No Flame But Mine

by Tanith Lee

  An avalanche or two slipped slowly down the higher slopes. Brief hurricanoes whipped and whirled.

  As frenzy subsided a sigh-like wind combed over all, optimistically tidying.

  ‘I shan’t be faithful,’ said Guri staunchly. He felt he owed her the non-promise.

  Ranjal, who herself was apparently rather more than in their past, remarked, grinning her white teeth, ‘Not want faithful. Want nothing, I.’

  ‘Was it a good nothing I gave you?’

  ‘Give again. I see.’

  After a while the combing wind gives up and leaves.

  The cold plain, warmed in curious ways, takes a tally. What has the cold plain received? The bawdy upheaval has scattered both electrical and man-made tokens widespread. For example shards of treasure from the temple, transported here inadvertently in the lovers’ stampede to get cracking. Among other things slivers of ornaments and filaments of wood and stone – including several stone figs. There are coals, chips off the ancient fossil blocks that Sham, the city called None Greater, uses for screens and panels, doors and roads. There are too traces of less concrete items. Shreds of spells and prayers, woven or carven, or simply made nearly actual by verbal repetition, flit and roll and settle all about for thousands of miles. A random sprinkle of such stuff comes down as far away as the continent’s eastern hilt – Jafn country. But whole clusters thud and tinkle home across the nearer plain. While hitting the distant mountain range, now south, the odd spatter infiltrates a cave or two.

  The god-charged artefacts and elements surely mean nothing in the broader scheme of history?

  Guri has already been about this plain of the past, searching for the Rukar civilization. During his first life in the future, the Ruk had been mighty. Up there had stood Ru Karismi, capital of kings. And from this land called Ruk Kar Is had ridden the Rukarian destroyers of Guri’s own people, who had mashed Sham to a mudhill. But in the past which is now, he has found no clue to them.

  When eventually they have partaken of enough, the two gods see evening is curtaining the world.

  By then everything else has settled, been absorbed. If they had in their delirium ever noticed the disturbance, now no evidence confronts them. All is well.

  Guri was relieved and sorry to see Ranjal depart. She flew off over the dusk in her old broomstick mode. It was most unlike the luscious companion of the day. She had her own people to attend to. And he, he supposed, would go back to Sham.

  Idly he bent and retrieved a piece of dark coal from the snow. Surely, not a memento?

  Otherwise he did cast one last look at the plain, yet failed still to recognize it.

  They had united in the Ruk’s heart, about two miles from the height which would, in less now than twenty years, wear Ru Karismi for its crown.

  If Guri felt any buzzing beneath his boots he took it for a slight subsidence in the permafrost.

  It was however the vibration of a hibernating civilization roused by divine sexnastics – and waking up.

  Two centuries of Winter, as they named the Ice Age, had driven these people below. The story of the earth, and of themselves prior to that retreat, became wrapped in the fog of drastic climatic change.

  Some code of conduct they managed to keep.

  This told them they had been, so should continue to be, couth and educated, a nation of hierarchies.

  Soldiers, hunters, land-workers gave respect to scholars and esoterics. Above these were kings, and above all the gods. For unlike the continent’s northern Chibe and Gech, the Rukarians were spiritually less confident.

  The undercity which they constructed against the arrival of the cold did not lie underground in quite that sense. A mountain supported their largest urban development, and in the mountain were adjacent mines. Into these they tunnelled, using up battalions of their soldiery and slaves. Here then were erected housing, thoroughfares, bridges, and vast rock chambers due to become markets, temples and palaces.

  As the ice established, they went to ground. Above, the original metropolis collapsed and vanished. Its wide upland river turned to ice more than a mile in depth. The surrounding region rose higher as the snows built it up. The mountain no longer looked like a mountain, only a hill perhaps. The rest all lay beneath.

  In this warren then the people of the Ruk lived on. Or died on. The Winter was unkind and they were slow to adapt. Because of that they started to elect three kings together, one the Paramount King, but with two others Accessorate. Should the King Paramount perish, as he often did, a replacement was to hand.

  They had some magic. Their scholars had already learned some. Incarcerated in the sub-mountain they practised more, and a selection among them with the most talent perfected certain aspects of utilitarian sorcery. The making of fire from air without the need to strike it was, unamazingly, one of the first developed skills.

  Meanwhile their attitude altered to their gods.

  The Rukarians ceased to like them at all, again through lack of self-confidence blaming the gods for the ice and snow, yet still of course fearing them, fearing them more. And so the number of the gods was doubled and redoubled to cover all potential of calamity, and besides each god came to have two sides, the benign and the malignant. The second was sure proof of human blame and fear, the first of nervous human hope.

  Adaptation progressed also as decades went by. It had to, or every creature not only in the undercity but in the world must have died.

  Into this static equation then fell the levinbolt from the adjoining plain.

  Gurithesput and Ranjal’s bit of ‘sport’ galvanized the central Ruk. An unseen rain of unhuman enlightenment penetrated the shortened mountain.

  From being a weakling among the surviving nations, the Rukarians grew over a space only of three or four years into a special race, their genes gold-veined with shining strengths. Not all were affected, naturally. But where the bounty landed it heightened in perhaps predictable ways. Among the ascetic scholarhood strains of spiritual and thaumaturgic genius were sown, and came to flower. From this the order of the Magikoy was born. Among the kings and their military strata a warlike and grasping tendency pushed up. And from that was born the will to conquer and to steal.

  As the maguses called forth their servant genies, and constructed their robot golems and scrying oculums, the Ruk emerged from cover and built a modern capital on the banks of the frozen river. Tall, vital and aglow now with powers both mental and automatic, they looked about. Then they clothed the land with towns and steads, farms and industries. Later the laziness of pride would level much of that, but such an hour was not yet. Soon instead a brazen face of war turned north, and east. The fascist Ruk had remembered there were inferior peoples out there, some of them quite wealthy.

  The Jafn they had problems with. They were fighters and anyway their area was energized in its own wild way. What had fallen in their country had caused the Jafn make-believe to come alive: sprites, wind demons, vampire seefs and sihpps – a diabolic host of things – had channelled Jafn belief to one unimpeachable God. They were also toughened in more ordinary form. They proved difficult to subdue, and though the Ruk might spar with them for years, treaties would result, tricks would be resorted to. Jafn was not lightly digested and so the brazen face glanced elsewhere for more available bounty.

  It was in that era the Magikoy moved their headquarters into the abandoned undercity. They titled it the Insularia. Here they maintained their secretive cells of personal command and austere service to others. But here too, at some unexplained persuasion of the militant warrior nobility, they commenced study of a sorcerous armament.

  Deep in the chasms once employed for survival, the maguses of Ru Karismi constructed their deterrent. Long after the subduing of north and east, the arrest of Jafn development, the despoil of Chibe and Gech symbolized in the sack of Sham, that thaumaturgic weaponry lay in the heart of Ruk Kar Is.

  It lay there until launched, centuries after, against the Lionwolf and his thousands-strong Gullahamm
er-legion. The White Death of the weapons would decimate all the peoples of the continent, not excluding those of the Ruk. And it would itself sack Ru Karismi, changing that crown upon the height to a rubble, littered with sugars of broken coloured glass.

  He had taught them peace.

  He had meant only for the very best.

  He did not want them to incur the ego-wrath Hell he endured after his deeds in battle.

  Guri, Gurithesput. The once and future god of Olchibe.

  The strange thing that had already occurred to him was made more clear when for a longer while he kept outside the limits not only of Sham, but Sham’s present time frame. By his own estimation he had been there all told seven months, or a little more. It was true, aside from his earlier excursions, he had indulged absences with his mistress Ranjal, or even to sleep, which he did not need. Also he roamed about the city’s outer areas, its slums, the swamp beyond. But presently Guri consistently saw that time seemed to jump away, even when he thought he had been watching and aware of its passage. For example, a plant in a hothouse would have put on sudden fruits – or shed them – in what he took for a single night or, worse, a couple of hours. He next noticed an extra house for the priests built on to the temple. One morning it had simply been there, and weathered too, the product at least of half a year.

  Sham had rulers of sorts, a group of elders, priest-kings. Guri did not pay them much attention providing they obeyed his holy tenets; the concept of kings had been and stayed remote for Guri. Yet he manifested in the city one midday and found himself in the midst of an elaborate funeral for two very elderly rulers – whom he had seen, both of them, hale and youngish only that morning. He had been close, too, out in the swamp looking at crocodiles. He had sensed nothing speeded up or odd. Yet some fifty years had evaporated.

  It made him dizzy, and uneasy. He fought to understand it and why it happened. He wanted to discuss the anomaly with Lionwolf, but did not want to slip off to some otherwhere to find him in case another time zone flooded away while he was gone.

  It seemed something was editing Guri’s era at Sham, and now forcing all onward at breakneck speed.

  Was he himself the culprit? Was an inevitable boredom in his residency now making him slapdash and over-hurried?

  But he did not even know where time was taking him, where he was heading.

  Guri felt fate tug at him like a worrying dog.

  And then.

  It was high noon and Guri was wandering a bazaar, disguised as a fat young merchant with a gaze for the girls.

  Abruptly the sky blinked.

  There was no other way to describe it. A vast eyelid flicking down over the eye of the sky with its iris of bright sun, a moment of nullity. Then up the lid went again and everything was as before.

  A quaver of consternation spread over the market, rumbled through the whole city. On all sides animals howled and lowed and screeched. People who had turned to each other in fear, wondering what had happened to their vision or minds, now realized with added terror they were not alone: the effect had been common to all the city – perhaps to the world.

  As for Guri, his memory only plunged him back-forward in time to that last battle below Ru Karismi. Everywhere then the rush and tumult of human warfare – and next a glimmer like softest lightning – a sound that quenched even the roar of the Gullahammer – a thunder that passed to silence. And the silence white – and white was, white whiter than whitest snow, white beyond whiteness, black, the night that cancels all days.

  The White Death, end of that first world. End of that first true faith.

  Although the blink of the sky over Sham was not really like that, yet it was precisely similar. It was, he knew, the same horror, even if in a different shape.

  While the crowd collected itself, laughed the event off or hurried to the temple, and some frightened bells and brass pots and gongs were beaten, Guri fled behind a wall and vanished. He blew northward, knowing also exactly where to go.

  There had been legends here and there in his former life. In Gech certainly, and among the vainglorious Rukar with their clever maguses and myth of magical super-weapons.

  High up he crossed the swamplands, and sped into the northern wilderness beyond. He saw villages and settlements. The region was sparsely but not emptily populated. The beehive dwellings however wore the look of tombs, and nothing moved.

  How long now had passed? Minutes? Guri checked the sun’s position. But the sun too seemed stuck where he had seen it from the bazaar.

  Then he beheld some dead animals far down among ice-net willows, and an ape high in a mangrove much nearer, but also dead.

  A wind was blowing out at Guri from the north.

  To start he had not assessed it. He had taken it for the rush of air against him as he flew. But soon it was very strong. Then liquid rivers of boulders gushed past him. Some even smote him, doing nothing to him – a couple shattered on his godish hide – but they were big. Many crashed down to the ground, broke, and then he saw they had been larger than he calculated.

  A pack of wolves was running far beneath, howling like the dogs in Sham.

  Guri, in an instinctive and maybe petty gesture, cast a lasso of protection about them. They streamed away into the ice-jungle not knowing they would be saved.

  Trees had snapped; they lay dying.

  The cold was savage now, no longer like cold, more like scalding.

  A rock chunk the size of a small moon, dressed with wrecked shrubberies and jagged caves, slammed by. It had been the top of a mountain.

  So Guri beheld the mountains of the north. They seemed to be in a cauldron of hurricanes, boiling there like vegetables, white and brown.

  Then the wind stopped. It did not drop or sink away. It was the effect of a lung that had exhausted its contents.

  Anything other than a god would have been dashed headlong to the earth. All about him Guri witnessed such dashings – mountainsides, slain birds.

  And by now the mountains were a ghastly sight, all chipped and cracked like old crockery, with all the wrong angles to them, the balance of centuries dislodged.

  He knew that despite this there would be a vast plateau still extant, held up high among them like a table-surface. Prehistoric this table-plateau, but now polished and laid for death.

  Snow was falling when he got near. It fell straight as pins from brown sky to white land.

  Had any lived here before? Perhaps. In the later time when Guri had first been born, the nomadic Urrowiy had migrated back and forth only over that tableland. Ask the snow what it is, sang the Urrowiy to their children, as the dog-teams of the future moved, and the bones of ancestors grumbled in their lacquer caskets,

  Ask ice, wind, sea and sky,

  Ask also the whale, the crait, the bear and the wolf,

  Ask wisely, not one will not tell you name and self …

  But what am I?

  They had come to know, it seemed, if nowhere else but in their lullabies. The meaning of the little song was now revealed in awesome horror. For what it really told was of the great white silent voice which had spoken on the plateau. And which had said: Go ask the snow and the ice, the wind, sea and sky what has been done to them. Go ask the beasts and they will show you they are dead. And I, mightier than all, what am I? I am the Death. I am the causer of this.

  What fell on the plateau in the north mountains was a bitter, beady little snow, harder than flints. It would never melt or fundamentally alter. It would become the inimical ice-sand of the north desert called the Great Uaarb.

  Guri did not go all the extra distance to look.

  He turned back to Sham, closing his sight against the rumpus and shambles in between.

  By the hour he returned over the outer swamps, time had passed. The sun was setting. It was blisteringly cold and snowing here too, flakes and feathers, nothing abnormal, and nothing lay dead – or no more than usual. The breath of the calcined Uaarb had not reached the city.

  But some nights
and days had gone by, so much was evident now he had detected time’s trickery.

  Guri sat atop the Copper Gate, watching the ordinary sun go down. He knew the Magikoy from the Ruk must have journeyed through this country, perhaps even gone through Sham itself, unseen by his supernal perceptions. Naturally they too had been incinerated in the north mountains when their experiment took place. Conceivably they had become part of the falling bitter little snow.

  Others of their kind would nevertheless have picked up the pith of the event, its ‘success’, through their oculums. They would anyway have guessed it was a dangerous mission. Why else send any of their genius magicians so safely far from the Ruk?

  Guri racked his brains. He was trying to find the after-image of Rukar Magikoy in Chibe or Gech terrain. But he could not. And backward time here in the past was always murky. He did not strive very long. He had learned some while before that endeavour was not always rewarding.

  The weather improved. Sham bloomed.

  There was no plague, no striding ruin. In the nearby surround of country people went about their lives. Only now and then news came of a distant storm that had brought sickness on its wings. Finally, spasmodically, a few hundred refugees entered the city. They were from intermediary land, far enough from the mountains to ensure that the scythe had merely glanced over their heads. And though afraid in subtle, deep-rooted ways, their fear went off. Absorbed in Sham they resumed their vocations and trades or took to inventive begging.

  He saw one Gech woman from the farther wilderness, who brought her two small sons to his altar in the temple for protection. Guri noted the boys were more scared of this adult god-person than of any remembered tempest. He came down and spoke kindly to them, dressed as a priest. Blessing them he made sure each, mother and kiddles, received cure-alls and long life. Sod bloody Lionwolf and his scruples about healing and benison. Even now Guri suspected his adoptive nephew had transcended too fast and so not grasped the facts of a hard life.

  But when Guri tried to extend his help across the whole city he felt his power waver. He too had been curtailed, though by what he did not know. By life itself perhaps, always in cahoots with death.