No Flame But Mine (41 page)

Tirthen looked down his long, chiselled nose.

He had been already in many places in his adopted guise. Back to Simisey to bluster and remind those who tended his altars; across the ocean to Kol Cataar where they did not know his name but, drawn by the crisp of heat, he had been a wolf and snarled and new altars had risen. He had also circled this insignificant dunghill, patrolling the hull of ice that kept it in. When the ice was breached he was offended. He was a jealous god made in the image of man, beautiful, envious and insecure.

It would be a minor deed to freeze this cavorting idiot with the wolfskin and staff. But Tirthen had made that fatal error when, an elemental, he had assumed human characteristics. The greater gods went the other way about, human to deity. Childhood normally works best by coming first.

‘Oh, desist,' said Tirthen, foppishly. ‘Do you fail to know who I am?'

His words filmed the werloka with ice.

But the grumpy old warlock was not overcome. Inside his slovenly muddle something burned.

‘Gler you are. I
name
you gler. Begone. Bugger off!'

Tirthen rose. But the werloka had by now entered an orgy of contrasuggestiveness. The atmosphere turned scintillant purple as he whirled and exorcised.

Tirthen started to come down from his hill.

The ice-domes at Kol Cataar and here, the attacking icebergs out at sea, the storm of hail and lightning in Kandexa, the splitting glaciers beyond Kol Cataar, all those and other epic stratagems had been due to Winter's jealous and instinctive murderousness. Ignite a flame, he would blow it out. Mindless then, and without either personality or outer form, he-it had laboured to prevent the renewal of the fire. But the fire had returned. Winter had lost the game, though irrelevant moves would continue for centuries. A new order began. Only in little things now could this fiend find triumph.

From the hill a giant black wolf launched itself. Icicles fringed its coat. Its teeth were like the broken edges of some gate to death.

With a howl the werloka flung down his staff. He did not himself wear wolfskin for nothing. In his youth he had been borjiy, a berserker, and his inner guide animal, savage and hot, was also
wolf
.

His bundle of body toppled off. He pummelled out of it. A grey old wolf with a hoary snout parted its jaws on yellow fangs. The werloka hurled himself in turn to meet the god. As he went he roared the blood-joy of the borjiy, and meeting the substance of Tirth plunged in his claws with the boiling glory of berserk fury.

The goddess Ruxendra, flying across the snow towards the garth, discovered she must haul her hound back. He was eager to join the fight below. Crossly she bit his ear. ‘Leave it, Star-Dog. They're not worth it.'

While for a mile around the young morning went deep red, as if laved in blood.

FOUR

During the night, and she had not been, was not now, quite sure which night that was following her return to the earthly plane, Ruxendra had seen some of her shrines. She had had a sensation of being tugged many ways at once. To begin with this panicked her. But then she learned she could move in several directions and
be
in them, and yet also stay together all in one place. It was, she concluded, what the liquid sea must experience, or even the driven snow.

This had happened because people were regularly praying to her, and making her offerings. Ruxendra wafted through the air of a small fane in Kol Cataar's new temple-town. Her shrine here was entrancing, gold and pink. Women were hanging little trinkets there. The statue was like her – but not like.
They have made my hair too light
. It seemed she was a dawn goddess, and one of the very, very few Rukarian female deities. Even so, like other Ruk gods, she had two sides. One was lively, valiant and caring, tearing through the ramparts of cold night. The other side was
dead
. How frightful! A dead dawn. This side, a lesser image, looked grey and had been veiled.

Ruxendra was both flattered and upset. She wondered how they had known she died, or how they knew her Hell-coined dawn name.

But soon she was in the ruin of Ru Karismi, and drawn to another shrine, a poor little one near the river. It was made of loose stones and set out of the way of the winds. One of the stones was her actual memorial from the burial Morsonesta of the defunct Insularia. Someone had dared that forbidden and previously impenetrable region and dug up the marker. She spotted a similar plaque far off over the ruin, that of Flazis, another Magikoy who like herself had perished of the White Death. What god was
he
supposed to be then? A god of mending broken bones, it seemed. But his shrine was neglected. Hers had been kept up. A fresh rose lay on it, turning black from frost. How had a rose grown outside a hothouse in this ravaged pile? Vashdran – Lionwolf, she thought. He must have passed by.

Although she was no longer enraged at Lionwolf, she did not like to recall their last encounter.

No one was about in Ru Karismi that she could see. Steel prongs of freezing weather searched it like heartless surgical fingers. She felt the reverse of nostalgia; a dread of remaining.

Another shrine showed up at a miniature village, far into the north-east sliver of land known as the Spear. That was in Jafn territory.

She was confused by this. The Jafn did not worship gods, only, barbarically, one God. How then did they come to claim her?

But in Hell there had been men from many countries, not all of them ever identified. And the shrine she now saw was less to a goddess than to a sprite. It had food offerings. From certain accessory items there, a lamp, a piece of glass fixed to reflect the sky, she assumed they took her as a spirit of radiance.

Eventually Ruxendra seemed to find herself and be in such a lot of areas she lost track of them. A compendium of altars, vessels, votives, demonstrated her as dawn or first light. In a handful of these ideas she was even fierce, a scarlet gull: Dawn Red-Winged. This was the memory of her time as a vengeance in Hell, a fifteen-year-old at her most militant. Yet there was another shrine in the Marginal Land beyond the Ruk, where she had been depicted as a goddess of love.

The far-flung mosaic of her consciousness flew back together.

She had by then also dodged the fighting wolves, and lugging her hound with her landed inside the Holasan-garth at the House door.

She had anticipated she would find Curjai again. But he was not there. Instead a Rukarian princess sat on an upturned bucket by the doorway.

Saphay. Ruxendra had never seen her, but knew her. Gods knew things.

With stilted Rukarian etiquette Ruxendra gave the female bow needed if still they had both been ordinarily alive. With matching starchiness Saphay inclined her head.

Ruxendra was aching with the wish to recover Curjai. Saphay was gurning with recollections of a dead beloved whom, even though reborn, she must either wait for – Athluan – or could never meet – Lionwolf.

As if just in off the avenue Ruxendra fastidiously complained, ‘There is a vile wolfish minor god brawling up the slope with a stupid man who has changed into a wolf. They're biting slices from each other. They nearly splashed my dress. And my dog here, well, I had to pull him away.'

Saphay said, ‘Males.' That was all. It summed up male gods, male witches and male dogs. It contained great condemnation.

‘Oh, naturally.'

A frightful bang, as if thunder had cleavered open the sky, shook everything. Snow gushed off the House roof and crashed around them, missing
them
completely but swamping other things. The clouds above burned up blister-red, then faded back to paleness.

The rest of the garth had gone to earth.

No one, nothing non-supernal, was to be seen.

‘My former companion,' began Ruxendra, ‘a young foreign prince—'

‘He has left,' said Saphay. ‘Some awful act happened. He said they had killed his mother … Something in him reminded me of my own—' She stopped. She said, ‘I doubt though if
he
would notice if
I
were killed. But then he knows I can never be killed. It is,' she said falteringly, ‘very hard on a mother. To lose – in whatever manner – her only—' and stopped again. Stopped as if struck dead as she never could be, now or ever.

The dog, who had sat peaceably through all this, even the cosmic bang and crashing snow, raised his nose and let forth a long, dismal howl.

Instantly every other dog, but also every cat and lion and hawk of the garth, began a complementary wail.

Saphay rose. She clapped her hands angrily. ‘
Be quiet!
'

With an impatient violence she clutched her mantle round her, and omitting another word glided off, not walking but slightly levitating, towards the distant slopes beyond the garth.

Ruxendra watched her a moment then leapt airward. The dog, silenced with the rest, pounced after her. Knowing where the town-city of Padgish was merely because she wished to know Ruxendra blew towards it. Escurjai must be – was – there. Ruxendra had matured. She was done with waiting. And her lover had been hurt.

Saphay however ascended the hills and soon found herself about six feet clear of the earth, above the bizarre statue of a gnarled old wolf. It seemed made of snow, glazed very dark. It was the remnant of the werewolf werloka.

Out of a tall snow-drift something turned and was Tirthen.

‘You are like Zth,' blurted Saphay.

In her voice was the purest horror and allergy and anger, but also some other element. She stared at the god, his raven hair and eyes and coldness, and contrasted him to the laval Zeth fiery in the womb of the ocean.

‘And you,' said Tirthen. ‘Whom do you resemble?'

‘They are my people, over there.' She found she had de-levitated. Her feet were on the ground.

‘That muck-heap? That anthill?'

‘Once before you damaged the humans in my care—'

‘Your care. You care nothing for them.' A flare lit in her mind. He read it apparently. ‘Very well.
One
you care for. A child – or no, a man now. I remember. You sealed him in fire. But
I
sealed him in ice. What is he? He does not count.'

‘You can't harm him. I've made him immortal.'

‘But you have not made him a god.'

Saphay became flame and lioness.

Tirthen became silver and giant wolf.

They slammed together like two doors kept apart for centuries and now breaking free of restraints.

As god-flesh clashed on god-flesh the whole surrounding landscape gave a groan. But it was not like any note of pain.

The cloud-bloated sky darkened to untimely night. A transparent image writhed on it. It copied the long-lost vision of the mage coal, thrown skyward years before, a lioness and a wolf locked in battle, but a battle which was foreplay.

Saphay did not know what she did.

Her brain and nerves were full of the past conflict among the icebergs, raw energy flailing from her. Through this thrust other sensations. She smote ice, she whirled and sank among it, and there was a jewel of fire, not in ocean now but in the crux of her body. The coldness was weight and heat. It scorched the length and depth of her.

Realigned with the human aspect of her divinity the day goddess found herself clinging to a god of Winter and unlight. In a pyramid of frozen glass they were coupling, breast to breast and mouth to mouth. And as he struck through into her core he was not cold at all and she grappled him closer, until they might become one single thing that galloped on the spot, atoms splitting everywhere about it in rainbow radiation.

Breakage sped every which way.

A noiseless shrieking made the vicinity into a crystal bell that presently disintegrated on three rocking buffets of noiselessness.

The dark sky drooped. Clouds seemed likely to fall off its surface. Snow skulked down.

At the garth nothing moved. Live creatures kept motionless. Some enormous miracle of happening had shaken all to bits – yet nothing came down.

But in the upper room of the Holas House—

This too produced no sound effect.

A kind of tingling slap, only one, inside every skull.

Nirri was the first to stir in hall. Going from her mute and disjointed husband and the host of women, children, warriors, beasts, she stumbled up the ladder and off into the bedchamber.

No shred of fire or ice lingered.

Her second son, Athluan, a white-haired Jafn man of about thirty years, sat on the Chaiord's bed. Grey-eyed he looked at her, his most recent mother. His face was already modelled in low sorrow familiar and controlled. ‘There, lady,' he said. ‘It's over now.'

‘I was dreaming of my father.'

‘Do you still dream?' she asked, curious.

The fire of her hair looked suddenly incongruous to him against her blackness, and his own. Why did he think that?

‘I'm human remember, Brinna. By two-thirds.'

‘Perhaps I dream,' she said. ‘But I don't ever recall. And besides I won't have it you're human, not remotely.' She grinned her wonderful clown's grin.

Encouraged Dayad said, ‘In the dream – Arok was sick. He had become – spoiled.'

‘Arok …' she said.

For a benighted moment he assumed she had either forgotten the name of his father like one more irrelevant dream, or worse pretended to.

He frowned and sat up. ‘My dream might be a true one. Among the Jafn we—'

‘Oh, the Jafn.'

‘Among the Jafn dreams have value. They can show us things. Arok had grown old before his hour. He was like – he was like the dead.'

‘Possibly he has died,' she remarked.

She combed her hair and the glorious scent of it disabled his irritation. But the hair of his mother, Nirri, also had a beautiful smell when washed and combed.

‘Brinnajni, if I said I must go home—'

‘
Where
?'

‘My home—'

‘You
are
at home. Your home is with me.
I
am your home.'