No Flame But Mine (24 page)

There was to be a hunt tomorrow. The Simese king had invited Arok and his men, as if to honour and reward them during a happy visit. Arok's ‘simple' plan involved going along with that, then spurring the sheep-mounts they would be riding and most of them had mastered, and getting away.

Now Khursp murmured, ‘And at the hunt when we run, will none of them try to shoot us down?'

‘We'll risk it. They don't spend much time refining their bowmanship. They prefer to bat balls at gongs.'

‘But still we make an offering to their Winter god?'

‘Still we do. While we're there we can ask for rotten weather to cover our retreat. Winter hates us all, regardless of race or creed. He won't mind.' And Arok thought of the true God in that moment, His neglected statue brought from the first Holas House. How faith now failed yet persisted, persisted, failed, never being resolved.

Below the hill of the capital lay a sort of ice-wooded deer park, maintained for hunting. Certain exits led from it out into the country beyond, but also there were lines of enclosure to keep the bulk of the wildlife in.

The Simese king led the way, his favourites around him, on this occasion mounted on choice brown horses from the royal stables.

At these the Jafn men looked sidelong. They were snagged between enamoured covetousness and allergy, because of the established resemblance to horsazin.

The Jafn themselves all rode dromazi. They were no longer inept at handling these beasts; nevertheless their hosts slyly mocked them. Many of the Simese rode dromazi on the jaunt too. They showed off, to put the Jafn in an unflattering light.

The light of the sky however was very flattering, unclouded and blue.

Game was started.

Everyone rocked and jounced between the aisles of the frozen forest, pyramidal conifers of silver spines and spreading marble plantain trees, to the brink of a river identified from the muscles stranded in its ice. It must have entirely thawed and refrozen quite recently. Curjai, somebody said, had undone the river months ago to provide a display for the hunting king and his men. Arok had seen Curjai often make magic after dinner in hall, rousing flames from the hearth to wing about like birds, or turning water to ale.

No deer were cornered at the river. The quarry was a pair of enormous furred pig, ruffed and tusked, the white swipes on their foreheads like paths of ice.

The hunters swung from horses and dromazi. They would not risk their mounts against sharp tusks.

Arok ran forward with the rest. The overcast or snowfall he had wanted to cover escape seemed unlikely. But the hunt would not be satisfied with just two pigs. It would go on most of the day, even to sunfall. After dark their chances would be better. No Jafn would move until he gave the signal. There were still only six of them anyway. No others had been judged viable.

Khursp, Elbar and the other three joined the cluster of Simese hunters. Arok pushed quickly forward. He was ahead of all of them. He raised the long spear. Simultaneously the larger of the pigs shook itself and came heavily cantering at him. Elbar broke suddenly across the animal's path. Its lethal snout swerved after him only a handspan away, but Elbar had dived into a somersault. The tusks missed him and the running pig stumbled.

Arok flung his spear. It caught the beast under the breastbone. Then Khursp's spear thunked home. Both shafts were stuck close together and well in. Their iron blades had met the heart. Staggering and squealing the bloody barrel slumped over into a snowbank and Arok's spear snapped. Noise ended. The pig was dead.

Certainly the Simese had ceased sneering. Perhaps they had not realized incomers might have hunted such pig before. If one needed proof of Simese contempt, ironically now their applause furnished it.

The other pig abruptly lumbered off into a thicket of thorn trees.

Khursp lifted his brows. ‘No, no,' said Arok graciously in Simese. ‘Let our friends of Padgish have that one. It's the smaller too.'

Something began to happen in the thicket.

‘What is that pig doing?' Elbar asked.

One of the Simese shouted. ‘Look – the thorns are burning.'

Thick white clouds went pouring up from the embrangle of glacial trees. A sinister gleaming colourless light was wound in them. They made a pillar that rose into the sky; far overhead yellowish lightnings crackled. The cloud-smoke did not disperse, nor did it spread. There was no smell of fire, only of unusual cold.

‘Stand away,' said Arok firmly in Simese, as if he had forgotten the Jafn tongue. ‘Something sorcerous is at work.'

He and his five warriors stepped backward. They eased through the line of Simese hunters, the other renegade Jafn.
They
were transfixed, all of them. Not even the king moved.

A little distance off Arok's men halted. Their dromaz mounts were here, tossing their heads and mumbling, lifting their pads in relays from the ground.

‘Here's our chance,' muttered Khursp. ‘Chaiord? We depart now?
Look at the sky
.'

Blue was congealing to curded vanilla. Although the cloud column had not spread the upper air seemed to have turned deadly pale in fear of it.

With caution, and moving curiously slowly, they mounted. The dromazi were evidently only too eager to be off. All around others of their kind were worrying at their tethers. Several had not been carefully secured and were pulling free. The horses too were now tugging and pawing the snow, raving their maned heads. None of them made any vocal sound. As if they did not dare.

A trance was on everything human. Arok felt himself mount up and his limbs and hands move to direct the dromaz as if through gelid, turgid liquid. His eyes seemed not to focus, or rather as if each eye saw something different. Before he could behold what came out of the thorn trees he had succeeded in turning the dromaz away. His five warriors galloped with him.

Yet the galloping also was – slow. Time had altered. Each second lasted a minute. It was like a dream.

The Simese king, a man who seldom offered all his thoughts, stood with his mouth ajar. The Padgish warriors, along with the remaining Jafn, gazed fixedly at the thorn thicket. White clouds made of snow-smoke parted. Some element – but which: light? wind? cold? – passed through, and so through the group of static men. Their skins cramped, their blood sizzled with frost. Not one did not feel it. None cursed, called or cried out. They had already perceived that, as the unidentified element went by the dead pig, the animal had turned to solid ice. Its bones were faintly to be glimpsed, set there in the iceberg of its meat.

But the
element
had brushed by, through and onward, travelling at great speed away from them. They were released.

Among the men of Padgish, one now silently fell dead. The remainder, Padgish and Jafn, revived in stages. Two or three wept, the tears freezing to their faces. Their feet seemed dead blocks of stone. Hands bore ominous white patches, a disfigurement of frostbite seldom now ever seen except in the very old or young who had spent days and nights lost on the waste.

The king closed his mouth. The teeth were knives. His lungs tingled full of frost.

In the thicket the clouds were thinning. The other pig that had gone in there abruptly trotted out again, a terrifying white-eyed swine made of dense crystal – that shattered in front of the men into tiny fragments, like a dropped goblet.

Much distance off Arok could know nothing of this. Nevertheless he was aware of it. It was like another figment of the nightmare that pursued the six of them, as they and the dromazi rushed so dawdlingly away towards the south. And Arok thought of the Jafn left behind.
God forgive me
.

Overhead the curded sky darkened. The sun was eclipsed by cumulus, and a lizard's tongue of lightning darted through it. These lightnings had a shape, hard and at odds with themselves. The Jafn had not anywhere seen lightnings quite of this type before.

Then the piece of the nightmare that pursued began to catch up.

Elbar turned his head.

‘Chaiord – the clouds are chasing us.'

Arok did not deny this. ‘We'll outrun them.'

He kicked the dromaz but the dromaz took no notice. It was anyway galloping as fast as it could. A second was a minute, a minute was the third of an hour.

Arok seemed now to behold all the spent moments scattering around them in gem-like bits – as if someone had dropped an enormous cup of cloudy crystal.

‘Oh, Chaiord – Arok – look behind us,' rasped Khursp.

Arok did not want to turn. But he, and the others, even as they ran looked back. As almost every myth of any people on earth instructed you must
not
.

There it was. The fact.

The fact streamed from the direction of Padgish and the royal hunting park, out of the north. It was
weather
– it was an element.

‘Great Heart of God,' Arok breathed.

They ran so tardily but this that followed was so very swift. Its time and theirs were quite unlike, and yet they were able to exist inside the selfsame dimension.

The impression Arok took was of a flying spear, even the one he had flung into the badger-pig. The centre was a darkness, but all about was a
whiteness
. Clouds boiled and funnelled, but more than anything the mass had a gliding motion. He and his men though strong and coordinated were ungainly. The pursuer, despite the crazy idea it had been quiescent, maybe even unactual, for centuries, was graceful and certain. The swiftness of it rent the mind. Only something unhuman and utterly extrinsic beyond race, superstition or dream could move and
be
like
this
.

‘Khursp – all of you – ride on. I'll remain. If it wants I'll meet it.'

‘
Chaiord
—'

‘
Go, you bastard son of a bastard son
.'

You did not call any Jafn man a bastard, let alone his father. It had been a reason for blood-feuds that had lasted generations. Arok had just assumed that he and his no longer had generations. Doubtless
he
had only three seconds, though of course for him now they would last three whole minutes.

Khursp did not argue. Cheerfully glum as a skull he grinned and saluted.

They fled away, the five Jafn. Arok reined in and coaxed the dromaz to turn about. It obeyed, sapped of all energy.

Like that then he faced what sped towards him.

Overhead now, all around, the cryogenic cloud of ice-spume roiled. Man and animal were enveloped in a seething cauldron of freezingness. The dromaz had a beard of icicles. Face coated and eyes glazed by rime, the Chaiord of the Jafn Holas watched this spear fly in.

It hit the target. It was there. It was motionless.

About two shield-lengths off a figure stood on nothing, between sky and ground.

Another man? Never. It only looked like one.

Arok stared at the snow-pale face, the snow-white, silk-like clothing, the hair, eyes and brows that were jet black, the wicked mouth.

The Chaiord tried to speak. ‘Believe I respect you. I can't bow down; I can't – move. Why do you follow me?'

The thing laughed, fluidly and attractively.

Next it spoke in a voice that was beautiful, like that of some high mage or bard. But the unkind lips scarcely altered.

‘Why do I follow you? Because you killed my beast.'

In Arok's brain something seemed to snap.

The apparition was not ugly; its teeth did not seem to be pointed. Despite that, ‘Tirthen,' said Arok. He remembered how he had offered for bad weather, facetious, unheard-of deed. And then – the inadvertent blood sacrifice of the hunted pig.

Then his intelligence and ethnicity rebelled. Only
God
existed. All else were demons and sprites. What then was
this
?

‘I beg your pardon, Lord Tirthen,' said Arok in stuttering Simese, ‘for killing your pig without properly dedicating it to you. Everything here in Simisey obviously is yours.'

‘No.' The mesmeric voice had no surface or depth. But the word it seemed to say transparently repeated in Arok's ears in a sort of tinnitus. ‘Everything,' clarified the Winter god, ‘everything on earth is mine. Every hill and mountain, every valley, plain, river and sea. And every living thing, plant, beast or man. All mine. Five centuries' worth of mine. And five centuries to come. And then five more, and on. For ever.' The words piled up, stone on stone.

Arok's brain began to congeal. His blood was already frozen he imagined, dark uncut garnets tight-packed under his skin.

There was no point in praying to anything, or begging for any respite. He was betrayed by a Power he had believed in, that did not exist. There was only this to pray to, and you could not pray to this.

‘Where were you going?' asked Tirthen.

‘My – garth,' mouthed Arok. The answer meant nothing to him.

‘I shall go there instead.'

Arok shuddered. Like a drunkard he enunciated with strict emphasis, ‘I'm dead.'

When he said this the dromaz on which he still sat began slowly to go down, collapsing like a huge boned cushion into the snow, that had itself frozen by now to a sheet of steel.

A screen clicked shut across consciousness. There was no space for resistance, anger, panic or regret. He had always hoped to die in battle. This was like uncontrolled sleep. And he had reckoned death would be like that. Vaguely, as all slipped from him, he remembered Nirri with apology, for he should have thought of her properly, and next of his sons. But he could not, though he remembered who, remember
what
they were. Titles – wife, son – were meaningless. How stingy death was. It cheated. He had not died as he should.

Nirri raised her head. She had been sewing with her women in the improvised chamber. Now the wool lay flaccid on her lap.

Something had passed from her. What had it been?

She did not know. For a brief while she wondered if she had felt the first threat of her approaching death. She had supposed herself healthy, but anyone might be mistaken. She was troubled by the notion mostly in a practical way. If she was soon due to become ill and die, many aspects of the garth would need to be organized. Her husband was absent and might not come back, otherwise there would have been less to bother her. On the other hand the mystic and exclusive spell that trapped the upper room must be addressed.