No Flame But Mine (50 page)

Southward and south-east, there she was. Vangui the panther with her steely claws, Toiyhin the dove smooth as rain. He gazed in that direction now.

The
sound
interrupted from the other direction, northerly.

It was a huge
soft
bang, like a clap of thunder muffled deep in the sea. But it did not sound and then cease sounding. It went on and on, elongating like something pulled and twisted and growing always harder and more infinite.

Night had covered everything up but for a last scarf of light that had no colour. Three moons had appeared, and over there a weird group of stars that flickered as speeding clouds began to flounder by in herds.

Lionwolf, remote and involved at once, knew what had gone on. Remoteness was shed.

He flung himself right off the mountain into the sky.

Like his father Zth Lionwolf's flight resembled fire, gold and red and sapphire.

The shoreline shook. It was splitting, exploding. Batches of ice, some big as towns, spiralled high into the air, crashing back and breaking, the shards again shot off, again falling and breaking, becoming eventually powder. The ocean had gushed away to the edge of vision. There it was building a vast wall. Any who looked could see this wall for it fizzled and dazzled, producing some chemistry of its own. It was white water, white as the inland ice. But then it went black.

What had caused this – Zth – was no longer on earth's premises.

But the people who at this time dwelled along the Kraag coastal areas, they had run out to see.

Behind and around them were their homesteads, the sheds and huts, channels of fields, the boats and little ships. Tethered animals called in fear from barns. Children shrieked in terror or excitement.

Some were already fleeing. On the fringed hnowas they had, perhaps, brought from Jafn land, in carts drawn by deer, sheep or goats. Most simply ran, babies and household oddments on their backs. Left behind, the sick and the weak, the old, the lame, the stupefied. No margin for compassion or empathy if you were to survive. Others incredibly dawdled, gaping at the view.

Where the satiny slime plain stretched out to the withdrawn sea, some of a new priesthood still picked between the flapping fish and cast shells. They worshipped the stony bearded god they called the Blue Sun, and now invoked him to normalize the ocean. But the chants faltered and the boy singers sang off-key. Soon even they were hastening away.

The wave was already so high it had blotted out the moons. Even the funny constellation many had noticed, product of Didri Star-Messer, had vanished.

Did any gauge the height of the wave, or the flattening scope it would have when it came in? Tens of miles would be swallowed, or more. Nothing but solid rock could withstand it. Really it was as foolish to flee as to stay put. Escape was not likely.

All this while the night had been growling and quackling as the floes and shore ice broke.

Now abruptly it grew uncannily quiet.

That lasted some forty seconds.

The ears were filled with clotted silence, as if prematurely full of water. Reddish glims threaded the clouds.

A kind of twang, not seeming particularly loud, more like the note of a string snapping, was heard all along the coasts, heard even inland in the hills. Heard as far they later said as Kol Cataar, over the dividing mountains to the west.

Then the black colossus of water turned like cream.

Sourly in it came.

In – in – in—

Curling, feathered with green-red fire along its top – wriggling within as if sea serpents writhed there—

In
.

Lionwolf dropped to earth.

At seven hundred different sites they would come to claim he had landed. Seven hundred shrines, and more, would be hewn and erected between the land and the sea. Numbers of future statues would demonstrate the god was an older man, bearded. Others would protest he was young, a youth, a
child
even with long ruby hair. Or he was a male god in the glory of his prime. Or he was the sun's disc fashioned from metal, with rays.

Being himself, Lionwolf landed at every site where he was afterwards depicted. And at uncountable others. He made of his etheric yet earth-linked body, flesh and eternity, a golden cordon that spread along the shore. Endlessly repeated then as if in multitudinous mirrors, a tall image of gold raising its right hand, the hand of the swordsman, the musician, against the influx of the waters.

He was not mild as he stood there on the coast. He was illimitable, a barricade and a fortress against demolition.

Flat, the hand held up against the sea.

‘No,' he said. Said almost tenderly, as a father tells an infant not to smash its toy.

No. That was all.

No
.

And the mountain of the wave stopped moving.

Off from its top burst plumes of foam and steam. Strands of it curdled and evaporated – whole swags of its molten wetness caved in, each descending with a boom, sending waterspouts high into the stratosphere, where they too hissed and sizzled and became nothing.

An aching warmness flowed along the beaches. The light of the god was sincere as sunrise.

No, he had said.

That was all.

A type of hot erratic rain piddled in over the land. The rain was amazing but not injurious. Women caught it in bowls and buckets but after it was found to be salty, sheer brine. They retained it to flavour the porridge.

No, he said.

Lionwolf was sunrise on the coast, obdurate yet quietly laughing. Some while later too some found their hair had turned golden, or the fleece of the sheep had done it. Or an ulcer that troubled was healed, or love had reinvaded a marriage, or a wanted child was conceived. They had too the healthiest, most glamorous rats that side of the continent.

The sea settled, shivering. It came in couthly like a brisk tide, winding over the slimy floor, reclaiming and sheltering the marine animals. Delicate wavelets ambled up the broken ice, bringing pearls for necklaces and purple weeds that were good for broth. Goldenness had set like the sun. No one could climb high enough that night to see it rise and fall or rise again.

Now it was sometimes day in the garden. A peachy dawn would bring a lucid morning lasting two or three hours. At apparent high noon the sky would flambé and the trees and grass cast no shadows. The deer concealed themselves. The saurians basked shapelessly as scaled bags in the flowers. Then two or three more hours carried the diurnal off down a pink sunset drain. Any actual sun stayed invisible. Doubtless there
was
no sun here. Daylight was a gift the goddess had extended to please or reassure them, or only to accustom them to the outer world they must re-enter.

For over a month by her own reckoning, Azula had watched her half-brothers going off through the park by day or night. Some had even deigned to tell her that they were departing. They meant to go home, they said, or elsewhere. Or they meant to make boats and cross the stretch of eastern sea beyond the island. Another land waited there, the third continent of the earth. It was populated, they seemed to think, but not crowded.

She sensed the ones who went homeward needed the familiarity. Those conversely who sought the unknown country wanted the unknown. Their brief nightmarish liaison with their first mother had enhanced them, and also cut them up. Not only the scars on their ribs then.

But Azula had no physical scars. Those inside her she felt lifting to her surface minute by minute, and more swiftly in dreams. She was not afraid of them. Scars meant healing, like the one that had been on her other mother Beebit's forehead.

Now and then Azula saw Chillel.

She did not know if any of the others ever had, after their ordeal.

Sallus had come to call on Azula only once. By then Azula had made herself a bothy from fallen branches she found among the groves and woods. Probably shelter was unnecessary, but nevertheless she preferred to have it. A fireplace smouldered before the doorway, for Azula knew how to make fire by striking two shards together. Inside was a bed of grass and a store of fruits she had picked from trees also found on her walks. She did not hunt, had never been taught; also the thought of killing the animals repelled her. Being useless at it therefore she did not judge she deserved to eat meat. So far this lack had not impaired her.

Her brother, the prince of Kol Cataar, strode up over the daylit hill and paused, staring at the snake. In a way the chaze had stayed with Azula, and in a way too it had not. One night it had gone out on one of its own hunting forays and in the morning, of which by then there had been seven, Azula saw it had folded itself into a tree. Going closer she discovered this was not quite the case. It was the tree which had twined the snake, throwing a cluster of vine-like arms about it. The chaze rested there in a sort of curving uprightness. Azula had believed it was trapped. Then she saw whenever it wished the snake merely squirmed free, the boughs themselves lifting away to let it go. They would coil back to hold it when it returned. She did not understand what this portended, or if it was relevant in any way. But she went out to explain the situation to Sallus.

‘Yes,' he said, when she had spoken. He stroked the snake's triangular head. Its eyes narrowed with bliss, but it did not desert the embrace of the tree. ‘I suppose,' Sallus added, ‘you're like the chaze.'

‘How?' she asked.

‘You won't leave this place. Or will you? I came to suggest you might travel back with me.'

‘Where?'

‘To my father's city. I
must
go back. What else am I for? All this – all this … is nothing.'

His face was older and more grave. Azula hoped the sorrow would leave him as he left the isle. She was well aware what had been done to all of them, the young men, the searing and momentary destruction that let in the force of the absolute. All had survived. None seemed glad of it, or felt they had received anything in exchange for their male humiliation, the horror of that severance from the primal mother, worse than birth. It had made any future asset soiled, meaningless.

She did not know what to say, so said mundanely, ‘Such a long way.'

‘No need to journey as we did. We can walk on water or fly now.' His face expressed disgust at the soiled, meaningless asset of this. He added, scathing, ‘Like
their
kind.'

‘Chillel's kind.'

‘Vangui. And the mad god Vashdran.'

‘But can we fly?'

‘Or whatever, Azula. This is childish. Will you go with me, even in a boat?'

‘I …' she hesitated. ‘I must wait.'

‘For what? For her to rip you to the bone? I thought she didn't need to do that, with you. She's partial to her own sex. She likes her female progeny more than the men. There are human women like that. Or,' he appended leadenly, ‘the other way about.'

‘No, Sallusdon, it isn't that, not with her—'

‘You've changed the tune of your harp, sister. I thought she was nothing. I thought you hated her.'

‘I did. Then I didn't hate her.'

‘Very well. You'll stay. Farewell, Azulamni, daughter of Beebit.'

Her eyes filled with tears but rather than spill over they swam back into her heart. She said, ‘We mustn't part unfriends. After I lost – my ma – you were the
only
friend—'

‘You honour me. Thank you. Take care of yourself in this foreign land.' He turned away.

She said, ‘I know my real name, Sallus. Shall I trust you with it?'

‘She gave it you. Better not to.'

‘It wasn't she gave – she revealed it.'

‘What worth then the name your
mother
gave you?'

Azula said, ‘There is more than one reality.'

‘So it seems. Farewell, sister.'

When he had gone down the hill, the chaze hissed faintly from the tree. Azula was sure she detected the syllables of her other second name in the hissing. But she went into her bothy, and sat there and cuddled her mother's bone and cried for Beebit, and for Sallus.

It was near sunset of the short day when Azula came out again, and looking along the sweep of the garden she saw Chillel who was Vangui and Toiyhin moving against a vermilion sky across the grassland, with six of the panthers trotting by her.

Azula put back her hair. She ran up the slope. When she was near Chillel one of the cats sprang away from the goddess and straight to Azula. Azula felt no alarm. The panther threw itself at her feet and flailed about purring. It was the one she had faced up to and it apparently remembered her.

She stroked the cat.

‘Goddess,' said Azula, ‘what must I do?'

Chillel smiled. There was such sweetness in her smile. She held out her hand. ‘Come with me.' You could not deny her. Whatever else she was or might become, at this instant she was only goodness and wonder.

They ran then side by side, keeping effortlessly together, and the panthers with them. The park sped by. The sunset became night.

Azula was uncertain if Chillel spoke to her aloud or only sang to her and told her stories in her mind. Azula learned histories and legends and jokes and games. Azula learned how to hunt and kill painlessly for food, how to find edible herbs and leaves, how to cook and read and speak other languages, and ride several beasts; she learned what lay deep in the sea, and high above the sky, and where the stars were. All was an astonishment, but very simple.

The excursion took the whole night, and they ran together all through it and Azula was never tired. They must have gone all round the island too, for different scenery appeared sometimes. She glimpsed the metallic rivers that guarded the outskirts of the Chilleldom, and also the outer sea. When the dawn returned, they were up again by Azula's bothy, where the snake slept in the clasp of its tree.

Azula sat down on the turf and the single panther stayed with her. It washed itself like the very thing she had mocked it as, a kitchen cat. Once birds ribboned over, fluting their song. The panther gazed, lashing its tail.