Gill Alderman - Lilith’s Castle

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Other Books By Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

About the Publisher Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

PROLOGUE

he fleeth as it were a shadow

Nandje, Rider of the Red Horse, Father and Imandi to the Ima tribe, lay still beneath the ceremonial blanket which covered him. The bustard feathers woven into it pierced his face with their long barbs and the rawhide strips lay heavier than lead on his throat, part of him and also something separate, deadly and symbolic. The felted horsehair had sucked up his blood and sunk into the rotting craters which were his wounds. He knew himself to be no longer human and a man but as much and little as the earth on which the Horse Herd also trampled, wounding its soft surface with the same lunular pits.

It was ill to be thus trapped underground, within a redundant body whose eyelids were held down with stones, nostrils and lips sewn shut with dried Plains grasses. Nor could he recall the Past, whatever that unlikely concept was, or look into the Future as he had once been able, in life. The Now, terrible, endless, was all: death inescapable, triumphant, eternal.

Aza, the Shaman, lifted the blanket from Nandje’s face and observed the dead Imandi’s crushed skull and grotesquely distorted face. The skin was drying out and splitting, pulling his twelve-month-old stitching apart. He found an end and pulled the grass strands out, to the last shred and wisp, using his nails where the flesh had tightened round the thread.

‘The sleep of death is long,’ said Aza ‘but there comes a time to awaken.’

He took up the pointed stick he had prepared during the long mourning and thrust it between the lips and teeth of the corpse, down savagely, hard to the base of the throat. It groaned and belched as the gases rose and bubbled from its liquid interior and a terrible stench was hurled into his face. The corpse moths which had been incubated in Nandje’s body flew free, a many-winged pied cloud.

‘Nay, go peacefully to the Palace of Shadows!’ he cried. ‘Be wise and kind, as you were with us.’

The final alteration had taken place with the freeing and the flight of Nandje’s soul. All that remained was lolling, putrefying matter which Aza might leave alone to complete its metamorphosis, flesh to grass. Tenderly and carefully, for this was the last office he was able to perform for Nandje, he rolled back and folded the death-blanket and carried it with him, up into the light.

THE PATHLESS WAY

Leave the past behind; leave the future behind;

leave the present behind

It is the usual thing for a herd led by a mare

to be strayed and destroyed

The night was almost over and the Red Horse walked slowly out of it, pacing steadily over the low hills which lay between Nandje’s tomb and his Herd. He had made this nightly journey since the burial, observing how the body he had carried at both easy walk and furious gallop was decaying and what tender care the shaman took over his rituals. Yet, each time he returned to the Herd, he felt at heart less satisfied and more restive. These emotions, he knew, came to him because his understanding was beginning to awake and not from sorrow at the untidy fate of Nandje, nor any fellow-feeling for the fine man he had been.

The horses stood in small constellations, group by group within the universe of the Herd. The stars were fading and dawn about to break. A skein of geese, pointing like an arrow to the far horizon, flew overhead and the Red Horse paused to watch them out of sight. They were flying into the wind and making heavy weather of it, yet the song of their wings was hopeful and eager: they were always moving on from riverhead to marsh, from forest lake to seashore, water their element as his was this grass-grown earth of the Plains. The wind pushed at his back and he moved off, breaking into a canter as he breasted the last hill and saw his mares and young stallions, his filly foals and colts all facing forward, all looking out for him. The Herd neighed a soft welcome, the sound passing from horse to mare, and he returned the greeting joyfully: this part of his life was whole and good. He turned his head toward the village where the Ima slept. The sun always rose beyond it. He waited patiently for its first, arising rays to touch the round roofs of the houses.

Nandje’s daughter crawled from her house. It was the only way to enter or leave it, through the low tunnel which was both doorway and defence. She was still in mourning for her father, deeply shocked and deeply grieving; but there were the everyday tasks to do, the chores which kept her headless family comfortable and the wolf, hunger, from the door. Milking was the first each day, a little thin, blue-tinted milk to take from each milch mare. She (as every Ima man and woman must) loved her horses and, equally, her wide, bleak birthplace in the Plains. Her name was Gry and her age, since time is lawless in Malthassa, was perhaps seventeen.

The cold wind blew in Gry’s face. She tasted the salt in it and covered her ears against the stories it brought from far away. Nothing could be done while the Salt Wind blew from the furthest corner of the Plains and passed over Garsting on its way to bring down the trees of the forest; and nothing could be done while they were all in mourning.

Her hair had begun to grow again and covered her scalp as the new spring grass does the ground, sparse and short. She knew how ugly she was and had been, shorn thus and stripped of every piece of her silver jewellery. That lay, with her hair and her happiness, in her father’s tomb while each new day began heavy and slow and continued unrelieved into night. She lifted her milking-pail and laid it across her shoulder, turned her back on the wind – that was where the Horse Herd would be, facing away from the salt-savour, heads low and ears flattened to diminish the rumours which – now – ears uncovered – she heard fly past her, the brittle voices of the zracne vile shrieking ‘Sorrow! Sorrow! Bitter death!’ It seemed to Gry that all of Malthassa, from marsh to ocean, from the unknown beyond the Plains to the end of the world at the back of the mountains, had died with her father. She trudged out across the first low hills, her bare feet shrinking from the chilly ground and the skin pail clammy against her neck. All the world was grey and dusky; of late, the birds, cowering in bush and grass, had forgotten their songs and did not take to the air on pliant wing; but the zracne vile, the spirits of the air, tumbled past in the wind, now head first, now blown backwards, hair and limbs awry.