No Flame But Mine

by Tanith Lee

  ‘Where’s your master, sheep,’ she called encouragingly as she started to advance. She did not levitate so as not to shock the sheep. But the sheep could have told her a thing or two about that. It tried to with an off-hoof bleat. But, ‘There, it’s only me, your friend,’ Stealflame reassured it presumptuously.

  ‘And which friend is that?’ said a woman’s voice from above.

  Stealflame stopped.

  In the shade of the frosted pines, eucalypts, flowering palms and pepper trees, she glimpsed a blacker shadow which perhaps held up a fiery torch.

  ‘Greeting, lady,’ said Stealflame. ‘What place is this?’ Although she knew it was Brightshade.

  The other seemed to know quite well herself, and that Stealflame did also.

  ‘Mine, and his own,’ she said nevertheless.

  ‘Yes, the whale’s land,’ agreed Stealflame. ‘But I meant what people have colonized it?’

  ‘You think there should be people here then?’

  Already Stealflame sensed there were, which was more than thinking there were. Exactly then, some way off, she heard a faint metallic clink of something, and then a rill of women’s laughter. Though expecting it, for some reason it startled her – why was that?

  She decided. She began again to climb. The dark woman with the torch seemed more intriguing than threatening.

  As she climbed, ‘May you tell me your name?’ inquired Stealflame, blooming with her own.

  She did not expect what came back. It was a sibling name, albeit minted in another tongue.

  ‘I am Brinnajni.’

  Stealflame then stopped rock still.

  She said, ‘You are Burning Flame. I am Stealflame. That means—’

  The dark figure moved out into the daylight under the trees. She was black as black silk. She was black as Chillel. Her torch-fire hair was the copy of Lionwolf’s and hung down her back to her ankles.

  Oh, said Stealflame’s lips, without a sound.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Brinnajni with ironic impatience. ‘I’m their child. Whose are you?’

  ‘Hers,’ said Stealflame, ‘and my mother’s.’

  Brinnajni gawped at her. Something so peerless, gawping, could not do anything but enchant. Stealflame gave an involuntary chuckle.

  At this Brinnajni’s beauty contorted in her clown’s grin.

  And Stealflame fell in love.

  Standing there on Brightshade’s continent, looking at her first half-sister, Stealflame gave up herself as lovers must, to reward and rapture or remorse, tyranny, hurt and Hell. No choice. No regrets.

  And this Brinnajni saw. Her dagger edge blended to liking, at least to that. And up in the woods the laughter came again, this time male and female mixed.

  ‘I was here before, this whalescape,’ Brinnajni announced. ‘I came back. The country has improved, I can tell you. I arrived with my other sister there, the sheep. She will be your sister too now. She and I grew up together, with no help from either of our mothers, but you fared otherwise, I think.’ Stealflame nodded, ashamed of her luck. Brinnajni said, ‘But you and I and our sheep have other sisters too, and some brothers as well. I don’t mean the men who went running to Chillel to be clawed by her and remade as little gods. No, these stay here, all of them, and I am queen over them. You shall see.’

  Stealflame said, ‘But how—’

  ‘Come, Steljeni’ – Brinnajni used the version of Stealflame’s name she would have been given among the herders where Brinna was born—‘surely you must see not all the men who lay with our mother kept her seed intact in them till the last battle? No, they went off with other women and seeded them with it. That way they died in the White Death as mankind are pleased to call it. But the mothers lived, went away as did yours, birthed the children … sad tales of their beginnings, or gleeful ones. But other tales they are. And how they came to me another story. One day I or they may tell you. Or not.’

  Stealflame caught her breath.

  Burning Flame seemed gratified. ‘Do you see up there, Steljeni, a makeshift house, quite domestic? The whale continent is worth a look. I explore often. When the whale comes home, I must introduce you to him. Can you fly?’

  ‘Yes, sister.’

  ‘I assumed you could. Let’s go up then. What,’ abruptly Brinnajni added, ‘were you doing this morning?’

  ‘The sun.’ Modestly Stealflame cast down her eyes. Opening the closed fingers of her left hand she displayed a petite mote of something that would have charred her palm, all her arm to bone, had she not been what she was.

  Brinnajni approached. She put her hand on Stealflame’s wrist and bent towards the worm of sun.

  ‘From there?’

  ‘From there.’

  They looked at each other over the stab of stolen sun-fire.

  ‘What a cunning one you are, Azula,’ said Brinna, using her sister’s other name now.

  ‘I didn’t mean to take it. When it was changed and I – did what was needed … Later I only found I had.’

  ‘The best thief, not even knowing her own theft.’

  ‘Perhaps I should never have brought such fire to the world.’

  Brinnajni put her arm over Azula’s shoulders as they climbed, in fact still on foot, the rest of the distance to her shelter. It looked grandiose despite her words, if rather lopsided. Within were tiled floors and the great bed Brinna had shared with Dayadin.

  ‘No, sister, you were clever. A link has been forged, earth with heaven. The earth has wed the sun. Spring’s coming, can’t you feel it? Spring will last a century. And then we’ll be ready for a Summer. In the long evenings I expect I will tell you all their stories. Do you like stories?’

  Where their feet had pressed the soil of Brightshade, anemones were drifting from the snow, dilute saffron like the start of the day. Merciless the black sheep grazed on them. They were mown, champed and swallowed. Impartial and harsh as fate, the sheep went from clump to clump. But on top of the hill the two sisters were laughing bell-like in the bright morning air, Flame with Flame.

  If Brinnajni scries, and maybe she is too occupied to do so, what does she see now?

  Aside from her own colony, all her hero brothers are scattered over the warming waking world.

  On the south-eastern continent they are finding other races, mingling with and becoming heroes for them, ruling over them as kings and chiefs. In the depths of these lands antique Kraag cities lie hidden. So the legends have it. But since Kraag philosophy states that what is real is only what is not, if ever found conceivably the cities will become non-existent.

  Sallus has gone home to the Southern Continent like a sword, to be the heir of a king. Dayadin in the north-west continent is with his own father and mother there, another prince, a Chaiord’s son in the Holasan-garth. But Guriyuve – nomadic like his father? – refused the act of home-going. He has undertaken an odyssey across all the seas and lands. This will one day finish in his recursion to Olchibe nevertheless. That must be. For an era will arrive when a brotherhood will be sworn among the Children of Chillel, not least by Sallus, then king of the peoples of the Ruk, Dayadin, then High Chaiord of the Jafn nation both in the south and the north-west, and Guriyuve, Great Leader of Leaders of the Olchibe. A fourth king will swear the bond with them in that time, a man named Gunri. He will not be a child of the goddess, not even of the rogue children who are Brinnajni’s subjects. But he will be a human of power and courage, lord of the united races of Vorm, Fazion and Kelp. Named for a mythic hero-poet he will be one himself. And before his death at a hundred years of age, when the Black Kings are far older yet still young, he will write something of their history and much of the saga of the Lionwolf.

  But if Brinnajni scries this, it is yet to come.

  Of all her brothers only Fenzi lingers alone on the island that had been Chillel’s.

  No other is there now. When he woke up from his short Jafn nap they had all gone, and the terror and splendour of the Spring’s first sunrise was over. He had missed i
t. Even so the park will soon cloud with blossom, the last of the ice barrier will melt, and the liquid metal rivers harden into mines of silver, copper and orichalc.

  Fenzi and the animals of the isle will wander among the groves, concerned perhaps by the increasingly fine weather and the blueness of the fluid sea. Fenzi will never take himself ‘home’. What in him had been a generous sweetness will modify, through trauma, exile and brooding, to gravity and wisdom. He is to be a mage of unsurpassable knowledge, whose ability will dwarf even the acumen of the Magikoy. And this too is still to come, miles off on the horizon of his immortal life and the centuries of his world.

  As for the unburned coal he picked up from the hillside, he will never throw it in any fire. Nor will he throw it away. Most likely in either case, he forgets to.

  Yet only a month from the first day of the reborn sun, Fenzi will glimpse Ruxendra Ushais dancing through the dawn sky, with a huge hound bounding at her side. He will put up, like many, a respectful altar to this youthful deity of sunrise. And a while after, next to it, one to her partner the god of fire, who in the Simese mode he will call Escurjos. But to the Lionwolf Sun and to his own mother who is Night, in all his unending days he will never raise a single stone.

  Under the carved and painted pillars of the Klow House, and the rafters where the hawks stalked and flared their wings, the Klow sat for their feast. Shaggy dogs patrolled the floor between the benches. The favoured lions in their house-collars posed pragmatically, knowing their warriors would feed them titbits when the food came in. The Chaiord’s pair were washing each other’s faces in a seemly but maybe greedy manner – licked pelt of a fellow lion being the hors d’oeuvre.

  The chamber was full of smoke and noise. Torches winked on jewels. Outside in the garth was the steady note of busy coming and going, and of song. Tonight was a festival of the Klow, the Night of Those Before. From sunfall to rise they would commemorate the ancestry of their clan, its former Chaiords and greatest fighters, mages and heroes, the relatives of the present king, all the remembered dead.

  With every toast someone was praised. Among these were the father and worthy brother of the current Chaiord. His other brother Rothger was not mentioned. Rothger, out in the world of men, had brought the Klow to dust. There they no longer existed save in anecdote or curse. And that was Rothger’s doing. Yet while he writhed in some hell of the Other Place, all these men and women now present and correct lived on in the personal world of Athluan and his queen. And he was an immortal and she was a goddess of day. But who those were that made up their court was debatable. Undoubtedly some were the dead who had returned to accompany Athluan, men he had known and trusted, valued women of the House. Others perhaps were even spirits, the very vrixes, corrits and glers of the Jafn earthly plane. Now reformed in a cordial environment they might make well-intentioned comrades, servitors. The House Mage was probably of this sort. Very old in appearance he was hale and virile, and performed eccentric conjurings.

  Just now said mage had turned a jug of black wine into a little fat black pig, which pranced about the floor to the disturbance of the dogs.

  Saphay was seated at Athluan’s side in her royal gown trimmed with silver and belted with garnets. She gazed at the pig wistfully. She was reminded of spells she associated with the brief babyhood of her son, funny things the Olchibe ghost Guri had arranged to make the child giggle.

  A toast rang out to Conas, Athluan’s honoured brother. Saphay too elevated her goblet. They drank.

  She thought, What if I had borne my son after all to Athluan … My son would have been white-haired, grey-eyed. Human. He would have died, she thought, when they cast us forth. And so would I.

  Out in the garth there was a more complex noise. Sometimes lifelike events happened here, apparently stage-managed by the composite will to pretend. This however did not sound like an upset.

  A ringing knock came on the door.

  The Jafn had kept the snowscape, the ice wastes. The vines here only grew, as in the past, in the hothouse or inside the windows of a room. As the door was pushed wide Saphay looked up in human astonishment. The taboos of Let’s Pretend were being broken. Outside the yard was full of burgeoning roses.

  Athluan’s steward hastened forward. ‘Chaiord, three travellers seek admittance.’

  Saphay saw her husband’s eyes were wide.

  ‘Let them come in.’

  And into the joyhall three men walked.

  Heads shrouded, they had dressed for the Winter, in mantles of heavy fur, clothes and boots of leather. One to the right carried a huge stoppered beer-skin. The man to the left bore a glass bottle stained dark blue, and some weird striped albino dog had padded in at his side. The central figure drew all eyes. He was not the tallest of the three: they were each tall and of a height with the others. And all were strong, muscular and straight, poised as warriors in the interim of some friendly combat. Yet at him all looked first, and back to him again. Across his shoulders was slung the great carcass of a deer, ready-drained of blood.

  He spoke, and his quiet voice carried to every corner, pitched like that of the perfect bard.

  ‘The Klow feast tonight, don’t you? Please accept my offering of meat for dinner. Fresh slain and kindly killed.’

  Athluan had risen. Saphay also had stood up.

  ‘Be welcome,’ said Athluan. ‘Say your name.’

  The hood slipped back from the head of each of the three.

  A sort of wordless chorus filled the hall.

  Curjai, dark and fine, stood to the left with an exquisite oil of Simisey taken from one of his own altars to anoint the Jafn fire. Guri, tattooed and braided, and the potent drink of Olchibe held by one hand, stood to the right. Lionwolf raised his head the last.

  For a second Saphay beheld then the wolf god from under the sea, Zeth Zezeth. For there he was, vested within a shell of gold and scarlet.

  But then, across the wide room and the more than a decade of years and more than an always of estrangement, he smiled his smile of love at Saphay. And she could see that, even if Zeth was there in him, Zeth no longer wielded any influence. He had become the tinder. The flame – was this.

  Lightly hefting off the deer carcass in the doorway, her son walked up the hall.

  ‘Good evening, Mother. Are you well? If beauty means health, never better I’d say.’

  She found she had lifted her hands and now he took them. The warmth and actuality of his touch disproved the real and the unreal both. He talked to her in the language of the start, Rukarian, and in the former flirtatious way she had forgotten.

  Saphay the lioness stared into his face, his eyes.

  ‘But you are the sun,’ she said.

  ‘I am the sun. I am energy, force and light, and so can be anywhere, in any shape I choose. I am this, and other things, and the sun too and for ever, until for ever’s done with. Don’t be nervous, my dear. The sunlight won’t go out if I pay you a visit.’ Still holding both her hands, he leaned forward and kissed her cheek.

  She whispered, ‘I thought even now – I’d never see you again. That would be my one last punishment.’

  ‘But we all make mistakes, Mother. Here I am.’ Then he let go just one of her hands and offered the Jafn salute, hand to heart, head unbowed, to Athluan. ‘Father. You keep a rare house here. You bade me welcome. Am I?’

  Athluan said, ‘Long ago in the waste of Kraagparia I told you as much. You know it. You are my son, and welcome as long waking.’ He moved around the table and embraced Lionwolf as his son. Athluan added, ‘And they are welcome too. Your brother there. Even your uncle.’

  The deer was taken to be portioned; here it would cook in one minute. The sensationally aromatic oil went on the hearth fire which burned blue and filled with pictures, though any dancing girls in the flames were decently clad. Guri brought the beer-skin which obviously poured on and on, never empty. He was the Star Dog Star and a planet now of morning and evening, but he too could be anywhere else, in the astral ’twe
en world or on the earth, as Curjai could be also. Beings of energy yet also of flesh. Mortality had taught them one of these conditions, death and rebirth the other. Gods are made by mankind.

  That night, or unnight, or real night, they feasted in the hall of Athluan. Later they told stories, of Olchibe and Simisey and of the Jafn heroes Star Black and Kind Heart.

  Later yet Lionwolf would go up another ladder-stair of darkness, and into its heart to his own wife, Chillel. Curjai would seek the couch of his wife who was the dawn, and wake her fire with his. And Guri? Guri would chase across the eternity of space, leaping meteorites and nebulas, finding out the distant stars which were not as he had ever supposed them.

  But Athluan and Saphay would make love in the stone-wood bed with the lamp turned to its more shady side, and the patterned covers plunging off on the floor.

  It was as he was constructing the first of the two altars, the one to Rusa Ushai, that Fenzi was joined by the chaze.

  He glanced up and saw it coiled round a shrub, watching him with its cat’s eyes.

  He was not especially one for cats, let alone snakes.

  But he recalled how it had always been with Sallus, a dependable enough man, and then it had been with Azula. Now it seemed it and she had also separated. Like himself, the chaze was on its own.

  Fenzi offered it water from the gourd he brought to and from the nearby brook. The snake sipped. When Fenzi had completed the altar to dawn and put a flower and a fruit on it, the chaze went and inspected his work.

  After sunfall Fenzi made a fire, obstreperously or couthly striking a flint to get it instead of any sorcery. The chaze positioned itself at the fire’s far side and watched him still.

  He threw it a piece of the meat he cooked.

  The snake ate it.

  That was a sleep night. It often was, now. When Fenzi woke at sunrise the next day the chaze lay curled against his back. At noon it brought him a dead rabbit it had hunted.

  Fenzi thanked the snake. He knew it would both hear and grasp what he said. Next therefore sometimes he talked to it.

  The young man thought how strange it was he had been severed from all he had known and any he had loved, and even from his own earlier self. And now his family was a poisonous white snake with a charcoal ring around its body. But he had taken up gods instead of God, too. What was a snake?