Lilith’s Castle. Gill Alderman

      GILL ALDERMAN

      Lilith’s Castle

      Each page a promise that all

      shall be well

COPYRIGHT

      Harper Voyager

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Copyright © Gill Alderman 1999

      Gill Alderman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN: 9780006482727

      Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008228446

      Version: 2016-12-22

DEDICATION

      To Justine and Dorothy

      with love.

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

The Pathless Way

       The Palace of Shadows

       Keep Reading

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       Other Books By

       About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

      he fleeth as it were a shadow

      Nandje, Rider of the Red Horse, Father and Imandi to the Ima tribe, lay still beneath the ceremonial blanket which covered him. The bustard feathers woven into it pierced his face with their long barbs and the rawhide strips lay heavier than lead on his throat, part of him and also something separate, deadly and symbolic. The felted horsehair had sucked up his blood and sunk into the rotting craters which were his wounds. He knew himself to be no longer human and a man but as much and little as the earth on which the Horse Herd also trampled, wounding its soft surface with the same lunular pits.

      It was ill to be thus trapped underground, within a redundant body whose eyelids were held down with stones, nostrils and lips sewn shut with dried Plains grasses. Nor could he recall the Past, whatever that unlikely concept was, or look into the Future as he had once been able, in life. The Now, terrible, endless, was all: death inescapable, triumphant, eternal.

      Aza, the Shaman, lifted the blanket from Nandje’s face and observed the dead Imandi’s crushed skull and grotesquely distorted face. The skin was drying out and splitting, pulling his twelve-month-old stitching apart. He found an end and pulled the grass strands out, to the last shred and wisp, using his nails where the flesh had tightened round the thread.

      ‘The sleep of death is long,’ said Aza ‘but there comes a time to awaken.’

      He took up the pointed stick he had prepared during the long mourning and thrust it between the lips and teeth of the corpse, down savagely, hard to the base of the throat. It groaned and belched as the gases rose and bubbled from its liquid interior and a terrible stench was hurled into his face. The corpse moths which had been incubated in Nandje’s body flew free, a many-winged pied cloud.

      ‘Nay, go peacefully to the Palace of Shadows!’ he cried. ‘Be wise and kind, as you were with us.’

      The final alteration had taken place with the freeing and the flight of Nandje’s soul. All that remained was lolling, putrefying matter which Aza might leave alone to complete its metamorphosis, flesh to grass. Tenderly and carefully, for this was the last office he was able to perform for Nandje, he rolled back and folded the death-blanket and carried it with him, up into the light.

THE PATHLESS WAY

      Leave the past behind; leave the future behind;

      leave the present behind

      It is the usual thing for a herd led by a mare

      to be strayed and destroyed

      The night was almost over and the Red Horse walked slowly out of it, pacing steadily over the low hills which lay between Nandje’s tomb and his Herd. He had made this nightly journey since the burial, observing how the body he had carried at both easy walk and furious gallop was decaying and what tender care the shaman took over his rituals. Yet, each time he returned to the Herd, he felt at heart less satisfied and more restive. These emotions, he knew, came to him because his understanding was beginning to awake and not from sorrow at the untidy fate of Nandje, nor any fellow-feeling for the fine man he had been.

      The horses stood in small constellations, group by group within the universe of the Herd. The stars were fading and dawn about to break. A skein of geese, pointing like an arrow to the far horizon, flew overhead and the Red Horse paused to watch them out of sight. They were flying into the wind and making heavy weather of it, yet the song of their wings was hopeful and eager: they were always moving on from riverhead to marsh, from forest lake to seashore, water their element as his was this grass-grown earth