No Flame But Mine

by Tanith Lee

Nirri was the first to stir in hall. Going from her mute and disjointed husband and the host of women, children, warriors, beasts, she stumbled up the ladder and off into the bedchamber.

  No shred of fire or ice lingered.

  Her second son, Athluan, a white-haired Jafn man of about thirty years, sat on the Chaiord’s bed. Grey-eyed he looked at her, his most recent mother. His face was already modelled in low sorrow familiar and controlled. ‘There, lady,’ he said. ‘It’s over now.’

  ‘I was dreaming of my father.’

  ‘Do you still dream?’ she asked, curious.

  The fire of her hair looked suddenly incongruous to him against her blackness, and his own. Why did he think that?

  ‘I’m human remember, Brinna. By two-thirds.’

  ‘Perhaps I dream,’ she said. ‘But I don’t ever recall. And besides I won’t have it you’re human, not remotely.’ She grinned her wonderful clown’s grin.

  Encouraged Dayad said, ‘In the dream – Arok was sick. He had become – spoiled.’

  ‘Arok …’ she said.

  For a benighted moment he assumed she had either forgotten the name of his father like one more irrelevant dream, or worse pretended to.

  He frowned and sat up. ‘My dream might be a true one. Among the Jafn we—’

  ‘Oh, the Jafn.’

  ‘Among the Jafn dreams have value. They can show us things. Arok had grown old before his hour. He was like – he was like the dead.’

  ‘Possibly he has died,’ she remarked.

  She combed her hair and the glorious scent of it disabled his irritation. But the hair of his mother, Nirri, also had a beautiful smell when washed and combed.

  ‘Brinnajni, if I said I must go home—’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘My home—’

  ‘You are at home. Your home is with me. I am your home.’

  ‘To my father’s garth then. Does that pedantically content you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Brinna—’

  ‘You will go nowhere but where I am. You’re mine.’

  ‘Come with me, then.’

  ‘There? To such a little place?’

  He left their bed; he walked to the doorway of their house and looked out into the nameless snow waste. It was night and a double of moons was rising, both halves, as if they were one moon snapped apart.

  ‘I was stolen from Arok and Nirri as a child by reivers. Next I was borne away towards another land, another continent. My father and my mother loved me dear.’

  ‘But I love you, Dayad. And I saved you from the belly of a monster. Is such a love not enough for you? It should be worth all and any love else.’

  He thought, She argues like a woman now, only a woman. I did this for you, and this. Therefore you are my property. No god argues that way. Does she?

  Dayad said, ‘I never and could never forget what you have done for me.’

  She too had risen. She furled about herself some garment magicked from nothing. The black sheep had come in and leaned against her, but unusually Brinnajni did not seem aware of the sheep, which otherwise she called ‘sister’.

  ‘Your words sound like farewell. Ah but pay heed, Dayadin, you don’t know how to find them, your father, your mother. Do you guess even where we are, you and I?’

  ‘I can find them. I have no doubt of it. I’ve always been there with them, some piece of me.’

  ‘And I thinking you were always and only with me.’

  He would not answer that. He said, ‘If I or any think of another very often, though separated by miles of sea and land, we live in the same country with him. So it is. He sired me. She bore me. They are my parents.’

  ‘And you are no longer a child.’

  ‘No and I never was, or only for a moment. Nor you, Brinna. We grew too fast. Let’s not squabble like children now.’

  ‘So you will leave me.’ Her voice was pale as ice.

  ‘Just for a while.’

  ‘Why limit yourself to a while? Go then. Go away. What shall I care? Human? Yes, so you are. Not her blood, one little third. But I am all god – Chillel’s, his. Siring, bearing – such trivial nonsense. I may hate she – he – but they made me as I am.’

  ‘Then understand, those humans I love have made me what I am.’

  ‘And I have only loved you. What has that made you? Faithless fool. Go away.’

  Outside, clothed for a journey and standing in the snow, Dayadin saw the hovor sprite Hilth bustle from a hilltop and flicker towards him.

  When Hilth burled foamily around him, he was lifted off his feet. The hovor too had become more vital, and full grown, in this unmapped wintry retreat of theirs.

  At first Dayad took Hilth’s antics as a game, trying to cheer him. Then he saw they were moving with purpose and swiftly, sometimes skimming the snow, more often whirling high above it.

  The sad severed moons moved too, now flying with them and now at an angle away.

  Hilth was carrying Dayadin where he had said he wanted to go.

  Perversely doubt assailed Dayadin. All this change had happened so abruptly. Then he looked back – back in some inexplicable manner since already they had travelled in every direction, east and west, north and south. But he could have seen Brinnajni distantly, if she had allowed it. Therefore it appeared she would not. He was bitterly sorry then. Yet he would be sorry whatever course he chose, for choose he had had to. The pull Chillel had exerted on all his brothers, like that of a mother planet, had not touched Dayadin. He knew nothing of it, and if Brinnajni did she said nothing. It was the dream which compelled him, the memory of his past that, until now, had seemed shut behind a screen of ice.

  When his boots again contacted the ground, Dayadin sensed he was once more properly in the world. He could not recollect passaging over any ocean, but he knew nevertheless he had reached the second continent, the landmass Saphay had been intent on gaining. Arok then presumably had also reached it.

  Cliffy heights soared up. On their terraces ice-forest masked itself in the strange white-blackness of moonset.

  Acres behind there was the pulse of the sea.

  He feared it a minute, though it was too removed to be heard let alone seen, for Brightshade lurked somewhere in the oceans. However Dayad might plot a course from it. The Holasan-garth would lie inland.

  Dayad ran over the plain, strode up the mountains. Though only one-third god, still he had capacities few men could call on. Hilth billowed along with him. Sometimes Dayad spoke to Hilth, as in the old days. Hilth had always conceptually understood Dayad, others seldom or not at all.

  The moons were down. Another rose. This moon was full and gave off a fluctuating carnelian glare that menacingly surged with black.

  Hilth poured over Dayadin, trying to bear him away backward. The bloodshot moon was rushing towards them out of a rip in the night.

  Struggling with Hilth, Dayad was thrown on the hard rime of a plateau. The moon resolved. It struck him just below the heart. He felt his flesh peeled open to the ribs in four long runnels. He could not even cry out. Blood spurted. The spurl of moon – all flame and pitch and claws – curdled, condensing to a crescent. It faded as consciousness went from his eyes.

  The hovor collapsed behind him, spattered too with Dayadin’s own blood.

  The dark was empty. Emptiness whistled over the plateau, poking out the stars as if with a stick.

  It would be dawn in less than an hour.

  And I hate you – hate you – cesspit – forecutch – trech—

  Azula blinks. She had not thought she could do that; her eyes had felt as if fixed by glue. The blink seems to last longer than usual, and when her lids go up again there is in front of her the object of her dedicated hatred. The goddess Chillel now called Vangui.

  But this is not Vangui.

  The goddess, five or six feet away, is tall for a woman but not astonishingly so. Made ostensibly of black satin with hair of trellised skeins of crimped black silk, she wears a simple dress. It
looks like undyed wool. But her exquisiteness is such the rustic garment itself appears wonderful draping her.

  And now she bends forward a little, just a very little, gazing into Azula’s face.

  To be impervious to the loveliness of Chillel, either man or woman would need to be, as the ancient poem had it, part dead in flesh and soul. Even her aroma, which is not any perfume only herself, is delicious, and … kind.

  She is kind. Her heavenly eyes are kind. Are holy. ‘Azulamni,’ says Chillel.

  The name grows ethereal and gleams on the dark.

  But Azula grips herself in barbed wire and rasps, ‘Slay me then. Be quick about it. You’ve murdered my brother or destroyed him in some other way. I’d destroy you if I could and I can’t. Vangui,’ says Azula, getting out the name like a curse.

  ‘I am not Vangui now. I am Toiyhin.’

  Azula falters at the new name. It is from a language she has never either heard of or subconsciously thought was in the world. She has heard of a profound mad race known as the Kraag. Is it a name of theirs? Azula has a notion that toiyhin means dove.

  The goddess is not a dove. She is a panther. She has claws.

  No claws, no pelt are visible. Her hands are perfect as is the rest of her, with clean oval nails of an organically pastel shade most beautiful against her blackness.

  The inside of her mouth too is rosy, and her teeth are white, but only like the teeth of a woman.

  Azula remembers how Beebit spoke of this, and reverently of the vulva of the goddess too, like a rose-heart—

  ‘Shall I tell you a story?’ asks Chillel who is Toiyhin, in the marvellous voice of a mother. Azula says nothing. She becomes sensitive to the space they are in, and that it has altered. The hall is now more like the great hall of a Rukarian palace, which she had heard described. In fact it is much larger than the one at Kol Cataar. There is a central fireplace where a low fire smoulders. All around are benches and chairs, where men are seated. It seems there has been a feast or dinner. The remains of luxurious foods and an ongoing largesse of drink indicate this.

  The men are black. Azula thinks lucidly they are her half-brothers, all those she has met and others too. They are dressed in their travellers’ clothes but are well groomed. Their faces are variable, some stern and some quite frivolous. Some look tired, some antagonistic. Some are very angry but it is an anger they are used to and do not mean to detonate. None of these men is injured or ill. None is bleeding. None has been slain. Unless, she thinks, the girl borne solely of two women, they are ghosts.

  Try as she might she cannot single out Sallus among them.

  Then the goddess speaks and Azula can only concentrate on her. Her soft voice fills the hall, as clear as a moon chime.

  ‘I am your life. If you will live through me, you will live. If you will not live through me you will live, but I will not be alive in you.’

  The hair crawls on Azula’s scalp.

  Toiyhin continues: ‘From nothing I was made – from night and snow. I am the vessel of what made me, who are three gods, or one god that has three persons. For this, and to be this, I was created and am. But also I have been made the vessel for renewal and further creation, both to receive and to release. I have joined with gods and with men and I have formed sons and daughters who are gods, or so close to gods that in the end only gods will tell the difference, by which time, who knows, my children may have become gods greater than such gods as I am or he is, the Lionwolf. Once,’ says Toiyhin, ‘it was Summer in the world. The sun dropped down into the sea one night, and never ascended any more. Only the phantom of the sun ascended, and gave no heat. Winter slunk into the world. But now there is another sun and he will rise, is rising, over the world. The door is undone and open wide. All things are suspended in the gateway of the dawn.’

  The unfinished story finishes then apparently. Toiyhin who is Chillel ceases to speak.

  Azula says in a child’s tone, ‘This isn’t a story.’

  ‘You, my children, are the story,’ says Toiyhin, but now she is only Chillel. ‘Hate or love me, I have scarred all of you just as your birth-mother did, but I have not left a tiny scar upon your bellies from the birthing-cord, but torn you open to the bone. You are marked with the power of eternity. Hate or love me you will live through me, and I through you, to time’s ending.’

  ‘I’m not scarred,’ says Azula defiantly.

  Chillel puts out her hand and gently brushes back the three-colour hair of Beebit’s daughter, acorn-brown, crow-black and the strands that have gone white. Chillel gazes into the hazel eye of Azula and into Azula’s ink-dark eye. ‘No?’

  Azula is afraid then. The fear is not like the terror of before. This fear is only human, or perhaps only godlike.

  ‘Those aren’t my scars.’

  ‘No, Azulamni. Your scars lie within you. They must reach your surface. Listen, I will tell you your true name.’

  Chillel leans forward. Her own exceptional tresses brush Azula’s cheek. How uncanny. They feel only like silky ordinary hair. Chillel whispers.

  Azula alone hears her true name. Her eyes widen. She knows it. She is cut through to the quick of herself, not by pain but by understanding.

  Chillel kisses her lightly on the forehead.

  The kiss seems unique, and burns pleasantly, a moon-kiss, then flutters off her and away – a moth, a moth that was a kiss, fluttering away.

  Everything else is gone too, the hall and the half-brothers and the goddess-mother. There is only the outer hill covered in warm night grass, and here she sits. There is no tower at all. Azula feels first after the bone of her human mother, kept for safety in an inner pocket. It is where it should be. Then she feels for the chaze, and it too is where it should be, round her neck, twitching consolingly. She says to it, ‘I’ll tell you my true name,’ and whispers the name against the snake’s head, about where she has always reckoned it hides an ear.

  As Curjai walked back to the city of Padgish, he aged. All the dregs of adolescence were sloughed.

  He had nearly always been in his first and mortal life an optimist, affectionate, expecting and meaning well. When he had thought he learned these values were misplaced, he was broken up like the mirror in which he had witnessed fatal reality. Later, when he died in that first existence he learned also ultimate horror and despair.

  Next was Hell. And Hell cheered him because it gave him instead a complete body that would do all he wanted it to, and a gamut of mythic warrior codes, along with comrades, and one especial companion, Lionwolf. So then much of the benign philosophy returned. In Hell mostly Curjai had prospered.

  Reborn thereafter to earth, a god now, his happiness had known no bounds. Even lacking Lionwolf, he had no doubt of their reunion to come. Once more Curjai anticipated only good, for himself, for all those he loved. Even for those he only liked or tolerated, such as his earthbound non-father the king. Why should any try to harm Curjai? He was invulnerable. Why should he not do magnificent things for all others – and why should they not accordingly be glad?

  But the mirror had again been broken.

  The facts of his mother’s death were entirely revealed to him.

  He walked, still disclaiming more flamboyant locomotion. Yet he covered miles in seconds. And in his development of self it was rather the same.

  The current self however was acrid. He tasted this acrimony and aged another fifty years.

  It did not affect his outward looks. A young and singularly attractive male he reached the exterior parks and plains of Padgish, with the invisible ageing nailed to him like a banner to a post.

  Here it was that Catty came running to meet him.

  Catty had washed his face and front fur in the snow to remove the blood stains of regicide. Despite that Curjai was instantly aware of what had gone on.

  ‘What have you done!’ he shouted.

  The countryside shook. Piles of ice from adjacent hills tumbled with a hissing roar.

  Catty stood his ground. He had been
a she-dog Hell hound and was now a Drajjerchachish male tiger. Once fed the ichor of Curjai, he did not fear him.

  Curjai calmed. He had wished to extract death himself but Catty had done it.

  Perhaps this was better.

  Curjai foresaw another thing in that moment. He was unlikely to be a violent god of retribution.

  Humbly he went to Catty and they leapt into each other’s arms, wrestling friendly on the snow while the epilogue of the started avalanches dropped in valleys.

  ‘I must still go there,’ he told the tiger when they had wrestled enough.

  He knew Riadis was now far away in another world, but terrible memories were flushing through him. She had always been despised in the capital after she had borne a cripple. When he was born again as a hero and divine, she had been praised yet still shunned as a freak. Riadis had not cared. She was proud, and only wanted Curjai to flourish. And he—

  And I neglected her. A gift of flame, a snatch of words, a necklace or coronet of jewels – ‘How long will this diadem last?’ ‘As long as love lasts.’ ‘Love,’ she said, in play. ‘Does that then last?’

  Living hearts are warm as flame. That was what I said.

  But dead hearts were not cold.

  He and Catty flew the final miles to Padgish.

  Curjai had exhibited few of his abilities so blatantly.

  On the streets below horses reared and dromazi cast their riders. Mages pelted from their esoteric houses. Women shrieked.

  Curjai shifted his focus and appeared suddenly in the tree-pillared royal hall, his white tiger at his side.

  There were mages here too. They grouped, looking at him askance, unsure for once of their mediocre and cliquish talents.

  They had not yet decided on a replacement king. Theoretically it should have been Curjai, son of the king, and by now in looks at least the most mature of his heirs. Besides he was the son of the god Attajos, via the king. Some advances were made to Curjai of this type. Warriors and statesmen and nobles crowded about the hall. Curjai recollected his first childhood, when he was a boy of intelligence and heart without functioning limbs or ‘human’ attributes.

  Only eventually did he speak. By then the hall was bursting with people and all of them trying to appease him. Incense sickened the air. And now too evening was also arriving, the hour of lamplighting, and everywhere flittered hurrying tapers.