by Tanith Lee
From the divine intimate tightness of a young and perfectly made woman, Chillel’s vaginal corridor had now smoothly enlarged until it resembled a small, rose-pale cave. There was no blood, and no prenatal waters spilled.
Something though moved deep inside the pulsing entrance. Then a form, with no preamble, swam outward. In fact, this was more of a slow diving than a swimming motion. First emerged the hands and arms, held forward, the head tucked neatly between, the body then with the legs pressed together. Out upon the fleece the dark image slid, and lay unfolding itself, like a flower and showing itself to be a well-made baby, black of skin like the mother, eyes shut, loose and relaxed, unstigmatized, unweeping.
The smooth core of Chillel’s loins instantly drew inward.
The yawn of birth was done. In a minute she was again like other flawless young women who had never borne a child, and had the firm, shapely vulva of an iris.
She sat up without haste or discomfort, and touched her newborn lying on the fleece, rather as she had touched the lamb which lay nearby. Both were female.
As there was no distress, illness, tiredness or pain on the face of Chillel, so there was no tenderness – no mother-love. She looked at the child as if at the not uninteresting progeny of another.
There had been no blood, there was no birth-matter. Nor was there any afterbirth. And to the baby there attached no umbilical cord.
She lay there, this brand new female offspring, on her back, her arms over her head, slowly breathing and gazing up now at Chillel with just-opened black eyes. Plainly she could see.
The lamb was nosy. It got to its feet and came to the fleece. It sniffed the baby, which carried neither the taint nor the intrinsic odour of arrival. The lamb nuzzled into the child, and the child, turning a little, put out a tiny hand, already equipped in the usual wondrous way with all its fingers, against the curly coat. Perhaps the lamb had decided this was a sibling, and one a little younger, which it must therefore instruct, care for, and boss about.
The baby had at least one distinct difference from her mother – even from the lamb. Across her head a down of hair lay like shavings of red-gold. But this was all she had brought into the world, that you could see, of her father the Lionwolf.
After a while, Chillel again lay back. If she slept was not apparent. Perhaps she did. The event had been after all, even if not uncomfortable, physically significant for her.
The baby cuddled with the lamb and vice versa.
Ddir entered the hut a short while later, like a fall of dust.
He was nondescript and colourless, as always, and his feet were bare. A genius artisan, he spared no margin to concern himself with his own appearance.
He was a god even so – one of the three given to Saphay, Lionwolf’s mother. Yyrot and Zeth, the other two, were cosmic distances off, and meant it seemed nothing to Ddir, who was a part of them. But despite that, he had created Chillel, and now, in mythically honourable tradition, had come to regard her baby.
What he thought was not obvious.
He pottered above the infant, scarcely alerting the lamb which gave him only one sleepy glance.
Then, abruptly, the god bent closer. He looked with a sudden sharpening of attention at the more or less un-flawed body of the child.
Like some elderly nurse Ddir, Placer of Stars, clicked his tongue – exactly what he had done before, confronting his own similar oversight.
Leaning right down he dipped his finger quickly, neatly, into the belly of the child.
She too had woken, and gazed back at him, quizzical but not alarmed. Clearly the god had not hurt her, though his uncanny pressure had implanted a miniature round hole in her stomach. Lacking an umbilical cord, it was the navel she could not otherwise possess.
Like father like daughter. Chillel had forgotten.
Along the south-east plate of the continent, the variable beach ice had been disturbed.
Cracked and broken fragments floated on black pools of liquid sea. An ice-cliff, a mile inland and running parallel for four or five miles, had received some blow that had fissured it in long inky veins.
Now and then the cause of the damage became discernible. A gigantic creature was cavorting out on the horizon, where the sea was mostly fluid.
Evening light played silkily over a tall black hump, over the scimitar flash of a colossal tail that raked the ocean, sending, both as it rose and as it went down, squalls of water insane distances into the sky. Often small tidal waves also resulted. They smacked the landmass in the mouth, breaking up the floes, hammering the barriers of cliffs. Earlier a chunk of forest had been dislodged. Massive trees, still in their casings of ice, lay nearby along the tideline as if waiting for the gargantuan vandal to apologize.
It was a horned whale. But much more than that. Even if any had lived thereabouts to stand, unwisely, on the shore and assess the beast, the size of it would have defeated them. Two strong men, neither particularly human, had taken more than two days to cross its back. The horn was a palatial mountain of a tower ringed with spurs that were also towers. Here were meshed the bones of some of those who had died in the environment of its back. Other skeletons creaked and clanked among the rank gardens, filth-hills and foul woods that grew about its hide. Occasionally the whale, diving to the depths, would allow some of this architecture to be washed or wiped away. But much was by now so established it clung on, indomitable.
The head of the whale ballooned out of the water, showing off the mountain towers of spurs and horns to a single pale and nervous moon.
The eyes of the whale, even after dark had come, blazed like tiny golden suns.
Brightshade had been resting on his laurels.
For two years, which to him were short, he had gone about his whale business in the sea, enjoying his feeding and fighting and copulation. All this while his brain sang with the memory of how he had, finally, ended the jealously abhorred life of his half-brother Lionwolf, the part-human child of Zeth Zezeth, also father to the whale. Lionwolf’s demise had pleased their father too. Zeth had wanted Lionwolf eradicated and had aided the process in supernormal, effective ways.
Yet now …
Seeing in shapes of thought, the whale had lolled in the deep, beginning to learn, as always by a sort of osmotic wordless telepathy, that Lionwolf – though crushed into non-being – still left his footprints on the mortal earth.
At the start there had been a dream of rising from the ocean, up – yet also downward – and dredging out into some vague and pallid nothingness, where a blue light dimly shone. The dream recurred in Brightshade’s intermittent sleep, warning him of problems he did not then suspect.
For what Lionwolf had conjured in the world, Brightshade had no idea, until the night when he made out the group of stars like an iris cast from diamonds glittering in the east. Even then the whale formulated no concept of the type of revival of Lionwolf which was now current. That was, the whale had no concept of a child – let alone her gender or her worth. Brightshade understood only that some burning drop of his hated brother had returned.
With inordinate blind rage, up from the bottom of the continent’s south-eastern sea he came, breaching like an avalanche in reverse, showering the sky and the land with wet fury.
This area was largely unpopulated, at least by men. Deer feeding in the injured forest had fled to safety at the first intimation of the whale.
The mysterious people of the Kraag perhaps knew what took place. These were their lands, but reality was unreal to them, and by disbelieving in Brightshade’s insane wrath very likely they were spared it.
Dead fish littered the shores, smashed in the whale’s upsurge. Birds who had hurried over to feed soon regretted it as the blasts of water continued.
The night became black, only the solitary moon, growing always whiter in dismay, and the iris stars moving over.
Near midnight, Brightshade lay in against the upset shore.
He lay thinking. But the thought process of Brightshade was
not thought.
Mirages of vengeance and denial wove through his mind. Once or twice, with his forelimbs, he pawed the ice and ripped it apart some more.
In a strange fashion, the red-haired child born that night was herself doubly related to Brightshade. Daughter of his half-brother Lionwolf, she was also Chillel’s; Chillel who had been constructed by Ddir – who, in the way of such triads, was one being with Yyrot and Zeth.
Gradually the image of the child began to appear in the mind of the whale. He puzzled over it, though he had seen children before, generally after shipwrecks caused by himself.
How to react, then, how to undo this procreation as Lionwolf had been undone.
Near dawn a thing manifested on the shore, moving along towards Brightshade’s horn-crowned head.
Brightshade watched it through one fiery eye.
The thing was tattered, mostly visually animal, limping, yet – shining? Something blue sponged over the muzzle and around the eyes, which were ruddy. A sick wolf?
Brightshade who might, if he wished, have ingested such a wolf with one small snap of his chasmic jaw knew already he could not.
He had never seen his father. But the imprint of Zeth was there in the whale’s mixed and marvellous genes. Brightshade grasped in two or three seconds that this was he.
Smoke smouldered off the apparition’s ruffled pelt. It sank down close to Brightshade and snarled at him feebly.
Brightshade was surprised.
Anyone reasonably might have been.
This was a god, golden and crimson and terrible in his own right.
‘Yes,’ said a voice, or the equivalent of a voice, inside the vaults of Brightshade’s mind. But Yes was only another shape, like the words which followed.
‘I have been harmed. Outside this paltry world I am as always. But to come here and find you, I have had to put on this corpse.’ The wolf paused, panting. It put its head on its front legs. Had it assumed a human masculine form, it would in fact have looked much worse. Dull trails of a substance once sparkling trickled away from it here and there.
Ichor?
‘You served me well,’ said the vocal shapes, presently. ‘Now you must complete another task.’
Brightshade’s terrifying eye fixed like a gold arrow-head. An autonomous shape from Brightshade’s brain questioned, Kill child?
A wolf paw, scarred yet not unvigorous, swept the question off the snow like a fly.
‘Leave your dreaming. This is your work: what I tell you to do.’
Brightshade received a transmission of vast open waters – the north – and of a stretch of land, and ships massing there, jalees. One more gold thing was gleaming on a rise.
‘An old enemy of yours,’ said Zeth Zezeth the wounded wolf, in patterns, to his son the giant whale. ‘Twice you tried with her. She is much stronger now – but so are you.’
Brightshade was disappointed.
It was not that he ever minded killing anything, but he had lost interest in this woman, the one with saffron hair. There had been two of her last time. Both were tipped in the sea. If either version had bobbed up again, surely she did not matter now? Only Lionwolf and the deeds of Lionwolf could matter, or would need to be cancelled.
Sensing all this prevarication, the god-wolf was angry. He struck Brightshade sidelong, in the brain. Though so wrecked in person and persona, Zeth still packed the punch of any god, and Brightshade collapsed.
When he unsealed his eyes again, and blew water out of his blowhole, where shock had made him inadvertently inhale it, the wolf had left the shore. Only some marks were there like those from the slime of a freakishly large sen-snail.
Of course there was no choice. Brightshade eased himself away from the land and out towards the eastern ocean. Before he turned due north, he fought with and slew several of his own kind, practice perhaps, or only temper. He was not his father’s son for nothing.
In a scorchingly gilded landscape, orichalc crags belched madder plumes, orchards of topaz fruit crowded to a flaming hub. The wounded god lay there, by a stream like honey, staring through it, back at something in another world.
Zeth Zezeth had been truly hurt in his brawl with Saphay.
He had not expected it of her, not understanding that the third member of the triad, Yyfot, Winter’s Lover, had seen to it Saphay too became not only immortal but empowered.
Zeth glared through the stream. He was nearly as thoughtless as the whale, for being created a god from his inception his intellect was severely limited to the sublime. Now he barely recalled any details of finding Saphay that first time, when she was drifting and drowning under the deep sea ice. All he retained were facts. He had sated and possessed her in an act of immeasurable yet momentary stupendous sexual love. And during that moment she had dragged into herself not only his potent seed, but a third of the essence of himself, his god-fire, and used both to make her son.
Zeth was a minor sun god, reportedly the god of the legend of a lost sun below the sea – the formerly hot sun of the world’s long-ago, when there had been Summer as well as cold. He was, like all such gods, a symbol.
He had derived most of his character from mortal belief. Rukarian in origin, he had been thought to have two natures, a benign and a cruel side, and so these evolved in him. His benign side was also passionate and supremely selfish. His cruel side was evil.
Saphay, who had become Saftri of the Vorms, would be punished. If Zeth could be harmed then so could she. Her death by now was another item and not overly important. Actually, it would delight him more to inflict horror on her forever, and if she could not physically die and so escape him – all the better.
He was not, however, gazing at the world of Saphay in the honey of the stream.
What Zeth was viewing was a world that substantially stayed bolted and barred against him. It was the world of Lionwolf’s Hell. Not much was ever clear there. How could it be, such hells being as they were? But something Zeth had sponsored did have for him a great ruby clarity as it flapped across an achromatic sky, starred with that huge blue sun of Lionwolf’s war guilt. Zeth observed it, then lay down, an invalid on the burnished grass.
If that was Hell, this place of flame and warmth was Zeth’s own paradise. It came from him and was his. Here only could he heal. His wounds were not real but they had almost incapacitated him. The philosophy of the Kraagparians would have reviewed his plight, but Zeth knew nothing of them. He was a god of the Ruk. They were humans, and foreigners.
Sixth Intervolumen
It is best I pay for what I have had, with my own blood.
Song of Lalt: Simisey
Each day he would do what he had done in the past. Each night the others would come, and to him it would in turn be done.
Soon he did not know which he dreaded most, the nights or the days, his own chastisement or the inflictions he forged, unable not to, aware as he did so that they would next be inflicted upon him.
There seemed no end to it. It never could end. There was no route by which to get away.
Before, when he had been dead, he had lived pretty well, charging about between the physical world – where he could in that identity perform miraculous feats – and the twilight ’tween-world, where he had partaken of full-blooded-seeming wars, feasted, and diddled mermaids.
Always too there had been a promise of some even more wonderful place – at the back of the stars, perhaps. He had never reached it. He had stayed behind to help rear Lionwolf. And then to be with him, loving him like a son.
When, after all the epic dreadfulness of the last unbattle and the White Death, he had met up again with. Lionwolf, Guri had no longer loved him. Yet they were bound to each other. Together they crossed the dirty garbage pail of the whale’s back, and confronted there inevitable fate.
Learning of the particular death-destiny reserved for Lionwolf, Guri had wept, and turned his shoulder to the gods of his people. It was that bad. It went that deep. Deeper.
So now, once more s
pitted and undead, Guri did not even have a god to cry out to.
Only his people themselves, his geographically unsecured land, did Guri keep. Olchibe. And that despite the war customs of Olchibe which had brought him at last to this.
He had sometimes too the weirdest notion that he need not, yet, have suffered any torment. One day certainly there would have been, since hell existed, a reckoning. But it had been his brush with Lionwolf, after which he had lived part in and part out of reality, that pushed him early towards atonement.
Day was ending now in Guri’s hell.
It was like earth, like the ice-locked Marginal. Ice-jungles massed the distances; somewhere lay sea.
Today he had fought among his vandal band, whose leader was neither a friend nor Peb Yuve. Hell had none of Guri’s companions in it, only those others.
The terracotta sun went under the world’s edge as Guri and his accomplices impaled their male captives, and left them shrieking to die the leisurely death. There had been women too. Guri had raped three. One, who had begged him not to, he had cuffed. She was a woman of the Marginal, peasant Rukar maybe. Since she was not good enough to sell in the slave-market at Sham, when he was finished he held her by the hair and cut her throat. The children, of course, in the Olchibe manner, they spared up to the age of twelve. A boy who claimed to be twelve, however, Guri killed. He was obviously older.
Now they went in to feast at a tented sluht which, as night grew in the earthly hell, looked flimsy to Guri as an assemblage built of smoke.
And as always, no sooner did he duck in at the doorway than all changed.
The first time it happened, he had stumbled, fallen by the little open hearth that was no longer the enclosed potted fire of an Olchibe dwelling or camp. He did not know what was wrong. And then – oh, then – he did.