Shadowfire

by Tanith Lee

  As the wind continued, she screeched that I should subdue it with my magician’s powers, and I informed her that I would put her to sleep with an oar if we had any more chat from her.

  In any case, the wind did no more than rock the boat and shear the caps from the waves. We sighted the island at length, and soon ground on its seaweed beach.

  Qwef and I pulled the craft above the tide-line, into the lee of long rocks, white-faced with the droppings of birds, and vivid green elsewhere from sea lichens. The wind flapped like idle wings among the tops of the great bare trees with mossy trunks that edged the beach fifty yards away.

  Gray gulls mewed, causing the red cat to growl in its cage.

  “The wind will drop by daybreak,” Qwef said. “I will return to the mainland then.” He stood looking at Hwenit, as she walked ahead toward the trees, and if ever I saw a man engaged by a woman, it was he.

  I said, “She will have you if you ask her.”

  “Maybe,” he said, “but I cannot ask her.”

  “Why, man, do you take her gibes for earnest?”

  “No,” he said, quiet as the sea had suddenly grown. “Certainly my father sees no wrong in it—it is not our way to make iron rules, like chains, and hang them on men and women. And yet, to me it seems—unlawful.”

  I did not understand him, and told him so. The girl was willing—urgent, even—Qwef’s father gave him blessing, and was Peyuan ungenerous?

  “But that is my problem,” he said, laughing a little. “My father and Peyuan are one man. He wed Hadlin after his white girl’s death, to obtain a mother for Hwenit, mostly, though he grew to love Hadlin after. And Hadlin bore me. I am Peyuan’s son. Hwenit and I are brother and sister.”

  Everywhere laws are different. Among the Dagkta, a man who lies with his sister is flogged and the girl branded between her breasts. Most communities frown on incest. In some, death is the wage it earns, and though the black folk were openhearted toward the fact of love, wherever it took root, I saw in Qwef’s eyes, side by side with his desire, a cold revulsion. To lie with the fruit of the seed that also fruited you, limb by limb with that which one’s father’s limbs had fashioned. The answering coldness stirred in my own groin at the dream of it. The oldest cringing in the world.

  Behind us all, a dull maroon sunset began to sink upon the invisible mainland.

  Part III: The Island

  1

  I LAY IN THE TENT on the island. I dreamed this:

  I was flying. As in the tunnel, I imagined myself black-winged. The beat of wings lifted me from one shore to another. I came back to the mainland, moving high over the ocean, seeing its blackness break below me into white gold on the headlands, finding the white skeleton of a city in a bay.

  This was the curiosity of the dream:

  Equipped with the wings of power, I knew myself yet for what I was born to. A tribal savage dressed for the summer wars, and on my body the scars of those wars, the scars I had never kept. It was as if I had been thrust back into a mold that had been expected to form me, rather than the actual clay of which I was made. And I thought in the dream, This is how she reckoned I should grow, the bitch who bore me. A human warrior of the krarls, with no birthright but battle and battle-death. Or worse, wolf’s death at the hands of the city men who hunted me.

  The grim glowing rain stretched up, and seemed to try to pull me into it, but I beat away, grinning, for even in the dream I was too strong to succumb to its rotten tugging.

  And then I saw her, hanging in the sky like a flake of the moon. A woman, her face masked by a black shireen, her body by a black krarl shift, but her white arms spread, and her white, white, bone-white hair blowing all around her like a flame composed of smoke. Recognition was immediate. It was my loving mother.

  I shouted at her.

  “Your son, Ettook’s warrior! Do you like what you have made of me? I have killed forty men, and I have four wives and thirteen sons, and three days from now I will die with an out-tribe spear between my ribs. I might have been a prince in Eshkorek Arnor, or in Ezlann. I might have been a king with a great army at my back, beautiful women to please me, and Power to make all men do as I wished. Do you like what you have made?”

  It was crystal clear to me, what he had meant for me, my father, Vazkor, what she had robbed me of. I drew from my belt my hunting knife and threw it at her heart.

  She hung in the air, and said to me, cold as silver ice, “This has no ability to kill me.”

  But she was wrong. Sorceress though she was, the knife pierced her breast, and she fell away down the night with a cry, and died into the darkness.

  I woke from this dream with a purpose as transparent as glass before me, cool, in possession of my waking senses, and bitter calm.

  Qwef was sleeping his serene young man’s sleep not far from me, loose-limbed as a lean black dog. Hwenit had bedded deeper in the tent, invisible behind a drapery she had flamboyantly erected to exclude us.

  I got up silently and stole out into the island night.

  The moon was down, the wind had dropped.

  We had raised the tent in the shelter of the bare trees, near a little spring of sweet water. Several paces farther on the rocky hump of the island started curving up like the shell of a tortoise, a bald carapace of rain-and-wind-polished slate.

  The island was small, not quite a mile from end to end.

  I halted at the foot of the incline; it seemed a private spot.

  I had only the tribal ways to fall back on. I had seen no religion or reverence in Eshkorek, save for the spitting of men at the name of Uastis. I cleared a space in the rough weeds, and piled up a mound of stones, leaving it hollow at the center.

  Into the hollow I pushed dry stems and stuck a flint to kindle them. The fire flared, quick and too hungry, an ephemeral blue. I took my knife—it had drunk her blood in my dream—and stuck it in my arm, and let my own blood sprinkle the blaze. I cut off a piece of my hair and gave him that, too.

  I thought I knew what he wanted, my father. I recalled how I had woken once before, dreaming of his death and said, “I will kill her.” Now all the uncertainties, the powers of healing and slaying and all the rest, came together in one ferocious urge I recognized as another’s. The gifts were his, the wish was his, the deed was his. Vazkor, unquiet in his death; my unquiet life showed me the manner of it.

  I said aloud, soft into the crackle of the brittle, already dying flames, “I swear it, Vazkor, on the fire and on my blood. Vazkor, my father, she has cheated both you and me, and she shall pay the price of it. I will strive to find her. When I do, I will kill her. You have revealed it to me. Now I know. Be still, Vazkor my father, wolf-king, Javhovor, only leave it with me.”

  It seemed to me then, the brief ignition faded in the stones, a shadow oozed from the fire and rested flickeringly against the slate wall. The fire’s shadow, a sort of shadowfire itself, resembling the dark reflection of a brightness and a strength burned out what was lingering, with a faint dull luster, in me.

  “Believe it,” I said to the shadow.

  At that the flame dropped to nothing. I was left with the empty sea-rocked night, and my iron future.

  Near dawn, Hwenit stole through the weeds and discovered me sitting there against the slate.

  “Why are you here, Mordrak? Are you sick?”

  “How can a demon be sick? I’m unused to your tender care. Go back, girl. The sun’s not up yet.”

  She slipped close and put her fingers on my neck in a touch that made me shiver.

  “You do not understand your powers,” she said.

  “That’s true enough. Yet I think now I begin to comprehend the seed that planted them.”

  “I mean,” she said, “you have no way to master your powers. They master you. You heal without being aware of it. Perhaps you kill as rashly.”

  I looked at her. The sky h
ad paled enough to show me her face, which might have been the face of another girl, steady, clever, and compassionate. I saw then what her priest-tutor had seen, the day he singled her out for healer and witch.

  “If I am rash, who will set me on the right path?”

  “I,” she said, “if you permit.”

  “I permit,” I said. “How do I recompense you?”

  “Lie with me,” she said.

  “In order that you may make your brother burn? In order that you may pretend I am he? Oh, no, blue-eyed witch. I am not for that game.”

  “Trust me,” she whispered, bending near. “It is you I crave. Though you are white, you are handsome and lusty.”

  “I have been sung that song before, and by women who believed it. As for you, little witch, you are half white yourself, under your black silk skin.”

  “Lie with me,” she moaned, melting my ear with her tongue.

  But I pushed her off, maddening though it was for me to do it.

  She stamped her foot, and ran away deeper into the wood, and presently I made out a reddish cat’s tail going after her through the tall grasses.

  When I returned to the black tent at sunup, Qwef was already gone. My teacher-temptress and I remained alone.

  There followed two or three peculiar days, during which I found out for sure that Hwenit-Uasti was two persons, as her two namings implied.

  Uasti, witch and healer, a woman indubitably honored and respected among her people, wise though young, patient and of infinite sympathy, materialized between the hours of sunrise and sunset. This being instructed me in the shade-walks of my own brain. Her fabulous knowledge, garnered from generation upon generation of priests—those poet-physicians and sorcerer-philosophers of the black tribes—was delivered to me simply and directly. I have met few others since who could compare with, or better, this mentor, a girl more youthful than I, slight as a sapling and mercurial to a fault. I think, too, that she was the superior teacher because she had not the mastery of these “arts” herself, while being fully cognizant of them. She gave me, at any rate, the key to doors, both to unlock and to seal them. A paradoxical key, simple but perverse. You must get it right before you tried the turn, or bring the house down. As to method and logic, to explain that would be to sit ranting in a jar for seven years, as the Moi say. You cannot truly define power, or why power will come. A child will learn to walk, but you must persuade him not to put his hands in the fire.

  That, then, was my psychic guide, Uasti, the composed and the humane.

  The other Uasti usually usurped her when school was done, first sparking up in her oceanic eyes when the fire was banked in preparation for the evening meal. This, in fact, was not Uasti but Hwenit the witch, the one I had met to begin with.

  She was all the other was not, skittish, heady, sharp as cat’s claws, and bent on seduction. A sore trial to me was Hwenit. I felt like a man being coaxed to steal his brother’s riches, and the brother off at the wars—yet Qwef was her kin, not mine. I resolved I would not be party to her snares and plots.

  We had been on the island two days, and that day’s sun a pale memory of rose across the sea, and the woods powdered with dusk. Hwenit lighted the fire and set out the food, and scolded her red cat, which would not eat its portion of nutmeats, since it had killed a bird in the high grass that afternoon, and was entirely satisfied with this gory fare. The scolding concluded, Hwenit turned to me.

  “Tonight I shall gather sea wrack from the beach. Shall you go with me, Mordrak?”

  Confusing one Hwenit with the other—Uasti—for a moment, I complied. Shortly, supper finished, I followed her among the rocks and tide-glazed sands. She picked at the red-purple weed and cut it with my knife, then the green-brown and the black. The light was gone. She judged the varieties by starshine, and placed them in a reed-woven basket.

  “Once all weed was black,” said Hwenit. “Then one man killed another and his blood fell in the sea, at which some weed became red. But the green weed grew when the Green Maidens, who live on the sea’s floor, swam up and lay with men. It is not weed, but green hair left for a token of love between water and land.”

  Catching the drift now, I said it was a nice story, and started to go back up the beach. But Hwenit, the little fox, unlaced her shift and ran into the sea, and returned like a Green Maiden herself, save she was black not green, scented with ocean, with water-jeweled breasts and chains of silver on her thighs. And that was that.

  After, she was silent as a rock, as if she must atone for her pleasure with melancholy as some do. It was not her first time by any means. The black folk had no rigid moral laws, being too moral, and too lawful, to construct them.

  We went to the tent and she hid herself behind her drapery, and then I heard her crying.

  All this I could have predicted. Her thoughts ran on Qwef. Presently she called out to me like a child, “What shall I do? What shall I do?”

  There is no reasoning with a girl in this mood. I got up, took down the silly drapery and put my arms around Hwenit, surprising myself somewhat at my own gentleness with her. Demizdor had weaned me to different ways, I supposed. It would have taken a woman who did not consider herself a milk-cow to show me that women are not cattle.

  Next, Hwenit hissed, “Mordrak, you are a magician. Make him belong to me. You will be kind, for I have helped you toward your sorcerer’s power. Use it, and help me.”

  “I won’t help you to that. Besides, my gift is scarce out of its cradle, as well you know.”

  “For this it is strong enough. Oh, Mordrak, I am nothing without him. I shall die of it.”

  I laughed, and assured her she would not.

  She wept, and assured me that she would.

  When she was quieter, she said. “It began between us, between Qwef and me, small as the first thread on the loom. Each day wove a little more. Now the garment is finished.”

  I said, “You are his sister, Hwenit. This is why he will not.”

  “Oh, the fool,” she said. “It would only make us closer. It is why we are bound. Flesh speaking to flesh, because the flesh is one.”

  “Be thankful, girl, you are not a Dagkta woman. They would whip you for dreaming of it.”

  “The red people are cruel and blind. Why should it be a whipping matter?”

  “If for no other reason, because the children of two so near in blood will be sickly.”

  “Are the beasts sickly? The animals of the hills and the fish of the sea, and the birds of the air? And often they mate, parent with young, and the infants of one womb together.”

  “Well,” I said, “but we are men.”

  “And the poorer for it. I never yet saw a man outrun a beast, outswim a fish, outfly a bird. If they fall ill, which is rarely, they need no healer to tell them what herbs they should eat in order to be well. They take no slaves and make no wars.”

  I said, “There are plenty who would court you in your krarl. Leave Qwef be, and choose another.”

  “I have tried. Two years I have tried. You see the result of it.”

  “Think,” I said, “what it would mean to lie with him.”

  “Trust me, I do, and frequently. Brother is a word; sister is a word. Do you feel a word? Do you suffer a word? Love you suffer, and desire and pain.” She put me from her with cold small hands, and oddly, I saw she was Uasti again, the calm, elder Uasti, deep as a dark well, and sad to the profundity of her depths. “Go sleep, warrior. Leave me my dreams at least, for which your Dagkta curs shall not beat me.”

  I left her, but later I heard her rise and go out.

  In the morning, I walked up onto the slate parasol of the island, and came on the black clinkers of a fire she had built there, and the tracks of her feet going around and around in the ashes of it. Some circle spell she had made to glamour Qwef.

  2

  That day, the third, was
still and windless, the trees carved on the sky, and the sea tumbling on the beach in slow rushes, without hunger.

  Noon came with a white sun; it was chill after the warm foretaste of spring we had been having. The quiet grew disturbing and I fancied foul weather was blowing up somewhere, gale or rain coming back to scourge the island, and wondered how high the tide would run in a storm and if I had best shift the tent.

  There was apprehension in me, too, something I tried to shake off. I found myself going over again the details of that dream I had had, the dream of wings and vengeance that had made me swear my oath to the shade, or rather the memory, of my father. In the dream I had listed, in warrior fashion and very thoroughly, my deeds and possessions, even to the quantity of my wives and sons, even to the tribal expression of having slain forty men, which forty stood for uncountable and unlimited numbers. I had also prophesied my own death: an out-tribe spear between my ribs—three days from that night. Today.

  This delicacy crawled about in my belly, till I cursed myself, all the more since having noted Hwenit’s burned out witch-fire. For it had come to me, bit by bit, that if the island was hidden in haze and night, one bright bonfire atop it might yet serve as a signal for any eyes on the shore.

  Hwenit had kept away from me all day, collecting her eternal bundles of herbs, ferns, weeds, thistles, thorns, and osiers, which she set to dry on little wicker frames about the tent. Her red cat stalked minute animal life through the grasses.

  I had gathered earlier that a man would row over for them on the morrow, and to bring news to me, providing no danger from the hunt had shown itself on the mainland. I made a resolution that I would go back with him, whatever had or had not happened. To be stuck forever on a mile of wooded rock afloat in water was not to my taste.