No Flame But Mine (13 page)

She looked. Where her gnarled claws clasped his small hand, an ember of light had formed. It was warm; even she could feel it now. It seemed protection of him seeped from her automatically.

‘What do you want most?' she asked.

He gazed at her now. ‘To grow up. If I could grow up, I'd marry you.'

‘I'm an old woman,' she said. She felt it, or thought she did.

‘Not so much,' he said. ‘I saw you. You were in the air and you were young. Well,' he amended justly, ‘young
enough
.'

She laughed. ‘Ungallant.'

He only smirked at the Rukarian word and concept, and rubbed his face on her hand, and the amber ember of light curled round his head like radiance freed from a lamp.

Saphay doused it. Someone else might see.

He gave a mutter of disappointment.

She sensed then the
energy
of the light, the protection, swirling and pushing inside her to get out. By all the gods she could now never call on – it was like a sort of birth.

‘Come along,' she sternly said, ‘you must go in and sleep.'

‘Saffi – no—'

‘Perhaps if you do, I can find a gift for you when you wake.'

So adult, his sceptical glance. ‘Oh?'

But he let her lead him back inside the House.

She and Nirri both conducted him up the ladder-stair, and various unliking and suspicious eyes oversaw their progress. The werloka alone voiced the discontent. ‘Too much allowed that outland female. Arok needs telling.' But Arok was not at home.

‘There, he's asleep at once. At that age such a fuss. Only my Dayadin – only he never had to put up with it. He grew so fast. He was almost beyond the sleeping age in a month.'

Saphay sat the other side of the cot-bed. ‘I've been pondering, Nirri.'

‘Yes?'

‘What you asked me.'

‘Yes …'

‘To protect him. There is something – but you will have to trust me.'
And I must trust myself
.

Nirri stared into Saphay's eyes, her face. She said, ‘I don't really, lady. But I trust the world less.'

‘I have known your son before.
This
son, Athluan.'

Nirri bowed her head. She understood none of this yet something in her had opened to receive it. After all, almost from the first, she had thought she also knew the old woman.

‘Do what you can, lady. I'll be responsible for your act. If you harm him I'll kill you. And then my husband will kill me. Those two results are sure.'

Saphay shook back her hair. A wild glint of gold lit somewhere in the strands, and from her floated the always present perfume that attended her.

‘You can't kill me. I shan't harm him. Now go out and let no one enter. Is that clear? I'll call you when you may come back in.'

It speaks inside me
, Saphay thought.
But it is me
.

When Nirri was gone Saphay leaned over the boy and breathed on him. From her mouth issued a soft scented flame that burned nothing. And then from all her body the flame issued. The release of it was to her very sweet. It covered the child like bloom. In wonder Saphay did as her own power drove her to do, inaugurator and bystander both.

Outside, the sounds of the House and garth were far away.

She could not see herself in those minutes as she was, a golden figure with the head of a lioness, maned in dawn, whose eyes wept tiny suns.

Despite the blood in her hair and her snapped left wrist, Aglin bent over the girl lying on the blackened snow. With her right hand the mageia stroked back Azulamni's bi-colour hair. ‘Time to get up, my girl. We'll go to Highness Thryfe. And you'll be needed, now you've found your magic.'

‘I won't get up. I'll stay here with my ma.'

She did not shed tears. At least not out of her eyes. Azula was all crying. She was like a vessel full of water.

‘Because she died?'

‘I've got her bone. I'll keep her bone.'

‘You keep it, that's good. She'd want you to. Now up you get.'

‘I'll stay here.'

‘You never will. Come on, make her proud, your mother.' One-armed, Aglin, shockingly tough, dragged Azula to her feet. ‘Make her proud, Azula. You're more than a mageia. I ran after you, though I was too slow. I saw some of what you did from that little rise, you see? You're a warrior and you're a goddess.' Azula leaned on Aglin's healthy arm. They walked together away across Kandexa, through the smoking, twice-powdered rubble, and the dead.

When Nirri first re-entered the chamber she turned only once to Saphay. The old witch, who had just summoned her, was blushed by the rich glow that filled the whole room like red-gold wine.

The pivot of the glow was Athluan's cot.

Nirri paused, her hands caught under her chin.

She could see her boy, but in an unexpected way, because he slept there right in the middle of a ball of flamy brilliance. And he too glowed, palely, like snow held safe in the heart of a fire.

Nirri took a step.

‘No,' said the crone, ‘no further. You mustn't break the web of sorcery.'

‘Is he – does he – does it
hurt
him?'

Scornful: ‘Does he
seem
to be hurt?'

‘Excuse me, lady.'

Lofty: ‘You have a right to ask. But there's no discomfort. He's asleep. Yes, that thing the Jafn despise so,
slumber
. And he'll sleep some while.'

‘How long? An hour?'

‘More than an hour.'

‘A whole night?' Nirri shot Saphay another astonished stare.

‘More than a night. More than many nights and many days.'

Nirri said in tones of cold wood, ‘What have you done?'

Saphay rose up. She rose up tall as the room until her lion's mane brushed the roof timbers. Nirri stared after her and saw Saphay in her aspect of goddess, and dropped on her knees in the prudent loosening of her joints.

‘He will sleep,' said Saphay the goddess, ‘until the fire has cleansed him of mortality and childhood both. He will sleep until he remembers what he has been, and his promise. Then never again will he be taken away from me.'

‘From
you
?' whispered Nirri.

But this time the goddess, in the customary manner of her kind, did not reply.

Eighth Intervolumen

Man salvages: Fate ruins. Man ruins: Fate salvages.

Bardic Lay of the Hero Kind Heart: Jafn

Thryfe scanned the sky, horizon to horizon. Seen from high above it the cumulus was itself a world. Clouds had formed a dark blue ice plain pierced by cobalt mountains. Westward spread an apricot lake of light. The seventh day aftermath of the hail and thunderbolts had left this tropospheric landscape consistently placid – unlike the carnage of Kandexa.

The magician, in his shape-shift of eagle, soared in steep wide combings, searching out any pocket of threat. But there was none. Since the storm had been uncharged, that oblique intelligence which must have crafted it seemed also to have withdrawn. For now. Thryfe glided downward, riding the winds of the air, entering the topaz eye of the sky-lake.

From here he could detect a caravan a mile and a half below. It crept so sluggishly over the ice, a colony of abstract dark more like a toy snake than a train of wagons, carts, slees and sleds; it crawled between the vast tracts and runnels of packed snow. The earth too was now turning bruise-blue with ended sunset. Night was out hunting. Night's first arrow burst on the shadow – one star, another and another.

Furling his wings the eagle dropped.

In his man's brain something said to him:
You see far better as a bird of prey. That was always so. But since your self-damage in the Insularia, even as an eagle Thryfe is not quite, any more, the eagle-eyed
.

Neither of them, though they meant to leave together, intended to take with them any further companions. In the stunned limbo after the storm both Thryfe and Jemhara had acknowledged, unspeaking, that she had been its target. The obscure adversary had originally tried to prevent conception. Now its aim was to nullify it; the child Jemhara carried was to be negated. For this reason therefore they must exit the city alone. Once stripped of them, Kandexa would be safe, ironically, as houses.

But like iron filings pulled to a magnet, of course the fearful and distressed survivors immediately rushed at them from every side. In an hour a huge crowd pressed round them, sobbing and shouting for help and reassurance, and for the shield, and the bandage, of Magikoy sorcery.

He drew her aside. ‘Once free of us their peril ends. We're its focus.'

To his dismay she checked him quite harshly. ‘
No. You
are
not. I
am the one it wants.' Perhaps he had hoped she was not completely aware of her plight. Which had been foolish of him, he thought.

But the crowd called and entreated. Up pushed a woman with two infants and several others all with injuries and grey faces, tales of horror. There was no space to discuss alternatives.

Thryfe and Jemhara resumed their role of healer and mage. Only when all was done could they slink away, under cover of darkness.

The maleficence of the occult enemy seemed spent for now. That was in their favour. Each time the dedication and vigour of it had been limited. They outwitted or eluded and it seemed to give up.

Methodically they did their work. The crowds surged and went and came. Others had naturally arrived from most of the zones. Sometimes pleading people led the two mages to different spots. Here they discovered more injured, and many dead. A thousand varieties of human woe.

Both of them noted that their attempts to repair those buildings not totally destroyed were met with indifference or hostility. Constantly the shaken heads, even words flung out at them: But we can't stay here! Twice-cursed Kandexa – the gods must hate it. Vashdran's devils razed it, now the wrath of the heavens smites it – we must go away, far away. Soon the nearly mythic name of the new Rukarian capital Kl Ctaar was offered. It was said to lie west and south of here. Surely it must exist? There would be security there.

In the afternoon, by which time anyway Thryfe and Jemhara had been separated by those begging their assistance, Thryfe met the mageia Aglin, Jema's friend, as she surfaced from the throng.

‘These are only scratches. It's just my wrist. Cleanly broken. I've made it not hurt, Jema taught me that trick, but it needs fixing. Do you see, Lordship?'

Thryfe looked where she pointed with her sound right hand. There were camp fires everywhere, burning for warmth among the often still-smoking re-ruined ruins, and in the glow of one of these he beheld the contortionist's daughter, Azula.

‘She's on her own. Is Beebit dead?'

‘Yes, dead. It was quick, I think. But by the time I found Azula—' The mageia swiftly told her tale, keeping her voice very low so no other should hear it. The low voice painted in flat bright strokes the girl like a silver spear on the mound of rubble, the lightning bolts pulled down to her, flying at her, through her, exploding
in
her, dying, doing no other harm.

Thryfe and Aglin stood in silence a moment, as if to allow the roaring echo of the quiet words time to fade.

He watched Azula at the fire. She was smutty from smoke and her face and hands were covered in little grazes, her clothes torn. Her two-colour hair had bits of beads sugared in it.

‘
That
is her gift, then.'

‘They called them fire-takers, where I came from, Lordship. We had a legend of one, a man. But that was hundreds of years ago, and it was only the sheet lightning he used to suck off the sky. Not great zinging bolts like she did.'

Thryfe asked himself then if after all the girl should be brought away with Jemhara. She might prove protective in areas he was not. Besides, Jemhara might need Aglin too. Aglin was a fair midwife. He had not decided where they could go, yet he too had considered Kl Ctaar. The murmurs of the Kandexans had not deterred him.

He saw to Aglin's wrist; she was a spry witch and felt no pain as he slapped the bone together again and internally soldered it, matter-of-factly binding it up herself afterwards and tying the knot in the cloth with her right hand and her teeth. That seen to, Thryfe walked over to Azula.

‘How are you doing?'

She looked up. Her eyes were empty. ‘I'm well.'

‘Your mother was killed, I hear,' he said bluntly, to try to fathom the depth of her state.

Azula emptily said, ‘Skull crushed off then blown apart. But I've got her bone.'

‘That's good.'

He touched her head. Under his fingers he felt the after-throb and pulse of dead lightning. Had it seared her out? Not her brain, but her heart and spirit? It was impossible to tell. She was bereaved. And she was uncanny too, if Beebit's history of her was a fact, and why should it not be in this age of mad foul wonders?

Near midnight, sky currently lucid, soft cloud reflecting two veiled half-moons, he located Jema over at Happy To Live zone. Happy To Live was flat as a stepped-on cake. Jemhara held two weeping women in her arms while a weeping man leaned against them.

Thryfe waited until Jemhara had done all she could, seeing he thought the healing seethe out of her, iridescent and not quite there, like the moonlight in the clouds.

In the name of any gods, how had he ever doubted her, this woman coined in the non-existent heavenly Paradise?

They stole off eventually in darkness, clandestine as two adolescent lovers.

‘I can't leave them yet,' she said. ‘Can you?'

‘No, not yet.'

‘I think the entity that pursues me has gone to ground. It expends such passion – and then gives up. Besides, Azula
hurt
it.'

‘Perhaps she did. Let's hope so. She must come with us when we go away. And Aglin too.'

She rested her head on his chest. For a few seconds she dropped asleep, exhausted. He held her. Above them the moon unveiled, veiled, seeming to sail for ever to some gentle shore. If one refused to see the mess of the earth, all might have been well.