No Flame But Mine

by Tanith Lee

  In this case the snow and ice had somehow ebbed away, like the stars, making themselves invisible, intangible.

  Along the avenues of ice-brick, in plots among the houses earth had appeared.

  The ground there was black. It was a compost of firm moist mud, usually about three yards lower than any previous surface. From it stubble seemed to have grown. Grass? Additional botanic things were rising. The formation of an ice oasis, so the Kol Cataarians labelled the change. Some hot spring, dormant for a century, must have been unlocked in the underlay of the city. Would the buildings be safe?

  Perhaps they would. Nothing so far had cracked or collapsed. The packed snow around and under their bases had not given way, with the result each edifice now looked nine to eighteen feet higher than road or pavement or courtyard. In parts the surrounding areas went down even further. Porticoes, doorways and steps were stranded more than the height of a man above street level, leaving occupants marooned in or outside. Meanwhile floral sprays rose with sorcerous rapidity. It was just possible to watch the grass growing. Creepers, no longer mistaken for giant worms or hydra-bodied serpents, sprawled limberly up walls and over the plaques of stone paving that had stayed intact. Ancient trees, ribbed birches and the candle-branches of rhododendrons, had shed plates of ice. The blond or black cradles of their boughs thrust through naked as skeletons. Such a marvel had never been seen save in some dwarf form within a hothouse. Oases, as most knew, could begin and perish in months or days. What then would become of all this roused life, woken in the hours before dawn?

  Drenched with sights and scents, wet wood, budding plants, blossoms, incipient gourds, soil, rot, minerals, the people of the city named for a risen phoenix did not know if they were enthused or afraid.

  Wagons were being rumbled along the vine-seething roadways, and planks thudded against the elevated houses so those trapped inside could jump or climb down, and those outside clamber back in.

  In paddocks lashdeer pranced over pads of grass.

  As the sky grew ever more threadbare, going up rather as the city had seemed to, they began to see the enclosed fields beyond. What was lifting there out of long pockets in the ice? A smoking-tower, its fume-plume still glowing in the last darkness, had itself let go a sheath of ice. At its foot a round pool gleamed back the reflection.

  The palace terrace by now was definitely a good thirty feet above the surrounding complex.

  Bhorth peered over, himself stranded too high to jump, like so many others.

  The snow-cladding of the foundations held here too. But nevertheless he was well aware the underpalace, basement labyrinth of stores and cubbies and one walled-up room, was now above ground. Even as he eyed it, barrels began to roll out of some gap.

  He and his court watched them bumbling off along the avenue.

  Everything will give way, thought Bhorth, with a resigned anguish. He had stopped being able to reason, considered in absolutes, gave up.

  He had done this, the evil insane god Vashdran. Any moment the demonic creature would also erupt from confinement, perhaps bearing the chewed bones of the Magician Thryfe in his lion-wolf jaws.

  Across the terrace Bhorth saw his queen. Behind her a nurse held one of the little girls, but Tireh had the other, the more frightened one. Tireh was white with shock and wore her bedgown slung over by a fur. She spoke to the child calmly. ‘Ssh, dumpling. Don’t be daunted. Look at that pretty flower growing there. Isn’t that a lovely thing?’

  Bhorth thought how Tireh had been when she knew their son had left them. White like this, staunch like this, saying to Bhorth, ‘He had no choice. How could it hurt me so if he had had a choice? He was never ours. Didn’t we know that? Surely we did.’

  The sun lifted into a misty sky.

  With the dawn the hugeness of change flashed on every gaze. Though they had been monitoring what went on for at least an hour a collective cry sounded.

  Pinkly golden the light described the wonder of it, the comedy of it, the abstraction. Marooned doorways and buildings on stalks of snow, the river of roses along Rose Walk, the glinting of leaves. Over the city walls the runnels and ditches of the fields were getting tall with parchment-coloured quills of grain.

  In the distance, the mist from which the sun had dashed out seemed to form a secondary wall. This circled round the city and its agricultural land. To the west the mist grew wan; it was like a frost of milk left behind on the rim of a glass.

  Directly above however the sky was blue.

  Bhorth’s more timid daughter stared up and gave a wail.

  Tireh said, ‘It’s only birds, my baby.’

  Hundreds of white-kadi, swarming in from the western sea, ribboned over the dome of the sky and away into the misty ring beyond.

  ‘Does it end over there?’ Bhorth mumbled. ‘Or are we shut in again by another bloody spell?’

  ‘For a little while,’ said a quiet voice. ‘These things … take time. If they’re to prosper.’

  Bhorth moved his head round, slowly. He saw an adult Lion-wolf, looking nearly exactly as Bhorth had seen him last, on the plain under Ru Karismi, stationed there at his elbow like a favourite courtier. Like a shadow made of light.

  As he progressed Thryfe felt only well-being and energy. The god’s healing of him had been thorough and he felt himself abused by it. It reminded him bizarrely of the boyhood beatings by his father. Not so perverse an analogy either; punishment had helped drive him towards recognition of his own powers, typified perhaps by the eagles which had then come to aid him. To what would the pitiless kindness of Lionwolf propel him?

  They had emerged from the labyrinth by mundanely walking down the opened corridor. A narrow door was undone and in the chamber it led to some barrels, probably of beer, had crashed over into the wall, knocking loose the stones. If nothing else had occurred the outer layer of ice-brick and established snow would have cemented the wall together. But thaw had happened on an intense scale. The barrels had rolled through and on down the road outside, which was patched with black soil and had plants uncurling from it.

  The god had caused the thaw. Tritely, a sun god; thaws would be his métier.

  Thryfe then glanced about at Vashdran, and found he had translocated elsewhere.

  People were all over the road.

  Once out of the palace confine Thryfe noted how the levels of the city had dropped, and jasmine was knitting shawls along the roofs, while steps and doorways hung up in air looking silly and macabre.

  He felt incorrigibly young and did not welcome or like it. Thryfe had struggled to become old before his time. Only with Jemhara had he been prepared to relax from himself his grip. But Jemhara—He did not know what had become of her, trusted no other to tell him. It seemed to him she lived, yet was dead.

  He had not allowed himself to grieve. And he could not hope. While to die had not been unreasonable for him, to cling or to lament were both useless, and contemptible.

  Despite all these feelings, or because of them, he got through the crowds unnoticed, and went out beyond the city.

  Here he saw the fields of dormant grain all metamorphosed into vibrancy. A lemon grove had shed an avalanche of ice like melting window-panes. Little bitter-green fruits gemmed the boughs.

  Where there had been an ice barricade round Kol Cataar now there was another fortification, this of thick mist. It left a wide crater overhead with Summer sky in it. The sun was warm, so warm he thought he could not stand it, and that none of the Kol Cataarians would be able to, so adapted were they all to five hundred years of utter cold. The smell of growing stuff was overwhelming to the point of nausea. He went past apple trees, black humps with the fruit nestling against the ground, acid green like the unripe lemons.

  Pools appeared, each time startling him. Their mirrorings leapt off the earth, where shattered bits of sky seemed to have dropped.

  He considered if he could get through the obstructing mist. Outside, the Winter would lie, familiar enemy reassuring as a friend of long-stan
ding.

  The last stage of his short journey – it had taken less than an hour – drew him across a wheatfield. Chunks of ice still stuck here, with the wheat speared through them arrested in mid-arrival, fossilized and white as salt. The mist curtained the edge of the field.

  Seen close to the mist was, as it had already seemed to be, opaque and concrete.

  The sense of warning stabbed suddenly in Thryfe.

  Why should that surprise him? It would be an act of imbecility to thrust through the mist and out into the true world. Or maybe it was even impassable, might attack him, throttle, or dissolve his flesh. Not that this particularly mattered, but such a force would need to be reported on. Most men did not want to die.

  Thryfe spoke one word to the mist.

  It was a word to dismember granite.

  The mist did not react.

  He tried another, actually three words, a persuasive phrase to do with the seducing of immoveable blockades that were partially sentient.

  From the mist, not a quiver.

  The magician said then words one might offer to a reluctant or damaged Magikoy oculum, a request to be shown what lay within or on the other side.

  Without hesitation now an oval portal formed. It appeared to rest in the mist-wall, and so displayed the depth of it, which seemed to go on otherwise unbroken for a quarter-mile. Down the long, horizontal chimney Thryfe beheld the world he knew, clear indeed as if projected through a seeing-glass. The picture was for a moment featureless, and then something slid out of its whiteness, blind black as the whiteness was blind white.

  A wolf prowled there on the outer perimeter of the mist. It was a black wolf, of the type Thryfe had known in his youth, one of the tribe which had torn his mother in shreds.

  The disgusting associated horror of the image was sufficiently apt he recoiled, but his mage-educated brain read the sight in another way. Here was the enemy personified. The enemy of the sun god in Kol Cataar, and of himself too, and of every living thing.

  Winter lurked and prowled along the verges of the wall, scenting their lives and the psychic cunning that kept it out. Ice Age Winter was the wolf, jealous and angry that the sun had risen, and might rise for ever now, and so forever end five pleasure-filled centuries of merciless hunting.

  Giving off a sparkle like needles, the mirror-aperture closed.

  Two white hares fled through the tassels of frozen wheat, towards the tastier crops nearer the city.

  Curjai had led the others down on to the plain. Now they were ranged on their dromazi below the chalk-white hill which, perhaps, had been the Holasan-garth. It was about the proper height. Fenzi had pointed this out. Even Arok agreed, although in his new, deadly-dull tones. At least he did not say, Curjai thought, ‘What is the Holasan-garth?’

  Otherwise Ruxendra had not joined them. Women were of course always unreliable.

  The sun was long down.

  Stars and three quarter-moons hung from the sky. The light was serene, and ineffectual.

  Nevertheless something still shone from inside the hill. Against the surrounding sobriety it soberly burned.

  ‘If it’s the garth they’ve lighted the lamps.’

  ‘It’s locked in ice.’

  Curjai nodded at the egg-smooth shape. He smelled the fires inside, man-made. His nod now opened fire from air like the wing of a crimson butterfly, the kind he had only seen in Lionwolf’s Hell.

  The fire settled on the ice-hill, ribbed it like the stem of a precious goblet. And died.

  So determined?

  The god of fire, son of a god of fire, glanced across at the zombie Arok seated there on the dromaz.

  ‘Who would be in your garth, Chaiord? Your wife and son. Who else?’

  ‘Wives,’ said Arok, ‘sons—’ He was off again.

  ‘Attajos!’ Curjai cursed, taking in vain the name of his father.

  Flame lanced directly from the eyes of Curjai and struck the side of the hill.

  For a second all of it changed to liquid cinnabar.

  Then again warmth and luminescence died.

  The men stood, or sat their beasts. Above, the minimalism of the night sky watched with little cold eyes under the arched eyebrows of quarter-moons.

  ‘Has he returned?’

  Saphay reined in her exasperation. ‘No. That one sends cold and dark, not fire.’

  ‘Was it fire?’

  ‘He is Tirthen. He’s Winter. Stand back.’

  Nirri stood back.

  The hag-goddess had become very young and glamorous, and seemed angrily fascinated by the flares of orange and blood-scarlet that had just now erupted outside. Outside anyway had an altered meaning. For with the departure of the Winter god the entire garth had been sealed in a hive of ice. Those inside exercised on the whole Jafn stoicism. Saphay of course had lost her temper.

  ‘My son,’ whispered Nirri now.

  None heard, or if they did thought her remark only inevitable.

  She had gone up to see him instants after the god-thing – Tirthen? – had evaporated.

  Nirri had climbed the ladder-stair to the room, and he lay there undisturbed, cupped still in the fireball the goddess had constructed.

  Nirri had crept close. He had suddenly aged – her son was now some sixteen years. Had the influx of the god galvanized the process? Or had it merely come gradually, and she been too afraid, too intimidated before to look close and see? The web of unconsciousness contained him: that had not changed. A piercing sorrow assailed Nirri at this outrageous precis of his childhood. Then she saw the other thing. The fire the goddess had wrought for him – was frozen.

  ‘Like the hearth fire below.’

  No other fires had congealed in the same way. Only the hearth in the hall, and this one. She stared.

  How strange to see these curling flames all knotted up and motionless.

  And Athluan trapped within the chrysalis.

  She had turned her back to it and gone straight down again to hall and seen them all to be, even the goddess, trapped too in the ice-hive that now shelled the garth.

  It arced high over the walls. Its whiteness was so virginal even the smoke-smear of torches and lamplight below made it bloom. Nirri thought of being imprisoned inside a great white tooth, the tooth of a giant whale maybe.

  Time passed. She had no idea how much. And then came the external flares of scarlet.

  Saphay ran forward, out on the yard.

  Her disgraceful beauty – the Winter god had also been like that if in quite another mode – disgusted and distressed.

  Khursp and Elbar, and the few others who came back with tidings of Arok’s death, crouched in the lee of the House wall, glaring and showing their teeth like dogs. They did not know what Saphay was, had not asked or been told, and did not like her. At Khursp’s grunt they rose and went to stand by their queen.

  Nirri found the people of the garth drew off from Saphay and came to Nirri herself, marshalling around and behind her. It was a move of defence, but also reminded her, yes even the warriors, of chicks huddling under the wings of the mother hen. This hurt her too. She could not protect them. But she stood her useless ground as if she might.

  For Saphay some other revelation was at hand. She had, when face to face with Winter here, realized profoundly and for the first what she was. She was a goddess of day. She had function and title. At once she had visualized light beginning on the sky’s edge, and that out of it was birthed the blazing sun. This poetic allusion had moved Saphay, and went on doing so. It consolidated her emotions. Rarely if ever before had she known her place in the scheme of anything. Now she did.

  ‘Someone is outside with the ability of fire,’ she announced.

  And only then she experienced the aura of the presence out beyond the hive of ice.

  My son—

  It is Nameless – it is Lionwolf—

  While in harmony, My son, thought Nirri too, thinking of Athluan.

  But more than miles away another woman thought those
words in her own tongue, that of the Simese. Her thought was louder and more frantic. It cut the night like a razor.

  And both Saphay and Nirri heard it in the hollow of their inner ears, and believed it had a bearing only on themselves.

  He had bided his time, the king in Padgish. He was measured, patrolling the brief limits of his brain, a villain of little importance and no remembered name, until this moment.

  Had he loved her, the tan-haired Riadis? Doubtful. But her unusualness had appealed to his lust, and besides he took many wives from hill clans aristocracy, a procedure meant to shore up his power and wealth. The first child she bore, that crippled lump which thankfully died in its early years, he had never reckoned was his. What, he to sire an abomination? Never. In any case he had not properly touched her for months. The king suspected her personal shaman, Korch, to be the culprit. Her tale, that she got it from the fire, he accepted because at that hour he had not wanted to take on a feud with her kin. Really she should have been exterminated at once. But he waited. And in the end lost interest. Then a sickness decimated the herds of her kindred and their influence began to wane. He kept the news from her, and watched with half an eye as they faded.

  That too was the year she came to him and said the fire had been at her again. The fire! He thought he would let her swell up and bear the thing, for it was unlawful to kill a pregnant or breast-feeding mother, and the king stuck to the codes of his kingdom. The child was certainly from the same source, Korch, and would turn out another malformed cretin. He would then bring Riadis to trial for treasonable unfaithfulness and have her burned – another custom if a rather old-fashioned one. The monster would be simple enough to smother.

  But then she birthed it. Not only was it a perfect male but it grew with supernatural speed. At a couple of months it was like a two-year infant. And though by then the boy had been weaned, the numinous stories that already surrounded him, and so her, made the king keep his hand off.

  So they all went on. And the legend grew. That Escurjai, as Riadis had named both her sons, was himself a god. The king did not think that, however. He did see the magic acts the child, then the youth, put on, and relays of other miracles – healings, weather adjustments. The king put all that down to the boy’s real father, who must be schooling him on the sly. Shamans naturally could perform feats of magic, create fire, doctor the sick, and sometimes chase off storms. The king’s slow brain could not encompass the sublime. He was a fool. And being one he did not believe in gods, only paying them lip-service. He paid that to Curjai as well. And Curjai, supposedly so divinely wise, failed to read the king’s subterfuge. Both the king and Curjai himself never reasoned that the clearest eye can see through clean glass, but seldom through a pathless mire.