by Tanith Lee
‘Just before,’ Yyrot tactlessly went on, ‘the great whale got hold of you and flung you to your second death in a freezing sea.’
Haughty, Saftri said, ‘Death is an experience you have missed.’
‘If you say so. For yourself it was necessary as a fixative. It sloughed off the last of your untidy mortal crumbs, and let you become what I, simply by my attention, had taught you to become, a goddess. He did not realize. Zeth. Curious, if he is supposed to be one with me and I with him. But then there is Ddir, maundering about in the sky. He too is supposed to be part of both Zeth and myself, but who can make head or tail of his doings? Have you seen his latest effort? An artistic cunt of two hundred lighted stars. Curious also.’
Yyrot did not look as if he were curious. He only sat there as if trapped by courteous manners at some lacklustre function. Best Bear’s mother had given over her genuflecting, but stayed face down before him. Saftri stood up.
‘Zeth I chastised.’
‘Yes, the ether rang with the blows. But he too is now up and about again.’
Saftri, despite all resolve, whitened.
‘What does he mean to do?’
‘Oh, some bad-tempered thing.’
‘Let him come back,’ blustered Saftri. ‘The snow by my door still shows the sludgy unwisdom of his last visit. I’ll hang him upside down next from one of the ice-trees on the bluff.’
When she said this, pictured it, Saftri felt move inside her a sickening quake of the heart. She did not know why. Did she still fancy Zeth Zezeth? The image of a man, glorious yet almost extinguished, hung up in that old Rukarian fashion of which a chattering court had once told her …
Saftri shook off the pang.
But it was Best Bear’s mother who sat up and said to Yyrot, ‘Exalted sky-one, do you know how my son does?’
‘Your son? Oh. He is dead.’
Saftri flinched. The mother did not. She anticipated, as Saftri saw, nothing better of gods, even in the light of Saftri’s patronizing kindness.
However, the woman explained, ‘Exalted, I mean after death?’
Yyrot now stood up. How odd. The mound he had sat on, which had taken first the form of a cat – Saphay’s? – had surreptitiously altered to the outline of a horned whale. Doubly insulting. But she too, Saftri concluded, expected nothing better of gods.
‘Mortals have a spirit creature inside them,’ announced Yyrot, waves of refrigeration beaming about his lecture. ‘They always persist, somewhere. Only deities are immortal and therefore finally burn out like suns.’
If the mother understood him at all, still she said and did nothing more, lowering her eyes and her head meekly.
Saftri crossed to her and pulled her on to her feet quite roughly. ‘We must be going. It’ll be dark as the inside of a piss-pot in an hour.’
As she spoke, some supernatural aptitude of her ears brought her the far-off ringing of the iron gong above the harbour.
A warning?
Had the fiend Zeth already returned?
Yyrot was standing, scanning the mountains, intrigued perhaps by potential glaciers. Above the sky was indeed clamming up towards night.
Saftri lifted herself and the mother of Best Bear into the air about twenty feet over the god’s head.
He observed them idly.
Saftri shouted back over her shoulder, ‘Tell my cat she is a slut!’
But Yyrot, Winter’s Lover, had already vanished from the spot.
Miles out, miles off, the indigo soup of sea depths was brushed vividly aside. The mobile fish that lived there swarmed like bees from the way of a comet. Those frozen to objects in clouds of ice stared indifferently, lit to gold, fading back to iron.
Zeth Zezeth passed.
He was Sun Wolf, and Sun Beneath the Sea. According to the unwieldy legend, the hot sun of former millennia submerged there and left the world to a ghost sun, an impostor that gave insufficient incandescence and so started five centuries of winter. Maybe this fable was true, but more likely it was not. It was the same sun up there, itself burning out as Yyrot had predicted for his own fellowship of gods. And if Zeth had ever been the sun’s prince, or its cipher, this did not really now show on him or in his deeds. He was soulless as only his kind could be. An intelligent and brilliant moron, clothed in beauty and unreasonable power.
As he sped along he was aware, vaguely, of others who worshipped him – all were Rukarian, of course. Since three gods were given to everyone born in the central Ruk, Zeth had often been dispensed along with two others, in those cases not Yyrot or Ddir. Zeth had been, for example, one of King Sallusdon’s gods, in company with Preht and Yuvis. If he cared to, Zeth could manifest to all and any worshippers even while he was doing other things. Gods could be, naturally, not only in two but in myriad places at once.
Now his main focus was on the lump of matter cruising ahead.
Brightshade, giant of the deep, felt the first intimation of his father in a sizzling sting across his skin and brain.
It revolved him, sending him crashing into undersea floes, breaking columns and drifts of ice, the water bubbling bright blue.
When he recovered, Brightshade settled to the floor of a trench. Here he lay, waiting.
He, this leviathan, was apprehensive.
Zeth shot by him, gilding darkness, and dazzled before Brightshade’s right eye.
‘Imbecile! Why do you dawdle? I showed you where to go. Months you take over it. I should smash you in pieces, split you, you stinking malformation.’
There was in Brightshade’s vocabulary of mind-shapes no word for sorry. Now he coined one and produced it copiously.
‘Silence, drek. You will speed yourself up. Leave off this fornicating and skirmishing. You have enough to do, as I told you, when you reach that scab on the sea called Vorm.’
Brightshade stiffly grovelled. In shapes.
Which stung him afresh. He was not used to it.
And too he had always been perfect. No reprimand, let alone insult, had come his way.
Zeth viciously smote him again before spearing off into the ink blots of night-falling ocean.
Brightshade lay on the floor of the trench, blinking at prehistoric evidence ancient as his planet’s babyhood. It had no allure for him.
Shape-thought occupied the whale. He seethed with resentment and never-before-known fear.
The gong had been ringing on the headland to signal the return, not of Zeth, but of the jalees of Krandif and his men.
They had been gone months. Now, both Mother Ships and long vessels laden with cargoes, the warriors came back, buoyant with success and tales of fights and reiver scams and cities and torrid homesickness – to find the leftovers of the burnt village, a charred stump above a harbour devoid of any other shipping.
A thick groan had risen out on the water when they saw. They believed the Faz or Kelps, always uneasy neighbours, had visited.
Krandif leapt ashore.
He seized Majord, Saftri’s bard-priest, by the arms. ‘What went on here?’
Majord told him the horror story in ten or so poetic sentences.
By then all the men were off and on the shore. The shamans were ranging from the Mother Ships, the horsazin, noticing nothing changed, splashing in the sea.
‘Did Best Bear die?’ Krandif sensitively asked. He was not considering the boy’s mother.
‘Yes. Neck-broken. Laid to rest by the mountains now. She goes there nearly every day’
Mozdif came up, with a wonder walking grave and dead tired beside him.
Krandif squared his square muscular shoulders.
‘Moz! Ah. Here is one. Let her see this.’
Majord had already been gaping. Now he made over himself an antique religious wave.
‘He’s been a talisman for us,’ went on Krandif, encircling the figure of wonder with one arm, possessive and supportive. ‘He gave himself in exchange for his father, a Jafn chief. We let the man live and brought the boy with us. He’s not more than s
ix, but speaks often like a warrior of eighteen. And when sharks came, what to do he told us. We sang to them, soft, and they went to sleep and sank away.’
‘But – what is he? Not human? What’s he made out of? Midnight?’
Krandif smiled. ‘A hero he is. A Jafn hero. But now he’s ours. And she’ – he raised his hand to salute the god-house up the hill – ‘he’s for her. I dreamed of it. And if her favourite’s dead—’
‘Best Bear. Yes.’
‘Best Bear was fine as silk, but only a boy.’
Majord looked down at the midnight child.
Calm sad eyes looked back. But Majord could not see the human sorrow for the marvel.
‘By what name?’
The boy spoke, in faultless dialectic Vormish. ‘This one is Dayadin, son of Arok, Chaiord of the Jafn Holas.’
Having established the village was not under attack, Saftri landed behind the hill. She and the mother of Best Bear walked home.
Krandif’s jalees had voyaged in, only one vessel missing, leaving twenty-six long ships and two Mother Ships, and besides just a handful of men lost. Saftri was glad. Her unplanned plan was firming up and becoming promising.
They would need more ships. But messengers could now be sent across the Vormland and to outlying islands. Before, no one could be spared.
Saftri walked up the hill to her temple with shells on the walls and candles on the altar. Night was down by now, moonless for another hour at least and very dark.
Hearing boots crunch on the snow behind her, she turned in the doorway.
There were Krandif and Mozdif, and Jord and Majord and the other seven of her priests.
With exasperation she assumed they all wanted congratulations.
Then she saw the night had become a child and waited on the path about ten paces from her.
Saftri was amazed. Only her own Lionwolf had been so extraordinary, so flawless. She did not see that even her Lionwolf had not possessed some elusive quality that this one had.
‘Our Lady, look.’
‘Our Lady, he was brought for you.’
‘He is Dayadin of the Jafn. He is like the star we saw which fell – that fell here and killed so many – but altered to gentle darkness.’
‘From sharks he saved us all.’
‘From a storm, from that he saved us, saying how we should breathe and then the wind would breathe as we did – and the wind did breathe that way and the sea was flat. Flat as this hand of him that says it.’
Saftri looked on at the boy.
Star Black.
She knew the legend. It was one of the first Jafn myths she ever heard from her husband Athluan, who had drawn her from the iceberg.
‘Why do you call the hero Star Black?’ she had lamely asked.
‘His hair and skin were black as coal.’
‘Are you a phantom?’ she demanded of the child.
‘No. I am Dayadin, son of Arok.’
Arok … that name too seemed familiar to her.
‘You were stolen,’ she said. Something shifted in her. She did not, after all this while, know what.
The men were thrusting him forward, and he obeyed them, plainly not afraid, only worn out and steeped in emptiness. He would not waste himself on protest.
Saftri watched.
She did not think what she made of this.
Then the men had ebbed away from the hill and she and the child were there by the doorway, against the wall of shells, where she had pulverized Zeth.
‘You’re Saftri,’ said the child, ‘a goddess of these people.’
‘They shouldn’t have brought you here. You’re nothing to me. My son died. They think you can make that up to me?’
‘They’re stupid,’ he said. But without either rancour or aggression. Stupidity was just a fact. ‘My mother,’ he said, ‘she’ll cry. No one can make me up to her.’
Saftri glanced and lit the candles in the temple by a blink, not even a breath. She was improving.
‘Go down to the village,’ she said. ‘There are lots of women there who are without their sons.’
The child frowned at her.
He said, ‘My mother hasn’t a hair’s breadth of your goddessness. But she’s more a queen than you.’
This was not said with a child’s rudeness. It was an adult footnote, and it went through Saftri like a lash.
She would have struck him, but he was too small. Six? He was not so old. She could sense he was not. Yet he spoke, as they said, like a young man.
‘I have no concern with your mother.’
‘No.’
‘And I don’t want you. Go to the village.’
‘Send me back then,’ said the boy simply, ‘send me back to my father.’
‘You are impudent and our – their – prisoner. And your tongue is too sharp. You’re cruel, as he was.’
‘Who was cruel?’
To her own distress she seemed to have no control of her words, which spilled out, and now tears ran from her eyes. Unlike the fire-tears of the battle, these were only water, symptoms of femaleness and lack of choice.
‘My son,’ she said.
She turned from the child who was Dayadin, or Star Black, and marched into the shrine.
She recaptured, not wishing to, in a tidal wave, Lionwolf, his colours of fire and sky, flying through the snow-forest and the costive village of Ranjalla, waking everything. She saw him in firelight in Nabnish’s chimney of a house, leaning on her, smiling, as she told him stories. In ten years he became a man.
‘How shall I live,’ she had cried, ‘if you leave me—’
The shame of her words. Her shame. Her love.
‘Go then. What are you to me … To leave me here …’
And leave her he did. He left her to the mercy of the cold world and ignorant men, and the skittishness of gods, and to her own cracked heart.
My son. Who is dead. My son.
‘Don’t cry,’ said the child in the doorway. ‘My mother will cry because of me. But you don’t have to cry.’
Saftri moved into the dark beyond the candles, weeping. Only when she heard the child begin to cry too was she riven out of herself. Her first instinct was go to him. A second instinct intervened, more harsh and practical. Grief had spurred her mind. She smeared the wet from her face, and being now a goddess was instantly pristine and ready for new action.
FOUR
Sometimes they flew, or levitated. Sometimes they ran. The dogs would not go up in the sky, but bounded below, or alongside on the ground, barking now and then as if to say, ‘See, we’re dogs!’ The two women strolled. All the men but Curjai and Kuul had been disapproving. Heppa’s girl was in the family way, and chariots were so easy to come by here. But she did not like, the girl, who was named Wasfa, Hell’s animals, except the dogs who were now so dog-like. She preferred therefore to walk. And after all, like all the rest, Taeb and she could travel in the air if they wished to rest their feet.
The Red Witch who had abducted Vashdran’s mirror-body had flown generally east of Uashtab by the sun. They could see her sky-trail, fading only slowly, like a rusty scratch.
As always, the armour had fallen from them, not being appropriate. They wore random clothing of many lands and styles, formed by thought.
Night was the time they really talked to each other; as they sat unsleeping under the underlit stars, and the narrow new eyes of the jatchas glinted in firelight. And then conversation or monologue was always of home. That was, of life, who and what they had been and done. Curjai did not say much about this. Vashdran said nothing.
Kuul praised his wife Jasibbi. He said neither of the brides he took here had matched up to her, and seeing his lack of affection they had both carelessly wandered off. Swanswine knew no ordinary woman was worth a woman of Olchibe. Heppa, resuming their speech patterns, talked of the Vorm Isles, the mountains and sea voyaging, mentioning no woman of any kind. Behf’s provenance remained unclear, though his community seemed to have been of a fisher-w
arrior sort. He muttered only of women. The current two, Wasfa and Taeb, waited on the men and did not reminisce. Both already knew how to summon food from the earth. Wasfa did not object to the pale shoots that sprang out, or the loaves of bread from stones. Joints of meat would come too, but those bloody and convincing dinners Wasfa did not touch, and neither would Taeb eat them, even after roasting them on witch-invented fires. ‘Some food always comes out of the ground,’ Wasfa said. ‘But not ready-butchered dead animals.’
Taeb called water, wine or beer from the sky. That was probably only her sense of theatre; it could have come from anywhere. It poured into a big round cup made out of the ground of Hell, and they would scoop off goblets-full, and later the goblets, cast aside, would return to shards.
Some nights Wasfa began to tell stories: heroes, deeds, riches.
They liked this. Even Vashdran liked it, though it pierced him to the quick. He had always felt isolated, as indeed he was, but never so much as now.
He began to wonder, as perhaps he already had, if any of the others were real or only more inventions of Hell. All but Curjai. Curjai was real enough.
Curjai had suffered in the world where Lionwolf had flourished. Now in Hell Lionwolf-Vashdran suffered and Curjai found Heaven. Vashdran hated Curjai. Or loved him. And was not sure which. Such had been the life – and death – of the Lionwolf, that now he could hardly tell the difference.
The square of packed-down snow at the village’s centre was bigger than it had been, since the burned houses were cleared away. Torches flamed on poles. The shamans had tinged them with mauve. This was Assembly.
Krandif the ship-lord and his crews stood on the men’s side. The women had gathered on the other, where at last the first moon of the night was rising.
Her priests brought out the goddess’s chair, too, which had been filched from the Ruk a year ago. Saftri sat in it, looking round, and Dayadin sat on a stool by her knee.
He did not seem uneasy, was used to being gazed at as a paragon. All trace of his tears, like hers, was gone.
They had discussed things anyway in her temple. They had made a bargain.
‘But Our Lady,’ said Jord, ‘we’d all die.’