Even gods can be mistaken. Behind Zzth a man had appeared, tall and far more blue even than he. The blue man was blued by rottenness, flesh dying on his dead frame. Then that was done with. Out of the chrysalis came a Jafn king, intact and presentable, rather more indeed, his white hair shining.
Is this the one who was before me with her?
Zzth heard the thought and turned.
Zzth was tickled, slightly. ‘A ghost? How did you die?’
The ghost looked eye to eye with the god.
‘I’m not dead, in that sense.’
‘Yes, you are dead. Where is your shadow?’
‘Where’s yours?’
Zzth recoiled. Remarkable. But shadows were a sore point with him since Lionwolf.
‘I need none of that.’
Athluan took a new tack. ‘What is your name?’
‘No, you could never have heard. A barbarian are you not? My name is Zeth Zezeth. And this cow is mine.’
‘Not so. This is my world and she is my woman.’
‘She is a goddess now.’
‘Still mine,’ said Athluan, Chaiord of the Jafn Klow. ‘Still mine.’
‘I shall kill her. Whatever she is now, I shall find a means. She was mine. I had her in the sea. What to follow, barbarian?’
This conversation, substantially, had come from before. Guri back then had been the ghost who crouched malevolently above the sleeping Saphay. And Guri, made irritable by Athluan’s intervention, had sprung at Athluan, the kind of leap a cat would make, over and through the flesh.
And Zzth – he was a god by now far too meshed in human customs.
Athluan sprang.
Straight through the orichalc and indigo-ashen body of the god he flung himself, through a web of superphysical fibres and filaments, through a heart that was not a heart, a soul that was not a soul.
It appeared Zeth felt that. Like scalding water? Who could say? A hoarse cry broke from him and a thrash of galvanics to rival the iridescence of the stones.
As the Jafn landed beyond him, Zzth ripped energies from his own core and slung them. For a count of five heartbeats the ghost was riveted, outlined in incendiaries. He appeared to be alight. His body, which had seemed so real, frayed at its edges—
The Stones of the new-found country darkened – then cascaded.
Any other light was extinguished.
The nightscape stared like a green bone.
Zeth was flailing. He was being knocked from pillar to post of the monolithic segments, thrown at them, spun off and buffeted into others. In vain he hurled his power about him. The Stones took his power and used it for themselves, feeding from him, draining him, so in the end he slumped at every hammering.
Athluan, recovering himself, lay on the green ground watching.
He saw Zeth Zezeth battered one last blow, then ejected very fast and upward into the sky. Far overhead the god was slammed against some apparent roof – it was a thick cloud, sculpted like a whale … Bright stars above it seemed to shake at the impact but none came loose.
For a brief while Zeth was plastered there on heaven. He looked most like some strange four-legged insect someone had trodden on. Then the cloud went black, the world went black. Zeth had once more vanished from it, and so had the light of the Stones.
Soon after, Athluan was himself again. He crossed through the darkness, and now he leaned over Saphay.
Her eyes were open. She had looked on death. Athluan stared, expecting death’s signature to be painted on the irises. But death, as now he knew, meant nothing so much.
He raised her in his arms and held her close against a heart which, presumably, no longer beat.
Before he planned, his mouth was on hers.
Athluan shuddered. She had a taste of eternity.
The kiss had lasted less than—
Less than for ever.
Warm.
‘Where—’ she said. ‘Where?’
‘Here,’ he said. ‘You’re here.’ And then, as before, he said, ‘Tell me your name.’
‘Saphay …’
‘Hear me,’ he said, ‘Saphay’ He lingered on the name. ‘Let me tell you. Long ago. The hero—’
‘Star Black,’ she whispered.
‘Star Black, yes. He had a second wife after the first perished. She was white as ice and he as black as night.’
‘Hold me.’
‘I am holding you.’
‘Where were you?’ she said.
‘Oh – I was in another place.’
‘But not with me. Why not with me?’
‘It happens that way. You and I are not alone in that.’
She moved. He held her closer.
She said, ‘What has become of us?’
‘Everything,’ he said.
‘Everything.’
‘Listen,’ said Athluan. ‘Star Black and his wife lived together for a great while. At last he must leave the world.’
‘Don’t leave me,’ she said.
‘Ssh. This is a story. Star Black said to her, I am always with you. Nothing can divide us, death least of all.’
Saphay turned her head on his arm.
‘We’re divided.’
‘Not by so much.’
‘I must be dreaming you,’ she said. ‘Even now I sometimes sleep and dream. Even of you. That’s what it is. I never loved you,’ she added bleakly. ‘It was that one I loved.’
‘You loved me. And I loved you. From the moment I saw you in the ice. But the love never grew. It hadn’t any chance. Not then.’
Where he had been, when outside the world, there was no time. It was now therefore as if only yesterday he had held her, only the day before that he found her in the pyramid of ice surrounded by jewels of blood.
She moved from him presently. They both got to their feet. The hill was dark though all about now it was possible to see tiny pinpricks of vague light on the crags around, herdsmen’s fires most likely. The land was not unpopulated. It was just that neither of them had yet looked for anyone else.
‘Well,’ she said.
They began to walk across the valley. It was like all such areas. The snow was crisp and glacial forest rose either side, now and then seeming to breathe as white bats fluttered in and out of the ice-caves which had formed between the trees.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘To a house over there.’
‘Is there a house?’
‘A sort of house, ruinous.’
‘Cold comfort. Cold unkindness. Like all this world.’
She so often sounded, this goddess, like a child. She was consumed by shame and distress and, worst of all, by an unrelenting hope. Athluan was as she remembered him. He had not grown older since the day of his death, while she had added ten or eleven years to her span before immortality checked it. They were now therefore almost of an age, she and he.
The ‘house’ appeared. It was a long, log-built brick, most of its roofing down, outbuildings reduced to single frames of wall or heaps of rubble.
‘We can make this better,’ he said.
The scene changed. The house was whole and upright. It was no longer any building of the new continent, but the Klow House, with the Jafn sword lying horizontal for peace above the door.
No lamps burned in the high windows, however.
She thought, as they went on towards it, He summons the illusion of shelter – but his honour won’t allow him too many lies. The House will stay dark, and empty.
It did so.
No Jafn warriors guarded the doorway or yard gates. No man or woman was there but for Athluan and Saphay, who anyway were neither, only a strayed ghost and a despised goddess.
The joyhall rang as they moved through it, not with the sound of them, but with nothingness. But up the ladder-stair they went.
Oh – the room …
As she followed him into it, it woke and became a flower of colours and illumination. There was the lamp that might be turned to provide a more somb
re glow, the axes, bows and other weapons gleaming in the firelight on the walls, the bed with its furs and chequered quilts.
‘You’re a mage now you’re dead,’ she remarked tactlessly. ‘There was another I knew like that. His name was Guri. An Olchibe spirit, who became the guardian of my – of—’
‘Our son,’ said Athluan. ‘Lionwolf.’
She stared. Almost in fear she said, ‘But he was not your son – do you still think that—’
Athluan said gently, ‘He was my son because you were wed to me, you bore him under my roof and, if I’d lived, I would have given him his name. To all eyes he would have been mine. Neither of you would have come to any such pit of grief as you did when I was taken.’
‘Athluan …’ she said, in her low child’s voice, ‘what would you have named him, our – son?’
‘Conas. For my elder brother who died.’
‘Conas—’
‘I’ve met him, Saphay, our son, some while ago on a shore by a sea. He knew me. We spoke of you.’
She put her face in her hands and began to cry.
‘Everything’s been done wrongly.’
‘No, Saphay. By the most twisting and tortured route, the arrows are flying to the targets.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I hardly know. It’s not yet the time to know.’
‘Conas,’ she wept. Then she looked up at him. ‘How curious – in your language it means as a lion.’
‘So it does.’
When he advanced towards her her stance became rigid.
Athluan halted. ‘Are you afraid of me?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘And I of you, goddess. But it’s too late for that.’
He put his hands on her then and his mouth on hers.
Like before … so like before—
She remembered him.
Love him? Whom else could she love? That had not been love at all, that other passion.
But the touch of lips that woke her in the heart of the ice – Athluan, who brought her back to life with his kiss.
On the bed they fell together, hungry as wolves and lions.
The first time, far off in that other country, he had paused at the brink of having her, finding she was not virgin – startled, dismayed. She saw him remember. He laughed aloud. And then his body came home to hers and the pleasure of so many years’ delay burst inside the pair of them, wave on wave, like a sunrise, which ebbed only finally to great tranquillity.
‘Don’t leave me,’ she said again.
‘My love, I must. How else can I come back to you?’
‘Riddles – silly Jafn word-games—’
‘I’m dead. Let me be born again here. I’ll find you, or you will find me.’
‘You’ll be human.’
‘Learn a way to make me immortal then, my wife.’
She lay watching him, frowning.
‘Will you stay – at least – till morning?’
‘At least till morning.’
The lamplight faded slowly through the night. The firelight dimmed. Over the window the vine that only bloomed inside the bedroom rendered a faint musky scent. And once, when they had again made love, in the after-stillness she thought she heard men singing below in the joyhall. Everything passes, everything returns. She was not a goddess nor he a ghost. At least, till morning.
‘Yes,’ said Arok.
He spoke brusquely, then turned and saw the fisherman standing there looking as usual uneasy, with the boy Fenzi by his side.
‘He wants to speak to you, Chaiord. He’s had a dream.’
Arok gazed into the face of the boy. He was not like Dayadin, though of the same hue and comeliness.
‘Yes, Fenzi, what was this?’
‘Sir, I saw Dayadin your son. I saw him before in a dream, only then I thought it was me – a frightening shut-in vault, a kind of indoor swamp—’ Arok caught his breath. Quick with reassurance, Fenzi added, ‘But now he’s free. Our sister set him free.’
‘Sister?’
The fisherman lowered his eyes. ‘He speaks of having an older sister, but my woman and I have no daughter.’
‘Dark as me,’ said Fenzi, ‘like Dayadin and the others.’
‘The “others” being other children like yourself, born among the Jafn?’
‘And in different lands. There are very many of us. But only one sister. She’s like us, but has bright hair, like a fire.’
Something shot through Arok’s mind, angering and alarming him, but peculiarly intriguing him also – so Lionwolf had fucked her too, Chillel. And unlike all ordinary men who had her, Lionwolf had been able to leave on the subsequent offspring one marker of his own – his bloody hair.
‘So Dayadin is with your sister.’
‘She’s called Flame.’
‘Where?’
‘I couldn’t see,’ said the child. ‘But it was a nice place. Not like the other.’
To his appalled helpless shock Arok felt tears run from his eyes.
Useless to hide them.
And the boy – the boy reached out and patted Arok’s arm in the friendly way of an elderly father.
‘You’ll see him soon, sir, I’m sure you will, Great God grant it,’ said the fisherman.
It was almost midnight. In the dawn, they would behold the new land kneeling up on the water.
Riadis detested the mages. They had had no interest ever in her son, not even when he had been dying.
Yet every day for almost three years she had invoked their permission to enter the god-hall, and there she went round to almost every one of the gods.
‘Send me a sign. Let me know of my son.’
This she repeated to all the images, the grey winter god of ice and snow, the gods of wind and night or sea and mountains, the horde of them standing there in painted whale ivory or stone. Even to the god of the dromazi, the chariot and sled beasts, she went. He was a compendium of man and dromaz, his back with two humps and his long-nosed face the dromaz face, with great petal ears. At the ends of his man’s legs were the big pads of his kind, and his hands were like that too, if smaller. He was coloured fawn and his eyes were black polished agates.
‘Send me a sign. Have your people seen him after death? Have they carried him on their backs behind the neck, or drawn his chariot? I know,’ Riadis said in a quick rough voice, ‘there he has all his limbs. If there exists at all.’
To each of the gods she went, hurrying to and fro under the high narrow window with its strips of stained glass. She poured motes of incense, offered blossoms from indoor lianas, wine and confectionery. To the god of the dromazi, Obac Tramaz, she brought bunches of live grass cut in the hothouse.
‘Send me a sign.’
Only to the god Attajos, Maker of Fire, did Riadis not go or speak. She turned her shoulder to him so her chestnut hair fanned in a satin smoke.
Attajos had been her son’s father. The king, her husband, who could fill ten other wives and countless concubines with babies over and over, had never been able to seed Riadis. But the god spat his fire on her foot, ankle and leg, and when she recovered from the pain she had found herself carrying.
Curjai the king had named him. Escurjai among his friends and kin: spirit, heart, mind.
He had had all of those. Only a faultless body he did not have.
Today Riadis completed her usual circuit of the god-hall. She had little else to do. None came near her now except her women, or the clan shaman who could sometimes give her a little comfort. For a queen she had a secluded and unfruitful existence.
Obac Tramaz was the last god before she reached the end.
From her basket, Riadis drew out the fresh grass. She prepared to lay it down.
‘Mighty Obac, send me—’
Something.
What?
A glitter over the black eyes of the god. Some trick of the window light.
Uncontacted, and on its own, an object flew from the offering tray that held yesterday’s bunc
h of grass.
Riadis saw the object roll across the altar and, with a click, down on to the floor.
As she stooped to retrieve it the remembrance woke in her how, five days after Curjai’s death, one of her attendants had stumbled on a loose tile in Riadis’s apartments, and when she stepped away the tile lifted, and there lay the small bow one of the warriors had fashioned for Curjai.
She had thought that might be a sign from her son himself. See, perhaps he said, now I can shoot with a bow, having both arms and legs in the afterlands.
The thing which had fallen to the floor was about the size of a large ring, some adornment say of the king’s. It was a firm seed-head, perhaps from the grass or from some other grain that had become mixed with it. As her fingers met the oval seed it split. Out came a sprig, uncurling to living green.
Riadis turned the morsel in her fingers.
Had Obac Tramaz given her the years-demanded sign?
His sculpted sheep-camel’s face was friendly, but then it always was.
Riadis crossed back through the hall and, emerging, found two of the mages, who had paused in weighty discussion of some esoteric trivia to do either with sorcery or with their priestly function concerning the gods.
They did not acknowledge her, nor she them.
It was the shaman, Korch, she meant to seek. He belonged to her own clan, and had travelled with her to Padgish those many years before when she was given to the king. Riadis came of a royal herder family living among the eastern uplands.
Korch was in his tibbuk or smoking room. He had been inhaling fumes from some burnt substance and the air was thick with the sharp reek of raw caramel.
By now the curtain was pulled back. She might go in.
As Riadis did this Korch got up and wove towards her, eyes inflamed.
‘Something you must see.’
‘Something I must tell you.’
They both spoke at once, but each heard the other.
‘Does it have to do with—’
‘With your dead son Curjai? What else?’
‘I had a sign from Obac – a live shoot in a head of grain that was cut and dead.’
‘I’ve seen the afterlands,’ said the shaman.
Riadis made a gesture of fear and protection.
‘Is Curjai—’
‘Go to your room, queen, and take out that bit of mirror I made you keep, the costly glass that you broke when Curjai looked in it and was made despairing. Send away your women. I’ll join you in an hour.’