Vamireh

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  The shroud came apart, however. A pale silhouette emerged. He looked around with the tranquility of his great courage, and saw that the avalanche was not very deep. Already he was sweeping it away, causing heads coiffed in snow to appear; his trumpet excited the courage of those still buried. Thanks to their huddling together, the surface to be cleared was restricted; soon, almost all of them were in the open—and during that rescue of specters in the bosom of the interminable snow, Tholrog embraced Irkwar. “The villages shall hear of your courage!”

  Irkwar returned the hug; he was emotional and troubled; there was a powerful fraternity in his blue gaze.

  Meanwhile, Dithèv touched Tholrog’s shoulder, saying: “Hogioé…and Eyrimah?”

  Tholrog shivered. He looked toward the place where he thought he had last seen the two young women. The snow was deep and compact there. “There!” he said. With one bound, he was there, digging with his hands, aided by everyone else.

  “Nothing!”

  Fraternity, love and mortal anguish were amalgamated in his soul. He went on digging, and uttered a loud cry. He drew out a body—Hogioé!

  Numb with cold, the young woman was reanimated. “Eyrimah is in there!”

  Irkwar and Tholrog succeeded in reaching the stranger and extracting her from the sepulcher. She was weak, but not unconscious; the sight of her delicate face and beautiful eyes, powdered with silver, increased Tholrog’s emotion—and the warrior’s gaze said: I’m the one who has saved you again!

  Eyrimah could not support that gaze; she lowered her eyelashes. Tholrog sensed how much further from him this daughter of his own race was than the lacustrian girl, how much more confidently and tenderly Eï-Mor’s dark eyes had looked into his own.

  It was necessary to resume the painful march, continuing to clear a path through thicker snows. Fortunately, the avalanche had cleared the heights of the mountain. They found the route over the rock just as steep, but less treacherous—and they finally saw the cave of Môh appear, where they would be able to rest from their long anguish and great efforts.

  VI. Eyrimah and Eï-Mor

  It is night, in the caverns of Môh.

  Tholrog gets up, anxiously. The wind is making the snow and rock talk. Tholrog walks to the mouth of the cave, slides between the stones and moves aside the furs at the entrance. He is on an aerial promontory, as if posed in the glacial light that dresses the mountain crests and peaks, plunging into livid gulfs, heightening both the complexity and the mystery of the harsh landscape. The wind seems to be falling from the Moon.

  The Moon is posed on the western summits, mediating above a cloud, hollowing out a river of light on the ice, a seeming highway of mingled wind and moonlight. Everything replies and calls out to the plangency of that wind; everything weeps, threatens or sings over the gulf and the stone. It is as if the entire landscape is populated by immobile wild beasts, crouching or standing, asleep or lying in ambush.

  Tholrog is dreaming. His heart is young and full. It says things as enigmatic as the cold Moon, as tender as the water that flows underground and makes the rivers of the future one drop at a time.

  Eyrimah is within him—and Rob-Sen’s daughter too. They are like two delightful combatants; his soul is the field on which they are battling. Down there, where something trembled, where something has fallen, be it a lump of snow or a pebble, is that the pale girl or the dark girl? What does the Mountain think? What does the jagged edge of the Plateau say?

  The wind increases, and Tholrog receives its cold thrusts with delight. His thoughts are animated by every crescendo of the storm, and mingle with all the responsive echoes. Nature enters into him with the two young women.

  How supple she is in terror, the daughter of Rob-Sen! How warm, soft and fearful her eyes are, and how menacing her smile. When he held her, saving her from falling, when she trembled on the flesh of his bosom, when her hair fell around his neck, there was something that dominated the abyss and defied the peril of death.

  But what of Eyrimah! Her gaze does not meet Tholrog’s, even when she is afraid, even when he saves her. At the moment of peril, she draws further away from him. She does not hate him…but her white arms would not wrap around Tholrog’s neck, fleeing him fearfully.

  That makes Tholrog indignant. Is he not the one who saved her when she fled to the mountain? Should she not be his submissive and faithful slave? Anger beats within his breast. He wants the fugitive and he can have her. What does it matter whether she refuses, or is afraid?

  Then, suddenly, he does not want her. He chases her away, feeling a hatred full of generous pride rise up within him. It seems that Eyrimah is recoiling before Eï-Mor’s large indefinable eyes and her soft hair, resting upon Tholrog’s neck. He opens his heart wide to Rob-Sen’s daughter. She enters, victorious. A confused voice says that she will not flee, that in spite of terror and racial enmity, she will be able to come and give herself to him voluntarily.

  Tholrog is mollified; his pride is appeased. And on a narrow strip of pale ice between somber silhouettes, he seems to glimpse the dark-haired girl, the mystery of her swaying hips, as beautiful and harmonious as the song of April handed down by the ancestors. Then, once again, there is Eyrimah, with the delicate chin, white cheeks and proud gait…and the son of Talaun is more indecisive than the rains of spring.

  He continues his dream in the great counsel of winds and clouds, before the glaciers that extend into rivers, widening into deltas, pausing in lakes, great reservoirs of the waters of the Earth—and the visions of combat, flight and peril mingle, becoming confused with love, with the night and with the splendor of rocks eaten away by the drops of water, cleaved and carried away by the ice, with the crumbling, devoured grandeur of the immensity of holes and escarpments: the formidable ruin that is the mountain.

  The storm eased during the night; the following day was clear and fine. The mountain-dwellers continued scaling the heights. When a third of the day had elapsed, they reached the rim of a gorge that would lead them to practicable paths toward the villages. While they paused, Tahmen the scout and Irkwar went down to explore the route. They came back in a hurry.

  “The lake-dwellers are on our trail, and the route is blocked. We saw them 3000 meters further down, in a ravine—half a day away, given the twists and turns.”

  “We’ll go on to the Ariès’ lands, then,” Tholrog replied.

  A few hours later, the ascent having been concluded, it was necessary for them to descend again, perilously at first, crawling silently. Long columns of overhanging ice might have crumbled in response to excessive vibration. High walls of ice displaced a menacing splendor, their summits ablaze, their ridges decorated by the great luxury of the sunlight. Then they began to hear the delicate silvery and crystalline songs of subterranean water.

  After more crevasses, gulfs, snowfields and corridors of blocks they ended up going through redoubtable gorges where the threat of landslides was ever present. The mountain became more helpful, the springs rustled, the verdure of fir-trees and grass decorated the little valleys; stubborn lichens colored the rocks; the ice and snow only remained in a few shaded places. There was life, the play of insects in the pure air, the vivacity of little birds and small animals.

  All of them were saturated, indistinctly, with the same lukewarm joy. They turned to the harsh slopes, the magnificence of glaciers, the virginity of colossi; they felt the youth of their blood, the brightness of flowers, the swift flow of streams and torrents. Only Irkwar, perhaps, regretted the ice and the peril, the ferocity of the winds and avalanches lying in ambush.

  After a long trek, they camped that evening on the threshold of the plain, a few hours from the lands of the Ariès.

  The next morning, before the departure—while his companions were hunting—Tholrog went to bathe in a little stream. The weather was mild, especially after the cold days on the high slopes. When he came out of the water, he stood looking, with barbaric vagueness, at the patient and lively poem of existence: the whol
e of nature streaming, filtering, growing.

  He was moved. The muted rustle of the stream replied to his thoughts. In the interstices of a young poplar, the alliance of forests of oaks and clear oases of birches was visible in the distance; beech forests climbed up to vanquish them with their mortal shade, as throughout the North, annihilating the oaks and birches as they moved to assault the old sylvan citadels.

  Tholrog half-closed his eyes. In his warrior’s body, still agitated by strife and peril, the advent of lust was terrible. It flowed like the young torrents of spring. The vast landscape was only one episode therein. Lying in the meadow, caressed by the grass, he reopened his eyes to watch a ray of light or an insect settle. The tiny leaves were trembling; the long trunks of poplars curved like the slender stems of rushes—and Tholrog thought about the young women.

  They were there, a few meters away, behind the chestnut-trees. They were his captives. Their flesh was softer than moss, their eyes more profound than the scintillation of a star in the depths of a lake.

  He got up and walked toward the women’s shelter. Then a timidity prevented him from passing its limit. Standing on the strong rot of a chestnut, he could see his sisters and their companions moving around. He shuddered. His heart stopped like a stream before a dam.

  Eyrimah came to the edge of the wood. Distracted, she attached a thorn to her hair. She arrived thus in front of Tholrog, and the lightness of her step, the contour of her cheek, the mystery of her face and all her youth entered into him as he watched. For a moment, he stood still; then an invincible impulse made him walk toward her.

  “Eyrimah!”

  She stopped, her gesture manifesting alarm. The man’s gaze was authoritarian. She said nothing, full of a wild gentleness.

  “Although you fled into the mountains, am I not the one who put his hands on you and saved you from hunger and the beast?”

  “You are, Tholrog,” she replied, with a tremor.

  “I’m the one who saved you from the snow—am I not your master?”

  “You are my master.”

  She said it with sincerity; in her savage soul, she would have liked to obey his command, to bow down before his words and his warrior’s mouth—but she wanted to keep herself for another, for the dark-haired head and somber eyes of In-Kelg, the fearful and hidden joy of gazes meeting.

  “You shall be your master’s wife, Eyrimah!” said Tholrog.

  She became paler than the water-lilies of the lakes. In a troubled debate, she was the docile slave and the virgin; she had a womanly inclination to yield to force and the willful desire to retain the power of choice. Tholrog appeared to her, alternately, as a chief whose orders must be followed and an enemy who rules by the sword. None of that had any expression, any language for the poor girl. She recoiled, a large tear cooling her anxiety.

  “Come!” he said, imperiously.

  She did not move. He took her by the hand roughly. She felt that she was in the grip of an irresistible force, like a goat-kid seized by a lynx; the flow of her tears increased.

  “Why weep?” he cried, harshly. “Is Tholrog not strong enough for the slave of the cowardly men of the lake?”

  She had no reply ready—and, in truth, Tholrog’s argument seemed irresistible; he was brave, strong and victorious. In a bitter abandon, she felt unable to refuse, and followed her imperious master—but her tears redoubled again, and Tholrog stopped.

  He was overtaken by a strange sentiment. The struggle was not against Eyrimah. Tholrog did not feel the victory attached to his possession of the young woman so much as his defeat by a rival. The son of a proud race, he would rather that the image of the other be replaced in Eyrimah by his own image, or that he had actually killed his rival. At the same time, he felt disgust, weariness and hatred well up in him. He grasped Eyrimah’s arm more roughly—and his savage eyes dominated her.

  “You do not love your master, slave of the men of the water! Go—their race has corrupted your heart…the race of those that I crushed in the dry stream-bed!”

  Eyrimah was overtaken by a confused regret, a near-desire to love the man of her own race—but the more precise that desire became, the more she saw the dusks of Re-Alg, the strolls over the pilings, the curly-haired head waiting for her by the water.

  Tholrog looked into the young woman’s eyes, and knew that their gaze was elsewhere, and his proud disdain was mingled with the regret of having been vanquished in that white bosom and the brightness of those eyes.

  “Get away!” he cried. “You are merely a slave who must serve her master without looking at him!”

  After Eyrimah had gone, he remained sullen. He wanted battles, dangers. Irritatedly, he contemplated the tall centenarian chestnut-trees, the fresh grass and the forests of oaks battling against the beeches. The emptiness of the day of rest weighed upon his barbaric imagination. A cloud of insects accompanied him into the shade, a buzzing cloud, a thousand minuscule lives determined to follow him. He swept them away with a slow gesture; he breathed in the terrible odor of vegetation, which was not the odor of their love. The florets of thorn-bushes and pools, the white unconsciousness of wild fruit-trees, the aroma of wild thyme, and the vapor of the mountain torrents troubled Tholrog. Instinctively, he had returned to the women’s camp. He stood at the edge of the wood, behind a clump of raspberry bushes. A large white cloud cast a cool shadow there.

  Suddenly, he was aroused, as he had been by the arrival of Eyrimah. A languorous and supple form had appeared on the tender grass. It was Rob-Sen’s daughter, in her fiber tunic ornamented by freshly-picked flowers. She incarnated the beauty of foreigners, the profound charm of enemy women. Everything about her spoke of hostile blood: the blood of men who had chased the blond race into the mountains; the grim flesh that had wanted to kill Tholrog’s people, and whom Tholrog’s people had dreamed of annihilating for centuries. Before the prisoner, however, all hatred blossomed into charm. Virginal, she represented the joy of mingling with our own race those whom we find redoubtable, for the sake of the mystery of beauty.

  With slow steps, Tholrog came around the bush to meet the young woman. She was alarmed by his appearance, but not like Eyrimah. There was certainly a little dread mixed in with her anxiety, but there was also manifest curiosity, astonishment and the admiration of his strength. Her gaze was so mysterious to the man of the mountains, so soft and so redoubtable, and some unaccountable artistry of attitude caused the anger that was tormenting Tholrog to vanish.

  In the language of the lake-dwellers he said: “Do you miss the great lakes, daughter of Rob-Sen?”

  “Yes, I miss the great lakes.”

  “Before nightfall we shall find new lakes. Would you like that?”

  “I would like to see the lakes of my own tribe again...not those of my enemies.”

  “You will never see those of your own land again. You are Tholrog’s slave.”

  She opened her eyes wider. Sadness struggled there with something vague, confused and infinite. Tholrog took pleasure in looking into them, as into the water of a precipice, and also with a tenderness as profound as that one feels before little children.

  His bellicose spirit reacted against the soft languor, and, almost roughly, he said: “Tholrog will never give up the daughter of Rob-Sen!”

  Her dark eyes beneath their networks of lashes and her red lips expressed a regret full of reproach. Then a tender malice appeared around her eyelids, almost a challenge.

  “Tholrog would give up the daughter of Rob-Sen to save the prisoners of his own tribe.”

  “There will be no prisoners of my tribe. We and our friends, the Ariès, will take the lakes.”

  She bowed her head, as if beneath a yoke, remembering the massacre of the stream-bed. She was overcome by a frightful melancholy at the idea that Tholrog might do battle with Rob-Sen or In-Kelg—and yet, in her indecisive heart, she could not hate her master.

  “You are strong,” she said. “Rob-Sen is also strong—and our warriors cover ten lakes!”<
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  “We shall take the ten lakes!”

  This time she looked at him with a faint anger; rebellion appeared in her dark eyes.

  “No one knows the will of the gods!”

  Tholrog was intoxicated by the beauty of those wrathful eyes. He desired them even more ardently. “Your people’s hour has come,” he said.

  “The gods have not spoken,” she replied. Her somber gaze contained the plaint of the weak confronted by the abuse of the strong.

  Tholrog, with the divinatory insight of savage natures, perceived that impression. His generosity stirred, but haughtily. “Your people are cowards. They massacred their guests!”

  “Rob-Sen did not want that. Rob-Sen tried to save your people.”

  “Why not surrender the murderers to us?”

  “He could not!” she replied, energetically but without bravado. “Ver-Skag aroused the men, and the priest approved. Rob-Sen spoke at length on behalf of your people.”

  Through her words, as through a vapor, Tholrog saw Rob-Sen speaking for the mountain men, and he saw Rob-Sen’s son, who had caused Eyrimah to run away, his young curly head, his bold stance. He had wanted to kill him; he had challenged him mentally. Then again, he thought that his was the same blood as that of his captive. That calmed him; he placed his hand on Rob-Sen’s daughter. “If Rob-Sen becomes our prisoner, I will speak for him.”

  She shook her head. Her face expressed filial pride. “Rob-Sen will not be captured.”

  “Have the gods spoken, then?” he said, ironically.

  “The gods have not spoken, but Rob-Sen cannot be captured. He knows how to commit suicide.”

  At that thought, she softened. A feeble sob elevated her bosom. Her head fell back, like that of a warbler preparing to sing. Tholrog was considerably affected by that. Love took tender and protective forms within him. He felt the gentleness of certain powerful animals for a small creature taking refuge among them. He glimpsed the melancholy of the lost nest, the distant warm clutch.