Cast a Bright Shadow Read online

  As he climbed, by means of boots and gauntleted hands, and both his knives pushed into more porous material yet sometimes slipping, the glinting of the distant sea confused his eyes. His ears began to sing: he seemed to hear voices which might be spirits or demons, or nothing.

  And then, his face was pressed over a pane like clearest glass. He looked through the window – and saw.

  The whalers had done this too, some of them. The wise-woman had not climbed, of course, or maybe one of her servant winds had carried her up. They had chipped out the ice shard as proof.

  ‘Face of God.’

  But it was not the face of God, in the ice. It was a woman’s face, young, beautiful and deathly, framed in hair like the wine he had brought for the witch. And in that hair were a thousand flaming sparks, more of the jewels he had been sent. But they were not cut rubies; they were a rainstorm of blood. And each drop burned.

  Her eyes were open. She had looked on death. Athluan stared, expecting to see death’s signature painted on the irises. He saw only his own reflection.

  Something was happening, for a moment he did not know what it was. Too late he tried to shift, but she had mesmerized him and made him careless.

  The slab of ice beneath him slid, and dropped.

  Athluan threw himself sidelong, grasping for purchase.

  The bodyheat of a man was not enough to melt such a thickness of pure ice – and yet it seemed that his had done so.

  He was slipping, slipping down forty odd feet, he thought, to smash hard as iron on the steel surfaces just below the water. Instead he sank forward, down but inside the gut of the ice. The pyramid was sheering and splintering everywhere, bursting off sunlit needles, till he shut his eyes to save his sight. And then he found himself at anchor.

  He had swum, more than fallen, in upon the body of the frozen girl. In a cruel parody of couching, he lay breast to breast with her. His mouth was on her mouth.

  Athluan shuddered. She had a taste of scented lip-paint. She was – warm.

  That appalling astonishing kiss had lasted less than a second. But, as Athluan pulled back his head, he saw her open eyes swirling with some organism that could only be consciousness. They focused on him entirely.

  He had heard of such events: animals, men, frozen in the floes, brought out with a flash of seeming life, gone in a breath – or, if living, a mindless shrieking lunacy.

  ‘Where—?’ she said. Her voice was a whisper. ‘Where … where—?’

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘You’re here.’ He thought of the tales and added slowly, ‘Tell me your name.’

  ‘Saphay.’

  The Chaiord brought his bride home at sunset.

  Under the closing sky, the entire Klowan-garth blazed with torchlight. The people there, in the wide wandering streets that had formed between the dwellings, looked long and in utter stillness at their chieftain’s consort-to-be. More than just an alien from Ruk Kar Is, she had come back from the dead.

  To Saphay the strangeness of this Jafn town, raised on its platform and surrounded by snow-locked walls and moats, meant little. She glanced randomly at the squat houses. They were clung with vines, their tallow-lit windows dulled by shutters of membrane. Everywhere totems stood on poles, among them the images of ice-devils, spirits, elementals. The Jafn did not worship these, she knew, for she could recall the chatter of her women on the journey – how long ago had that been, surely months? Once her memory reached the moments of the glass lake – the sliding, tumbling slee, the shudder of the ice as the pursuing mammoths went down – a curtain dropped across her brain.

  Yet memory began again with startling immediacy. It contained a face which stared at her, inches from her own. A white-haired man, with eyes hardly much darker, his wind-tanned skin tasting of heat and cold. For he had kissed her, and left the impression on her lips.

  Now he stood beside her in the chariot, their two hands, his left and her right, bound together with a cord at the wrist. They did not speak – altogether he had told her not much.

  The lions padded on through the streets, up towards the garth’s summit, the Klow House. She thought, If it were not for what has already happened to me, should I be frightened now?

  Athluan lifted her from the chariot, at the arched door. A great steel sword was fixed above it, kept always bright for the Chaiord’s honour. It lay sidelong, to indicate peace.

  It was Rothger, the brown-haired brother, who cut the mage-tied cord that bound bride and groom, freeing them for each other. Then they went into the House.

  ‘My father,’ he said, ‘could heft and swing the door-sword one-handed. So could my elder brother, Conas. It weighs heavy as a man of fifteen years, and I can only lift it with both hands. Do you like me less, now you know I’m a weakling?’

  Amazed, Saphay looked at her husband across the narrow bedchamber, where other weapons hung on the walls. Having kept silent till now, suddenly he talked as if they had known each other, were friends, had agreed to this wedding long since, and to what came next. Furthermore, as if he had chosen her, and she him. She lowered her eyes. ‘It isn’t needed that I … like you.’

  ‘Then you don’t? Or are you afraid of me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  She had learned, from everything yet seen, a man did not mind making others afraid. Partly she said it to flatter. Though it might be true; she did not know.

  Below, in the joyhall of the House, the Jafn Klow had earlier feasted on roast venison, shark and deer-seal, and on alcohol of various kinds. The thick pillars in this hall were painted and carved, and held up a roof that partially comprised rafters, where the Jafn’s striped ice-hawks perched. Shaggy hounds patrolled the floor between the benches. There were lions too, the best trained and most favoured. Of these both males and females were maned. Athluan’s pair of beasts had sat by his table, in gold House collars, where he fed them meat and fruit. The chamber was full of smoke and noise. When the women came to take her up, Saphay was glad. Athluan had not exchanged a single word with her there.

  Now he swore, but the oath was beyond her, for Jafn speech combined two or three languages, one sufficiently like that of the Ruk to be comprehended, but of the other two was this one, which was not.

  ‘Saphay,’ he now said. He lingered on the name, then said it again. ‘Saphay, I think your people never told you of our customs.’ She waited, eyes down. ‘A man mustn’t converse with his wife on the day of the wedding, not all day, until they’re alone. Then, and thereafter, he can.’

  She felt foolish, childish, frightened after all. ‘They didn’t tell me.’

  He sat in the chair across the room, and she in the vast stonewood bed, among its furs and dyed, chequered coverlets. The lamp burned low. From the shadow he said, ‘Let me tell you then why. Long ago, the hero Star Black brought his wife to his House. He was so taken with her that he spoke only to her, neglecting his guests. Most excused him, but one was a gler, a thing of outer darkness which had got in disguised as Star Black’s uncle. This devil then followed Star Black up to the bedroom. It stood outside, and no sooner had Star Black laid hands on his wife than the gler spat out its bane. The muck ran in under the door like the venom of a snake, and touching the girl’s bare feet, killed her. And for that reason, Saphay, to protect his bride, no man gives her a word until they meet in the upper chamber.’

  Saphay did not know if she should laugh or shiver. To the Jafn, as she had already noted, the supernatural was real and ever-present. On the way here from downcoast, after Athluan and his men had brought her out of the ice, she had seen them sometimes talk to beings in the snows and in the winds, even leaving them out placatory food. To her, these creatures were invisible, but she did not necessarily doubt them.

  ‘Why do you call the hero Star Black?’ she asked lamely.

  ‘His hair and skin were black as coal.’

  The lamp flame fluttered. Outside a wind was rising from the ice fields of the sea. This was a bleak and deadly place, and they had wed her t
o a barbarian.

  She did not really believe, even though she remembered it, that she had been found in an ice floe, scattered by frozen jewels of a blood not her own.

  He, this man, reckoned his God had saved her, and the jewelry blood was therefore His sign. Saphay must herself accept that the barbarian had rescued her from living death.

  Athluan stood by the bed. Under the robe of fur he would be naked, as the Jafn women had made her for him. The wedding ceremony was nothing, a word or two, and the binding cord. This was the wedding, how a man and woman became married.

  ‘Saphay,’ he said again.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid. Please do to me quickly what you must.’

  He turned the lamp round to its darker side. She thought of what he had said about the door-sword, and wondered if he indicated something else, some sexual failing. Then his hands were on her, and his mouth on hers.

  Memory remembered, too, his mouth. It was this very act, the pressure of his body, his hands, his lips, which had brought her out of the ice-sleep, melting to warmth.

  She clung to him, crying. He held her. It was not his comfort she wanted. She remembered him, and it was she herself, all at once, insisting, urging. And Athluan abruptly who hesitated.

  ‘Please,’ she said, ‘I’m willing, yes—’

  At the brink of her, unbearably he paused, apparently undecided. His face was stern and remote, and she laughed at this face and drew it to her breasts.

  Saphay did not guess how she knew so much. In turn she had put her hands on him. Her body tingled with desire, yawning open like a flower, and fully aware of its moves.

  ‘Surrender to me,’ she said, as if she were the warrior.

  They came together under the furs and colours and checks, which presently poured off onto the floor.

  Before the statue of God, below the cellars of the House, Athluan, Chaiord of the Klow, waited in silence and bitter cold.

  The statue had no face, for the Face of God might be seen only before birth and after death. The form of God was without limbs, glassy in texture, inert yet animate. Through the edges of it, which he had grasped, Athluan felt the pulse of eternity.

  ‘I swear this to You, no other shall know but myself. Nor will I exact any penalty from her. She recalls nothing of it, or she could not be as she was with me. She’s suffered enough. I will cherish her. She’ll make a wife for me better than any other. I shall come to love her.’

  This secret must otherwise be strictly kept, to save her further shame or peril. Its substance: Saphay had come to her husband unvirgin. She had been broken into, and recently. The Olchibe would have done it, before she fled, a couple of them – not more, he thought. They had not destroyed her, or her body’s beauty.

  That those scornful and lying murderers in Karismi could have sent her to him already breached was also possible, but he doubted it. She might, despite their plots, still have reached him – as she had done so – and the insult then begun by a previous deflowerment would have led not only to the cancelling of any pact, but to blood-feud or war. Besides, the evidence of her unsealing was fresh, enough so to ensure she had tonight bled again, which would make glad the chamber-women in the morning.

  Her rape plainly she did not recollect. She was innocent of it. She must be, or could not have behaved as she had – tense and timid, and then a spirit of the fire. God would know. God also perhaps knew that Athluan, from the instant he saw Saphay in the ice heart, had taken her into his own.

  Up above, in the House, the Chaiord faintly heard laughter in the joyhall. Rothger would be clowning to amuse them, maybe walking round the benches, one foot each on a separate lion’s back. They were in fact the lions of Athluan’s own chariot, but Athluan did not see this as he climbed again up the private ladder, to his wife at the top of the House.

  THREE

  A face, a kiss, had woken her out of death. Now, again, the black of nowhere flooded with light.

  Curling and rushing, it came like fire, and with it an incandescence of heat. It was a wave, deep in the sea, a giant comber of gold, and from it something golden gazed in at her, trapped there in her globe of ice.

  Athluan, as he himself had learned, had been second with her.

  She remembered now, almost remembered … golden eyes, a force that raised her like a vast hand, and scorched the length and depth of her body.

  Asleep, her awareness far away from the stonewood bed in Jafn, Saphay twisted in terror and pleasure.

  Yes, she remembered. Among the blind caves which had grown up between the skidding of the slee and her awakening under the ice-hill, memory still survived, though fragmented to a tribe of shining beasts.

  She saw, as she had seen, the colossal columns that held up a roof of frozen water like clouds of cut pearl. Around her, in midnight liquid which could flow, entities and bubbles of life revolved. Through the black ran veins of floating ice, cold blue, and streams of fish that, with scales thickened to armour, could outwit the temperature. But these extraordinary sights, granted normally only to those who drowned, were lost on Saphay. She had begun to see, instead, the god.

  Dreaming now, she felt the weight and heat of him. Her flesh burned at his flesh, under the showering laval silver of his hair.

  Did she know him? Partly she did. He was a god of the Ruk there beneath the ice of the Marginal Land, one she had made offerings to, even feared as a child. This of course was his predisposed and genial aspect: he was amorous. If he had been in malign mode – his other aspect – his mood alone could have torn her apart.

  The bloom of such lust was a glory. Orgasmic tumult eviscerated her. Nothing mortal could have induced this ecstasy.

  But in her sleep she made no sound. She did not move. She had in fact grown stiff as a corpse, if anyone had been there to observe or touch. But the Jafn spurned sleep. Athluan had left her after another hour of love – gone hunting. So she lay alone, if not quite alone, coupling in her dream over and over with that power which had taken her virginity under the sea.

  That was the first memory, and in the morning Saphay again did not recall it.

  She woke in the bed when the women came to wash and dress her. Saphay felt ashamed – she did not know why. The ones who waited on her, two of them old and seasoned, and finding the blood-marks in the bed, took her reticence as proper.

  Before she left the chamber, expected below as the Chaiord’s new wife, Saphay sent the women out. She had lost, during the Olchibe attack, the gilded box which contained her personal gods, those three allotted her at birth in Ru Karismi. Although respectful to gods, she had not thought very much about them, save when made to as a child. Now, however, she offered to them wine and a blossom pulled from the vine across the window, which flowered only where it came inside the room.

  She sensed their presence then. She uttered a prayer, and began to name them carefully, in a low voice not to be heard outside the door. ‘Yyrot, Winter’s Lover. Ddir, Placer of Stars,’ Saphay stammered. A gush of feeling, between horror and sweetness, caught at her insides. Her cheeks flamed, and she spoke the last name haltingly. ‘Zezeth … Sun Wolf.’

  Shadows flickered across the room, then were gone. But, above the Klowan-garth, four or five hawks were flying, visible through the window. It would be that.

  Out on the ice fields, other Klow hawks had brought down several white-kadi from a flock that had been fishing in thin, thawed cracks and channels. The hunters had seen a trio of bear too, and given chase, their lion chariots bolting. But the bears vanished into the snow – perhaps they had been demon things.

  The party paused to eat and play games of skill, shooting at sticks stuck in the ice, with horn bows.

  ‘The Chaiord’s eye is out this morning.’

  The men laughed. To be a poor shot after a night of bliss with a bride was as correct as her virginal blood on the sheets.

  ‘Soon it’ll be Roth’s turn. What do you say, Rothger? Do you pine for a wife?’

  ‘I?’ Rothger
squinted down the bowstring at the marks. He let the light arrow loose without a hitch, and it struck full-square. ‘When I go courting, God spare me a bitch of the Rukar.’

  ‘But she’s a pretty face.’

  ‘And clever too,’ Rothger added gently. ‘She can lie packed up in ice and come out whole.’

  The group of Klow about Rothger fell to brooding. They had been trying, in their own way, to mislay the bride’s uncanny adventure.

  ‘She was meant to be ours,’ one of them said at last, ‘and so endured.’

  ‘Maybe she was. Do you call to mind the story of the Crarrow?’ said Rothger, who had entertained them all so well at the feast the night before, playing the fool or performing cunning tricks and bizarre magics that made even the House Mage start. Rothger had joined in the telling of tales also. Now it seemed he had another.

  They knew this one, most of them, but they waited, attentive. For the recounting of stories out-hall was always laden with presage.

  Rothger spoke. ‘She was a Gech witch, one of the Crarrowin. The Jafn hero Kind Heart, when hunting, found her lying in the snow, bleeding from the attentions of fleer-wolves. She hadn’t died, but he put this down to her arts. In the night she set a spell on him and he was seduced. He cutched her for seven hours, never taking a rest, so greatly did she inspire him, despite her nasty ochre skin. Then he took her home and wed her. The Crarrow was the best wife in the world to him, for half a month. Then came the night of triple moonrise. That night the Crarrow rose up on their bed and herself turned into a fleer. She tore out Kind Heart’s kind heart, and ate it smoking hot. Then she did for as many of the garth as she could, before its warriors killed her. Nor did she stay quiet in the grave, after. Every triple-white night she would be up again at her business. Not till they burned her, and closed the ashes in a silver-lead casket and flung it in open sea, were they free of this devil.’

  The men considered this, silent. Down the shore, their Chaiord took aim again, missed again, and himself laughed.