by Tanith Lee
Saftri turned her head. Her eyes glittered strangely. She was crying, but if they saw it made no difference.
They only ranged there in front of her, a tall fence of male hatred.
‘What do your women say to this?’ she asked after a moment.
‘You shall hear, goddess, what the women say.’
He would not call her Our Lady now; she was no longer anything of theirs. He moved aside and out of the rank of men a single woman came. Her hair was still quite short. She was Best Bear’s mother.
‘Go away,’ said the woman to the goddess. The woman’s face was flat and expressionless, unafraid and unhuman. ‘Go far. Never come back.’
Saftri flared like a torch. Fieriness streamed from her. Not one of them flinched. They looked at her burning there as if at an aggravating infant that shows off.
‘I could blast your little lives to clinker,’ said Saftri. ‘Be afraid of me.’
‘Terrified we are of you,’ said Krandif leadenly. ‘Look where you’ve brought us. My brother dead in the salt sea. That’s where I’m brought by you. Go, you Unluck, go away. What can you do to us now worse than what already has been done because of you?’
Saftri trembled. She put out her light.
She rose into the air, stood in it looking down at them. But they paid her no attention now. The body of men and the single woman had already moved off, back towards the encampment.
‘I saved you,’ Saftri whispered.
How small the camp, how few the survivors. She turned all of herself away from them.
At a loss, Saftri-Saphay looked in the only other direction.
Above loomed the pitiless grim phantoms of the cliffs and mountains. She found herself beginning to walk along the sky towards them. There was nowhere to go, and for that very reason she went towards one facet of the nowhere. And this reminded her of something. At first she could not think what. Then the memory returned sharp as a razor. That time the tears had frozen on her face, but – outcast from the Jafn-garth – she had clutched to her one element that gave her warmth. It had been her own child, Nameless, Lionwolf. Her dead son.
But now all things were really gone. She walked the sky towards the uninviting mountains.
Such calmness of sea and sky seemed remarkable to Arok as the voyage continued. Blue days of sun entered nights fiercely embered with stars, and nearly always one moon at full.
The big ship ploughed her burnished path, going over more westerly now as the whalers steered her course.
No one had objected to taking the ghost’s advice on that.
‘Athluan is our good spirit,’ they said. ‘He was a brave warrior and a just king, who died in battle at his brother’s hand.’
Steadfastly they refused any connection between the Jafn ghost and the Lionwolf. Athluan after all had been dead before the Lionwolf was born.
Often the ghost was absent. Then the voyagers would look for him. Even Arok found he did so. Sometimes the hawk was up in the rigging when Athluan was nowhere to be found.
They had been at sea a great while. It was hard to imagine ground beneath you that did not tilt; views of hills or ice-jungle.
Arok, standing his watch on a sleep nocturnal, turned and saw Athluan also standing at the rail.
‘In ten days you’ll come to it,’ said Athluan.
‘The land?’
‘The land.’
‘And my son is there?’
‘Yes, though you’ll have to search him out.’
‘Do you know where he is?’
‘No. The dead can see farther than you, but not all the distance.’
‘You know my son is black like the other child aboard – like a hero.’
‘Like Star Black Made-of-God. Yes. I’ve glimpsed his first mother, too. Oh, not in the way we do it here. Between the spaces of the stars – like that.’
Arok breathed in and out, a kind of sighing. ‘Chillel. She was the most enticing woman on earth, so we thought, all of us. Him too, the – him.’
‘Yes. She was also god-created. A minor god of the Ruk.’
‘It’s puzzled me always, why she chose me. The other men all went after her, but me she picked of them all. I never forget it. Here as wife, she said to him – to Lionwolf. And he said, thinking as each of us did she was to be his, Whose? And she said Now I choose and he said to her Who will you have? And she turned and pointed to me. That man, she said, I choose that man as husband.’
‘You loved her.’
‘You couldn’t miss loving her. Or hating her when she began to ride with any other man who wanted it – even the Vormish scum, and Faz. I threw her out of my tent. I’d had enough. But every man she cutched lived through the Death at Ru Karismi. I saw them after – thirty – fifty – I can’t recall that, how many of us had dighted Chillel and so lived. One of them was one of the Rukar kings.’
‘And he, too,’ said Athluan, ‘was chosen by Chillel.’
Arok’s head jerked up. He glared, staring. ‘Why? A Rukar?’
‘She was made by a Rukar god. I told you.’
‘But he – and I? We two. Did she want us? Was that it? I suppose,’ he said, dropping his voice, ‘if I have to share that with someone, if he’s a king it’s not so bad.’
‘You too were recently a king, of the Holasan-garth.’
‘Not for so long. Nor when she picked me. Besides, she didn’t seek out any of the other kings or clan leaders. That yellow vandal king, Peb Yuve, he wouldn’t go near her. But there were others, and they only got her if they went to her. Why did she choose the two of us, Athluan?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps time will reveal it.’
‘There’s Nirri now,’ said Arok, looking at the moonlit sea. ‘I don’t love her, but she means a lot to me. She’s a good woman. Hot in the bed as well. And she gave me my son, even if he was Chillel’s too. Chillel never had to push him out.’
‘One thing I do see,’ said Athluan, ‘Nirri has another boy in her now.’
‘What? Why haven’t the damned wise-women told me?’
‘They haven’t seen it yet.’
‘A boy? A boy. Is he—’
‘No, Arok. Pale-skinned like you or me. But healthy and as he should be.’
‘He’ll be born in another country.’
The ship rocked gently. It amazed Arok now that this accustomed motion could ever have upset him.
Glancing aside, he saw Athluan their benign spirit had gone away, the hawk too. Arok sensed they might be gone for good. Ten days, and then the new world. And – what? – eight months and then the new child … Did Nirri herself not know? He would take a bet she did, was only waiting to be sure before she told him. He would say nothing, let her have the glory of announcing that to him. Perhaps he did love her anyway. Another sort of love, not rampant and searing, milder and calmer – like the sea now, and the sea’s deep tender motion.
As the sun set dull red among the mountains there was a horned whale in the sky, made of maroon cloud. Every detail of it was exact – Brightshade to a T. From the blowhole curved up and over a spout of extremely bright stars. Ddir had been busy, apparently; stars and clouds for this latest artistic effort.
Below too something flashed and gleamed, but with an ebb and flow unlike that of anything in the sky.
Yyrot, Winter’s Lover, sat on a mountainside, gazing down at the earthly light-source. Beside him sat a curious being. She was a woman – of a kind; and beautiful – in a distinct sort of fashion. She was covered in short sleek fur that took a reddish polish from the sunset. Inside this fur envelope her body was, plainly, that of a human female. Yet where her hands, aside from covering, were also human, her feet were enlarged versions of two clawed paws. Her head was a cat’s head without camouflage, the ears placed high and pointed, the eyes, now shut, normally rounded. Behind her, her tail flickered to and fro. She was dozing, leaning on her partner. Once she had been Saphay’s cat.
She still had a cat’s lack of concern with most things not inv
olving herself. At home, wherever their bizarre domestic arrangements might lie at the time, the cat and Yyrot-as-hound’s thirteen children lived their own lives, hunting and fighting, eating and singing in unique voices. Sometimes they too mated. This rarely happened between two of at all the same type, rather between two of the most opposing types. Thereby they had already produced a bevy of even more eccentric creatures than themselves, if that were possible. Drajjerchaches and chachadrajes – dog-cats and cat-dogs. Credited and named in the mythic antiquity of Gech they, like the fabled ice-beast the lionwolf, were hybrids. And their offspring, which even Gech had not supposed could ever exist, went by the parents’ name still, the drajjes being those most canine, the chaches those most cat-like. None of the grandchildren in fact resembled the founders of their line with their characteristics of pure cat and pure dog. But then neither did Saphay’s cat much look like her former self. She had a name, however. Yyrot had given it to her: Shimmawyn.
Now Shimmawyn stirred and opened her round eyes.
Yyrot’s interest in the rising and sinking light below had been put aside. He was standing up, as over the ridge of the ice-locked mountain another god came stalking.
Shimmawyn lashed her tail and sprang behind a convenient rock.
‘Well, brother,’ said Yyrot. ‘You have brought splendid weather with you.’
Doubtless it was being around the mortal world as they had been now for twelve years or so which made them carry on like mortals to the extent of holding conversations. Half a century before, if anyone had told them they would be doing such a thing, particularly amongst themselves, could they ever have believed it?
Unlike Yyrot the second god did not evince his amenable side. His face was masked in indigo, and so was every inch of his golden skin. His hair was grey and spiked with small knives.
‘Why am I here?’ he demanded, stopping some feet away from Yyrot.
‘Why are you? I have no idea why either of us is here.’
‘This is not my domain. This is the shit-heap the woman I hate was aiming for. I am surrounded by those who enrage me yet slip from my grasp.’
‘There, there,’ said Yyrot, banal and remote.
Zeth Zezeth smote the ground with his look. Large clumps of hard snow went flying upward then down, thundering into murky valleys miles below.
Shimmawyn, unseen by either god, slunk off round the rocks and hid in a cave, and so beheld Ddir, the third of the triad, descend the staircase of the air outside. He peered in at her briefly but showed neither fascination or disapproval, moving on to join the other two.
Yyrot saw Ddir and nodded. Zeth cast him a blazing and poisonous glance. Ddir only sat down on a rock. Blandly he peered into space, his unmind on other priorities.
‘What is that light down there?’ Yyrot presently asked Zeth.
‘That? Some rubbish of humans.’
‘Do you think so? I am inclined to go and see.’
‘Go then.’
‘And you?’
‘I will remain here with my hatred.’
Yyrot paused. ‘Saftri, you mean.’
‘Saftri – Saphay—’
‘She is too strong for you now. Even for your whale. Did you kill him, by the by? Surely he also is too vigorous to actually die.’
‘I neither know nor care. That cretin Ddir has slapped him up on the sky, you see? What message does that convey? If I come across the animal again I will blast him into three million crumbs. But she – I want her. I will have her. She will pay me. She will pay for ever. Meanwhile …’ Zezeth hesitated noticeably, ‘the boy is beyond me for now in his pathetic hell, but when he returns, this time I shall deal with him.’
Yyrot mused. The nature of his musings took shape in the snow in a series of well-executed carvings. They pictured Zeth Zezeth very much compromised in ways that were, in human terms, frankly indescribable.
Zzth saw them too.
The blue shade of his malignity began to infect even his hair.
He roared, ‘Why have you aided them? Why did you make her an immortal?’
‘Did I?’ said Yyrot.
‘You go against me. You are no confrère but an enemy, just as that star-fiddler is only a fool.’
‘We are one,’ said Yyrot. ‘We have grown together. I am you and you are I, and both of us are him as he is us.’
‘I am myself. Zzth, Sun Wolf.’
‘Did you steal some of my ice pyramids and send them out along the ocean here?’ Yyrot asked suddenly, an afterthought.
‘I would neither tamper with nor utilize your icebergs. They are beneath me.’
‘Then who, I wonder, moved them all? They vanished, but I detect their debris under the water, along with one or two ships.’
Each god then was for a moment alerted. Even Ddir seemed to be concentrating on Yyrot’s words.
‘Winter is here,’ said Yyrot, ‘adorable and perfect winter. Nothing can disturb the equilibrium.’
Ddir got up and went off. They watched him climb back up the invisible stairway. He had thought of something extra he wished to add to his whale-sculpture, and in a minute more they saw the result. One bright ray, perhaps from the all but vanquished sun, pierced through the cloudy belly of the whale, and out along it there glided an incredible thing, a black star that sparkled like all the rest.
Zzth struck the whole top of the mountain. Ice and snow erupted high into the sky, and Shimmawyn came running for her lover’s protection.
Yyrot enfolded her in his dark hair. They winked out of the world.
Zzth stood alone, scowling down on the shifting lights below in the valley, which grew richer now the sunset faded.
Zzth hated Saphay and hated the frozen world. He hated Lionwolf more even than these – Lionwolf whom Saphay had enabled to rob Zeth Zezeth of some of his essence. The essence, though long since returned to him, he felt no longer quite fitted into the grooves of his deistic material. Lionwolf had contaminated it.
But Lionwolf would come back. The signals for that had been clear, revealing themselves inside Zzth’s awareness at once. The Rukarian girl he had sent through the Afterlife to punish Lionwolf had only succeeded in galvanizing him. Yes, return was now inevitable, the parents had been selected. But there Zzth had some leverage. He had visited the prospective mother. This had not been during her current bewildering adulthood, but by travelling back into her past. Whatever mankind became, however many changes humans made to themselves, the past, the beginning, would always slip through under the correct stimuli. They had no real stamina, none of them. Their persistence in adversity’s face was not noble endurance or fortitude – it was bloody-mindedness and idiocy.
And she, this woman with black hair, she would be worse than most. She had magical powers, but had been in her youth an evil-inclined harlot, abused and abusing, interested only in herself and her desires. It had pleased him enormously visiting her adolescence years ago, weaving with facility through time. He found her there concocting some dirty little spell to harm others. A pretty girl, yes, very attractive. He might sample her himself – in the coming future that was. Even to a god, action in finished time was impracticable. He had only been able to look at her and charm her with his smile. How properly flattered she had been. She had also, he guessed – knew – wondered why he had appeared before her, during the rest of her young life.
She would become an acolyte of his. What man could compare to Zeth Zezeth?
‘Jemhara,’ murmured Zzth aloud in the world he did not like, and for an instant the gold and silver of him showed through the raging blue. But only for an instant. He turned, as if listening. He had picked up the scent of Saphay’s life on the wind. He too disappeared from the mountain, leaving only stillness and the light fluctuating far below.
Does suffering increase when you can no longer suffer? That is, when the wound that never closes has become unfeeling, nerves put out like candles – yet the nerveless wound stays agape and bleeding before your eyes.
Saphay, the
goddess Saftri, had flown in over the high cliffs, but somehow gravity like a magnet had pulled her down to earth.
It was not that she pretended to be only a woman, outcast and trudging across the snow. She did not know what it was.
No thoughts came to her except all the memories of her son. Against the white world, these colours of fire and love. Night was sifting through the pallor after a lethargic crimson sunfall. Some cloud forms massed, not dispersing. She took no notice, not properly observing anything external. A god, she walked more swiftly than any mortal and no physical obstacle impeded her. She covered miles.
In the night darkness, stars above, she went down into a valley and halted, dazed by a race of light. It was a startling bluish green, luminescent, surging up along a hill near the valley’s centre. Into the sky the glimmerings rose. The snow burned like emeralds.
I have heard of something like this—
After a second, Saftri who had been Saphay recollected. In Ruk Kar Is, a mystic area, Stones that lit, passing lambency from one to another, often coruscating all at once, immutable and never understood. Even the Magikoy had had no answer as to what they were or might be.
She had never seen them.
But here it transpired were others just like them.
The patterns, flitting, flaring, lowering like lamps, hypnotized her.
When she reached the spot the conductors had attained a climax of brilliancy and held it static. The whole night and all the valley seemed glowing. They were Stones, and very high, some over fifty feet she thought. They described the outline of the short hill, marching up and over it and down the far side.
She walked up with them, over and down.
At the foot of the hill stood a blue thing with knives in his hair.
‘So you are here then, you nothing,’ he said.
Saphay had no resistance any more. She looked at Zeth Zezeth and she let go. She fell. She was finished. She no longer cared.
Zeth leaned over her. How ugly he always was at such moments, a horrible sight.