Cast a Bright Shadow Read online

  Now, to the watchers, this had an ominous look. But Rothger shouted for more of the black wine.

  Cup in hand, he strolled to companion his elder brother.

  ‘Have the mages sent yet, Athluan, to the Magikoy in Karismi?’

  ‘Tonight they’ll do it. They need Saphay for that, and I left her sleeping.’

  ‘Yes, they’re fond of their sleep, the western peoples.’

  ‘Try this bow,’ said Athluan. ‘It won’t oblige me.’

  Rothger smiled and thanked him. For any other man to be allowed use of the bow of a Chaiord was a vast compliment. Rothger took an arrow and set it swiftly to the string, drew and shot. Perfect: the marker was split in two. A cheer bounced up the shore and made the ice-hawks jatter.

  That night the Jafn Klow sent tidings to the Ruk of Saphay’s survival. The distance was great, and the image must be clear. Sixteen garth mages came into the House to do it, to the Thaumary behind the joyhall.

  The room was built with three sides only, and the wooden panels of the walls were drawn with scenes of ritual and magic, blurred and centuries old. There were no windows. At the core of the place squatted an iron basket filled by pine cones and coals. This the Mage of the House fired with a word. The flames the Jafn used at such times, as with their torches at an allied Thing meet, were green.

  Saphay stood in her Jafn royal robe, trimmed and belted with silver. The atmosphere was quickly heavy and prickled by energies, and she felt the hair bristle along her scalp, even at her groin. She sensed she had displeased her new husband, despite the fact he had spoken to her courteously on his return from the hunt, and kissed her lovingly before the crowd to show he valued her. She did not know what it was – perhaps he had not liked her sexual hunger. She had been startled at it herself. Besides, how could she understand Athluan? For she was among a strange people. Even so, and even though uneasy, she longed to meet this man again in the bed upstairs.

  Now the mages chanted and made gestures of summons and arrangement. Peculiar rays and specks of light whirled round the chamber. Then Saphay saw a door open in the air. In distaste, she found herself glaring along a spinning tunnel, and it seemed to her she must be sucked into it. She shut her eyes, as she had done in the escaping slee. The older nurse had once told her a basic trick of lower witchcraft – deliberately not to see might render you yourself invisible.

  Saphay knew, however, that the mages were pressing her likeness on the tunnel, pushing the facsimile away towards Ru Karismi, to prove she was alive and in the east.

  Although she had been told nothing of the thoughts of these people, or their suspicion of a Ruk plot to kill her and so deprive the Klow of her pact-worth, Saphay wondered what the lords in the city would think on discovering she had not perished. Her father, she believed, would be indifferent either way. For the rest, they scarcely knew who she was. The other King Accessorate, Bhorth, on the two occasions he had spoken to her, mistook her for another of the minor daughters. The King Paramount, Sallusdon, had never spoken to her at all, or probably even physically noticed her.

  Something shook and tugged at Saphay. Her hair was blowing round her, and her robe billowing about her legs, as if she poised at the heart of a gale.

  She opened her eyes after all. Appalled but resigned, she saw her mirrored image arrowing like a fish away through the tunnel. Then it was gone. The wind dropped. Her hair settled. She thought, But when have I ever seen a fish which moved?

  The room was cold, and the green fire had, in the second before it too disappeared, adopted a curious shape like that of two lions, or perhaps a lion and some other animal, fighting.

  The mages did not speak to Saphay. Task completed, they walked straight past her out of the chamber. Here, too, she was apparently beneath notice.

  Saphay leant towards the fire-basket. It was heatless and dead, but none of the cones or coals had been consumed.

  ‘Chaiord’s Wife! Chiaord’s Wife!’ called a woman from the doorway. She waved her hands at Saphay, entreating her to come out.

  She dares not enter, and I myself must leave.

  Some impulse made Saphay turn as if to glance back, and, as if tidying a fold of her skirt, snatch one of the dead coals off the magic hearth. Never before had she done such a thing as to interfere in thaumaturgic acts. Even these barbarian magicians had the craft – so she had surely been foolish, and risked danger. Concealing the coal in her sleeve, she did not know why she had done it.

  The House Mage said, ‘Athluan, your bride’s candle is lit.’

  Athluan’s face did not alter. ‘So soon. Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course. The flame is lodged in her womb. It was clearly to be seen during the spell of sending.’

  ‘And gender, could you see that too?’

  ‘A son, Athluan. You’re blessed.’

  ‘Thank you for the news. I’ll make an offering to God, and a placation to the relevant spirits – but without too much fuss. It’s very soon to inform the House, let alone the garth. She’s only just arrived.’

  When the Mage was gone, Athluan walked about. He was in the small space a Chaiord kept for himself to the north of a joyhall, opposite the Thaumary. It was a study formed solely by wooden partitions. In the candlelight, the pelts stretched over these partitions, each with its glass stare, watched enviously his ability to live and move.

  Tonight it seemed to him there were more spirits and presences abroad in the House than was usual. At the foot of the ladder-stair he had spotted a vrix lurking in the shadows. It was wan and tenuous but wicked-eyed. He muttered the formula to see it off, but it only pressed into the outer wall, and merged itself in an old carpet hung there, in the design of which parts of it were still easily to be seen. Athluan had sent one of the under-mages to deal with the creature, since it was beneath the attention of the House Mage. He hoped it would be gone by the time he went up to Saphay.

  He paced, and thought, while the pelts watched. She is quickly sown. Was it from me – or from that other one-of-how-many who had her before I did?

  During the night, the ice cracked for a mile out along the extended shore, a barking terrible sound. This was to have been a House nocturnal of three or four hours’ sleep. The hall had put aside its wine cups and skins of leaf ale, and the men, with their women, stretched along pallets in the semi-privacy behind the pillars. Children had been sent to their own house across the yard. The lions had lain down, and the dogs, too. Only the hawks amid the raftering, quickened by their day of hunting, preened and fought each other, so that barred feathers clattered to the floor. But when the bark of the ice came, all the House burst awake. And out in the Klowan-garth the torches flashed, and people ran along the streets.

  Athluan swung out of the bed. ‘I must go to see. Last time the ice gave with such a racket, the water came in as far as the lower walls.’

  Saphay thought, Why do they live so close to open water, only a few miles from it, if there is this peril?

  But she knew the ice seldom gave, only shifted or baulked a little. There had not been, in these lands, an episode of Summer in any living memory.

  To her surprise again, he took her hand a moment. ‘Stay here. We build high, so even if the sea comes, it can’t breach the garth. You will be safe.’

  ‘Thank you for your care of me.’

  ‘Naturally I care for you. You’re my wife.’

  But he had cheated her, coming to bed with only a kiss. A sleep night was not, it seemed, a night for anything else among the Jafn.

  She watched them ride off in their chariots, from the window hidden in the vine. There were, as she had been told, so many white-haired persons among the Jafn Klow that in the dark she quickly mislaid him among his men.

  She was not afraid. Let the sea come, what did she care. She had survived the sea, and the ice … Something had happened to her, something impossible. And yet, she now had nothing left of it.

  Saphay went back to the bed. She lay down on her side. In the far corner she could see
the chest that now was hers. Inside the chest, wrapped in one of her shifts, nested the coal from the sending fire.

  Not thinking to sleep, suddenly she found herself lying in a cave of gold. Before even he was visible, she felt the god, his caresses, his mouth, felt his penetration of her. She knew him instantly in the dream. Bewildered, too, she thought, But I forgot—then forgot everything in the agony of delight that Zezeth Sun Wolf gave her.

  As he drove towards the rift in the ice, Athluan might have heard or glimpsed something of this, but he did so without knowing what it was. He looked over his shoulder, back towards the garth, once, twice, as if alerted at a cry. But tonight he was his own charioteer, Rothger riding in another car. Needing to keep his eyes on the way, Athluan did not turn a third time.

  When they reached the spot, it was far out along the ice fields. The moving sea was present at the horizon, tufted with its white spit under two moons.

  The rift was not so bad as it had sounded, yet it was deep, a black channel riven down about a quarter mile into the ice-plates. The liquid water at its bottom was sluggish, however, and had not greatly risen.

  They went along, checking for other flaws or fissures, and located none. On the chariot-sides the lion harness, little bells and discs, jinked in the towering silence of the Winter night.

  The under-mage they had brought with them leant on a staff, staring down at surfaces. He said presently, ‘The crack will heal over – but something has come out of it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A thing dead, yet alive in spirit.’

  Athluan said, ‘Must something be done to appease it?’

  ‘No, Athluan. It’s already gone.’

  It was Rothger now who looked behind him, back towards the Klowan-garth, then up at the sky. A ghostly cloud appeared blowing by above, moonlit, without any wind to power it. Seeing him look, others looked and saw it too. Some even pointed. But the dead-and-alive came often from cracks in ice. They got out and blew around the world a while, before going to the Other Place outside.

  On the ride back, the sky-cloud was ahead of the warriors but by the hour they reached their platformed town it had vanished away.

  In the joyhall, drink was heated. There was only a pair of hours left before the dawn, and no one now was in a mood to sleep. When the Chaiord took the ladder door, presumably going up again to the bedroom, some of the men nudged each other and grinned. A few seemed less happy at the sight.

  For himself, Athluan had noted previously that the vrix had left its partial concealment in the wall. Yet, reaching the ladder-top, his whole body seemed laved in cold. He stepped off into the room.

  The lamp had guttered out, but the sinking, vine-littered moonlight showed the bed. Athluan’s wife lay sleeping stilly. Near her feet, and on the bed, crouched a wiry, ugly man. His skin was leopard-colour, his braided hair like murky milk and decorated with tiny beast skulls. An Olchibe!

  Athluan knew this being was not fleshly-living. Though solid, he had no weight to him, left no imprint on the covers, cast no shadow. Nor did he glance about to see who had come in to disturb him. In his own tongue, which Athluan could speak, the Olchibe muttered, ‘Bitch-whore, bitch-whore, through you I am this. I will curd you. I’ll take your skin off for me, bitch of bitches.’

  Is this the one who was before me with her?

  Athluan spoke, in the language of Olchibe. ‘How did you die?’

  A Chaiord, who dealt often with his mages, learned certain lessons. This was how one must address the dead, especially the savage, angry dead. It was usually their main bone of contention, and centred them upon their state.

  The ghost looked round, peering through its braids at Athluan. ‘I’m not dead.’

  ‘Yes, you are dead. Where’s your shadow?’

  ‘I left it with a friend, for safety.’

  Athluan took a new tack. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Why should I tell you?’

  ‘Because this is my House, and that is my bed, and she in it is my woman.’

  ‘Ah?’ The ghost seemed pensive. ‘I shall kill her. She was mine – my prize for my leader. But she got away from me. The wind came out of the water. It was black and had a crown of ivory spikes. Whale – it was a horned whale. She and I, we rode the whale. Then it went down.’

  ‘And your name, rider of a whale?’

  ‘Guri.’

  ‘Off my bed, Guri.’

  The ghost slipped round, and then, weightless, fleshless, boneless, sprang right at Athluan. It was the kind of leap a cat would make, teeth jutting to bite, and nails better than daggers.

  Athluan stood, unmoving, and spoke a word. Guri sprang over and through him. Without substance, the ghost, yet Athluan felt it pass through his own body, like scalds of water, in at the front and out through his back.

  When Athluan looked, no one was behind him, no Guri now was anywhere to be seen. Athluan coughed and spat. He would need the Mage to clear him of Guri’s taint, but that could wait. In the bed, Saphay was stirring. Athluan regarded her, tousled and lovely, rosy from the warmth of sleep, blameless in all of this.

  She must be protected. The Olchibe had come back from death to harm her – his reason muddled, as the reason of ghosts frequently was, when they had been meshed in the world.

  ‘Come to me,’ said the girl in the bed.

  Who is she seeing?

  The urge to tell her she had been visited by a vengeful undead was strong, to try if it would release some memory in her of her rape. Athluan perceived he required to hear from her how much she had suffered. He was growing convinced she had not suffered. That what she had forgotten had been her pleasure, not her pain. For the room, soiled by Guri’s ghost, had also a glow about it, and she, over whom the ghost had shed his aura, was like a woman who had been dreaming of her lover.

  Nights came and went, and days beside them, over the Klowan-garth. Blocks of eleven days and nights, which the Jafn named an Endhlefon, absorbed the single days and nights. A month had passed, and then another.

  Saphay sat in the upper room, by the window. She had been filled with loose, warm lead.

  As the lead weighted her to the chair, she stared on and on at the pale blossoms opening inside the window embrasure.

  ‘Is it like that?’ she asked the vine.

  They had told her, yesterday, she was with child. She had of course strongly suspected, knowing about such things, but Saphay found the idea absurd. It was what a woman was meant to do with her body, and yet she had not, somehow, even through the most avid nights with Athluan, anticipated its occurring. It had nothing to do with her, but was now a fact.

  Her sense of growing enervation, too, was explained, and the nausea she sometimes experienced on getting up or lying down.

  Saphay was removed from herself. She felt muddy, and strangely old, crippled almost. She spoke aloud to objects, and said nothing much to human things.

  At the start of the two months, before she had realized or been informed of her condition, the bedchamber was cleansed by magic. Athluan mentioned that the cleansing, and the hanging of garlands of flylarch and weed-of-light, were to protect her during a future carrying and parturition – but even that had not alerted her at the time. The weed-of-light, which threaded the ice-forests with dim bluish flowers, stayed crabbed and did not burgeon in the room. The flylarch opened green needles and long red berries. They did not fall or fade. Had Athluan been so sure she would conceive? She half wondered now if the greenery itself had primed her to be pregnant.

  No one told Saphay these plants, along with the amulets and charms mingled among them, were actually an extreme protection from ghosts.

  Beyond the window, the garth today was busy. Vehicles came and went. Anvils rang and sparks and smitches rose. A seller of smoked fish walked into the yard, and another bearing slings of oranges from the hothouses.

  Then Rothger arrived, driving his chariot up through the lower houses, among the icons of vrixes and sprites.

  Rothger
she did not like. She did not know why; he had little to do with her. Besides, it was irrelevant for a woman to dislike a powerful man with whom she had no close connection. Even so, she believed she had had a dream recently, remembering how he cut the wedding cord at her wrist, and in the dream he had cut her hand, too.

  There were other dreams but she could never recall them; They ran along the outskirts of her awareness. They had been like honey once, something kind and marvellous, though then forgotten. Now this was no longer the case: often she woke with her heart crashing under her breast. Probably this child in her belly was responsible for that.

  Her head sank back. Saphay found herself in a hollow of darkness. She knew she had fallen asleep, and that she was afraid.

  The darkness moved. It was full of the jewels of gliding fish, although nearby lay several fish which had frozen.

  The water – it was water – parted. A wave was coming. It was a roil of ink streaked with blood.

  The chariot, as it breasted through the sea, was of agate, and drawn by wolves of ice that bounded along the floor of the ocean.

  Saphay knew utter fear. She dropped to her knees.

  The schizophrenic god had changed his aspect: there in the chariot he stood, his face stained to a violet mask and his hair the grey of ashes. His eyes too were agates, devastating with his own blasting contempt – and the violent madness it provoked in him.

  As he raced by her, he did not even glance her way. And yet the chariot veered, deliberately, so the near runner smacked into her body. In waking life, this would have been enough to break her arm and splinter her shoulder joint. In the dream she was only thrown, hurt and frantic, slung away. The sea rumbled. Somewhere fire spouted from the basement of the earth.

  What had she done to bring this aspect of disgust and malevolence on him, the god who had loved and lain with her? But Saphay knew, although he had not deigned to tell her. She had conceived his child.

  Athluan came up to the bedchamber to fetch his second bow, which hung on the wall with other secondary weapons. By day now, unless he chanced to come here, he seldom saw his wife. Nor did they meet at night very much, for while she slept he was awake and at the work and acts of a Chaiord. Athluan’s master bow had something wrong with it. Since that day’s hunting on the ice, it had turned against him. The House Mage had told him a corrit had got into it; it must be purged, and even so he might now need another.