“Naï loved another girl. Passionately. Alas for Naï, her beloved was sensible. She would have accepted her own betrothal without hesitation unless to haggle a better deal, understanding marriage to be a contract between families, corporate entities. In my country,” I said aside, for I knew it not to be true in Sjolussa, “until quite recently, fidelity, as you call it, was seldom a clause in the contract. Nobody would glance askance if Naï kept her lover after marrying the suitable boy. She would be thought peculiar if she didn’t: flighty, perhaps untrustworthy.
“Naï was peculiar. She waxed eloquent, proclaimed her unequalled love, declared she would die rather than share her beloved or be herself shared: they were one soul!
“The other girl first laughed, astonished by Naï’s ludicrous passion, then quieted. You are not sane, she said, turning away. Then, for she did truly love Naï, the sweet careless girl Naï had been, You must marry the boy. Nothing between us will change, my dear, unless it grow richer, deeper. She saw the incomprehensible horror on Naï’s face and said, her heart closing like a fist, If you choose not to marry him, I will not know you. And then she walked away.
“Betrayed, as she saw it, Naï fell weeping to the ground. Her tears made mud of the street, her cries made the air ring. People passing by glanced aside, for madness is a sad and holy thing. Busybodies, of course, ran at once to her betrothed’s mothers, more compassionate persons to Naï’s.
“Peculiar she was, mad she might be, but Naï was not entirely stupid. As she howled and wept, smeared her face with dirt, pounded her fists against unyielding earth, at a certain point she realized she had made herself a scandal that could not be lived down. The most perfect of all girls would shun her. The suitable boy of whom she had always been fond would not marry her. Her mothers and fathers would not be able to—would not care to protect her. She would be a figure of horror or of fun for the rest of her days.
“If she remained in Defre.
“So she rose to her feet and with all dignity she could muster strode away from the town and our Father Bodo, into the forest. When her mothers came to succor or scold her, she was not to be found.”
My throat was dry. Taking an effervescent sip from my flute, I glanced through lowered lashes at my audience: wide eyed, her lips prettily parted, cigarette smoldering forgotten between her fingers. “Do go on,” she pled.
I sipped again. “This was long ago, you understand. Not so long ago one wasn’t aware there were other towns, other nations in the world, but sufficiently so that one didn’t quite believe it. Only the rare, adventurous person would ever leave the place of her birth, seek out the habitations of strangers—know where to go. Naï had never been adventurous. She entered the forest blind. Once she believed herself out of sight of everybody she had ever known, she began to run.
“The dimness of the forest canopy swallowed her up. Large and small creatures that lived on the ground scattered before her noise. From the tall trees, monkeys and parrots mocked her. She felt too desolate for fear to mean much but she became more and more fearful. Was that tall, bulky shadow a bear? Could that be a leopard reclining at ease but alert on that high bough? Did tall grasses conceal a tiger? She feared, too, a great many spirits, hobgoblins, fabulous beasts it would be tedious to list.
“Hours later, when Naï stumbled upon the shore of the lake we now call Kittan-e-Chuei, there was not much left of her but sorrow, fear, exhaustion. The lake’s waters looked bad, filmed with clouds of green, blue, red-brown, and smelled worse, but she was too parched not to drink. Then she fell precipitately into sleep.
“When she woke, she believed her lover had come to comfort her. The night was dark. On the slimy surface of the lake gleamed reflections of stars like indifferent eyes. Something warm and alive was nudging her shoulder in a rude caress. She rolled over, ready to weep, forgive, be forgiven, but her lover did not embrace her. Even in darkness and the confusion of waking, Naï knew to the center of her being it was nothing human that gently pushed her again. She screamed, tried to scramble away. There was nowhere to flee but into the shallows of the lake.
“Wait, said the being.
“Naï shrieked again, trapped between unclean waters whose depth she did not know—not unusually, the girl could not swim—and the…beast. Tapirs were not meant to speak.
“Tapirs are shy, unworldly creatures. They would rather flee than attack. Naï knew this, even in her terror. But they are large, bulkier than the fattest wrestler and more agile, brutal when cornered or provoked. Naï knew that as well, and this beast was monstrous, half again the size of any natural tapir. Monstrously huge and uncanny. Wait, it said again. I am your only friend. Its lambent blue eyes glowed through the darkness. Faint light caught the white tips of its ears as they swivelled toward her, gleamed in the wet nostrils of its seeking trunk. Do not fear. I am here. Its regard steady, the animal settled back on its haunches.
“Naï was not comforted. Go away, she said weakly.
“You came to me.
“The moon rose above the trees around the lake and, most unnaturally, the monster reared up on its hind legs like a bear, pawing at the air with the blunt toes of its forefeet. Pale moonlight bathed the tapir’s vast black bulk and it changed.
“Flesh melted from its great belly. The bones of its stubby rear legs lengthened. The creature whined in a thin voice as pelvis, spine, shoulders realigned themselves to support upright carriage and its forelimbs became arms. The shape of its skull deformed, fleshy and cartilaginous features migrated and shrank. The dense pelt that had covered it melted away. In the few moments before the moon slipped entirely free of grasping branches, the giant tapir was transformed utterly. A giant man twice the size of Naï’s betrothed stood on the lakeshore.
“He shook his head as if confused, clenched and unclenched his fists, closed and opened clouded blue eyes. His skin gleamed black as coal tar, black as a tapir’s pelt, except on the rims of his slightly over large ears, white as salt. You came to me, he said again, my lovely bride.”
“Ah!” sighed my lovely listener with great satisfaction.
“And then the chuei rushed forward, swift and inescapable as a charging tapir. He grabbed cringing Naï around the waist and threw her over his shoulder. Shrieking, she beat with her fists at the saddle of salt-white skin on his back. He took no notice but strode toward the center of the lake. The unhealthy water rose to his knees, his thighs—the chuei neither halted nor slowed.
“In a matter of a few more strides, the lake lapped at his shoulders and all Naï’s effort went into keeping her head above water, flailing and coughing and screaming. The lake continued to deepen, the chuei to proceed. Tapirs, of course, are very fond of water, capable of holding their breath for a goodly period as they wander about beneath the surface, while uncanny beings such as chueie need not breathe at all unless they choose.
“Disobedient or insane girls are not so made. By the time the chuei of the lake reached his subaqueous home, his lovely bride was quite drowned. Her husband was not dismayed. He pampered Naï’s sodden corpse until her flesh dissolved into the lake’s waters. As years passed, now and then he rearranged the bones of her skeleton into newly decorative attitudes. And all along, since her body had been given neither to Mother Flame nor to the swift currents of Father Bodo, Naï’s soul was trapped in the lake: she would never in all of time reach that deep blue sea which is the sky, where the burning spirits of women and men are forever marked by their descendants on earth as stars.
“No, foolish Naï remains eternally with the chuei and all his subsequent brides, yearning always for the lover she abandoned in her pride, regretting always the husband who might have loved her sincerely, gently, instead of rutting on her like a graceless tapir whenever the desire struck.”
My onetime lover clapped with delight when I finished the tale. “Oh!” she exclaimed as I swallowed wine to soothe my throat, “oh! No wonder you were scared! Is it only girls who prefer girls who become the chueie’s brides?”
“Girls who defy their mothers’ sensible wishes. Girls who run away from home.”
As the woman bent her head to light another cigarette, a lamp within doors made her hair flare up brilliantly. Her eyes caught the light when she raised her face again. “We have a similar monster,” she breathed. “Here—in the city!”
“A tapir?” I asked, amused. Such animals are not to be found at Sjolussa’s latitudes except in the great zoological gardens.
“No,” she said, misunderstanding me. “I have never heard of it taking animal form. It preys on lost women and men.” And she began to tell me of the creature that dwells on the far side of the other bridge.
Perhaps she was simply not a storyteller: it was a confused recitation, lacking narrative or character: a haphazard collection of rumor and legend. Many centuries ago when the river was wider and the two banks of the Sja were separate nations speaking separate languages, if both nominally provinces of Katothtet’s patchwork empire, a person was exiled from the capital so far to the south and west. She did not recall his name or crime, whether he came to Góad, the town on the left bank where the Sja makes its great bend, or Pasna, on the right. She did not recall whether he was an engineer—ancient Katothtet still renowned for its engineers—or merely a visionary. He resolved the river must be bridged.
And so it was done. The logistics of such an immense undertaking were of no interest to the teller—how suspicious native governors on either side of the river were persuaded to sponsor it—how, lacking stonecutters and masons, Pasna and Góad contrived to throw a massive, unprecedented span on six arches across the swift, unforgiving Sja. For a thousand years it remained the river’s sole bridge. As Katothtet lost control of its distant provinces, then the nearer ones, finally was sacked, overrun, and reborn, Góad and Pasna prospered. The peoples and languages on either bank mingled. The separate towns became a single hybrid city, a prosperous entrepôt, Queen of the Sja. Sjolussa.
Naturally, Sjolussa fell within the eye of Owe-ejan-akhar when that monstrous conqueror, having overthrown three eastern empires, turned her attention west. Sjolussa was scarcely the Ejan’s target—grand as the town was, it was a hamlet compared to the imperial capitals she already owned—but its bridge offered the most convenient route into the rich, disunited heartlands of the subcontinent.
Refugees announced the imminent arrival of the Ejan’s hordes. Bearing the bread and salt of submission, the city’s co-princes rode half a day’s journey northeast to meet her. Gracious, she accepted their surrender and their invitation to a banquet in the Pasna prince’s palace across the river to negotiate terms: how much real tribute, how many slaves, how many lives.
It was not meant as a trap. If it had been, the Góad and Pasna princes should not have preceded the Ejan onto the bridge. It was afternoon of an uncommonly warm late-spring day. As often occurred on such days, the chill Sja had birthed a thick fog. Afoot, the co-princes of Sjolussa strode under the Góad gate, onto the bridge, and into the pearl-white mist, followed by the mounted Owe-ejan-akhar, her chief heir and commanders and one tenth of her personal guard, the Thousand Tall Riders.
At the Pasna gate waited the princes’ chamberlains and counsellors, the masters of the guilds that would bear the burden of the Ejan’s tribute. They waited, squinting into the fog rolling down the course of the river. They waited. Of the whole grand party, not a single person ever emerged from the mist.
When word of the Ejan’s vanishing reached her people, the undisciplined horde, loyal only to her, superstitious, long away from home, dissolved into tribal bands and turned east. Her minor heirs and the surviving Nine Hundred Tall Riders naturally laid waste to Góad and massacred its inhabitants. They declined to set foot or hoof on the fateful bridge. Terrible revenge taken, they too turned their horses’ heads toward the dawn and set out to carve up the Ejan’s dominions among themselves.
“You mentioned a monster,” I said. “Which preys on lost women and men.”
My flame-haired acquaintance looked up. Her eyes were glassy: the wine, the hashish and other adulterants in her cigarettes. “Come home with me,” she said, “beauty.”
I was perhaps a little drunk myself—I was flattered. But unmoved. “My dear. I must decline. I have an early appointment. It’s the inconvenient time of the month. Another night.” I made my escape.
The second week after I arrived in Sjolussa and settled into my stark but rather lovely apartment on Av. Heras on the right bank, I purchased a fashionable little motorino. The Métro was inconvenient for my purposes and I had never learned to drive an automobile. Automobiles were in any case frowned upon in the center city and prohibitively taxed. My moto had, in fact, been built in an Avengi factory: built for export, so it was slightly more powerful, slightly less noisy than the one I learned to drive on the clogged streets of Defre. Leaving the count’s house, I waited for some minutes under the porte-cochère for an attendant to fetch the moto. It was late for most citizens but not for the count’s guests. Nobody else waited with me, and the attendant appeared mildly shocked I should depart so early. I tipped him well.
Mounted at last, I drove through the count’s night-obscured gardens to the gate, where another liveried attendant bowed me through. On the narrow street overlooked on one hand by the high walls of the count’s estate, on the other by taller tenements, I thumbed the switch to initiate the navigation system. The left bank was not significantly more chaotic than the right but it was not my territory. (It bemused, almost pleased me to realize I considered any part of the imperial city mine.) The translucent display across the top of the moto’s windscreen directed me upstream.
At one time or another I had crossed and recrossed each of the city’s four bridges. The Half-Centennial, which had opened only two years earlier, was the most beautiful, a white cable-stayed harp designed by the Uvian celebrity engineer Suwin, but it was well out of my way downstream, linking the two halves of the purpose-built business district. The Jubilee, a century older, had once been beautiful, though modern eyes found its agglomeration of industrial lattice and faux-antique ornament grotesque. Av. Etz vaulted the Sja supported by an elegant steel through-arch, while Av. Gruth’s span was unremarkable concrete. As blinking dots and arrows led me on, it occurred to me that none of the extant bridges was the ancient six-arched stone span of the legend I had just heard. I had never seen a trace of it.
I was distracted. I remembered coming across a monument once in a small left-bank plaza, a plain, impassive stela inscribed to the memory of the Góad Slaughter. Another monument I had often seen without properly understanding was the Ejan Pillar, fifty meters of etched steel spiring up from an artificial islet in the river upstream of the Half-Centennial. Plaques in the park at the water’s edge called it a gift to Sjolussa from the government and people of Lararniw. Which windswept, mineral-rich, landlocked nation, I tardily recalled, claimed to be the heartland of Owe-ejan-akhar’s empires. The Ejan’s covetous eyes had never looked as far south as Aveng and our neighbors so she did not so much feature in our mythologies. Perhaps her Pillar marked the site of the old bridge from which, I had just been told, she and her Tall Riders vanished.
Perhaps not.
I steered my moto without thought according to the graphic prompts on the windscreen. There was remarkably little other traffic. I was accustomed to the uneven cobbles of Sjolussa’s surface streets, intended to keep drivers slow, cautious, alert. In the latter purpose, in my case that night, they failed. My moto and I had wobbled well across the river, bathed by its cool, odorous breeze, before it struck me none of the four bridges was cobbled. A wall of curdled fog rose before me, disturbed into eddies and whirlpools by the ancient stone bridge’s low parapets and the squat stone bollards that marked the abutments of the six arches upholding it. The motorino’s engine sputtered, failed. Still more distressing, the headlamp yellowed and went out, the navigation display evaporated.
The brakes had failed as well but I was travelling sedately and was no
t so incompetent I couldn’t plant both feet on the roadbed before the motorino fell over. Climbing off, I hiked up the rear wheel and kicked down the stand. Stupidly irritated, I glared at my pretty little moto. None of the four bridges I knew was within convenient walking distance of Av. Heras.
This was not any of the bridges I knew.
“Beauty,” said the river purling against the bridge’s piers.
“Beauty,” said the breeze.
“Beauty,” said the fog, something within the fog, striving to take form.
“No, really,” I said, “this will not do.”
I was not beautiful, not in Sjolussene eyes, certainly not beauty. Not even terrifically exotic. Even among the circles in which I moved there were several other expatriate Avengi of rank. There were Dothans, Piquers, who resembled me in being small, dark, more plumply voluptuous than the current subcontinental mode. There were exiles of nations I found exotic, Kyrland, Trebt, Lararniw, distant Haisn, still more distant and strange Yf. Diminished as she is, Sjolussa remains a capital of the world. “No,” I said again.
The figure resolving within the fog, about to become my flame-haired quondam seducer, hesitated. When it took another step, it had grown still taller, still more rangy and angular. It did not call me Beauty again. Instead, in a curiously muffled voice it said, “Come. Your…conveyance does not serve. I will bring you home.” Behind it loomed the indistinct silhouette of an enormous stallion.
“Thank you,” I said politely, reaching into my bag, “but I will manage quite well by myself.”
The being hesitated again.
My ’phone could find no signal—hardly surprising, I suppose, in supernatural circumstances—but its other functions appeared to be unaffected. My thumb found the camera icon, the flash illuminated the fog, the spectral horse reared back against its reins and the Tall Rider—perhaps she meant to be Owe-ejan-akhar herself—turned quickly to calm it.
Heiresses of Russ 2014 Page 4