No Flame But Mine

by Tanith Lee

  But Azula only looked at him and replied, ‘My mother is dead.’

  Deep in the grey architecture of the labyrinth lies motionless colour. The labyrinth knows it, has grown used to it. It lives here.

  That is, if it does live.

  How long then has the child, the newborn, sprawled on the weighing slab of stone against which sacks of milled flour had reposed? A month. At that age, they grow so quickly. One moment the floppy babe-in-arms, and then, and then—

  Rats that exist in the underpalace have sometimes come and stared at this motionless yet undead thing. Their eyes are sequined with rubies. So would the child’s eyes be if ever they moved, to catch the light.

  For there is some light here.

  An old man, tall, gaunt and stooping, goes about the storeroom, always slowly. There is an aura to him of great presence, but it wobbles, as if he had become displaced from it, as if all that was ever anything in him has entered the aura, and inside he is just a memory, something left over.

  The eyes of the baby are even so phenomenally blue.

  The magician looks into them.

  ‘What do you want? You have crushed the world in your hands. I should destroy you. But I don’t, do I? Is it because she bore you? I doubt that. Even the rats won’t have you. You’d choke them, probably.’

  The baby does not stir. On the floor around the slab where the flour once was are pieces of what look like broken eggshells.

  The baby itself is vivid. He is mottled with rings of dark tan and the red of a banner. He is less like a child than like a fabled insect.

  Thryfe the magician seats himself in the chair Bhorth’s men have brought him.

  Since the miraculous child appeared here in the chamber where Thryfe had lain in his trance, no one will enter. Thryfe is well aware the king expects him to throttle or smother the child, as the magus himself had advised.

  ‘In the dream,’ Thryfe says, ‘you emerged as an eagle, fully fledged. And you are a sun god. So too you told me some while ago, there in the oculum which never lies, wish it would as one might. Not even in a dream.’

  Thryfe has tried, without undue cruelty, to be rid of the perilous creature on the slab. For it is not a child. He laid a pillow over it and pressed down. There was no struggle. After what seemed an hour of personal torment he straightened and beheld the child exactly the same, mottled, bald, breathing, serene, eyes wide. There have been other methods since. After each assault Thryfe fell back shaking in the chair. It must be his fault. His ability and knowledge have bled out of him.

  The stories told how the Lionwolf, Vashdran, had grown in ten years to be a man of twenty-one. Other legends had wafted about that it had asked only ten days for the god to grow to manhood. The god now has been on earth a month. He does not seem to require sustenance, not even a mother’s milk. He does not move or cry or show any even quasi-natural reaction. His eyes do not follow anything. Yet when you stand above him, they gaze deeply into yours.

  For the hundredth, thousandth, time Thryfe nerves himself to stare into the blue eyes of Vashdran.

  ‘What do you want?’

  Minutes pass.

  Thryfe leaves the monstrosity where it lies and goes back to his seat. On his instructions they have walled up this chamber. The air at least is dying. The mage thinks of his lover, and how he has no power to help her.

  In a sort of dream again, Thryfe is viewing Bhorth in an inner room. No one is with him.

  Bhorth’s beloved son, the witch-seed of Chillel, has gone from the city. Whatever scenes attended Sallusdon’s quittal leave no mark, except in furrows between the king’s eyebrows, and below his eyes. He has put on weight again and looks older.

  Thryfe recalls Bhorth’s heavy portentous steps finally descending to this area of the underpalace, and how Bhorth had demanded to come in and free the city, and Thryfe himself, of the burden of Vashdran.

  Thryfe’s own weariness and disgusted boredom by then perhaps had exceeded Bhorth’s panic and ruthlessness.

  ‘Wall up the entry here,’ had said Thryfe. ‘I told your man that when I told him the child was here.’

  ‘Don’t be a numbskull, mage! Already it’s shifted itself from one solid place into another. It can pass through stone.’

  ‘Not any more. Perhaps it’s exhausted. It doesn’t move, perhaps can’t. And too I shall watch that it doesn’t.’

  ‘How can you prevent it?’

  Thryfe had smiled unseen and drearily. ‘I am its physical father. I believe that has tethered it. And I am, even now, one of the Magikoy.’

  They had argued then, and for some days after off and on. Or Bhorth had done so. Thryfe did not speak again, nor did the king enter the chamber.

  The child lay throughout motionless, and iridescent with its unnerving, insectile colours.

  At length Bhorth went away for good, and then his men came and there was the noise of the walling up.

  It is true Thryfe has also spoken words to anchor the god-thing where it is. But really Thryfe believes it will not be able to leave him. Ironically, while the heroic demi-god Sallus has removed himself from the care of a loving father, the fiendly Vashdran has come psychically running to his hating progenitor – who thereafter has attempted many times to destroy this son.

  What binds Vashdran to Thryfe is not really any mantra. Presumably it is habit. The first father, Zzth, had also hated his son, and attempted wherever possible to kill him. The rubbed place in the heart most often attracts the blow. Men are caught by this snare. How can gods be immune?

  The magician pushes off his meditation. He drinks from the crock of water on the floor. There is nothing else. He sits in silence until the rats steal out again and watch, then steal again away.

  Something in the air.

  The rats are dazzled.

  They have stars in their eyes now, not rubies.

  A starry filtered flicker and glister ensues, a circular unravelling, that swarms through the storerooms over and around jars of oil and preserves and closets of frigid meat, eddying always inward to one goal.

  Like snowflakes the stars infiltrate the walled-up room.

  Is anyone here aware enough to note them? The magus has again sunk in deathly sleep. But does the uncanny baby see? The eyes of it still do not move, yet the stars obligingly dance about the child’s head before prancing on and amalgamating high up in the chamber’s darkest corner.

  And there the stars form something. If stars do this the something will be spectacular.

  Nondescript in his garments coloured like biscuit crumbs, Ddir descended, walking down the wall as if it were a flight of stairs.

  Ddir, the third of the trio of gods active in, or somehow swept up in, this supernatural tragi-comedy from the start, was the artisan, the maker. His arrangements of stars and their subsequent portents had brought him much attention. Ddir himself seemed never to be aware of that.

  Now the genius of his unmind was already working. He had forgotten – if he had ever known – what had attracted him to this storeroom. Nothing was of consequence to him apart from the creative process, in this case represented by the child on the slab.

  There had been something like this before. Years ago, or minutes. Or centuries.

  The gaudy baby was not a blank canvas. More a spoiled one.

  He stood looking at it.

  Then he began.

  The fleshly bundle became instantly formless. It was a lump of dough or wet cement, the colours swirled in it. Only two blue dabs of light hovered now here, now there, under its surface. The eyes, perturbingly able at last to move, were swimming about through its mass like busy fish.

  Then the doughy mixture parted in the middle. Two halves slicked back. Inside, a light like a dawn sun rayed upward. Although of such intensity this light lit nothing and cast not a single shadow.

  Ddir gazed into the ray, causing and monitoring its realignment.

  The two halves of mass fell off on the floor. They shrivelled to husks and went to crumbs
. More crumbs. The light however spread and now it swiftly assumed a shape. That of a tall and full-grown man.

  The body was of perfect proportion – what else could one expect from an artisan such as Ddir, no doubt obsessed by flawless maths? Lean, and long of leg, wide at the shoulders, hair streaming out behind a mask of face that quickly accumulated features. In seconds every correct anatomical element was present. The closed eyes were lashed, the brows drawn, the lips sculpted and the mouth equipped with faultless teeth. Male nipples gemmed the flat muscles of the strong chest. At the groin the phallic weapon lay impressively sleeping. The hands and feet took on their nails. Even this time a navel formed, not having been forgotten. Whether it might have been extant anyway was debatable.

  Ddir looked on intently. But the blue eyes, those independent fish, hovered about, watching too. Did they approve?

  Apparently. As the fiery substance of the madeover god began to cool to a golden opacity, fire now only in the hair, the eyelids lifted. Into the sockets dropped the vagrant eyes like two blue spoonfuls of water.

  Something shuddered in the stonework. An unphysical quake.

  The atmosphere settled.

  Ddir closed his hands and put them away in his sleeves like valuable tools.

  And on the slab the god sat up. He was a young and beautiful man of about twenty-five years of age, his nakedness resplendent as any new suit of clothes.

  ‘My thanks,’ he said to Ddir. ‘That saved some time.’

  Ddir did not speak. He was losing interest. The project was complete. He levitated upward. When his head brushed the room’s ceiling he simply continued on and ebbed through and away. His bare feet went the last, already transparent, and the toes not well manicured.

  Lionwolf stretched himself, and rose.

  He crossed the room as a man would have done. He had been a man in life, and death. Humanness remained comfortable and appropriate for him, despite so many talents.

  Thryfe lay crookedly sleeping in the chair. Lionwolf set one hand quietly on the magician’s head. Thryfe, though starved of air, was not yet dead.

  Lionwolf nodded to the doorway that had been walled up. Stones and mortar mellifluously crumbled and powdered down. Outside ran a dim corridor of the labyrinth, empty of anything except a dead torch. But when the eyes of the god touched the torch with their glance it sprang into hot flower.

  If he could do so much, why had he needed so much help to break from the matrix? Zzth had interrupted his arrival: was it that? The ritual, once begun, must be concluded in good order. If that, then now for sure it was.

  The wall having given way fresh air was soaking through. Curiously ordinary once more Lionwolf picked up Thryfe’s mantle, discarded on the floor. Lionwolf dressed himself, and belted the garment with a length of cord drawn from a nearby sack.

  Thryfe moved. He drew in a long, clicking breath.

  His eyes opened and fixed on what stood in front of him.

  Saying nothing, pulling again only on enormous reserves of will, the magician dragged himself to his feet.

  His sole and total plan raved in his glare. He must once more assault the creature, whatever it was, whatever it might do. He must somehow impair it.

  But the boy – boy? – this beast-thing from some Hell – the boy held out his hand. ‘You’ll feel better in a moment, sir.’

  ‘What?’ said Thryfe, arrested by absurdity where terror and horror and despair had not stopped him.

  ‘You’ve suffered, but you heal. Give it a chance. That’s best.’

  Thryfe sealed his lips. He came at Lionwolf in a lurching leap.

  Lionwolf caught him. Held him.

  Something … The touch of the god was wonderful, like fiery wine which – yes – healed.

  ‘I can’t call you Father, can I?’ the god asked with a certain tactful inanity. ‘Physically of course. But there.’ He put Thryfe down gently on the slab.

  Ashamed by a dreadful wash of compliance, Thryfe felt how life flared in him now. It ran like lions through his veins.

  He forced out words. ‘What happened to the woman who bore you?’

  ‘Jemhara lives.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘She has been taken, but the one who has her thinks her valuable.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The god Zeth Zezeth.’

  ‘Are all of you real then?’ Thryfe blurted scornfully.

  ‘Some of us are.’ Lionwolf had now, it seemed, the grave authority of a great earthly king. Surprisingly again, he knelt by Thryfe, looking into his face. ‘But Thryfe, a destiny may sometimes be immovable. The parts we play, gods and men, may be written out for us before we are born. And in that writing we too may have colluded.’

  Thryfe sat stunned, stupefied. He felt vigorous, healthy, young. He was hungry and thirsty in sane and eager ways. He was greedy for his existence that, less than five hundred heartbeats before, he had meant to sacrifice. It was like becoming drunk on wine, he thought. As the drunk believed, it should despite anything be possible to move the world in the desired direction.

  I must wait to regain my right mind. Until then there is no use in questioning, even in thinking. He had touched a god. God help him.

  Somewhere above the room and corridor there was the sound of general disturbance. Men were coming, Bhorth’s guards no doubt.

  Thryfe became aware of the rats then. They were emerging from all points of the room, crowding in like a thrilled audience. They stared at the Lionwolf.

  And the god rose, turned abruptly and saw them, and his face lit with laughter. He shook his head at the rats and the scarlet hair shook too like a wild wing. But the rats only kept their ground, chittering, tweeting like strange birds. Some held on to others, as people did sometimes when amazed or delighted.

  ‘Oh, then,’ said the god. A kind of pale, soft fan of light flew off from him. It covered the room, the dank dark walls of which shone out like honey. The rats jumped and sported in the wave of light, washing themselves and each other.

  When it sank they scurried off. They were gone and the room was dark again and empty but for the magician, and the god he had fathered.

  ‘What did you do,’ Thryfe said, ‘to the rats?’

  Down to such a ridiculous and irrelevant query had this vast event driven him.

  But the god only laughed aloud and did not answer.

  Above came the noise of mailed, running feet. Below rang the bird-like song of rodents doused in beams of supernature.

  ‘He is a fool. Yes, as he foretold, a fool. Does he have no idea of what constrained him – what can still unmake him?’

  The voice was melodious. The place, glorious.

  Jemhara took in the scene with a deadly rapture.

  She sat in a grove where trees in heavily gilded leaf gave on a view of distant mountains, russet and vermilion, some of which mistily fumed into an amber sky.

  The warmth was rich but not oppressive. A fountain of liquid water spouted through twists of copper.

  ‘No, not quite what you see, Jemhara,’ he said. ‘None of you ever can see it, or report it, quite as it is. Perhaps nor do I.’

  His malign side was shut off. The god Zeth was attractive and delicious in all ways. He looked not only unsurpassably handsome but good, wholly benign, as if no unjust or spiteful action could ever be possible to him.

  She thought, I am in his paradise, where the Rukarian priests and poets say he goes for recreation. It’s true they all describe it differently.

  She looked down and saw she was clad in orichalc tissue. Her hair was clean and perfumed with an attar of some unknown and matchless plant probably foreign to earth. She was young again, not even young as she had been before Apple, but about seventeen. She did not need the flitter of little glass mirrors hung in trees to tell her her loveliness had returned repaired, in fact improved.

  Her first actual thought had been one of fear – she could not find, either on her hand or lying where it had about her throat, the silver ring. Fear
subsided to a small grey ache, the familiar bruise of loss. But then she had wondered if the ring too, magical and representing so very much, were still a part of her, had become a part of her. She imagined it grown into the marrow of her bone above the heart. Let that be so. Let me think that. And the ache melted away.

  By then beside her stood Zeth Zezeth, the Sun Wolf.

  ‘Don’t bow to me,’ he said. He did not mean it. It radiated from him that she must always bow no matter what he said. He caressed her cheek with one finger. The sensual pleasure of this was nearly unbearable. Rapture – deadly, deadly.

  ‘Please pardon me, lordly one. I can hardly bear to see—’ she attempted as he led her towards a prism drifting between the leaves and the water.

  ‘But you must.’

  So she must.

  It was the world naturally that was to be scried in the prism. She expected to be shown Vashdran there, the Vashdran baby crying, frightful yet vulnerable and pathetic. Or the sudden egg. But what was revealed was a snow-high street and over it, between house walls, a stream of rats scampering. Each was very large and seemed to have been dipped in gold leaf.

  ‘Playful,’ said Zeth. He smiled. ‘He plays about like a little boy even now. Imparting energies to rats. But can he know, or does he not, why Thryfe could both draw him in and hold him put? Only that roaming moron Ddir, who had nothing better to do today, was able to release the simpleton called Lionwolf from his stasis. Well, Jema, you have been a Rukarian scholar. What do you think?’

  ‘How can I know, lord?’

  ‘Even you, my Jema, trammelled and trapped Lionwolf. Thirteen months. Poor boy. Poor Jema.’ The jeer in Zeth’s sublime voice was enchanting. Nothing foul or vicious could be involved with it at all.

  ‘Did I, lord? I had thought the delay was—’

  ‘No, Jemhara. It was you. The two of you.’

  Jemhara wanted only to listen. She did not want to listen. She wanted anything, even pain and degradation, all but this. Irresistibly she gazed into his face. Her spirit seemed sucked right out of her. But then he had made a slave of her spirit already. Without thought she knew even the silver ring within her breastbone could not anchor her soul against this flood. She drooped with desire for Zeth, and love, and in her heart a little knife began to turn slowly on and on, coring her like the apple she had been named for.