by Tanith Lee
Quite a long way from the city, Behf and Kuul crouched on a slope below the mountains. They had been hunting, but taken shelter at a bizarre hallucination. The sun had seemed to be snatched from the heavens, and when it reappeared an insane tempest began.
‘Is it him caused that?’
‘The boy?’
‘Vashdran – is that still his name?’
‘Lionwolf,’ said Kuul, frowning. ‘It means that. A lion who mates with a wolf and produces one like him. They have a myth for it in Gech.’
‘Him then?’
‘Him then.’
When the storm dissipated, the plains cheered up remarkably. Hordes of deer went galloping by, nearly flirting with the hunters to follow, which they did.
Returning at sunset with four carcasses dragged on an invented sled – summoned out of the air, as they were getting used to doing – Kuul and Behf saw the camp had also taken on a new lease of life.
The makeshift dwellings looked much better. There were trees, some of which showed green – flowers were speared through the ground in what had become virtually forgotten colours, rich scarlets and cherries and honey yellows. Had Taeb done that?
But Taeb was in her bothy with Swanswine doing what came naturally, and doing it very naturally, judging by the row they produced over it.
Wasfa and Heppa were also busy, although much more quietly, in their own apartment.
Behf and Kuul gave each other a look, dumped the deer carcasses and went into their own shack with a pot of wine.
Ruxendra alone sat on a boulder with the dogs lying round her, staring with their large, gleaming, ale-brown eyes. The hound which had been Vashdran’s, Star-Dog, started gently to whine. As the gold-blue sun went down in a garland of candy clouds, Ruxendra who was Ushah, and the jatcha who was now a dog, wept together yet apart in their own ways. As if finally realizing, both of them, that love, worse than dead, was gone for ever into another country.
THREE
That night Sallusdon, son of Bhorth, woke in his bed at Kol Cataar. Feeling him wake, the chaze snake woke too and draped its inquiring length about Sallus’s wrist. What is it? unspeakingly asked the raised flat head, and, Is it rats? hopefully.
Sallus generally knew what the snake was thinking. ‘It’s nothing here. Out there …’ Sallus pointed away and away, through the wall of the chamber, the other walls of the palace of ice-brick, the various walls of the tent-shack city.
After a short while Sallusdon lay down again, troubled. It was no use getting up and roaming about. Since the night when the chaze had first arrived, all those months back, any nocturnal excursion of his – even to the latrine – occasioned a worried check from guards, not to mention the new nurse; even sometimes Bhorth himself.
Sallusdon lay pensive, while the snake re-coiled itself against his spine and slept.
Had it been a dream? Sallus believed not. No, he had seen something, even through the medium of dreaming, that had actually occurred. And this something was horrifying, for though mostly amorphous visually, a glimmered shifting gloom, a sense of horror massed all through it.
The seen place was, he thought, the inside of some colossal building. That must be it, for objects – indecipherable yet omnipresent – loomed everywhere, and from these came a glow, greenish or pallid, giving a sort of illumination. But there was also mist or vapour swirling about, and even as you began to decide what that peculiar structure might be, or that one, the fog eddied between and all clues were lost. Liquid water lay over the floor, if it was water. Again it was not possible to be sure. Drips and gurnings, savage yet inexplicable noises filled the space. It stank, too. But even the effluvia was unusual and unnameable, aside from a distinct odour of fish.
In the dream or seeing Sallus had moved, staring around him, experiencing the horror. That was all. It was enough.
He lay wakeful an hour, then sleep reclaimed him. During the second sleep he had only his ordinary dreams – of running or flying in the air, of playing friendly with large beasts, and riding a sleekar chariot as his father did. Average things that were interesting but never too taxing.
The nurse woke him next, an hour after sunrise, as she always did.
Unlike the former nurse who had not prevented the chaze entering the room and fainted when it came back from death to be Sallus’s companion, the new one was lively and alert, and not afraid of the snake. Sallus preferred and liked her, though he felt sorry for the other woman, now relegated to the outer ramshackle environs. Here, he had heard from guard-talk, she lived with a drunk who beat her. Sallus had attempted to improve her lot via his father, but Bhorth said she must learn her lesson. Life seemed full of such cruel lessons. Maybe even because they passed Sallusdon by, he pitied the ones who must suffer them.
Like, he assumed, the boy he had been inside the dream confine, wading in stinking water.
Over to the north-east in the Marginal Land, Guriyuve son of Ipeyek was musing on a similar dream.
Less than a year old, Guriyuve had escalated in his growing up as if he must correct delay. He was already like a boy of ten, strong and handsome, with long black crispy hair that Hevonhib his mother braided for him in the Olchibe fashion, fixing in small painted beads and tiny mouse or bird skulls.
Because of the production of Guriyuve and his own hunting skills, Ipeyek had been elected to a high position in the sluhtin. He was the nearest they had to a leader now, for the Crarrowin, particularly Piamtak the Crax, kept the underpinning of any command. As Piamtak had remarked, exalting Ipeyek had eased the whinging of the old men. They could pretend they had a man in charge.
But the Crarrowin stayed powerful. They had let go nothing. And stripped of youthful men, for the most part the hunts and other masculine duties were still organized and performed by the women, while other women wove and cooked and worked the stills for alcohol.
Olchibe had always respected a Crarrow. It was not so hard for them really to give the Crarrowin the reins.
Meanwhile, two of the ancient mammoth females who had not gone to war and so been slain had birthed, one a pair of females, one a pair of males. Everyone was surprised, for double births were rare, the animals were old, and they must as well have retained the seed a greatly extended time – longer than their normal two-year pregnancy. It augured splendidly. A replacement herd was in the making.
Guriyuve was often with the mammoths. They grew fast, as he did. The sluhtin looked on approvingly as he showed such an able happiness with them.
He would be a hero. He would bring glory back, perhaps even the historic glory from the time before the Ruk smashed the Olchibe nation and took its land.
Living even in such a web of approval, Guriyuve did not become wanton or foolish. He reverenced the Crarrowin, his mother included, and was nice to the men. He saw himself, of course, as unique. He would be the one man equal to the women.
The dream, however, upset him.
Where had he been? In an ice swamp, he thought, like those he had been told of up near Sham. Mud and liquid on the ground; smoke, and vague fiendish lamps blurring in it.
He was trapped, he knew that much. And he had also been deserted by somebody he had, perforce and unwilling, trusted.
Having woken, Guriyuve wrestled all night with the demon of the dream, and eventually slipped out of Ipeyek’s shelter, along the cave halls full of bleary potted firelight and snores, towards the mammoth enclosure. Here he sat down with the four young ones, the old females drowsily browsing and paying little attention.
The young mammoths had, rather as had Guriyuve, grown abnormally quickly. A few months of age, they had more a look of two or three years, and already their tusks were showing.
They clustered round the boy and in whispers, not to annoy the older animals, he recounted his dream.
All the twins seemed concerned for him. They moved in and stood right against him, then kneeled down as their elders had for mounting.
Guriyuve fell asleep again leaning on their steamy wool. Th
en he only dreamed the average dreams of flying, or swimming in the depths of a liquid sea.
Across the length and girth of the continent, and now further off, northward beyond Vormish lands, the black sons with whom Chillel had impregnated men shared, unknowing, the same dream or trance. All saw it somewhat differently, but all saw it, experienced its murky detail and ambience of misery. Only those of the ships of the Vorm-Kelp-Fazion fleet knew why. They knew who it was and in whose wretchedness they had participated: Dayadin, son of Arok, there in the guts of Brightshade under the ocean.
For a while after he had been gulped down Dayadin was stunned, hardly aware. The ingestion had been like plummeting through a burning fleshly whirlwind, only to arrive in a sewer.
He had landed by luck or more likely design, for even in his own distress the staggering whale had wanted to safeguard this prize, on some type of raft, probably the side of a wrecked boat long since otherwise absorbed.
When Dayadin properly came to, he sat up. Above him the whale’s stomach roof arched along great flexing bulging ribs of muscle. On every side matter, decay and fluid were gently lapping. In them bobbed every kind of junk once under the sun. Some distance off bulked actual banks of debris. Here plants and white trees grew from the mire, and house-like structures leaned, perhaps made by other unfortunates who, sucked in, had died here.
Brightshade’s innards, as with his disgusting botanic back, were not exactly like those of other sea mammals, even those of his own species.
He held a sort of breathable air, though it was more flavoured by unwholesome gases than not. In addition, his digestive tract was adaptable and also selective, in that his digestive acids might be diluted, or segregated from items he wished to preserve – at least for as long as the wish continued. These abilities were now automatic. As well they were. Dayadin was their beneficiary, even as Brightshade toppled over and over down into the depths.
By the hour Dayadin was once more fully conscious, the whale lay prone again on the sea floor. He breathed in slow waves, a respiration not general with his kind, sifting the outer waters spontaneously. Brightshade was not insensible, but he had sustained injury and was in acute pain. He was also afraid, with some cause. And through all that he had now forgotten snatching the levitating child. All Brightshade could think about was the blast Saftri had fired at him – and the imminent wrath of his father, Zeth.
Dayadin’s subsequent movements did not disturb the whale’s reflections. They amounted to no more than the passage of intermittent so-far-spared live fish through the murk of the abdominal pressure-cabin.
With vast reluctance Dayadin took a bit of floating plank from the fluid, and began to row his raft towards the nearer ‘bank’. As he did this he felt a fluttering – and then a helpful push on the raft.
Looking behind him the boy saw that the hovor, Hilth, had also been gulped, very likely against his will. But finding a friend in need brought Dayadin to tears. He sat sobbing as he had done only once since his abduction, and let Hilth do all the work to bring them ashore.
The bank was as ghastly as he had expected. He sank in the mud, and in pretend streams that coursed over beds of jumble. Things gleamed fitfully through the perambulating vapours. Though by now he was getting used to the smell, the dangles of human bones and half-digested sea life made him nauseous.
It was the hovor who pulled Dayadin into one of the odd house-structures. Here in the almost total dark, with less vileness to gaze on, Dayadin became calmer. He sat on an upturned bucket left lying there, and the hovor folded itself round him.
‘What shall I do? My father would want me to do something now. He’d know the answer. Like in the legends of heroes.’
Mournfully Dayadin peered into his own mind.
He had always blithely guessed he had powers, but they were now like limbs which had been robbed of circulation and gone to sleep.
Outside and around, Brightshade was also thinking of his talents and his daddy.
As the amalgamated day-night of the sea floor continued, moons and a sun rose and fell on the world above. The fleet and the woman were long gone.
The agony in the whale’s side grew less. He had managed to attract a deep ocean shoal of blind fish to clean the wound and slather it with a kind of oily salve their bodies excreted. As a reward he ate the shoal. But he did so by discharging his juices selectively, even without recalling why. There was always something or other in his belly he wanted to hoard for a while. Dayadin, during this manoeuvre, had only an impression of flapping and exploding in the surrounding ‘water’, and a stench beyond all others so that he buried nose and mouth in his own whale-scented shirt.
Now that he was feeling rather better, Brightshade’s shape-thoughts started to rotate like a wheel, searching for a solution.
Should he pursue the witch-goddess-human female, and again try to obliterate her? Should he give up on that and seek Zzth, begging forgiveness, entreating some extra aid? Zzth had assisted when Brightshade tackled the woman last with her hated son.
Glumly Brightshade knew, whatever shapes he entertained of victory, Saftri was now too much for him. While Zzth would not be forgiving.
As soon as he felt he could, Brightshade lifted up through the water to where the ton weights of it were less. He turned himself full north-east, a direction the fleet had not been going, the direction that was farthest, he hoped, from any land and any gods.
Off he sailed, under thick sheets of surface ice and wide open stretches of waves. Now and then when he risked going up for fresh air, he shattered the tough ice in preference with his pinnacled horn. It gave him a feeling of self-worth.
Once only he had an idea of something sitting inside him. But it was merely like one more thought-shape, a stomach thought, refined and deserving to be kept, if he could remember to.
A morning dawned and the whale was an incalculable distance from his starting point.
He rose to breach for a change through unimpeded water, attracted to the sunlight.
Maybe he had begun to be optimistic.
He should not have been.
Between the mighty head of the whale, ejecting tumults of water through the blowhole, and that attractive inviting sun, something was waiting on the sea.
Zeth Zezeth Zzth was himself quite recovered. He blazed with silvery goldenness, but his entire face had shaded to indigo. The malign side. What else?
Brightshade gave a hiccup of fear. It thundered all through him, knocking Dayadin and Hilth out of their mud-house, into the acidic lake beyond. As the hovor plucked Dayadin up, the boy shouting with sheer horror, their enclosed world again went sprawling, and any chance of rescue or protection ended.
Topside, Zzth was lamming into his son with whips of lightning and rods of malevolence.
Brightshade screamed.
The whole sea heard, and its cold blood ran colder.
No use to beg for mercy now.
The deity has given up his appealing man-god form. He has become a hurricane. He spins the whale, bashes him down and up, pummels him, throws him for miles, retrieves and stamps on him.
The atmosphere blackens. A storm is churning through. Tidal combers hit the sky as Zzth hits with his psychic fists.
Zzth offers no words. Yet his fury fills Brightshade’s brain with shapes of viciousness and never-ending contemptuous hate.
Only when, resistless, blank and broken into pieces, the gargantuan mass sinks again into the deepest depth, can Zeth in his ecstasy of rage draw back.
Then the god shoots away up the sky like an arrow of silver, and with a strange howling. Could it be his volcanic violence has been too much even for himself to endure?
The whale has vanished and does not resurface.
If any flicker of being was detectable from Dayadin, now it is not.
Five shepherds stood just down from the important hut. Higher was the fifth of these.
‘After the stars altered. Not after that,’ said Higher, repeating what they had said earli
er below in the village.
The others nodded. He was accurate. The heavenly iris of bright stars had diminished. And after that night not one of them had seen Chillel.
‘You see her before then – you said she appear from air—’ added another of the men.
‘True,’ said Higher. ‘I did. She did.’
Several days, ten perhaps, had elapsed since the event. He remembered, however. Chillel had told him to go. Something was coming he ‘must not see’. It might ‘frighten’ him. And he had been scared stiff anyway.
Now it was dusk, and the twilight empty of the iris stars, and the village wanted to be told a story by their story-teller, even if the tale was – as always – obscure.
But they stood here, and had politely called to her five or six times, and got no answer.
‘Big with baby,’ said one of the men.
‘Should women come up see?’
At this moment two things happened. They heard the black lamb they had gifted to Chillel bleat loudly, and the door was moved aside.
It was not Chillel who stepped out, nor for that matter a black lamb.
The lamb had become a full-grown sheep, with a king’s ransom of curly fleece. Next to it was a young woman.
At a glance they saw this was not Chillel.
Indeed not. For though Chillel was young and exquisite, the girl was younger. She was, even so, fantastically lovely, and she had a look of Chillel. For example, her skin and eyes were jet black. However, the rich hair that streamed from her head was of a colour none of them had ever seen on man or woman. It was like the cup they had once been shown when some of the vagrant wanderers from an abandoned Ruk town stopped by. The cup had been gold mixed with copper, and they saw it by the red of the communal fire.
‘Who are you?’ said Higher.
‘My name,’ said the girl quietly, ‘is Brinnajni.’
They had none of them ever heard a name like that. Yet they knew what it meant instantly. Rather than try to pronounce it, one by one they murmured, ‘Burning Flame.’ Except for Higher who, condensing pragmatically, said, ‘Flame.’