No Flame But Mine

by Tanith Lee

  Now Guri, young externally, fully felt his entirely remembered earlier life. Plus his timeless yet eternal-seeming sojourn in Hell. Regret and anxiety battled inside him with a dire scepticism. His fate was cast. He was to be a god, and to bring misery and downfall. That was often the way of the gods. Why should he be the one charming exception?

  The witch let the caravan go on along the road. They had another witch in tow. Guri’s witch – she never gave him her name; he only ever called her by the nickname of Magica – stayed with Guri.

  The nineteen other Chibe warriors looked at her, unsure. They were gratified Guri had picked up such a girl, but nervous, and so acted up like pillocks all the rest of the way to Sham.

  Once in the city, however, the sights saw to it they pulled themselves together. Sham impressed. Though sometimes called the ‘sluht-city’ it did not resemble any sort of sluhtin. They craned to see towering metallic gates, the towering towers, the arenas and long winding markets, full also of darkish basement areas where myriad displays of goods glittered like stars. Saurians waddled by in harness, their claws gilded; tree-wolves with dyed pelts fought in yards packed by spectators. Exquisite whores posed on terraces, baring one perfect breast or depilated leg, their furs otherwise so thick the cold caused them no trouble. There were high metal-sheathed doors in Sham in those days, bronze inlaid with silver, iron with copper, tin with pyrite, all in complex patterns. But behind a door that was of fossil-wood the witch led Guri to her chamber. She lived normally outside the city. When she was there this room was always hers, kept for her empty and clean.

  Gurithesput had already had plenty of women in the sluhtin, aside from Yedki, his own mother before she was. The leader of the community had encouraged this. He and many more believed Guri would gift them a pack of healthy half-hero sons; the fiction that Guri was a hero not a non-existent god still held there. But from the numerous couchings no baby was conceived. The leader, a terse man named Har Jup, then instructed women who had already borne children to lie with Guri. Guri would accept only those who were widowed, or free Crarrow, and willing. He did not mean to offend husbands or insult wives. Nevertheless plenty of candidates arrived and he lay with them. Again, not one took.

  Gurithesput had realized swiftly. He was to be like Lionwolf in this too. His body was able and potent. His seed was not.

  Magica screamed four or five times in ecstasy at the climax of their unions. The psychic force of her orgasms blazed in the room for hours after, so they rarely needed lamps or brazier.

  Guri himself predicted he might fall in love with her and grew terrified. Witch though she was, she was mortal and already some years his senior. Physically at least.

  Unsensibly a night came when he told her where he had come from, that was his other life up to twenty-eight, then the ghost-life, association with Lionwolf, the wars and horrors, and the punishment in Hell – all, all of it. She listened as if in a trance. He hoped in the morning, after he had indulged in unneeded sleep, she might have thought he lied. But her eyes, once so flat and eldritch, had become while she heard him out young and absorbent as a kiddle’s. When he turned over on the morning pallet she was long gone.

  Now and then she had gone off before on her own errands. This time she did not come back.

  Later he went to search for her through the city. She was nowhere to be found.

  The Chibe men, who always tried to rally round Guri given a chance, kept attaching themselves to him. Finally they carried him off to drink in a beer-basement. He was a hero, that was all; there were no gods. Drink up, Gurithesput! they cried. Heroes were allowed to go soppy on a woman. Even to be abandoned by said woman, although obviously any woman who did that was mentally deficient. Heroes could get drunk as well. Only gods found anything like that very difficult.

  Guri could not rid himself of the correct idea that Magica had buckled under the burden of his autobiography. He visualized her hanged in her own hair. Or walking willingly into a crocodile pit.

  The clash had begun inside him between godhead and an inherent learned mortalness. And too between inner agedness and inner adolescence.

  He recalled how Lionwolf had struggled with all this hopelessly. You could not live this double – triple – multiple life. Nor, being now immortal, could you avoid it.

  He never saw her again, Magica. Probably he could have scried her, located her. Like the Crax of Yedki’s coven maybe he did not try very hard.

  Two more years went by. During these Har Jup died. The election of a new sluhtin leader selected Gurithesput inevitably. Equally inevitable was Guri’s refusal.

  Until then he had remained mostly in the sluhtin. He was invaluable to them in everything save the business of siring babies. They forgave that, indeed stayed optimistic things would change. They must recall, in actual years he was only ten.

  For himself, Guri knew, he had been in hiding. He had not even revisited Sham. He could not bear to, loaded as it had become, in hindsight worse than at the time, with her prophecy.

  At home he hunted and performed the other masculine chores, along with the men and his own inadvertent gang of admirers. He oversaw their weddings, and the fast acquisition of their children.

  He spent many days and nights, sometimes months of them, alone out on the snow wastes, in the forests of ice. He even trekked to the sea shore and beheld the extended vista of ice-beach, and the thread of black liquid water miles beyond.

  Gurithesput was alone anyway.

  Guri preferred aloneness.

  The former ghost-life had prepared him.

  But after the election when he put aside the leadership, and heard his gang ranting, and women wailing as if at a death, Guri determined to go away for good.

  He was bound to Ol y’Chibe – to Olchibe. He would serve them as best he could, but the terms of his employment must become more broad.

  Partly he had resisted branching out in the world, recapturing the image of Lionwolf bounding to begin the Jafn drama of vengeance and kingship which had culminated in Ru Karismi and the White Death. Only intermittently did Guri think of the other Lionwolf, the god who had subdued death, and transformed Hell to a heaven. Guri did not trust this memoir. He himself had not yet reached any equilibrium between gods and humanity. He shied off from putting such success on any other.

  But Guri branched out nevertheless at last.

  He left the sluhtin, riding one of the male mammoths. The females were the law among the herds and he did not want to worry the animals as he had had to the men and women.

  They rode down into what would be, hundreds of years on, the southernmost Marginal Land.

  Sluhtins and individual sluhts received him. Ranging bands, not yet much committed to war with anyone else, welcomed him into their camps.

  He tried to learn their intrinsic ways, which were not like the ways of his people in the future, aside from everyday basics. The whole paradigm was different. It was not only their theology but their worldly aims. They moved inside a measured and established ethos, their goals straightforward. They wanted survival and security, status to the limited high points of their own clan-group, pleasure and happiness where able, re-creation of what was known and enjoyed, where able. They moved like breathing through life and into death and out again to life. He had seen that even a hero among them was useful only inside such spheres.

  Guri assumed that what had altered them centuries on was their fall. When, prior to his first life, the Rukar invaded Olchibe and Gech and smashed their universe on earth – and therefore, worse, also in their Elsewhere. Crawling up from the cold mud they had substituted, for the theft of faith in self, a faith in the Great Gods who would assist them to their aim of revenge.

  And she, his witch, had smelled on Guri that he was responsible.

  ‘The future is in my past.’

  And was the fate of his nation, which had made him Guri in that future-past of his, now in his hand?

  Guri overlooked one salient fact.

  In his
mortal past he had never wondered what the Great Gods were. They were, that was it. In his day, rather like the God of the barbaric Jafn, they were formless yet omnipresent. One did not portray them even mentally as they were undelineable, and anyway visible in all other things.

  Roaming about hero Guri came to be revered. It was unavoidable. All he was and the abilities he demonstrated, often without thinking, showed him off.

  Then other adventures happened.

  A cluster of huts among pillars of frozen trees and a child throwing a fit. Guri steps forward, what else, and touches the child, which relaxes, revives and is never sick again. A shore village, and a man gored by a horned shark. Guri steps forward … A mammoth dying with her calf trapped inside her. Guri steps … An illness from bad meat. Guri …

  There had been more minor events like this in his own sluhtin. But there they had just accepted it. A Crarrow, a coven, had reared him. He had picked up some skill.

  But now, oh, now. Guri, Guri, Guri. Gurithesput. Star Dog Lit Among the Nights. That was what the composite name meant, if woven in cloth or scratched on a wall.

  She had been able to stammer it out, or nearly, his witch on the road. G-g-god. God. Guri the god.

  Like the subtlest whiff of incense-smoke or burning honey from a Crarrow spell-fire, the odour of sanctity floats around the confined world of y’Chibe and y’Gech, under that low horizon.

  A day comes, the region not so far from glorious Sham. Two war bands of the Chibe are about to be engaged in battle. But Guri, who had loved battle with the best of them, has learned in his Hell that what is done is always paid for. He wants to forestall the killing.

  Guri … steps forward.

  Between the two onracing packs of mammoths and men he stands on the snow and only breathes out once.

  Not fifteen feet apart both battalions lose their speed. Without being harmed, not skidding or toppling, without even a hint of being jerked back or muscular whiplash, all ceases. They are slowed inside some other space, and come to rest on their own gentle as feathers.

  Amazed, the men sit their beasts among the skull banners. But the beasts are much ahead of their riders. One by one, and several together, the white mammoths kneel to Guri, and on their backs the warriors goggle, so shaken by surprise and so unshaken physically that they are silent in life as death would have made them.

  Guri smiles. He has about him that irresistible sweetness Lionwolf had eventually reached in Hell. Sweetness and calm sadness and antique wisdom in a young face of countless years. He has made peace.

  g-g-god …

  g-g-God …

  Great Gods, what has Guri done?

  FIVE

  The pair of sentries pacing round outside the palace had met on their nocturnal hourly circuit for a mutual swig of wine. Something had been going on in Kol Cataar for several months. No one was completely ignorant of it. You felt it in the air. After the sky fell, or rather the meteorological ice-lid on the city gave way, any doubt was banished. Despite that few grasped, let alone guessed, the real substance of events. And the sentries had only been doubled after all.

  ‘I heard he was gone,’ said one of the sentries.

  ‘So did I. None saw him leave. Do you reckon it can be true?’

  ‘It’s unthinkable. The king’s son. Unless it’s some secretive mission entrustable only to Prince Sallusdon.’

  ‘But where would he go? There’s none of us left. The population of the Ruk was creamed off by the Death. Just the whey left now, steads and little towns like Kandexa – and most of them have come here.’

  ‘It can’t be true then. Sallus must still be in the palace. Did you hear about the whore?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Some woman. They say she carried a big bellyful for thirteen months and then gave birth to a pig.’

  ‘Some wondrous father then.’

  ‘Some mother.’

  They laughed very low. They were under the windows to the back of the regal house. Below lay a courtyard, frankly a parody of the courts at Ru Karismi. Two trees made of silver-wire had been roughly fashioned. Queen Tireh would walk here and the two infant princesses played ball. Above in the King Paramount’s apartments the first family would currently be sleeping.

  ‘Somebody said a Magikoy had come to the city,’ the second sentry muttered. ‘That is, apart from the two ladies we already have.’

  ‘I heard that rumour too. But he was old, they said. He must have died like our other mage gentleman.’

  ‘What’s that noise?’

  Gossip sloughed, each man turned towards the court a combat-machine, all senses alert.

  From the unleavened night a slight filmy motion stole up to them.

  Being careful to tilt a wall lamp downwards, the first sentry angled its beam on to the paving.

  ‘It’s a snake—’

  ‘Snakes – scores of them—’

  Both men snatched out their swords. This sound was masculine and positive, the sound and movement below feyly feral.

  Long, slender, quivering, questing skeins wriggled and crept and slipped ever onward—

  ‘Are they chazes?’

  ‘Never. Too thin – and see, they have spikes – is it spikes – gods – gods – see, look, they’re growing other snakes out of their own bodies all the time—’

  Eyes wide with fear the men kept up their battle stance a cupful of moments more. Then the shaking light picked out the other snakes, which were now pouring in like spilled water over the nearest roof.

  One sentry shouted, then the second. They must wake the house.

  A rumple of other sounds now, and out of these the striking of flame and kindling of lamps indoors. Whole windows flowed up suddenly molten behind shutters of wood and glass. The hind face of the palace flung light across the courtyard, the fake trees, walls, accessory buildings which in their turn were also flaring up.

  And so Bhorth’s men were the first to see that it was not snakes which had cascaded in over the house and up from the ground, but creepers, black as oil with a sheen of emeraid, and here and there a red, red bud.

  Bhorth had not been sleeping, nor was he occupied with his wife. He had been padding quietly up and down like the sentries, though his route lay indoors, through his study, along a gallery with a rough library in it, along corridors, down a stair and back into the study. He had taken up this practice about a year ago on odd nights when sleep failed him. He found it courted slumber better than poring over some unwanted book. He thought too of his former Rukarian estates where he could have prowled nightlong, unchallenged by any and unsettling none. But he had never been insomniac then, save through choice with a woman. All this too made him feel old. Oldness had slunk in on him in these years of disappointment, compromise and platitude at Kol Cataar. Before there had been a while when he thought the black witch who left her seed in him, and so prevented his death, had made him invulnerable and splendid for ever. But of course once the seed was expelled, Sallusdon conceived and borne, the sublime insulation leaked away. Bhorth had no designated purpose after this, or only that of the average man, to strive uselessly and reassure falsely, to get fat and sour and feeble. He had tried hard not to mind it. Much as he had seen others do. It was foolish to grow bitter at the inevitable. Yet his short span of believing he could outwit the common fate gave reality an extra vicious bite.

  And then Sallusdon went away. He had not explained, or his explanation had been so abnormal as to be inexplicable. My son—

  My son.

  Bhorth blamed the strange girl Azula. Her shaved patchwork hair and tawny skin. What was she? Did the young man desire her? Sallus had seemed sure Azula was his sibling, which made a romp unlawful. Had that been the cause?

  Her fault anyway. Sullen and draggled, following Sallus about, some commoner’s chick—

  I am unfair. I can’t know his going is due to her. And what are commoners? My subjects and people, of whom I am the guardian. Am I one more filthy Vuldir to judge them nothing,
traduce and discount them? We are all men.

  The other thing lay under all this like a leaden chain, slowly weighting the rest, even the sorrow of Bhorth’s missing son, down into a black hole beneath the palace.

  A black hole that was a walled-up storeroom.

  Bhorth had reached his study for the fifth time that night. He was not yet weary enough to go to bed. By the glim of the wax-furred candle he pawed at some papers on a table. They were written accounts of various failures and mishaps in the city. The paper was knobbly and badly made and the inks either too black or too watery.

  Some vellum had been brought from Ru Karismi but had been eaten by rats in the chest.

  There was a slight quirky movement of one of the lamps outside. Sentries were passing—

  Then came shouting, a descant for two voices. ‘Help here! In the name of the kings!’

  It was a ritual call, once used even in war.

  Bhorth snatched up his swordbelt and buckled it on as he sprang from the room.

  In an awful way he knew he was glad to be interrupted, as if boredom and depression were worse than active danger.

  Not for a moment did he think this alarm anything less than significant.

  Nor for a moment did he, most curiously, connect it to the underlying pull of the leaden chain.

  On a terrace of the king’s house most of the palace people had gathered. From windows others stretched to see.

  But all over the city they crowded out. The streets were full of doors flung wide, lights lit, footsteps, cries.

  By now only an hour stood between them and sunrise. The night sky was fraying. The stars ebbed, less as if dying than concealing themselves, the better to spy on everything else.

  There was a change in the air. It was warm. Some had experienced thaws. These often portended lethal shifts in the general snow-crust, or a flood as undetected frozen waterways threw off restraint, slurrying up to make mess.