by Tanith Lee
Heppa peered at Ruxendra. ‘Who’s she?’
Curjai said, ‘Up on the mountain, Vashdran died the second death.’
One by one their heads rotated on the columns of strong necks. Only Wasfa did not turn, but instead made in the air a lilting gesture, to some god of the dead most likely.
How normal she looked, with her swollen fecund belly and the bubbling pot of porridge, the dogs sitting anxiously by, wanting breakfast.
How unnormal, everything else.
‘Who’s leader then, who’s chief Saraskuld?’ asked Behf.
‘I,’ said Curjai, with a prince’s authority. ‘Who did you think?’
They grunted. No one argued.
They had not recognized Ruxendra. That was not so odd. Persons came and went here in an incorrigible manner. Besides, she did not look at all as she had.
Taeb was stalking in over the plain. She bore in one hand a large bloody bone torn out of the huge left foreleg of the wolverine.
‘I can read it in the fire,’ she said, ‘Lionwolf is no more.’
That was all.
As the sun slid up the sky, cutting its way with a razor edge, they kept to the hearth and ate Wasfa’s porridge, which was good, salty and spicy.
There was beer too. They drank it, mostly unspeaking. Only Swanswine said in the end, ‘What next?’
‘Wait for night,’ said Curjai. ‘Then we’ll cremate them. His two corpses.’
‘That moon’s going down,’ said Kuul. ‘Only the Queen here can call the moon.’
‘She called the moon to mark Vashdran’s death.’
Heppa peered again at Ruxendra, sheltering small, seen-and-not-heard under Curjai’s non-literal wing. ‘Who is she?’
‘Mine.’
And then Ruxendra added for herself, very low, subservient or cunning, ‘My mother called me Dawn. After the sunrise when I was delivered.’
‘An adorable name,’ said Kuul. ‘In Jafn that would be Ushah.’
The others, where applicable, generously donated extra names for a dawn in their own former tongues.
Ruxendra gave a small smile, a girl who was flattered by big brave men.
But Taeb spun about three times on the spot, then flung the wolverine leg bone up at the sun. So far as they could see it did not hit the sun, but her action wrecked the atmosphere rather. The dogs bolted out on the plain and pretended to hunt invisible things.
At day’s end, they lit torches and went up the mountain. The five men walked at the front, Wasfa and Ushah the Dawn and Taeb and the six dogs at the procession’s back.
None of them employed flight. It was only again the speed and great ease with which they scaled the peak’s sheeny side that gave the strategy away.
The tower was wilting. Abandoned by Ruxendra-Ushah’s will the rock of it was crumbling, subsiding into the parent crag.
Curjai alone entered it. No one else wanted to. Had they in the end felt connection to Vashdran, or loyalty to him, or anything at all? Probably not. Certainly Kuul, who had attached to him in the beginning as if Vashdran were a battle-standard, had lost faith. Kuul’s life-memories, even though impaired, had not helped the process either. They had all run with Vashdran to this area because it was something else to do.
In true life, Vashdran’s charisma had drawn men and women, even beasts. They had raced towards him, in love with all he was.
In death he was only one more outcast spirit.
And even in second death, solely Curjai seemed compelled to organize a funeral rite. And it was in the nocturnal style of his own country.
Inside the tower he uttered prayers he had heard said for warriors of Simisey. He offered a couplet or two from the Song of Lalt, Lalt’s elegy for dead Tilan, his hand-fast brother. Above, under the cloak on the transparent floor, a carcass lay red and black, and by it the body of a boy of twelve years, curled up on his long red hair.
Curjai slung his torch into the melting structure of the tower.
‘I never knew till we met I had a brother, born not of my mother’s womb but of the same metal that forged me.’ Lalt had said this. Curjai said it over. ‘Sleep a while, brother, and then return. Or half of myself for ever wanders in your underworld, and here in the lands of men I stumble, lame in one foot, sightless in one eye, old as winter like an old man. Attajos: consume flesh, and let the spirit free.’
Before the fire caught hold of either body, Curjai stepped out of the tower.
The others threw in their torches, haphazard, Behf and Heppa looking nearly embarrassed, Kuul grim and Swanswine blank.
Vashdran’s jatcha, which he had named Star-Dog, began abruptly to howl. Either it had fathomed its owner was dead, or it smelled something alien in the pyre.
Kuul dragged it away.
They all trailed down the mountain, and the firelight flamed over and reflected ahead of them, drawing their shadows too on the pale ground, doubling their number, threatening omens of the gods knew what. Behind them blocks of the tower cascaded with awful cracks and thuds. Pieces of the stained glass hailed around. Nothing harmed the funeral party. Despite all appearance and sound, the debris was weightless and incorporeal. Once they reached the plain, to those that looked back – Curjai and Ushah, Taeb and Kuul – the last of the tower offered a concluding burst of fireworks. Then it sank in a rush and was absorbed instantly by the mountain’s snowy crown.
A year, almost that, elapsed on the plain. Or it seemed to.
They did not unremember what they were or where they were, but nevertheless they – lived.
A small settlement became built about them, more camp than stead let alone town. Its population was consistent: five men, three women, six dogs. They had raised the tented structures, having found trees locally that were a sort of familiar icy wood, and later animals had spontaneously shown themselves – or materialized – and these, being earthly, were hunted with the jatchas for meat and skins. Even the bones and pelt of Taeb’s wolverine they put to use in various domestic ways, Swanswine having first asked Taeb if they might.
While the months or seeming months lagged by, Swanswine began to court Taeb in an unfriendly yet dogged fashion. He said to Heppa she was the nearest he would get to an Olchibe woman, the Gech being quarter kindred to his own people.
Taeb let Swanswine woo her. Eventually she took him into the shelter he had made for her and they did not come out for most of a day.
The other men were at first celibate, even Heppa soon, for Wasfa grew enormous. Her pregnancy went slowly, despite her size, yet she was unconcerned.
‘How many are in there?’ Heppa had asked Taeb, between greedy glee and disconcertment.
But Taeb shook her head. ‘I have no power here to scry.’
Heppa believed she lied, but did not challenge her. She was a witch.
Kuul and Curjai and Behf excavated their native games from the landscape and taught each other moves and counter-moves with dice and clay figures and boards that had squares or circles on them.
Curjai and Ushah made no arrangement. Since the moment on the mountain they had been circumspect, courteous and distant. Now and then something happened between them, hand brushing hand, the scent of each other causing a swift chemical reaction in brain and blood. But Curjai was really far off, locked into the intensity of a life he had never been able to have before, not wanting to muddy the issue yet with any woman, let alone one he had claimed with a kiss and the public word ‘Mine’. For her part Ushah-Ruxendra was in love with him, and too much a Rukarian minor aristocrat to display it. That he was a barbarian she had erased but her own pride she wore as a mantle. All else was gone, but for Curjai and lusting love and pride.
Kuul and Behf formed a male bond after several months, in the honoured tradition of Jafn fighters who might be without women for the duration of a war.
How much time did go by? There was no time. No time went by. Yet … almost a year.
The sun by then looked less blue, brighter. At sunrise and sunfall the sky blushed at
its extreme horizons, east or west. Even the stars polished themselves up, and often the moon came, only one it was true, but much better than no moon at all.
All around the campstead they had found icy forests, and sometimes, in certain lights, the earth was so white there might have been snow and ice down. The wells they created stayed. One, pouring from a slanted rock, would freeze over in the night, sweating back to liquid only at noon so morning ice would have to be chipped from it as the women had done at home in the world.
Then a water-freezing night came, and Heppa thundered yelling out of his tent. ‘Taeb! Taeb!’
Taeb emerged from the cover of her tent and Swanswine.
Ushah said, primly, ‘Wasfa’s in labour.’
Wasfa did not cry out. She said she had no pain, only the great urge to push as if to turn herself inside out. She did not seem frightened, and explained she had never seen a child born; it had not been allowed her, before. Possibly she did not know childbirth did hurt, and had only heard epic tales of pushing.
The men, thankfully barred from the tent, went some way off, gazing at the night through which deer herds occasionally wafted, phantasmal until studied closely.
Swanswine whittled a minuscule skull for hairdressing, Behf and Kuul diced vulgarly for colossal heaps of gold coins, Curjai suffered a weird inexplicable shame.
The sky lightened with Ushah’s dawn.
As the blue-pink sword tip of the sun unsheathed itself, Wasfa gave her first and only cry. It was loud enough to startle the men, but was a signal of triumph. The child had left the womb in a gush of crystalline and odourless liquid – somewhere someone must have told the living Wasfa also about a woman’s waters breaking. She had simply got them in the wrong order.
Heppa stole into the tent, pink as the morning.
‘A boy,’ revealed Taeb, adding, ‘as I said.’
Ushah-Ruxendra, who from her Magikoy instruction accurately knew about the business of births, had hidden her surprise at the peculiarities of this one and assisted ably. Now she put the baby, duly washed and wrapped in a woollen shawl, into the mother’s arms.
Neither Ushah or Wasfa said a word.
Nor did the others, now.
Only Taeb, the clever one, had missed what was under her nose.
Sensing she had blundered, she turned on Swanswine. ‘The blame is yours.’ At which Swanswine struck her. With this fanfare then, the sun returned to Hell.
‘… my hell may not be the same as yours.’
Guri heard his own voice, speaking over unknown distances.
And what had Lionwolf replied? He wished Guri a better hell than his own.
Not long after, the god-whale killed them.
Is your hell lovelier than mine, Lion, or more hellish?
Guri lay in the hut. He was not female, so it must be close to sun-up when he would be an Olchibe man and go out to slay and ruin. Once or twice he had woken early like this, after the female or male abysm and deaths of the night. Not often.
Something too – not like other times.
He could hear still a voice, calling to him. The voice was not his own, nor the mesmeric voice of Lionwolf. It was—
Was—
It is the voice of an embryo and a soul, joined by a fiery cord to the womb that houses the infant it is due to be, and meanwhile the spirit running wild, playing truant, coming and going as it wants, glad to look in at its maturing self, or about at the approaching world.
‘Guri – Olchibe Uncle Guri!’
Yes, not the voice of Lionwolf when a man. This is the boy’s voice, a child’s voice, back at the commencement.
Call out my name, Guri had said, promising rescue.
Lionwolf had called it, and Guri had answered the call.
If he had kept his gods, the Great Gods, now Guri would blaspheme them royally. But what is the point in shitting on the non-existent?
Guri puts his head to the ground, and in that fraction of a second the side of the hut gives way, and something bounds through, shining and flaming, lit like the morning sun that here in Guri’s hell is not yet rising.
‘Guriguriguri!’
The boy, about eleven or twelve, throws his arms round Guri’s neck and hauls him off the ground to hug him more thoroughly.
Guri cannot speak. Cannot think. Dies in some form and in some form comes back to life.
‘How – are you here—’
‘It’s me! Uncle, it’s me!’
‘Yes – I know you. I know you.’ Something splits Guri’s heart and rears out in an insane expression: ‘Great Gods witness. Amen.’
‘It reeks here, Uncle. Putrid.’
‘I – know.’
‘Tell me about the whale.’
‘The – whale—’
‘How you rode on his back to the bottom of the sea, and saved me from the stink-god, old Blue-face.’
‘Did I? Are you – saved?’
‘Yes!’ cries the boy.
Guri looks at him and sees he is.
Guri throws off his personal feebleness and says, ‘You mustn’t stay here, Lion. No, it’s no place for you.’
‘That doesn’t matter, Uncle. All places are for me.’
‘Not – this one.’
‘Look,’ says the boy. A spangling red jewel slides from his hair and smashes on the floor of the hut, becoming there a hundred jewels. ‘Mine now,’ says the boy, ‘only mine.’
Guri binds himself in iron.
‘In a while I must go. I have things I must do – foul things. But I get no choice. And by night – never come here by night.’
The boy’s beautiful face is troubled only a moment.
He puts his hand on Guri’s hair.
How gloriously hot the touch. Like sunlight after chill.
‘Only call out my name,’ says Lionwolf, as Guri had to him so many millennia ago. ‘And what is my name?’
‘Lion – Lionwolf.’
‘Yes. When the night comes, call me. I know a trick or two.’
Guri lowers his head.
When he looks again the boy is gone. The jewels too are only bits of flint.
A dream. A dream in hell.
Outside, bleak hellish sunrise. Notes of men and mammoths, the day’s vileness in preparation.
The dream has done nothing to counteract such stuff; how can it? And as for today’s night of punishment and despair, Guri would no more draw that child, dream or boy, into it than he would try to evade its justice.
Going out however Guri finds Ranjal, goddess of wood, parading about on the snow, unnoticed by the Olchibe men. Even the mammoths fail to detect her, trampling through her, as she grins in obvious scorn at their daftness.
‘Ask,’ says Ranjal, who claims Guri has been charitable to her in years gone by.
‘Did you send the dream?’
‘No dream. Ask.’
The Olchibe enemy – yes, his enemies now – are yodelling at him to come on.
The mammoth who will always die stands like a sentient fog bank before him.
She has told him before she cannot remove him from this hell.
‘Save my mammoth from his death,’ Guri blurts.
Ranjal smiles her peg-tooth smile.
A hell-hour later the mammoth, snagged by a glancing spear, shakes it off.
Guri jumps down, and punches the Olchibe men witless as they attempt to kill their prisoners. The released men of the Marginal scamper away. Guri stands in limbo, sighing, patting the mammoth absently as sunlight curds the snow.
That night falls fast and in the hut he calls to no one. But the two men who enter are only weary, and only ask him, or her, for shelter. One makes love to the woman Guri usually is by night. Makes love. Guri thinks he – she – must be a whore to like it so much. But then the man congratulates her on having been a virgin.
Next day Guri is male and light is there, but no one on the snow shouting. Only the solitary mammoth, blowing its closeted breath, the trunk searching out little dormant delicacies un
der the ice.
Guri mounts the mammoth. They wend westward, the direction the pale sun is not yet going in Guri’s hell.
Now ten days went by on the plain under the mountains. Each day a year, of a sort.
Did the days seem especially prolonged? Not really.
The did what they always had, the campstead. The men hunted and played games, the women cooked and tidied. Taeb quarrelled with Swanswine. Curjai and Ushah looked at each other under their lids.
Wasfa fed her baby from the breast. It transpired she had been allowed to see this act. But by the end of the first day her milk dried, and the child did not appear to need it.
They knew. How could they not know, the evidence so garishly offered them, red, amber and blue.
Swanswine said he would take himself off. He might after all find others of his race roaming the plain of Hell now it was improved.
Taeb said nothing, but self-evidently she would put a bane on him if he did.
Behf and Kuul paid no one else much attention save Curjai, the accepted leader of the group.
Heppa and Wasfa were an innocent unit, sufficient to themselves and foolishly happy. But they also, by the third day, excluded the child.
Everyone did this. Even all the dogs.
The child did not seem to mind. He was swiftly independent. By the morning of the second day he had walked, and by afternoon run. He ate ordinary food from the second day as well, and grew measurably, escalating upward and filling out.
They watched his long-legged gallop over the rim of the plain, outracing the deer that had conveniently evolved, his fire hair streaming behind him. It was the fourth day, and manifestly he was more than eight years of age.
He never spoke to any of them. Not a single syllable, although he had a voice, for they heard him now and then singing. He was always gentle, not snatching or frenzied in the inarticulate frustrations of infancy. Perhaps anyway he knew none of these, for he grew so fast nothing was denied him. No sooner did he wish to do a thing than he was enabled to do it.
His eyes were very blue, more so than the sun, but in certain twists of firelight or sunset a glowing garnet crescent would curve between iris and pupil.