No Flame But Mine (36 page)

When the child had darted off Lionwolf walked on.

That too was somewhat like the controlling of love. He could fly, levitate, dis- and re-integrate, simply
be
elsewhere. And so, he walked.

At first the boundary of fog, where it thickened, had been impassable to men – even to a mage like Thryfe. Now any could go in and out for the warmth of the magical Spring had consolidated itself and was secure. Once Lionwolf had walked beyond the loosened barrier, however, he might have expected to see no other except some approaching refugee.

Yet about three miles further along the plain he passed someone neither approaching nor going from the city.

It was Tirthen, the black wolf.

Lionwolf spared Tirthen a glance, without actually looking at him.

Dismissed, this lurid personification of Winter, Tirthen caught Lionwolf by the shoulder. Save it was not obviously the catching of a shoulder by a hand, not even quite a shoulder.

‘And?' said Lionwolf.

Tirthen
walked
by him. He was handsome as before, clad now in black wolfskin that matched his wolf-black hair, and icy mail.

‘I slept too long,' said Tirthen. ‘I missed
your
waking.'

‘But, well,' said Lionwolf.

‘I met your mother once,' said Tirthen. ‘Or twice. Among icebergs we fought. The second meeting was more civil.' The golden god said nothing. The cold god said, ‘Perhaps Saphay and I will grow fond of one another. She's a juicy piece.'

‘She is not,' said Lionwolf, ‘exactly my mother.'

Even Tirthen, who seemed to have learned his dialogue hanging as icicles on the eaves of taverns, was shocked.

‘She conceived and bore you.'

‘She conceived and bore me. Next Wasfa did so. A while ago Jemhara also conceived and bore me, despite your artistic attempts to prevent it.'

‘Three mothers. I shall visit each of them. Compare succulence.'

Winter had lost much of his grandeur and his compelling in the snare of human-like impersonation. It was a complicated role to learn, that. Harder than bad dialogue. Yyrot had fallen in such a trap, but was not unhappy. But then Yyrot had given up his more strident side centuries ago.

Lionwolf anyway seemed unconcerned. They walked swiftly. Five or seven miles skidded by about them at each step.

Tirthen began to murmur in his beautiful voice.

After all, something up his wolfy sleeve?

‘Ice twilight,' murmured Tirthen, ‘twice light. Ice twilight … twice light.'

‘A riddle.'

‘There are others. Who passes, asks the wolf. The wolf answers, I am you that passes. No, says the wolf, you are my shadow. Your shadow, says the wolf, is me.'

‘There's another shadow and another wolf,' said the other god. He sounded wholly like a man, Lionwolf, and in his tone was the identical intelligent impatience of his third father, Thryfe the magician.

‘Your first daddy, Zethzez.'

‘The Sun Wolf,' said Lionwolf.

‘He is not greater than I. So much is self-evident. Is he greater than you?'

Lionwolf halted suddenly.

Ridiculous. Borne by his own supernatural speed Tirthen had steamed on over the horizon like a comet, and was gone. Then had to hurry back in an explosion of disturbed snow.

‘It gives you pause,' tried Tirthen. Trying it seemed to cover his overshot.

Lionwolf smiled.

Even Winter personified could not help but produce in him a strand of compassion and care.

Besides you could just see some vestige of Yyrot in Tirthen now. Yyrot had left his job in the Rukar pantheon in order to spend more time with his family. Ddir, the other member of Zth's trio, had done this ages before in order to spend more time with his stars. Debris, fall-out from Yyrot's resignation, had partly enabled Tirthen no doubt to be coined. But Tirth was a god of Simisey initially. There was, if Lionwolf could detect it, a racial memento of Curjai to him.

‘We'll be friends, you and I,' said Lionwolf, smiling still. Tirthen writhed under the smile's glory. It hurt him, it pierced his icy marble with golden veins. ‘Lalt and Tilan,' said Lionwolf, flirtatious. They were the Simese heroes Curjai had told him of. He batted Tirthen gently across the cheek. He did not do more.

Tirthen might have thawed. Instead he vanished.

There was only pleasure in the god Lionwolf. All he kept with him was affection. Though his love and healing could be witty, cynical, potentially caustic, they were ambient. He loved his enemies too. To those who might hate him he was only too pleased to do good. He existed in light. He no longer cast any shadow at all.

On he walked. Places of the earth were passed. From his footsteps vines grew and streams of liquid water sprang. The dying revived at the distant whisper of his breath. The living prospered.

At last a night came when he dreamed of his first father, Zeth Zezeth.

By then Lionwolf was far from the Ruk. He had gone up into the southern mountains that divided the continent. Kraagparia had been across the border and in his first incarnation Lionwolf had entered it. The awful horror which had preceded the entering no longer troubled him, though it burned itself into his id and there lived with him, in harmony, but such things were only possible to gods.

Kraagparia conversely did not appear to be there now. Those people had learned long before the irrelevance of concrete blockades, the immovable shutness of flimsy things. Or, they were only serenely hiding.

In the dream Lionwolf, a god of love, unearthed sheer venom from the cellar of his essence. Everything that has life after all will cast a shadow. A sun more than most. A burned sun more even than most.

The dream.

Zth drives his chariot through the gaps between the stars, which are golden too, azure and amber and mauve.

Lionwolf flies towards him through the airless outer environment of space. Up here are the gateways, or so they say, to afterlives and astral planes and a medley of fascinating alternate venues.

A moon crests the black hills of the interstellarium.

Seen clear of the dark reflection of the earth, the moon is permanently full, round and blissfully white as the rounded bud of a white rose. A second moon pursues the first. Then comes another from around another space-hill. But two more rise next.
Five
moons?

Lionwolf to a large extent ignores this achievement.

He flies on, wingless and profound, straight against the meteor of Zth's chariot.

The team of blue wolves leap from the traces.

Lionwolf is in the vehicle.

He grabs and manhandles – godhandles – Zth, who struggles molten as a torch, evasive though grasped.

‘Let go of me,' snarls Zth. ‘Do you want death?
What
do you want?'

‘
He I have hold of
,' answers Lionwolf. ‘And I have hold of
you
.'

‘I shall punish you.' Zth speaking like sparks. ‘
Then
let us see how you will be. To me you can do nothing.'

‘I will kill you.'

‘How?' Zth relaxes. They poise in the chariot in space, clinging together like surprised lovers. ‘
How
will
you
kill
me
?'

‘I trapped you in my shadow. Only to
kill
you should be easy.' Lionwolf is aware that both Zth and he repeat phrases already spoken. Yet even repeated the words are not what they were. Lionwolf says with a hate so velvet it puts the scratchy rasp of love to shame: ‘Your death is mine. I own it. It is all for me now.'

A light has begun, even as they have striven, even as they have become quiescent in each other's incorrigible clasp.

Where the five – six? – white moons ascended in round plates, the solar frenzy comes as a disc so white it is a rainbow, and from its circle a billion spears, daggers, swords stick out, which are the rays it has extruded to rend and rip the fabric of the void. And the void too flames. All space is scarlet, scarlet and blue. Aureoled in the inferno the miniature ball of the earth so far down seems destined for cremation. But the earth only flushes mildly along one narrow curve. This boiling terror then is an old sun, an elderly, bitter old sun in a shallow sheath of healthy splendid fire.

Lionwolf hefts his father, his only true father and finally his only true hate, from the chariot.

He holds him out over the rising disc of rainbows, knives and blades.

‘Look, Dadda,' says Lionwolf. ‘
Look, Dadda
. Yours.'

And hurls him down into the heart of the sun.

Sham, city of Ol y'Chibe and y'Gech, in the years of its magnificence has acquired a single temple. The building, built of obsidian and plated with brass, gold and polished coal, dominates a rise. It is reached by a road of black slate on which, over and over, the name of the god is inscribed in patterns.

Sometimes the god drops by, and is without exception terrified by his temple.

He lurks in disguise on the thoroughfare, squinting at pilgrims, lines of priests and fine animals brought for sacrifice, mumbling and cursing under his breath.

On countless occasions the god has been arrested for blasphemy, chucked into prison or prepared for slaughter by Shamish gladiators or giant crocs. Of course he always miraculously disappears before he can confront and so hurt them. Ah! they exclaim, it was the Great God himself, testing us.

The disguised god, an age-loaded beggar, a ragged stripling, even a fat priest, has plucked up his courage and actually gone inside the imposing fane. Here he has gaped groaning amid the stew of incense and chanting.

Once he allowed himself to get drunk. Allowed, since a god needed to permit his ethereal cells to process alcohol in a human manner. Staggering and shouting he had charged about the enclosure, scattering acolytes and worshippers, tumbling over two sacred goats kept to provide milk offerings, ending in the silver font. Somewhere in the mayhem he had shed his disguise. He had not meant to. He was identified instantly. Ah! Now the Great God was displeased.

Three hundred people threw themselves on their faces. Many voided bladders and bowels as they did so, the two goats included.

Gurithesput, Great God of Ol y'Chibe and y'Gech, sat in the font. He knew by now it was hopeless to explain, let alone try to dissuade them. He had tried before.

Oh, he had tried and tried.

Yet these lands, which had rejected all chance of any god coming between them and their untrammelled faith in their own ability to live, die and reincarnate, had taken to this deity with gusto. Not only rumours but evidence of his swift gain of adulthood, his gift of healing, his just peacemaking, his magicianship and – decidedly – his ethnic purity, wooed and won his fellow countrymen. Seldom are any believers more fanatical than converts. What has changed our mind, convinced not others but
us
, must be of superior quality. Ego triumphs over logic. Perhaps too they had been a little lonely, having only themselves ever to rely on.

At least he had now ensured their warlike ways were channelled. They went into contests and the games in the Sham stadia, most of which were ‘friendly' bouts. Feuds among neighbouring sluhtins now hesitated to start. If started, discussion generally settled them.

This must be a virtue.

Disarming them, Guri did feel some pride. His appalling punishment in his own Hells had been his judgement on himself for his days of warriorism, the tortures, rapes and executions he had performed so righteously. A racist then, he had never fully thought other races had sensibilities. Had not credited they felt horrible pain exactly as a man or woman of his own kind did. Hell had cured him. He did not want his nation to stray on to that same path which had spawned himself and his brothers. This being so he also attempted to open the eyes of y'Chibe and y'Gech to other societies. But in this country of the past, few examples of such other peoples came their way.

Guri had therefore searched about the continent, roaming even as far as the outer isles that would, in the future, become the Vormland and the habitats of Fazions and Kelps. He found that at this date these peoples too were ignorantly insular. They also viewed Guri, even acting human, with total fright. The Jafn race along the north-east coast of the continent were primal too. If not reduced to gibbering by Guri's black hair and yellow complexion, they treated him as an object of curiosity, a sort of silly vrix. For the Jafn were even then riddled by such sprites and devils. The odd thing was God-Guri could not see these spirits. He would have expected to, for in his future they had been real enough in their own subreal way. Once a ghost he had been able to spot them if he let himself. He suspected now the Jafn must gradually have
made
them real inadvertently from belief, the constant repetition of superstitious avoidance or night-fear horror stories told during the many nights they refused to sleep. The schizophrenic gods of the Rukar had evolved like that, surely. Faith was a dangerous weapon.

And the Rukar were the final mystery. For nowhere could Guri unearth or unsnow any trace of them.

The southern north and west that had been their wide territory had nobody there. The southern east had only the tribal louts with mottled skin, who worshipped wooden gods, like Ranjal in Guri's future, or volcanoes that puffed out smoke.

Thus Guri brought no introductory human offers home to Olchibe. The examples he had seen would have gone mad or died of alarm, which could hardly have recommended them.

He did, where Olchibe had some inkling of another area through trade or accident, tell tales of such cultures. His nation sat marvelling, loving every word of what they acclaimed as imaginative fantasy.

When the temple went up in Sham it bothered Guri too for another reason than his hike to godhood.

He had been elsewhere on his journeys, sometimes riding his mammoth. Though leisurely, he thought he had taken months, no more. Mostly he had not indulged in riding. He could spin as he would from here to there or anywhere in seconds, or, if dawdling, hours.