No Flame But Mine Read Online Free Page A

minds perhaps were all on the important battle soon to come, the jewelled capital bursting with riches. If they went with any woman tonight it would have to be a more average one. Nobody else was near the place where Beebit had been tethered or rather left un tethered. Suddenly Beebit, not knowing she would, had got up.
    â€˜It was never that she was looking at me,’ said Beebit in the mageia’s room; ‘she wasn’t aware of me at all. Her eyes were far away. But I looked at her . You couldn’t not look at her .’
    Beebit’s life, she said, had made her discount all men but her father – the only one who had not molested, bought or raped her. But now and then she had made love with women, usually her fellow harlots.
    Chillel drew level with Beebit, and only then she turned, as if Beebit had called out to her, which the girl would never have dared to do. ‘Perhaps,’ Beebit observed, ‘my look called out to her. Her beautiful eyes fixed on my face. They were like the night sky, blackness and stars. She said, Is it that you want me? What could I say? I shook all over and stammered, Yes. Then I am yours, she said. And held out her hand to me.’ Stunned by memory Beebit paused again. She thought of the texture of the hand of Chillel – silken, slender, not soft, more like a wonderful weapon of some sort, sheathed in costly material. Beebit finished, ‘We went into one of the little tents. Two Gech girls had put it up then gone off with some Jafn. I didn’t think they might come back. They didn’t until later. It was over by then.’
    She lowered her eyes.
    This censored account left out the amazing act which had taken place between herself and the goddess – she could be nothing else – Chillel.
    And the act was made amazing not only by its extreme delight, its sensual gentleness and ultimate orgasmic delirium, but by the fact that Chillel too proved to be herself able to manipulate her own limbs as Beebit could. Of course, to a goddess, such a knack must always be available.
    Afterwards Beebit had seen their joining over and over in her mind. Yet from the strangest vantage, as if she had left her flesh in the seizure of pleasure and watched from the tent’s low ceiling. They had lain forward on their ribs and forearms, heads held upright, almost in the pose of lions, but hands clasped and mouths fused. The rest of their bodies had risen like the tails of two snakes. Above them their torsos and their limbs arched, met and twined, until their loins could also meet in a perfect and irresistible momentum.
    â€˜My spirit,’ said Beebit in a whisper, ‘came out of me. When I came back to myself, she was gone.’
    The fire flickered. The mageia spoke to it and it steadied.
    Beebit did not speak. Instead it was Azulamni who matter-of-factly said, ‘My mother screwed no one else. Not long after, the Lionwolf’s Gullahammer reached the big city. The Death happened. Eight months on I was born.’
    Beebit brightened. ‘I was in a village by then miles to the west. I was already wending home here, but I got too large. The villagers took me in; there were only a handful of them. I had two days and a night over her. They wondered, as I could do such clever things with my joints and spine, why I had such a time birthing, but I did. And she came out already with two-colour hair and her eyes unlike, and then they were frightened. Rather than drive me off they ran away from their village. I could see them up on a snow-hill, hunkering there, moaning. So as soon as I could I tied the baby on my back and went away. The journey took about two months. By then she was already walking, and talking to me. In a pair of years she’s got to be what she is. I’m not bothered. What can you expect if a female god gets a baby on a woman? She’d have to be special. She can do all my contortions too, but that’s nothing to what maybe she can