Jemhara did not forget his smile. She had been aware, though Zeth Zezeth the Sun Wolf did not touch her or speak, that he found her quite appealing. He seemed to approve of her. Few had. Few had cause.
It had stayed a small shimmering mystery of her existence, which she had never solved and finally seldom considered. Only when the city icons of Zezeth began to crumble in the onset of the barbarian war had Jemhara re-analysed what, if anything, this god might mean to her. Certainly he was not one of her natal gods; three others had been given her. Then Vuldir re-entered the picture of her days, and soon shifted her mind from Zezeth by sending her to entrap Thryfe. How could he have been so stupid? Yet … in a way, she had done it … And what followed that congress thrust everything other from her brain.
In the attic room at Kandexa, Jemhara compared the gold and silver god with the gold, fire and sapphire of the deity in her trance.
They were alike, vastly so. As brothers might be, or more perhaps a young father with a son curiously the same age.
Her trance had shown her Vashdran. She grasped this. Vashdran, the alien Lionwolf, and he was made in the image of Rukarian Zeth Zezeth, but for his colours and his beauty, which was greater – greater than that of Zeth.
In the trance too there had been an unknown city raised very tall, more elevated than Ru Karismi even, and set amid long meadows and fields of extraordinary growing stuffs. A procession wound slowly through the city lanes, chariots drawn by lions such as the Jafn favoured, or by lashdeer in the western way. Men were in these chariots, maybe two hundred of them, all exchanging banter both with each other and with an adoring crowd which danced, tapped drums and flaunted bells. A sunny day. The light had struck Jemhara even though in the trance she had been a bystander floating in the air, removed, involved only as audience and herself unseen.
At the procession’s head, in a lion chariot of gold-trimmed bronze, rode the man who was also undeniably a god.
His face was mostly pensive. Sometimes he, also like Zeth, flashed out a smile like lightning to the crowd, or at two men who rode beside him. One of these was an Olchibe with leopard-coloured skin. The other was young and handsome, dark-haired, brown of complexion and eyes.
Though Jemhara had heard music and song in the trance, even portions of ribaldry and repartee, she heard nothing from these three despite seeing they sometimes spoke to one another.
Then the red-haired god looked over. He looked directly into her eyes. This Zeth had not done, to spare her most definitely, for now the direct look from this other was like an assault. Yet, too, an assault that enchanted, that possessed. None surely could ever resist, or want to.
‘Greetings, Jemhara,’ said the marvellous voice in Jemhara’s trance-dreaming mind. The smiling mouth of the god did not move.
Jemhara did not vocalize. She was snared, could only listen.
‘Life,’ said the Lionwolf, ‘how we struggle with it. But I’ve let go of all that. This is like dropping a burden. Simple. It is simple, Jemhara. Do you believe me?’
Now she could answer.
‘Is it, lord?’
‘Don’t call me lord, Jemhara. That would be a craziness between us, you and me. When you see me next, I’ll be a fool again for a while, a type of fool. Will you mind?’
The lunacy of what he said, which seemed entirely sane and lucid while he spoke, each time rinsed over her thoughts, scattering them. But he could read her thoughts. They made him laugh, she saw.
He was gentle enough, playful even. Not the maniacal warrior, the Jafn Borjiy who had provoked the destruction of so many and so much.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘pretty Jemhara. I’ll have to learn again, out there, what already here I know. Don’t expect wisdom from me to begin with. Not that you will. Here is the best news, then. A man is on the road to you. A man like a tower of ice with eagle’s eyes. Who can that be?’
Jemhara’s trance heart stopped, then surged forward. Lionwolf shook his head. His face was shadowed she saw when the smile left it, but not with any grief that could lessen or corrode. Even so, it seemed he had not forgotten who he had been, what he had done.
As she must one day learn, the evil past is to be given room, a little space to sit, for it must be available like any necessary reference book. No need, though, to fill the house with it.
‘Until we meet, Jemhara,’ said Lionwolf.
The chariots moved on, and Jemhara hung in the sunny air. Then she saw the dark Kandexan attic and the slit of cold dull morning, the city outside, and far to one side the distant frozen sea.
Only by rehearsing the trance all through again in her conscious mind did Jemhara reach its last moments, and hear again those words, A man is on the road to you. A man like a tower of ice with eagle’s eyes.
Reaching this, Jemhara cried out.
As if by a broom everything else was brushed in a hundred bits into the storage bins of her memory.
Thryfe.
A god – even a god of madness and cruelty, perhaps a dead god – had foretold her future.
Ridiculously, Jemhara recollected the wicked steader witch of her youth, who had sexually abused Jemhara and beaten her into her first spiteful shape. The witch, as Jemhara’s mother also had, once promised Jemhara a future magnificent love. Lying sops to summon obedience. Realities?
As the days moved over the South House and melted to nothing on the horizon, Thryfe divided his time between his studies and the needs of the village of Stones. He walked to the village every third afternoon, or sometimes took the sleekar to give the deer exercise. These had been his vehicle and team. He had abandoned them on entering Ru Karismi in the aftermath. Someone – or thing – had saved the chariot and kept it in repair. The lashdeer too had obviously been well cared for. He did not think gargolems had seen to this, for they were by then in the city all defunct, or had disappeared. But whoever it had been, Thryfe would not spoil their thrift by leaving the deer to atrophy in a yard.
The village did not require his assistance, but seemed always delighted when he appeared.
In lieu of other service, he started to teach some of the children who showed aptitude rudiments of magecraft. Most if not all the Magikoy were dead. Who knew, maybe emerging generations would supply replacements. Though where they could be tutored to the higher levels he had no idea. Not the Insularia. That potent complex was now like clinker from a burnt-out hearth.
The children were promising. Some of the adults too when they dared lurk on the periphery of Thryfe’s classes. One young woman, who had never dealt a stroke of sorcery in her life, learned literally overnight how to bring fire – which she did not extract from the air, but out of her abdomen – rather in the Crarrowin manner. Thryfe then had the task of reconciling the woman’s husband to her promotion to village mageia.
One superstition thay had all stubbornly grappled to them with bonds of steel was about the Stones themselves, up above the ice-forest. No one would go there. They told Thryfe that originally no one had looked that way after nightfall, for fear of noting any glow.
‘The Stones are an enigma, but not anything to be afraid of.’
Nobody seemed convinced, even by this Magikoy lord they had sworn to serve.
In the end, Thryfe persuaded a party of them to go with him to the spot.
He had found, to his relief and satisfaction, that he had almost bottomless patience with the villagers. In Ru Karismi patience had worn thin as gauze against the arrogance and numbskullery of kings and courts.
He chose four of his brightest pupils, plus the new mageia. The village leader would have to come as a matter of course.
The seven of them went up around the forest in the dusk. A faint snow was drifting by and pearly ice-spiders spun their intricate webs. They met an enormous badger too, white as alabaster, just the tarnished stripe of cream along its forehead, trotting on shovel claws.
When they reached them the Stones were not as Thryfe recalled. They had grown, in some instances colossal, and they were black.
br />
Only a single half-moon was up. It limned the Stones but nothing more.
Thryfe was taken aback. He had never expected they would enlarge, nor had he ever seen them wholly unlit aside from by day. With sunset they began, and ended with the dawn. The sheens and colours were malleable, generally running to and fro, but always there.
Something seemed to him inherently wrong, if not in gained size then in the absence of light.
Inevitably he thought then of the dream he had had of Lionwolf and the sun that Lionwolf was. Thryfe had tried to paint over the picture many times, putting it down to disorders in his own self-harmed brain. But always the original vision scorched through. What did it really mean? And now this – what did this mean?
He stood with the villagers for ten minutes.
Then he said, casual, ‘No, it isn’t a night for them after all.’
‘But don’t they always light up?’ asked the leader, who knew too much for his own good.
‘Not always.’
Thryfe sent them down to the village with this comfy lie. They were glad to be let off, he could see, even the fire-bringer.
Thryfe himself walked round the Stones. He did and said nothing, for they had been at all times objects beyond his scope. He had met no other Magikoy, let alone lesser magus, who knew of them and thought anything different.
Eventually, despite that, he put his right, still-functional palm on one of the lower Stones, which was only about twice his height. He had never touched them before. Had anyone? Maybe. Even as he made the move a sort of warning – no, not that, some faint, unidentifiable alarum not to do with fear, only readiness – sounded in his mind.
Under his hand a vivid emerald spasmed all through the standing Stone. As his hand of its own volition flew off, the ignition sped from block to block, until the entire ring of them blazed green.
Something emerald and flaming burst too in Thryfe’s brain.
He tasted snow – and leaves.
The second, which had lasted a long while, became another second. Thryfe found himself again, upright and solid in the middle of fifty giant pitch black stones.
From his body the half-moon cast a sombre reflection on the pale ground. It seemed to be the copy of some other life-form.
Thryfe smelled Jemhara’s perfume in the night and felt her finger tracing back the hair from his forehead. He knew what she had done, bringing him the snow, cramming it into his mouth. He remembered what until now he had never seemed to have been present during, let alone a part of – the howling limbo, the torture cell of smoke and chains, the double resurrection.
Stupidly he said aloud, ‘But to bring me out of hell she too must have gone down into the Weapons Chamber. She must have suffered the ordeal of swords—’
The Stones were black.
Where had the moon got to? Ah, it was sinking along there, in the west. How bizarre, to sink in the west. Why did it do that? This earth – so strange to him. As if he had never lived in it till now.
He went over the slope and towards his house. Its windows shone a smooth non-frantic blue.
He thought of the night they had glittered whitely for a threat of danger. Why had he never before wondered how the shape-change to a hare of a limited and mercenary minor witch could have stirred up the sentinels?
His studies altered. Thryfe sat hour by hour in front of the oculum.
It was history he wanted now, the history of his life, and of one other’s.
The oculum displayed the measured, conservative panoply of his own years, the vibrant, multi-hued scramble of hers.
He had been born in near squalor, among lamasceps and unknowingness. She too. His mother was slain in front of him. Hers cast her merrily out to the care of a fiend of a witch. He flew with eagles, she unlocked ice. He went towards the legendary Magikoy, she murdered her abuser and turned crook herself. As Thryfe walked from the Insularia a master magician, Jemhara skittishly studied in the libraries of the city and at Vuldir’s orders seduced, wed and poisoned Sallusdon, King Paramount. Then Thryfe and Jemhara, those two disparate mortals, met.
Locked in an infinity of rapturous lust, she had loved him. Let it now be said, he had loved her. How not? Each set free the other from approximately two decades, or with him rather more, of self-induced blindness. But only she had known she had received the gift of sight. Thryfe had bound his eyes and thrown himself into the pit.
Guilt – useless, perhaps unmerited. What anyway could guilt achieve? Throw that in the pit instead then, and leave it there.
He saw himself hung in smoulder and nullity in some crevice of the Telumultuan Chamber. He saw Jemhara run through the snow, a little black hare. He saw her enter ruinous Ru Karismi naked, and the Gargolem itself appear and succour her.
Oh yes. Only the greatest of the sorcerer kind could attract the attention of the Magikoy Gargolem. At the finish, not even the Magikoy had lured it from its obscure alternate universe.
But Jemhara had.
Thryfe saw her fall into the room of ordeal, saw her rent, slashed, cut to scarlet rags, as he had seen his mother. Watching this Thryfe held himself in fetters of iron. But soon he threw the iron off into the guilt pit. It was not appropriate any more. Then he wept, leaning his head on his dead left hand.
Defenceless, he beheld her healed, and then her rescue of him, her courage, her becoming the bait for him as eagle and predator, and how she did not know her own wisdom, only knew him, and waited there as he came at her to kill her, which he would have done had he been able.
At last Thryfe watched as Jemhara tended him, ordering his supernatural servants with ease. He saw her fetch and put the transmuted snow into his mouth. How he reprimanded her. How she went away.
Over the land she went.
Going ever into icy distance.
To his bewilderment, after that view the oculum would display no more of Jemhara. It turned opaque and refused to answer his request that it show him where now she was.
She then had become capable of shielding herself from him?
He deserved nothing better of her.
No, throw that too over in the pit. Who deserved anything? Alter and grow more worthy, and earn the rewards.
It was her pain clouded and blanked the magic glass, her pain, his.
What am I, that I can’t find her?
He felt his power, both as a mage and as a man. He laughed.
He knew what he was. Now he knew, although it could take all his life maybe to learn and get it right. Finding Jemhara, to this, was nothing.
In the village of Stones they started up in dread. One of Thryfe’s gargolems, two or three of which some of the villagers had glimpsed around the mansion, ambled into the street and halted by Ravenhair’s well. Its voice was mild, mechanical, and gradually reassuring.
‘He has gone on a journey, and sent me to school you. But best,’ said the gargolem, ‘you are coming up to the house.’
Several days and nights went by. No one went.
The gargolem, or one of them, was there every morning in the village and each twilight the same, always with a similar announcement.
The students who had been lessoned by Thryfe got over their fright at it first. One sunrise it made a slide all down a slope, for the younger children to enjoy when the slide attached to the well was too wet.
The students decided they would chance the mansion.
Also the mageia thought she might go up with them.
‘It does no harm,’ she said to her husband.
‘Oh yes, off you go,’ he said. ‘Leave me to fend for myself, you thankless lump.’
The mageia called him a name not often coined by a decorous woman for her partner. Then she filled their hearth with a conjured fire, set a chicken sprung from the cold-larder ready cooked before him, with fresh-baked bread which had been rising dough a split minute earlier.
‘Get on with you,’ said the mageia. ‘You won’t starve. And if you miss my company, there’s always the carter’s widow i
n the third house, the one you have a frolic with when you think I won’t find out.’
Seventh Intervolumen
Whether I have been broken dead under a chariot or turned into a flaming star, if ever I see again the ones I love, I shall remember that once I lived and was one among them.
Bardic Lay of the Hero Star Black: Jafn
It had not been possible to return, not for two days and a night. All that while Saftri, goddess of the Vorms, had wrapped her fleet of Vormlanders, Kelps and Faz in a swimming inpenetrable fortress of air, and drawn a wind to blow them swifter than any could row, north-west.
She could have sped them faster. But seeing their hair blown forward and the very skin blown forward from their cheeks like bladders, not to mention how the sails banged about on the Mother Ships, she did not risk higher velocity.
All this speed was precautionary. Brightshade, though subdued, would recover. Zeth might even assist him in person. Then one or other or both of them once more pursue.
Saftri when Saphay and a princess had been trained in a sort of miserly aloof housekeeping. Waste nothing, and take care of what you have. Probably in her girlhood she had not practised these arts. Endowed with supernature she began to. So the ships belted over the sea until she felt sufficient miles of water had been opened between them and the giant whale. Only when they anchored in the lee of a field of small icebergs did Saftri go back alone to search for Dayadin.
She recognized the stretch of water where the whale had sunk after a while. A mark was on it, visible only to one such as she.
Saftri darted along the surface of the waves. But she could not bring herself to go down into them. Her last mortal memories of dying there put her off. She was, it must be said, phobic about most things submarine.
Needless to say, even so her psychic antennae soon picked up an absence in the sea rather than a presence. Brightshade had recovered himself enough to slink away.
Saftri searched then over a wider radius of ocean. She did it diligently, but with an increasing impatience and a flagging heart. Loss tended to make her irritable now. As much as Dayadin’s awful plight engulfed in the monster’s belly, she resented her own inability to reach him and smarted that she had not properly protected him.