by Tanith Lee
Other creatures were regularly ejected from these walls and bounced alive, clothed and garlanded. He went inward, hoping to be expunged – was not.
The tragedy of too vibrant an individual. Some went out like snuffed candles. Some it might take a detonating sun to wipe away.
Curjai, who had been searching for him, found him, the way regions and people could be found in the cities of Hell through wanting to find them. Curjai sat down by the wall in which he had detected the coiled form of Vashdran, now like a fossil.
The remaining commanders – all but Behf, who was missing – were grouped in one of the other areas. Heppa was crying because he had seen his own dead face. Swanswine was raging, slamming his fists against the architecture because he had seen not only his own corpse, but himself when living tortured by terrible processes. Heppa’s bride, the very young girl, posed meekly nearby. She kept her optimistic serenity even in this extreme. Taeb, who was the wise woman or witch, combed her green hair, her sly eyes cast down. Kuul was mournful. He continually recited bardic poems of the Jafn featuring the death of heroes, one named Star Black, and one strangely titled Kind Heart. Men coped as they could with the fact of death, just as when alive they had had to. Uashtab, city of Hell, was full that day of comparable scenes.
At first Curjai had been transfixed by terror like all of them at sight of his own body. He had told Vash to shove the remnant into the river where the others were going. Then Curjai took himself off. In one of the innumerable halls of Hell he strode round and round, his thoughts labouring over what he had seen, until he had remoulded it into a negotiable form.
For dying did not count here. He was dead – and alive. More, Curjai, Escurjai to his friends, knew that along with these macabre penalties he at least had been favoured and rewarded for his courage and his battles in the living world.
When he came across the others of their band, he patted Kuul on his pale-haired head, slapped Swanswine on the back, kissed Heppa smackingly on the forehead, remarked Behf’s absence, drew two flowers from a handy wall – greenish for green-haired Taeb, white for Heppa’s patient partner – and went to find Vashdran.
He predicted that Vash, his dead skin not having been hung out with the rest, had been selected for a worse show – worse even than Swanswine’s harrowing personal account. Curjai already grasped that Vash had both earned this and also must undergo it. Curjai remembered the smelting of steel for swords. Through fire and water and beating it went, and so was made perfect.
Vashdran was after all a god. That was laughably obvious.
Having discovered Vash there in the wall, Curjai too began to speak a bardic lay of his own people.
‘So then says Lalt, bleeding, I have paid enough. Get up then says the other, for only your misapprehension keeps you here.’
Curjai told the story of Lalt, the god-hero of Curjai’s native land, the great country of Simisey. How he was conceived when a woman was striking a flint for fire, a boy ignited into being in this woman’s womb. He told of Lalt’s youthful adventures and how, eventually, he went down into the depths of the deadland to rescue his friend and blood-brother Tilan.
The road was so black he tried to light a torch but the torch wouldn’t light. ‘Lalt exclaims, So dark it is, how shall I see to find my way? And the unlit torch replies, You’ll find your way better if you’re blind. Because then you’ll have to.’
Lalt roamed through pits and underpasses of the underworld. Here and there he had to pay a toll – a kiss to a maiden made of bones, a snip of his unshaven beard to a shadow, a cupful of his blood to a scaled worm thing that had given him fruit and water.
‘At length he comes on his friend, lying on his side in a stupor in a box of stone. Lalt says, Wake up, brother, morning’s broken. But Tilan won’t wake up. Lazy in death he lies there. Lalt shakes him, spits on him, pulls his hair, insults him – nothing.’
Curjai paused. He waited, and waited, and his eyes were sly at that moment as the untrustworthy eyes of Taeb.
Behind him at last in the wall, a voice, deadly dull, is still asking: ‘So what did he do?’
Curjai, his back to the embryo-fossil which had just addressed him, smiled unseen.
You’re only a boy, thought Curjai. Like I was. And you’ve been told stories before.
‘Well, what can a man do when his brother and the man he loves best among men lies curled in a tomb of his own devising?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Let me show you, dear heart,’ said Curjai, leaping up and dancing round, a sword like a cleaver in his hand, come from nowhere, for this was Hell and inventive. ‘Let me show you what Lalt did. He smashed the fucking grave.’
With a concussion resembling a localized earthquake, the blade stormed through the wall. Particles and slivers of the milky quartzine stuff hurtled through the air; huge chunks met the floor and disintegrated. Out of these unfolded amorphous parts of physiognomies and physiques – elegantly quarter-made ears, toes and eyes, jewels and wisps of clothing.
Vashdran too plummeted out of the wall.
He sat up on the floor, glanced round him and bellowed – at which the tiny atomies rushed away, even the eyes gliding on miniature unseeable runners.
Curjai stood over him.
‘I was born like that,’ said Curjai. The cleaving sword was sheathed and gone.
‘Out of a wall,’ said Vashdran, his eyes, despite the shout, dull as his speaking voice had been and was.
‘No, from a struck flint. My mother was barren – five years. The king turned to other women for his sons. Then an ember off the hearth – her gown caught alight. They beat it out – and she was with child. She bore scars on her left ankle and calf, which she showed me after, where the god had caressed her before seeding her. Attajos. I was his son.’
Lionwolf got up. ‘Why didn’t you leave me be?’
‘Does the son of a god leave another son of a god – and both flaming fire gods at that – cribbed up in a wall?’
Vashdran advanced. He flung his arms round Curjai. He held him close for a few seconds, then thrust him away. ‘We’re done. Now let me alone.’
As Vashdran moved off, Curjai sprang at him like a lion. Both of them crashed down headlong.
‘What did they make you see?’
‘Enough. Get off me.’
‘Make me.’
‘Oh, it’s this again – this never to be ended futile war—’
‘No. Tell me what they showed you, Vash, these ones here – were you dead?’
Vashdran said, pushing Curjai aside and once more getting to his feet, ‘Alive.’
‘Torture then? Unspeakable humiliation and pain, just as Swanswine was forced to witness for himself?’
‘Alive and upside down in chains.’
‘Where?’
‘Gone now. That red Magikoy witch – she took me – she took – what I had become. You were right about her. She has considerable powers in Hell.’
Curjai too got to his feet. ‘And?’
‘And nothing. Let it go. Let me go. I’m over, Curjai, like a book some fool has read and failed to understand.’
‘Escurjai,’ said Curjai. ‘Listen. Lalt broke the box of stone and Tilan stumbled out dazed—’
‘It’s a story.’
‘We are a story. You. You, you say, are a book. Listen, Vash. We’ll go and—’
‘No.’ Vashdran looked away through the vistas of Hell. ‘The weight of too much is on me and I’m sick of myself, I am poisoned by what I’ve been. And still – still – I don’t know what I am, or how I caused it all, or why I’ve come down – to this.’
Curjai glanced idly at the dismembered wall, back into which ejected atomies were still busily crowding.
‘Wine!’ he called, imperious.
It seemed he had learned the system here rather well. For out of the same wall at once, in a flurry, were hatched two girls with rounded arms and alabaster vases of booze.
Vashdran stood, thinking nothing, knowi
ng himself lost, staring into a golden cup which had a pattern of jet black snakes, and was full of a rich yellowish wine.
‘If you won’t hear the tale of Lalt, maybe I’ll tell you my story. My book,’ said Curjai.
‘You’re the son of a fire god.’
‘So I was. He made a mistake.’
‘Do they? Yes. Perhaps they do. The god who fathered me made a very great mistake.’
Curjai raised his goblet and drank. Vashdran copied him. The wine was good, as always.
They began to walk, slowly, as if just getting the knack of walking, along the hall, through an arch into another hall, through another arch and on.
‘My father was a king,’ said Curjai, ‘by which I mean the husband of my mother. He had seventeen sons when I was delivered, the gift of Attajos, into the royal bed. Out I came, and my mother – she heard a silence. And then she heard one of her women give a wavering squeal. I know. My mother told me this.’
‘Such a remarkable baby,’ said Vashdran, ‘too beautiful to keep quiet over.’
‘Ah.’
Still walking, Vashdran looked aside at Curjai. Handsome and fine, he paced at Vashdran’s side, smiling even now a very little.
‘I was a monster.’
They walked.
The story of Curjai exerted its fascination over Vashdran. Gaps appeared in his agony of ego-absorbed pessimism.
He resisted, attempting to preserve a firm hold on his misery – but kept mislaying it, amnesiac for seconds at a time of self.
And Curjai read aloud from his book.
Simisey began at a sea as usual frozen for miles, and went inland in hilly snowfields that everywhere were uplifted into cliffs. Ice-forest clung on the sides, flashing like zircons when the winds funnelled through defiles.
A dark-haired, tawny people, the Simese wedged their villages and towns in the snow rockery of the land, and rode over the terrain in sleds and chariots drawn by tall sheep-like long-necked beasts thatched in brown pelt, whose backs also went up like a small mountain, or a pair of them. The capital was at Padgish, and here Curjai’s nominative father ruled as king, as his own father and grandfather had ruled before him. The palace was built of whole tree trunks, and throughout they stood like pillars to hold up the roofs of latticed stone. Curjai’s earliest memories, after his mother, were of these towering pitted black columns, and of the enormous pawed feet of the hump-backed dromazi. Later he saw the horses kept in the royal yard. Sometimes they were ridden, usually in war, or when hunting deer and snow-tigers.
Curjai yearned after the horses, their care, their riding, as he longed to see the battle banners and hear the accounts of fights with marauding neighbours from land and sea.
Placed on his colourfully woven rug before the courtyard door, he watched everything, all eyes, yearning and longing, and soon sad.
He had learned swiftly, perhaps by the age of three, none of that could ever be for him, though he was the legal son of a king by his foremost queen, and through fire the son of Attajos the god.
Curjai had been born this way. Both his legs ended at the knee, his right arm at the elbow. His short left arm was equipped with a hand, with one finger and a thumb – a blessing, some crone of the house had remarked in his earshot, for otherwise surely he must have been destroyed like a deformed kitten. Curjai knew these facets of himself familiarly. However, he had never seen inside a mirror, though his mother, being royal, had one of silvered glass. In the end, inevitably, Curjai did see himself, by an accident of his mother’s women, probably not malign, for by then they were quite fond of him.
His face was no face. It was the rudiments of a face before features had been carefully applied. He possessed an apparatus to breathe through, if with a degree of difficulty. His mouth was shapeless, and had a limited selection of long teeth – just enough to eat with. Ears he did not have. Only his eyes were there, one rather cloudy, and both of a colour that was too pale, like dilute beer. He had been dressed sumptuously as befitted his rank. Otherwise he had not a single hair on him. At that hour of the mirror he was about six, and he floundered away, afraid. He did not know, until people came running and he saw their reflections too, it was himself he had been shocked by.
‘Break the mirror.’
His mother said this.
‘But lady – it’s of glass—’
‘Break it! In a millon pieces.’
The mirror was broken. Something broke also in Curjai. He did not reveal any evidence of it. How could he, when all he was must be taken now for evidence of prenatal breakage.
Though he still loved and yearned after the glory of the warriors, he had long ago given up the dream of becoming a man.
Now he began to notice the birds. If he had been a bird, the child reasoned, his physical deficiencies would not so limit him. The abbreviated arm and hand would be incorporated in wings and bear him up. And he would need then no legs, for he thought had he been a bird, he would never have come back to earth.
In the palace they were all tender enough to him. They liked him. They made sure he heard the stories and the songs and legends of Padgish and Simisey, and was instructed, to a certain extent, in the role and duties of male royalty.
One day a favourite warrior brought him a small carved bow – not to be learned on, of course, merely to have – and he cried out with joy at seeing it. That very afternoon Curjai, who had no external ears but heard too well without them, detected the voice of this warrior, laughing and saying over the courtyard wall, ‘But Curjai can’t live, can he, not for long? A blessing’ – that word again – ‘for the King.’
Curjai could crawl on his stumps if he had to. He put the bow, which he had been nursing, under a loose tile in the main room of his mother’s apartments. He did not want to hurt the bow; it was not its fault. That was the year he was thirteen. Also it was the year he was to bless his father the King by dying.
Many caught the fever. It was nothing much; even the old mostly recovered.
Curjai was watching the birds sailing over the world of the sky when he felt the first intimation of it. It astounded him, for suddenly he found he no longer cared about the birds, and he could not think why not.
They carried him to his pallet and he thought that was all he wanted. But the pallet could not make him comfortable. Then his mother arrived. She picked him up, able to because he was so small and so much of him not physically present, and bore him to her bed. She got in with him and held him, and spooned liquid water into his mouth when he sobbed for drink.
Her hair was tan, between brown and red. His sharp ears had heard the King wed her for her hair. Fire in her hair, Curjai thought. She talked too of fire.
‘You can’t be sick much longer,’ she tutored him, sensibly, ‘you are my only son. You’re the son of the fire. Look, see where he kissed me, Attajos, before he made you in my body.’ That was when she showed him the scars on her ankle and her lower leg. It struck him chaotically in the spinning of the fever that perhaps the god had withheld his own legs for that very cause. But why both legs, and also an arm, fingers, ears and nose? His mother had not been burned there.
In the end agony infused Curjai. He knew nothing much of that time. Only her tears on his face, her rocking arms. By then both of them lay on a straw mattress at the will of the physician. He heard it rustle through all his tumult. A straw death, the death of illness and weakness any warrior shunned.
The king’s mages never visited the room.
The clan shaman came in near dawn. Curjai was having his last lucid moment.
Curjai’s mother spoke to the holy man.
‘Is this all? Why are the gods so wicked?’
‘Tainted by us, lady. It goes up, our muck, with the offering smokes.’
‘Then all’s hopeless.’
‘He,’ said the shaman, staring at Curjai with an old hot gaze, ‘death will be the gate for him. Don’t hold him back. You wouldn’t from a war.’
‘Death …’ she said.
&nb
sp; Death, Curjai heard, over and over in his scrambled brain.
But then the shaman’s litany entered there.
‘Don’t be afraid. You’ve fought all your life, harder than any warrior, to stay in this world. How else could you have done it thirteen years? In the Afterlife you’ll find the warrior’s haven. I see it, and will mark it on a scroll.’
The sun rose, and Curjai died. The last he had of earth was the savage threnody of his mother, tugging on him, still trying to keep him with her. Then dark. Then light. Then – this.
‘I woke up here a man, formed and complete, as you see. A dazzling figure. I’m quite enamoured of myself, Vash, I can tell you. And here I fight as a warrior and I win. And death and sickness are nothing. Even seeing the death of this man I had also become. What died? Only my reflection again in my mother’s mirror. But I was a boy. As were you? Perhaps. And now I have everything I longed for, including, when I like, wings made from shields. Oh, Vash, pardon me, but this Hell – it isn’t Hell for me. This is my Heaven.’
Today the blue sun was roped by blue cirrus. Ruxendra flew beneath, intransigently holding Vashdran’s other self.
When night had come yesterday she alighted with her burden on a block of stone, one of many in a shingled valley by one of the lakes of pointless white fire. She sat there all night, watching him. He did not try to get away. But then, she had nearly drained him of blood – not drinking it, she would not wish to, merely letting it out of him through bites, and stabs she gave him with a paring knife. The knife belonged on an attirement table of her mother’s and was used for cleaning the nails. Ruxendra had not seen it since she went to the Insularia, yet here in Hell she found it usefully fastened in her sleeve.
The moment she was dead, Ruxendra had begun to travel. She had come to herself in fact walking firmly along a wide paved road, like those in the city of Ru Karismi, save there were no buildings to be seen, and no funeral pyres.
She was glad she felt better, and clear-headed, but rather uneasy after all knowing she was dead.
On either side of the road stretched something she had never beheld in her life. A kind of grass or grain was growing in vast quantities, very pallid and feathery, and running away to left and right and behind and in front for miles, she thought, towards horizons of swag-bellied cloud. There was slight colour to anything and this had disturbed Ruxendra too, but after a while a change came over things. The sky soaked bluer and the grass-grain of every steader’s wish-fulfilment, the subject of many homilies on the delights of the next world, more greenish.