No Flame But Mine (49 page)

Although he was not, she sensed Athluan was laughing, there under the play-act of his rage.

A silly smile upturned her lips. She erased it.

‘I am ready,' she said softly, behind him.

And she walked behind him too, angered at it, yet tickled and laughing at it also, marvelling and nearly weeping, full of every contradiction that any woman in love might feel and know.

Past the collapsing pyramid, whole storeys of which were now bursting in the black, moving sea, no trace of the Winter god was to be seen.

Above wretched Ddir, rearranger of stars, had put up a ridiculous effigy of some animal, part lion, part wolf – ah yes. A lionwolf …

‘Where will we go?' she murmured.

‘Where I say.'

‘Very well then,' she said. The smile fluttered on her mouth again and she did not resist.

They trod across the sheet of snow, not climbing up the rock, only skirting the ice fields and the sea.

After a mile she said, almost inaudibly, ‘I'm cold, Athluan.'

She was, but only because she had allowed it. She did not need to be cold, nor care if she was.

‘Soon it will be
Summer
,' he said, perversely perhaps.

‘Not for a century at least.'

‘Then this is Spring.'

She had never heard that term before, not as such. How clever, she thought, that the barbarian Jafn had language for an interim condition, as Ice Age gave way to ordinary seasons. Though their speech
did
contain more than one language,
was
quite clever …

And it was true. Irises inked black-blue through the ice. Nearby a hump of tree had removed its glacial coat, its black leaves unfurling like eager hands.

It occurred to her she might be drawn back to placate the entity of Winter now and then. It was not real infidelity. It would be part of her function to deflect his – its – powers. She mused on this with a strange innocence.

Probably Athluan knew as much too. Would he be incensed?

But she was the goddess of day, and
Summer
day at that.

As she walked, in deep silence, she began to remember her son.

His image had been fused up there on the tapestry of night, but did this mean she would certainly see him again? By now, to see him seemed impossible. So long to wait – you have made me wait – a child, a child in fire growing quick as a plant in sunlight – but he had been a baby, Lionwolf. She had borne him, and then—

Her mind moved suddenly from him and fixed its total attention on her husband, striding before her. All she could see or think was him, and how the cloak swung from his shoulders, his pale hair, the sound of his light breathing.

It was as if she had not seen him before. Now she did. And with that revelation came an overwhelming consciousness of loss. This halted her. It seemed like the sinking of her heart's own sun.

Never before had she felt it, evaluated it,
known
it. Not any other loss, but this loss,
this
: Athluan's death, there in the Klowan-garth so long before. When it had happened she had been only afraid, if rightly so, for herself and her child. Now years, far more, had run away, and the pain reached her blazing, as if one of Ddir's farthest stars fell towards her and crushed her where she stood.

‘You died,' she said, staring at the earth. ‘You were killed and they brought you home in your chariot, for tradition, and you turned blue in your chair in the hall and decayed, but
you
weren't there and there was no one, no one – and I – and you – Athluan …' she sang in lament. And sinking on her knees she began to cry the long-ago widowhood of her youth and her mortality.

Athluan turned then and came back to her. He lifted her up into his arms.

‘And now I'm here. Because of you, goddess, I shan't die again either in this world.'

But she only cried, holding on to him, crying, crying.

Behind them both now, above a slope, out of one external half-world and into another perhaps, Jafn warriors waited for Athluan, riding-masks pushed back from faces. Their hawks ruffled their feathers, and the well-trained dogs stood on the snow. The lions that drew the chariots did not make a sound, save when the last whisper of the snow-wind chinked their harness and the beads in their manes.

Athluan thought stilly,
This woman bore the brunt of all our beginning. What has been begun was begun through her alone
.

Her recent adultery meant nothing to him. He too foresaw it might now and then be repeated, in order to defuse the energies of the cold. Another myth, purposeful yet weightless.

In the end, her tears ceased.

She said to him once more, ‘Where will we go?'

‘Home,' he said, ‘to the Klowan-garth.'

‘But the Klow—'

‘Are gone. Not here, sweetheart. Here they
live
. Give me your hand. I have my own place yet, and you're a goddess. Not till time's ending will we be separated, or suffer. Maybe not even then. Is that the vow you want from me?'

‘Yes. Take me home.'

There had never been a home, save there, she thought, in the barbaric and despised Jafn garth. Before that the unloved, unloving, impoverished corner of a palace in Ru Karismi, later a host of spots and spate of journeys, and she on her own, even when she had thought herself among companions. He had told her, they had been meant to love and had no space to accomplish it. As he now dismissed her coming ritual infidelities, so she ignored the immateriality of this re-creation they would go to.

Together they stepped up the slope.

The night undid itself there; paleness and brightness rode through. And then they were all of them gone, gone to their own place, to torchlight and black wine and a lamp that would darken on one side, to the joyhall and the songs and the upper room, and the young lions and the stripy hawks, and the coming of the day, and of Spring.

TWO

Just before the sun had fully set that particular evening, the great whale Brightshade had been basking on some distant shore, this time in his complete regalia of psyche and physical body.

Zeth Zezeth was anticipating returning into his heaven and finding there Jemhara, irresistibly awaiting him. And this now was his final visit to Brightshade. Although, at the hour of performing the visit, Zth did not know how final.

Here was the coast of Kraagparia, the land from which the Kraag had long departed. Only Brightshade was there now. And the dull sun was descending inland, making the snow-hills black and the icy shore rich red.

Having brought himself to it Brightshade too was waiting for Zth. He flexed his massive, comparatively for him small, fore-limbs, tossed the last sun on his horn. In the fishy forests on his back things slithered, twittered.

Brightshade was aware Zth would be arriving. Maybe he had drawn Zth to him to settle the business between them. The whale was no longer afraid.

No, even when the fire-arrow of Zth's advent marked the orange-red dusk.

Zth touched down.

‘Well,' said Zth speaking very beautifully, gleaming with malice, ‘here you are, as ever. Idle. Did I not give you tasks?'

Brightshade talked in a fine coined voice, an innovation which startled Zth.

‘You may take your tasks and chew on them,
Pth
.'

The deliberate mispronunciation of his mighty father's name's first consonant was extremely insulting. Did the Sun Wolf try to tell himself it had been due to the whale's infancy in words? Or to whalish nerves?

‘You rouse yourself to rudeness, you cretinous hulk, do you?' Zth let loose a golden bolt of electric pain. It slashed across Brightshade's body.

Another wonder. Brightshade had himself released a
shape
of thought. It formed instant armour all about him. Though the ice cracked and the sea reared, Brightshade was unharmed. He lay there and looked at his evil parent, and let the
essence
of the armouring
shape
show itself to Zth, freestyle but unmissable.
Lionwolf
, said the
shape. Lionwolf my brother, and my loving ally
.

Zth let go his equilibrium. Violence and lights flashed round him. He shrieked his malevolence. Through the tornado of insane rage small phrases sliced. ‘So you make up to
him
? So you think he can match
me
? So you think
you
can match me? I will take every fleck of you apart and cast the fragments into nothingness.' But despite all that the whale lay there,
smiling
. The missiles bounced off him to hit land or sea or sky.

Only the earth took any damage. An ice-forest above the shore was burning. A real tornado started to brew between water and atmosphere.

High overhead a curious star formation had begun to show a lionish animal, which winked on and off as inflamed cloud raced over it.

‘Now I kill you.' Zth, prancing.

‘Oh,
Pth, Pth
,' said Brightshade. ‘I have only to call my darling brother. Shall I do that? When he comes he will do for you.'

Zth rushed along the frozen beach. He seemed not to grasp his face was in a rictus of fright, let alone that he was running away. To Zth, already much more than three-quarters a deic lunatic, the retreat seemed actually mere boredom at being with his second son.

Zth naturally would murder Brightshade. He would blast him into atoms and seed the clouds with him, and for days and nights it would
snow
whale. But first there was something more pressing … what was it? Yes, yes, Zth must punish the coast.

Definitely the Kraag were gone. But other people had here and there moved into the land's interstices. They were fishers or herders, sometimes nomadic like the Urrowiy of the northern North.

Night was now fully present, only one ribbon of non-colour dissolving over the land. Three moons had come up, each some way behind the other. And each only the most transparent crescent. The stars that displayed the legendary Gech lionwolf beast had grown more bright.

Zth Zzth ploughed along the coastline, stitching it to the ocean.

Jemhara, still then alive, was observing through her spyhole in heaven. She had not fully understood what happened next. She had seen only that he let loose some virulent strike that had no excuse, was ‘unforgivable'. This act of his now about to take place would decide her on her ultimate action, and she would therefore seduce the god, impair him beyond recovery, and herself die.

What Zth would do, had done,
did
, was to engender a tsunami from the depths of the outer sea.

The landscape had grown warmer by some slight degrees. It was partly ‘Spring', no longer all Winter. This made catastrophe simpler. Icebergs sailing beyond the skyline had melted off water into the waves. Currents were eccentric.

Zth summoned the forces of the sea which, since he had been exiled there in ancient myth, he seemed to keep some control over.

The coast began to churn.

Long troughs of liquid and ice were being dredged away to the horizon. Frozen slimes appeared where comatose creatures crawled, revealed unready to the air.

Zth brayed his orders, springing southward from beach to beach. He covered thousands of miles.

By the time he had done his worst, all thought of Brightshade was gone from him. He was assured he had achieved his aim. He then launched himself back towards his own sun-world, where the human woman of great beauty waited, a dagger of destruction in her loins.

Fluid water never left him quite unmoved, not even now he had so often woken it from the frozen state. His passing was like that of a warm creative sun. What else, of course?

Lionwolf had been walking for ever, or for a short intermittent while down the land of Kraagparia, towards its furthest southern tip. Aware of other things, his own metamorphosis was itself still continual. He was, even for himself, like a scroll covered with writing and painted images that unrolled and unrolled finding and showing always more, never coming to an end. But so it must be for all living things, it seemed to him. Their self-discovery merely took them millions of years. But then, he had always grown up fast.

Now he had stopped his stroll high up among mountains and beside a river. He gazed down on the thick rifted ice that culminated centrally in one slender stripe of moving water. Silken worm, it wended eastward to the ice fields and the sea. Lionwolf had stood here physically for an hour or a day observing this.

Gradually the sun began to disappear.

The sun was not yet his; it had not yet begun its transformation. That it gave off more heat was due only to a sort of attraction between them.

Sunset here was strong. Lionwolf examined it. Darkness hung overhead. But below Lionwolf lay an apricot lake of light cupped in a dark blue ice plain, pierced itself by indigo mountains. This alternate country was made only of clouds and afterglow.

Lionwolf turned from the river and climbed further up the mountainside.

Presently the sun, which had sunk, became visible again down in the apricot lake.

He let it sink once more. Then swiftly once more climbed to get above it, and that way watched it sink, for him the second time.

The Winter god had said to him,
Ice twilight, twice light
. Musing as a man would, Lionwolf wondered what this riddle meant. Perhaps it meant only what he had just done and therefore seen, the double sunset.

As the cloud and light had constructed another country so something lay physically beyond the world itself. It was a void that was not a void. There the stars burned and the moons rotated, and the sun was born and died and was born again. He had not yet gone out to the region where these things went on – not yet climbed that high. He knew and had for some while, no longer thinking as a man but as a god, that it would naturally be possible to him to leave the world and travel up beyond the sun, there to look down on it from the spatial void, as he had done minutes before from the mountain.

In that unexpected moment his mind touched Chillel. It had not happened before in this second transcendent earthly life. To touch her was a miracle. Like velvet the surfaces as his thought rubbed itself against the thoughtless beauty of her own. Even for a second, to be lost in her …