by Tanith Lee
None of these ocean-accustomed men had ever heard a sound like the one now penetrating the sky and drawing every second nearer.
It was a kind of bestial scream, but compressed to the width of a needle, and stretching over the whole arch of the sky. It pierced not only the night, but the ears, so men put their fingers in them. Brave faces filled with a murky uncertain look.
On the decks of both the Mother Ships the shamans had come out. Chants drifted in a sizzle of mage-fires. A rumbling woke from the underdecks among the agitated horsazin. They did not like this new noise either.
Then fire burst out across the sky, one extended streamer of it. It was golden-red, with a central vein of blackest blue, and like no northern light any of them had ever seen. In a breath it was miles off – then overhead.
As the fire coursed over they felt the freeze of it scorch them. Men flung themselves down. The sea heaved. The ships bucked dangerously.
Krandif, the leader, kept his station at the horned prow. He stared up into the fire and saw it was like a flaming rope, spitting and sparking, pulled now on and away at great speed into the north.
Behind it followed simple darkness. The moons shone out again, seeming less vital than they had.
Krandif looked about. A few men had toppled or sprung off into the sea. They were being hauled out and wrapped in furs. Skins of grog went round. The shamans had ended their sorcery, perhaps convinced they had sent the fire-rope packing.
The leader called, pitching his voice to all twenty-seven of the long ships.
‘A star-stone tumbling out of heaven. I’ve heard of these. My grandfather saw one. It will mean for us much luck.’
His message was accepted. He was the ship-lord.
He himself was not so sure. But he had had the warning he anticipated, had only to think how to judge it. For if it was a fall, then whose? The Rukar had already fallen, and the Jafn. Maybe it was their anger then, all those dead, blown away from the south in fire-breath, delayed for some reason, an afterthought.
They always brought her supper when the sun went down, from what was cooked for their men’s evening meal. Sometimes Saftri would eat what they brought. She never needed to, and the food was, to her Ruk-educated tastes, frequently unpalatable. Another measure of her boredom was whether or not she ate dinner.
Tonight she picked at some type of porpoise stew, then pushed the bowl away. The little apple she consumed slowly, devouring even its core and pips. There was a dearth of fruit normally, the village hotshed meagre and constantly getting cold.
Saftri went out of her temple, and waited on the hill for moonrise.
How strange these luminous nights. She was never used to them. She had earlier dropped asleep too, and dreamed of love-making. First her companion was her Jafn husband Athluan, who had been a very pleasing lover. Then he was there, the god, Zeth Zezeth Zzth. He, of course, had been a lover beyond all compare or scope. In the dream she had dissolved in ecstasy, but then woken in fright. The god had always wanted to murder her for her impertinence in becoming pregnant with his child. She thought now she had, in some esoteric way, inadvertently robbed Zzth of some of his mightiness, when she had done this, for though he had haunted her in her human sleep, terrorizing and in dreams harming her, once Lionwolf was born she had not seen Zzth anywhere for a great while. In the end he had returned with threats. But that too might not have been reality, only some sort of hallucination. At the time she was in the comfortless care of Yyrot, the second of her three personal gods.
In any case, Zzth had, she assumed, eventually caused the death of her son, and of Guri, and of herself.
Two years had gone by since then. Perhaps, as it had seemed before, Zzth could no longer find her.
Was it her boredom made her think of him?
Was horrible terror then preferable to dullness?
Despite the deliciously lascivious dream, Saftri must enduringly hope Zzth would avoid her.
The moons danced over the horizon. The first was full and the other a bow.
She might make one of her wingless flights. She was a goddess now. She could, if she truly wished, fly right up to the moons.
Saftri was still poised before her doorway musing, and the moons just over an hour up the sky, when a shattering bang shook the air and the island, and out on the horizon to the south a plume of scarlet fire cancelled darkness.
What was this? A storm – some eruption of an ice-volcano far off in the sea?
Below, people were surging out of their houses. A hundred hands superfluously pointed towards the south.
This had been the direction Krandif’s fleet had taken. Had something gone wrong with his adventure?
Speculation ended with an answer.
The red fire-line hurtled straight at the Vormland, straight as a spear flung at the bay.
Saftri gave an ungoddess-like squeak. She had deduced the aerial missile was aimed at her.
She did not need to inform herself who had sent it or – as she could now see – was a part of it.
Much worse than any nightmare, the flame sprayed open like an aspirated boil in the skies above the harbour. A blazing gout, it roiled there, and in the midst of it was the image of a gigantic snarling wolf, blue, a blue almost black, and its eyes like molten, bleeding gold.
It glared right down at her. Into her gaze.
Saftri, goddess of the Vormland, felt herself wither with infantile fear.
Why he had waited she did not know. Some further game? Now he was here. ‘Your punishment I keep for you …’ this was what he had said last, ‘… we shall savour it, you and I. I shall flay the skin off your soul’s blood … Into eternity I will take you … It is owed.’
Her impulse was to bolt for cover, but there was no such chance. He was – omnipotent.
They were shouting below. The entire village, the bluff, the ice and snow, were lit to a lurid daylight.
The wolf that was Zeth Zezeth leaned from his fire-cloud and blew fire also out of his jaws.
In the bay, with an explosion, three remaining anchored Mother Ships died. Columns of fire hit the walls of night. Flinders, ivory pieces, bits of oars and masts and planks spouted in all directions, striking on the bluff in a clinketing rain. Nearer the shore a scatter of jalee ships and fishing boats were alight too.
Some of the men left in the village had begun to pelt harbourwards to try to save their vessels. But they turned and sprang back the other way as the wolf-god breathed again, almost mildly now, in across the shambling village.
Fifty roofs, made of old boats and covered by snow-slabs and oiled skins, crackled into ignition.
The calling and screaming was agony to hear. People, reduced by evil radiance to silhouetted fiendish shapes, gushed to and fro. Children shrilled. The side of a house caved inwards, another detonated outward. The choked air was full of whirling objects and the cacophony of panic.
Saftri slunk to hide herself inside her fragile shrine.
But blue-black was spilling swiftly from the fire-cloud. It circled down, spinning, and contacted the island. Saftri had not even got in at her door. She saw him, indistinct for a moment, wolf or man or neither, poured upward to describe the form of a god. He was only a few strides from her. As in her dream, her recollection, Zeth Zezeth was as beautiful as only a god could be, maned with hot silver, his eyes like solar discs. And in that place, all this beauty had become the most repulsive obscenity ever to exist.
Her bones were water. She must throw herself at his feet and beg for mercy. It would make no difference to his sadism. Yet she could not help it.
Behind him, behind the figure of Zeth Sun Wolf, a woman with her hair on fire was stumbling up the hill. She carried something. She was crying Saftri’s title, Our Lady! Our Lady!
But I am powerless, now.
Zeth smiled. ‘Good evening,’ he said, ‘Saftri.’
His voice was like a glacial wire and full of mockery – the endless scorn of a god.
How could she have dre
amed of love with him? How could she ever have accused herself in the past of only loving her son because he had reminded her of this devil?
Saftri backed stiltedly away from Zeth Zezeth. He did not take a step but yet kept pace with her retreat, staying where he had been: only a foot or so from her. She put her hands behind her against the uprights of the door of her temple. What use was the temple? It could never shield her from him.
‘Is there,’ she whispered, as she had before, ‘no other recourse? What have I done to anger you? It was you—’
‘Silent,’ he said. That was all. His voice was barely audible yet tremored the hill. In the incineration of the village further house-frames cracked. ‘I have allowed you this interval,’ murmured Zzth, ‘to spread your insignificant wings. To believe yourself safe from me. But now we are done with that, you and I, Saphay.’
Despite the rest, Saftri blinked at his use of her former name.
As she blinked, the vista beyond the god cleared in an unanticipated way. And she saw that the woman who struggled up the hill in the smoulder and sparks of her burning hair was one of the village mothers. What she held, with some awkwardness, was a dead child. Saftri-Saphay took in, even in that infinitesimal blink, the boy’s own unburnt hair, lustrous and brown and caught in a whale ivory clip. His head hung to one side, spineless, the neck snapped. It was Best Bear.
Tears filled the eyes of Saphay and dropped from her. Before they reached the ground they changed. They too became gleaming fire.
She was weeping flames.
Saphay raised her head and looked through her incendiary tears at Zzth.
‘You killed my son.’
‘So I did,’ he said.
She did not hear.
Saphay, who had become Saftri and the goddess of the Vormland, was also now metamorphosing.
Her hair exploded to a stiff flambeau of gold, her face became at once both that of a woman and that of a lioness. She was a lion, standing upright. She was a woman, leaping forward on all fours – and where her metallic pads met the snow, bubbling rents appeared.
She reached Zzth in one heartbeat more. Her mouth undid itself on a river of laval notes, between a lament and a guttural roar. Her entire body was in flux, an entity of pale flame and brilliant flesh, each able to be the other.
Long claws of adamant struck home in the flawlessness of Zeth Zezeth. With her other forepaw she smashed his body backwards.
He was a god, Zzth. One of the least amenable.
But she was not Saphay, not now.
He tipped off the side of the hill, floundered and went down like any earth-born creature. The lion-faced goddess landed on, him and, cat-like, shook him by the throat.
Zzth howled. He tried to slam her from him. Golden bolts dashed upward, but she beat his hands off her without effort and sank her fangs into his etheric body. He was no longer beautiful. She had ruined his looks inside a few minutes. He flopped in the snow, gurgling, struggling, impotent. What must be his blood – dark and silvery – was coiling down the hill.
From all sides men and women had by now come staggering. They balanced on the hill’s edges, with their burning world at their back, and watched as Saftri gnawed and ripped the demon which had come at them from the sea.
They watched in awe, in stunned pride, despite the evisceration of their security and their hearts.
The goddess finally seemed to be trying to tear the god apart, limb from limb. This she could not quite do. Nevertheless, he appeared lifeless as a rag, unconscious perhaps; certainly he no longer attempted to fight her off.
Saftri rose from him. She stamped on his belly, in his spangled blood. The lion aspect of her went out then like a strong light, yet still she was sheathed in a gold glow.
In the sky meanwhile all trace of the fire-cloud had dispersed. Only the village lit the night.
Saftri turned that way, and as her enemy had done she breathed, this time towards the sea. Icy mist flowed from her lips and covered the coast, blooming over the arson of the houses. Their redness dimmed to black. Smoke drifted, smelling of soot and ice.
Saftri stepped off her lover, the father of her dead son. ‘You will have other spare lives for your use,’ she said, ‘a closet full. I will do this to all of them if you come back. Like you, I have eternity now.’ The wolf-god’s apparent corpse sagged into the snow, crumbling like wet bread. There was, over the smog of smoke, some other aroma, holy and bewitching – the pheromones perhaps of an ethereal argument.
Seventh Volume
LET THE LION ROAR
The ourth may trumpet,
And grumble may the bear;
The wolf will howl –
But let the Lion roar.
Children’s song: Olchibe
ONE
Pale sky met white land. Between the two, still, lay the city.
No road any more led to it. It was surrounded by a featureless waste. There had been dust, curious dust, but winds had spread it or shovelled it away. New snows flaked down and frosts hardened. The city itself had kept its likeness to these snows and frosts. Occasionally, despite everything, from the heights above the walls a splinter of crystal might glitter, ruby or diamond. From far off you could even now, at certain times of day, mistake Ru Karismi, City of the Kings, for something populated and alive.
A wind brushed the evening along. It was not any wind that had risen after the White Death. Yet it had an unsettling music. Through keyholes of window-empty towers it piped, and down the streeted slopes.
On the Stair of a thousand marble steps a band of men paused.
The treads were broad, but on every one was set a steel statue, each confronting the next diagonally. The statues were generally of persons straightforwardly recognizable: swordsmen, crowned kings and queens, hooded mages of both genders, priests. One or two defied analysis, however.
‘What can that be?’ Krandif’s brother Mozdif inquired.
The Vormish men considered the statue.
‘It is a woman, is it? A man?’
‘No. A beast it is.’
‘A woman,’ said Krandif, making a leaderly decision, ‘who’s a beast also. You’ll all have been meeting a few of those.’
It had turned out a fair crossing after the fire-star omen. And riding inland the country was deserted, no opposition anywhere. Perhaps a fight would have been more cheering.
They went on, mountain-climbing the Stair.
Healthy, strong men, used to husbandry and rowing, they yet found the steps difficult. There were not many staircases in the Vormland.
Further down, in the long intervals of silence, the discontented neighs of horsazin might be heard. Other parties from the fleet rummaged there through abandoned stately houses whose roofs had sometimes collapsed, and most of whose coloured windows had been stormed out and now littered the roadways like jewels.
They had come across old funeral burning places, still black under two years of ice. They found skeletons too, the grinning balls of skulls. Once or twice there was a corpse the cold had entirely preserved, but even these had given up their humanity, and were like carved, painted things which had faded.
There were plenty of treasures left in Ru Karis. But more than gold and silver, the sea-peoples valued the unusual and nutritious foods and drinks, and foreign armaments, and of most of those the city had been despoiled. Either that or its own citizens had taken them away to the west. The Rukar had some town of tents there now, it was said, ruled by the last King Paramount, a coward who had run from the final battle and so lived.
Of course, there were supposedly mechanical wonders in the city, but none of these were ever located. They had had, these Rukar, magical servants made of brass and iron. And also they had been served by the greatest magicians of the known world, the Magikoy. But all the Magikoy, so the story went, died, either at the loosing of the fatal weapons or in the months that succeeded. The Magikoy were no more.
At the top of the Stair was a high wall, but part of it had given way. T
he entrance into the parks and palaces of Ru Karismi’s royalty was uncomplicated.
They picked their way in over the stones. They peered along twilight avenues of ice statues, shattered glass parasols, latticed and pillared pavilions.
‘There are ghosts in this garden.’
‘In all spots. With us came our own ghosts from this very war. They will take care of all such.’
The wind whined. Stars showered on the sky like the broken glass of the city’s windows.
For a moment Mozdif, turning, caught sight of a shining shadow, man-like but sculpted, and much taller than a man, with the head of an animal.
He drew his long knife and moved stealthily after it, where it had seemed to slip back among the architecture.
After a fruitless search of some twenty minutes, he gave it up. The apparition too must be a ghost, or the spirit of the beast-woman-man off the stairs.
Although he, along with the rest, had heard of the Magikoy and their mechanical golems, Mozdif did not identify what he had seen.
Long after the reiver band had forged on through the gardens, the great Gargolem of Ru Karismi stalked from its alcove in a section of wall which no longer existed, passing indeed – and obviously – from its own other dimension.
It stood, looking down on the darkening city. Its head was elongate and fanged, but was the head of an obscure creature none had ever dared to classify.
In the aftermath of war the Gargolem had vanished. Those remaining had not known if it too was destroyed, or if it had only abandoned them in their fall.
Unreadable now, the visage of the Gargolem. But it had always been so.
From isolated man-made caves, the little lamps of the Vorms flowered up. They washed their horsazin with stale seawater, then feasted in the halls and houses, and sometimes sang there. But they were not the vandals they had been, or had been said to be. Ru Karis, where they would spend the night in order to tell the tale properly in the future at their hearths, commanded veneration. They offered wine and titbits to the dead; their songs were low and slow and sad.