by Tanith Lee
But now she was strong, Her wings beat and bore her up, and as the gigantic flame began to rise, a paean of joy, a hymn, tore through her wordlessly. And she believed she might be what her mother had indicated, and that her destiny sprang from it. So it was, conception, birth, the second birth called death.
The fabric of stones and sky gave way. Medaci lay like a smooth cool bead within the inferno that lifted Safca upward.
But northwest, a white flower of fire steadied the ecstasy and madness.
Bronze and silver and gold, the weavings of the light wove them all to that whiteness, which was Koramvis and her hills and the eye of the sleeping lake.
• • •
It was, in this high place, the swarthy Thaddrian who held the gate, guardian, black feather in a balance of pallor. A priest, he was not quite unversed in metaphysical conduct, or the intangible. And he had his own talents. His terror was nothing, nor did he count it.
Below him, the fair men and women maintained their own equilibrium, facing up toward her where she was on the hill’s crest, a tiny figure like a little doll.
But the Thaddrian, though facing away from her, knew the light came up through her, and presently, mundanely, he noted his own shadow cast before him on the earth, jet black from the dawn of whiteness on the crest of the hill.
• • •
In all its quarters and corners, the night lay, to the human eye, deep as water over every inch of Vis. The stars followed their courses. The moon went down. The hour before true dawn came quietly across the sea.
The ships like sleeping birds anchored, wing-folded, five miles off the tip of Alisaar. Her clockwork patrols, if they had noted them, had noted also their diplomatic distance, and let them alone. Alisaar might, besides, have other more pressing business.
The beacon on the edge of the western jungle wilderness had been seen to blaze by those who took heed of it. Thirty-five galleys of Free Zakoris, emerging from nowhere like things born out of mud, had swung northwest, perhaps to harry Saardos, or to attempt the Corhlish and Iscaian beaches.
Report stated the greater fleet of the Leopard, which kept on toward the Inner Sea, had grown like a conjuring trick to one hundred and seventy-six ships. There had been bays along that chartless jungle coast, where uncountable vessels might shelter, and slip out to join the concourse, or carry its dealings elsewhere.
Word was, eastern Karmiss had been covered, as if by a swarm, bleeding and on fire, the smoke of Istris one more cautionary beacon.
The mountain Pass from Thaddra into Dorthar would be fluid with battle.
On the passes above Vardish Zakoris, where Yl’s men now ran at will, the Dortharians would use the mechanics of avalanche to block the way. Even if the device had been betrayed, the Leopard would be in difficulties to prevent it. To swamp the Okris delta must be easier. The last message from that region had all the river inlets in arms, the reeds on fire, the stone towers holed by catapults. The wind, blowing to Anackyra, bore ashes and the cries of men, which could not be a fact, and was only a parable of despair.
In Xarabiss, the troops of Thann Xa’ath had retreated from the port of Lin Abissa, leaving the docks alight. A Xarabian detachment had pulled out of Moiyah and marched back to the border, to the Dragon Gate and Sar. There were similar desertions elsewhere, men forging homeward.
In the hour before dawn on the sea once called for Aarl, those who waked or watched on the King’s ship, saw Raldanash go by, walking on the open deck. Here and there a low-voiced greeting was exchanged. His whiteness, clothing and hair, seemed nocturnally luminous, as was the sea itself in patches. At the rail above the prow, he spoke with the captain.
They stood awhile, gazing west.
At sunrise, the vessels would make on. Yl’s great fleet, nearly twice their numbers, would sail to meet them. The area of meeting had been established by some Amanackire priest. It had a religious purpose.
The goddess would, naturally, be with them. The captain, leaving his King to his final living privacy, went away along the deck. A man of Marsak in Dorthar, the captain had never credited Anack, though he had wisely given her lip-service and offerings. Over the black water, he saw now the ghostly Ashkar banners of the Vathcrian galleys. And, moved by a sudden fury, the captain spat in the ocean, in case after all She might be real and he could show her how he rated Her paucity.
• • •
Raldanash son of Raldnor observed the sea, with its patches of fire that did not burn.
Soon, he would return to the foredeck cabin, and don the non-physical armor of his training. To linger here was just the humanity in him. His affairs otherwise were in order. But he had wished to bid farewell.
Already pulses, unheard, unseen, unfelt, rocked the world.
An hour, a little more, and it would come to pass. If there was not power or strength or faith enough, it would fail.
There would be, therefore, power and strength and faith enough.
The captain from Marsak, his nervous hatred and act of defiant wrath, these Raldanash had noted, as he could take note of all the welter of thought and will and wish about him. He was even aware of the creatures far below, the huge fish deeply meshed in the currents of the ocean, as they swam out their alien time, valid and unknowable. And he longed to go away with them, stripped of intellect and burden. But could not, would not.
My father, also, was alone like this, that night under Koramvis.
Raldanash sighed.
Those who watched him covertly saw only the handsome face, the royal bearing, a king who had the ichor of gods in his arteries. A mote of trust and perverse hope settled on his watchers. By his excellence, he seemed to prove to them a miracle was possible.
But Raldanash had clasped hands with life, and surrendered it.
When the man of the Amanackire came noiselessly to him, calling without words, Raldanash, Storm Lord and Dragon King, turned back along the deck to make ready.
• • •
The great fleet of Free Zakoris, veering eastward now with the tidal currents and winds of sunrise, did not know there was a line drawn across the sea.
They had made sacrifice to Rorn as the disc of the sun escaped his halls. The brief barking prayers were done, though still the bluish streamers of incense rose from every prow of those one hundred and seventy-six ships.
Yl himself rode this arm of his fleets. He straddled there, close to the Rorn god of the King Ship. Behind him was the mass of sail, ochre-colored, with the Black Leopard scrawled over it. The dawn was in the Zakorians’ faces. They had gained indications that enemy shipping might come out to greet them. They expected Shansarian Alisaar, or Xarabiss, more than they looked for Dorthar and Dorthar’s King.
As for the line of psychic force, it was invisible and apparently immaterial.
What they did come to see was a sudden turbulence in the glimmering water fifty oar-lengths away.
Yl’s captain pointed. There was a parcel of shouts.
“Huge fishes, Lord Yl, leaping from the depths.”
There were so many of these fish, they slowed to let them by.
When the arcing, snakelike forms and the sea-flushed spray had settled, a shadow came out of the sun.
The watch-horns sounded. The Zakorian galleys flung themselves to battle-stations before the devices of Dorthar had even been read.
Braziers roared. Fresh smokes curled up into the morning sky. The ballistic weapons were hauled and secured in position on their shrieking chains.
“They don’t come on, my lord.”
“Shy? We shall go to embrace them, then,” Yl said. “Dorthar, and Ralnar’s son, crushed in the fist.”
• • •
Across the slight interval of water, oars idle, the Storm Lord’s fleet stood waiting on his order. Which did not come.
“My lord—” said the captain from Marsak.
Raldanash was above him, by the rail. Somehow, a group of Amanackire had got between him and his officers.
All at once, the air was changed. It seemed to ignite, as if the sun had slipped from cloud, but the sky had been clear since dawn.
The captain did not speak again. He wet his lips and rubbed his temples, wondering if only he was effected. All about him, surreptitiously at first, the soldiers did similar things. It was like a sort of drunkenness when the stomach was not full. A rush of clarity that equally obscured. A folding away. A going outward—
The sea began to shiver.
Long waves, like those foretelling storm, raced and broke about the ships.
No wind blew. The sky was pristine.
The sea bucked and tumbled.
They had seen large fish, could it be they were rising again, under the very keels?
Men ran about. A scatter of orders were bawled. Then silence came back. Yet, there was a sound. It seemed rather to be in the skull than in the passages of the ears.
Above them, Raldanash, in the prow. Not moving. Doing nothing.
That white hair was like a flame. Flame ran along the edges of him, a man cut from parchment, burning.
Men cried out now.
A huge sheen enveloped the ship, reflected in the pounding pouring waves.
• • •
The foremost Free Zakorian galleys were approaching ramming speed when the sea raised itself and slewed against them.
As the first great runners hit them, oars flailed, breaking rhythm. Then the massive sweeps were shattering like twigs, and a terrified howling came from the rowers’ decks below. On the floundering timbers all about, men crashed over in a rain. A catapult tilted slowly and fell into the water.
“In the name of Zarduk—” Yl, struggling to his feet, gripped his captain by the neck.
The man pointed wildly.
“Something—something in the sea!”
Between the careering, speed-smashed Zakorians and the silhouetted static ships of Dorthar, the water spouted upward, black and combing, sediment and spray and gusts like mist or steam, blotting out now the sight of each fleet from the other.
Something indeed was active there, some massive hulk or beast, thrusting up from the floor of the ocean—
Aarl, place of submarine volcanoes—the story flooded a thousand minds. They called to each other in horror, remembering—
And then in a spume and spurl the ocean was ripped apart.
Walls of water a hundred feet high or more burst into the air. Darkness threw itself over them. The sea would be next. It would crush them in its fist.
And yet, the sea did not fall back as it must, dashing them in pieces, swallowing them whole. The sea hung like a curtain there, glittering and quivering, and the sun began to soak through, and the sea dried in the sun, upright in the sky.
• • •
Raldanash had become the mirror, of bronze and silver and gold and white light. His brain separated from his body, then his consciousness.
He floated high in the air, a seabird, weightless, and beheld the ships below, pale and dark, like figures on the war-table at Anackyra. And the sea surged up between.
Flame from the north sheared through. He was aware of Rarmon, very near, as if he were at his shoulder in some fight, their shields locked. Yet Rarmon-Rarnammon was miles off. A communication passed between them, speechless and without format, understood instantly, then gone.
The two lesser fires were nearer. They entered and refocused, swelling, ascending. From the east and the south. He knew the beings searing in the fire, male, female. They touched him, and each other, and the gold light of Rarnammon. The fourth light was beyond them all, so pale it had a core of blackness. Ashni. Sunrise. Morning Star.
Raldanash, or the awareness Raldanash had become, felt itself consumed in the conflagration, without pain or fear, peacefully. And as he died, the fifth ray of the star exploded outward, the psychic orgasmic energy of the spirit.
The filaments flared, from outer point to center and so to each outer point once more, and every filament as it centered and returned, centered and returned, spun off from itself the newborn intersecting threads. Over all Vis, the woof and weft of a colossal loom crackled and sparkled and gave birth.
The sea was in the sky.
Then a figure was there, girded by ocean, tall as the roof of heaven.
The Dortharians saw Anackire.
She towered, She soared. Her flesh was a white mountain, Her snake’s tail a river of fire in spate. The eight arms stretched in the traditional modes. Her eyes were the sun twice over. She spoke to them, in their minds, wordless. She said: It is ended.
But the men of Free Zakoris did not see Anackire, the Lowlander-witch they abhorred. They saw Rorn, their own god, who was black, with sea-plants in His ebony hair and jewels in the palms of His hands. And with one of these gargantuan hands, as He leaned down all His length toward them from the ether, He pushed their ships firmly away, firmly but carefully, for He did, being theirs, care for them.
Rorn spoke in words. It was a voice of tempest, and His breath was salt. You won your land, Rom said to them. Be proud of your kingdom, carved from Thaddra, and be also content. The rest is not yours to take. It is I RORN who say this.
They lay on their faces before Him.
Blue sea gems flashed in His teeth. Thunder encircled His head.
At last they looked, and saw only a white shade of his blackness, waning on the day. They had been moved back like game pieces many miles. The Dortharian fleet was not to be seen. The sky was overcast and troubled, the sea beneath littered with timbers, bits of ironware, and coals that had spilled and not yet gone out. There were, too, a host of broken swords, split cleanly in the midst of the blade.
They had not lost a single vessel, or one man.
Their slaves clamored below, an outcry, in which the names of many gods were mingled.
Yl kneeled trembling before the little Rorn god in the prow.
Above, the ochre sail had parted from the yard. The emblem of the Leopard of vengeance and war had been smeared into shapelessness as if by some immense hand.
• • •
The gods walked all Vis that day.
Ten miles from Saardos, Rorn appeared before thirty-five Free Zakorian ships, admonished them, and turned them. He kept one foot on the distant land as He breathed on their sails and blew them southward. The fleet of Alisaar encountered Him, too. When men, maddened by the sight, tried to immolate themselves in His honor, Rorn told them such death was not needful. The Shansarians in the fleet, however, declared they had witnessed Ashara of the fish’s tail. The sun was caught in Her golden hair. Her breasts were lovely. She reminded them of the Homeland.
As, in the person of Ashkar, She reminded the Vardians, Tarabines and Vathcrians in Xarabiss, the Lowlands, and elsewhere.
Close to the port of Lin Abissa, She uncoiled from the road, and Her skin was honey. Her serpent’s tail red copper, and Her hair was red as wine. But the Free Zakorians there saw Rorn, striding through the charcoaled ships, the smoke on His shoulders.
In Thaddra it was Zarduk, Who routed Yl’s forces from the border forts of Vardian Zakoris. And Zarduk, too, on the mountain Pass above Tumesh, Who rose out of the stones. The sun was not in His eyes, it made His belly. Black, magnificent, His masculine form enclosed the whirling solar disc. His breath was incense and heat, a scorching dust wind.
The Dortharians on the Pass saw this: A dragon out of their mythological genesis. It drove down the sky; incendiary beams shot from its carapace and jaws. They expected both the enemy and themselves to be at once incinerated. But not a man was lost, here as elsewhere.
Zarduk was in the delta of the Okris.
The spoons of catapults snapped off against their buffers. The black ships shuddered. Zar
duk’s feet were braced in the river, which barely reached His knees, his fiery belly blinded them, or should have done. Anackire, or a creature much like Her, was positioned at His left side.
In Ommos, the god was duality, both feminine and male: Zarok-Anackire.
In Ylmeshd, Yl’s city in Thaddra, a golden glow stained the anthill dwellings, emanating from the cave temple of the fire god, causing some panic.
It was said that priests, stealing in to see, found the topaz Eye from Ankabek, brighter than a lamp, had been transported of itself into one of the eye-places of the Zarduk. That a Zakorian deity should have, thereafter, half the gaze of a Lowlander, was so suitable to resultant legends of that day, it was later suggested Yl himself, not the gods, organized the matter on his return.
Ashara appeared to blasted Karmiss. She rose above Ioli like a daytime moon. In Istris, Rorn had seemed to shake the city, very gently, as if to shift crumbs from a mat.
Stray Leopard ships making for Lan came upon Him seated on the ocean. He said they must go back to Thaddra. They believed Him.
The versions were endless. All differed. Ten men in one place had each seen a vision no other saw. Stars fell, mountains moved, bells rang in the sea.
Yet the words, uttered to the ear, the brain, or the heart—they were substantially the same.
And the felled ballistas, the broken swords, lay thick as flowers where the dead should have lain.
• • •
The four fires, the burning-glass, joined like the amber ring, now letting go the light.
Each drew away, became an incandescent dot. The web of force grew dim. Went out.
The dulling of the vast effulgence revealed another, lesser effulgence, where, everywhere, there were shining the tiny faint lights, the miniature trusts and prayers of a world, the will of a multitude to persist—fuel for the vaster flame. And then these also were dimmed. All but one.