There was a bothy of frozen wood, and in it – nothing.
‘She away,’ said the sibull, smugly.
Jemhara, still polite, asked what she should offer the absent goddess.
‘Nothing,’ said the sibull, ‘nothing, like all-nothing in here.’ She cackled. ‘But offer it genteel, lady, her like neat service.’
Jemhara elegantly scattered nothing on the floor of the bothy.
The sibull grinned, her mottles flushing a rich gravy red. ‘Her the goddess of wood. Take this.’
Jemhara saw the sibull had given her a little dry branch. Did it have any power? Doubtless not. Never mind. They parted the best of friends.
Over the snow, away from the crag and the village, a slim black hare went bounding.
Since puberty Jemhara had been capable of this. But he had taught her, cruelly and surely, that she must not lose herself in her shape-change, must keep always at least one iota of herself as guide.
To do it now was like her proof to Thryfe. She had been an apt pupil. She had earned the right – had she? – to save him alive.
Travelling in this manner, how swiftly she moved. Yet how huge, threatening and forbidding the terrain.
She foraged in the dusk through cracks in topsnow and ice, dredging up what she could. She skated through deer herds, who lifted their hooves over her, and only tried to kick her when she attempted to eat what they had already uprooted.
Unerringly now, the right direction drew her like a magnet. She ran flawlessly west and north towards the ruined city.
Lacy snow sprayed back from her, the stars burst like fruits of light, she dived uncatchable – more human witch than hare – between the paws of an astonished wolf, and fled on.
There was anyway no chance she could forget her human self, not now. She was only for him. Always for him. All caution mislaid, all doubts erased.
Thryfe – Thryfe – lover – lord …
FOUR
Vashdran entered the feasthall of Uashtab. It was very much as he recalled from Shabatu. A river divided it, black and deep under the high banks. Caverns yawned away on either side in white torch-flume.
The difference was specific. One table, vast enough to seat hundreds, had been spread on this near bank. It contained the remembered bisecting tributary, which splashed along, stocked no doubt as the other had been with fish and small vicious dragons. All the men filled up the one table, now sitting both sides of it. They were drinking and eating the dainties that gauze-clad women brought them.
On the river’s other side there was no similar table.
Nothing was there, only a cave of darkness.
The men of the army or Gullahammer or whatever it was supposed to be banged goblets on the table to welcome him. Vashdran, the Saraskuld. He must, apparently, receive this tribute, though he had issued no orders and done nothing spectacular by his own assessment. He was no king here. He was no commander here. Empty show, like some echo from another place.
Heppa and Kuul came up to him, dressed in their glamorous armour.
‘Vash! Come eat.’
He sat down among them.
He had a sense of dire immanence, some bad extraordinary thing which drew close.
But it seemed he was alone in that. Or maybe it was only for him.
Certainly he had come to the hall to face it. For it was no use hiding. Not here, not now, never ever again.
The chat, the food and wine went round him, and the black rivers went along the table, and below. The men became very noisy. Huge roasts and cakes appeared. The women attendants, most likely made in the walls of Uashtab as the other women had been in Shabatu’s walls, permitted themselves to be fondled, pulled down. Vashdran scanned the table’s length. Of the mageia Ruxendra there was no sign, but he had expected none, not here. No free woman, even if dead, would sit alone in such male company.
One tense, shadowed expression there was. Curjai’s.
He looked at Vashdran, then away.
Vashdran got up. Heppa protested, and Vashdran patted Vormish Heppa, who never spoke like a Vorm, on the metal shoulder. Vashdran walked along the table to Curjai’s place.
‘What now?’
‘None of the enemies we beat are here. Do you see?’
‘No. How perceptive you are, Curjai.’
‘Yet they are.’
‘A riddle,’ said Vashdran. He leaned smiling over Curjai.
Curjai raised his head. ‘Don’t you know yet? The same city, the same palace. The same war – and the ones we fought, also the same. They were us. They were ourselves. Oh, not every man,’ said Curjai in a quick hoarse voice, ‘fought and killed himself out there on the ice-sand. We killed others we never had the space to recognize in the heat of the battle. And some anyway – some lived.’
Vashdran understood he had already thought this, known it, but – not known.
Slowly he said, ‘That’s their table, then, across the river. Invisible. But our table still.’
‘No. They – we – are captives. Vash – I saw my own self. They dragged me – I was broken and I bled. No healing, no springing back to health and wholeness.’
Vashdran said, ‘Stand up. You and I. We at least will confront it. Leave these drunken sots to their trough. We’ll cross this sewer of a river, and see.’
Curjai swung at once off the bench and stood up.
Now none of the other men paid any attention.
But at that instant a wide sonorous bell-like note pulsed through the feasthall. To that, no one could avoid responding.
The diners looked up, startled, their hands full of meat and drink and the fluent flesh of women. The men with their backs to the river turned round.
Over the water, light was rising like a pale unblue sun.
It lit the cave there like a stage.
A fearsome groaning and whining sound began to issue from the feasters. In droves they were staggering upright. Some fell forward and some on their knees. Many wept in the harsh ragged stammer of those who have never in adult life shed tears before. Many rushed from the hall, screaming, howling, calling on gods or for comrades they had trusted when living.
Across the black river, on the far bank, was piled the offal all war leaves behind it. The dead.
They sprawled, some on their backs, some on their faces, layered under and over each other like slaughtered carcasses flung down on the ground. It was all told a mountain of men. It went up high. And out of the mountain poked and hung feet and heads and hair, and hands that held nothing now, no food or wine, not even a blade.
Vashdran picked his way through the living dead who crouched and knelt on the floor. He was aware that, in some impossible supernatural fashion, every one of them had looked into his own dead face across the river. Every one had seen his own corpse.
They reached the near bank’s edge, Curjai and he.
‘How do we cross?’
‘Fly. How else?’
Curjai lifted his arms. ‘The shields that make the wings are gone.’
‘Then fly without wings.’
They sprang together off the brink. For a moment Curjai seemed battered by gravity or by some contrary air current. Then he too had aimed himself over the divide as Vashdran did.
The mound of corpses peered at them from myriad dull-glinting eyes. They were naked. The stink of corruption was all over them.
Curjai gagged, braced himself. He pointed. ‘There. They’ve finished with me now.’
At the top of the heap Curjai’s own body had been draped, loose-limbed, boneless. The head hung down, the darker skin defining him among the other men who were speckled or white or yellow of complexion. The hair was a torn flag, and the eyes open too, glacial and pitiless. What should I care for you? the eyes said. I am done with you all.
‘Who brought me down, I wonder? I never met myself when we fought with – them. And who killed me in this palace?’
Vashdran dived straight upward. He seized Curjai’s body from the corpse mountain, standing
on the faces and legs of other men.
At Ru Karismi, the omnipresent dust had obliterated all this. But elsewhere he had looked at it, moved among it. Even here, among the twice-dead.
He dropped back down and laid Curjai’s body on the bank. The body, as they all were, was without clothing, and gouged and striped with wounds and the toothed tongues of whips.
‘This,’ Vashdran said, ‘is not yourself. You are here.’
‘Yes – no. A part of me is there. Don’t you feel that, Vash?’
‘No,’ Vashdran said.
He thought, But my body isn’t here.
And Curjai said roughly, ‘You are not among the dead.’
Over the river, the last men were crawling or running away. The sweet attentive servants had vanished. Overturned wine dripped into black water.
On this side the ground was now shifting, rising up in lumps and pillars that promptly became guards, all in their black and gold, their snake-hair fully unbound, exhilarated and hissing and striking out. The smell of the venom infiltrated the stench of death and was one with it.
Jatchas shouldered and nosed around the corpses.
Vashdran and Curjai stood above Curjai’s corpse, and watched wordlessly and thoughtlessly as the guards of Uashtab, aided by their eyeless dogs, dismembered the mountain and pushed its components into the river. A torrent of men guttered down. The water parted itself for each and knit together again above him.
None of the guards so far approached Curjai or Vashdran or attempted to grab and sling away the solitary rescued corpse.
As the hideous mountain decreased, Vashdran again picked up Curjai’s body. He did not know what could be done with it other than what was being done with the rest. But it was Curjai who said, ‘Throw it over too. Throw it away.’
Vashdran said nothing. He walked to the lip of the bank, and let go his burden. He, but not Curjai, watched as this body also entered the river and was swallowed. Turning again he found Curjai had gone, but ten of the guards had left their work and closed about him.
‘You will not resist,’ they said, in their amalgamated voice.
Vashdran did not resist.
They took him somewhere in the labyrinth. Hall led into hall, into hall, into hall. Once he heard one of the boulders descend quite near them, to the right. The ground trembled at the impact and steadied again to vitreous.
His mind crawled about sluggishly as the men had crawled around and away from the banquet.
You are not among the dead.
I have died, he thought. I am dead.
An archway gave on a chamber whose floor seemed oddly tilted. Vashdran could not decide how to place his feet, to walk. He fell without warning.
Looking up, he saw why.
The Lionwolf hung headfirst in chains from one long beam which straddled the roofless upper walls. He was as Vashdran, and a million or more separate others, had known him, unmistakable. His hair was the shade of sunsets, his tanned skin alone clothed a body of exact proportions, wide at the shoulder, narrow-hipped, legs long and strong, held there in the clasp of silvery shackles. Even the male weapon was on display, large, quiescent and kempt. It slept, but he held his arms rigidly upright against his sides. His eyes were not blue, but also red, as they had become in war. The red eyes moved in the upside-down face that was yet beautiful, sightless and living, searching the chamber, the air, the world of Hell, for something. They found it then. They found their doubles: They found Vashdran.
Vashdran stared. He pulled himself back to his feet, still staring.
The figure hung high up, but given Vashdran’s everyday power of flight could be reached at once.
Vashdran did not attempt to reach it.
His forearm burned sullenly. He did not need to look at it to know that the words scorched there by Ruxendra’s spit were flaring. I am the payment.
All ten guards grouped against an archway, small in distance as children, unconnected to this scene. Soon, maybe, they would slide again into the floor.
Blood trickled like the table wine on the river bank, from Lionwolf’s ears and from the corner of one crimson-pupilled eye. It was a torture of the sophisticated western cities of the Ruk, this method, to depend a man by his feet and leave him there. In the end he would go mad, or die. But it was not a rapid end.
Vashdran stood swaying, glaring at his image, and as he did a woman moved out along the chamber. She too was all in red to match the occasion of hair and blood.
Ruxendra regarded her quarry, both of him. Vashdran, unable to look away from himself, did not see her face. But he heard and felt the melody of her hatred, playing for him, like a rusty scratching nail.
Fifth Intervolumen
The apprentice, who had been given many hard tasks, said to the mage, ‘Sir, it seems you wish me to be in two places at once.’
The mage replied: ‘I simply wish you to work until you are exhausted. For being in two places at once, only the gods can do that.’
Padgish story: Simisey
The sheep, though not lamasceps, had lion faces and the long necks known all over the Ruk. Their fleece was very thick and soft. In temperate weather, the shepherds led them up to the creases of dormant grass in the southern mountain snows, among the green beryl of caves and milk-glass of centuries’ static waterfalls. When a black sheep was born, they said they would take it to the Woman. It must be hers, because of its colour.
Kraagparia lay over the mountains, or so they had heard and believed. It was no less real to them than any other myth, and they had assumed the Woman came from Kraagparia, for it was a land of wonders, where people could dance Summer back into the world for days on end, and pass knives through their necks without harm.
The Woman, though, had never done anything like that. Nor had they requested she should. Sometimes she told them stories, that was all. She would go to their fires on the mountains, or to the communal fire in the centre of the sheep-village, and beguile them with her tales and her voice.
She was always gentle, fragrant as flowers they had seldom seen, lovely as the deep nights she resembled.
She had been with them by their reckoning, which was not like that of the Ruk, seven years. Her name, she said, was Chillel.
Just before the evening when the black sheep was born, a new constellation had been put up on the sky by a god the shepherds called Didri.
Higher, the biggest shepherd, admired the stars courteously, making the proper appreciative gestures to them, as he climbed up to Chillers hut carrying the gift.
The hut was exactly like all the others, except that no smoke issued from its smoke-hole, and instead Chillel’s scent breathed about the doorway.
When he called to her, she came out at once. She never seemed, like other women, to be now and then in the middle of some task she could not instantly leave off. Chillel perhaps did nothing when she was in the hut, save sit or lie on the bed of fleeces. Sometimes the village did not see her for days, or else they saw her walking over the slopes, even up on the mountains, not seeking their company. They let her be at such times. To themselves they had named her Story Maker. This gave her an official function, and added sense to the idea that she be fed, housed, clothed, and respected. Frankly though her stories were not always clear to them. Possibly they liked them the better for that.
‘Here,’ said Higher, extending the young sheep to Chillel.
‘A lamb,’ said Chillel mildly.
‘Black lamb. Yours,’ explained Higher, feasting his eyes on her.
The shepherds did not use many words. Neither did she, even in her tale-telling.
Now she put out her slender hands and took hold of the sheep, which gazed at her just as Higher was doing.
‘Thank you,’ said Chillel. ‘I will care for her.’
The sheep was female, altogether a good present, since she could later be bred on and would give milk.
Higher felt he should go now, but he did not want to quite yet. So he said, ‘Much grass up on pasture. Awake
brown grass. Weather warmer. The sun shone on the glacier and I see flowers in it.’
‘Flowers?’ asked Chillel.
He pondered, did she know about flowers? Even though she smelled of them, perhaps she did not.
‘In the ice,’ said Higher, ‘trapped long, long out of memory. Blue and yellow. Too dangerous to try take them.’
She turned her head on the exquisite slender neck, looking at the mountains above. Like the black curling fleece of the little sheep, her hair. She did not speak. So Higher said, ‘Will you come tell a story at moonrise?’
Her eyes returned to him. Such eyes … ‘Yes, then.’
‘Have you seen the star-burst there?’
‘Yes, I have seen it.’
‘That’s like a flower. The dark blue flower in the ice.’
When he got back to the village, the evening meal was being brought out to the large fire, with beakers of fermented milk. Higher, to the surprise of many, for he had a fine appetite, strode by and up to the hut of the village magio.
He, wrapped in his wool and hair, was chomping busily and did not care to be disturbed. Despite that, Higher felt he must be made privy to the news before anyone else, and did not trust himself to sit on it until later.
‘Father, I have taken the sheep to the Woman.’ The magio scowled and bit pointedly into his meal. ‘It’s that, when I was by her, I see her belly.’ The magio stopped chewing. He nodded, Go on. ‘It gets round, Father. Like she’s in teem.’
The magio’s gulp was audible.
‘Baby in her?’
‘So it looks, Father.’
‘Whose?’
Higher spread his hands and lifted his brows, offering the guess to the whole of the universe.
‘No man been in with her?’ The magio considered; he answered himself. ‘No. No man.’
‘Seven years she’s here,’ said Higher gravely. ‘She could never bring it with her.’ He was right in this, for even by Ruk standards, over two years had elapsed since Chillel appeared among them.