‘One thing it is for the men who brave the waters,’ said Krandif. ‘But what you moot – our women are mortal, Our Lady. They can’t, with the best will the world allows us, do what you can.’
‘Listen to me,’ said Saftri, rising with her snake-like hiss of impatience, the one her priests had overheard so often inside the god-house, ‘if you remain here, you’ll die for sure.’
‘But, Our Lady, you protected us, and killed the wolf-demon—’
‘Kill? How could I kill him? He’s a god, as I am. Meanwhile one hundred and six women died during his attack, and twenty-one of your men, and twenty-one of your children too, among whom was Best Bear.’
‘Lady,’ said Krandif with diffident sternness, ‘look at the lad we brought you instead.’
‘Children aren’t a commodity, Krandif, to exchange one with another. Say it to the mothers of the dead. Say it to the wives who cry and the men with no wife and no son – and no house left either, after the filthy fire-breath of the wolf. What he is, this boy, is your amulet for a voyage.’
The men rumbled. They surged there, coming forward one by one, or in groups, haranguing the goddess. During Assembly the word of all and any was equal. The village refuse-picker ranked with the leaders and the warriors, and a goddess too, though always treated respectfully, must attend to them.
Saftri sat scowling.
She looked, Dayadin noticed, like a furious girl of about four, who had been told she would not get her way and must go to the sleep-house.
‘You are fools!’ she shouted at them suddenly.
And from her hand a flash of light peeled off over the square, struck the wall of a cattle hut and exploded. Two or three logs clattered down, and three of the surviving precious cows came blundering out mooing.
‘Our Lady – take care! Spare us our lovely cattle – only ten remain since the night of the wolf—’
Saftri snarled, ‘I do it to educate you. I’m your goddess and look what you provoke me to. But if he comes back, and I’ve heard he will, do you think one stone here will stand on another, or one cow not have been roasted alive?’
Over on the square’s east side, a woman shouted, ‘It’s the men who are cowards here. And they blame it on us, saying we’re the weak ones who can’t be risked.’
‘Krandif Shiver-Heart!’ called another.
Out over the square the women came pouring then like melted snow. They had plainly been reining in their anger as Saftri had not.
‘Must we be made to stay and die, because the menfolk are scared of open sea to the north?’
‘Our Lady says there’s land there. Let’s go and see it.’
‘This land is spoiled,’ screamed one higher anguished voice, ‘by the bodies of our dead blighted.’
At Assembly even women might have an equal say. It was Vormish law.
They had stung the men, too. Krandif had gone red then pale. Others were arguing and grumbling.
Some hundred women stood firmly in the middle of the square in the purplish torchlight, and others grouped ready at the square’s eastern edge.
‘Let’s us take the jalees,’ called the woman who had led the assault. ‘Let’s leave these ones who tremble, and go us, and Our Lady, and find another country. Weaklings are we, Krandif Knock-Knees? Let you go and get yourself with child and labour to push it out, and then see who’s the stronger, we or you!’
An hour later Saftri waited in the doorway of her temple, watching the huffy hearth fires burning behind village shutters. Women were banging pots, scorching food, sacrosanct this one night since it was their right to have an opinion in and after Assembly.
Saftri saw another movement. Dayadin was returning up the hill, and behind him something skittered on the night wind like a ripple of transparent washing.
‘A hovor,’ said Saftri.
‘They can’t see him,’ said Dayadin, ‘or not properly.’
‘I lived among the Jafn,’ said Saftri. She omitted to confess that when only human she had never seen any of the Jafn sprites, or not enough to be sure.
Dayadin had already told the goddess of the Vorms how, when he was abducted by Krahdif’s men, the hovor had first defended him, then fled. It had been his pet for some while, but obviously barbarians unnerved it. Dayadin did not hold its flight against it. It was only one more family friend he had lost.
‘Then he came back.’
Dayadin called the hovor ‘he’, and had ages before given it or him a male name, Hilth, which apparently it or he had agreed to accept.
The hovor, Hilth, followed the reivers’ two jalees back out to sea. Hilth blew in on a wind, and wrapped himself round Dayadin’s body, mostly not spotted by the crew. Or, if spotted, not as anything real.
Dayadin had been very glad to have this creature beside him again. He was touched by its loyalty and persistence, which were unusual, if not unheard of, in Jafn tales.
About fourteen days on, when they were far out on the leaping black seas, sharks had come up out of the water. They were large examples of their kind, each more than fifteen feet in length, sea-black, with narrow horns for ice-breaking set in above their grey dead eyes. The water quickly grew choked with them. They thudded in again and again, whacking the sides of the vessels, nosing and bumping. Oars bashed, braining a few. Other oars snapped. Snouts with snaggle-pointed teeth nosed up the timbers. Even the Mother Ships rolled around while the shamans on the decks staggered, looking as if any moment the tide of sharks would capsize them.
Men used long knives, bows, arrows and spears. But the sharks were uninterested that night in the blood of their own. They could smell man-meat.
Krandif had lurched over the tilting walkway to Dayadin. ‘See there, the Mother Ship with the blue decoration? If this vessel goes down, get on my back. I’ll swim and fight you across. The shamans will see you safe.’
‘Your shamans are crazy,’ said Dayadin. ‘They can’t do a thing.’
Krandif was offended, but another buck of his ship put that from him. It was Dayadin, and oddly another something, operating out of thin air, that grabbed the ship-lord back from falling over into a shark-maw.
As he righted himself, he heard Dayadin say, ‘Tell your shamans to shut their mouths. Their wailing is making these things eager. Even worse than the noise of those four-legged cod down belowdecks.’ Now the horsazin were insulted. ‘What you must do is sing.’
‘… sing …’
An abrupt lull occurred.
Dayadin, standing there small and collected among the angry horrified men and sea of starving sharks, began himself to do what he had suggested. His voice was high and carrying, with the purity some boys’ voices had until about the age of eleven or twelve. It was a Jafn lullaby.
Hearing him, astonished, the men fell quiet and an attendant silence filled the jalees. Even the shamans left off their excited chants.
As for the sharks, they too were suddenly immobile.
The sea rocked. Boats and ships and sharks rocked with it.
‘Sing,’ Dayadin said, between one verse and the next.
Krandif took the chance. He yelled the order towards all the ships.
The men began to sing along, wordless, to the Jafn cradle song, which generally they did not understand.
After about five minutes, great watery omissions undid the sea. The shark pack had started to sink and float away under the water. Their eyes were wide, but it was evident they slept. Down they went.
When the water was all open again, Dayadin ended the song, and so did the Vormlanders.
‘Will they die?’ Krandif asked. ‘We must make offering if so to the shark god. There were ninety of his people here if there was one. He won’t like to lose so many.’
‘Sleep won’t kill them,’ said Dayadin with scorn. ‘Sleep only kills men if practised too often.’
‘Right. You have the right of it.’
This story Dayadin had told Saftri. Next he told her how the storm came after. The fleet was soon lying over
on its side, and one vessel had been smashed.
It was Mozdif who roared across the walls of sea and storm: ‘Hero-boy, will you sing again?’
Dayadin shouted that the wind was world’s breath. The hovor, as he also informed Saftri, had somehow taught him as much.
‘I said they must keep still and breathe deeply and quietly, in and out.’ Rationally he added, ‘Because the song worked with the sharks, they did the breathing.’
Glassy-eyed, the men inhaled, exhaled. On the shaman ships the shamans gazed from thin jealous faces. None of their spells had worked.
The hovor though dashed up into the teeth of the gale, where Dayadin saw it brutally tossed about. It came to him that Hilth was brave, as well as loyal, but he went on breathing.
And in the end, perhaps a quarter of an hour later, when everyone was all but tranced, the wind slumped and dropped in the lap of the sea.
Hilth sprang out of its toppling folds and gave to Dayadin a tiny white pebble of ice. The boy wondered if this were the wind’s heart, which Hilth had valiantly torn out. But although he could communicate with the sprite by speaking to it aloud or in his mind, Hilth could not convey words, and seldom concepts, only its willingness or reluctance to obey.
‘And so you saved his jalees,’ said Saftri. ‘Will you take part in this next voyaging for me?’
‘I’ll do my best, if you keep to your half of the bargain.’
Saftri said, ‘I don’t break my word. I’m not a man.’
Dayadin had nodded, and looked away. But after the Assembly he said he would call the hovor to show her. Perhaps it was to show her to the hovor as well, and also he was testing to make sure she really could see such things and was therefore a proper goddess who had lived among the Jafn.
‘He has a gift for you,’ said Dayadin. ‘I know you expect one.’
Saftri saw the hovor bore a little carved whale tooth.
She held out her hand, and the wind-being let go the tooth into her palm.
Then she stood perplexed, forgetting Dayadin and the village. She had been once more reminded of whales.
In her past, Ruxendra had moved about Ru Karismi some days before she fell ill. She had been trying, by means of her Magikoy training and her youthful confidence, to heal the sick. When she was five she had healed her kitten by a laying on of hands – that was how it had been first seen she had magic potential. However, after the White Death, her optimistic efforts were useless. Then she could only help burn the bodies. That was bad enough, but she never supposed she too could die. She had early on thrown the hideous idea out of her head and barred all doors to it. But death got in at every pore instead.
In the initial phase she refused to accept and still wandered about the emptied thoroughfares till she collapsed. Someone brought her home to the fine house of her rich parents and its cloud of fear and mourning. Ruxendra, once she regained her senses, could not believe that any of this had happened to her.
She fought death off then, sitting bolt upright, sometimes spewing in a bowl, determined to get better.
Next morning just after sunrise, a stranger walked in at her bedroom door.
Ruxendra thought he was a physician and told herself he would make her well. He was young and wonderfully handsome, in a marvellous way that was nearly familiar even though she had never met him. Was his hair blond? That must be so, and he had also powdered it with shining silver. His complexion had a golden cast she had never seen except on statues which had been gilded.
Zeth Zezeth was one of the three gods given to Ruxendra at her birth. He had come from her mother, who in turn had him from her own father. All three of these gods stood, each in double aspect, as a small jewelled sextet in one corner of the chamber, but Ruxendra had not troubled with them for some while.
To start with then she did not know him. But when he leaned over her and his hair brushed her face, she did.
She said at once, offended and frightened, ‘Have you come to take me away?’
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Only to look at you. What a lovely girl you must have been,’ he added, callously, ‘before you began to die.’
‘I beg you – save my life. I have – things to do.’
‘Oh, dying will never stop that.’
Ruxendra opened wide her eyes.
‘Won’t it?’
‘You must do something for me, and for your city, when you go down to the shadowlands,’ said Zeth winningly, seating himself like a human friend on the side of her bed. Anyone but himself, or someone near death, would have hallmarked this pose as ridiculous. Perhaps even certain dying persons would have. ‘He that destroyed Ru Karismi, Vashdran as you call him, is my enemy too. I shall kill him – or, going on the curious time of mortals which is so consecutive, I may already have done so. Go seek him therefore in Hell. You shall be my pretty hound and track him. There, your powers will equal his. And he too will be only a shadow you may worry at and tear apart for your little personal vengeance, my greater one.’
Ruxendra was confused. The room swam and she lost consciousness, and through her internal dark moved a silver-golden light, constant as a lamp.
Waking because a man’s footfall sounded in the smoky room, she anticipated – what? She could not recall. And anyway, it was now a Magikoy of the Highest Rank who entered, Thryfe, who attended the city’s kings.
‘Revenge,’ Ruxendra had told Thryfe, arrogant again and sure in her final moments.
But it was the geas of Zzth on her that had made her certain. And by the time she reached the proper Hell, as promised, Lionwolf was indeed already there.
He lay there now before her, Ruxendra the Sun Wolf’s vengeful hound.
She sat up on her ledge below the stained glass windows, looking while the multi-coloured dapple crossed his body. It had nearly mesmerized her, though she did not know it, how his red hair became fluted with magenta and tawny green, and his skin, on which the stripes and cuts stayed always open and ready to bleed, was resurfaced now with a beautiful changeful leprosy.
All the way to Hell she thought her revenge had blazed before her golden and silver, like the lamp of the god.
Yet now—
Now.
What was it best for her to do, either to Vashdran or about him?
Her vicious loathing of him was withering on the vine of her heart. She had not been brought up by either her parents or the Order of the Magikoy to harbour resentment, let alone to maim and slaughter.
Improvisations of torture were deserting her. Worse, her wish to use them.
Besides in the end he could only presumably die, like the other mirror images. He had seemed to say so.
Nevertheless she had brought him to hold hostage, wanting the other, the true Vashdran. And what would she do about that true Vashdran then? He must suffer.
Ruxendra upbraided herself. She should be as she had been when she swore to the barbarian man Curjai that Vashdran was her foe for ever, or till time itself was dead and rotting in some hell.
He did not stir, there on the floor. Seen clearly through the vitreous, the rest of the tower descended back into the crook of the mountain. Nothing moved below. Nothing, but for the windows’ coloured reflection, altered.
FIVE
White snow contained or decorated the mountain pinnacles. Swags of bluish cloud hung low around them. The hyacinth sun was going down in a sea of distance.
‘Now I go on alone.’
His companions and fellow Saraskulds looked at him dubiously. Above was the stronghold, a raggedly hewn tower inhabited by a dangerous witch.
Each of the men said something. Swanswine even vaunted a Crarrow lover, who had taught him a spell or two – entirely inadmissible, since the Crarrowin shared no knowledge of that sort with any man, let alone lover or son. Yet it was Taeb who said, ‘Let me walk behind you. I’ll cast some power around the place.’
And Vashdran turned on her, lion and wolf, his crimson mane flaring like the live snake-hair of the guards of Hell. ‘Keep
here. Only I.’
Kuul commented, ‘You said you didn’t even say you’d follow her.’
‘Nor did I. Now I have. Stay.’
Curjai stepped forward and warded them off, shaking his head. In his brief earthly life, about which only Vashdran knew anything, Curjai had spent most of his days with women. He had learned something, not knowing he did, of their necessary mild placation, their needful flirtatious wiles, lies and interventions.
Vashdran was changeable. As if differently tinted lights passed over and over his mood. Now an anxious child, now a raging hero, now a god who feared nothing and could accomplish anything. And now a man near death, full of grief and guilt, and bitter as a gall.
Vashdran climbed the steep mountains. He walked up their sides, leaning out horizontal to the ground – his old habit. Either flight had not suggested itself to him, or he found it by now samey. Or was he pretending to be only a hero?
The men stood watching him. Heppa sat down and let Wasfa braid his hair and deck it with beads she drew out of the stones – an Olchibe fashion Vorms did not utilize. The dogs sat too, panting, exercising their eyes. Only Taeb and Curjai stepped apart, though in different directions. She roved along the landscape about a hundred yards behind the others, muttering, concocting some sorcery after all. Probably only, Curjai thought, to safeguard herself.
Otherwise Curjai observed Vashdran and the mountains exclusively. Up there something sparked suddenly, as the last sun licked off the light to take away with it.
Hell’s palette did not have many colours unless you made them. It would seem therefore Ruxendra had formed those slivers of raspberry and green crystal. Were they windows? The palace at Padgish had had one such, above the god-hall.
Vashdran himself did not look back. He was glad to slough them all; they were nothing to him. He could not care for them, nor behave honourably to them. Their still-human needs, conflicting constantly with his, often exacerbated him beyond bearing. As when he had witnessed Heppa pissing neatly against a rock, when no natural functions were valid any more. Even Heppa’s baby in the girl’s womb was an absurdity, and doubtless an imaginary pregnancy. Swanswine, with his physical similarities and nearly total unlikeness to Guri, irritated like a pin in the boot. Jafn Kuul, and Behf whose origin, if known, Vashdran had mislaid, perturbed him with their memories of things Vashdran himself had experienced when alive. Curjai angered him more badly, like a brother. In some way linked, he could never be shot of him. Taeb annoyed maybe the least. She was untrustworthy and her efforts to hide it laughable. You knew where you were and she knew she was dead. He had seen her one evening as they came here, working some curse on the animal which had eaten her alive. Like Ruxendra then in that, she wanted retribution on her murderer.