by Tanith Lee
The child’s skin was tawny amber, golden. He was in all ways perfect. And by the seventh day he was fourteen and by the eighth, sixteen, and a child no longer.
At this juncture they had come, mostly, not precisely to ignore – but to overlook him. He was like weather or morning or their own spuriously beating astral hearts: a fact, unconscionable, undeniable. There.
And he had almost done all this before, of course. He was an expert at faultlessly rapid maturation.
The evening of the ninth day, eighteen years and a little more, handsome and couth, coordinated and immensely strong, he strode away from the camp and did not come back.
On the tenth day, only then, they began to discuss him.
‘Lionwolf. As he was. I remember him now,’ said Kuul.
‘He was a god,’ said Swanswine. ‘One of the mad useless gods of the Rukar.’
‘He’s a god again,’ said Behf.
Heppa said, ‘I never saw him then.’
Wasfa said, ‘It’s as it is.’
Taeb said something in the Gech tongue so smothered with magic and secrets they did not comprehend it.
The dialogue circled and veered everywhere and nowhere, meaningless, meaningful.
Curjai detached himself and went off too, loping over the nearer slopes of the mountains. Ushah who had been Ruxendra withdrew into her tent.
Curjai was in a whirlpool of thought. The girl had distracted him. He blamed himself not her, not seeing that it might have been neither of them that kept him from seizing on the child, attempting to adopt it when the rest let go. Not either of them, but some other thing.
But he, the red-haired being, god or man, both and neither, twice-dead, twice-born, he stood at some fundamental centre of the plain which had become, beside him, empty and bare, scattered only by stones and with the wind of Hell whistling mournfully as the blue sun sank.
Ask the snow what it is,
Ask the ice, wind, sea and sky,
Ask the land what it is,
And the light and the dark that hurry by,
Ask the beast and the bird,
And the cunning, and those that lie,
But of all that is
What am I? What am I?
Night came.
One by one the burnished tarnished stars of Hell lit up. The moon, which had been absent since the fourth night, rose on the brink of the plain, tiny as a seed.
He who had been Nameless, and Vashdran, and Lionwolf, stood sentinel of himself through the night and watched the occluded heavens of Hell wheel slowly over. The wind sang to him, and sometimes he sang also back to it in a bright bronze voice, old songs of the Urrowiy and the Olchibe, sophisticated songs of the central Ruk that Saphay, his first mother, had sung in his other boyhood. Or he sang mixtures, medleys, of all.
What am I? What am I?
It had always been his question, of the world and of himself. It is always the question, for men ask it too, but Lionwolf, bemused by his own terrifying power and glory, had never reasoned this out.
When morning stirred along the plain, the moon was still parked, a miniature white ball. It had got no nearer. And the wind still blew. Nothing had changed.
But then he turned, and he blew softly, and blew the wind away over the mountains and the last of the darkness with it. And reaching up his hand – the length only of his arm, the length only of infinity – he plucked the sun of Hell from the sky.
It was no larger in his grasp than it had looked above. A banner, the sun, blue as the flowers of the weed-of-light but dripping long discrepant flames of orange and yellow. The sky displayed clearly where he had dislodged the disc, a strange flickering and rounded hole that showed behind it a void, an absence.
The sun was neither hot nor cold to the touch, neither material nor of energy – what then was the sun?
When he released it, the orb shot upwards again and slammed itself back into the setting of the sky, which went black.
All around the plain was littered with trickles of electric azure and orange. Demented clouds gathered in the upper air.
A great way off Curjai, who had seen the sun dashed by some invisible force from its niche and then returned, believed he had had a vision.
But now a tempest of reborn winds and turbulence was pounding from all compass points. Thunder bawled, and the ground shook.
Over the plain something else was rushing.
Curjai, as he sprinted forward, saw the chariots tearing along. He had given up any sense of direction. The sky had only four matched quarters, all booming with storm and disturbance, and the sun, stuck back into its bloodshot socket, was blurred and static as if afraid to move ever again.
Yet surely the chariots were from the city, one of the twin cities of Hell – Shabatu, Uashtab – they were black and brilliant, with spikes of hoarse light glancing from their runners. Not the weasel animals but the more ominous spider-horses drew them, their eight leg-divisions making slight work of the terrain.
The foremost chariot contained two figures, both dark, one clad in a pastel gown that might have been vividly blanched if the shade of the storm had not diffused it.
The rest of the chariots, five or seven of them – in the roused tumult it was hard to be certain – roiled after. The guards of Hell clustered in those.
Lightning irradiated the surface of the cumulus, east to west and south to north, fissuring the cloud like a plate.
Pieces fell on the plain. Curjai, running, stared at them and when they struck him shied. They felt like smacks and had a smell of salt and galvanism – they were shards of the sky.
Lionwolf turned and regarded the chariots.
He waited motionless as the mountains seemed to be, and the six or eight vehicles foamed in about him in a spray of disintegrated stones, under the seizure of sky-falling tempest.
The stone King of Hell stood above Lionwolf in the black and golden prow of his car.
‘You have touched the sun.’
‘Yes.’
Hell’s King was the first creature Lionwolf, in his most recent incarnation, had talked to, yet he did it simply, graciously, those qualities conveyed in even so small a reply.
‘I am Hell,’ said the stone King. ‘Do you understand this now?’
‘I understand.’
‘To touch the sun is to displace the atoms which I am.’
‘This world,’ said Lionwolf, ‘must be displaced.’
‘By you?’
‘Who else?’
Beside the stone King was his black queen, Winsome. She was like a statue of flesh, warm but not yet alive.
‘Do you see the city?’ said the King. ‘That is Thasuba.’
Lionwolf gazed through the wallow of the storm. A city lay there, the same city, with high, high walls.
The guards had descended from the chariots; they too occupied the plain, inscrutable and adamantine.
And this was the tableau Curjai looked at as he bolted towards it and the sky fell.
The mammoth, a great vehicle smothered in coarse white hair, suddenly stalled.
Guri tapped it lightly, behind the ear.
‘On we go.’
But the mammoth would not budge.
All through the grey stillness of that day they had moved across the terrain of the private hell. Truly now private it was. No others were there, neither men nor animals. Nowhere on the open waste, or among the distant boles and arches of ice-forest, did Guri perceive a sign of life, not even the semblance of it.
But the peace which came from this vacant land had instilled itself into him. He did not mind aloneness, perhaps never had. And to be free of false comrades, and actively real enemies, was a kind of bliss after what went before.
He had not been thinking much of the way ahead, letting the mammoth mostly tread as it wanted. It was actually a female, old today, tusks yellowing and encrusted so he would need to scour them carefully in the evening, providing this remission from horror continued. She might have been, the mammoth, a he
rd leader. They were generally females. Curious that. He had known of course yet never considered it. They must be sagacious then, like a Crax. Therefore, did she understand more than Guri did?
Ahead – what was it? Just whiteness, what he had taken all this while for a tall featureless escarpment of hard snow against cold sky. Yet in fact—
Guri tipped back his head.
The snow bank rose up and up. And up. It rose into the amorphousness of the low heavens, and even there he could see it now he tried to, flat and stationary behind the drifting cloud.
He turned, left, right. He craned once more upward.
The snow bank not only ran into the sky but also off to both sides. At ground level it curved a little as it went, he could make out now too, curling to accommodate stands of forest or high rocks.
Could Guri fly here? He could not guess, but nor did he wish to try. For he sensed what lay there in front of him and away on either side would ascend to some impressive height and there join another thing, a thing in that case like – a roof.
Without reason, with utter certainty, it came to Guri that he had reached the end of his hell, and then the unassailable idea that he – and it – were contained, not only within high walls, but inside a box.
SIX
Like a new coastline, most of the harbour swallowed, the lesser bergs driven away by fire and towing: a shore now of ships, four hundred and seventy-eight of them, long vessels and Mother Ships, approximately nine thousand men, some with their women and their sons. The holds of the Mothers were stuffed not only with horsazin, but with lowing cattle and disgruntled fowl, with stores and barrels of water and alcohol far in excess of anything previously got up for a voyage. The Vorms had rallied, then they had called to the Kelps, and perhaps more softly to the Fazions of the outer isles. For sure not many Faz came in comparison; only six jalees of theirs were out along the liquid sea of the harbour. The Kelps had sent eleven jalees of long ships and narrow boats. Best take as many of your fellow reivers as you could with you on such an expedition, lest they be tempted to swoop on the homeland in your absence.
But then, would any of them be returning to the homeland anyway?
Centuries of experienced raiding, adventuring, piracy, buoyed up the collected fleet. That and the fierce, wolf-god-smiting goddess, who came and went yellow-haired among them, lighting torches with her eyes, smelling always of perfumes from the far south.
And there were the hero-children, too. Five of them were present by then. Rumour said at least twelve more were scattered on various of the northern isles. Of those here now, two were Kelpish, and one Faz, and one a Vorm from further along the Vormland coast. The fifth boy came from the continent, southwards. He seemed the eldest though all were adultly old beyond their reported years. Either oddly or inevitably, these boys did not cleave to each other. Every one looked on the rest with a remote and collected suspicion. They had, at least all five currently here, been visibly unique until this gathering.
Their disunity may though have seemed bizarre. Beings of such unusual excellence had been expected to flock together. Also, the Vorms were disappointed in the reaction of their goddess Saftri. She treated all the boys, including the eldest, Dayadin, who had been stolen from the Jafn as her special treat, in the same almost unliking way.
‘But to bring her joy, that was why Krandif took him,’ Mozdif had complained to Jord.
‘Joy he doesn’t bring her. She sits apart, biting her nails at the delay in setting off.’
‘Are gods ungrateful? Yes,’ said Mozdif. ‘And my brother dreamed it, too. What reward does he get? Not even a blessing.’
Saftri, in her god-house, had stopped biting her nails. They always grew back in minutes, oval and charming, irritating her doubly. Just as children unhealthy or otherwise unsuitable to the voyage had been weepingly farmed out at remaining villages, so she had given Dayadin to the willing guardianship of the local women, who reverenced him and lavished on him every care.
‘He is not my son.’
That was what Saftri said, both to Krandif’s crestfallen crew and to herself.
But this was not really it. Dayadin was, if physically quite unlike Lionwolf, so very like him. For both were or had been flawless, and virtually extraterrestrial in their glamour and otherness.
She had been smitten by this once, with Lionwolf. But even then, if she had been honest, Saftri must have acknowledged she fooled herself constantly into believing that he was in some weird way only human – or superhuman – rather than totally foreign. With Dayadin, who was not the child of her body, she refused a second encounter with the sharp-edged blade of maternal love.
Besides, she had sworn to him that once he had acted for her as the Vorm fleet’s lucky talisman she would return him to his own people, the Jafn Holas.
With the influx of other black children, Saftri had thought Dayadin might seek her and demand she take him back at once, four more such talismans now being to hand. But he did not. His part-adult mind was only too conscious how his fame had grown for the Vormlanders, whose jalees were nineteen in number. He had saved men from sharks and breathed down a gale. It seemed even towards those who stole him he had a sense of duty.
If Dayadin was unhappy or disorientated none of them but Saftri had been shown it. He was princely, courteous, and reserved. He had trained the hovor sprite Hilth to help the women in daily tasks. Oh, the jolly laughter, seeing the pails of chipped ice or milk skimmed along by a little creamy wind – that was, once they got over their fright.
How long readying the expedition had taken, however. The men coming round to the venture, the getting up of ships, the repair of any damaged, or building for those lost, the embassies to other islands, the in-gathering.
For a human community they had been in fact remarkably speedy. But for the gods obviously, to whom this was nothing, how it dragged.
Each evening Saftri scanned the west and south. Sometimes she flew up to make sure. Was anyone – anything – coming? No, not yet.
Why did he idle, the atrocious Zzth? Had she really impaired him so thoroughly? Was he afraid of her?
‘I am alone,’ she said to herself or to her temple. How strange. The notion of Zzth’s impotence made her … lonely?
She had noticed Best Bear’s mother no longer wanted to visit the grave. Best Bear’s mother spent time with Dayadin, who in turn seemed not repelled by her. The woman’s hair was growing back.
‘Best Bear,’ said Saftri, again aloud.
With an astonished inner turmoil of temper and distress, she thought, Why couldn’t I have borne a mortal son? Why couldn’t I have stayed a mortal? What has been done to me? Why? Why?
A mile below the Vormland, with its ice and mountains, villages and graves, driven-off bergs, liquid sea and garnered shipping, black murder was slowly swimming round and round.
The stem of the large Vormish island grew down into the bedrock under the sea. Brightshade, second half-god son of Zeth, was perambulating in his legless manner, circling the stem, thinking his own whale shape-thoughts of discontent and mishap.
Zeth had cowed him. Never before had anything been able to do that. Brightshade had always been bombastically villainous. It was the norm for him – he was a giant whale. Now the affront of a bully greater than he had torn his limited and sparkling world in shreds.
He was here to kill the woman-creature he had seen off before. It would not be so easy this time.
But also he was here to mourn the subjugation of self, the unfairness of everything.
Finally he sank down.
He lay, as he had after his father’s beating, on the floor of the ocean, sometimes sipping fish, but with no enjoyment. He brooded.
Without a qualm he would destroy Saftri and her insectile horde of men and ships. That was nothing.
And then he would smash the islands. He would smash it all. And go to his father with the wreckage on his back. Look what I have done for you.
The god would respect him then.
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Surely?
Yet Zeth had betrayed him anyway. Lionwolf had been the betrayal, And then that fiery other something – the other birth, Lionwolf’s daughter – and Zeth had no concern for any of that.
The hugeness of the whale, if he had risen, would have matched the Vormland. Even to mountains, even to ships and graves, for Brightshade’s back had all of those features and more.
He liked lying coiled about them, unknown; some consolation.
Nor was this the moment. He knew when the moment was. He would sense and hear it too, drumming down through the stem of the island.
Departure. The voyage. The open sea.
The morning of departure came.
The goddess walked along the shore. She blessed the men and the jalees, the horsazin, the cows, the water. She had got her way. A thorough blessing was the least she could do.
The Vormland crews were still mentally teetering between distrustful apprehension and their inbred craving for adventure. To live a saga – that was no bad thing. This would be sung of, one day.
Saftri was rowed out to the second Mother Ship of Krandif’s two jalees. The boy, Dayadin, went with her.
The shamans who at all other times would ride the ship alone apart from animals in the underdecks, or prisoners taken, lurked beneath one of the nine masts, where the canvas was about to be unfurled. They were always ambivalent about Saftri. Gods too should know their place, and this one did not.
‘Gentlemen,’ said the goddess, giving them a look of mingled distaste and scorn.
Only one leapt forward, gyrating before her on the deck, waving rattles of bone, were-lights spraying from his garments and saliva from his lips.
On the planks a symbol was spontaneously drawn in anaemic fire.
Everyone stared at it.
Saftri read it by her power in three seconds.
‘Danger,’ she said. She herself had decided to be valiant. Her mouth quirked. ‘Oh dear.’ She spoke in Rukarian, then added in Vormish, ‘Thank you for your warning, sir. But don’t be afraid. I’m with you.’
The shaman’s mouth too did something, pulling back over long, darkened teeth, wolf-like.