No Flame But Mine

by Tanith Lee

  Even so the Magikoy women nodded at her. The younger, who was the more thin and stern of the two, remarked, ‘Anyone can see at once.’

  The elder then declared, ‘One of ours. Greetings, Jemhara.’

  ‘You’ve recounted everything?’ Jemhara asked of Aglin.

  ‘Everything. The city’s thrown open the gates to us. The king here – it’s Bhorth – has been told the facts by Highness Thryfe.’

  Jemhara forbore to pose the one question she craved to, How is my lord? Someone would have mentioned, or in some manner given it away, if Thryfe were worse.

  ‘I’m ready then,’ Jemhara said. ‘Do what you must.’

  Aglin shook her head.

  The younger Magikoy Lalath said, ‘It isn’t to be more sleep for you, Jemhara. That would harm you probably, and no doubt the baby you carry.’

  ‘Is to harm it possible?’ Jemhara was scornful.

  ‘Who knows? It’s a god, or what will pass for a god. So we were given to understand. Whichever he is, few Magikoy would risk the health of such a foetus. Besides, my code is always, save in rare extremity, to protect the unborn. I know you weren’t lessoned quite as we—’

  ‘No, madam, I wasn’t. I now put the lives of a few thousand persons before the hypothetical well-being of this – lodger inside me. And it can protect itself, I’m sure.’

  The older Magikoy spoke. ‘There’s no leisure for a debate. What we propose is this. By your own powers, Jemhara, you will change your appearance, not superficially but intrinsically. You will be given another name. You’ll live out in the city, unknown, and be treated there as any common woman heavy with a bastard got lying with gods know whom. Aside from your disguise, you’ll use no magic, either for yourself or any other. In secret you’ll be cared for and kept safe. We’ve no notion what is hunting you, but this manoeuvre will perhaps defend us all.’

  Jemhara lightly laughed. She said, ‘Yes, why not? That makes some sense. And I would rather move about than sleep. Will Thryfe—’

  ‘No. He must sleep. His waking power attracts this element much as you do.’

  Jemhara flared. ‘Only through me. Therefore I will sleep. Let him be awake. He is so weakened, further hibernation might kill him—’

  ‘Thryfe himself has decided. Do you wish to go against him?’

  ‘And do you tell the truth?’

  ‘The Magikoy don’t lie in such matters. You must learn that, Jemhara, now you belong among us.’

  ‘I am no Magikoy.’

  Lalath said, ‘How vehemently you spurn us. Do you dislike yourself so much?’

  Jemhara turned her face as if at a slap.

  ‘And was it Thryfe who decided on the manner of my disguise?’

  The older woman said, ‘We have done that. Does it displease you? It is the best course.’

  Jemhara said, ‘Perhaps. I wished to know only if the idea was yours. And now I do. I will of course accept all of it. Now I should like to see Thryfe.’

  Lalath looked at Jemhara. Lalath’s eyes said clearly, You remember you were a queen then, do you? Aloud, ‘No,’ said Lalath. ‘Already Thryfe sleeps again.’

  Jemhara gazed far away into an inner bleakness and darkness. Her face was that of a girl of about five, sent from home to live with a human monster.

  ‘Very well. Let my lord sleep. And I shall be a pregnant refugee. What’s my name? Have you decided that too?’

  ‘Apple.’

  Jemhara looked sidelong at Lalath.

  Did she know that also? The apple he had brought that always grew back after they had eaten it? What had become of it when the house fell? Fool, she thought, to grieve for an apple—

  She thought, Perhaps all things grow again after death devours them. One way or another.

  She thought, I still have his ring.

  ‘Apple, then,’ she said.

  Azula sat on a low wall, running one hand over and over her shaven skull. She had herself chopped off all her hair and burned it, an offering to her mother’s memory. Aglin had then suggested that the residue be shaved that it might grow back more evenly.

  Azula’s other hand held Beebit’s lightning-blanched bone.

  She spoke to the bone, as sometimes she did.

  ‘I miss you. Where are you? You’re all I know. You loved me. I wish you’d come back to me. Can you hear?’

  Then she stayed quiet, her head bowed and both hands on the bone. It had come from Beebit’s right forearm. It was healthy, though broken at its upper and lower ends.

  At the beginning of the narrow alley, one of an assortment lying just above Kol Cataar’s smallish Great Market, there was a sound of marching mailed feet. An example of King Bhorth’s city patrols must be going by.

  Azula paid no heed.

  She held the bone.

  Her tears, very slow, glycerine, almost emotionless, spotted its ivory. She studied them through the next group of tears that formed and fell.

  At the alley’s mouth came the slight scrape and scuffle of a military halt.

  Next, individual steps. These were masculine, a man well built, young, and without any impediment; also nicely shod.

  No shadow covered Azula. And yet she sensed a type of darkening which had nothing to do with shade or loss of light.

  Reluctantly she raised her eyes.

  Night was in the alley, elegantly cut into a perfect human form. Through her demobilized brain flew the picture Beebit had so often painted, Chillel, goddess and beloved, Azula’s second mother. But this was a male. He was youthful. He was dressed as a prince. Gold and silver hinted. They were nothing to his own intense lucency – like that of a dark star.

  ‘Is your name Azulamni?’ he asked. The question was a commonplace. As if he often inquired the names of those he met, straight out, nothing to it.

  ‘So my mother called me.’

  ‘That was Beebit?’

  ‘My mother.’ Holding the bone, the girl got to her feet. He was weightier and taller than she, and a man and royal. She said, ‘What’s that to you?’

  ‘Everything. I’m Sallus – King Bhorth’s son by Queen Tireh, and by Chillel the goddess.’

  ‘Chillel …?’

  He held out his hand.

  One gold wristlet clothed it and a ring that was a silver snake. There was a live snake, she now noticed, coiled over his shoulder. It too looked at her but with a sideways eye.

  ‘I am your brother,’ Sallus said.

  Azula stared.

  She could not move, it seemed. From tactful reserve at her shock, neither would he.

  So the chaze, the serpent, unroped itself like flexible cord. It swayed forward, its tail still cinched round Sallus’s arm, and lowered its head on to Azula’s breast, gazing up at her from that one fixed eye she could see.

  Azula was not frightened of the snake. She should have been: they were poisonous usually and she had been told of them. But it seemed a prince of its species, as he was, the man who had brought it. The feel of the snake too, contrary to all she had heard, was heavy and tepid and dry. The sinuous life in it was like a conduit that joined them now, he and she – like an artery running heart to heart.

  ‘You’re not afraid of him,’ said Sallusdon presently.

  Azula, the bone now returned to her other hand, stroked the flat head of the chaze. ‘No.’

  ‘Then,’ he said, ‘why be afraid of me?’

  Seen from above, the city of Kol Cataar, unfinished in its determined and valiant ‘finishes’, like a model created by amateur artisans experimenting – but now the more clever workers have been called away.

  Does Thryfe see that? Has the eagle of his magician’s psyche got out from his trance? Has it quartered the sky, searching, watching, keeping guard? If so it leaves no evidence for other lesser mages to decipher. And he himself is unaware of it.

  The chamber of his unconsciousness lies under the palace. Here Lalath and the older Magikoy woman check on him at strict intervals. Servants creep to him nervously and tend his sleep
, turning him regularly, bathing and rubbing his body to keep it supple. Water is drizzled through his lips, and in the trance he swallows it. Even Bhorth uneasily visits the couch, frowns and departs. Black Sallus also has come here, although his reactions to Thryfe’s coma are unreadable. When Bhorth frets, Sallus is reassuring: ‘But look, sir, he is one of the greatest among the mages. We must trust his judgement.’

  Only one person is always absent from the room. If she had gone in there what might have happened? The electric passion in her heart, roused only by seeing him – would that too be like a lure to the thing which pursues? Doubtless. She had better keep away.

  Otherwise the city goes on much as it had. The newcomers from Kandexa have been absorbed. Some have even found long-lost relatives, who generally have taken them in and made them, gladly or grudgingly, welcome. Others have started their own straggly estate where, with the permission and indirect help of the king, they are transforming wagons, huts and tents into wood and ice-brick houses. A fourth hothouse has gone up. It is so well made by those Kandexans who erected it that Kol Cataar’s architect has approached them to learn their secret.

  Months pass.

  Two or three thick snows come. Nothing malign or unusual in them, simply an everyday ingredient of the five-centuries-old Ice Age, the ice-jewel of the earth.

  Months pass too that bring various festivals of Ru Karismi. There are the hanging of wreaths of frozen leaves and hothouse or paper flowers, and processions of candles to and from the small temple-town, where the blue priests crouch over their altars largely neglected.

  After the last of the thick snows the sky stays pallid and dense. A filmy cloud, a kind of icy fog, covers the city. Through this the sun can only be spotted when very bright. Only a triple moonrise is visible by night, when the city is flushed with a rare antimony sheen.

  And all the months of time and festivals and moons pass on, and on, and on.

  For some they hurry too fast. This house and that is not yet ready. This heart and that is not yet calmed, or revved up to eagerness. And for some the months shift like dragging, enormous boulders. One month is like seven, one day is a month …

  ‘Get along, you dirty whore! We don’t want your sort here. You’ll earn nothing from us.’ And a flung chunk of snow, striking sharply, left its track on her cloak, an invitation to others.

  ‘Doesn’t even guess its father.’

  ‘For shame – in times like these. A known murderess.’

  ‘Ugly bitch!’ screamed voices, and next a battery of hard bits of snow, some of which contained pieces of flint or pottery, stung down.

  She knew to shield her breasts, face and head with her arms.

  Her belly, engorged with the hugeness of the child, was neither to be hidden nor preserved. Let it preserve itself. By this hour she often dreamed it and she might die. But that was a silly premise. How could it? Therefore how could she?

  A handful of times a man had caught and raped her, once standing at a fence with, behind it, some lashdeer grazing on dormant grass, paying no attention. On another occasion she was pushed flat on her face, which in the early days was still just possible. That assault tore her; she bled. But such treatment meant nothing to the thing inside her. And if it meant anything to her she never said.

  She remembered the two Magikoy women. Months before the younger one, lofty and contemptuous, had commended her. ‘You’ve cast an able illusion on yourself. I shouldn’t have known you.’

  ‘She’s done wonders,’ Aglin had agreed.

  There had been an edge to her tone. She resented the change on Jemhara’s behalf, for Jema had been so beautiful. But now, her hair hacked short and bleached to a tawdry rusty blonde, her face and body, even her skin and features, altered by both magecraft and make-up, Jema was a puffy-faced and warty woman, slit-eyed and pig-nosed, with sloppy breasts and splayed fingers. She stank too. She, who had smelled always of some perfume, her breath clean as cool water. Jemhara had been nearly amused when Aglin had stepped back in revulsion. ‘Have I done that well?’

  ‘You will live,’ Lalath had gone on with her dictum, ‘in the slum quarter. Kol Cataar inevitably already has one. It lies behind the temple-town. Significant perhaps. Our gods have been debased. In trouble men either cling to them the harder or throw them out with the trash.’

  ‘Another identity has been arranged for you,’ said the older Magikoy. She looked less implacable, more vindictive. This would be against the Magikoy creed. ‘Word will go about that you, now called Apple, are not merely a prostitute but one who tricked a man into marriage, then murdered him in cold blood. His sons had cast you on the streets a few days before Lionwolf reached the capital and the White Death was unleashed.’

  ‘If that had been the case, would said sons not have put her up for trial?’ barked Aglin.

  The woman refused to take affront at Aglin’s directness. ‘There was no proof.’

  Jemhara said nothing. Infallibly she had recognized her punishment.

  In cold blood she had murdered a king. She had been cast out.

  ‘Such notoriety,’ said Lalath, ‘will cause others to avoid you, which is in their interest as well as in yours. As for your remarkable pregnancy, Apple does not know who got her with child. An unfussy and unhygienic customer, obviously.’

  The older one interpolated priggishly, ‘This too is necessary. We don’t mean to sully the reputation of Thryfe, former Warden of Ru Karismi.’

  ‘Despite the fact,’ added Lalath, ‘some have wondered where he was when Ru Karismi fell.’

  ‘With me,’ Jemhara said.

  Only her voice had stayed the same, musical, lovely.

  Lalath said nothing. She looked away.

  The older woman let out a truly chilling hiss. ‘Then it is good you should now pay some small price, Jemhara.’

  At that Aglin had startlingly shouted. ‘What do you know of prices paid? Did you ever live in the real world? You shot up from the Insularia like weeds round a rose-bush. What can you know of how women – and men – have to live out here on the snow? Magikoy,’ she concluded. In the word was a contempt to which their own was nothing. ‘Magikoy.’

  ‘You will be silent,’ Lalath suggested.

  Jemhara had turned to Aglin. ‘All’s well, Aggy. It is nothing to me.’

  Aglin quietened. Without another syllable, the two mages left the room.

  Jemhara had been afraid from the beginning, the instant Thryfe told her what had happened to her. She had seen at once that her own compliance with the vision of the Lionwolf had put this upon her. She had longed for Thryfe. The rest must follow. And from that hour she had no defence, would expect none. She too, as before, could only live as one did out here, on the snow.

  Not long after, in the persona of Apple, the slut and murderess, she was living in one of the alleys in her allotted shack.

  When she was three months gone with child she was not very big, but seemed larger due to illusion and padding. That had not deterred the first rapist, he who had thrust her over on her face.

  She sat up in the towery of her brain, mind and soul. As he left her she found she had automatically sheathed herself against his parting kick. She reminded herself then that she must forgo all self-protection. That alone, despite disguise, might call back to her the hunting foe, the demon of the storm. The god in her womb would have to look after her. She could not.

  There was she learned a terrible release in giving up. She had never essentially done that before she met Thryfe. Any surrender had been pretence. With Thryfe her surrender had been total; it was only love. Her fate in Kol Cataar however was itself a sort of death, and thus a sort of laziness. But it too must be.

  So Apple existed in her shack. A man had died of fever there not long before. Everyone else kept clear of the place. It lay behind a refuse tip which, as the boulders of the months piled up, seemed to symbolize them under its weight of snow and muck.

  When she went abroad Apple was spat on, insulted verbally, a qu
antity of times hailed with garbage and rocks. During those last adventures Bhorth’s soldiers had miraculously eventually appeared. The militants were told Bhorth did not like such goings-on in the slum.

  At night secret slinkers arrived at Apple’s shack. They brought her packets of decent food and flasks of wine. Even unpolluted water was brought, for now Jemhara was not allowed to employ her most basic talent of thawing. She had also a burning coal that could not go out. Aglin had given it to her in a pot. After the fever-fear left the surrounding slum-dwellers, several times men or women came to extinguish the fire. When it would not perish, ‘It’s mageified,’ they snarled. ‘The rotten bitch has stolen it.’ Wary, they would not steal it in turn.

  So slow, so heavy, month on month.

  Jemhara puzzled. Of those few humans who did know what she carried, would none seek to kill her after all? They could not suffer the return of Vashdran. Yet it must be impossible. They too would have no choice. She realized her thoughts had become confused a little, circular. Meaningless.

  And slow … heavy … month on month on month …

  Four months. Eight months.

  Now it must be soon.

  She felt no spark of him in her womb – of neither of them, the vile god Vashdran or her beloved Thryfe. It was only a lump.

  Which weighed her to the earth.

  Her back split with pain. She sweated and shuddered through the nights, still often vomited on rising.

  Soon. Soon.

  Nine months.

  Ten months.

  With a woman who had never borne before, an initial child might well be late.

  Aglin crept in at midnight, swathed as a dirty old hag and guarded by a single brawny soldier, himself disguised as the most revolting of sexual customers. A sensible lad, he played his role with gusto outside, and became a model of decorum in the shack, turning his back as Aglin examined Jemhara.

  ‘You’re sound,’ said Aglin. ‘It’s there and in the right position, and alive.’

  Jemhara who could have learned this for herself had had to ignore her diagnostic skill. ‘Then when shall I give birth, Aggy?’