No Flame But Mine (53 page)

Both animals had engaged instantly in a dance of war. One leapt at the other, both leapt, both fell and rolled together over the sky. The stars were snagged in their mouths, in their pelts and in the wolf-cat's mane. They spat or shook the stars out again, wanting only to maul each other.

Uncle Guri, do you see
? called the boy's voice from long ago.

From the door of the hut, ‘I see,' muttered Guri.

On this occasion Guri was sure, though he was aware the war dance would soon end in congress, he would not be aroused by what went on overhead. He would not now, he thought,
chance
it.

But behind his shoulder the young girl stared with a kind of priestly amazement. He could tell for Azula this ethereal mating would be holy.

There they went, too. The male dog-cat had pinned the female cat-cat to some invisible surface. He was mounting her, holding the back of her neck in his jaws.

As they worked towards their apex, the couple in the sky, Guri felt the urge only to grimace. Well, he was a god now himself. He pondered too that this was nothing to the incendiary madness that must have gone on when he and Ranjal enjoyed their
antics
.

Lionwolf had become utterly
lionwolf
.

In the ice swamps of Gech they would point them out, the marks of wolfish lion-pads in the snow, prints of abnormal size which shone without need of sun or moon.
That
was a lionwolf.

Now in the garden of night the lionwolf had also come to exist.

He was a beast of the size of the largest lion, and he was maned as both male and female lions were, but with the superb exaggerated ruff of a young male. The facial mask was that of a wolf, yet the skin smooth of pelt as was a lion's, though with a wolf's golden eyes, in the pupils of which sequins darted of cobalt and red. The ears were wolvan. The rest of the frame had all the flexibility seen only among cats or serpents. But the structure of the lean pelvis was more like that of a wolf, and the feet of the beast had aspects of both wolf and lion, while the lower legs were clad in hair. The animal's tail was plainly uncanny. It was like a thick club, but composed itself of two elements. The inner cauda was hairy, a wolf's, but about it wove like a liana a
second
tail, which was a lion's and ended in the leonine tuft. Beneath, genitalia were in evidence. These were sheathed after the way of a dog.

The shade of him was nearly white, just as was the vivid image of him in the air. An unanticipated colour maybe. But the mane and ruff were brazen, and the hair of the limbs and tail showed brazen, and the lion tuft of the tail was like bloodied brass.

Over the parkland he raced. From the thickets the deer bolted away, and small lizards fired themselves off like curled balls. He hesitated for none of them as the creatures overhead had spurned the stars. He was intent only on one project.

Ahead the tower rose, with the silvery blown moon static on its top.

In the brain of the god-become-beast was what? Power and lust, intent, culmination. No other thing.

He had gained the upland of the hill when out of some opening in the tower
she
expressed herself.

Chillel had become panther. Though larger than the cats of her retinue, matching in size the male animal that sought her, she was maneless like them and covered like them in a short plush of hair. Yet her colouring too was unusual.

Where his gold and red had gone to snow and brass, her blackness was
blue
. She had spent time in Lionwolf's blue Hell. Perhaps she had been influenced there to this complexion.

She poised on the hill, watching as he rushed towards her. Access to the brain of Chillel had never been available. Either she was too complex, or she lacked all complexity always. Her brain remained therefore obscure and indescribable. Yet in her black eyes which had an emerald sheen on them a sort of tender hunger was, or was imagined.

The lionwolf reached the panther on her hill.

Phallic, the tower went up above them. But it was hollow also, and might symbolize rather the female vaginal canal, contained inside the body of night. The moonglow that anchored over it must then perhaps represent a womb.

Both creatures paused below the tower.

Each sprang.

On earth as in heaven the dance of war commenced. Both fell, locked already by their fangs fastened each in the other's flesh. Blood sprayed, his black, hers crimson. As they rolled over the turf lush plants unfurled instantly from the blood spillage, and the grass grew longer. Sometimes as the two beasts fought and rolled and kicked at each other, the just-grown flowers were snapped off in their mouths. But even these, dropped, grew again. The dual tail of the lionwolf lashed the ground. His weapon had unsheathed. Swarthy and smooth as any bulb, it glittered moisture, touching now and again the paler iris of the she-beast's labia.

The dance and the war abruptly concluded.

Up reared the male and stood over her. He took her by the fur and skin behind her head.

With his teeth clamped in her neck, he mounted her, bestrode her as day topped a world of night, and sheathed the blade of his sex once more, now in the dusk-blue honey of that inner tower.

Above, across heaven, all the lights burst.

On the ground jewelry buds opened wide in petals and penile stalks fiercely pushed and strove like snakes.

The land roared in one prolonged, gargantuan spasm.

They sank together, beast on beast, lowering their heads gently to the turf.

And the sky broke in twain.

To one side, the east and south, it became, in a swift lambent torrent, morning, and a diamond sun flamed in the height. To the west and north the phosphorescent night stood, seeded with stars and now with six quarter-moons strung up like a chain of scythes.

And oh the silence, not that of any quiet day or calm sleepful night. It was the silence of an interval between two vast dramas. The margin between the past and all else that was to be.

Fenzi had hypnotized a deer and slain it without hurting it, as he now knew how to. He was amenable to not causing undue distress. Nevertheless he missed the chase, and even the satisfaction of a quick efficient kill.

When the sky filled with incendiaries he was offended.

Marvels happened too frequently. He had had enough.

And with that to consider, when the cipher of the two doggish cats copulating gave him an erection, Fenzi refused to respond. Tumescence went down as they did. Then he beheld midday and midnight co-existent and total as two pages, up there together in the sky's book.

He sat on the grass beside a grove and looked at this abomination, and felt no hint of future improvement.

Gradually the double face of the sky melded into a twilight, and then into a dawn where the sun and all the over-number of stars and moons became shadows.

Only then did he lope across and stamp out the tiny fire he had noted on an adjacent hillside. Some kind of lone coal was in it, which indifferently he picked up when the fire went out.

Lugging the dead deer he started to walk away.

No other lingered on the island. Only the vicious sorceress-goddess and her filthy cats. Although the woman Azula had stayed.

She was up there in that ill-made bothy, with the wisp of fire-smoke on its roof.

Fenzi thought of the lonely coal left in the forsaken fire.

He too was unused to being alone.

If he took the meat up to the bothy would Azula be impressed? He visualized her dark eye and her hazel eye and the hair and the skin. She had a charming voice, he must admit. He had heard her singing recently.

She loved the goddess.

Well, Vangui was not violent to her own sex.

Fenzi recalled his physical mother, and Nirri. He curtailed that. But then he remembered the little white lionet tiger cub he had delivered to the prince at Padgish. That had been a cat, but it was perfectly all right.

Not wanting to but not wanting either to do otherwise, Fenzi got a more adequate grip on his kill and began to climb towards the girl's hut. Was
Azula
her real name?
Azulamni
? But that was her mortal mother's name. He was most of the way up the hill when her secret name, which no one had ever told him, sang inside his ear. If it made him jump that was only a reaction. He had heard her singing anyway. He was almost at the door before he saw Guri looming there, protective avuncular arms folded, beetle-browed.

Fourteenth Volume

S
TEALFLAME

Keep something between you and the hot sun.

Advice attributed to the Kraag:

Southlands and South-East Continent

ONE

Azula sees it come, the levinbolt. She bares her teeth and bellows into the core of it.

The levinbolt strikes the earth directly
through
Azula.

At this point she is unaware when the corpse of her mother disintegrates.

Beebit, dead and held in Azula's arms, could not withstand the blow.

For herself, Azula feels nothing epic.

She is conscious of a kind of fizzing in her veins.

Nothing more, really.

Yet now all the lightnings fall on her, singly or in groups, and as each of them blasts through her and is
earthed
and so ruined by her, only her fury makes her drunk with pleasure that this enemy who had murdered her mother is now destroyed.

Then the attack ends and quietness fills everything, and Azula looks about for the bone which is all that remains of Beebit.

Before she sees it, a charismatic man is standing in front of her. Never has she seen anyone like him, although perhaps the Lionwolf is like this in his own different manner – and by now she knows she has met the Lionwolf, though where she is unsure. The Lionwolf has called her in courtesy ‘Daughter'. But this other god has long black hair and black eyes and he is Winter, this she sees too, Winter who here at Kandexa has tried to wreck some essential scheme. And she has foiled him.

‘How talented you are,' says Winter, who in Simisey is Tirthen. ‘You can defeat me. Come then, I shall be your slave, fair maiden. You have no kindred. Let us go away together.'

But Azula can already see how he is disintegrating – not abruptly as did her mother's corpse when lightning struck it – but as a snowstorm may, when the wind blows from the south.

And then she opens her eyes and the swirl of whiteness is only petals shedding from the vine she has twined through her hut.

Outside Guri and Fenzi were cooking the deer meat over a bigger fire they had built, speaking in low voices of hunting and skirmishes, of bows and types of knife, and the best seasoning for particular animals. Men's chat. Azula was not sorry Guri had headed Fenzi out of the bothy. Though a Chilleling Fenzi was not like Sallus, could not remind her of Sallus. She wished he would go away.

The snake had rustled off into the dawn. The prodigies of the night seemed to have made no impression on it.

Azula however believed the creatures mating high in the air had had vast if obscure import. She herself felt some door now stood wide, some barrier had dispersed. Again and again her eyes were drawn to the sky. Clouds difted over and birds, and the light varied. This was not why she stared at it. She was uncertain why she did.

The dream of the lightning at Kandexa had not, curiously, vexed or grieved her. Waking she took up Beebit's bone and stroked it, but then she often did. The dream too was an intimation?

When the meat began to be ready on its spit, Azula grew irritated at it, the al fresco meal, the heady smell and way the men sat there comparing Jafn and Olchibe spices and bows.

She walked from the bothy without a word and trotted off through the park, the grasses brushing her ankles. Neither of the men tried to stay her. Neither spoke.

‘It's coming, Ma,' she said to Beebit in her mind, as she jogged along the rim of the land. ‘Soon I shall be doing it.' But she did not know what or where, or why, only that it must be, and that Beebit perhaps knew that too, and was watching. A distinct excitement filled Azula. And a slight doubt, which she was sure was only her ignorance, for it would not matter. ‘Do you like my other name, Ma? I'll always be Azulamni too. But it's proper that Chillel-Toiyhin-Ma gave me a name as well, I suppose, don't you think so?' Azula's mind sang her second name. Now she ran fast, leaping high above the grass like a young deer, or sometimes turning cartwheels. On their hill the two god-men looked at her. They were no longer comparing bows.

Gold on black, black on gold. They wear their natural colours. They unite as humans would. Only
they
reveal they are gods.

Vashdran the Lionwolf, Toiyhin the Dove.

In
this
reality there is no necessity for one to dominate. The dominance of each is absolute. As is their integral oneness, with themselves and with each other.

Do they even talk to each other? Does the language of eternity now convey all meaning? But do stars converse, suns and moons?

She spoke to her lover in the centre of the day that ruled now the garden of night.

‘Remember, beloved, from nothing I was made – I am the vessel of what made me, who are three gods, or one god that has three persons. For this, and to be this, I was created and am.'

‘The three gods Ddir, Yyrot, and the other, Zeth.'

But his tone was relaxed and almost teasing.

And the Dove finally answered her own riddle.

‘No, beloved. Think only of one god that has three persons. A god firstly born from a mortal, a god secondly dead and alive in Hell, a god thirdly reborn as the sun. It was not who fashioned me, but whose unformed will desired my fashioning. You, my love. Who else?'

Lionwolf held her in his arms. In her face he could find the reply to every question. But in these empyrean moments they discarded godhood. They were only a man and a woman. And if they would never die, neither fully could any man or woman either. Or if at last they
could
die, so might all.