‘More about the man. He is Olchibe?’
‘From Northland Gech – the desert over the mountains. The other men she canoodled with took other women and passed on the seed. But this man, Ipeyek he’s called, was the first with her. He’s done nothing with it since. He wanders about, half crazy. But he survived the Death in the Ruk, and he carries the seed. The next woman he has, she’ll swell with it and birth you a hero. I’ve been driving him here, the way I used to drive the deer along before my second death. It’s taken me a time, Mother. Normally I have to be somewhere else.’
All out of turn, Hevonhib whispered, ‘Where?’
Guri glanced at her. ‘That place,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask me. You wouldn’t care to hear of it.’
‘Is it where we all must go?’ cried the youngest girl of eleven.
The Crax turned her head, but did not chide either of them.
‘You?’ he said. ‘No. You’ll never be where I am. None of you.’
His face was riven now.
One must be tactful with the dead. You saw they already had enough to put up with.
‘Guri, I thank you for your gift of this man. We’ll watch for him. The Urrowiy of the far north are not our people, but near enough to Olchibe. What in return, Guri?’
‘Keep my name,’ he said. His eyes were blazing with desperate unhappiness and hope. ‘Keep my name in Olchibe.’
‘Whoever is the mother,’ said the Crax, ‘this son shall bear your name, Guri. Great Gods witness me.’
‘Amen,’ they said. All of them.
In the air the fire fluttered as Guri winked out of the world like a morning star.
Ipeyek who had been the first, if unofficial, husband of Chillel staggered into the sluhtin the next day.
He had tried in a futile way to live life after the White Death as he had in his hirdiy in the Uaarb desert. Lacking dogs or transport he still roamed in oval treks over the same terrain, only wandering out of the areas after fresh game. He met no one human, and if ever he came on a village or stead, kept clear of it. Men had been heavily weeded from the south-east region in any case.
Ipeyek was profoundly affected by his recent experiences. He had no true means of expression for this profundity. Sometimes he drew strange abstract shapes in the snow, or saw others inscribed on the face of the moon by clouds.
When two years had almost ended, Ipeyek began to be plagued by a spirit.
He knew what it was, and attempted to see it off – but though he had been thought priestly among his priestless hirdiy, he was no match for this thing. Also, the bones of his ancestors were a quarter of the continent away in the Uaarb, with the wives and children whom he had deserted.
Ipeyek’s ploys and snares did not disperse the spirit.
One evening it sat down at his fire.
It did not have the appearance of a man, and yet something was there in it, something masculine and of humanity. To this, despite his aversion, Ipeyek was susceptible.
A white blob, it lurked across the fire. Then it seized a bit of the meat off the botched skewer and slurped it. The meat declined, repellently, through the non-substance of the spirit, and landed on the snow – and who could eat it now? But the spirit seemed to have enjoyed the repast.
Then it vocalized.
‘You’ve come from the Rukar city. You lived through the Death and the dust. You’re Gech. I’ve seen you about the Gullahammer – you brought the black woman, Chillel.’
Ipeyek sat gaping and dismayed.
The spirit went on, ‘You haven’t screwed a girl since.’ Ipeyek started – the verb offended him almost as much as the crudity. But ‘No,’ went on the spirit, ‘I can discover it in you like a dark jewel. Go north then. Go into Olchibe. You’re not theirs, but you’ll do.’
Ipeyek threw a chunk of hard kindling at the spirit. Like the meat it sailed straight through.
Even so, the apparition faded. Next day it was back. The spirit overtly chased Ipeyek across the snow, uphill and down, over frozen waters and under ice-locked boughs where fruits hung in pods of coldness. Around the outer boundary of the Rukar calamity the spirit herded Ipeyek. Always north.
Ipeyek knew this was his penance for survival.
Then he stumbled into the sluht camp, and beheld they expected him – or someone.
Five days he lay, mostly unconscious and reasonably at peace, under a sloping roof of tent and snow and tree boughs, tinted orange and cerise from measureless smokes.
Then food came, water and alcohol. And then a lovely butter-coloured girl, her hair unbound and scented with spice.
She lay beside him and fed him slivers of thawed roasted pineapple. It was full of fibres which gently she prised from his lips and teeth.
In the end he was soothed. The spice, and the incense she had flung on the fire-pot, roused him.
‘I on you?’ he inquired, in the honourable manner of the Uaarb.
‘Do all you will,’ said she.
She was Hevonhib, sixteen years and a virgin, and a Crarrow, longing for a child of night.
Ipeyek obeyed. At the end, he simply murmured, ‘Wife.’
They were married. And she was pregnant.
Fundamentally, that was how it stood, near the end of the second year. The lands above the barrier of the southern mountains of Kraagparia were emptied. As the capital of the Ruk, such as it now was, moved into the far west and became Kol Cataar, the south-eastern villages, towns and estates dwindled. In the tracts of snow you might come on a deserted stead or towered mansion, caked in ice and blind with cold, its surrounding fields of dormant grain long since rotted black, and wild deer and elephant feeding in the last of the humpbacked orchards.
Where everyone had gone was something of a mystery. Though many had died at Ru Karismi, or in surrounding places that the White Death enveloped, outlying villages that the Death had not touched even so lay vacant, the lairs often for packs of pale wolves.
South and west, the village of Stones had also been entirely vacated. Or almost entirely.
A woman lived on there, at first with two aggrieved servants, but they finally ran off. Then she lived there by herself.
Each day she would wend her way to the village ice-grove, and shake down or snap off icicles for water. She would take a turn round the houses built of tree trunks and ice-brick, observing how they deteriorated. Her own, which had been the lodging-house of the village, was too by then in poor repair.
When wolves meandered through the village, she took shelter indoors. But they were timid enough, and kind to each other, unlike the lean solitary black wolves of the upper west and north.
There was a store of food. It kept, of course, in the endless winter. The villagers had brought her this provender, and voyaged away over the snow on their slederies drawn by long-necked sheep. They even left her one of these lamasceps, which was in milk. They knew she would not have to soil her white hands with milking it, but could employ magecraft, being a witch as well as royal.
She had asked them with slight concern where they were going. They told her north-eastward, perhaps even to the Marginal.
Although she had not informed them of anything she might have witnessed in her scrying mirror, still they seemed to know some horrible event had overtaken the capital, that it must be avoided, and that this part of the world was now worth nothing.
The woman put back her long black tresses and they acknowledged her as very beautiful and completely useless to them, both of which she was. But not only was she a witch, she had been a queen in Ru Karismi, so they bowed as they went away.
A bizarre thing happened that night. The woman who had been a queen woke up weeping – not for herself, but for the villagers and the Ruk.
Maybe it was the only time in her life this far that Jemhara had felt another’s pain or loss. She seemed to have learned it through her own.
Now and then, if there were no wolves, Jemhara would go to visit the eldritch Stones themselves. She would pause awhile, watching them gleam
with their internal lighting, turquoise, rosy, ashen, one burning up like a candle, then the next, the next, until all fifty of them flamed and the bleak dusk was coloured over. They seemed to have grown bigger.
Perhaps only in her personal perception.
By that savage light, and in her shape-changed form of a black hare, he had caught her, her lover, the magician Thryfe.
Never before had either of them truly desired or loved. Overwhelmed, they coupled for some incalculable time inside Thryfe’s southern house, until time itself had coalesced and blocked them in. When the sorcerous stasis gave way he had loathed and hated her, for during the days and nights of their sexual trance Ru Karismi had let loose its psychic arsenal and thousands of lives had been smashed.
He had cast her out, and she had gone. When she dared to wander back in the darkness, his house was again sealed, now only by impassable magic, and Thryfe had ridden towards the city.
Jemhara saw what he found there. She saw it in blurred and shaking images that bubbled over her scry-glass and eventually broke it in fragments. But for all the horror and despair she had seen, Thryfe she could never locate. He was Magikoy, a Master, and her enemy: naturally therefore she would never see him, either in any mirror, or ever again in life.
At last she stopped going up to his house. Its towers by then were webbed in spun ice. Some weird noise rang inside it on and on, now loud, now vague, possibly the echo of his rage and grief.
All her days she had been a schemer, even a murderess. But these deeds had really come about through the actions and wants of others. Thryfe, however, wrongly believed she had set out to trap him. It was a fact, he of all the Magikoy might have prevented Armageddon in the Ruk. And by discovering him, by loving him, she had kept him from it.
Late in the second year, Jemhara dreamed of Thryfe. It was not the occasional repeating dream she had in which he came towards her with a sword to kill her, and she stood her ground in dread and misery to let him. In this new dream she saw him suspended – hanging upside down in the claws of long steel chains. His eyes were open wide, brutish with agony. All around him was a limbo of incoherent dimness. She woke with a jump, unable to breathe and gasping. When she had recovered herself, still she did not know what had happened to him, or where he was, or whether even his plight were literal or a cipher of his mental state – let alone if the nightmare showed anything actual. Yet somehow it seemed to her he had allowed her to receive this dream.
Until then she had understood he was forbidden to her. She apprehended this not only as a woman but as a sorcerous sensitive, for his overruling must be supreme – he was by far the greater mage. But, following the dream, something flowed back into her like clean blood into a bloodless heart.
That day Jemhara made magic, there in the moaning, snow-leaking guest-house.
As she would not be able, even by witchcraft, to see him with her waking eyes, instead she conjured a creature out of the air.
It was a rat-spirit, intelligent and quite eloquent in its own tongue. Jemhara had enough skill to translate its phrases. She offered it a dish of meat cooking on a brazier, and for a while it pranced about in the smoke, drawing in sustenance or only nasal enjoyment.
But when she made her demand, it listened couthly, its rat hands folded.
‘Him to find? Him is mage. Is easy not.’
‘You have partaken of the meat. Do as I say.’
The rat vanished in a trail of the smoke it had dragged with it to devour.
Such beings came of some spillage of the entity-consciousness of all their kind. It could therefore detect any of the findings of that kind. Rats ran everywhere and in many guises, big rats and small, icenvels and scrats.
It reappeared in the twilight.
‘City,’ said the rat-spirit.
‘Which?’ prudently inquired Jemhara.
‘How I know? Walls is there and runnels. Ground have little wink things as colours is.’
Jemhara drew breath.
She had seen in her scryer, before it exploded, the tinted glass of Ru Karismi dewing the streets.
‘High up in the city or low?’
‘See not.’
‘Beneath the city?’ Her voice was less than a breath.
The rat-spirit considered judicially. Then it spoke a name it could not know, yet did, so powerful was the name, and now so awful. ‘Insularia.’
Free of the upsetting ghost, Ipeyek soon established himself among the people of the sluhtin.
He had learned to speak all languages as part of the boon – or trauma – of surviving the White Death. He correctly treated the elders, was good to the kiddles, and seemed appreciative of the women, especially Hevonhib.
Ipeyek was also a hunter of consummate ability.
Definitely, twice-dead Guri had done the sluhtin some favours, and no doubt Ipeyek too. For Ipeyek had not wished to go home to the Uaarb, having become another person than the one he had been there. Olchibe suited him.
Hevonhib grew very large very fast. In her third month she was like a woman in her eighth, and in the fourth month her time came. It was as if this child, having been delayed so long by Ipeyek’s continence, meant to hurry now.
Hevonhib was a Crarrow. She did not shriek. With the help of Piamtak and her coven sisters she left her body, and only sat astride it, assisting it and the baby to separate. This was safely accomplished in the pre-dawn hour.
A perfect boy, black as iron against fire, he undid his eyes and plainly saw them all, and everything.
A month after, as this year of never-ending winter drew to a close, unheralded as always now by anything other than some markers on a calendar of stone kept by the Crarrowin, the boy was already crawling and sometimes trying to walk, nor so unsuccessfully. He could already say a few words, and when he was told he was called Guri, that was Star Dog, he smiled and said the name over and over. Despite that, as the next months passed and he got up and strode around, read the words woven on the blankets and rugs in the sluhtin, laughed and leapt like a boy of ten, a finish was, almost inadvertently, added to his name. Guriyuve became his ultimate cognomen. Piamtak said, ‘I don’t believe he will mind it, that undead warrior, to have his own name wedded to that of the Great One my husband, whom Guri loved so.’
The journey was to be extensive. Jemhara prepared for it as the year concluded. In the city there would have been a festival, but she was here and on her own. She would not even waste a candle on the dying year – after all, each year was precisely like all others, a slab of winter leading to another such slab. Yet it occurred to her she was twenty-one. Time had gone by.
She found a slederie and attached the female lamascep to it in the way the villagers had done. Jemhara was light in build, but with provisions it would be a hard haul for a single sheep. Jemhara thought she would let it go at any reasonable settlement they came to.
On the morning of departure the sky was a thin clear blue.
She had noticed the night before, in her agitation unable to sleep, a vivid constellation in the sky. A decided shape was picked out in bright clusters of stars, presumably by the god Ddir, the Star-Placer. It was like an ice-iris, the petals folded open. It reminded her too of some Other thing. She did not know what. Perhaps it boded well.
The land-raft of the slederi jounced along, the female lamascep gamely pulling. Often Jemhara got out to walk, leading the sheep. Coming here at the order of King Vuldir, her evil genius, the ride had been quite swift, even if she thought it was not. But she had then been riding in a lashdeer-drawn slee, with every comfort.
They went on, and on. The days were blue and transparent, the nights lighted with stars, and at evening with the starry iris.
If I can reach him, she thought, there in the totally inaccessible Insularia of the Magikoy beneath Ru Karismi – he will spurn me. I can be no help to him. Perhaps we shall both die. An old song of her childhood rippled through her brain: By all the winds that never blew, I sing of you.
His anger made no odds. O
n she went.
Whenever she stopped, Jemhara melted ice for water with a silent flicker of her will, and created fire. She and the sheep stayed near it. She was sorry for the sheep, but it was healthy and its milk had finished. Probably it did not mind some exercise, or the warmed grains she put out for it to eat.
One night a tribe of elephant roamed near, some twenty or so beasts. They paid no attention to firelit Jemhara and the sheep, but moved in all around them. Woolly, grey-white animals, they puffed and snorted like pigs, she thought. The smell of them, dungy, grassy from the dormant plants they could, with their tusks and long trunks, unearth, gave a curious solace. How terrible it was, she who had been heartless and shallow, to leave her callousness behind. To become what she must.
By her reckoning it was forty days later when she saw the ramshackle village, planked in against the roots of an ice-crag. Forest statically tumbled from the top, porcelain-white plantains and eucalypts that clung all down the cliff. The village surrounded a tiny hot spring, fringed with stunningly green ferns. No wonder they had not run away like the rest.
The men who came out had the mottled skins of the eastern Ruk, and they brought a single sibull with them, a woman of middle years, who took one look at Jemhara and declared, ‘Give she what her wants.’
Jemhara slept that night in a snowhouse heated by a stove, having bathed in hot, hot water. She had realized she had strayed too far to the east. Tomorrow she must regain her bearings. However, they familiarly knew of Ru Karismi here. They spoke of it in awe and distrust.
In the morning she gave them the lamascep and they were pleased, as was the sheep, whose milk had already come back during the cosy night.
The sibull appeared at Jemhara’s door.
‘How will her get on, undrawn?’
Jemhara said she had other means of mobility.
The witch nodded and said she had seen Jemhara was one of the mage caste. Then she invited Jemhara to meet the village goddess.
Jemhara did not want to waste the time, but politely she agreed. Partly she thought she was secretly glad of these excuses for delay – her gods knew what she would have to confront in the doomed city. Besides, she had made up her mind on how she would travel the rest of the route. It was cunning, and dangerous. Half an hour more before she must do it was welcome.