No Flame But Mine (27 page)

He had been Lionwolf's inadvertent apprentice. Watching the fabulous brat had taught Guri his trade of deitility and now he did not miss a trick.

Despite that, this second beginning had not been very auspicious.

His mother, Yedki, had abandoned him as soon after labour as she could walk.

They had all reasoned with her, most significantly her Crax. Yedki would not listen. ‘I was deceived,' she said. ‘I never asked for
this
.'

‘Yet you have it. See, you've borne a hero—'

‘Befuck it,' said Yedki, packed a cloth with her effects and went away on a young female mammoth. Either she perished in the wastes or found another sluhtin. The Crax, who thereafter could not find her in any occult fashion, possibly did not try very hard.

Ennuat was the one who reared the child, feeding him the mixed milk of two mammoth cows and also of her elder sister, who had herself just given birth to a normal kiddling. Guri thrived. Not that any named him Guri. He was known as Gthesput. At the start the name muddled then amused him. Then he grew used to it. When he was about twelve – or six – he incorporated Guri into the name.
Guri
thesput.

By then his fame was automatically waxing, and with it an additionally bizarre story. Ennuat was the virgin coven member. The tale went Guri was therefore the result of a virgin birth. This seemed less disgraceful than what Guri knew as the reality: that he had fathered himself. Therefore he did not deny the tale. As for Ennuat, she would look so forbidding when anyone mentioned it, soon no one did.

When he was sixteen, that was eight, Guri left the sluhtin and went to visit the sluht-city of Sham. A crowd of adoring young warriors rode with him, all of them on fine mammoths.

Approaching the city they were met on the road by a caravan of y'Gech.

Though racial ‘cousins' some rivalry and caution did exist between y'Gech and y'Chibe. Seeing twenty mounted Chibe warriors advancing along the road, which was Shamish-built and a paved one, the caravan ushered its own fighting men to the front and right across the way.

As Guri and his company drew level the caravan's Gech witch ran out too. She had green and black hair and shook a rattle made of crocodile bones and small brass bells. Imperiously she pointed with one long finger at the ground. The Chibe warriors must dismount.

Only Gurithesput did so, amicably enough.

‘Hail, magical woman. What's up?'

She was young, but with old, flat, venomous eyes. Perhaps she had lived among crocodiles and other swamp oddities too great a while.

‘You shall not go by. You mean ill to Sham. I can
smell
it on you.'

The Chibe men snarled and the mammoths snorted. No one liked to be insulted over his smell. They had got themselves up in their best, too, for the visit.

But Guri only grinned. He was a god, acknowledged it, felt still renewed and young enough, not to mention wild enough, to
revel
in it. Along with the other perks of godism he smelled excessively good, he knew, at all times.

‘Are you sure, Magica? Why don't you come and sniff me? Then you might change your mind.'

The Chibe chuckled. One of the mammoths put up its trunk and bellowed in a bold paraphrase of the male erection.

Magica stamped her boot. Stalks of greenish fire burst from the paving and made a low crinkling barrier between the warrior Chibe and the Gech caravan.

Guri looked at it. ‘When a man likes a girl,' he said, ‘it takes more than a fence to keep him away.' And with that he walked right through the fire, which at his touch went out.

He towered over the witch and now, if she had doubted, very likely she sussed a hint of his enticing personal aroma. Then he kneeled on the road before her and kissed the boot which had stamped. Instantly the kiss-shape appeared on it, made of white silver.

Guri got up again.

The witch's eyes were no longer flat or venomous. They were full of tears. For a moment Guri triumphed, and then he felt sorry. He had not meant to humiliate her. He had always had, and had now, vast honour for sterling mageias of most sorts, and always for the Crarrowin and Cruin.

‘I'm sorry,' said Gurithesput. ‘I went too far.'

‘No,' whispered the witch, ‘I see what you must be.'

‘A god,' Guri risked admitting.

‘There are no such. But yes. A g—a g—' A proper sound atheist, she could not even get it out.

‘I am Guri,' said Guri, to help.

‘Whatever your name or nature,' she said, throwing back her head to meet his eyes full on with her weeping ones, ‘you will bring shame and death among us, and on mighty and glorious Sham you will bring down ruin. This prime city will be trampled to a cake of mud, because of you and your –
godishness
.'

Guri went sallow. His eyes flickered as if he might faint. He was convinced she was not cursing him. She had sensed –
smelled
– on him some awful flavour of forecast events. Dumbly he thought back over his past, so far in these people's future. Yes, by the time of his first life, Sham had been nothing, a heap of dirt with one lone wreck of a gate. And the glory of Chibe was reduced to scattered war packs whose sluhtins crouched always under a weight of unvoiced nonentity. As for the country of Gech it had been a borderless ramble – tiny villages amid the ice swamps, wanderers and wise-women who served others, such as Jafn barbarians. The coven-name
Cruin
had been forgotten.

He steadied himself and said to the witch, ‘Can't it be averted? You tell me. I will be guided by you.'

‘Perhaps,' she said, averting instead her gaze. She put her hand on his and a shiver went through her. ‘I can counsel you.'

At which Guri gave up, for he saw she fancied him as most women did, and wanted him for that, the more important axis of people and land forgone or lessened by desire. Women. But that was unfair, his sixteen-year-old acuity told him: men were just as bad in such matters.

Exactly as the elderly might feel young inside their bodies, the young might sometimes feel, inside their own youthful hides, ancient, tired and nearly historical. The Chibe detailed in their woven songs, and in some of the carved or written graffiti found on stones or walls, that the recurring birth-death-birth cycle of reincarnation was the reason. Not everyone every time lived to a ripe old age. Thus old age, when experienced, was the
less
familiar state. But the first stages of life, childhood and youth, might be repeated thousands of times. The young, even children, could well feel old and worn therefore.

Now Guri, young externally, fully felt his entirely remembered earlier life. Plus his timeless yet eternal-seeming sojourn in Hell. Regret and anxiety battled inside him with a dire scepticism. His fate was cast. He was to be a god, and to bring misery and downfall. That was often the way of the gods. Why should he be the one charming exception?

The witch let the caravan go on along the road. They had another witch in tow. Guri's witch – she never gave him her name; he only ever called her by the nickname of Magica – stayed with Guri.

The nineteen other Chibe warriors looked at her, unsure. They were gratified Guri had picked up such a girl, but nervous, and so acted up like pillocks all the rest of the way to Sham.

Once in the city, however, the sights saw to it they pulled themselves together. Sham impressed. Though sometimes called the ‘sluht-city' it did not resemble any sort of sluhtin. They craned to see towering metallic gates, the towering towers, the arenas and long winding markets, full also of darkish basement areas where myriad displays of goods glittered like stars. Saurians waddled by in harness, their claws gilded; tree-wolves with dyed pelts fought in yards packed by spectators. Exquisite whores posed on terraces, baring one perfect breast or depilated leg, their furs otherwise so thick the cold caused them no trouble. There were high metal-sheathed doors in Sham in those days, bronze inlaid with silver, iron with copper, tin with pyrite, all in complex patterns. But behind a door that was of fossil-wood the witch led Guri to her chamber. She lived normally outside the city. When she was there this room was always hers, kept for her empty and clean.

Gurithesput had already had plenty of women in the sluhtin, aside from Yedki, his own mother before she was. The leader of the community had encouraged this. He and many more believed Guri would gift them a pack of healthy half-hero sons; the fiction that Guri was a hero not a non-existent god still held there. But from the numerous couchings no baby was conceived. The leader, a terse man named Har Jup, then instructed women who had already borne children to lie with Guri. Guri would accept only those who were widowed, or free Crarrow, and willing. He did not mean to offend husbands or insult wives. Nevertheless plenty of candidates arrived and he lay with them. Again, not one took.

Gurithesput had realized swiftly. He was to be like Lionwolf in this too. His body was able and potent. His seed was not.

Magica screamed four or five times in ecstasy at the climax of their unions. The psychic force of her orgasms blazed in the room for hours after, so they rarely needed lamps or brazier.

Guri himself predicted he might fall in love with her and grew terrified. Witch though she was, she was mortal and already some years his senior. Physically at least.

Unsensibly a night came when he told her where he had come from, that was his other life up to twenty-eight, then the ghost-life, association with Lionwolf, the wars and horrors, and the punishment in Hell – all, all of it. She listened as if in a trance. He hoped in the morning, after he had indulged in unneeded sleep, she might have thought he lied. But her eyes, once so flat and eldritch, had become while she heard him out young and absorbent as a kiddle's. When he turned over on the morning pallet she was long gone.

Now and then she had gone off before on her own errands. This time she did not come back.

Later he went to search for her through the city. She was nowhere to be found.

The Chibe men, who always tried to rally round Guri given a chance, kept attaching themselves to him. Finally they carried him off to drink in a beer-basement. He was a hero, that was all; there were no gods. Drink up, Gurithesput! they cried. Heroes were allowed to go soppy on a woman. Even to be abandoned by said woman, although obviously any woman who did that was mentally deficient. Heroes could get drunk as well. Only gods found anything like that very difficult.

Guri could not rid himself of the correct idea that Magica had buckled under the burden of his autobiography. He visualized her hanged in her own hair. Or walking willingly into a crocodile pit.

The clash had begun inside him between godhead and an inherent learned mortalness. And too between inner agedness and inner adolescence.

He recalled how Lionwolf had struggled with all this hopelessly. You could not live this double – triple –
multiple
life. Nor, being now immortal, could you avoid it.

He never saw her again, Magica. Probably he could have scried her, located her. Like the Crax of Yedki's coven maybe he did not try very hard.

Two more years went by. During these Har Jup died. The election of a new sluhtin leader selected Gurithesput inevitably. Equally inevitable was Guri's refusal.

Until then he had remained mostly in the sluhtin. He was invaluable to them in everything save the business of siring babies. They forgave that, indeed stayed optimistic things would change. They must recall, in actual years he was only ten.

For himself, Guri knew, he had been in hiding. He had not even revisited Sham. He could not bear to, loaded as it had become, in hindsight worse than at the time, with her prophecy.

At home he hunted and performed the other masculine chores, along with the men and his own inadvertent gang of admirers. He oversaw their weddings, and the fast acquisition of their children.

He spent many days and nights, sometimes months of them, alone out on the snow wastes, in the forests of ice. He even trekked to the sea shore and beheld the extended vista of ice-beach, and the thread of black liquid water miles beyond.

Gurithesput was alone anyway.

Guri preferred aloneness.

The former ghost-life had prepared him.

But after the election when he put aside the leadership, and heard his gang ranting, and women wailing as if at a death, Guri determined to go away for good.

He was bound to Ol y'Chibe – to
Olchibe
. He would serve them as best he could, but the terms of his employment must become more broad.

Partly he had resisted branching out in the world, recapturing the image of Lionwolf bounding to begin the Jafn drama of vengeance and kingship which had culminated in Ru Karismi and the White Death. Only intermittently did Guri think of the
other
Lionwolf, the god who had subdued death, and transformed Hell to a heaven. Guri did not trust this memoir. He himself had not yet reached any equilibrium between gods and humanity. He shied off from putting such success on any other.

But Guri branched out nevertheless at last.

He left the sluhtin, riding one of the male mammoths. The females were the law among the herds and he did not want to worry the animals as he had had to the men and women.

They rode down into what would be, hundreds of years on, the southernmost Marginal Land.

Sluhtins and individual sluhts received him. Ranging bands, not yet much committed to war with anyone else, welcomed him into their camps.

He tried to learn their intrinsic ways, which were not like the ways of his people in the future, aside from everyday basics. The whole paradigm was different. It was not only their theology but their worldly aims. They moved inside a measured and established ethos, their goals straightforward. They wanted survival and security, status to the limited high points of their own clan-group, pleasure and happiness where able, re-creation of what was known and enjoyed, where able. They moved like breathing through life and into death and out again to life. He had seen that even a hero among them was useful only inside such spheres.