No Flame But Mine (31 page)

She lowered her eyes for now he was looking round.

Perhaps he had seen her gaze on him. It was inevitable she would stare at him. How could she not? He would expect it.

Something anyway distracted him.

In the riot of the vines the pink flies had grown bored with victimization. They were setting about the beetles, ripping them apart. Blue iridescent segments clinked on the path.

Zth disliked that. Blue was the sigil of his wrath. Nothing could get the better of it.

He went away. Through trees of a sort, water of a sort, a kind of sunset—

His world grew honeyed once more, fusing to gold like his mind.

Jemhara laid the scroll aside. She had instead a vision before her of an elderly man sitting on a luxurious bed. He was holding out his twig-like claws urgent to receive her body. His old gnarled voice, no longer much that of a King Paramount, quavered to her. ‘Jemhara, Jemhara, if only I could enter you – I long to, my darling, I
dream
of mounting you – once I was strong, if only I'd seen you then – is there not some potion you know of, you cunning minx, so I can stand up like a man—'

King Sallusdon in Ru Karismi. The wreckage of whom, for the sake of heirdom, Bhorth had remembered in the name of his immaculate son.

How the old king had begged her for the ability of male erection. All the rest she gave him was never quite enough. For it was really his youth he wanted back. Rather than whine for potency and orgasm he warbled to be young again. She had had to give in. How glad Vuldir was. Jemhara could now poison the senile fool and leave no trace. And that she had done.

But why think of dead King Sallusdon now?

Bhorth spoke, his tones level.

‘What will you have then? Everything I suppose. The city. My apologies it's not a finer one for you to trample, not as succulent as Sofora and Kandexa were, let alone the capital. But there. I don't expect you'll worry, will you? You are a sun god I believe. Did Thryfe say that? The gods know who said what. You'll fry us or demolish us. Too much to hope you'll let any live. You and your armies never did. Not even women, or children above eleven years. Or was it twelve? Not even a cat or dog, or a bird.'

Lionwolf stayed quietly, listening in a polite, somewhat detached manner.

He looks sad
, Bhorth irrationally thought.
No, it's a look of disdain. Or neither. Why would he bother? Whatever he is, he is here
.

‘Yes, I am here,' Lionwolf said.

And he can read thoughts. As inevitably he must
.

Lionwolf smiled.

They had come in through the crowd on the terrace, none of whom had seemed to see Lionwolf at all, but then none of them had seemed to see Bhorth either. Fat, solid, scowling Bhorth, their king.

This room was a small vacant chamber off the hall, which had wine and water jugs standing on a table. A child's toy, a fish made of wool, had been dropped on the floor.

Lionwolf bent suddenly and picked up the fish. And the grace – the
power
of this insignificant movement dried Bhorth's mouth so that he felt he would choke.

‘A fish,' said Lionwolf, gently. He placed it out on the air as if on a surface, and at once the woollen toy began to swim along, wiggling its tail and the two little fins.

Bhorth's eyes bulged.

He's a child!
But there was something so appealing in the sight of the inanimate toy happily splashing along in mid-air that moisture came back into his mouth, and a type of animal joy flooded him.

Lionwolf said, ‘I don't hurt things now, Bhorth. Where is my need?'

‘Did you
need
before?'

‘Yes. I was partly human before.'

Bhorth found he took a step backward.

The fish dived abruptly by and into a jug of water. There it went on cavorting.

‘What do you want?' Bhorth asked again.

‘Everything. And that, Bhorth, is the spark of humanness still in me.'

Bhorth sat down heavily. He looked at his boots. Water from the jug was being slopped out on the floor. There it turned to – were they diamonds? Yes, yes. Why ask?

Lionwolf was sitting beside the king. Bhorth had not seen him approach. He had not
approached
. Manifested.

Bhorth had the insane urge to laugh.

Lionwolf laughed then. And Bhorth began to laugh.

‘I want nothing from you, Bhorth. I want
nothing
. Nothing and everything. Look.'

Through the laughter Bhorth looked and saw a flowering vine had come up from the floor. Red grapes swung bursting on the vine, their juice dripping, and there were tiny turquoise beetles and little insects with wide rosy wings, but these were made of gems and gauze.

Lionwolf got up and Bhorth got up, and Lionwolf put his arms about Bhorth. Then Bhorth wept. Trained to creeds of manliness, and in himself a man of wilful self-control, he had not shed tears for what seemed decades. They all spilled now, like the jewelry water and the juice of the grapes. He wept for the cities and for the world, and for the going away of his hero son who once, only a moment of years before, had been a child and the snake bit him and Bhorth sucked out the venom and his son Sallus lived, and now Lionwolf sucked the venom out of the bite in Bhorth's soul which had been all the past, and Bhorth too would live.

When the god let him go Bhorth balanced on the surface of the air as the toy fish had done. He felt warm and new, and his belt was sagging because he had grown fit and lean again in his own stocky way.

Lionwolf was no longer there.

So Bhorth went to the water jug and took out the now inanimate wet wool fish and laid it on a bench to dry. Since it was better to be kind, where you could.

But out at the border of the fruiting fields of Kol Cataar, the Magician Thryfe saw a figure tower up in the wall of mist. For a second he believed the black Winter wolf had gained entry. Then he saw properly what walked towards him out of the shadowy door.

‘Greetings and well met, Highness Thryfe.'

The Gargolem was as it had been always. Beast-headed, maned and fanged, its body that of a human male yet above the height of the tallest man.

‘Gargo,' Thryfe found he said.

It spoke like a man too, as ever. And was always addressed in turn.

‘You are here for the king,' said the Gargolem.

‘It seems so. And you?'

‘I am here,' stated the Gargolem, as some of the gods had recently done. But it turned its head towards the city. ‘This place shall be raised up.'

The grain, even in these minutes, had itself lifted higher. The blossoming trees were opening narrow wings of foliage. Among these cascades of growth the unmistakable metallic forms of lesser gargolems were appearing, brought into being presumably by the Gargolem.

‘Will you attend the palace?' the Gargolem now inquired.

Thryfe acquiesced. Former habit, Magikoy conditioning, encased him. He could not avoid it; to avoid it would not be excusable. Aside from that, what else was there for him to do?

And as he stepped forward towards the city, the Gargolem said, as so long ago it would have done in the City of the Kings, ‘I will send word then. Proceed.'

The hordes of living fish that fluttered to his mouth seemed to want to tempt Brightshade.
Can't you see how tasty we are?
they seemed to tweet.

Brightshade however did not often rouse himself to eat them.

It was unappreciative of him, and a dull guilt at slighting their edible charms began to pervade his synapses. Sometimes he even did consume large unwanted mouthfuls, so as not to insult and upset them. Pity and empathy had come belatedly to the whale, and he had got them wrong. But there. Conceivably it was a start.

He was cruising mostly along the sea-bottom by then. Randomly, he had thought, he had drifted about through the oceans under the ice floes. When he supposed he must breach he did it always with intense caution. He did not want to meet Zth again out ranting in the bright air.

But it was on such a mission of breaching that Brightshade emerged into the cold sunshine, and saw he lay adjacent to a vast plate of land. It was the sword-like South Continent, its western side, and he had anchored below the tubby portion of the hilt. North, south and west therefore the landmass stretched. Extravagantly gigantic though the whale was, even he was not quite as big. In size contest the sea did not count. It was fluid. But the
land
resembled another Brightshade.

For some reason he was reassured by this.

He coasted to and fro a while, admiring the icy shores. Ice-forests scintillantly embroidered the snow.

Had Brightshade missed the sight of land? Formerly it had often brought him many delights, such as fisher-fleet and village wrecking. But here no trace of human habitation remained.

With immense delicacy Brightshade flapped his tail. A spray of lucid liquid hurtled shorewards. Some trees snapped like splinters.
There
. Empathy did not catch him out this time either. He grinned and turned his horned face, and the lesser continent of his vegetable-clad back, to the sun.

And in that comfy second he felt the twitch of another's attention scrape against his own insides. It was the regard of Zeth – unmistakable. In fact, a random regard, although Brightshade in his abrupt terror did not guess this. Zeth had only thought of Brightshade –
that damned whale
– and in the most abstract fashion. Which was enough.

Down to the ocean floor Brightshade plummeted, displacing gallons, tons of liquid sea that gushed back over the shore. Most of the artistic forest broke. Whole leagues of coastal ice split off and went careering skyward, next landward, coming to rest on far-off hills.

In another submarine trench the leviathan cowered.

Can anything live like this? Some must. Some will not.

Crushed again by Zth's implacable and bullying eminence, Brightshade's persona veered at last towards rebellion. How lucky that he had after all a thread of elastic woven in his clunking iron psyche.

He was enabled suddenly to see it was not necessary to lie in a trench all the remainder of his immortal life.

A curious mental
shape
-picture entered his thoughts. He saw a tiny whale swimming around in a water jug.

Somewhere deep in his throat, Brightshade
laughed
.

He
could
laugh. He was a god.

And gods who laugh do not spend eternity in hiding.

Thought-
shapes
abounded now, a high tide of ideas.

There were others who had great powers, surely Brightshade could sense them, and besides some of them had defeated him here and there. Now he could accept they were his equals, and one, one he had hated above all things –
that
one was greater. Certainly they had been enemies, Brightshade and his half-brother Lionwolf. But Zeth was enemy to both.

Smiling, and he was a god, he could smile too, Brightshade eased upward through black water to grey to vinegar green. He fixed his physical sight once more on the land, and with his sight his inner vision. And saw the burning
shape
of the one he sought.

Sea god, however, the whale could not travel over land, only through the waters about and beneath. No doubt there might be an underland route, but this would bring destruction to everything around when finally he rose. And that seemingly would not be the best reintroduction to Lionwolf.

Brightshade pondered. Then he knew. Gods have so many talents.

Inch by inch, mile by mile, like a vast vapour, a sky-wide cloud, the etheric insubstantial
in-ness
of Brightshade slipped from the landmass of his flesh. When all of it was free, only a slender rope of nacreous light connected whale body and astral body. But the rope also was elastic. It could extend – for ever.

Like that then the projected soul of Brightshade now hurried to meet his kin. To meet him for the first, for they never had
met
. Not even when Lionwolf had stridden over the whale's back or, darkly perceived, been tossed into infinity – or only Hell – from the height of Brightshade's skull.

Parked by the shore the huge whale physique was not insensible. It kept alert, on guard. It calculated everything. And when more fish sported near it, it ate a few of them courteously, killing them as quickly and gently as it could.

Ninth Intervolumen

Does the leaf remember

The tree which gave it flight?

Does the star recall

Which fire woke its light?

Love Song: Ruk Kar Is

Sea filled the floor of the night.

Each one of them must travel it.

Their own intent and flawless darkness was or would be pinned by starlight on the black backdrop of heaven and earth, among the silver-creaming of the liquid waves.

The Children of Chillel.

Her magnetism pulled them surely on and in.

At first they had had to walk over the land, those countries of Simisey and Vormland, the Kelpish and Fazion isles, the coasts and inner reaches of the continent shaped like a sword: Gech, Olchibe, Jafn. All of them gained the sea. Some were alone and some in groups. There were more of them too than any who locally witnessed their number ever estimated. All were male but one. And every male participated in the journey – but one.

Elsewhere Dayadin, son of Chillel, Arok and Nirri, stayed moored with his half-sister Brinnajni. But here, on the sea floor of night, Azula, daughter of Chillel and Beebit, sat with her half-brother Sallus who was the son of a king.

They had ridden in a sleekar drawn by lashdeer. It was Sallus's property, though he had not before often used it. A small example of luggage and provisions was in the chariot.

Azula stood behind Sallus, who drove the team. When occasionally he glanced back to check on how she was, Azula was always mute and expressionless; her cloak and short hair streaming back from the racing speed were all that demonstrated she was not a statue.

When they paused to eat or sleep they spoke very little. He let her sleep the most. She seemed to feed on sleep more hungrily than on food. Did she dream then of her human mother?