by Tanith Lee
Despair crept over Jemhara.
Her initial high hopefulness evaporated. Her own endurance held but became wan. She felt old, she was bereft. Sometimes she thought fiercely that she should have killed him outright in the Insularia to spare him this. Occasionally she became enraged herself, wishing to strike him, wishing to run away.
But she loved him, loved what he was or had been, and could not leave.
The awful clamour of his voice, when it had sunk so low she could not, waking from slumber, hear it, frightened her with absence. She would rush to the room he lay in above the subtor in case he had died.
She only touched him now and then. She believed he would hate her touch. But now and then when he stretched there, droning and muttering in half-sleep, she brushed one finger over his forehead, or set it on the back of his hand.
Once or twice she dreamed again he approached to murder her. Once too she dreamed she kissed his hand instead of merely setting one fingertip on it. This dream but not the other made her weep.
The evening after the vagrants had stared at the house and then gone up to the village, Thryfe dropped into one of his more docile ebbs. Jemhara went out of the mansion, and herself walked away up the slope towards the Stones.
It took her as always about an hour and a half to cover the distance.
As she got nearer the moons were coming up, all three of them, and full, remaking night as day. The familiar curl of ice-forest spread across the vista. The village was over there, but in the bright moonlight she could not tell if fires or lamps were burning now.
She had not visited the Stones, unlike the village, since her return here.
There had been some slight alteration in the terrain; a ridge of impacted snow had drifted into prominence. When she had climbed it she saw the Stones about seventy paces away.
Jemhara stopped in her tracks.
Phenomenal always, now the enigmatic ring had become fantastic. For it had grown.
Before she had sometimes considered this might be happening, but never been sure. Now, like infants she had not seen for a while, the Stones had shot upward.
Not all were the same. Some had reached a height of fifteen, sixteen or seventeen feet; others towered thirty feet or more. And all were entirely and flamingly lit. They had assumed an unusual colour also. They were green.
The light slowly pulsed, but did not otherwise change. Each stone flamed like a jewel.
A sort of radiation seemed to come from them. She felt the skin of her face tighten, and the roots of her hair. There was a low audible vibrancy, almost like … music.
Jemhara formerly might well have retreated over the ridge.
But now the perhaps unsafe sorcery of the Stones lured her. After everything else, her ability to be afraid had lessened or rather grown unimportant.
She went on.
The jade light covered her, tinting her complexion and clothing as it had the surrounding snow.
As she came among them she found the Stones had in addition a scent. She did not know what it was. It reminded her of ripe fruit or salad from a king’s hothouse.
The musical undertone played through her ears.
She stood at the centre of the ring and remembered how she had darted here as a hare, and Thryfe had pursued and caught her and the world been refashioned.
Looking at the coloured snow she thought, Like myths of grass …
Then she discovered that she leaned forward, bending to the ground. She did not know why. She took up a handful of the green-tinted snow, which here was loose and simple to get hold of.
The snow too carried the refreshing edible smell. It chilled her hand, and straightening up again she slipped it into the deeper pocket of her cloak. Probably outdoors it would not melt. Snow and ice now had this property: human warmth was not enough to quench them.
Suddenly, everything else ceased. The scent and sound and feeling of radiation. The brilliant green light went out.
That was like a blow. How dark the night of three full moons.
‘What – have I done?’ she stammered to the Stones, now huge dark monoliths. ‘Have I offended you?’
Another strange thing happened then. A woman crossed over the new snow hill above. Jemhara took her for one of the travellers. But she had a curious appearance – rough and layered, with wild tufting hair, and in her hands, or so Jemhara thought, branches and twigs, also hand-like, which she must mightily have torn from the adjacent forest. The woman, passing over the ridge, grinned at Jemhara. Then she was gone – perhaps down the far side of the hill, perhaps into some spot the triple moonshine, oddly, had not reached.
In Jemhara’s other lesser pocket something buzzed softly. She put her hand there, and located the twig from the rural temple, the twig that had seemed to direct her in the Telumultuan Chamber. She had forgotten it.
She eased out between the Stones. ‘Pardon me …’
Looking back some minutes later, she saw them stationed, lightless still, glistening only faintly from the moons.
When, two hours later, she re-entered Thryfe’s house, he was already bawling again. She had heard the distressing outcry almost a mile off.
Jemhara went to the room where they had bound him.
All three gargolems had hold of Thryfe, who writhed and roared. He was like a deranged beast, no longer a man. She did not know him.
Because she approached him, the gargolems voiced a warning. Normally she kept back at the room’s edges when he was this bad. Not now.
Thryfe did not, she thought, exactly see her, yet he reared towards her nevertheless, sensing something that must be to him an enemy or threat of some type. She would have to be swift.
Bringing out the snow, which had been coloured over green and now was only a mottled white, she ran forward and crushed it into his open bellowing mouth.
There were never any words to his tirade.
Now there was a word. It was the word of sheer extraordinary silence.
He froze there, as if contact with the snow had changed him to a pillar of ice.
Through his face, his body, behind the skin, muscle and bone, she saw something plunge that was like a boiling cloud. His eyes retained it the longest. They seemed to fragment in swirlings of smoke and fire. Then the cloud was gone, and still he stood there, static, and his eyes looked at her. They saw her.
Jemhara did not know what she had done. But she beheld he had come back into himself. Not in pleasure or relief, not to be thankful or generous or benign. But to be Thryfe the Magician – oh yes, to be that. So when he spoke to her she did not flinch either in amazement or pain.
‘Here you are again. I told you once to stay far off from me. What a meddler you are, Jema. You can leave nothing alone.’
He straightened up and shook himself, and the gargolems and the great padded bonds were sloughed from him like slips of paper.
‘Fetch water and wine,’ he said to the jinnan which had wafted to the door. ‘And something to eat. It’s been a long fast.’
Jemhara raised her head.
He saw that.
Cold as the hell he had inhabited, he said to her, ‘And I’m to thank you for my release? No. Why do you think I brought myself to this? It was my atonement, you stupid bitch. Once you undid my life. Now you undo my death. Get away from me. As I’ve told you before, you will prefer to take yourself off to any travel arrangements I contrive for you.’
She did not lower either her head or her eyes.
‘I’ve done as it was given me to do.’
‘Given you. Who gave it?’
‘You,’ she answered, her voice quite flat.
‘You’re mad, you little whore. Get out.’
‘Yes, I shall go.’
She turned and moved to the door. Pausing there, she glanced back at him. He had left off looking at her.
Aloud she said, ‘You’re not such a weakling, my lord, as you like to think.’
Outside the room she whispered, ‘If any god hears, help him, help hi
m.’ She did not ask for herself, knowing she was now beyond their help.
She went through the mansion and out into the night and began again to walk up the slope, this time towards the village.
Vagrancy had made them uneasy. Their nearness to the fluctuating, vivid Stones had increased this. They were glad eccentricities of the landscape hid the supernatural sight from them when in the village.
The next morning, as a powdery sun rose, some of the women went out to chip water.
A woman was already there.
She was beautiful, her black hair streaming down.
They could not read her face, even though her soul was now written on it. They could not read, after all.
‘What is it, lady?’ The leader of the travellers had nervously emerged. He identified this woman as somehow relevant, maybe dangerous.
‘What do you need?’ she replied.
They gazed at her, flummoxed by a vague potential cornucopia.
Jemhara was exhausted from her journey and her recent experience. She said plainly to them, ‘A well of liquid water? And do you need fire?’
They had fire. It was kept alight with difficulty in a semi-sealed vessel, because they had no witch left to bring it out of the air. Water they only got by chipping.
Jemhara advanced to the container of fire and twisted its element to stay always alive when in the pot. She told them what she had done in brief sensible words. But as she talked the fire erupted in red florations – muscular.
Then she made a well for them in an old ice cistern. Jemhara unlocked the snow, the earth – she who could defrost ice. The water came, astounding everyone who saw, even conceivably Jemhara herself, for the fluid burst from the cistern and poured over the ground, and would not desist. Only far off did it freeze and become a slide. The children soon went there and skidded madly about. But in and by the well the water constantly flowed.
Jemhara next set about the shoring up and fastening of the village. She enabled, by her magic, roofs to coalesce and walls to congregate. With spells she laid thresholds and re-established broken rooms, bricks and logs scurrying at her command, while the travellers gaped.
Her heart was flung wide as any window. She wished these people to be secure and hale, so that they might be usefully available to Thryfe – to be, in fact, assistants to him on whatever course his Magikoy aptitude decided.
She had been so hurt – that was, grievously harmed – that she did not truly know what she did. Yet some stricture persisted. Him she would serve, even if indirectly, even if he had disallowed it.
When all was done, the travellers were uplifted to a fever.
She noted their tiny ecstasy with a dim gladness, seeing how they, like the water and the fire, flowered in the slipstream of what she had worked for them, such little practicalities.
But she saw too how she had warped and waned.
Jemhara, silent in their adulation, took herself off and left them the minuscule world of the village of Stones.
She had an itinerary she herself did not grasp. She wished to cast all segments of her awareness elsewhere.
She went away over the waste of snow, leaving her sorcerous abilities to become legends in altruism and power in the village. They did not know her name so called her Ravenhair. But Thryfe they knew of because she had, during her short sojourn, educated them. Thryfe therefore they valued, and would be prepared to assist.
Thryfe meanwhile dreamed of his mother.
As he watched, the black wolf rent her in bits.
He woke abruptly, and for some minutes did not know where he was, or what he was.
Then he recollected.
One of the jinnans was there offering him a snack.
Thryfe began to speak uncouthly to her. He curtailed himself and spoke with politeness.
‘No. My thanks. It isn’t necessary.’
He pulled himself up on the couch, longing to remain where he was. He was drained of energy and could sleep he thought for ever.
But as he strove between unawareness and consciousness, some other urge forged through his veins.
Thryfe thrust himself to his feet and balanced by the wall. When the jinnans came, both of them, to aid him, he showed them they must move away. They did so.
What have I become?
He did not know.
Memory was all a book of granite which had been scored and axed with words he could not decipher. He saw what had occurred, and his part in it – or removal from it – but all that was as if some other had done these deeds, and some other had been written of.
Nevertheless, in the citadel of his intellect he knew. It had been him, right enough.
The pain flowed through and from him, endlessly renewed, like water from an unlocked well.
Like fire that cannot die.
He staggered again to the couch and lay down, and again dreamed. This time he dreamed of a woman with long black hair, lovely – and prohibited.
In the dream he embraced her. And she embraced him. Day broke like the well he had partly envisaged, light flowing forth as the water had done. Thryfe tried to hold his loved one back from the morning, her sweet face, her sweetest self – but she put him aside smiling. Out into the world she went.
And under the tree, where the ice hung like swords, the wolf came.
The wolf came and cut her into pieces.
Jemhara, leaving the village of Stones, did not visit the Stones themselves, although she had informed the villagers that certain marvels went on there which should perhaps be monitored.
She did not care. She found however she cared for human things. Love had taught her all about itself by now, and she gained solace from solacing them. But she was like a sort of ghost.
She walked across the land. She did this without analysis, in some way sure she was capable of survival, and in another unmoved as to whether she might be.
She did not affect her shape-change to the physical persona of a hare. She could not be bothered.
Jemhara came on empty farms wrecked under the innovative advances of snow. She came on deserted bothies where dead animals lay, their carcasses picked clean of flesh – and cleared of soul. Other villages she entered, where beasts and men were wavering, hung between body and spirit. She stole among them all, putting right what she could, adjusting, for by now Jemhara had a true perception of what was appropriate, either living or dead.
She saved many lives, giving gifts of constantly flowing water, enduring fire, salvaged homes and provender. Many took her for a great mageia, and often – since this was in the Ruk – for one of the Magikoy returned to them, a forgiveness of the gods.
Unlike Jemhara’s scryer which had burst at the destruction of Ru Karismi, the great oculum in the towery of the South House had only displayed the message of the White Death, then mutely closed its eye. Perhaps even so its structure was made friable by the experience.
Though not a living thing, each of these enormous Rukarian magical mirrors possessed, like so many so-called inanimate objects, a fundamental life which developed in accordance with individual power, not to mention constant use. Thus, in some form, the oculum did live. And it was the transcribed image of another live entity, the rising of the whale called Brightshade on one of his calmer over-sea appearances, which had destroyed the oculum’s fabric. None of them had ever been able to relay a picture of Lionwolf, save in – self-protective? – symbols. The firefex was shown, a flame-cloud, similar things. But this other being was a god-whale, and only his whaleness had been captured in the mirror. At that inevitably his godness damaged it. Maybe the oculums, or this one, had been prey to the defect of racism: thinking the race of animals less than that of humanity. If so, a high price to pay.
Thryfe, locked those years before in timeless lovemaking with Jemhara, had not received the oculum’s signals, just as, for the same reason, he had not been present at the White Death. The oculum cracked and flew apart.
Ten days after Jemhara woke Thryfe from the last of his madnes
s with snow from the Stones, he reappeared in the upper chamber. He was dressed in a workman’s clothes, and followed by all three of the gargolems.
He ordered the room and the workforce, himself pitching in with the readiness of any trained labourer. His own lingering debility he ignored, along with those impairments which now stayed with him – a slight limp in the left leg, a stiffness in the fingers of his left hand, a tiredness of his eyes and lungs.
To such as Thryfe any bodily infirmity was to be treated with scorn. Either it would disperse with exercise or he would become accustomed to it. He could utilize other strengths to compensate.
The physical task was additionally good. He had been too long – years long – inactive, and he had thought too much.
Needless to say, the repair of the oculum was not a project for any ordinary workman. These also were Magikoy skills.
Passing between the lower subtor and the upper towery, he limped up and down hundreds of stairs, the gargolems with him bearing implements or finished sections of glass. Magery was stirred into every item, even the carefully ground lenses of the mirror-eye itself. Day and night the mansion was liable to echo now not to infernal shouts and cries but to the notes of hammer and burnisher, winch and counterpoise.
The commission took more than a month.
By then, though Thryfe still halted a little on the left side and must often flex his fingers to unknot them, he was generally healed and seemingly as vigorous as he ever had been.
As for the oculum, it began to operate again, slowly to begin with, itself relearning ability and force.
Beyond the house white weather scourged the landscape. Blue days went by. Storms returned.
In the magic mirror the first scene Thryfe searched for and was given was of the plains around the dead city of Ru Karismi.
Thryfe saw, as he had predicted more than two years ago, an uncanny change was now taking place there. The sheaths of snow and ice were granulating, becoming a kind of bitter little sand, composed of motes like marble salt. Here and there already a crouching mesa of ice had extruded from the expanse, where the sweeping up of the sands for some reason left it whole. Generally the level of the land had dropped.