by Tanith Lee
The wooden mammoth was light brown in tone. It quickly darkened from his tears.
In the walls, the hands of women and men slid over each other, in futile consoling gesticulations.
Once more they were outside the city. They stood on the plain of stones, the soaring walls, which from inside looked only like alabaster or marble, glowing in the outer darkness of Hell’s night. The men had been kitted out, all six Saraskulds of the stone King’s army, in black armourings inlaid with gold and cold jewels, grey topaz, speckled serpentine. It was fancy stuff, as Swanswine had remarked. He had been aggrieved at the dress armour. Swanswine, who was in fact only half Olchibe, got on an enslaved girl of the Marginal Land and reared by his father, wanted to lumber into battle as he always had in life, astride a mammoth, clad in Olchibe gear, his teeth freshly painted and with a decaying human head as a banner. Heppa however was foolishly proud of his new clothes. What sort of commander would he make?
The plain gave way to the long, sharded shore, and they tramped down it, the dogs padding among them, and the cloud of priests drifting before with their incense. Tonight, no fog bank occluded the view.
In the dark the sea was as sticky and non-oceanic as any of them recalled.
At the head of the procession, the weird elderly child who had fluted above the river gave his unnerving solo.
‘I would smother that brat,’ remarked Behf.
‘In Ru Karismi,’ said Kuul knowingly and inaccurately, ‘they would have shot it dead with bow and arrow.’
Reaching the brink of the sea, where the pebbles and flints seemed wet, everyone stopped.
Vashdran thought, What if I wade out, walking on water as I can still walk in sky, here. Or sink. Sink to the bottom.
But who could say what lay under the sea’s turgid skin? They had come up from there.
The wavery song ended.
Miles out at sea, something became visible.
The once-living men were quickened.
Spectral on darkness, rank on rank of sails were appearing, over the rim of the water.
There seemed to be at least a hundred vessels, maybe more. As they drew closer, the sea was crowded by them as if by a flock of gulls or kadi.
Behf said, ‘I’ve the long-sight. I can tell you, it’s worth a look.’
From where did Behf come? He had kept the Jafn name of Eleven, but he was surely no Jafn warrior, no westerner or northerner either.
Vashdran stared, indifferent, towards the phantom ships.
They were rafts, flat assemblies of defrosted logs, each with a single sail. They moved, blown by some unfelt, unseen wind, towards the barren coast.
I too can see with long-sight.
On every raft was a solitary female figure. Some stood upright, holding to the thin mast, gazing shorewards. Others were huddled, or lay along the raft’s surface, sleeping or insensible.
These women were all young, all, so far as could be made out, well formed and alluring.
Vashdran passed his extended glance over their faces. Some of them might have put on masks, devoid of anything. Others wore an aspect of bewilderment and some of fear. A very few looked joyful. They were of several races, and once more not all were known to him.
The six Saraskulds were to choose from this multitude of wives, one or more per man.
The priests were actually urging this now, insistently calling back to them, like pimps.
The men shoved forward, and the priests gave way. The men stood with their feet in the sea, elatedly pointing out this one’s virtues or that one’s.
Curjai even had moved away along the beach, scanning the rafts, also deciding.
Human-born the stone thing had said to them. Dead women then. Dead women banished to the War-Hell, subserviently to companion warriors.
Vashdran could see nothing in any of them, nothing in them at all that he wanted. Between him and these undead brides, she floated, like a flaw in his sight. Chillel …
It was not he wanted her. When he had at last possessed her, had been despoiled by her and burned her up in turn, even then he had no longer wanted her. It had been only that he must have her. And curiously, depressingly, even now it seemed he must, whether in her original cool persona, or that of the moon-bringing queen of Hell.
But the other men were busy choosing.
Vashdran watched, neutral.
Kuul selected two, and Behf four. He boasted he could keep them all happy. Heppa was shy. Swanswine mocked him till Heppa conceded, ‘That one then, her, with the malt-colour hair.’ Swanswine opted for a herd of six. It was common enough, among the sluht-camps of his people. Not true wives either, only slaves, for none of these were good enough, not being yellow-skinned.
Curjai by now must have chosen also.
A priest mewed at Vashdran.
‘None,’ Vashdran said. He had the wish to swat the flat-featured priest away.
‘You must select a wife.’
‘No.’
But the priest, face like that of some ice-locust unlocked from a socket of frozen grain, pointed out to sea, and Vashdran found he looked again, where the priest indicated.
Vashdran saw then one he almost recalled. Who was she? Through his brain fluttered the wraiths of the women he had delved, in the ice-village of Ranjalla, in the garth of the Kree, on the march north and the Gullahammer ride to the west and south.
The woman on the raft had disagreeable hair. It was a sort of green, like grass he found once in other circumstances. The witches of North Gech sometimes gave themselves such hair. Her skin was sallow more than yellow. She clasped the mast with one hand, and with the other fumbled over a string of beads she held, thaumaturgic doubtless, though just now of no use to her. Her face was shut up, unwilling to display her thoughts, but her eyes were frightened.
‘Tell me her name,’ said Vashdran. ‘If she’s mine.’
‘Taeb.’
Taeb …
‘How did she die?’
‘Before her time. An animal slew and ate her.’
Taeb. Yes, he knew Taeb. The northern witch who had assisted in the killing of Saphay’s Jafn husband, and who had helped cast Lionwolf and Saphay out of the Klowan-garth, to sure death in the ice waste. Taeb, who had been also foul Rothger’s bedfreh; she had absented herself before Lionwolf sacked the garth. And now she was here.
‘Very well,’ Vashdran said. ‘But she can expect no kindness.’
Perhaps fate, even now, permitted him one more soupçon of revenge. But he no longer cared about any of that. Ah then, vengeance without meaning. What else, in Hell?
The Saraskulds had chosen fifteen women. The youngest, who was Heppa’s, looked barely nubile, but she was one of the few who did not seem afraid.
Shockingly, back along the beach, the trumpet-mouth mooed from the city gate.
Before it had been the motivation for grim gathering and war. Now its statement provoked only the sea.
All the men shouted in horror and affront – all but Vashdran. It appeared the choosing was some malevolent tease. For, from the depths of that gluey ocean, something was rising, rising, more dense and intransigent even than the water.
A giant whale – I dreamed of it – now I recall the dream – the whale – its back …
Nothing, nevertheless, was to be seen, only the sea thrashing in waves – and something in the waves, wheeling, severing, like an enormous scythe.
In ones and twos, tens and twenties, the rafts of the brides were overturned, snapped away. The women went down screaming. White arms flashed like sea-spume, flying hair meshed with water. Here and there, a Jet of dark red sprayed against the stars, but fell away again, back into the deep.
As the hubbub settled, the sea sluggishly thickened. Nothing at all might have gone on. Generally, the surface was empty, but over the water fifteen intact rafts were still speeding in to land. Almost every woman left on her raft stared terrified behind and about her. Some wept and shrieked. But they were the chosen wives, and had been spared t
he tumult of second death. And of them all, now, only Taeb was serene, her face secretive, pensive.
Once the rafts had bumped home on the shore, the cloud of priests enveloped them. There was a droning, wasps tutoring newcomers to the waspery. What the priests said to the brides none of the six men heard.
There was no formal marriage, not even an abbreviated Jafn handfasting.
The women were sent along the beach away from the city in a straggling unspeaking group. And the men were next encouraged to follow.
Behf, Swanswine and then Kuul set off galloping, Behf whooping in a manner that soon made the leading female group increase its speed. These three men at least seemed already forgetful of the cull they had just witnessed.
Heppa went slowly, though, with a long, worried face. Curjai kept pace with him, ignoring Heppa and also Vashdran. Curjai too was stern and preoccupied. He had chosen a tall, slender young woman, dark-haired, her eyes bright with panic.
The jatcha hounds meanwhile ran enthusiastically everywhere; they even darted into the unsea, like dogs.
Vashdran walked along the beach last of all, and up into the plain of stones. There was, apparently, some building outside and beyond the walls of Shabatu, in which the merry nuptials would take place. Gradually all the others dwindled into distance.
When Vashdran reached the building, it was a travesty of his memories.
Stone blocks had built a type of lodge. In their translucent bricks cryogenized fish were sealed. The lodge rose from a grove of trees neither leafed nor cryogenic. These trees were of twisted petrified stone.
The fifteen women and five men were already presumably inside the lodge. The dogs too had either entered or found other pastimes.
Vashdran, who did not care, went in at an open doorway. The floor was glassy, like floors in the city. Ahead lay one of the wide arches, and then a downward slope of frost-feathered stairs. It was dark here. As he descended it grew darker still. A small light then drifted towards him, waxing as it came. It was a miniature floating moon, about the diameter of a crait’s egg. Sheer radiance blazed from it. It hovered in front of him, determined, he could see, and whether he was compliant or not, to light his path.
He assumed he was being led ritualistically towards his ‘wife’, the witch Taeb. And he was curious, a little. Only that. An irony had addressed itself to him. He had asked forgiveness of so many, even of a surreal wooden toy, yet this woman, who had assisted in his babyhood ill-treatment, he had declared must expect from him no kindness.
I am two beings. Of course. Lion, wolf. Mortal, god.
Where had the others been led?
He stepped off the flight into a grotto, far beneath the lodge and the plain of stones.
There were swart hollow caves, and on the ribs of them frozen ferns that might have been pure ice, and slim frozen streams like platinum veins. But there was fluid water too. Coming from a live world of snow and winter, even now fluid water could never leave him quite unmoved. He looked at it, how it wavered over a toothed pyramid of rock cascading away to one side and into some only-imaginable void beyond the light.
Then Taeb came skulking out around the pyramid.
When she saw him, she grew motionless. She had a clever face. He recalled how he had been told that she helped in Athluan’s murder, Athluan who would have been, perhaps, Lionwolf’s surrogate father, if the Jafn Chaiord had lived.
‘You fled once,’ Vashdran said to Taeb. ‘But it seems you didn’t get far enough.’
‘Everything must be paid, in the end.’ She was pragmatic.
He said, almost intrigued for a minute, ‘So you know you’re dead.’
‘Yes. How else all this?’
‘How did you die, Greenhair?’
‘In the ice swamps near the Copper Gate. I left my house at the wrong hour and met a wolverine.’ She added, without any feeling, ‘It tore me in pieces.’
‘Then you must be glad to find yourself together again.’
‘Yes. But for how long?’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘don’t fret. I won’t harm you. I won’t even trouble you to open your legs. I don’t want you, and if I kill you for your past offences against me, I suppose you’ll only revive, or go elsewhere like the rest of Hell’s twice-dead.’
‘There is one,’ she said. She hooded her eyes. ‘There is one who has come after you. Who chose to seek you here, in anger.’
‘Who?’ Alarm coursed painfully through him. In his mind was the sudden image, a man with fiery hair and a blue stripe like a Fazion’s across his brows – Zeth Zezeth – Zzth, the god who had sired him and had so wanted this son dead.
But I am dead.
Death, of course, for such as Zzth the Sun Wolf, might not be sufficient.
‘It is,’ said the witch, ‘one you have never met in life. From the big city in the Ruk, Ru Karis.’
‘Ru Karismi? Who then from there?’
Relief made him stupid, he thought. For she said after a second, ‘I can’t see who it is. But only human, once, though gifted with magic.’
‘Why are you telling me?’
‘You chose me and spared me the churning second death in the deadsea.’
‘I didn’t choose you, Taeb, girl. I was given you.’
She shrugged her slight shoulders. ‘Even here,’ she said, ‘I have some powers. I can tell you things.’
‘Like this tale of some man of the Rukar who is in pursuit of me.’
She lowered her eyes.
Around the rock with flowing water, on the other inner side to the fall, he began to make out a chamber with a couch. It looked so ordinary and inappropriate he reckoned it sinister.
No, he would not lie down with a witch there.
‘Taeb,’ he said, ‘you can go where you want, or where they’ll let you. This is all the couching we’ll have, you and I.’
She nodded. Not meek, he thought, only cunning.
‘If any ask me about this,’ she said, ‘what do you wish I shall say?’
‘Say whatever you want.’
She bowed her head and slunk across the space and up the first of the stairs. When she had gone out of his sight, he walked through carelessly into the room with the low couch. A kind of membrane hung across it that he had not seen but which parted before him, rather like the web of some huge ice-spider giving way.
Turning back to see what it was, he put his hand against something that now closed the opening off from him, transparent and hard, like crystal.
Vashdran looked back into the room. He saw that after all a woman was on the bed, who had been quite invisible from the barrier’s other side. She lay on one elbow, her black hair falling over and along the floor as the fountain fell from the rock into the shadow. Her naked body was as black. It stretched there perfect and complete on the couch’s paleness, high yet heavy breasted, narrow of waist, wrist and ankle, the half ellipse of the polished ebony hip like the ripe curve of a black plum.
Vashdran forgot Taeb, forgot his insane and vicious paranormal father. Forgot the unknown man from Ru Karismi who might vengefully seek him here. Forgot he was in Hell.
Oh no, desire was not over in him, or not for her. He stood still, gazing at her.
‘Are you Chillel?’ Would she answer this naive question? He had never, in this incarnation, heard her speak.
The woman who was queen of Hell smiled. The midnight stars of her eyes had diamonds in their centres from the reflection of the little moon, which now balanced lovingly in the air above her head.
‘My name is,’ she said, in the voice of Chillel, from the body of Chillel – yet all not quite Chillel, not now, not here – ‘Winsome.’
Vashdran stared at her.
The polyglot language available to all in this afterworld, where anything spoken in whatever original mother tongue was somehow instantly translatable to every man, threw the delicate, appealing and somehow scornful word at him like one more stone.
But ‘Winsome?’ he said lightly. ‘Well, so you are.�
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‘Lie down with me,’ she said. ‘This bed is softer than the floors of Shabatu.’
Vashdran said, ‘You’re his wife. The stone King. Not that this frightens me much.’
‘No, I am not his wife, he is my husband. I am the moon of Hell. I am the dark moon who gives light.’ Her voice was honey. It dripped through his bones, turning to hot wine in the core of his loins. ‘It’s from me he takes that power, all the powers of light which fill the city. Lie down.’
Vashdran said, playful he thought, perhaps not only that, ‘If you’re the moon, you’ll burn me, maybe.’
‘Not you,’ she said.
In the worldly Chillel there had been only a vast empty landscape of night. But in this Chillel, who was called Winsome for her own beauty, some other expanse lay there dormant, welcoming perhaps, yet also indecipherable.
‘The last time,’ he said, ‘we did each other harm.’
‘This is not the last time.’
He moved towards her, and when he reached the couch her arms rose like snakes and coiled about his legs and buttocks, pulling him in against her, while her hair spilled all around them.
Yes. She burned. And his garments, all that armour, had evaporated.
He thought, astonished, I am alive after all.
Then he slid down into her arms, upon her body, her breasts, her mouth, no longer concerned with anything but to have her and to be had.
Curjai, who had spent his living life engaged in endless battle, and died of fever on the straw mattress, had never had an interval to lie there or anywhere with a woman. Confronted by the girl he had picked from the rafts, he was uneasy. It was a fact, some premonition had made him aware that to choose her would be to save her from something worse. Had he foreseen the extent of the massacre on the sea, he would have picked every woman left out there unselected.