No Flame But Mine (14 page)

He knew already if these people, all of them, wished to leave the ruin accompanied by both their Magikoy, neither he nor she would deny them. Maybe Jema and he could go elsewhere at some later date and so ensure the general preservation. And yet, without mages, other problems might arise for them.

His thoughts moved sidelong. Holding her, he gazed for a moment deeply into his mind.
What do I feel
? It was so extraordinary that despite all resolve it seemed he must question, must challenge it. For whatever spark of Hell or flame would come to possess the physical budding in Jemhara, also it was – his. His
son
. Against this unseen radiance every dilemma abruptly meant little. He stood there with her, silent, holding her under the sky.

Some people elected to remain.

They were defiant, adamant, and in a minority.

About twelve hundred persons said they would travel west of south, to Kl Ctaar. There was a new king there, perhaps one of the King Paramount's lesser sons who had somehow not died after the White Death.

Factious zone-wars were forgotten. They were again a single nation: Rukarian.

The best slee was brought for the female Magikoy. It even had its silk carriage-shell and furs. For Thryfe they brought an aristocratic lashdeer chariot, a sleekar. The runners were oiled; the deer had been cared for and were well fed.

Separated again, he and she rode away from the city, out into the snow waste, among the throng of evacuees.

Jemhara and Thryfe performed their mage duties for the travellers. About the caravan they folded sheaths of weather-protection and semi-invisibility.

But the skies were swathed in blissful clarity, rouged dawns and gilded sunsets, pale, mild, blue days with strands of feathered cloud, or banks of cloud always smooth and white. No snow fell, only light winds blew. By night the stars were sharp as spikes.

‘Look, d'you see that? That eagle flying up there – it's him, his Highness the male Magikoy. He flies over the cloud to scout for us.'

Thryfe and Jemhara sat by night in a small tent.

‘Where has it gone, our faceless enemy?'

She said, ‘It's everywhere. Don't you feel that, Thryfe?'

‘Yes, in its very
absence
.'

It was waiting for them. Avoiding the young girl Azula, who might again be able to deflect its mindless,
focused
venom?

‘What can it be? What is it?' Jemhara murmured. ‘I'm afraid to know.'

‘Remember that what it hates,' he said quietly, ‘is not yourself but the child inside you.'

She lifted her head. ‘Then it must go on hating. I've no choice.'

‘Should we reconsider this? Perhaps I should attempt—'

‘No, Thryfe. Even you – what can you do? It is
set
in me, like a
stone
.'

He said with an acted coolness, ‘But there's grave danger even if you get to term. How can you birth such a creature?'

‘I shall have to. It will want to live and may guard me from harm to help itself. Besides, another woman gave birth to it – to
him
, before. Saphay.'

‘He was partly mortal then. Now … the gods know what he is.'

‘Gods again. Are you coming to believe in them?'

‘I believe in that one. The one who has claimed what's in your body. Either a god, or something that can only go by such a
title
as god.'

‘The Lionwolf. Should I therefore …' She lowered her eyes. She had been about to suggest that Lionwolf, if a god, might be the very one to pray to now. He had a vested interest after all.

But she did not finish her sentence and Thryfe did not ask her to continue.

Jemhara thought, with a glitter of her old slyness,
Vashdran won't let anything damage it, this embryo he wants. He is selfish and terrible and golden. So, I must live, and Thryfe surely must live too, so he can assist me. At least until the hour of birth
.

Would Vashdran then simply kill both no-longer-needed parents – she first, torn wide, like wrapping from some long-wanted gift?

Chilled, she kept her eyes on the earth. Not knowing she did so, she turned Thryfe's ring round and round on her finger.

Thryfe, whose thoughts had been similar, also did not look at Jemhara.

Outside a naive weary singing rose from the travellers' fires.

Occasionally Aglin and Azula rode with Jemhara by day in the slee. The two older women were not inclined to chatter. The girl was almost always dumb. Virtually unblinking she watched the snowscape pass. When Aglin pointed out oddly shaped ice-hills or rafts of frigid forest, obediently Azula looked at them. Now and then, if seldom, they went by old villages. Most of them were deserted and snowed under, but at one spot a host of bellowing men came bounding from some group of hovels, brandishing farming tools and rusty weapons, intent to rob or just to slaughter any passers-by. The Kandexans, trained to fast reaction and fighting mostly from formerly attacking each other, beat them off. A couple of dozen village corpses littered the ground; the defeated living hurried away. After this moronic battle, Azula spoke a sentence: ‘Ma told me most men were idiots.'

Later, at the evening halt when they were alone – Azula had gone to fetch a hot drink for them – Aglin recalled these words. ‘Is it good she spoke out? I don't know. Whenever she says anything of any substance it's to do with her mother.' The mageia grunted. ‘Beebit had a premonition she was due to be off, or so I think. Just a day before she said to me, It's a chancy life, whoring, but now Azula's with you, lady, she'll learn better.'

Jemhara saw she had let fall her scarf in the snow and bent to retrieve it. Aglin tapped her on the arm. ‘Don't you go bending like that, Jema. Oh, I know you're in the family way. Have a care.'

‘You've grown too clever, Aggy.'

‘And who taught me
that
?'

At which they smiled and Aglin picked up the scarf. But no more was said, for Azula came from the cook-fire with the hot beer.

It would be a long journey. None could have doubted that. The smooth milky days progressed, and the star-sparkle nights, during some of which the caravan forged on.

Ten days further south white woodland came down the land to meet and envelop them. The trees, though stretching every way for miles, were widely spaced. Glacial spires of pine and balconies of glassy cedar, damson and fig in knotted rings like petrified dancers, the stems and roots making hurdles between, forced the caravan from its serpentine formation. Vehicles, riders and trudgers alike were scattered out. Here stabs of ice tall as towers dripped moisture at the persistent sunlight. A faint musical tinkling filled the air even by night, a song of water drops let fall on the thin white tin of centuries-frozen leaves.

This would be a bad place for an ambush or other assault. Nothing like that occurred, but they pressed forward as quickly as they could. Men riding ahead presently returned and told how the woodland lasted for many more miles.

Thryfe the eagle, too, quartered the sky and pored over the terrain below. The woodland did indeed go on and on, breaking only at last on a bleak plateau that hung above a craggy mass of snow fields. Nothing was there either. Far away and away the land ran, melting into distances the too-gentle blue of the sky.

Even if Kl Ctaar existed, this would be a quest of months. Though the people had brought food and other stores with them, and the men hunted where they could, even the woods were unusually sparse in the matter of game. A strange impression fastened on Thryfe. A giant broom seemed to have swept the country bare of anything more useful than wood, ice and snow. Perhaps
not
strange. Perhaps
something
had.

Jemhara saw, across the woody vista of dark glass and white tin, a figure walking steadily towards her.

The trickling tinkling sound of the melting water drops was very shrill. No one else was near by – and abruptly she noticed that the six dogs who had been harnessed to the slee standing just to one side were not there. This did not seem particularly notable. She sensed huge thaumaturgic pressure in the air. She was here to meet the one who strode towards her.

He was clad in a mail of ice. His dark hair blew back behind him.
The god Yyrot
, she thought.
Winter's Lover
.

The god spoke. ‘A beautiful Winter's day, Jemhara.'

Jemhara bowed.

When she looked up again, Yyrot had altered. Now he was another god. This had happened before, she believed, this sudden metamorphosis.

Now the god was Lionwolf – yet—

‘Surely you remember me better than that, Jemhara?'

Golden this god, with laval hair like molten silver. And
not
Lionwolf, but the one who had first fathered him on Saphay.

‘So I did, or was made to. But
now
,' said Zeth Zezeth the Sun Wolf, ‘his father is mortal and his mother mortal. And even though they are of that wise little sect the Magikoy they are made only of dust and cold human mud. What a shame. How far he has sunk, my former
son
.'

Jemhara knelt down on the snow and this time bowed her head very low. Inside her body her heart hammered, like a fist in her brain, like a drum in her womb. Did the foetus hear too?

‘I doubt he hears. As yet he is not in the flesh. He was in Hell a long while. So currently he will play about incorporeally on the earth, refinding it.
Do you see this
?' Without preface Zeth turned his back to her. She beheld, through the layers of whatever cosmic fabric clothed him, and perhaps also through layers of etheric skin, a scar that jagged like one of the death-storm's lightnings along his spine. ‘Oh, it is nothing,' said Zeth, terrifyingly resentful and frivolous. ‘But I have shown you. Something flung me against the sky. I will admit it hurt me. I have been hurt. I do not like to be hurt. Not that any save great powers could ever do it. One like you, little Jema, or like your paramour that
cripple
Thryfe, neither of such as you could touch me even if you ripped your souls apart with trying. Do you see? Answer now.'

‘I see, perfect lord.'

‘Yes, such good manners. You learn all your lessons swiftly and superlatively well – magic, whoring, excessive
virtue
. Now learn
this
. I am quite fond of you, Jema. Never disillusion me in my fondness. I have many scores to settle and you will be my handmaid. Then I may spare you much that others will have to endure.' Jemhara knelt on the snow. The aura of his gold and silverness vibrated in rhythm with the drums that clanged in her body. ‘You are, in this at least, modest, and inquire of yourself how it could be likely that you might ever aid a god such as I am. But I shall find for you a way. An honour and delight for you, is that not so?'

‘Yes, perfect lord.'

He laughed then. The wonderful quality of the laugh seemed to squeeze her inside out – and, worse than that, inside out of the
world
—

Jemhara woke as if breaking free through thick ice. A violent nausea convulsed her. As she vomited, she felt the strong hand of her human lover supporting her forehead.

‘The child,' Thryfe said, as bonelessly she slumped back against him.

Jemhara whispered, ‘Yes, that. And a dream.'

‘What dream?'

‘I don't recall.'

The caravan crawled on through the woods, a dislocated snake. At last the white plateau, balanced on its shafts of cliff ice, gaped in front of them. It was unwelcoming and apparently featureless. However, it made a change.

As night descended, long before any moonrise the brilliancy of the daggerish stars shined the plateau up. The travellers became aware that the starlight was exceptional.

From about the camp fires they gazed at the heavens.

Gradually a mutter began, then a calling. The noise was excited yet without any hint of alarm.

Thryfe left the tent where he had been doctoring a feverish old man. He stood on the snow, gazing up as did countless others. Even the animals seemed to take in the picture in the sky and had raised their heads to stare.

A city blazed up there, made of stars, picked out in piercing splashes of turquoise, reddish and yellow fire. It had walls and roofs, high terraces and towers, a reminiscence for many of Ru Karismi herself in the era of her glory.

The incredible sight covered so much space that even a man's two hands held up against it did not obscure more than half the image.

Across the camp the voices were exclaiming now that Ddir had done this, the god who placed the stars. He must have drawn in millions of them to create this fabulous artwork. A Rukarian deity, he could only mean it for them or their kind. A lustrous omen. It was his guarantee to them: they would soon reach the new metropolis.

Behind him Thryfe heard the old man's two grandsons carrying him out to witness as well. ‘Look, Great-da. D'you see it? Isn't that fine?' Thryfe thought they should not have moved him just yet. Nevertheless the stars burning in the old man's eyes were probably excellent medicine.

Thryfe wondered if Jemhara too had left whatever she was at to look at the phenomenon. Probably she had.

There were gods, then.

It seemed to him he had always, secretly, feared as much.

Some hours after, when the city of stars had moved further to the west, one vaporous dim breath of cloud blew over them and covered them for a minute or so. They blazed on through the cloud, then all at once their unique fire deserted them. They became only stars again, vanished back into the void, making no special pattern. Only three narrow moons gave light.

The next day virtually every person in the caravan was imbued with vigour and hope. Jokes were shouted to and fro as they urged their transports on. Song carolled. The snake, again in flawless formation, hurried.

During the afternoon the clear sky showed a sheet of purity, the air motionless. Seen from above, as Thryfe this time did not see them, they had moved about one-third of the way across the plateau. Perhaps some forty miles lay behind, eighty or ninety ahead.