No Flame But Mine (57 page)

Just now said mage had turned a jug of black wine into a little fat black pig, which pranced about the floor to the disturbance of the dogs.

Saphay was seated at Athluan's side in her royal gown trimmed with silver and belted with garnets. She gazed at the pig wistfully. She was reminded of spells she associated with the brief babyhood of her son, funny things the Olchibe ghost Guri had arranged to make the child giggle.

A toast rang out to Conas, Athluan's honoured brother. Saphay too elevated her goblet. They drank.

She thought,
What if I had borne my son after all to Athluan … My son would have been white-haired, grey-eyed. Human. He would have died
, she thought,
when they cast us forth. And so would I
.

Out in the garth there was a more complex noise. Sometimes lifelike events happened here, apparently stage-managed by the composite will to pretend. This however did not sound like an upset.

A ringing knock came on the door.

The Jafn had kept the snowscape, the ice wastes. The vines here only grew, as in the past, in the hothouse or inside the windows of a room. As the door was pushed wide Saphay looked up in human astonishment. The taboos of Let's Pretend were being broken. Outside the yard was full of burgeoning roses.

Athluan's steward hastened forward. ‘Chaiord, three travellers seek admittance.'

Saphay saw her husband's eyes were wide.

‘Let them come in.'

And into the joyhall three men walked.

Heads shrouded, they had dressed for the Winter, in mantles of heavy fur, clothes and boots of leather. One to the right carried a huge stoppered beer-skin. The man to the left bore a glass bottle stained dark blue, and some weird striped albino dog had padded in at his side. The central figure drew all eyes. He was not the tallest of the three: they were each tall and of a height with the others. And all were strong, muscular and straight, poised as warriors in the interim of some friendly combat. Yet at him all looked first, and back to him again. Across his shoulders was slung the great carcass of a deer, ready-drained of blood.

He spoke, and his quiet voice carried to every corner, pitched like that of the perfect bard.

‘The Klow feast tonight, don't you? Please accept my offering of meat for dinner. Fresh slain and kindly killed.'

Athluan had risen. Saphay also had stood up.

‘Be welcome,' said Athluan. ‘Say your name.'

The hood slipped back from the head of each of the three.

A sort of wordless chorus filled the hall.

Curjai, dark and fine, stood to the left with an exquisite oil of Simisey taken from one of his own altars to anoint the Jafn fire. Guri, tattooed and braided, and the potent drink of Olchibe held by one hand, stood to the right. Lionwolf raised his head the last.

For a second Saphay beheld then the wolf god from under the sea, Zeth Zezeth. For there he was, vested within a shell of gold and scarlet.

But then, across the wide room and the more than a decade of years and more than an always of estrangement, he smiled his smile of love at Saphay. And she could see that, even if Zeth was there in him, Zeth no longer wielded any influence. He had become the tinder. The flame – was
this
.

Lightly hefting off the deer carcass in the doorway, her son walked up the hall.

‘Good evening, Mother. Are you well? If beauty means health, never better I'd say.'

She found she had lifted her hands and now he took them. The warmth and actuality of his touch disproved the real and the unreal both. He talked to her in the language of the start, Rukarian, and in the former flirtatious way she had forgotten.

Saphay the lioness stared into his face, his eyes.

‘But you are the sun,' she said.

‘I am the sun. I am energy, force and light, and so can be anywhere, in any shape I choose. I am this, and other things, and the sun too and for ever, until for ever's done with. Don't be nervous, my dear. The sunlight won't go out if I pay you a visit.' Still holding both her hands, he leaned forward and kissed her cheek.

She whispered, ‘I thought even now – I'd never see you again. That would be my one last punishment.'

‘But we all make mistakes, Mother. Here I am.' Then he let go just one of her hands and offered the Jafn salute, hand to heart, head unbowed, to Athluan. ‘Father. You keep a rare house here. You bade me welcome.
Am
I?'

Athluan said, ‘Long ago in the waste of Kraagparia I told you as much. You know it. You are my son, and welcome as long waking.' He moved around the table and embraced Lionwolf as his son. Athluan added, ‘And they are welcome too. Your brother there. Even your uncle.'

The deer was taken to be portioned; here it would cook in one minute. The sensationally aromatic oil went on the hearth fire which burned blue and filled with pictures, though any dancing girls in the flames were decently clad. Guri brought the beer-skin which obviously poured on and on, never empty. He was the Star Dog Star and a planet now of morning and evening, but he too could be anywhere else, in the astral 'tween world or on the earth, as Curjai could be also. Beings of energy yet also of flesh. Mortality had taught them one of these conditions, death and rebirth the other. Gods are made by mankind.

That night, or
un
night, or
real
night, they feasted in the hall of Athluan. Later they told stories, of Olchibe and Simisey and of the Jafn heroes Star Black and Kind Heart.

Later yet Lionwolf would go up another ladder-stair of darkness, and into its heart to his own wife, Chillel. Curjai would seek the couch of
his
wife who was the dawn, and wake her fire with his. And Guri? Guri would chase across the eternity of space, leaping meteorites and nebulas, finding out the distant stars which were not as he had ever supposed them.

But Athluan and Saphay would make love in the stone-wood bed with the lamp turned to its more shady side, and the patterned covers plunging off on the floor.

It was as he was constructing the first of the two altars, the one to Rusa Ushai, that Fenzi was joined by the chaze.

He glanced up and saw it coiled round a shrub, watching him with its cat's eyes.

He was not especially one for cats, let alone snakes.

But he recalled how it had always been with Sallus, a dependable enough man, and then it had been with Azula. Now it seemed it and she had also separated. Like himself, the chaze was on its own.

Fenzi offered it water from the gourd he brought to and from the nearby brook. The snake sipped. When Fenzi had completed the altar to dawn and put a flower and a fruit on it, the chaze went and inspected his work.

After sunfall Fenzi made a fire, obstreperously or couthly striking a flint to get it instead of any sorcery. The chaze positioned itself at the fire's far side and watched him still.

He threw it a piece of the meat he cooked.

The snake ate it.

That was a sleep night. It often was, now. When Fenzi woke at sunrise the next day the chaze lay curled against his back. At noon it brought him a dead rabbit it had hunted.

Fenzi thanked the snake. He knew it would both hear and grasp what he said. Next therefore sometimes he talked to it.

The young man thought how strange it was he had been severed from all he had known and any he had loved, and even from his own earlier self. And now his family was a poisonous white snake with a charcoal ring around its body. But he had taken up gods instead of God, too. What was a snake?

Eventually they were more used to each other. He began to fathom now and then in turn what the snake ‘said' to
him
, by its body movements, and symbols it ‘drew' in the ashes of the fire. Sometimes it went with him when he walked about, but they were not always together. Fenzi would go off by himself, or the snake would. Once he saw it mate with a long slender lizard. Could offspring be possible? He never learned, nor did the chaze ever tell him. But Fenzi gave the snake the name
Fron
. This, in fisher-Jafn, approximately meant your best team-fellow on a boat. The chaze accepted the name and would, when in the vicinity, come to it when called.

Occasionally too it went up again to the slope where Azula's bothy had been. The shelter had collapsed long ago, but the tree into which the snake insinuated itself had only flourished. Here the snake would lie upright in the embrace of branches.

One evening, put out by the singing birds and a little drunk on some berry liquor he had managed to ferment, Fenzi copied Fron. Wriggling his own way into another larger tree he cautiously wound back the branches to try to make them support him. He fell asleep at this and roused aggrieved, because it really was
not
a sleep night and he had behaved in a totally unJafn way. Then he found his tree had made a cocoon for him and held him firm. Only when he attempted to leave did it mellifluously unwind and let him go.

There had been mystic dreams during the forbidden sleep in the tree. One showed him that he felt the scars on his ribs to be like the strings of a harp, able to make melody. He only recollected these surrealisms gradually. When ten nights later he, and Fron, went back and repeated the procedure, other mystical dreams informed Fenzi's sleep. He discovered after about twenty similar experiences that he began to understand the speech of birds and beasts, and of the trees and plants themselves. It was the initiation of his magicianship, the beginning of the enormous genius of thaumaturgy that would come to him. And it was also the end of his aloneness and his sorrow.

TWO

Meeting a blue sky, a green land. Between the two lay Kol Cataar, the Phoenix city. The magician stared unblinking at the scene. At noon the city had that look it always had, and was intended always to have perhaps. Every wall and tower, every terrace and roof seemed designed as jewelry. But between this luminosity and his mansion, a discrepancy occurred.

He had kept the snows about his southern house. Where the fertile fields and pastures ceased his acres of Winter began. Only three miles further south beyond his house did the frazzle of blowing wheat and corn, dilf and barley blondly resume.

Thryfe's estate had become an island.

‘Highness.'

Thryfe turned. Lalath was there, the female Magikoy who retained her own accommodation in the city as he did not.

‘Thank you, Lalath.'

She had brought a letter from the king and other impedimenta of the court.

He was aware, with his refurbished instinct for such stuff, that Lalath believed she loved him. He felt regret for her when he remembered this. He would – could – never return even the slightest of her feelings. Being Magikoy she too would know this. She approached him where needful as one did a magus of an august order. Otherwise she never intruded herself. Had there been gods Thryfe would have thanked them for that. He did not want to be cruel.

Yet she turned like a shadow of drooping wings. And when gone she left a remnant of her frustrated desolation in his room.

Aglin was better, he thought. The mageia who had been Jemhara's friend was by now attached to the royal household, a favourite with Queen Tireh and her daughters. Aglin did not seem distrait but she had made a private shrine it was said to her Magikoy tutor, and brought offerings there to Jemhara as if to a goddess. He had not chided her for this though he believed Jema would not have liked it – perhaps she would only have laughed. People sought consolation in various ways. To Thryfe, if she should encounter him, Aglin was scrupulous in forms of respect, but she did not meet his eyes. She blamed him in some oblique manner for the loss of Jemhara. In that she was like Thryfe himself. He did not see what he could have done finally. Yet he would never quite forgive, as Aglin would not, his ultimate incompetence, his inadequacy in the grip of fate.

He vacated the room and climbed the three hundred stairs to the towery.

Some huge old books brought from the former capital rested on stands. He prowled among them, turning a page, reading a few lines, moving to another volume. Outside the windows as below, the distant twinkle of Kol Cataar.

At sunset he must go there. Bhorth had requested it.

And I would rather do anything than go
, thought Thryfe with weary wryness. But it was not to be avoided. He was still Magikoy and had been detailed to serve the court of the King Paramount.

Swift as an arrow a bird flew over the casement.

It was of a sort he had not seen before in his life, though his books recorded it from the past. It had a brown body but an orange breast and flicks of azure on its wings. A novel bird of the world's Spring.

How quickly the newborn season raced. Whole forests, jungles, cast off their mail of ice, their foliage expanding to blot out the sky. Weeds and briars pierced the crevices of streets and houses. From the coast came word of splitting ice and high waters that now and then flooded inland. Their ingress was always leisurely and heralded by warnings. The fisher villages and even the small disorderly cities to the north – Thase, the enduring Kandexa – took heed and had no casualties. There was a tale too of a giant wave to the south-east which had been halted and blown away by the god that none of them ever called Vashdran – Lionwolf. In fact, like the Jafn, they had taken to calling him only
God
. For he was the sun and the sun
was
God at last. The sun had been resurrected out of the cold ocean, or the colder Hell. He rose to nourish the earth.

Thryfe's mind obstinately shifted.

He shut his eyes and thought of her.

To the deluge of pain that struck him what was a tidal wave? He reprimanded himself. He shut himself in the iron of self-control. But nevertheless, he thought on. Of her.

Long ago, not so long ago, when he pursued her to Kandexa, he had believed he could find her and save her, if needed, from whatever had encompassed her. And yet over there in that now glinting city, he had known in conquering rushes of despair that she was lost.