No Flame But Mine

by Tanith Lee

  Four women were dancing in a clearing in among the grain. There was a sort of floor there where the wheat did not grow, kept clear and beaten flat.

  The women wore black, and were immediately to be seen. But two had wine-yellow hair and one was fair and one malt-brown. In their hands were four swords that gave off a flash as they smote them together.

  Lionwolf stood watching them.

  He had reached the southern limits of Kraagparia, and here they were, women of the Kraag, as he had seen them long ago elsewhere during his first life.

  In the dance the girl with the darker hair turned her head around completely and looked over at him, even though the rest of her body still faced the other way. Darhana.

  When the dance finished, the three blonde girls sat down on the dancing floor. Darhana turned her whole body towards him and walked through the wheat to where he stood.

  They had been lovers before. As she had told him, she loved him – and others too. Faithless, he said. She had answered faith-full.

  Now she made an obeisance to him. It was curious. She had never been so reverent as he saw she was, nor last time so happy with him.

  ‘Welcome, Risen Sun,’ said Darhana, beaming at him as if he were her beloved and long-lost husband.

  He knew now that she lived in this moment as she had in the former moment of their acquaintance, and both of these moments despite her natural physical death many hundreds of years ago. Since time was also to be manipulated, no doubt it was always possible to venture forward or back, and to leave some essence of oneself to remain sentient there, awaiting a meeting, though the rest of one had moved away.

  ‘Now everything’s well with you,’ she told him.

  ‘Now everything is or will be well with me, Darhana.’

  ‘Now you are god.’

  ‘Without your kindness,’ he said, ‘what might have survived of me?’

  ‘All,’ she said frankly.

  ‘But my road would have been stonier. Remember fire’s called or struck into the world. If none calls it or strikes it with a flint, what then?’

  ‘At last it generates of itself,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’ he asked her.

  She laughed then, and so did he.

  It was his flirtatiousness to ask her, for he was the god now and knew. Yet the playfulness and etiquette of his earliest years had not abandoned him. Whether all their cruelty and recklessness were entirely gone remained to be proved.

  He and she went into the wheat and joined the women sitting there. A sunny wine appeared in vessels of glass and they drank.

  They spoke of little matters. Only the unreal was real.

  The old sun strolled over a warm and fondant sky and hid behind the mountains.

  When the shadows had deepened to bronze, he and the women got up and went southwards through the field of the plain, the great stalks tasselling and rustling as they passed by. Eventually a sea appeared on the horizon, darkest blue, and restless in its Summer freedom.

  An hour after Darhana pointed.

  ‘There is your vessel.’

  ‘I need no ship, Darhana, as you understand.’

  ‘A gift, Lionwolf. A last token of what is not real.’

  Narrow and gilded, with one bowed butter sail, the small ship lay at anchor a strong swimmer’s distance from the shore.

  ‘How shall I get there?’ he inquired, playfully.

  ‘Why, walking on the sea, how else?’

  He bent and kissed her, as a husband kisses his beloved wife farewell. ‘I love you, Darhana,’ he said, ‘and all the others you will be. Live beautifully, sweetheart, in your past, and your every present to come.’

  But he ran over the blue waves like a boy, laughing again, shaking back his mane, while the fish rose to touch the soles of his boots and get the blessing of his transcendence.

  As he could have walked to the island, and to the third continent itself over the ocean, so he could have caused the ship to fly there. He had weighed anchor with a thought. Thereafter the unreal and pretty bark did anything required of it without his even thinking it should. This was one of the finer jests perhaps between the world of men and Lionwolf’s abstract realm of gods and marvels: to cross a sea on foot to gain a ship no water-walker would need, and to have it carry him on by its own will. No object was inanimate, even if it must keep still. Lionwolf let her sail. She made full speed under the windless sunset.

  ‘Is that you, Uncle, sitting there against the mast?’

  This question came about two hours later. By then three full moons were up and the waters were lit like high noon. Even a poor-sighted human must have spotted the hunched, disconsolate figure sitting cross-legged on the deck.

  Guri did not answer.

  Lionwolf seated himself at Guri’s side. There was suddenly a wineskin.

  But Guri did not touch it.

  They sailed on then for a long while in the silence of vessel and waves.

  ‘Lion,’ said Guri in the end, ‘I’d thought I paid my dues in Hell.’

  ‘So you did.’

  ‘No, Lion. No. I’ve paid again since. And because of it – now my debt stinks worse. No man, no god, has a debt can match what I owe. Not even that rabid thing sired you. Not even Zeth.’

  Lionwolf looked only out at the running waves and the white crystal breaching of the prow.

  ‘Sham,’ said Lionwolf.

  Guri bowed his head. He was immaculate, braided and adorned like the best of Olchibe, even the authority tattoos on his cheeks that leaders of vandal bands had come to have in recent times. And all this was the mistake of some – not even unconscious – vanity or sense of self-preservation, for Guri had not personally arrayed himself. He had come away from the abyss clad only in rancour and despair. But what he had become now was always beyond automatic disarray. He had forgotten or not known that to look as he felt he would have to create it as carefully as, before, he had had to paint his teeth and plait his hair.

  ‘I couldn’t help them,’ he said in the cool solemn tones of the abyss. ‘I tried to make them be fair to each other – and to any others. Put them off war. I’d seen, hadn’t I, where war takes you, and what comes after too. Warriors. Some god of Gods save me from warriors. But when it was all done, the city all down and bubbling in its own swamp and shit and the fires gone out and the crying put out – then I heard them whispering to me, even then. I’d become two Great Gods, Lion, do you see? A God for Peace and a God for Battle. A God for Then and one for To-come. But I’d failed them and they still – prayed to me – Lion – Lion – they prayed to me.’

  ‘What did they say, Guri?’

  Guri wept. He said, ‘They were saying it was never my fault. They said I’d help them if I could. But I was a god like men. A god who wanted to be just and valiant but was overthrown. I had done all I could, they said. But I wasn’t strong as the stronger powers, not stronger than the evil mad gods of the Ruk. So Olchibe and Gech must keep faith for me. They must hold me – both of me – in their hearts, and never forget I had done my best. They heard me sobbing for them, they said, these slaves driven off under the whip and in chains, women with their kiddles dying – or dead – at their breast, men each with an eye gouged out to keep them docile … They valued me, their Great Gods, who cried over them. And a day would come when they could fight for me. They would make me great again. Lion, even now, the sound of the waves has got their prayers in it.’

  Lionwolf spoke after a gap of several minutes.

  ‘I still hear the unheard sound from Ru Karismi. The White sound.’ He waited, then said, ‘But it’s over.’

  ‘No, Lion, no it isn’t. In time – it happens again and again, and Sham happens again and again—’

  ‘No, Guri. Not in the way you mean.’

  ‘But I went back to it, and was born there.’

  ‘But now you could do neither.’

  Guri thought. ‘It’s so. I can’t go back. I tried to. I tried to go back to before to teach them different th
ings than I taught – and I couldn’t. I can’t now. Why, why? Have I done enough damage, ah? Is it only that? I remember in my mortal life, the Great Gods were only a potent name. No idea of paucity or sadness. No idea they had been absent – when Sham went down.’

  And he recalled how long ago he had informed someone, If you believe in gods they grow valid and help. Or if you’re afraid they hurt you …

  He had then only just become a ghost. He had known so much, so little.

  My people, he thought. But he was calm once more. ‘They forgave me,’ he said, in calmest desolation. And sat listening to the forgiving prayers in the running sea as Lionwolf sat listening to the scream of Ru Karismi.

  At length Guri said, ‘I was the one woke up the Rukarians. I rutted with that broomstick goddess. Some ectoplasmic sperm of mine showered the land with galvanics. They came to and learned magic. All the Jafn demons and sprites got started too. There was a rain of sacred coal from the temple at Sham. I only found one piece of it. One coal. Just one. Just …’ Guri looked up. In the moonlight a kind of sheen had begun in the hollow of the ship. It was richer than the moonglow but not so descriptive. Maybe it was some sending of his nephew, something healing, kind. Then it faded.

  Instead Lionwolf murmured, ‘Some might tell you, Guri, that you bear no blame. Even if not meaning to you gave the Rukarians a bright lamp to light their way. If they used it to set fire to things that was their crime, not yours.’

  Guri said, ‘I met one of the Crarrowin. She said something moves us all. We’ve had no choice. Is that it, Lion, do you think?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lionwolf.

  He took Guri’s hand and held it. This was a Jafn custom. But Guri clung on. How good the hand felt, holding him up above the abyss.

  ‘What is it, Lion, moving us? The Crax showed me but I didn’t grasp it. Do you know?’

  ‘No, Guri. Yes, Guri. Guri, listen to me now. You’ve done only what you must. The past was written. Now you have stepped away and will never return to it. The future alone is open and to be made.’

  ‘I’ll never set my hand,’ he wrung the hand of Lionwolf for emphasis, ‘to any other thing. Never, Lion.’

  ‘Ah, but Uncle, you haven’t yet been up to see the stars.’

  Guri stared at him.

  A memory filled Guri’s troubled mind of his ghost days long ago. Of how he had longed to leap and touch that stellar silverware – but something had interceded. It had never been achieved. In a wandering wonder he tilted back his head and looked now beyond the strident moons, to the little chips of brilliance that shone behind.

  A real, or unreal, wind all at once blew into the sail, which turned itself somewhat.

  Two small islands evolved from the waters to the south-east, going by fire-white in their crusts of snow.

  ‘Stay with me, Guri,’ said Lionwolf. ‘This is almost done now.’

  ‘Is it? That’s fine. Fine as gold.’ Guri lifted the wineskin. He drank. He said, ‘The Rukar stole many of our Olchibe names. They even made a god named Yuvis. That was a name of the Ol y’Chibe. And Peb’s name, my leader, Peb Yuve. Here’s the coal I picked up on the plain after Ranjal and I … then. It seemed familiar. Can you see, it’s singed a bit?’

  ‘I can, Uncle.’

  ‘Of course you can. It must have come from Sham. Out of the past.’

  THREE

  More night than day the island, even now.

  Guriyuve, son of Ipeyek and Hevonhib and Chillel, had quit the grassy park, the pale flowers and groves of trees.

  Ignoring the rambling deer and occasional slink of saurians, paying no heed to the bat-like birds that flew across the moonlight singing, he had come back to the wooden barrier, carbon and ebony, that edged the goddess’s queendom.

  Before him unseen, hellish metallic rivers already poisoned the air. Then there would be the lacy ice-caverns and after those the island’s end, the sea.

  He was the last of the Chillelings to leave, he thought, apart from the Jafn Fenzi. And the bi-colour girl acrobat.

  Guriyuve too hated Chillel. Drawn to her like moth to flame he had been burned. Although this had made him greater and more his own, unlocking abilities he had not guessed at, the hate was bound below the cage of his heart as surely as the scars of her claws.

  He did not know where he meant to go. He no longer wanted the sluhtins where such as his human mother and her coven ruled. All Olchibe had gone or was going that way. The women, with only dead men or weaklings, had ably taken up the reins. A female mammoth normally led the herd. Why not a woman then to lead Olchibe? If the men had not fallen under the spell of the Lionwolf none of this would have happened. It was true, women knew best in some things.

  Fenzi had not had such a problem. The depleted Jafn territories were not becoming matriarchies. Rather lawless, and wild lions were rife – an adventure playground. Besides, Fenzi’s Chaiord had discovered a new continent, and planted there the Holas sigil of the roaring seal. But Fenzi said the Chaiord’s hero son was now with him, Dayadin. There was no place for Fenzi, offspring only of a fisher and his woman. Or so Fenzi seemed to think. Fenzi had added, with shame, that his feelings for his blood kin were long gone. There had been a lover too, but this link had shed its meaning also.

  ‘What will you do then,’ Guriyuve had asked, ‘seek the next new country over beyond here to the east?’ The rest who had not gone home had done that.

  But ‘All lands are alike,’ said Fenzi. He spoke as if therefore all lands were useless, meaningless as any kin, lover or friend.

  Neither man had much real interest in the other anyway. They had always all been like that, the Children of Chillel. Though they had tried to band together to attempt resistance of Chillel’s sorceries, or to make inroads on the third eastern continent, there was no attraction of like to like. You knew they would cleave to white companions, swear brotherhood with them, and be sure even if another black woman might exist to spurn her. She would remind them of their mother. Even their own brothers did that. Yet who could suppose their progeny, even mixed with milk, could be anything but black too? The sublime strain would go on. Eventually there must then arrive a time when some black warrior would form true fellowship with another, or be smitten by a woman with a skin like night. But this was far, far off.

  The ourth Sjindi, on whom Guriyuve sat, snorted. He forgot Fenzi and cuffed her light and lovingly, then scratched through her greasy hair. They had grown up together. He was closer to her kind than to his own, whatever his own kind was. She had been brave and steadfast even when he was dragged away to Chillel’s tower of agony. Coming back he had met her thundering up to him, so that scores of deer dashed from the grasses, cracking the skies with her trumpetings.

  ‘Shall we ride away on the ice as we did?’ he asked her. She snuffled he thought disapprovingly. ‘Tell me, where shall we take ourselves?’

  Then she tensed through every muscle and bone.

  Ahead in the murky gloaming, two figures had appeared.

  Otherwise there had been no sign of their approach. Even the mammoth had not sussed them until now.

  Sjindi lifted her trunk, but she did not bray.

  She held it high in a kind of incongruous greeting – or salute.

  ‘Great Gods witness what I see, amen.’

  Guriyuve had heard quite a lot here and there of the Lionwolf, the demon god whose eye-blue standard of a sun had conscripted the flower of Olchibe and Jafn to a mowing.

  Had he never heard that an Olchibe man, back then a ghost, had sometimes attended the Lionwolf?

  Now one did. Not now a ghost, either.

  At the sight of proper yellow skin and hair braided with rodent skulls Guriyuve’s heart panged with unexpected nostalgia and gladness. The man had the tattoos of a vandal band’s leader.

  Guriyuve nevertheless made no salute. He did not tap Sjindi to kneel and let him dismount. He sat and watched the startling travellers as they strode in through the dusk. They were ordinary in their manner, as
if they had just come home from hunting perhaps. Did they know this benighted region?

  The red-haired one, Lionwolf, he stopped about forty paces off. The Olchibe warrior plodded on. Reaching Sjindi he rubbed her side. She lowered her trunk at once, and flicked him with a swift but unmistakable caress.

  ‘She’s a nice one,’ said the man, grinning. ‘You should get fine calves from her when you breed her – make sure the male’s worthy of her.’

  ‘She wouldn’t wear him otherwise, Great One.’

  ‘No, that’s a fact. Don’t mind me, teaching you your business. I can see you’re a son of the goddess’s, but you’re Olchibe too right enough—’ The man had seemed to recall something and then be about to invoke the Gods, but he did not do that. He thinned his lips. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Guriyuve, son of Ipeyek the Gech.’

  ‘Ah?’ said the man, softly. His expression was a strange compound of raw sadness and deep pride. ‘You were named for me – for me and, I’ll hazard, for my leader, the Great One Peb Yuve.’

  ‘You … are Guri?’

  ‘What did they say of me to you?’

  ‘Only the name, and then the other name – the Crax’s dead husband.’

  Was he lying?

  Guri stood back and studied Guriyuve.

  He had, Guri, never been able to dight Chillel, nor would he have if he got the chance. She always unnerved, half frightened him, and her effect on Lionwolf had made Guri uneasy – and yet he had known little of her at the time. These memories, if so they were, felt as if pasted on afterwards. None of it counted now in any case. The weird notion obtained however, despite everything, that this man was Guri’s own son. And in a way he was. Guri had made certain Ipeyek spent his precious Chillel-seed at Peb’s sluhtin. It had been Guri’s sole magnificent deed while he suffered in Hell.

  The handsome young man, darker than the dark of the isle, looked down at him couthly, polite and attentive.

  ‘And now,’ said Guri almost rashly, ‘you’ll go back to the sluhts, to Olchibe, and be their hero for them – be …’ he faltered, and then said decidedly, ‘a new god for them.’