No Flame But Mine

by Tanith Lee

  Was he sad? Yes. Was he happy? Yes. The mortal condition had grown stronger in him, he thought, the further from it he went. There was much to be thankful for. And things to do. But when?

  We wait, he thought distinctly.

  Precisely then Ruxendra turned from the dawn and cried back to him. ‘Listen! What’s that?’

  Curjai heard the call only in that moment. After she had heard it. He came to his feet.

  Oh, he knew who it was, what it was. It was the summons of his brother and king.

  He bounded up the hill and caught her to him. She laughed, all puzzlement. ‘What is it? What?’

  ‘I must go to him.’

  Immediately her face fell and her chin grew pointed. She knew who he meant.

  She was jealous. Would they never lose such inner sores?

  He kissed her, and the dog and cat were cavorting round them convinced some game was about to start.

  ‘If you go,’ she said, ‘I’ll never see you again.’

  She had reduced all things to the plane of ordinary mishap; the mundane.

  He would not have it from her now. He spoke in other terms.

  ‘Yes, Ruxendra, you will. In the morning, Ruxendra. We’ll see each other again in the morning of the New Day.’

  And then he was fire. She held fire in her arms unscorched, and then the fire became nothing, only the yellow of the sky to give her any light.

  The third recipient of the summons heard it last.

  And even as she heard it she felt herself lifted, as though in a vast hand. Up and up, over the park and the groves, higher than the tower of the goddess, into the sky.

  She could see to the edges of the island presently, the threaded streams of metal and barriers of dark, and of curlicued ice. In the east the sky was colouring.

  Azula was not afraid. A song of her childhood stole into her mind, one Beebit had sung in Azula’s earliest days when already she was like a child of seven or eight. In the song it was a twilight time not of evening but before the dawn, and the last stars had gone out leaving only the sheen of the white ice. A woman trekked across the ice waste and she saw the sun begin to come up, wan and yellow at the cold. ‘How shall I get any light or heat from that chilly sun?’ the woman wept. And the sun saw her, and that she sheltered a baby at her breast. Some cruel steader settlement had cast them out, the woman with her son, to die. But the sun took pity, and from his inmost heart he drew up a greater heat and a greater brightness, just for that one morning alone. And within the glow of the sun’s generosity the mother found her way to safety and the baby with her. ‘In the ice of twilight – twice the light of the sun – touched the earth like a father’s hand,’ Beebit sang. Perhaps she had recalled the song when, her own baby in her womb, she fled over the ice after the Death at Ru Karismi.

  ‘Ice twilight, twice light,’ sang Azulamni, lifted through the sky.

  Then she looked down and the isle was little as a pinhead.

  For a minute she was dismayed, but she raised her eyes and gazed only wherever it was she was going. Which was obviously out into the space beyond the earth, where Gurithesput had already gone and Escurjai, and where Lionwolf stood in the chariot, Zeth Zezeth held in his arm.

  Around the rim of the world the sun appears.

  To begin with the sun is a crescent, but already rays and blades of radiance strike out from it. Rainbows reel across the lens of vision. Only gods can stare directly at this.

  And the crescent grows. A half-sun now is visible, like a broken shield of white gold.

  Then the sun slips loose and all of it coruscates on the black of space, and the earth and the moons flare as if they were made of burnished glass.

  Lionwolf and the chariot and the snarling stamping wolves become burnished too. Strangely Zth does not light up at all. He curls there, a withered dry husk, mewing even now that he is cold, cold.

  Guri stands in space to Lionwolf’s right. He is in the place of a father, perhaps, as Curjai, positioned to the left, has the brother’s place. They have eyes only for the sun. Though it cannot sear or blind them as now they are, yet they are locked in awe of it. The extraordinary stars and moons are like playthings beside this glorious monster.

  Can it be this much fire can give only such slight energy to the world? It seems so. The world is frozen.

  The sun moves higher – or appears to move higher.

  Lionwolf turns and looks back and Azula, who is his daughter only in name, has arrived in the pageant of space, and she is looking not at stars or moons or even at the sun, but solely at him.

  ‘What is your name?’ Lionwolf asks her.

  Azula says, with a young woman’s pride, ‘Stealflame.’

  ‘Good. You must stand between the sun and the earth. When the fire breaks you must meet the fire.’

  ‘I know,’ says Azulamni who is Stealflame.

  It is true she does know, as if she always knew even from her first conscious moment, and perhaps in some way she did. She is quite calm. She contemplates her task and is aware she will complete it. She feels no fear. She is not one-third god but one full half, and her mothers are Chillel, but also Beebit.

  Therefore Azula has answered Lionwolf with seriousness as if to reassure him, and for a second this young father who is not grins at her. And then he cracks the reins over the red wolves’ spines, and the chariot races for the rising sun.

  In his wake two comets fly, Guri and Curjai.

  But Stealflame stays where she is, and regards the sun with her inky eye and her tawny eye. And under her feet the earth lies far below.

  He had begun, as the chariot rushed forward, to mutter, the old god Zth Zzth. ‘Have you seen a woman with a child?’ Despite his decrepit state the mutter was quite menacing. Lionwolf did not reply, but demonstrably in Zth’s warped unstrung memory someone did, for ‘You are lying,’ croaked the malign and withered locust. ‘Yet I cannot now go past your lie. We shall meet again. Then let us see.’

  In fact Zth was peering sidelong at Gurithesput, Great Gods of Olchibe, sprinting through space to the right. Zth had met before with Guri. But Zth’s cerebral exchange had finished. Another started. ‘How will you do it?’ If there had been the dregs of venom in his tones before, this time it was robust. ‘I shall not see to it.’ Though robust, more disjointed. ‘Did you not coerce me?’ gravelled the husk. ‘Do you think a human woman stupidly drowning in her yellow hair could tempt me? It was your power – yours, Nameless One. Lacking me, what is there for you? I will have you put out like the blown flame. They all do my bidding. They will destroy you.’

  The disc of the sun had grown much larger and was directly in front, on a level with the chariot.

  It was as if they rode headlong at a mirror reflecting only magma.

  Sheer vast scalding winds blew towards them out of the mirror’s mouth, and these were hemmed with flames. A type of roaring came from it too, and howling, like the voices of wolves and lions that were multitudinous and of stupendous size.

  The chariot-wolves shied. They tried to veer away. Supernatural as they were neither the rays nor the heat nor the noises could harm them, but all these things had at last made them afraid.

  Lionwolf hauled on the reins and brought the uncanny vehicle to a halt. There was no need to ride closer, perhaps had been no need to approach this near. He was intensely drawn towards the disc. He knew it, knew attraction finally was as such immaterial. They had only to wait a while, he and the sun.

  He glances at the wolves. They are tearing at their halters and at each other in their automatic desperation to escape. ‘Go, then,’ he says to them. The traces disintegrate. The creatures dash away, each alone, not a pack, vanishing under cover of the winds and spurts of fire.

  Zth lurches in Lionwolf’s detention. He screws round his neck and head and gapes at the old sun which is so appallingly brilliant.

  ‘What,’ says Zth, stretching out his hand, ‘what is that?’

  ‘The sun,’ answers Lionwolf without emph
asis.

  Zth turns back again and stares up at Lionwolf with eyes that are almost no longer to be seen themselves and which, unmistakably, have become almost sightless.

  ‘Warmth,’ says Zth. ‘Make me warm.’

  The Lionwolf looks down into the face of his enemy. His own face is unreadable. There seems nothing behind it, certainly no triumph and no rage.

  ‘Yes, Father,’ he replies. ‘You shall be warm.’

  In his dream the sun had lain below and into it he had hurled the fiend Zeth Zezeth, who had sired and hunted and tortured him and so many others for his sake. But in this waking hour Lionwolf only gathers Zth more firmly in his arms. And the wizened remnant of the god puts up the wires of his arms to clutch Lionwolf, to hold on to him more tightly.

  And then Lionwolf leaps upward from the chariot, and as his feet strike it in passing it bursts in bits that, like the wolves, shoot away beyond the moons and stars.

  Lionwolf is speeding, himself a star of fire, golden and crimson in an aureole like volcanic corundum, straight, straight as a spear, for the heart of the sun.

  On the canvas of space, hammered there like two immovable polished nails, Guri and Curjai can only behold his flight. They must not, perhaps cannot, shift.

  Countless distance beyond and beneath, Stealflame is surprised by none of this.

  Lionwolf rushing to the target, his burden in his arms, cleaves through corona and photosphere, through bands of smolt-white and melt-pinkened gold, through moments of incandescent lava and gaseous magnesium, spindrift of neon and respiring torrefaction. Eruptive scarlet splinters. Fire becomes fire. Winged with atomic light sun collides with sun.

  For an instant, nothing.

  Nothing detectable left of the Lionwolf or of Zth. Nothing to distort the sun’s mirror or the pitchy mute surround of space.

  A tiny hollow sizzle of sound starts up. It is like a gnat. Then like a pot hissing on the hearth.

  The hiss grows.

  It swells.

  An orchestra squalls suddenly in heaven – every instrument of chaos screaming.

  And space rips open as the mirror sun explodes.

  Curjai does not move. He becomes red fire. Guri, unmoving, becomes white fire.

  All the skin of the airless ether is blistering with a hideous beauty. The moons dissolve to whitest silver, and drip.

  Below and below the globe of the world blushes like blood.

  And the blast of the fire gushes out and down – and a single slender object is interposed.

  Here is the one called Stealflame. Here she is, extending her arms and screaming back into the screaming torrent of annihilation – almost just as she did on the riven hail-heap at Kandexa, challenging the lightning.

  And as the lightning had done so does the laval onrush of the sun. It clashes together in century-wide segments and bolts of bonfire, shrieking and spurling, and falls on her.

  Stealflame receives it.

  Though she is crying out, this is no lament as it was in the past. This is triumph, enough for Lionwolf and for all the world.

  The screech of fire goes through her again and again, through her and through. With each assault on every side it erupts out of her too, but then dissipates in fading rivers of soft rose-red and a few gigantic handfuls of dying sparks.

  Stealflame stays fixed, greeting and grabbing and taking in the fire, all the expended overspill might of a rejuvenating solar disc. Taking and defusing, earthing the sun.

  What does she feel now, the goddess’s child, Beebit’s daughter?

  Nothing unique. Only enjoyment and a sort of drunken smugness as the destruction of the world reaches out, meets her, and is destroyed by her. By her.

  This then is her magic.

  Stealflame steals the flame, and inch by inch, miles by miles, the vault of space lets go its cacophony of fulmination, its blaze of noise.

  In a while through the dark red aftershock, night rises again and fills space with the coolth of black. Over the disc of the sun a black panther of night casts herself down, seizing the flames of it in her jaws, and the fire must bend and bow to accept her.

  The moons cease to smoke and steam and run. They too cool and harden to their former shades, bone, silver, milk-gold, slate.

  To the left Curjai stands in his fire, and to the right Guri in the centre of a forming planet which is his own.

  Slowly, like sighing, the sun achieves equilibrium once more. Until it too is standing up there in blackness, garlanded with its flames that are new as a child’s first breath. The sun is clean and very, very bright. It rests on the breast of night, and silence comes back as it always must and will, between one great shout and the next.

  Over eastward of the earth the dawn is climbing, and she also is gazing up to watch the sun.

  What a sunrise it had been. Had any not been woken and gone out to look? The sky, first nondescript, became splashed all over by vermilion, so rich and total a colour that some grew alarmed at it. Everywhere dogs had yowled, other beasts cried out in their own way. But then the dye was rinsed off, the skies became serene. The ruby light that was like the symptom of a disastrous inferno in heaven drained from the earthly landscape, between hills, along rivers of ice and snow, and from the staring eyes of humanity which had clambered on to roofs or into towers to see. Even from the closed eyes of those who slept or had taken refuge under blankets it washed away, and left them in peace.

  During the succeeding minutes before the sun fully rose several noted an uncharted star, flashing as diamond, going over to the west. In the Ruk they knew Ddir the Artificer had set the star for them. It had the shape of a man, the star. Or some said it was like a lean hunting hound; it was a dog star, which ran before the sun barking with glitter into the morning. In Kol Cataar, when the star returned afterwards at every dawn and sunset, they called it Firefex, the Phoenix. In Olchibe they called it Guri. Which meant Star Dog. It was, there, as if the name, an ancient one, had only been waiting for a proper subject.

  Through that first roast then watered orchid dawn, one shooting star plunged to earth. Ddir patently had not made this one, or, if he had, had dropped it. It was like a torch, and threw after it a trail of argent particles on the lightening sky.

  As it descended, did the star perceive the world? No doubt it did. It had a vested interest.

  Displayed: the Southern Continent, balanced icy on the icy ocean that only grudgingly gave on shadowy liquid green. Islands lay north and west. Further on a second continent reclined, just like the first in its ice if not in shape. Down to the south-east other larger islands spread, and then another continent unfolded its white carpet among the ice floes and open water.

  Unallied with any of this, there was now something else.

  High up towards the crown of the world’s globe, the northern pole housed a fourth, lesser landmass.

  Reconnoitred from immensely far aloft, it seemed also more oddly shaped.

  It was in the form of a horned whale.

  But the shooting star fell on in the way of shooting stars.

  Stealflame shot from the etherium rejoicing and wild in her incendiary panoply, her right hand open and her left closed in a fist.

  She knew what the landmass was. It had been built from the leviathan Brightshade.

  And because Brightshade could now release his astral being whenever he wished and without hindrance do whatever he wanted, his physical body was anchored like his luxurious palace in the ocean, ready always for his return. The body had indeed sequentially become a continent, though of modest proportions. The back of the whale had long been an established ecosystem and now, parked indefinitely, it mutated into a geography and biosphere of swamps and jungle-forest. Now too it was quite cold, but soon would be merely moderate. In any context, a surprising term to apply to Brightshade.

  Stealflame had saved the world and was skittish. She sang about twice-light.

  Below, a tall, dark-green plantation, coated only thinly with rime, invited her.

&n
bsp; Into the woods of Brightshade Stealflame descended.

  No sooner did her feet touch the ground than she herself was earthed. Stealflame, like the saved sky, regained serenity.

  Between the trees the terrain was covered in snow, but through this grass and herbs were protruding. Nearby a baroque assembly of elderly wreckage and skeletons had been grown over by lianas – an arbour. In a valley beyond the woods two broken ships, one with fifty masts, were changing to verdigris.

  There were no longer any regional effluvia, no rot or fishy stinks. With the advent of lush fauna Brightshade had become fragrant.

  The Children of Chillel knew most things now. Did Stealflame’s mental library suggest other past elements of Brightshade-land? Did eyeless monsters still dwell on his back? What lurked in the shrubbery? Nothing nasty stirred. Would it matter if it did?

  Using her inner senses, Stealflame cast downward instead through the whale’s earthworks to see if her step-uncle was in. But only a ticking of sentry mechanisms – lungs, heart, brain and suchlike – could be picked out. Himself was clearly off on a jaunt.

  However—

  Stealflame glanced up into the higher thicker woods.

  A large black animal – no monster; a cow? – was pernicketing its way through the trunks, sometimes pausing to pluck and chew the grasses.

  In the end the cow too glanced in Stealflame’s direction and stopped in its tracks. It was covered in thick curling wool and was not a cow at all but a gargantuan sheep.

  Stealflame stared, and the sheep thoughtfully stared back.

  The young woman had not checked her own appearance. Never mediocre now she was arresting. Her solar victory had turned her fawn skin to a deep gold, of all things most like the skin of her unrelated stepfather Lionwolf. Her hair was all purest silver. Only her eyes had not altered, one dark, one light.

  The sheep seemed to evaluate this.

  The girl wondered how it would react if she began to go towards it up the slope, because if it was here then people were too, surely. Stealflame felt a wish in herself to see some people. She wanted to prove they like the world had stood up to everything, were thriving.