by Tanith Lee
The antique scores were always ready to be considered. The Jafn nation and the outland peoples had always fought, as Olchibe and Gech had always harried and wished for vengeance on the Ruk.
But – were only skirmishes possible now?
Krandif’s band made up their minds and souls. They would settle for simply killing these Jafn, as a man killed a scrat in his grain store.
Off and down the slope they thundered in a panoply of loose snow, Krandif’s two hundred and thirty-three reivers, towards the lion chariots and Arok’s forty men.
We will die.
Then let us die in glory.
Arok met the first line of the Vormish charge with a swingeing series of axe-swipes that took off enough heads to line one of their soints of ships. A few hands and arms went too.
Horsazin shrieked and neighed, filling the air with kicks and the reek of gamy mackerel.
Peripherally Arok noted that, though only a lad, his charioteer was collected and canny. As one of the barbarian’s long knives sheered inwards, the boy ducked and struck up with a dagger, punching a tidy hole.
The chariot careered in circles, the lions letting out gusty snarling snortings. Where they could, well trained, they raked with their long, amber-ringed claws. One Vorm leaned in too near and learned, yelling, his chin had become the prize of Arok’s younger lion.
Arok felt his axe break on the breaking back of a man. He let it go and drew out the sword. One, two, three, four, five, six. The corpses showered like hail.
Already the snow was carpeted over with red. Glancing, Arok saw that he had personally contributed. Though he could feel no wound, something had nipped him; he was scarlet on the left side, the side of the heart, which was not ideal. It proved anyway he was no immortal, no longer invulnerable, and had better fight properly now and no more like a silly girl.
Through every corner and chink of sight, beyond his own sphere of battle, he saw his warriors going down. Young and old, clever and weak.
In God’s Name. There had only been forty to start with—
Arok bit his mental tongue. At least they had fathered children. But – these Vorms would have those. The children would die too, or become slaves.
Rage lit him. Arok reared, snarling like his lions, and clove a man in two bits.
Then the chariot tilted.
It was unexpected. You never reckoned it could happen in the thick of war—
Down he fell. He was on the coloured snow, which crinkled and crunched beneath him. A dead lion lay over him and he had to push it off – it was his, the best – but at least it had a Vormlander’s separated chin in its jaws to take to the Other Place.
The young charioteer was dead. God – where is justice? He had been fine and valiant – so young—
Be quiet, heart. Let the mind think.
Arok lay as if slain under the wheel of his chariot, with the inert lion still partly on him, and looked with one eye to see what could be done.
Nothing, it would seem.
The Jafn force was engulfed.
Over there, the three mages, not even defended, were working up rays that wobbled into the mêlée – but the wretched Vorms had their shaman, and the mage-rays kept going out.
Nevertheless, the sparkle of Holas blades continued.
One of the oldest of the men, ninety years he always claimed, but others said he was only seventy, lashed about him with a beautiful accurate abandon. Vorms dropped like smashed plates.
They will sing of this.
But who could survive now of the Jafn Holas to sing?
And if their allies even came to join them, that must be too late.
And nor would they sing.
The Jafn peoples had always been chancy in their own alliances. Only that man-god, Lionwolf, only he had brought them together and made all one, even with the stinking Vorms and Kelps and riffraff. Only Lionwolf, and look what had become of them, under his banner.
Arok erupted bawling like a bear from the pile of dead lying over him, and slapped his sword through a reiver’s guts.
It was then he saw, across the shoulder of the battle, something very dark bowling over the whiter snow beyond. It seemed winged with a frothy opalescent wind – sprites, were they? Seefs maybe, sihpps, things that liked to drink blood by proxy through observing the feeding of fleer wolves or kindred vampires.
Arok experienced a strange softness that sponged along his skull. It rang. He turned over and went down and men on foot ran across him, and a horsaz leapt to clear his body.
Now I finish.
He could not move, yet he could still see.
What he saw was his son, Dayadin, dashing suddenly over the vista.
Illusion.
Arok remembered what his son had said. Take me with you.
Nirri was forever remarking that Dayadin nearly always got his own way—
Arok floundered. Judging by the blood which covered him he must be near death, but he had to reach his child—
He saw the child spring high in the air – a hovor was lifting him, and three others attended, flapping into the faces of the Vorms who, ignorantly blind to Jafn spirits, rubbed their eyes and swore and doubtless thought the weather was getting up.
It was Krandif who glimpsed the boy and did not believe it. Then, seeing him again and again, it was Krandif who disengaged from a dying man at least seventy who had almost split his torso with an axe, leaned over and grabbed the child from the way of a toppling horsaz.
The boy writhed. He had seemed to be able to fly. He was perfectly black: skin, hair, the centres of his eyes.
Krandif recognized him instantly.
‘It is.’
The boy seemed to understand the Vormish language. He glared at Krandif in fury, and replied, ‘I it is. Where is my father?’
‘Who,’ said Krandif, idiotic, ‘is your father?’
‘He is king.’
‘Ah. Then a Jafn, is he?’
‘He is king.’
Krandif knew, whatever the father was, this boy was the being he had dreamed of, the fallen star, flame to darkness.
‘You are god-given.’
The boy shot him a look of unadulterated vitriol, and writhed all the way about.
‘Daddy!’ shrilled the child.
Then he recollected himself. Although the man he loved most in any world was crawling on the slush of pink snow, his body running with blood as if he had bathed in it, before an enemy you stayed formal. ‘My father,’ said Dayadin. Dry-eyed and fearsome he added, ‘Hear me that says this: spare him, or I’ll see you dead.’
Krandif held the child and answered, ‘Come with me to Our Lady. That’s where you must go. Do that, and we leave your people be. Say it, and all’s done.’
Dayadin closed his eyes. Krandif did not see this gesture, that of a grown man who can bear no more.
‘I will.’
When Krandif belled his lungs and sounded the hoot of retreat, every one of his men that could obeyed. You did not quarrel with your own in a fight.
However, it would take some explanation, for the garth was just down the valley and these Jafn were at their end.
As for the Jafn themselves they stared in amazement as their outnumbering foe turned tail and galloped away.
The snow was laid with blood and bodies.
Seventeen Jafn men stood or leaned there, some badly hurt, gazing at the reiver retreat.
Only Arok, who was to find he had no wound, had only been laved unknowingly in the gore of others, kneeled on the snow, his head still ringing from the blow of an iron knife-haft, his heart, that he had bade be silent, torn in two. One half, black as night, had been carried away with the reivers. One half, the lesser, stayed in his chest. This with the rest of him he must take home, to tell the remains of his people and the boy’s mother what had befallen them.
TWO
On the tenth day the landscape altered. Until then the plain of stones had persisted, deadly in its sameness, causing a sense of enervatio
n, desolation, or near panic. Occasionally crags went up miles off to either side, one or two with boiling indigo plumes. The smoke of these volcanoes, if that was what they were, unravelled on the grisaille of the sky. Sometimes forests of stone rambled over the scene. The tree-like forms of these were tall, and top-heavy with formations of boulders or huge flattish piled stones, resembling frozen foliage only in the distance. The men marched or rode in the black chariots. The vehicles were hauled forward by fauna that were most like enormous grey weasels. Portions of the army had even laughed at these animals on first seeing them. But their fast, creeping, muscular gait was sinister and disturbing. Like so much else, they had evolved from their surroundings, in this case out of the plain itself. And once on the move the troops of the Hell King often spotted similar life-forms, oozing up out of the ground or down from the columns of the stone trees.
But on the tenth day a lake appeared. It was a lake of creamy fire, crackling and spitting, from which black burnt particles were constantly fired off into the air.
There was no way across the lake, which filled in the view from one side of vision to the other.
The Gullahammer of Hell halted its advance.
It sat or stood eyeing the lake.
Bird things winged by high up, calling in skeletal voices. They had seen these only now and then before.
‘What next? Do we swim?’
Vashdran glanced back. Who had spoken? Any of them. Though he had been made a Saraskuld commander, like Curjai and the others, he gave no orders to this force. Rather, they and he acted – at least physically – like one coherent whole. They paused at sunfall, made their bivouac, resumed at sunrise, trundled on. The direction they had been pointed in was westward, and they maintained it. Was this arbitrary?
Vashdran said, ‘Swim? Can’t you fly?’
A frisson of alertness energized the lines of men behind his chariot.
Before the chariot, the two weasel things stayed immobile. They had no curiosity. They had no smell. No persona. Did any of them, here, aside from men?
And this war they had been sent on, this conquering of ancient ‘enemies’ and liberating of captured cities – was any of it real?
Vashdran considered Hell’s queen. That night lay eleven days behind him. In some other world, he would have revelled in the recollection. But here – here he was not sure. Every delight he had contrived with her – although he was now uncertain if he had actually had her – still left an unsatisfied memory of Chillel uncoiling in him. The midnight eyes of Winsome had shown him, too, what he had woken in her. Her body wrapped his in an embrace of fire more searing than the white lake. But with the rising of the cold blue sun she had been gone, and only Taeb the Gech witch lurked outside in the grotto. She said guards had sent her back below to wait for him. He asked himself if she had been the one he lay on, her perhaps Hell-augmented powers leading him to believe in all ways she was another.
After all, was Winsome even real? How could she be? She was Chillel – a Chillel who had sought him and taken him. A Chillel whose orgasmic pleasure had only engendered fresh desire – not cored his soul of its light.
Each morning of the war march – if it was morning, or a march – he asked himself if any of this place or any of these shapes, these creatures and plodding men, were what they seemed.
But what else was there but to go on?
It was, Hell, like life in that.
The men of the Gullahammer were springing up into the air, flying. Vashdran could see, over on the left flank, Curjai’s men also ascending, beating their shields into wings.
The distressing birds above hurtled off, not happy at rivals.
Vashdran sprang upwards also. He arced, with countless others, above the army that so far remained on the ground, over the abandoned chariots and weasel things, which did not even raise their heads to watch the flying charioteers.
It did not astound him when, one by one, vacated cars sank into the grey-white earth, which for less than a minute was darkly stained by them. The creatures curled down too, seeping away.
This place …
Vashdran turned his head resolutely for the farther shore of the lake. Having risen high, partly to avoid the black spittings of the fire, he could just make out the perimeter, another stone forest bundled at its edge.
When they alighted over there, Vashdran was convinced the black metal chariots – or identical chariots – would come up again from the ground. The trees would spawn more weaselings.
Everything came and went – and came back.
Even the glamorous armour the Saraskulds had been awarded, that they had carefully been dressed in by the attendants at Shabatu, melted off when unneeded or inappropriate. When he had reached out for Winsome, the armour had dissolved. When he got off the couch the following day, yes even as he hesitated there, staring round the empty chamber, the armour had formed again on his body in exact order.
Had he exchanged any words with any other man here, since that night?
Vashdran could not recall. He had been thinking so much it seemed to have cancelled recent memories.
Taeb, he knew, had been guided into the city by the priests, along with the other brides – all but one, that thin girl with very long dark hair, Curjai’s choice. She had protested, shouting she wished to go with the army. She said she could fight psychically, had been trained to it, and been more than a mere witch or mageia when she lived.
He remembered this because it had momentarily fascinated him, her logical angry protest, her reasoning, and the incongruous, now inevitable words, ‘I had respected abilities, when alive.’
Curjai must have won her love during their night, to make her cling so.
Then Vashdran had lost interest. He did not see the outcome of the argument. Probably she would be punished for protesting, as he and others had been before. Or maybe instead they let her accompany the march.
Curjai had said nothing to Vashdran. Besotted too? Curjai had seemed to mean something, as Choy had, and Kuul also. But quickly that decreased, melted from Vashdran like the armour.
No doubt all human preoccupations seeped away into the ground or the stones like everything else.
All, that was, except sex, and aggression.
Vashdran spun on over the lake. He looked into it a couple of times, but it seemed the same from above as from in front, seething and laval. It gave off however no heat. If anything it gave off even greater cold.
He thought, I can fly without wings. Presumably I can walk up walls and trees here, as I did … elsewhere. What abilities have I lost? None? I’ve gained some, maybe, and not found them yet. But any man can do as I do. And nothing is of any use. If everything is limitless, I am limited by it. I am in chains.
This was why he felt only dreariness at the idea of combat. This was why Winsome, who was Chillel, had rendered him no true satisfaction, no proper victory.
Of course he could cutch her here. Here he could do anything, providing it had no value …
Vashdran skimmed the end of the lake. Boulders, semi-molten, lay bubbling below. He landed on the forest’s roof of stone foliage.
In the distance now he could see something different.
‘Hey! Hey!’ Heppa landed by Vashdran, ungainly and still unwisely tickled at his accomplishment of flight.
‘Look,’ said Vashdran.
‘What?’
‘Another city.’
Heppa screwed up his eyes to see. His eyesight stayed faulty. He made something out.
Other men were raining down on the forest tops. The army pointed and squinted all one way.
A desert expanse of what seemed to be frosty sand, rather like the fine-sifted grains of the Uaarb of northern Gech, stretched for miles. The blue sun was travelling on the same route, westward, and shone on a mass of escalated, manufactured walls. The structure was pale, like Shabatu. Shabatu’s instructive priests, sending them to this metropolis, had given it no name. It was only the city held by ancient enemies.
‘A word with you.’
Vashdran was irritated by this play-acting of normality. Surely they must give it up?
‘What do you want?’
‘I tried to tell you – five times I’ve tried. You walk off.’
‘You sound like some girl.’
‘It’s about some girl. Do you know of a high order of magicians – Magikoy?’
‘Rukarian. In the world of life.’
‘One’s here. She’s sought you through the geography of this underworld, and wants your blood.’
‘Well, she can have it. It isn’t going to matter, is it, either way. Besides, she? This mage is only a woman.’
‘She demanded to attend the army. To be, she said, our mageia. She said it was common for an army to have battle mages. Plenty of the men shouted out that this was a fact. My people too, where I … lived. We used such magic.’
Vashdran thought, I missed all that – the woman saying she was a mage. How did I miss it when I was standing there? Or did I only forget? Nothing has any meaning. Or did it never happen at all, and only happens now because Curjai tells me it has?
‘Be quiet,’ Vashdran said loudly.
Curjai stepped swiftly over the treetop and slapped Vashdran backhanded across the face.
Vashdran reeled, pulled up, swung to return the blow – and stopped himself before he could deliver it.
All around men became an audience, enjoying the little tiff between their irrelevant commanders.
‘I gave you my true name,’ said Curjai, very low. ‘Don’t talk to me like your dog.’
‘I speak more nicely to a dog.’
‘So you do. But those dogs were left in Shabatu, and I am a man and now you can speak nicely to me instead.’
Vashdran looked away at the city.
‘None of this has any substance. How I speak to you or if we quarrel or are vow-brothers. Whatever glory or disgrace we incur. Whether we die or live or lie face down on the rocks. Nothing.’
The men had been distracted by another thing. They started cheering and waving at a colour in the sky.