No Flame But Mine (34 page)

‘She isn't the proper black.'

Sallus smiled. He put his hand on Azula's shoulder. ‘But much better-looking than the rest of us, wouldn't you say?'

Guriyuve stared at Azula. The other nine men, all brothers too and from all the lands of the former continent that was a sword, either stared at her or glanced off.

Azula said, ‘I am better than you men in other ways. I am solely
woman-born
.'

‘She had no father,' Sallus explained. ‘Her mother conceived directly from the goddess.'

‘The seed was uninterrupted. I am the stronger. If any doubts, he can fight me now or, if he wants,
try
to cutch me.' Then she leapt straight up and whirled right over in a double somersault, landing on her hands. Like that she strutted up and down, both her legs held up together as if pinned to one another and the sky.

A couple of the others chuckled, applauding.

Then Azula lowered her legs, leisurely, effortless, and with no interval of readjustment stood confronting them. Her tawny skin showed colour in the cheeks. Her eyes were bright.

Sallus was astounded and delighted by her. She had woken up at the right time.

He added graciously to Guriyuve, ‘Also I fear you'd have to take me on too, if any of you tried any of that with my sister.'

The snake had roused itself and was running along his arm to Azula's shoulder. The chaze was showing as well who was with whom.

‘What's your name, woman?' said Guriyuve.

‘Azulamni, daughter of Azulamni-Beebit. My land is Ruk Kar Is.'

‘What's up there on that hill?' asked Sallus.

‘None of us is sure. We have our camp over there. Better come with us. This country is unsafe.'

More than fifty men sat together on the ground. They were all armed, dressed in the various styles of their native cultures. They did not seem oppressed by the strange heat of the night save in random ways.

Sometimes they talked. Now one would say this, now another would say it or something very like it. They were in agreement, and could each understand exactly what every man there said though the languages were several and the dialects diverse. A band of brothers, now and then they would put a hand on another man's shoulder, to concur or chide – even jokingly to cuff him.

Only Fenzi stood outside the fellowship now, morose and bereft, two states that a year before had been virtually alien to him.

It was not that he could not also fathom the languages, or make himself clear. It was not that he did not grasp their mutual if contrastingly seen predicament. Nor was it that he was particularly unwelcomed, though none of them, despite the chaffing camaraderie established, was really keen to be friends with any other.

At the beginning he too had been relieved he had arrived, and suspicious of both region and company. But slowly, going about on this night plain with them, or seated in their untidy circle around their frail pale camp fire, Fenzi had learned, he believed, his difference.

For these other men, heroes or minor gods, whatever they were supposed to be, were somehow sure of their
human
station. They had had their mortal fathers and mothers, and come to their awareness of their second goddess-mother as had he. Yet in Fenzi's case there was the dilemma of Arok and of Dayadin. At the time he lived through it Fenzi had not beheld this. Or not done so in any form that encroached on his own ego. But leaving the Jafn Holas in that precipitate hour – Arok dead yet
not
dead, the garth clutched by ice and then broken into – Fenzi saw the facts as they were. They were these: Arok the Chaiord had, in the most elusive manner, represented a father to him, and perhaps Nirri a mother. Though they had been too careful or too fastidious to adopt Fenzi, son of a fisherman, in some hidden corner of Fenzi's heart he had taken the place of lost Dayadin, not only warrior but prince, not only favourite but family. It was not that he valued status much. It was – love. And this loving son had watched his father dragged back from death a soulless husk. Then stridden away towards the other pole of familial love, which was not familial and not love at all, Chillel. His physical father and mother he had not even searched out in the garth. He had not said goodbye. His identity, which he had never before examined, was lost as surely as Dayadin.

I did not even leave Sombrec, my friend, with any grace
.

Perturbed, Fenzi moved around the edges of the circle.

Even the patchwork-coloured young woman was seated with them, next to the other newcomer, a Rukar king's son it seemed. Guriyuve the Olchibe, who had told the story of his own advent here, sat listening with the others to Sallus now telling of his voyage. The mammoth Guriyuve had brought had been tethered nearby, munching turf under a black-leafed ilex tree. The Olchibe, after his ice-raft sank, had pulled the animal through the sea to the coast. He had conveniently been able to swim himself, though never before knowing how. Many had complementary tales of swimming abilities, knacks of long-distance running or skirmishing never taught or tried before.

Sallus's story bored Fenzi although the rest seemed involved.

All of it bored Fenzi. The plain that was like a night garden bored, the over-pouring night in which only fleeting twilights indicated morning or evening, and where no sun or moon ever got up. The mythic quality of it was anathema to him, a sort of drudgery. He wished, without words or a single thought to picture it, that he had stayed at the garth. He could have served Arok the best he could. He could have remained himself.

But she. This demoness-goddess they called Chillel, or sweetly sometimes of all things
Winsome
, or by another name he did not quite catch or that maybe they never quite correctly pronounced.
She
, by whatever name, had forced him to her. He had already two mothers, both forsaken. What did he want with
Chillel
?

‘She has enslaved us,' he said to the circle.

None of them registered his words. They were intent on Sallus and his yarn.

Only the girl passed her eyes over Fenzi in an odd glance – black, hazel. She was solely female-born it seemed. No father then to answer to.

Turning, Fenzi gazed off across the night. On the hill the chimney or tower had cancelled its intermittent halo. You could not swear it existed.

Fenzi considered going off that way.

Not one of the others, despite the tales
they
would soon produce of the spirits or sprites that menaced them here, was inclined to act.

Fenzi decided he
would
go.

‘Farewell,' he bitterly said.

No one heard him. Even the patchwork girl did not.

As he set out, loping through melanic grasses, he pondered if he would meet demons. But obviously he must. He felt no fear, no reserve. He could smell fruit and leaves and an indescribable wild fragrance. The accountancy of his mind did not add up.

How long would it take to cross the plain, surmount the hill, confront the shadowy tower? He did not care. He was already well into his stride, running less towards than away.

‘If we sleep, even if some keep watch,' said the Faz-born named Three-Hundred-Eyes, ‘a beast will prowl the edges of the camp. If any of us out venture, to hunt the deer-animals that wander there, come it may, this beast, and fasten on someone. That is, despite the deer that take it could.'

Three-Hundred-Eyes had been called this in his own language, for the timeless Faz practice of digging out the optics of dead enemies and fixing them in glass as jewelry. He was not the Fazion who had travelled first to the north-west continent. Three-Hundred-Eyes until recently had stayed home in the islands.

Like all of them he spoke in his own tongue. And all of them knew what he said, as he knew all they said too.

If Threehe had noticed Fenzi turn and go away he did not seem to. He looked at Sallus.

‘Like beardless lions these beasts are. Great cats, black as we. With pallid gaze.'

‘Liopards,' said another of them, a Chilleling from the Ruk's eastern villages.

‘Is what, liopard?' asked the Faz.

‘I don't know,' said the Rukarian. ‘They're in old ballads.'

All of them puzzled an instant over the word. It had a resonance of
catness
, that was all.

‘But you say the beast – or beasts – come and drag men away?' said Sallus. He wanted it clear.

‘Yes,' said Threehe. He did not wear any of the monstrous jewelry he had been named for, at least, Sallus thought. What would it have been like to spot what looked like dead Rukarian eyes staring at you, here?

One or two more of them talked about the ‘beasts' now.

Beyond the circle and the dim fire little rustlings of the flexive living leaves and grass added descriptive menace.

Perhaps they were all mad; perhaps any who came here went mad.

‘Don't you hunt and kill them, then?' asked the girl, out of nowhere. Her voice was interrogatory, even brusque. ‘You take the deer, but the liopards take
you
?'

‘They're sorcerous,' said another of the Chillelings. He spoke to her contemptuously. He was also Olchibe and she a woman from the Ruk, and besides not properly coloured in. Had she been pure black like himself and his brothers, like their mother indeed, he might have been more polite. Or if she had been yellow and a Crarrow, of course.

But Azula performed her trick. From a sitting position she rose fluently to stand before them on one hand. It was certainly attention-grabbing.

‘So are
we
sorcerous,' announced Azula. ‘Or are
you
only cowards?'

They stirred scowling, and Sallus too between amusement and concern.

But Azula simply spun herself into the air, effortlessly hooked a bough above her, swung on to it and crouched there.

She peered down at them, making in her throat a kind of lionish growling. Her eyes glittered from the fire, opal, agate.

Many among the Chillelings sprang up.

And from out of the dark rim of night beyond the firelight, Azula's growl was replied to in a lower and more fearful register.

They were behind him, several of them from the sounds.

As he ran images burst in Fenzi's mind.

When first he had arrived in this night country, he had thought the men's mutterings of beasts might even be apocryphal or analogous to the dark, and the dark mystery of Chillel. But soon a time came when he woke violently from the deep sleep of a sleep night and saw with his own eyes a jet-black creature, lean, cat-like, and untenuous, pulling a fellow sleeper backward from the fire.

Fenzi had tried to rise and go to assist the man, who had not apparently woken even with the fangs of the animal fastened in his clothes and hair. Yet he could not move. His brain jolted and raged but his body lay inert. A cold sweat broke out on his skin and he felt sick to death. In this horrible trance he, and all the others gathered there, watched as the chosen victim was drawn away into the night.

When finally he had been able Fenzi staggered up. He reached the place beyond the fire and tried to see among the trees. He called to the rest to help him. None did so. Instead a few crawled off and vomited. In a while so did he. After, he fell down nearby and lost consciousness. In the morning it was not discussed, and he would have reckoned it a fever and some fever dream but for the marks on the turf and the small fact of a man's being missing.

At his questions they grumbled that they had warned him. They would not even calculate how many of their brothers had been removed in this same way.

Fenzi searched about for bones. He found nothing.

Some night periods later he was taken hunting with six other men. They brought down a deer from a wild herd. Even these deer were not quite like any he had met before. The night deer were very dark, almost black, the better for camouflage probably.

Then, while they were bleeding their kill before the return to camp, two of the black cat-beasts came slinking down the hillside. They were plainly in sight, and Fenzi gave a shout. His knife was already in his grip and painted with hot blood. Yet once more the awful, insulting horror of paralysis enveloped him, and all of them. Their eyes could move, their hearts still leadenly beat, thoughts leapt in panic in their skulls. But they could not operate hand or limb. Like thinking statues they must stand and await their choosing by the beasts.

Now he saw them close, Fenzi examined them with a type of irrational and petrified need to find them entirely supernatural. But they were not.

One padded right up to him. It lifted on its hind legs and put one heavy forepaw on his left shoulder. It sniffed him briefly, its eyes of ghostly flame dripping their gleam into his. He had thought he was to be that night's choice, and his senses flickered out. It was less terror than nausea. He counted himself dead anyway. As he fell miles down inside the confine of his own stone-struck body, he felt the sinuous rasp of
its
body glide against him and away.

When he came to he was sprawled in the grass with four others. This time he managed not to puke. Two of them did. And two were gone, of course. None of the survivors had seen, as they never did, where the great cats had dragged them.

They called their goddess-mother Chillel. All of them had learned this name, either told it or somehow finding it within their own brains. Now another name surfaced among them.

Fenzi heard it uttered over and over in his mind.

Vangui
…
Vangui
…

What did the name represent? Was it the secret and absolute name of Chillel? It had, unlike all other names, no
meaning
in any language Fenzi knew, or had discovered he could speak.

Vangui …

It was a dark name, a melanic name, shaded like the grasses and groves and hills of the island. It was an
angry
name with blade-like edges. A hungry name that hunted for its sons, hypnotized, selected, seized and abducted them. A name that devoured.