No Flame But Mine

by Tanith Lee

  Five months later confused word began to filter in, this time from the south, of a vast movement of warriors. Most took it for some ferment among the Ol y’Chibe.

  Guri went to see.

  It was not the Chibe. Although the Chibe had been involved.

  Without a doubt his gospel to them of non-violence had impeded their resistance when, with no or minimal warning, the horde of the Rukar coursed down on them.

  The Olchibe fought, yes. But guilt attended the skirmishes. To kill was an error. They must indirectly beg the pardon of Great God for any victory; they must atone.

  The Rukar had no such scruples. Their gods were gods of smash and grab. Flaying the packs of Ol y’Chibe, they bore on towards the city.

  Guri manifested both in his temple and among the sluhtins. He gave priests and people a sermon. He gave the warriors the same sermon while their mammoth cavalry stamped in rhythm. The Olchibe must resist the Rukar scum. To kill was not always a mistake.

  He put on too the appearance of a warrior and led them into battle. Some fights this way were well won. Not all though, for those who followed him had gone over to the manner of peace and compromise. It had been ploughshares for decades by then and the swords were rusty.

  The Rukar, in battle, he did not recognize. But he had removed for himself all personality from them. An enemy should never have a soul. Being like the old days of his first life this disturbed him. He too felt yearnings for atonement. Flattened them.

  A new myth meanwhile rose among his people. There were two Great Gods. One was a god of passivity and tolerance, and one a war-god for conflict, mounted on a roaring mammoth.

  Divided in twain Guri marvelled in angst at how the Great God – he – became plural. That peerless totem he had sworn by so often as a man – it was himself, and twice. Like the filthy gods of the Ruk, he also had been made a schizophrenic.

  Guri’s own sluhtin, where reluctant Yedki had borne and left him, had itself been sacked by the time he reached it. Any Crarrowin he believed must have been slaughtered. Normally they were. Unlike the average woman – or man – they refused to give in and fought on with magic till crushed. He had heard tales of the occasional Crarrow who had used her skill to escape. But mostly they would not desert their sluht.

  Almost a year after the sky blink of northern destruction, a quiet night covered Sham.

  Observing the dark Guri thought it had outwardly Sham’s general night-look. Torches and braziers were blazing on the streets, lamps in windows, and along the frontage of the temple. But he could hear all around a sub-vocal plaint of anxiety like the rustle of rats in the cellars.

  It had seemed to him there had been no recent time-slips. He had been consecutively aware of the passing of every day and night here. This was so since the Uaarb was blighted into being. He had used every minute to rally the city, preaching, energizing. Themselves they had laboured. The outer walls were toughened and built up, the city gates reinforced. Military exercises took place. Crocodiles and the vicious apes had been trained too, to attack a foe as in the arenas. But they were erratic. They often made mincemeat of their tutors instead.

  Many declared no force would ever reach Sham. Sham was favoured and invincible. Sham had her God – her two Gods. These would protect her.

  Guri had considered that aspect. Unbeknownst to the optimists of course he had already seen he could not do it. More to the point he had already seen he had not done it. Privy to the future of his first life, he knew that he had not rescued Sham. Even so, he considered options.

  To protect the whole city seemed beyond his power. To destroy the enemy wholesale seemed too dangerous. It would require a blasting energy that might rival the Magikoy weaponry and fall-out of some type must be inevitable. It never suggested itself to him that they might employ their now newly invented weapons here. The future also demonstrated they had not. Doubtless the Rukar too were initially and sensibly afraid of them and kept them far in reserve.

  Knowing the future was the main stumbling block to Guri frankly, and all options broke on the face of it. The events now sweeping in had already happened. Even if he were able, what enormous foundation might he dislodge should he dare try to undo history?

  He did not yet know he was to blame for waking the Ruk civilization. He had thus far been spared that.

  On this night however, standing on a corner of a narrow street in Sham, Guri beheld the Crax of Yedki’s coven wending towards him along the hard-packed snow.

  ‘You are Gurithesput,’ she said.

  He had been in disguise, that of a gladiator with a skin of drink on his arm to warm him.

  He saluted her politely. ‘Good eve, Mother.’

  She must have been dead surely, twenty or sixty years or more ago. This was her ghost, her phantom come out from some hell – or hopefully in her case, heaven.

  A painful memory struck him of how he once, when dead and damned, had visited his own sluhtin coven, and sent them the black seed of Chillel in the body of Ipeyek, to foster a hero among them.

  ‘You consider the fate of Sham,’ said the Crax now.

  ‘Just a little, Mother.’

  ‘Do nothing, Gurithesput. Do nothing.’

  Shocked. Guri dropped the beer-skin off his arm and glowered at her. ‘What?’

  ‘You know, Star Dog God, that interference is fatal or more likely only useless. Leave it well alone. Yes, you are a god, but you are not in charge of these matters.’

  ‘If not me – then which god rules here? Is it the Rukar trash—’

  ‘None of that. None of you.’ The Crax raised her hand, on the wrist of which a bracelet of thin gold shone. She looked healthy for a ghost. ‘See.’

  A ball of fire rose from her abdomen and floated up to perch as a globe on her palm.

  Guri stared. In the fire he saw another globe. This was white, yet faintly stained here and there with a bluish greenishness.

  ‘What is that, Mother?’

  The Crax only watched him. She had coins strung in her hair too. She had come out well dressed. Nor did she seem old now he took her in properly, resting his eyes from the fire ball on her face.

  ‘Some things must be,’ she said. ‘The foul herb must be eaten and the fever endured in order to grow well.’

  ‘I don’t understand you, Mother.’

  ‘You yourself have suffered death, horror, salvation and rebirth. A common event. The old sun was the enemy, and then the Winter itself, the time of ice, that was the adversary. But only one other moves you now, moves all of you like bone pieces on a board. Struggle as you may, moved you will be. From the start of it, this One has moved you about. Even your rise to godhead has been this One, moving you. And the rest, gods and men, one and all.’

  Guri wished he had not put down the beer. He had a very mortal dryness in his throat. Obligingly the skin lifted itself to his mouth and let him swallow a gulp.

  ‘What purpose do I have then, Mother?’

  ‘Your purpose is to be moved. It must and will be accomplished. You’re not alone, Star Doggy. Your Lionwolf too is a game-piece. Even the night-goddess Chillel-Vangui, even she. And the old gods, they’re like children’s toys by now. One moves you, moves you all.’

  Guri said, ‘Why have you come to tell me?’

  ‘To save you effort that will only hurt you and others. Poor lad,’ she added, with a strange smile, ‘I recall how you grew up so fast, and your mother ran away and Ennuat, fussy as a bear, took care of you.’

  ‘I was my own father,’ confessed Guri wearily.

  ‘So you were. So are all men, Guri. Now I shall go.’

  ‘Where to, Mother?’

  ‘Ah. Don’t you know? I’m a child among the y’Gech now, a boy of seven years who grows in the ordinary slow way.’

  ‘A boy—’

  ‘A boy, Guri Lit Among the Nights. My soul’s come out this evening in this former physical shape you recall to tell you things. But now I hear my mother singing in the potted firelight. In a month o
r so she and I will be slaves of the Rukar. I want to be with her now, while I can.’

  ‘Then let me save you – that I can do—’

  ‘Now, my boy, what did I just tell you?’

  The fire in the hand of the Crax blew suddenly up into the sky. It drifted off over the roofs of the city, flame with a round core of white and green. And that was his adversary, that moved him like a piece of bone? Over the temple roof it went and was gone.

  When he glanced back so was the Crax.

  Tears ran down his face. He rubbed them off with the gladiator’s fist. Taking up his beer-skin he slunk to a brothel to pleasure the girls till the sun was reborn. But even in their arms he thought now, I am being moved like a game-piece. Even this, then. Even with Ranjal? And somewhere in the busy dark he saw the waking he had caused with Ranjal in the Ruk, though nothing had been further from his thoughts.

  A man would have slain himself probably. But that was no solution for a god – nor maybe for a man either, if he must only get up again in another life.

  A century after perhaps the Magikoy, or some lesser scholar, rewrote the story of the Ruk. The blasting of the Uaarb, this document insisted, happened in prehistory. The destruction of Sham too somehow retreated further into the past. Despite that it was happening now.

  Time must after all have slipped. But he thought not really, the god, starting up from some amorphous otherwhere he had retreated to, as men retreat into drugged unconsciousness.

  Scenes:

  The big sculpted darkness of Sham against a sea of fire. The walls had given to the south; the siege if such it was had not lasted long. The enemy rode their chariots inside, their deer-drawn sleekars. Banners redder than the fire. A hundred, a thousand faces turning over like broken flowers. A Rukarian man raping a Shamite whore against a burning wall, stabbing her even as he thrust, penis and knife. Tears of blood, vomit of flame. A tower crashing. The roads of coal caught light with perfect logic. Streams of melted snow went running like live boiling rivers. A chest spilling jewels was left by the path, there was so much plunder.

  He had seen it all in the legend anyway. In his first human day this tale of the city’s sack had been told to all the kiddles at the earliest age. They were educated in it, just as they learned to braid their hair and to say their prayer Great Gods, amen.

  Guri pelted through Sham. Now he was a warrior, on foot, smiting the foe. Now he was a priest, one of many carrying the treasure of the temple to a place of concealment – which was soon found, of course. The spears went through him, the sword cuts. Sometimes he even fell down out of a sort of unsurprised amazement. There were from him no bouts of bellicose sorcery, no weapon wielded by him that was ahead of its time. He himself did kill, if only with mortal tools. Once, twice, countless tiny times he rescued someone – a woman, a child with a baby in its arms, a little dog, even a wounded crocodile. Even a Rukarian lashdeer trapped in the harness of an upset sleekar. Such small acts did not disturb the huge and wicked scheme of the sack. Do nothing, he had been advised. Something moves you and all things. There was no choice.

  Scenes: The temple, one section of which was exploding under the pressure of fire and oil, shards of bronze and wet silver and coal plummeting to all sides, sparkling. A tangle of limbs, a shattered pillar. One of them a Rukar, a boy – ah, god – God – for a moment his dying eyes, though dark, were like the lost and fearful eyes of Lionwolf that long-ago, far-ahead night as they had marched towards Ru Karismi. ‘Sometimes I look back and see the distance I’ve come,’ said Lionwolf, ‘or forward, and I see a light as if the earth burned. And sometimes I wonder what choice I have.’ And Guri had answered, ‘No choice. Your kind – none.’ None, no choice, he murmured now. None of us ever, gods or men – none, none, none.

  He breathed on the enemy young man’s dying eyes and took his pain, which passed like a black thunder up through the sparks and smoke. All of us, one way or the other, live for ever. But does that then make this acceptable? Is for ever to be only – this?

  Black night went to black day. The sack continued.

  Scenes: Scenes.

  Guri stood on a high place and looked down and saw already the hideous coffles of slaves, roped, chained, driven through the avenues of sinking or rising fire. Some had been praying to him in his half-wrecked temple. He had not had the gall to manifest. What use was a god who could not help them? All he could promise was life everlasting, but this psychic bandage, at such an hour, was surely contemptible.

  Then he saw the mammoth charge.

  Naturally there had been several hundreds of them incorporated in the fight. He had watched as they buffeted, kicked and trod the Rukar sleekars and their charioteers to flinders. But now those of the tall pale beasts which survived were masterless. Mourning for their riders and for their own kin, they blundered among the general demolishment, sometimes trumpeting and calling. Sometimes too he had seen that they wept. The curious and awful phenomenon pierced him through; he had witnessed it before in his human existence.

  But presently something else blew up at the central point of the city. Guri supposed it was the palace building that as a rule he avoided, the living quarters of the priest-kings. The afternoon sky, which had been cinder-grey, ignited to marigold. How beautiful the colour was. Guri gazed at it affronted, disgusted by the bad taste of its glamour. And then he heard the bellowing of the ourths in concert.

  They came like an earth-bound whirlwind through the avenues, dashing all things from their way or trampling them into pulp beneath their feet. They were sombre with soot, bloody, seared by fire. But they pounded on as one single entity, in a rolling harmony, smashing those walls that still stood, those gates that had not gone down, destroying Rukarian and Shamite alike. Their eyes were minuscule dots of sightless light, mad with wrath and terror. Guri also experienced their brains; these were like lava. Dead smoke blew back from their hair, and some bore in their trunks pieces of corpses – a thigh, a whole torso even, entrails roped on tusks – and one had had some curtain topple on its sloping back that stayed caught by golden hooks. But all galloped like the liquid outer sea, a tidal wave, straight through the viscera of dying Sham. Northward they rushed. He saw them hit the ultimate wall, dismantle it, casting aside its last attackers and defenders like twigs from an impeding tree. Out into the swampland the mammoths poured, into the fog of arson that hung there, grew ghostly, vanished. From miles off distant isolate bellows drifted back, and drowned in the lament of the city.

  He did not search after the ourths. He let them go.

  Guri stood on the high place and beheld the greatness of the world razed. And Sham the candle blazed to its end, burned to a stub, faltered, flickered, and went out. The red nights were over, gradually the sable days were cleared. What then remained was not recognizable, only slag and flame-baked mud, from which the living were herded away into the south. No god had saved them. No god would. The past was over. To illuminate the future the fires of vengeance and hatred had instead been lighted. The legend had begun.

  Thirteenth Volume

  TOWER OF THE MOONS WITH SILVER HAIR

  Both ending and beginning may appear wearing the other’s clothes. Not until they are seen naked can they be known, and sometimes not even then. Skin too is only a garment.

  Magikoy saying: Ruk Kar Is

  ONE

  Green shoots had expressed themselves from the snow crust in broad swaths. Often there were dips of flushy snow nearby, upholstered by mosses or bristling weeds of some sort. In ice-woods every now and then a sycamore or tamarind might have thrown off a cask of ice. One branch or ten would hold up a spray of chestnut-coloured buds, albino fronds. Dark blue irises sheltered slyly in clusters. Some apples had been let go beneath a tree already reclaimed in solid rime. He ate one of the apples. It was not sweet yet had juice and pith and two black seeds attendant at its core. To him none of this was much of a mystery. But also he came across an upland village where evidently they had been made afraid by such changes. They
were entreating Attajos their fire god not to overheat the earth. For what would they do if he did? And in the temple of the ugly Winter god, Tirthen, they grovelled saying sorry, sorry, as if it were their fault alone.

  Athluan did not interfere. He had learned the lesson long ago of tolerance. He had been too tolerant perhaps. But still it was a habit not without credentials.

  You could not ignore either the sheer wonder of being hale and whole and strong again. Of being adult as remembered. Add to that the fact one was immortal.

  At some juncture he would pass through a door in this world, in this continent, and so into wherever it was Tirth had taken his wife.

  Athluan by now was not unused to this sort of shift. He had been a ghost and travelled in various climes, before returning to the astral country and so back here. Only the astral phase he did not recall. No doubt that was part of the penalty for his current state.

  Another village later had put a different shrine by the track. It caught his eye. It had been erected to a fire god, this one named, so the lettering said, Escur. He seemed to be a warrior god yet famous for more kindness than the other one, Attajos, whose son he was. An old woman tended the watch-flame. She called out to Athluan in the native vernacular which he had picked up with unnatural swiftness.

  ‘Yes, lady?’

  ‘Make Escur an offering. He’ll grant you warmth and justice and good luck. Only once was he cruel, but that was to his own people after they slew his mother.’

  ‘Which seems quite reasonable.’

  ‘So too, it does. He rides a white tiger he calls Cat, and his partner is a goddess of dawn, Rushais. Thus the altar faces east.’

  Athluan had nothing much with him, therefore he pulled off a silver link from his shirt and put it in her hand. The link was quite a fair size now though originally it had not been. His child’s clothes which had left him quite naked at one point had cleverly grown up and modified with him in Saphay’s fire-spell.