s remembered his wife.’
Not so, Kuul. Not my wife. Or only once.
Yes, he had remembered her. He had remembered it all.
It had suggested itself to him that, in this edifice, you had only to wander about to find any location you ever wanted or must reach. But the palace was really like a landscape, or the inside of a mountain, mined by caves.
In just such a clandestine closet he and she – last time – had lain down.
She had made him wait for sex, but by that hour in the mountains he was ruined, half-mummified with guilt and despair. And when he put his hands on her, when he lay over her – she had drained the fire from his spirit.
Chillel.
That had been her name. But here? How did they name her, here? Because she was not quite as she had been, he believed. This version of her beauty was more sumptuous, luxurious at breast and hip. Her hair curled more, did it not? A little more … though it was as long and lustrous. Her face too: the same, yet – was it more sweet? For Chillel had been sweet only in her beauty, and this new version of Chillel had almost a human curiosity in her expression.
Chillel had been made of snow. She had gouged the fire out of him – but he had melted her.
Vashdran laughed.
The laugh cracked round the towering walls, hit the moonstruck sky.
He could remember all of his life now. It had rushed back to him, as the boat meandered away. How he had grown in ten or eleven years to the intelligence and physique of a heroic man. How he had become without any effort a magician, a lover, a leader, a conniver – a king indeed. He could remember the city of the world, the one that had disappointed him, with its twinkling ruby and zircon parasols and the high bastions which, to the walls of this Hell, were only toys. Lions, he remembered those, hawks and hounds, women and men, a mother, an uncle, and mortal enemies on whom he had lavished witty punishments and surcease.
He remembered also dying himself. But the actual means of death lurked behind an inner partition and was not yet to be re-experienced, let alone seen. He would come to it. But for a while – Great Gods keep him from it.
‘Guri,’ said Vashdran. ‘Olchibe Uncle Guri. Peb Yuve, mighty leader of the vandal bands. Saphay, my mother.’
But his father had been a god.
Vashdran spun about and crashed his skull against one of the hard walls of Hell.
It stunned him. He slipped down to the ground, and sat propped there like some drunken idiot.
In life, if there are agonies, the escape of death is always an option. But once dead – what then?
As his head cleared from the battering, buzzing slightly like aggravated bees, he began to hear a different music.
Under his lids slowly he looked along the space where he had been walking. It was like a long narrow room, and gave on another through the usual soaring arch.
There sat three or four women on a glassy floor, with harps balanced over their knees. They played and sang in remote pastel voices.
At the middle of that adjacent room, beyond the musicians, was a flight of stairs, and on this the black woman who was Chillel, and was not, poised with one hand outstretched. Down into it, from the open roof above, countless brilliant orbs were flying. They lit on her fingers, or circled round her, friendly moths that were each a tiny gleaming moon.
Their reflections danced on her, danced across the stony palace.
For a moment he did not notice she had seen him. Then he saw she had.
He sat where he was, on the floor, staring straight back at her.
After another minute, she spoke. He heard the words. ‘What’s there.’ Not a question. She had articulated in the tongue of Olchibe. It meant: Something of great significance is before me. He had no urge to get up and talk to her. He rested against the wall, and soon a curtain like flexive opal dropped over the archway and hid it, even the music and the glitter of flittering moons.
THREE
Around the Stadionum of Shabatu the benches were crowded by people who excitedly shouted or laughed, waving or making gestures of contempt. They seemed physically real, but if so who were they? Where did they come from – out of the city walls? Whatever else, they had filled the thirty-odd tiers that rose up through the stadium. Snake-head sentries kept guard, set on the dividing stairways like statues, each with a single
jatcha or a pair. Sometimes flowers were tossed down to the stadium’s oval floor, which seemed made of marble, densely scored to prevent slipping.
Vashdran, Yorrin and Kuul stood at the oval’s edge, looking about, seeing all this. For a couple of hours they had been corralled behind one of the gates of openwork metal that ringed the floor, gazing out at others who already fought. The action had been fast and violent, but with each ‘kill’ a bout finished. In this way and in so short a while, twenty-nine skirmishes were hatched – and terminated.
‘Where does the blood go?’ Kuul had asked, with reluctance.
‘Soaks down through the floor,’ Yorrin mumbled, his eyes glued to the current combat, by then five men – all that were left of eight – hacking each other apart. They looked perhaps like Faz warriors, having blotched their faces with blue.
‘How? The floor’s stone.’
‘It’s all stone. Even the gadcher of a king is stone.’
‘What do you think, Vashdran?’
‘It’s magic,’ said Vashdran. His face was stone too, had been since the previous night. Kuul and Yorrin curtailed the debate.
Ten minutes later, the last of the fighters strutting, or dragged off motionless, their gate rolled up with a snarling shriek of hinges.
Out they went, on to the blood-drinking marble floor.
Then another gate opposite went up, and three others swaggered through.
‘Three to three. And that one. He’s mine. Should have had a bet on it.’
‘You knew it was him, eh, Yorrin?’
‘Who else?’
Vashdran said quietly, as they began to move out over the oval arena, ‘Yorrin, what do you mean?’
‘We’re linked, he and I are. I know that one. He helped sack my village in the Marginal Land. I slew him at Sham. Then I saw him again last night, at table over the river.’
So Yorrin had been of Rukarian steader stock. Vashdran considered the Marginal Land, infinities off in the world, between Ruk Kar Is and Gech. Yes, the opponent Yorrin talked of had a yellowish Olchibe cast to his skin. He might well have run with one of the vandal bands.
Names – always names – were being called by priestly voices from some upper tier. It was the normal formula that they had already heard applied to others. ‘You fight for honour. Without honour you are nothing and must leave this place. Therefore fight well. Here are your matches. Kuul with Heppa and Heppa with Kuul. Ginngow with Yorrin and Yorrin with Ginngow’ – Ginngow meant swan-pig: swanswine – ‘Curjai with Vashdran and Vashdran with Curjai.’
I said I would look out for these men in war.
It was no use. Vashdran had eyes only for one.
Curjai strode forward, arrogant, grinning, lifting his arms to the enthused if unreal mob.
The high cold sun burned on Curjai, and filled his dark eyes with blue.
Vashdran found he darted forward ahead of the rest. Curjai incensed him. There was neither time nor reason to ask why.
The snake-heads had already handed every fighter weapons. There had been no choice.
Vashdran had looked in bored distrust at the apparently virgin sword they gave him, flat-bladed, the hilt ready roughened and bound in leather strips. There was now no difficulty, however. He slapped it in across Curjai’s ribcage and heard the grunt of expelled breath. Curjai leaned forward, airlessly blaspheming some outlandish, never-heard-of god. But as Vashdran drove the blade back, to cripple, Curjai’s own blade, a long, double-faced, notched knife, swung in and chipped the blow away.
I should have killed him at the first stroke. Why play? Some can die, but not I or he …
Vashdran stepped back.
‘Good morning, darling,’ he said.
Curjai straightened, spat on the marble, and lifted his handsome head.
‘But did you slumber well, my pet?’ he inquired tenderly. ‘Maybe I can lullaby you off to sleep again.’
Behind him, Vashdran heard the swords and knives of Yorrin and Kuul at work on those of the other two – Heppa, Ginngow. No man had been given a shield. So this one would not sprout wings and take to the sky.
Curjai sliced in at him.
Vashdran felt the knife – long as any sword and square ended – unseam his forearm and drizzle over the bone.
Left-handed he struck Curjai in the face and Curjai’s left hand came in turn, punching into Vashdran’s throat.
Vashdran staggered back. He gagged, but his vision stayed lucid. He must end this. How to slaughter what could not be killed?
He heard Kuul singing a battle chant of the Jafn Irhon. Yorrin used slamming damning thuds of flesh and steel. But these other fights were miles away.
It was like love. Did Vashdran know what love was? Exclusive, immediate, augmenting or painting out the remainder of existence with its colours.
He bent, skimmed the unalive sword along the marble, its passage raising a foul shriek, brought it upwards in an arc. Curjai was leaping forward. The blade met him exactly as and where Vashdran had desired.
Vashdran felt the resistance and give of severed flesh and sinew, muscle and skeleton.
A rose-red fountain flamed into the air. The head of Curjai, so well made, dark locks swirling, tumbled away along the arena.
Vashdran straightened.
The moronic, probably unreal people on the tiers were screaming in adulation, and the filthy eye-flowers raining down.
Vashdran looked briefly over his shoulder. He saw Kuul drawing his sword from the heart of the foe called Heppa. And that Yorrin too was dead – or ‘dead’.
Looking again at the head of Curjai. Vashdran could see it had bowled to the far barrier. It lay there. The eyes blinked. But Curjai’s body was stretched out quite close, flaccid, as if resting.
Vashdran went to the body. He kicked it once, sharply in the side. And at this it spasmed.
Then he heard Curjai calling hoarsely, softly, carryingly, under the tumult of the tiers, ‘Here – come here, you …’
The body flipped over. It got up on all fours, and crawled, like a bemused dog, away over the stadium.
‘Here – here – hurry up. I’m waiting.’
Vashdran burst suddenly into laughter. Above and around those on the benches were laughing too. And Curjai’s head also laughed.
The crawling dog of body reached the cut-off head. They united, without shame, and were again scarlessly one.
Curjai stood up on the oval, and raised his arms, and the crowd thundered, and the flowers fell like the snow of a winter world.
Vashdran caught one, as he had before. He looked into the petals and saw, not an eye, but a mouth fixed with pointed hungry teeth. He stamped on it.
Kuul was there.
‘Yorrin’s dead.’
‘We can’t die. He can’t. It happened before on the plain, remember, and he lived.’
‘No, he is dead. Some still can die.’
Vashdran looked, and Yorrin lay on the ground, bloodless. But Yorrin’s opponent, the one whose name meant Swanswine, and whom Kuul had dispatched, was healing at a great rate, pulling himself up, making obscenely definite gestures at girls in the crowd. Kuul’s own slain match, Heppa, was also back on his feet.
‘Truly,’ said Kuul, ‘surely and for ever. This is Hell.’
Vashdran woke screaming. Kuul shook him fully awake.
‘Sleep is still the main enemy,’ said Kuul.
‘So … you Jafn say.’
‘Aren’t you Jafn, Vash? I thought you were.’
‘Sometimes,’ said Vashdran. He sat up. They were in one of the long rambling nothing-halls of the labyrinth. It was evening. Elsewhere the feasting went on, as it did every night, apparently. Or at least as it had done for the eleven days and nights they had now been in the purlieus of this palace.
‘I was dreaming,’ said Vashdran absently.
Kuul looked at him again. ‘Yes?’
‘I dreamed of my death.’
‘The death today when that cutcher Curjai finally killed you? It�
�s the first time he has. Ten times before you’ve—’
‘Decapitated him, impaled his heart, gutted him. I recall quite well, Kuul. He always jumps up again and his head can call his body back like his hound or hawk. It wasn’t that death, today, my dream. Death here is only pain, and a handful of moments that touch oblivion with one finger. There’s no such thing as death any more, for us.’
‘No, Vash.’
‘You die here too. Is it the same for you?’
He asks almost like a child, Kuul thought, surprised. Sometimes he’s like that, though so vital and shining. Who is he? I can never quite remember, though I remember a war – I remember a chariot, and riding at his back. And I must have died then, actual death, and I don’t recall that either. Only my fake deaths here.
‘About the same as you say. Like a faint. Like … sleep,’ said Kuul.
Vashdran got to his feet. He had believed he and Kuul were alone in this chamber, but Kuul himself had followed him, and now Vashdran saw others must have followed Kuul. They too then had heard him cry out in terror. Anger set Vashdran’s face once more like the stone face of the King.
He stalked across the space and stood glowering down on the Olchibe Ginngow, which meant Swanswine, and the other man, Heppa, who were playing some type of game with peculiar rounded dice. Curjai sat nearby, his back to the wall, carefully paring his nails with the edge of his knife.
‘We meet too often,’ said Vashdran. ‘Why are you here?’
‘Here’s as favourable as anywhere,’ replied Curjai temperately, not looking up.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Vashdran, in his beautiful voice that carried now no meaning, ‘I’ll think of something more challenging for you.’
‘Yes, it loses its savour, all this unfruitful death.’
‘Not for some,’ muttered Swanswine. ‘Not for Yorrin.’ He threw the dice and seemingly won, though how or what was unclear. Vashdran leaned over and pulled him up anyway in mid-cackle. He lifted Swanswine high, like a boy, and slung him about sixty paces off, skidding down the room to land hard against an adjacent wall.
Heppa said stupidly, ‘What was that for? We’ll get enough of that tomorrow.’