Lilith’s Castle

Oh no, sweet maid, I cannot marry you …’

‘For I have no coat to put on – I know it well,’ the Red Horse interrupted, ‘but a horse can only nei-hei-heigh! – carol on, little Rider. My heart is singing with you.’

The lake called Pimbilmere stretched left and right before them, an open eye in the heathland. Birch trees huddled together in small stands or hung over the water, dipping long, silver fingers. The mere was bordered by a bright margin of green grass and a line of clean sand.

The three companions were delighted. Mouse-Catcher jumped over the heather-clumps, disturbing the mice and voles which were hiding in them and living up to his name. Gry, longing to drink the water and to cleanse herself, slid down from the Red Horse’s back and ran to the shore. As for the Horse, he flexed his lips in the shape of a smile, shook out his mane and the aches in his neck, lay down and rolled his weariness away.

‘The grass looks fresh and good,’ he said. ‘I am hungry! – and perhaps Mouse-Catcher will bring you a heath-jack for supper.’

The wolf’s hunting had already taken him out of sight and, soon, the Horse was a red shape in the distance as his grazing led him along the shore. Gry stood at the water’s edge, shyly lowered her dress and overskirt to the ground and stepped out of them. She unwound her leggings and, leaving them where they fell, walked into the water. It was warm from the sun, clear over a sandy floor from which sparkling grains swirled up as she trod. She undid the strings of her cape and threw it ashore. The mere received her like a lover; she lay down in it and swam, drinking the water and ducking her head. Time slowed as she floated there, content. Her bleeding had stopped: they must have been travelling seven days, but months and seasons did not always follow each other, Herding after Birthmoon, Summer before Leaf-fall, in the Plains and, now that she had left, they were altogether out of order. She knew left from right and right from wrong but, if anyone had asked, she would have told him that at Russet Cross it had been springtime while, here, it was a fine day in autumn.

The sun dried her as she sat by the water, clothing to hand in case the Horse or the Wolf should appear.

‘I am not like Byely,’ she thought, studying her lean, brown body. ‘What man will look at me?’

When she was dry, she dressed in her old rags and slowly put on the beautiful blouse, buttoning it carefully and turning about to admire her reflection in the evening-shadowed mere. Next, she collected dry heather roots and dead wood from a birch-clump and made a fire with her sparkstones. The smoke smelled sweet and woke her hunger: all she needed now was meat – and there, in the lengthening shadows, came Mouse-Catcher, a fat heath-jack in his jaws. The Red Horse was following close behind. He carried some twigs in his mouth which, when he dropped them by her, she saw had blueberries on them. She ate the fruit hungrily while she skinned and cut up the heath-jack and set it over fire on a skewer of tough heather-stem.

‘That is a splendid garment for a poor nomad,’ said the Red Horse, looking at her with his great, umber eyes.

‘It is better than my old dress!’

‘It turns you into a princess. Dear Gry, if I were …’ She waited, full of guilt and melancholy, for him to finish his speech, but all he did was strike the ground impatiently with one of his forefeet and mutter, ‘A horse! A damned horse!’

‘That is a good knife,’ he said, after a while.

‘My father used it all the time – for every kind of task. But it should have gone with him and not to the Lady. If I could, I would lay it on his body in the mound –’

‘Only you cannot return to the Plains. Not yet. Perhaps you will find a way, as we travel, of telling him that you have it and take good care of it. Surely the rabbit is cooked? It smells delicious! If I were not a horse, I’d eat with you.’

‘But you are a horse, the Horse. I am glad of it.’ She patted his neck and turned away, to her meal of roasted meat.

They crowded together in the firelight, the Horse, the wolf and Gry who was busily tying and folding her old bodice into a carrying-bag. When it was done to her satisfaction and she had made a strap for it from her scarf, she wrapped the remains of the heath-jack in grass and put it in her bag.

‘Breakfast – maybe dinner as well.’

‘After sleep. So – Goodnight, Gry.’

‘Goodnight, Red Horse and Mouse-Catcher. Sleep tight.’

The wolf answered her, his voice more certain than before, ‘Starshine on you, small She,’ as she lay down between him and the Horse and pillowed her head on her arms.

She slept at once, her breathing light and relaxed. The Horse, keeping the first watch, looked fondly at her and, a thought from his mysterious and mystical past floating light as thistledown into his head and, spiny as a thistle, sticking there, wrinkled the velvet of his nose and shook his great head to dislodge it:

‘They were all as false as fool’s gold, my great Loves.’ He snorted. ‘It is better to be the Horse.’

The stars came out and Bail’s sword was mirrored in Pimbilmere. The great guardian-star shone in his solitude over by the Altaish, and the air, as the night deepened, grew cold. Gry stirred, curling tight against the Horse. She was dreaming of a knight like those in the old Lays of her people, not Bail but one who was beautiful to look upon and who was gentle and brave, gallant and bold; so, she passed from dreaming to deep sleep as the night-animals of the heathland hunted or were hunted, living out their short and furious lives. In the mid-night, the wolf woke and took over the watch while the Red Horse closed his eyes to sleep and was powerless to prevent the alternative story he could resist by day from capturing his mind:

I, Koschei the Deathless, Traveller Extraordinary, Onetime Archmage and Prince of Malthassa, now Magister Arcanum, write this sitting at the cedarwood table in the small white temple with the gilded roof which is the satellite of my Memory Palace locked in unreachable Malthassa. It is a fair room and I can see the pink siris and the smaller Tree of Heaven from my seat. Beyond, in the ‘real’ world (as some say) it is a Holy Day, the day for the propitiation of the great Naga or cobra snake, and the people have laid food and water at the round doorways of the snakes’ houses. My Lady smiles and says nothing; she has kept her human form since we first met on the slopes of the Rock at Solutré; she has been Helen for two whole world-years who once was Helen Lacey, supreme gypsy-witch; who was Silk Leni, Lèni le Soie; Ellen Love, the Bride of the Loathly Worm and Helena, Grand Duchess of Galicia with Beskiden, schemer, stealer of hearts, drinker of young mens’ and maidens’ blood; who once, in the Golden Age, belonged to Menelaus, was stolen by Paris and taken to be the glory and the bane of Troy! Who is Lamia, snake and woman, viper and pythoness, beauty of the jewelled far-seeing eyes and banded coat, sin-scarlet, bitter-orange, deathly black …

Oh, Mistress of Mortality, Identity and Age! How gladly I travel with her, knowing Wrecker of my heart, dark shadow of my older Love, the fair, inviolate Nemione, whose brown body and lustrous witch’s hair, whose forked tongue and pitch-mirk eyes are the counter of Nemione’s fair pallor and golden showers, soft corals and sapphires set in pearl. Parados loved her as well as I, that’s sure and she has left him to his fate to go with me.

Q What difference for her, since I inhabit his discarded body, which works hard for me, by day and by night?

A My mind, controller, not his. My intent, vicious, not his. My way, devious, not his.

But I have, with Parados’s body, his fount of brute energy! And something of his hopefulness, I think, a residue he left behind when he condemned himself to exile from himself! Mine’s the better deal – new life, new landfalls and horizons, new mistress; and the same misspelt name, Koschei, which he – or I – trawled from the infinite world of the imagination, collective memory, universe of tales.

Here they think it is a gypsy name and that is what they take me for, one of themselves, dark-skinned from the hot sun of this land, a Rom colourful and canny.

Our lives are simple, Helen’s and mine. Our angel-haired son left us a while ago in a cold country, in winter, the snows and the mountains calling him – he drove away in the wheeled firebird to whatever dissolute or physically punishing pastime best amuses him and we travel on. Our conveyance now is a creaking cart with a canvas tilt for the rains or worldly privacy; once it was painted in gold and red and black and decorated with suns and moons. A few streaks, weather-ravaged, of this old coat remain, for we fashioned it together (one starlit night in the Yellow Desert) out of the material of her vardo, her gypsy caravan. From the skewbald horse we made a brown and white ox to draw it. We love and laugh and live as gypsies, the last of the true vagrants, and tell fortunes when we are asked. Helen reads hands while I pretend to scry in my little prism – I found it lying in Limbo beside Parados’s abandoned body. It is a useless, shiny bauble now, the only souvenir I have of Malthassa, its compound, magnifying eye fixed firmly on the last thing it saw, the dove-woman Paloma flying (in her second apotheosis at my, or should I say ‘the cruel hawk’s’ talons?) into Malthassa’s sun.

My divine Helen, for her rich clients, uses her magic Cup, the King’s Goblet upon whose surface passes not only What is Gone but What Will Be, here on Earth. It is not hers, this wondrous Cup, but stolen like my body – and I think we are both scented by an ambitious pursuit for I have seen (one dawn in the Shalimar Mountains) an eagle fly up hastily from the rock beside our camping-place and (in the hot afternoon when the red dust rises over the Thar) a camel wake from deep sleep to stare after me.

We have wandered through the warm, wine-loving countries which crowd around the shores of the Mediterranean Sea; we have crossed the driest deserts and the highest mountains to reach this, our temporary home. Its people, who are god-fearing and industrious, call it Sind; but we belong to a smaller nation, my Lady’s Tribe of Romanies which history, legend and themselves name the Gypsies of the Gypsies, the Dom, whom Firdusi called the Luri and others, the Zott. They crowd about and protect us with their noise and numbers while we make our grail-less, idyllic odyssey.

All too soon, the stars waned and dawn came. Gry woke suddenly, for Mouse-Catcher with eyes wide open and ears erect was sitting by her, a great furry watchdog waiting for the sun to shine; but the Horse snorted in his sleep and pricked his ears as if he were listening to another’s tale.

Go into the forest till you come to a fallen tree;

then turn to your left and follow your nose.

‘I must show you my tail,’ Mouse-Catcher said to Gry. ‘The Red Horse will be pack-leader of you as before-me. What-men-call Pimbilmere is the last place of my wolf-mother.’

Gry looked into his yellow eyes in case she were dreaming still. Inside the small, contained world of her head she had heard the wolf’s voice clearly. It was a voice which travelled quickly up and down an inhuman scale and was full of yelps and soft growlings.

‘She says, leap quickly beneath the trees. Run there. A tree fell down –’

‘And then – what will we find?’ Gry interrupted.

‘New animal-country? I never smelled it. Never jumped Pimbilmere in my cub-days. But now. Dear She, Mogia says again, do not howl to the samovile.’

‘I am not afraid of spirits!’

‘But do not yap to the birch-people. They know brother-spirits in the shadow castle.’

The wolf looked about him and sniffed the air. He pointed his nose at the sky, which was high and grey with heavy clouds flying fast toward the country they had come from, and gave a queer little howl.

‘I know your smell. Until breath stops,’ he said, came closer and thrust his muzzle under her hand so that she had to lift it and stroke him. For a short time, he was still while she smoothed his heavy ruff of hair and wished he would stay. Then he lifted his tail high and bounded away from her across the heather clumps. He did not pause or look back and soon was hidden by the purple stems and the gaunt yellow grasses which grew amongst them.

Gry stood up to stretch and taste the wind. It blew steadily and smelled of wet earth and toadstools. The Red Horse stirred, lifted his head and shook it. His hairy lips wobbled as he snorted and blew the sleep from his nostrils and eyes.

‘So Mouse-Catcher has gone home to the Pack,’ he said. ‘A wolf is uneasy when he is away from his kin.’

Gry stared at him as he rose, forelegs first. He was so very big and his tail so long and mane so thick: all horse; magnificent now, and when he guarded and chivvied his mares, when he mounted them in season, when he fought the lesser stallions. He was splendid as when Nandje used to ride him on feast-days or at the horse-gatherings, his red coat hidden beneath ceremonial trappings of spotted catamount skins, the tails hanging down all around him and bouncing as he galloped.

Yet –

You don’t sound like a horse, she thought, remembering how the wolf had howled and yowled his words and the peculiar way he had of fitting them together, so that you had to guess at his meaning; while the Horse spoke well, like a village elder or a travelling teller of tales.

She ate one of the legs of the heath-jack Mouse-Catcher had killed, chewing the tough meat reflectively and sucking the grease from the bones. Then she packed her belongings into her bag, and walked a last time on Pimbilmere’s sandy shore. She drank its water thirstily. The sounds she made when she walked and drank seemed to her loud and rudely human: she had neither the speed and elegance of the horse nor the courage and stamina of the wolf although, like Mouse-Catcher, she wanted to go home. The wind had nothing now to tell her and merely stirred the reeds and ruffled the expanse of water which was grey and cheerless like the sky. She hurried back to the Horse.

Gry, riding between the blackened, wintry stems of sloe and gorse, had lost her look of sturdy fortitude, shrinking in the chill immensity to a fragile, brown elf. Even the Red Horse looked smaller.

‘These melancholy lands are called Birkenfrith by the heath-cutters who live alone in their most secret dells,’ he told her as they passed from the heather in amongst the birch trees where, to avoid being swept to the ground, she had to lie full length along his back.

Golden leaves brushed her head and she looked up at the tree spirits’ feet, appearing no more substantial than they, who were green of hue and whose tangled skeins of hair hung down like spiders’ webs. She felt the transcendent power of the birches themselves. The spirits stared back with huge, shining eyes whose pupils were as luminous as moonlit pools, and gestured at her with spiky fingers like broken twigs. Some had young clinging to their backs, two or three chattering imps which lunged outwards from precarious holds to bite off crisp leaves and nibble them with long black teeth. The older samovile had grey skins like their trees and thin, silver hair. Their faces were wrinkled and lichen-hung.

As the Red Horse and his small burden passed the samovile called out to him and shook the branches till they groaned and the trees cast their dying leaves to the ground where they lay and drifted in trains of gold and ochre. Their song passed from mouth to mouth and from tree to tree:

Red Horse come not near!

Horse run mad, Horse afear’d!

Leave our birch frith wild and weird,

To your pastures, to your Herd!

Away!

Be gone!

‘Keep your horny hooves away from us, Old Nag!’ they screeched and danced wildly on the tossing branches.

But the Horse walked stolidly on, looking neither to right nor left. Some of the vile dropped leaves on him; and these covered Gry in a rustling blanket. Only her eyes and the tip of her nose showed. Fragments of birch-song filled her ears and ran about in her mind with alluring images of sun and snow, of the slow drop of falling leaves and of new, yellow growth thrust forth in spring. There came a muttering and commotion in the branches above her and a gust of wind as the vile blew the leaves away and soothed her with warm draughts of air. Suddenly the Horse gathered his legs beneath him and jumped a fallen tree trunk. Some of the spirits were holding a wake over it and tending it by straightening its crushed boughs and brushing the soil from the broken toes of its torn-up roots. They bowed to Gry.

‘Turn to your left, little brown woman!’ they cried. ‘Follow your nose.’

Wishing to thank them she opened her mouth and whispered, ‘You are kind folk –’ and bit her tongue as she remembered Mouse-Catcher’s words: ‘Do not yap to the birch-people. They know brother-spirits in the shadow-castle.’ He meant ‘You must never speak to the birch-vile unless you want to find yourself with the dead.’

The birches grew more sparsely; tall chestnuts whose arrow-shaped leaves were blowing away on the wind succeeded them. Gry saw no vile but sensed them close by, hiding in hollow trunks or lying high where the tapering branches waved at the sky and whispered sparse songs. Once, a stony-faced puvush looked out from a hole in the ground; once, a blue and white jay flew chattering above them. She sent a thought to the Red Horse:

‘Is this the Forest?’

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘The Forest-margin at the least, safe enough for woodcutters and foresters by day. This must be Deneholt where the young River Shu runs; it is brother to the Sigla and, like him, a tributary of the great River Lytha.’

‘My father often spoke of the Lytha – though he had never seen it! And Leal too, who had not seen it either.’

‘Near Pargur it is so wide you cannot see the far bank.’

‘Shall we go far enough to find it?’

‘Perhaps, little Gry, perhaps – but the Shu, as you will see, is more like your own Nargil, shallow, fit to drink and easy to cross unless it is in spate.’

‘Battak threatened to drown me in the Nargil.’

‘Battak is a hard and tormented man – and no river is without danger.’

‘They say the Nargil flows into the Lytha …’

‘All rivers flow into the Lytha; all the river-water flows into the Ocean.’

‘You will fall into the Shu, Horse!’

‘Then hold fast, Gry! Perhaps I will have to wade.’

From her high seat on his back, Gry saw how steeply the river bank swept down to water’s edge. The Horse went cautiously, slipping and sliding on the dead leaves until he reached the shallows. Here, he stopped to sniff the air and to drink. The far bank was hidden in vegetation except for a narrow beach littered with mossy stones and for this, he struck out the water creeping to his knees and, near the middle, swirling as far as his belly. He stood still and looked down into the water.

‘I am a handsome fellow, Gry, am I not?’ he said, as he admired his reflection. ‘The nivashi think so. I can see one there, by the big boulder. She has the haunches of a high-bred mare and a smile like the Lady Nemione’s. Her eyes are white opals.’

Gry was afraid. He sounded less and less like her dear Red Horse; but perhaps he was bewitched and a nivasha had got hold of his soul. She sat very still to listen for its thin, ululating cry; and heard nothing. A fly buzzed in her face and she waited until it had flown away. Then, like the whine of a gnat on a still summer’s night, she heard the soul of the Horse. ‘Help!’ it was crying. ‘Help me!’

The Horse, while she listened, had lowered his head and now stood with his mouth in the water and his eyes on the hurrying ripples which flashed silver and green as they eddied about him.

Gry kicked him hard, as if he were an ordinary horse. She clicked her tongue and whistled to him; and he stayed where he was, frozen and immobile in the middle of the River Shu.

‘I am not afraid of you, nivashi!’ she said, and slid into the water. It came to her waist but she surged regardless through it until she reached the beach on the far side, where she wrung out her skirts as best she could. The Horse had spoken of foresters and woodcutters; such men would have ropes or might know of a shaman who could break the enchantment. Before she set off, she called out to the Red Horse but, dull and motionless as the stones themselves, he did not look up.

The brambles and thorns above her looked impenetrable so Gry walked along the beach. The river bent twice, to the right and the left; the shore became sandy and low. She climbed a bank and stepped at once into a grassy glade. Five hens and a splendid cockerel were feeding there, close to a gypsy bender-tent which stood like a small, multicoloured hillock in the exact centre of the clearing; for the bender, though clearly made of willow sticks and green-fir branches, was finished with a roof of chequered cloth, red, yellow and blue. So soon! Gry rejoiced. A gypsy forester: I never thought of that! The bender reminded her of the shelters the Ima put up when they were herding far out on the Plains and she hurried to it, while the chickens clucked and pecked contentedly at some corn-grains scattered in the grass.

She could not see the door. ‘Hello!’ she called. ‘Is anyone at home?’

No one answered her, but there was a loud rattle. The bender moved suddenly, jumping up on seven-toed feet of willow twigs and settling as quickly on the ground, while Gry rubbed her eyes and shook her head in disbelief. At least, she thought, she had found the door, there, arched and low in front of her. Again, it reminded her of home and she knelt and peered in.

She called again, ‘Are you inside?’

No sound came from the dark interior though a chaffinch in a treetop trilled, dipped his wings and flew off. She saw a three-legged stool on a hearthstone, bent her back and crawled forward. There was no entrance tunnel: you were either out or in, and she was within. Her eyes grew used to the dimness. She saw a bedplace made of cut bracken, a blanket of the tri-coloured cloth lying across it, and a small chest for clothes and possessions. There was also the stool, very low like the ones at home. She sat down on it to look about her. Curious – it almost seemed as if the place was growing lighter – and bigger. A rustle in the hearth made her jump. The sticks had fallen together and a small flame leapt up. Soon the fire was burning brightly and the kettle began to sing, while her wet clothes steamed faster than the kettle and in a moment were bone dry.

In the far wall was an archway tall enough for her to walk through and there, beyond it, was a high and airy bedroom equipped with every luxury from cushion-littered bed to silk carpets and cut-glass bottles of lotions and perfume. She pulled the stopper from one and put a dab of golden liquid on her wrists. It smelled of waxy cactus-blooms and far-off, spicy desert sands. She saw them as she breathed it in, enchanted. Beyond the bedroom was a transparent, six-sided tent with an empty bath sunk in the floor. She touched the walls and marvelled at their hardness; knelt to examine the pictures of deer and huntsmen with which the bath was lined. Water began to flow from the mouth of a stone snake coiled on the bath’s rim: Gry backed away and bumped into the glass wall. Outside was a garden in which herbs and sunflowers grew against a picket fence and bees made constant journeys to and fro between a row of wallflowers and a straw bee-skep. But there was no door into the garden and neither grassy glade nor forest trees beyond the fence. The view was wide and inspiring: of a flower-starred meadow amongst high mountains capped with snow and divided, one stone face from another, by shiny ribbons of falling water.