by Tanith Lee
‘There are only the Great Gods. I’m no god. One-third immortal, and scratchered. I belong nowhere, Great One.’
‘And I’m no leader, not a Great One,’ Guri said in a slow, terrible way. ‘And the Great Gods don’t exist – they never existed. It was an error. Easy to make. Wrong.’
He had affronted his surrogate son. But it would be ridiculous and awful to try to explain how Guri knew the Gods were wrong.
Guriyuve did not answer. He frowned. Then he said, ‘I shall not go back into Olchibe. It’s a country of women now. They can rule without me.’
Guri opened his mouth to protest. Then closed his mouth and lowered his head humbly.
‘Yes, Guriyuve son of Ipeyek, you yourself must make up your own mind. Forgive an old man for teaching you your business again.’
Sternly Guriyuve told him, ‘You’re not old, sir.’
‘All the less right then to order you about.’
The mammoth coughed. Her breath smelled of fresh growing grass. ‘There, Sjindi,’ said Guriyuve.
Guri said, ‘Where will you go then, warrior?’
‘Across the world. I shall find some place to be.’ For the first as he said it, he saw he might credit it.
‘May the best always befall and be with you,’ said Guri.
He stepped aside.
Guriyuve glanced then just once more at the golden figure of the Lionwolf. Even the dark could not mute him. Even the blackness of Chillel’s night had not been able to smother his fires. A demon? No, he did not seem to be a demon. And Guri was his companion, who had denied the real Gods, yet so regretfully.
‘May the Great Gods be with you, Guri,’ said Guriyuve deliberately.
Guri shrugged and smiled after all. ‘Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps they exist. Perhaps the wrong one was only – mistaken for them …’
The mammoth was turning, her rider easing her away into the belt of swamp and shadow split by seams of boiling brass, platinum, mercury and lead. Mist closed round him, and round the beautiful ourth.
When Lionwolf came up Guri said, ‘Do you think it’s that? I was mistaken for Gods?’
‘No, Guri.’
‘But are there Gods? Surely we – and those Rukar forcutches – surely there is something greater than us?’
‘Very probably.’ Lionwolf put his arm over Guri’s shoulders.
‘Is that then what moves us about, makes us do these things, is it that, Lion? A God?’
Lionwolf punched him lightly on the arm. They were the same age in the appearance of their years, his uncle and he.
‘Never, Uncle. Do you think a pure and genuine God would stoop so low?’
‘Then what does move us?’
Lionwolf himself moved Guri bodily to face him. He clapped a kiss on Guri’s forehead. Then put his hand behind Guri’s head and gently, firmly, made him bow it to look at the ground where they stood. With his other hand Lionwolf pointed downward, to the earth.
Two travellers came by night to a bothy on a hill.
A distance from the door a white snake shone in the enfolding of a tree, watching them with serious eyes, listening with unusual ears to their footfalls.
Doubtless it had listened also to the young woman’s lovely voice that sang in the hut.
Lionwolf, bending to glance in through the door, beheld Azula, Chillel’s first daughter, writing on the air with a twig, using her recent education, laughing low as she saw words printed there as if in light. But even Lionwolf could not see them, or did not attempt to do so.
The interior of the shelter had slightly changed.
A flowering vine was trained wall to roof. Flowers and herbs rose in clay vases, blooming in spring water. Many-tinted fruits balanced in a nest of woven grass. There was no meat. Though she had been taught how Azula still elected to kill nothing that had blood in it.
The fire had been brought indoors and blossomed like the flowers in a ring of stones. It scorched nothing, and sent up only the thinnest sweetest smoke. Flat bread was baking in the ashes at its rim. Somewhere she had uncovered or invented grain, something of the sort.
Through firelight and word-light Azula raised her eyes.
For a second her face was sharp with horror.
Then the horror sank away. She knew the Lionwolf, and that he was not as he had been. Chillel had lessoned her in that too.
‘Good evening, lord,’ said Azula, casual.
Lionwolf smiled. The light of the smile outdid all else.
‘Good evening, madam. May we enter your house?’
‘Yes, do. Mind the doorway doesn’t collapse. It’s very flimsy.’
The two traveller gods entered.
A guardian par excellence, the chaze eddied in after them, and stood itself up on a coil of itself, observing them carefully.
Azula poured water from a clay pot – she had made all the vessels herself, baking them on the fire – into a pair of clay cups.
Lionwolf blinked.
The water became the reddest wine, an old Rukarian vintage, both in the cups and in the jar.
‘Oh – thank you,’ said Azula. ‘One of my mothers taught me how to do that. I didn’t think to.’
Stately, Lionwolf replied, ‘But it is pleasant for a guest to contribute something.’
The night was now pitch-black outside, but gushes of stars, an abundance never seen before even here, were coming out like exquisite prickles on the hide of the sky.
No moons arose. Maybe they would not compete.
The three persons in the hut ate hot bread and a peppery spread of herbs, leaves of lettuce and fronds of graron. Such items were not generally picked wild. The red wine flowed on long after the jar should have emptied. It was potent but nourishing.
The chaze listened while they talked of the distant Southern Continent and Kol Cataar. Azula now began to ask questions about rats and roses and houses cleared of snow standing with their doors high in the air. When Lionwolf offered the snake wine it sipped from his cup.
‘And here,’ said Azula finally, ‘will you seek the tower?’ She spoke matter-of-factly.
Lionwolf smiling said, ‘How shall I find it?’
A ritual?
Azula clasped her hands about her knees. She put on the storyteller’s face – and for the very first time it was possible to see in her her goddess mother. But she had no sound of Chillel. Had she known it, as Lionwolf did, her words resembled a very different message once uttered by the Kraag.
‘At the centre of Chillel’s park stands the stem of her high tower. It is the Moons’ Tower. It was built far back in time, to call up the moons as visitors. And she enters there. Beyond this hill, raise your eyes to the distant heights. Moonlight floats sometimes on the crown of the tower like silver hair.’
Lionwolf got up. He stood over her and gently said, ‘Daughter, give me a piece of your fire. Uncle, give me the coal from Sham.’
Azula reacted wondrously. She stretched out her hand and picked a flame from the hearth. She held this up to Lionwolf and only then said in slight surprise, ‘I can do that too!’
But he took the flame also in his bare hand. He waited, carrying the light lightly while Guri gaped at him. Guri was the only one apparently determined to fluff his lines.
‘What coal, Lion?’
‘From the plain below Ru Karismi, where it fell when you … talked to Ranjal.’
‘But – it’s worth nothing – ill-omened thing – no, I won’t let you have that.’
‘Uncle, once before you did. Do you recall the coal Saphay drew from the Jafn sending-fire and burned in the waste when I was a baby and you had found us? You kept it after and gave it me. But in the White Death it perished with the rest. Guri, the coal is from Sham. It fell in Jafn lands and made magic. This second time it fell with you and your lady on the plain. You found it again. And it holds another of the emblems that I am, lion and wolf. You can’t deny it, Uncle. It’s come back to close a circle.’
‘Which circle?’ Guri scurried amon
g his garments as if searching for a flea.
‘Oh, some minor matter.’
The phrase struck on something like a coin in Guri’s shirt, making it ring. Guri reached in and removed the coal, black and shiny with its only-just-singed youth.
Lionwolf leaned forward and took the coal. He was too quick for Guri’s futile gesture of trying to snatch it back.
‘Lion—’
Lionwolf was gone.
Outside a river-like ripple shook the night. But it settled in a moment and the stars resumed their chorus.
Another fire crackled now, untended on a slope. Despite not being secured by stones and the tall grass not even cleared aside, it did not abuse its position. It did not stray to eat surrounding vegetation. The fire comprised a solitary coal, and a unique flame. From the heart of it a narrow streamer, not sparks or smoke, curled upward to the sky.
Suddenly aerial lights began to flicker on the ether. They were like the coloured northern lights of Vormland. Presently they had no form.
Then that changed.
A pair of creatures had grown from the random streams of dazzle. One was a big cat, unruffed, less lion than panther, the other a cat of equal size, yet not entirely cat. Some who knew might have identified it as an example of that hybrid horde, a chachadraj or drajjerchach – cat-dog, dog-cat. And yet its doggishness was far more wolf-like.
Both animals had engaged instantly in a dance of war. One leapt at the other, both leapt, both fell and rolled together over the sky. The stars were snagged in their mouths, in their pelts and in the wolf-cat’s mane. They spat or shook the stars out again, wanting only to maul each other.
Uncle Guri, do you see? called the boy’s voice from long ago.
From the door of the hut, ‘I see,’ muttered Guri.
On this occasion Guri was sure, though he was aware the war dance would soon end in congress, he would not be aroused by what went on overhead. He would not now, he thought, chance it.
But behind his shoulder the young girl stared with a kind of priestly amazement. He could tell for Azula this ethereal mating would be holy.
There they went, too. The male dog-cat had pinned the female cat-cat to some invisible surface. He was mounting her, holding the back of her neck in his jaws.
As they worked towards their apex, the couple in the sky, Guri felt the urge only to grimace. Well, he was a god now himself. He pondered too that this was nothing to the incendiary madness that must have gone on when he and Ranjal enjoyed their antics.
Lionwolf had become utterly lionwolf.
In the ice swamps of Gech they would point them out, the marks of wolfish lion-pads in the snow, prints of abnormal size which shone without need of sun or moon. That was a lionwolf.
Now in the garden of night the lionwolf had also come to exist.
He was a beast of the size of the largest lion, and he was maned as both male and female lions were, but with the superb exaggerated ruff of a young male. The facial mask was that of a wolf, yet the skin smooth of pelt as was a lion’s, though with a wolf’s golden eyes, in the pupils of which sequins darted of cobalt and red. The ears were wolvan. The rest of the frame had all the flexibility seen only among cats or serpents. But the structure of the lean pelvis was more like that of a wolf, and the feet of the beast had aspects of both wolf and lion, while the lower legs were clad in hair. The animal’s tail was plainly uncanny. It was like a thick club, but composed itself of two elements. The inner cauda was hairy, a wolf’s, but about it wove like a liana a second tail, which was a lion’s and ended in the leonine tuft. Beneath, genitalia were in evidence. These were sheathed after the way of a dog.
The shade of him was nearly white, just as was the vivid image of him in the air. An unanticipated colour maybe. But the mane and ruff were brazen, and the hair of the limbs and tail showed brazen, and the lion tuft of the tail was like bloodied brass.
Over the parkland he raced. From the thickets the deer bolted away, and small lizards fired themselves off like curled balls. He hesitated for none of them as the creatures overhead had spurned the stars. He was intent only on one project.
Ahead the tower rose, with the silvery blown moon static on its top.
In the brain of the god-become-beast was what? Power and lust, intent, culmination. No other thing.
He had gained the upland of the hill when out of some opening in the tower she expressed herself.
Chillel had become panther. Though larger than the cats of her retinue, matching in size the male animal that sought her, she was maneless like them and covered like them in a short plush of hair. Yet her colouring too was unusual.
Where his gold and red had gone to snow and brass, her blackness was blue. She had spent time in Lionwolf’s blue Hell. Perhaps she had been influenced there to this complexion.
She poised on the hill, watching as he rushed towards her. Access to the brain of Chillel had never been available. Either she was too complex, or she lacked all complexity always. Her brain remained therefore obscure and indescribable. Yet in her black eyes which had an emerald sheen on them a sort of tender hunger was, or was imagined.
The lionwolf reached the panther on her hill.
Phallic, the tower went up above them. But it was hollow also, and might symbolize rather the female vaginal canal, contained inside the body of night. The moonglow that anchored over it must then perhaps represent a womb.
Both creatures paused below the tower.
Each sprang.
On earth as in heaven the dance of war commenced. Both fell, locked already by their fangs fastened each in the other’s flesh. Blood sprayed, his black, hers crimson. As they rolled over the turf lush plants unfurled instantly from the blood spillage, and the grass grew longer. Sometimes as the two beasts fought and rolled and kicked at each other, the just-grown flowers were snapped off in their mouths. But even these, dropped, grew again. The dual tail of the lionwolf lashed the ground. His weapon had unsheathed. Swarthy and smooth as any bulb, it glittered moisture, touching now and again the paler iris of the she-beast’s labia.
The dance and the war abruptly concluded.
Up reared the male and stood over her. He took her by the fur and skin behind her head.
With his teeth clamped in her neck, he mounted her, bestrode her as day topped a world of night, and sheathed the blade of his sex once more, now in the dusk-blue honey of that inner tower.
Above, across heaven, all the lights burst.
On the ground jewelry buds opened wide in petals and penile stalks fiercely pushed and strove like snakes.
The land roared in one prolonged, gargantuan spasm.
They sank together, beast on beast, lowering their heads gently to the turf.
And the sky broke in twain.
To one side, the east and south, it became, in a swift lambent torrent, morning, and a diamond sun flamed in the height. To the west and north the phosphorescent night stood, seeded with stars and now with six quarter-moons strung up like a chain of scythes.
And oh the silence, not that of any quiet day or calm sleepful night. It was the silence of an interval between two vast dramas. The margin between the past and all else that was to be.
Fenzi had hypnotized a deer and slain it without hurting it, as he now knew how to. He was amenable to not causing undue distress. Nevertheless he missed the chase, and even the satisfaction of a quick efficient kill.
When the sky filled with incendiaries he was offended.
Marvels happened too frequently. He had had enough.
And with that to consider, when the cipher of the two doggish cats copulating gave him an erection, Fenzi refused to respond. Tumescence went down as they did. Then he beheld midday and midnight co-existent and total as two pages, up there together in the sky’s book.
He sat on the grass beside a grove and looked at this abomination, and felt no hint of future improvement.
Gradually the double face of the sky melded into a twilight, and then into a dawn where the sun
and all the over-number of stars and moons became shadows.
Only then did he lope across and stamp out the tiny fire he had noted on an adjacent hillside. Some kind of lone coal was in it, which indifferently he picked up when the fire went out.
Lugging the dead deer he started to walk away.
No other lingered on the island. Only the vicious sorceress-goddess and her filthy cats. Although the woman Azula had stayed.
She was up there in that ill-made bothy, with the wisp of fire-smoke on its roof.
Fenzi thought of the lonely coal left in the forsaken fire.
He too was unused to being alone.
If he took the meat up to the bothy would Azula be impressed? He visualized her dark eye and her hazel eye and the hair and the skin. She had a charming voice, he must admit. He had heard her singing recently.
She loved the goddess.
Well, Vangui was not violent to her own sex.
Fenzi recalled his physical mother, and Nirri. He curtailed that. But then he remembered the little white lionet tiger cub he had delivered to the prince at Padgish. That had been a cat, but it was perfectly all right.
Not wanting to but not wanting either to do otherwise, Fenzi got a more adequate grip on his kill and began to climb towards the girl’s hut. Was Azula her real name? Azulamni? But that was her mortal mother’s name. He was most of the way up the hill when her secret name, which no one had ever told him, sang inside his ear. If it made him jump that was only a reaction. He had heard her singing anyway. He was almost at the door before he saw Guri looming there, protective avuncular arms folded, beetle-browed.
Fourteenth Volume
STEALFLAME
Keep something between you and the hot sun.
Advice attributed to the Kraag:
Southlands and South-East Continent
ONE
Azula sees it come, the levinbolt. She bares her teeth and bellows into the core of it.
The levinbolt strikes the earth directly through Azula.
At this point she is unaware when the corpse of her mother disintegrates.
