No Flame But Mine (6 page)

Athluan glowered now, furious at her insult to his father Arok and the men of the Jafn Holas. But in that instant she winked out into nothingness.

He stood there now actually
un
believing, until his nurse came with her smiling kissed mouth, and the orange.

Around ten hours after, as the garth prepared its suppers, and in the joyhall of the Holas House women hurried from the cook-fire to the long tables with meat and bread and beer, the watchman at the west gate heard a faint knocking. Looking over from the height he saw a thin old woman lurking on the platform outside. The last of a dull sunset was behind her. She resembled nothing so much as a dilapidated crow.

‘Where have you come from, Mother?'

He was
genuinely
startled and disbelieving, for she did not belong among the Holas and no other human thing lived in these parts, as they knew very well. Despite leaving your own local demons behind, you often admitted there might still be demons native to the new place.

‘Miles I've trudged, over hill and mountain, through ice-wood and ice-jungle,' grumbled the reedy old voice below. Oddly he could hear every syllable – in Jafn, too.

‘How have you survived then, Gran?'

‘Wise-woman I am,' she snapped. ‘How the cutch else, you gobbler!'

The watchman recoiled. Perhaps though she was? But the Holas had five such women in all, plus the grouchy male werloka. Let them see to her then. If left outside she might, as some of them were said to do in legends, fly in over the wall and cause havoc.

THREE

What came along the alleys, around the outcrops of Kandexa, was a sight to cause sore eyes not cure them. If any
did
see they made off, banged the shutters, told themselves it was a fluke of the shadow and the last useless bit of moon.

For a kind of fast-growing vine crawled through the dark, over the snow and the stone.

Up a wall, across a roof, down an old mashed stair, on through another alley.

At the end of the wriggling, leafless, woody vine was a thing like a clawing hand, running spiderish on its far-too-many fingers.

Thryfe, standing in his chimney prison of ice, detected the scratching outside. A rat?

He had been unable to pierce the confine, let alone thrust it apart. For an hour therefore he had waited, aware of the horror of a gathering cold which seeped even through the psychic bubble that protected him. He had been trying to learn the nature of this sudden sorcery. For sorcery it must be. No everyday avalanche could contain such a magician as Thryfe. Even in his recent humility he knew it.

The cold laid its own claws on his body, invading blood and muscles, vision, thought; questing. He ignored it. He must find out the motive force of this foe, for only in that way—

The scrabbling above turned to a mad skittering.

A tribe of rats were about to burst through the lid of ice above. Could they also break the bubble of defence? Formerly he would never have believed so.

But formerly he would by now have freed himself. Everything had therefore become doubtful.

The ice above split. It fell in a cloud of powder. After that another thing fell.

He saw it dive straight down at him, a spiralling black spider already clutching for his face.

Like a man ungifted in magic Thryfe, as best he could in the narrow space, stooped quickly away, slinging the edge of his cloak across his head—

A voice spoke in the air.

‘Greeting, man-mage. It right you bow me.'
Bow
? He had
ducked
. ‘Ask now, be I get you out?'

Thryfe pushed off the cloak, then straightened. He had recognized, he thought, the dialect and syntax of the rural eastern Ruk, but with some other essence in it far more sophisticated. Yet as he expected no figure was visible. Only the spider hung dangling, which now he identified as a carved wooden hand, with other hands sprung from it and at least twenty-one fingers. Something tickled in the back of memory.

‘Yes, I should like you to get me out. Is it possible to you?'

‘Why I offer if not?'

‘Reasonable. In exchange, what do you require?'

‘Nothing. Give now.'

Thryfe acquiesced. ‘You are part of Ranjal then, goddess of wood.' He had heard of her, seen her temples in the eastern villages. Nothing was what she was always ceremoniously offered.

Thryfe did not believe in gods. At least, his attitude towards them was ambivalent. Everywhere they reportedly abounded, or if not then one omni-ruling and all-purposeful God. These things to Thryfe were merely magic focuses, or the power surges either of men or of the earth, both entirely misunderstood.

Nevertheless here this being was. The recollection of his dream of the Lionwolf as sun god sparkled across Thryfe's inner eye. He dismissed it.

Some antagonist was at work against him: this unknown element, felt when Jemhara had been hidden, felt again in the attacking snow, might have stirred up, inadvertently, the arrival of a rogue helper symbolized as the primitive Ranjal. Benign energy to balance the malignant one.

Thryfe offered Ranjal several elegant palmfuls of nothing. He had seen this done in her rough little temples. Though unreal she was presently alive and not to be offended.

The hand seemed satisfied. It gave him a playful tap on the shoulder.

Without any other preliminary the wiry vine that coiled behind it paid out like twirling whipcord. It roped him harsh and hard. The hand hooked companionably about his neck.

The force of Ranjal, whatever motivated it, was conclusive. Lifted without effort, Thryfe was rushed up through the chimney, out of its top, and deposited neatly if ungently in the alley.

A muffled rumble and further cloud of ice crystals signalled disintegration of the chimney.

The hand unhooked. It lay down on its vine on the street.

He might as well ask.

‘What caused my imprisonment?'

‘How I know? Some enemy cause it to you.'

‘Surely. Then why help me?'

A pause. He sensed a shaggy divine puzzlement.

‘How I know? Is to do.' The hand bounced and administered a sisterly slap on the arm. ‘Go us now.'

‘Where?'

‘Where you want go, where you as were going.'

‘You know Jemhara's house here?'

‘This one of me,' the hand flapped, ‘live there.'

Then it gripped him, not quite by the scruff of the neck. He was reminded of a mother cat dragging her young to shelter, although Ranjal of course was more the mustelid type, a badger. By means of her merciless clasp they flew up walls, scraped rather against them, over roofs and sheets of ice.

They landed among a bundle of dwellings, some marked by old fire. A door gave on a stair. The hand let go again, retracted its vine and leap-crawled away ahead. ‘Attic,' was the last word the goddess vouchsafed to him.

When he reached the top of the stairs the hand had vanished. He read that the door was firmly secured by magecraft. He read too Jemhara was not at the moment here. She had been. A faint non-physical perfume lingered.

Thryfe leaned to the door and spoke an inaudible word.

Unlike the ice-prison, the door reacted at once and in the anticipated fashion, opening without fuss.

Something terrifying happened.

A flood of joy sang through him. Twenty years – no, a hundred – dropped from his shoulders. He thought, No, not terrifying.
Am I still such a fool
?

He saw the narrow bed with its pelts, and the pillow where her head had rested. He saw the objects on the inlaid Rukarian table. On the wall was a peg with a worn, darned dress that seemed to turn his heart to butter, then harden it to a fierceness that burned. A twig hung there too, rather like an uncanny hand. Thryfe saluted it. He crossed the room and stood over the empty hearth and brought fire to it from nowhere in a single splash.

Soon she would return. Soon she would enter this room. It occurred to him she might be afraid to discover him there, or think him some illusion, even a trick played by a talented malevolent rival witch.

He put one goblet, made apparently from clearest ice, ready on her table, filled by dark red wine. And beside that an apple with a pure green skin that he had found on his travels and kept for her. A case of ice still swathed it, but the warmth of the conjured fire would deftly thaw that through. By the apple he laid an ancient ring of tarnished silver.

Outside, the now moonless city crept unknowing towards morning.

Thryfe opened the shutter.

Whether he stepped out, or simply disappeared into the shadows there, was uncertain, but where he had stood nothing visible of him remained.

On the peg the twig-hand twitched. It seemed Thryfe the Magikoy Master would not often need Ranjal's assistance.

The journey was a bumpy one.

Up hill, down dale – snow slide, treacherous crevasse, bear-fur forests, mountains poking like dagger behind dagger. They had been told to leave their chariots. That was to get out of them, give them up, for the seventy-nine men who had been one hundred and fifty, and themselves lied about being ninety, had captured Arok's hunting band and decided they would keep the chariots for themselves. Instead the prisoners were hauled aloft the hills of the giant riding-sheep.

Dromazi
the mounts were called. Most had two humps, between which the Jafn men were each obliged horrifiedly to perch behind the original cavalier. Some other beasts had only one hump, and there the rider sat forward on the creature's neck. None of the captured were offered a seat on these. They were entirely grateful.

The position and motion of the ride anyway were agony. Arok expected to become seasick but did not. Only marvellous Fenzi took it all in his or the dromazi's stride. He had mastered the knack in a couple of hours. But his reward for this was to have his hands tied to the saddle in case he also mastered his jailer, unseated the man and escaped. Meanwhile the Jafn chariot-lions padded behind the party snarling, in custody.

Once or twice you could spot a heap of buildings high above amid rocks and trees. Farms? Strongholds? No one said.

Up and down their procession went over the terrain. Then up and up.

Only Arok and presently Fenzi understood the new language, Simese. Their conquerors called the land Simisey. They were ferocious and loud, bellowing songs and curses, their hair woven and beaded like the manes of Jafn lions.

The little lionet-tiger cub had first been cradled lovingly by their leader. But after it bit him repeatedly, he was urged at last to have Fenzi's hands untied and to give the cat back to him. ‘There, baba,' said Fenzi, now in Simese, ‘come to your elder brother who loves you.'

‘No brother of
yours
, barbarian!' roared the red-wool-braided leader, whose name was Sombrec.

‘There, there,' repeated Fenzi sweetly to the tiger, just managing to say it also to Sombrec, who seemed on the road to exploding from rage. His mount however did so instead, letting off a colossal fart. That quenched even Fenzi's flirtatious sarcasm.

They finally reached the Simese city. Arok registered a crows' nest of a town up a mountain. This tip was known as Padgish. It was the capital.

To Arok only a garth could have any worth as either town or fortress; only a Jafn clan House had any credence as a palace. Sullenly he scowled at Padgish as they entered, until at length, reluctantly, he changed his mind.

For Padgish was impressive.

One long straight paved road, worthy of Ruk cities, led all through. On either side were edifices of two or occasionally three storeys. Some windows had glass. The palace had an excess with colours stained in them. Gardens boasted vast trees, and tree-trunk columns upheld the frontage of the palace house, then marched away in ranks inside.

Next something went tearing by, a man riding an animal that was not tiger or lion, not even a humped and huffing dromaz.

‘Horsaz?'

‘No – no scales. No pong of fish either.'

The horsazin of such reivers as Kelps and Faz did bear some vague resemblance. But the Simese variety were made of warm-tinted hide, the flying mane and tail of hair. They had no horn jutting from the forehead.

In depressed wonder the Jafn captives were herded into a yard of the Padgish palace.

‘This one can speak our tongue. And the black one, he too.'

Arok, and Fenzi still with the cub in his arms, feeding from a vessel of milk the captors gave him, stood in the throne hall. Sombrec, a warrior aristocrat born from a long line of farming royalty, scathingly listed the captives' only worth.

Trunk columns forested the edges of the hall. A king sat on a carved seat. Before him lay a knife with a blade of shattering brilliance. ‘Diamond cut by diamond,' Sombrec had loftily remarked. The king was like his men, dark-haired, dark-eyed, brown of skin. His clothes were rich and his demeanour frankly grim. He had asked questions of Sombrec and his men as to who, or what, the strangers were. He had already been told it seemed the strangers had killed a tiger, and freely confessed slaughtering others in the past year.

‘Well, if you can speak our language, step forward.'

Arok did so.

Fenzi walked just behind him, with the cub.

Khursp and several more attempted to follow.

‘Two are enough. Keep the rest of them back.'

A brief kerfuffle. Arok did not turn to see. He could guess.

He faced the savage king with bleak dignity, well aware the king thought
him
the savage.

‘What,' said the king, ‘is your outland name?'

‘Arok, Chaiord of the Jafn Holas.'

‘
Ch
—What does he say? Their
king
is it?' Murmurs. Yes, this chalky barbarian was the other nineteen barbarians' ‘king'. Ha ha. What a ripe jest! ‘Is he old? His hair is white.'

Arok interposed. ‘Among my people, young men and women too have such hair.'

‘
Women
, you say?' The king was intrigued. Disgusting. ‘Do you have any with you? Women, I mean.'