No Flame But Mine (18 page)

‘You will be silent,' Lalath suggested.

Jemhara had turned to Aglin. ‘All's well, Aggy. It is nothing to me.'

Aglin quietened. Without another syllable, the two mages left the room.

Jemhara had been afraid from the beginning, the instant Thryfe told her what had happened to her. She had seen at once that her own compliance with the vision of the Lionwolf had put this upon her. She had longed for Thryfe. The rest must follow. And from that hour she had no defence, would expect none. She too, as before, could only live as one did out here, on the snow.

Not long after, in the persona of Apple, the slut and murderess, she was living in one of the alleys in her allotted shack.

When she was three months gone with child she was not very big, but seemed larger due to illusion and padding. That had not deterred the first rapist, he who had thrust her over on her face.

She sat up in the towery of her brain, mind and soul. As he left her she found she had automatically sheathed herself against his parting kick. She reminded herself then that she must forgo all self-protection. That alone, despite disguise, might call back to her the hunting foe, the demon of the storm. The god in her womb would have to look after her. She could not.

There was she learned a terrible release in giving up. She had never essentially done that before she met Thryfe. Any surrender had been pretence.
With
Thryfe her surrender had been total; it was only love. Her fate in Kol Cataar however was itself a sort of death, and thus a sort of laziness. But it too must be.

So Apple existed in her shack. A man had died of fever there not long before. Everyone else kept clear of the place. It lay behind a refuse tip which, as the boulders of the months piled up, seemed to symbolize them under its weight of snow and muck.

When she went abroad Apple was spat on, insulted verbally, a quantity of times hailed with garbage and rocks. During those last adventures Bhorth's soldiers had miraculously eventually appeared. The militants were told Bhorth did not like such goings-on in the slum.

At night secret slinkers arrived at Apple's shack. They brought her packets of decent food and flasks of wine. Even unpolluted water was brought, for now Jemhara was not allowed to employ her most basic talent of thawing. She had also a burning coal that could not go out. Aglin had given it to her in a pot. After the fever-fear left the surrounding slum-dwellers, several times men or women came to extinguish the fire. When it would not perish, ‘It's mageified,' they snarled. ‘The rotten bitch has stolen it.' Wary, they would not steal it in turn.

So slow, so heavy, month on month.

Jemhara puzzled. Of those few humans who did know what she carried, would none seek to kill her after all? They could not suffer the return of Vashdran. Yet it must be impossible. They too would have no choice. She realized her thoughts had become confused a little, circular. Meaningless.

And slow … heavy … month on month on month …

Four months. Eight months.

Now it must be soon.

She felt no spark of him in her womb – of neither of them, the vile god Vashdran or her beloved Thryfe. It was only a
lump
.

Which weighed her to the earth.

Her back split with pain. She sweated and shuddered through the nights, still often vomited on rising.

Soon.
Soon
.

Nine months.

Ten months.

With a woman who had never borne before, an initial child might well be late.

Aglin crept in at midnight, swathed as a dirty old hag and guarded by a single brawny soldier, himself disguised as the most revolting of sexual customers. A sensible lad, he played his role with gusto outside, and became a model of decorum in the shack, turning his back as Aglin examined Jemhara.

‘You're sound,' said Aglin. ‘It's there and in the right position, and alive.'

Jemhara who could have learned this for herself had had to ignore her diagnostic skill. ‘Then when shall I give birth, Aggy?'

‘Oh, sweetheart. The gods know. The thing lies there like a balnakalf – big and solid. Two years you might port it about.'

‘Don't say so.' Apple took a breath. Her squinting eyes were pulled earthward at the corners, her unkissable mouth was a crescent moon upside down.

‘No, no, it won't take so long, sweetheart. How could it? But it's comfortably lodged. It's biding its damned moment.'

Ten months. Eleven months.

Now was the festival of the Rose Star.

No star was visible over Kol Cataar, only the antimony night sky of triple moonrise.

Bonfires on the streets, and firecrackers let off in emerald and magenta flights, which descended over-suddenly, starting one or two small house fires, so illuminating a corner of the rancid shack.

Now?

The arson nights of the Rose Star passed.

Twelve months.

It was a year.

Then more. Thirteen months.

Apple stared into a tiny slice of glass, careful not to scry.

She was a mountain of flesh, her eyes two lines scratched deep inside the blubber. No longer was any padding needed, and not much of an illusion. As well. This lonely magery of concealment was becoming too much for her to perform. She could not wear his ring. It hung on a string about her neck.

Confused and circling her thoughts. Even her constant trepidation over Thryfe had muddied and grown vague. She had been condemned at last, as before, to care only about herself.

That morning she did not bother to drag her body from the mattress. The previous night someone had come with food, and a salve for the blistered inflammation of her hands and legs that would not heal.

She had not eaten the food but thought of eating the salve to poison herself. Then of simply reiterating her own power, blasting herself to bits and, if she could, the fiend inside her too. She did not upbraid fate, demanding why this had happened to her. She wanted only release.

About noon, when the slum market bell rang, Apple heard the boy priest, the one who sang so well, fluting some hymn tune as he walked through the area. Eventually he stopped by her door, having presumably discovered it behind the refuse tip. She glimpsed him through an unmended slat. By himself the boy begged only with the song. He did not knock let alone hold out his palm as the blue priests of Kol Cataar always did.

‘I've nothing,' Apple panted. ‘Go away.'

The boy turned and as he did so Apple – or Jemhara – felt something break inside her, as if a goblet of white glass took the full crack of a hammer.

She expected immediate agony. There was none.

An abstract energy flew her up into the high tower of her mind, and there again she sat and saw, astonished and appalled and ultimately dismally uninterested, a tunnel opening in her physical core. Out of it flowed a swimming creature most like a smooth silken flame.

I'll die now. That's good
.

Beautiful again, and herself, though only in the surreal mind-tower, she was aware something bent over her and touched her forehead lightly with one finger. She saw him. His red hair lay around them like a cloud of fire. She heard him speak. ‘
Forgive me
,' he said.

The words, the voice, went on echoing over and over, through and through. He did not sound sorry, only kind.

Her body thrummed like harp strings, that harp someone had mentioned in the palace, shaped like a butterfly and brought from Ru Karismi where once she must have heard and seen it played.

The god, so like Zeth Zezeth, so unlike, stood above her, perfect, distant, near, kind and regretful, yet smiling. A smile of cruelty? Or some promise—

He shook his head.

Then came a falling flutter of butterflies, ruby and golden, bronze and pearl and opal. Their exquisite otherness settled over her, sank through her. She was crystal and filled by a dance of wings.

If this is death then death – is wonderful
.

She remembered Thryfe and her tears poured inward, themselves turning to winged insects, these made of mirror.

Long distances away a door which had opened was closing. Miles off a baby lamented shrilly. The last she saw was the crying of the newborn child, which crying had also turned to butterflies, blue as lapis lazuli, silver as clean knives.

Going out after supper Bhorth found his son once again on the terrace, staring up at the sky. Nearby the very young woman from Kandexa also stood, circumspect perhaps, her shaven head covered by a fur hood and the pet snake round her waist. She was a liaison that one should not instantly try to detach. If one did probably it would only grow more intense. A sister, Sallus had declared. Bhorth was not happy with that. But then he was scarcely happy with anything. Jemhara had incredibly not yet given birth to the abomination Vashdran. Bhorth's spies watched her, by now reporting hourly. He had just heard the latest report. She was sick. Perhaps then she might die, crushing the monstrosity inside her? Why had he never tried to have her seen off? Fear of her power, or of Thryfe's? He thought distractedly it was as if, in some cell of his reason, he had wished to protect her and what she carried. But that could not be so.

‘No stars tonight,' said Bhorth. He felt now he wanted to discuss with Sallus, alone, the problem of the impending devil child, its removal.

‘The stars can't be seen,' said Sallusdon.

‘Nor for months,' acknowledged Bhorth. As yet he was not at a loss. He parted his lips to suggest privacy, nicely, so as not to annoy his gallant son.

But Sallus spoke again. ‘Let me show you, Father.'

Bhorth saw Sallus had a small hunting bow from the more primitive Ruk. The young man fitted an arrow. The arrow seemed gilded with some luminous stuff. What joke was this, then?

Quirkily Sallus leaned back and fired straight up into the night sky.

Sallus seldom acted randomly, did not clown about. Bhorth therefore patiently watched the arrow's shining ascent, waiting for it to reach its apex and so prove the point, whatever that might be. All that could happen of course was that it would arc over and drop back to earth.

But it did not.

Instead the arrow raced into the vault of foggy heaven, which one isolated full moon had barely lit, reached the peak of its flight and struck the upper air. Struck it and
stayed
. Quivering and minuscule, three hundred feet overhead, the arrow trembled but did not return. Very clearly it had pierced the roof of the sky, and stuck.

Eleventh Volume

T
HE
W
OLF
R
EGARDS THE
S
UN

This place I have returned to is unfamiliar to me. Before I came here I lay in a grave. That grave, though unremembered, was better known and greatly more comfortable.

Part of an untitled tract woven in cloth:

Antique Ol y'Chibe and y'Gech (translation approximate)

ONE

His dream had been horrible. Waking, he moved to seize and destroy it, as he would have done a physical enemy. But already the nightmare wavered, subsided.

He could not recall detail, only the dread and anguish that spread over him like a mountain of black stone.

Yet its colour had not been black. It had been smoulder-red,
warm
, like fire beneath the sea.

In itself even so the colour was not favourable.

Thought-
shapes
bubbled through the psychic blowhole of Brightshade's exquisitely hamfisted inner mind.

Even unremembering he
knew
what this input meant.

Lionwolf
.

Ah, since the first awareness of that unique other being, his
half-brother
, the whale Brightshade had floundered. His ideal and virtually brainless path of unmitigated living and enjoyment had been
soiled
. But striking out, made into an assassin by their father, Zeth, Brightshade had ultimately failed at murder more than once. Thereafter the vicious insane assaults of Zzth had slung the whale to the floor of this north-eastern ocean. Here beneath an element frozen and un, someone now forgotten had come unheralded to
comfort
him.

Brightshade laboured to recapture the strange sense of gentleness. What had it been? Two different things happened. His eyes opened and a sore itching physical pain made itself known. All the other hurts the god-dad had inflicted seemed cured. Not a trace of them remained. Only this thin and intruding strand of – less pain than honed
feeling
.

Something had pierced Brightshade, right through from outer hide to within the inner left wall of his stupendous gut.

Muddled, he flexed his vast form. Nothing worse occurred. No dangerous twangs of crippled tissue alerted him. He was healed. Yet had been
penetrated
.

He did not need to consider why.

Brightshade's back was always to some extent landscaped by a terrain of wreckage, marine flora and bones. But his most creative, or destructive, principle was the ingesting of things. Even now a swift sweep of his belly-contents consoled him with the knowledge of hundreds of interesting bits still stored there. They included ships, antique and modern, treasure of various sorts, freakish plant life resultant from all the above. Nevertheless, one unidentified item he could not even picture had been removed. Though he had mislaid its nature, obviously it had been most valuable. Of this he had been robbed.

Brightshade lay in the neverness of ocean. His waking eyes followed the flights of blind black fish that found their way by other senses.

Dainty as the undoing of a small door the whale's endless jaws cracked. The black fish were whirled inside.

Brightshade swallowed.

Better?

Was he safe here in all this utter dark? Zzth his persecutor was a sun god, albeit a defunct one. Zzth could still burn under the sea when the mood took him. It was down here after all he had begotten both sons, Brightshade, unarguably on a female whale, and Lionwolf on a drowning woman.

Deep depression lowered itself over Brightshade.