No Flame But Mine

by Tanith Lee

  Through the laughter Bhorth looked and saw a flowering vine had come up from the floor. Red grapes swung bursting on the vine, their juice dripping, and there were tiny turquoise beetles and little insects with wide rosy wings, but these were made of gems and gauze.

  Lionwolf got up and Bhorth got up, and Lionwolf put his arms about Bhorth. Then Bhorth wept. Trained to creeds of manliness, and in himself a man of wilful self-control, he had not shed tears for what seemed decades. They all spilled now, like the jewelry water and the juice of the grapes. He wept for the cities and for the world, and for the going away of his hero son who once, only a moment of years before, had been a child and the snake bit him and Bhorth sucked out the venom and his son Sallus lived, and now Lionwolf sucked the venom out of the bite in Bhorth’s soul which had been all the past, and Bhorth too would live.

  When the god let him go Bhorth balanced on the surface of the air as the toy fish had done. He felt warm and new, and his belt was sagging because he had grown fit and lean again in his own stocky way.

  Lionwolf was no longer there.

  So Bhorth went to the water jug and took out the now inanimate wet wool fish and laid it on a bench to dry. Since it was better to be kind, where you could.

  But out at the border of the fruiting fields of Kol Cataar, the Magician Thryfe saw a figure tower up in the wall of mist. For a second he believed the black Winter wolf had gained entry. Then he saw properly what walked towards him out of the shadowy door.

  ‘Greetings and well met, Highness Thryfe.’

  The Gargolem was as it had been always. Beast-headed, maned and fanged, its body that of a human male yet above the height of the tallest man.

  ‘Gargo,’ Thryfe found he said.

  It spoke like a man too, as ever. And was always addressed in turn.

  ‘You are here for the king,’ said the Gargolem.

  ‘It seems so. And you?’

  ‘I am here,’ stated the Gargolem, as some of the gods had recently done. But it turned its head towards the city. ‘This place shall be raised up.’

  The grain, even in these minutes, had itself lifted higher. The blossoming trees were opening narrow wings of foliage. Among these cascades of growth the unmistakable metallic forms of lesser gargolems were appearing, brought into being presumably by the Gargolem.

  ‘Will you attend the palace?’ the Gargolem now inquired.

  Thryfe acquiesced. Former habit, Magikoy conditioning, encased him. He could not avoid it; to avoid it would not be excusable. Aside from that, what else was there for him to do?

  And as he stepped forward towards the city, the Gargolem said, as so long ago it would have done in the City of the Kings, ‘I will send word then. Proceed.’

  The hordes of living fish that fluttered to his mouth seemed to want to tempt Brightshade. Can’t you see how tasty we are? they seemed to tweet.

  Brightshade however did not often rouse himself to eat them.

  It was unappreciative of him, and a dull guilt at slighting their edible charms began to pervade his synapses. Sometimes he even did consume large unwanted mouthfuls, so as not to insult and upset them. Pity and empathy had come belatedly to the whale, and he had got them wrong. But there. Conceivably it was a start.

  He was cruising mostly along the sea-bottom by then. Randomly, he had thought, he had drifted about through the oceans under the ice floes. When he supposed he must breach he did it always with intense caution. He did not want to meet Zth again out ranting in the bright air.

  But it was on such a mission of breaching that Brightshade emerged into the cold sunshine, and saw he lay adjacent to a vast plate of land. It was the sword-like South Continent, its western side, and he had anchored below the tubby portion of the hilt. North, south and west therefore the landmass stretched. Extravagantly gigantic though the whale was, even he was not quite as big. In size contest the sea did not count. It was fluid. But the land resembled another Brightshade.

  For some reason he was reassured by this.

  He coasted to and fro a while, admiring the icy shores. Ice-forests scintillantly embroidered the snow.

  Had Brightshade missed the sight of land? Formerly it had often brought him many delights, such as fisher-fleet and village wrecking. But here no trace of human habitation remained.

  With immense delicacy Brightshade flapped his tail. A spray of lucid liquid hurtled shorewards. Some trees snapped like splinters. There. Empathy did not catch him out this time either. He grinned and turned his horned face, and the lesser continent of his vegetable-clad back, to the sun.

  And in that comfy second he felt the twitch of another’s attention scrape against his own insides. It was the regard of Zeth – unmistakable. In fact, a random regard, although Brightshade in his abrupt terror did not guess this. Zeth had only thought of Brightshade – that damned whale – and in the most abstract fashion. Which was enough.

  Down to the ocean floor Brightshade plummeted, displacing gallons, tons of liquid sea that gushed back over the shore. Most of the artistic forest broke. Whole leagues of coastal ice split off and went careering skyward, next landward, coming to rest on far-off hills.

  In another submarine trench the leviathan cowered.

  Can anything live like this? Some must. Some will not.

  Crushed again by Zth’s implacable and bullying eminence, Brightshade’s persona veered at last towards rebellion. How lucky that he had after all a thread of elastic woven in his clunking iron psyche.

  He was enabled suddenly to see it was not necessary to lie in a trench all the remainder of his immortal life.

  A curious mental shape-picture entered his thoughts. He saw a tiny whale swimming around in a water jug.

  Somewhere deep in his throat, Brightshade laughed.

  He could laugh. He was a god.

  And gods who laugh do not spend eternity in hiding.

  Thought-shapes abounded now, a high tide of ideas.

  There were others who had great powers, surely Brightshade could sense them, and besides some of them had defeated him here and there. Now he could accept they were his equals, and one, one he had hated above all things – that one was greater. Certainly they had been enemies, Brightshade and his half-brother Lionwolf. But Zeth was enemy to both.

  Smiling, and he was a god, he could smile too, Brightshade eased upward through black water to grey to vinegar green. He fixed his physical sight once more on the land, and with his sight his inner vision. And saw the burning shape of the one he sought.

  Sea god, however, the whale could not travel over land, only through the waters about and beneath. No doubt there might be an underland route, but this would bring destruction to everything around when finally he rose. And that seemingly would not be the best reintroduction to Lionwolf.

  Brightshade pondered. Then he knew. Gods have so many talents.

  Inch by inch, mile by mile, like a vast vapour, a sky-wide cloud, the etheric insubstantial in-ness of Brightshade slipped from the landmass of his flesh. When all of it was free, only a slender rope of nacreous light connected whale body and astral body. But the rope also was elastic. It could extend – for ever.

  Like that then the projected soul of Brightshade now hurried to meet his kin. To meet him for the first, for they never had met. Not even when Lionwolf had stridden over the whale’s back or, darkly perceived, been tossed into infinity – or only Hell – from the height of Brightshade’s skull.

  Parked by the shore the huge whale physique was not insensible. It kept alert, on guard. It calculated everything. And when more fish sported near it, it ate a few of them courteously, killing them as quickly and gently as it could.

  Ninth Intervolumen

  Does the leaf remember

  The tree which gave it flight?

  Does the star recall

  Which fire woke its light?

  Love Song: Ruk Kar Is

  Sea filled the floor of the night.

  Each one of them must travel it.

  The
ir own intent and flawless darkness was or would be pinned by starlight on the black backdrop of heaven and earth, among the silver-creaming of the liquid waves.

  The Children of Chillel.

  Her magnetism pulled them surely on and in.

  At first they had had to walk over the land, those countries of Simisey and Vormland, the Kelpish and Fazion isles, the coasts and inner reaches of the continent shaped like a sword: Gech, Olchibe, Jafn. All of them gained the sea. Some were alone and some in groups. There were more of them too than any who locally witnessed their number ever estimated. All were male but one. And every male participated in the journey – but one.

  Elsewhere Dayadin, son of Chillel, Arok and Nirri, stayed moored with his half-sister Brinnajni. But here, on the sea floor of night, Azula, daughter of Chillel and Beebit, sat with her half-brother Sallus who was the son of a king.

  They had ridden in a sleekar drawn by lashdeer. It was Sallus’s property, though he had not before often used it. A small example of luggage and provisions was in the chariot.

  Azula stood behind Sallus, who drove the team. When occasionally he glanced back to check on how she was, Azula was always mute and expressionless; her cloak and short hair streaming back from the racing speed were all that demonstrated she was not a statue.

  When they paused to eat or sleep they spoke very little. He let her sleep the most. She seemed to feed on sleep more hungrily than on food. Did she dream then of her human mother?

  Her hair was growing back swiftly and she had rinsed it in black dye before they left Kol Cataar. Now it seemed only one colour. It was just her skin and eyes that might attract comment.

  A couple of tiny, terrible villages appeared and vanished. One was clearly a nest of partly demented robbers, who rushed or hobbled at them waving their arms, shouting the fake over-welcome of a spurious host. Oaths and dooms were heaped on them as they sped away. In other spots they dashed past villages and steads long abandoned. The bones of animals lay just under the softer snow, lividly ochre against the whiteness. But as the coast drew near – the ride had not taken more than four days – a bigger conglomeration showed, this one not quite mad or ferocious. From here an ice-road led down to the shore.

  Sallus haggled for one of the clinker-built black boats, for its dun sail, oars and fishing lines. He offered only copper coins but they were the currency of the dead city of Ru Karismi.

  Dreadfully, people in the village street shed tears, and came reverently to touch them. ‘Were you from there? Is that what turned you black?’ Sallus evaded talk of colour. Carefully lying he explained he and his sister had been born to steaders outside the city. The whole family had escaped before the invader came, or the White Death.

  ‘Where are you heading on the cold hard sea?’

  ‘A mage put it on us to make the voyage,’ Sallus said. ‘I had to promise my father we would. Seek the coast of Kraagparia, he told me.’

  Then the villagers made old religious signs of the Rukarian pious. They moved away from Sallus and Azula as if they were sorry for them but no longer wished to be in their vicinity. The boat they got for only twice its reasonable price. He suspected the copper coins would not be spent but kept as heirlooms.

  But they must go farther than the hem of Kraagparia.

  They must go down to the very tip of the blade of the sword – and further. South-east to south, following the shores, further than any apparently had been. And further still. South-east to south and next south to east. There. If there existed. And the boat – was not so strong.

  It would be a voyage of months, conceivably of years.

  Who knew anyway after such a journey, whether travelling in hope or denial, if it were possible ever to arrive?

  Fenzi, son of Chillel, a fisherman and his woman, met four half-brothers, the two Kelps, the Faz and the Vorm, in the middle of the northern sea.

  They and he had simply set out overland on the coastal ice of the north-west continent. He might even have met them there, had he reached it more quickly. The four had taken a fishing boat from the village they called respectively Kelfazvor, Fazkelvor or Vorkelfaz. Fenzi, fisher’s son, had knocked one together on wooded land above the shore.

  A storm blew up one night, one of those nights floored by the black and silver sea. Amid the lightning flares and tall waves the two small boats were steered into each other’s vicinity.

  Five men now, they roped their craft together. Greetings were cool. Oneness did not really provide a sense of finding or family. Only Chillel the magnet had true relevance.

  To the islanders Fenzi was landlocked Jafn, and they to him were thieving reivers. It was inevitable they join forces, but not especially to be celebrated.

  Fenzi then sat alone on his Jafn-built boat, tied to the others by cord and symbolism.

  He thought about his father and mother to whom he had not said farewell. But he and they had not been like Arok and Nirri with their Dayadin. Fenzi’s parents were always slightly bemused by him, and after Dayadin was lost, apologetic.

  Fenzi thought of Sombrec too. He had not bidden him any goodbye either.

  Fenzi thought of himself. During his ultra-short childhood and adolescence he had been quite a sunny boy, sure and sometimes psychic. In fact he had not changed so much until that gallop back to the garth, until the hill of ice, until Arok returned dead from death. Until the Pull became everything.

  They knew where they went now, the five Chillelings.

  Once the storm subsided they steered by the stars for the far south-east.

  Obviously something was there, some land or other, despite elder beliefs that nothing was. The other continent at the world’s top to which Arok, and Saphay, had sailed them those few years before, that too had been a place unknown, non-existent until they anchored there.

  Azula watched her brother sleeping. She kept her hand guidingly and lightly upon the tiller, as he had shown her how to. The chaze snake had coiled about Sallus’s waist, its head resting on his chest above the heart.

  I hate her, Azula thought. She meant the goddess Chillel, her other mother. Why should I want to go to her when I hate her? I don’t want to. I could slip over the side into all that black water, and go to Beebit-Ma instead. I hate Chillel.

  ‘I hate her,’ said Brinnajni.

  She lay on her back, her red hair spread across the pillows. Her brother Dayadin lay against her, one arm about her waist as the snake had coiled about Sallus, and Dayadin’s head too rested on Brinnajni’s breast. During the past months brother and sister had become lovers. It carried for them no faintest stigma, though among the Jafn it was reckoned a sin, and amongst the hill shepherds where Brinnajni had begun her life, a crime that merited terminal stoning.

  ‘Who do you hate?’ Dayadin murmured. He raised his face to look at hers. Her eyes were shut. He kissed her lips and asked them, ‘Who?’

  ‘Who do you think, beloved?’

  But Dayadin did not know.

  In the deerskin that hung across the door, the hovor Hilth blithered quietly, playing with the drape as it sometimes did. The black sheep, which had by now grown as large as a cow, was outside the hut, nibbling grass which had bloomed out of the snow near the wall.

  Brinnajni – Burning Flame – had built this crochety home with a couple of muttered supernatural instructions. Trees cracked in ice, ice-brick skirled. Up it went, in they went. The bed had been brought from longitudes off, some furnishing left to rot in a fine house somewhere. Now dressed with fur and cushions it was a couch fit to conjure with. And they had.

  ‘Who do you need to hate, Brinna?’

  ‘My mother.’

  He looked long at her, then, without a word, rolled over to his back. At last he did say, ‘Are you able to hate Chillel?’

  ‘Yes. Trust me. Quite able.’

  They lay side by side in silence. Slowly his hand stole out to discover hers. Their hands clasped, became one.

  ‘I love you, little brother.’

  ‘And I you
.’

  ‘I was old before I was young, Dayad. She sloughed and left me. I had to make my own way. My darling sheep was more mother to me than Chillel. As for a father – well. Old before young, your Brinna. Now I’m young with you. You grew up nearly if not quite as fast as I. Dayad—’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Stay here. We are too strong for her.’

  ‘She is nothing to me.’

  Unthinkable, thus unthought, the slightest doubt assailed him when he made her this automatic vow. He accepted instantly however it was not Chillel who meant anything. It was Nirri, Arok.

  ‘… Nothing,’ he said again, mild with truthfulness.

  Guriyuve the Chilleling from Olchibe – son also to Ipeyek the Gech, and the Crarrow Hevonhib – had put out long since on the more south-easterly seas, travelling from the Marginal Land of the sword continent. He had said farewell to his mother. Ipeyek the father, though made leader, had a year before wandered away from Olchibe back to the Urrowiy, his nomadic people of the Great Uaarb.

  Hevonhib, now the nubile and child-bearing member of her coven, was already teeming with another man’s kiddle. She looked at Guriyuve with only a formal regret. She, who had been so proud to get him. ‘You were named for a dead warrior. He wished his name to live on among our sluhts. Your name has also come to include that of the sluhtin’s priest and leader of most renown, Peb Yuve.’

  Guriyuve replied, ‘Yuve is like a Rukar name. Does it result from one of their gods known as Yuvis?’

  Although offended Hevonhib did not show it. The Crarrowin ruled lots of the sluhtins by now, and here the same. Her coven too was the chief one.

  ‘How do you know a Rukar name?’

  ‘I can’t say, Mother. Sometimes I know things.’

  ‘Then know this: we keep enduring enmity with the Rukar. Time out of mind they ruined us and destroyed the glory of Sham, that great city better than all. Also the Lionwolf came from their blood who caused much harm.’

  Guriyuve thought uneasily that his mother sounded more portentous when she was with child. No doubt she had been that way too when carrying him. He said, ‘I’m sorry the ghost warrior Guri will lose his name here. Before I leave shall I give it up? Then you can gift it again to your next one, which is also a boy.’