Lilith’s Castle. Gill Alderman
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