No Flame But Mine (32 page)

Her hair was growing back swiftly and she had rinsed it in black dye before they left Kol Cataar. Now it seemed only one colour. It was just her skin and eyes that might attract comment.

A couple of tiny, terrible villages appeared and vanished. One was clearly a nest of partly demented robbers, who rushed or hobbled at them waving their arms, shouting the fake over-welcome of a spurious host. Oaths and dooms were heaped on them as they sped away. In other spots they dashed past villages and steads long abandoned. The bones of animals lay just under the softer snow, lividly ochre against the whiteness. But as the coast drew near – the ride had not taken more than four days – a bigger conglomeration showed, this one not quite mad or ferocious. From here an ice-road led down to the shore.

Sallus haggled for one of the clinker-built black boats, for its dun sail, oars and fishing lines. He offered only copper coins but they were the currency of the dead city of Ru Karismi.

Dreadfully, people in the village street shed tears, and came reverently to touch them. ‘Were you from
there
? Is that what turned you black?' Sallus evaded talk of colour. Carefully lying he explained he and his sister had been born to steaders outside the city. The whole family had escaped before the invader came, or the White Death.

‘Where are you heading on the cold hard sea?'

‘A mage put it on us to make the voyage,' Sallus said. ‘I had to promise my father we would. Seek the coast of Kraagparia, he told me.'

Then the villagers made old religious signs of the Rukarian pious. They moved away from Sallus and Azula as if they were sorry for them but no longer wished to be in their vicinity. The boat they got for only twice its reasonable price. He suspected the copper coins would not be spent but kept as heirlooms.

But they must go farther than the hem of Kraagparia.

They must go down to the very tip of the blade of the sword – and further. South-east to south, following the shores, further than any apparently had been. And further still. South-east to south and next south to east.
There
. If
there
existed. And the boat – was not so strong.

It would be a voyage of months, conceivably of years.

Who knew anyway after such a journey, whether travelling in hope or denial, if it were possible ever to arrive?

Fenzi, son of Chillel, a fisherman and his woman, met four half-brothers, the two Kelps, the Faz and the Vorm, in the middle of the northern sea.

They and he had simply set out overland on the coastal ice of the north-west continent. He might even have met them there, had he reached it more quickly. The four had taken a fishing boat from the village they called respectively Kelfazvor, Fazkelvor or Vorkelfaz. Fenzi, fisher's son, had knocked one together on wooded land above the shore.

A storm blew up one night, one of those nights floored by the black and silver sea. Amid the lightning flares and tall waves the two small boats were steered into each other's vicinity.

Five men now, they roped their craft together. Greetings were cool. Oneness did not really provide a sense of finding or family. Only Chillel the magnet had true relevance.

To the islanders Fenzi was landlocked Jafn, and they to him were thieving reivers. It was inevitable they join forces, but not especially to be celebrated.

Fenzi then sat alone on his Jafn-built boat, tied to the others by cord and symbolism.

He thought about his father and mother to whom he had not said farewell. But he and they had not been like Arok and Nirri with their Dayadin. Fenzi's parents were always slightly bemused by him, and after Dayadin was lost, apologetic.

Fenzi thought of Sombrec too. He had not bidden him any goodbye either.

Fenzi thought of himself. During his ultra-short childhood and adolescence he had been quite a sunny boy, sure and sometimes psychic. In fact he had not changed so much until that gallop back to the garth, until the hill of ice, until Arok returned
dead
from death. Until the Pull became everything.

They knew where they went now, the five Chillelings.

Once the storm subsided they steered by the stars for the far south-east.

Obviously something was there, some land or other, despite elder beliefs that nothing was. The other continent at the world's top to which Arok, and Saphay, had sailed them those few years before, that too had been a place unknown, non-existent until they anchored there.

Azula watched her brother sleeping. She kept her hand guidingly and lightly upon the tiller, as he had shown her how to. The chaze snake had coiled about Sallus's waist, its head resting on his chest above the heart.

I hate her
, Azula thought. She meant the goddess Chillel, her other mother.
Why should I want to go to her when I hate her? I don't want to. I could slip over the side into all that black water, and go to Beebit-Ma instead. I hate Chillel
.

‘I hate her,' said Brinnajni.

She lay on her back, her red hair spread across the pillows. Her brother Dayadin lay against her, one arm about her waist as the snake had coiled about Sallus, and Dayadin's head too rested on Brinnajni's breast. During the past months brother and sister had become lovers. It carried for them no faintest stigma, though among the Jafn it was reckoned a sin, and amongst the hill shepherds where Brinnajni had begun her life, a crime that merited terminal stoning.

‘Who do you hate?' Dayadin murmured. He raised his face to look at hers. Her eyes were shut. He kissed her lips and asked them, ‘
Who?
'

‘Who do you think, beloved?'

But Dayadin did not know.

In the deerskin that hung across the door, the hovor Hilth blithered quietly, playing with the drape as it sometimes did. The black sheep, which had by now grown as large as a cow, was outside the hut, nibbling grass which had bloomed out of the snow near the wall.

Brinnajni – Burning Flame – had built this crochety home with a couple of muttered supernatural instructions. Trees cracked in ice, ice-brick skirled. Up it went, in they went. The bed had been brought from longitudes off, some furnishing left to rot in a fine house somewhere. Now dressed with fur and cushions it was a couch fit to conjure with. And they had.

‘Who do you
need
to hate, Brinna?'

‘My mother.'

He looked long at her, then, without a word, rolled over to his back. At last he did say, ‘Are you
able
to hate Chillel?'

‘Yes. Trust me. Quite able.'

They lay side by side in silence. Slowly his hand stole out to discover hers. Their hands clasped, became one.

‘I love you, little brother.'

‘And I you.'

‘I was old before I was young, Dayad. She sloughed and left me. I had to make my own way. My darling sheep was more mother to me than
Chillel
. As for a father – well. Old before young, your Brinna. Now I'm young with you. You grew up nearly if not quite as fast as I. Dayad—'

‘I'm here.'

‘
Stay
here. We are too strong for her.'

‘She is nothing to me.'

Unthinkable, thus unthought, the slightest doubt assailed him when he made her this automatic vow. He accepted instantly however it was
not
Chillel who meant anything. It was Nirri, Arok.

‘… Nothing,' he said again, mild with truthfulness.

Guriyuve the Chilleling from Olchibe – son also to Ipeyek the Gech, and the Crarrow Hevonhib – had put out long since on the more south-easterly seas, travelling from the Marginal Land of the sword continent.
He
had said farewell to his mother. Ipeyek the father, though made leader, had a year before wandered away from Olchibe back to the Urrowiy, his nomadic people of the Great Uaarb.

Hevonhib, now the nubile and child-bearing member of her coven, was already teeming with another man's kiddle. She looked at Guriyuve with only a formal regret. She, who had been so proud to get him. ‘You were named for a dead warrior. He wished his name to live on among our sluhts. Your name has also come to include that of the sluhtin's priest and leader of most renown, Peb Yuve.'

Guriyuve replied, ‘Yuve is like a Rukar name. Does it result from one of their gods known as Yuvis?'

Although offended Hevonhib did not show it. The Crarrowin ruled lots of the sluhtins by now, and here the same. Her coven too was the chief one.

‘How do you know a Rukar name?'

‘I can't say, Mother. Sometimes I know things.'

‘Then know this: we keep enduring enmity with the Rukar. Time out of mind they ruined us and destroyed the glory of Sham, that great city better than all. Also the Lionwolf came from their blood who caused much harm.'

Guriyuve thought uneasily that his mother sounded more portentous when she was with child. No doubt she had been that way too when carrying him. He said, ‘I'm sorry the ghost warrior Guri will lose his name here. Before I leave shall I give it up? Then you can gift it again to your next one, which is also a boy.'

‘I know it's a boy,' said Hevonhib sternly. She was Crarrow. Crarrow knew these things. She knew too the father of this second son had not been pre-prepared by the astonishing seed of Chillel. The man was not very strong, nor would the child be strong. Fast-grown Guriyuve of course was perfectly stalwart.

But Hevonhib had foreseen and was resigned. She gave him an amulet of the Crarrowin he would not need, a flat greenish stone with a circle carved in it.

Guriyuve thanked her and departed.

He rode one of the female mammoths he had grown up with. The other three, always till now companions both to her and to him, stood mourning at the exit of the caves.

Parting was usually cruel. But Guriyuve felt much more regret about leaving the mammoths than over the authoritative women.

His mount, Sjindi, bore him eastward, callously delighted he had chosen her. When they reached the variable coastal ice fields that fringed the sea Guriyuve led Sjindi far out on to the ice. Before them, not five dawnshadow-lengths off, jet-black fluid ocean rolled.

Guriyuve scrutinized the surrounding ice. It was about a quarter-mile thick.

He whistled then on a single note. Turning slowly round sunwise, that is east to south to west to north, he kept on whistling. The ice without demur neatly split away, leaving him and his mammoth on an irregular platter, fifteen to seventeen feet in width and some twenty-five feet long.

This ice-raft floated forward and out into the open sea, bearing the hero and his mount with it.
Her
only comment was a solitary triumphant trumpeting.

It seemed Guriyuve could do such things, a kind of magecraft. But all of the Children of Chillel could do sorcerous things, and had talents in magic. It was apparently a question if they recognized their own cunning in this way, or felt it ethical to use it, as to whether they became wizards.

Guriyuve's voyage was definitely the fastest by any account. He positively
flew
around the coastline and then due south. Either there had come a mighty wind to blow the raft, or somehow he called or invented one. Or he had a sail of some magnitude the Crarrowin had spelled, or the amulet spelled. Or the wild gulls, the white-kadi and the inky sea-ravens of the outer rocks, flocked in to fan the raft along. Or it was the horned sharks that surfaced and towed it. These tales abound. Whatever it was, he beat the record, and reached the south-east ocean before his siblings.

The route thereafter is charted. But whether fact or fiction none will be sure.

Two months beyond the leave-taking of his human mother, Guriyuve sailed the raft across a deep blue partial strait, a sinking indigo dusk at his back, three full moons glaring in his face.

Huge islands loomed around. They burned like phosphorus in the moonfire. The surf thrashed about their aprons of ice. And tiny icebergs like ivory pins dizzied along.

Until out of the very eyes of the three moons another country rose, isle or continent, but it was not like any similar place.

Resembling spun white sugar the meshes and webs that walled it, architecture or strange vegetation. Guriyuve could not tell. And beyond these twists and twittens was a darkness even the moonshine did not clean. Sjindi, who had been dozing, her legs folded under her like a cat, got up again. Guriyuve looked and saw why. The ice-raft was melting under them. Already the long belly-tresses of the mammoth were salty wet and her feet were awash, as his boots were also. Two hundred yards from the alien shore perhaps they could only drown.

During the prolonged journey the dye grew out of her hair. It was not now two colours but three. When she hacked off the black-tinged ends
still
it was three. For on her right side it was once more black, and on the left side pale brown. But through both the black and the brown threaded strands of silky white.

Beebit's death, the lightning storm, had bequeathed her something else then beside a bone.

Azula remembered Aglin, the mageia from Kandexa. Aglin had tried to befriend Azula after her bereavement, but soon enough all Aglin's concern was directed towards the Magikoy woman Jemhara.

Azula had not said goodbye to Aglin.

Sometimes she held the snake in her arms, rubbing her cheek on its incised smoothness.

Sometimes she stood on her hands, made a hoop of her back, folded herself up like a blanket for a box. Things her mother had done.

The lines Sallus set caught fish, but not regularly. Their provisions they rationed, as with the water. When ice passed them and the sea was still, Sallus would swim over and cut slices for the water-skin. It had all sorts of tastes, this brew, brackish or fishy, yet also perfumed, redolent of heated gardens.

Both of them, the young woman and the young man, surrounded by the immensity of ocean, seemed to grow further off from each other.

They had kept a calendar of days. They were very particular over always making the scratches along the rail, the planking, at length the mast. To start with they had often counted up the days, twenty, forty, seventy. But then they stopped counting.