No Flame But Mine

by Tanith Lee

  The whole hall danced to its feet. Children shrilled, women yelled, men bellowed. The lions and dogs got up rumbling. Nirri’s girls were upset, but Nirri only said, ‘Very clever.’

  ‘Clever?’ Granny did not like that evidently. ‘Can you do it?’

  ‘No, I can only cook it. Which is more useful, do you think?’

  Some laughed. Others held their breath. After all this wise-woman was wise. Be careful.

  But then the witch too broke into a cackle.

  ‘What shall I do with it? Make it into a roast again?’

  ‘No, poor thing. Let it live now. We’ll eat something else.’

  The old witch flumped herself down among the unsettled Jafn waiting ladies, and reached for a pie.

  ‘You must be hungry, madam,’ said Nirri.

  ‘Not unless I feel I’d like to be.’ The witch ate the pie. Something odd there. She had pedantically good table manners.

  Nirri, who had brazened it out till now, began to experience a curious tug in her recollection. She stared at the witch. Where before had Nirri seen this raddled mop of yellow-grey-white hair, these creased yet once delicate features, hands and frame?

  ‘Do you tell any your name, lady?’ she asked the witch abruptly.

  ‘I’ll tell you. Not here. Who d’you think me to be?’

  ‘There was an old – lady once, when I lived by the shore in the other country. Fishers found her and brought her to me. A great while she lay in my hut. She was a foreigner. I called her Saffi.’

  The witch’s face broke like a plate in shards of bitterness.

  ‘That, that. You would have to recall that to me, wouldn’t you? That was never me, fishwife. Just some bit of me that sloughed off. My real old age I shall never have. And so maybe I had to have it somewhere then. And besides, do you think I don’t recall how you left the old bat in your hut, left her to her fate, didn’t you, when the whale-demon poured up the vast wave? She must have died, must she not? Let me tell you, I met her after. Saffi. She taught me how to act this out, this crone I am, but she is never me. But for all that now she’s dead as a nail in your door.’

  Nirri had recoiled. The witch craned limberly forward. Nirri was nonplussed yet again by the unlikely freshness and fragrance of the crone’s breath. There was a subtle perfume on her too emanating from her rags of hair or garb, her sackcloth skin.

  The witch said, ‘Where’s your son?’

  ‘My son? Do you mean Dayadin – my lost best boy—’

  Now the old crone’s mouth dropped open. Did she go white? ‘Dayadin …’ she said. The voice had changed. ‘Oh God – oh gods – was he yours?’

  ‘You have seen him?’

  ‘Don’t ask – don’t ask me—’

  With no warning both women were in floods of tears. They leaned together, sobbing, finally clinging to each other weeping. The already anxious joyhall palled with trepidation.

  It was a fact Arok had rescued Nirri from the tidal wave the whale-leviathan Brightshade had raised, and the old mad Saffi was left behind, turning up later on the whale’s nightmare back-country of mud, monsters, stench and bones. There Saffi and her inadvertent originator Saphay had perished together. But when Saphay rose from death a goddess, and ruled a while over the Vormish, Dayadin had been brought to her as their captive. As she was taking her new people across the ocean to this second continent, Brightshade, on the orders of his father Zeth Zezeth, had attacked her. In the fracas the bloody whale had swallowed Dayadin whole.

  Nirri wept for her lost son, not asking, fearing the worst.

  Saphay, goddess in guise of crone, wept for all of it: lost Dayadin, Lionwolf her own lost son, Athluan her lost lover now born back into the witless world as Nirri’s second child.

  How tangled the lives of men and gods.

  When the tumult of grief drained off, Saphay in her crone form straightened and patted Nirri on the arm. Nirri was cinder-eyed from tears. The crone naturally was fresh as a shrivelled hothouse peach.

  ‘I meant your other son. Athluan.’

  At this one of the waiting-girls jumped up and shrieked, doubtless unsensibly, ‘Don’t let the old bitch near him! Kill her! Kill her! She’s a gler!’

  ‘Oh, sit yourself and shut up,’ snapped Saphay. ‘I’m unkillable. Don’t waste all our time with such stuff.’

  Upstairs in the Chaiord’s apartment, Athluan had woken up and asked his young nurse what the noise was for below in hall. The nurse had been unnerved by some of the cries. She said if he would be good and not stir from his bed, she would go down and inquire.

  Athluan sat there, wondering who he was. He had had another bad dream, the recurrent one about Rothger, his brother who had slain him in the previous life. At the moment the child could not put any of it together. Asleep he was someone else, or, more troubling, who he really was or should be. Waking was often a trial.

  His nurse did not come back.

  Then he heard his mother’s step on the ladder-stair.

  She appeared in the room and he saw she had been crying. He held out his arms mutely, full of sadness that something had made her unhappy. Was it his father? No, for Arok was away. Had something happened then to his father?

  ‘No, hush, nothing like that. But a wise-woman has arrived. She spoke of your – your lost brother.’

  ‘Rothger …’

  Nirri was growing used to these discrepancies. They were upsetting but would surely fade out of him with age. She said, ‘Dayadin.’

  The wise-woman now stepped off into the room. She was very agile for one so elderly. Athluan stared.

  ‘It’s you,’ said Athluan. Suddenly he was all smiles.

  Saphay the crone poised in the upper room, still fazed a little by her refound lover so unsuitably young – as indeed he had told her he would have to be, when last they met. But her eyes strayed from him. The room was extremely familiar, very like the upper room of the Klow House. There a bed with coloured quilts and furs, there the Chaiord’s weapons and a lamp that might be turned to give a darker light. In such a room years past they had first made love, and in the phantom of such a room that ultimate time, Athluan a ghost and she a god, they had again made love. What else terrible and tiresome and soul-destructive would occur before he grew up and once more they might couple?

  To Nirri Saphay spoke solemnly. ‘I have bad news, lady. Your beautiful black son was swallowed by a giant whale.’

  Nirri turned, clutching Athluan. The toddler was all that kept her from falling on the floor.

  Tact had never been Saphay’s strong point.

  ‘I saw a vision – an omen—’ said Nirri, stumblingly. ‘A black girl with fiery hair on a sled drawn by a black sheep, riding over the sky—And then the ghost promised my husband the Chaiord that Dayadin would be here – or somehow found here. And then Fenzi dreamed Dayad was here, in a nice place, Fenzi said.’

  ‘There are always these things,’ Saphay replied with a wretched dismissiveness. ‘They mean little. Or else something gives us hope to torture us more. A nice place … probably that’s death. At least death would be restful. I’m sorry.’

  ‘My son.’ Nirri buried her face in Athluan’s small body. Her ‘son’ did not mean him, he knew.

  Athluan sighed. It came from deep within him, from the former one he had been. He said the words the former one had said: ‘Nothing can divide us, death least of all.’

  Then the one he now was began to sob, not knowing what he said or why.

  Sombrec glared at Fenzi. Fenzi shrugged, and, extending his hand, helped Sombrec to his feet. Both young men were stripped to loin-guards. They had been wrestling, a favourite warrior sport at Padgish. Fenzi, wrestling Jafn fashion, had seemed an easy target. Not so.

  Risen, Sombrec went on glaring, now at a pillar. Risen, he was struggling with a physical reaction to Fenzi that was more than martial.

  Fenzi apparently missed this. ‘I hear the tiger cub is doing well,’ he suggested generously, as they strolled towards the communal h
ot tub.

  ‘How not, with Curjai to tame it.’

  Arok and his men had been at Padgish ten days. Everyone was friends, as Prince Curjai had predicted – or had ordered.

  The Jafn men, picking up the new language, were quickly told the story, taken for flat fact by the Simese, all of them, one heard. Arok, despite his own interesting adventures with goddesses, giant whales, and invulnerability, reserved doubts. Two women, one supernatural, and a man might perhaps create a child between them. But this?

  The king was said to reckon it true. And if a god had seen to the business, any king would be cracked if he objected.

  Riadis, the red-haired queen, was one of many regal wives but had borne no children. Then she did bear one, which she claimed to have got from the Simese fire god Attajos; she had, they said, the burns to prove it. This first boy however was crippled, missing limbs or something of the sort. He had died young of a fever. Not so long after, the shaman attached to the queen’s suite beheld a vision of the dead lad, who had been named Curjai, returning, this time equipped not only fully to live as a man, but as much more. At which another sparky smacker burst out from the heart of the fire, scarred Riadis again and again made her pregnant. When the second boy was born there could be no doubt of a resemblance to the earlier child, though this time nothing was awry, and next thing he began to grow at a prodigious rate, one year for every two or three months, they said. A couple of years now under his belt and he was twelve or thirteen – as certainly he did look to be. Moreover he could work magic as elegantly as any mage or shaman. He healed, he drove off dangerously bad weather, he summoned fire. He could even, for a joke if it were wanted, turn water to beer, iron to silver and silver to gold and – best of all – snow to fire. Well, if the dad was Attajos, how not?

  Arok, saved from the White Death by Chillel’s charms, Arok who had watched Dayadin grow faster than any other child he had known, and likewise Fenzi – Arok sat on the fence between the two courts of belief and doubt.

  ‘We never saw the lad before. Maybe a sorcerer got him on her—’

  ‘The Simese king says the god, and that the god asked his, the king’s, agreement first.’

  ‘A likely idea. Please may I beg to borrow the sweetmeat of your wife. What damn barbarian god ever thought to do that?’

  Fenzi did not argue. He had known Curjai for a god instantly. That was that; why scramble about?

  ‘There are no gods.’ Arok was irritable. ‘There is God. Aside from Him there are sprites and demons.’

  ‘Did God not make all things?’ had asked Fenzi equably.

  ‘So you were taught. At least I trust you were.’

  ‘So I was. Thus, if God created all, men and demons and the rest, why not create gods too?’

  ‘Gods? Why?’

  ‘To save Himself a little of the work.’

  Despite this Arok and the Simese king made themselves sociable with each other, as did the Jafn and Simese warriors and definitely some of the Jafn and the Simese court maidens.

  Arok had meant to despatch a messenger to inform the garth of his whereabouts.

  The Simese king declared he would send some of his own men to do it, save Arok the bother. No doubt the king wished to note the virility of the garth, while keeping the rest of its warriors busy in Padgish. Arok worried. His men seemed only glad to go on roistering in the jolly palace, which had underfloor heating from braziers and pipes and several other luxuries. Not to mention exotic horses and girls.

  ‘Why must we stay, why do they want us,’ Arok said to Khursp and Fenzi, ‘save to try us out and subdue us?’

  ‘Their young prince seems to like us.’

  Khursp said darkly, ‘I asked this prince how his mother came by her copper hair. The boy says to me, Oh, are there none in your continent with red hair? I answer. Only one: he’s dead. I’ve heard of something like that, says the prince. He meant that scourge, that gler-get fiend the Lionwolf. And Curjai does know of him, I swear he does, but not from us. There was a sort of laughter in his eyes.’

  Back in the exercise court and reaching the tub, Sombrec plunged in. Then Fenzi.

  Presently Sombrec gave in, and asked a question.

  Fenzi smiled. ‘Among the Jafn too, with warriors who like each other that way, it’s not uncommon. Why don’t you swim a little nearer?’

  Riadis was combing her hair, that talking-point. Curjai, Escurjai among his friends and intimates, stood watching her, so far unseen.

  All at once a flurry of purple jewels formed in a garland round her brow.

  She laughed with delight, and saw her son then in her second mirror of real glass.

  ‘How long will this diadem last?’

  ‘As long as you want, Mother. As long as love lasts.’

  He was especially himself today, she saw: he glowed – like the fire.

  ‘Love,’ she said, playful. ‘Does that then last?’

  ‘Though the world’s cold,’ he said, ‘living hearts are warm as flame.’

  Riadis thought abruptly of how, those years ago, she had gone to her private interview with the king her husband, proud and sure, telling him straight out the god of fire again demanded use of her. The latest burn raved rawly on her leg; she knew that already her womb was filled. ‘I have heard of your mad dreamings,’ said the king. ‘You said the last one was the fruit of Attajos. Another than I would have killed you outright for fornication.’

  ‘Another,’ had said Riadis, ‘would not then have been so prudent or pious as you.’ She knew the king was afraid to harm her. Yes, even though her first child had not been his, and malformed so they said. Her family was important and influential. And now if she had twice betrayed the king he would besides look such a fool.

  The king said acidly, ‘If you birth another monster—’

  Riadis turned and left the chamber.

  She had been utterly certain of vindication. And when Curjai was born, swiftly and with little pain, she had it. Since then the king could do nothing but revel and boast of her choosing by a god.

  ‘Stay,’ she said to her son now. But before the word had left her mouth the glass rippled. Curjai had simply vanished. Only the glory of the amethysts, only the glory of pride, remained.

  They were motionless, frozen. As if ice had clustered over them, a chimney of it, a barricade of icy prisms.

  Jemhara: This, the third time he had beheld her naked. There might have been a fourth. But that time she assumed he never saw her at all – her entry to the wreck of Ru Karismi, searching for him—

  On that occasion, and one other, it was the shape-shift that laid her bare, as now. But once he himself had undressed her body, laid bare heart and soul.

  What had she been before that conflagration?

  What was she now?

  Had he come here to kill her after all? She had dared to save his life and his sanity – surely when undesired a capital crime.

  Thryfe: What was she then beyond that blaze of white flesh? The hair – lips – eyes—Little black creature of the order of lepus, that lilted in at the window when the shutter banged. Something was in the alley. He had been about to look and see what it was – a snowfall. Was he thinking now like a man? No, no mage, no man. A boy.

  Did he want her? What did he want? He must reject the evidence of his lust, perhaps his human need. It must be more than either of those.

  What then? She frightened him.

  Jemhara too was afraid. Not of any violent act, even though with Thryfe she could not, she believed, protect herself. She had dreamed how he wrung her neck, or meant to.

  He had despised her.

  Hated her.

  Thryfe drank her in through eyes and nostrils, through every pore of his skin. The room brimmed with her.

  I loathed her. The touch of her like thorns – worse, because I have been lacerated by thorns and borne it easily. Her eyes are full of something, maybe love, maybe only my reflection …

  ‘You are an illusion,’ crisply said Jemhara
. ‘I will banish you.’

  ‘You are not an illusion,’ steadily said Thryfe. ‘I will keep you here.’

  Between them was the inlaid table, gleaming in firelight, or from another source. The wine and apple and ring shone, three tinted moons, ruby, emerald, silver. On a wall a twig glimmered too, unnoted.

  Jemhara drew back. She sat on the edge of the bed. ‘Please sit, Highness,’ she said.

  Thryfe ignored the single chair. ‘I’ll remain as I am, Highness.’

  ‘How can you address me as a Magikoy?’ Her voice was very thin.

  ‘I think others have done so.’

  ‘They were wrong.’

  ‘I was wrong, in so much, until now. What shall I do, Jema, to put it right?’

  ‘Leave me,’ she said. ‘Go hurriedly away. That’s best.’

  ‘Then,’ he said.

  ‘Then nothing. I was foretold you’d come. By a devilish god. By Vashdran—’

  ‘A sun god, if his foretelling to me was real. I’ve never been sure. We can discuss it.’

  ‘Go away,’ she said.

  He sighed. ‘I’d suppose you took your revenge on me, but I don’t think you so petty. What is it? Have I ruined it all, wounded you so deeply that all you feel now is the wound?’

  A whisper. ‘All I feel is love.’

  ‘Oh, love. Love is always fearful. It sees its first object torn in shreds under a tree of ice by a black wolf. It sees the people it must protect dissolved to sand. It says, hang yourself, atone, suffer. That’s what love does. Is there nothing else?’

  Her voice now was even less, a flake of tinsel dropped inside a cup. ‘Why did you leave the wine and fruit, the ring?’

  ‘I found the apple on my way here. In a derelict hothouse, the last single apple, all the rest black and rotten, but this one pristine and preserved in ice. The wine was frozen too in a goblet which had itself become ice. I lit your fire and let them thaw.’

  ‘And the ring …’

  ‘The ring. That was mine, when I was young. When I had a little money, in a city – then. Then I left it off. The display of Rukarian kings made me sick. So no adornment for proud Thryfe. I found it recently at my house near Stones, after you’d gone away. I was – drawn to it again, to my earlier self – innocent, unembarrassed to be happy. But I found too I can’t wear it now. My left hand’s turned partly to stone.’ He saw her start, glancing up with a firework of concern in her gaze. Oh, women. Women. He said, ‘You have my ring. I’ll go away now.’