No Flame But Mine

by Tanith Lee

  Beebit, dead and held in Azula’s arms, could not withstand the blow.

  For herself, Azula feels nothing epic.

  She is conscious of a kind of fizzing in her veins.

  Nothing more, really.

  Yet now all the lightnings fall on her, singly or in groups, and as each of them blasts through her and is earthed and so ruined by her, only her fury makes her drunk with pleasure that this enemy who had murdered her mother is now destroyed.

  Then the attack ends and quietness fills everything, and Azula looks about for the bone which is all that remains of Beebit.

  Before she sees it, a charismatic man is standing in front of her. Never has she seen anyone like him, although perhaps the Lionwolf is like this in his own different manner – and by now she knows she has met the Lionwolf, though where she is unsure. The Lionwolf has called her in courtesy ‘Daughter’. But this other god has long black hair and black eyes and he is Winter, this she sees too, Winter who here at Kandexa has tried to wreck some essential scheme. And she has foiled him.

  ‘How talented you are,’ says Winter, who in Simisey is Tirthen. ‘You can defeat me. Come then, I shall be your slave, fair maiden. You have no kindred. Let us go away together.’

  But Azula can already see how he is disintegrating – not abruptly as did her mother’s corpse when lightning struck it – but as a snowstorm may, when the wind blows from the south.

  And then she opens her eyes and the swirl of whiteness is only petals shedding from the vine she has twined through her hut.

  Outside Guri and Fenzi were cooking the deer meat over a bigger fire they had built, speaking in low voices of hunting and skirmishes, of bows and types of knife, and the best seasoning for particular animals. Men’s chat. Azula was not sorry Guri had headed Fenzi out of the bothy. Though a Chilleling Fenzi was not like Sallus, could not remind her of Sallus. She wished he would go away.

  The snake had rustled off into the dawn. The prodigies of the night seemed to have made no impression on it.

  Azula however believed the creatures mating high in the air had had vast if obscure import. She herself felt some door now stood wide, some barrier had dispersed. Again and again her eyes were drawn to the sky. Clouds difted over and birds, and the light varied. This was not why she stared at it. She was uncertain why she did.

  The dream of the lightning at Kandexa had not, curiously, vexed or grieved her. Waking she took up Beebit’s bone and stroked it, but then she often did. The dream too was an intimation?

  When the meat began to be ready on its spit, Azula grew irritated at it, the al fresco meal, the heady smell and way the men sat there comparing Jafn and Olchibe spices and bows.

  She walked from the bothy without a word and trotted off through the park, the grasses brushing her ankles. Neither of the men tried to stay her. Neither spoke.

  ‘It’s coming, Ma,’ she said to Beebit in her mind, as she jogged along the rim of the land. ‘Soon I shall be doing it.’ But she did not know what or where, or why, only that it must be, and that Beebit perhaps knew that too, and was watching. A distinct excitement filled Azula. And a slight doubt, which she was sure was only her ignorance, for it would not matter. ‘Do you like my other name, Ma? I’ll always be Azulamni too. But it’s proper that Chillel-Toiyhin-Ma gave me a name as well, I suppose, don’t you think so?’ Azula’s mind sang her second name. Now she ran fast, leaping high above the grass like a young deer, or sometimes turning cartwheels. On their hill the two god-men looked at her. They were no longer comparing bows.

  Gold on black, black on gold. They wear their natural colours. They unite as humans would. Only they reveal they are gods.

  Vashdran the Lionwolf, Toiyhin the Dove.

  In this reality there is no necessity for one to dominate. The dominance of each is absolute. As is their integral oneness, with themselves and with each other.

  Do they even talk to each other? Does the language of eternity now convey all meaning? But do stars converse, suns and moons?

  She spoke to her lover in the centre of the day that ruled now the garden of night.

  ‘Remember, beloved, from nothing I was made – 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.’

  ‘The three gods Ddir, Yyrot, and the other, Zeth.’

  But his tone was relaxed and almost teasing.

  And the Dove finally answered her own riddle.

  ‘No, beloved. Think only of one god that has three persons. A god firstly born from a mortal, a god secondly dead and alive in Hell, a god thirdly reborn as the sun. It was not who fashioned me, but whose unformed will desired my fashioning. You, my love. Who else?’

  Lionwolf held her in his arms. In her face he could find the reply to every question. But in these empyrean moments they discarded godhood. They were only a man and a woman. And if they would never die, neither fully could any man or woman either. Or if at last they could die, so might all.

  ‘What will be here tomorrow?’ he asked her then.

  ‘What you will have made.’

  ‘Will that be good?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘So very good.’

  They smiled at their joke, their pretence of doubt and reassurance. But he at least had been partly human. Maybe, maybe …?

  ‘Kiss me farewell then, wife,’ said Lionwolf. ‘I must get up and go to fight.’

  Chillel kissed him.

  And for an instant they were in a Jafn garth, the warriors waiting below, and he had slung on his sword some mageia had protected, and the other House sword stretched upright over the lintel, and his woman stood on tiptoe to embrace him.

  ‘When I return to you,’ he said, ‘our theatre in this world is over. We will come here, and to such places, but for ourselves we begin elsewhere.’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘Will we mind, Chillel, becoming what next we become?’

  ‘How should we? For that rebecoming we live. Not even the earth stays still.’

  ‘But you and I,’ he said, ‘will never part again.’

  Regardless of metamorphosis and eternity, they then let go of each other with the same melancholy reluctance mortal lovers demonstrate.

  Lionwolf entered his father’s private world without show or clamour.

  Certainly he had had three fathers. The second was Heppa, a man of little wit and some heart. The third was Thryfe, a Magikoy Master among mages, who had both brain and, ultimately, heart. But the first father was Zeth Zezeth, the god of split personality and heartless discord, the fallen sun.

  At once Lionwolf beheld Zth’s world was injured.

  Amber and fire remained, but they too it seemed had gone mad.

  It was a kind of garden, and the trees were burning, and even the grass was tipped with lit fire. Liquid amber light slopped heavily on the surfaces like a wet sick snow. Here and there too molten gums trickled out of the pores of things, turning to a sort of sewage. Zth’s heaven reeked of arson and garbage.

  Lionwolf selected a path the paving of which bubbled and wriggled. Autumns of flame fell on him as he passed. The dropping amber was tepid.

  Zth was deep in where vines bled and lay thrashing on the ground. He seemed to be dancing, circling intently round and round on the spot. Sometimes he let out a caw of delight. ‘Yes, yes,’ cried Zth, ‘they do all I command, for the great whale is my servant, and the woman my slave, and she has gone to act out my instructions, and there are others, many others, and everything proceeds like the clockwork mechanisms of that city where they worship me in fear and love, the Rukarian kings, whom I shall break in small bits, and all of it is mine and only I am the sun and see how I shine – how marvellously I shine!’

  Lionwolf halted, looking at the wizened thing that was his father. The god was brownish as an old hothouse locust that had crisped its wings too long in a Summer heat, and could no longer fly.

  The amber dropped on Zth and he brushed it off, but w
as smeared in its grease. Brittle brownish hair hung from his scalp. His dried-up face had two eyes in it that were like dull lead and perhaps were mostly blind.

  All this had been done to him by Lionwolf, if not in person. Through the bodies of two women the bane had fixed on Zth. Saphay’s had robbed him of a segment of his immortal essence, which even when replaced no longer fitted him; Jemhara’s had poisoned him with the template of prior supernal birth.

  He did not seem to see at all, as he swayed and praised himself, what stood and looked at him, let alone that it was the author of his downfall. But then surely he did not know himself downfallen. He was Zeth and he shone, marvellously.

  Lionwolf moved forward.

  Stasis gripped the garden. The bloody vines stuck to each other and fused. The fire in the grass died in a veil of smoke. Beyond, long hilly fields of flaming grain were shrouded too in a sudden pall.

  There came only the drip-drip of the amber. A skeleton of some unreal bird cascaded from the white sky, fragmenting to powder as it came.

  Zth glanced up.

  Perhaps he did see Lionwolf now, yet improperly.

  ‘Where is the she called Jema?’ asked Zth.

  ‘Back there,’ said Lionwolf.

  ‘Fetch her here. She should be here, attendant on me.’

  Lionwolf said nothing. He had distinguished the traces of the pollen of Jemhara’s pearly ashes – they had only been visible even to him since they alone had not caught fire.

  ‘Well,’ said Zth, ‘if she will not come I shall punish her. Probably she is in terror already and conceals herself.’

  ‘Probably. If so she does it with skill.’

  ‘Meanwhile I shall send you on my mission. You shall go to harass and eradicate him for me. I will not sully myself with his death. To kill a god, for now that is what he is, leaves too much debris behind.’

  ‘Not always,’ said Lionwolf.

  He had come up beside Zth. Zth stopped circling and dancing. He peered at Lionwolf like an old, old man who squints into the sun.

  ‘Who are you?’ said Zth, without interest.

  ‘I am myself.’

  ‘No, I am myself.’

  ‘You are no longer any self.’

  ‘I am greater than self.’

  ‘You are greater than nothing.’

  ‘Go now,’ said Zth tetchily. ‘Begone.’

  ‘We are gone,’ said Lionwolf.

  In that moment Zth screamed aloud. Lionwolf had taken hold of him, and instantly the whole of the personal astral world gave way. It cracked and crumpled and crashed noiselessly in, imploded, evacuated, releasing into gods knew what adjoining regions a trillion atomies, each eager as a swimming sperm.

  And it was true both of them, Lionwolf and Zth, were also gone – out into the illimitable environ of space itself.

  Of this arena Lionwolf had dreamed. But Zth perhaps never had.

  An incredibility occurred.

  Zeth Sun Wolf turned his head and burrowed in horror into Lionwolf’s chest like a frightened child.

  Lionwolf held Zth without effort, and the solar and stellar winds blew back Lionwolf’s hair, which was the only fire visibly brought away intact, as he scanned about him.

  Some miles below lay the enormous earth.

  It was round and white, an astronomic snowball, but for a few watery shadows and veins of vaporous green and turquoise that seemed to come and go, like signs of breathing in a being tranced asleep. Or rather, in hibernation.

  The immeasurable mosaic of stars however appeared no closer.

  Even so they gleamed and sparkled all about, above, around and beneath.

  Just like the dream, six moons were lying on the black velvet of the spatial sky. They were pallid, none so pure as the snowball of the earth. Three were an ancient white like dug-up bone. Two were like dented and qualified nacre. One, currently the farthest off, was bluish. All were pocked and scarred, which gave them an awful loveliness. They were unreal and so quite real; they had suffered, and survived. While, just discernibly, you could see they moved.

  But then, then – yet out of the east or not, Lionwolf did not know – three more moons rose up from behind the mask of the earth. And these three moons, also each full, a globe, were like palest beaten gold.

  And in this way the phenomenon of the erratic, ever-altering lunar discs seen on earth was revealed. For some hid themselves behind others, or shied away on another orbit – of each other, or some unadvertised magnet. From earth never more than three were ever witnessed together. But nine they were and their mysteries of revelation, at full or half or crescent, were dependent on their procession in space.

  Lionwolf gazed at all that, absorbed. Time condensed, unravelled. And he supported the putrid hulk of his father in one arm. Zth saw nothing. He would not look. Or could not look.

  Nevertheless in the end, hours later, he spoke.

  ‘I’m cold,’ whimpered the god, like any mortal thing. ‘Cold, cold.’

  ‘Hush,’ answered Lionwolf quietly. ‘Soon you’ll be warm enough.’

  He looked about sharply then, and called without sound. And from the invisible but unmended tear in space, the entry-exit to Zth’s bankrupt heaven, Zth’s sun chariot flared out, spitting with smokes and embers, drawn by six wolves that were not indigo now but the shade of rust.

  Once the vehicle reached them Lionwolf stepped into it. He roped the reins about his waist as would a Jafn warrior in battle. He kept Zth all the while in his arm, held tight.

  Maybe there was an urge to gallop the outer circuit of the world. If so he resisted.

  Instead Lionwolf kept the chariot stationary.

  Let the moons wheel around, and let the world spin as perhaps it did. Soon the sun too would come from behind the world. For this he would wait.

  Did the sun encircle the earth? That it did Lionwolf, a god, was sure. Conceivably the stalled chariot itself subtly moved to follow the tug of the earth, and so rotated with the earth, seeming to stay put, allowing the sun to seem to rise in space. Or else the sun did circle the earth, the normal earthly conclusion. The unreal mathematic must therefore have been real.

  But the sun’s rising was essential.

  More time presumably went by.

  The living god stood in the chariot supporting the demolished god, and the wolves gnashed their fangs and stamped on airlessness irksomely.

  Unfathomed distance underneath, the earth’s surface caught three others of the god’s soundless calls.

  These dipped in through the layers of non-air like arrows.

  The first nipped Guri’s ear as he sat with Fenzi on the island hillside. A day had gone and a night had gone after it, and now dawn was again considering, prevaricating like a woman, if she would return.

  Fenzi slept, for according to him he was due a Jafn sleep night, a custom he insisted on keeping, though now of course sleep was not essential. Besides, he slept more often than he would have done in the garth.

  The girl Azula had ages since disappeared on her cartwheeling constitutional over the slopes.

  Uncle.

  Guri lifted his head, alert as long ago.

  Uncle – come see the stars!

  Guri shook himself and got up without haste. He scrutinized the horizons where the seeable stars were already fading.

  He recalled another night, as it seemed to him now millennia before. He had stared then at the sky, thinking he saw the route there which led into a second world, a world of more importance and validity. He had been infatuated with it, its inspiration and splendour.

  And in that pivotal instant he had lifted his ghost arms to fly upward into eternity.

  And the cry came from the child in Saphay’s womb. Guri – Uncle Guri – and he turned his back on what he did not even know but which had seemed to offer him limitless joy, and went to rescue Lionwolf.

  In this call now there was no panic and no appeal. However flighty, it was a summons.

  Guri shrugged in the familiar way.
r />   Here the stars had been put out, but perhaps up there they went on glittering. And the boy – the man – the god – called him. He was Guri’s leader. Guri had better go.

  He lifted his arms. He did not need to any more, yet it was a sort of embrace.

  He sprang for heaven.

  Elsewhere as that happened, Curjai was watching Ruxendra as she walked up a track to a hilltop. A phantasmal flush of yellow was in the east. The dawn would begin soon, and at every dawn Ruxendra climbed this hill. It was her narrow feet which had worn the track in the snow.

  She had taken the proliferation of her altars seriously. Sometimes when she had gone to see them she frowned over it, trying he could tell to be virtuous and conscientious, as she had in the school of the Magikoy. But having become a goddess of sunrise plainly she did not grasp her duties, for there seemed to be none; sunrise went on anyway. They debated such matters.

  They had other pursuits of course, he and she. The snow house he had constructed, warm enough inside, oversaw their love and its expression. The dog and the tiger oversaw these too. Presently the animals watched Ruxendra on her hill, as Curjai did.

  Often he had the sensation she might abruptly leap from the hill and vanish.

  This never happened, but his wariness never left him.

  He murmured, and the fire bloomed up on the hearth by the door.

  Was it natural that they should live like this, like penniless peasants on a Simese hill, who lacked even herds or growing-land, and had nothing to do but hold theosophic debate and make love?

  He could not tell if they had even stayed in the world. Very possibly they had expelled themselves into some look-alike domain formed, like house and fire, out of Curjai and Ruxendra’s own unusual qualities. Here the dawn might not even be actual. Did it simply show up to remind her of her role – as maybe the fire obeyed him to jog his memory?

  Curjai now thought of Lionwolf. It was not he did not frequently do so.

  Curjai’s time in Hell had been both fraught and magnificent, and always free of guilt. He had been at his best. He had become himself there, the best of himself, but who was he now? Even reborn in Padgish, who had he been? A blind fool, he decided. It was that which had allowed his mother to die.