by Tanith Lee
She was glad to be alone. But as the miles went on she did not like to be totally alone. After that sometimes she glimpsed peasants working in the fields, and a few birds flew overhead. In the end, no doubt because she felt the day had lasted too long, a sunset happened, scald-red. Any stars? Yes, out they trooped, even some in constellations that she knew.
But this was not Ruk Kar Is. This was not the world. And during the next day, which started with a sunrise gaudy as trumpet blasts, Ruxendra found she distrusted the landscape. At which, in soft blurrings, it melted away.
She lost her bearings rather after this. There seemed to be smogs and twilights, and sometimes rivers she journeyed on, raft-borne and solitary, or in a type of half-seen company. She seemed sleepy, dull, no longer unnerved. That all these incoherences might be due to her own lack of flexibility never occurred to her. Besides, her purpose stayed fixed. It shut off other elements from her, whatever they were or might be. She wanted to seek the god-demon Vashdran who had ended her world. She thought he too was dead, was sure he was – she had been given some reason to think so. But what area did half-gods frequent in death? Hell, it would seem.
So Ruxendra was convinced she travelled towards Hell, and thus with time – or perhaps without it – she identified the deadly, wide lands she traversed as outposts of nastier confines – those he would be consigned to.
Like Lalt of Simisey, had she but guessed, Ruxendra was now presented with myth and story challenges. A herd of large grey animals stampeded towards her through the mist – bossy brave little girl, she halted them with a loud shout and Magikoy symbols summoned from the air. A table lay before her, set with tempting food, fruit and pastries, and she spurned them and then saw they were only cleverly painted stones. A liquid sea appeared across the land, impassable, but Ruxendra sang out a Magikoy sentence and the sea froze over and she walked across it.
She had always wanted power. Not power to harm, it was true, power to do good. But she was opinionated and had died too young. All these tests of her seemed to spring from her own unconscious mind, but her soul, if such it was, revelled in them, making up for what it had never had the space to do on earth.
If she had outlined her adventures while travelling, Ruxendra would have embroidered, but factually she forgot much of them or never really saw or attended to them. I travelled for years, she would, and virtually had, said. I was offered this or that and I turned away from all, wanting only one reward.
At last she found herself on another night sea, riding another raft with a sail, one of the contingent of undead ‘brides’ blown towards the shore of Shabatu.
That someone had chosen her and so saved her from the fate of most of the other women, abruptly engulfed by some ghastly mechanism of the deep, Ruxendra did not guess. The experience left her shaken, but already she had spotted Vashdran on the shore. She knew him solely from description. None of the fully fledged Magikoy had ever been able properly to coax his image in an oculum. But the city had been flooded by second-hand reports: his burning hair, his eyes blue as sapphire that turned red as ruby during battle.
His beauty left Ruxendra, rather than unmoved, more angry. The beauty of the other one – Curjai – enraged her too.
By her remaining and mostly Hell-augmented astral powers, Ruxendra determined some link, closer than brotherhood or loverhood, between shadowy Curjai and fiery Vashdran.
So she would damage both of them. But Vashdran first.
Over the battle-mad men in Hell she knew how to exert fascination. In life she had always been able to tame men, other than the abstemious and studious Magikoy Masters. Her father had been the proverbial putty in her hands, her brothers too. As for the apprentices, one had thrown himself out of a high window at the lack of her returned affection. He lived but was banished from the Insularia. Ruxendra did not even remember him. But in Hell she had more than girlish charm to her armoury. She had the stature of a talented witch. It was no longer necessary to flirt or flatter. Now she could put her foot down. Down it went.
Despite what she had said, Ruxendra had asked no one’s permission to abscond with Vashdran’s double. She had not frankly thought she need apply to anyone, for once more most of the beings here seemed misty, not quite real – yes, even the warriors she had goaded and entranced.
All the success, bubbling in the cauldron of her hatred, boiled over in a paroxysm.
When she sank her teeth and claws in Vashdran the Lionwolf, and soared with him on her scarlet wings – leaving him also abject and shatter-spirited below – Ruxendra reached the highest peak. It was not however as high as she had anticipated. It was a little less.
And all this after, this flying about, was not so wonderful either. She meant to secure some fastness here, and to take him there for her – what else – pleasure. But a sort of tiredness was coming on.
He did not respond as she had wanted, neither of him.
Under blue sun and blue cirrus, Ruxendra quartered the sky and eventually flapped eastward. Some mountains had appeared, amazingly high, with cloud wreaths round their pinnacles and actual snow flaming white.
When she threw him across the flank of one of these heights, Ruxendra decided she must build there a tower. That should be easy. It was.
She drew it up out of the rock with the snow still glinting on its shoulders. It was rough-hewn; her abilities did not stretch to those of the artisan. Lopsided even, slightly, the tower, with unmatching windows of too-excellent shape, and stained glass in them because of the casements she recalled from home.
He lay as if dead. But he was dead, so had nowhere else to go.
Except of course the mirror images of the men had died, completely, all but this one. Really though, it was not this one who truly concerned her. He was her hostage, and hurting him was more demonstration than achievement. It was the other she wanted, the original, Vashdran. Would he follow her captive? He must.
Inside, the tower had no stairs. It hardly inconvenienced winged Ruxendra.
She lugged her plaything up into the head of the tower with the artistic windows, created a floor of transparent vitreous, and dropped him on it, thump.
The Lionwolf Vashdran looked at her. Had this mirror-man ever spoken? No. He shed blood, that was all.
‘Speak to me,’ said Ruxendra, ‘or I shall increase your suffering.’
‘What,’ he said, ‘shall I say?’
Ruxendra grimaced. She settled on a spur of un-smoothed rock above him. ‘Say what you are.’
‘Lionwolf.’
‘Vashdran. Can you die?’
‘That is all I can do.’
The sun was moving over. Bars of shadow drifted from the windows, dark viridian and magenta.
‘What do you mean? I won’t kill you – not yet. You have some worth.’
‘My worth is my death.’
‘I’ll harm you instantly if you persist in your silliness.’
No reply.
Ruxendra turned and gazed through the coloured glass. She sighed. A tiny figment of her plucked at her heart, whispering it wanted to be five years old now and tucked up in bed with its doll, and Mother and the slave girl bringing hot milk with cinnamon, and only nice things in the morning. Only nice straightforward things.
They had come to the black river. Neither meant to, or thought he meant to.
The feasthall was gone, the tables with their streams were removed or dissolved. Two or three torches burned, their light less hard.
Vashdran and Curjai stood on the bank, and saw one more curious sight. The stone King of Death was stationed there farther along, with a pack of six dogs bounding round him, sometimes feeding them morsels of what seemed to be only meat.
King Death was as ever bald stone with cracks and lines running up through his bluish-greyishness. Then he looked over, and he smiled. The stone moved, ponderous yet willing, about his mouth.
‘Approach,’ said the King of Hell.
Curjai and Vashdran exchanged a look. They walked towards the
King.
As they went, the six jatchas came flying at them, their pack from Shabatu – Star-Dog and Atjosa, the hounds of Behf, Swanswine and Kuul, and Heppa’s preposterously happy Bony.
Frisking, they thoroughly licked the hands of the two men. Like dogs, like dogs.
‘Do you see—’ Curjai was awed.
‘I see. Where their eyes should have been.’
‘Something – is.’
From slits in their jatcha hide, the gleaming beginnings of bright dog eyes looked up at Curjai and at Vashdran.
But the King was waiting. Best not to annoy, going on previous occasions, especially as he continued to smile. He loomed over them. He was not a man. Had he ever been?
He read their minds.
‘No,’ he said, in his voice of a thousand voices. ‘I am Hell. I am the cause of all you see.’
Neither man understood him.
Vashdran said, ‘Forgive us, lord King.’
‘That is over,’ said the King. ‘You have learned how to be humble, if not humility itself. You have learned fear, but not how to deal with it.’
‘You are wise, lord King.’
‘And to flatter very poorly. You must do better, Lionwolf, son of Zzth.’
The King placed himself between them and let down his heavy stony hands like lead weights on their shoulders. He was like a regal yet amenable father with sons, and all round ran the family dogs, winking new eyes and wagging tails.
‘Your men, the other Saraskulds, are approaching this chamber. Some of your bride-wives are with them, those who play a part in this. But not Ruxendra, who is ahead of you.’
‘Another war?’ Vashdran asked tonelessly. ‘Another combat in a stadionum?’
‘To your kind, so much is war and combat and a stadium. But you will go after the red witch. I believe you have discussed it.’
‘Sir,’ said Curjai, ‘heroes go to rescue their friends. Sometimes even their enemies.’
‘And which of those is the Lionwolf to Vashdran?’ asked the King.
Vashdran said, incongruous, ‘I never said I’ll go.’
Just then Heppa, Swanswine and Kuul appeared along the bank. Behf had turned up too and come with them, solemnly downcast. All four men fell prudently on their knees to the King. But their own dogs rushed at them. Heppa was the first to give in. ‘Bony! Bony! You bad hound!’ In the background stood Taeb and Heppa’s bride, but none of the other numerous women the men had accumulated.
And Winsome? Vashdran dismissed the question from his mind. He believed he was done with her. She had seen, while Ruxendra taunted and the body hung in its chains and the boulder of thought crashed through the floor. That time, he had barely noticed Winsome. She was not real, not in this place. If she had ever been.
Yet she had said she was the well-spring of one facet of the power of the stone King … had she? She alone could call the moon, or light the cities.
‘Yes, come forward,’ said the King, over their head.
Vashdran saw Taeb was creeping up, suspiciously timid.
She did not speak but pointed at Vashdran’s forearm. He glanced, having forgotten the words written there in Ruxendra’s saliva, and used to the gnawing scorch of them. I am the payment.
‘Let me take her curse off you,’ said Taeb.
Vashdran held out the arm to her – and looked away as if afraid. He did not reckon she could do it.
But Taeb bent over his arm and he felt her cat’s tongue rough on his skin, licking up the words.
‘It’s gone, Vash,’ Curjai said.
Vashdran looked back. The words were no longer on him. Instead he glimpsed Taeb’s tongue glinting with them. She spat them out three times on the floor, where they shone and dried to nothing.
‘I have magic to match hers,’ said Taeb.
The stone King had withdrawn, as before. Either he had disappeared, or curiously melded with the cavernous hall. Perhaps that was him still, standing there – that man-like looming stone among stones. Or there? Or … there?
The others were all gathering round Vashdran, seeming more cheerful now, telling him they must get ready for the journey, acting out again this semblance of mortal life, or heroic legend.
Something came to Vashdran’s attention, jolting him, astonishing him.
The little malt-haired wife of Heppa was also before him, her hands folded. They, and the woven girdle, had lifted at her waist over her swollen stomach.
‘Heppa—’
Heppa grinned, proud. ‘Credit he that says this. What you see is true. She’s got my brat cooking in her oven there.’ It was the first time Vashdran had heard him talk even partially in the vernacular of the Vormland.
Vashdran’s eyes travelled to the demure face of Heppa’s wife.
Heppa said, ‘We heard it can happen here. Some other woman, got with child she was. I – never managed it – in the world. Who’d think it, eh, Vash?’
Indeed, who would think it, pregnancy here among the legions of the dead and damned.
THREE
Leaders and warriors, when dead, they burned. Long in the past enamoured wives had sometimes climbed up on the pyre to die too. Otherwise men and women of ordinary rank were buried under the nearer mountains in the snow. Children were buried there, too. It was always thought best to discourage the attendance of parents and friends, so that the death itself might be forgotten, only the life recalled. And with this in mind, mourners were not encouraged to tend towards the graveyard, once the snow was pushed back over a mound. Nor were the mounds marked in any way. In fact the graveyard seldom looked like what it was, the one or two fresh graves soon snowed under. But there had been clear freezing weather, and so many dead, almost a hundred and fifty of them. Large mounds and small ones were picked out like diligent sculptings from the ice, there under the frowning embankments of the mountains with their white combers. Despite this, the burial place was deliberately many miles inland. Who anyway could find the time?
Two did.
The mother with her incinerated hair shorn to stubble, and the lioness-goddess Saftri.
There had been no jealousy before. Horribly now there was, a little, fermented from grief. ‘He was her favourite.’ ‘She never though saved that boy’ ‘Carries her, she does. To make fast the going.’
Saftri did carry the mother of Best Bear, otherwise it would have been a distended and impossible trek. Saftri had been carried through the air by Guri, and she politely asked the mother initially if to air-carry her was acceptable. It was. They did it out of sight of the village, but some saw. Some always see what is not meant for them. It is a law.
Yet Saftri had ultimately saved the village, perhaps all Vormland, from the fire wolf who unseamed the sky. In the end, they were dumb about these grave visits.
Saftri-Saphay sat on the ice of the graveyard facing Best Bear’s mother.
In the beginning, the mother had asked if the goddess might raise Best Bear from the dead.
This had petrified Saftri. She was an inexperienced deity still, doubted such an act was in her range, and feared it besides, for in what state would the poor child emerge?
‘No,’ she had answered. The woman accepted this with a stricken quietness. ‘I might however draw out your hair and grow new for you—’
‘No, no. Let it be as it is. If you allow.’
By now they only came and sat here, or sometimes wandered around, staring at other identical graves, the mother trying to recollect whose they had been.
There was no longer any purpose in coming here. Neither Best Bear’s mother nor the goddess believed he was in the graveyard. He was in Paradise, or in the sky, somewhere delightful with an improved climate.
‘Is there warmth there?’
‘Once I glimpsed a land of warmth,’ Saftri said. ‘Golden trees and mountains.’ But she suspected that geography had something to do with Zeth.
What had become of him? Had she definitely vanquished him? After her seizure of power and vainglory, when she had bea
ten him, as much as was feasible among gods, to a pulp, Saftri entertained a couple of doubts. Suppose he recovered and returned? Would he always be doing this? There would be no Vormland left …
A plan had commenced then, within her mind. She had not yet voiced it and, for a plan, it had actually undergone little planning.
Saftri heard Best Bear’s mother give a sound like cold water falling on a hot stone, and turned her head sharply to stare in the same direction.
About twelve feet away a male figure sat, as they did, on a grave mound. But his mound had taken on a shape which was like an ice-carving of a huge cat. He had come from nowhere.
‘You.’ Saftri’s tone struck neatly between alarm and disgust.
‘I.’
Best Bear’s mother, no fool, had got on to her knees and, fists to forehead, was bowing over and over down on the ice.
Saftri ignored her.
‘What do you want, Yyrot?’
The god, second of Saftri-Saphay’s birth-given pantheon, was just as she recalled, greyly smooth of skin, exactly like the dog he sometimes turned into, black-haired and rimed by icicles. He wore an inelastic agate robe that resembled a sheet of permafrost. This was not his angry side, in which he laughed and gave off heat. No, he was in a benign state of mind, and loaded the chill atmosphere with planks of extra coldness.
‘I have not visited you, Saphay, since you lived among the ripe wheat inside my icebergs. You will be pleased to know your cat is well, has grown to a large size, and also borne me, or my canine aspect, thirteen children.’
‘Stop it,’ Saftri snapped at the bowing woman. ‘My cat can do as she likes. Her repulsive offspring I saw when I was enmeshed in another’s dream.’