Here in Cold Hell Read online

  The seating was along one side only, and on the further bank the same, so the diners would face each other, just the wider river between. The original army of Shabatu – if such it was – sat the south side, the shield-wings to the north. You gauged this from the compass point of sinking blue light in the west.

  Music tinkled from somewhere. The unbiquitous, mellifluous attendants served more drink and treats.

  ‘What will they have cooked for us? I’ve seen no animals about the city.’ Yorrin was uneasy.

  Eighteen said, scathing, ‘You ate it all up last night.’

  Vashdran, sitting among them, looked for and discovered the flyer Curjai at the opposite table over the river.

  How wide was the water there? Not so wide, not wide enough, maybe.

  Then the food started to be brought in, great platters which smoked. There was meat and pastry, vegetables which seemed familiar, probably to all of them. Sauces were offered from long-necked jugs like those seen in cities.

  Kuul, on Vashdran’s right, said, ‘This is good. Better than yesterday. Look, that gadcher of a winged thing is staring over.’

  ‘Yes. He’s raising his cup to us.’ Vashdran lifted his silver goblet, and pressed it to his lips. He did not swallow any of the fiery Olchibe liquor he found in the cup. He would not toast Curjai. No doubt Curjai did not down his mouthful either.

  A sullen sorrow was on Vashdran. He could neither name it – in this country of namings – nor shove it off. He bore it, like a wound, hi his mind, he saw the stony plain, and the dead who could not die but had, sprinkled generously there as salt. What would become of them? Tomorrow this unholy citadel must reek from the fumes of decay.

  ‘The water’s getting up in the river,’ said Yorrin.

  ‘Along the bloody river in our table too,’ added Nineteen.

  They gawped. Two large fish dived high from the table-river and arced back down, spraying everyone with water.

  Nineteen, obviously believing this too succulent to pass up, lurched forward, grabbing with both hands. He yelled.

  Something else came out from the stream, attached to Nineteen’s hands.

  It was like a tiny dragon, plated and sinuous. It clung on with its claws and serrated teeth. Nineteen was screaming, trying to pry it loose, but with no spare hand to accomplish this. Vashdran got up. He pulled one of the torches off the wall behind them and put it to the dragon-creature. Now it too shrieked and leaving go of Nineteen’s bleeding fingers spurted back into the stream, was gone.

  Kuul held Nineteen’s shoulders as he threw up on the stone floor.

  ‘It’ll heal, fool. You can’t be hurt here.’

  Sobbingly Nineteen clasped Kuul like his father until Kuul pushed him off.

  ‘Get back to the table. Eat your food.’

  Already the abrasions were fading. Nervously giggling, Nineteen resumed his seat, and presently started again to dine.

  ‘The moral of this tale,’ announced Yorrin sententiously, ‘is never pluck your dinner from running water.’

  Vashdran threw the burning torch down over the bank into the black abysm of the river. He saw Curjai regarding this but pretending, like a woman, not to.

  Now from the east, along the course of the river, some kind of boat was coming. Vashdran could see the soft lights at its prow, and oars dipping in the water.

  His ten men had crowded round, all but Nineteen who was replacing his lost food, refusing to look up. Others from their side were also leaving the table, assembling on the bank to stare away, through the inchoately luminous arches and caverns of the labyrinth, at the boat. On the far bank too the flyer men left their places, Curjai among them.

  What was slinking up the river towards them all?

  Vashdran could make out the torch he had jettisoned burning there under the black surface of the tide. The water here, then, did not extinguish fire. Something to memorize.

  The boat was long and low. There were no rowers, the oars worked by themselves. In the middle was a black awning, and under this were two chairs. Here sat two figures, not properly to be seen.

  A priest standing in the prow blew a horn, and rounded echoes winged away from the solitary note.

  ‘Another of those flat-faces.’ Yorrin gnawed a meat bone brought from the table.

  Kuul said, ‘More of them, look.’

  They turned and saw the priests arriving, orderly and together in their advance as things that had one brain between them. Over the river it was the same. Behind both long tables the cloud of priests assembled, raptly gazing towards the river.

  ‘And from above.’

  Something was drifting lightly downwards. It was a sort of broad platform, lowering itself as if weightless, on a chain which must slide from some high shelf in the walls.

  There were priests on the platform, but at the front of it was positioned a slender, pale-clad shape, which as it descended folded its hands and began to sing.

  ‘What is it? Is it a child?’

  ‘It’s a boy. It sings like the trained boys in the freakish temples of western lands,’ declared Kuul, uncertainly.

  Behf said, ‘No, it’s old. Look at its face. And the voice …’

  The singing was alternately pure and horrible. It had rich sudden fullnesses, and a needle-fine upper register. But then the voice would stumble and change to a soulless strength-less drone.

  The elderly child sang on until the platform had halted low above the river. Then it concluded, bowing its head.

  Vashdran though had barely taken his eyes off the boat.

  Something cold and genderless called: ‘The king is here.’

  The vessel had reached a spot below, just where the torch had been thrown in and still burned. The awning and its deep shadow concealed the two seated forms. But Vashdran thought one was male, and one a woman – the king then, the King of Hell, and his wife.

  The unseen caller called again.

  ‘Here are the lists of those who will fight tomorrow in the Stadionum, which privilege they have won by their prowess in battle.’

  Dumbly, the men along the banks attended. Not every name by any means was called out. Vashdran heard his own, that was the name he had given himself here, and that of two of his men: Kuul, Yorrin – the very ones now beside him. And he heard as well the name of Curjai. That was enough for Vashdran. A grim satisfaction washed over his mind. Tell himself as he might that Hell had reduced him in a hundred ways, he felt settled, stimulated, very nearly at peace. The chosen others were the same, he saw. Only the several men not chosen were frazzled and angry. He heard rough cries – Why not me? I fought as well as that one.

  Even this did not disturb Vashdran. He had gone back to staring down into the boat.

  It was then that the male figure, presumably the King, got to its feet and walked forward into the prow.

  Gradually and totally all sound ebbed from the banks.

  The King of Hell, if so he was, stood taller than most and was heavily built. His bare arms showed chunks and plates of muscle, as did the column of his neck. A loose dark hood covered his head. He was the colour of Hell, bluish-grey, and the skin that covered him had cracked a little, but did not move.

  ‘Is he …’ whispered Kuul, ‘is—’

  ‘He’s made of stone,’ said Vashdran. ‘That’s novel.’

  It was. The stone King could, unlike his skin, move fluently. His mouth had somehow looped into a thin smiling, and his eyes, black as the river and, like the river, spangled with the lights, passed across all the men clustered above and around him.

  He said nothing, the Stone. Only looked at them all, in silence. Then he went back to his chair under the awning, and she, the woman who must be his consort, walked out into the prow instead.

  She was not stone. She was like the liquid curving river … like the flight of a bird …

  Vashdran started as if someone had stuck a red-hot dagger into him.

  ‘What?’ asked Kuul. ‘Don’t you like her? She’s—’
/>   ‘Quiet,’ said Vashdran. When they obeyed him, even the other men standing near who had been murmuring over her, Vashdran merely forgot them.

  He knew the woman. He did not know how, or from where. He did not know her name. Or did he?

  She was slimly yet voluptuously curved, and her long hair, curling like a fleece, hung to the hem of her golden-white clothing. Her hair was black, and her eyes, but her skin blackest of all – black as night.

  ‘Like Star Black,’ Kuul risked muttering.

  ‘Then,’ said Vashdran, ‘she too must have been made from snow.’

  The woman did not smile as her partner had done. She appeared impassive, perhaps slightly quizzical. For a queen she had few ornaments, only the faint dust of gold across her dress and hair.

  She raised her arms. They were like the stems of black irises, the kind that broke sometimes from channels in the ice fields after a harvest of dormant grains.

  Vashdran paid no attention to this flicker of memory. He could not look away from the woman, not even inside his mind.

  Then the moon came, the moon of Hell.

  It came because the black woman summoned it. So much was obvious.

  Preceded by a blazing white radiance that dulled the torches, the round orb swam into the sky above the high walls. At first it seemed to come swiftly, but once in view it grew motionless. It had a likeness to other moons Vashdran had seen, full and blinding bright. Brighter than the sun of Hell-day perhaps.

  The woman lowered her arms. As she turned to go back to her chair, some small groups of the men shouted to her, surprisingly couthly, asking her to remain. If this was impertinent, or could at all matter, was unsure. But no reprimand was issued, nor did she heed the shouts. Back under the awning she went, and sat down beside her lord, the Stone.

  The awful disparate singing began again from the floating platform, which now was drawn up and away. The boat rowed itself forward downriver.

  Not one man did not stare after the boat. Until, as the last glimpse of it blended with distance, a whistling roar jerked them from their trance. Out of the moonlit sky something, some huge black thunderbolt, arrowed towards them. Next second it smashed into the river, sending torrents of non-wet, freezing liquid up the banks and walls. But the river closed over the missile, and it might never have been.

  Vashdran, who was Nameless, and Lionwolf, roved through the labyrinth of Hell.

  Far off, yet for a long while, he heard the feasthall bellowing on with drink and boasts. In his head lay a sharp-edged fragment, Kuul’s murmur to Yorrin, ‘Let him go. He’s remembered his wife.’

  Not so, Kuul. Not my wife. Or only once.

  Yes, he had remembered her. He had remembered it all.

  It had suggested itself to him that, in this edifice, you had only to wander about to find any location you ever wanted or must reach. But the palace was really like a landscape, or the inside of a mountain, mined by caves.

  In just such a clandestine closet he and she – last time – had lain down.

  She had made him wait for sex, but by that hour in the mountains he was ruined, half-mummified with guilt and despair. And when he put his hands on her, when he lay over her – she had drained the fire from his spirit.

  Chillel.

  That had been her name. But here? How did they name her, here? Because she was not quite as she had been, he believed. This version of her beauty was more sumptuous, luxurious at breast and hip. Her hair curled more, did it not? A little more … though it was as long and lustrous. Her face too: the same, yet – was it more sweet? For Chillel had been sweet only in her beauty, and this new version of Chillel had almost a human curiosity in her expression.

  Chillel had been made of snow. She had gouged the fire out of him – but he had melted her.

  Vashdran laughed.

  The laugh cracked round the towering walls, hit the moonstruck sky.

  He could remember all of his life now. It had rushed back to him, as the boat meandered away. How he had grown in ten or eleven years to the intelligence and physique of a heroic man. How he had become without any effort a magician, a lover, a leader, a conniver – a king indeed. He could remember the city of the world, the one that had disappointed him, with its twinkling ruby and zircon parasols and the high bastions which, to the walls of this Hell, were only toys. Lions, he remembered those, hawks and hounds, women and men, a mother, an uncle, and mortal enemies on whom he had lavished witty punishments and surcease.

  He remembered also dying himself. But the actual means of death lurked behind an inner partition and was not yet to be re-experienced, let alone seen. He would come to it. But for a while – Great Gods keep him from it.

  ‘Guri,’ said Vashdran. ‘Olchibe Uncle Guri. Peb Yuve, mighty leader of the vandal bands. Saphay, my mother.’

  But his father had been a god.

  Vashdran spun about and crashed his skull against one of the hard walls of Hell.

  It stunned him. He slipped down to the ground, and sat propped there like some drunken idiot.

  In life, if there are agonies, the escape of death is always an option. But once dead – what then?

  As his head cleared from the battering, buzzing slightly like aggravated bees, he began to hear a different music.

  Under his lids slowly he looked along the space where he had been walking. It was like a long narrow room, and gave on another through the usual soaring arch.

  There sat three or four women on a glassy floor, with harps balanced over their knees. They played and sang in remote pastel voices.

  At the middle of that adjacent room, beyond the musicians, was a flight of stairs, and on this the black woman who was Chillel, and was not, poised with one hand outstretched. Down into it, from the open roof above, countless brilliant orbs were flying. They lit on her fingers, or circled round her, friendly moths that were each a tiny gleaming moon.

  Their reflections danced on her, danced across the stony palace.

  For a moment he did not notice she had seen him. Then he saw she had.

  He sat where he was, on the floor, staring straight back at her.

  After another minute, she spoke. He heard the words. ‘What’s there.’ Not a question. She had articulated in the tongue of Olchibe. It meant: Something of great significance is before me. He had no urge to get up and talk to her. He rested against the wall, and soon a curtain like flexive opal dropped over the archway and hid it, even the music and the glitter of flittering moons.

  THREE

  Around the Stadionum of Shabatu the benches were crowded by people who excitedly shouted or laughed, waving or making gestures of contempt. They seemed physically real, but if so who were they? Where did they come from – out of the city walls? Whatever else, they had filled the thirty-odd tiers that rose up through the stadium. Snake-head sentries kept guard, set on the dividing stairways like statues, each with a single jatcha or a pair. Sometimes flowers were tossed down to the stadium’s oval floor, which seemed made of marble, densely scored to prevent slipping.

  Vashdran, Yorrin and Kuul stood at the oval’s edge, looking about, seeing all this. For a couple of hours they had been corralled behind one of the gates of openwork metal that ringed the floor, gazing out at others who already fought. The action had been fast and violent, but with each ‘kill’ a bout finished. In this way and in so short a while, twenty-nine skirmishes were hatched – and terminated.

  ‘Where does the blood go?’ Kuul had asked, with reluctance.

  ‘Soaks down through the floor,’ Yorrin mumbled, his eyes glued to the current combat, by then five men – all that were left of eight – hacking each other apart. They looked perhaps like Faz warriors, having blotched their faces with blue.

  ‘How? The floor’s stone.’

  ‘It’s all stone. Even the gadcher of a king is stone.’

  ‘What do you think, Vashdran?’

  ‘It’s magic,’ said Vashdran. His face was stone too, had been since the previous night. Kuul and Yor
rin curtailed the debate.

  Ten minutes later, the last of the fighters strutting, or dragged off motionless, their gate rolled up with a snarling shriek of hinges.

  Out they went, on to the blood-drinking marble floor.

  Then another gate opposite went up, and three others swaggered through.

  ‘Three to three. And that one. He’s mine. Should have had a bet on it.’

  ‘You knew it was him, eh, Yorrin?’

  ‘Who else?’

  Vashdran said quietly, as they began to move out over the oval arena, ‘Yorrin, what do you mean?’

  ‘We’re linked, he and I are. I know that one. He helped sack my village in the Marginal Land. I slew him at Sham. Then I saw him again last night, at table over the river.’

  So Yorrin had been of Rukarian steader stock. Vashdran considered the Marginal Land, infinities off in the world, between Ruk Kar Is and Gech. Yes, the opponent Yorrin talked of had a yellowish Olchibe cast to his skin. He might well have run with one of the vandal bands.

  Names – always names – were being called by priestly voices from some upper tier. It was the normal formula that they had already heard applied to others. ‘You fight for honour. Without honour you are nothing and must leave this place. Therefore fight well. Here are your matches. Kuul with Heppa and Heppa with Kuul. Ginngow with Yorrin and Yorrin with Ginngow’ – Ginngow meant swan-pig: swanswine – ‘Curjai with Vashdran and Vashdran with Curjai.’

  I said I would look out for these men in war.

  It was no use. Vashdran had eyes only for one.

  Curjai strode forward, arrogant, grinning, lifting his arms to the enthused if unreal mob.

  The high cold sun burned on Curjai, and filled his dark eyes with blue.

  Vashdran found he darted forward ahead of the rest. Curjai incensed him. There was neither time nor reason to ask why.

  The snake-heads had already handed every fighter weapons. There had been no choice.

  Vashdran had looked in bored distrust at the apparently virgin sword they gave him, flat-bladed, the hilt ready roughened and bound in leather strips. There was now no difficulty, however. He slapped it in across Curjai’s ribcage and heard the grunt of expelled breath. Curjai leaned forward, airlessly blaspheming some outlandish, never-heard-of god. But as Vashdran drove the blade back, to cripple, Curjai’s own blade, a long, double-faced, notched knife, swung in and chipped the blow away.