Lilith’s Castle

‘Nandje himself could not master the Horse without the Bridle,’ Oshac said, amid a chorus of agreement, ‘and Leal has condemned the woman out of his own mouth. Stand straight, Brother, and admit your error.’

Leal did not move but only stared at Oshac and Aza as if they, not he, had lost their senses, while the shaman beat his drum and brought the violent sounds of quarrelling from it.

‘Many have spoken,’ he said, ‘but none harshly enough. Your punishments are fit for common criminals, mere transgressors of the Law; for tricksters and adulterers, for thieves and murderers. Have you not heard the wisdom of the ancients? The punishment must fit the crime. This woman has put herself in the place of a man and of her father, the Imandi of the Ima. Let me punish her for you! I will tie her to the strongest of the unbroken stallions and chase him for a day and a night until he tires; then, if the woman is still alive, she shall be put in the mound with her father’s soulless body and the ghouls and corpse-moths which tenant it; and the doorway filled with boulders.’

At this, Leal rose like a hurricane and called out with its voice, ‘Never! Never! Not until the rivers dry up and the stars fall!’ His voice was so strong, so loud that the women of the village stopped whatever they were doing, sewing or cooking, and their children began to wail as Leal’s cry went leaping and echoing over them and across the grassland terrifying small creatures and large until it reached the horses which kept watch at the margins of the Herd. These sentinels pricked up their ears and stood ready to signal flight. The mares heard Leal and, turning to their foals, nuzzled a warning; Summer and the Red Colt heard Leal and the Colt danced in alarm as his complaint came at last to the two black-tipped ears of the Red Horse. The great horse turned his head to hear it better; nodded, almost like a man, that long, sagacious head; and cantered forward to join his sentinels.

Then Leal, on the hearth of the Meeting House, called for compassion and justice for Gry and on his friends for aid and support. Seventeen men joined him there; the rest swore to follow Battak, all but Garron and Kiang who were left like abandoned princes between two armies. Each faction began to shout for its leader and Gry, lost in the noise, opened her bruised, sore mouth at last and spoke.

‘Nandje came to me,’ she said. ‘My father told me I might look on his body because his soul was on its way to the Palace of Shadows. He did not chide me for my friendship with the Horse.’

Her voice was so low and full of fear that none but her brothers understood her, and they could not believe their ears. Nor did Gry dare repeat the words which had floated into her head as she and the Horse made ready to leave the mound: ‘You are the Rider.’

Heron rounded on her, out of the throng. The rest, in their growing quarrel, had forgotten her, the source of it. The historian, by contrast, had become civil. Though he dominated her, leaning his bulky body too close to her and touching her indelicately with his eyes and thoughts, his voice was gentle and persuasive.

‘Not one of them is fit to choose the new Imandi,’ he said. ‘I must put you in a place of safety and then, by our fathers! we shall discover what your fate is to be.’ He took her arm and led her from the House and across the empty ground in the centre of the village where the communal hearth, which was used on feast days and for cooking the horsemeat at slaughtering-season, was deserted and cold, another testament to her alienation. She thought of escape, of flight; but her soul was terrified and had curled itself up like an unborn babe and retreated so far into her body that she could not tell where it was; she was nesh, her limbs addled as if she had a fever; and this weakness, she thought, was the shaman’s doing.

Heron, not unkindly, pushed her into the low mound where the dried meat was stored; and came in after her.

‘You won’t be frightened in the storehouse,’ he said. ‘The children play here and lovers, too, at midsummer.’

Gry felt obscurely grateful. He wasn’t so bad, the old memory-keeper. A man would have been tied outside in the cold and watched from the warm shelter of a house doorway. She knew this and began to think herself lucky, resting at last on the ground. It was dark in the storehouse. She heard Heron rummaging and the sound of a hide being dragged.

‘Here is a skin,’ he said. ‘Put it beneath you, there! Soon, I will bring you water and meat, and tomorrow I will speak for you in the House. I have heard many quarrels and listened to many judgements. It seems to me that your punishment will not be as terrible as that of Huçul.’ Again, she heard the sound of horse-leather being moved: it was Heron unbuckling his belt. Where was he, beside her, before? The sun-disks on the belt jingled. ‘Oshac’s solution is best, for then you will not die or have to leave the Plains, nor exchange them for the fiery wilderness of Hell.’

Gry, in the blackness of her prison, felt his hand on her wrist.

‘I have the captive’s choice,’ she said.

‘Then choose wisely! If I am to speak for you, it would help your case to show how willing you are and how meek. Let an experienced man, weighty but wise in his knowledge, be convinced of your remorse.’

His voice came from the darkness directly in front of her; indeed, she could feel, and smell, his breath, which was coming in short gusts like that of an animal which has been running hard.

‘It is no choice at all.’

The man fell on her in a rush, all at once, pressing her down on the horse-hide. He was heavy and his calloused hands tore at her skirt and rasped her thighs. She did not dare resist, nor want to; everything the future held was dull and mean. Slavery meant being used. He was merely the first. She felt his thing nudge her. She thought it was huge and swollen like a stallion’s; it would hurt. It pushed against her as if it would devour her from the inside out or, at last finding the way, suck out her soul through this, the narrow passage which was meant for her lover and her babies. She tried to think of healing, of wind and water, of small, blue flowers in the grass, of birds in flight; but all she knew was the man, his heaviness, his rank smell. The ground heaved under her: she had heard that was what happened when man entered woman’s gates and Heron, with a horrid, passionate gurgle, crashed across her and was still. Astonished, she lifted one hand to touch his face. Was this all? A short struggle and nothing more, no kind words or sweet sensations. Was this the great and wonderful union that the lays told of, the songs celebrated? Like a dead baby in its grave-cloth, Heron’s head was wrapped in the horse’s hide and one of the long tubes of leather which had once covered its legs was taut about his neck. He did not speak, nor ever speak again.

Gry shivered violently. The quarrel in the Meeting House was still going on. She heard the men shouting insults and challenges, their voices fuelled by kumiz. She lay completely still, under the dead man. Time crawled. Something was sticking to her left hand and she moved it, touched it cautiously with the other. It was the cloth of her skirt and Heron’s blood on it – not her own, the blood of her torn maiden’s veil, nor his – stuff. Those – she felt – were lower down, some on her, some on his cast-aside clothing. This – it felt like blood from a wound. She did not, could not understand, and lay motionless again.

After a time, she convulsed and struggled free, throwing Heron off. The body fell to one side, so much dead meat in the hide wrapping, and she spat on it. She was stiff: cramps in her legs and arms. Eventually she got up, on to her knees, and crawled into the doorway.

The night smelled clean, fresh as flowers; cold as spring water. Out in the open it was spaces, stars, wings, freedom. What was in the dark storehouse behind her she wished to forget, seeing, sensing only this, the changed, new world.

Gry wiped her hands, herself, on a tuft of grass and stood cautiously up. There was no one about, the house-mounds dark, the shouting replaced by drunken laughter all muffled like puvushi chanting underground. The sound was not of this wide, starlit world. She was glad to see the stars and Bail’s keen Sword there pointing towards the inhospitable mountains of the Altaish, a pitiless place of ice and snow. Beyond them, as she knew well, the world ended. Far brighter than any other star shone that marvellous light which the Ima called the Guardian of the Herd. It had appeared not long after the stranger Paladin, the wanderer called Parados, had left the Ima and, to Gry, was like a sign from him that all would and should be well. And perhaps it was truly a sign tonight, for it burned ardently and seemed to wait for her, halfway between the rocky ridges of the Altaish and the ragged skyline of the distant Forest. Or perhaps it was a sign that she must seek and find her father, wherever his grey shadow had fled.

A footfall disturbed the grass; she heard it clearly, and another, two, three and four. Not a man. A horse. The Red Horse paced calmly into the village, came close to her and laid his head on her shoulder. His warm lips caressed her neck; then, drawing slightly back, he pricked his ears as she might raise her eyebrows, to ask a question, and raised his foreleg so that she could mount. She heard the voice in her mind:

‘Come on! It’s time to go.’

His hooves marked the frosty grass, once, twice. Then he was into his stride and they were away, crossing the village grounds, bounding up the first hills. She expected him to carry her into the Herd, but it was nowhere in sight and they were heading into the barren wastelands beyond the pasture-grass. The Swan spread her starry wings above them and Gry bent forward and spread her arms to hold the Horse’s shoulders, for it was bitter cold up there on his back. Someone said, ‘No hair, no coat!’ or perhaps it was a thought. At least his long mane covered up her hands and arms.

Her mother used to carry her in safety, in front before the saddle, so that she could sit straight and believe she was riding alone, stretch forward and embrace the striding warmth of the mare’s shoulders or, leaning back, nestle into the fur binding of Lemani’s jacket: when they were all young and hopeful, Nandje not yet leader of his people, Lemani a beautiful young woman whose silver and jet jewellery was handed down from the oldest ancestors, perhaps from Hemmel herself; when she had sisters still alive and was herself a child, Garron a little boy, and Kiang an unborn soul in the Palace of Shadows. Those were the days, the Ima at peace with their enemies and with one another, the grass rich, the horses glossy and fat, Nandje himself strong and ardent, but wise. Gry let herself pretend, feeling the white wolf-fur and the cold, hard beads and the sharp-pointed silver stars touch her back. She grew tolerably warm.

The grass flowed like a dark river beneath them, the Horse and herself; but sometimes he made mighty bounds and sideways leaps across streams or into the stretches of gravel that appeared with greater frequency as they neared the wastelands; and always a restlessness or a tensing in her mind preceded these leaps and bounds so that Gry knew she must likewise move back a little way or tense the muscles of her legs to keep her seat on his back. The Horse, it was clear, was trying to confuse anyone who might find and follow his hoofprints.

The low hills of the open country gave way to steeper, rocky hills. Narrow valleys, which the Horse must thread, passed between them; falls of water dropped suddenly, cascading out of the dark; a rustling patch of bushes, which might hide any number of thieves, or lions, appeared on the left. Yet, the Red Horse hardly slowed his pace and, in Gry’s mind, nine words constantly jumped and span,

‘Good. Free. Good Bridle. Free of. It is good to be free of the Bridle.’

In Garsting, Aza, flushed with kumiz and the madness of failed magic, crawled from the Meeting House and squinted at the sky. A flight of cranes passed overhead, marking the ground with their cleft shadows. Aza read what the shadows told him: the Heron is dead. The hoofmarks in the grass told him the rest: the girl has fled with the Horse. He plodded wearily across the village to the storehouse.

It had become a death house during the long night. Aza crouched to examine Heron’s throttled, bloodstained body, primming his thin lips briefly, almost smiling when he saw what carnal conquest the historian had been attempting when he died, his scarlet, double apron cast aside but still attached to his unbuckled belt, his unwound loincloth stained with the tinctures of his last, greedy act and with the bright blood which had spurted from the unstoppable fountain of his heart.

‘She did not have a dagger – she found a dagger? One was lost among the skins, perhaps?’

The shaman puzzled over Heron’s death-wound. As to the throttling, it was all too obvious how that had come about: the iron grey horsehide which was still wound tight about Heron’s head and neck had come from the stallion, Winter, jealous rival of the Red Horse, fast and cunning, if a mite too weak to usurp the rule of the Horse. Both stallions had favoured the white mare, Summer, but the Horse had won and taken her; now she nursed and nurtured the Red Colt while Winter had died in the last Killing, driven over the precipice of the Rock of SanZu. Leal had skinned him; Garron and Kiang had disembowelled and cut up his carcass; Leal’s mother had made him into wholesome food, dried hross, succulent stews, sausages thin and thick, lard – but it had been Heron who spoke the ritual of placation over all the dead horses of the killing-harvest. So.

Aza frowned and struck his forehead with his rattle. None of this explained the heart-wound. None of it made sense. And his head was thick with kumiz-ache, his mouth and tongue parched, longing for a draught of clear river-water.

Heron was dead. Nothing remained of the Ima’s long history but a few fragments in the head of Heron’s successor, Thrush – who had committed only one third to memory. What was left? Gossip and women’s talk; some songs; the Lays, the Tales too – inaccurate fables which praised the ancestors and the deeds of the rare and heroic strangers who strayed into the Plains. Heron was dead. History was dead.

Henceforth, all Ima history would begin with the Red Horse’s Flight.

Why had he gone with her?

Aza trembled then, recalling his accusations in the Meeting House: ‘this daughter of foxes, this sister of the wolf, has stolen the will of the Ima’ and ‘how else but by sorcery could she tame and ride the Horse?’ He had not known fear since he had fought to rid himself of the death-curse of his last wife, and now it visited him, licking the nape of his neck with its long and slimy tongue, laughing and blowing up the skirts of his gown so that he shivered. He wanted to rid himself of it, lie down upon the spirit bear and surrender to the dreams which lived there – he could not. He must discover Revenge, drag her out and parade her before the Ima until they, too, were possessed with her spirit.

Aza closed Heron’s eyes and weighted them with stones. That was all he could do: for rites, for burial, the historian must wait; meanwhile, let him haunt whoever and wherever he would. The shaman crawled into the day, uncovered his drum and began to beat it. He pounded it, walking always about the village, hurrying before the crowd as it gathered.

Leal Straightarrow, Garron and Kiang, Nandje’s sons, ran in a pack with their supporters:

‘Gry is gone!’

‘May Mother Earth protect her.’

The men rushed from their beds, or from their drunken slumber in the Meeting House:

‘Who is dead?’

‘The story of the Ima has been murdered.’

The women came from their milking, wild-eyed and wailing:

‘Where is the Horse?’

‘Search for the Horse! Find our Red Horse!’

For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf,

and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack

Night stayed a long time in the wastelands where it was hard for the sun to penetrate the valleys and drive away the shadows which dwelt amongst them. The crags seemed to build themselves up about Gry and the Red Horse, towering high, until they resembled buildings made by men. Nandje had told her how the city men, they of Tanter, Myrah, Pargur, made themselves artificial cliffs and tors from stone, great hollow eyries where men and women ate and slept, made love, gave birth and died. Castles, they were called. So, Gry imagined these fabled people as she rode, lords and ladies, sorceresses and magicians, lovely Nemione, evil Koschei.

Overhanging bushes caught at her clothing. She could duck and dodge them but the shadows, which travelled with them and tormented her because she could not make out what they were, she could not avoid; and, soon, she noticed that the shadows had legs and were running; she saw ears, long, bushy tails and ‘Wolves!’ she breathed. Wolves, which could catch the birds out of the air and pull down a charging wisent and, easily, a horse, even one as fleet and mighty as this, her saviour.

‘But wolves are Good Animals,’ murmured the Voice.

It was clear that the wolves were driving the Red Horse. He had lost impetus and his pace had slowed. The wolves knew where they wanted him to go and pushed him on with small rushes and nips at his heels. Gry tucked her feet up, as high as they would go on the undulating back of the Horse. Above and before them, the lowering cliffs and giddy bluffs had joined themselves together to make a castle indeed, an ominous pile of deep, unpierced darkness which loomed huge at the summit of a pile of jagged rock. She was terrified, feeling the Horse tremble too. They were forced on, always on, and upward towards the walls in which, at the last dreadful moment when she believed the wolves would trap and overcome them against the barrier, she saw a doorway – yet it wasn’t a doorway, only an arched formation in the rock and the great room beyond was no chamber but an open space, walled in by the rocks and roofed with the dark sky and a welter of glittering stars. This castle had not been built by men.

The wolf pack had fallen behind, dragging itself like a furred train after the Horse; ready, she thought, to run in and dismember them whenever it would with teeth of ivory and jaws of iron, and she crouched lower on his back and bit into a strand of his mane in her fear. He had stopped moving altogether and was bowing his head, cowering before a lone wolf almost as big as he. The wolf pointed its nose in the air and howled, ‘Foe, foe, foe!’ and the pack answered, ‘Woe, woe, woe!’, its hundred voices reverberating among the rocks and echoing across the sky, loose and terrible among the cold stars.

‘It is their queen,’ whispered the Voice and Gry, in the same moment, thought, ‘It’s the Wolf Mother.’

The great wolf sniffed the air and put out her red tongue. She panted and her tongue lolled over her teeth and moved about her jaw and her thin black lips – ‘She’s smiling,’ Gry said aloud. ‘Just like my Juma when I give her sweet grass to eat,’ – The tail of the wolf thumped audibly on the ground. ‘And they are going to eat us.’

The wolf walked slowly all round the Horse, who had become a horse merely, a poor mesmerised animal stripped of his power; about to die. Again, she circled them and stopped, was approaching, was close, her head level with Gry’s knee. Gry shrank back, and felt the wolf’s wet tongue lick her foot. She looked into the beast’s eyes where a yellow flame flickered in a ring about pupils as dark and deep as wells; soon, when she had enjoyed her triumph, the wolf would pull her by the ankle from her perch.

The wolf continued to lick, smoothly, softly. She backed away and crouched on the ground, her hindquarters high and her tail tucked so far in, it was no longer visible. Her ears shrank; she pulled them tight against her head; she made tiny, puppy-like whining noises.

‘She’s bowing to you.’

‘Oh …’

‘Say something to her!’

‘Good w-wolf,’ stammered Gry.

‘That’s hardly appropriate! She doesn’t speak our language.’

‘What …’ said Gry, ‘Ah –’ and put her hands suddenly to her head, holding them high and confident, like ears. Then she lowered one arm and swung it like a tail. The wolf sprang up, Gry shrank away and, growing bold again, leaned forward, talking with her ‘ears’ until, at last, the wolf persuaded her with whines and gigantic thumpings of her tail upon the ground, to jump from her last refuge on the back of the Red Horse to the certain peril of the hard and open ground.

Gry glanced behind her fearfully. The wolf pack was still, its two hundred eyes upon her and glowing with desire. Her ‘tail’ drooped and all the wolves tremulously lowered their tails and shrank into their skins until they looked more terrified than she.

But wolves are treacherous.

‘Not to their friends.’

Gry looked at the Red Horse. He stood tall, huge and invincible; his ears were up. What did he mean? Meanwhile, the Wolf Mother had crouched down beside her and was delicately sniffing her crotch.

Gry heard the voice in her mind. Its tone was one of amusement and delight:

‘Just like a faithful dog!’

‘It’s you!’ she cried and the Red Horse nodded his head.

‘It’s me.’

‘But –’

‘Not the time to explain – attend to your hostess. She is not interested in me: I’m just your conveyance.’

Gry sniffed the air as close to the tail of the wolf as she dared.

‘Her name is Mogia,’ said the voice of the Red Horse.

‘Mogia?’

‘It means Child of the Lightning.’

The big wolf, when she heard her name, leaned against Gry in a friendly manner, wagged her tail and seemed to invite Gry to walk with her. Over the stony ground they paced, backwards and forwards, while Mogia sang to the stars and the Red Horse walked solemnly behind. Soon Gry was singing,

‘When the bright stars hang clear and still

The grey wolf comes loping o’er the hill,

He is hungry, he is strong, it won’t be very long

Before he has hunted and eaten his fill.’

It was a song her mother, Lemani, had taught her, of fifty-two verses and a chorus repeated fifty-five times. In Verse Thirty, events turned against the hungry wolf and he was pursued, surrounded and hacked to death by brave Ima; but this, Verse Two, fitted the time and place and Gry sang it over and over again, her voice lifting as free and high as that of Mogia, the Child of the Lightning.

Mogia, pressing her right side hard, turned her about and led her across the sky-roofed chamber to a great boulder on the top of which was a lesser, but wide, flat stone; and here girl and wolf sat and sang together while the pack howled and the Red Horse kept time by beating his hooves on the ground.

Presently, the wolf stopped howling and lay down, her nose on her front paws. In the court below, the pack followed her example and the head of the Red Horse nodded, as if he too, would sleep. The wolves’ eyes closed; some of them snored, or dreamed in their sleep, ears and tails twitching, while the legs of the smallest cubs, which had not yet learned to know motion from stillness, moved continually as they slept. Gry lay close to Mogia, her head pillowed on the soft flank of the wolf.

At dawn, Mogia woke, turned her head and licked the bare arm of the sleeping girl tenderly, as she might one of her own cubs. The Red Horse was awake already, staring out into the new day beyond the Wolf’s Castle. Gry, confused, yawned and stretched in her wolfhair bed.

‘Yellow dawn – Good morning!’ The voice of the Horse, sudden and cheerful as a happy thought, woke Gry properly. She was hungry; she was cold – as soon as she moved away from the warm body of the wolf – but, she thought, free and outside, far from the terrible, dark storehouse where Heron had died as he lay on her; very far from the men of her tribe, their Meeting House and their Law; far from her home and every small thing which filled it and her life; a very long way from Leal, whom she had (once upon a time: it was all as distant as a dream or a fairy tale) begun to love. Her dress was torn and bloodstained; she had neither silver nor horsehide on her, no wealth whatsoever.