‘So you’d have me bound as lesser kinsman with the Kree? The Kree that first banded with the Lionwolf and began all this?’ The fifteen-year-old looked down. Arok thought, Why shame him? We’re shamed enough. He recalled how he had always been lesser kin to the Holas, and only brought to lead the garth in default of others who had not survived the Rukar war.
‘No,’ said Arok. He stared away from them. ‘If you will leave, then do it. I’ll neither prevent nor bless you. Any who wants, let him be off. Make your way with the Kree if you like, prosper if you can. Never,’ he switched his gaze back to them, dark as the threatening dusk, ‘never return to this garth. When once you’re outside, these gates will close against you for ever.’
Some of them grimaced, some looked sick. The antique widow who had been the ninety – or seventy-year-old’s wife gave Arok the coldest glance. But he shook his head at her. ‘You also, Mother. Though your man was a great warrior, if you choose to go away, you’re none of ours. Erase your Holas clan name. Now you are Kree.’
Arok did not watch the departure of the column of men, women, chariots, carts, and sleds; the lions and dogs and hnowas; the hawks that were their property and which he had allowed them to keep.
Even the House Mage and his fellows left. Without one word.
Nirri did watch. She stood up on the wall of the garth in driving sleet. It was the queen’s duty to oversee the important arrivals or their going away.
When the exodus was complete, the garth was virtually empty. Five men remained, twenty women and six children, four of these girls.
Arok did not climb down to the statue of God in the below-stairs of the House.
If God did not already notice what went on, He was no God at all.
Against such a background, Nirri entered the joyhall and announced, ‘I have seen a sign.’ The eleven or so women and two men in the hall looked round. A baby started to whimper and the mother shushed it. ‘I saw,’ said Nirri firmly, ‘a black sheep of unusual size pulling a sled over the sky. A figure sat on the sled, black like the sheep. And its hair was made of fire.’
When Arok came in from a desultory hunt, he and his three companions toting a seal carcass which fleers had already been at, the garth was in ferment.
It enraged him. All this spurious adrenalin.
‘Is this your doing?’ he demanded of his wife, having heard what she had reportedly said.
‘No, sir,’ said Nirri. ‘I was shown it.’
‘And you have hatched this smoke-brained scheme because you had a dream by a window?’
‘It wasn’t any dream.’
‘What proof?’
‘That I say it, and you have always known me for a proper Jafn who does not sleep save at the proper time, and also as a sensible woman who does not lie.’
Arok was taken aback. She did not frequently stand her ground with him. As a rule she simply stepped aside from his moods, letting him come round in his own way. This too was happening in the joyhall, with all the excited women and the now obviously influenced men looking on.
‘Upstairs,’ said Arok.
They went.
Arok paced about. The fragments of the dismembered sword lay in a corner still with just a shawl thrown on them. He indicated them.
Nirri said, ‘All the more reason.’
‘You say we too are to go off.’
‘To the north,’ said Nirri, ‘where I saw the firehair go.’
‘It was some gler, trying to trick you.’
‘I’ve seen glers enough. This was no gler.’
‘You’re too uppity, woman. Did I wed you for this?
Nirri replied without a pause.
‘You wed me because I carried your son, who was black as that figure on the sled, your boy that you loved, and I loved, I who bore him in that very bed there. Arok’ – she seldom called him by his name save during sex; she had always been highly courteous – ‘Arok, let’s go northward. Make or take a ship. Follow the reivers. Find Dayadin.’
‘Six men and a boatful of yattering women. And where’s the boat to come from? We haven’t a Mage either. What do we do for fire or to ward off tempests? Jafn aren’t seafarers. We resign that to the Kelp and Vorm and Faz filth.’
‘There is,’ said Nirri, ‘a Thing meeting spot along the coast, and a tall ship there, many-masted, like the Mother Ships of the reivers.’
‘It’s wedged in ice!’
‘Unwedge it!’
‘I should kill you—’
Some dam within her burst, as episodes of Summer, once in a thousand moons, undid the ice floes and flooded the land.
‘Kill me then!’ she shouted at him. ‘Kill all the world! It was never your fault you were robbed of your son – nor any fault of mine! But this – this is your fault. What are you, you man? My lord – or some wretch from a midden? Take up your kingship, Arok, before all of it flakes from you. Why do you think your people left you? Arok – be Arok. Be the one who outraced the giant whale and saved me with him and gave me a life and a love and a child and all those things I never had. Be Arok, you man. Or I’ll hang myself from that beam there. Where else but the Other Place can I go, if you are no longer Arok.’
He bounded towards her.
She thought now he truly would kill her. She stood straight. She had never felt more alive, or sure.
Arok fell at her feet and buried his head in her lower belly, against the mound of her sex. He, not she, wept. She stroked his white hair, knowing the battle won.
FOUR
Evening had descended early – the time spans of this contained world seemed to vary wildly. Guri by then had moved the mammoth away from the wall of the box which shut in his hell. They camped in a stand of cryogenized forest, under fir, eucalyptus and palm trees so crusted with ice they had become walls themselves, semi-transparent, a little daylight still kept inside. Guri made fire with a flint. He did it carefully, abstemiously, in the fire-pot he had somehow kept. The mammoth browsed on ferns, chipping off their frost carapaces with her curved tusks. He had delicately descaled these for her during the late afternoon.
Night filled the box that was the hell.
It seemed only peaceful and ordinary with the fire, the cold, the large beast steadily chewing.
And tonight no one at all came near, either to hurt or to cajole. Perhaps they had all been, those tormentors, those Olchibe bad companions, figments of Guri’s own blame.
He had never known he blamed himself. Yet he must have done or how otherwise could it all have happened?
A means of escape from the box was less believable. Probably now he must linger here alone, if not forever then for aeons.
At least they – or he himself – had allowed him the company of the mammoth.
He dug into the snow beside the pot of fire. Rolled in his furs he slept.
A low wind was whispering over the forest ice when he woke again. It was still night. Two mammoths were there now, grazing side by side, the second one a younger male whose coat had been beautifully groomed, combed even it looked. He was behaving civilly to the female, uprooting fern and small iced saplings for her, spreading them before her trunk and stepping back a little to allow her room to eat.
Someone sat across the fire.
Guri stared. He lifted himself up slowly.
‘Well, Uncle. What an age you took to wake. I’ve been sitting here for hours, counting the leaves and needles in the ice. A million million and two I make it. What do you think?’
‘Lion—’
‘Uncle.’
‘You’re a dream.’
‘No. Reach over and take my hand.’ Guri did nothing. ‘Then I must take yours.’
Right across the fire, through the craning flames which flared to lick unattended at his strong brown wrist, Lionwolf reached and caught the hand of Guri. The flames licked both of them then. They were only pleasantly warm, while the clasp of Lionwolf was like fire as it should be, burning, utter.
Guri snatched his hand away.
He looked at Lionwolf who was precisely as he had last seen him in the living world, a flawlessly made man of about twenty-three years, and in the dark blue mirrors of the eyes two slender crescents like polished rubies.
‘Why are you here?’ said Guri.
He shook. He did not know at last what he must feel. Floods of love and loathing crashed through him. Every memory shared and every joke and every bitter dismay.
‘It’s time,’ said Lionwolf gravely, ‘that we think about going home.’
‘Home? Where’s home?’
‘The world, Uncle. Where else?’
‘I’m dead.’
‘Never stopped you before.’ Lionwolf grinned.
Ruefully Guri said, ‘I’m twice dead now. I came here for punishment and got it.’
‘So did I. Now we move on to other events.’
‘How?’ Guri challenged him, shivering, his teeth chattering, maybe only with shock.
‘First, we’ll leave here.’
‘I can’t. There’s a wall round it, a roof on it—’
‘Oh, yes. But as you see, I and the mammoth had no trouble with those. Do you recognize the mammoth, Guri, by the way? He’s the toy you gave me, the little psychic toy, when you were a ghost and I was just born.’
‘You brought him into hell.’
‘He came with me. Look at him now.’
They looked at the toy which had become, at least to all intents and purposes, real. He and the female were feeding close together now.
‘I can never escape this country,’ said Guri.
‘I’ll show you the way.’
Guri pulled a wry face. The shakes were going off. He felt only shaken. ‘How’ll you do that?’
‘There was a hero called Lalt,’ said Lionwolf.
‘Some Jafn freak. Bright green of skin, was he, ah?’
‘Not Jafn. Lalt is a hero of Simisey. No, you’ve never heard of Simisey. Listen. Lalt went down into the hells under or between the worlds. There he asked how he could see to travel in the dark, and they told him: You’ll find your path more easily if you are blind. If you are blind, you’ll have to.’
‘Each of us,’ murmured Guri, ‘tries to find his way blind. Look where it takes us.’
‘Get up, Uncle,’ said Lionwolf, standing, hauling Guri effortlessly and unexpectedly upright also. ‘Mount your mammoth and when you’re sitting comfortably, bind your eyes with this cloth. Make sure you can’t see a thing.’
‘Then what?’ Guri demanded.
‘Trust me to lead you.’
‘You?’
Before he could decide if he wished to say that or master it if he did not, the word had flamed from Guri’s lips thick with contempt and allergy and accusation.
Lionwolf’s face did not change. It was, Guri thought confusedly, always now partly melancholy, but too always clear and collected.
‘I led you into an earthly hell before, Uncle, you and thousands of others. Now let me make amends. Let me lead you out of this one.’
Guri stood by his mammoth, leaning his head on her side. He stayed like that for more than an hour. Then, silent, he had her kneel, and got up on the wide familiarity of her back. Not looking at Lionwolf, who burned on motionless on the ground below in place of the fire which had vanished, Guri tied the black cloth tight about his eyes and, bending forward, hid his face in the mammoth’s greasy hair.
Presently he felt her move.
He heard ice crackle underfoot. He heard the other mammoth treading in step with his own. He heard the slight night wind ruffling the immovable cryotites of the forest. He heard the presence of Lionwolf, son to god and mortal, twice dead and twice born.
Don’t look.
Advance blindly.
The darkness and the light guide you.
Let them do what they must.
Curjai was listening to a boy singing in a high pipe of a voice, every note like a coin of silver.
As he walked into the great hall of the palace at Thasuba, Curjai saw a group of the priests who seemed to haunt each city. They were going slowly through the hall, swinging the censors of incense. Something was immediately startling about them. They had each a uniquely defined and human face. At the procession’s head was the old child who had sung so peculiarly elsewhere. Now he sang like a well-tuned instrument. If anything, his face was older, but there was a look of absorbed content on it.
Curjai watched them pass, and when they were gone he strode towards the terrace at the hall’s far end.
He had slept in a side room the night before. There had been a bed in it that reminded him almost painfully of royal beds he had seen at Padgish. They had never been for himself, then the invalid, but for men of standing. In the room he was waited on by two delicious women. But though he found himself aroused by their appearance and actions – slightly, unnervingly aroused, for sexual arousal was quite new to him – he did not invite either into the princely bed. After all, they were doubtless figments of the walls. To screw the brickwork did not appeal to him, when he considered it. It made him think, even so. Why he had never felt even a twinge of desire when formerly alive he was not certain. For sure he had been equipped for it, if not for everything else. It seemed to him he had learned to suppress desire at source before it could gain any hold. And why? Maybe on advice he could not recall from one of his king-father’s judgemental mages – or even the shaman. With Ruxendra-Ushah he had begun to feel desire of course. But they had not consummated their mutual lust. Puzzling on this but only with half a mind, Curjai went on to the terrace.
It was open to the sky above, the city below.
He looked down and saw festive activities in the streets and squares. Nothing seemed to need doing here that was onerous or a chore. Crowds went along with flowers, and beating drums and choruses of laughter and music. From window-places banners and ribbons waved in a light breeze. The sky was deep blue, the sun blue only at its outer circle, the rest gold. You could still gaze straight at it. Sometimes birds flew over. They had the appearance of pigeons, or the long-necked gosands of Simisey.
Curjai looked further, and beyond the high walls of Thasuba he saw the plains dressed in fresh colours: tawny ochre, green, here and there rivered across by other shades of crimson and violet. Things grew there. Grasses, grains even, not that he had ever seen them in life to recognize them now. Flowers provided the extra colour. He could smell those, he thought.
Down on the plains men from the armies, presumably disbanded, rode in chariots or on the backs of horse-like creatures – these Curjai could make out. Deer ran in a blond ripple.
It was … warm?
Last night Lionwolf had gone away with the Queen of Hell.
Curjai wondered if he had been at last left behind in this afterworld he had claimed, truthfully, was like Heaven to him. He did not know if he was chastened or angered by dismissal. And if he was either, then as a man or a child?
Lionwolf and he – something bound them. What bound them? The boy’s worship of the older boy? Something so minor? Or did it have weight and worth?
‘Lalt,’ Curjai said under his breath. ‘Tilan.’ Tilan, in the legend, had let Lalt bring him out again from death. But later they quarrelled. There came a battle between them. Lalt killed Tilan with his own hands. Then Lalt mourned Tilan for all the remaining years of his life. And all the fair women that he loved, the saga said, could not console him for the loss of his brother.
The sun – felt hot.
Curjai glanced at it.
For one dislocating moment he thought he saw part of a face and an eye glaring right through the sun, at him and at Thasuba.
It must be the face and eye of a god. One who was seething and – virulent.
Curjai steeled himself for whirlwind or hurled thunder-stone, but nothing else happened. The impression of a watcher withdrew. Only the friendly sun beamed on. Whatever had looked in at this etheric world, that being could not enter, nor even send a token, or surely retribution would have sprung wolf-lik
e on them all. Everything would have been smashed to pieces.
‘Undo the blindfold, Guri.’
Guri undid the black cloth and dropped it. He did not undo his eyes.
Through the closed lids streamed light.
He heard a susurration all around. It reminded him of the noise of a woman’s sleeve or skirt brushing as she walked, but much amplified.
There was a scent too. What was it? Like spices, was it? Or like bonbons for a celebration …
Another noise alerted him. The sound of things running, their feet beating on the ground, the sound of deer going pell-mell, but chariot runners too, whisking along as he had heard on the snows when he visited Lionwolf’s earthly Gullahammer.
A stab of horror went through Guri. Great Gods – had the boy drawn him back into those wicked and ill-omened months?
Where temptations had not made him open his eyes, affront did.
Guri sat his mammoth, paralysed.
‘Where—’ he said. ‘Where?’
‘My Hell. It’s healing. Don’t you like it? It wasn’t like this before, I can tell you. All stones and dross.’
Guri, paralysed on the mammoth, amid the standing corn.
‘But—’
‘Cereals and grains that grow. Grass that grows, the way it would around a hot oasis or spring.’
‘Green.’
‘Yes.’
‘Yellow – butter yellow, like a pretty Olchibe girl.’
‘Not quite as good as that, Great Gods witness.’
‘Amen,’ said Guri without thinking.
A herd of chariots was pounding through the stalks, broadly smiling men in them waving their arms. Lions drew some of the vehicles, deer drew others, and there were riding animals like horsazin, but neither horned nor scaly, nor smelling of fish.
‘Lionwolf! Lionwolf! The war’s over!’
‘I know,’ he told them.
Several jumped down, embracing him, slapping his mammoth and Guri’s on the side so the big beasts shuffled and squinted at them.