No Flame But Mine (35 page)

Was it that he gambled now the demon cats would not pursue him if he ran
towards
the unholy, part-amorphous tower on the hill?

If it had been that, he miscalculated.

Really Fenzi had most likely only decided, on some obscure level of inner reasoning, that he would seek his inevitable fate rather than be
picked out
by it.

Autonomy however would not be allowed.

Once only he glanced back.

He was by then approaching the higher ground, the tree-lathered base of the larger hill where the tower was, or sometimes was. Tonight he could not see it, and no moonglow burned there. When he looked over his shoulder the stars were eager enough to show what followed.

How they pelted on. They poured over the starry nightscape like spilled silvery oil.

Surely by now they should have reached him, brought him down, if only by causing the paralysis that they – or she – inspired. Maybe it was their entertainment, to hunt like this with delay, cat with mouse.

There were nine of them tonight.

Nine, and all focused, fur and fang and talon, on him.

An honour?

Fenzi ran.

Twelfth Volume

N
IGHT
'
S
P
LEASURES

‘Who passes?'

‘I am you.'

‘I am here.'

‘
I
am here and you are
there
.'

‘Are you my shadow?'

‘You are mine.'

‘
What
are you then?'

‘What
you
are.'

‘Begone.'

‘I am gone.'

‘He is gone. But where then am
I
?'

Apparently unanswerable riddle, found in various forms:

Most lands of most continents

ONE

At the top of the stair the Gargolem stood, looking down towards the city of Kol Cataar.

How many years had passed? Less now than two. Everywhere time was working differently as, in the worlds beyond the world, it seemed it always did.

Two mortal years had even so watched the re-creation of this city into a version of the burnished jewelled metropolis of Ru Karismi. Under the instruction of the Gargolem, the lesser golems had performed the task with the efficiency and speed of elegant ants.

It was sunrise. The sun flashed and was suddenly in the eastern window of the sky. The new and now impressive urban heights winked ruby and diamond from the tinted parasols and domes of mansions, palaces. The thousand steps of the rebuilt marble stair flooded with a vainglorious blush. The thousand statues, diagonally set, flaunted the dawn like rose-quartz not figures of steel.

Daybreak coursed and filled the lower city and gradually the streeted slopes. Other objects of metal shone. There was no waterway. The frozen necklace of the River Palest did not exist in Kol Cataar. Nor did any occult Insularia, warren of the almighty Magikoy, tunnel under the river and the thoroughfares. Only three Magikoy survived. They did not require – or merit – an Insularia. But the Great Markets, even the temple-town of the Ruk's neglected gods, lay, with the endless threading weave of boulevards, squares and alleys, spread like a map for many miles. High barriers enclosed the complex. As before they were broken only by tall gates, Southgate, Northgate. The night's torches were being doused there as along the winding roads.

But one other thing was in Kol Cataar the Phoenix. And in her forerunner this had not existed.

Although the sun was up clouds were massing from the east. Light snow was driving in torn ribbons across the face of morning.

As the snow slanted in over the city it altered. White feathers changed to transparent beads. Then it was
rain
falling on Kol Cataar. Rain, unknown as such for five centuries. And the rain libated upon the orchards and the gardens, the parks and lawns, catering for the thirsts of cedars blue with needles, oaks and tamarinds with leaves of bronze and rinds of wooden bark. Into the goblets of drinking peach trees and aloes, apple groves and clinging grapevines and roses, the crystalline breakage of the tender rain plashed down. Pots and jars, tubs and big barrels stood waiting on every terrace, by every wall, at every public corner. Had you never tasted rain? Cool and sweet, far better than reconstituted ice. Better than wine. Seven thousand households would serve rain tonight in cups of clay, pewter, gold and glass. Children erupted from the differing prisons of artisan apprenticings and scholar schools, to splash and roister in puddles like ponds. Women washed their long hair over balconies.

Thryfe trod up the slippery stair in the rain, not pausing to breathe though he had climbed the entire thousand treads without hesitation.

There was no longer any hint of a limp. His left hand flexed with ordinary strength as he wiped rain from his eagle's eyes. ‘Good morning, Gargo.'

Bhorth, King Paramount, waited on his balcony, looking at Thryfe.

The balcony jutted from the King's Hall of Kol Cataar, out over the glittering three-mile-deep abyss of sunlit rain and city.

For a moment Thryfe was caught by an eerie flinch of déjà vu. But this often happened, for the new city was deliberately so like Ru Karismi, and Bhorth was the last of the kings.

Thryfe anyway was always now at odds with himself. The god's healing and revitalization of him left a strange dichotomy. Young and strong and fit as ten years before, Thryfe's body contained the bitter and dissatisfied mind of an older and more damaged man. Was Bhorth too in this state? The god had touched him also. Yet straight and vital Bhorth carried the mind and heart of a man who had lost his son.
And I
, thought Thryfe,
lost everything
. But he struck the thought off at once.

‘The augurs that were taken, Bhorth, have reshaped their aspect.'

I choose similar words
. He had recalled the former time this one reminded him of. Not déjà vu, only memory. It had been when first he warned them of the advent of the Lionwolf.

Bhorth did
not
remember. He said, ‘In what way?'

‘Your son is alive. This is now sure. But
where
he is is indecipherable.'

‘Then – it
is
death.'

‘No. I have said. He lives.'

‘So our wretched priests tell us we all continue to do, after dying.'

Thryfe felt the familiar impatience.

He had, delivering that first warning, foresensed the death of the Ruk, and of her kings and people. But Bhorth survived and the population of Kol Cataar had decidedly risen from the ashes. The recurrent influxes of Rukarians from all over the south, east and west disproved previous prophecy. The nation had seemed to re-emerge from beneath the very snows.

Thryfe chided himself as recently he often had to do.

Be kind to him
. All that remained was duty. Besides Bhorth was a good king. And unhappy.

‘Sallusdon your son may return to you, Bhorth. But for now some other bond has claimed him.'

‘He's trapped?'

‘Perhaps. Perhaps willingly.'

‘Is it the girl?'

‘Azulamni? No. There's a hint of her presence somewhere in his life, that's all. You know, Bhorth, don't you, when the gods meddle in human affairs, these lacunas appear. Sometimes even they are physical. The problem of where Sallus is seems like that, a physical place, some inaccessible and unknown crag or island, maybe.'

‘Chillel,' said Bhorth. ‘She has him.'

‘A goddess then. You have some hope from that. She was, I think you said, only very nice to you.'

Bhorth nodded at the irony. ‘Yes. Extravagantly nice. And saved my hide into the bargain. What goddess is she, do you guess, Thryfe, eh? If
he's
the sun.'

The peculiar conversation was quite normal. Hundreds of persons must consider in this way, now deities wandered over the world in full view.

‘You told me she was black, like your son.'

‘Black as night. Stunning as the moon.'

Both men glanced again down the terraces of the city to where, in Ru Karismi, the River Palest would have shown, the entry to the Insularia under its ice.

‘Night then,' said Thryfe.

‘There are a collection of gods of night in our temple-town,' said Bhorth bleakly, ‘and have been for centuries. Why does night need another one?'

And they laughed quietly, angrily, these two elderly and impaired men, there on the glittering balcony in the warm sunshine and the smell of flowers, and their unlined, healthy skins.

Beyond the phoenix city, the fields and orchards had piece by piece extended. Banks of fog attended their outer limits, reaction to the warmth and chemical shifts of permafrost and soil. No wolves were seen here now, though in patches among the trees and vine-stocks sometimes a votive or shrine might have been put up. Most featured the Rukarian gods of agriculture. One or two had a small clumsy stone effigy that did depict a black dog or wolf. Winter had departed from the area, but blind instinct must have dictated a little insurance.

Where the hot-spring weather ended, outside the fog, icicles formed long skinny stalagmites growing a hundred feet or more from the ground.

After the stalagmite fence the Ice Age recommenced.

This plain of wind-riven white bore no sign of anything unusual. Here snow, when it fell,
snowed
.

From a distance out there nothing was visible of Kol Cataar. Even at sunrise or set no single ornament glinted on her heights. But as Thryfe had noted, this had not prevented thousands of refugees from seeking, discovering and entering the city.

The phenomenon of the phoenix Spring was equated wrongly but handily with those abrupt oases of heat and flora that now and then happened in the southern continent. All oases vanished in a period of time short or long. But as longer periods might last up to fifty years, the tales reported, better make hay while the sun shone. A man could be dead in much less.

The heat was not really intense. It would have killed them if it had been after such adaptation to cold. The plants, the grains and flowers too, had needed only the faintest tepidness to bring them on.

Oddly, the heat sometimes caused one curious mirage or hallucination, to the east of the foggy perimeters.

There a stone, tall as a man, appeared. It would seem to have been erected in a stand of sorry wheat that had tried to grow but, just too far outside the limit, had frozen in upright black bars. The statue looked real enough, and rough-hewn enough, a male figure of fierce and regal bearing. The face was the most finely carved, with even a short beard carefully delineated. But parts of all the rest of it, including forehead and hands, had not been fully excavated from the pitted native granite.

A sourceless cruel blue glow sometimes played about the statue when the sky was overcast. Then it looked ominous. But at other moments it was not uncheerful, and certainly the most interesting of the votary objects kept outside the city.

Then again the statue would disappear as regularly as it showed up.

Some had even gone out to visit it and witnessed its melting away in the air in front of them.

None had ever had physical contact with the stone.

A child who had strayed into the black wheat had told her mother that once she saw a young man standing there also. He had been studying the statue. The mother, aware of all the travellers who presently flocked to Kol Cataar in their wagons and slees, took no notice until the child insisted on description. ‘His hair was
red
– it was red as the red glass windows in the king's high palace. His eyes were red too, inside. But then he smiled at me and his eyes were dark blue like—' at which point the recital ended in a shriek. Mother had slapped child.

‘Sew up your tongue! Don't tell lies! Don't ever speak of
him
.' For though they had, almost none of them, this time seen him, or even ever seen him in the past, the legend persisted of the demonic invader Vashdran, who had nearly brought history to an end.

Vashdran … Lionwolf … Nameless …

As he walks over the world the god memorizes himself, all he has been, all he must become, and those intersections where Before and To Be mingle.

When formerly dead in Hell, some of his first life had gone with him to help him make, from the material of his psyche, the country and cities there. But aspects from his future had also followed him, for in the kingdoms and republics of the fore and afterlife time existed/exists exotically or not at all.

So, for example, the mendicant priests from the original Kol Cataar had gone around in Hell, one of them singing too, if not as well as he would on earth.

Hell had
been
Lionwolf, and he his Hell. The King of Hell, also Lionwolf, was a being hewn of mobile if obdurate stone. And now at the border of the place of Lionwolf's third rebirth, the Hell King was an idol in the frozen wheat.

Lionwolf had indeed studied his statue, or granite alter-ego.

The addition of the beard – something
grown
– had beguiled Lionwolf. In Hell the stone King was hairless. The beard represented, rather firmly, the idea of age and wisdom, a mature and noble god less hard of heart than of fist, sinew and resolve. To Lionwolf he seemed far kinder than the smooth-shaven monarch who had smitten him with agony and dragons.

Did Vashdran recollect later the girl child who had ambled up to him that day? Yes.

She had glimpsed the scarlet crescent that lit his pupils from some angles, but was not afraid. When blue-eyed he smiled, she smiled too and he saw
his
smile sink into her. She would live now to be extremely ancient, without illness and frequently lucky. A shame her mother would hit her – he foresaw it like a tiny blotch on the snow. But such problems would become rare.

He loved to bless them. He loved to heal them. He loved it with such a savage and barely containable delight that he knew he must curb it in himself. It was not his task to refashion all humanity to perfection, as the army of gargolems had done with the city of Kol Cataar. Mortals grew another way. He tried to leave them alone, but occasionally – this indulgence.