Gill Alderman - Lilith’s Castle

‘Poor lady,’ said Gry. Her tears fell like rain on the Horse’s shoulders and, when she had shed enough of them to make her feel cheerful, she dried her face on his mane and sat up. The wolf carried his tail high and happy and Gry’s posture on the Red Horse’s wide back was easy and relaxed. They ran through a green landscape where bushes laden with catkins and blossom grew and the sun shone in a blue sky. Skylarks rose from the ground, ascending specks against the sky. She heard their song flood down and fill the open lands through which they rode, and she smiled. The shepherds’ gift of sparkstones danced a lively jig in their bag, which hung round her neck, and she had tied their beautiful blouse about her waist until she could find the time and the place to wear it. It was yellow like the day and made of Flaxberry silk bound with ribbon as juicily red as mulberries.

‘I shall put it on when I have bathed in Pimbilmere, whatever that is and wherever that may be, for I would follow Mouse-Catcher anywhere; and I would ride my beloved Red Horse to the edge of the world,’ Gry said to herself.

The Horse was silent, pounding along. Soon Gry found herself singing the song Lemani had learned from the tobacco traders:

‘Oh, soldier, soldier, won’t you marry me,

With your falchion, pipe and drum?

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 …