No Flame But Mine (15 page)

There are forecasts in most situations. The hammerhead cloud closes before the storm, the glare burns on the face of one about to strike you. Now nothing, no clue.

Those behind saw the head of the caravan serpent suddenly dip – as if it had found something intriguing in the ruffled thick-packed snow.

Then the serpent's head was all gone. Instead there was a black hollow about a fifth of a mile in radius, full of a loud rushing gasp.

Into the pure air sprayed ice crystals – tiny stars – shimmering. And on the edge of the hollow there was a peculiar writhing upheaval and commotion – which was wagons, carts and animals and human things attempting to save themselves, each other – yet pulled forward and away by some invisible horror which sang,
Now, now, why bother with that? See, this is so much easier – why trouble to resist
?

Slipping, tumbling, the shambles poured down into the vortex – struggles at a further edge here and there anchored, hauled back, stragglers and their property – or struggling, anchored, hauled and then still prised loose, losing everything, everything—
Down
—

A liquid wave of shrieking and cries, the crack and groan and smash of wooden things, sloughed wheels bowling merrily along the snow – uproar bleached to a dull moaning boom. A sort of stasis after, in which to attempt understanding of something never to be understood.

Even in this stasis, however, one major flaw. There was to be no margin to attempt anything of consequence. The drama is not done.

Another hollow opens.

It is a huge throat, yawning, swallowing.

Repetitive the awful action – living things and vehicular things – slipping, tumbling – the gush and crackle, ring and thud, the screaming – the lovely lacy sprays of ice and snow—

Thryfe, standing in the sleekar, blinds himself deliberately to any thought of Jemhara in her slee, and where she may be positioned, or if already she has gone into the abyss. He dredges from the ravaged gulf inside himself, the core from which he wrested raw power to save her from the lightning bolt, and slings with gargantuan force a kind of armour round and over the piece of plateau where the caravan reels, round and over and under, down into the shuddering fault lines beneath.

For a moment he thinks the cordon holds.

Then comes another black gulping, another plunge – so close now that Thryfe can perceive, exact as a printed scene on a bowl, the arching bodies as they spin and dash away – the dogs tangled in harness, the woman with her flying curly hair—

Snow spray mantles him. His power is rubbed out.

To the sky he roars in silence, utter silence: Take me. If I'm useless that way, use me another.
Use
me. Seal up the snow with
me
—

And he feels the blow slam down on him as if the sky fell. His last thought is a wordless, hating
arrogant
thanks.

Unconscious in the sleekar he does not get another view of the next subsidence. He had believed in himself, he had reckoned his power might transmute, through sacrifice. An ultimate hubris? If so Thryfe is unaware of his punishment, the humiliation of redundancy.

The whole of the plateau is going, streaming inward on itself, down, down into the gut of the ice-cliff, the outer walls of which, eighty, ninety miles away, now rock and spit at the shock.

Jemhara had been with Aglin and the girl Azula.

After the first and second catastrophes Jemhara had seen Aglin glance urgently at Azula, and then give up. Azula only stared, sallow under her brown skin – frightened?

Then Jemhara saw the crack in the snow that came ribboning towards them like dark ink spilled. She pushed both women out of the slee. ‘Get away! It's only me it wants.
Run
!'

But Aglin at that instant, all across the chaos and the plumes of upthrown spray, saw Thryfe had fallen. And how the area about him settled – grew
solid
.

Aglin jumped back at Jemhara. ‘Sorry, my pet.' She had herself learned a few methods of survival, this mageia of the backlands. She punched Jemhara full on the jaw with her sound right hand.

As Jemhara collapsed Aglin caught her awkwardly. ‘Help out, you!' she snapped to Azula. Like an embarrassed child the girl sprang in the slee and took Jemhara's weight.

‘Why did you?' Azula asked.

‘Can't you see?' All around, crinkling and griping, the plateau was now insanely stabilizing. ‘She said, it was her it wanted. Her – and
him
.'

‘But—'

‘Enough. Look, the crack's sealed over. The ground's all right now. I've got her. There, she's resting on the floor. Run and fetch my herbal bag. There are plenty to tend. Gods grant I haven't harmed the kidlet.'

Westward, where the city of stars had dissolved or sunk, Bhorth, King Paramount, descendant of the royal line of Ru Karismi, paused just outside the wooden doors of his palace in the physical city of Kol Cataar,
Phoenix from Ashes
.

Inside the hall, now stolidly built of rock-hard wood, the after-supper poet was whinging away to his harp. Strains of the poem seeped out.

All are selfish. Even the savage

Have their own concerns
.

The house-dove sees darkness fall

With such regretful petulance

She longs to fan with her wings the fires

Of sunset
,

And keep them aflame;

The hunting wolf regards the sun

As thief of night's pleasures
,

And would tear out the throat of day
.

Bhorth had never had much patience with poetry. Years ago at Ru Karismi he had tended to nod off when the poets started, or else had absented himself with a woman. In this new-built and rough-hewn conurbation, the sophistry of such stuff had for him a false note. The poet's harp, for example, shaped like a great copper and gilt butterfly, strings stretched over the pin-shaped body; did that have any excuse for being here?

A guard on the door saluted over-solemnly. ‘
He
's in right good voice tonight, sir.'

Bhorth pulled a face. ‘Probably eaten too many ginger leaves.'

They laughed. Poets? Keep them. Soldiers were better, soldiers and sensible artisans. You knew where you were with those.

Bhorth moved off along the terrace which, only a year back, had still been fashioned of crammed ice-brick, but was now of finished stones. Much of the palace had been constructed of stone or wood. The areas of packed ice remaining stood out. As for the town – the city – whatever it was – the majority of the buildings were hardwood, some of stone, at the worst sheathed in something less finite than hide or snow. The two successful hothouses had been expanded. The third one which nobody had been able to make work, it was cursed the architect declared, had at last been remade on the barbarian plan – and since went on not badly.

And who are we to argue

With our savage inmost hearts
—

Bhorth glanced indoors through a high narrow window with a disordered curtain, now bottled in glass. He saw his queen, Tireh, seated with her women and her aunts, listening to the poem and the music.

Neither of the city's two Magikoy women were there. They tended to keep apart as had been proper earlier in the true city, when Magikoy were plenteous. As for the ancient male Magikoy here, he had died five months before sitting peacefully at the iron-clad hearth of the hall, smiling as if amused at running out on them like that.

Deeper into the palace the pair of infant princesses, Bhorth and Tireh's latest children, slept in the care of nurses.

Bhorth realized he was making an itinerary of facts and persons, achievements, weaknesses, precisely where everyone
was
. As if he would soon be reporting on it all. Why was that? Did he sense something?

After the White Death, after he had passed on the black pearl seed of Chillel, some other awareness had sometimes stirred in him. Not too often, and he was glad of that. A mage or sensitive he had
never
wished to be.

Turning the palace's stone corner Bhorth beheld his son, his son by Tireh via the peerless loins of Chillel. The young man was standing on the terrace's edge, gazing up into the steel-blue icicle of the moonlight.

Sallusdon was named for the former King Paramount, to remind Kol Cataar that he would be a king. But how could there anyway be any doubt of that? Such beings
must
be kings – or something higher.

Getting on for four years of age, Sallus was a man and already taller than his father. You would put him at nineteen or twenty years. He had too a maturity behind his look that signified unusual intelligence and spirit.

Women sighed when Sallus went by. Men stared. But this was not a beauty to woo or be envious of. Black Sallus was a hero, a god maybe, at least partly.

Bhorth bulked there, watching his son. If he was honest the awe had never quite left him, though generally it was subsumed by some other emotion. The ever-present love and pride were perhaps more unwise. How could you pride yourself on fathering –
this
? It was like patting yourself on the back for dropping, accidentally, an apple pip – and four years later there soared a miraculous tree growing from snow, its arms burning with golden fruit.

‘Come and see, Father.'

Bhorth pulled himself together. He walked over beside his son.

‘What's up? Are you star-gazing?'

‘I am. About an hour ago something like a city, picked out in stars, appeared through the cloud in the west. It went down before I could be sure.'

‘A city. That's old Ddir Star-Placer then, pottering about up there.'

‘Now he's made something else.'

Sallus pointed. Even the flex and stretch of his arm, ebony with a single gold wristlet, was a marvel.

Bhorth forced himself to regard not the arm but the sky. The three quarter-moons were in a row, and bright.

‘I can't quite—'

‘
He
knows,' said Sallus, with a grin.

Bhorth noticed the chaze, the snake which should have slain Sallus about two years before when it bit him in childhood. It lay coiled under Sallus's cloak, but the flat head had come poking out, weaving a little, one quartz eye on the heavens.

Bhorth was accustomed to the snake by now. He recalled how he had sucked the poison out, and how his son, less than two years old, had himself already killed the snake. Bhorth had feared Sallus would die too – but neither did. Sallus survived; the snake came back to life, and was his son's pet.

‘Well, he can see, and so can you. I can't.'

‘Follow my finger, sir.'

Bhorth did so. Instantly and unerringly the finger described for him up high, in the blue circle of moons, a faint, lit scribble.

‘I
do
see. It's like a snake too. One that seems to move forward—'

‘Westward, after the star city,' said Sallus. ‘Or towards this one.'

‘Here? A snake? As you say, he'd know.'

The chaze swung its head, darting Bhorth a glance. Had it learned human speech? That was not inconceivable, seeing whom it belonged to.

Sallus said, ‘I don't think the stars really show a snake. The snake symbolizes some other thing.'

‘I'll send to the Magikoy women. Get them to toil over it. That's their job.'

Sallus looked across. His face was calm yet alive with interest. ‘Father, I think it's a caravan of people. Suppose instead of looking up at it one looked down from the air – then the shape might resemble something of that kind.'

Bhorth was musing.
No Rukarian, apart from ourselves, has journeyed here before. I always thought others would come. Splendid and rotten, the canny and the indigent and the useful, the useless. Why now
?

In the long street recently named Rose Walk, which led across the city to the so-called Great Market of Kol Cataar, the priesthood were abroad and gathering alms.

It was about an hour after sunrise. The carts from Second Hothouse and the farmed ice-fields beyond Eastgate had mostly trundled through. People were about, to sniff the air, or here and there they had stopped a vendor to buy. When the priests shifted into view, swinging their brass censers of incense, several doors slammed. It had never been like this in the old capital. For a start Ru Karismi's high-nosed priesthood had never begged. But this fellowship, revived from the dregs left living by the Death, was slight in number and needy. It was a fact too their temple-town here was very small, a handful of buildings on the north side of Kol Cataar and not one of these yet rendered in anything more durable than ice-brick.

Then, at the head of the column a boy began to sing.

Dressed in deepest blue, their hair impoverishedly greased with candlewax into long stiff tails, the priests advanced, each holding out his left or right palm for coins or other presents. The boy was dressed in the same way. He was about eleven. His face was almost boneless with youth, his fair hair only slicked back with water. His voice however was sheer and faultless, less like that of anything human than some instrument of the old city, a flute perhaps. It peeled effortless as a golden wire off the side of the morning.

After all hands delved in pouches and pockets. ‘Here—' ‘Take this—' ‘All I can spare – religion is familiar with you. Bless us with a lucky day.'

The grabs of the priests shut like the mouths of certain sub-oceanic beasts found only far off in moveable water. The boy himself did not even seem to see. Eyes glazed he sang on, praising the kindness of divine otherlings, gods no one could recognize. Yet something had given him a wondrous voice. For an instant faith in gods seemed credible.

Only as the priests flowed away into the market did those loitering on Rose Walk grow aware of another noise to the east.

‘It'll be some feud. Like before. The dilf-cutters fighting with the vinery wagons.'

Presently five or six men bolted down the road, pushing off onlookers eager to gossip.