No Flame But Mine (45 page)

And look now, she was raising herself like a serpent, flexible and velvety, pleading with her wondrously depthful eyes. How enchanting her scent. It was natural to her, he had noticed before. Fragrant, and so clean, so clear – like the inner waters of the earth itself.

‘Let me die for you,' he thought she said.

Something stabbed in Zth's inner awareness. He had a sight of subsea blue and a girl with lemon hair, and of how possessing her had robbed him of an intrinsic facet of his power. But that could not have happened, or if it ever had he had repaired from it. They were only bits of clay, these mortals, they never lasted even when one was careful.

‘Then you shall,' he said. ‘Die for me, that is.'

As he lifted her up Jemhara's eyes were brimmed with triumph. Presumably he did not see that either or misinterpreted it as well.

Then all the marvellousness of this sexual contact drowned her. Within the tidal wave of supernal ravishment only the slightest fragment of her actual self survived, swept round and round in the maelstrom. It was such a minuscule crumb. Even she could barely know it.

There had been nothing like this when she lay with wretched King Sallusdon, allowing him to enter her and use her as he wanted, while inside her vagina she had previously inserted a rare thaumaturgic pessary. To its venom she, having taken the antidote, was immune. But Sallusdon, King Paramount, was poisoned.

All her life, shallowly lived or profoundly, seemed to have tended to these two paired deeds, the regicide of a king, and now this deicide.

Zth would not exactly die, it was true. Nevertheless some essential aspect of him was about to be corrupted, corroded and
ruined
.

Yet how could that be?

Jemhara's flawless core harboured no poison now. What earthly poison anyway could harm Zth?

Somewhere among fields of light, illimitable conclusion raced towards the woman and the god.

Another sound that had no sound rang through the air and the unworldly soil. The sunflower sky tore end to end. A sort of matt bleeding soaked out there, dimming everything.

Zth started back. It was far too late. He had spent himself against the woman's womb, and she herself, all of her, burned up and flowed and separated to a sequined pollen. Nothing was left of her, nothing left of beautiful Jemhara, no particle or tint, for even the pollen was fading now, sucked down by the thirsty fake of Zth's landscape.

And Zth was hopping, springing, dancing a fever-dance of wizening and withering, twisting as he did so in an invisible but hungry furnace. He was becoming a locust, a grasshopper. Brown and brittle like burned grass, like a single grass-stalk pulled from a hearth,
charred
, his radiance flaking from him.

She had come to understand her own ultimate weapon as he had come to forgetfulness. For Jemhara had borne the Lionwolf. She had carried him inside her a year and more and brought him forth fully a god. It was not a poison this time in her loins, but an extraordinary panacea, inimical to such a creature as Zth, as pure fire must be to impure gold.

Zth the locust sizzles away over the ups and downs of his private terrain. A greasy unwholesome smoulder is rising from his passing, and all the while the private sky above is growing more sallow.

Saphay had also contained a damaging power for him when they coupled, but she, having a purpose even if unrevealed to her, survived the union.

Jemhara's purpose, however, is fulfilled, and she has not survived. Jemhara, whose blood had held the scent of clear water, whose eyes had held a depth in which eternity might be seen, had served clarity and eternity, and was dead. Jemhara is dead. Is dead.

Tenth Intervolumen

Since Today is weary and would like to sleep, kiss Tomorrow awake.

Found on the wall of a hill-brothel:

Simisey

The city was like a baby: it kept getting bigger, and the noise it made too got louder and more demandingly urgent. Whether you loved this kiddle or not, sometimes you were daunted. Great God Guri certainly was.

How many decades had elapsed by now? He had heedlessly not properly made a note. And he detected errors too in the priestly or mercantile reckoning of Sham itself. Probably it was around ninety or a hundred years since they built the temple to him. There was a slab of fossil coal in the holy sanctum that pronounced it much longer, but then there was a woven cloth behind the altar that counted it at only six decades.

Time, to Sham, was adaptable.

He had wondered, time-traveller that he had become, if he was to blame for that too.

Even so the bough he had left on Kitten's little tomb, though it had changed to adamant, had somehow also grown. It was currently a big gnarled tree, with no leaves but stony purplish fruits. When they fell they made a clank. Remembering how she had played with the first fig made him sorrowful.

Why had she died? Surely all the others had not subsequently died simply through coupling with him?

Sham gave him a headache anyway with its row. Not that it was a real headache, yet it ached.

That morning he was standing by the fig tree looking at the tomb, and he wore the disguise of an elderly gladiator-master. When a woman approached and spoke to him
sotto voce
he took it for the usual thing. Despite his various disguised and often nasty appearances, women were still attracted. He always resisted now, frightened of causing them hurt.

This one though, he thought, half glancing round at her, it would not be a vast sacrifice to forgo.

‘Ah?' said Gurithesput unhelpfully.

‘Bow me,' said the woman, very low. ‘
Give
me.'

‘Be off, you harlot,' grumbled Guri. And from nowhere a bolt of energy swiped him. On this occasion it did not floor him, he was a god, but he staggered nevertheless.

Guri flung round. He knew who it must be, and a nearly welcome irritation spurred him on.

‘What in Hell are you at here, you old blather?'

As long ago, she grinned. ‘Old not now. All me young. God I, like Gurithesput.'

‘All right, very well. You're young, young as a fine morning. What do you want?' And reluctantly an inner voice said to him,
You should be nicer. She assisted you once
.

‘Nothing,' said Ranjal, goddess of wood. ‘
Give
.'

‘Great fucking God me amen,' cursed Guri, and threw a handful of nothing before her. To his astonishment it instantly became a heap of vulgar gold trinkets, ribbons and sweetmeats.

Ranjal, who always insisted on nothing and nothing but, stamped upon and squashed the pile to silt, and glowered at him.

Guri stood there. ‘Well. So you see. I got it wrong. I'm not much of a bloody god I can tell you, old lady.'

‘Learn better be,' said Ranjal.

‘If I could.' He turned away and gazed gloomily at the fig tree.

Ranjal spoke again, very low still. ‘Who you think make on grave-spot tree to grow?'

‘I,' he said dully.

‘
I
.'

‘
You
? Why would you …? It's a girl I had and she died – you never—'

‘See you sad, I. Ranjal sorry. Make the tree. I goddess of wood, remember you. Tree to remind you dying is lying. Can tell you where,' wheedled Ranjal, ‘your Kitten born back—'

‘
Don't
. Don't tell me.'

‘Not trust self you now? What fool is he, Gurithesput. She not die of
you
. Just die. Some do. Die young.
You
her make happy so she go glad and easy.'

‘Do you say the truth?'

‘Why fib?'

‘You might. What do you care what makes me grieve?'

Ranjal said, ‘Before, I tell you. Ranjal-Narnifa I, and you make it for me that I become god.'

‘I never meant to,' he said sheepishly.

‘Who care? Is done.'

‘Then it's done. What do you want now?'

‘
Nothing
,' said Ranjal, abruptly and startlingly with a sort of witty female slyness that was alarmingly unmistakable.

She was interested in him, it seemed. In the romantic way.

And now he fully looked at her—

Her badger hair was brushed and scented and had been made quite magnificent. Young indeed, the mottled effect of her skin, fawn and pale, was glossy and healthy, if odd. Her eyes sparkled. Her teeth were no longer wooden: somewhere she had bothered to redesign them white and clean in a fresh pink mouth. Though big she was … buxom rather than hefty. Her very large round breasts pushed invitingly at the woollen cloak she seemed to wear. And her hands, though many-fingered, were cunningly shaped and graceful, and unnervingly suddenly suggested all sorts of erotic extra-fingered possibilities—

Guri stepped back and the fig tree slammed him across the shoulders and head.

A fig dropped with the usual clank.

To his total dismay, Guri had found himself vastly aroused. He had just recollected, too, the dancer he saw in the fire on the plain with Lionwolf. It had been this one. It had been Ranjal goddess of wood.

‘With me now, come. We sport a bit.'

‘No, no,' said Guri and nearly groaned at the pain which shot through his balls at the evasion.

‘
Give
me,' said Ranjal.

Great God amen
.

‘Not – here—' stuttered Guri, sweating his enticing sweat and seeing her nostrils widen appreciatively. She too he must admit smelled glorious—

She rested one finger of the many on his chest.

The temple rocked. A sort of earthquake dislodged on all sides showers of gilding, brass votaries, plates of coal, scores of stone figs.

The responsive noise of screams and alarmed shouts and running feet was audible all around.

‘Stay yourself, girl,' grunted Guri, ‘not
here
. We'll bring the whole building down.' Both she and he smirked, a youth and damsel nearly caught out in the fruit shed.

He put out his hands and gripped her. Oh, she felt like the Rukar Paradise. ‘This way.'

It seemed to Gurithesput, Dog Star Lit Among the Nights, that he was aiming to spirit them back to that plain where he and Lionwolf had played at being human. It might have seemed like that to Ranjal too, for she had stalked Guri there. For sure, it was a plain, but if he or she had looked they were
north
of the mountains, and not therefore even non-physically in mutable, generous Kraagparia.

Guri did not guess this. He had tried to avoid causing damage. Now all he could think of was sex. Most of a mortal century, and the gods knew how much supernatural time, he had kept abstinent.

Down among the white blankets of the snows they hurled themselves. Warm as new-baked bread they found each other. Oh the touching and caressive grabbing, oh the thighs and breasts and loins and mouths and apertures and nooks, and oh the waves of lovesome lust that sent the top-snow itself into incessant javelinesque ejaculations.

An avalanche or two slipped slowly down the higher slopes. Brief hurricanoes whipped and whirled.

As frenzy subsided a sigh-like wind combed over all, optimistically tidying.

‘I shan't be faithful,' said Guri staunchly. He felt he owed her the non-promise.

Ranjal, who herself was apparently rather more than in their past, remarked, grinning her white teeth, ‘Not want faithful. Want nothing, I.'

‘Was it a good nothing I gave you?'

‘Give again. I see.'

After a while the combing wind gives up and leaves.

The cold plain, warmed in curious ways, takes a tally. What has the cold plain received? The bawdy upheaval has scattered both electrical and man-made tokens widespread. For example shards of treasure from the temple, transported here inadvertently in the lovers' stampede to get cracking. Among other things slivers of ornaments and filaments of wood and stone – including several stone figs. There are coals, chips off the ancient fossil blocks that Sham, the city called None Greater, uses for screens and panels, doors and roads. There are too traces of less concrete items. Shreds of spells and prayers, woven or carven, or simply made nearly actual by verbal repetition, flit and roll and settle all about for thousands of miles. A random sprinkle of such stuff comes down as far away as the continent's eastern hilt – Jafn country. But whole clusters thud and tinkle home across the nearer plain. While hitting the distant mountain range, now south, the odd spatter infiltrates a cave or two.

The god-charged artefacts and elements surely mean nothing in the broader scheme of history?

Guri has already been about this plain of the past, searching for the Rukar civilization. During his first life in the future, the Ruk had been mighty. Up there had stood Ru Karismi, capital of kings. And from this land called Ruk Kar Is had ridden the Rukarian destroyers of Guri's own people, who had mashed Sham to a mudhill. But in the past which is now, he has found no clue to them.

When eventually they have partaken of enough, the two gods see evening is curtaining the world.

By then everything else has settled, been absorbed. If they had in their delirium ever noticed the disturbance, now no evidence confronts them. All is well.

Guri was relieved and sorry to see Ranjal depart. She flew off over the dusk in her old broomstick mode. It was most unlike the luscious companion of the day. She had her own people to attend to. And he, he supposed, would go back to Sham.

Idly he bent and retrieved a piece of dark coal from the snow. Surely, not a memento?

Otherwise he did cast one last look at the plain, yet failed still to recognize it.

They had united in the Ruk's heart, about two miles from the height which would, in less now than twenty years, wear Ru Karismi for its crown.

If Guri felt any buzzing beneath his boots he took it for a slight subsidence in the permafrost.

It was however the vibration of a hibernating civilization roused by divine sexnastics – and waking up.

Two centuries of Winter, as they named the Ice Age, had driven these people below. The story of the earth, and of themselves prior to that retreat, became wrapped in the fog of drastic climatic change.