No Flame But Mine (43 page)

Here it was that Catty came running to meet him.

Catty had washed his face and front fur in the snow to remove the blood stains of regicide. Despite that Curjai was instantly aware of what had gone on.

‘What have you done!' he shouted.

The countryside shook. Piles of ice from adjacent hills tumbled with a hissing roar.

Catty stood his ground. He had been a she-dog Hell hound and was now a Drajjerchachish male tiger. Once fed the ichor of Curjai, he did not fear him.

Curjai calmed. He had wished to extract death himself but Catty had done it.

Perhaps this was better.

Curjai foresaw another thing in that moment. He was unlikely to be a violent god of retribution.

Humbly he went to Catty and they leapt into each other's arms, wrestling friendly on the snow while the epilogue of the started avalanches dropped in valleys.

‘I must still go there,' he told the tiger when they had wrestled enough.

He knew Riadis was now far away in another world, but terrible memories were flushing through him. She had always been despised in the capital after she had borne a cripple. When he was born again as a hero and divine, she had been praised yet still shunned as a freak. Riadis had not cared. She was proud, and only wanted Curjai to flourish. And he—

And I neglected her. A gift of flame, a snatch of words, a necklace or coronet of jewels – ‘
How long will this diadem last?' ‘As long as love lasts.' ‘Love,' she said, in play. ‘Does that then last
?'

Living hearts are warm as flame
. That was what I said.

But
dead
hearts were not cold.

He and Catty flew the final miles to Padgish.

Curjai had exhibited few of his abilities so blatantly.

On the streets below horses reared and dromazi cast their riders. Mages pelted from their esoteric houses. Women shrieked.

Curjai shifted his focus and appeared suddenly in the tree-pillared royal hall, his white tiger at his side.

There were mages here too. They grouped, looking at him askance, unsure for once of their mediocre and cliquish talents.

They had not yet decided on a replacement king. Theoretically it should have been Curjai, son of the king, and by now in looks at least the most mature of his heirs. Besides he was the son of the god Attajos,
via
the king. Some advances were made to Curjai of this type. Warriors and statesmen and nobles crowded about the hall. Curjai recollected his first childhood, when he was a boy of intelligence and heart without functioning limbs or ‘human' attributes.

Only eventually did he speak. By then the hall was bursting with people and all of them trying to appease him. Incense sickened the air. And now too evening was also arriving, the hour of lamplighting, and everywhere flittered hurrying tapers.

‘My father is the god of fire,' said Curjai. He did not think he believed it quite, not now. But they did, at least by lip-service. ‘He has passed the importance of fire to me. Now it is under my jurisdiction.'

He looked about.

One by one the fresh-lit torches, the limpid candles failed.

A sort of gasp winged through the chamber. It was like something going away.

‘I take back from you the gift of fire,' said Curjai. Tears sprang into his eyes. He
grieved
for them, he saw, even as he spent on them his curse. He could have razed the city. Yet was this any more lenient?

‘Any flame you conjure here, for light or heat, to cook, to comfort yourselves, any flame will die. As my mother died from your lack of honour. And as your scavenger king died from the claws of my cat.'

A hush, multiple, imploring, descended.

Dozen by score the lights went on going out.

Beneath their feet the warm floor turned to ice.

As the night swept in it found the palace thick with shadows. The capital sank to turbidness all through. Though they struck their flints again and again, though their mages and shamans again and again drew up the magic sparks, each glint of fire immediately died.

No torches burned now along the streets. The lamps of houses were void. Coldness entered and strolled with the dark in the rooms and thoroughfares. A faint moaning and weeping lifted. The stars stared down. A single moon, a crescent like a cat's claw, gained the zenith in a kind of mockery.

Like a city sacked, ruined by war and plague, Padgish a necropolis, with ghouls and ghosts wandering about sobbing and praying, striking flints on walls, watching the bright seeds shrivel, one by one.

Ruxendra found Curjai seated in the hunting-park some ten or so nights later, with Catty lolling at his side. Catty had caught a deer and, having vainly tempted Curjai to eat some of it – daintily bringing him a severed leg or haunch in his tigery jaws – was enjoying a solitary supper.

The blue dog bounded to join in. The tiger and the Hell hound had a brief tussle, cleverly recognized each other from their recent astral past, and began to dine
à deux
.

‘Animals can be so disgusting, don't you find?' said Ruxendra primly, inappropriate with emotion at finding him.

‘Human men and women are animals,' said Curjai, not glancing at any of them.

‘And we are no longer human.'

Curjai rose and strode away along the slope.

He had been so difficult to find.

Ruxendra sped after him. ‘Curjai!'

‘What is it?'

‘Do you remember me?'

‘You? Yes. You wished to slaughter Lionwolf and failed. You forced Arok back from death and did him harm. You are a travesty.'

She baulked. Recovered. ‘It is you who have made a mistake. Now you blame me for an invented error. My brothers were like that. But I could always get round them.'

‘I am not your brother.'

‘I'm glad of it. In society, where once I was brought up, incest is frowned on.'

At her own words Ruxendra coloured. But she was a goddess now. She blushed like a dawn.

Curjai did not see this, did not look. She was irrelevant to him. All things were.

He stared towards the capital, obscured now by ice-woods and elevations. ‘I robbed them of their fires.'

‘They killed your mother. Why shouldn't you punish them? They hurt you – you might have rained fire
on
them and well served.'

He turned to her, perplexed. She bristled there, furious for him. She had no tact. She was like Catty. She would have ripped off the king's face to pay him out, then brought Curjai dinner, probably cooked in some Rukarish way – useless and ill-fitted gestures. But motivated by love of him, he tiredly thought. Like her bold claim that he was not her brother, so might be loved by her in carnal ways.

‘You know what they did then.'

‘Of course,' she said, with a slight impatience.

‘They will die,' he said. ‘And not all of them are guilty. Their children, their beasts. I had no call to punish
them
.'

Ruxendra went to him and put her hand lightly on his arm. ‘Look there.'

This different side of her took him by surprise. She was also capable of gentleness, sense, and magery. He recalled that now. He looked where she pointed.

In the snow a picture blossomed.

Curjai beheld droves of people, all those in Padgish, leaving the metropolis. Leaving the lean, well-paved streets and central wide boulevard, the tree-trunk pillars and high roofs and windows with patterns of coloured crystal. He saw the dromazi and the horses and the dogs going with them, and cats on leashes or in baskets, and birds in cages or on wrists. And with them too, huge and upright glowing shadows on the unlit shadows of the dark, the great god Obac Tramaz, with his dromaz head and fine black eyes, and his small elegant blonde mouse wife Vedis – for there were plenty of her kind too concealed in the furnishings and provisions packed on the carts.

These two gods were involved and nurturing. They attended and presided over the exodus as the people did with their loved pets. And though the citizens of Padgish did not see the giant presences that moved among them, perhaps they felt some strength from them.

‘
There
are the gods,' said Curjai.

‘The old order. They are the past.'

‘Then the past – has been more kind.'

He noticed among the persons passing out through the black gates two of Arok's Jafn. One of the men held a child caringly in his arms. Humanity also could express kindness.

What have I done? Can I undo it
?

He knew he could not. He had passed sentence, and it was not in him to revoke his bane; he would be
unable
to take it from them until for him too the anguish calmed.

Ruxendra began to speak in a haughty superior way of new duties and acts among gods, then stopped. Instead, with a quiet firmness she said, ‘I will send them a fair dawn, your people. A benign omen for tomorrow.'

Her own reversal of tactic pleased her. She was pleased to have spoken more softly – he did not need abrasion. If he was to love her he must learn he might trust her, even though he was a man, a hero, a god.

And she imagined painting in extra tints on the sky and for a moment, making her jump, a fan of diluted cerise rouged the midnight east. There was no sun there. It was a false dawn, and next went out like her blush.

Curjai had not even seen it, she thought, though numbers of those fleeing Padgish had craned over their shoulders in fright. One must be more careful.

Back along the park Catty and Star-Dog exchanged two or three buffets and then lay down for a snooze.

How could she woo Curjai? How awkward he was. Alas, in her past in the ordinary world, outside her training she had only had to deal with fairly petty troubles, until the very end, by which time she was dying, then dead, unable to take notes.

‘Curjai?'

But he did not hear. He was reciting, barely aloud, the Simese lay of Tilan and Lalt. The two heroes met and were united, kindred and beloved. Tilan and Lalt; Curjai and Lionwolf. That then was the only one who could comfort him.

Ruxendra-Ushah forgot how his voice had cracked before when he spoke to her, and their alchemical if non-physical and never verbal congress in Hell.

She summoned her pride, and went away.

She did this as a woman not a god, and so had only reached the slope beyond the wood when from nowhere Curjai stood in front of her on the snow.

Ruxendra managed not to start, nor to click her tongue with disapproval.

He had left off reciting.

He held out to her his hand.

‘Walk with me,' he said.

She gave him her hand.

How warm and strong he is
, she thought.

How cool and serene she is
, thought he.

God and goddess, they began a stately perambulation, as if both were in their mortal nineties, erudite, and had done all things over endlessly.

Beyond the height of the deserted capital neither Obac Tramaz nor Vedis paid heed. Old gods indeed,
centuries
old they were, but ancient adults do not always spurn young lovers. Some see such love like a lighted torch that illuminates the future. Kiss then the more when the fire fails. Kiss the more when the lamps go out. Kiss tomorrow awake – who else will bother to do it but love?

Somewhere among the snows Curjai and Ruxendra embrace. Fire and morning; heat and light. And in the mournful procession now a hundred miles from Padgish, the brands shine up without being kindled, and in their cages, thinking daybreak has come, all the cage birds call.

He had been looking at the agony for some time.

It was a long way off now, across hills and seas and continents.

As it sailed further from him so he came closer to himself, and finally he knew he was Dayadin, son of Arok, and that he lay on his back on the hard snow.

Maybe a quarter of an hour after this he went up a stair in his brain and looked out of his eyes. He beheld Hilth the hovor cavorting in a small home-grown blizzard. Poor Hilth. Obviously he had been badly frightened. Now he rushed to Dayadin and forced upon him the only type of adoring hug a wind spirit could offer.

Once he had dug himself out of the resultant snow-drift, Dayad soothed Hilth down like a testy hawk.

Dayad felt by now only the thinnest resonance of any wound. But putting his hand over the left side of his ribs he saw instantly an image in his mind of what had been done to him. Four scars, scored spitefully deep, embroidered his diaphragm. On his blackness they were white as the bones they had, however briefly, exposed. But the healing it seemed had been almost as swift as the mutilation.

Who had done this, and why?

He thought it had been Brinnajni. She had marked him from female rancour, the way some Jafn girl might scratch the face of a man who spurned her. And a god naturally must always exceed.

Dayadin believed it was a latent fury that made vitality burn through him from the scars.

He got up and, with Hilth flapping round him, began to continue his advance inland. Soon he felt much better. The advance grew up into a sprint. The white world dashed by. Either he was again flying now or as near as made no difference. Delighted, the hovor kept pace. And for the first occasion ever Dayad thought he glimpsed the face of Hilth, fey yet almost man-like, coming in and out of the moving air.

There was a volcano in the end, far over to the north and east, puffing up a cloud on the lightening sky.

Here below a wolf made of rock and ice posed in mid-leap. Presently ahead a habitat appeared. There were walls and gates up on a platform, and a high house with a cracked sword horizontal over the lintel.

It was the Holasan-garth, rebuilt in another country.

Dayad the Star Hawk dropped to earth nearby. Fallen slabs of ice lay about strangely on the platform's terrace.

Through a sort of psychometry he knew at once all about Tirthen's ice-dome and its shattering. He knew of yellow-haired Saphay, and her departure.

Dayad had got up over the wall of the original garth those handful of years back, when he was a child and chasing his father to the battle. Hilth had assisted then, and insisted on helping now. If there were sentries, they did not see.