by Tanith Lee
‘On her wanders in the mountains, then,’ decided the magio.
‘But Father – always we can see where she goes there. Any man would know if other was up on the heights or anywhere about. And dogs would yell too.’
‘True, you’re true. A spell then. She’s not like other women. But it must bode well. Two such creatures.’
‘She’ll tell story tonight,’ said Higher. ‘Then you see too.’
The magio nodded. ‘Then I see.’
A duo of moons rose. One was full, the other at half, and they glittered light all over the mountains and the village.
Chillel came to the fire in her woollen gown, and not one of them could not make out that her stomach was suddenly big and round as a ball. To Higher, oddly, it seemed even more pronounced than when he had noticed it earlier.
The star-burst of Didri was by now moving over to the west, but it too still offered light. Chillel gleamed unearthly in the moon and star rays, and sat down.
‘The sun,’ said Chillel. She was obsessed by the sun, nearly always making her stories concern it. ‘It shone so bright that it scorched the world. Things died in droves. Men and beasts withered to dust. Then the sun was sorry and cast himself down through the west into the world under the world, which is Cold Hell. There the sun is blue and can burn only like ice.’ They waited. Chillel then told them some adventures of the sun before it fell, how it was also a male god and a hero, very handsome and strong, who fought men and monsters, and rode a great whale, but in Hell he was put, for his sins, into chains, and hung upside down helpless for all to curse and deride.
The children listened wide-eyed, and the adults too. They had never heard this tale before.
After Chillel had spoken about all this for quite a while she merely ceased speaking. She sat and looked round at them. The story, ultimately, seemed as obscure as most of her others.
Several children jostled. Another called out what would happen now that the sun lay in chains in Hell.
‘Who can say?’ replied Chillel. The next inquisitive child was shushed by his mother.
They offered to the Woman dishes kept from the evening meal, and Chillel ate a mouthful and drank a mouthful of the milk-alcohol.
As she was leaving the fire, the magio beckoned her aside.
He too was consistently respectful to her, as she was to him. Although not mightily blessed with powers, he had the knack, and was well aware of her uniqueness if unsure what it amounted to.
‘Woman Chillel, are you with young?’
‘Yes,’ said Chillel, without inflexion.
The magio asserted himself. The father figure of the village, he had some authority. If any other unattached woman had been pregnant he would have questioned her thoroughly. As with the sheep and dogs, breeding mattered.
‘Who have paired with you?’
Chillel looked long at him. He found he could not stand the lustrous intensity of her calm gaze, and brooded down at his feet, abashed.
‘I have lain,’ said Chillel, ‘with countless men. None of these is the maker of my child.’
‘One here then? Will you hand-tie to him?’
‘It is no one here.’
He shot her after all a sidelong optic question mark. ‘By no man then?’
Chillel smiled. Surely none could be unmoved by that. As she had with the boy at the fire she said, ‘Who can say?’
She walked away up the slope to her hut, and everyone on the street watched her go. Her long hair brushed the icy track.
Chillel entered the hut. She glanced about her as if there were a hundred interesting objects there – but there was nothing much, only bare walls of ice-brick and sheepskin, the woven door and bed of fleece, and two pots in the corner, one for unfrozen drinking water and one for functions she need never attend to, unless on a whim.
Ddir, Didri to the shepherds, he who placed the stars or, more accurately, shined up certain ones to show patterns, had made Chillel also. And when he created the pattern of the star iris a handful of nights earlier, it was because, apparently, he was conscious of Chillel’s fecund state. It was not really an iris, either, there in the sky, but a flawlessly formed female vulva. Maybe he had even done this to boastfully celebrate his own cleverness in remembering to give her both vagina and womb. After all, he had nearly forgotten her navel.
Even fey Ddir, however, did not know the mind of Chillel.
Did she know it herself?
As the third moon was rising, she left the hut. It was often her habit, as they had noted, to walk on the mountains.
Some few days after, having briefly caressed the lamb, Chillel left the hut again. This time she did not do it in the accepted physical way. Or by means of the door.
It was, if any had seen it, an alarming excursion. Chillel poised there by the hut’s unlit fireplace. Then – she poured inward. This was like water running into and down through some tiny aperture or drain. Through some central part of herself, positioned roughly between her middle ribs, all the physical presence of Chillel swirled in and away. Her fluttering mantle of hair vanished last of all, sucked out – or in – from the world of mankind.
Nothing living was there now in the hut, but for the little slumbering sheep, which had not stirred.
Chillel descended, or flew upward – it could not be quite certain, the tendency of this medium she rapidly travelled through. In the medium also there was no substance even, yet perhaps a faint encouraging light. The journey was indescribable, yet actual, and lasted only a split second split again and again to a final splinter thinner than the strand of a spider’s web.
Elsewhere a point of scintillant dark appeared, and out she flowed once more, out and all around herself.
Chillel stood entire and intact and in another place.
Now, however, she was no longer quite … Chillel.
More voluptuous, softer, the midnight hair more curling, her eyes with another luminosity, less cool, more coolly warm.
Instead of the coarse wool gown she wore a dress of sheerest white, dusted with golden particles that shimmered. Gold was on her hair too.
She smiled that smile of hers, and even this smile, always so wonderful, was subtly unlike itself. It had, here, a hint of connivance, even of flirtation.
Winsome, queen of Cold Hell, moved across the glassy floor of her chamber, where women servants stretched out to her appealingly, half formed from the walls. There was a flight of steps that led up high into the roofless top of the palace. Winsome went up them, up and up, as high as the stair itself stretched.
How high now she is. Winds from a night sky unlike all skies of any earth play with her hair, unfolding coils of it, sensually draping it back across her body.
She stares at the opaque stars of Hell, none of which have any pattern. One thing though there is which has stayed with Winsome that formerly had been Chillel’s. It is the swollen belly of pregnancy.
Winsome holds up her arms, and from nowhere at all scores of the small moons and the greater drift towards her down the dark.
They sing, these moons, in high tinsel voices, a wordless song. They swarm around Winsome, laving her in light. The moons are company, in a way all the company she has here or has engendered anywhere. Because what she is she too does not know, nor is she urgent to learn. Neither Chillel nor Winsome cares about her identities, either or any of them. And even when surrounded by persons, even when, in the past, lying on or beneath her succession of mortal, passionate, adoring or jealously violent lovers, she is and was indifferent to herself in that aspect, and so has gained no more of herself from having looked in the mirror of their eyes.
But Lionwolf, who is not mortal, is unique to her. Lionwolf is fire. In his eyes, when they lay together, Chillel or Winsome saw herself as never elsewhere. She saw his father too, Zzth the Sun Wolf. Zzth’s release from the body of Lionwolf at their first congress destroyed her – but during destruction she had known it did not matter. Spread as meltwater on the floor of a green cave, Chill
el had remained as much herself as she ever had been. And when she rose again from the ice she, of all things, was unamazed.
The Lionwolf is now in Hell. For this reason she too comes here.
Her memory is fully documented for her, encompassing additionally events she has never seen or heard of, and she forgets nothing, even if she may say she does, even when she is another woman, among shepherds, or with singing moons. Lionwolf, to Chillel or Winsome, is what life is, as total, as alien, as unavoidable. As desired.
Winsome lets moons perch on her fingertips. Others dip into her hair. One sits on her risen belly intrigued, maybe, by the thrum of the second life inside.
After a long while, she sends the moons away, tolerantly, like children she is fond of, and since she has something else to do.
Winsome entered the hall which contained Lionwolf. In the Uashtab labyrinth, where so much was duplicated not only from itself but from the previous city of Shabatu, anywhere he was would be easy enough for her to find. He glowed like the flame he was through all the endless stone barriers and tiresome repeating architecture.
Besides, like herself, he too had now been doubled.
Although it was not the same, not at all.
It seemed to her she should name the one hanging from the beam across the sky with the familiar name: Lionwolf. And he, the one who in this world had again been her lover, she would give the name he had chosen here, the Rukarian name which meant Lionwolf: Vashdran.
Vashdran leaned on the air. Somehow it was keeping him upright. He stared at the live prisoner who was himself hanging in chains.
And nearby waited, like a preying tiger, the astral thread known as Ruxendra.
Neither of them seemed to be aware of Winsome.
‘You see,’ said Ruxendra to Vashdran – but as if the unregistered Winsome’s arrival had kindled dialogue – ‘how things are. I had powers when alive. Now too. I asked for this and earned it in the battle. You’re mine – or that is mine.’
Vashdran said nothing. Had he heard her?
Ruxendra did not like his reticence.
She went over to him, to Vashdran, and struck him, using her hand but also a shaft of lightning that punched out from it.
Vashdran partly turned. He caught her wrist and stared down into her face.
‘Does it hurt you,’ Ruxendra said, ‘seeing that live carcass hung there?’
He let go her wrist. Again he said nothing.
Winsome saw that he was at this moment like an infant. Not his strength nor any male arrogance kept him tight-lipped. It was that he did not, lost on this sea, know what to answer, or even to ask.
But Ruxendra again misinterpreted. She showed her teeth and snapped, ‘I will take that thing, that thing in chains, I will take it and pull it apart. And you – you will have to search for it, for all the bits I shall carve it into. And do you think it can die? Can you? Have you? You live and it lives. It is you. I’ll make this filthy doppelganger suffer for ever, for I have for ever, here. And you’ll feel every drop of its pain, every bumpy mile of its anguish. It’s you.’
‘Do it then,’ he said. ‘I shan’t prevent you.’
‘Yes, I’ll do it. How could you prevent me, now?’
Briefly deflated by his blankness, the vengeful Magikoy apprentice, fifteen when she died of the White Death, gabbled some litany of malevolence, though the Magikoy, despite the ancient armament they had unleashed, did not use such baleful formulas. Their remit had been always to help, and for self-protection, even vengeful justice – if ever needful – they prescribed other behaviours.
Winsome did not intervene.
All things had their correct times. To such as she, what must be done by her was consistently evident.
Like Ruxendra, like Vashdran and his simulacrum, she waited.
For what did they wait?
It was as if they must pause, to maintain the tempo …
Yes. From the sky, gusting, wailing, casting its black shadow, one more boulder rushed towards the hall.
Winsome was beyond the range of it. Between the three other figures, two standing, one hung upside down, it crashed.
Something happened that was not as either Vashdran or Ruxendra at least had seen before.
That area of the stone floor smashed into a million fragments. They flew upwards and everywhere, shards like needles, larger pieces like quartz bricks or blades or axes, and some slivers like narrow daggers honed ready for injury.
Both the man and the mageia-girl were cut; one missile spun her and she went down with a furious cry. The hanged man too bled all over again, his whole body striped like that of a warrior of the Vorms or Kelps.
Vashdran said to himself, as if he were an idiot for whom things must be spelled out, ‘Thoughts then. The notions we send before us or think up when here. They break into the pool of Hell like stones through water, and fracture the ice.’
Ruxendra crawled over to the hanging man. She struggled to her feet and propped herself in front of him, as if she would have to hold Vashdran off.
Vashdran did nothing.
Still reeling, Ruxendra opened from her shoulder blades the huge red wings she had selected, and flared them wide. Into the air she went, over the floor that was now just like the shore of the Hell sea, stones and shards, flints and flinders.
She smote the chains that held Lionwolf. As they gave in a welter of white sparks, slight as a snake she took hold of his naked and bleeding body.
Her arms she had about it, her legs, as if, memory of his first battle here, in a parody of the sexual act. Last she sank her teeth into his neck.
Tears of blood rolled from his eyes. He shut them.
So perhaps he did not see as Vashdran, standing watching, shut also his.
Ruxendra’s wings bore her skyward, into the high darkness and over the top of the palace. She flew heavily, like a lammergeyer made of rubies holding a victim also made of rubies.
Vashdran opened his eyelids. He trod across the shattered floor. He came to Winsome when he reached the unscarred stone beyond.
He saw her now, did he? ‘You’re not real,’ he said. ‘Don’t speak to me.’
She was real, but she did not speak.
Flecks of his blood, showered off from his hair, flittered over her and settled, like the gold and the moons, on her own hair and her dress, and on the globe of the child within.
It was his child after all, conceived in Hell at their initial couching, and possibly it felt the blood, through all her supernatural flesh.
Higher sat with the magio on the ground. They gaped gloomily into a large bowl of water on the hut floor between them. Only the magio thought he could make out anything in this primitive scrying glass.
At last he raised his head.
Higher reverently kept quiet.
‘She’s away,’ said the magio.
Higher nodded. He already knew this, having not seen the Woman for two days, and so having gone up to the hut to take the lamb some warm milk. The lamb had been in good condition, as if well nourished. But the Woman was nowhere to be found.
‘She goes off,’ said Higher. ‘But not through door. One or other down here is always looking that way, at her house. Even at night, on the sheep-watch.’
The magio shrugged. But he said, ‘You go up and stay by hut. When she comes back, look how she is.’
Higher agreed.
Three days ago, they had all seen her, and some of the women exclaimed. Higher, who had ten small children from his own wives, knew well enough how long a baby took to bake in the heat of the female womb. From the start he had thought Chillel showed suddenly and large. And just before this absence of hers – of which maybe there had been others, missed by the village as they never normally approached her house – Chillel had walked along the slopes, and then she was very big. From a woman who seemed midway through her term, abruptly, in a pair of days, she had become like one close to parturition.
‘Perhaps she go to birth it somewhere else?’ he
suggested now.
‘Yes. You men must look about for her.’
So, while a party of shepherds and dogs set off to seek the strayed and magically invaluable wonder of Chillel, Higher went up the slope and sat down by her doorway.
For some reason he could not fathom, occasionally he pushed at the edge of the woven door frame and peered into her empty hut.
He decided he was checking on the lamb, but he was not. It was the way you might look again in the same spot for something you know must be there, but is missing.
Because of this, though no one had ever so far seen Chillel’s departures to and returns from Lionwolf’s Hell, that evening someone did.
When the glimmering sable point appeared inside the hut in midair, Higher thought it was his eyes, and rubbed them. When he stopped that, there she was, the Woman, petal-opening out of herself and out of nothing at all, in a broadening black nimbus of being.
Higher stuck his head, mouth undone, eyes on stalks, right in through the gap between door frame and wall.
There was Chillel, now burstingly heavy as a lambent tree with her fruit.
She glanced at him.
She spoke.
‘What comes soon you must not see. It may frighten you.’
Already frightened out of his wits, Higher mechanically retreated and went on hands and knees away from the hut and down the slope, forgetting to stand up until he reached the street below.
So he missed the second, far less common, marvel of the night.
She had carried for nine days. Nine days that was by a Rukarian calendar.
Now Chillel was conscious the hour had come to bring forth.
She touched the black lamb, which unlike Higher was staring at her now with unperturbed approval. Obedient and calm, the lamb lay down on the floor. Chillel stretched herself out on the fleece.
Women screamed with some cause in the agony and horror and panic of labour. Chillel’s labour was devoid of all three elements. She did not scream.
She had raised her skirt and spread her legs wide, and now a soft earthquake moved through both her belly and her female parts below. Beautiful and easy as a lovely mouth which opened to yawn, the birth canal visibly and entirely expanded. Perhaps the sensation was even pleasant – like a yawn. She had closed her eyes, but her expression slightly curved into a smile.