No Flame But Mine (48 page)

Then he saw the mammoth charge.

Naturally there had been several hundreds of them incorporated in the fight. He had watched as they buffeted, kicked and trod the Rukar sleekars and their charioteers to flinders. But now those of the tall pale beasts which survived were masterless. Mourning for their riders and for their own kin, they blundered among the general demolishment, sometimes trumpeting and calling. Sometimes too he had seen that they wept. The curious and awful phenomenon pierced him through; he had witnessed it before in his human existence.

But presently something else blew up at the central point of the city. Guri supposed it was the palace building that as a rule he avoided, the living quarters of the priest-kings. The afternoon sky, which had been cinder-grey, ignited to marigold. How beautiful the colour was. Guri gazed at it affronted, disgusted by the bad taste of its glamour. And then he heard the bellowing of the ourths in concert.

They came like an earth-bound whirlwind through the avenues, dashing all things from their way or trampling them into pulp beneath their feet. They were sombre with soot, bloody, seared by fire. But they pounded on as one single entity, in a rolling harmony, smashing those walls that still stood, those gates that had not gone down, destroying Rukarian and Shamite alike. Their eyes were minuscule dots of sightless light, mad with wrath and terror. Guri also experienced their brains; these were like lava. Dead smoke blew back from their hair, and some bore in their trunks pieces of corpses – a thigh, a whole torso even, entrails roped on tusks – and one had had some curtain topple on its sloping back that stayed caught by golden hooks. But all galloped like the liquid outer sea, a tidal wave, straight through the viscera of dying Sham. Northward they rushed. He saw them hit the ultimate wall, dismantle it, casting aside its last attackers and defenders like twigs from an impeding tree. Out into the swampland the mammoths poured, into the fog of arson that hung there, grew ghostly, vanished. From miles off distant isolate bellows drifted back, and drowned in the lament of the city.

He did not search after the ourths. He let them go.

Guri stood on the high place and beheld the greatness of the world razed. And Sham the candle blazed to its end, burned to a stub, faltered, flickered, and went out. The red nights were over, gradually the sable days were cleared. What then remained was not recognizable, only slag and flame-baked mud, from which the living were herded away into the south. No god had saved them. No god would. The past was over. To illuminate the future the fires of vengeance and hatred had instead been lighted. The legend had begun.

Thirteenth Volume

T
OWER OF THE
M
OONS
W
ITH
S
ILVER
H
AIR

Both ending and beginning may appear wearing the other's clothes. Not until they are seen naked can they be known, and sometimes not even then. Skin too is only a garment.

Magikoy saying: Ruk Kar Is

ONE

Green shoots had expressed themselves from the snow crust in broad swaths. Often there were dips of flushy snow nearby, upholstered by mosses or bristling weeds of some sort. In ice-woods every now and then a sycamore or tamarind might have thrown off a cask of ice. One branch or ten would hold up a spray of chestnut-coloured buds, albino fronds. Dark blue irises sheltered slyly in clusters. Some apples had been let go beneath a tree already reclaimed in solid rime. He ate one of the apples. It was not sweet yet had juice and pith and two black seeds attendant at its core. To him none of this was much of a mystery. But also he came across an upland village where evidently they had been made afraid by such changes. They were entreating Attajos their fire god not to overheat the earth. For what would they do if he did? And in the temple of the ugly Winter god, Tirthen, they grovelled saying
sorry, sorry
, as if it were their fault alone.

Athluan did not interfere. He had learned the lesson long ago of tolerance. He had been
too
tolerant perhaps. But still it was a habit not without credentials.

You could not ignore either the sheer
wonder
of being hale and whole and strong again. Of being adult as remembered. Add to that the fact one was immortal.

At some juncture he would pass through a door in this world, in this continent, and so into wherever it was Tirth had taken his wife.

Athluan by now was not unused to this sort of shift. He had been a ghost and travelled in various climes, before returning to the astral country and so back here. Only the astral phase he did not recall. No doubt that was part of the penalty for his current state.

Another village later had put a different shrine by the track. It caught his eye. It had been erected to a fire god, this one named, so the lettering said, Escur.
He
seemed to be a warrior god yet famous for more kindness than the other one, Attajos, whose son he was. An old woman tended the watch-flame. She called out to Athluan in the native vernacular which he had picked up with unnatural swiftness.

‘Yes, lady?'

‘Make Escur an offering. He'll grant you warmth and justice and good luck. Only once was he cruel, but that was to his own people after they slew his mother.'

‘Which seems quite reasonable.'

‘So too, it does. He rides a white tiger he calls Cat, and his partner is a goddess of dawn, Rushais. Thus the altar faces east.'

Athluan had nothing much with him, therefore he pulled off a silver link from his shirt and put it in her hand. The link was quite a fair size now though originally it had not been. His child's clothes which had left him quite naked at one point had cleverly grown up and modified with him in Saphay's fire-spell.

He had taken the woman for a minor priestess. But apparently she had, like the Olchibe, more than one string to her bow. ‘You seek Winter Tirthen?'

‘I do.'

He thought,
And I am the one believed only in God
.

But she said, ‘Over that rise the air sometimes lashes and shines. The weather has been better – or worse. Too warm. The fruit trees bloom and shed their fruit. Something has taken Tirthen's mind off the world.'

Athluan thanked her and went on and looking back five minutes after, as he started up the rise, saw she was no longer by the altar and there was no sign of her on all the open snow. He doubted she could have got to the village that fast.

About twenty paces down the far side of the ridge he saw the shimmer in the air.

A single stone stood up from the ground here, like the ones he had seen before on this continent.
They
had been many and very tall, and had given off sheets of emerald light. This was a dwarf of its clan and gave no light at all, but even so he sensed its true nature.

Among the other stones Zth had abused Saphay, and Athluan had demoralized and deflected him. And then the stones had themselves chastised Zth with their energies, hurling him at the sky where he disappeared, and from which he did not return.

Athluan bowed to the stone. He pulled off a second silver link – now only one was left: respect could be expensive. He put the link at the foot of the stone, and went on. Stepping straight into the disturbed air he moved through a semblance of a thin curtain. Then he was on a sea shore.

Out there beyond the shore ice the water was indigo blue.

Lapped by the shallows, an icy pyramid went up, and it was cloudy as scratched vitreous. It reminded him of the occultly shaped berg in which he had discovered her the first time, his bride, yet was not exactly the same.

Besides dusk was settling here, while in the previous landscape it had been morning.

Athluan paused to watch as a single full moon sailed up from what must be the east, out over the liquid sea. The sky was congested, nearly dark as the water.

Down the shelving rock he climbed, and so on to the ice fields, feeling as he did all his restored vitality and ability, young enough, old enough. For him maybe thirty had been the flawless age, and wrenched from him too soon in his former life.

Presumably he would have to scale the pyramid. That had been the plot before.

It would give him no difficulty. This body was ready-made nourished, exercised and flexible.

Yet he hesitated.

Instead of setting off at once he watched the solitary moon.

The sky closed about it, any faint star going out. Cloud foamed over, and one of the sky's mystic firmamental incidents happened.

A single shaft of moonlight speared down, catching the icy pyramid in its ray. The impression then was of a tower, solid at its base and less so above. And directly overhead in the cloud mass the moon still smokily glowed.

Athluan recollected a legend of a Jafn hero, not the famous Kind Heart or more famous Star Black. This man was a warrior of the ranks, but yet he had found in a moon shaft the white platform and garth of a gler that had molested his people the Jafn Klow. Entering the shaft he had met and killed it.

This then was an omen.

Surely even an immortal might receive one?

Before the shaft of brilliance faded Athluan ran along the shore. Reaching the pyramid's base, flaming in the moon, he sprang. He ascended the roughened quartz side with ease, not even really needing the precautionary two knives he pushed in and out and in to aid his purchase.

At the moment he reached the top the moon and cloud altered. A splatter of white-blue stars appeared further over to the south. They described he thought exactly the form of a beast, some sort of lion, but was not certain.

Athluan pressed his face high up to the pyramid's sloping side. It was more clear this high, and in this area it was like a window. He saw.

‘Face of God.'

But it was not the face of God, down there in the ice. Nor a woman's face as at the first.

What he beheld was Saphay below, locked in a sexual embrace with a black-haired being. Her delight was unmistakable, as was her unhuman partner's. No mortal might intrude, compete, draw near. No, not even an immortal.

‘Enough.'

It was not shouted. There was no need to shout.

One vibrant kick had smashed in the apex of the ice, and he had leapt down the space, thirty shield-lengths, maybe sixty, with the confidence of all he had become. Nor did his body fail him. He landed on his feet without any hurt or hesitation, beside the tumbled couch. They paid no attention, did not seem to see or hear.

The air was spiced and tingling –
musical
– from their pleasure.

He brushed that off him and spoke the one clear stern word.

Saphay opened her eyes. Everything else left her instantly, he noted, except for knowledge and dismay.

She was like any wife in life or story caught out with the neighbouring Chaiord. In the stories the cuckolded husband would then plunge his sword through both their adulterous bodies, cipher for the other betrayed weapon.

Athluan, though he had come armed from the Holasan-garth, did not draw the sword.

Instead he put his hand on the shoulder of the amorous god and with one wrench pulled him free of all contact. It must have been uncomfortable for both parties, even painful. Yet with gods, who could say?

Tirth spun away and as he spun a blizzard enclosed him, in which he stabilized fully clothed, not a hair out of place.

‘Unwise,' said Tirth. Another unique word.

‘Wise,' answered Athluan.

‘In fact not. I shall dispose of you now.'

‘She,' said Athluan, ‘has made me eternal. You though she's partially defrosted.' He folded his arms. ‘Try if you like. I'll wait.'

Tirth came at him then. That was, screaming snow and wind and needles of ice came at him. Athluan stood there immovable. What did this count for? He had been slain by a snow-wind much worse than this, full of lethal animates that tore him in pieces.
This
blast struck Athluan, his body, his face, slapped in at his eyes like bits of glass. But he withstood it, stood it, then ceased to stand for it at all. Shouldering through the mob of the blizzard he reached the entity Tirthen, which still somewhat resembled a handsome man.

In that moment Athluan perceived the god's basic unvalue.

He thought of the lighted stones and Zth, and crashed his fist into Tirthen's face. Winter was catapulted once more across the chamber of the pyramid and, striking the lower wall, flew right through it. Huge ice-works came down. A jagged dark hole with night in it and waspish whitish weather was the result.

Tirth did not return indoors. And above the open triangular chimney of the iceberg surged and grunted, threatening to fall in.

‘Now you'll come with me,' said Athluan. He did not glance at her.

Saphay sounded mortified. ‘You took too long.'

‘Oh? I thought a woman preferred her lover to take his time.'

‘Don't play with Jafn lewdness – or Rukarian sophistry. How dare you mumble that to me? All that trek I had to find you – and then you a child – and putting you in the vitalizing fire – and
then
how long I must wait.
Again. Years
I've waited for all this
curse
to be solved. And you, dawdling in the flame, like bread that wouldn't – oh yes, now a lewd pun –
rise;
too lazy to wake up—'

Without turning, Athluan smiled. The theatre of this was not lost on him. He used a voice like a battle-cry. ‘
Get up
. Now do as I say. I'm sick of your Rukar whinging, woman.'

‘
You
—' The fury in her perished.

Outside, her previous precious inamorato flailed and curdled on the night. Useless, all of them. Son, husband, lovers – men.

But she left the couch, which anyway by now was a heap of uneven ice. Once upright on the floor she was immediately washed, dried, brushed, combed and scented with Paradise. Her whiteness had sheathed itself in a suitable gown. Even she was taken by slight confusion, realizing the garment was in the Jafn style.