by Tanith Lee
Saftri felt a twang of annoyance. Do I despise every male, god or human?
But Dayadin said, putting fists to forehead in the respectful way, ‘Father, you are here to help them, also. They should be brave with so much help.’
Mollified, perhaps, the shaman changed the shape of his mouth, but even so danced on about the deck creating other fiery symbols, yellow and pinkish, the tint of sick. These seemed meaningless.
‘Why do you make up to him?’ said Saftri. ‘He and his stole you.’
‘You want me for your luck. The sooner we reach the new land, the sooner I can go.’
‘Perhaps they’ll refuse to let you go.’
She thought, Why am I cruel? Yes he is beautiful but he is not Lionwolf, nor mine.
She thought how Dayadin had cried only that once.
She said, ‘Forgive me. I’ll keep you safe.’
Saftri had vowed to him she would carry him back across all lands, all waters, no matter what.
Dayadin said, hushed and like a child, ‘If you don’t keep your word, I’ll swim back there.’
Yes, so you would. Maybe even you could.
‘I will keep my word.’ She heard with relief the protectiveness in her tone.
The land moved, so it looked. Like huge slabs of multi-coloured ice the vast flotilla separated from the shore and breasted the sea.
Beyond the harbour lay green open ocean, ruffled with white rollers.
Looking back – many, many did so – the flattened crag of the island, the mountains, one today with a sunlit cloud on its shoulders. The sky was pallid but otherwise clear. The village and the bluff, the temple with its shells, a pair of last unheeded smokes rising, and kadi circling in the still air: these were the finishing scenes of home.
Women who had been strident for going away cried. Younger children sobbed noisily, confused. Down in the holds the horsazin trundled and the cows mooed, while sails bellied to the off-shore wind. Krandif’s men began to sing. Presently others joined them. It was one of the already-established sagas, of Gunri the hero and wise-man, who had founded not only the Vormland but the nations of Faz and Kelp also. A hymn suitable for everyone.
In this way, singing, under a clear sky and the watching of one golden cloud, the fleet sailed out on to uncharted waters.
Feeling the drum purr down to him through the island’s stalk, Brightshade woke from a partial dream. But he was always in readiness, his armour constantly on him and in his mouth. Silent and leisurely, shark-like, his impossible mass uncoiled with the oiled ease of a serpent.
Above, far off, he saw the shadow-shimmer of disturbance as the sea was runnelled by the prows, keels and oars of nearly five hundred ships.
Brightshade’s thick tongue licked out, and spooned up a breakfast starter of shoaling fish.
He knew pleasure now, was hungry now, had an appetite despite everything for the job in hand.
The fleet, all gleaming ignorance, forged on, and the great whale maintained a steady amused pace with them, below. He turned over as he did this, like antique collected treasures, past events of wrecking: jalees of a hundred vessels sunk, men swallowed whole – not to eat, merely to keep within his cavernous guts which were haunted always by the residue of humanity, as by the least soluble parts of ships.
To Brightshade the depth of the sea was warm with guarantees.
Morning intensified and peaked to noon.
Up there by now the sky was a jewelry blue and the sea had blue in it, as if the sky had spilled over. A single chain of icebergs marched miles off to the west, glittering and of unusual shapes like Rukar diadems and Mother Ships all masts and rigging of semi-transparent ice that glowed like beryls.
Fish in thousands inadvertently plunged up from beneath. The reivers did not deduce that something deep down and more than inauspicious had dislodged them, and only spread their lines and nets and hauled in the bounty. Fish did rise. It was just good fortune.
In the second of Krandif’s Mothers Saftri sat on her carven chair, forward of the deck. This vessel moved by thaumaturgics as well as sail, needing little guidance on calm seas.
Something nibbled at her composure, unacknowledged. She would not look in at her mind to see what it was.
She had crushed the whale tooth with a flick of acid light from one hand. Sympathetic magic, worthy of minor Rukarian royalty.
There was no reason to think of the whale.
It was only a beast.
Besides, even if – well, she had decimated its father, Zeth. The mammal, despite its bulk, must be child’s play for her now.
And yet the small stain thinly spread along her consciousness whether she glanced there or not.
In the afternoon the icebergs were behind them, as were the occasional minute and uninhabited isles they had seen.
Saftri knew the overview of this seascape from her flights, but from the water itself everything was different.
The bounty of rising fish had stopped.
Some of the women who rode with their men were already gathering the caught fish, dropping them in pots of vinegar. On the decks of the Mothers, other women had braziers smoking under fish strung up like necklets of soapy gems. The sea smelled of fish also. Out here the odour was particularly strong, curiously increasing.
He was lifting himself now, the giant shadow beneath.
He was driving his land-long body more swiftly – outstripping in a matter of minutes the ships above.
Brightshade nurtured his own shape-thoughts of the spectacular. He wanted to present himself to the fleet before he destroyed it. He wanted them to see and be quite sure of what he was, his illimitable size, his black brilliance, his horn like a tower of white onyx. He looked forward to confounding them first with himself, as the prologue to their death.
Was Brightshade aware that this was his recompense for Zeth’s harshness? That the arch-bully had made him a bully too, where formerly he had been only ruthless, indifferent and mighty?
‘Look,’ said one man after another, one woman after another, ‘what is that?’
‘Where?’
‘Ahead of us – to the star-side – there.’
‘More fish rising.’
‘A herd of the whale folk it is.’
A fresh wind blustered suddenly towards them over the crests of the sea. The wind was huge and it stank of fish-life and of the decaying loams and botanical submarine detritus that massed the ocean’s lowest floors.
The ships rocked wildly. On their poles the sheets of sail wagged and cracked against their stays.
Saftri got up, as the shamans sprang yelping into the ship’s bow.
Dayadin said quietly, ‘It’s land coming up from the bottom of the sea.’
Saftri as before felt herself gripped by terror. Memory was her enemy. All it would give her was the recollection of her journey over a diluvian back, her incarceration in mud, her freezing execution and her second death which, by now, she had almost managed to blot out.
Brightshade, night-in-day, rose from the sea.
So softly, carefully he came up, not wanting to dislodge too much. Not breaching, not splashing, neither striking with nor standing up on his tail to put out the sun. No, he must be subtle now if they were to see his glory properly. Subtly he arrayed the surface of the water with all his landmass magnificence, raising his head the last very high, and also the serrated fan of his tail, demonstrating them, while the horn on his kingly head spiked men’s future and killed it.
He too had grown since last Saftri beheld him, since Lionwolf and Guri had traversed his back in a quest of two days. He had grown since Zeth last thrashed him, even, by a touch.
He heard them shrieking, felt the shapes of their mindless agony of fear and disbelief, the chaos as human hope gave way.
See me.
See.
Then from his blowhole he fountained out, with the utmost delicacy, a diamanté streamer of water, allowing it to fall down on them like the mildest tickle of icy hail.
/> The jumbled sea, displaced by his arrival – in spite of all his cleverness – had begun to seethe.
Men ditched in the waves clung to oars and the sides of vessels. Women held their children as if to press them back inside the womb – uselessly. There was no safety to be had.
Not only by the gargantuan size of the leviathan, instinctively they were educated by other elements about the whale. He was sentient, he thought. He was malign. He was death.
The shamans gabbled. Their fires created webs that were then disrupted by electric explosions. The explosions stuck to each other and plopped into the sea.
Gradually a silence closed over the ships. They froze in it. All outcry died. A preface.
Krandif, his own son in his arm, a lad of ten, terrified yet turning a hard man’s face to nemesis so Krandif – even at the gate of ending – was proud of him, Krandif said to the silence in a whisper, ‘Dayadin, son of Arok – find a song – find a way to breathe – now – or we die. You with us.’
Saftri was struggling with herself. She tried to energize her powers. But they were lamps without kindling. This, most horrible of all, was like some appointment she had had to keep – now three times.
Dayadin spoke, perhaps not with his voice. ‘Hilth! Carry me—’
Attention only for the whale, still they glimpsed something else whizz through the sky. It was only part of the nightmare.
Brightshade though, with one sidelong sun-splinter eye, noted a child running over the air towards him, winged with a sort of fleecy breeze.
It would be nothing to snap up this bug.
Then Brightshade hears Dayadin talking to him, talking in shapes.
‘How fine you are,’ says Dayadin, in shapes, ‘you are blacker even than I. You are black as the other side of a star.’
Brightshade’s brain answers, nearly inadvertently, a shape – irresistible – of accepting gratification.
A second shape follows, which observes that Dayadin, though nowhere as black or vast as Brightshade, is for a human thing very black, better than most. Courtesy?
The hovor holds Dayadin before Brightshade’s eye, which is small compared to the rest of the whale, but round and large as a wheel to the boy, a wheel or a window of stained glass.
Brightshade tautologically assures Dayadin, now in shapes, what he has already demonstrated: that he is able to extinguish him and all the other life over there in a matter of instants.
Dayadin neither replies nor seems interested, if anything disappointed. A vague shape filters to Brightshade that Dayadin thinks this would be a distinct waste of Brightshade’s genius.
Brightshade looses the thread slightly of his murder mission. He is an adolescent in some ways. He wants to show off now, because Dayadin has something also about himself, something that burns and is wonderful. This something was all over the former foe, Lionwolf. It evoked envy and rivalry. But Dayadin is no rival. He is not anything to do with Zeth Zezeth. And yet he is – godlike. He is – like Brightshade. Dark as night and shining as day. A smaller package. An exquisite gnat.
Brightshade is aware of the hovor too, some non-corporeal slave. The child is a magician.
The whale twitches daintily and the sea gulps and crashes. The hovor topples about but never lets go of Dayadin. Who – laughs.
Brightshade thinks to him: You must visit me, admire me. I can wait to batter and bone-break and drown those on the ships. Until you’re done.
Dayadin thinks back, Why drown them? What do they count for?
I have sworn I will.
Who could make you swear anything?
One there is.
Dayadin is about to go on with his persuasive murmur of shapes. But this is the moment Saftri the goddess regains herself.
Maybe it is Dayadin’s risk-taking valour, or the fix she has got all of them into, some deep human idea of behaving honourably.
Whatever it is, and perhaps it is only solipsism, the power lamps flare on again.
Saftri stretches out her hands and opens wide her attractive mouth and over the ships of her people, over the heads of no longer gibbering shamans, she breathes her lioness fire. It goes itself like a tidal wave, and smashes into the mountain of Brightshade about the area of his ribcage.
She has aimed well away from Dayadin. She does a new thing next, casting a ring of air more solid than steel running half a mile upward and rather more down, about the reiver fleet, to protect it as the whale – as now he does – rolls and thrashes. Saftri has truly hurt him; worse let it be said than any preparatory punishment of Zzth’s.
A kind of screaming fills the sky, high as a whistle, scalding the ears so again the people on the ships cry out in turn.
But Saftri sees her cordon of protection holds them against the jar of the outer waters. The water inside is only very choppy.
She means psychically to lasso Dayadin and bring him back, up over the cordon, but now she cannot find him.
Then she does. Although not with her eyes.
Dayadin, son of Arok, Nirri and Chillel, was spun round and round by Brightshade’s paroxysm. The hovor wound Dayadin like a rope, clinging to him as much as supporting him. And in that timeless second Brightshade did what it had been in his thoughts to do, did it less from malevolence than from a desire to possess, which had now become automatic as all his colossal body rang with blinding pain. Choking and seared, Bright-shade undid the doors of his mouth, the palisades of his teeth that were like domed buildings of zinc. Brightshade inhaled and swallowed. And Dayadin, son of Arok, goes down into the belly of the whale.
Ninth Volume
BLIND SEEING
The nostalgia the essential soul feels, when in the physical world, for the so-called hells and heavens of the after-and fore-life, compares directly with the nostalgia it also feels, when in the spiritual world, for the so-called real world of the flesh. The purposes however are different. The astral soul seeks review and integration of its physical lives in order to expand its wisdom. While, world-locked, it dreams of luminous places where it may enjoy – and suffer – those adventures physical life has denied it.
Kraag dictum: Southlands and South-East Continent.
ONE
His voice – shouting, tolling like a hoarse bell, descending to a ragged maniacal drone – was constant there as some fearful wind. At first the land, the walls of the house, seemed to quake. Then they became used to it. Now, if it should ever cease, what then? But perhaps it never would.
The travellers who had struggled in across the snow waste, blizzard driven, paused below the great house to gaze up at its towery and the sightless darkened windows, listening in awe.
The storm of weather was nearly over. A few flails of snow flared across the dusk.
What is this place?
It is a magician’s mansion.
But that sound—
The torment of one he punishes.
Presently they moved away, plodding on towards the village called Stones, which they had been told of by other travellers met on the ice plains. They were all Rukarian, of the outlying steadings and villages, whose cores over the past two years had somehow fallen in socially and architecturally, like rotted vegetables. Stones it seemed for some reason still stood, though in poor repair.
They had heard of the sorcerous Stones themselves too, and took care not to go close to them.
From one of the high windows of Thryfe’s southern house, Jemhara had watched the people come and go. She saw where they must be heading. She herself had been to the village yesterday, as sometimes she did when he was a little more sluggish. Then the magical house servants were sufficient to guard him.
He and she had existed here some months.
To begin with she had only been relieved to arrive, astonished and grateful when the house, at her request, opened itself to let them in. Thryfe had been in a stupor, the same stupor that felled him in the Telumultuan Chamber. Only three of the house gargolems remained active; the rest had disappeared. Also only two
of the feminine jinnan spirits and one male jinan were there to tend the building. Above in the towery the wonderful scrying oculum had smashed itself to grains like sugar. Below in the subtor, though these doors too opened for Jemhara, there was nothing she thought she could understand or with which, therefore, she could help him.
Thryfe regained consciousness on the second day. During the first he was like a man near death. Then vitality came back, and the wordless shouting and roaring started.
It was impossible to quieten.
The gargolems saw to it that Thryfe stayed bound, for his own protection and hers. The jinnans soothed the hurts and abrasions he gained when striking out, resisting the padded bonds, howling until he choked.
Jemhara and the jinnans mixed curative potions or nourishing broths. When he grew intermittently enfeebled and almost docile, only moaning in that fearful low rasp, they were able to spoon some of these into him. He seemed unaware of it and of them all, or else saw them as shadows.
No conversation was feasible with either gargolems or jinnan. You could only issue instructions or receive general news. The masculine jinan did not talk at all. It was the handyman of the mansion, hunting and setting traps for food, feeding the lashdeer team, mortaring up loose tiles, and so on.
Jemhara did not talk to herself.
Deep in her mind she thought, Thryfe now sees only Thryfe and the crime he considers he is responsible for.
But it was more desperate than that, and perhaps she knew as much. Thryfe saw only futility. Nothing was of any use. No act, however valiant, was worth the attempt. Facing the negative abyss, he refused to look away. It was no longer his rage at himself or other men, or whatever unknown gods. It was nullity he strove to embrace and, at the same moment, nullity he raved at in utter revulsion.
He was very strong and of unusual endurance and his mage-powers were of the highest order. For those reasons he had survived, and because of that alone Jemhara had been able to resuscitate him in the city. Yet she had brought him back to this state. It was a living hell. It was cold and had no end.