Cast a Bright Shadow Read online

  Somewhere in the core of her skull jumped a howling rage. She noticed it vaguely.

  The child was still warm. She noticed he did not sleep now very much. He seemed more intrigued by something on the landscape she could never see.

  ‘Jafn baby,’ she said, surprised. Or tried to say; her lips would not really move. ‘But I come from the Rukararian city westwards. And I have to sleep, … the sprites are invisible to me.’

  The winds sounded distant. The numbness they had eventually brought was not unpleasant. It was not she believed she would die. After all, she had died and not died, previously.

  As the sound and sensation of the world began to go, Saphay saw instead an object catapulting along the top-snow. Against the luminous gem of dusk, it turned cartwheels. What was it? The child laughed.

  There, before Saphay’s open, nearly sightless eyes, Guri performed a somersault which escalated into flight. Re-arriving on the ground, he peered in the woman’s face, shrugged and spoke.

  ‘This isn’t any use. Hey, girl, can’t you see me yet?’

  Saphay yawned. Her eyes lidded over.

  Guri himself seemed to see a diaphanous half-thing that floated round her – part of her soul coming adrift? He pushed it back, or tried to. He gave her this, she had done her best. Now he thought he had better save her, for without her, or someone similar, the boy-cub would not survive. It was not his time to die – and not hers. She was contaminated by a god, would have to use up and jettison all that before she could go properly elsewhere. Guri wondered, dissatisfied, if that also applied to himself.

  Guri the ghost, whose undead magic proved an endless source of fascination to him, reached inside his being and brought up sheer physical strength. He leaned over and dragged the girl off the snow. Her head lolled. She said, ‘Let me alone.’

  ‘Shut your noise.’

  The child climbed partially away from her, until some of its aura was sitting astride Guri’s shoulders – with all the appearance of a boy of about two years. The baby, though, stayed curled in Saphay’s locked arms and went to sleep.

  Guri hauled Saphay and the double child up in the air. He scudded backwards over the plains towards the sky, holding her insolently around the ribs. As he did this, she began to swear and curse him. He was impressed a little by many of the phrases she knew, a mix of Jafn lewdness and Rukar profanity. How had she ever heard them? In a sane and conscious state of mind would she even remember such words?

  The turquoise sky turned indigo. A moon rose through the darkness in a lurid white-gold cloud.

  They splashed down into soft drifts.

  ‘Sit there.’

  ‘Cutch-gop, you soint.’

  ‘Yes, ladyness.’

  Guri put down the aura-child, who at once discovered Guri’s gifted toy mammoth and began to play with it.

  In turn, Guri released more of his own magery. In life, he had seen the Crarrowin make fire. Then he had not had any true talent for witchcraft. Now was different of course. He did it, however, as they did: not calling the flames out of nowhere, as for example the Rukar and Jafn did, but pulling them out in drops from the centre of his abdomen. The fire-drops landed on the snow and began to blaze, needing neither kindling nor hearth. The heat was good: it tempted even Guri, who did not need it. But he had other things to do.

  Saphay was stirring as he left. Since she had seen him, through being half dead herself, he fancied now he might be fairly obvious to her, sometimes.

  He leapt upward. The child watched appreciatively until Guri was out of sight.

  Guri raced over the air, his own psychic speed pleasing him. He had reached the borders of the sea in moments, and next dived out across it.

  Moon, stars, Guri rushed by each other. He could already smell – having snuffed after them – his quarries.

  The ice-hill berg lay maybe seven miles offshore in liquid water. It was one of an army of bergs that still glimmered greenly blue, having trapped, it seemed, the ended dusk inside themselves.

  But at least one of their number – the one he wanted – contained better things than mere light.

  Guri put down on the berg. He paused there a second to take in the swinging view of sea and heaven, before plunging straight in through the granite thickness of the ice.

  He struck home in a sort of wonderland. There, frozen in the innards of the ice, were weird-lit orchards of fruit and avenues of luminescent grain, ancient as the lost Summers which had formed them, potentially succulent as if ripened yesterday.

  Channels were chopped slenderly through the ice as Guri went harvesting. He ravished the berg, ripping out sheaves of dilf and wheat, snapping away boughs, the improbable green of verdigris, massed with rouged plums and apples, vine-grapes black as the evening.

  After the berg, Guri soared back inshore. He found the herd of deer at the perimeter of an ice-forest which, unlike the trees in the berg, had no colour at all.

  Guri tried to kill one of the deer. This proved impossible, to his irritation. Yet he managed to extract several handfuls of blood from three or four of the sprinting beasts, nipping their arteries open then quickly shut, as he had once seen a Crarrow do. It would be a while before he would question himself as to why he had not let the deer he could not otherwise bring down simply fall from blood-loss.

  The bounty anyway was not so bad.

  Proud of his ingenuity, heavy-laden and jolly, Guri galloped back towards the woman and child.

  Waking by the fire, Saphay had no instant of confusion. She knew she was not in the garth, nor in a city. She recalled precisely what had happened.

  Oddly, however, she recalled also another thing, which all this time she had forgotten.

  There was something in one of the deep pouches of the cloak she wore. She had clandestinely put it there, taken out of the chest, on the day she was moved from the upper chamber to the room of screens. She had never considered why she did this, but it was, after all, a sorcerous object. Perhaps now the vivid flames reminded her.

  Saphay slipped her hand, which had felt cold and wooden but was now pliant and helpful again, into the lining of the cloak. No one, it seemed, had thought to search Saphay’s garments.

  She brought out her trophy from the Klow sending fire, and held it in her available hand.

  The coal was black and inanimate, just as it had been when she stole it from the fire-basket.

  She sat against the snow-bank, looking at the coal in the firelight.

  The baby slept in her arm. She could feel his even, healthy breaths against her heart. Somehow, too, she seemed to see into his dreams, and beheld him there running and playing with some toy that moved independently on runners at his side. She smiled at this, charmed by her own fantasy.

  The fire that burned here was magical, and everything would now be well, for evidently some kind itinerant had found her or she them. It was only a matter of awaiting their return.

  Feeling comfortably rational, Saphay did not probe this fuddled madness.

  Instead, while she waited drowsily, she turned the coal in her hand. Then she threw it into Guri’s mage-fire – perhaps because it seemed some sort of combustible.

  As Guri then came soaring in down the sky with his lawless shopping, he was greeted by a display of lights all across the lower horizon.

  Far, far north of this land and sea were the barren countries of such boors as the Vormish peoples. There lightnings constantly wheeled about the night skies, so Guri had been told. He had never wished to view either those lands or their illuminations.

  He checked in mid-air, frowning. Then he saw what it was that dazzled in the sky.

  No one had said the Vormish lights made pictures, or images. Yet here a lion and a wolf, both scarlet-red and jade-green, were engaged in a dance of war. One leapt at the other, both leapt, both fell and rolled together over the sky. The moon was caught in their mouths, in their pelts and manes. They coloured it and let it go, wanting only to maul each other. And either the lion was of a lesse
r size, or the wolf a giant of his kind, for they were evenly matched.

  In his brain, this second brain of his earthly spirit, Guri heard the child. He was not calling in fear: he was laughing with enjoyment. The antics of the pair of fire-animals entertained him.

  Uncle Guri, do you see?

  ‘I see,’ said Guri.

  He shot forward down the night. You could not leave, as his own father had said, a woman alone for five seconds without she would be up to mischief.

  It was as he sprang over and came down beside them that Guri took in two further items. For one, Saphay was alarmed, sitting up and properly protecting the baby with her arms, even as he struggled not to lose the gorgeous sight of the scene above the fire – and he laughed still, the baby, as he had inside Guri’s head. The second thing was that now the wolf had pinned the lion to some invisible surface overhead. The wolf was mounting the lion, holding the back of the great cat’s neck in his jaws. Guri conceded that the smallness of the lion’s mane might indicate a female. That had not been battle, then, but foreplay.

  Guri, despite himself, felt a surge of arousal. It was now plain that neither animal disliked their unusual sexual act.

  Of course not, for Guri had heard of it. It was a legend among the Gech, if an old one and seldom mentioned, the mating of lion with wolf – which must then construct a creature both freakish and divine. In the ice swamps of Gech, now and then, so Guri’s grandmother had said, they could point out to you the marks of lionish wolf-pads in the snow, prints of abnormal size which shone without need of sun or moon. That was the resultant hybrid: the lionwolf. But Guri had always thought this a story.

  They were attaining their apex, the couple in the sky.

  Guri felt the current of their climax stamp irresistibly through him. He turned away and quickly, unseen by woman or child, vented himself at the snow. That he could still do this did not astound him; he thought it his right, even after life. But psychic animal carnality was one thing; he who had raped countless women did not mean to offend this one, nor disturb her son.

  Thunder rang over the sky. The wild flames flared. It was over. The lights went out. Guri tidied himself, turned round and walked sedately across the snow to the more traditional magic fire he had made.

  ‘You can see me now, then?’

  ‘Yes. Where does this food come from?’

  ‘Out of an iceberg. Have you ever tasted better? Another day, I’ll dive – get up fish for us.’

  ‘None of this,’ said Saphay, having come to a sudden conclusion, ‘is real. I’m seeing supernatural events and apparitions, to which category you belong.’

  ‘Great thanks, lady,’ said Guri, sarcastic. He too slurped up the blood porridge he had heated on the fire in a bowl made of snow which neither melted nor restrained heat. The dish was thick with the rich dilf, nutty and salty and delicious.

  ‘This won’t sustain me,’ said the woman.

  Guri wished to slap her but he saw, dejectedly, that he would never again be able to do this. Not after what he had witnessed.

  ‘It will sustain you.’

  Before, she had not been able to speak his language, but now anything he said and wanted heard was decipherable; and anything he listened to and wanted to grasp was the same. Might it have been easier if he and she could not communicate? If he could slap her? Oh yes. Well, no use lamenting sunrise, as Peb Yuve had been accustomed to say.

  She nagged on, ‘How can it? This food is all imagined. None of it’s real.’

  ‘Yes it’s real, in its own fashion. Look at it this way. Part of you is not real, lady: your inner being – your physical soul. Feed that, and all of you gets fed – if you let it be.’

  She looked haughty, the bitch. She was a bitch. No use lamenting …

  ‘Pay heed,’ said Guri harshly, ‘the gods too are like all this. If you believe in them, they grow valid and help you. Or if you’re frightened of them, they’ll hunt and hurt.’

  Her proud princess face, no longer ruined by the bite of the cold, the onset of death, sank on its bones. She lowered her eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  She and Guri sat thinking of the god under the ocean – this one’s father.

  This one.

  ‘Lady,’ said Guri, ‘look there, do you see that?’

  She glanced, warily. Apparently for the first time, as with himself she too now saw the true shadow of the baby, stretching down across her lap into the snow.

  ‘Bright as the ruby-jewels of the Rukar,’ said Guri, ‘all those little spangles.’

  ‘A child of fire,’ said Saphay. She sounded complacent. Then suddenly she was asleep.

  Guri hazarded, relieved, that as she grew stronger again, even on partly unsubstantiated foods, she would probably lose sight once more of the shadow’s aspect, and – grant, oh Great Gods – of himself.

  During the days, which was mostly when they travelled, Guri was often aggravated by their slow pace. Then he would take hold of Saphay and carry her, his arms fastened round her waist. Now, when he did this, he did not snatch her up, but suggested the portation first and took hold as politely as he could. To begin with she had protested, so he had had to explain the obvious to her.

  ‘So we can go faster? Where are you leading us?’

  ‘To safety.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Some settlement or town. Somewhere that Jafn Rothger and his curs won’t harry you, or that he even knows exists.’

  Guri thought the Jafn parochial and ignorant. He mislaid, blithely, the insular quality of Olchibe, which knew not much of anywhere beyond the back door.

  He was not very interested, even now, in exploring this world. He took it for granted, as he always had, expecting of it nothing and everything.

  She let him carry her, anyway. The child too loved it, coming out of his baby-shell and sitting astride Guri’s back, while the baby-body slept.

  He and Guri currently had conversations frequently, whether the baby was asleep or awake. They were childish talks, though intelligent. Occasionally something else was there, some brilliance. It manifested in a word or concept – Guri was never swift enough to catch or prolong these moments. But then, he had come across curiosities from the very young before. One of the kiddlings of the sluht-camp, four years old, had instructed Guri, with total accuracy, how to tie a particular knot of which the child had no knowledge. Even more oddly, one of his own kiddlings, only three, had told him frankly, ‘When I was born before, I was a chief and I ate bearmeat.’ Guri had thought that quaint and feyly believable. He saw now it had likely been prosaic fact.

  They moved south, west of south, selecting plains between great forests, or flying over the forests with Guri in charge. Each evening Guri would find food. He went down through the crust of the earth into depths of black water, and brought up cryogenic fishes. But it was Saphay who had then to slaughter them. Guri had learned he could no longer do this, try as he might, his best blows passing through and through some animal, fish or bird, leaving it flummoxed but whole. He could only thieve a little blood. He remembered the Crarrowin said the dead could not kill any creature. Although he recollected also tales of how the dead could vex or terrify their own – living – kind into a grave.

  Watching Saphay bash the fish over their heads, and then, the initial time, throw up on the snow and refuse to eat them, Guri pranced with frustration. But they improved: Saphay at her butchering, Guri at his patience.

  Where they were going, Guri really was uncertain. He guessed they would eventually arrive somewhere, some region that he might leave them to. He could not – though he did not acknowledge this – visualize leaving them; that meant leaving the child.

  The boy had no name. In Ruk Kar Is, and among the Jafn, a father must name his offspring, thus proving his acceptance of it. Athluan had not, of course, done so. Saphay called the baby by love-words and pet names; Guri had called him Lion. After seeing the image of mating beasts, Guri thought it prudent to be less familiar. He
was not afraid of the child; however there was more to this child than a child.

  By then, too, Guri had begun to see other unhumans in the world. They were not exactly there, not in the world that Saphay and her son still inhabited. More, they were in a kind of ’tween-world which lingered always between the day of normalcy and the night of occult otherness. Guri, as he now was, could move in and out of this ’tween-world without a problem. He was becoming used to it. He saw the boy too, even when a baby, could see some of it as well. Saphay, despite continuing to see Guri, could not see the ’tween-world – except in bizarrre and random slices, as for example when they came out on to the shores of a great frozen lake plain, here and there cracked in mile-deep channels. Liquid water lined their floors, and there were meras sitting along the channel-sides. Mermaids, they were unearthly, yet physical enough, unlike Guri, to lay hold of fish and kill them – next eating them raw. Guri stood watching, envious and resentful. White-skinned, with pearly webbed hands and coiled pearly fishtails, their hair was formed of watery, weed-like tendrils, clear as glass. But they too had the eyes of fish, lidless and pale. Their teeth were jagged as fishbones.

  ‘What can you see?’ Saphay asked, and then, ‘What are those animals along the channels? Are they seals?’

  ‘Meras,’ said Guri. Why prevaricate?

  Saphay stared, herself, then she put one hand to her mouth. ‘Yes – yes I do see them. My nurse told me about them – they drown the ships. But no. No, they’re seal.’