Lilith’s Castle

‘It may be a good morning for some,’ she said.

The pack had also woken. Several young wolves, whose manes were as yet small and brown in colour, were dragging something across the ground and up, across the jagged rocks towards her. It was a chesol deer, tawny as the Plains grasses when they flowered. A number of other wolves – five, six – followed them; these carried groundapples in their mouths. Raw deer and fresh fruit, this was breakfast, Gry realised, when they had all climbed the rock of the throne and laid their burdens in front of her.

‘Wise creatures!’ said the Red Horse. ‘You have eaten my poor relatives, mixed with quail eggs and wild garlic in your Herdsman’s Comfort, Gry; so do not gag at this sacrificial deer. And the groundapple, intelligent choice! You know as well as I do that its juice is as good as fresh water.’

‘But I’m cold,’ moaned Gry.

The food helped warm her. As she ate, quickly swallowing the pieces of deer-meat which the wolves chewed from the carcass for her and sucking the acid juice from the groundapples, she saw that other yearling wolves had come to the deer and were tearing its skin into long strips and rough triangles. Soon, while the Wolf Mother directed them with little barks and sharp nips in their ears, the young wolves had picked up all the golden pieces of the deerskin and were laying them at her feet. Two were bold enough to drop their gifts in her lap.

Mogia wagged her tail and, cocking her head, gave Gry a lop-sided look.

‘Warm clothes,’ murmured the Red Horse.

Gry gathered up the bloody pieces of hide and, too modest to be a true member of Mogia’s pack, retired behind a rock and tried to make a garment from them. When she squatted to evacuate and relieve herself, she found fresh blood on the insides of her thighs – Svarog – Sky! It was her own blood: she should rejoice; she bent forward until her forehead touched the ground and gave thanks to Mother Earth. This blood-cleansing was another freedom, and nothing of Heron had remained inside her long enough to make a luckless, bastard child. Hastily, shivering, unburdened, she tore rags from her skirt and made a pad to soak up the blood. Next, the deerskin strips made footless leggings and, with the help of more rags from her skirt, the triangles could be fashioned into a shorter, thicker overskirt and a small shoulder-cape. She chewed holes for her makeshift cape-strings in the skin, tasting the fat and sinew, spitting out hairs and feeling as gorged as a well-fed wolf. So, dressed at last, she stepped out and showed her new clothes to the pack and the Horse. A cub barked once, quickly silenced by his mother, and the adult wolves howled an acclamation; but, deep inside Gry’s head, a low, delighted chuckle started and swelled – the Horse: as if a horse could laugh! Evidently, he could. She listened well – had she not heard that laugh somewhere before? In some place that was friendly, homely? In a place in which her father was alive and lively, Nandje, Son of Nandje, He Who Bestrides the Red Horse, Imandi of the tribe? Nandje’s laugh had been raucous, cackling; this, it was gentle, even cautious, in its happiness.

She remembered walking along the main street of the town of Vonta in the Near Altaish where Nandje and Lemani had taken her for the Horse Fair; she had been sucking a greengage lollipop when a boy her age had passed her and grinned, waving his own lollipop in the air, before he blushed and turned away, pretending to look in the window of a toy shop. Something in the display there had amused him and he had laughed aloud, a happy, bubbling sound: it was not that laugh.

That, until now, was the only time she had been out of the Plains.

Gry shook her puzzled head and, making a small fist of her right hand, thumped the Red Horse gently on his neck. In answer, he nuzzled in her breast.

‘Horse!’ she cried, and thumped again.

‘You are beautiful, even now,’ came the reply.

‘I am as wild as a drunken shaman after a spirit-feast,’ said Gry.

‘When you find a tarn or lake up in the hills and use it for your mirror – oh, you will! – you will see that I am right. But listen to Mogia. She says that, though you look like a deer, you are almost half a wolf for “eating meat with Us brings the wisdom of wolves, which men call cunning.”’

Mogia’s Story: Winter Hunger.

Take care. The road to true wisdom is long and hard. I was a cub in the years of Koschei’s Winter. Snow covered the Plains and the rivers were ice. Small birds fell dead from the skies and, for a while, we were content to eat them. Then came a day when all the birds were dead. We had eaten the land-animals long before: the deer, the heath-jacks and their kith and kin. The last mouse had been swallowed whole.

My mother called the Pack together and we left the Plains, journeying long and high into the Altaish, where the snow and ice endure for ever. Some of the wolves spoke against her, arguing that if we could not find food in the frozen Plains, what could there be to eat in the mountains? There was a fight – so bad that two wolves were killed in it, and wolves never kill their own: to this, the magician had driven us with his foul heart and fouler weather. The rest of the dissenters left the pack and turned into the forest where, they said, they were certain to find prey. We travelled on.

Soon the way grew grim. Great boulders made of ice reared themselves in front of us and the ice made hard stones of itself in the soft spaces between the pads of our paws so that we had many times to lie down in the cold and chew the ice away before we could walk on. It snowed, sometimes so hard that we lost our way and must, once more, lie in the bitter cold until the storm died and we could see. Four of the old wolves lay in their snowy nests and never got up again. Still my mother led us on, and higher.

We dared venture into the remote, Upper Altaish and here, as my mother well knew, we found great companies of mountain lemmings which, being animals of the cold and the heights, had not died out. We had a great feasting – taking care, by my wise mother’s orders, to leave enough of the creatures alive to breed new colonies, which they do most rapidly, in the time it takes for the moon to grow from a claw to an open eye; so we remained in the Altaish until Koschei’s power waned and the spring came, living as do men-farmers by taking care of our herds.

‘See, my Sisters and Brothers, my Daughters and Sons,’ said my sagacious dam, ‘the truth of our old saying For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack!

‘“But, woman-Gry, wolves’ wisdom will not serve you at all the turns,”’ said Mogia in the Horse’s familiar voice. ‘“You must consult your own ancients, the shamans at Russet Cross. I will lend you a guide –”’

Mogia broke off her whining in the Red Horse’s ear and howled once. A young, grey wolf came running to her side.

‘“This is my scout, my dear son Mouse-Catcher! – who loves a succulent mouse so much he hunted nothing else in his infancy, bounding over the long summer grass, high and low, like a heath-jack in his love-madness. Mouse-Catcher knows the salt wilderness. It is one of his hunting grounds. He loves a mouse with a salt savour. Hey! dear Cub,”’ and the great wolf licked her son’s ears lovingly.

Gry looked up at the Red Horse. He was nodding his head but, this time, she could not tell whether he meant to speak to her or was only ridding himself of the first flies of the morning which, attracted by the meat or by her strange, uncured skin clothing, were beginning to swarm about them.

It is the blood, she thought. Flies love to drink it – and I am stained with it, Heron’s, mine, and the chesol deer’s. Three have died – there was Heron and the deer; and there would have been a baby if I had not begun to bleed. Poor soul, it must hurry back to the Palace of Shadows and wait for a happier coupling to bring it to Malthassa.

The flies will follow me now and bother the Horse – I have no lemon-root to rub on him and keep the flies away.

She felt Mogia licking her hand and put her sad thoughts away. The Red Horse nudged her and offered his foreleg to help her mount. Mouse-Catcher danced, eager to be off and running hard.

Leal’s rage had settled inside him like a hard and indigestible fruit. He had ceased to mull over Aza’s accusations or regret his own passion at Gry’s fate although it made him an outcast too, and a thief. He was in Garron’s house, turning over the household goods, Gry’s possessions, her brothers’ things – as for Garron and Kiang, they were without somewhere, helplessly watching as Battak and Aza drummed up a pursuit. He would pursue her too, alone – without those loyal seventeen who had pledged him their faith. There was no other way: he must be silent and circumspect like a hunter in the forest. No one must know which way he had truly gone; and he would go, very soon, when he had found what he sought in the house.

In the village, there was anarchy and the men of Rudring had heard of it. It would not be long before they of Eftstow and of Sama also heard and rode to join the throng.

Where was it? He lifted the lid of a chest. It was full to the brim with carefully-folded clothes. He let the lid fall softly.

The women had their opinions, too. He had listened to some of them when he washed, at the river.

‘She was foredoomed – a spirit was in her,’ one had said – Daia, Konik’s daughter.

Battak’s wife had no sympathy: ‘If she had taken one scrap of her father’s wisdom to herself, she would be on solid ground. But she was always wayward. If she had liked our company and gone milking with us, she would have kept clear of the Horse and of temptation. What folly to milk alone, when the dew is still on the grass and the puvushi scarce abed!’

‘I heard she has a lover in Rudring,’ said Oshac’s wife maliciously.

He came out from behind the reeds then, naked, just as he was, thinking to shame them. But they had stared at him, bold as hares, and Daia had smiled and flirted up her skirt, pretending its hem was wet. He clearly heard what she whispered to the other women: ‘Leal is a horse of a man.’

Where had Nandje kept it? Leal spun slowly on his heels. Ah! Fool that he was. The bridle hung on the wall, in full view. It had been behind him. He lifted it gingerly down, almost expecting it to burn him. Then it was in his grasp and stolen, the Red Horse’s bridle – which I shall need, he told himself, when I find Gry and the Horse. It was made of soft Om Ren skin, cut from the hide of the old Forest Ape which the Red Horse himself had killed.

But somewhere in the forest fastness there would be a young Om Ren growing, and his hide would be taken for the Red Colt when the time came.

Leal looked about him, trying to memorise the interior of the house. Here, Gry had cooked and worked, sewing hides into horse-gear and silk and linen into garments for her father and brothers. She had tended the fire on the hearth where the cold, black ashes lay. Earth, an ill season! Time to go. His feet scuffed up the dry soil of the floor and something which had been missed, for all Gry’s sweeping, caught on the toe of his boot. It was a single band of silver with a clasp of horn, Gry’s ankle-ring. He sighed, remembering her narrow feet and long, grass-stained toes, kissed the silver and tucked it in the folded cloth at his waist.

Then he moved, ducking swiftly out of the house and striding out to the hollow in the Plains where he had left his gear. He caught fleet Tref and the sorrel mare Yarila, saddled Tref and hung the magic bridle from the cantle, under his bow, put a halter on the mare; and was gone from Garsting.

Aza listened to the wind. Stribog, he blew from the north, bringing the thud of hoofbeats and the howling of hungry wolves to the ears of the shaman who breathed in the god through dilated nostrils, filling his lungs. Cold, his body sang, Meat, Salt.

‘Russet Cross!’ he cried, the words leaping from his open mouth.

‘We ride, then,’ said Battak gruffly. ‘Into the bitterness and the cold.’

‘Ay!’ Konik shivered. ‘Bring a fire-pot, Klepper. We shall need it.’

The men mounted their horses and turned their heads into the wind. They rode slowly at first, rubbing their watering eyes, until the immensity of the Plains and its high and empty sky took hold of them and they urged their horses into a lope and then a gallop, laying out the thin, black line their enemies feared.

Gry expected to see the Altaish, immense, cold heights upon the horizon, as they travelled into the day, herself, the dear Red Horse and the grey wolf, Mouse-Catcher; but the hills before them were low and crimson as blood. The salt wind, blowing in her face, alarmed her, but Mouse-Catcher paused to relish it, wagging his tail as if all was well. The air grew damp and the bothersome flies left her. She put out her tongue and licked salt crystals from her lips.

They were still among rocks, boulders scattered across level pavements of stone whose crevices were home to low, fleshy plants. Mouse-Catcher, by biting their leaves and sucking out the dew inside, showed her that these were almost as good for thirsty travellers as groundapples. There was nothing else fit to eat or drink: the further from Wolf’s Castle they journeyed, the saltier the ground became until they were crossing white flats on which the larger crystals lay as thick as frost and glittered as the sun rose higher. Further on, the salt-bearing rock was red or, sometimes, the two kinds of salt lay close together, forming wonderful, twisting patterns. The hills were nearer, seeming homely because, for all their weird colour, they were shaped like the green hills of home.

Again, the wolf sniffed the wind which, whirling over the salt ground, sang with a mournful note. Mouse-Catcher howled with it.

‘We must go further,’ the Red Horse told Gry.

The wolf and the Red Horse travelled hard, stopping neither to eat nor rest, while Gry slept deeply, so benign was the rocking motion of the Horse. She woke and slipped from his back at evening, while Mouse-Catcher ran among the rocks and found what edible plants he could. Swiftly, they ate and sucked the water from the fleshy leaves.

‘… and further still,’ said the Red Horse, offering a foreleg for Gry to mount by.

When morning came again and the sky was pale as the inside of a new-laid egg, Gry sat tall in her seat and stretched. The salt ground had never altered, continuing to unroll beneath them like the skin of a skewbald horse. The pallor of the horizon was remarkable, dipping down to touch land which wavered like a summer mirage in the Plains. She watched the sun colour the land, marking out the different zones in the rock, russet and stark white; laying a watery tint on the undulant distance. All at once a man appeared, motionless in the landscape. He had one thick, brown leg and one which was thin as a stick of willow. She did not want to meet him.

‘Please turn back,’ she begged, but the Red Horse gave no sign that he had heard her and kept up his steady pace, following after the wolf. It was the man who began to run, waving the long stick he had been leaning on and which Gry had thought a leg, and followed closely by the large flock of sheep which she had taken for bushes.

‘Wolves and sheep don’t mix!’ said the Red Horse.

Mouse-Catcher turned his head in the direction of the fleeing sheep and gave a deep, appreciative sniff.

‘He is an honest wolf and he is hungry – but we must hope he will not follow his instincts,’ the Red Horse remarked. ‘Are you comfortable up there? It has been a long ride.’

‘As if I sat on my mare, Juma,’ said Gry. ‘I think my legs have stretched to fit your broad back.’

She heard the gentle laugh of the horse again and, again, it puzzled her.

‘What is that place?’ she asked. ‘Is it another plain?’

The voice of the Horse, busily talking like a dream-voice in the very centre of her head, was even and affectionate.

‘It is a plain, of sorts,’ he said, ‘but it is made of water. Men call it the Ocean. It rolls between the worlds, too deep and cold to swim across. It is ruled by the moon, which pulls its waters first one way, then another. Such movement is called a tide; and those rolling hills you see in the water are waves. In a moment – there! – one will arrive and break in pieces on the shore.’

Gry watched the waves surge up the beach.

‘The Ocean is like a huge river,’ she said. ‘River-water also turns to mist when it hits rock.’

‘You are a wise woman.’

‘I? – I know little beyond the Plains. But you are a wise horse. How can a Plains horse, though he is the Horse, know so much?’

‘I have heard many tales,’ the Horse muttered evasively.

‘In Garsting? When Nandje rode you?’

‘My ancestors had the wisdom of centaurs.’

‘Of sentries?’

‘Centaurs. Mythical beasts, half-man, half-horse. You know, Chiron – of course, you would not … Come, Gry, muffle your face in the scarf you have made of your seductive skirts, blue as eyebright in the grass! We shall soon be on the shore and the wind will try hard to fill your mouth with grit.’

Obediently, she wrapped her head in the torn cloth. The smell of the sea caught her by the throat, frightening and exciting her. The Horse’s hooves drummed on the rippling watermarks and the wind, as he had promised, blew salt sand in her face and filled her eyes with tears.

It was a lonely place. The sands ran on for ever, combed and billowed by the sea and the land curved gently down on left and right; but ahead, where she was being carried, there was nothing but the glinting water with its random spouts and crests of white spray; and that water made roaring, dragging sounds which deafened her and filled her head and senses so that, though he was speaking, she could not hear what the Red Horse said. Strange plants grew in the sand, stiff like trees made of glass, their tiny branches broken. Fresh cloven hoofmarks crisscrossed and surrounded them, for the sheep had been feeding here.

The wind got inside her thin clothing and chilled her to the bone. They forged on, the wolf pushing himself forward with all his might, his fur blowing wildly about him.

‘Where are we going?’ she cried into the din. ‘Over the edge of the world?’

The Horse was shouting too, a whisper in her mind.

‘Almost! Look ahead.’

The waves were roaring louder than a thunderstorm. Gry wiped the wind and water from her eyes. It was hard to see. The water tossed up its countless heads. Something stood there, firm in the spray, a giant or a mighty beast of the spume. It reared high and held out stiff limbs. Gry wiped her eyes again.

It was a great tower, stripped of any skin or covering it might once have had, a rusty, metal skeleton many times taller than a forest tree.

‘Russet Cross!’ the Horse shouted. ‘What a structure!’

‘Russet Cross?’ she echoed, and scarcely heard herself, scarcely believed it. An awful thing, she thought, like the shaman, Aza’s, house which was no house but a grassy hollow in between the hills. Or like Wolf’s Castle, no castle but stones piled up by the spirits themselves: as this storm-blasted tower, she supposed, had been built and wrecked.

The Red Horse stopped at the water’s edge, Mouse-Catcher sheltering, ears down, beneath his belly; both of them gazing at the metal monster.

‘Russet Cross,’ Gry repeated. ‘What is it?’

‘A misplaced memory, a meeting place,’ the Horse replied. ‘The point at which the winds and the waters meet. Where spirits howl together and pass on their voices to those who must hear.’

‘Mogia wanted me to come here?’

‘She had her good reasons, Gry. The water is not deep at this state of the tide,’ said the Horse calmly and, for the first time, Gry heard the wolf’s answer, an audible shadow in her mind,

‘Deep for me. Terrible for the warm land-She.’

The Horse walked into the water. Gry clung tight, looking down, horrified as each wave rose and threatened to engulf him and her clinging self, and passed them by to be succeeded by another just as great. Nothing was steady now, nothing sure. The good ground had vanished; in its place, the treacherous, moving water.

The wolf, who had remained behind, spoke in his throat, neither whining nor growling: ‘Rurr – rrr – rurr!’ And, having voiced his opinion, followed them.

They soon reached the nearest limb of the tower. A stairway hung from it, giddily down to touch the water.

‘You must climb it, Gry.’

‘I can’t – Red Horse – I can’t. How can you climb stairs?’

‘I shall wait here, up to my withers in sea water. Mouse-Catcher will go with you so there is no need for fear.’

‘It is high; I can’t tell how high!’

‘Fear not, trust me. You won’t fall – look, there is a rail.’

There it was, a handrail looping and scrolling at the staircase-side, though she had not noticed it before. She reached out and took hold of it. The Horse was warm beneath her. Wasn’t she well-used to climbing trees at gathering-time, when the women journeyed across the Plains to pick a harvest of nuts and berries from the trees at the forest-skirt, and mushrooms, toadstools, puvush-cushions, puff-balls and spirit’s saddles from inside the forest itself? The stair looked firm. She swung suddenly on to it, climbed two steps and looked down. The Horse was afloat already, solid, glossy, alive in the cold, wet Ocean, his tail fanned out like weed behind him. Mouse-Catcher was swimming too and his ears were up. She tried to be brave.

‘Goodbye, dear Horse!’ she called.

‘Climb, my sweet Gry! I shall soon welcome you back.’

Thirty steps, and she was in translucent cloud, chasing raindrops and rainbows as she climbed. She felt the wolf behind her, hairy, soaking wet, and then his nose against her hand, comforting her. The rust-coloured limbs of the tower bent about and enclosed them as they climbed. Thirty steps more: her head was above the mist, in sunshine. She looked up and saw, flying on the tower-top where two metal beams made a huge, jagged cross, the blue flag of her people, the Ima of the Plains. Its fluttering challenge stirred her heart and she climbed more rapidly, passing through a circular doorway in the floor of a rickety platform. The nose of the wolf touched her hand once more.

A table had been placed there, far above the sea, a table set for a feast. The guests were waiting for her and two stools were empty. She crept forward, wary and reassured by turns for the other feasters were dressed like her, in tattered indigo and skins. The wolf at her side began to moan quietly, in that midway voice: ‘Rurr – rrr – rurr.’

The old ones had been sitting a long time, wind-dried and wizened in the eye of the sun, neither on the land nor in water, each one salt as grief and dead as stone.

Gry buried her fingers in Mouse-Catcher’s thick mane and looked at the circle of shamans. They were fearsome, shrunken like trophy-heads, preserved but loathsome like the food on their plates, withered plums, black slivers of meat and grey heaps of mulberries. The skulls of some were visible through leathery pates, under wisps of hair; from others, the fingers had dropped and these lay on the table among the dishes. They wore creased robes of balding stuff which had once been good horsehide, and were hung about like Aza with necklaces of birds’ skulls, thunderstones, claws and bones; a circlet of wood, which had been a drum, was propped against the foot of one; another had lost its nose although its lips had dried into two hard ridges which were pinched together in disapproval.

Gry curtsied to the dead shamans, while she wailed, ‘Oh, my father – protect me!’

The shaman nearest the stair was less cadaverous than the rest: he must be Voag, Aza’s master, who had died when Nandje was a boy. To propitiate him, she spoke his name and said, as she might to any one of her people, ‘The grass grows!’ Immediately the words were out, she clapped her hands over her mouth: what if he should answer with thin words blowing? She listened hard, but no sound issued from Voag’s cracked lips and she sighed with relief and bent close to the wolf, putting her own warm lips against his head. She kissed his muzzle and spoke softly in his ear.