No Flame But Mine (44 page)

The Jafn Holas identified Dayad instantly. Mystically in their minds he had been growing to manhood as fast as he had done in fact.

They advanced on him; greetings and cries, cheering on the seething lanes, impeding him. He did not want to be churlish. Yes, yes, here I am. You knew I would come back? Of course you knew. He wanted them to make less noise. What would Nirri think? And Arok, his father—

Then they recounted the tale of what had happened to Arok. The dream had been true. Oh, he had realized it was. He had left Brinna for that, though he had seemed to love her more than all things, and now he did not love her at all. The people in the lanes beat on him like seas. So much sorrow, so much hope.

These people, this place, Arok and Nirri, they must fill up the gaping cavity where sexual love – first love – had been.

He reached the yard of the House. It was full of long-necked hump-backed beasts. He gaped at these, and a man of about twenty-nine years came out of the door.

Then
the hush fell.

The crowd offered no explanation. It seemed caught in some conspiracy which excluded Dayadin and the man equally. But whether a conspiracy of unease or compliance it was impossible to be sure.

Dayadin looked solidly at the man. He was strong and well made, unmistakably Jafn with light eyes and white hair. He had an air to him too. Dayadin, if he had not been told Arok still lived in body, would have reckoned this man some usurper Chaiord.

‘Who are you?' Dayad spoke loftily. He found himself envious and wrong-footed and shrugged the feeling off for he could not know if his reaction was a true one.

The white-haired man said simply, ‘Your brother, Dayadin. My name is Athluan.'

At once the clamour bubbled out again.

‘Second born, but older now than you are, Dayadin.'

‘A mageia did it. She fancied him older.'

It was Athluan who raised a quietening hand. The crowd duly quietened.

Dayadin said flatly, ‘Greeting, Athluan. If you are brother to me, then where's our father?'

Athluan stepped to one side. ‘Go in and see.'

Dayadin had forgotten Hilth. But Hilth had led the way, then hung himself up like a shirt just inside the door.

To cross the threshold.

So easy? It was done.

The joyhall was like the dream again. He had recalled it so often, he saw, he seemed to have robbed it of reality. And anyway that hall had not been here, had not been now. The confusion of return, massive as abduction, rocked Dayadin. For a moment he faltered, not knowing where he was or quite who. Perhaps when she had struck him on the snow with her claws he had died, and all this was some mirage of the Other Place.

He glanced at the beams, and the skeleton crew of striped hawks gathered there, at the dogs and the old lions in House collars. Women poised at the hearth and two or three at a loom. The warriors, fully armed, were banded in silence. All was silent finally. It was like a house of the dead where only statues of the deceased, faithfully carved and painted, displayed what had been done in life. Dayad even noted a man in a corner with a tawny skin and beaded hair, not Olchibe but some other race indigenous here as were the animals in the yard. But this man too was a statue.

And Nirri was standing in the firelit shadows.

How much older she had grown, yet how queenly. Of course, her statue showed her at her best, the age on her put in for gravitas. She stared at him unmoving as a statue must.

He saw the gems of water spilling from her eyes.

She wept. She lived. She was not, even if all the rest were proved to be, a dream.

With a clutch of the heart that was almost terror he acknowledged she would have known him if he had returned in the shape of a bear or as a vrix. She would have known him probably from a single knucklebone or crinkled hair. And he had thought
her
a statue.

He reached her with uncanny swiftness. She only smiled. He held her in his arms and not a word was said between them, there in the silence of the joyhall.

And then she did speak. ‘There he is, there he is, your father. Go to him, Dayadin.'

So then he let her go and turned his eyes to the wooden chair where Arok the Chaiord sat.

One of the wise-women had left her house and run panting up the garth. Now she appeared by Dayadin and mumbled again the story of Arok's misadventure. ‘We could do nothing. He died and was brought back – but his soul was caught among the stones.'

‘I see that, lady,' said Dayad.

He did. He crossed between the other statue people and the fire, and stood in front of Arok.

‘Father,' said Dayadin humbly, ‘here I am.'

Arok said nothing. Then he dully said, ‘Who? Where? What does it matter?'

Dayadin beheld the source of statues and dream-state.

He put his left hand four-fingered on the four scars under his clothing. He only knew to do it. A throb of power shot into his arm and through his spine.

He thought
Not Brinna – She – it was Chillel—

‘Father,' said Dayadin, ‘come back to me.'

Arok muttered. Then vaguely he said, ‘No, son. You stay there and guard your mother and the women.'

In Arok's floating, bloating brain a kind of upheaval occurred without warning. Huge blocks seemed to loosen and move this way and that, crunching over each other.

He was fighting in the snow.

No, that was not what he was doing. Someone, some Vormish enemy, had bashed him on the head. The blow had sponged him with unlikely gentleness. He had turned over and gone down and men on foot ran across him, and a reiver fish-horse jumped to clear his body.

Now I finish
.

He could not move, yet he could still see.

What he saw was his son, Dayadin, dashing over the vista.

Illusion: Dayadin was no longer a child but a grown man, a warrior.

I shan't live to see that then. That's what it means. I lived through the White Death, but Chillel's purpose is accomplished. I am redundant and can die
.

Arok remembered what his son had said.
Come back to me
.

Nirri was for ever remarking that Dayadin nearly always got his own way …

Arok floundered. He had to reach his son.

‘
God – God
—' Screaming deep-voiced like a stag, Arok burst upward – out of Hell or out of Heaven, out of coma, through every obstacle of flesh and spirit, from snow and blood and earth and stone and smoke and winter and time – and landed in his own body in his own garth in the new continent, with his chair crashing over and the world spinning, and seized Dayadin in his arms – ‘My
God
– you
live
– you're
alive
—'

‘Yes, Father,' said Dayadin modestly, holding him close. ‘And so are you.'

‘And so – am I.'

FIVE

When twilight lingered longer than two hours, eight or nine moons came up.

They were very slender and gave slight brilliance. Nevertheless luminous shadows were cast in the gardens and groves of Zeth Zezeth's flaming world. And in these shadows now and then, tiny cool fires glittered like watching eyes.

Jemhara felt the dusk empowered her. She trusted her magical instincts. Though never Magikoy, yet her abilities were sometimes phenomenal. Looking back she had viewed them with bittersweet awe. They were the fruits of her life. Yet here in this part-death she surely kept their essence; perhaps, though unordered, they were much stronger.

She contemplated her knack of shape-changing to a slim black hare.

But she could not attempt that in Zth's province.

Instead Jemhara put out her finger and squirled open a miniature window in the crepuscule. She had learned, or guided herself to,
this
knack only a short while before, after her melancholy dream of Thryfe.

Through the portal she beheld the earth. None could mistake it was the earth, snowbound and itself turning from the sun of day.

Out of the earth-sky a gilded spear flashed down.

It was the god himself, Zth.

What was he doing?

Curious, Jemhara observed him skittering along a frozen shore. Something vast basked against the plates of ice, between the ice fields and the moving ocean. Jemhara was reminded of a seal that sunned itself. But this creature was so large she could not make out what it was, only its mass, the citadel of a many-spurred horn—

Then, something horrifying.

It was like a bomb of the disappearing sunset that exploded back into the world. All was brightly lighted to a stark nothingness. And then darkness mopped everything up.

Through
the dark, which was too rapid for the natural end of day, fireballs bangled about and arching rays slashed the upper air. This did not go on for long.

Things settled.

Yet the sparkly little atomy that had been and was the god was bounding away and away, hemming the darkness and the shore like a lunatic mending.

The creature she had thought like a seal seemed eliminated.

From a continent's distance a grinding noise started in the substrata of the sea …

Jemhara smoothed over the pane of dusk. The eyehole was no more. She was glad she had seen nothing else, for surely the ranting little maleficent deity had caused some cataclysm, some strike that had no excuse, and so was unforgivable.

Soon he would rush back into his own domain. The stench of his evil would be on him, enthralling as sunshine.

Best prepare herself.

She thought of the wicked bitch who had abused her in girlhood, and of others, of so many others. They processed before her mind's eye. Vuldir, Sallusdon the king …

Only of Thryfe she could not think, for to entertain his memory even for a second in such foul company was –
unthinkable
.

Smoothing closed also all the cracks and ravines within her own mind. Smoothing, smoothing, Jemhara summoned a fountain from the dusk, glittery with the tiny shadow-stars, and bathed there.

She experienced lightness and happiness as she did so. Next she enhanced the garments the god-thing had given her, and fashioned jewels from moon litter. As she arrayed herself, most other elements were discarded. Even the lightness, the happiness. How could they stay?

Spangled and honed, Jemhara stole about the gardens. She was waiting, all prepared, as only once before.

I am inside the ice. Again
.

The girl, no longer a girl, the woman of twenty-six or seven years, lay coiled among her covers and gazed up into the tapering pyramid of glassy freezingness.

The familiarity of it might have angered her. But she did not feel anger. At least, she was angry only with herself and that in a makeshift way.

Really it was pointless to lament over her deflowerment by Zth in the cold core of the sea, of her later imprisonment by fate – presumably – in the pyramid from which her Jafn husband had released her. Nor was it valid to complain of Yyrot's worrying triangular bergs, stuffed with wheat and corn that died and went black.

Tirthen would also logically make use of such uninspired retreats.

Saphay threw off the voluminous covers of fur and silk. They vanished.

She stood up naked and lovely and shook her hair.

Tirthen was seated across from her, naked too, his attractions heart-stopping.

‘I shall leave this
den
,' said Saphay. ‘Now.'

‘Why?' asked the economic Tirthen, languidly.

He was
not
like Zth. Less worshipped and therefore less formed and fuddled by mortal expectation, Tirth managed to maintain a vibrant, primitive forcefulness, a sort of genuine animal magnetism.

As he rose, in each proper sense of the word, Saphay's resolve dwindled.

But she said, ‘I can dismiss your powers. I am not your prisoner.'

‘Dismiss me then. Like the last time. Such enjoyable dismissal. Let us be each other's prisoner.' After all, a hint of Padgish courtier-speak.

Saphay broke open the side of the pyramid with a look. Indeed it did not have the resistance of the dome at the garth, or such resistance had been deemed superfluous. Probably the latter.

Tirthen approached her in one step and drew her against him.

The side of the pyramid sealed shut.

‘I refuse this,' said Saphay as she wound her arms about him.

Down among the rehabilitated furs and cushions they sank.

A minor external snowstorm veiled the iceberg.

I have been so long alone
, she thought excusingly.

What Winter thought goes unrecorded. Maybe little – he was an element. Yet, beyond the pyramid intermittent leaves split their chrysalids, a runnel of muscular water pushed from the ground. And the storm was feeble, more sleet than snow.

Zth walked through his garden and it became again the heat of the day.

He was full of himself, the god. He had done something momentous out in the world, and was warmed by his own ability. It had reminded him of his past when he had visited the limited sphere of the Ruk, lording it over mankind; his glory days. But why should he not regain all that? Everything he required would be given him.

Zth had lost the coherent idea of the Lionwolf, and that the Lionwolf must be destroyed. Or that this had proved always impossible.

Zth was in denial, which he discovered to be both ennobling and restorative.

When he saw Jemhara, his acolyte and chosen victim, sitting in a shining shade, only the most amiable memories stirred of inter-species congress.

Had he forgotten who she was, what she had done, what she had borne and birthed?

Jemhara got up and came to him. She knelt on the path and obeised herself, her hair sweeping up the petals of fallen flowers.

Sportive, for the hundredth time, ‘How tempting you are, Jema. You must go away or I can't be answerable.' He sounded quite elderly.

Jemhara spread her body out at his feet.

‘Don't send me away. How I love you, lord. Let me stay.'

Zth paused. He felt, conversely, very young and polished. If he had her, he would kill her. But did that matter dreadfully? She had served her purpose … surely she had. He did not need the help of a woman anyway. That had only been his game. He was Zeth Zezeth. All
she
could ever be was a toy. And of course she loved him more than her paltry little life. It would be a kindness to oblige her.