No Flame But Mine (56 page)

Unallied with any of this, there was now something else.

High up towards the crown of the world's globe, the northern pole housed a fourth, lesser landmass.

Reconnoitred from immensely far aloft, it seemed also more oddly shaped.

It was in the form of a horned whale.

But the shooting star fell on in the way of shooting stars.

Stealflame shot from the etherium rejoicing and wild in her incendiary panoply, her right hand open and her left closed in a fist.

She knew what the landmass was. It had been built from the leviathan Brightshade.

And because Brightshade could now release his astral being whenever he wished and without hindrance do whatever he wanted, his physical body was anchored like his luxurious palace in the ocean, ready always for his return. The body had indeed sequentially become a continent, though of modest proportions. The back of the whale had long been an established ecosystem and now, parked indefinitely, it mutated into a geography and biosphere of swamps and jungle-forest. Now too it was quite cold, but soon would be merely
moderate
. In any context, a surprising term to apply to Brightshade.

Stealflame had saved the world and was skittish. She sang about twice-light.

Below, a tall, dark-green plantation, coated only thinly with rime, invited her.

Into the woods of Brightshade Stealflame descended.

No sooner did her feet touch the ground than she herself was earthed. Stealflame, like the saved sky, regained serenity.

Between the trees the terrain was covered in snow, but through this grass and herbs were protruding. Nearby a baroque assembly of elderly wreckage and skeletons had been grown over by lianas – an arbour. In a valley beyond the woods two broken ships, one with fifty masts, were changing to verdigris.

There were no longer any regional effluvia, no rot or fishy stinks. With the advent of lush fauna Brightshade had become fragrant.

The Children of Chillel knew most things now. Did Stealflame's mental library suggest other past elements of Brightshade-land? Did eyeless monsters still dwell on his back? What lurked in the shrubbery? Nothing nasty stirred. Would it matter if it did?

Using her inner senses, Stealflame cast downward instead through the whale's earthworks to see if her step-uncle was in. But only a ticking of sentry mechanisms – lungs, heart, brain and suchlike – could be picked out. Himself was clearly off on a jaunt.

However—

Stealflame glanced up into the higher thicker woods.

A large black animal – no monster; a cow? – was pernicketing its way through the trunks, sometimes pausing to pluck and chew the grasses.

In the end the cow too glanced in Stealflame's direction and stopped in its tracks. It was covered in thick curling wool and was not a cow at all but a gargantuan sheep.

Stealflame stared, and the sheep thoughtfully stared back.

The young woman had not checked her own appearance. Never mediocre now she was arresting. Her solar victory had turned her fawn skin to a deep gold, of all things most like the skin of her unrelated stepfather Lionwolf. Her hair was all purest silver. Only her eyes had not altered, one dark, one light.

The sheep seemed to evaluate this.

The girl wondered how it would react if she began to go towards it up the slope, because if it was here then people were too, surely. Stealflame felt a wish in herself to see some people. She wanted to prove they like the world had stood up to everything, were thriving.

‘Where's your master, sheep,' she called encouragingly as she started to advance. She did not levitate so as not to shock the sheep. But the sheep could have told her a thing or two about that. It tried to with an off-hoof bleat. But, ‘There, it's only me, your friend,' Stealflame reassured it presumptuously.

‘And which friend is that?' said a woman's voice from above.

Stealflame stopped.

In the shade of the frosted pines, eucalypts, flowering palms and pepper trees, she glimpsed a blacker shadow which perhaps held up a fiery torch.

‘Greeting, lady,' said Stealflame. ‘What place is this?' Although she knew it was Brightshade.

The other seemed to know quite well herself, and that Stealflame did also.

‘Mine, and his own,' she said nevertheless.

‘Yes, the whale's land,' agreed Stealflame. ‘But I meant what people have colonized it?'

‘You think there should be people here then?'

Already Stealflame sensed there were, which was more than
thinking
there were. Exactly then, some way off, she heard a faint metallic clink of something, and then a rill of women's laughter. Though expecting it, for some reason it startled her – why was that?

She decided. She began again to climb. The dark woman with the torch seemed more intriguing than threatening.

As she climbed, ‘May you tell me your name?' inquired Stealflame, blooming with her own.

She did not expect what came back. It was a sibling name, albeit minted in another tongue.

‘I am Brinnajni.'

Stealflame then stopped rock still.

She said, ‘You are
Burning
Flame. I am
Steal
flame. That means—'

The dark figure moved out into the daylight under the trees. She was black as black silk. She was black as Chillel. Her torch-fire hair was the copy of Lionwolf's and hung down her back to her ankles.

Oh
, said Stealflame's lips, without a sound.

‘Yes, yes,' said Brinnajni with ironic impatience. ‘I'm
their
child. Whose are
you
?'

‘Hers,' said Stealflame, ‘and my mother's.'

Brinnajni gawped at her. Something so peerless,
gawping
, could not do anything but enchant. Stealflame gave an involuntary chuckle.

At this Brinnajni's beauty contorted in her clown's grin.

And Stealflame fell in love.

Standing there on Brightshade's continent, looking at her first half-sister, Stealflame gave up herself as lovers must, to reward and rapture or remorse, tyranny, hurt and Hell. No choice. No regrets.

And this Brinnajni saw. Her dagger edge blended to liking, at least to that. And up in the woods the laughter came again, this time male and female mixed.

‘I was here before, this whalescape,' Brinnajni announced. ‘I came back. The country has improved, I can tell you. I arrived with my other sister there, the sheep. She will be your sister too now. She and I grew up together, with no help from either of our mothers, but you fared otherwise, I think.' Stealflame nodded, ashamed of her luck. Brinnajni said, ‘But you and I and our sheep have other sisters too, and some brothers as well. I don't mean the men who went running to Chillel to be clawed by her and remade as little gods. No, these stay here, all of them, and I am queen over them. You shall see.'

Stealflame said, ‘But how—'

‘Come, Steljeni' – Brinnajni used the version of Stealflame's name she would have been given among the herders where Brinna was born—‘surely you must see not all the men who lay with our mother kept her seed intact in them till the last battle? No, they went off with other women and seeded them with it. That way they died in the White Death as mankind are pleased to call it. But the mothers lived, went away as did yours, birthed the children … sad tales of
their
beginnings, or gleeful ones. But other tales they are. And how they came to me another story. One day I or they may tell you. Or not.'

Stealflame caught her breath.

Burning Flame seemed gratified. ‘Do you see up there, Steljeni, a makeshift house, quite domestic? The whale continent is worth a look. I explore often. When the whale comes home, I must introduce you to him. Can you fly?'

‘Yes, sister.'

‘I assumed you could. Let's go up then. What,' abruptly Brinnajni added, ‘were you doing this morning?'

‘The sun.' Modestly Stealflame cast down her eyes. Opening the closed fingers of her left hand she displayed a petite mote of something that would have charred her palm, all her arm to bone, had she not been what she was.

Brinnajni approached. She put her hand on Stealflame's wrist and bent towards the worm of sun.

‘From
there
?'

‘From there.'

They looked at each other over the stab of stolen sun-fire.

‘What a cunning one you are, Azula,' said Brinna, using her sister's other name now.

‘I didn't mean to take it. When it was changed and I – did what was needed … Later I only found I had.'

‘The best thief, not even knowing her own theft.'

‘Perhaps I should never have brought such fire to the world.'

Brinnajni put her arm over Azula's shoulders as they climbed, in fact still on foot, the rest of the distance to her shelter. It looked grandiose despite her words, if rather lopsided. Within were tiled floors and the great bed Brinna had shared with Dayadin.

‘No, sister, you were clever. A link has been forged, earth with heaven. The earth has wed the sun. Spring's coming, can't you feel it? Spring will last a century. And then we'll be ready for a
Summer
. In the long evenings I expect I will tell you all their stories. Do you
like
stories?'

Where their feet had pressed the soil of Brightshade, anemones were drifting from the snow, dilute saffron like the start of the day. Merciless the black sheep grazed on them. They were mown, champed and swallowed. Impartial and harsh as fate, the sheep went from clump to clump. But on top of the hill the two sisters were laughing bell-like in the bright morning air, Flame with Flame.

If Brinnajni scries, and maybe she is too occupied to do so, what does she see now?

Aside from her own colony, all her hero brothers are scattered over the warming waking world.

On the south-eastern continent they are finding other races, mingling with and becoming heroes for
them
, ruling over them as kings and chiefs. In the depths of these lands antique Kraag cities lie hidden. So the legends have it. But since Kraag philosophy states that what is real is only what is
not
, if ever found conceivably the cities will become non-existent.

Sallus has gone home to the Southern Continent like a sword, to be the heir of a king. Dayadin in the north-west continent is with his own father and mother there, another prince, a Chaiord's son in the Holasan-garth. But Guriyuve – nomadic like his father? – refused the act of home-going. He has undertaken an odyssey across all the seas and lands. This will one day finish in his recursion to Olchibe nevertheless. That must be. For an era will arrive when a brotherhood
will
be sworn among the Children of Chillel, not least by Sallus, then king of the peoples of the Ruk, Dayadin, then High Chaiord of the Jafn nation both in the south and the north-west, and Guriyuve, Great Leader of Leaders of the Olchibe. A fourth king will swear the bond with them in that time, a man named Gunri. He will not be a child of the goddess, not even of the rogue children who are Brinnajni's subjects. But he will be a human of power and courage, lord of the united races of Vorm, Fazion and Kelp. Named for a mythic hero-poet he will be one himself. And before his death at a hundred years of age, when the Black Kings are far older yet still young, he will write something of their history and much of the saga of the Lionwolf.

But if Brinnajni scries this, it is yet to come.

Of all her brothers only Fenzi lingers alone on the island that had been Chillel's.

No other is there now. When he woke up from his short Jafn nap they had all gone, and the terror and splendour of the Spring's first sunrise was over. He had missed it. Even so the park will soon cloud with blossom, the last of the ice barrier will melt, and the liquid metal rivers harden into mines of silver, copper and orichalc.

Fenzi and the animals of the isle will wander among the groves, concerned perhaps by the increasingly fine weather and the blueness of the fluid sea. Fenzi will never take himself ‘home'. What in him had been a generous sweetness will modify, through trauma, exile and brooding, to gravity and wisdom. He is to be a mage of unsurpassable knowledge, whose ability will dwarf even the acumen of the Magikoy. And this too is still to come, miles off on the horizon of his immortal life and the centuries of his world.

As for the unburned coal he picked up from the hillside, he will never throw it in any fire. Nor will he throw it away. Most likely in either case, he forgets to.

Yet only a month from the first day of the reborn sun, Fenzi will glimpse Ruxendra Ushais dancing through the dawn sky, with a huge hound bounding at her side. He will put up, like many, a respectful altar to this youthful deity of sunrise. And a while after, next to it, one to her partner the god of fire, who in the Simese mode he will call Escurjos. But to the Lionwolf Sun and to his own mother who is Night, in all his unending days he will never raise a single stone.

Under the carved and painted pillars of the Klow House, and the rafters where the hawks stalked and flared their wings, the Klow sat for their feast. Shaggy dogs patrolled the floor between the benches. The favoured lions in their house-collars posed pragmatically, knowing their warriors would feed them titbits when the food came in. The Chaiord's pair were washing each other's faces in a seemly but maybe greedy manner – licked pelt of a fellow lion being the hors d'oeuvre.

The chamber was full of smoke and noise. Torches winked on jewels. Outside in the garth was the steady note of busy coming and going, and of song. Tonight was a festival of the Klow, the Night of Those Before. From sunfall to rise they would commemorate the ancestry of their clan, its former Chaiords and greatest fighters, mages and heroes, the relatives of the present king, all the remembered dead.

With every toast someone was praised. Among these were the father and worthy brother of the current Chaiord. His other brother Rothger was not mentioned. Rothger, out in the world of men, had brought the Klow to dust. There they no longer existed save in anecdote or curse. And that was Rothger's doing. Yet while he writhed in some hell of the Other Place, all these men and women now present and correct lived on in the personal world of Athluan and his queen. And
he
was an immortal and
she
was a goddess of day. But who those were that made up their court was debatable. Undoubtedly some were the dead who had returned to accompany Athluan, men he had known and trusted, valued women of the House. Others perhaps were even spirits, the very vrixes, corrits and glers of the Jafn earthly plane. Now reformed in a cordial environment they might make well-intentioned comrades, servitors. The House Mage was probably of this sort. Very old in appearance he was hale and virile, and performed eccentric conjurings.