Bloodmind

by Liz Williams

  I visit them once or twice a day, going from my own quarters up the long, winding flights of stairs. It’s a bird’s eye view from up here, the city spread out below, like a map. Up here, the air still smells of salt, but here the smell is faint, almost refreshing, and there’s a stiff breeze even on the hottest days. No wonder they built their city here on these rocks. There are sudden, surprising views of city and sea, glimpses where you least expect them.

  Everything is an odd size, however. The halls and corridors are much too big, and much too thin. I think of our female Hierolaths as being very tall and flat. There’s nothing to show their true size in the wall drawings, which are in the very highest room, just before the bell tower.

  This room is open. The roof rests on columns, of a dark red stone marbled with green, and the stone floor is always a little dusted with sand where the wind blows through. The skeleton-winged efreets of the desert gather in the eaves, chittering and rustling, and when you look up in the evening, you see a rash of red eyes. But during the day, it’s quiet and still.

  From here, you can stop to look at the wall drawings, or go up to the bell tower. The wall drawings are worth looking at. They must be very old – we don’t know how old, since we know so little about these lost people, but despite the wind and the sand, they are still bright in the more sheltered places. It’s easy to see figures and faces: a tall, slender people. They have huge eyes, golden skins, complicated slits where a nose and mouth should be, shining cowls which cover their heads, like the head-coverings we had to wear in Iznar. Or maybe they are a form of hair. Their hands are more like huge petalled flowers than human fingers, and their arms come from too low in the body. They wear simple things: long slit robes, flowing capes, small perched hats (which suggests hair rather than cowls). It’s hard to say what they are doing. They stand in groups. None of them holds anything. Looking at these women – these creatures – I feel a sharp tingling of shame, and then pride. Perhaps that’s why I like this place so much: it shows what women can do, the kind of beauty they create. And then it’s back to that central question: are they female at all?

  The younger women have no such doubts. They are worshipping, they like to say. They love these supposed female-Hierolaths, and they hold rituals here on holy days that bear no relation, as far as any of us can remember, to the holy days of the men’s cities, of Iznar and Chem and Bachassar. All of our legends are made up, no more than a few decades old, the same age as our colony. Do something twice here, and it’s a tradition. They need something to believe in, and so do I.

  On, then, to the bell tower, leaving the goddesses in their green and grey robes behind, leaving the lilies among which they walk, the wetland scenes which must have had some meaning then, and now are lost beneath the dust and the encroaching desert. Was this why they died or went away? Did everything simply dry up and die out? Did they die of the heat and their plants with them? Their world lives on in my dreams, when the colony is arranged on a series of canals, flowering with lotuses like the ones in the men’s pools to the north, rushed with reeds.

  On to the bell tower, and up.

  From the bell tower, which has only one rusted bell hanging on a hook, you can see oh so far. All the way to the Middle Mountains, the yellow-banded barrier of the Great Desert. The men’s words are so practical, so lacking in imagination. The Great this, the High that. Middle and Lower and Upper. Soldiers’ words. We’ve made our own tongue over the last fifty seasons, but we’ve borrowed a lot all the same, words seeping up into our newly conscious minds, heard for years and barely understood, or not at all, until the day when the mist lifts and understanding slowly comes.

  Our colony is called Tesk, the Edge, in the men’s language. The edge of the world, the edge of the land, the edge of our lives as we cling to this thin strip, this ruined city that is nothing to do with us at all.

  From the bell tower, it’s obvious just how much of an edge this is. There is the black sea, there is the gold-and-ochre of the desert beyond. There are the mountains, purple with shadows in the evening light, beautiful and far. There, tumbling down beneath my feet, are the crumbling sandy tiles of the high chamber and then the city itself. All our little lives beneath my feet, like beetles. Is that how the men think? I hope I’ll never know.

  I wait, here in the bell tower, until twilight rolls down from the mountains and the bowl of the sky above my head glows with light, and then fades. Below me, the lights start to come on, smouldering at first. Sea-burn lamps, from the weed gathered from the shore, stinking of the sea. A few candles, rarer, made from the casings and the shit of the wax grubs that are found in the cool places between the rocks. Light is rare here, but we don’t mind the dark. Those lamps won’t burn for long, as people do the last few night tasks, then go to bed. I wait until the efreets spiral up from the temple chamber in a great dark cloud, flit shrieking past my head on their stretched bone wings, hunting insects. I wait until the air grows cool, and then I go back down through the hushed temple, with that unhuman golden gaze upon my back, to my own small room, and there I sleep.

  FOUR

  PLANET: MUSPELL (VALI)

  When I next woke, it was to see Glyn Apt watching me from the other side of the cell field. The data stream was back and her birds were whirling around her head in a snowy cloud.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you,’ Glyn Apt said, politely enough but with an undertone that suggested it was an order, ‘about the selk.’

  ‘I’ve told you all I know,’ I said. I thought she was referring to the ones in Hetla.

  ‘I’m more interested in your theories,’ the Morrighanu said. ‘About the selk, and about what the vitki are doing with them.’

  I laughed. ‘You might almost persuade me that you care. I’m more interested in your own plans for the Rock. How about a trade?’

  It was Glyn Apt’s turn to laugh. ‘I’ve already strip-mined your brain, Skald girl. Not much of a choice, is it?’

  ‘You’ve raided my memories. I’m not sure you can get me to spill my thoughts so easily.’ Bravado, it’s true. The seith field can protect you from only so much and I’d already had the seith ripped from me. Not during the rape on Nhem – I’d killed a man with it there. But later, during Gemaley’s attack on me, the seith had been no help at all: the Mondhaith girl had torn it into shreds and tatters. Perhaps Frey had taught her vitki tricks. And perhaps not.

  ‘You killed my leader,’ I said. ‘Why should I help you any more than I have to?’

  Glyn Apt’s pointed black eyebrows went up. ‘Is that what you think?’

  I stared at her. ‘Who else?’

  ‘We gained access to this fortress when you were down in the hallway, not before. We’ve killed only one member of the Skald and she went down fighting. I can prove it to you, if you like. But we didn’t kill Idhunn Regnesdottir.’

  ‘Then who the hell did?’

  ‘Tell me what you think about the selk,’ Glyn Apt repeated, ‘and I’ll tell you what I think about Idhunn’s murder. How about that for a trade?’

  ‘Very well,’ I said after a pause. ‘I believe that what the vitki are doing to the selk in those tanks is directly related to the war effort.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘To isolate the switch within their genes that causes their sentience to be seasonally switched off, and create a virus which mimics it, to infect those of us of the Reach. To render us unsentient.’ If she was closer than she claimed to the vitki, then this wouldn’t be news. And if that was the case, then she must be aware that I already knew. If Glyn Apt didn’t know – well, that might be knowledge she could use, and which might make her better disposed towards me. Some hope.

  There was a long silence. I could not read Glyn Apt’s expression. After a while, she said, ‘I read your report to your leader – that was what Frey was doing on Mondhile, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. He hadn’t got very far, luckily for us. I wasn’t long behind him. The people there undergo periods where they are unsentient, l
ike the selk. They look human, but sometimes their self-awareness, their consciousness, falls away and they’re just human-shaped animals, basically. They call it the Bloodmind. And the Nhemish men do a similar sort of thing, too, to their women. Makes them no better than breeding-cattle.’

  Glyn Apt, still unreadable, nodded.

  I went on, ‘Release a geno-virus, wait for a while, then walk in and enslave us. The Nhemish women might be docile enough. But the Mondhaith weren’t – not in this state, Glyn Apt. They turned into predators.’ I shivered, thinking of that town turned to nightmare, in which I had become trapped. ‘But they were engineered for that, and so, presumably, were the selk, unless it was some kind of side effect. If the vitki could create a geno-virus that would make the rest of us no more than half-alive, to be used as slaves – I can see where their research is going. I’d have said that makes these experiments a critical part of their war effort. And we don’t know how far they’ve come.’

  Glyn Apt shifted position.

  ‘Let’s assume that Frey went to Mondhile to try and find an answer to this issue of sentience. Say he was sent there as part of the war effort. Yet the vitki I spoke to – Thorn Eld – he wanted Frey dead. Why so, if Frey was doing the vitki’s own work?’

  ‘Perhaps he wasn’t,’ the Morrighanu said, after a moment. ‘Perhaps he was working for himself, against the rest.’

  We stared at one another, frustrated, in what felt like a sudden, odd alliance. ‘We might never know,’ Glyn Apt added. ‘The politics of your own Skald are bad enough. Imagine how much back-stabbing goes on in the Darkland sects.’

  I sighed. Coming from Glyn Apt, that amounted almost to a girlish confession. If the Morrighanu commander had been telling the truth, the thought of sitting here while Idhunn’s killer roamed free was chafing at me. ‘And what about the selk that came here?’

  ‘I’ll go and speak with the selk, if it returns,’ Glyn Apt said. She spoke grudgingly, as if she was sparing me some social burden. ‘I will tell it that we’re in no position to assist others. And now, I have to go.’

  ‘You said you’d tell me your thoughts about Idhunn’s murder.’

  ‘Did I?’ The Morrighanu commander gave a thin smile. ‘Maybe later.’

  And later for the selk, too. But the selk were to prove more insistent than either of us knew.

  FIVE

  PLANET: MONDILE (SEDRA)

  It was on one of the coldest days of the year that I left the clan house forever. I’d insisted on taking the parting ceremony the night before, with the moon Elowen hanging over the eaves of the house and the frost crackling and snapping like a live thing as I walked across the courtyard. I said goodbye to all of them in turn: from the next oldest man to the youngest girl, only recently returned to the world. She turned her face away: she hadn’t yet felt the pull back. Some of them miss it and never adjust, but she wasn’t one of those. To her, the outside meant beasts and nothingness, hunger and cold and constant danger, without words to describe it all. She could not understand yet why I had to go and why I wouldn’t be coming home again.

  ‘It’s the way things are done,’ I told her. ‘Winter’s coming. Too many mouths to feed. What, would you have me die in my bed? As though I was cursed with sickness, a weak old thing? You wouldn’t want that for me, would you?’

  But she just stared into the fire and wouldn’t answer. The others took it well, of course.

  ‘So,’ Rhane said. ‘You’re off, then?’

  ‘Off and not coming back.’

  ‘Well, that’s as it should be.’ She gave an approving nod. I’d always got on well with her. I remembered her birth, her mother gritting her teeth against the pain and not making a sound, as befits a huntress. I remembered, too, the day we’d put the infant out onto the hillside and left her to fend for herself for the next thirteen years. And the day she’d returned, stumbling in out of the howl of the wind, a fierce small thing. Now, Rhane was one of the best huntresses of the clan, still fierce, still small, still doing what had to be done. Just like me.

  ‘When are you off out, then? In the morning?’

  ‘I’ll go at dawn. It’s been good to me, this clan, this family, you. I’ll miss you all.’ I said it reluctantly. I don’t like sentiment, all those southern poets’ ways.

  ‘I know. We’ll miss you, too.’ Rhane gave me a slanted glance. ‘It won’t be the same without you telling me what to do, old woman.’

  ‘Or without you ignoring my advice, chit of a girl.’ We laughed, and then I said goodnight.

  I didn’t sleep well. Too many feelings, whisking round the chamber like birds, and none of them settling. I was glad when the thin light started to creep through the paper pane and I could honour my decision and get up. I wasn’t planning to take anything with me; it was a pleasure not to have to pack, like going on migration. I told myself that this was all it was: just another migration, my fourth, although this time it was to Eresthahan, to the nowhere-land of the dead. But I’d been there before, before my birth, before the one before that.

  I did not take weapons, and in that respect it was nothing like a migration. Even when you’re in the bloodmind, it still helps to be armed. Instinct will carry you a long way, further than claws or teeth. But this time, my death would come to meet me and take the form it was destined to take, perhaps at the mouth of visen or altru or wild mur. Or perhaps it would be the cold – I confess, I was rather hoping for that. They say it’s a quiet death, though I’ve never been one for peace and quiet. I wasn’t afraid of pain, but I didn’t court it, either. I’d no wish to go down fighting. Who are you proving yourself to? It’s your death; no one will know how you died, nor care. Perhaps it’s part of the men’s mysteries, though, some old tradition. Perhaps you’re supposed to end up in some particularly appealing part of Eresthahan, with dancing girls and a lot of drink. I’d just be happy when it was over and done with, but I admit, too, that part of me was looking forward to the chance for this one last trip. I hadn’t been out in the winter world for years – it hadn’t been my time to die, before, and why court lung fever or worse? But now the time had finally come, no more excuses. I was off.

  The fire had burned down in the grate overnight and the hall was cold, smelling of ashes. I did not look back. I closed the doors behind me, with the shock of morning air in my lungs and the scent of blood coming from the murs’ stable. They’d brought the mur off the mountain pastures only a week ago, and already the snow had crept halfway down the slopes. The mountains blazed in the new light, all glacier gold. I walked slowly to the end of the clan house and the moat twitched and tingled to let me through. I wonder sometimes whether the moats know when we are leaving for the last time, earth-consciousness, whether in their own way they bid farewell. But it’s probably just a fancy, nothing more. I stepped over the invisible line of the moat and felt the world shift a little. Then on, across the bridge that crosses the roaring waters of the Sarn, down the stepped streets to the town wall, with the morning town silent around me. We rise late in winter, go to bed early, are glad of the rest.

  The walls, and then the town gates. I pushed the gates open, felt again that twitch and snap, of the town moat this time. Then I was pushing the gates shut behind me and walking up through the thorn path that leads to the pastures, the hunting grounds. By now, the golden light had spread to the bottom of the snowfield, though the narrow valley and the torrent were still in shadow.

  I knew where I was going. Some people don’t. They just wander about, following this line or that line, listening to the energies and patterns below the earth just as they’ve always done, depending on their particular speciality. My sister had been water-sensitive, but though we came from the same litter, I didn’t share that. I was drawn to metal: I could smell it in the earth like the dinner cooking. I’d taken a lot of people to the metal lines, and they’d mined them, too. The town was famous for it: bracelets and cuffs, earrings made out of the darksilver substance. I never used to wear it – it interfere
d too much, in what I was seeking. But now, the time of my dying, it did not matter and I wore a ring of it in my ear and one on my finger. Vanity perhaps, in a woman so old, long past any attraction to men or her own sex, and yet it felt good to wear it, after so much denial. In my youth I’d been considered a beauty, but that doesn’t matter when you grow old. I still had a sharp enough wit and a readiness to laugh and that makes men look past the face. Make them laugh enough and you’ll keep them, whilst beauty fades and grows quiet. But this wasn’t a time for wit or beauty. I was alone, the town silent behind me, the mountains ahead. I turned my back to my home and went on.

  By noon, I had already reached the foothills of the Otrade. It was slow going, with the tracks obscured by snow and the rocks slippery with ice, but I was in no hurry. I took it step by step, until I reached a stone outcrop, jutting high above the valley, and then I stopped and finally looked back.

  By now, my breath was wheezing in my chest and it hurt. I didn’t know whether this was a premonition of the sickness that would, eventually, kill me, or simply a sign of age.

  The satahrach had not been clear about the nature of my death, saying simply that he had looked into my lungs with the aid of the fire and that they were diseased, gone beyond any help his herbs might give me. But I already knew the truth myself. I’d woken too often in the night, my breath rasping, my throat tightening as though a hand had closed around it, the nightmare sense of something huge and heavy crouching at the end of the bed. I dimly remembered being a very small child, and feeling the same sensation, although since we retain so little of our childhoods, I thought I might be making this up. I remembered more than most, after all. Whatever the case, I didn’t speak of this to anyone except the satahrach. I did not want the clan’s pity nor its care. No fuss. Someone in the family always fusses and nothing annoys me more. So I endured the night terrors as best I could, took the herbs that the satahrach gave me, and gradually, as they failed to work, accepted that the time of my death was at hand. And now I was here, in the high cold hills, looking forward to it, because I would be with her again.