No Flame But Mine (58 page)

A god had stolen her. Another myth? A true one … Whatever it was, he was himself helpless. He had known, he
knew
, he would not see her again in life. And if the condition only of physical life were real, which he dreaded and trusted it was, in the nothing which followed he would not see her either.

Lionwolf – his
son
– had healed Thryfe of all maladies, all damage. Lionwolf, or
God
, had told Thryfe Jemhara lived. And Thryfe had disbelieved him. For he knew she did not. But—There came another hour.

What had Thryfe been doing in that hour? Did he recall? He did not. For the revelation wiped everything else of it away. The revelation assured him that Jemhara had in some sense lived till then. But now, now in that exact moment she died.

He felt her die. It was so fast. Like a flower that vanished suddenly in sourceless flame. Ashes, pollen, falling. That was all. That was Jemhara. Silvery pollen falling, fading.

And he remembered then the words the god God had said to him. Thryfe had imagined Lionwolf spoke of himself, but saw that he had spoken of her. ‘Destiny may sometimes be immovable. The parts we play, gods and men, may be written out for us before we are born. And in that writing we too may have colluded.' The god had meant Jemhara. And now truly the page had closed on her.

Thryfe, having he noted learned nothing after all from the tedious wicked lessons of existence, had been so sure she was already dead. But now she was. Now and for ever she … was.

Beyond that hour he had not progressed. He did not want to. Where else was there to go?

He served the court and the people of the city. He performed the tasks, studies and rituals essential to his vocation and his Wardenship. He even slept some spaces of each night. He even noticed special birds that flew, or the name of the Sun God. Or Kol Cataar's twinkling. But he did not leave the hour of Jemhara's dying or the words of her fate. Her fate had become his fate. Her death had become his life.

Over Southgate in the dusk the torches were blazoned. The gate stood wide – they had seen him arriving. He glimpsed the salutes of the guards. He walked through and along the streeted slopes of the city.

He climbed without pausing the thousand-stepped staircase, paying no attention to its statues.

Tonight no Gargolem manifested from an alcove. Although it had come back, it was not often in evidence here.

Other guards saluted him into the marble maw of the palace. Beyond in lamplit air lay the starry halls of the king whose complacence Thryfe had not come to spoil.

Bhorth it was who strode out of the throng to greet him.

He had grown fat again and there was grey finally in his fair hair and creases in his face, even though the God had touched him. He kept the authority of his recent years nevertheless, and his strength, one thought. Bhorth stayed honourable. Besides, he was happy now; all of them were. Sallusdon his son had come home some months ago.

‘I am present,' said Thryfe placidly. ‘How can I assist?'

‘Ah, Magus. Well. Let's go aside into that room there, where the best wine is.'

In the room, elegantly panelled and adorned, the servers brought glass goblets of wine then removed themselves.

Through the doorway king and mage watched the court dancing to music. Tireh the queen was dancing too, with a well-clad old man. The little girl princesses were there. They were growing up. The younger had topaz hair, like the hair of Saphay, Bhorth's niece, mother of God.

‘Do you see?' asked Bhorth quietly.

‘Yes.' For now the king's black son went dancing by. He did not seem as he had when he returned. Now he looked almost happy too, though in his eyes age waited as it did not even in the eyes of the queen's old courtier.

‘Sallus is better,' said Bhorth. ‘When first he came back he wasn't like this. The gods – God – knew what had happened to him. He wouldn't and will not say, even to his mother. I mean, to Tireh. We discussed him then, did we not, you and I?'

‘Yes, Bhorth.'

‘And even the Oculum couldn't show you what he'd suffered.'

‘That is so.'

‘But now,
now
look at him. The change in him.'

‘Very definitely.'

‘Guess what it is.'

Thryfe watched the young prince. It did not really require magecraft.

A tall young woman danced with Sallus. Not Azula; she had not returned. This was a more average Rukarian girl, brunette and pale-skinned. She was pliant but not fragile, a little heavy perhaps but well formed. She had gold wound in her hair. Some daughter of high family.

But, ‘Not royal,' said Bhorth, surprising him slightly, ‘Sallus found her on the street, in a manner of saying. She's from the Ruk east outland, one of the villages there, a farmer family. Worships some goddess made of broomsticks,
Rajel
or something like that, who ruts with a star.'

He gossips now
, Thryfe thought. ‘And she has revived your son.'

‘
Yes
. And his mother. Some women get jealous, don't they, of their son's choice. But Tireh's only glad to see
him
glad. A fine woman, my queen. As for peasant blood in the royal house, it will build us up. God' – he had got it right this time – ‘knows we need it.'

They watched the dancers changing partners and weaving through another measure. How nimbly they did that. Just so they accepted the God, and the gold rats that rambled in the alleys.

‘Then what troubles you, Bhorth?'

Bhorth looked away. He stared through a window of the room into the clear and star-tipped night.

‘Not myself. Sallus. And this he
has
told me. Of course he can't be like the rest, and it's what he is – how long he may live—None of us know our length of days, especially at his age, but for him, with the blood of the black woman, the goddess, in his veins—He said to me, Mage, he said he may live for ever, at least till those stars go out.'

‘And she, his lover, is mortal and will die.'

To Thryfe his own words had the sound of a baleful curse. He grew ice-cold from them, but the king only nodded.

‘Just so. Naturally she loves him, but he can't bring himself to confirm it. He won't have her, won't let himself take up with her though anyone can see he rattles with wanting to. Because she will die and he will go on. We'll all die and he will go on. How can he bear it?'

‘I don't know, Bhorth.'

I should tell him that twenty-three days and nights of love are better than an existence without it, let alone immortality without
.

I can't tell him.

It is not true.

We are better left alone inside our cells of granite
.

Something odd took place in the atmosphere of the room. Beyond the door the lights went on glowing. In here a tinsel of frost seemed to form. And from some shadow another server glided out and came to them and filled their goblets from a ewer of wine.

A woman, very graceful, but she retained the shadow. She had a sombre skin. Was she black? No black women were at this court or in this city. None had ever been in these lands but one.

The servant woman murmured.

No one could have caught her words.

Thryfe did so.

‘
Tell Sallusdon to recall the snake which bit him
.'

‘Magus,' said Bhorth, ‘what is it?'

There was no servant present. The cups had not been refilled. The room was hot and lit by candles.

‘Some message has come to you,' said Thryfe flatly, ‘or for your son. Was he ever bitten by a snake?'

‘Yes, by – yes. Had no one told you? When he was a child. A chaze bit him. He killed it with his own bare hands though he was an infant. I sucked the poison from him. A little while after the snake appeared, alive and well. Did you never see it with him? Biting him I've always believed did the damn reptile good.'

Thryfe said, ‘Tell your son to remember that. He must draw his own conclusion.'

‘If – you say so, Magus.'

Another more frisky dance had been kindled. The participants whirled along under the latticed golden lamps.

Thryfe spoke from the past. ‘Be aware, if I say to you it is, then you know I speak the truth.'

Bhorth checked. He did not analyse the reprise but it flew home in his mind. He would tell Sallus.

He tried then to tempt Thryfe out to the feast, where poor Magikoy Lalath stood in her feast dress, lovelorn as any girl. But Thryfe stayed less than ten minutes more. He never would.

In bed that night with Tireh, panting after their extremely rewarding exertion, the king planned how he would reveal the Magikoy message tomorrow to Sallus. He trusted Thryfe. He trusted luck too. How else had they flourished?

Lilting asleep to the lullaby of Tireh's low purring snores, Bhorth asked himself again one never answered question. Why had Chillel chosen him to lie with? All men otherwise had gone to her; so much was evident from some knowledge rooted deep within himself. All men. But he – and one other man of whom Bhorth knew nothing but that fact – were selected by the goddess herself. He did not argue at being chosen. Yet the why of it he never comprehended. He was a king, but at that time a prisoner. The other man, had he been a king too?

It would not suggest itself for many more decades to long-lived Bhorth that perhaps he and that other man, whose name Bhorth would never know to be Arok, had simply been ‘chosen' because either Chillel must choose, or there had been no other free to be chosen. Luck had been the factor for both of them. It had had no other reason. Not all things must have singular purpose, even in an era of the miraculous.

But Chillel's message, if such it was,
did
have purpose.

Sallus was informed of it and grew pale in his darkness. Soon he drew the Ranjallan girl aside. He offered her his love, his heirdom, but also his blood to drink. If she gazed at him in revolt or transport none has ever described. Both? But it seems she accepted everything.

Like all his brothers and his sisters he did live for ever, or for
that
for ever, seeing that times change and their geometry with them, and even infinity may be finite. But a white queen they say ruled with him all that while. Her name was from the Ruk royal house: it was Yazmey. But she worshipped Ranjal goddess of wood. And to the consternation of Kol Cataar she refused ever to make her a single offering.

Near dawn there was an urgent hammering on the door of the mansion.

The house of a Magikoy could be concealed, and few but those Magikoy-trained would find it. Only infrequently persons
stumbled
on the spot, locating it by accident where a search would be useless. Thryfe's suburban house was not concealed. It glared from its island of snow among the ripening fields. There was one oddness by the door if any got close: a thriving shrub with fat dark flowers striped over white. A local legend insisted the hand of a woods goddess had been planted there. But as a rule none saw, for none called. Sensibly one left the magus alone.

A jinan appeared before Thryfe.

He had had less than an hour's sleep, but inquired what was wanted.

The jinan explained, by jinanic methods, that three men were below. Yet the jinan was unable to indicate their need or intention.

Thryfe threw on his clothes and went down.

Among the snow-drifts and against the widening arch of predawn sky, one man waited by the cavernous entrance. Another, possibly awkward, stood a short way off, and yet another a dozen feet further along.

From the look of them they were labourers or itinerant farm workers. Plenty such had come to Kol Cataar. Their garments were rough and too thermal for the Spring climate, if not for Thryfe's snow.

‘Highness Thryfe,' said the man by the door, and he bowed. In the muffle of his hood a square weather-beaten face was partly visible. He looked shy and in awe but steadfastly determined. He carried something small too, inside a sack in his arms. The other men were more nondescript. The nearer had a fur hood, the farthest off hung a head of shaggy black hair and studied his black nails.

Thryfe said, ‘Do you need my help?'

‘In a way, Highness.'

Something came to Thryfe. Was this near one actually fawning slyly, making a performance of his own humbleness? Some plot? Absurd. None but a fool threatened the Magikoy.

‘Like this it is,' said the suspect labourer. ‘We are up the field. Bit of a fire starts. Puts it out. But then this hare runs from the stalks. Think it were a girl, but then no, no girl. But this. And she runs this way, towards your house here, Highness. So and we come to see. But then she's all bemused, like she would be. Go I, gets her gentle and picks her up and brings her.' The man held out the filled sack which now, unnervingly, gave off a sinuous lurch of motion. ‘Was all,' said the man in a different, stranger tone, ‘I could bring away from there. Out of the ash.'

Thryfe stared down at the sack. And either the man smoothed it off and away, or the substance of it parted.

So he saw.

In the arm of the man sat a jet-black hare, long ears like sable petals folded back, black gem eyes fixed only on Thryfe.

Thryfe could not speak.

He said, even so, ‘Out of the fire, you say, the ash.'

‘Oh yes, High Father. Out of the fire. All I could bring away. Not quite herself. But all I could bring you. Out of the fire.'

The hare lifted herself, and Thryfe saw something gleam, snagged there in her fur against the breast, like a hollow teardrop. She launched herself forward and he found he gathered and gripped her, gripped her tight. In
his
arms now.

‘See, High Father. She likes you. You it was she wanted.'

‘What—' Thryfe tried again. ‘What is that caught in her pelt?'

‘A ring it is, tarnished silver.'

The man in the middle distance said, ‘He thinks we'd steal it so why have we not?'

‘Now, Uncle. He never does. Excuse my old uncle, sir. He has the feverish Olchibe blood. And that's my brother, over there. He's a boyo and no mistake. Come oversea and the girls won't leave him alone.'