No Flame But Mine

by Tanith Lee

  ‘I know it’s a boy,’ said Hevonhib sternly. She was Crarrow. Crarrow knew these things. She knew too the father of this second son had not been pre-prepared by the astonishing seed of Chillel. The man was not very strong, nor would the child be strong. Fast-grown Guriyuve of course was perfectly stalwart.

  But Hevonhib had foreseen and was resigned. She gave him an amulet of the Crarrowin he would not need, a flat greenish stone with a circle carved in it.

  Guriyuve thanked her and departed.

  He rode one of the female mammoths he had grown up with. The other three, always till now companions both to her and to him, stood mourning at the exit of the caves.

  Parting was usually cruel. But Guriyuve felt much more regret about leaving the mammoths than over the authoritative women.

  His mount, Sjindi, bore him eastward, callously delighted he had chosen her. When they reached the variable coastal ice fields that fringed the sea Guriyuve led Sjindi far out on to the ice. Before them, not five dawnshadow-lengths off, jet-black fluid ocean rolled.

  Guriyuve scrutinized the surrounding ice. It was about a quarter-mile thick.

  He whistled then on a single note. Turning slowly round sunwise, that is east to south to west to north, he kept on whistling. The ice without demur neatly split away, leaving him and his mammoth on an irregular platter, fifteen to seventeen feet in width and some twenty-five feet long.

  This ice-raft floated forward and out into the open sea, bearing the hero and his mount with it. Her only comment was a solitary triumphant trumpeting.

  It seemed Guriyuve could do such things, a kind of magecraft. But all of the Children of Chillel could do sorcerous things, and had talents in magic. It was apparently a question if they recognized their own cunning in this way, or felt it ethical to use it, as to whether they became wizards.

  Guriyuve’s voyage was definitely the fastest by any account. He positively flew around the coastline and then due south. Either there had come a mighty wind to blow the raft, or somehow he called or invented one. Or he had a sail of some magnitude the Crarrowin had spelled, or the amulet spelled. Or the wild gulls, the white-kadi and the inky sea-ravens of the outer rocks, flocked in to fan the raft along. Or it was the horned sharks that surfaced and towed it. These tales abound. Whatever it was, he beat the record, and reached the south-east ocean before his siblings.

  The route thereafter is charted. But whether fact or fiction none will be sure.

  Two months beyond the leave-taking of his human mother, Guriyuve sailed the raft across a deep blue partial strait, a sinking indigo dusk at his back, three full moons glaring in his face.

  Huge islands loomed around. They burned like phosphorus in the moonfire. The surf thrashed about their aprons of ice. And tiny icebergs like ivory pins dizzied along.

  Until out of the very eyes of the three moons another country rose, isle or continent, but it was not like any similar place.

  Resembling spun white sugar the meshes and webs that walled it, architecture or strange vegetation. Guriyuve could not tell. And beyond these twists and twittens was a darkness even the moonshine did not clean. Sjindi, who had been dozing, her legs folded under her like a cat, got up again. Guriyuve looked and saw why. The ice-raft was melting under them. Already the long belly-tresses of the mammoth were salty wet and her feet were awash, as his boots were also. Two hundred yards from the alien shore perhaps they could only drown.

  During the prolonged journey the dye grew out of her hair. It was not now two colours but three. When she hacked off the black-tinged ends still it was three. For on her right side it was once more black, and on the left side pale brown. But through both the black and the brown threaded strands of silky white.

  Beebit’s death, the lightning storm, had bequeathed her something else then beside a bone.

  Azula remembered Aglin, the mageia from Kandexa. Aglin had tried to befriend Azula after her bereavement, but soon enough all Aglin’s concern was directed towards the Magikoy woman Jemhara.

  Azula had not said goodbye to Aglin.

  Sometimes she held the snake in her arms, rubbing her cheek on its incised smoothness.

  Sometimes she stood on her hands, made a hoop of her back, folded herself up like a blanket for a box. Things her mother had done.

  The lines Sallus set caught fish, but not regularly. Their provisions they rationed, as with the water. When ice passed them and the sea was still, Sallus would swim over and cut slices for the water-skin. It had all sorts of tastes, this brew, brackish or fishy, yet also perfumed, redolent of heated gardens.

  Both of them, the young woman and the young man, surrounded by the immensity of ocean, seemed to grow further off from each other.

  They had kept a calendar of days. They were very particular over always making the scratches along the rail, the planking, at length the mast. To start with they had often counted up the days, twenty, forty, seventy. But then they stopped counting.

  The chaze seemed content. It fed on fish and never strayed into danger, curling by or about them to sleep. They slept together too, for warmth under the fur. But there was no likelihood these two persons would become sexual partners. They had joined so utterly and dissimilarly, their loneliness was amplified. They were like certain small pieces of frozen land that went by, linked by some causeway or wiry isthmus, and pushed by it also ever apart.

  Bad weather occasionally took place.

  They and the slim boat survived it all, the lash of hail and outpourings of snow on the sea. Sea-life such as big horned whales surfaced miles off. Cloudy sunsets and dawns would drift away or towards them like cities of basalt and gold. Once lightning writhed and fought overhead, seeming to fill the water with blue-white serpents. They watched it. Azula was not even reminded of the strikes at Kandexa. Her mother’s death was growing into her, becoming indigenous. It was beyond memory, ever present in some plaintive, unfigured way.

  They met no others of their kind.

  Above moons came and went in their random sickles, globes, solos, duets and triads.

  Sallus and Azula’s was one of the lengthiest voyages of the Chillelings. Yet winds did propel them, and something other thrust the boat on too, so it went skimming and darting about the continent, and upwards and around and over and down and along, until they entered a sort of timeless inevitability. Which was that of reaching their insistent and mostly unwanted goal.

  For did even Sallus want to reach Chillel? He was only magnetized, while a feeling of betraying and dishonour, bred by his upbringing among Rukarian refugees, became always stronger in the back of his brain.

  It was an hour after sunrise that they came among a clump of islands, and to the ragged outline of the biggest island or small landmass.

  All night a splatter of weird stars had lamped their way. The stars were disturbing for they were in the shape of a crescent moon. ‘Ddir,’ remarked Sallus the Rukarian.

  Azula, also partly Rukarian, had omitted to hear of this god. But she only said, ‘Yes?’ in her lovely, lonely voice.

  The afterglow of dawn still flushed the east dim yellow under blue. It was a fine morning. And despite that the stars in the crescent shape were only just now fading overhead. And … it was warm.

  Though they had missed the thaw at Kol Cataar, they had been told about episodes of Summer.

  This must be one.

  As more light filled the seascape fish rose like opening flowers. Sallus caught them easily, even with his hands.

  ‘They’re bemused – touch, it’s warm, the water.’

  She trailed her fingers among the swimming fish who, fearlessly unaware of the danger of Sallus’s lines and grip, nibbled at Azula’s skin. She withdrew her hand with a startled laugh.

  She said, ‘Like water heated for a bath then cooled.’

  Even the curious volutes and kinks of snow that shut in the large island looked warm. A warm white, twined with dabbles of warm shiny icicles.

  A haze hung over the land. There was a scent i
n the air, again a kind of perfume, indeterminate.

  Sallus gave his attention to the boat. Azula took in the sail. They rowed for shore.

  Ice fields lay, as was normal, against the littoral. But there were areas where the sea gushed like a liquid river straight forward to the coast. This itself was dense with layers of ancient permafrost, impacted snow and ice and glassy striated rime.

  They landed the boat in one such cove and dragged it in up the cryonic beach. The walls of twisted ice ahead ran irregularly. Mostly, if not always, they came right down to the ice fields, or the open bays. This stretch of beach here was at least four times as broad as the length of the boat.

  Slipping and sliding on the polished surface rime, they hefted their last provisions, and Sallus the snake, and began to make towards the fretwork ‘wall’.

  Several entrances were visible in moments. Sallus chose one and they entered by it.

  Was it an ice-wood? Or some cave system largely demolished by weather?

  Inside the ‘wall’ the whiteness now was like lacework or clever tatting. It was sharply beautiful. The sun flittered through, luminous then blinding; the snow seemed sculpted. The ‘wall’ was full of forms and faces.

  Gradually the warmness became spasmodic. In spots it cuddled, in others it was shut away and the ordinary cold hit like knives against their bodies.

  ‘What’s that sound, Sallus?’

  ‘Yes, I hear it too. I don’t know.’

  They paused to listen.

  ‘Is it music?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ The snake lay heavy and supportive over his shoulders. These were fearsome sounds, he thought dispassionately.

  ‘I dislike it,’ she said.

  Flutes maybe, he thought, piping. They fluctuated in little frills and skitters.

  The voice of the sea was ebbing away.

  Into a region of crimped ice-pillars they walked, then of ice-pillars that seemed to have been clotted into ringlets.

  The flute sounds did not stop and now there began to be an unnerving odour. Sallus was reminded of the roast acid tang of bronze beaten on an anvil.

  One more series of openings appeared. These were exits. The structure of lace-caves ended here.

  He and she stepped out. The chaze lifted its head.

  It must still be broad daylight. They had got through the enclosure in less than a pair of hours. Yet beyond lay dusk.

  No sun was to be seen. Smoke hung over everything, in which the metallic smell eddied in gusts. Something must burn somewhere.

  Again, as on the slippery shore, they moved carefully and slowly. Last pillars and pylons of the ‘wall’ phantasmally rose in front of them like bergs in a sea fret.

  If it had been music or not, the fluting was gone. Now there was a low hissing. It was like a snake’s, and the chaze, which had the faculty of hearing or had gained it, rippled round his neck, undoing its jaws, sipping the air uneasily with a black tongue. Ahead a light shone blearily in the smoke.

  The hissing serpent revealed itself.

  Before them the snow had broken. Far below a chasm wormed away through the mist. Gaps too undid the murk.

  A fluid river bubbled in the channel, sending up a cloud-like fog. In colour the river was like mercury. It had a doleful satiny sheen, lit up from within.

  ‘Don’t breathe it.’ He pulled her back and they went aside into the thicker fog.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know, Azula. A million swords might have melted there.’

  ‘Will it kill us?’

  ‘No. We have a special strength from her.’

  Azula spat on the smoky ground.

  The chaze had burrowed its head inside Sallus’s shirt. He drew them both away. Eventually the curve of the land guided them out of the smog and away from the metal river. It was day again here, but a sombre one, the sky overcast with steep banks of cumulus.

  ‘This place is a Hell,’ Azula said. ‘This bitch lives in a Hell.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes. She was a whore – oh, so was my mother, but my mother did it professionally, properly. This – this prak, she just did it to ruin men – and women too—’

  ‘It seems she did it to keep them alive. Don’t you know yet, every man, and your mother, survived the Death because Chillel had lain with them? Didn’t your mother love Chillel?’

  Azula began to weep. Her tears, horribly, had the same gleam and sheen as the antipathetic river. ‘More than me,’ she whispered.

  ‘If she had,’ he retorted, ‘you wouldn’t love Beebit as you do.’

  After a while Azula wiped off her tears with her three-shade hair. She said, ‘Who told you about Chillel? Him – the king?’

  ‘My own mother told me, Tireh. What do you think she felt birthing the baby of my father and another woman? Tireh told me about Chillel, and that she was a goddess. She did it in secret. She wouldn’t say how she herself knew. Had Bhorth told her? Perhaps she’d only heard stories. My father never did tell me, or not exactly. Maybe he expected I would simply know, as birds know how to fly. Come on. There’s a way through this country. Why stand chatting?’

  He stalked ahead. The snake did not glance at her.

  Azula had the sullen urge to stall, to be left behind, but the territory scared her and presently she trotted after him.

  They went by another parallel channel soon. The steam and fog here were localized and sulphurous. The ‘river’ was a brazen stream, like laval piss. Heat rose and huge cracks in the bank betokened collapse. They hurried on. A steamy smoky swamp began. Dead trees, stripped of both ice and cryogenic foliage, poked like dead black hands from whitish mud. They trod with care the frozen tracks of stone and coal that veined it.

  Night fell. To Sallus it seemed some hours too early.

  There were no moons, no stars. The sky itself gave off a watered luminosity.

  By then they were just through the swamp, and over a final brook of what seemed liquid vitreous smelling of marzipan and bile.

  The air was clear at last. With clarity and cleanness warmness came again.

  A big amorphous animal passed quite closely in front of them, undetailed in limited light.

  But ‘A saurian,’ he said. ‘Such as there are in the far north at home.’

  It paid them no attention.

  When it was gone they stared into the formless glimmered dark beyond. What lay ahead was most unsure.

  The passage through the dark also went on for some time. Worse than a lack of moons or stars they seemed to have entered a confine, and there light had not yet been invented. The vague sourceless luminosity confused rather than illustrated.

  And although they trod again so carefully, there was apparently nothing here to blunder into or stumble on. The area was empty not only of true light but of all true elements. Any external sound had died. When they spoke to each other, briefly, in monosyllables, their repressed voices had no expression, were almost without gender.

  Eventually they reached a high hedge of what seemed to be fossilized wood. Perhaps millennia-old trees made arcs and arches of carbon.

  They went through one of a selection of narrow breaks.

  At once everything changed.

  It was easy to see. Though no moon was up the night was encrusted by stars, some a piercing citrine or aquamarine, or like watered wine.

  Azula had been told religious legends by Beebit when they were young together. ‘Is it Paradise?’ she asked now. But she did not sound either glad or overawed. If this were heaven it was Chillel’s personal and private one. Beebit would not be here.

  Sallus said nothing.

  They had come out on the brink of a wide plain that curved into shallow valleys and low hills.

  Black pelt covered the land. It must be verdure, grasses and trees completely free of ice. Hollows and rounded slopes were powdered by starlight. In the grass that bladed from the ground in front of them, turrets of pale flowers were spread.

  The warmth was constant now, and the
curious scent had become an unmixed perfume of hothouse blooms, salad and fruit. The eerie piping notes were sounding all about. A bird flew across the stars. It was followed by others. These creatures were what made the piping.

  But for all that which returned or began again here, another thing, till then perpetual, was gone. The impulse towards the magnet of Chillel had ended.

  Sallus felt this with a bewildered uncertainty. Of course the tug on him must end here. He had reached the source. Nevertheless it was as if he had been stranded. He knew the self-angry dismay of the swimmer who had struck out confidently and now found himself too many miles from shore, the mirage he had meant to gain having vanished.

  Azula would not feel this.

  She had never wished to find Chillel.

  Sallus saw her eyes were fixed far off. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘there where that big hill goes up.’

  He looked. The hill, the tallest of the vista, lay over beyond what seemed to be groves. The hill appeared to be burning at its top with a fresh and paler light.

  ‘A moon’s rising. Two maybe.’

  ‘It isn’t the east.’

  Nor was it. Despite differences, some of the star formations above were the same as those he had encountered when they sailed over into southern waters. Was this, he wondered, the large stellar cluster that had copied the form of a crescent moon, and which they had seen before they beached here? That was the rogue creation of a god. Therefore it might move eccentrically.

  They watched the hilltop. The white glow did not increase or fail. Nothing scaled the height.

  Sallus started to think he could see a funnel or chimney which rose from the hill’s apex. It must be the centre of the light. But there was so much darkness in this country, so much that was not ice or snow. His eyes might be misled.

  More birds fanned over.

  He too disliked the noises they made. That twittering and fluting was almost like a melody—

  ‘Something comes.’

  At her whisper Sallus shook himself back into alertness. He drew his knife and would have set Azula behind him but she would not obey, and had a little dagger clutched in her hand.