No Flame But Mine

by Tanith Lee

  Disconcerting himself slightly he saw she was quite a hefty female, with uncouth billows of dark hair. She kept drawing his eye. He could not fathom it. ‘Is she one of your inventions?’

  ‘That one? She seems familiar.’

  The dancer with rowdy hair flaunted and winked at them, then vanished with a sharp crack. Out of the camp fire whirled a tangled twig. It must have broken off the cherry tree.

  The moons swung over.

  The gods lay on furs and bundled grass. The mammoths chewed calmly nearby. Guri told Lionwolf stories. Lionwolf told Guri stories.

  ‘Shall we sleep?’

  ‘Let’s sleep. Tonight we’re human.’

  ‘Does it sadden you, Lion – does it make you afraid … it used to, I remember that, being a god.’

  ‘Everything alive, if it can think, may be afraid of itself. No, I left my fear in Hell. I left my self there. Now I’m no-self. Self-less, Guri, as I was Nameless, once.’

  ‘But you – love.’

  ‘I am love. Fire and warmth and hope and health and love.’

  ‘Then how—’ Guri faltered.

  Lionwolf provided the question. ‘Then how do I love the ones I truly love?’

  ‘You and I, Lion,’ said Guri in a little voice. ‘That boy-god in Hell – what was his name? Escurjai – Saphay your mother – and she – your black goddess? Or should we just be jealous now, lumped in with all things, loved equal, no one worse, or better?’

  Lionwolf laughed. The stars flashed, looking earthward to bask in the properties of the laughter.

  ‘I’m no longer a man, Guri, but yet I am a man, still.’

  ‘Ah? A word game.’

  ‘Who passes,’ said Lionwolf, ‘it’s yourself. No, I am here and you are there. Yet I am there, you here. If you leave me I shall have left myself.’ The fire crackled. No one danced in it now. It was like a flake of the sun mislaid in midnight. ‘All of us, all things, are one. The material which made us is the same, even if each of us is fashioned in unlike ways. The snow is the moon and the moon is the sky and the dark is the day, and the day the dark. You are Lionwolf, Lionwolf is Guri. A man dying a million miles from us is you, and myself, and we are him. A woman giving birth below the mountains is Chillel, and Chillel is Lionwolf and Lionwolf is the woman giving birth. All equal, Guri. Equal. But this equality is in every instance unique.’ Lionwolf raised his right hand into the moonlight. ‘There is my present lover, Guri. My crude and basic born and man-made instrument of wankery. But I am Chillel. My hand – is Chillel. And when I find her again as she is, all things will be there in her. I shall love her best, and all things therefore best. When I kiss her mouth, I shall kiss every lover, every friend, the lips of the earth and the sky, of space and of eternity. But Uncle, as you know, any worker or soldier or king who lies tonight with his own lover does the same. As so does he or she.’

  The trees murmured, tilting stars in their branches. Leaves had eased from the ice. By sunrise they would be withered but for now they softly sang. The phantom mammoths snuggled, and observed the night wind blow, like dreams, along the plain.

  Back where the mountains, Kraag’s barrier or not, braced the sky, another shadow had shown itself. It seemed to have been cast by some colossal, otherwise invisible planet far overhead. Enormous and semi-transparent, the shadow had eclipsed most of the mountain range.

  Now and then a huge lamp, or two huge lamps, gleamed from the front sides of it. Eyes?

  Brightshade’s released astral body lies on the bony breast of the crags, waiting for morning to draw near his brother.

  This is partly reticence and proportionate unease, plus egoism. Yet he has picked up something of Lionwolf’s monologue.

  Brightshade, musing on its shapes, is puzzled, yet grows rather less reticent, uneasy and solipsistic.

  He too scans the stars and the moons, and every so often a peculiar and to him minute figure, crunching about in the top-snow of the plain. Is this another tree that has not only woken up but begun to walk? Or is it an oversized badger? That it is able to be noticed at all on such a night implies some freakishness in its make-up. For even if all things are one, the fashioning of this one thing is unlike. Unrecognized, another goddess not remotely resembling Chillel is stamping cheerily southward. She has her eye on Guri, from whom she expects, as usual, absolutely nothing.

  TWO

  Five panthers entered the Chilleling camp. Two ran straight at Guriyuve, leaping over other men to reach him. Two bounded at Sallus. The hideous trance had overcome each of them already. But somehow both Guriyuve and Sallus put up a brief fight before they too slumped down and the white teeth closed on them.

  Azula alone, up in a tree, did not experience this paralysis. She stared terrified from her bough, involuntarily twitching to throw herself over on to one at least of the cats. But a pair of icy, luminous eyes now held hers. The fifth creature had climbed half up the trunk towards her. Its mask was opaque fur, only the eyes and paler patch of nose to be seen, and then the silvery slit of its undone mouth. The rumble of threat was so low she seemed to hear it sounding in her arteries.

  The fifth cat kept her in place by this irresistible method until the other four had dragged their captives from sight.

  Then it made a kind of grin at her. Like a segment falling from the night it was gone.

  Azula tumbled down the tree. Only her double-jointedness saved her from injury.

  The other men were reviving, groaning, some crawling or staggering aside and spewing violently.

  She stood screaming at them – Hurry, hurry, we must go after. Somewhere in the trees she heard Guriyuve’s mammoth trumpeting. Its outcry seemed as redundant as her own. For none paid any attention. The ones who heard her turned from her in a combination of contempt and shame. Go after? What point? Draw near the liopards, the beasts of night, and the abysmal trance would drop on them again. Helpless they were and would stay so. There was nothing to be done.

  Azula abused them, shouting, kicking at them.

  Her own former trance, brought on by Beebit’s death, had evaporated in this hellish country. After her mother Sallus was the only one who had ever genuinely and compulsively seemed to care about her. He was her true sibling. They had travelled far together, albeit silently, in spirit as much as in the physical world.

  She bent suddenly and lifted the chaze snake from where it lay among the tree roots. It had been coiled up with Sallus, somehow sloughed or thrown clear as he was seized.

  It hung a moment like a dead rope on her arms, then quickened and curled about her, its head and ticking tongue against her throat.

  ‘You and I then, brother,’ said Azula to the chaze.

  Fast as any liopard the girl sprang out of the camp, through the trees and up the rising ground beyond.

  She was unused to running over such terrain.

  The turf and flowery grasses impeded her. They felt more precarious than the most slippery or crumbling snow. Sinews spread from trees into the ground; unseen rocks and stones were obstacles she jumped high to miss.

  She thought she might see the mammoth running as she was. There was no sign of it.

  The liopards and their prisoners had vanished. Vague tracks bruised out in undergrowth seemed to indicate their progress. But other animals moved in the night: sombre deer, a clan of which she noted gazing at her from a wood; lizard-things as large as dogs. These too might have created the tracks.

  Yet Azula had seen the higher hill where a tower seemed to be, and how it had been weirdly lit as if by a small internal moon. She guessed the liopards went there. Chillel the bitch goddess was there. And the cats were her beasts. Besides, in a story, the hero must always go to such a tower, the tower of a god, even if he was a man and a warrior – even if he was a she, and a woman acrobat. Beebit had told her such a tale, Azula thought. And in it there had been three towers. The echo came to her as she ran. A tower of the sun that glowed gold, a tower of ice with crops in it, and one of cloud in the sky. Yet there
was another tower too; that one caught fire and burned.

  And then there was this tower, which shone silver.

  Now it did not shine.

  The lamp was out.

  Obverse of a beacon then, the blind spot seemed to signal: This way, this.

  A band of groves, loose-linked as crowds of persons holding out their hands to each other, spread across her route. About to dash forward between the low branches Azula halted.

  There was more to the trees than boughs and black foliage. Emerging from the blackness flowed another blackness featuring three gleaming dabs of light and next a slit of light that growled.

  Beebit’s daughter did not draw her knife.

  She danced on the spot, twirling over into a cartwheel that bowled her directly at the liopard. With a snort it flung itself aside, hunching down into a snarling heap. The chaze, which until now had effortlessly coiled her, let go and sought the closest burrow. Azula did not realize.

  ‘Here, puss! Hey, puss! Not scaredy are you?’

  Azula’s voice was shrill with fear sublimated to anger.

  She spun at it again and the great cat pleated itself away, raking the air with its claws. It missed her, and she came at it again and again. Over and over the manoeuvre was repeated. Every time the claws were seconds too late.

  ‘You’re only a big stupid kitchen cat! Can’t catch a mouse! Have to hunt humans! Poor thing!’

  Springing from cartwheel to handstand Azula slapped the liopard across the muzzle with her left foot and next her right hand, and reeled off once more.

  What happened then almost robbed her of her perfect balance.

  Rocking home on her heels she stared at the liopard, which slowly rolled over on its back and lay limp-pawed and quiescent, looking at her sideways from quicksilver eyes. The growling had altered to a throbbing purr.

  A trick?

  It was the beast of the bitch. Probably it could reason, even if only to a limited extent. Azula would neither approach it nor flee, nor would she stay put. She shot up one of the low trees and the chaze shoved itself out from the roots and rushed rippling after.

  Again Azula glared down into the mask of the fifth panther. The snake looked over the branch too.

  Chillel’s beast rose, shook itself, padded to the tree and there rubbed itself, flanks and back and face, releasing from its pelt a feral scent of grass, meat, fur and the tenebral.

  Then it lay purring under the tree, singing them a lullaby, smiling up at the girl and the serpent with half-shut, mercury eyes.

  Fenzi had reached the tower hill inside two hours.

  He had been shepherded by the nine cats that followed him. Never had they accosted or attacked, nor did the trance overcome him; plainly he raced towards the pen intended for his keep.

  Only when he gained the slope of that ultimate hill did he see the sheen of renewed light. Against this the tower was evident. It looked blacker than the dark but not as tall as he had reckoned. The architecture was not unique. Also the glamour of brilliance was behind it not inside. There were no windows he could recognize.

  In the past now and then he had run as fast and for more impressive distances, but tonight he was exhausted.

  He had ceased to be afraid of the liopards.

  Everything, if he considered it – he did not – had given up its sensible meaning. There was no rationality here. And his own seemed to have been destroyed.

  He stopped about thirty strides below the summit. He breathed, breathed and waited for equilibrium, but though his lungs became glutted and less demanding, his mind was not appeased.

  Chillel.

  He thought of his mortal mother, the fisher’s wife, and how he had employed her as children do, caring, careless. This one above him in the tower, if she was, was unusable.

  Knowing nothing directly of the liaison of the Lionwolf with Chillel, even so Fenzi, now a man, felt the otherness of the female being. Darkness, moon, kindred, alien. Woman.

  Below him down the hill the nine cats too had ended their race. They were seated watching him. No doubt if he tried to leave they would prevent it.

  Simply walking now Fenzi went on towards the hilltop and the tower.

  Borne backward across the scroll of night, too warm, entirely dislocated, Sallus son of Bhorth, Guriyuve son of Ipeyek, were unable to thrust off the sickening stupor the beasts invoked. Momentum was illness. Night was Hell. Living was dying. Almost anything tortured for too long resists through non-resistance. Yes I will becomes the wall of adamant.

  At some boundary torture finished nevertheless.

  Fangs withdrew their scalpels, precipitation ceased. The stink of carnivorous respiration was replaced by the fragrant moisture of landscape free of snow, which was naturally no less inimical.

  All light was blotted out. The stars, which speed had coalesced in streamers of radium overhead, were now extinguished. At first the total dark was welcome. That did not last.

  Nausea slunk away. More comfortable, the two men must regain awareness. They did so. Then utter rage and panic filled the space. Each man clamped them in mental fetters.

  ‘We are in the tower.’ Guriyuve, coldly.

  Coldly Sallus: ‘This is another dimension.’

  ‘Rukar philosophy.’

  ‘Perhaps. But this isn’t the world. It’s beyond it – or inside it, some psychic cabinet we’ve been thrown in.’

  They got up after that and felt around the angles and openings of the prison. Although it had seemed lightless, now they thought they could see somewhat. Barriers of apparent stone contained them. These climbed up and up to a vault of nothingness. But three wide archways gave on other stone containments, and these in turn each had three fresh wide archways leading to similar areas, also with archways, also leading on.

  ‘A maze,’ said Sallus.

  ‘We must stay together.’

  They had already searched their clothing for any means to make flame. Sallus had possessed a flint, but it was missing. Guriyuve said, ‘A Crarrow birthed me. She could call fire out of her belly. Would the knack had passed to me.’

  Deliberately they vacated the first area where they had been sloughed by the cats.

  In a while Guriyuve remarked, ‘I can still smell her animals.’

  ‘You’re right. We’ve been drawn after them by their scent. Why not? Where they’ve gone we can go. There may be a way out. Yet it may not be any physical way.’

  ‘We have powers,’ said Guriyuve dully. ‘Even your sister-girl said that.’

  ‘Your sister-girl too. Azula.’

  ‘So. Very well.’

  They stood in the vaguely visible stony unness.

  Sallus said, ‘My powers aren’t tested. I grew up quickly. I killed a snake and it returned to life and stayed with me. Everything was quite easy. I never questioned until this thing came on me, this impulse to be here. And then I only obeyed her geas.’

  ‘More Rukar words.’

  ‘You know quite well what they mean. If I can pick the meat off the bones of your Olchibe hooting, you can tell what I say.’

  ‘Shall we try what we can do?’ said Guriyuve.

  ‘She – this Chillel – she’s reduced us to little boys, as our mothers never did.’

  ‘She makes all men fools. Even her lovers. The demon Lionwolf she turned into a clown. My father Ipeyek was a nomad. He travelled to be rid of her. When she got close to him again in his mind through me, he deserted me and travelled back alone to the Uaarb.’

  ‘My father wasn’t like that. He forgot her by staying put. Yet – he remembered her too. Yes, if I’m honest. He’d look at me, and think back to her. I can see it now. My real mother could see it then.’

  ‘But we’re men,’ said Guriyuve.

  Both of them put one hand on the nearest wall.

  There was no need to discuss this.

  Jointly they let the rage and panic off the leash and sent them headlong in every direction.

  The prison roared. Huge cracks and spl
interings resounded. Chunks of masonry burst outward. From above a torrent of stones and stanchions plunged down. But the debris was insubstantial as smoke, and the falling stuff like a deluge of dark feathers.

  When the dust settled they stood untouched in the middle of a vast open hall, like that of a king, but a king greater than the monarchs of dead Ru Karismi.

  Overhead the roof had become non-existent. The stars blazed. With an almost musical choreography, nine round white lamps of differing sizes circled and partnered and abandoned and crossed each other.

  ‘Are they moons?’

  Which of them asked this aloud? Both believed the other asked.

  Then from a long way off up the hall they beheld a woman, moving neither quickly nor slowly towards them. Limned by the moon-lamps she was slender and quite tall, clad in a colourless garment, with black hair budding and lustrous as a plant of the outer garden, heavily drifting out behind her to the ground. Her face they could not properly see. Even as she drew nearer, they could not see it. Was she veiled or masked? It did not seem she was. But everything else was exactly visible now, everything but for her face. She was black as they. She was Chillel. Chillel moved towards them. Chillel – and they could not see her face.

  Azula dreamed she had slithered down the tree in the groves, the chaze looped about her shoulders.

  In the dream this seemed quite a canny move.

  When she reached the liopard that lay calmly by the foot of the trunk, she stretched out her arm and the panther started running its head against her hand and wrist. She knew it was called a panther at this point.

  The feel of its pelt was like the shorter and more wiry grass, yet with a lushness woven in the coat that surprised her. The snake did not try to escape. Eventually the cat got up and she and it trotted, a sort of dog trot, towards the hill with the tower. Azula saw the glow had come up again behind the tower. It reminded her of the big cat’s eyes.

  Just then she woke up.

  Azula learned she, the chaze round her neck, was dog-trotting with the panther over the turf towards the tower.

  A liquid splash of fright went off inside her, covering her insides, heart, viscera and brain with abject dread. But next that washed away like water tipped from a bowl. She thought, It’s too late now.