Cast a Bright Shadow Read online

  Saphay smiled. She wished he would go, he was tiring her so with his own vitality, and the weapons he had put on, the cloak of bear fur, his warrior-strategist’s eyes.

  Yet she heard herself say, ‘I saw a man once, he stained his face blue when he was angry.’ She thought, No, I have never seen a man like that.

  Chanting made a sea-sound from the Thaumary. Not bellicose, but hypnotic. Somehow she had closed her eyes. Athluan bent over her. ‘I’ll be gone at least two Endhlefons. Rothger of course goes with me. Erdif holds the House and garth during my absence. Take care with yourself. You’re near your time.’

  I know, she thought. She thought, He tries to be kind and courteous, and to want me as his wife still. But I believe he has no true interest in me. He says it is a boy I carry – his mages say so. Does he want the boy, then? Or loathe him?

  Athluan kissed her, not her mouth but her forehead. She was too pregnant, it seemed, to be kissed on the mouth. She remembered the passionate acts they had played out in the upper bed. Those seemed like madness now, but the madness had brought her to this.

  Athluan noted Saphay was again asleep. He could not help considering Jafn women who, even when massively with child, only slept three or four hours every third night. But Saphay was a westerner.

  As he crossed back through the busy hall, one of his hawks flew off from the rafters and came to his arm unbidden. People stared at this. Hawks were seldom taken into war.

  Athluan said mildly. ‘He’s come to wish me luck.’

  He stroked the creature’s head, and tossed it up again into the roof, where it settled instantly.

  It was Rothger who said to those men near him, ‘What was that? There was a hero once whose hawk flew down to him when he was going to kill a dragon—’ Then he broke off. The story nevertheless, known to all of them, continued in every head. The dragon had done for the hero. His hawk, foreknowing, had flown down to say farewell. The men murmured.

  Rothger shook his head. He spoke a word to unsay an accidental omen. ‘Forgive my loose tongue. I’m prattling like some girl at the washing.’ He took his sword from the servant who held it ready, and touched the blade with his lips. ‘God guard us. May the snow cover deep all our enemies.’

  In other weather it might have been a journey of a handful of days. It took more than seven. At first the snowfall thickened. Then came a light freeze which made the land surfaces treacherous, like slippery brittle sugar with a soft quag of uncohered snow beneath. After that the winds picked up, scything across the ice-sheets. The lions bounded, relentless, strong, their eyes covered by crystalline visors. Now and again, a chariot sloughed, swerved. One foundered and was consumed up past its runners. Another chariot stayed back, with grooms and an under-mage to get it free. The days were dark nearly as the nights. Then, when the wind and snow eased, a night’s brilliant stars seemed to hang in nothingness, between earth and some other thing, neither sky nor heaven.

  On the eighth day they gained the upland plain which looked out along The Spear. Here there was a cliff range jutting from the snow, furred with ice-woods. As they roared up to this place, white bats, which made their caves beneath the top-ice, burst from the ground in cascades like water.

  A kind of twilight came, late afternoon but overcast, with two early moons, one full and one a crescent. Assembled in the lea of the woods, the Klow men could look for miles towards the east. Out along that shore, where the deep sea lay liquid and black, there was still a fog of smoking and burning. It was too distant to make out the flames, the ships, the carnage and death. Some hours more of travelling, and they would reach them.

  ‘They’re lazy, these Fazions, don’t shift themselves from where they got in.’

  ‘But, again, there are rich villages there: huge stores of fish and whale meat, and hothouses packed with fruit and vats of wine. They can feast and thrive.’

  Above, the bats still circled.

  Athluan thought of the hawk which had flown down to him. The House Mage kept to the garth, as he must in wartime. The mages who accompanied the war band were trained to operate in battle, but he had not consulted any of them. There was enough to do.

  Rothger was suddenly just behind him, having approached soundless over the snow.

  Rothger said, ‘Am I with you in your chariot tomorrow?’

  It was tradition in war, as at betrothal and marriage, that the nearest brother of the Chaiord be his charioteer. In the past, Athluan had done the service often for Conas; in recent years Rothger often for Athluan. So why ask?

  Athluan looked round. Several men had come with Rothger. They stayed still and quiet, as if to support him in some claim.

  ‘Why ask me? It’s how it’s done.’

  ‘So long as it suits you.’

  ‘Why would it not?’

  ‘Well,’ Rothger said. He dropped his voice. It was still Rothger’s clear voice, one that carried even when muted. ‘We’ve had words already about certain worries of mine to do with the woman you have to wife.’

  ‘Months back.’

  ‘I don’t forget them. I was hurt, I confess.’ As Rothger paused, Athluan considered Rothger, hurt. ‘But I meant no dishonour to you. Only …’ Athluan waited. The men, too, also waited at Rothger’s back. ‘It would shame me if you didn’t want me for your charioteer, brother.’

  ‘I have never doubted your courage and wisdom in battle.’

  The men with Rothger produced a little approving noise.

  But Rothger said, ‘Yet, if I displease you …’

  Athluan saw that more than this small group now paid attention. Among the listeners were some of the Shaiy and Kree allies who had ridden ahead and already caught them up. The son of the Kree Chaiord, Lokinda, was there, a burly young man with big ears.

  Athluan stepped forward. He clasped Rothger in his embrace. ‘The Fazions displease me, and you are my kinsman. We go to fight together.’

  Some time after full night had come down, something stood up on the cliffs, gazing over curiously at the war camp of the Jafn.

  Guri was accustomed to war camps of Olchibe, which did not create large camp fires but kept tiny personal fires in vessels for carrying. Their banners were superior too, with the severed heads on the staves, and depictions of fiends and unknown, scarifying animals.

  Nevertheless, he took an interest. Now he was, as he supposed, a ghost, he had access to many formerly unrealized activities.

  Down in the Klow camp was that man who believed he had fathered the red-haired child. Or possibly he did not believe it. Guri had figured everything out: the woman’s Rukar god was the father. Maybe the Klow chieftain had grasped this also, for as time passed he had certainly grown less and less fond of the woman. Guri had seen this happen, because he kept an eye on them. Even so, the Klow chief was not cruel. He appeared even sorry.

  But it was the child Guri liked. Children were the future of all men. You could see the future through them: an easy enchanting sort of magic given only by the Great Gods, therefore special. They had met, he and the child, twice more on the edge of physicality, although the child had not been calling him: it seemed the god had, for now, withdrawn his animosity to him, as the Klow chief had done with his love.

  Where Guri went, when not in the world, he himself did not know, nor did he care. But somewhere, on the shores between there and here, having again met the child, Guri had found too a gift to take him. It was a beautiful little carved mammoth, every hair delineated and the tusks of ivory. Mounted on runners, it could be ordered into movement by three simple if sorcerous words of command. Guri vaguely recalled finding and giving something similar to one of his sons among the sluhtins, but never mind. The best gifts might be repeated.

  The stars were stretched tonight – twice their normal size, Guri thought. He missed riding his own mammoth, and thumping into his own Olchibe wars behind Feb Yuve. On the other hand, he could now run for miles above the ice, spring across frozen channels wider than vision could span. If he wanted, Guri gues
sed, he could spring upwards and seize the dazzling stars with his hands.

  Rothger entered the cave under the ice.

  He had come up here to the cliff base, through the woods, and no one had seen or heard him. In his tent behind the fires, his copy lay seeming to sleep its three allotted hours. The copy was not very exact, but enough to convince anyone who did not look too closely. Having grown up privy to magecraft, Rothger also had learned some of it, perhaps a fraction more than was usual.

  Bats hung in the cave whose walls glowed mauvely green from outer moonlight. At its furthest end, against the cliff, was darkness.

  Rothger walked on into the dark.

  Here he threw down the powder he had brought. Where it dropped, it smouldered and smelled of cooling metal and of other things.

  In blackness, a presence began to be.

  ‘Is it you?’ enquired the presence.

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Who else but you would dare?’ said the presence. Its voice, strangely, was the same as Rothger’s own.

  ‘Oh, I dare.’

  ‘What do you have for me?’

  ‘First, what do you have for me?’

  Then it emerged.

  He had seen it before, more than once – unsurprisingly since he had summoned it in the beginning. With familiarity, it had taken on not only Rothger’s tones but something of his looks. Yet it was white and partly transparent, and its eyes burned yellow. It was a seef, a type of ice-devil.

  ‘Well,’ said the seef, ‘I can give you what you wish.’

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘Give me a small present,’ said the seef, coaxing and reasonable. ‘It will make me vigorous, so I can slave the better for you.’

  Rothger grimaced, then he sliced his dagger, already drawn, across the back of his left forearm – already bared for the assault. Blood welled, in the dark almost invisible, but not to the seef.

  ‘Give me—’ it wailed, frenzied and wriggling with greed. ‘Give – give—’

  Watching it the while, Rothger raised his cut flesh to his lips, and slowly drank his own hot blood. As he did this, the seef rocked with ecstasy. Its cat’s eyes shut, it held itself in its own arms, trembling, and gradually its pallor was suffused with the faint pink of earliest dawn.

  ‘Now,’ said Rothger.

  ‘Yes, you shall have it. You know I am able. I showed you that day with the deer.’

  ‘True,’ said Rothger, ‘but swear it.’

  ‘Why must I swear it? You and I are kin now.’

  ‘So says my brother, too. Swear.’

  ‘I swear by all the gods—’

  ‘No,’ said Rothger haughtily, binding his arm with the strip of cloth he had brought for the purpose. ‘Make the only oath to me I know you’ll keep.’

  The seef spat. Its spit was visible like a struck flame, but where the spit landed on the cave floor it chimed like a silver bell. ‘By that, then. I swear by the blood in me and the blood to come. By that I swear I will do all you want, providing I am fed after.’

  ‘I always feed you. How else do I retain your charming loyalty?’

  Miles off, beyond the cave and the obdurate-icicled woods, came the awful cries of lost children and agonized young girls weeping and shrieking, echoing over the plains and rocks of The Spear.

  ‘Listen,’ said Rothger, ‘the song of fleer-wolves, out mourning and dining on the remains of the Fazions’ war.’

  ‘Yesss …’ said the seef. Its eyes twinkled. It shape-shifted suddenly, was now a glistening cryomite, and then was gone, away along the night to feed on the feeding of the fleers.

  Above the House door, the horizontal sword had been set upright and anointed with the blood of a herd animal.

  Saphay saw this: it meant the Klow were at war. And to Saphay it meant nothing.

  Rowah led her back to her room. It was fitting for a Chaiord’s wife to view the sword. But, though Erdif the steward had requested this, Rowah did not approve.

  The Rukar princess was near her time. Rowah felt the tension in the air of the room, the tension of Saphay’s womb preparing to give up the child. ‘I could count the hours left before she starts,’ Rowah murmured to God, in whom she often confided, ‘count them on the fingers of one hand.’

  Both Rowah’s hands were missing a finger each.

  She was right. Three more fingers-count after witnessing the war sword, Saphay’s pains began.

  Before the sun came up, the Jafn mages performed pre-battle rites.

  Every man received his drop from the sacred cups. Around him was woven a protection which, if it did not keep him alive, would still guide him safely into the afterlife, the Other Place beyond the world.

  The Kree and Shaiy, who had been arriving all night, their chariot runners thick with snow, had among them too a wise-woman originally from the far north. She prowled down the lines. Where she touched the lion-teams, their manes crackled with lightning, and they bellowed and pawed the ice. The swords of leaders, drawn and given her to handle, she made into flames and handed back. These incendiary lights faded only slightly in the scabbards.

  When the magic was completed, shouting, and high as the hidden stars, the men rampaged into their vehicles. Like a tidal wave, the Jafn army whirled across the plains towards the shores below. After a while, as they went, the day rose up to meet them from the sea.

  Already out and about in the morning, invading Fazions glanced from their toil among the ruins.

  Along the shoreline, the jalee of smaller vessels lay at anchor, as if they suckled at the land. The Mother Ship had slunk far in, her sails part-reefed, black on sunlight.

  Of the fat rich villages of the coast, not much was left. Mile on mile they had been calcined, their goods, treasures, cattle, women and boys boarded on the Mother. But the Fazions were still searching for anything valuable, or even usefully alive, among the wreck they had constructed. Thrifty, the Faz. Like the Jafn peoples they rationed sleep, but to a greater extent. A Faz warrior who could not go seven days and nights awake and functional they would themselves kill, slinging him to the sharks and spine-rays. Awake, needless to say, they had been drinking and eating heartily, singing all the past night and telling tales of their victories, historical or to come. Their faces were freshly blued, which they did every evening before supper, during raids. On hands, around necks and arms and booted ankles, were polished quartzes with, fitted inside, the once-living eyes of those they had slaughtered. The more jewelry a Fazion possessed, the more men he had slain.

  But now they beheld the sunlit roller of the chariots coming down on them.

  Then you saw what else the Mother Ship could do.

  Ramps slid out of her between the oar banks. Along these there soon stampeded something which gushed straight off into the water, then raced for the shore.

  ‘They have their bloody demon horses with them!’ The Jafn shouted the report to and fro. No one was astonished. Most of the reivers who used the open seas had acquired similar steeds. Yet some of the Jafn’s younger men, new to fighting, had never seen these things before – except with the inner eye at story times.

  As the beasts landed, they shook icy liquid carelessly from them. Such horses, which the Faz called horsazin, loved the sea. They travelled easily inside the guts of a Mother Ship, let out every day to swim alongside her, sporting in the death-cold water. It was true they had each the body of a horse, an animal otherwise seldom come on in northern climes. Also, like deer, they were horned, although the horn was singular, and jutted centrally from the forehead. But their main characteristic was that their skins were scaled like those of huge fish. Grey as ice-bass, with round pale uncanny eyes, they flexed themselves on the shore, tossing thin wiry manes and tails the greenish shade of the sides of glass. They were covered too with barnacles, sea-parasites, seaweeds from the farthest outer depths.

  The Fazions sprinted to them and careered up on to their bare backs. Only one other procedure was observed. Slinging a piece of cord about the long
neck of his mount and through a kind of halter there, every rider then tied this rein swiftly at his belt, leaving his hands free for the trade of war. Howling, they rode inland.

  One wave hurtled towards another now. Down from the plains the Jafn chariots came, up from the sea the Fazions on their fish-horses.

  They met above the shore. The clash shattered the day. The symmetry of either charge was lost in a maelstrom of exploding lights, buckling vehicles, sunny red columns of blood.

  ‘Lady, you must work harder.’

  Saphay stared in disbelief at the faceless women clustered around. Who had spoken so insanely?

  Another spoke, also unseen: ‘Men fight with swords. This is the woman’s war.’

  Then pain, enormous and unthinkable, drove for the millionth time through Saphay’s body.

  She had tried not to scream; it was some vestige of pride, of anger really. She did not want the barbarian hall to hear her screaming. Nevertheless soon enough she had begun to scream. Now the cry burst from her, and she heard it far off as the stinking makeshift room receded.

  She would die here. She would die and it had not been fair on her. But to escape this horror – oh, death would be so good.

  Falling then – down, inwards, away – Saphay glimpsed great pillars and vast darkness. In the dark a violet flame bloomed like a blossom. Seeing it, a different terror clutched her. He was there – he. Within herself also now, Saphay screamed out – not to the gods, for he was a god – but to nothingness, to everything. And, as she did so, she heard a second voice raised with hers.

  Swinging the axe one-handed, Athluan watched men fall, headless or otherwise apart, under the runners of the chariots. The evil horsazin reared all about, kicking with steel shoes. They reeked like curing mackerel. One thrust close to him, snapping shark-like. With the sword in his left hand, Athluan sliced through its fish-snake’s neck. Witchfire danced on both blade and corpse. As the monstrosity went over, Athluan sheered undone its Faz rider – a filet off the bone.