Cast a Bright Shadow by Tanith Lee

Author:Tanith Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

Days later, he was following her, or the trail of her narrow, high-arched feet, across the dunes.

Ipeyek had left his family of two wives and dozen children, left his tent-house and cart, his dog-team, and three burden-carrying dogs. He took only his fight-and-hunting weapons, and the clothes he always wore. No one remonstrated, though the wives were solemn and some of the youngest children cried. It was the way of the Northland, generally, not to debate.

Why did he go after the woman called Chillel?

The simplest cause: he had fallen in love with her. And he had done this sufficiently to be able to give up everything else.

Most often, his quarry was herself out of sight. Sometimes he saw her in the distance, but she moved on too, after sunset. In Gech lands, to sleep by night was the norm, but Ipeyek rationed sleep now.

He hunted as he went across the ice desert. Game was scarce, yet he had grown up with the scarcity and the country, and knew their secrets. The infrequent hares fell to his sling. Once he saw the tracks of a tattarope, found its hole in the dunes, and dragged the snake out. He ate all food raw, as he walked after Chillel, and for drink chipped ice off the mesas with a razor-like flint knife.

Chillel, he thought, ate nothing. Possibly she had only accepted small portions of the hirdiy food from a bizarre courtesy – because eating was one more thing that humans seemed to do?

Ipeyek wondered, startled, if she had only urinated for the same reason.

He did not ever attempt to catch up. Not even when he could see her there a long way ahead of him, like a solitary black finger moving over the bleached sand, writing something on the sky he could not read.

Ipeyek did not measure time as he crossed the Uaarb. Presumably neither did Chillel.

One morning, after he had been striding monotonously for hours, Ipeyek grew aware that he approached the plateau’s end.

Here the external mountains became involved again with the flat terrain. The land dipped, crumbled. As it gave way more and more, Ipeyek came to see the slopes reeling off below, down to the lower sweeps of the northern Gech wilderness. He had never been so many miles towards the south.

All that day he never saw Chillel, and the rockier ground hid her footprints. Persistent, single-minded, he kept doggedly on.

That evening he made, unmagically, a fire in the lee of a rock, striking up sparks from his flint. Darkness came, and only emptiness was there – but night and unsound were also Chillel.

Next day he found her. She was about twenty feet from him. She had halted confronting the massive final drop, as the plateau plunged over towards the wilderness far, far below. He did not think it was fear that had stayed her. She was perplexed.

‘I and you down mountain,’ he said. ‘I able. You easy with me.’

She could not fly. That was odd, but fortunate, or else he might then not have caught up to her at all.

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