No Flame But Mine

by Tanith Lee

  All the while, as the god rapidly grew up, the king was nice to him and waited. With the arrival of the foreign barbarians who claimed to hail from some unknown continent, a chink of possibility showed itself. When the king allowed a small party to seek the foreign garth Curjai went with them. Let Curjai’s shaman magic meet the outland hostility of these savages. Very likely they would slaughter him, at least take him prisoner against Arok’s return.

  And as that happened, the king would erase Riadis from his life. By now she enraged him, sweeping about, no longer young, and with her garish hair and reputation as the fire god’s concubine. Well, let her see what the fire god thought of her burned alive.

  The king did not quite have the gall to bring her to trial, not in the end. He went another way to work. In this his priest mages assisted him. They had their own gripe with Riadis’s hubris and did not value Curjai much, for the converse reason. They did believe in gods, and those gods should only be accessible to such as themselves. One walking about and there for everyone in the brown skin of a boy would not do.

  She was weaving in the Simese way, the handloom balanced on her knees as she moved the shuttle through the warp. The cloth was the colour of fire. In the rhythm of her weaving Riadis was at peace.

  Nearby the tiger had been sleeping on a rug. Curjai had reared it and it was a credit to its species. Now it woke with a wide yawn.

  Presently Riadis heard it growl.

  ‘Hush, baba. He’ll be here soon.’ She meant Curjai and hoped that she was correct. She drew the weft to completion. Her hands fell loose on the loom. She had herself no fears for her unearthly son. What could harm him? But she felt his absence. Altogether there was a strange note of separation in the afternoon. She could not explain it. She recalled the deep stillness that had clasped about her rooms that day Korch had shown her Curjai in a piece of mirror, riding a chariot through another world. Today the king was off hunting in the royal park; most of the foreign men had gone with him. Through her windows the sky was darkly white and nothing seemed to move.

  The tiger growled again. It got up from the rug and back across the tiles, shaking its paws as it went as if to rid them of something sticky. Its charcoal-blue eyes were fixed on the brazier of coals.

  Riadis said, ‘Haven’t you seen a flame before, baba?’

  But she too cast a look at the brazier.

  Something was in it she had not noticed, there at the bottom. It seemed, rather than a coal, to be a round blackish stone, and now cracks were appearing in it, filtering green. Intrigued, Riadis watched.

  The tiger yowled. It ran about there yowling, by the upright of the bedchamber door.

  She would have to get up and go and see what was the matter with it. There was a sort of comfort in this, the tiger conniving, becoming a baby for her.

  Eyes still attracted by the curious fracturing stone Riadis was rising, just about to turn her head, when the nucleus of the fire exploded.

  It was magecraft. A gout of atomic incandescence broke upward and outward in a wave. The wave engulfed Riadis before she could even cry aloud. She was instantly dissolved in the inferno. For a few feet around furnishings singed, and the small loom itself caught alight, fire-tinged cloth clothed in fire. Yet almost at once the incendiary was burning out. Pale cinders floated through the room and settled like powder. Nothing was much disordered. A brief black tarry mark was on the tiles with some charred sticks – the loom – beside it. An odour like newly forged steel clung to the air.

  Riadis, who had just been totally thaumaturgically incinerated, and was dead, did not know this.

  But someone held her, smiling down at her. This was a man of extraordinary attractions, very dark of skin and hair and golden-eyed.

  ‘Attajos,’ she said. Her voice was a girl’s again.

  The god smiled on. Dislodged, the memory of burning arrived and prompted her. Her soul asked, Was it you?

  ‘No. But now, in the most appealing way,’ said Attajos, ‘it will be.’

  As he bore her off over a hazy country she was not yet able quite to see, Riadis gazed back only once. Some frenzied part of her sang the name of her son. But even so soon the longing for him was heartlessly leaving her. Her fierce thought was left adrift to echo above Simisey.

  Below she did not see either a figure sprinting. It was the shaman Korch. Poisoned by the king he had quickly sped here. He had been here often enough to know the way by heart.

  Back in the everyday world of viciousness and violence, the tiger cub struggled to its paws against the far bedroom wall. It had been blown through the doorway and on twenty paces by the fire’s ignition, but was not hurt. Together with rearing it on milk and broth, Curjai had also given it a sip of his blood. Disappointingly though so far he had not realized who it was, or had been, and so not named it correctly. He called the tiger affectionately Catty. But the tiger was a lot more than that. Ahead of its years it was already nearly full-grown, building up with the same celerity Curjai displayed.

  A window screened by membrane had torn at the blast.

  ‘Catty’, who was not, threw himself at the rent and squirmed through, dropping down into a tiny snow-garden of iced mimosas.

  In the palace and the town no abnormal sound gave warning of anything. Only the odd stillness of all things showed any indication now of further events.

  The tiger trotted beneath the walls, through gateways, along narrow side-slips under tall royal blocks. He reached a colonnade of the huge iron-tree pillars. This was the direction the king of limited mind would travel, on his return.

  Catty lay down to wait.

  His animal consciousness did not comprehend or therefore need to analyse the awful snowstorm which next took place. Catty knew it was Winter, now in the person of the god Tirthen roused by unthinking recognition and sacrifice, but also by the moronic evil of recent murder on the doorstep. Human sacrifice. Catty could have told you, had you asked and he been equipped to answer, that Winter had only put on the form and idea of Tirthen in the same way someone without one, going out, put on the nearest fur cloak in his size. Winter was up for it, and Tirthen just happened to fit.

  It was some hours before the king’s hunt did return.

  They had been smitten by horrors, and one of the warriors was dead. None of them cared either that all of the barbarians survived and some had made off. Did any of the Simese even recall?

  The king had left his horse and walked slowly up the colonnade, leaning on two servants. It was doubtful too if he even recalled his queen had been executed while he was out.

  Catty emerged like a loyal and concerned hound from behind a column. Actually Catty had been a hound in his former existence. He had been an eyeless jatcha in the blue Hell, not to mention a female. Atjosa, Curjai had named her/him there. But more than a Hell hound Catty was plainly a Drajjerchach-Chachadraj, one more spawn of all the cat-dog matings of the surreal. And now he was a nearly full-grown tiger.

  When Catty sprang the servants were knocked spinning. They tried to rally and others came running at the screams. But Catty had completed his task by then. The king’s face and throat were off and out and neatly sprinkled on the snow in bite-sized chunks, and Catty-Atjosa was over another wall and away.

  It came to him like something breaking in his own body, or in the night.

  Curjai knew he had experienced a blow so large that it meant the death of another. And his initial thought was for Lionwolf—

  And then he knew it was not Lionwolf, as how could it be, and anyway, brother and beloved though Lionwolf was, only one familial tie would perish in this shock, like the cutting of the umbilical cord.

  He stood in silence and the roar of severance bored through him. Riadis was dead.

  Perhaps as appalling as the rest, he understood too she had died some days and nights before this juncture when he felt it. Being what he was – being not a human man – should he not have known before? Even some men did that … An unintelligent and wooden aspect of his own self
had somehow shut awareness from him until now, when he paused baffled by the hill.

  On this cue the fire came, the combustion which had slain his mother. He held it within him one endless split second, then smashed it against the slope of ice.

  About him men gaped in terror as Curjai fell headlong to the earth, and something like a lightning crashed into the hill that was the garth.

  There was a boom like that of a berg giving way into the open sea.

  As the ice gave, showering off like glass, loud yells and shrieks were audible from the far side.

  A colossal archway penetrated the hill. Inside you could see the garth’s outer walls and gate, then the jumbled mass of houses and the upper eminence of the big House. People were rushing to and fro. Dromazi were in there too, charging along the tracks—

  Curjai had got up. ‘It’s well, Sombrec. Let me be. Where’s Arok?’

  ‘He – ah, there he is. Look. He hasn’t moved.’

  Curjai shot a look at Arok the zombie. No, he had not moved. Unmoved by all of it.

  Curjai took in Fenzi standing by the dromaz that Arok sat on. Fenzi also seemed relatively unmoved. Or rather, more concerned with something he could see in the distance – where nothing was.

  But there was a ribbon of pearly golden light, anyone could spot that now, spilling down from the high House, and something walked in the middle of the light that had hair like a young torch flame.

  My mother is dead.

  I am an immortal, and my mother is dead.

  People were coming out of the garth and there was excited interchange of questions and replies.

  When Curjai looked up again a woman with saffron hair was there beside him.

  He did not know who she was, and perhaps he might have done for he had known Lionwolf.

  She in turn did not know Curjai at all. And yet she had mistaken him for someone else not hours before.

  Neither spoke to the other.

  All around the flurry of everything else, the human calling and hurrying, the rain of slivers of ice still evacuating the entrance, the pandemonium of the dromazi, and Fenzi turning abruptly, walking off over the plain. In the midst of it Curjai and Saphay remained unspeaking side by side. Both their heads were bowed. Fire god and day goddess, their tears dropped molten on the white ground. Lambent inside their glowing ice-hill of woe, all other things left them strictly alone.

  Zeth Zezeth saw none of that. He was observing from some other vantage the stupid girl from Ru Karismi, cavorting in the night sky with her hideous mongrel.

  He would have both of them.

  He would bend them to the right shape, maybe simply snap the dog in half and throw it away. Her too, probably, her too.

  Back along an ormolu avenue, with fiery vines making a pergola in which blue beetles of rage devoured little pink flies, Zth regarded his other catch, the witch Jemhara. She was quietly seated, reading a book he had permitted to form for her. The esoteric knowledge in it, copies of such essays penned on earth but ethereally distended, might scorch out her brain. But so far she had managed to cope with it. Remarkable for a mortal, even a Magikoy. She would be far more use than the other one, the girl Ruxa or whatever her name was.

  Zth raised a goblet of orichalc and drank a liquid that lighted the avenue.

  He unwittingly drank because men, who had made him in their image, had done it first.

  For that reason too the drink made him – could it be? – just slightly drunk.

  But now he was benign. He was actively enjoying his fury. Pink blood dripped from the vines.

  Mentally he reviewed his plans. Jemhara would be sent to destroy Lionwolf. The Ruxa girl would also be sent to destroy Lionwolf. And then he himself would leisurely descend again and destroy Lionwolf, and destroy the bitch-doy Saphay, and the other useless article, that damned whale. Destroy all of it, blast the whole curse-fucked world, and sit laughing in glory on the blackened clinker.

  His own god-mind unmind was turning to gold, fusing his thoughts there like marvellous jewels, so he could go round and about admiring them. He basked in himself, in proposed restitution and reprisal.

  Along the avenue Jemhara intermittently watched him over the rim of the great gilded scroll. Time did not truly exist here, but nevertheless she was aware Zth used up a vast amount of it in the same way as now. Nor had he as yet made her carry out any of his plots. His wondrousness tugged at her frighteningly. Yet she could see through the fissures in it to glimpses of indecipherable anomalies. Occasionally he called her close. He might award her dainty and overwhelming caresses – a finger brushing her shoulders, the tip of his tongue against her hair. These seemed enough to kill her. Often he spoke of possessing her entirely – and that he must not for then she would die of it. Or that he might anyway, an ultimate punishment and reward. Some aspect of this, even wrapped in delirious fear as it was, had begun to ring a bell of recollection. The note of the bell was not quite as it had been, which made it hard for her to be sure which act or person from her past it evoked.

  She lowered her eyes for now he was looking round.

  Perhaps he had seen her gaze on him. It was inevitable she would stare at him. How could she not? He would expect it.

  Something anyway distracted him.

  In the riot of the vines the pink flies had grown bored with victimization. They were setting about the beetles, ripping them apart. Blue iridescent segments clinked on the path.

  Zth disliked that. Blue was the sigil of his wrath. Nothing could get the better of it.

  He went away. Through trees of a sort, water of a sort, a kind of sunset—

  His world grew honeyed once more, fusing to gold like his mind.

  Jemhara laid the scroll aside. She had instead a vision before her of an elderly man sitting on a luxurious bed. He was holding out his twig-like claws urgent to receive her body. His old gnarled voice, no longer much that of a King Paramount, quavered to her. ‘Jemhara, Jemhara, if only I could enter you – I long to, my darling, I dream of mounting you – once I was strong, if only I’d seen you then – is there not some potion you know of, you cunning minx, so I can stand up like a man—’

  King Sallusdon in Ru Karismi. The wreckage of whom, for the sake of heirdom, Bhorth had remembered in the name of his immaculate son.

  How the old king had begged her for the ability of male erection. All the rest she gave him was never quite enough. For it was really his youth he wanted back. Rather than whine for potency and orgasm he warbled to be young again. She had had to give in. How glad Vuldir was. Jemhara could now poison the senile fool and leave no trace. And that she had done.

  But why think of dead King Sallusdon now?

  Bhorth spoke, his tones level.

  ‘What will you have then? Everything I suppose. The city. My apologies it’s not a finer one for you to trample, not as succulent as Sofora and Kandexa were, let alone the capital. But there. I don’t expect you’ll worry, will you? You are a sun god I believe. Did Thryfe say that? The gods know who said what. You’ll fry us or demolish us. Too much to hope you’ll let any live. You and your armies never did. Not even women, or children above eleven years. Or was it twelve? Not even a cat or dog, or a bird.’

  Lionwolf stayed quietly, listening in a polite, somewhat detached manner.

  He looks sad, Bhorth irrationally thought. No, it’s a look of disdain. Or neither. Why would he bother? Whatever he is, he is here.

  ‘Yes, I am here,’ Lionwolf said.

  And he can read thoughts. As inevitably he must.

  Lionwolf smiled.

  They had come in through the crowd on the terrace, none of whom had seemed to see Lionwolf at all, but then none of them had seemed to see Bhorth either. Fat, solid, scowling Bhorth, their king.

  This room was a small vacant chamber off the hall, which had wine and water jugs standing on a table. A child’s toy, a fish made of wool, had been dropped on the floor.

  Lionwolf bent suddenly and picked up the fish. And the grace –
the power of this insignificant movement dried Bhorth’s mouth so that he felt he would choke.

  ‘A fish,’ said Lionwolf, gently. He placed it out on the air as if on a surface, and at once the woollen toy began to swim along, wiggling its tail and the two little fins.

  Bhorth’s eyes bulged.

  He’s a child! But there was something so appealing in the sight of the inanimate toy happily splashing along in mid-air that moisture came back into his mouth, and a type of animal joy flooded him.

  Lionwolf said, ‘I don’t hurt things now, Bhorth. Where is my need?’

  ‘Did you need before?’

  ‘Yes. I was partly human before.’

  Bhorth found he took a step backward.

  The fish dived abruptly by and into a jug of water. There it went on cavorting.

  ‘What do you want?’ Bhorth asked again.

  ‘Everything. And that, Bhorth, is the spark of humanness still in me.’

  Bhorth sat down heavily. He looked at his boots. Water from the jug was being slopped out on the floor. There it turned to – were they diamonds? Yes, yes. Why ask?

  Lionwolf was sitting beside the king. Bhorth had not seen him approach. He had not approached. Manifested.

  Bhorth had the insane urge to laugh.

  Lionwolf laughed then. And Bhorth began to laugh.

  ‘I want nothing from you, Bhorth. I want nothing. Nothing and everything. Look.’