by Tanith Lee
‘We went along the plains,’ said one man in a deer chariot, ‘saw others there. Not all wanted to come to the city. They like the life among the fields. Harvest soon.’
These phrases, ideas – fields, harvests – seemed known to them not from hothouses or slots of dormant flora. They came from the far past, five centuries before in the days when winter was seasonal not ubiquitous.
But Guri stared on. He held out his hand and something small and flying settled on his thumb. It paused there, fanning its wings to receive the sunlight. The sun glowed through the wings, which were red as garnet, thin as finest Rukarian paper.
He did not know it was a butterfly. It flew away presently.
And Lionwolf and he rode on towards the city.
With the prolonged fiery sunset, a torrent of water dashed from the sky, tepid and fragrant, shining, making every wall and tower, gate and pillar, glitter in the hot sidelong shafts of the sun. As the downpour lessened, narrow waterfalls went on tinkling from the high cornices and edges of things, twinkling, turning the whole city into a vast, strung, sounding harp.
Rain.
Only genetically could they have remembered it. The ice-cold earth had not known rain as such time out of mind.
Curjai who, along with hundreds of others, had been standing out to be soaked in the milk-warm showers, saw Lionwolf coming up a stairway and next to him an Olchibe – not Swanswine but another, younger and thinner, but also scowling as Swanswine generally did.
Lionwolf took Curjai’s right hand and Guri’s right hand and put the two hands together.
‘Curjai, son of the kings of Simisey. Guri, first captain of Olchibe’s vandal bands.’
The two men looked at each other. Lionwolf added easily, and without flourish, ‘Guri, Curjai is my brother. Curjai, Guri is my uncle.’
Below trumpets were honking men in to another feast – perhaps for victory, or only for greed.
These three stayed on the terrace, with the rain spangling down. Nine moons rose in the east, three crescents, three halves, three full.
Curjai recollected how he thought he had glimpsed the face of the black queen in a moon, and the face of a furious god today, in the sun.
Guri said, ‘If this is your hell, Lion, why are all these others in it? Aren’t they real?’
‘Their hells are enough like mine to make them seem to be here, or me seem to be in theirs. We come and go across each other’s paths. Like life, do you think?’
It was so strange, the healed Hell, so strange and alluring. Everything had altered but did any of them know into what? They did not want to speak of it much.
The sun had still not sunk, and the rain still littered down, and the nine moons hung in the east as if shy.
A word quivered through the city. It came from the timpanic rhythm of the rain now so lightly hitting the stones. Tomorrow was the word.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Curjai. ‘Do you hear it?’
‘Tomorrow,’ Guri said. ‘I hear it plain in the Olchibe tongue. And you—’
‘In Simese.’
‘Do you hear it, Lion?’
Lionwolf looked into their eyes. He was no longer even Lionwolf. What then – what then?
‘I spoke it,’ he said.
Curjai said, ‘What must we do?’
‘Wait. The night will be a long one. Use the night.’
Men who died here in their afterlife, men like Choy and Lifli, where had they gone to? A better or a worse place? It was possible to stay here. To spend eternity, perhaps.
But for Curjai – he felt an alternative abruptly tug on him, drawing him – where? A plunge of fear – oh. He knew.
‘We go back to the world, then,’ he said. ‘Well,’ he added, straightening, ‘this holiday has been informative.’ He thought how he had been when alive, left on his rug by the door, without limbs, without a face, the looking-glass broken. And the loved warrior saying over the wall how glad the king would be that Curjai must soon be dead.
Lionwolf detected Curjai’s thoughts.
He said, ‘That was the previous life, Curjai. Not the next.’
Guri said, ‘You mean we’re to be born again in the flesh.’
‘Yes, Uncle. Some poor mother will have to put up with us all over again.’
‘The flesh,’ repeated Guri, stunned. Then, ‘How do we get there?’
‘How we came here.’
The sun went suddenly. The whole of the east flushed to carmine. Overhead stars winged from their shells moltenly brilliant and laid in complex patterns.
‘Death,’ said Curjai. ‘We have to die fully ourselves. As the others did.’
‘How do you know this, Lion?’ questioned Guri seriously.
‘Because now I can read it on all of those men here – they have all done it many times. Dying in the world, entering an afterlife, returning through death to another mortal life.’
‘Not you?’ asked Curjai. ‘Why not you?’
‘My last life in the world was my first life in the world. Given such powers – yet so ignorant. No wonder I was adrift. But also it’s true for you, Curjai, and for you, Guri. One human life. Then this.’
‘Only one life – we are so young, then.’
‘No. We are so old.’
‘A riddle.’
Lionwolf said, ‘I’ve found – not what I am, but what I am to be. When I reach it I must be thrice dead and thrice born. And you two lazy ones – Guri will be thrice dead and twice born. And you, Curjai, little brother, just twice dead and twice born. Don’t pine. That will be enough. There are other kinds of death we have all known. Even the false real deaths Guri has known here. But once we leave this curious region, death will be done with us, bored with letting us in and out.’
The rain was over. It had fixed itself up on the sky as more stars, better than the stars of Hell had ever been.
‘We’re gods,’ said Curjai. It’s that. I told you so.’
Lionwolf said nothing. Guri was offended. ‘My mother was a woman. And my father mortal too. Be gods if you like, but leave me to make my own road. Great Gods hear it and amen.’
Tomorrow tintinnabulated in the last rain dripping from the high places of Thasuba.
One by one the nine moons separated and reached the apex of the sky.
By then Guri and Curjai in uneasy alliance had gone down to drink in the feasthall, where a wide pool spouted cooked fish and gorgeous girls wove about, dressed in veils like spun glass. The guards, vizorless, off duty, drank with the rest, snake-hair lying quiescent. They had eyes. All the dogs had them too, running here and there for titbits. Later Guri and Curjai would go out to look at the two mammoths on the plain, which were shedding their heavier wool in the low heat. Great sheaths of it lay among the trampled stalks. Evidently they had been mating.
And Lionwolf lay entirely mated in the arms of Winsome, in a room from one side of which a fountain poured over a pyramid of rock and away into the dark.
‘Will I find you again?’ he said at last to her. ‘Or will you become Chillel made of obsidian ice, and hide from me?’
‘Your light,’ she said, ‘will find me out, wherever I am.’
‘Are we gods? What are gods?’
‘It can never matter, beloved. It has only to be lived.’
‘Then to us it does matter.’
‘Least of all to us.’
She raised herself to lie above him, and gazing into his face she said, ‘From nothing I was made – from night and snow. I am the vessel of what made me, who are three gods, or one god that has three persons. For this, and to be this, I was created and am. I am this cup. If you will drink, you will drink.’
‘Those were the words you spoke in the burnt city of Or Tash, to all of them but me, and nearly drove me mad.’
‘I am the cup,’ she said again, ‘and now I’m only and ever for you.’
He put his mouth to her, to her breasts, drew her like silk over his body, brought the centre of her darkness that was not dark, the midnight
cup holding its pomegranate wine, to his lips. ‘And I was so thirsty. How can you have guessed?’
After this long night it would be a while without intoxication. After this last night of Hell that had healed to Paradise. And Tomorrow breathed the rain beads on the stones. Yesterday.
FIVE
Asleep, he heard the oculum signal to him.
Still sleeping, he dragged himself off the couch.
He woke up only as he stood. Body first, mind second.
Then he ran.
The halt in his left leg was improved, Thryfe thought, even as he propelled himself up the stairway into the towery of the South House. But his left hand was if anything worse – like wood. He flexed it as he went. Entering the chamber of the oculum, he stopped dead.
The great eye was full of a laval amber. Through the amber shot cross-currents of blue and gilded white, and dim streamers of a variable red.
‘Oculum, I’m here. Let me see.’
He had given up on his left hand and abandoned it to lie partially inoperable by his side. With his right hand Thryfe made a gentle pass over the thaumaturgic globe, as if to draw a curtain aside.
It drew.
It drew—
‘Incendimus ar konturbatexis.’
Thryfe spoke spontaneously a phrase from the elder writings of his Order. This was not an incantation, more a kind of prayer: Deliver me from such ruin-fire as this.
He knew what he saw now. His brain held only that – was subsumed by that.
The oculum had grown red and gold, with a core of live whiteness. All the while, golden and orichalc, flares bloomed like feathers and exploded like volcanoes. The urge to cover the eyes was very great. Yet also, impossibly, he was not blinded. Nor did the rebuilt oculum give way. If anything the uncontainable power now imaged there seemed to feed its own.
Formerly the firefex had been visible in the glass, the legendary bird that burned itself in the sun and rose from its own ashes more beautiful and more valid. Later, other half-seen ciphers, symbols—
But this was the sun itself.
This was the sun as once it had been before the age of ice.
‘In the name of any god – is that what you are?’
Like a flower, the magmatic tumult resolved by closing up its petals, then drawing away and away, up into a distance and a sky more blue than blueness. There it blazed, and only there.
Below, a young man was seated on the side of a building, perhaps a terrace or balcony. There seemed to be a city beneath, but it was unclear. The young man turned his head and looked at Thryfe looking into the oculum.
The stranger had coppery hair and was blue-eyed, and his skin was tanned as if from a sunlight long since departed out of the physical world.
‘Yes, that is what you are.’
‘Is it?’ said the young man. ‘Is that truly what I am?’
There was an appealing innocence, a disquieting sophisticated humour, together terrifying to any observer.
‘Vashdran,’ said Thryfe. ‘Lionwolf.’
‘And …?’ said the Lionwolf, sitting there and smiling at Thryfe, respectful and nearly humorously naive; prompting.
‘And the sun. You are the sun.’
‘Thank God,’ said Lionwolf. He grinned at Thryfe the wonderful human grin he had gifted to his daughter. ‘It could, couldn’t it, have been so much worse.’
Thryfe woke.
He was lying half off his bed, his left hand dead under him, his eyes he thought already wide open.
A dream?
This time he pulled his body together like a rowdy and undisciplined battalion, before driving them and it to limp up all the stairs.
In the upper room, the oculum was blank and cool. Day was beginning in the windows, slaty-skied, no hint of any solar disc, and the snow miles deep to every point of the compass.
Kandexa had surrendered instantly those years before to reiver squadrons of the Gullahammer. They for their part killed every Rukarian man, woman and child they located there, stole anything portable or herdable, and went away.
Due to the submission, however, less damage than usual had been done to the city’s architecture. What had – due to the sprees of the invader – ice and snow had capitalized on inevitably.
A dreary hollow, Kandexa, echoing with silences and noises that were too loud.
It was in size below one-eighth of the circumference and volume of Ru Karismi.
Others were already in possession of certain areas. These had marked off their established zones with piles of rubble, packed ice, and derelict carts or slees. They had written up titles for the territories, for example: The region of the West Villagers, The New South, Hopeful Still, Clever Town.
All were guarded, some even by men who wore the mail of Rukarian soldiery. Either they were those who had made themselves soldiers after the war, or deserters from it.
When the caravan arrived, wending through the barricaded areas inside the crushed-in gate, it was challenged more than once.
‘How many are you? We have many communities already here.’
‘But we’re all,’ said the leader of the entering caravan, Gabram, ‘Rukarians.’
‘That’s debatable.’ This from a batch of ‘soldiers’ over whose improvised wall flew the red and silver colours of Ru Karismi itself. ‘You’re easterners, aren’t you?’
‘No,’ said Gabram. ‘Some of us are from here. And some from the City of the Kings.’
The interrogator spat on the ground. He said only, ‘Try the New South. They may welcome you. They’re running out of sheep.’
But they did not try the New South, which anyway they saw along a wide avenue now blocked by ice-bricks with metal shards sticking out of them.
A lower section of the city was vacant. Someone from the caravan had owned a house here. The lots were marked by fire. They had heard, twice small bands of reivers had come back to loot the remains of Kandexa. Gabram and his brothers decided it was best to dig in on this ground. They did. Within a few days then they too had their own district, spaces between existing walls filled by whatever lay to hand and even a title on the stonewood door that served as a gate: Paradise.
Perhaps the irony of the name, or just the general breakdown of law and livelihood, produced three raids on Paradise during the first month. Gabram’s men repelled the raiders, all of them from other settlements in the city. And when one belligerent gang brought along their witch, Gabram called out the caravan’s middle-aged mageia.
Up on the barricade she stood throwing psychic rays at the other witch down the street, who threw rays back.
Jemhara, who had been unblocking a well among the courts of burnt houses, heard the commotion as the older mageia was felled by a small flung ball of marble.
When Jemhara reached the fray, she bent first over the mageia, her friend by now, and felt her forehead to make sure the skull was in one piece. It was, so Jemhara climbed on the barricade in turn.
Her advent at the top checked some of the attackers. Some even called out obscenely to her, seeing she was young and attractive.
For all she had changed her nature Jemhara had, when feasible in her past, given short shrift to dangerous morons – and that method she had kept.
She concentrated her gaze on the cemented snow of the avenue. Within three or four seconds it was churning, fissuring, giving. Shouting and yelling, the enemy force sprawled every which way, until a gushing wave of melted ice rose and swept them, their mageia included, right along the boulevard in a screaming, kicking mass, smacking them into other walls and obstacles along the route, for a bonus.
The defenders of Paradise began to laugh. Gabram cautioned vigilance – but it was unneeded. Even hours, days later, the raiders had not returned. Nor did any of the zones mount an attack on Paradise thereafter. Word had got round, it seemed. Paradise had a Magikoy.
‘Drink this,’ said Jemhara, spooning a cordial into her witch-friend’s mouth.
‘There. Worth a bump on the head to taste
that. Wine in it? Thought so, a good one. Don’t cry, Jema,’ added the older witch, moved at this concern. ‘You and I both well know I’ll live.’
Jemhara shook herself cat-like to cast off the tears.
She did not reveal she had not shed them for that. The cordial was one of those she had mixed for Thryfe in his mansion, and she had spooned it into him too when his delirium would let her.
That night Jemhara lay in her room, the attic of a small house by Paradise’s eastern barricade.
She could not sleep. She could only think of him.
Near dawn, however, she dreamed. Waking from this dream she did not believe she had slept. The dream had only netted her in, a sort of trance that had nothing to do with unconsciousness. Two years ago and more she had sometimes sent her physical spirit through doors and walls of the world – but never out of the world. Not until now.
After the dream, Jemhara sat a long while by the slit of window, aware she had journeyed very far.
Below teemed the people from the caravan, intent on renovating their district. She had helped with this and would soon go down to do some more.
But the dream for now came between her and her duties. Even between her and her longing memory of Thryfe.
She knew who he was, the man – the deity – in the dream. Yet she had never before seen him. She too, like Thryfe, had missed his advent at Ru Karismi.
Once, nevertheless, she had met one who resembled him.
That had been in her primal adolescence, there in her hovel near Sofora. She had been working up a spell to punish some unwary person in the stead who had offended her. Suddenly, from a corner of the shack, a being stepped out.
She had in fact not been entirely certain of who or what he was, but canny from her awkward life she understood she had better kneel and kiss the floor at his feet.
Years after, having identified the visitor from the god-statues in Ru Karismi’s temple-town, Jemhara boasted to a session of scholars at one of the libraries of magic she frequented. They had mocked her, naturally. Why should the god Zeth Zezeth have attended her silly little spell? And in his benign aspect too …