by E D Ebeling
At the vengeful dying year.
Cut their throats to make them rasp
And break their backs to make them writhe.
Teach them how to dance while they die,
To scream and stamp before the scythe.
The blooms at dusk all rattle their hulls,
Ugly now, and bones stripped bare.
Proud behind their grinning skulls,
They scorn the vengeful, dying year.
Though their thankless young have scattered,
They know how the seasons run––
The freezing scythe, the thickening blood,
The fearsome, resurrected sun.”
“That’s the most morbid Yule song I’ve ever heard,” Sarid said.
“So?” He sat in the snow next to her. His dark eyes and mouth looked like checks in his white face. “Yule is a morbid time of year.”
“We ought to make light of the longest night. Otherwise we should all be very depressed.”
“But then,” he said leaning forward, his breath cold on her ear, “then you draw further and further away from the point of Yule––fury, death and despair. There’s grandeur in it, in a never-ending night.”
“There’s bigger grandeur in the sun rising the next morning.”
“Resurrection is only as grand as the death before it.” He had the hart’s antlers on his head. He looked very handsome, like a forest leshy.
“You look very handsome in your antlers,” she said.
“You look ravishing in your albatross.” He pulled her up to dance.
***
Later in the year Aleksei taught Sarid how to become a gust of north wind by eating cloudberries frozen in hen’s milk, and how to become a gust of west wind by blowing air into a toad raised by stoats.
She remembered the first time. She stood on a cliff above a sea of black trees and sighed. Her tongue became a lick of dust and her breath blew the dust out her mouth. Her body followed after. She rematerialized (slammed, rather) against the wall of an abandoned hut some miles away.
Everything seemed fine––until she looked down and saw that her head was on backwards. Aleksei came soon after and set it right.
She learned many things that winter: how to summon powerful saebels and bind them to her will; how to manipulate her enna, and cast glamors over herself and the land. She was mad enough that she could do most of it naturally.
Savvel learned things, too. His nightmares brightened, become something else. Aleksei went often into his mind, pulling the sun with him, and Sarid could only guess what the two of them were growing.
She didn’t wonder overmuch; her father kept her occupied, all the time showing her things and taking her places.
One of these was the Kindeaghllechgonaidh: a small, round mountain whose foot was always hidden in mist. The Eyonav, folk called it in proper language.
The mountain was covered in huge firs with trunks hard and grey as granite. As Sarid and her father climbed, it seemed as though they were on a last hump of land in a grey sea of cloud.
At the very top, under the oldest firs, was a platform of crumbling stone. Upon this platform lay seven or eight people wrapped in cloaks. Travelers, Aleksei called them.
Sarid went up to them and saw that some were so old their faces and clothes had worn away. And some seemed newly asleep, their skin lined and porous, their clothes patched and frayed. She touched one and felt stone. They were all stone.
They had preserved their bodies so they could travel in the Aebela, Aleksei told her. Worlds of the mind, parallel universes. Some for many thousands of years.
“How?” Sarid asked.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because I should like to try it sometime.”
Aleksei raised his brows. “Ought I to tell you? I’ve never done it. It may be painful.”
“I’ve experienced pain.”
His eyes lost some of their manic light. “You climb onto the platform right as the last evening light disappears. The light takes you with it. I don’t know where.”
“And my body would turn to stone?”
Aleksei ran his hand over the chipped nose of a little girl. “Yes.”
“How do they wake?”
“Someone else has to wake them.”
She was intrigued, and told Savvel about it. They decided they would very much like to see a body turn to stone at sunset, so they made plans to capture some creature and try it.
They forgot for a while, busying themselves with other things. Until two saebels, Tilderog Fat and Tilderog Skinny, caught just such a creature wandering around the bottom of an old quarry.
Sarid wasn’t sure what sort of natural force had gone into making the Tilderogs Fat and Skinny. They were little wizened karzeleki, with long gnarled hands that looked as though they could crush stone. One had fat thumbs that dug runnels through the ground, and one had long nails that made mulch of the underbrush.
One day Sarid and Savvel were lighting fires under the pines to make them pop, when Tilderogs Fat and Skinny shuffled out of the woods, moving rubble around with their big hands and dragging behind them a very peculiar looking creature.
It looked almost like a person. Except that it couldn’t have been, because its feet were made of bent branches laced with leather.
Aleksei’s daughter, said Tilderog Skinny, this evil thing has strayed into our brugh. We can’t decide what it is.
We think it is a bukavac sent by Ogher of the Black Pool, said Tilderog Fat.
Or else a big mudskipper caught in a fish trap, said Tilderog Skinny.
“It looks like a birch mavka who’s eaten a horse,” said Savvel.
“I’m not a saebel, my lord,” said the creature.
“Not a saebel!” said Savvel. “I’ve never seen such unnatural feet on a person.”
“They’re snowshoes––”
“Snowshoes?”
Tilderogs Fat and Skinny tugged on the creature’s legs. “My lady,” it shrieked, “oh my lady, stop them, they’re hurting me––”
“What’s this?” said Sarid. “I’m not a lady. I’m Queen under the Dark Mountain. You’ve driven it insane, Tilderog. Bring it here.” The Tilderogs dragged it by its gigantic feet to where Sarid stood. It cowered there for a moment and then loosened the cords around its legs and pulled the feet off.
“You see?” It started crying. “I’m not a saebel. Don’t you recognize me, my lady?” It pulled its cowl off, revealing a nest of golden curls.
“Saebels don’t cry,” observed Savvel.
“Look at these.” Sarid yanked the curls. “Did you steal gold from my father’s trees, wicked creature?”
“It’s my hair.” It pulled the hood back up. “Don’t you know me? I was your lady’s maid, and I’ve come to fetch you back. Your sister, she’s stealing children from the village, and when they come back they’re not right in the head. And she eats songbirds, folk in the kitchens say, and I think it’s something to do with––”
“It chitters like a mad sparrow,” said Savvel.
“And your brother, my lord,” the creature said, “he flogs them cruelly, them that speak out, that don’t go south. And some disappear. My uncle disappeared when they took his girl and he went up to the hall with our butchering knife––but we’re not allowed weapons, and he’s gone, dead we fear.”
“Creature,” said Sarid, “you won’t have so many worries when you’re traveling in the Aebela and your body’s a stone. Bring her to the Eyonav,” she said to Tilderog and his brother, “and bind her to the platform.”
***
When rills of violet had spilled from chasms, and flooded the valleys, and the top of the Eyonav shone like a lump of gold in the late sun, Sarid and Savvel climbed the mountain.
The Tilderogs had bound the creature with spiny brambles, and placed it on the stone platform.
They stood by as the light slipped off its legs. And finally only its hair was lit, a fizz of gold, and Sarid fanci
ed the rest of it, the pale, wet face and skinny limbs, looked stony enough already. She heard sobbing, and her mood became sad rather than eager. She thought to herself that she did good by the poor, unhappy thing.
But she turned and saw the sobbing came from Savvel. “Don’t let’s do this,” he said. “It reminds me of someone. My mother.”
She didn’t like to see Savvel sad. She made the Tilderogs Fat and Skinny untie the creature and carry it down the mountain. There they let it go. Sarid kept the snowshoes to show to her father.
“Fascinating.” Aleksei plucked at the laces. “Did it say where it got them? I should like a pair of my own.”
“No,” said Sarid, “but it squawked and gibbered, mostly about birds. Songbirds and children.”
“Songbirds and children?” Her father put his foot on the snowshoe, and broke the laces. “Sounds like the Smick.” He picked up the broken snowshoe and looked at it with a nostalgic expression. “I did it once. Smicked a a girl in Pengrava. But she clung to me, and I grew sick of her and gave her to the Maids of Heartache who punish bad men.” He tossed the snowshoe behind him.
“What’s the Smick?” asked Sarid.
“You eat the heart of a baby bird, and put your mouth to a child’s ear, and suck and suck, and pull the stubborn blind trust out of his head. After this he dies because he doesn’t trust food enough to eat it. When the trust is still in your mouth, you put your mouth on someone else’s mouth, and breathe the trust into her. And she imprints on you like a bird. And follows you like a shadow and scorns everyone else.”
“I rather think Savvel’s Smicking me,” said Sarid.
“I detest that accusation,” said Savvel. He threw a stone at a scolding jay.
***
Some time after this Aleksei stopped going into Savvel’s head. Sarid went instead. It was fascinating; the sun was red and the lakes violet, and irony hid beneath every grand thing and made it tremble.
When Savvel was troubled he would cast snow off mountains and flood valleys. When he was content snow would fall and fall, and the two of them would lie buried under it like two giants sleeping at the warm center of the earth. She thought it all extraordinarily amusing.
There came a time when Savvel was able to pick, as one chooses clothes from a drawer, the particular madness that suited him on a particular day.
It was late winter. Sarid had just come into his head, and they were standing under three pear trees on a high hill. The late sun shone through the trees, and all around and far below a thorny winter forest stretched in all directions. She felt the cold more keenly than usual, and looked down at herself.
“I’m naked.”
Savvel moved his mouth wordlessly for a few seconds. “I didn’t do it.”
“Yes you did,” she said.
There was wildness in the sharp blue grass, dripping like dew off the yellow pears. She was colored in wildness, shaped by it.
Savvel looked away, as though uninterested. She thought it silly, and walked up behind him and put her hand on his back. He tensed under her palm.
She pulled his breeches down.
She turned him around and ripped his shirt off, and his baldric. It wasn’t hard. “Does it make you happy,” she said, dropping the rags, “that you’re much bigger than you act?”
“You’re horrible.” He picked the baldric up and put it back on. “And a horrible dancer. I wanted so badly to break your legs.” He frowned, with a fuzzy look. “Can’t remember when that was.”
“Your restraint was incredible.”
“One of us had to be the prince.”
She grabbed the knot of his hair. They put their heads together, and he stumbled and knocked her over. He pinned her to the ground. The grass tickled her, and she laughed so hard he put a hand over her mouth. “Try, try away,” he said. She bit his hand away, so she could kiss him properly. He put his hand somewhere else, and she gasped, pushing her hips against him. He slipped himself in, and she put bruises all over him.
He lost his clothes in the weeks following––shirt, breeches, boots––until only his belt and baldric were left. He liked them there because she could catch him by them, he said. It was marvelous being caught by a belt.
He ran through the woods, manhood slapping against his thighs, leather against his chest, and when she caught him his skin was all over welts.
She picked the thorns from his sides, and he braided her hair with moss and cut pictures into her skin.
Whenever he was sad, and he did become inexplicably sad sometimes, she sang to him over and over the only song she knew:
A red moon sets. My leman falls
Into the sweet sap of his rose.
I rest my heart against his mouth,
And down the crimson wave he goes.
He draws him well beneath the tide
For certain rescue to forestall,
And when he pulls himself ashore,
He tells me, ‘we, love, have it all.’
A blue moon slides beneath the sea,
Into a place of frozen sleep
We share our limbs, and forge one soul
Out of the burning wounds we keep.
And should the frost break through our guard,
And blight the rose with bitter pall,
We’ll keep us warm in our one skin,
And whisper, ‘we, love, have it all.’
She loved every part of him. His skin, so easily made purple; his eyes like eclipses; his hair, matted into stiff, black felt; his lips, the blood.
She liked it best in his head. He was stronger than her there. She could slam against him and rough him up without hurting him. He could force her to do things, which was something she hadn’t experienced with anyone except her sister.
***
One day in the early spring they were tangled together between two rocks, and Sarid was staring at the sky.
“What are you thinking?” he said. His face changed in her mind, became more boyish. His beard disappeared, and his hair loosened from its mats and became a ruddy brown.
“Nothing.” But he knew.
His face darkened. He pried her away, got up, and left.
She didn’t see him again for two months. It was unbearable.
Eighteen
Spring came. The earth blushed with flowers, and the snow sank into the ground in sullen, muddy dapples. Turgid rivers rushed down to the plains, carving cracks deeper into the hills.
Gryka came back first. It was midday and Sarid was catching trout with her bare hands (they were still sluggish from the winter), and she felt the dog’s snout in her hand. She looked up. Water foamed around Gryka’s belly. The dog wagged her tail, flinging drops about, and Sarid tried to remember when Gryka had left her. She couldn’t.
She gave a fish to Gryka. She stamped on another one with her heel, and she and Gryka lay on their stomachs and ate.
Savvel came back a day later, with a goddess.
Sarid was planting witch-hazel sticks in a circle in the ground, so the rain would know where to fall when she called it. She stank and needed a bath. Gryka stank too––she’d rolled in the fish skins yesterday, so Sarid took her by the scruff and dragged her into the circle.
Sarid said the words and the rain fell in a sheet, glinting in the sun like glass. She tilted her head back and let it beat against her.
She saw behind the shower two figures: one small and the other like a tower of thunderclouds.
She moved out of the rain with her dog. Water fell off her face and naked skin.
Savvel stood before her, and the goddess next to him. Her eyes were fire, and there was a diamond in her forehead, a dark eye that cast dread over Sarid and turned her insides to liquid. Gryka barked. The goddess looked at the dog with her fiery eyes, and the dog jerked from Sarid’s hands and crawled dripping under an elder bush.
Sarid saw immediately that Savvel was a captive, his eyes frightened, his lips bloodless. He said, “She’s become very powerful.” He held his han
d out to her. “Do you know me, Ida?”
“She’s enslaved you,” said Sarid.
“No, she hasn’t.”
“There’s a collar around your neck.” There was. White, made of cloud.
The goddess said, “Could we tie her up?” Her voice boomed through Sarid’s body, shaking the water off her.
Sarid forced herself to look fully on the goddess, and she saw it.
It was a glamour: a thunderous, cacophonous glamor, but thin as vellum, and hiding behind it a mere girl.
It was shoddily done, a damaged net barely closing round the girl’s spirit. Sarid reached out, untangled it, and pulled it off. The glamor sparkled in the air like a brittle snow, and then dissolved.
The goddess was just a sour-faced girl. “You’ve taken it off me.” She began to cry big, ugly tears, and Sarid couldn’t stand it. She put a hand around the girl’s neck. She squeezed the long throat, and the girl’s hands scratched pitifully at Sarid’s, her eyes wide and bloodshot.
Savvel said in Sarid’s ear, “Sweetheart, let go. She has no more power.”
As if there were a strength in his words she must obey, she loosened her hands. He took them in his own. “What did she do?” she said.
“Come into my head and I’ll tell you.”
She squeezed his hands and she was in his head.
It was a trap.
He turned into a hard brown monster with golden eyes, and Sarid howled and beat at him with her fists. He’d stolen her power. She came up to his breast; she felt as if he’d chopped her head off. She turned to run. He picked her up and she was sick all over his chest.
“I’m sorry,” he said, but he still held her in his arms. He began walking away, walking like a mountain beneath her, and Gryka ran around them, barking. “We’ll take you someplace to wait until you’re well.”
The sky moved over her, and the trees and hills, and they brought her into a mean, dark place––a cave, or dugout––and bound her to a post. They tortured her with hot water and sticks. Bats flew in and out, and always the monster that used to be Savvel sat before her and watched her.