‘Where is Woman Chillel?’
‘My mother has gone away,’ said the girl. She seemed resigned.
They beheld that in ten days the baby had been born, had grown, and was in village time by now at least sixty years of age – that was a damsel of about eighteen.
A living story – and not at all obscure!
They swallowed it complete.
‘Are you to take her place?’
‘For a while.’
‘Then come to the fire. The magio must see you. Eat, and tell us a tale.’
The living tale smiled at them in a way that was, unlike her astonishing mother’s, attractively knavish. And the sheep bleated again vociferously. Together, Flame and her black sheep went down the slope to the village.
‘Once there was a hero,’ began Flame, standing rather than sitting among the villagers. ‘He was sailing across the seas of the world, when a great and angry whale rose from the deeps.’
‘Ah,’ muttered some of the audience, ‘the whale story again.’
But it was not the story Chillel had told before.
‘The hero, who was named Hawk-of-Stars, flew out to the whale to pacify it, and almost he had done this when the goddess of the area, mistaking what went on, struck the whale in its side with a bolt of energy.’
Flame’s story-teller voice was thrilling, and she acted in gestures all she said. Chillel had never done that.
Coming to the energy bolt, Flame mimed it so vigorously, whirling on her heel, flinging out her arms, her fire-hair waving, that many gasped, and most of the children shrieked.
‘Alas,’ cried Brinnajni, standing now solid on the spot, her voice dropping an octave, ‘Hawk was swallowed by the whale in this frantic moment.’
A groan from the crowd.
Brinnajni bowed her head.
The village waited on her, breathless.
Then she told them how it was within the belly of the whale. Obviously, although she did not say so, she, like all her brothers, had seen this in her sleep.
She described everything minutely, and how Hawk had rowed his raft to the foul shore. She did not say he wept. She knew that too was a secret.
‘Many days and nights the whale lay wounded on the ocean floor, until finally he dragged himself away northwards and eastwards, and Hawk, his prisoner, without a choice was taken also.’
Brinnajni described the journey now – fish which leapt, other marine life, the frozen cellars of the sea where all things had become like steel or diamond. These facts were to the village fantastic as any legend.
She did not speak of a god erupting from the sunlight to take vengeance – the third secret.
After an hour of the most vital story-telling they had ever heard, Brinnajni ended her tale just as her mother had, with it hanging in the air.
The village was used to that. Nevertheless, her performance had so enlivened them that several called out to her to ask what would happen to Hawk. Would he be saved?
Brinnajni looked about at them all, serene and yet cunning.
‘Do you wish him saved?’
‘Yes—’
‘Yes, yes – a hero—’
‘At what cost?’
‘Any cost – it must be done.’
‘Then,’ said Brinnajni, ‘you must let me go and do it.’
An astounded dumbness blanketed the spot.
After a while the woolly magio got up. He pointed at the black sheep, which had sat all this time to the side of the fire. He meant, We gave you a sheep, there it is, and now you desert the village, both you and your mother.
Brinnajni nodded in the terse village way. Her face was no longer playful, but adult and closed: no argument.
Higher went to the magio and said softly, ‘Like the flowers in the glacier – and in the sky – come, and go.’
When Brinnajni walked back up to her hut, the sheep processing with dignity at her side, the shepherd people talked sullenly. Higher said, ‘Chillel never say she’ll go. This Flame told us she must. To save the hero.’
‘She’ll disappear anyhow, do as we want,’ said another.
The magio had gone into his own hut and put the cord across the top of the door which indicated he should not be interrupted.
That night every one of them, even he, dreamed of being in the belly of the whale, in the dark and muck and stink and solitudinous horror. Children woke screaming to be comforted by trembling parents.
They knew exactly what the dream was, but how Brinnajni had made them dream it they could not fathom. By the evidence she was a mageia herself. Her mother had been too apparently.
When she went away the next morning, setting off along the snow on a sled pulled by the full-grown, elegant sheep, her red hair flaring like her banner, no one attempted to detain her.
That year, which was a year only by the shepherd’s calendar, all the sheep produced three or four lambs, a dead fruit tree put out bulbs of fruit inside its ice, and one night a piercing red star lit in the east and only faded three nights after when, presumably, Didri the star-lighter quenched it.
She had magic, the girl, and she put it to work.
When they were entirely clear of the village she spoke to the sheep, which – also exceptional from nearness to mother and daughter – sprang into the air.
Upwards they soared, sheep and sled and girl.
They flew fast towards the north, devouring the miles, literally as the crow flies.
Flame took no notice of what dazzled by below, and little of what went on in the sky. They were the everyday things anyway, snow and ice, ice-forests and wastes, sunrise and moonset, weather of various types – not all amenable, but no real problem for these travellers.
At some juncture certainly the girl on the sled flew over the eastern hilt of the continent, over the very snowbound garth where whale-gulped Dayadin had been brought into the world. This was not deliberate, nor that she be seen. Yet seen Brinnajni was. Nirri saw her, Nirri, wife of Arok the Chaiord of the Jafn Holas, the mother of Hawk-of-Stars Dayadin.
Nirri, who had been shedding tears as so often now she did in private, saw the red flag and the black fleece speed through the sky. Something plucked at her psyche. She got to her feet, dried her eyes, put on another necklace and went down into the joyless joyhall.
‘I have seen a sign,’ said Nirri, in the bell-like tone of a true queen.
But the flying Flame, even if she sensed any of that, did not pause.
She was already out at sea, over the ice plates and the dark, shining, shallow-moving waves with their frills of pallor, heading towards the far north-east.
Brinnajni could hear the whale. He was trumpeting like an elephant in distress, down there in the maw of the ocean. And she could hear the small, perhaps impervious heart of her brother Dayadin, ticking in the maw of the whale.
Unlike her brothers, Brinnajni had been born of two superlatives, each a god. And if one god had actually been dead when he got her on her mother, the result seemed unimpaired.
Winds came, clouds came, to pay court to her as she flew, and below the green outer waves tilted up to look at her with their subliminal eyes.
Guided by the mental bellows of Brightshade, who no longer made any physical noise at all, Brinnajni plunged towards the ocean at an area off all the maps.
As they entered the sea the black sheep turned and gave her a single glance. Brinnajni grinned. Where her mother’s smile had undone a thousand hearts and sexual continences, Brinnajni’s grin – clown-like and elastic on that lovely face – would also leave few unmoved.
The sheep ducked her curly head. She swam down into the core of the icy sea, drawing the sled and her adopted sister after. Flames are extinguished by water and sheep drowned in it. Never mind that. Not these two.
The ocean changed from greenish to ashy, ash to obscure blue, to blue-black.
Here were the drifting rifts of ice, the icy cliffs, the ledges stabbed to blue-whiteness by ancient shells and fossils. The pressure grew
as all light was sucked away. Brinnajni felt this, but it did not impede her. Fish swarmed by, armoured like warriors to withstand the cold. Others watched unseeing, frozen till eternity should shed its skin. Down, down they went.
Suddenly, through the dimmest region of the dark, where the water pressed heavy as a quarter of the volume of the world, willing to crush anything that was not sparked with divinity or a similar talent, a black bulk became – not visible, but psychically tactile. Brinnajni felt it over. She knew she had found the sick-bed of the leviathan.
Brightshade was barely alive. Being what he was, however, he was not remotely dead either. An uncomfortable state. As much as physical hurt, his essential self had been ripped in tatters. He had forgotten all things except himself, a predicament suffering may induce in almost any creature. He had never needed love or kindness. Awe and fear he had always been able to inspire. He had never needed help. He had never needed to think aside from as a hobby; now this was all he could do. Brightshade thought, unloved and maimed, having no one to turn to and nowhere else, not even death, to which he could escape.
Settling like bubbles through the sea, the sheep landed the sled weightless on the astonishing country of Brightshade’s head, just behind the forest-like mansions of the horn spurs, with the vast horn itself about a quarter of a mile away inside them. Everything was hung about with skeletons and ribbons of even gods did not know what. A dull moaning sounded, not in the ears but in the mind: Brightshade’s anguish translated.
Brinnajni stepped off the sled. She walked up the headland. Standing on the skull of Brightshade, she listened intently, both to his distress and to the ticking of Dayadin’s heart acres away below and behind, where the guts were.
After a while Brinnajni sat down.
She thought inward at the whale.
Poor child, said the thought, shape or not.
Something in the whale raised its little sad head, not at all like the gargantuan mound she sat on. A little beaten thing gazed up, all tears. Was it laughable? Was it absurd? Well deserved maybe, redolent with justice – but was it tragic? When the proud and mighty really fall, why not tread on them? Why not pick them up?
Gently, baby, thought Flame to Brightshade.
Did he, even for a second, reckon this elemental young woman was the very child or baby he had wished to eradicate? It seemed not. He was beyond jealousy, for now.
But, sobbed Brightshade, but …
Brinnajni began to sing a lullaby of the Jafn. It was the very one Dayadin himself had given to the sharks that sent them slooping off in slumber.
Brightshade’s small interior child-head sank. He lay, metaphorically only, in the arms of Flame, and metaphorically only she rocked him to sleep.
Poor silly great walloping lummox. She was quite fond of him, already forgiving him for what he had done to Dayadin – who was almost Brightshade’s own nephew. For now it would not matter.
Once the whale was deep in a trance Brinnajni returned to her sled. She flew over the whale’s body, going back towards his belly. As before the prospect dazzled by below, only sheathed now in the pitch black of the ocean’s foundation. Brinnajni caught sheeny glimpses of putrescence, jungles, swamps, and here and there a wormy perhaps-animal gawping at their progress, without eyes.
The sheep navigated their landing this time on the spinal cord, above the stomach.
Flame knelt down. They were in a kind of ravine between hills of detritus. Some of this was constantly dislodging and unravelling away through the sea.
Which was irrelevant.
She called in through the gallons of blubber and flesh, calcium and fluids, to the wet inferno where Dayadin lay.
The hovor, whom Brinnajni mentally made out at once, had hauled him back into one of the vile structures on the stomach’s muck-banks. A white treeish something craned over Dayadin, with the hovor perched in it. The sprite had managed, using the art of its wind-power, to empty Dayadin’s lungs of acid and guts of poisonous dirt. He lived. He was Chillel’s. Of course he did. But that was all you could say. Every so often the hovor would leave the tree and breathe his fragrant snowy breeze through the child’s nostrils. Brinnajni noted that. She spoke to the hovor with courtesy, giving it instructions.
She had many gifts, attributes and knacks. One was fire.
Saftri’s blasting bolt, to this, had been rather pale. Like a laser the black girl’s flame pierced the hundred barriers of Brightshade’s body. She created a narrow fissure, narrow that was in comparison to Brightshade’s size. Through it blood and tissue would have flowed off had the gap not been cauterized instantly by the very heat which caused it. The excavation took some while. And it made the sea grow white and boil so the fish fled before they were fried, and the sheep sunned herself, pleased to be warm.
When the appalling hole was all the way through to the stomach, out tipped assorted juices, dead digesting prey, and many of the trophies of Brightshade’s innards. Bits of ships were there, whole ships sailing upside down, treasure-remains of several types, flotsam and jetsam; rubbish.
Last of all, propelled by the hovor Hilth, Dayadin, limp and eyes closed, was swum through into the open sea. Hilth let this clean water wash Dayadin, then he flitted along the whale island, carrying the boy before him. Hilth waited until Brinnajni had resealed the tunnel in the whale, padding and adhering and stitching with all her pharmacy of paranormal transplants, glues and threads. Satisfied she stood, and Hilth placed Dayadin in her arms. Hilth had apparently decided to have faith in this one.
Brinnajni sat back on the sled, her brother carefully positioned oh her lap, the hovor billowing in her hair. Hilth was a marvel. He had filled Dayadin with enough good air to last the journey.
The black sheep shook herself.
Very slowly now, to offset the oceanic pressures, up they all went.
In the aftermath of the fight, the garth had bowed in fateful gloom. Arok and all the able or passing for able men of the Holas had ridden out to meet the Vormland reivers. Only sixteen living men came back, including Arok himself. The larger part of their number, an army of forty, they brought home on the chariot floors, unhuman as logs – twenty-three corpses. Two more of the wounded died only paces from the garth gate. Once within the walls, the fires mage-tinted black to mark enormous lament, the white mourning garments donned, and yet another casualty dying – leaving them fifteen men, and many of these disabled – grief burst like steam. Wizened women screamed and fatherless babies shrilled. Two Endhlefons went by. And on the twenty-fourth day Arok went into the upper room a Chaiord shared only with his spouse, took down a sword from the wall and broke it in half with an axe.
Nirri, precipitated to her feet in the corner, was shocked. She knew what the ritualistic gesture conveyed: So I have been broken and all that is mine.
But she put back her shoulders and remarked, ‘At least you did it up here. None of your people saw.’
‘My people,’ said Arok. ‘My people. Who’s left of my people?’
Nirri thought of the Jafn phrase for malign luck sometimes found in songs and legends. We have a raven in the eaves.
‘Sir,’ she said to him, ‘brace up for the sake of the garth—’
And at that he turned on her and she reckoned she would get from him what she had so often had from her former husband the fisherman, a blow in the face. But Arok did not strike her with his hands, only with his next sentence.
‘Don’t give me lessons, you stupid shumb. Do you forget already we lost my son?’
To which Nirri replied in such a low voice he read her lips to hear it, ‘Oh, was he solely yours?’
Arok strode from the room and down the ladder-stair and went out with the last men to hunt.
Nirri wept, huddled to a wall.
Initially, when he had returned with the dead and the news of Dayadin’s abduction by the barbaric offal of Vorm – so delighted to collect such spoils they had made off at once, leaving the dregs of the Jafn alive – Nirri and Arok comforted eac
h other. Even, once or twice in following days, they made love, hoping perhaps in unthinking instinct to conjure another child. But no other child came, and anyway how could he have been another Dayadin? Though Nirri did not herself know Arok’s well-founded theory of the boy’s conception, Nirri could not imagine a second hero would be birthed from her. They had mislaid the gift of Great God. No wonder now they could never be fortunate again.
Months evaporated in the Holasan-garth. No one knew where time went, now they did not use it properly.
An evening dropped, louring with the promise of deluging snow. Ten men and a pack of women came to the House door. Those that lived within the House went out and joined with the visitors.
‘What?’ said Arok, pushing out into the dusk to meet them.
He had lost weight since the reiver fight, looked gaunt and haggard. Despite always trying to put a brave face on like a mask to hide his wretched privacy and evil dreams, he saw they knew. They had judged him, his people, the ones Nirri had told him once to brace up before. Maybe they supposed he was even the source of their rotten destiny. Maybe they were right.
They told him, with obsequious mannerisms that made him want to put his fists into the jaws of the men and storm at the women young and elderly alike, that they wished to go elsewhere.
‘We haven’t enough men here.’
‘What will we do now if others of the sea-scum attack us?’
Arok could no longer declare their Jafn allies would rally to them. He had toiled so fiercely to attach the potential aid of the Kree, the Banjaf – any who seemed willing to make a pact. And look how they had rushed here! God’s eyes, even following the battle, none of them had come. A few commiserating messages only were sent. The ‘allies’ blamed everything for their non-presence, uncertain top-snow, illness in their garths, accidents, omens. None had come. None ever would.
‘Where will you take yourselves then,’ said Arok icily to his folk, ‘if you leave your own place?’
‘Chaiord,’ said one of the young men who had survived the fight, a warrior about fifteen, ‘we can go to the Kree. They’d welcome more men – women too, even the old ones. And our newborns.’ He himself had sired six sons since his thirteenth year. He had fought like a lion. An asset. ‘Chaiord,’ said the warrior, ‘why not throw in your lot with us? They’d honour you, and your wife.’