by Tanith Lee
‘The Jafn peoples have a god or hero who was black,’ said the mageia surprisingly. ‘Only the inside of his mouth was red like a man’s. And the balls of his eyes were white – and his teeth.’
‘And she was like that. But inside her – I mean, in there. Like a dark pink rose.’
Hushed, the women now. This silence was unlike the others.
Beebit’s daughter-if-she-was seemed unworried by Beebit’s words. She had, the girl, a smooth and almost emotionless face. There was truly a look of something not wholly ordinary about her; even if her hair and eyes had been normal and her skin pale, this look would remain.
Beebit was remembering, and now she told only a little of it. The black woman was called Chillel, and she came walking quietly through the huge camp, where men turned always to stare at her. Beebit saw her draw nearer and nearer, until she was crossing among the carts. If a man had stepped out and spoken to Chillel of wanting her, she would have gone away with him at once. This was what she did. She had apparently told a kind of parable about herself. She said she was a cup the gods had made and filled. Whoever wanted might drink from the cup. But tonight no man approached her. Their minds perhaps were all on the important battle soon to come, the jewelled capital bursting with riches. If they went with any woman tonight it would have to be a more average one. Nobody else was near the place where Beebit had been tethered or rather left untethered. Suddenly Beebit, not knowing she would, had got up.
‘It was never that she was looking at me,’ said Beebit in the mageia’s room; ‘she wasn’t aware of me at all. Her eyes were far away. But I looked at her. You couldn’t not look at her.’
Beebit’s life, she said, had made her discount all men but her father – the only one who had not molested, bought or raped her. But now and then she had made love with women, usually her fellow harlots.
Chillel drew level with Beebit, and only then she turned, as if Beebit had called out to her, which the girl would never have dared to do. ‘Perhaps,’ Beebit observed, ‘my look called out to her. Her beautiful eyes fixed on my face. They were like the night sky, blackness and stars. She said, Is it that you want me? What could I say? I shook all over and stammered, Yes. Then I am yours, she said. And held out her hand to me.’ Stunned by memory Beebit paused again. She thought of the texture of the hand of Chillel – silken, slender, not soft, more like a wonderful weapon of some sort, sheathed in costly material. Beebit finished, ‘We went into one of the little tents. Two Gech girls had put it up then gone off with some Jafn. I didn’t think they might come back. They didn’t until later. It was over by then.’
She lowered her eyes.
This censored account left out the amazing act which had taken place between herself and the goddess – she could be nothing else – Chillel.
And the act was made amazing not only by its extreme delight, its sensual gentleness and ultimate orgasmic delirium, but by the fact that Chillel too proved to be herself able to manipulate her own limbs as Beebit could. Of course, to a goddess, such a knack must always be available.
Afterwards Beebit had seen their joining over and over in her mind. Yet from the strangest vantage, as if she had left her flesh in the seizure of pleasure and watched from the tent’s low ceiling. They had lain forward on their ribs and forearms, heads held upright, almost in the pose of lions, but hands clasped and mouths fused. The rest of their bodies had risen like the tails of two snakes. Above them their torsos and their limbs arched, met and twined, until their loins could also meet in a perfect and irresistible momentum.
‘My spirit,’ said Beebit in a whisper, ‘came out of me. When I came back to myself, she was gone.’
The fire flickered. The mageia spoke to it and it steadied.
Beebit did not speak. Instead it was Azulamni who matter-of-factly said, ‘My mother screwed no one else. Not long after, the Lionwolf’s Gullahammer reached the big city. The Death happened. Eight months on I was born.’
Beebit brightened. ‘I was in a village by then miles to the west. I was already wending home here, but I got too large. The villagers took me in; there were only a handful of them. I had two days and a night over her. They wondered, as I could do such clever things with my joints and spine, why I had such a time birthing, but I did. And she came out already with two-colour hair and her eyes unlike, and then they were frightened. Rather than drive me off they ran away from their village. I could see them up on a snow-hill, hunkering there, moaning. So as soon as I could I tied the baby on my back and went away. The journey took about two months. By then she was already walking, and talking to me. In a pair of years she’s got to be what she is. I’m not bothered. What can you expect if a female god gets a baby on a woman? She’d have to be special. She can do all my contortions too, but that’s nothing to what maybe she can do. And so I thought the mageia here might train her for magic, or you, Highness, since you were kind enough to look in.’
In Jemhara’s vacant attic room, the moon-skimped darkness showed little. A cat might have seen: a mattress animal with rough furs; a table of intricate mosaic found in the ruins and brought to her, on which lay a piece of mirror for scrying, a goblet, some sticks and a tiny knife. A small hearth was blackened from fires. A peg jutted out of the wall near the window. Here hung another gown, this one of darned wool. Something else hung down by a ribbon. It was a twig formed disconcertingly like a hand of too many fingers.
A temple of Ranjal, the Rukarian goddess of wood, had given Jemhara the twig when she had been going to Ru Karismi. Although she finished the journey in her shape-shift of a black hare, the twig had remained with her. It had its own peculiar power, and helped her find Thryfe in his cell of self-torture below the city. She had kept the twig, naturally.
Nevertheless, can a twig be a hand? Can a hand listen?
The hand of Ranjal listened.
A faint pollen-like glow settled on its western edges.
Slowly the twig rotated on its ribbon. The many fingers pointed.
About half a mile off at the west end of Kandexa, the Magician Thryfe was standing by another barricade. This ramshackle haunt of the West Villagers was licking its wounds after today’s defeat by Clever Town. Half the sheep had been stolen and seventeen men were hurt, six more dead. Soot and burning lingered on the night air.
The man with the badly splinted broken arm spat at Thryfe, but the spit bounced off which gave them pause.
‘He’s some mage.’
‘Hey you, can you mend bones?’
‘Yes,’ said Thryfe. ‘But I charge a fee.’
‘Then you’re no true mage. How much do you want, you bastard?’
‘Tell me which settlement here has the Magikoy woman.’
Sly and uncomfortable they started away and grunted among themselves like badgers.
It had been plain enough everywhere here that most of them knew such a woman was in their minced city of zones. Envious of the group which had her, the rest refused to tell.
Thryfe mused on the eccentricity of the non-human thing that also masked her whereabouts from him. Even though he had been able to fathom she was at Kandexa, once arrived some type of uncanny tangle hid her again and more completely. He now sensed, he thought, an intelligence withdrawn and scheming, yet primal, nearly instinctual.
The fellow with the broken bone stepped forward again. ‘Here’s my arm. See to it, and I’ll take you over there myself.’
Perhaps it was a bluff; the man was chuckling scornfully when Thryfe put both his hands on the mess of the arm. The chuckle became a scream. The break had been bad, a shattering. Thryfe pushed energy through the splinters of bone, realigned them, adjusted the splint, caught the man as he pitched forward in a dead faint. Thryfe handed him back to his mates.
They remarked bemusedly on the heat the arm gave off, admired the splint and leered at Thryfe, deciding to be friends.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘She’s with that herd at Paradise. Across the city eastward, the lower section. Black-
haired piece – er, lady. They say she was a queen once. They say she can change into a hare.’
Thryfe had gone.
The east had been clearly marked, another moon risen there, this one thin as a child’s nail.
He had noted in several spots before the fading of either fear of or respect for mages, even the Magikoy. Those few years in the past it would have been unthinkable. The world had been altered. Only the endless snows were changeless.
The endless snows—
It was at that moment, passing beneath the ruin of a tumbled tower, that Thryfe heard the ominous groan of shifting ice. The noise was overtaken instantly by a deathly crunch, as if some more enormous bone had broken in the crooked arm of the tower.
He flung up the shield of his power with less than a second to spare. From above him blocks of snow and stone cascaded to the street. He watched the avalanche, a falling wall of white that missed only the hollow space which surrounded him with its shimmering bubble. The falling wall hit the earth and began once again to build itself upward.
Within a single minute, Thryfe found himself inside a cold chimney. The snow had imprisoned him – yes and totally, for now one extra gush of white slammed down to shut the chimney’s upper opening.
Thryfe stood immobile. He heard, dully now through the chimney’s sides, the rumble of some other subsidence along the street.
All settled.
The Magikoy Master gathered himself. He would speak certain words of release, and send a surge of might against the incarcerating snow.
He spoke the words, and the pale prison shone; he sent the surge, and saw the snow-wall crack to the pattern of a spider-web. But that was all.
Again he uttered the mantra. Again he thrust the spear of mental strength into the snow. Now not even a crack resulted. The first webbed crack was healing with a skin of ice. The pallid luminosity went out. He could hear the slow hard beating of his heart. No other thing.
TWO
Far north of Kandexa, beyond the northern head of the southern continent, over the sea now black, now green, plated with scales like pearl, past the lands of reiving Vorms and Kelps and Fazions, westward and northward still: the new continent lay behind its aprons of ice. The landscape rose there to tall hills and mountains, columned with forests like black glass chiming with cryotites, and albino birds that piped but never sang. Some days gosands flew over, long necks stretched, chanting in their unearthly language to the sky. Across the frozen plains below tigers sprinted, shadow-striped white pelts hiding them, but at a certain angle the fur flushing pastel amber – so they seemed to vanish, reappear, vanish again. The Jafn pioneers had never learned their name. They called then lionets, the nearest creature to them being, perhaps, Jafn lions.
Despite the magicality of the pelts, obviously they were also invaluable as covering.
Today, even before the sun had risen, Arok went out with ten of his men to hunt lionet.
Arok’s men had initially been composed of the five warriors who remained with the Holasan-garth, and those fishermen and whalers who joined them on the chancy voyage north.
In the time since landfall, the younger ones had grown up and some of the older ones died. Compared with the numbers the Jafn Holas had boasted in the past they were a meagre crew, but Arok did not carp about it.
Directly behind Arok’s chariot rode one of the more recent warriors. He was unlike the rest. Fenzi, son to a Holas fisher and his woman, was black as the hero Star Black. He had grown up too in these three years to be a man with the physique and mind of seventeen or eighteen. His father, who like Arok had cutched the fabulous Chillel in the Lionwolf’s war camp, and so survived the White Death, seemed happy enough for Arok to favour Fenzi.
That Arok’s own black son had been stolen by Vormish raiders was Arok’s reason for making this unconscionable voyage at all. Then, virtually in the hour they sighted the second continent, Nirri, Arok’s wife, informed him she was again with child. He had acted great surprise and elation. The elation was real but not the surprise. A Jafn ghost who had travelled some way with them on the ship had already foretold the pregnancy. The ghost had warned too this second child would not be made like ebony. Nor had he been. Birthed, he was a fair-skinned boy with white hair like Arok’s own, and many other Jafn. He was well formed, the usual kind of offspring any Jafn father would celebrate. And Arok did so, and Nirri loved the boy. He was an infant still, not much more than a year in age, and maturing normally, that was slowly.
In a moment of strange inspiration Arok had named him for the helpful ghost: Athluan.
Reaching this new country all of them deemed it enough like their own sloughed southern continent. The terraced mountains and frozen forests were only like an extravagant reinterpretation.
Probably some of them mourned the land they had left. This replacement was interesting and good enough, but incapable of matching up.
Just as Arok, admit it though he never must, found his second son.
Did she think like that too, Nirri? He was unsure. Women kept their secrets. Best let them. They were more foolish yet also more wise than men.
Leaving their ship they went inland, away from the bleak shores which, in the other country, they had never much avoided. They entered this upland of high plains between hills and mountains. At that season Nirri was very big with the child and another couple of women the same. Everyone was tired, the success of having got here making them lax. Deer and edible rodents abounded. Having made a camp they stayed. After the children were born, they did not move on.
A garth rose on the slope, constructed with wood from the surrounding forests. They made too a Holas House, and set the traditional sword over the high door, horizontal for peace.
The land was empty of other people, and benign to them, as if pleased to receive visitors. God they thought had assisted, rewarding courage and persistence.
Frequently they said, the males of the garth, that when the hour was right they would set out again to explore and to search.
And Nirri? She who if truth were told had brought them all to this place through her determination to find her first lost son? The vision had been hers of a black woman riding over the sky on a sled drawn by a black sheep, while the woman’s hair was fire-red – Nirri had declared this an omen. They would locate black Dayadin if only they would sail after his abductors. Nirri had then once or twice looked up at Arok, the new, pale, ordinary child at her breast, when exploration of the new land was mooted. She said, ‘When he’s grown a little. He isn’t like our other one – this boy can’t become a man in only three or four years. May we wait, sir,’ – for always she was respectful, save in moments of lust or supreme stress – ‘until then?’
The chariots ploughed through the softer top snow.
Tiger-lionets had been sighted north of the garth, two of them, or so the Holas scout reported.
The true lions of the chariots, elder beasts but vital, leapt along the slopes and up the hillocks. They never objected to cornering their lionet cousins. Nor did the lionets ever seem inclined to be charming to the lions. Some months ago on a similar hunt a tiger had sprung and grabbed one of the chariot-lions, killed it.
Lionet meat was foul to human taste; it was that of a meat-eater, too strong and acidic. It was the white-amber coats that were the prize. Already half the warriors, Arok the first, had mantles of such pelt. Nirri as well. Even the little white son Athluan had a wrapping of tiger fur.
Over the petrified fields of the sea the lion-drawn chariots came flying, winged with ice-spume. Torches spat green against a night long emptied of its moons. Far out … liquid waves moved with a sullen sound … The grey, densely furred lions, their black manes plaited with coloured beads and metal …
The Thing place. An area of truce. The Thing appeared. Ancient, curious and huge, a seventeen-masted ship, frozen.
Athluan knew it well. He had been brought to Thing meetings since the age of nine; the Chaiord of the Jafn Klow had been his father.
He opened his eyes.
He lay in the cot in the corner of the upper room. A colourful rug sprawled over him, and his lionet-pelt.
It was still mostly dark but by the warm light of a lamp Nirri his mother leaned towards him.
‘Was dream,’ he said. And for an instant a flash of irritation rattled through him at his lack of language, his inability to grasp strength or autonomy. Never mind; this stage would pass. He would grow up. Everyone promised him this. But Great God, how long? Twelve years? Fifteen? Twenty?
‘Were you dreaming?’ she asked.
How could she be so tirelessly patient with him, when he was so self-impatient—
The mood, which had run directly out from the fragment of dream, melted and left him only bemused. Slumber always bored him on waking. Though all the Jafn kept sleep to a minimum the very young were indulged. They needed to sleep often, to grow. Should he then sleep more?
‘Morning?’ he asked. ‘Good.’
‘Yes. I’ll blow out the lamp.’
She did so. The deep grey light in the window blinked white behind the shutter of membrane.
‘I dreamed a ship,’ he said, ‘all ice. Ten and seven masts.’
Nirri said, ‘That was the ship we came here in. I’ve told you about it. Were we at sea in your dream?’
‘No. Was long off – long ago. Stuck in ice.’
‘I told you about that too. How your father and his men and the werloka and wise-women released it. I pulled on the ropes too.’
‘My father is Klow Chaiord,’ murmured Athluan to himself. ‘I have two brothers. Conas who is good. And Rothger who is stink.’
He saw Nirri’s face. The returning dawn was carving it from the shadow. She seemed disturbed. She said nothing.