Lilith’s Castle. Gill Alderman
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 …
Oh, Mistress of Mortality, Identity and Age! How gladly I travel with her, knowing Wrecker of my heart, dark shadow of my older Love, the fair, inviolate Nemione, whose brown body and lustrous witch’s hair, whose forked tongue and pitch-mirk eyes are the counter of Nemione’s fair pallor and golden showers, soft corals and sapphires set in pearl. Parados loved her as well as I, that’s sure and she has left him to his fate to go with me.
Q What difference for her, since I inhabit his discarded body, which works hard for me, by day and by night?
A My mind, controller, not his. My intent, vicious, not his. My way, devious, not his.
But I have, with Parados’s body, his fount of brute energy! And something of his hopefulness, I think, a residue he left behind when he condemned himself to exile from himself! Mine’s the better deal – new life, new landfalls and horizons, new mistress; and the same misspelt name, Koschei, which he – or I – trawled from the infinite world of the imagination, collective memory, universe of tales.
Here they think it is a gypsy name and that is what they take me for, one of themselves, dark-skinned from the hot sun of this land, a Rom colourful and canny.
Our lives are simple, Helen’s and mine. Our angel-haired son left us a while ago in a cold country, in winter, the snows and the mountains calling him – he drove away in the wheeled firebird to whatever dissolute or physically punishing pastime best amuses him and we travel on. Our conveyance now is a creaking cart with a canvas tilt for the rains or worldly privacy; once it was painted in gold and red and black and decorated with suns and moons. A few streaks, weather-ravaged, of this old coat remain, for we fashioned it together (one starlit night in the Yellow Desert) out of the material of her vardo, her gypsy caravan. From the skewbald horse we made a brown and white ox to draw it. We love and laugh and live as gypsies, the last of the true vagrants, and tell fortunes when we are asked. Helen reads hands while I pretend to scry in my little prism – I found it lying in Limbo beside Parados’s abandoned body. It is a useless, shiny bauble now, the only souvenir I have of Malthassa, its compound, magnifying eye fixed firmly on the last thing it saw, the dove-woman Paloma flying (in her second apotheosis at my, or should I say ‘the cruel hawk’s’ talons?) into Malthassa’s sun.
My divine Helen, for her rich clients, uses her magic Cup, the King’s Goblet upon whose surface passes not only What is Gone but What Will Be, here on Earth. It is not hers, this wondrous Cup, but stolen like my body – and I think we are both scented by an ambitious pursuit for I have seen (one dawn in the Shalimar Mountains) an eagle fly up hastily from the rock beside our camping-place and (in the hot afternoon when the red dust rises over the Thar) a camel wake from deep sleep to stare after me.
We have wandered through the warm, wine-loving countries which crowd around the shores of the Mediterranean Sea; we have crossed the driest deserts and the highest mountains to reach this, our temporary home. Its people, who are god-fearing and industrious, call it Sind; but we belong to a smaller nation, my Lady’s Tribe of Romanies which history, legend and themselves name the Gypsies of the Gypsies, the Dom, whom Firdusi called the Luri and others, the Zott. They crowd about and protect us with their noise and numbers while we make our grail-less, idyllic odyssey.
All too soon, the stars waned and dawn came. Gry woke suddenly, for Mouse-Catcher with eyes wide open and ears erect was sitting by her, a great furry watchdog waiting for the sun to shine; but the Horse snorted in his sleep and pricked his ears as if he were listening to another’s tale.
Go into the forest till you come to a fallen tree;
then turn to your left and follow your nose.