No Flame But Mine (37 page)

On returning to Sham his immediate shock had been nightmarish. Such a work as the temple, unaided by god-power, or the weird sorcerous-mechanical power the later Rukar would come to have, must have needed several years.

Soon he knew, questing disguisedly about the streets, the temple had been erected at vast speed and the cost of a few thousand lives, in one and a half decades.

Guri had not grown older, naturally. His divine aggregate seemed fixed at about twenty-five, twenty-eight. But where had fifteen years gone then? He went to look at the mammoth. He read the signs. It was old now and must retire. The mammoth might have been his calendar, but willing and stoical in the way of its kind, it had not complained. It had still fluidly knelt and risen, galloped and preened; still threatened over-feisty wild elephant or lurking fleer-wolves mewling in the wastes. Now he praised it and saw that it went to be a pampered stud. And Guri found himself alone. He could not however shake the thought that, at the beginning of his short journeying about, the mammoth had
not
been old at all.

Static amid mortality and mortal time Guri grew mithered. He was powerless at least in this. Despite his regression to the past he could not retrace what now had been let slip. Some laws still applied. If not to him, certainly to the forward propulsion of the earth.

He did manage to squeeze from time one backview of the temple's building. It was about five years in when he reached it. But the scene was like a picture painted on a rickety wall. It faded and wobbled, could not be entered.

Sometime after this, Guri fell in a sort of love with a priestess of his own order.

Until then, after leaving his sluhtin, he had been abstinent. Sex had become an itch he scratched in private, quickly and without much interest. His godness had not enhanced masturbation either.

The attraction to his own Olchibe priestess was classic both in its mythic precedents and ordinary inevitability.

Guri tried to hold off. But why hold off? He would not harm her. It was about then he recalled Lionwolf in similar circumstances. Lionwolf had not harmed. Nor had he sired a single child. Guri had only sired his own self.

Tactfully Guri sought the priestess in one more guise as a mortal. But he was a good-looking specimen now he had to admit.

The girl had been a Crarrow. The priestesses were generally picked from the covens. She was combing her long raven locks when she saw Guri standing outside in the courtyard, with a pitcher of greenish wine.

‘How did you get in?' she asked coldly. No men were allowed in the precinct.

‘I saw you in the temple,' said Guri, exquisite in the braid-paint-skull haute couture of ancient Ol y'Chibe. ‘I climbed the wall.'

‘I saw you, too,' lied the girl. He had not been there, was only here.

He gave her a fig he had woken from the ice. It was like a small brown-purple animal, and she stroked and toyed with it until she nearly drove him out of his mind.

She was fourteen, a virgin, and once they had joined on the slender bed the priestess girl said to him, ‘You are the Great God, Gurithesput.'

‘
Shush
,' he chittered, breaking out in a thick sweat which, being what he now was, was delicious as wine and honey. ‘He'll smite me! Great God hear amen.'

The girl giggled. ‘No, I foresaw,' she said – her name meant Kitten. ‘You are God.'

‘Ah? No, no. You're mistaken.'

‘You have lived and died and lived,' she murmured, ‘you have lain with mermaids, you are uncle to the sun.'

He realized then their coupling had brought on a trance, and sincerely she had sussed him. He possessed her again hoping to quash the visions. She slept, and he left her. Next night he was eagerly back.

She knelt down on the floor, touched the stone with her forehead, got up and jumped into his arms.

To be the mistress of a god was only a treat to her; nothing onerous or scaring.

Kitten did not become pregnant. This disappointed her, he knew. Then one evening Gurithesput entered her cell and Kitten lay asleep on her bed, cold as ice and dead.

He did not examine her. He had been tentative and subtle, unleashing his need only when sure she was able to withstand him. She had been so happy. Her body was unscathed, outwardly, inwardly. Yet – he must have murdered her, his lovely girl.

Had Magica died too? Up there in the Gech swamps, dying abruptly from the delayed sting of the paranormal. Had they
all
died before their time, the ones he had lain with in the sluhtin? Some had, he knew – was that his fault?

It was soon after this, after they had buried Kitten with innocent ceremony and written on the basalt above her grave the pattern of God, that Guri got drunk that time and ran amok in his temple, finishing up in the wet font, with a carpet of terror-shat people all around.

In that awful moment he faced responsibility like a white-hot brand.

‘All is well,' boomed the Great God, shaking off his drunk. ‘I have tested you. You are not wanting. I am yours now. I am your Great God. Trust in me, trust and obey what I have taught you. Not feared of me, are you?
No
. You needn't fear your God, your old Olchibe God. I like you all finely, and you me. Listen to me, you call out for me. Call by my name, which is—'

Three hundred voices quavered: ‘
Great God
.'

‘Amen,' said Guri, and slid away and through a crack in the incense. He would still haunt the temple, the road, and grumble, but the fight was out of him.

Mostly, now, in a cupboard of darkness he sat alone, and let their prayers ring and tremble like a far-off outer sea. He unbraided his hair. He had spoken to them like kiddlings, like
his
kiddles. They were all the children now he could ever have.

A month after her death he left the bough of a fig tree on Kitten's grave. It rooted, but then froze to vitreous. Those who saw it made a fuss. Then they forgot. But Guri thought on and on about Lionwolf, the very first one he had ever promised special protection of a non-mortal type. He had done it with phrases inadvertently resurrected at Sham.
Uncle to the sun
, she had said. Olchibe Uncle Guri.

It was a day of pale air. You looked at this air and gauged from it the closed veil of the cold. This was a day in aspic.

Lionwolf walked down from a tall mountain, possibly one of the complicated chain that separated the southern Ruk from Kraagparia, or not.

He walked as nothing human could, his position sometimes horizontal and his head on a parallel with the plain below.

Where he reached the summit's foot an ice lake opened. Someone else sat on a mound in the middle of it, about a mile away. He seemed to be fishing through a hole in the ice.

Lionwolf was curious, perhaps. He had retained certain everyday emotions and some whims, though they were often of the more animal variety. He sped out on to the lake, skated towards the seated fisher. He spoke without delay.

‘Caught anything tasty, Uncle?'

Guri looked up. His doleful expression morphed to one of embarrassed relief. ‘No. I can make them swim up, but then I take pity and let them go. The fishing line's just for convention.'

Lionwolf sat down beside him.

They peered into the hole, which was suddenly blocked by the faces of some twenty or thirty fish, wriggling to leap up and touch the gods.

Lionwolf blessed them, breathing a golden sigh into the hole. The fish themselves goldened. They dropped back, and for a while both gods watched them shining under the ice as they frisked about.

‘They'll live for years now, immune to all peril,' said Lionwolf. ‘I must stop doing this.'

‘Is that what you do here?'

‘Too much. But – it's a wonderful feeling. You pass a sick man on a village street and let what you are enfold him. He – alters. A bird falls dead out of the sky. In my footstep. It shakes itself and flies off like a firework.'

‘You intellectualize too much,' grunted Guri. He could hear his own Rukarian phraseology. ‘It's your corrupt Rukar blood. Even now.' He drew out the line. One extra fish came up with it, not hooked but clinging on, waggling at Lionwolf.

‘Oh, very well.'

Golden, the fish plunged back with a silent, noisy wail of ecstasy.

‘Well, I've healed a bit, but I've not done anything kind,' said Guri. ‘Maybe that will balance yours.' He stared at the ice hole as it closed. And told Lionwolf of Kitten.

Lionwolf listened without comment, then turning began to braid Guri's hair, threading into it as he deftly did so tiny beast skulls and Olchibe beads conjured from nowhere.

Guri let this soothe him. Lionwolf had always had a gentle side. He was complete now, so fully masculine at last the female element too had found its parameters.

‘Did that …' Guri paused. ‘Have you ever had a similar mishap?'

‘Diddled a girl and found it killed her? Not last time I was here. They all lived. I doubt I changed them. This time, well. I haven't had the urge.' The god smiled. Guri felt the smile soak into him, warm weather. Above them a hole had appeared in the paleness very like the hole Guri had made in the ice. Blue sky filled it. ‘Rather,' amended Lionwolf, ‘I've had the urge, but for only one.'

‘The black woman.'

‘Chillel Winsome Toiyhin.'

‘Is that her name now? Ask her to pardon me. I said
woman
. Goddess.'

‘She won't take offence, Guri. But I don't see her. Except in my mind and in the little independent brain that dwells in my loins.' Casually he added, ‘Chillel is her dispassionate name, the crescent moon that is a physician and a whore. Winsome is her wife-mother name, the moon at full. Now she's the warrior moon, celibate, the thinnest crescent before darkness. Vangui is that name, but Vangui too has her other self, Toiyhin, the moon's shadow, like a bird.' Lionwolf shrugged. One of the fish, the last one probably, was still glimmering busily about under the ice. It gave off an inaudible merry squeaking. Lionwolf said, ‘I inadvertently filled the new Ruk capital with golden rats.'

This made Guri laugh. His hairdressing was established. He felt better. He would either have to make do sexually with memory, or find a goddess he could get on with. And Kitten – she was safe now, and would be born again.

He shifted his thinking to other matters.

‘I exist in the past,' he said. ‘My temple's at Sham. Sham's a glorious city in these – in those days. How is it then I meet you?'

‘You and I, our sort, we can go in and out of time. When we want we find doors. Did you think you'd meet me?'

‘Nothing was further from me.'

‘Nor I. But it's good.'

‘Yes, Lion.
Good
.'

They spent the day in the plain under the mountains, which might have been in Lionwolf's present era or Guri's past time, or in neither, instead an extension of that intriguing 'tween world Guri had accessed in his former living ghost-life.

They ran and flew. They hunted deer – phantoms – which waited in an ice-jungle for them but reacted in a non-uncanny way and did not glow gold. Two mammoths met them also, were duly mounted and ridden. One was Guri's older mount from the Hells, the mature female. He scrubbed her tusks and fed her black juicy grass that flailed from the snow when Lionwolf spat on it. Evening came and the tired earth sun, or its facsimile, rolled off over the edge of daylight in a welter of crimson. Chillel-Winsome-Vangui-Toiyhin's night encompassed the sky with black silk and platinum stars. Only three moons rose, a full moon bracketed by two crescents. Did she send a message to her lover? Or was Ddir playing about again? The first crescent moon did look suspiciously like a cunningly arranged cluster of stars.

They made camp, and in the Olchibe way to content Guri the fire was kindled in a small pot.

‘Do we eat?'

‘Let's eat. Tonight, Uncle, we'll be human.'

Venison steaks were to hand at once, jars of wine and spirit. A full-blown cherry tree exploded out of the ice and rained fruit on them. As they had long ago they made illusory naked girls gyrate in the fire-pot. When it proved too reduced a stage they installed a Jafn camp fire and the illusions danced there.

‘I like that one. She's Olchibe.'

‘I like
that
one. And look, she isn't black.'

Guri tried to muscle off his own xenophobia. He had never much fancied any un-Olchibe women, even, Great God Guri forgive himself amen, the ones he once took by force. But it clawed at him to think of them, and he had paid expensively for his crimes. He tried to like another dancer.

Disconcerting himself slightly he saw she was quite a hefty female, with uncouth billows of dark hair. She kept drawing his eye. He could not fathom it. ‘Is she one of
your
inventions?'

‘That one? She seems familiar.'

The dancer with rowdy hair flaunted and winked at them, then vanished with a sharp crack. Out of the camp fire whirled a tangled twig. It must have broken off the cherry tree.

The moons swung over.

The gods lay on furs and bundled grass. The mammoths chewed calmly nearby. Guri told Lionwolf stories. Lionwolf told Guri stories.

‘Shall we sleep?'

‘Let's sleep. Tonight we're human.'

‘Does it sadden you, Lion – does it make you afraid … it used to, I remember that, being a god.'

‘Everything alive, if it can think, may be afraid of itself. No, I left my fear in Hell. I left my
self
there. Now I'm no-self. Self-less, Guri, as I was Nameless, once.'

‘But you – love.'

‘I
am
love. Fire and warmth and hope and health and love.'

‘Then how—' Guri faltered.

Lionwolf provided the question. ‘Then how do I love the ones I truly love?'

‘You and I, Lion,' said Guri in a little voice. ‘That boy-god in Hell – what was his name? Escurjai – Saphay your mother – and
she
– your black goddess? Or should we just be jealous now, lumped in with all things, loved equal, no one worse, or better?'