That alone made a great difference, and though he was still confused and apprehensive he felt himself succumbing to the water's grateful warmth. Whatever was to come, he reflected, he could face it better rested and relaxed; it could hardly put him in any worse case than he was already. With a deep groan he sagged back into the water, wincing as it bit at his scrapes and bruises, and blinked his eyes clear. He could hardly believe them. Only once before had he seen rooms so richly furnished, the old royal chambers of Morvan; but they had been dusty and ill-lit, and Kermorvan had had them cleared to suit his own more austere tastes. Here the floor was of polished stone, black as onyx, the walls smooth white but overhung with velvet in rich blue hues of night, worked about with gold and silver; if there were any windows they were hidden. At each corner the bath was lit by lamps on ornate stands, blazing with scented oil, and though he saw no fire the stone at the bath-rim was warm to the touch. Many ewers of lye-oil and balms stood there, mingling their fragrance with the heavy air; in an idle humour he reached out to one, but as he touched it it rattled and rocked on its base, so sharp and sudden was the tremor in his hands. The tall fair woman who sat in the shadows of the hangings rose from her chair, stooped swiftly and caught the ewer before it could overset.
"Have a care, young smith. This is a rare and precious stuff you trifle with here. Lean forward - bow your head."
Elof, slack-jawed, could not bring himself to move, let alone obey; for he could conceive of nothing save his own immediate and helpless death. Had he been clad and afoot he would have been casting about for some weapon, some way of escape; but now an absurd and paralysing vulnerability held him in thrall. The tall woman snorted with impatience, pushed his head down on his chest and poured a measured flow of the stuff in the ewer over his head and shoulders, and into the water beyond. It gave off a strange scent, dark and slightly bitter, and tingled on his skin; but where it flowed the worst of his pains seemed to dissolve away, and he subsided into the water once again, utterly at a loss.
"Louhi..." he said, or meant to say; it emerged as a ghastly croak.
The woman smiled in wry acknowledgement. "Even so. The Ice lies all about the earth, south and north, west and east; why should you not expect to find me here?" She set the ewer down and stepped hastily back to her former place. "Enjoy your bath, young smith; make yourself as clean as you would wish to be. Doubtless you will be more at ease so, and I also. No offence! But you have come through great hardships of late, that cannot but have left their marks upon you; and I suffer from too keen an awareness of such things. Of senses other than smell also," she added with rueful grace, "not being born to them. I lack a lifetime's practice in ignoring their importunate messages, such as you mortals enjoy. To me they come new-minted, undulled, each time I take on form, and they are a continual torment."
"A wonder you can endure the Ekwesh, then," Elof grunted, his head still awhirl.
Louhi shrugged her shapely shoulders in answer. "I cannot, save with difficulty. I deal with them through more civilized minions, or from a distance; you may have heard what they call me - Iltasya, the Old One Unseen. But they are apt to the hand, and they are brave. As are you, young smith! All across the Seas of the Sunrise you have sailed, to their eastern shore - and all in vain."
Elof tensed, but remained lying where he was. "Who says so, lady? Yourself? But you cannot be sure of my purpose, can you?"
Louhi, her face grave and impassive, almost sad, turned to a low table beside her, of black marble white-veined, and took up from it something that caught and enhanced the gold of the lamplight, mellow and fair. Elof's heart gave a terrible leap. It was his half of the broken armring. They had given her his pack… She came forward again, gathering up her white robe to kneel by the bathside; to his astonishment she held out the half ring, and put it into his hand. But then she reached up to her throat and drew up a thin golden chain that hung there, and from her breast lifted another such twist of gold upon its end. And that, too, she put into his limp fingers ere he could speak. He looked from it to her, feeling its warmth contrast with the coolness of his half, then seized the pieces and thrust them together, telling himself frantically that it was a trick, a copy, that such a thing might easily be confected in a few hours, were the jeweller skilled enough…
But it was not. They fitted, and not only in physical form. Elof knew the unity of his own work, none better, and his fingers could sense the sudden reviving flow of forces within the metal as it touched, his eyes saw the tremulous gleams that shot this way and that like small fish in a pond, independent of the lamplight. This was in truth his first gift to his love and his last, the making of it and the breaking. He glared up at the pale-haired woman, silently daring her to gloat, or even smile, so that he could dash it from her face. "You… took this from her?" he grated. "Where have you caged her, you wolfs bitch? Where is she?"
But Louhi's face remained calm. "She gave me it," was her quiet reply. "Without benefit of cage, or any such barbarity." Gently she slipped the pieces from Elof's nerveless grasp and, ignoring his belated grab, replaced them on the table. "You see," she said, without a trace of a gloat, "I have what I have long sought. And I fear you need not think to take it from me ever again."
It came to Elof's mind then, what part of it could still think, that Louhi had ordered her ground for this encounter with great subtlety. None among his folk save the upper orders were especially squeamish about nakedness; no others could afford to be. And he was no highborn, yet he found himself fettered by his situation, fettered and depressed. Before those cool blue eyes he was as uncertain as a child, unwilling to leave the sheltering water, yet within it vulnerable and at a loss, too easily dominated. He saw it clearly; yet he was powerless to change it. For those quiet, unforgiveable words he might have sought to attack Louhi with his own two hands, to stifle the life of her body or even try to hold her hostage before her followers. But thus naked and enmeshed he could hardly summon up the spirit. He could not possibly hoist himself from this deep bath swiftly enough. He would look ridiculous. He would probably slip on that glassy floor and split his skull, anyway. And what good would it do? What did it truly matter? It, or anything. He had no trouble believing Louhi's words; in her very mildness he could read their truth. Kara, in her fury and her sorrow, had obeyed that nagging call, and fled back from the company of men to the security of her bonds, the shelter of her own kind.
He could hardly blame her. A deep misery, deep as the roots of the world, came pressing in upon his mind, and depression like a rolling wall of mist, distancing and darkening the very hues of life. It clung to him too closely for the release of fury or of sorrow; he had done with caring. He laid his head back wearily against the lowest step, and closed his eyes.
He jumped when Louhi spoke again, for it had seemed there was no more she need say; also, she was again close by, kneeling and looking down at him with that same grave mien. "I find it in me to pity you, young smith…" Elof flinched in angry disgust, but she held up a restraining hand. "No. I speak no hypocrisies, truly. What need have I to? What I said, I meant. Have I not felt as you feel now, and at your hands? Believe me, I would not mock it; I know. But do not despair too soon. I said that you need not hope to take her from me, and that I meant also. But it is possible that I might relinquish her."
"Re-relinquish her?" Elof felt more adrift than ever.
"So. Oh, not wholly, not forever. Would you, had you the choice? For a time, a span - the span of a mortal life." Her full lips pressed tight till the colour drained from them. "That is not easily offered, or lightly. Even to think of it is… oh, pain, revulsion; look into yourself and understand. Yet I have had to see her pass from me once already and to me one life would be a short enough time to bear… though that life might be made very long indeed, young smith. If you were willing to join Kara, in my service."
"Consider!" she said, almost pleading, before Elof could even gather his startled thoughts, let alone utter a word. "Why not? Consider what you h
ave seen here. Has the dominion you call the Ice not won far further southward than in your own land? Most of the world is thus, Elof. A great change is coming, and it totters in the balance. Only a little further, a small advance, and the balance will tip, beyond recall." She rose on her knees, staring out into infinite distance, and shook back her smooth cascade of pale blonde hair. "I had hoped to make that advance in your land, young smith, thinking it easier than here. You taught me my mistake, you and yours! But here it shall still come about. The Ice will advance, not far, young smith, not far; but far enough to reflect some small portion more of the sun's heat, and so cool the clime of the world just a fraction further. And that will be enough! That, cast into the scales, will turn them. From that moment on we need no longer strain to advance the Ice. It will become a process of growth, clean growth without the taint of life. Its advance will chill the world further, and that chill will advance the Ice; as a morsel of snow set tumbling own a mountain may grow, unstoppably, to a mighty avalanche, so die margins of the Ice shall grow of their own moving force to encompass and cleanse this carrion world. And the peace that is cold will settle about it, and our day shall come again! Then we shall live free indeed, free from the strife that devours us, free from all the ills, demands, indignities, free from the burning tomb that you call flesh!"
Slowly she subsided, leaned sideways to rest on one hand, her hair hiding her face. Elof sank down in horror, the warmth of the bath lost to him in his shock, recalling all the duergar lore he had learned of the Ice. It was all too plausible, what she had said; it could come about… But when? How soon? How long remained?
She looked down at him suddenly, high breasts heaving, but serene of face as ever. "But it would not all happen at once, young smith. Not in one lifetime of men, or even two, though it could not be stopped. You could live on happily enough. Even your friends would be left alone to live out their lives, if they wage no war against me; for I would no longer need to assail them."
"And those you assail here?" demanded Elof sternly, though his words rang hollow within.
She shook her head sadly. "Them? You need think nothing of them. In their unceasing folly they deserve disaster; almost they court it. They will bring down the Ice upon their own heads. I cool the water about these lands, mass the drift-ice at its gates, freeze the rivers that feed the land. The Ekwesh serve only as the living spearhead of the Ice; and the haft is half a world wide, and hurled by many hands. Fair young smith, I and mine are on the verge of victory; and yet that victory will only win back what was so unjustly wrested from us, long ago. We have yearned for that, yes; but is it so terrible to yearn thus, exiled and dispossessed? Can you find no scrap of sympathy for us, no understanding? Have not you done the same, in all your wanderings? And along the way, from haste or need or plain folly, we have done some terrible things; and have not you, also? But we will have what we yearn for; and perhaps you shall, also."
"If you would gave me what I yearn for," said Elof dully, "you would slay me here and now. It would be kindness, perhaps."
She gazed back at him, and shook her head. "Once I might have. But smith, I have warmed to you. You are brave, and you harbour a force of your own, mortal though you be, that is rare among the herd of common men in any age. And I have learned much about you, aye, from Kara. You have awoken a Power to love, young man, and that is no small thing. Our kind knows love indeed, but of a different nature. It is not the same as this mortal huddling, this passion that spurs on the lowest, laughable urges, the mingling of flesh in filth. It is no desperate snatching at happiness made more precious by its own mortality, by its own inevitable end; it is no fire, doomed both to blaze and burn out, no flake of snow to melt even as it is grasped. For the force of the lower love to touch the higher, that is rare, and not to be lightly thrown aside. I say again, Elof, I would have you at my side." She rose, tall and beautiful as a crest of sun-bright cloud, and turned back to the table, began sifting through the things that lay there. "You are a smith of surpassing craft, like none other I have encountered in this age. That helm… I have marvelled at its power. But I do not see it here; lost in your wrack? A terrible loss; but you may live to shape another. And this gauntlet… from among the duergar, perhaps, but no other men; and the same for this hammer. And these, these are surely the fatal anklets… I find it hard to blame you, young smith, truly I do; you have my sympathy, even if I have none of yours. And this sword, that you call Gorthawer…" She drew it with a hiss and a flourish, but in her hands the black blade was silent. She gave a bitter laugh. "This at least I have felt from you!"
She balanced it in her hand a moment, then suddenly she sprang forward in a fierce lunge, and sent it stabbing and cutting through the air in graceful exercises of formal sword-play that bent her lissom body like a bow, drawing her robe tight about her and loosening it at breast and flank. Elof watched her in fascination as she danced back and forth about the bath, cleaving the columns of steam into swirling panic, till at last she paused with a peal of silvery laughter and stood panting, her straight hair clinging in dishevelled wisps about her damp face, her cheeks and breast flushed bright with unaccustomed colour. "This at least…" she repeated, her blue gaze bright and intense. "And small wonder; it is a magnificent blade, a noble weapon." She stooped beside him like a plunging bird. "Here you wounded me, in the shoulder. Do you think I would hate you for that? But I, I at least, can forget wounds when they have healed." She reached out suddenly, and her long strong fingers closed on his; their warmth was startling. She lifted his hand unresisting to her shoulder, and with it drew down the loosened shoulder of her robe. "See; not a scar remains."
It was true; where Gorthawer had struck, the skin was milky white, unmarked, unmarred, glossed with a faint sheen of perspiration. She drew his fingers over the spot, and down over the curve of her breast, the robe falling away before them. Colour surged beneath the skin, and she breathed quickly through parted lips; her blue eyes were half hooded by their fluttering lids. Her breast jutted firm and damp into his cupped hand, and he traced the nipple with coursing fingers; her other hand reached out, touched his neck and quivered there an instant, then moved on to caress his neck and ear, his throat and chest. She gasped slightly, throwing back her head, and caught his hand to her. Only then did he try to snatch it away; but she was as strong as he was. Then she relaxed, slid it down across her ribs, the taut plane of muscle at her waist and down, pulling her sash away and parting her robe, down till it slid over soft curls and pressed in between her thighs. Abruptly she pulled away and rose, and stood a moment with parted robe clinging to her damp body, fixed in his gaze, gazing at him with an intensity that blazed like the North-Lights. Suddenly the air was heavy with a scent, whether it rose from the water or from her, that stirred his thoughts into a blurred confusion. "Hate if you will, Elof!" she said softly, almost chanting her words. "Only hate fiercely! They are the great twins, Mastersmith, the great unities - Hate and Love, Ice and Fire. And when the force of the stars themselves is spent, when rights and wrongs alike are forgotten and darkness claims all things, they shall lie down together, and become one…"
Loss and misery, drowning in the beauty of her, foundered in her gaze. Then she shrugged the robe from her shoulders and peeled it away, and stood naked and fair as the vision of her true self amid rivers of falling stars. Yet fairer still than that vision she seemed, for she was present and real, though her skin shone translucent as milky ice. When she padded to the steps and down, thigh-deep into the lapping water, Elof caught his breath, as if the heat might melt her away. But the hand that touched him, that coursed along his body and encircled him in its caress, was warmer even than the water, and the lips that pressed on his flared like fire, traced burning trails of it along him as he floated, catching flame in his turn. The arms he closed about her encircled glowing heat, his fierce caress unleashed its flows. And as she pressed closer to him, flung thigh across him and drew him close, he remembered what he had once been told; that deep within t
he Ice the fires of the earth might still burn, a furnace contained that could burst out with searing force. They closed, and within the furnace she drew him, and as one they burned.
After a time, when the seething water grew still, she led him by the hand from the bath and across the room to the alcove where she had sat, and drew back the heavy hangings there to reveal a carven door. It opened onto suffocating luxury, a wide galleried bedchamber hung all around in gold and saffron yellow, save where a tall narrow window gleamed upon blackness. Against the far wall was set a great bed of silken cushions and counterpanes. Upon a side table stood a pitcher and goblets; she poured him a glass of thick yellow wine, honey-scented and strong, and slipped back into the bathchamber a moment ere she came to join him. Together, sipping their wine, they walked hand in hand to the bed, and there as she lay down he poured a trickle of wine across her breasts, and kissed it away. Among the cushions, as time passed, they twined and thrashed and sweated to their shuddering conclusions, each contesting the other's limits, till they fell at last to the dalliance of exhaustion, and from that sighed down entwined into sleep.
The Hammer of the Sun Page 15