His answer came, then, almost lost in the noise of the storm.
‘Yes.’
Swiftaxe felt so elated that he screamed. He rose to his feet, rubbing the ache from his stretched muscles, and looked around for his axe. The wind
shrieked beyond the stones, and the ground beneath his feet seemed to tremble; he noticed that many of the dark beings were stamping the ground.
He plucked his axe from the soil and hooked it on to his belt.
‘Walk through the spaces between us,’ said a voice from behind him, and Swiftaxe obeyed, stepping between the heaving flanks of two great beasts that watched him pass below them with something of an expression of humour on their wide, granitic faces.
The wind shrieked deafeningly as he stepped beyond the ring, and then everything twisted; he felt his head spin as the world seemed to invert beneath him.
The next thing he knew he was sprawled on warm grass staring up into an intensely blue sky. He sat up and twisted round, and found himself staring down into a deep, steep-sided valley.
Enormous structures of some transparent, blue-tinged stone had been built along the bottom of the valley, linked only by the winding river that emerged from a cave below where Swiftaxe was sitting. The crumbling ruins of these buildings were crawling with life, and the polished stone burned bright and blinding in the summer sun.
Someone was running towards him from behind and he twisted round, ready to leap to his feet and defend himself; but it was merely a girl, running down the hill, her hair streaming, her skirts flying.
Instinctively Swiftaxe had sensed the unthreatening nature of the new arrival, and he remained seated as the strange woman passed him by, then stopped, and slowly turned, her eyes widening as she looked at him.
Suddenly she started to laugh, almost hysterically, pointing at him and then covering her mouth with her hand. Her body shuddered with ill-restrained mirth, but after a moment, still wide-eyed in astonishment, she stopped laughing and walked a few paces towards the Berserker.
She was dressed in a translucent green robe, through which her well-rounded body was provocatively visible; she seemed young, yet fully mature, fat breasts firm and wide-nippled; her body hair was pale brown, a faint marker to the apex of her plump thighs and well rounded belly. Her waist was as narrow as the neck of a jar.
Golden hair, parted centrally and plaited on each side to keep stray strands from entering her eyes, tumbled past her waist. Swiftaxe loved that. It reminded him of his own people, and the way the women had worn their hair.
But this girl was not like the Coritanian girls in any other detail. Full-mouthed, wide-nosed, orange-eyed. Swiftaxe had never seen the like of her before.
She started to laugh again and ran up the hill and round him, stopping on his right and crouching, as if ready to run away. She shook her head, still giggling, and now Swiftaxe felt the first hint of a smile touch his own lips.
‘What’s so funny?’ he asked.
At the sound of his voice the girl shrieked with mirth, ran back in front of him, then twisted round and flopped to her knees, beautiful mouth stretched wide with her private joke, eyes narrowed with pleasure. She laughed and laughed, the sound as light and as pleasant as the cascading of water down a waterfall.
‘Are you mad?’ said Swiftaxe, laughing too. He stared at his own body, wondering whether something was stuck to him that amused her. It was probably his clothing, he imagined.
The girl sobered abruptly. ‘I am the illusion maker,’ she said.
‘I am the Berserker,’ said Swiftaxe. ‘Where am I?’
The girl clenched her lips together as she stared at him, and it was obvious she was restraining more laughter. The sound, gentle and delightful, burst from her uncontrollably, and Swiftaxe found himself roaring in merriment too.
What
was
she laughing at?
‘What
are
you laughing at?’ he asked, still chuckling. ‘Tell me. Please. My clothes? What?’
‘You’re so … so …’ again she racked uncontrollably, then through tear-filled eyes she regarded him and gasped, ‘You’re so ugly. I’ve never seen a being so ugly. You really are very funny.’
Swiftaxe stopped laughing.
The girl looked apologetic. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t laugh so. You can’t help your looks, no more than I can help these …’ she glanced down at her own body. ‘It’s so unusual, so uncomfortable. And these things …’ she lifted her breasts, one in each hand and squeezed them. ‘They’re so heavy, so cumbersome. Are they functional? I can’t imagine what one does with them.’
Gaining an inkling of what was happening, Swiftaxe said, ‘This is a stolen body you wear, then?’
‘An illusory body,’ said the girl. ‘I have to stop you seeing what we really look like. I have to paint the
Cynegesa
from what you see. You would go mad if you saw our true form.’
‘I saw nothing excessively fearsome in the beings in the gate … I don’t understand …?’
The girl laughed. ‘The
Cynesgesa
no more look like the Old Ones than they look like this or you. The Old Ones have incorporated animal shapes from your world into their forms. It’s one of the games they play in the stone. You would hate to see what we really look like. I am the illusion maker. I make things comfortable for you. It was felt that you might enjoy your guide wearing a body like this, rather than a male body. Is that correct? I can easily change. Which is the sexual aperture, by the way? The one at the front or the one at the back?’
Swiftaxe felt the blood rise to his face. The girl’s expression was so intense, so straight, so innocent and concerned. ‘Both,’ he said nervously, and she nodded then smiled. ‘Any changes?’ she repeated.
‘No. No changes. Your body is fine. Keep it.’
‘Not even a
fragmentary
change?’ she insisted, staring at him very hard. ‘Would you like these a little bigger? Although how I’ll move with them defeats me.’ Again she shook her breasts and laughed. ‘They’re so
funny
.’
‘Keep them just the way they are,’ said the Berserker, grinning but painfully aware of the girl’s body.
She said, ‘I am instructed to tell you that you can make whatever use of
this body that you wish. It isn’t mine. I shall enjoy the sensory education. You can even kill it if you want. I can soon replace it.’
‘Somehow you’ve managed to take all the pleasure out of the situation,’ said Swiftaxe, and climbed to his feet. ‘Where am I, by the way?’
‘Through the gate,’ said the girl. She winked elaborately and rose also, brushing the loose grass from her pointless gown. ‘The
Cynegesa
wish to show you something. Something that will help you understand what possesses you.’
A shadow passed across the sun, a shadow no less dark than that which passed through Swiftaxe’s soul. ‘But can I be helped? Do these strange beings know a way to rid me of my curse?’
The girl’s laughter relaxed the warrior. She reached out a hand for his and said, ‘You will see. Come on. If you linger too long in this world you will return to your own not hours, but months after you left it. Come on.’
She let go of his hand and raced ahead of him, down the steep valley slopes, slipping and sliding on the grass. Swiftaxe followed, loving the warmth of the sun, and becoming sufficient of a child to try and race the girl.
His weight, the cumbersome bulk of his axe, and his own muscle-bound physique, slowed him; the girl raced ahead.
By the time he stumbled to the shore of the small river, splashing his face and body with the cool waters, she had already recovered from her own exertions, and was on her feet, urging him to follow.
‘Wait,’ he gasped, wiping sweat from his hair and neck. She laughed at him. He squinted against the sun to see her, and found himself much attracted to her body, the earlier disillusionment having faded.
The girl came back to him and crouched beside him, reached out to wipe her fingers across his saturated brow. She studied him intensely for a second or two, then let her gaze drop to his chest and arms. She tried to encompass his arm muscles with her tiny hands, and cocked her head sideways as she failed.
She looked into his eyes again, frowning slightly. ‘How do you engage in intimacy with these bodies? Will you show me?’
Aroused by the girl’s nearness, and the dampness of her skin from the race down the hill (and the way her robe clung to her body at its points and clefts) Swiftaxe reached out and took her chin in his broad, strong fingers. He pulled her gently to him and pressed his lips against hers, ended the kiss by nipping her lower lip. He felt her jump with the sudden pain, but she was smiling when she drew back.
‘Pleasant,’ she said. ‘Is that all?’
‘No,’ said the Berserker. ‘But I have no time to be a teacher. Take me to your druids. Quickly.’
He climbed to his feet and pulled the girl to hers. She seemed disappointed, but then said. ‘My what? My
druids
? What’s that?’
‘Your men … your
things
of magic. Those who make spells and break spells. The creatures that spoke to me in the stone circle. Come on. My time runs short.’
‘Follow me, then, if patience is not one of your virtues.’ The girl turned and ran along the shores of the river.
Swiftaxe gratefully followed.
When he stopped for rest, splashing himself in the river again, he looked around the mysterious valley, still amazed at the bizarre structures that clung to its slopes like the shattered shells of gigantic crystal snails.
He remembered nothing from the land of the Romans that matched these shimmering remains; Roman marble was bright and slick to the touch, but these buildings seemed to have been fashioned from the finest glass laid over beams of bright iron.
Shapes moved in the ruins. He could see movement along the vast girders, and behind the jagged edges of crystal. Some of the buildings were more intact than others, and within them he could see colours changing and moving as if elaborately dressed men danced and fought there.
There were hundreds of these ruins, mostly collapsed domes, but many of them looking like elaborate caskets, poking out of the ground and supported by nothing beneath.
It was a vision of the land of the gods, and Swiftaxe shook his head as the sights began to make him dizzy.
‘What is this place called?’ he shouted after the girl. He didn’t know her name, he realised, but then she probably didn’t have a name.
The girl stopped and looked around her. ‘For all time it has been called the Valley of the Lost Fire. But the city around you is known as Durengweer, which means in the new tongue: the City of the Travellers.’
Swiftaxe came up beside her and looked further down the valley to where the buildings clustered so densely that they were difficult to look at in the bright sun. Brighter, even, than his polished axe.
‘Who are the travellers?’
‘Legend speaks of them as those who built the city, in a time lost from all our minds. Those who came then either died or went to the rocks. A few of them guard the gates; some of them you saw in their game forms. We are their descendants, each of us living a life longer by hundreds of years than your own, but short by comparison with the Travellers. We are the
Cynegesa
, but we are just children, playing out a sort of death game in the remnants of what was once built to house a great race.’
They walked through woodlands, ducking beneath low branches and idly watching small forest life, rabbits and mice, scattering through the
undergrowth. Further in the copse there was the sound of bigger movement, and when Swiftaxe peered through the leafy dimness he thought he saw an animal like a deer, darting away from the intrusion into its domain.
‘Travellers,’ said Swiftaxe quietly. ‘From where, I wonder? From further east than Rome? Further north than the ice wastes? Or further west than the great sea? I wonder.’
The girl laughed. ‘Further than all of those,’ she said. ‘A great sky fire drove us from our lands, so we are taught; but a few of our ancestors captured part of the fire and rode it to a place of peaceful valleys and hills. They say the fire was so great that the stars changed position in the sky so we could no longer look at the heavens and recognise the shapes there. But a few of us, those who are
my
ancestors and who now live in the stones, they were lost from their friends and lovers, and settled here, in this valley, and though they searched for thousands of years they never found the others. So it became the Valley of the Lost Fire.’
Emerging on to the grassy downs again, Swiftaxe saw the land littered with strangely carved rocks, white and grey stones that were half buried in the ground. They looked so like the standing stones of his own people, and those of the peoples who had gone before, that he felt almost at home among them.
They ran down a dip in the ground, and then slowly climbed the rise on the other side, and Swiftaxe noticed how the girl studiously avoided running in the shadows of the stones.
Swiftaxe moved through one such shadow, and felt his head spin; he heard wind, and then sounds of a storm, the deep breathing of some gigantic beast, and felt the sensation of running. It frightened him, experiencing things that were not within himself; he moved from the shadow of the stone and was back in the sun.
At the top of the rise he looked down at the main city, a sprawling array of shattered crystal buildings, and twisted spires, rising high and bright into the air. The girl took his hand and tugged him down the hill. They arrived by the river and the girl searched among the big rushes that hugged the shallows until she found a small, round boat, more elegant than a corach, made of tougher material; its hull was painted yellow.
They climbed into this, and Swiftaxe felt how low the vessel sank in the water; he kept very still indeed. They used thin wooden paddles to propel themselves into mid river, and then the current carried them along, into the vast maw of a towering building that seemed to watch, through glassy eyes, as they were sucked into its mouth.
As they passed through the great arch into the dim and cool interior, Swiftaxe felt his instincts for danger sharpen. He drew his axe on to his lap and searched the landing ramps that drifted past, scanning the shadows and the spaces beyond the fractured glass for signs of enemy activity.