No Flame But Mine (47 page)

The weather improved. Sham bloomed.

There was no plague, no striding ruin. In the nearby surround of country people went about their lives. Only now and then news came of a distant storm that had brought sickness on its wings. Finally, spasmodically, a few hundred refugees entered the city. They were from intermediary land, far enough from the mountains to ensure that the scythe had merely glanced over their heads. And though afraid in subtle, deep-rooted ways, their fear went off. Absorbed in Sham they resumed their vocations and trades or took to inventive begging.

He saw one Gech woman from the farther wilderness, who brought her two small sons to his altar in the temple for protection. Guri noted the boys were more scared of this adult god-person than of any remembered tempest. He came down and spoke kindly to them, dressed as a priest. Blessing them he made sure each, mother and kiddles, received cure-alls and long life. Sod bloody Lionwolf and his scruples about healing and benison. Even now Guri suspected his adoptive nephew had transcended too fast and so not grasped the facts of a hard life.

But when Guri tried to extend his help across the whole city he felt his power waver. He too had been curtailed, though by what he did not know. By life itself perhaps, always in cahoots with death.

Five months later confused word began to filter in, this time from the south, of a vast movement of warriors. Most took it for some ferment among the Ol y'Chibe.

Guri went to see.

It was not the Chibe. Although the Chibe had been involved.

Without a doubt his gospel to them of non-violence had impeded their resistance when, with no or minimal warning, the horde of the Rukar coursed down on them.

The Olchibe fought, yes. But guilt attended the skirmishes. To kill was an error. They must indirectly beg the pardon of Great God for any victory; they must atone.

The Rukar had no such scruples. Their gods were gods of smash and grab. Flaying the packs of Ol y'Chibe, they bore on towards the city.

Guri manifested both in his temple and among the sluhtins. He gave priests and people a sermon. He gave the warriors the same sermon while their mammoth cavalry stamped in rhythm. The Olchibe must resist the Rukar scum. To kill was not always a mistake.

He put on too the appearance of a warrior and led them into battle. Some fights this way were well won. Not all though, for those who followed him had gone over to the manner of peace and compromise. It had been ploughshares for decades by then and the swords were rusty.

The Rukar, in battle, he did not recognize. But he had removed for himself all personality from them. An enemy should never have a soul. Being like the old days of his first life this disturbed him. He too felt yearnings for atonement. Flattened them.

A new myth meanwhile rose among his people. There were
two
Great Gods. One was a god of passivity and tolerance, and one a war-god for conflict, mounted on a roaring mammoth.

Divided in twain Guri marvelled in angst at how the Great God – he – became plural. That peerless totem he had sworn by so often as a man – it was himself, and twice. Like the filthy gods of the Ruk, he also had been made a schizophrenic.

Guri's own sluhtin, where reluctant Yedki had borne and left him, had itself been sacked by the time he reached it. Any Crarrowin he believed must have been slaughtered. Normally they were. Unlike the average woman – or man – they refused to give in and fought on with magic till crushed. He had heard tales of the occasional Crarrow who had used her skill to escape. But mostly they would not desert their sluht.

Almost a year after the sky blink of northern destruction, a quiet night covered Sham.

Observing the dark Guri thought it had outwardly Sham's general night-look. Torches and braziers were blazing on the streets, lamps in windows, and along the frontage of the temple. But he could hear all around a sub-vocal plaint of anxiety like the rustle of rats in the cellars.

It had seemed to him there had been no recent time-slips. He had been consecutively aware of the passing of every day and night here. This was so since the Uaarb was blighted into being. He had used every minute to rally the city, preaching, energizing. Themselves they had laboured. The outer walls were toughened and built up, the city gates reinforced. Military exercises took place. Crocodiles and the vicious apes had been trained too, to attack a foe as in the arenas. But they were erratic. They often made mincemeat of their tutors instead.

Many declared no force would ever reach Sham. Sham was favoured and invincible. Sham had her God – her
two
Gods. These would protect her.

Guri had considered that aspect. Unbeknownst to the optimists of course he had already seen he could not do it. More to the point he had already seen he had not
done
it. Privy to the future of his first life, he knew that he had not rescued Sham. Even so, he considered options.

To protect the whole city seemed beyond his power. To destroy the enemy wholesale seemed too dangerous. It would require a blasting energy that might rival the Magikoy weaponry and fall-out of some type must be inevitable. It never suggested itself to him that
they
might employ their now newly invented weapons here. The future also demonstrated they had not. Doubtless the Rukar too were initially and sensibly afraid of them and kept them far in reserve.

Knowing the future was the main stumbling block to Guri frankly, and all options broke on the face of it. The events now sweeping in had already happened. Even if he were able, what enormous foundation might he dislodge should he dare try to undo history?

He did not yet know he was to blame for waking the Ruk civilization. He had thus far been spared that.

On this night however, standing on a corner of a narrow street in Sham, Guri beheld the Crax of Yedki's coven wending towards him along the hard-packed snow.

‘You are Gurithesput,' she said.

He had been in disguise, that of a gladiator with a skin of drink on his arm to warm him.

He saluted her politely. ‘Good eve, Mother.'

She must have been dead surely, twenty or sixty years or more ago. This was her ghost, her phantom come out from some hell – or hopefully in her case, heaven.

A painful memory struck him of how he once, when dead and damned, had visited his own sluhtin coven, and sent them the black seed of Chillel in the body of Ipeyek, to foster a hero among them.

‘You consider the fate of Sham,' said the Crax now.

‘Just a little, Mother.'

‘Do nothing, Gurithesput. Do
nothing
.'

Shocked. Guri dropped the beer-skin off his arm and glowered at her. ‘
What
?'

‘You know, Star Dog God, that interference is fatal or more likely only useless. Leave it well alone. Yes, you are a god, but you are not in charge of these matters.'

‘If not me – then which god rules here? Is it the Rukar trash—'

‘None of that. None of you.' The Crax raised her hand, on the wrist of which a bracelet of thin gold shone. She looked healthy for a ghost. ‘See.'

A ball of fire rose from her abdomen and floated up to perch as a globe on her palm.

Guri stared. In the fire he saw another globe. This was white, yet faintly stained here and there with a bluish greenishness.

‘What is that, Mother?'

The Crax only watched him. She had coins strung in her hair too. She had come out well dressed. Nor did she seem old now he took her in properly, resting his eyes from the fire ball on her face.

‘Some things must be,' she said. ‘The foul herb must be eaten and the fever endured in order to grow well.'

‘I don't understand you, Mother.'

‘You yourself have suffered death, horror, salvation and rebirth. A common event. The old sun was the enemy, and then the Winter itself, the time of ice, that was the adversary. But only one other moves you now, moves all of you like bone pieces on a board. Struggle as you may, moved you will be. From the start of it, this One has moved you about. Even your rise to godhead has been
this
One, moving you. And the rest, gods and men, one and all.'

Guri wished he had not put down the beer. He had a very mortal dryness in his throat. Obligingly the skin lifted itself to his mouth and let him swallow a gulp.

‘What purpose do I have then, Mother?'

‘Your purpose
is
to be moved. It must and will be accomplished. You're not alone, Star Doggy. Your Lionwolf too is a game-piece. Even the night-goddess Chillel-Vangui, even she. And the old gods, they're like children's toys by now. One moves you, moves you
all
.'

Guri said, ‘Why have you come to tell me?'

‘To save you effort that will only hurt you and others. Poor lad,' she added, with a strange smile, ‘I recall how you grew up so fast, and your mother ran away and Ennuat, fussy as a bear, took care of you.'

‘I was my own father,' confessed Guri wearily.

‘So you were. So are all men, Guri. Now I shall go.'

‘Where to, Mother?'

‘Ah. Don't you know? I'm a child among the y'Gech now, a boy of seven years who grows in the ordinary slow way.'

‘A
boy—
'

‘A boy, Guri Lit Among the Nights. My soul's come out this evening in this former physical shape you recall to tell you things. But now I hear my mother singing in the potted firelight. In a month or so she and I will be slaves of the Rukar. I want to be with her now, while I can.'

‘Then let me save you – that I can do—'

‘Now, my boy, what did I just tell you?'

The fire in the hand of the Crax blew suddenly up into the sky. It drifted off over the roofs of the city, flame with a round core of white and green. And
that
was his adversary,
that
moved him like a piece of bone? Over the temple roof it went and was gone.

When he glanced back so was the Crax.

Tears ran down his face. He rubbed them off with the gladiator's fist. Taking up his beer-skin he slunk to a brothel to pleasure the girls till the sun was reborn. But even in their arms he thought now,
I am being moved like a game-piece
. Even this, then. Even with Ranjal? And somewhere in the busy dark he saw the waking he had caused with Ranjal in the Ruk, though nothing had been further from his thoughts.

A man would have slain himself probably. But that was no solution for a god – nor maybe for a man either, if he must only get up again in another life.

A century after perhaps the Magikoy, or some lesser scholar, rewrote the story of the Ruk. The blasting of the Uaarb, this document insisted, happened in
pre
history. The destruction of Sham too somehow retreated further into the past. Despite that it was happening
now
.

Time must after all have slipped. But he thought not really, the god, starting up from some amorphous otherwhere he had retreated to, as men retreat into drugged unconsciousness.

Scenes
:

The big sculpted darkness of Sham against a sea of fire. The walls had given to the south; the siege if such it was had not lasted long. The enemy rode their chariots inside, their deer-drawn sleekars. Banners redder than the fire. A hundred, a thousand faces turning over like broken flowers. A Rukarian man raping a Shamite whore against a burning wall, stabbing her even as he thrust, penis and knife. Tears of blood, vomit of flame. A tower crashing. The roads of coal caught light with perfect logic. Streams of melted snow went running like live boiling rivers. A chest spilling jewels was left by the path, there was so much plunder.

He had seen it all in the legend anyway. In his first human day this tale of the city's sack had been told to all the kiddles at the earliest age. They were educated in it, just as they learned to braid their hair and to say their prayer
Great Gods, amen
.

Guri pelted through Sham. Now he was a warrior, on foot, smiting the foe. Now he was a priest, one of many carrying the treasure of the temple to a place of concealment – which was soon found, of course. The spears went through him, the sword cuts. Sometimes he even fell down out of a sort of unsurprised amazement. There were from him no bouts of bellicose sorcery, no weapon wielded by him that was ahead of its time. He himself did kill, if only with mortal tools. Once, twice, countless tiny times he rescued someone – a woman, a child with a baby in its arms, a little dog, even a wounded crocodile. Even a Rukarian lashdeer trapped in the harness of an upset sleekar. Such small acts did not disturb the huge and wicked scheme of the sack.
Do nothing
, he had been advised.
Something moves you and all things
. There was no choice.

Scenes
: The temple, one section of which was exploding under the pressure of fire and oil, shards of bronze and wet silver and coal plummeting to all sides, sparkling. A tangle of limbs, a shattered pillar. One of them a Rukar, a boy – ah, god – God – for a moment his dying eyes, though dark, were like the lost and fearful eyes of Lionwolf that long-ago, far-ahead night as they had marched towards Ru Karismi. ‘Sometimes I look back and see the distance I've come,' said Lionwolf, ‘or forward, and I see a light as if the earth burned. And sometimes I wonder what choice I have.' And Guri had answered, ‘No choice. Your kind – none.'
None, no choice
, he murmured now.
None of us ever, gods or men – none, none, none
.

He breathed on the enemy young man's dying eyes and took his pain, which passed like a black thunder up through the sparks and smoke.
All of us, one way or the other, live for ever. But does that then make this acceptable? Is
for ever
to be only
– this?

Black night went to black day. The sack continued.

Scenes: Scenes
.

Guri stood on a high place and looked down and saw already the hideous coffles of slaves, roped, chained, driven through the avenues of sinking or rising fire. Some had been praying to him in his half-wrecked temple. He had not had the gall to manifest. What use was a god who could not help them? All he could promise was life everlasting, but this psychic bandage, at such an hour, was surely contemptible.