by Tanith Lee
Vashdran and the others looked up.
‘This,’ said Curjai, ‘is her.’
The woman flew in swirlings of her long hair. If they all had magic powers here, then she had chosen to use also some imagination. Great scarlet wings supported her, like those of the legendary firefex. Her clothing was the deeper red of blood. As she soared over, she sang to them in a wild high voice, smiling and beckoning them on, on to the city and the war. She was able it seemed to imbue them with a fierce lust for battle. Their cheers rose to bellows, and the clang of fists on shields. But passing over Vashdran’s head she, like the lake, spat full in his face.
Something made him fling up his arm to protect himself. The spittle of the Magikoy mageia Ruxendra flamed as it flew. And as it scattered along Vashdran’s forearm he saw it form letters – in the alphabet of Ruk Kar Is, that Saphay his mother had shown him. I am the payment, read the message Ruxendra had written on him. It would fade. It was not real. But it did not fade … perhaps it was.
Their Magikoy mageia rode, as was not the custom, at the forefront of the advance, in one of the recreated black chariots. Unlike the flying men she did not slough her wings when they were unneeded, but kept them on display.
Curjai, you became aware, stayed well away from her.
As they neared the second city over the ice-sand of the plain, somehow she urged her chariot and slink-striding weaselings to a gallop.
It seemed she could not wait to sink in her teeth.
The sun was at the zenith now. It clearly showed when the gates of the city opened and the fighting force spilled out, gathering in a great pond of darkness and glitter under the walls.
Vashdran felt nothing. He was indifferent, even to the words scorched on his arm. And yet he did not jump down and walk away, but rode the chariot on. All the chariots began to race now, though no order had been given and Vashdran certainly had not made any signal to his running beasts. Only the warmad mageia apparently prompted this headlong rush.
The dark battalions facing them were forming into an arrowhead, its point aiming straight at the galloping Gullahammer.
The enemy also had black chariots, grey weasel beasts, armour which caught the blue sun. Men with wings were rising up there, circling, diving in along the sky. The ones who flew on the Gullahammer side put on their shield-wings and went up too, line on line of them, like craits rising from an ice floe. And now the enemy chariots were racing.
Everything would meet with a clash and rumble. Everything would collide, explode, like mirrors shattering, and jets of fiery blood go up to hit the sun.
Ruxendra, as Vashdran glimpsed in the seconds before the opposing chariots struck each other, had also taken to the air again. He watched her flapping scarlet cross high above the airborne men who were already at grips, hacking and ripping each other on the wing. She screamed with viciousness or excitement, and sorcerous rays spread from her like burning cirrus, feathering earthwards on all of them.
The chariots met.
Vashdran saw a face – unknown, unknowable—He killed the face and his beasts trampled over the beasts of the fallen chariot, trampling on into the thrust and clamour of the fight.
The sword swung. The knife. Sometimes there was the Olchibe bow Guri had taught him how to use. Five arrows veering away at a single twang of the string, the dead dying, falling under the runners and feet, lying there till death-life should come back to them – and, as before, some not returning, the twice-dead sprinkled like pebbles on the shore of Hell.
Vashdran’s chariot, rammed from the left side, splintered and gave way.
Vashdran too fell under the runners, the pads of the grey beasts. He should lie here. Why flounder about? It would not affect him, or only with pain at least.
But he found he had grabbed the runner of another car, pulled himself abreast the bodywork and over into the black shell of it. He slashed the charioteer in the neck and heart and pushed him out.
This is why I can’t die. This in me can’t die. This irreducible immortal dross. This brilliant rottenness of self …
Fighting, he heard the cheering gush up again. Who was winning? They? Or us? But it was irrelevant, for they were all the same.
Vashdran rode among the first into the open city gate, above which an iron mouth was now mooing just as one had at Shabatu.
This city … was identical. The broad, winding roadway, undefended, unpeopled, led to a citadel high above.
Welcome to Uashtab sang the crowd inside the carven white gates.
Rattles cracked, harps let out plinking cadences.
The men and women who, it seemed, they had liberated from the ancient enemy danced, singing with feral joy their lawless, optimistic praises. Flowers made the path blue and purple, and in the lush petal cups of amethyst and azure, cold eyes regarded the boots of warriors which smashed them.
At the end of the wide road a towering archway gave on what must be the vast palace of … Uashtab, city of Hell.
In they went to a labyrinth, hall giving on hall. Walls stretched upwards, vaguely coolly shining. There was no roof. The sun sliced down with swords of light. Somewhere a boulder dropped with a whistling scream, a dull deep thud.
Curjai stood over Vashdran.
‘There are hot springs here too. Those baths with the girls. Why not come and wash off her spit?’
Vashdran glanced at the scald of letters on his arm. They were still readable. I am the payment.
‘You should,’ said Vashdran, ‘have treated her better in bed. Then she’d have less interest in me.’
Curjai said, ‘I didn’t take her. She didn’t want me.’
‘You should have made her want. Or taken her anyway.’
‘I never had a woman.’
Vashdran said, without interest, ‘What have you had, then?’
‘Nothing that way. Only a never-ending fight.’
‘This is the same city,’ Vashdran said.
‘I know it,’ said Curjai, ‘and the name—’
‘A play on the letters of the first name: Shabatu Uashtab. Like a Rukar word game. Probably there is a king here made of stone. And a black woman who is queen and calls the moon.’
‘We’re trapped in a circle. Perhaps we can break out. Even she – the red mageia – might help us do that.’
‘No. We’re to be punished. There can be no breaking out. No help.’
Vashdran put his hand inside his shirt, searching for something – the toy mammoth – but again it was not there. Curjai stood gazing at him for a little while, but Vashdran only stared into his own thoughts. Curjai went away.
In one of the corridors, some of the snake-head guards went by, dragging in chains a prisoner from the battle. Here, thought Curjai, was one difference from the last time. Those they had overcome had not been welcomed to the city equally with the conquerors. The defeated enemy were driven along, naked and in shackles, and beaten as they went with whips. Curjai had seen such events in his former life. But something in these groups of prisoners unsettled him, and also unsettled many of the men of the Shabatu army, some of whom had seemed actually afraid when prisoners were hauled by.
Curjai moved back to allow the single captive and his wardens past. The captive appeared genuinely hurt. Curjai noted this, and then saw the face of the man, matted over though it was with blood and ragged dark hair. With a horrifying sensation of rightness, Curjai leaned there on the wall, staring after the procession until it rounded the curve of the passage, and was gone. The man beaten and in chains had also been himself. Had also been – Curjai.
THREE
At first the children had cried all the time, for their fathers, their uncles and brothers, just as the very old men cried, if quite tearlessly, for their sons. But with the arrival and departure of the months the old men and the children came to accept that the women, who were many of them young, and some of indisputable power, must rule. If not for ever, at least for another decade.
Naturally, some younger men had missed t
he war and lived. But they were all unsuitable to lead the bands or govern the sluhtins, being severely lame or not whole of mind, or physically too feeble. Three men had returned to their homes, or so the story went. But those sluht-camps were far off, isolated by many miles from this large one here under the frozen fig trees and pineapples.
Piamtak sat with her coven in one of the great sluht halls that was her husband’s castle, when he lived. Peb Yuve had been old, but still a strong warrior. Now he was dust. As for her children, they had all been sons and all grown men; they had gone with Peb, and so were dust too.
Piamtak had not only lived as one of Peb’s wives, but was the crone or Crax of her coven.
This coven comprised a virgin girl of eleven, a young woman of sixteen, and a woman who had borne children, though all the men she had favoured were dead as well in the war, and perhaps she would not bear again.
Piamtak was swathed in a mantle of white fur. It had been gifted to her by the wondrous god-being, Lionwolf – just before he mesmerized all the Olchibe men and led them off to their deaths.
That day, that death-day, Piamtak’s coven, and several others across the Marginal Land and southern Gech, picked up the psychic broadcast of catastrophe. It had marked all of the women, even the youngest.
Some of the old men subsequently reproached Piamtak, though she was Crarrow, about continuing to wear her white fur. Had not the demon-get given it her? Was not her man, the leader of thirteen vandal bands, destroyed – and had she not seen it in her coven fire?
That evening of the reproach, Piamtak had told a parable to the sluhtin, a thing women did not do, standing there in her mantle, her forehead clasped with gold and green stones braided in her grey-black hair.
‘In the beginning, the God of the Great Gods, He who made woman first that she might bear the first man, created too the animal world, to please, intrigue and assist her.’
Piamtak told the gathering, all the women who were left and the impaired males and the children – who were still crying then almost all the while – how God gave each creature his shape and covering, his abilities and his voice.
‘The youngest among us know the song,’ said Piamtak. ‘Come then, for the sake of your perfect fathers and brothers that we will never forget, sing out to me that song.’
And the children, most of them, choked off their weeping and sang the song, because she was Yuve’s widow, Yuve once their leader and priest, and she was a Crax of the Crarrowin, the wisest witch-women, so the Olchibe claimed, on earth.
Piamtak then repeated the last words of the song, which had been antique time out of mind. ‘And so the God decreed as follows: the ourth may trumpet, and grumble may the bear; the wolf will howl – but let the lion roar.’
A stillness hung on the crowd, dense as the nectarine-coloured smokes which had stained all the inner roofs.
Old men, and the company of women, thought of loss. They thought too of the ourths, their beauteous and mighty blond mammoths, turned to dust along with their men. The children sobbed and snuffled, drowning the breasts of their mothers in tears.
‘Who knows,’ said Piamtak, ‘the meaning of this song?’
An old man shouted from the crowd, ‘It means the woman must know her place, under the jurisdiction of the male. And what if she be Crax, and what if I am bent and old, nevertheless I tell her to burn that fur of a white bear.’
Piamtak waited. Then she said, ‘I will explain to you the song. The God of the Great Gods allowed each animal his authentic music. The mammoth is a warlike beast, and so he has the note of a trumpet, and the bear is sullen so he rumbles and grumbles. The wolf makes a serenade to the moons, and he has three pipes in his throat, the moon number, to howl with. But the lion is greater than these. He is the grey shadow that moves through the snows, and men see him at dawn or twilight, and they do not trouble him, for he is lordly. And among the lionkind are females too, strong and maned like the males.’ The sluhtin listened. Even the children only wept softly now while the Crax spoke. ‘It counts for nothing,’ said Piamtak, ‘what any tell you, or what is done to you. If you are a lion, you will roar. Olchibe is a lion. A lion wounded and lessened. But we live. We live and we will roar, as God made us to do and the Great Gods endorse, amen. Who here then believes that of you all, I am not a lion? What do I care that he, that demon-get as you named him, gave me this coat of mine? Am I to fling it off because of him? Was he the white bear? We are more than that pettiness. We are the lion. He that tricked and sullied us is gone. And here we are. Roar, my lions of Olchibe. And I and all your women shall roar with you.’
Hevonhib, the sixteen-year-old, sitting beside the Crax today, was remembering all this. She mentioned it quietly. The coven duly recollected. Only the nubile woman who had borne three children sighed – for those perhaps she would never make.
‘There have been raiders along the coast,’ said Piamtak, after they had recalled for long enough. ‘And inland, too. That pile of ruins, the Rukar city, they have been there, and next met the Jafn, who are also our enemies again. All these allies once under that banner of a blue sun. No more. We must arm ourselves and prepare.’
Hevonhib said, ‘I heard of one of the Olchibe warriors who returned – he sired a kiddle. It was black as night.’
‘Get up,’ said Piamtak, doing so herself. ‘We will go and make our own fire, and see.’
They went through the jungle-forest, walking on the track of cut logs. Deer were among the glades, white ghosts behind the crystal stems of trees. They did not shy away from the Crarrowin coven, sensing its preoccupied passivity.
In the usual spot, the women formed their four-cornered circle, facing inwards. They called the sheer amber fire up out of their abdomens. It rose into the air, collected together, poured down and became a burning bush of flames.
‘Cast in the blood.’
‘Weed-of-light and kiss-grass …’
‘Sweet honey, berry beer …’
‘Iron ice.’
They gazed into the fire. A disc appeared. Inside the disc they saw a sluht, a small one by the side of a frozen waterfall, off which women were chipping pieces for drink or cooking. As in all other sluhts now, only a scatter of men were visible, mending things. A hunting party was setting out – women again. As with the great sluhtin of Peb Yuve, it was mostly women who braved the jungles and the wastes, armed with male bows, in search of deer, hares and icenvels, or traipsed along the white shore with seal-spears.
They had learned these skills from their men in the past, fathers, brothers, husbands. Those who knew currently taught others.
The image in the witch-fire circled round and flipped like a coin.
The four Crarrowin saw directly into one of the dwellings. A potted fire glowed on the ground. A boy sat on a rug alone, playing a game with painted mammoth teeth. He was important. Only a special child would receive such toys, particularly now almost all the mammoths were gone.
He was black, as the rumour had it. But he looked in age about five; too mature then to have been conceived after the war.
Hevonhib, however, when she beheld the boy, felt a peculiar tug within her body. She had never borne a child, had not yet lain down with a man. Like the older nubile Crarrow, she had resigned herself to the fact that now very likely she never would – at least not with one of her own kind.
The black child raised his head. There in the disc inside the fire, he looked back at them intently.
What was this?
The boy spoke, seeming nearly amused. ‘I see you!’
‘Yes, he sees us,’ said the Crax.
She slapped her hands together with a crack, and the picture went out; the fire bush became four spirals and lifted again up in the air, hovering protectively above them.
‘What is he? Is he a mage?’
‘So young to be empowered – he is a miracle worked for Olchibe.’
‘Why,’ said the nubile woman, ‘have we not received such a miracle here? Our sluhtin was among the large
st and best, our leader shining, like a night of three full moons.’
But the Crax Piamtak had turned right round.
The other three women turned more slowly.
He had come from the west.
Men generally, even the lackwits of the camp, did not trespass on the work of the Crarrowin. But this one anyway was not of their camp. Or … no longer.
Piamtak knew him. Long ago, he and she had made love and a child themselves. Because she was Crarrowin she was permitted sexual freedom, and later on this man’s son had been lauded as hers, along with two others by other men, and lastly the tribe of sons she had produced for Peb.
This man however must be dead, for although he seemed quite real and solid, standing there with a tired face and carefully braided and adorned hair, he was young. He was as young as when she had seen him last – about twenty-eight years of age.
The dead man offered a solemn show of respect in the correct Olchibe fashion. As yet he said nothing.
Piamtak said to him, ‘From where have you come?’
Then he did speak.
‘From some place behind the moons – or below the seas. The places of the unalive.’
‘Will you tell us then about the other world?’
‘Best not,’ he humbly said.
‘What do you want?’
‘To bring you something. That is, bring the sluhtin something.’
‘Your name is Guri,’ said the Crax, remembering. It was his voice perhaps, this young voice stalled for ever in eternity. ‘You were with the Great One’s first band.’
‘Yes, Mother,’ he answered, awarding her her social title.
She thought, He doesn’t recall me. Well, now I’m old. And was a second startled at this inappropriate vanity.
She said, ‘Well, what have you brought?’
‘A man,’ he said. ‘From the war under the city – a man who carries that seed like black pearls, from the night-woman Chillel.’
‘Ah? Is that how it happens … a woman’s seed inside a man. Is she a goddess?’
‘God-made, Mother. Not our gods, whom anyway I’ve given up, if you’ll forgive me.’