No Flame But Mine (52 page)

‘What will you do then,' Guriyuve had asked, ‘seek the next new country over beyond here to the east?' The rest who had not gone home had done that.

But ‘All lands are alike,' said Fenzi. He spoke as if therefore all lands were useless, meaningless as any kin, lover or friend.

Neither man had much real interest in the other anyway. They had always all been like that, the Children of Chillel. Though they had tried to band together to attempt resistance of Chillel's sorceries, or to make inroads on the third eastern continent, there was no attraction of like to like. You knew they would cleave to white companions, swear brotherhood with
them
, and be sure even if another black woman might exist to spurn her. She would remind them of their mother. Even their own brothers did that. Yet who could suppose their progeny, even mixed with milk, could be anything but black too? The sublime strain would go on. Eventually there must then arrive a time when some black warrior would form true fellowship with another, or be smitten by a woman with a skin like night. But this was far, far off.

The ourth Sjindi, on whom Guriyuve sat, snorted. He forgot Fenzi and cuffed her light and lovingly, then scratched through her greasy hair. They had grown up together. He was closer to her kind than to his own, whatever his own kind was. She had been brave and steadfast even when he was dragged away to Chillel's tower of agony. Coming back he had met her thundering up to him, so that scores of deer dashed from the grasses, cracking the skies with her trumpetings.

‘Shall we ride away on the ice as we did?' he asked her. She snuffled he thought disapprovingly. ‘Tell me, where shall we take ourselves?'

Then she tensed through every muscle and bone.

Ahead in the murky gloaming, two figures had appeared.

Otherwise there had been no sign of their approach. Even the mammoth had not sussed them until now.

Sjindi lifted her trunk, but she did not bray.

She held it high in a kind of incongruous greeting – or salute.

‘Great Gods witness what I see, amen.'

Guriyuve had heard quite a lot here and there of the Lionwolf, the demon god whose eye-blue standard of a sun had conscripted the flower of Olchibe and Jafn to a mowing.

Had he never heard that an Olchibe man, back then a ghost, had sometimes attended the Lionwolf?

Now one did. Not now a ghost, either.

At the sight of proper yellow skin and hair braided with rodent skulls Guriyuve's heart panged with unexpected nostalgia and gladness. The man had the tattoos of a vandal band's leader.

Guriyuve nevertheless made no salute. He did not tap Sjindi to kneel and let him dismount. He sat and watched the startling travellers as they strode in through the dusk. They were ordinary in their manner, as if they had just come home from hunting perhaps. Did they
know
this benighted region?

The red-haired one,
Lionwolf
, he stopped about forty paces off. The Olchibe warrior plodded on. Reaching Sjindi he rubbed her side. She lowered her trunk at once, and flicked him with a swift but unmistakable caress.

‘She's a nice one,' said the man, grinning. ‘You should get fine calves from her when you breed her – make sure the male's worthy of her.'

‘She wouldn't wear him otherwise, Great One.'

‘No, that's a fact. Don't mind me, teaching you your business. I can see you're a son of the goddess's, but you're Olchibe too right enough—' The man had seemed to recall something and then be about to invoke the Gods, but he did not do that. He thinned his lips. ‘What's your name?'

‘Guriyuve, son of Ipeyek the Gech.'

‘Ah?' said the man, softly. His expression was a strange compound of raw sadness and deep pride. ‘You were named for me – for me and, I'll hazard, for my leader, the Great One Peb Yuve.'

‘You … are Guri?'

‘What did they say of me to you?'

‘Only the name, and then the other name – the Crax's dead husband.'

Was he lying?

Guri stood back and studied Guriyuve.

He had, Guri, never been able to dight Chillel, nor would he have if he got the chance. She always unnerved, half frightened him, and her effect on Lionwolf had made Guri uneasy – and yet he had known little of her at the time. These memories, if so they were, felt as if pasted on afterwards. None of it counted now in any case. The weird notion obtained however, despite everything, that this man was Guri's own son. And in a way he was. Guri had made certain Ipeyek spent his precious Chillel-seed at Peb's sluhtin. It had been Guri's sole magnificent deed while he suffered in Hell.

The handsome young man, darker than the dark of the isle, looked down at him couthly, polite and attentive.

‘And now,' said Guri almost rashly, ‘you'll go back to the sluhts, to Olchibe, and be their hero for them – be …' he faltered, and then said decidedly, ‘a new god for them.'

‘There are only the Great Gods. I'm no god. One-third immortal, and
scratchered
. I belong nowhere, Great One.'

‘And I'm no leader, not a Great One,' Guri said in a slow, terrible way. ‘And the Great Gods don't exist – they never existed. It was an error. Easy to make. Wrong.'

He had affronted his surrogate son. But it would be ridiculous and awful to try to explain
how
Guri knew the Gods were wrong.

Guriyuve did not answer. He frowned. Then he said, ‘I shall not go back into Olchibe. It's a country of women now. They can rule without me.'

Guri opened his mouth to protest. Then closed his mouth and lowered his head humbly.

‘Yes, Guriyuve son of Ipeyek, you yourself must make up your own mind. Forgive an old man for teaching you your business again.'

Sternly Guriyuve told him, ‘You're not old, sir.'

‘All the less right then to order you about.'

The mammoth coughed. Her breath smelled of fresh growing grass. ‘There, Sjindi,' said Guriyuve.

Guri said, ‘Where will you go then, warrior?'

‘Across the world. I shall find some place to be.' For the first as he said it, he saw he might credit it.

‘May the best always befall and be with you,' said Guri.

He stepped aside.

Guriyuve glanced then just once more at the golden figure of the Lionwolf. Even the dark could not mute him. Even the blackness of Chillel's night had not been able to smother his fires. A demon? No, he did not seem to be a demon. And Guri was his companion, who had denied the real Gods, yet so regretfully.

‘May the Great Gods be with you, Guri,' said Guriyuve deliberately.

Guri shrugged and smiled after all. ‘Perhaps you're right. Perhaps they exist. Perhaps the wrong one was only – mistaken for them …'

The mammoth was turning, her rider easing her away into the belt of swamp and shadow split by seams of boiling brass, platinum, mercury and lead. Mist closed round him, and round the beautiful ourth.

When Lionwolf came up Guri said, ‘Do you think it's that? I was
mistaken
for Gods?'

‘No, Guri.'

‘But
are
there Gods? Surely we – and those Rukar forcutches – surely there is something greater than us?'

‘Very probably.' Lionwolf put his arm over Guri's shoulders.

‘Is that then what
moves
us about, makes us do these things, is it
that
, Lion? A
God
?'

Lionwolf punched him lightly on the arm. They were the same age in the appearance of their years, his uncle and he.

‘Never, Uncle. Do you think a pure and genuine God would stoop so low?'

‘Then what does move us?'

Lionwolf himself moved Guri bodily to face him. He clapped a kiss on Guri's forehead. Then put his hand behind Guri's head and gently, firmly, made him bow it to look at the ground where they stood. With his other hand Lionwolf pointed downward, to the earth.

Two travellers came by night to a bothy on a hill.

A distance from the door a white snake shone in the enfolding of a tree, watching them with serious eyes, listening with unusual ears to their footfalls.

Doubtless it had listened also to the young woman's lovely voice that sang in the hut.

Lionwolf, bending to glance in through the door, beheld Azula, Chillel's first daughter, writing on the air with a twig, using her recent education, laughing low as she saw words printed there as if in light. But even Lionwolf could not see them, or did not attempt to do so.

The interior of the shelter had slightly changed.

A flowering vine was trained wall to roof. Flowers and herbs rose in clay vases, blooming in spring water. Many-tinted fruits balanced in a nest of woven grass. There was no meat. Though she had been taught how Azula still elected to kill nothing that had blood in it.

The fire had been brought indoors and blossomed like the flowers in a ring of stones. It scorched nothing, and sent up only the thinnest sweetest smoke. Flat bread was baking in the ashes at its rim. Somewhere she had uncovered or invented grain, something of the sort.

Through firelight and word-light Azula raised her eyes.

For a second her face was sharp with horror.

Then the horror sank away. She knew the Lionwolf, and that he was not as he had been. Chillel had lessoned her in that too.

‘Good evening, lord,' said Azula, casual.

Lionwolf smiled. The light of the smile outdid all else.

‘Good evening, madam. May we enter your house?'

‘Yes, do. Mind the doorway doesn't collapse. It's very flimsy.'

The two traveller gods entered.

A guardian par excellence, the chaze eddied in after them, and stood itself up on a coil of itself, observing them carefully.

Azula poured water from a clay pot – she had made all the vessels herself, baking them on the fire – into a pair of clay cups.

Lionwolf blinked.

The water became the reddest wine, an old Rukarian vintage, both in the cups and in the jar.

‘Oh – thank you,' said Azula. ‘One of my mothers taught me how to do that. I didn't think to.'

Stately, Lionwolf replied, ‘But it is pleasant for a guest to contribute something.'

The night was now pitch-black outside, but gushes of stars, an abundance never seen before even here, were coming out like exquisite prickles on the hide of the sky.

No moons arose. Maybe they would not compete.

The three persons in the hut ate hot bread and a peppery spread of herbs, leaves of lettuce and fronds of graron. Such items were not generally picked wild. The red wine flowed on long after the jar should have emptied. It was potent but nourishing.

The chaze listened while they talked of the distant Southern Continent and Kol Cataar. Azula now began to ask questions about rats and roses and houses cleared of snow standing with their doors high in the air. When Lionwolf offered the snake wine it sipped from his cup.

‘And here,' said Azula finally, ‘will you seek the tower?' She spoke matter-of-factly.

Lionwolf smiling said, ‘How shall I find it?'

A ritual?

Azula clasped her hands about her knees. She put on the storyteller's face – and for the very first time it was possible to see in her her goddess mother. But she had no sound of Chillel. Had she known it, as Lionwolf did, her words resembled a very different message once uttered by the Kraag.

‘At the centre of Chillel's park stands the stem of her high tower. It is the Moons' Tower. It was built far back in time, to call up the moons as visitors. And she enters there. Beyond this hill, raise your eyes to the distant heights. Moonlight floats sometimes on the crown of the tower like silver hair.'

Lionwolf got up. He stood over her and gently said, ‘Daughter, give me a piece of your fire. Uncle, give me the coal from Sham.'

Azula reacted wondrously. She stretched out her hand and picked a flame from the hearth. She held this up to Lionwolf and only then said in slight surprise, ‘I can do that too!'

But he took the flame also in his bare hand. He waited, carrying the light lightly while Guri gaped at him. Guri was the only one apparently determined to fluff his lines.

‘What coal, Lion?'

‘From the plain below Ru Karismi, where it fell when you … talked to Ranjal.'

‘But – it's worth nothing – ill-omened thing – no, I won't let you have that.'

‘Uncle, once before you did. Do you recall the coal Saphay drew from the Jafn sending-fire and burned in the waste when I was a baby and you had found us? You kept it after and gave it me. But in the White Death it perished with the rest. Guri, the coal is from Sham. It fell in Jafn lands and made magic. This second time it fell with you and your lady on the plain. You found it again. And it holds another of the emblems that I am, lion and wolf. You can't deny it, Uncle. It's come back to close a circle.'

‘Which circle?' Guri scurried among his garments as if searching for a flea.

‘Oh, some minor matter.'

The phrase struck on something like a coin in Guri's shirt, making it ring. Guri reached in and removed the coal, black and shiny with its only-just-singed youth.

Lionwolf leaned forward and took the coal. He was too quick for Guri's futile gesture of trying to snatch it back.

‘Lion—'

Lionwolf was gone.

Outside a river-like ripple shook the night. But it settled in a moment and the stars resumed their chorus.

Another fire crackled now, untended on a slope. Despite not being secured by stones and the tall grass not even cleared aside, it did not abuse its position. It did not stray to eat surrounding vegetation. The fire comprised a solitary coal, and a unique flame. From the heart of it a narrow streamer, not sparks or smoke, curled upward to the sky.

Suddenly aerial lights began to flicker on the ether. They were like the coloured northern lights of Vormland. Presently they had no form.

Then that changed.

A pair of creatures had grown from the random streams of dazzle. One was a big cat, unruffed, less lion than panther, the other a cat of equal size, yet not entirely
cat
. Some who knew might have identified it as an example of that hybrid horde, a chachadraj or drajjerchach – cat-dog, dog-cat. And yet its doggishness was far more wolf-like.