Читать книгу Lilith’s Castle - Gill Alderman - Страница 10

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.

Gry ran back the way she had come. The fire burned merrily on the central hearth, but the doorway had gone: the curving wall of branches ran all the way round the room. She beat her hands in vain upon it and turned away, tears welling in her eyes.

‘The Horse,’ she murmured, ‘I must get out and rescue him …’

But nothing seemed to matter greatly, neither the Red Horse trapped in the river, nor her own predicament. The bed-place vanished and a velvet-covered chair appeared. A tin box stood on the hearthstone beside a spouted pot and two cups. Gry sat down on the three-legged stool and opened the tin: it contained dry leaves which had a sharp and appetising smell and a spoon with a short handle in the shape of a briar topped by a rose.

The kettle boiled, its quiet song bubbling to a crescendo and Gry, surmising that the leaves were much like those of the water-mint she used at home, warmed the pot with a little boiling water and tipped it to one side of the hearth with an automatically-muttered charm.

‘May the grass grow sweet.’

She put three spoonfuls of leaves into the pot and poured the water in.

‘Do you take it with milk?’ someone asked.

Gry swivelled wildly on the stool and almost upset the pot.

The doorway had come back! But it had grown big enough to accommodate the tall, stoop-shouldered figure of an old gypsy-woman. In her large and capable hands she held a brown jug which matched the teapot in Gry’s hand. She wore a scarlet skirt and a black bodice and the shoes on her feet had high, scarlet heels; her jewellery was made of gold and bone, of amber and jet; she had a wart on her chin and blood-spots on her apple-cheeks; her eyes, bright as a wren’s, were full of knowledge and cunning; worse, her grey hair fell straight down to her shoulders where it began to twist and curl in waves as tumultuous as water in a rocky rapids. In short, she had all the signs and hallmarks of a witch.

Gry was speechless.

‘Go into the forest till you come to a fallen tree; then turn to your left, and follow your nose – and you will find me!’ said the witch and cackled with laughter. ‘And here you are – a little, thieving Ima woman.’ The witch advanced and set down her milk jug on the hearth. ‘A female horse-herder far from home. They don’t let their women roam alone, those handsome, doughty horsemen; so this one must be a harlot or a murderess. An outcast, plainly.’

She bent over Gry and took the teapot from her unresisting fingers, poured milk and tea into the cups.

‘Will you take a cup of tea with me, my dear?’

‘I –’ said Gry. ‘I –’ but she could find no other words.

‘Drink your tea and then you will tell me all you know and every detail of your story,’ said the witch; and Gry drank, feeling warmth and courage flood into her with every sip.

‘Now!’ The witch was sitting in her chair, leaning back against the purple velvet like a queen on her throne.

Gry recited her tale, without sentiment and without apology, right to the end,

‘… and so I sat on the three-legged stool and put some leaves and boiling water in the pot –’

‘Tea!’ interrupted the witch. ‘You made my tea! Witless girl: couldn’t you see the house was waiting for me, making itself comfortable and laying out the things it knows I like. You’ve confused it, don’t you see? – look at the wall, are those a gypsy’s traps?’

Hanging from a peg were three Ima bird-traps and a horse-goad which shimmered and disappeared as the witch glowered at them.

‘You are a gypsy?’ said Gry hesitantly.

‘Am I a gypsy! By all the stars and Lilith, I am Darklis Faa, the famous gypsy witch, the celebrated chov-hani.’

‘The gypsies sometimes came into the Plains to buy horses of us,’ said Gry, the picture from childhood strong in her head; though whether it was her own memory or a tale her father had told, she could not remember. ‘The women carried willow baskets and their children on their hips and the men had bright neckerchiefs and big, gold earrings and sprigs of rosemary in their buttonholes and whips plaited from the hides of griffons. They prized our horses above all others.’

‘Tosh! We use Ima horses to pull our vans, but never for riding: they are too coarse.’

‘They are the chosen mounts of the Brothers of the Green Wolf.’

‘Thieves and murderers all – perhaps your ingenuousness comes of true innocence after all. You seem extremely stupid for a woman with the Gift,’ said Darklis crossly.

The hair stood up on Gry’s neck.

‘I am no diviner,’ she said fervently.

‘I, who can see a person’s soul-light, say it is otherwise. The light above your head is clear as crystal – and if that does not indicate a shaman who understands the speech of animals, I am not Darklis Faa! You were in luck, Ima woman. If I had not recognised a fellow-adept, you would have been a statue in my garden as quickly as Lord Koschei can say “Snipper-snap!” and turn his foes into woodlice.’

‘I can understand the Red Horse, Madam Faa, and the wolf, Mouse-Catcher; but their speech is as thought to me. I hear nothing and they certainly make no noise – they are animals after all and have their own ways of talking with tail and ears.’

‘I think you can also scry. Look at the tea leaves in your cup! What do they say?’.

‘I cannot read –’ Gry began; but there were no signs or letters in her cup. The tea leaves had crowded together in a dark mass which bubbled and sighed like marsh-mud and, settling, became the bottom of a clear pool. In this mirror there appeared first the Red Horse and, as the picture widened, a second horse or pony with a coat of dapple-grey. Gry’s hands trembled and the picture shimmered.

‘Be still!’ cried Darklis.

The Red Horse and his companion were grazing quietly in the glade, the Horse cropping near the mare and gallantly leaving her the most tender shoots.

‘That is my Streggie,’ the gypsy explained.

Gry smiled, and felt a small pang of jealousy.

‘Your Horse is a finer specimen than the average Plains animal,’ said Darklis carelessly. ‘Fortunately for him, I discovered him before the nivasha got her teeth into his tender flesh. She’s a good girl, Hyaline, but she loves to tease animals – and drown them.’

The picture spun in the cup and the horses vanished. When it was still Gry saw a stoat, which had run into the clearing and frightened Darklis’s chickens into a huddle of ruffled feathers which the cockerel protected with neck and spurs outstretched.

‘What a fine house I have!’ gloated Darklis. ‘Better at guarding my possessions than a whole army of the Archmage’s soldiers.’

‘How does it turn itself about?’ Gry whispered. ‘For that is what it did when I arrived – and I did not believe my eyes.’

‘On its four feet – and by my enchantments, addlehead!’ cackled the witch. ‘How fortunate you are, little woman, to have found me and my canny home. What is your name? Will you give it me, for I have told you one of mine.’

‘The Ima have no superstitions about names,’ said Gry. ‘Our souls are our own and free. My name is Gry and I am the daughter of that Nandje I told you of, the Rider of the Red Horse and Imandi of all the Ima.’

‘Are you sure of your name, girl? “Gry” is the gypsy word for “horse”.’

‘It is the Ima word for “Princess of Horses”, Darklis Faa.’

‘Look into the bowl once more, Princess.’

Now, the hut itself was visible, squatting like a mother hen on its feet of twigs. The little flock had run beneath it and settled in the dust to bathe. Gry sighed, but did not know if she envied the chov-hani or was merely tired of her questions and her conversation. She yawned.

‘Show me – something wonderful, something I can only dream of such as Pargur, the illustrious Crystal City, or else the handsome knight I see when I sleep. Please, Darklis,’ she pleaded. ‘Show me a glad sight, something to cheer a fugitive.’

‘No,’ said Darklis. ‘The leaves are spent,’ and she tipped them into the fire. ‘Instead, let us smoke a pipe together.’ She felt in the pocket of her skirt and drew out a knobbly, briar-root pipe and a small sack of tobacco closed at the mouth by a piece of red cord. She filled the pipe, tamping the tobacco down with a horny thumbnail, and gave it to Gry.

‘Take a glowing twig from the fire – there is one! – and hold it to the weed; but suck on the pipe and draw your breath in as you light it, or there will be no smoke and no satisfaction.’

The pipe-end was worn and marked by the chov-hani’s teeth. It tasted foul but, persisting out of fear and a wish to propitiate the witch, Gry persevered, sucking hard. Smoke shot into her throat and she choked.

‘More gently. As if you tried to suck a spirit in, for that is what you are doing, communing with the soul of the tobacco. Which brings contentment.’

And now the smoke flowed, cool and aromatic, by way of Gry’s throat into her nose, her vision, her heart and soul, and she was filled with calm and good will.

‘Aah!’ she said and handed the pipe to Darklis. They smoked quietly together, turn and turn about, until the Swan, the Hoopoe and Bail’s Sword itself were visible through the smoke-hole in the roof.

‘Like you I journey,’ said the gypsy, ‘but my quest has an object where yours discovers its objective as you search.’

Darklis Faa’s Story: The Silver Dwarf and the Golden Head

Once upon a time, not so long ago, I was camped at Lythabridge with my tribe. My sister, Lurania, had been taking the air and improving her fortune by cheating the men of their gold – which they have far too much of. She came to me in high spirits and with merry mien, accompanied by a dwarf of lofty ambition, resplendent courage and singular appearance.

I recognised him at once: he was Erchon, the Silver Dwarf. You may know (or you may not) that the miner-dwarves of the Altaish are marked by their trade and take on the colour of the material they win from the earth. Thus an Iron Dwarf has a rusty skin and a Copper Dwarf is the colour of a new penny, an Emerald Dwarf is green – and these are easily told from their common brothers, the Stone Dwarves, who are merely grimy. Silver Dwarves are more rare and Gold Dwarves only heard of.

Erchon is famed for his dense colour, like a duchess’s teapot – all over I don’t doubt! – and is a fine rapiersman always armed. Also he wears one of those flourishing hats of the fantastical kind, large and highly-coloured with a gigantic cock’s feather, for dwarves as you may also know (or not) are celebrated for their voracious carnal appetites and like to demonstrate their potency in an obvious and manly way. It does no harm!

The dwarf my sister had met bore all these characteristics. So, to cut the thread close, there was I exchanging pleasantries with the eminent Erchon outside this very bender-tent, which was pitched by the roadside.

He is bold and he is brave, I thought. I will test his courage and see if it can bring me gain; I will try him for my own amusement. So I made him a proposition and would have offered to pay him whatever his heart desired – but that, he was already in pursuit of though he knew it could never be his. He loved the Lady Nemione, his mistress: she who could never be his Mistress for she was courted by both Koschei and by the Kristnik, the stranger-knight. He took up my challenge out of goodness of heart and his love of adventuring. I thought that he, of all brave hearts, could find what my heart desired and bring it to me.

I wanted him to bring me Roszi, that wonderful gold head which sees and speaks all; Roszi, who was once a beautiful nivasha in the Falls of Aquilo; Roszi whom Koschei, by joining her icy soul and head to the body of a fire-demon and enchanting them both, had made into a puppet, a mere bed-toy to play with in the dark.

Ah, how I long for the Golden Head, spoiled and wayward though it be. How it would improve my shining hours! I would give it a proper, fitting use.

My wits are – a very little – sharper than Erchon’s; nevertheless I was surprised when he obeyed me and lay down on the banks of the river, the mighty Lytha. Before he could raise his sword or otherwise resist, I kicked him into the water and at the same time spoke a spell. I turned him into a drop of river water and off he went to Pargur, which at that time was under siege from the Kristnik, Lord Parados, and which the Archmage, Koschei the Deathless, held.

Erchon tricked me, somehow, somewhere. He never returned from Pargur; much less carrying the Golden Head with him. I do not believe him dead, for no one has seen him or Roszi – but she is no longer in Koschei’s gluttonous grasp, for she vanished the same day from Castle Sehol.

Darklis blew out a fan of smoke and idly watched it float above her head.

‘I fear that he is using her, though I did not know he could work magic. Certainly, he uses her for his convenience and pleasure. Neither dwarf nor man, if he love a nivasha, will ever rest easy or be content with a common, mortal woman.’

She put down the pipe and leaned forward.

‘Have you seen them, little Princess? Did they stray into your Plains, pretty Gry?’

‘They are surely creatures from a fable – no!’ breathed Gry. ‘I have never seen nor heard of anything, of any creature like this Roszi. No. But I knew Githon, the Copper Dwarf –’

‘Who is Erchon’s cousin twice-removed in the female line?’

‘Yes. Githon is a fine, upstanding dwarf, a travelling philosopher and lover of the curious. He was my father’s friend.’

‘Where is he?’

‘I do not know.’

The gypsy witch stared long at Gry, paying particular attention to the luminous, unwavering flame above her head, which was the light of her soul and which only she could see, and to the depths of her dark pupils. Gry, like all Ima women, could hear the soft interior pulse-beat and other tiny sounds a person’s soul makes within him; now, feeling the eyes and attention of the gypsy on her, she listened for Darklis’s soul and soon heard it yawn and begin to snore, calmed into slumber by the strong tobacco. Soon, Darklis herself yawned.

‘I am quite sure you are telling the truth,’ she said, a little grudgingly. ‘How late it is – or how early! You had better take my bed. I will sleep here, in the chair. There is too much of soft living in that bedroom for me: it is an ambitious conceit and I am happier by my smoky fire.’

Gry lay between clean, white sheets beneath a quilt of softest eider down and a coverlet embroidered with rainbows and clouds. The tobacco made her drowsy and her attention wandered, following the long journey she had made from home, and straying on the borders of sleep where the knight dressed all in silver waited to welcome her to his castle.

A gentle, querulous neigh broke into her dreams,

‘I trust you are lying in the lap of luxury, dear Gry?’

‘I am, I am, Red Horse,’ said Gry, laughing.

‘Then sleep safe,’ the Red Horse answered. ‘Goodnight!’

‘Goodnight, dearest Horse.’

She fell asleep in the warm, dark haven of the bed. In the fire-lit room beyond, Darklis’s soul was still snoring, while the witch talked in her sleep,

‘What happened to the Kristnik, I wonder? Where’s Parados, twelfth son of Stanko, the stranger-knight? I’ll give a pound for a penny to any of you, man, mouse or maiden, who’ll tell me. Where has the fellow got to since he disappeared at the Siege of Pargur?’

She is neat and slender-hoofed, thought the Red Horse in the glade; she has a small and pretty head and the hairs of her mane and tail are almost as fine as linen thread; her eye is kind and she smells good, of hay, horse-grease, mare’s-scent. But she is not a Plains horse, not my white Summer, wife and mother of my Red Colt; nor any of my mares; she is not a Plainswoman, not Gry – she is nothing but a dapple-grey pony. However, I shall not stop her from leaning her head so comfortably against my shoulder. In fact I shall return the compliment by resting my head on her neck. His eyes closed and he lifted one hoof up to a tip-tilted position so that, should he slip into the still waters of profound sleep, he would stagger and so wake himself.

When your Intelligence has passed out of the dense forest of delusion, you will become indifferent to all that has been heard and all that is to be heard.’ I have these words from the Sage who begs outside the Temple of the Highest Thought and, having noted and learned them, resolve to use them as text and precept during my sojourn in this hot land of Sind. I shall make them the bread and wine of truth – or rather, since the priests and people here are sparing and ascetic by nature, the dry biscuit and water, the very stuff and staff of life. It would be a great convenience, could I close the doors of my mind on all the perils and trials through which I and my divine Helen have passed and – no small benefit – on the bustle of our gypsy encampment; for it is the driest season, dusty, fruitful, abounding in deep noontide shadow and patches of bare ground too hot for a naked foot to bear. Our people are restless and tired.

To pass from delusion: what does the sage mean, do I want to accept his gift of mental peace? I live by delusion, by sowing and spreading it in the minds of others. Necessarily, my own temple of thought, my inner self, is full of strange creatures and fantastic images. To clear all this away, to prune and then burn as the gardener does when he tends an overgrown tree? To be empty, to be calm? What hard questions.

This afternoon, when I was in my usual perch, the cleft in the mango tree upon which blows the little, warm breeze which seems by contrast cool, I looked lazily down on the heart of the encampment Surely its noise was not unbearable? Fragments floated up to me, a confetti of conversations, both human and animal; a salmagundi of music and song. The oxen were lying dully awake like opium-eaters, and chewing the cud; Mana’s children played with their pet mongoose while she, squatting in the shade, was shaping dough between her flattened hands which she clapped together with a sound like self-applause as the paste began to fall and was caught. Raga sat on the fallen log, tapping his small, round drum while the flies buzzed unheeded about his shaggy head. The boy, Chab, accompanying him on the nose-flute, was so lithe and golden I wished I had carnal inclinations toward the male of our species. On solitary nights, when Helen was abroad with the snakes who are her soul-sisters, I had played with an idea of transforming myself into a sodomite and my redblood masculinity into something fittingly lickerish so that I might seduce and enjoy him. (Temperance, Koschei! Are you not about to make a resolution to quit such excellent diversions, to absolve, to abjure; to try the ascetic’s way?) Laxmi, combing out her night-black hair, reminded me for an instant of my beloved, yet not so exquisite, not so voluptuous despite her curves in their wrappings of shockingly pink cotton, and her bell-hung, chiming rings … (Soon I will be free of such distracting images!) Slender Ravana waved to me and, again, I was tempted and tormented; he had the outward appearance of a woman, bright clothing, kohl-rimmed eyes, red-painted lips and beneath this frippery, a great piece of meat, a male tail almost as long as mine and two mighty testicles. He had been an actor with a travelling theatre before he ran away with we greater vagabonds.

I found myself half-aroused at these sights and thoughts; allowed the thoughts to reorder themselves until the recollection of magnificent Helen overcame them. Then, was I truly aroused – to what purpose? For Helen has gone. I write it again:

‘Helen has gone. ‘Helen has left me.

and again

Eluned va da. Eluned mi da vyda, the language of the dwarves being most suitable for incantations mal or bona. All the languages that are and ever were or will be cannot contain my perturbation, my utter disquiet.

‘For our good. For mine, but yours principally, dear Koschei,’ she assured me as we took our last drink (the sweet juices of the melon and the passion fruit mingled, and a pearl against poison dropped in) together from her Cup. She kissed me on the lips and wiped the sweat from my face with the end of her scarf. I caught the phantom perfume which remained upon it in my nostrils; she had used the last drop long ago but, like its name, Sortilège, Spell, it lingers in the memory and wreaks sensual mischief there.

Helen turned the cup in her hand and sighed. I did not look at her again, being mesmerised by the spinning colours of the Cup, the sky-blue ground, the gold of the graven flames, the crimson and green letters. Words grew from her sighing.

‘Must go – far – you know the Cup is dangerous – you know we are pursued, Koschei – Koschei-i-i-i-i.’

I looked sharply up, in time to see the Cup accelerate, turning now upon a seven-ringed shaft of light, and Helen’s beautiful face above it, rapt. Then it and she vanished like a paper lantern crumpled, like leaves in a storm, and I was left alone to speak my question into the void.

‘Where are you going?’

I listened, while the gypsies’ talk hummed outside the cart, while the mocking jays sang. No answer came.

That was before noon. Hence it was that I sat like a monkey in the tree, hair tousled, body aching for love; and like a man, for I can reason: Helen, knowing my arcane and sensuous nature as well as she does her own and, well understanding how I might yearn, provided for me before she left. She will be away for no longer than one moon, she told me, before we drank our loving cup, or the time it takes for a crawling grub to become a winged and glorious butterfly; long enough, think I.

‘I have left you a gift,’ she had said. ‘Something of myself, you may call it; something I know will please you.’

She has left me Nemione, expertly plucking her senseless body from the great Plane of Delusion where she deposited it near the end of our last adventure and dressing it prettily in the female fashions of Sind – some lengths of more or less transparent, silver-bordered cloth, which go by the names of saree, yashmaq, fascinator &c – and bidding it lie in her place in our bed: for Nemione’s soul is Helen’s and so may my beloved put the pale, matchless Beauty to any use she will.

Nemione, my Lady, fair where Helen’s dark, slender where she has abundance, voiceless where the rich tones of my witch surpass the beauty of the dove’s ‘curroo’, the night owl’s throaty hiss. Oh terrible asceticism, hard master, cold mistress! Must I spurn her? Must I abjure her? I stood up in the fork of the tree, reached out a little way and plucked a rosy-red fruit – so fecund is this little paradise. I tested the mango with my nail, making a shallow fissure from which its yellow juice ran out, and this I sucked, thinking first of absent Helen and then of present Nemione. (Perhaps my mind seeks the ascetic’s way because I have excess of pleasures? I cannot believe it.) Decided for the time being, I climbed down and ran to my waggon, eager to share the fruit with Nemione.

Inviolate Nemione! Entire creature, unravished maid!

The curtains were closed beneath the tilt and I lifted a comer of the nearest to expose Nemione to my gaze. She was asleep, her snow-white skin flushed with the heat or from desire, perhaps, and she was sweating gently so that the womanly smell mingled with her jasmine perfume. Scenting her, I became excited and I dropped the mango in the dirt. Then, it was a moment’s work to mount into the cart and, straddling the sleeping virgin while I uncovered myself, mount her. She woke as I drove into her; Nemione woke and smiled, who in Malthassa was cold to me as snow and ice, as the everlasting Altaish mountains themselves. I paused a moment in my exertions to put some words into her mouth, that she might speak and, ‘Lord Koschei,’ she whispered, her voice rasping with emotion and desire. It brought me to the brink and I erupted within her, a volcano released.

The first time is the last, I thought.

I looked down on Nemione, enjoying her transports, feeling her intimate grip and release as she sank panting in her own waking dream; and wondered, as we subsided together in the bed and lay close-twined, whether she could keep my seed and conceive of it. She was a toy; but she was flesh and blood and her blood stained my Parts, evidence of her chastity when she was a she-mage in our own country and proud proof I was the first to take her.

‘Could you carry and bear my child?’ I asked her, forgetting; of course, she answered nothing, being not only voiceless but senseless as far as mental matters go, and I heard Helen laugh in my mind, a ribald echo. Such a fancy would please her keen, malicious mind. The sounds of the encampment broke over me, pushing away the passing moment, demanding to be heard. I kissed Nemione on her parted lips and tasted her patchouli-scented breath.

‘Say “Whatever you will, dear lord. I am here to worship and serve you alone, potent Archmage, king of my heart,” I whispered and pushed the words into her mouth with my tongue.

‘Whatever you will, dear lord. I am here to worship and serve you alone, potent Archmage, king of my heart,’ Nemione breathed, her lash-fringed gaze the colour of an indolent, afternoon sea.

“Sleep,” I bade her, ‘until I have need of you.’

She slipped from beneath me then and, turning her back, fell deeply asleep. Solitary again, I adjusted my clothing (the loose cotton trousers they call shulwars, nothing more), lifted one of the starry curtains which made the walls of our travelling house, and picked up a mirror, a common one, for grooming and vanities, no magic there – unless it was in the face reflected. My face, browned by the sun and the wind, blue-eyed; thatched with thick, greying hair in which still glittered many strands of yellow, a corn-colour; clean shaven. His face, browned by the sun and the wind, blue-eyed; thatched with thick, greying hair in which still glittered many strands of yellow, a corn-colour; clean shaven.

The even-contoured face, confident of life, its beauty enhanced by wisdom and the years, looked at me, Koschei Corbillion. Once, it belonged to Guy Parados. He’s good as dead, lost in my world of Malthassa while I, in his, can do whatever I will, can travel as now I do, can live and love where I choose, can journey to his native country and claim all that is his.

When I last saw Parados, he had taken over the body of a horse and was using it for his so-called noble ends –

’Tis pity there’s no notation in this alphabet for laughter.

We wise men of Malthassa think little of changing one body for another. It is from this, I think, my new ideas spring; for the sage of Highest Thought also taught me that by following his Way, any can become what is ordained be it dog, ape, or prince; and this notion, I wish to explore. My hunger for knowledge exceeds my lust by many a degree. Besides, it is written in the Twofold Scripture that the priest and the mage are one and the same and I suspect that he of the Temple is a deep magician.

These thoughts, which I now record, were mine while I regarded the face in the mirror. I put it down to look at sleeping Nemione. Asmodeus, she was beautiful, a perfection of soft colour and form!

‘Snare!’ I said, ‘Delusion!’

But I could not forbear kissing her – thrice – in farewell.

So I went out into the evening. The sun had set and the heat his fires wake in the earth had receded to a gentle warmth. Fireflies and night birds were abroad. I stepped over the dry moat which divides the encampment from my garden, a magic garden I had made to surround the little annexe to my Memory Palace left in far Malthassa and in which I stored my most tender and amazing memories. It had taken seven nights to erect to my satisfaction, to decorate: a pretty thing, carved and ornamented in the style of this country yet cool and elegant, white as milk. I approached it through the garden, ducking under the branches of the flowering siris trees and passing the lake where the black swans and gold-winged divers swam. I paused to inhale the perfume of the night.

It was dark when I stood before my little building, if dark it can be when the skies are encrusted with jewels, and I went gladly in at one of its arched entrances and sat with crossed legs on the floor. It is the posture the sage uses when he exercises his body and mind to meditate and I had practised it until I was perfect. Such suppleness is the reward of discipline and I had my body well-attuned. I would begin work on my mind.

First, to clear it, I repeated the mantra the sage had given me and which I can record here in the secrecy of mind and journal. ‘Jaa’ it is, meaningless to me but, I know, a noise like that of the thunder and with an echo in my mind or the mind of this body which I cannot locate.

Jaa! No room in my mind for thought. Jaa! No room for hunger. Jaa! No room for desire. Jaa! Here is the engine of the body, pulsing, breathing.

I heard nothing but these, the sounds of life, and the near world fell away from me. I opened my eyes: the building had gone, the trees which surround it, the stars, the night. I sat in an empty place where a redness glowed. Sense of distance, sense of time: they had gone, but somewhere, maybe before me or to one side, I saw a rise in the ground and something indistinct upon it. I thought I was on the Plane of Delusion and blinked to clear my vision. The place glowed, red as the fire of a volcano. My eyes closed, opened. I was back in the annexe and the stars were visible, sparkling gladly beyond the arches.

I was glad, to be back, to have travelled; but I wondered, where? I took my journal from its place on the shelf beside the statue of Cyllene and wrote in it. At the end of the passage I drew a neat line and a sigil of protection, breathed upon that and replaced the volume. My hand, as I withdrew it from the shelf, knocked against something, the corner of a picture which had not been there before. I stared at it: I had no knowledge of it, had not conjured it; yet there it hung, framed in dark red mulberry wood and glazed with fine, clear glass. It was a portrait in oils and I recognised the sitter, Gry of the Plains, Nandje’s daughter, or to put it in the hyperbolic, Ima style: the picture was a likeness of the Princess of Horses, Gry, Daughter of He Who Bestrides the Red Horse, the Rider, the Imandi. The woman looked serenely at me, dark eyes limpid – beautiful eyes! – her two plaits of hair bound with silver wire at the ends and silver in abundance, worked and engraved rings of it, on her bare arms and one, which had a cunning bone clasp fashioned to look like the tail of a horse, about her left ankle where the hem of her blue dress hung down.

Parados has done this, I thought. He intruded into my Memory Palace and now he is hanging his memories in my annexe. Yet I could not see how he gained entrance.

The rolling green Plains made the background in this pretty intrusion, hills and hillocks under the grass, some of them the dwelling-places of the Ima who burrow in the ground as if they were marmots or moles. The sky above the woman’s head was clear and light. That is all, a plain composition truly yet a skilful one for it showed Gry as she is, untouchable and incorruptible, a true daughter of the Horse.

Marvelling the while, I saw that the sun was fully up. The fires aroused by my writings of Nemione above were quite damped by my writings of what passed here in the night, or maybe by the purity of the new portrait. I lay down to sleep on the hard, marble floor and felt its smooth cold enter my body and freeze my lust altogether. But when I emerge into the day and the camp and am again confronted by the startling beauty of Nemione, I may be in different case.

The witch’s house, as Gry came in the morning from her sunlit, magic bedroom, had a disordered look. The chair and chest were gone, the stool was upended on the hearth and the tinware packed away. The light at her back, which gilded her dark hair and outlined her slight figure, snapped out as, with a suck and a sigh, the bedroom and all its luxuries vanished; but she spared it not one thought. The experiences of the night had taught her this, that magic may work for ordinary folk, and she ducked outside, through the original, low doorway.

There was Darklis, holding a steaming cup and a white plate on which lay two slices of dark, rye bread and a boiled egg. The chickens scratched in the grass at her feet. Beyond them, the Red Horse and Streggie waited, the pony laden with two panniers packed with all manner of gear, and a high-backed and embossed saddle. The expression on the pony’s long face was resentful. I’d bet gold – if I had any – that she kicks, thought Gry.

‘Ha!’ said Darklis, as Gry advanced and Red Horse neighed a welcome. ‘A tousle-headed lay-abed. Come, chi, hurry yourself. Here’s a break-fast.’

The food was welcome and Gry ate it quickly and made haste to greet the Horse.

‘We must never be parted, you and I,’ she whispered.

‘Never again,’ he agreed.

With many a curse and sigh, the gypsy was dismantling her hut and Gry went to help her, but the willow-sticks whined as they were untied and separated from each other. She dared not touch them.

At last, Darklis finished loading her long-suffering pony and heaved herself up into the painted saddle, settling with a grunt, her feet hanging low either side. Gry mounted the Red Horse by knee and mane.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Where we are taken, I suspect; but I think her journey is ours and will take us to Wathen Fields.’

‘Come, pretty Chickens and you – my fine fellow!’ the gypsy cried as she touched the pony’s sides with her scarlet heels, and the five hens and the cockerel fluttered in a panic after her and shot, one by one, into the sunny, morning air and so to their perches on the panniers and the pony’s neck.

‘Streggie knows where she’s going,’ Darklis called, over her shoulder.