Lilith’s Castle. Gill Alderman

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      The north wind passed over Aza in his hollow. The shaman kept five spirit-horses, long and fearsome creatures made of ash-poles, skulls, and hides and hair, and he looked up, seeing how the wind moved their skins and brought life to their dried tails and manes. The horses guarded him and there was one to face East and one to face West, one for the South and one for the North; and one to watch the sky. At night, or when he had gone into the breathless trance, Aza spoke with them and learned what they had seen; now they were silent, unless the rattling of their skins against their bones of ash wood was a kind of speech, or a lament for earlier and better days, when they had galloped, eaten the sweet grass and roamed the Plains at will.

      Aza had a sixth horse which he had inherited from the old shaman, Voag, when he was called to his seat at Russet Cross. He kept it in a basket. Now, he rose and fetched the basket from where it lay upon a rolled-up prayer flag. Unpegging the lid, he lifted the separate pieces of this horse out of its basket and stable and began to arrange them in an intricate pattern on the ground. He wanted to weave a bridle out of the living grass and to do this, it was necessary to bring the power from the bones of the sixth horse and a hungry sprite from the earth.

      ‘Svarog, see me! he cried, ‘Stribog, hear me! Feel me walk upon you, Moist Mother Earth. O, send me a puvush, a goodly puvush lacking nothing but her malice and wanting nothing but food. I will feed her, I will put bread in her mouth and send her back to you uncharmed and unharmed.’

      In front of Aza, the ground rippled as if it had become water, and the limbs of the bone horse lying on it clashed together. A small mound grew beneath the grass and, suddenly bursting open, let go a long, grey body thinner than a snake or blind-worm. The puvush reared up and the skeletal horse jumped high to follow her and join her wild dance. It had been strong and fleet before it was killed and remembered how its joints fitted together and how it had run and shied at shadows whenever it desired, and drunk the constant wind; and how its head had been taken from its body and burned in a fire so that it could no longer do any of these things.

      ‘Rest, little Tarpan!’ Aza commanded it. ‘Your part is finished.’ The bones subsided and lay still and Aza knelt beside the dancing puvush to wait until she tired. At last, her head and body bowed and she turned her pinched and greedy face towards him. He was ready and thrust the bread crust he was holding into her open mouth.

      ‘I have you. You are mine,’ he said, ‘for the time that begins now and the time it takes for this feather to fall to earth. Make me a bridle: I have something to bind.’

      Aza’s magic skylark’s feather rose into the air and swayed there while the puvush, moving faster than the winter wind about the shaman’s sky-roofed house, picked a bundle of grass stems, twisted each stalk thrice and wove them into a bridle. The shaman’s eyes grew sore and his head dizzied from watching her. It was done, the charm complete; but Aza groaned aloud. The price of this charm was a cupful of blood, to be drawn from his arm before sundown and offered to Mother Earth. The feather fell to earth and he bade the puvush be gone in a gruff voice, testy with fatigue.

      It was done. The hooves of the spirit-horses clapped together at the ends of the skin tubes which had been their legs: Aza had his bridle, which he held up, admiring its close weave and counterfeit, bristly bit. He was ready, he, Aza the Shaman, who no longer had any use or affection for women, excepting the Night Mare, and who had seen Gry, Nandje’s daughter, an unwed woman, riding like a man (no less!), doing what she should not, and entering where she was forbidden. Therefore the shaman had made his preparations, his defence and attack.

      Gry sang. Her sorrow had lifted as the day lengthened. I do not know where Nandje’s shadow rests, she thought, but there is no longer any reason to cry because I have spoken with him. Life ends so that death may begin.

      The Red Horse followed as she walked him back to his mares and to her pail of milk, which she lifted to her shoulder. Then she patted the Horse with her free hand and watched him wander into the new grass and lower his head to graze, his back toward her, his tail twitching off the flies. She turned in the opposite direction and made for home. The blue flag of her people was flying bravely over Garsting and its colour, brighter than the sky in midsummer, made her think of warmth and the coming Flowering of the Plains. She sang cheerfully of love and marriage:

       ‘I long to be married when the red poppies grow

       And the grass whispers “Leal is my darling,”

       It’s time to wear yellow and braid up my hair,

       But I need a pair of boots for my wedding –’

      It was that time before dusk when the light lingers on the hilltops of the Plains and the hollows in between are awash with violet shadow; it is hard then to judge distance and to keep one’s mind from wandering into the dreamworld which rightly belongs to night. Yet Gry, carolling the chorus to her love song, strode through the gloaming and wondered if anyone had missed her. There were few to do so. Her aunts had their own households to care for and their own mares to milk, while she had only a few milch mares and Garron and Kiang, who were both courting and often out teasing their lasses or hunting jacks and partridge to give them. When she got home, she would pour the milk into the kumiz vat and rake away the ashes from the embers on the hearth; she would pile on fresh fuel, knead last night’s dough again and set it to bake on the stone; perhaps Garron would come in then, with his keen gaze that was so like her father’s and his forest-wood bow. He would sit to unstring and grease it while they talked over the day. Or Kiang would hurry in, bending in the doorway, laughing at some mishap or joke – Gry started and the milk slopped over her neck. The song had already died … It was Aza: what could he want? She did not like him, for all he was a holy man. He used to scare her with his auguries and chanting when she was small; she did not nowadays care to be alarmed for nothing. Especially when she had just learned to be whole and happy again.

      ‘It is warm; the grass grows,’ she said, conventionally.

      ‘It is warm, my daughter, and warm enough for travelling,’ the shaman answered. Gry immediately resented his words and, her face reddening, said stubbornly, ‘I am my father’s daughter, Aza.’

      ‘This makes you bold. You have been a long time at the milking – a morning and an afternoon to bring the milk of ten mares home to your brothers!’

      ‘My brothers are courting, Aza, and don’t care what I do –’

      ‘But I do, Nandje’s Daughter – or have you an ambition to be his third son? I saw you by the burial-mound. I saw you and the Red Horse at the burial-mound.’

      Aza came nearer, detaching himself from the shadows, a wizened spider of a man hung about with the sharp bills of ravens and the curved beaks and talons of hawks which scratched at and tangled with his strings and necklaces of shell and bone, and with the dried faces of the Plains stoats stitched like battle-trophies to his mantle. A monkey’s skull was fastened in his wild white hair.

      ‘I saw you astride the Red Horse!’

      The shaman leapt forward suddenly and grasped Gry by the arm so that the pail flew from her shoulder and all the milk soared out of it in a great, white arc.

      ‘More than milk will be spilt,’ said Aza.

      Gry did not move. He terrified her, leering in her face with his thin lips and his black and broken teeth. He smelled of corruption and death and his touch was that of a viper, dry and mean. Slowly, he lifted his left hand, waving it as a snake does its head to mesmerise a heath-jack. He held a bridle, she saw and then, in the blinking of an eye and before she could bestir herself or scream, it was tight on her, its straps chafing her cheeks and brow and СКАЧАТЬ