No Flame But Mine

by Tanith Lee

  Soon she would return. Soon she would enter this room. It occurred to him she might be afraid to discover him there, or think him some illusion, even a trick played by a talented malevolent rival witch.

  He put one goblet, made apparently from clearest ice, ready on her table, filled by dark red wine. And beside that an apple with a pure green skin that he had found on his travels and kept for her. A case of ice still swathed it, but the warmth of the conjured fire would deftly thaw that through. By the apple he laid an ancient ring of tarnished silver.

  Outside, the now moonless city crept unknowing towards morning.

  Thryfe opened the shutter.

  Whether he stepped out, or simply disappeared into the shadows there, was uncertain, but where he had stood nothing visible of him remained.

  On the peg the twig-hand twitched. It seemed Thryfe the Magikoy Master would not often need Ranjal’s assistance.

  The journey was a bumpy one.

  Up hill, down dale – snow slide, treacherous crevasse, bear-fur forests, mountains poking like dagger behind dagger. They had been told to leave their chariots. That was to get out of them, give them up, for the seventy-nine men who had been one hundred and fifty, and themselves lied about being ninety, had captured Arok’s hunting band and decided they would keep the chariots for themselves. Instead the prisoners were hauled aloft the hills of the giant riding-sheep.

  Dromazi the mounts were called. Most had two humps, between which the Jafn men were each obliged horrifiedly to perch behind the original cavalier. Some other beasts had only one hump, and there the rider sat forward on the creature’s neck. None of the captured were offered a seat on these. They were entirely grateful.

  The position and motion of the ride anyway were agony. Arok expected to become seasick but did not. Only marvellous Fenzi took it all in his or the dromazi’s stride. He had mastered the knack in a couple of hours. But his reward for this was to have his hands tied to the saddle in case he also mastered his jailer, unseated the man and escaped. Meanwhile the Jafn chariot-lions padded behind the party snarling, in custody.

  Once or twice you could spot a heap of buildings high above amid rocks and trees. Farms? Strongholds? No one said.

  Up and down their procession went over the terrain. Then up and up.

  Only Arok and presently Fenzi understood the new language, Simese. Their conquerors called the land Simisey. They were ferocious and loud, bellowing songs and curses, their hair woven and beaded like the manes of Jafn lions.

  The little lionet-tiger cub had first been cradled lovingly by their leader. But after it bit him repeatedly, he was urged at last to have Fenzi’s hands untied and to give the cat back to him. ‘There, baba,’ said Fenzi, now in Simese, ‘come to your elder brother who loves you.’

  ‘No brother of yours, barbarian!’ roared the red-wool-braided leader, whose name was Sombrec.

  ‘There, there,’ repeated Fenzi sweetly to the tiger, just managing to say it also to Sombrec, who seemed on the road to exploding from rage. His mount however did so instead, letting off a colossal fart. That quenched even Fenzi’s flirtatious sarcasm.

  They finally reached the Simese city. Arok registered a crows’ nest of a town up a mountain. This tip was known as Padgish. It was the capital.

  To Arok only a garth could have any worth as either town or fortress; only a Jafn clan House had any credence as a palace. Sullenly he scowled at Padgish as they entered, until at length, reluctantly, he changed his mind.

  For Padgish was impressive.

  One long straight paved road, worthy of Ruk cities, led all through. On either side were edifices of two or occasionally three storeys. Some windows had glass. The palace had an excess with colours stained in them. Gardens boasted vast trees, and tree-trunk columns upheld the frontage of the palace house, then marched away in ranks inside.

  Next something went tearing by, a man riding an animal that was not tiger or lion, not even a humped and huffing dromaz.

  ‘Horsaz?’

  ‘No – no scales. No pong of fish either.’

  The horsazin of such reivers as Kelps and Faz did bear some vague resemblance. But the Simese variety were made of warm-tinted hide, the flying mane and tail of hair. They had no horn jutting from the forehead.

  In depressed wonder the Jafn captives were herded into a yard of the Padgish palace.

  ‘This one can speak our tongue. And the black one, he too.’

  Arok, and Fenzi still with the cub in his arms, feeding from a vessel of milk the captors gave him, stood in the throne hall. Sombrec, a warrior aristocrat born from a long line of farming royalty, scathingly listed the captives’ only worth.

  Trunk columns forested the edges of the hall. A king sat on a carved seat. Before him lay a knife with a blade of shattering brilliance. ‘Diamond cut by diamond,’ Sombrec had loftily remarked. The king was like his men, dark-haired, dark-eyed, brown of skin. His clothes were rich and his demeanour frankly grim. He had asked questions of Sombrec and his men as to who, or what, the strangers were. He had already been told it seemed the strangers had killed a tiger, and freely confessed slaughtering others in the past year.

  ‘Well, if you can speak our language, step forward.’

  Arok did so.

  Fenzi walked just behind him, with the cub.

  Khursp and several more attempted to follow.

  ‘Two are enough. Keep the rest of them back.’

  A brief kerfuffle. Arok did not turn to see. He could guess.

  He faced the savage king with bleak dignity, well aware the king thought him the savage.

  ‘What,’ said the king, ‘is your outland name?’

  ‘Arok, Chaiord of the Jafn Holas.’

  ‘Ch—What does he say? Their king is it?’ Murmurs. Yes, this chalky barbarian was the other nineteen barbarians’ ‘king’. Ha ha. What a ripe jest! ‘Is he old? His hair is white.’

  Arok interposed. ‘Among my people, young men and women too have such hair.’

  ‘Women, you say?’ The king was intrigued. Disgusting. ‘Do you have any with you? Women, I mean.’

  Arok’s glower eclipsed his features.

  ‘None.’

  ‘I think you fib, Whitehair.’

  Arok said, ‘We came to your God-forsaken country on a great ship. Do you think we’d risk our women over the seas?’

  ‘A pity. Why did you come?’

  Arok decided on truth. ‘An omen. My son was stolen and, the omen said, brought here. I came to find my son.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the king. For the half of one half-second a glint of slinking sympathy lit his eyes. ‘This I understand. To lose a son – to have lost him – what can compare with such a loss? Have you found him?’

  Arok did not credit the sympathy. It had a weird colour to it for him, like wine that was too dark.

  ‘Not yet.’ It was still the truth.

  ‘Meanwhile you poach the tiger-kind. Know this. They’re only for us, for our royal families among the farmers or hunters or herders. Or of course for me, and mine.’

  ‘How could we know?’

  ‘If you speak our language, how could you not know?’

  ‘We met none of your folk to tell us,’ barked Arok.

  ‘Then you lie in all things. For how can you speak Simese if you came sea-over and till now met none here to teach you?’ Crafty, the king, twiddling the diamond-bladed knife.

  Arok said, ‘I can speak many languages because I’m witch-gifted.’

  ‘Are you, by mighty Attajos, may his fire burn bright? Where’s your proof?’

  Arok stalled. He had none. None at least he could trust.

  Fenzi spoke carryingly yet quietly behind him. ‘I am his proof, sir. The witch that spelled him was my mother.’

  Another murmuring ran around. Already, the Jafn had heard no black-skinned man or woman was known in Simisey.

  ‘Yes, you are bizarre. What are you made of, velvet?’

  Fenzi smiled in a disarming way, not insulted.
‘Of skin and flesh and bone and hair. Sir. As are you. But my mother was made of snow and at the touch of God grew living and black. Arok, my Chaiord, lay with my mother.’

  ‘Then Arok is your father too.’

  ‘No. He is the father of my half-brother, Dayadin, who is also black … as velvet. It was Dayadin who was stolen, and brought into these distant lands.’

  The king gave a dangerous laugh. ‘I’m confused. Enlighten me.’

  ‘My witch-mother, in fact a goddess, carried seed like a man. Any man she lay with took in this seed and then passed it to his own woman. Both my second mother, and Dayad’s second mother, Arok’s wife, received this seed. And so each woman bore a black son.’

  ‘I commend your story teller’s skill. We like it. That alone may save you from death. But otherwise your tale is like the air that comes from the back gate of a dromaz. It stinks.’

  Fenzi shrugged. It was the tiger cub, gazing at the Simese king, that lifted its lip and gave a miniature growl, which plainly offended the king. He rose, the diamond knife still in his hand.

  At that very instant a woman walked into the hall, and by her side a tall boy about twelve years of age.

  Every head turned. Even that of the incensed king.

  Arok swore very low, and behind him, held firm by warriors among the pillars, the remainder of the Jafn. Not all of them so decorously.

  For the woman, who was herself tall, and voluptuous, had long hair of a red-bronze shade. Exactly as black skin was unknown in Simisey, red hair had been unknown among the Jafn or elsewhere on their continent. Save in one instance only: Lion-wolf, red-haired hero and genocide.

  The woman seemed to take all this mixed attention as her right, used to scrutiny. Mixed ethnicity seemed equally unchallenging. She inclined her head to the Simese king. Gold and silver jewels swung in her rufous tresses.

  The boy though, he looked round at Arok and the Jafn and he too laughed – but not as the king had.

  ‘Curjai,’ said the king, ‘Curjai, we are—’

  ‘You are making something of a mistake, sir,’ said the boy called Curjai.

  He was utterly confident yet completely without arrogance. He looked at his king with fearless kindness. Yet no king could allow such an affront even from a beloved son. No king could make a public mistake.

  Nevertheless the king failed to lose his temper. He put down the knife and nodded at the boy. ‘We listen, my son.’

  He was a son then. Even so—

  The boy was extraordinary. Yes handsome certainly, and well made, long of leg, strong, wide-shouldered, his brown-black hair streaming to his waist with jasper clips winking in it. He was brown-skinned like the others. His eyes were rather lighter. But none of that was what caught you. No. This boy – this son – even supernatural Fenzi was gaping at him in recognizing astonishment – this boy was perhaps more than merely unhuman. This boy just conceivably was—

  The boy said, ‘Everything the newcomers say, Father, is true. Oh, except that they brought no women. They have fine women at their garth. Excuse me, sir,’ he added mildly to the staggered and threatened Arok, ‘but we’re to be confided in, when once you accept us. Friends don’t keep secrets from one another.’

  Arok opened his mouth. Before he could let out something sure to spoil the party, Fenzi placed his hand on Arok’s arm. Crazily Arok was aware the cub had started purring. ‘Wait, Chaiord. Don’t you see?’

  ‘The boy? He’s a mage – he’s an enemy mage.’

  ‘No, Arok. This one is fully a god.’

  Jemhara had halted in the street. Her way was blocked by something that, initially, she had taken for a natural subsidence of snow or rubble. Now and then walls, whole houses, being largely unmaintained, might collapse.

  But she had made light to see. The lit globe hung in the air and showed her an astounding heap of what she took for gem-stones. Icy pale, yet they were, every one, cut into glittering facets which shot off tiny rays of prismatic colour.

  Nevertheless such an enormous hoard seemed unlikely. They filled all the alley, and piled high up against the sides of dwellings, ending in one huge barricade against the house where she kept her attic. She could see nothing of it save the top of the roof, and there her window too was almost covered over. The depth of the barricade meanwhile could be, she judged, far deeper than the width of the house itself.

  Had some witchling from another zone done this to spite her? It seemed feasible, but on the other hand were any of them canny enough?

  Jemhara approached the stack of gems. They glinted prettily. She touched one with her finger’s end. The cold scathed her and examining her hand, she saw a blister form at once on her fingertip. An effect of cold so intense was also unusual, for the people of this five-century Ice Age had adapted to it long ago. Only extended exposure could burn, never such a brief touch.

  Jemhara stepped back and threw a psychic blow at the pile of gemmy ice. It would have been crucial enough to fell a man. The ice never moved.

  Someone uttered a low sound behind her then.

  Jemhara did not turn.

  Every hair on her head and body had risen. She spoke softly, civilly. ‘How may I serve you, most mighty one?’

  But no answer came.

  Instead a sensual caress slipped over her neck and shoulders – light as nothing, perhaps no more than the lilt of a night breeze. Before she could prevent herself she had veered to face it. She caught the slightest glimpse.

  She had seen him before, she thought, or had she? For the god who had once visited her in her misspent youth, the Rukarian god who had fathered Lionwolf – Zeth Zezeth, the Sun Wolf – he had not looked as this one did. And yet, yet for an inexplicable moment he was Zeth. And then—

  Then he took on another masculine image. That was of a man in a mail of rime, his black hair spun and chipped with frost. And this Rukarian god’s name was Yyrot, Winter’s Lover.

  Her own hair smoothed down on her head. Whichever – whatever – it had been was gone.

  What had the double image said to her? Was ‘said’ too precise? It was more a noise, like that some large sombre animal might make, vocal, untranslatable. Jemhara calmed her breathing.

  The night had stayed otherwise very still. Or was it only that this part of Kandexa seemed closed in by heavy curtains?

  She looked again at the barricade.

  She remembered how she and Thryfe, lost in their love-making in the house at Stones, had also been shut within walls of timeless ice. But that had not been like this …

  Except probably that now, as then, there was involved a kind of occult magery, a thoughtless obdurate thing that did, could, would, obey few other magical laws.

  Jemhara’s earliest ability had been to thaw ice. She was a small child when first she did it. With her, it was less talent than intrinsic knack as, say, she had learned to walk.

  After a little while the edge of the barricade began to steam, or smoke. Rivulets like molten crystal snakes ran down into the street. Here and there flashing jewels tumbled from the pile.

  But then that too ceased. Though she had damaged the appearance of the gemstone wall the rest of it would not give.

  Jemhara saw she could not break through. And as she was she could not climb over, however swiftly or sorcerously aided.

  She had sensed an adversary all instinct. Thoughtless itself, could it read her thoughts? She brushed them away.

  Quietly she turned and went back along the alley and on, into another.

  How well did the faceless intelligence know her? If it came from a god, no matter which one, it might know all. But if it could not think—

  Jemhara wiped clean the whole surface of her mind.

  She crouched down in the pre-dawn dark – and was gone.

  A few minutes later another night-walker, a slender jet-black hare, loped into the eastern alley, reached the faceted cut-glass blockade, and sniffed it disdainfully.

  Then it bolted straight up the ice, its powerful hind limbs pr
opelling it forward at breathless speed. Gaining the head of the heap it launched itself directly at the just visible window. A shutter slapped inward with a bang. Down into Jemhara’s attic room hurtled the hare, to land as if well practised on the bed of pelts.

  One instant more and Jemhara rose up from her shape-shift, a woman black of hair, fair of face, naked as cloudless morning.

  Outside, with an aggrieved rasp and crackling, the diamante wall gave way, showering the alley with sparklers that quickly dimmed and melted, then again froze over in the ordinary manner.

  Inside the room Jemhara saw a fire burning, a glass goblet of wine, a green apple dewed with snow, a silver ring, a tall man made of shadow but with the eyes of an eagle.

  For an old woman in rags she was haughty enough, so they all thought in the Holasan-garth. Brought to the Holas House by one of the night watch, she clacketed through the joyhall uninvited and unabashed, and stood there by the table, where this evening Arok’s wife was sitting among her women. Arok was away of course on his hunt. But the garth looked fine, decked with lamps and hangings, a couple of lions and a dozen dogs there, and some hawks on the rafters, and plenty of tough young men and weapons.

  ‘Pardon, Nirri-lady, she just—’

  ‘Hold your squeaks,’ yapped the old crone the watch had let in, he said, from sheer compassion. ‘It’s her I’ll talk to.’

  Nirri, who everyone knew had been a fishwife before Arok got her with child and wed her, was now an excellent Chaiord’s lady. She sat with dignity, and only a slight smile whisked over her mouth.

  ‘Speak then, Mother.’

  ‘I’m no mother. I renounce any mother I was. I’ve come a long distance. I have mage powers.’

  ‘You’re a wise-woman?’

  ‘Better. Behold!’

  There had been a cooked bird on the table. The old beldame pointed at it and it leapt, whole and live, covered all over in its original feathers, flailing its wings and knocking items about, honking through its angry beak before taking off into the rafters. The hawks fled.