No Flame But Mine

by Tanith Lee

  Lionwolf hefts his father, his only true father and finally his only true hate, from the chariot.

  He holds him out over the rising disc of rainbows, knives and blades.

  ‘Look, Dadda,’ says Lionwolf. ‘Look, Dadda. Yours.’

  And hurls him down into the heart of the sun.

  Sham, city of Ol y’Chibe and y’Gech, in the years of its magnificence has acquired a single temple. The building, built of obsidian and plated with brass, gold and polished coal, dominates a rise. It is reached by a road of black slate on which, over and over, the name of the god is inscribed in patterns.

  Sometimes the god drops by, and is without exception terrified by his temple.

  He lurks in disguise on the thoroughfare, squinting at pilgrims, lines of priests and fine animals brought for sacrifice, mumbling and cursing under his breath.

  On countless occasions the god has been arrested for blasphemy, chucked into prison or prepared for slaughter by Shamish gladiators or giant crocs. Of course he always miraculously disappears before he can confront and so hurt them. Ah! they exclaim, it was the Great God himself, testing us.

  The disguised god, an age-loaded beggar, a ragged stripling, even a fat priest, has plucked up his courage and actually gone inside the imposing fane. Here he has gaped groaning amid the stew of incense and chanting.

  Once he allowed himself to get drunk. Allowed, since a god needed to permit his ethereal cells to process alcohol in a human manner. Staggering and shouting he had charged about the enclosure, scattering acolytes and worshippers, tumbling over two sacred goats kept to provide milk offerings, ending in the silver font. Somewhere in the mayhem he had shed his disguise. He had not meant to. He was identified instantly. Ah! Now the Great God was displeased.

  Three hundred people threw themselves on their faces. Many voided bladders and bowels as they did so, the two goats included.

  Gurithesput, Great God of Ol y’Chibe and y’Gech, sat in the font. He knew by now it was hopeless to explain, let alone try to dissuade them. He had tried before.

  Oh, he had tried and tried.

  Yet these lands, which had rejected all chance of any god coming between them and their untrammelled faith in their own ability to live, die and reincarnate, had taken to this deity with gusto. Not only rumours but evidence of his swift gain of adulthood, his gift of healing, his just peacemaking, his magicianship and – decidedly – his ethnic purity, wooed and won his fellow countrymen. Seldom are any believers more fanatical than converts. What has changed our mind, convinced not others but us, must be of superior quality. Ego triumphs over logic. Perhaps too they had been a little lonely, having only themselves ever to rely on.

  At least he had now ensured their warlike ways were channelled. They went into contests and the games in the Sham stadia, most of which were ‘friendly’ bouts. Feuds among neighbouring sluhtins now hesitated to start. If started, discussion generally settled them.

  This must be a virtue.

  Disarming them, Guri did feel some pride. His appalling punishment in his own Hells had been his judgement on himself for his days of warriorism, the tortures, rapes and executions he had performed so righteously. A racist then, he had never fully thought other races had sensibilities. Had not credited they felt horrible pain exactly as a man or woman of his own kind did. Hell had cured him. He did not want his nation to stray on to that same path which had spawned himself and his brothers. This being so he also attempted to open the eyes of y’Chibe and y’Gech to other societies. But in this country of the past, few examples of such other peoples came their way.

  Guri had therefore searched about the continent, roaming even as far as the outer isles that would, in the future, become the Vormland and the habitats of Fazions and Kelps. He found that at this date these peoples too were ignorantly insular. They also viewed Guri, even acting human, with total fright. The Jafn race along the north-east coast of the continent were primal too. If not reduced to gibbering by Guri’s black hair and yellow complexion, they treated him as an object of curiosity, a sort of silly vrix. For the Jafn were even then riddled by such sprites and devils. The odd thing was God-Guri could not see these spirits. He would have expected to, for in his future they had been real enough in their own subreal way. Once a ghost he had been able to spot them if he let himself. He suspected now the Jafn must gradually have made them real inadvertently from belief, the constant repetition of superstitious avoidance or night-fear horror stories told during the many nights they refused to sleep. The schizophrenic gods of the Rukar had evolved like that, surely. Faith was a dangerous weapon.

  And the Rukar were the final mystery. For nowhere could Guri unearth or unsnow any trace of them.

  The southern north and west that had been their wide territory had nobody there. The southern east had only the tribal louts with mottled skin, who worshipped wooden gods, like Ranjal in Guri’s future, or volcanoes that puffed out smoke.

  Thus Guri brought no introductory human offers home to Olchibe. The examples he had seen would have gone mad or died of alarm, which could hardly have recommended them.

  He did, where Olchibe had some inkling of another area through trade or accident, tell tales of such cultures. His nation sat marvelling, loving every word of what they acclaimed as imaginative fantasy.

  When the temple went up in Sham it bothered Guri too for another reason than his hike to godhood.

  He had been elsewhere on his journeys, sometimes riding his mammoth. Though leisurely, he thought he had taken months, no more. Mostly he had not indulged in riding. He could spin as he would from here to there or anywhere in seconds, or, if dawdling, hours.

  On returning to Sham his immediate shock had been nightmarish. Such a work as the temple, unaided by god-power, or the weird sorcerous-mechanical power the later Rukar would come to have, must have needed several years.

  Soon he knew, questing disguisedly about the streets, the temple had been erected at vast speed and the cost of a few thousand lives, in one and a half decades.

  Guri had not grown older, naturally. His divine aggregate seemed fixed at about twenty-five, twenty-eight. But where had fifteen years gone then? He went to look at the mammoth. He read the signs. It was old now and must retire. The mammoth might have been his calendar, but willing and stoical in the way of its kind, it had not complained. It had still fluidly knelt and risen, galloped and preened; still threatened over-feisty wild elephant or lurking fleer-wolves mewling in the wastes. Now he praised it and saw that it went to be a pampered stud. And Guri found himself alone. He could not however shake the thought that, at the beginning of his short journeying about, the mammoth had not been old at all.

  Static amid mortality and mortal time Guri grew mithered. He was powerless at least in this. Despite his regression to the past he could not retrace what now had been let slip. Some laws still applied. If not to him, certainly to the forward propulsion of the earth.

  He did manage to squeeze from time one backview of the temple’s building. It was about five years in when he reached it. But the scene was like a picture painted on a rickety wall. It faded and wobbled, could not be entered.

  Sometime after this, Guri fell in a sort of love with a priestess of his own order.

  Until then, after leaving his sluhtin, he had been abstinent. Sex had become an itch he scratched in private, quickly and without much interest. His godness had not enhanced masturbation either.

  The attraction to his own Olchibe priestess was classic both in its mythic precedents and ordinary inevitability.

  Guri tried to hold off. But why hold off? He would not harm her. It was about then he recalled Lionwolf in similar circumstances. Lionwolf had not harmed. Nor had he sired a single child. Guri had only sired his own self.

  Tactfully Guri sought the priestess in one more guise as a mortal. But he was a good-looking specimen now he had to admit.

  The girl had been a Crarrow. The priestesses were generally picked from the covens. She was combing her l
ong raven locks when she saw Guri standing outside in the courtyard, with a pitcher of greenish wine.

  ‘How did you get in?’ she asked coldly. No men were allowed in the precinct.

  ‘I saw you in the temple,’ said Guri, exquisite in the braid-paint-skull haute couture of ancient Ol y’Chibe. ‘I climbed the wall.’

  ‘I saw you, too,’ lied the girl. He had not been there, was only here.

  He gave her a fig he had woken from the ice. It was like a small brown-purple animal, and she stroked and toyed with it until she nearly drove him out of his mind.

  She was fourteen, a virgin, and once they had joined on the slender bed the priestess girl said to him, ‘You are the Great God, Gurithesput.’

  ‘Shush,’ he chittered, breaking out in a thick sweat which, being what he now was, was delicious as wine and honey. ‘He’ll smite me! Great God hear amen.’

  The girl giggled. ‘No, I foresaw,’ she said – her name meant Kitten. ‘You are God.’

  ‘Ah? No, no. You’re mistaken.’

  ‘You have lived and died and lived,’ she murmured, ‘you have lain with mermaids, you are uncle to the sun.’

  He realized then their coupling had brought on a trance, and sincerely she had sussed him. He possessed her again hoping to quash the visions. She slept, and he left her. Next night he was eagerly back.

  She knelt down on the floor, touched the stone with her forehead, got up and jumped into his arms.

  To be the mistress of a god was only a treat to her; nothing onerous or scaring.

  Kitten did not become pregnant. This disappointed her, he knew. Then one evening Gurithesput entered her cell and Kitten lay asleep on her bed, cold as ice and dead.

  He did not examine her. He had been tentative and subtle, unleashing his need only when sure she was able to withstand him. She had been so happy. Her body was unscathed, outwardly, inwardly. Yet – he must have murdered her, his lovely girl.

  Had Magica died too? Up there in the Gech swamps, dying abruptly from the delayed sting of the paranormal. Had they all died before their time, the ones he had lain with in the sluhtin? Some had, he knew – was that his fault?

  It was soon after this, after they had buried Kitten with innocent ceremony and written on the basalt above her grave the pattern of God, that Guri got drunk that time and ran amok in his temple, finishing up in the wet font, with a carpet of terror-shat people all around.

  In that awful moment he faced responsibility like a white-hot brand.

  ‘All is well,’ boomed the Great God, shaking off his drunk. ‘I have tested you. You are not wanting. I am yours now. I am your Great God. Trust in me, trust and obey what I have taught you. Not feared of me, are you? No. You needn’t fear your God, your old Olchibe God. I like you all finely, and you me. Listen to me, you call out for me. Call by my name, which is—’

  Three hundred voices quavered: ‘Great God.’

  ‘Amen,’ said Guri, and slid away and through a crack in the incense. He would still haunt the temple, the road, and grumble, but the fight was out of him.

  Mostly, now, in a cupboard of darkness he sat alone, and let their prayers ring and tremble like a far-off outer sea. He unbraided his hair. He had spoken to them like kiddlings, like his kiddles. They were all the children now he could ever have.

  A month after her death he left the bough of a fig tree on Kitten’s grave. It rooted, but then froze to vitreous. Those who saw it made a fuss. Then they forgot. But Guri thought on and on about Lionwolf, the very first one he had ever promised special protection of a non-mortal type. He had done it with phrases inadvertently resurrected at Sham. Uncle to the sun, she had said. Olchibe Uncle Guri.

  It was a day of pale air. You looked at this air and gauged from it the closed veil of the cold. This was a day in aspic.

  Lionwolf walked down from a tall mountain, possibly one of the complicated chain that separated the southern Ruk from Kraagparia, or not.

  He walked as nothing human could, his position sometimes horizontal and his head on a parallel with the plain below.

  Where he reached the summit’s foot an ice lake opened. Someone else sat on a mound in the middle of it, about a mile away. He seemed to be fishing through a hole in the ice.

  Lionwolf was curious, perhaps. He had retained certain everyday emotions and some whims, though they were often of the more animal variety. He sped out on to the lake, skated towards the seated fisher. He spoke without delay.

  ‘Caught anything tasty, Uncle?’

  Guri looked up. His doleful expression morphed to one of embarrassed relief. ‘No. I can make them swim up, but then I take pity and let them go. The fishing line’s just for convention.’

  Lionwolf sat down beside him.

  They peered into the hole, which was suddenly blocked by the faces of some twenty or thirty fish, wriggling to leap up and touch the gods.

  Lionwolf blessed them, breathing a golden sigh into the hole. The fish themselves goldened. They dropped back, and for a while both gods watched them shining under the ice as they frisked about.

  ‘They’ll live for years now, immune to all peril,’ said Lionwolf. ‘I must stop doing this.’

  ‘Is that what you do here?’

  ‘Too much. But – it’s a wonderful feeling. You pass a sick man on a village street and let what you are enfold him. He – alters. A bird falls dead out of the sky. In my footstep. It shakes itself and flies off like a firework.’

  ‘You intellectualize too much,’ grunted Guri. He could hear his own Rukarian phraseology. ‘It’s your corrupt Rukar blood. Even now.’ He drew out the line. One extra fish came up with it, not hooked but clinging on, waggling at Lionwolf.

  ‘Oh, very well.’

  Golden, the fish plunged back with a silent, noisy wail of ecstasy.

  ‘Well, I’ve healed a bit, but I’ve not done anything kind,’ said Guri. ‘Maybe that will balance yours.’ He stared at the ice hole as it closed. And told Lionwolf of Kitten.

  Lionwolf listened without comment, then turning began to braid Guri’s hair, threading into it as he deftly did so tiny beast skulls and Olchibe beads conjured from nowhere.

  Guri let this soothe him. Lionwolf had always had a gentle side. He was complete now, so fully masculine at last the female element too had found its parameters.

  ‘Did that …’ Guri paused. ‘Have you ever had a similar mishap?’

  ‘Diddled a girl and found it killed her? Not last time I was here. They all lived. I doubt I changed them. This time, well. I haven’t had the urge.’ The god smiled. Guri felt the smile soak into him, warm weather. Above them a hole had appeared in the paleness very like the hole Guri had made in the ice. Blue sky filled it. ‘Rather,’ amended Lionwolf, ‘I’ve had the urge, but for only one.’

  ‘The black woman.’

  ‘Chillel Winsome Toiyhin.’

  ‘Is that her name now? Ask her to pardon me. I said woman. Goddess.’

  ‘She won’t take offence, Guri. But I don’t see her. Except in my mind and in the little independent brain that dwells in my loins.’ Casually he added, ‘Chillel is her dispassionate name, the crescent moon that is a physician and a whore. Winsome is her wife-mother name, the moon at full. Now she’s the warrior moon, celibate, the thinnest crescent before darkness. Vangui is that name, but Vangui too has her other self, Toiyhin, the moon’s shadow, like a bird.’ Lionwolf shrugged. One of the fish, the last one probably, was still glimmering busily about under the ice. It gave off an inaudible merry squeaking. Lionwolf said, ‘I inadvertently filled the new Ruk capital with golden rats.’

  This made Guri laugh. His hairdressing was established. He felt better. He would either have to make do sexually with memory, or find a goddess he could get on with. And Kitten – she was safe now, and would be born again.

  He shifted his thinking to other matters.

  ‘I exist in the past,’ he said. ‘My temple’s at Sham. Sham’s a glorious city in these – in those days. How is it then I meet
you?’

  ‘You and I, our sort, we can go in and out of time. When we want we find doors. Did you think you’d meet me?’

  ‘Nothing was further from me.’

  ‘Nor I. But it’s good.’

  ‘Yes, Lion. Good.’

  They spent the day in the plain under the mountains, which might have been in Lionwolf’s present era or Guri’s past time, or in neither, instead an extension of that intriguing ’tween world Guri had accessed in his former living ghost-life.

  They ran and flew. They hunted deer – phantoms – which waited in an ice-jungle for them but reacted in a non-uncanny way and did not glow gold. Two mammoths met them also, were duly mounted and ridden. One was Guri’s older mount from the Hells, the mature female. He scrubbed her tusks and fed her black juicy grass that flailed from the snow when Lionwolf spat on it. Evening came and the tired earth sun, or its facsimile, rolled off over the edge of daylight in a welter of crimson. Chillel-Winsome-Vangui-Toiyhin’s night encompassed the sky with black silk and platinum stars. Only three moons rose, a full moon bracketed by two crescents. Did she send a message to her lover? Or was Ddir playing about again? The first crescent moon did look suspiciously like a cunningly arranged cluster of stars.

  They made camp, and in the Olchibe way to content Guri the fire was kindled in a small pot.

  ‘Do we eat?’

  ‘Let’s eat. Tonight, Uncle, we’ll be human.’

  Venison steaks were to hand at once, jars of wine and spirit. A full-blown cherry tree exploded out of the ice and rained fruit on them. As they had long ago they made illusory naked girls gyrate in the fire-pot. When it proved too reduced a stage they installed a Jafn camp fire and the illusions danced there.

  ‘I like that one. She’s Olchibe.’

  ‘I like that one. And look, she isn’t black.’

  Guri tried to muscle off his own xenophobia. He had never much fancied any un-Olchibe women, even, Great God Guri forgive himself amen, the ones he once took by force. But it clawed at him to think of them, and he had paid expensively for his crimes. He tried to like another dancer.