by Tanith Lee
‘Don’t be afraid,’ he said at first, noting how she pressed her hands together, and the skitter of what he took for fear in her dark eyes. But then she looked him full in the face, and he saw she had been shocked, but only that. She was not fearful. Something else tensed her and made her eyes so stabbingly bright.
‘I know where I am,’ she said to him then. ‘In a hell. I’ve travelled a great distance, through many horrible and partly seen dead lands, to reach this one. I will tell you why.’
Curjai waited.
They were in a cave-like small cubicle inside the lodge of fish-stones, with one white torch flaming on the wall. There was a mattress on the ground. An unaesthetic and uninspiring love-nest. He had always, Curjai, preferred to look at pleasing objects, and in this room she was by far the best thing to be seen.
‘I will,’ she said, ‘if you insist, perform with you the sexual act. Aside from that, my business is with the one called Vashdran. My name is Ruxendra. I was an apprentice of the highest Maxamitan Level, in the Insularia of the Magikoy at Ru Karismi, City of the Kings. This city Vashdran, through his war, brought to destruction. When our ultimate weapons had been loosed on his horde of savages, death fell out of the skies also on us. Of this plague I perished. I was fifteen. When you’re done with me, barbarian, go to Vashdran, your brother. Tell him Ruxendra is here, Ruxendra who is not a woman but Magikoy. Whatever enemy he must otherwise face, he is my foe for ever, or till time itself is dead and rotting in some hell.’
Fourth Intervolumen
Sometimes flowers open in darkness; they are generally the thorned kind.
Proverb: Ruk Kar Is
Compared to Lionwolf’s hell, the largest island of the Vormland was warm, encased in centuries’ frozen shores of ice and hills of snow, over which snow-plastered mountains craned. The day was sunny, too. A fierce earthly sun leisurely crossed a steep blue sky. Out on the distant liquid sea, icebergs sunned themselves like huge seals, and steam lifted from them in long trails resembling smoke.
The god-house had been built beyond the shore village, on the side of a hill. It was a temple in the Vormish, Faz or Kelpish style: a box covered with ancient fossils and shells dug over years out of the undersnow cliff. Inside it had the usual wooden roof, made from an upturned boat. An altar of stonewood carved with fish, whales, porpoises, sharks and so on supported a mass of yellowish candles. When the goddess came out of her inner apartment, she would light them by breathing on them. Men had journeyed for miles to watch this sacred act.
‘She is Our Lady Saftri. She rose from the sea on a wave.’ This was what her priesthood told all visitors. They had seen the miracle in person. Naked and saffron-haired in a spurl of spindrift, she had landed at their feet. Then they had dropped at hers in worship.
Majord, the bard, composed a hymn on the spot. Two years on, it was still carolled about the islands, along with the others made since.
He stood now, Saftri’s priest-bard, by the doorway of her temple.
Inside it was dark. She did not sit in presence then.
She was a goddess, but Majord suspected her of sulking. She grew bored easily, and sometimes lost her temper. Once she had drowned a fishing fleet. But then she wept and rescued the men, sweeping them ashore. None of them grumbled at having to rebuild their boats. Irrational divine wrath was what you must expect, sometimes.
In the first months she had been all misery, mourning the loss of a son, also obviously a god. Women throughout the Vormland were mourning too in just that fashion.
Perhaps a tenth of the men of the north seas had gone to join a war far in the south, on the great continent there. For the first time in known history, Vorm, Kelp and Fazion had allied with the continent’s Jafn clans, the yellow Olchibe and crazy Gech. There had been a leader, a hero of extraordinary powers. All had followed him in a battle Gullahammer against the luxurious cities of the Rukar. But the mages of the Ruk deployed some supernatural weapon of colossal force. Not one man of the Gullahammer, they said, had survived. The Jafn clans suffered the worst, having invested every warrior of fighting age in the conflict. Olchibe and Gech fared little better. Only women and some of the ignorant tribes of northernmost Gech remained.
But the Rukar themselves had not done so well either. They had lost their smaller cities to the war. Unleashing their sorcerous death-strike, they caught the backlash of it on the capital, Ru Karis. The metropolis now stood defunct, abandoned save by the dead, snow-drifts drizzling over it.
During that year of mourning, almost every reiver of the north sea who had not joined the war and so survived threw himself into a new pact. Kelp and Faz and Vorm prepared their jalees, their scaled fish-horses, their fat Mother Ships. Their shamans raved in groves of ice, calling home the spirits of the local dead to swell their fleet.
Before, they had usually only raided along the Jafn coasts. But now the whole table of the continent’s upper lands lay unprotected, defended only by ancients and girls. The Ruk had been a living myth for ever of wealth and plenty. Once the poison-plague had rinsed itself away, all the unguarded treasures of the Rukar lay there for the taking.
The reiver ships set off. Those that returned months after, in the second year, told tales of easy fights and limitless gains. And they brought with them proof: curious foods and beverages, materials, ornaments and weapons, slaves. Even the stonewood altar in Saftri’s god-house had come as a trunk from Jafn lands, while the candles were the tribute of a Rukar village.
Majord cleared his throat. He warbled a flattering line. ‘Fount of grace, as morning is sun-haired.’
In the core of the temple he heard a sort of hiss.
Ah, she was not in a happy frame of mind.
Next second she manifested on the other side of the altar. Not a single candle did she light. A pity, for then the bits of Ruk gold hammered in there gleamed satisfactorily. Nevertheless her golden necklaces sparkled, her earrings and rings. She herself seemed made of pearl and topaz.
‘Our Lady.’ Majord went to his knees.
‘Oh, get up. What use is that?’ Up he got. ‘Why are you disturbing me?’
‘I come to beg on the new fleet your blessing. The fleet of Krandif’s men, two jalees and—’
‘Another fleet.’
‘Bound for the south, Our Lady.’
‘Yes, yes,’ impatiently. ‘Where else do you ever go? There are other countries, I’ve told you this. Northwards and west.’
Dubiously Majord nodded. ‘Yes, Our Lady.’
‘But you don’t believe me. You dare to disbelieve your goddess.’
‘No – no – but such tasty pickings there are to the south, and the other way would be a long, difficult voyage—’
‘Oh, a hail of fire on it,’ spat Saftri, using one of the – to her – inadequate curses of the Vormland. ‘Very well. I’ll come and bless your cutch of a fleet.’
Majord was accustomed to his goddess’s foul mouth. He had learned ages ago what cutch meant, and that it was fairly cutching useless to entreat her not to say it.
Saftri herself, who had been known in her former life as the Princess Saphay, progressed with a walk like music to the temple door.
She looked down with disfavour on the large village below the hill, the houses that were huts with sharkskin shutters, the one narrow hothouse for fruit, the nets and drying fish strung up, and the forlorn reddish cows that ambled about the streets, allowed to do anything, even eat hung-out washing, they were so scarce and precious. A stand of ice-poplars blocked off the view of the cliff’s lower edge and the bay below. But she had flown out there last night, unable to rest, and seen the assembled two jalees, one of which had sixteen ships, drawn up on the shore. Men had enhanced the cow or whale horns on the prows, and old human skulls had been cleaned and decked with coloured wool and unsuitable jewels pilfered from the Ruk. The two Mother Ships wallowed at anchor further out on the wet sea.
Saftri-Saphay had flown about a great deal over these past two years, getting her bear
ings – less geographically than personally. Being a goddess had many perks. Also a downside. For one, she could rarely sleep, exactly like, she exasperatedly thought, the Jafn peoples to one of whose chiefs she had once been married. The Vorms too did not sleep. Vorm, Faz and Kelp could go six or seven days and nights without slumber. This, as with the sleep-deprived Jafn, made them either psychic or deranged, she had still not decided which. Besides, as a goddess, she herself could now see Jafn sprites and spirits in the atmosphere – hovors and vrixes, glers, corrits, all sorts. She perceived they kept well clear of her.
Flying – not that she flew precisely, only swirled through the air as she had seen Guri do in her previous past – Saphay had found the landmasses further north and west. But, if she were honest, which generally she felt it best not to be, they alarmed her. She had never gone close. These continents were anyway like all the rest of this winter-shrouded world, cloaked in white, sea-edged with ice floes and bergs. If she ever supposed she caught the glint of lamps, she ignored it. She preferred the insane configurations of Vormland’s northern lights, which fluked across the night skies at irregular seasons. Their spasms and colours pleased her, flickering, beaming, fawn and bronze, hothouse rose and iridescent turquoise.
Flying was her hobby.
She had though never returned to the Southern Continent. The idea of Jafn lands depressed her, partly from having heard of the wreck her son’s war had brought them to, and partly from her bad memories. Ruk Kar Is held no allure. Her own country had been nothing to her ever, as she had never been anything to it.
Majord had now backed away, genuflecting, and was off at a trot to tell the ships their goddess was coming.
Saftri meant first to visit the village bath.
This was a hot spring about two miles further inland. Fogs of steam sometimes went up there, at others the spring shrank away into the earth. Brown grass grew lustily round its brink, and a single short tree that bore uneatable but pretty yellow fruit. Here the women of the village would congregate to bathe once or twice a month. They took their babies and younger children with them.
If Saftri was there, the women were always thrilled. They loved her and loaded her with garlands of the grass threaded with shells and bone trinkets they had made. Sometimes they told stories, glancing shyly at her. Saftri too told them stories, suitably translated from the Rukarian. Mostly she looked at their children, at the boys who were now all the ages Lionwolf had been, when she had borne him and seen him grow. Half god, in ten years he had become a man of twenty or more. These everyday infants took their time. She could gaze on them, sometimes hold them in her arms or stare into their eyes, for up to twelve years before she must let go. The mothers did not mind. The benign involvement of a goddess was also a blessing. And they remembered her lament for her dead son at the time they too were lamenting their own dead sons of fighting age. Not aware, of course, it was her son who had drawn theirs to annihilation under the walls of Ru Karismi.
The women at the spring exclaimed as Saftri appeared out of the air – one more perk of goddessdom was this knack of manifestation.
Saftri found their adulation gratifying. She could not help herself. She had been so often discounted and ignored in her mortal life.
Soon she was seated near the steamy well, her hair garlanded and her favourite child, a male of seven years, positioned on her lap.
His name was Best Bear. His mother looked fondly at him sitting with the goddess. His mother opined there must be great things due for Best Bear.
He was a sturdy child, good-mannered and good-looking, with long brown hair bound back in a whale ivory clip. He lay quietly against Saftri, who intrigued him. He was conscious also of his exalted status in being chosen.
‘Tell to me a story,’ he demanded.
Saftri smiled, and the women nodded.
‘Once there was a mighty hero,’ said Saftri.
‘What name was his?’
‘His name … why ever do you ask?’ Both of them were coy.
‘Was his name – anything to do with bears?’
Saftri smiled again, mysterious. A glorious scent came from her, and from her hair, at all times now. The boy was in love with her, as a boy may be with his mother, at first. But neither his physiological mother nor his peers were jealous. They too had piously accepted his destined importance.
Saftri told the story of a hero who grew to manhood and won great riches and three wives of surpassing loveliness.
Best Bear sat thoughtful, as always, entranced.
He was not Lionwolf. Only Lionwolf could be that. But he was wholesome and handsome. He let her hold him and there would be at least five more years before he was a man and she must release him.
Sometimes she vaguely wondered how it was that Lionwolf, himself half immortal, had died, when she who had only, she believed, had dealings with the gods became one herself. But her grief still lay deep within her like a sleeping stone, and had never allowed her hope of Lionwolf’s return. She had felt his death. As if her womb itself had been plucked away and flung under the ice of the sea. She knew also she would never again bear any child. Nor did she want to.
Out along the bluff that marked off the bay, an iron gong clanged into noise. It was the summons to the men, the women too.
Irked, Saftri relinquished her maternal clutch on Best Bear, who was in fact the first of everyone preparing to run to the shore.
There were always these duties. Once a princess, Saftri was well schooled, if mutinous. No prowess could be had without some concomitant task.
She too got up, and de-manifested. It was time to bless Krandif’s pestilential ships.
Horsazin were being persuaded out of the open sea after a swim. The fish-horses shook themselves, their glassy manes and tails. Greyish in ordinary tone, they had already been striped over with waterproofed magenta dye by the Vormish reivers, ready for raiding and battle.
Saftri sniffed. The air reeked of fishy horse. But she must bless them also before they went up the ramps into the lower decks of the two Mother Ships.
She did her duty solemnly, and looking very young herself, a virtuous royal child.
Touched, her people – for hers they were – clustered in reverent silence. Even the horses kept still, and now and then nodded their single-horned heads.
Krandif the ship-lord moved among his men, hanging on them fresh luck-charms for the voyage. Though the continent was now so easy to burgle, the seas between were always liable to problems. Last, Krandif came to the goddess, put his head down on his fists respectfully, and kneeled in front of her on the ground.
‘Go with my blessing, Krandif Wild-Heart. Go and kind weather go with you, and vast riches await you, ripe as fruit on a hotshed vine. Amen,’ she added, in the Olchibe way. She had not spent all those years with Guri without picking up the odd mannerism. Guri too had died. She had often wished to attack him herself he had so irritated her. But he had been loyal to her son, and his death unfair.
The goddess now seemed sorrowful.
Worried, Krandif gained his feet.
‘Do you have for me a warning of something, Our Lady?’
Saftri said, ‘All will be well with you. There’s no warning necessary.’
Krandif, a Vormish warrior in the prime of youth, was not seriously unnerved. Nevertheless he thought he had better look for omens and read them sensibly when once at sea.
They were packing the horsazin, whinnying and boisterous, into the deck holds. Men rolled their slimmer boats down on runners to the liquid sea of the harbour.
Heavy with stores, horses, and travelling war shamans who would undertake to harm any foe by magical means, the Mother Ships rode low in deeper water. One had nine masts and one had eleven, all clotted with canvas.
Saftri had viewed similar events many times during the last year, and the victorious returns.
There had even been some slaves brought from Ruk Kar Is. But none of them had survived more than a month on the uncivilized Vormland
shore.
Above the sky was purely blue. Saftri yawned with impending ennui. Best Bear was diving about among the men, asking to go with them, and laughingly praised and denied. It seemed to her suddenly he was becoming too male, too fast. Perhaps she would not have him to console her more than another couple of years.
By noon, Krandif’s fleet, sailing due south, had made fine headway. All land was by then out of sight, save for the occasional islet or tower of ice. A weightless wind puffed from the northeast. The oars churned the water. Men sang, glad to be at work.
There was nothing untoward anywhere.
Once a small whale breached about ten ship-lengths away. Its horned head shot high, but it was less in size than one of the Mother Ships, and went down again smoothly, with no bother.
During the afternoon, they passed among a herd of emerald-tinged bergs, and on the far side clouds strayed over the sky. But these too slid away. The sky generally stayed clear – unreadable.
Krandif patrolled the narrow upper deck, when not taking his turn on the row-bench. He had not been able to rid himself of the instinct that something unusual might happen.
The day ended in a soft dusk.
Fit and keen, the men elected to row on through the night.
Darkness began, just the horizon retaining a greenish luminescence, as often it did. Above, no flickers of lights appeared, merely stars, but they were enough, and then two moons came up, one full and the other a slender bow.
It was about an hour into full night that the sound started ahead of them.
One by one the crews rested their oars, and perched silent, looking away into the south, from where the sound seemed to come.
There were several and various peculiar noises to be heard out on the moving seas of the north. Whales mooed or ululated. Ice split like the blast of magicians’ cannon. Weather too spoke eerie or threatening. And the wind, they knew, carried the voices of the drowned, which would sometimes tell you things.