by Tanith Lee
Westward, where the night hung totally black with overcast, Bhorth the king, who was no coward and had not run from battle, walked his own city.
It had a title. It was called Kol Cataar, from the Rukarian firefex, sometimes named Ctar, that was Risen From Ashes.
Bhorth was a big man, but he lost fat after the White Death. He had regained, not entirely unwillingly, the bulky muscular physique he possessed in former years. His blond hair was thicker too, where his waistline had lessened. This had been the secondary benison of that which somehow saved him from the Death, a side effect of magic.
He had not known, to begin with, what it was. But there were other survivors. He dreamed often of Armageddon and its epilogue. How they sat in a circle in the desert of dust – which was all that was left of arms and armour, chariots and armies, nations, men. And how those in the circle had only survived through being proofed. Bhorth remembered Ipeyek the tribesman too, who had explained: ‘Through wife. Wife of me.’ And, later, ‘Whoever lay on her.’
True enough. Any man it seemed who had dighted that irresistible woman, blacker even than this night, lovelier even than life, had survived the Death.
‘See there, lord king. The third storehouse is done.’
‘That’s good,’ said Bhorth, marshalling his thoughts, gruffly encouraging.
‘And one whole extra street.’
‘Yes. A fine job. Very straight.’
The new houses were built of forest logs tough as rock. Bhorth had forbidden the use of ice-brick except for temporary shelters. Mostly the town – city – of Kol Cataar was still made of ice. And where not of ice, of skin tents and leaning bothies of branches and snow.
Five hundred odd, those were all the citizens and steaders he had been able to establish here. For even once they left the poisoned Ru Karismi, his subjects fell dead on the journey. Not all of them perished from the weapon-plague. Some only gave up. The weather had been bad. Snowstorms, hail and wind like swords from the east – as if it would never stop blowing over them the dregs of the Death, the dust.
The Magikoy had done their share of dying as well. When the survivors stabilized in the first year to approximately five hundred, only three of these were Magikoy. Two women, one man. The women maguses were young, but the man very old – two centuries old he looked to Bhorth. How long, even with his arts, could he last?
Bhorth had often considered too what had become of the city’s own guardian mage, Thryfe. He had not apparently been present when the weapons were used, though there were reports of his being noted in the city afterwards, attempting to ease the sick. Too late. It would always perplex Bhorth, Thryfe’s derogation from duty. Before that, the tall striding magus had if anything been over-immaculate and harsh in his service.
‘There is the third hothouse, lord king. Unfortunately the sheets of quartz in the outer wall cracked.’
‘I see it.’
‘We’ll start again tomorrow.’
‘Yes, better start again.’
The king and his architect, planted on the straight narrow street, looked mournfully at the slightly leaning mess of the third hothouse. Already the men had been ten months over it. Probably it would never be completed satisfactorily. One and two were not so efficient either. They might have to go the way of the Jafn barbarians, using stonewood and ice again, and magecraft, if the three maguses could rise to it.
Bhorth patted the architect on the arm.
‘You’ve done well. Don’t be concerned. It will come right. Maybe you should get home now, to your wife and fireside.’
Thankful, the man and his assistants went off through the town.
No, you could not dignify it with the word city. Even razed Kandexa to the north, even razed Or Tash and Sofora, had been greater than this shambles.
But Bhorth was not pessimistic, and he too turned back for his ‘palace’, his three guards ambling along with him.
Bhorth liked the informality of this pioneer project. He liked the fact he had supernaturally been enabled to live through the blast of hell. Also, he liked his present queen, and the son she had given him the previous year, about the time of the Garland Festival.
Something remarkable there. Something more to cogitate over, when otherwise fate seemed set against his people of the Ruk.
The ‘palace’ had been put on a terrace of snow-blocks, and was built of snow. Bhorth had stipulated that a palace proper, one of stone or at least logs, would be the last building in the new city to go up.
This was a big house, though, with a wide wood door braced by steel and guarded by two more men in the dilapidated mail of Ru Karismi.
Bhorth hove inside.
Torches blazed on walls, and little wet rivulets of melted ice wiggled down from them. The entry broadened into a hall. It was a sight. Rare screens of ivory and gold stood about in it, and candles burned in silver sconces. When it was dinnertime, the cooked game and frost-bitten fruit would be brought in on plates of glass, the excellent wine served in goblets patterned by gems. All this inside an ice-box! Besides these everyday souvenirs of the Ruk, there were the velvets and silks and tapestries locked in chests to save them from the cold. Bhorth and his queen wore deer leather and bear fur.
There she was, Tireh, Bhorth’s queen, among her four women by the big iron-clad hearth. The boy, just a year and a half in age, was sitting by them on the warm hearthstone, reading – yes, reading – from a little scroll with coloured pictures.
Bhorth gazed at this, not startled, for he had seen it before, from the boy’s ninth month.
Tireh was not royal. All the royal women had died, save the two queens of the former King Paramount, both of whom had retired from the city a while before the war, and did not reappear. Tireh was merely a young woman who had, during the awful trek here, trudged along in the snow, allowing her grandmother and aunts – her mother being dead – to sit in the lashdeer-drawn carriage-slee.
Bhorth had noticed her bravado. One night, when he was doing the rounds of the bivouac to see how his people had fared, which usually was not well, he had complimented Tireh on her care of her folk. An hour later she and he were coupling in the ‘royal’ tent.
They had six or seven nights together. Then the business of the exodus drew him away.
He saw her next when she arrived with one of her elegant aunts. The aunt announced Tireh was with child.
‘Well,’ Bhorth had said then, ‘but may I ask if it’s mine?’
Tireh only said, ‘No other, lord King. I was virgin, as you know.’
‘So you were.’ Yet, he thought, there could have been others subsequently. Whatever, poor girl, he had better look after her anyway. He put her in a private slee, and sometimes rode by in his own sleekar to visit her. Three or four more times they made love. It was friendly rather than passionate.
By the day they reached the western Ruk village Bhorth had decreed would be the root of a new city, Tireh was swelling very fast. She gave birth not long after the ‘palace’ was erected, but several tent lanes away from it.
He heard the outcry and thought something had caught fire, the barely started metropolis melting. He rushed through Kol Cataar, his men at his heels, and found instead of fire an element black as night. Blacker. As black as the woman he had lain with before the White Death, the woman who had somehow inoculated him, by the sexual act, against dying.
Among the Jafn, Bhorth had learned, such a child was reckoned a hero, constructed directly by God. Bhorth did not believe in God. He believed in gods. Only a plethora of such personalities could create the bloody mayhem everywhere demonstrated in the physical world. Despite that, Bhorth was impressed. Everyone was. To the refugees of the Ruk this uncanny baby represented a miracle – a sign of renewed reward and faith.
Bhorth therefore married Tireh. She was crowned with an ancient crown of gold, his queen. They got along famously.
But the boy.
Gazing over at him now, Bhorth felt as always a kind of jumping in his veins. It was
a question – and an answer.
Never before had Bhorth come across the notion that a man might lie with a woman, and she get him with child. But that, plainly, was what the black woman had done. Bhorth, escaping death, had been gravid with the offspring of their union. Having himself no womb he had needed to pass on the seed. This he soon accomplished by the mundane biological means. But Tireh’s baby was undeniably also the baby of the woman whom Ipeyek had called Chillel.
Now the little boy saw Bhorth.
The child put down his scroll and bounded sure-footedly forward, arms held out.
He was black as a fossil-coal in the fire, and superlative. Besides he looked older than his months. A child of three or four perhaps would be his match.
Bhorth caught him and swung him high.
‘Father!’ he cried, staring up in joy at the dripping ugly ceiling.
Bhorth hugged his son. He loved the child. He had had to name him too, that was the custom. Sallusdon had been the name Bhorth elected to give. It was the name of the last King Paramount, before pernicious vile Vuldir had assumed the throne. Sallusdon had been inept and selfish but that did not matter now. His was a king’s name without stigma, and the boy must bear it.
‘Sallus – what have you been at today, while I was busy?’
The child smiled into his eyes. Tenderly he said, ‘I missed you, Father.’
They ate supper by the fire with the old Magikoy, something that would never have happened in Ru Karismi. Bhorth squinted at the old fellow now and then, afraid to catch him out in some senility.
A poet came and spoke an ode over the twanging of a narrow harp.
The evening ended. Everyone went to bed.
Bhorth and Tireh had sex in their comfortable greedy fashion. They were well suited.
Sleep filled the palace and the city-town, prerogative for the western peoples, for whom more than one insomniac night was an affliction.
Bhorth dreamed, and Tireh also. She dreamed she was standing in the midst of a waste of snow, calling and calling in fear for her son. Bhorth dreamed he hunted an unseen, unknown beast, running it down, always almost taking it, but always it got away.
The chaze, a snow-snake about the length of a woman’s arm, came in through a torch-licked hole in the terrace side, and slithered awhile in the understores among casks of bear meat and jars of oil. Able to resist, as all its kind now could, the freezing winter of the world, the snake still enjoyed heat. When a chaze would happen on some village or camp, fire-wary it avoided the direct rays of the hearth, preferring to snuggle up with men and women in their toasty bed-places. Being virulently poisonous it must often have been disappointed that the ones bitten by it so quickly lost all warmth.
The prince, the son of Bhorth, Tireh and Chillel, lay sleeping under his rugs with the utter peace of childhood.
As the white, grey-barred snake slid fluidly in beside him he did not wake, and in a short time the snake slept too.
It was the moons which half woke Sallus.
There were three of them in a group, but all only a crescent. Nevertheless they gave a permeating light, which crossed over the high skin-glazed window slowly, throwing lit panes down on the floor.
Sallus stirred, his eyes almost opening as the moonlight infiltrated his dreams. Sensing a companion, he took it for the known body of a favourite toy, and gathered it in his arms.
The chaze thrashed fully alert. Its riot roused the boy. Surprised, it was not until the venomous teeth closed in his shoulder that Sallus cried out – and then only at the pain.
Bhorth leapt from his mattress. Tireh surged upright, her hands to her mouth. Down the corridor there came the noise of a woman’s shrieks and the thudding rattle of armed guards running.
Thrusting through his men, Bhorth ran into the room the first.
Sallusdon’s nurse, her hair standing on end, posed in a screaming moonlight tableau. Bhorth pushed her aside.
The boy sat there, continuing to seem surprised, holding the dead rope of the chaze in both his hands, which together were just big enough to encircle it.
‘Look, Father,’ said the child.
Bhorth looked.
He saw the snake had had the life wrung out of it by his son of less than two years, and also that before dying the chaze had bitten the boy in the left shoulder above the heart.
‘Stop that fool screeching,’ Bhorth advised. One of the guards took hold of the nurse and dragged her outside, where there came the sound of a slap and sobbing. Bhorth leaned over his son. ‘You’ve been very brave and clever. Keep very still now.’
‘But it’s dead, Daddy,’ said Sallus, letting go of etiquette in puzzlement.
‘Yes, but we must see to that bite.’ Bhorth knelt on the bedrugs. He saw a scarf with the imperial crimson and silver of Ru Karismi, and the favourite toy, a black woollen seal, and nearly began to rant in anguish and sorrow. He thrust the clamour down. The boy would die, in horrible agony. Bhorth had even seen such deaths here and there among the steads of his own estate. The only chance, and it was slim, was to suck the filth out of the bite-holes.
‘Do you trust your father?’
‘Yes, Daddy.’
‘I need to clean your wound, my warrior. Hold quiet.’
Bhorth put his arm round the child, bent his head and fixed his mouth on the mark. He had watched a mageia do this once. Though she swallowed none of it she had been sick for a year from contact with the poison, and only her magecraft saved her. But the victim lived.
Bhorth understood something was quite wrong, however, the instant his lips and tongue met the bite.
The taste of the infected blood, he knew, should be bitter, and the edge of the wound metallic. They were not like that. The blood of Sallus had the meaty taste of health, with something else spiced inside it. The cut skin was clean.
Notwithstanding, Bhorth siphoned up the blood from the bite, turned and spat it on the ground, put back his head to suck and spit again.
Around him Bhorth’s men had stayed immobile as statues. Tireh, unlike most mothers at such a juncture, was equally motionless. A splendour of a girl, a born queen. And the boy was a royal prince. Not one whimper or plea, and this must have hurt, maybe worse than the bite.
Exhausted, Bhorth sat back. He wiped his mouth. He felt dizzy. Was that the poison? But the vertigo went off. Sallusdon looked sleepily up at him.
Perhaps, perhaps I was in time. He’ll live – he must live.
‘It’s all right, Father,’ said Sallusdon. ‘Thank you.’
Bhorth got up presently and went out. Before he made himself precautionary throw up off the terrace into the moony dark, he flung the dead snake on to the bare street below.
In the morning, those who looked for it saw it had gone. No doubt someone had taken it to peel its skin for gloves, not realizing yet what ill-omened harm it had done.
Some days later when Bhorth, strong as an ox, was out hunting, and the young prince running laughing and shouting through the palace’s back corridors ahead of his still-shaken nurse – who had expected only death for her negligence – the chaze reappeared. It crept out on the rough-laid tiles and gazed with first one then the other grey sidelong eye at the boy.
The nurse, always resourceful, fainted in a heap.
Sallus asked sternly, ‘Is it you?’
The snake seemed to think that it was. It turned round like a legless cat. Then laid its head flat on the floor for Sallusdon, son of Bhorth, Tireh and Chillel, to put his foot upon. An uneven black ring went round its fully alive body, the reminder of how and where the child had crushed it to death, this boy of less than two who looked only four, yet had employed the strength of a man of sixteen.
‘Very well,’ said Sallusdon.
He put his foot on the snake’s neck. The snake allowed this, even vibrating slightly, as if pleased.
Across almost the length of the continent, eastwards, in Jafn country, the Holas House was celebrating the Feast of Embers. The two years since the calami
ty in the Ruk had seen an improvement for this clan whose emblem was a roaring seal. Youths thought too immature or weak to join the Lionwolf’s Rukar war had by now mostly grown into adequate men. Even some of the greybeards worked with a will. Willing work also took place on the mattresses. Twelve daughters and twenty sons had been the result, all yet living and hale. One of these was the Chaiord’s son, that every one of them knew must become a hero.
Arok had not been idle in other ways. He had secured the defences of his garth, then ridden over the seaboard ice fields and inland territories suggesting alliance with every other clan that would. Not all wanted to comply, and some never had. But against a background of constant reiver raids from the north, for the most part the good sense of Arok swayed the Jafn, even the hot-headed Kree and the conniving Shaiy. At Thing meets along the coast, under frozen pylons, giant ships and other curiosities, handfuls of men quibbled, debated, and truce was made. Not one of the clans had not been pared to the quick by the White Death. Every Chaiord who met with Arok was, as Arok was, some kin, close or obscure, of a previous leader who had died under Ru Karismi. But at the meets Arok saw the face first of one man, then of three more, he had met before after the Death, there in the mystic circle. Fighters who, as he had, had possessed the black woman, and over whom the white flash of annihilation had gained no power.
He had sped away from the circle and from them all that night, loping off through the unspeakable dust, turning east against his will. He had felt then separate even from these brother survivors, because of them all Chillel had picked him out. Him she had wed in the Jafn manner. When Nirri bore Arok’s son, and the child was black as starry night, Arok had thought that must be why Chillel had chosen and married him – that he was the only man capable of becoming – why mince words – knocked up from her seed.
But when he saw, here in the homeland, the faces of four others from the circle, Arok had needed to think again. For it was always the same. ‘Here is so-and-so, son of so-and-so. He, like you, Chaiord, lived through the Rukar curse. And his woman has borne a son – a son black as Star Black Made-By-God.’ Many of them had been promoted to Chaiord too, of course, even if they were no relative at all to the former king’s line. For what else should you do with a warrior who sired a phenomenon?