by Tanith Lee
‘But long off,’ he repeated, apologizing.
‘Do you say your father was another man? He never was.’ Her voice sounded hushed and flat. ‘Your father is Arok, the Holas Chaiord. You have only one brother – he who was stolen.’
‘Yes, Conas died. Roth died after. The Lionwolf killed Roth. That was after I was dead in any case.’
He heard Nirri catch her breath sharply, as women did when sewing and the needle pierced their fingers.
He thought, less in words than in pictures, What did I say?
His mind cleared to its general infantile opalescence. He was left solely with a faint sense of having been cheated, and drummed his heels angrily on the cot.
‘There,’ she said, and stood him up. ‘Now tell me—’
‘Want pot,’ said Athluan. ‘Quick! Quick!’ Between childish amusement and alarm.
So Nirri brought him the chamberpot.
The two lionet were a male and female. They were fighting, perhaps as a prelude to sex. As a rule these were solitary animals and to come on two full-grown ones together was a bonus.
Not until the five men had left their chariots and slunk forward did either animal register encroachment. The male it was who spun immediately away. A flung spear did not even graze his flank. They were so difficult to pick out when moving.
The female though stood her ground, snarling. Her teeth were already daubed by contact with the male – if the hunters had not been able to scratch him, she certainly had.
Arok sprang forward, Fenzi to his left and Khursp just behind and to the right.
The female cat also sprang: she came in like a living bolt at Arok, and landed heavy and entirely dead in the snow at his boots, Fenzi’s spear through her brain.
‘I marked the pelt. My regrets, Chaiord.’ Fenzi was always self-controlled.
‘Well, the furry fellow marked her worse – look at this gash along her side,’ said Khursp. He bent to her admiringly. ‘Forgive us, fair lady. We need your skin to keep us snug and your meat for the dogs. Her holed skull, if painted,’ he added, ‘will make a lovely lamp with oil and a wick inside. Do her honour.’ Khursp was the poet among them. He had been a whaler before and always, he said, begged pardon of the whales and fish he slew. ‘God allows it,’ he said, ‘providing it’s for food or cover, or to defend.’
The tigress’s fur was lush. They combed it with their fingers.
‘She’s one of the best we’ve taken – so glossy and full.’
Khursp straightened. ‘Now we see why. Ah, shit.’
Turning her they had found her primed with milk, her dugs rosy from use.
Black luck to kill a nursing mother.
‘No wonder the male was here and she so tetchy. Over there,’ said Arok, ‘that hole through the ice under the trees.’
They went to see, and there was a single cub about six days old, pretty with its youth, blue-eyed and whining on a bed of ice-moss and bones.
‘Let’s take the poor boy home,’ said Khursp.
‘We could raise him,’ said Fenzi. ‘Perhaps for the chariots when he’s grown.’
A sound behind made them draw their heads out of the ice-cave so fast necks were ricked.
Holas were shouting.
‘Arok – a band of men is coming!’
Arok’s brows contracted. ‘This country’s empty.’
Through all their trek inland, all their sojourn during which they had put up the garth and the House, none of them had seen even in the distance another human being than their own.
‘What sort of men?’
‘About a hundred, warrior-looking, all mounted on a kind of beast – like great sheep—’
Arok scrambled up the slope where the look-out was. Standing there under two or three crystallized palms, he too saw. A hundred, a hundred and fifty men riding tall sheep that galloped with the rhythmic, sickening lurch of a ship. They were heading straight towards the area of the hunt. Decidedly any activity here was what had brought them.
Too near to flee, too many to fight.
Arok directed his warriors. They mounted their chariots, and into Arok’s vehicle was lugged the female lionet’s body. Fenzi ran out from the cave, the lionet baby squalling and clawing in his arms. Leaping back into his car Fenzi held the struggling cub in one arm, the reins round his waist. One hand was free now for sword or dagger. He seemed not to care. ‘Hush,’ he said to the lionet. ‘Hush, baba.’ And the lionet grew still.
Extravagant clouds of snow and rime spurled up from the advancing band.
Unpleasantly Arok was reminded of the Lionwolf’s legions on the march. Then of the reiver raid that had dispossessed him of his first son Dayadin.
He drew his sword with a crisp abrasive noise.
He began to see yellow and red cloth, with silver and brass winking on the fitments of the peculiar sheep-like riding animals. They had long necks like serpents beneath sheep’s heads, and behind on their backs rose a pair of hills which seemed a part of their bodies. Between the hills their riders perched. In colour the beasts were various browns, some almost black, and one almost white as dirty cream. When the mass was about seventy feet from the Holas a group of the animals separated and came lolloping forward, the white one to the front.
Arok indicated to his men that they should wait. He flicked the reins of his chariot and drove forward alone.
He rode into the space between the Holas and the unknown riders. By the Eye of God, though, the sheep-brutes were big – bigger than lamasceps.
We have no language in common. He thought this almost idly. Then, They’re angry. Then: Is Chillel’s magic still on me? I think not. I was hurt in the last fight. I can die, now.
He offered the Jafn salute, fist to shoulder, head unbowed. A politeness. He conserved himself. The other side was now mostly static, drawn up in jostling lines. Just the pale animal picked forward.
The man on the animal was dark-skinned – not dark like Fenzi, but more as if he had been seethed in honey and smoke. His hair was black, with scarlet wool woven into its plaits.
He stared down at Arok with contempt and animosity. He said no word, only pointed with a gold-ringed finger at the dead lionet.
‘Who gave you leave to slay our tigers? Only our royals may do so, or their servants for them.’
Arok found he could understand. That then had remained to him if invulnerability had not, one more fringe benefit from lying with Chillel. But would this other understand him?
‘We’re strangers in your land and didn’t know.’
The man on the tall sheep widened his eyes.
The tall sheep burped with a disgusting sound that filled the air with the odours of fermenting grain, rotten wood and decaying vegetables. This did not disconcert the rider, only Arok, who coughed.
‘You speak Simese?’
Arok cleared his throat and risked the throw. ‘I speak all tongues.’
‘I see you are an outlander. You’re snow-coloured and have the hair of an elderly man.’
‘I’m young enough. What reparation do you want for killing your beast?’
‘Probably your death.’
‘Then sing for it.’
‘No. My king will sing for it and we’ll skin you and hang your pelt by the tiger’s.’
‘You think so.’
‘Come,’ said the rider, almost gracious with scorn, ‘you have about twenty men. We are ninety.’
I misjudged the number. Ninety? Can we do for them? No.
‘Take me,’ said Arok. ‘I killed the animal – your tiger.’
‘And you’ve thieved the cub. All of you will go with us. The king will like to know how you reached our country. Before he skins you all with a blunt knife.’
Athluan was a child again, a toddler with strong legs that, once grown, would be long and muscular. He was paying visits in the garth, ambling up and down the man-made slopes and terraces.
People were always pleased enough to see him. He did not know yet clearly sensed they ga
ve him their approval and kindliness in lieu of something else. Although he had been told of the stolen first son, Dayadin the Hawk, no one had ever made Athluan miserable or jealous. No comparisons were ever voiced. It would be unlucky, disregardful of God’s second gift. In any event Athluan’s was not a jealous nature, He was a serious boy, already bright and generally reasonable.
Behind him walked the nurse of fourteen who acted as his guardian on such excursions. She was always careful of him, yet here he was safe enough. So she had paused to linger with one of the younger men by the hothouse. A few kisses and fondles and she would pluck an orange for Athluan and catch him up.
Arok’s lionet hunt would be gone for some days. The garth was usually a little more relaxed in his absence. More than a year without sight or sniff of an enemy had lulled them after the brittle last days in the former country.
Athluan had also paused. He had been going to the blacksmith’s, to watch the hammering of metal and the sparks fly. But in a small yard between there and the houses, an interesting whirling went on in mid-air. What was it? Almost it was like the smithy sparks, only wilder.
Or was it bees? He had seen bees somewhere, the hive-bees that must always live indoors – the Holasan-garth did not have such hives, but Athluan did not recall this.
Soon he went towards the bee-sparks, fascinated, unafraid. At that moment they coalesced in an unlikely upright formation. Athluan stopped still again. Something was about to happen.
It did. The glinting nothing of the shape drew itself swiftly into lines and curves and put on washes of colour.
To a young child magic is everywhere, startling but seldom unbelievable.
He looked up at the pale young woman in her silvery dress and fall of saffron hair. Her eyes were black. They looked right into his grey ones.
Somewhere inside the boy’s brain a thought skipped. It – but not he – knew this apparition, this lovely young female who had emerged from thin air. He knew her frown too, the flinch of bad temper, and then the two tears that spilled like stars out of her eyes.
‘What is your name?’ said the woman.
She spoke in a language Athluan had never heard, at least not recently. Jafn did have some affinity with it but this was not why he knew what she said. But then a curtain closed and anyway he did not know it. And so he stared. Then she said, in perfect Jafn, ‘How are you called?’
‘Athluan,’ said he. He added, to be helpful, ‘My daddy named me for ghost that have guided his ship to land.’
The woman in the air clenched her fists.
He was not afraid of her. He laughed.
‘Oh, you can laugh!’ she exclaimed. ‘Look at this mess! What a fix to get in. Don’t you remember?’
Really startling himself the child heard his own child’s voice reply, ‘No. Cheer up though, my darling. Here I am.’
Then they both lowered their eyes and gaped at the ground, as if the words had been printed on the snowy yard.
‘I should smack you,’ she whispered.
‘My mother would smack you,’ staunchly the boy answered.
‘Yes, like life – always a smack for me. You heartless – no, no,’ she wailed. ‘Poor boy! How handsome you are – just as you must have been in childhood before. Do you remember me?’
Guileless, sombre, the child said, ‘Love you.’
She put her hand over her face.
How golden her hair was. He had never seen such hair – or had he? He thought perhaps she was a gler, or a corrit – worse, a sort of sihpp – but Nirri had told him most of those Jafn demon-sprites had been left behind in the old country.
He tried to make amends for thinking her a gler.
‘Love you almost as much as Mother.’
‘Shush,’ she said. She was crying.
He went up to her then and attempted to take her other hand, very white and graceful. But when he touched her, there was nothing of her at all.
Was she a ghost?
She dried her eyes and he saw that, unlike ordinary physical people, her tears had left no mark on her. She said, ‘I’ll return soon. Then you’ll be able to hold my hand. It’s only that I’m not yet here.’
He nodded. ‘Where then?’
She pointed. ‘Across those mountains. The great upland forest. I’ve had to look for you a long time, and you’re to blame for that.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes. You are. But men – always it is their blame.’
‘You won’t be here long time,’ he said, ‘if all over across there.’
‘Silly,’ she said fondly. Her frame of mind seemed to alter nearly with every breath. ‘I can fly. Don’t you see? I’m a goddess.’
Ah, a goddess. Yes, that might explain a lot. Except there was only God. Other gods were inventions.
He nodded again, judiciously not protesting.
‘Sunfall,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll come back then. Oh, just look at that House up the slope. What a sty! I suppose it’s no one’s fault, building in this wilderness—’
Athluan glowered now, furious at her insult to his father Arok and the men of the Jafn Holas. But in that instant she winked out into nothingness.
He stood there now actually unbelieving, until his nurse came with her smiling kissed mouth, and the orange.
Around ten hours after, as the garth prepared its suppers, and in the joyhall of the Holas House women hurried from the cook-fire to the long tables with meat and bread and beer, the watchman at the west gate heard a faint knocking. Looking over from the height he saw a thin old woman lurking on the platform outside. The last of a dull sunset was behind her. She resembled nothing so much as a dilapidated crow.
‘Where have you come from, Mother?’
He was genuinely startled and disbelieving, for she did not belong among the Holas and no other human thing lived in these parts, as they knew very well. Despite leaving your own local demons behind, you often admitted there might still be demons native to the new place.
‘Miles I’ve trudged, over hill and mountain, through ice-wood and ice-jungle,’ grumbled the reedy old voice below. Oddly he could hear every syllable – in Jafn, too.
‘How have you survived then, Gran?’
‘Wise-woman I am,’ she snapped. ‘How the cutch else, you gobbler!’
The watchman recoiled. Perhaps though she was? But the Holas had five such women in all, plus the grouchy male werloka. Let them see to her then. If left outside she might, as some of them were said to do in legends, fly in over the wall and cause havoc.
THREE
What came along the alleys, around the outcrops of Kandexa, was a sight to cause sore eyes not cure them. If any did see they made off, banged the shutters, told themselves it was a fluke of the shadow and the last useless bit of moon.
For a kind of fast-growing vine crawled through the dark, over the snow and the stone.
Up a wall, across a roof, down an old mashed stair, on through another alley.
At the end of the wriggling, leafless, woody vine was a thing like a clawing hand, running spiderish on its far-too-many fingers.
Thryfe, standing in his chimney prison of ice, detected the scratching outside. A rat?
He had been unable to pierce the confine, let alone thrust it apart. For an hour therefore he had waited, aware of the horror of a gathering cold which seeped even through the psychic bubble that protected him. He had been trying to learn the nature of this sudden sorcery. For sorcery it must be. No everyday avalanche could contain such a magician as Thryfe. Even in his recent humility he knew it.
The cold laid its own claws on his body, invading blood and muscles, vision, thought; questing. He ignored it. He must find out the motive force of this foe, for only in that way—
The scrabbling above turned to a mad skittering.
A tribe of rats were about to burst through the lid of ice above. Could they also break the bubble of defence? Formerly he would never have believed so.
But formerly he would by now have freed
himself. Everything had therefore become doubtful.
The ice above split. It fell in a cloud of powder. After that another thing fell.
He saw it dive straight down at him, a spiralling black spider already clutching for his face.
Like a man ungifted in magic Thryfe, as best he could in the narrow space, stooped quickly away, slinging the edge of his cloak across his head—
A voice spoke in the air.
‘Greeting, man-mage. It right you bow me.’ Bow? He had ducked. ‘Ask now, be I get you out?’
Thryfe pushed off the cloak, then straightened. He had recognized, he thought, the dialect and syntax of the rural eastern Ruk, but with some other essence in it far more sophisticated. Yet as he expected no figure was visible. Only the spider hung dangling, which now he identified as a carved wooden hand, with other hands sprung from it and at least twenty-one fingers. Something tickled in the back of memory.
‘Yes, I should like you to get me out. Is it possible to you?’
‘Why I offer if not?’
‘Reasonable. In exchange, what do you require?’
‘Nothing. Give now.’
Thryfe acquiesced. ‘You are part of Ranjal then, goddess of wood.’ He had heard of her, seen her temples in the eastern villages. Nothing was what she was always ceremoniously offered.
Thryfe did not believe in gods. At least, his attitude towards them was ambivalent. Everywhere they reportedly abounded, or if not then one omni-ruling and all-purposeful God. These things to Thryfe were merely magic focuses, or the power surges either of men or of the earth, both entirely misunderstood.
Nevertheless here this being was. The recollection of his dream of the Lionwolf as sun god sparkled across Thryfe’s inner eye. He dismissed it.
Some antagonist was at work against him: this unknown element, felt when Jemhara had been hidden, felt again in the attacking snow, might have stirred up, inadvertently, the arrival of a rogue helper symbolized as the primitive Ranjal. Benign energy to balance the malignant one.
Thryfe offered Ranjal several elegant palmfuls of nothing. He had seen this done in her rough little temples. Though unreal she was presently alive and not to be offended.