Read Online No Flame But Mine by Tanith Lee - Free Book Online Page B

was extremely familiar, very like the upper room of the Klow House. There a bed with coloured quilts and furs, there the Chaiord’s weapons and a lamp that might be turned to give a darker light. In such a room years past they had first made love, and in the phantom of such a room that ultimate time, Athluan a ghost and she a god, they had again made love. What else terrible and tiresome and soul-destructive would occur before he grew up and once more they might couple?
    To Nirri Saphay spoke solemnly. ‘I have bad news, lady. Your beautiful black son was swallowed by a giant whale.’
    Nirri turned, clutching Athluan. The toddler was all that kept her from falling on the floor.
    Tact had never been Saphay’s strong point.
    â€˜I saw a vision – an omen—’ said Nirri, stumblingly. ‘A black girl with fiery hair on a sled drawn by a black sheep, riding over the sky—And then the ghost promised my husband the Chaiord that Dayadin would be here – or somehow found here. And then Fenzi dreamed Dayad was here, in a nice place , Fenzi said.’
    â€˜There are always these things,’ Saphay replied with a wretched dismissiveness. ‘They mean little. Or else something gives us hope to torture us more. A nice place … probably that’s death. At least death would be restful. I’m sorry.’
    â€˜My son.’ Nirri buried her face in Athluan’s small body. Her ‘son’ did not mean him, he knew.
    Athluan sighed. It came from deep within him, from the former one he had been. He said the words the former one had said: ‘Nothing can divide us, death least of all.’
    Then the one he now was began to sob, not knowing what he said or why.
    Sombrec glared at Fenzi. Fenzi shrugged, and, extending his hand, helped Sombrec to his feet. Both young men were stripped to loin-guards. They had been wrestling, a favourite warrior sport at Padgish. Fenzi, wrestling Jafn fashion, had seemed an easy target. Not so.
    Risen, Sombrec went on glaring, now at a pillar. Risen, he was struggling with a physical reaction to Fenzi that was more than martial.
    Fenzi apparently missed this. ‘I hear the tiger cub is doing well,’ he suggested generously, as they strolled towards the communal hot tub.
    â€˜How not, with Curjai to tame it.’
    Arok and his men had been at Padgish ten days. Everyone was friends, as Prince Curjai had predicted – or had ordered.
    The Jafn men, picking up the new language, were quickly told the story, taken for flat fact by the Simese, all of them, one heard. Arok, despite his own interesting adventures with goddesses, giant whales, and invulnerability, reserved doubts. Two women, one supernatural, and a man might perhaps create a child between them. But this ?
    The king was said to reckon it true. And if a god had seen to the business, any king would be cracked if he objected.
    Riadis, the red-haired queen, was one of many regal wives but had borne no children. Then she did bear one, which she claimed to have got from the Simese fire god Attajos; she had, they said, the burns to prove it. This first boy however was crippled, missing limbs or something of the sort. He had died young of a fever. Not so long after, the shaman attached to the queen’s suite beheld a vision of the dead lad, who had been named Curjai, returning, this time equipped not only fully to live as a man, but as much more. At which another sparky smacker burst out from the heart of the fire, scarred Riadis again and again made her pregnant. When the second boy was born there could be no doubt of a resemblance to the earlier child, though this time nothing was awry, and next thing he began to grow at a prodigious rate, one year for every two or three months, they said. A couple of years now under his belt and he was twelve or thirteen – as certainly he did look to be. Moreover he could work magic as elegantly as any mage or shaman. He healed, he drove off