No Flame But Mine

by Tanith Lee

FIVE

  When twilight lingered longer than two hours, eight or nine moons came up.

  They were very slender and gave slight brilliance. Nevertheless luminous shadows were cast in the gardens and groves of Zeth Zezeth’s flaming world. And in these shadows now and then, tiny cool fires glittered like watching eyes.

  Jemhara felt the dusk empowered her. She trusted her magical instincts. Though never Magikoy, yet her abilities were sometimes phenomenal. Looking back she had viewed them with bittersweet awe. They were the fruits of her life. Yet here in this part-death she surely kept their essence; perhaps, though unordered, they were much stronger.

  She contemplated her knack of shape-changing to a slim black hare.

  But she could not attempt that in Zth’s province.

  Instead Jemhara put out her finger and squirled open a miniature window in the crepuscule. She had learned, or guided herself to, this knack only a short while before, after her melancholy dream of Thryfe.

  Through the portal she beheld the earth. None could mistake it was the earth, snowbound and itself turning from the sun of day.

  Out of the earth-sky a gilded spear flashed down.

  It was the god himself, Zth.

  What was he doing?

  Curious, Jemhara observed him skittering along a frozen shore. Something vast basked against the plates of ice, between the ice fields and the moving ocean. Jemhara was reminded of a seal that sunned itself. But this creature was so large she could not make out what it was, only its mass, the citadel of a many-spurred horn—

  Then, something horrifying.

  It was like a bomb of the disappearing sunset that exploded back into the world. All was brightly lighted to a stark nothingness. And then darkness mopped everything up.

  Through the dark, which was too rapid for the natural end of day, fireballs bangled about and arching rays slashed the upper air. This did not go on for long.

  Things settled.

  Yet the sparkly little atomy that had been and was the god was bounding away and away, hemming the darkness and the shore like a lunatic mending.

  The creature she had thought like a seal seemed eliminated.

  From a continent’s distance a grinding noise started in the substrata of the sea …

  Jemhara smoothed over the pane of dusk. The eyehole was no more. She was glad she had seen nothing else, for surely the ranting little maleficent deity had caused some cataclysm, some strike that had no excuse, and so was unforgivable.

  Soon he would rush back into his own domain. The stench of his evil would be on him, enthralling as sunshine.

  Best prepare herself.

  She thought of the wicked bitch who had abused her in girlhood, and of others, of so many others. They processed before her mind’s eye. Vuldir, Sallusdon the king …

  Only of Thryfe she could not think, for to entertain his memory even for a second in such foul company was – unthinkable.

  Smoothing closed also all the cracks and ravines within her own mind. Smoothing, smoothing, Jemhara summoned a fountain from the dusk, glittery with the tiny shadow-stars, and bathed there.

  She experienced lightness and happiness as she did so. Next she enhanced the garments the god-thing had given her, and fashioned jewels from moon litter. As she arrayed herself, most other elements were discarded. Even the lightness, the happiness. How could they stay?

  Spangled and honed, Jemhara stole about the gardens. She was waiting, all prepared, as only once before.

  I am inside the ice. Again.

  The girl, no longer a girl, the woman of twenty-six or seven years, lay coiled among her covers and gazed up into the tapering pyramid of glassy freezingness.

  The familiarity of it might have angered her. But she did not feel anger. At least, she was angry only with herself and that in a makeshift way.

  Really it was pointless to lament over her deflowerment by Zth in the cold core of the sea, of her later imprisonment by fate – presumably – in the pyramid from which her Jafn husband had released her. Nor was it valid to complain of Yyrot’s worrying triangular bergs, stuffed with wheat and corn that died and went black.

  Tirthen would also logically make use of such uninspired retreats.

  Saphay threw off the voluminous covers of fur and silk. They vanished.

  She stood up naked and lovely and shook her hair.

  Tirthen was seated across from her, naked too, his attractions heart-stopping.

  ‘I shall leave this den,’ said Saphay. ‘Now.’

  ‘Why?’ asked the economic Tirthen, languidly.

  He was not like Zth. Less worshipped and therefore less formed and fuddled by mortal expectation, Tirth managed to maintain a vibrant, primitive forcefulness, a sort of genuine animal magnetism.

  As he rose, in each proper sense of the word, Saphay’s resolve dwindled.

  But she said, ‘I can dismiss your powers. I am not your prisoner.’

  ‘Dismiss me then. Like the last time. Such enjoyable dismissal. Let us be each other’s prisoner.’ After all, a hint of Padgish courtier-speak.

  Saphay broke open the side of the pyramid with a look. Indeed it did not have the resistance of the dome at the garth, or such resistance had been deemed superfluous. Probably the latter.

  Tirthen approached her in one step and drew her against him.

  The side of the pyramid sealed shut.

  ‘I refuse this,’ said Saphay as she wound her arms about him.

  Down among the rehabilitated furs and cushions they sank.

  A minor external snowstorm veiled the iceberg.

  I have been so long alone, she thought excusingly.

  What Winter thought goes unrecorded. Maybe little – he was an element. Yet, beyond the pyramid intermittent leaves split their chrysalids, a runnel of muscular water pushed from the ground. And the storm was feeble, more sleet than snow.

  Zth walked through his garden and it became again the heat of the day.

  He was full of himself, the god. He had done something momentous out in the world, and was warmed by his own ability. It had reminded him of his past when he had visited the limited sphere of the Ruk, lording it over mankind; his glory days. But why should he not regain all that? Everything he required would be given him.

  Zth had lost the coherent idea of the Lionwolf, and that the Lionwolf must be destroyed. Or that this had proved always impossible.

  Zth was in denial, which he discovered to be both ennobling and restorative.

  When he saw Jemhara, his acolyte and chosen victim, sitting in a shining shade, only the most amiable memories stirred of inter-species congress.

  Had he forgotten who she was, what she had done, what she had borne and birthed?

  Jemhara got up and came to him. She knelt on the path and obeised herself, her hair sweeping up the petals of fallen flowers.

  Sportive, for the hundredth time, ‘How tempting you are, Jema. You must go away or I can’t be answerable.’ He sounded quite elderly.

  Jemhara spread her body out at his feet.

  ‘Don’t send me away. How I love you, lord. Let me stay.’

  Zth paused. He felt, conversely, very young and polished. If he had her, he would kill her. But did that matter dreadfully? She had served her purpose … surely she had. He did not need the help of a woman anyway. That had only been his game. He was Zeth Zezeth. All she could ever be was a toy. And of course she loved him more than her paltry little life. It would be a kindness to oblige her.

  And look now, she was raising herself like a serpent, flexible and velvety, pleading with her wondrously depthful eyes. How enchanting her scent. It was natural to her, he had noticed before. Fragrant, and so clean, so clear – like the inner waters of the earth itself.

  ‘Let me die for you,’ he thought she said.

  Something stabbed in Zth’s inner awareness. He had a sight of subsea blue and a girl with lemon hair, and of how possessing her had robbed him of an intrinsic facet of his power. But that could not have happened,
or if it ever had he had repaired from it. They were only bits of clay, these mortals, they never lasted even when one was careful.

  ‘Then you shall,’ he said. ‘Die for me, that is.’

  As he lifted her up Jemhara’s eyes were brimmed with triumph. Presumably he did not see that either or misinterpreted it as well.

  Then all the marvellousness of this sexual contact drowned her. Within the tidal wave of supernal ravishment only the slightest fragment of her actual self survived, swept round and round in the maelstrom. It was such a minuscule crumb. Even she could barely know it.

  There had been nothing like this when she lay with wretched King Sallusdon, allowing him to enter her and use her as he wanted, while inside her vagina she had previously inserted a rare thaumaturgic pessary. To its venom she, having taken the antidote, was immune. But Sallusdon, King Paramount, was poisoned.

  All her life, shallowly lived or profoundly, seemed to have tended to these two paired deeds, the regicide of a king, and now this deicide.

  Zth would not exactly die, it was true. Nevertheless some essential aspect of him was about to be corrupted, corroded and ruined.

  Yet how could that be?

  Jemhara’s flawless core harboured no poison now. What earthly poison anyway could harm Zth?

  Somewhere among fields of light, illimitable conclusion raced towards the woman and the god.

  Another sound that had no sound rang through the air and the unworldly soil. The sunflower sky tore end to end. A sort of matt bleeding soaked out there, dimming everything.

  Zth started back. It was far too late. He had spent himself against the woman’s womb, and she herself, all of her, burned up and flowed and separated to a sequined pollen. Nothing was left of her, nothing left of beautiful Jemhara, no particle or tint, for even the pollen was fading now, sucked down by the thirsty fake of Zth’s landscape.

  And Zth was hopping, springing, dancing a fever-dance of wizening and withering, twisting as he did so in an invisible but hungry furnace. He was becoming a locust, a grasshopper. Brown and brittle like burned grass, like a single grass-stalk pulled from a hearth, charred, his radiance flaking from him.

  She had come to understand her own ultimate weapon as he had come to forgetfulness. For Jemhara had borne the Lionwolf. She had carried him inside her a year and more and brought him forth fully a god. It was not a poison this time in her loins, but an extraordinary panacea, inimical to such a creature as Zth, as pure fire must be to impure gold.

  Zth the locust sizzles away over the ups and downs of his private terrain. A greasy unwholesome smoulder is rising from his passing, and all the while the private sky above is growing more sallow.

  Saphay had also contained a damaging power for him when they coupled, but she, having a purpose even if unrevealed to her, survived the union.

  Jemhara’s purpose, however, is fulfilled, and she has not survived. Jemhara, whose blood had held the scent of clear water, whose eyes had held a depth in which eternity might be seen, had served clarity and eternity, and was dead. Jemhara is dead. Is dead.

  Tenth Intervolumen

  Since Today is weary and would like to sleep, kiss Tomorrow awake.

  Found on the wall of a hill-brothel:

  Simisey

  The city was like a baby: it kept getting bigger, and the noise it made too got louder and more demandingly urgent. Whether you loved this kiddle or not, sometimes you were daunted. Great God Guri certainly was.

  How many decades had elapsed by now? He had heedlessly not properly made a note. And he detected errors too in the priestly or mercantile reckoning of Sham itself. Probably it was around ninety or a hundred years since they built the temple to him. There was a slab of fossil coal in the holy sanctum that pronounced it much longer, but then there was a woven cloth behind the altar that counted it at only six decades.

  Time, to Sham, was adaptable.

  He had wondered, time-traveller that he had become, if he was to blame for that too.

  Even so the bough he had left on Kitten’s little tomb, though it had changed to adamant, had somehow also grown. It was currently a big gnarled tree, with no leaves but stony purplish fruits. When they fell they made a clank. Remembering how she had played with the first fig made him sorrowful.

  Why had she died? Surely all the others had not subsequently died simply through coupling with him?

  Sham gave him a headache anyway with its row. Not that it was a real headache, yet it ached.

  That morning he was standing by the fig tree looking at the tomb, and he wore the disguise of an elderly gladiator-master. When a woman approached and spoke to him sotto voce he took it for the usual thing. Despite his various disguised and often nasty appearances, women were still attracted. He always resisted now, frightened of causing them hurt.

  This one though, he thought, half glancing round at her, it would not be a vast sacrifice to forgo.

  ‘Ah?’ said Gurithesput unhelpfully.

  ‘Bow me,’ said the woman, very low. ‘Give me.’

  ‘Be off, you harlot,’ grumbled Guri. And from nowhere a bolt of energy swiped him. On this occasion it did not floor him, he was a god, but he staggered nevertheless.

  Guri flung round. He knew who it must be, and a nearly welcome irritation spurred him on.

  ‘What in Hell are you at here, you old blather?’

  As long ago, she grinned. ‘Old not now. All me young. God I, like Gurithesput.’

  ‘All right, very well. You’re young, young as a fine morning. What do you want?’ And reluctantly an inner voice said to him, You should be nicer. She assisted you once.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Ranjal, goddess of wood. ‘Give.’

  ‘Great fucking God me amen,’ cursed Guri, and threw a handful of nothing before her. To his astonishment it instantly became a heap of vulgar gold trinkets, ribbons and sweetmeats.

  Ranjal, who always insisted on nothing and nothing but, stamped upon and squashed the pile to silt, and glowered at him.

  Guri stood there. ‘Well. So you see. I got it wrong. I’m not much of a bloody god I can tell you, old lady.’

  ‘Learn better be,’ said Ranjal.

  ‘If I could.’ He turned away and gazed gloomily at the fig tree.

  Ranjal spoke again, very low still. ‘Who you think make on grave-spot tree to grow?’

  ‘I,’ he said dully.

  ‘I.’

  ‘You? Why would you …? It’s a girl I had and she died – you never—’

  ‘See you sad, I. Ranjal sorry. Make the tree. I goddess of wood, remember you. Tree to remind you dying is lying. Can tell you where,’ wheedled Ranjal, ‘your Kitten born back—’

  ‘Don’t. Don’t tell me.’

  ‘Not trust self you now? What fool is he, Gurithesput. She not die of you. Just die. Some do. Die young. You her make happy so she go glad and easy.’

  ‘Do you say the truth?’

  ‘Why fib?’

  ‘You might. What do you care what makes me grieve?’

  Ranjal said, ‘Before, I tell you. Ranjal-Narnifa I, and you make it for me that I become god.’

  ‘I never meant to,’ he said sheepishly.

  ‘Who care? Is done.’

  ‘Then it’s done. What do you want now?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Ranjal, abruptly and startlingly with a sort of witty female slyness that was alarmingly unmistakable.

  She was interested in him, it seemed. In the romantic way.

  And now he fully looked at her—

  Her badger hair was brushed and scented and had been made quite magnificent. Young indeed, the mottled effect of her skin, fawn and pale, was glossy and healthy, if odd. Her eyes sparkled. Her teeth were no longer wooden: somewhere she had bothered to redesign them white and clean in a fresh pink mouth. Though big she was … buxom rather than hefty. Her very large round breasts pushed invitingly at the woollen cloak she seemed to wear. And her hands, though many-fingered, were cunningly shaped and graceful, and unnervingly
suddenly suggested all sorts of erotic extra-fingered possibilities—

  Guri stepped back and the fig tree slammed him across the shoulders and head.

  A fig dropped with the usual clank.

  To his total dismay, Guri had found himself vastly aroused. He had just recollected, too, the dancer he saw in the fire on the plain with Lionwolf. It had been this one. It had been Ranjal goddess of wood.

  ‘With me now, come. We sport a bit.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Guri and nearly groaned at the pain which shot through his balls at the evasion.

  ‘Give me,’ said Ranjal.

  Great God amen.

  ‘Not – here—’ stuttered Guri, sweating his enticing sweat and seeing her nostrils widen appreciatively. She too he must admit smelled glorious—

  She rested one finger of the many on his chest.

  The temple rocked. A sort of earthquake dislodged on all sides showers of gilding, brass votaries, plates of coal, scores of stone figs.

  The responsive noise of screams and alarmed shouts and running feet was audible all around.

  ‘Stay yourself, girl,’ grunted Guri, ‘not here. We’ll bring the whole building down.’ Both she and he smirked, a youth and damsel nearly caught out in the fruit shed.

  He put out his hands and gripped her. Oh, she felt like the Rukar Paradise. ‘This way.’

  It seemed to Gurithesput, Dog Star Lit Among the Nights, that he was aiming to spirit them back to that plain where he and Lionwolf had played at being human. It might have seemed like that to Ranjal too, for she had stalked Guri there. For sure, it was a plain, but if he or she had looked they were north of the mountains, and not therefore even non-physically in mutable, generous Kraagparia.

  Guri did not guess this. He had tried to avoid causing damage. Now all he could think of was sex. Most of a mortal century, and the gods knew how much supernatural time, he had kept abstinent.

  Down among the white blankets of the snows they hurled themselves. Warm as new-baked bread they found each other. Oh the touching and caressive grabbing, oh the thighs and breasts and loins and mouths and apertures and nooks, and oh the waves of lovesome lust that sent the top-snow itself into incessant javelinesque ejaculations.