Child of Flame Read online

  Just as he had feared: a Quman soldier had found the discarded armor.

  He lunged through the curtain. The Quman soldier had wings curling up above his back where he bent over the mail and helmet. Ivar ducked down to get under the wooden contraption. Just as the other man spun, he thrust. The short sword caught the winged soldier just under his leather-scaled shirt. With his wounded arm he reached out and wrapped his forearm around the man’s head and with all his weight pulled him in through the entrance. Wood frames snapped against the lintel as Ivar fell into the water with the Quman landing face first in his lap. The sword drove to the hilt between the enemy’s ribs.

  Water licked Ivar’s lips as he pressed the man down, holding him under. The man twisted one way and then the other, trying to raise his head out of the water, but Ivar countered each movement with a sideways push on the hilt of the sword. Steel grated against bone, causing the warrior to convulse and lose whatever advantage he had gained. His black hair floated like tendrils of moss. Ivar tasted blood in the water. All at once, the Quman went limp.

  Ivar shoved the dead man deeper into the pool and staggered to his feet. His body ached from the cold. He dipped a hand in the water to scrub at his face, to wash the taint of blood away, but all around him the pool seemed polluted by the life that had drained into it. He carefully slipped past the moss and found clear water outside.

  Lightning streaked the sky, followed by a sharp thunderclap. A voice called out a query. On the earthworks beyond, a man’s shape, distorted by wings, reared up against the night sky, questing: an- other Quman soldier, looking for his comrade. Ivar’s position at the base of the ditch, within the shadow of the lintel, veiled him. A moment later the shadow moved on, dropping out of sight behind the earthworks.

  A drizzle of rain wet Ivar’s cheeks. With a swelling roar, the river raged in the distance like a multitude of voices raised all at once, but he couldn’t see it, nor could he see stars above. A bead of rain wound down his nose and, suspended from its tip, hung there for the longest time just as he was suspended, unwilling to move for fear of giving himself away.

  Finally he set down his sword, rolled up the mail shirt, wrapping it tight with a belt, and looped the helmet strap over his shoulder. With the sword in his good hand and his injured hand throbbing badly enough to give him a headache, he fell: his way back under the lintel. Gruesome wings brushed his nose, one splintered wooden frame scraping his cheek as feathers tickled his lips. Outside, rain started to fall in earnest. Thunder muttered in the west. If they were lucky, rain would obscure the signs of their passage and leave them safe for a day or two, until the Quman moved on. Then they could sneak out and make their way northwest, on the trail of Prince Bayan’s and Princess Sapientia’s retreating army.

  In his heart, he knew it was a foolish hope. The Quman had scouts and trackers. There was no way a ragged band of seven, four of them wounded and most of them unable to fight, could get through the Quman lines. But they had to believe they could. Otherwise they might as well lie down and die.

  Why would they have been granted the vision of the phoenix if God had meant for them to die in such a pointless manner?

  Baldwin was waiting for him where the tunnel floor sloped upward and out of the water.

  “Come see,” said Baldwin sharply. “Gerulf got a fire going.”

  “Gerulf?”

  “That’s the old Lion.” Baldwin tugged him onward, steadying him when he stumbled. Weariness settled over Ivar’s shoulders. He shivered convulsively, soaked through. He wanted nothing more than to drop right where he stood and sleep until death, or the phoenix, came for him. Or maybe one would bring the other, it was hard to think with the walls wavering around him.

  Strange sigils had been carved into the pale stone, broad rocks set upright and incised with the symbols of demons and ancient gods who plagued the people of elder days: four-sided lozenges, spirals that had neither beginning nor end, broad expanses of hatching cut into the rock as though straw had been pressed crisscross into the stone.

  Yet how could he see at all, deep in the heart of a tomb?

  With Baldwin’s help, he staggered forward until the tunnel opened into a smoky chamber lit by fire. He stared past his companions, who were huddled around a torch. The chamber was a black pit made eerie by flickering light. He could not see the ceiling, and the walls were lost to shadow. He sneezed.

  Just beyond the smoking torch, a stone slab marked the center of the chamber. A queen had been laid to rest here long ago: there lay her bones, a pale skeleton asleep in the torchlight, its hollow-eyed frame woven with strands of rotting fabric and gleaming with precious gold that had fallen around the skull and into the ribs. Gold antlers sprang into sight as Gerulf shifted the torch to better investigate his comrade’s wound.

  “You shouldn’t have lit a fire in a barrow!” cried Ivar, horrified. “Everyone knows a fire will wake the unholy dead!”

  Frail Sigfrid sat at the unconscious Lion’s head, nearest to the burial altar. He looked up with the calm eyes of one who has felt God’s miraculous hands heal his body. “Don’t fear, Ivar.” The voice itself, restored to him by a miracle, was a reproof to Ivar’s fear. “God will protect us. This poor dead woman bears us no ill will.” He indicated the half-uncovered skeleton, then bent forward as the old Lion spoke to him in a low voice.

  But how could Sigfrid tell? Ivar had grown up in the north, where the old gods still swarmed, jealous that the faith of the Unities had stolen so many ripe souls from their grasp. There was no telling what malice lay asleep here, or when it might wake.

  Ermanrich and Hathumod sat together, hands clasped in a cousinly embrace. Both had lost a great deal of flesh. How long ago it seemed when the four youths and Hathumod had served together as novices at Quedlinhame, yet truly it wasn’t more than a year ago that they had all been cast out of the convent for committing the unforgivable sin of heresy.

  Baldwin circled the stone altar and its dead queen, crouching to grasp one of the gold antlers. The light touch jostled the skeleton. Precious amber beads scattered down among the bones, falling in a rush.

  “Don’t disturb the dead!” hissed Ivar. But Baldwin, eyes wide, reached right in to where strands of desiccated wool rope, whose ends were banded with small greenish-metal rods, curled around the pelvis. His hand closed over a small object, a glint of blue.

  “Look!” he cried, with his other hand lifting a stone mirror out of the basin made by her pelvic bones. The polished black surface still gleamed. As Ivar took a panicked step forward to stop Baldwin from further desecration, he saw his movement reflected in that mirror.

  “Ai, God, I fear my poor nephew is dead,” murmured Gerulf. “I swore to my sister I’d bring him home safely.”

  Other shadows moved in the depths of the mirror, figures obscured by darkness. They walked out of the alcoves, ancient queens whose eyes had the glint of knives. The first was young, robed in a splendor as bright as burning arrows, but her mouth was cut in a cruel smile. The second had a matron’s girth, the generous bulk of a noble lady who never wants for food, and in her arms she carried a basket spilling over with fruit. The third wore her silver hair braided with bones, and the wrinkles in her aged face seemed as deep as clefts in a mountainside. Her raised hands had the texture of cobwebs. Her gaze caught him as in a vise. He could not speak to warn the others, who saw nothing and felt no danger.

  Hathumod gasped. “What lies there?” Her words sent ripples through the ghosts as a hand clears away algae from an overgrown pond.

  Ivar found his voice. “Baldwin! Put that down, you idiot!”

  As Baldwin lowered the mirror in confusion, Hathumod crawled forward. Her hand came to rest on a bundle so clotted with dirt and mold that her hand came away green, and flakes fell everywhere, spinning away to meld with the smoke from the torch. Like Baldwin, she was either a fool or insensible. She groped at the bundle, found a faded leather pouch that actually crumbled to dust in her hands, leaving nothing in her
cupped fingers except, strangely, a nail marked by rusting stains.

  She began to weep just as Gerulf shook loose the rotting garments: a rusted mail shirt that half fell apart in his hands, a knife, a decaying leather belt, a plain under-tunic, and a tabard marked with the remains of a black lion. “Some poor comrade of mine must have crawled in here to die many years ago,” said the old Lion.

  “Who’s there?” demanded Sigfrid, throwing his head back as if he’d heard something. Baldwin, still gripping the obsidian mirror, screamed and crumpled forward. On the ground, Gerulf’s dead nephew jerked as though a demon had poured itself into him.

  The chamber flared with blue light.

  Ivar cried out, but he could not hear his own voice. His throat muscles strained as he forced out air. Blue fire blinded him. The ground wrenched under his feet, throwing him sideways, and he tumbled to his knees, but no earth met his outstretched hands. He fell, endlessly, hands grasping at empty air, as the young queen with the knife-edged smile walked toward him over a carpet of brilliant fire with her arms extended as if in welcome. He reached for her, grasping for any lifeline.

  Touched her hands.

  And knew nothing more.

  PART ONE

  THE FLOWER

  TRAIL

  I

  THE HALLOWED ONE

  1

  AT sunset, Adica left the village. The elders bowed respectfully, but from a safe distance, as she passed. Fathers pulled their children out of her way. Women carrying in sheaves of grain from ripening fields turned their backs on her, so that her gaze might not wither the newly-harvested emmer out of which they would make bread. Even pregnant Weiwara, once her beloved friend, stepped back through the threshold of her family’s house in order to shelter her hugely pregnant belly from Adica’s sight.

  The villagers looked at her differently now. In truth, they no longer looked at her at all, never directly in the face, now that the Holy One had proclaimed Adica’s duty, and her doom.

  Even the dogs slunk away when she walked by.

  She passed through the open stockade gate and negotiated the plank bridge thrown over the ditch that ringed the village. The sun’s light washed the clouds with a pale purplish pink as delicate as flax in flower. Fields flowered gold along the river plain, dotted here and there with the tumbled forms of the grandmothers’ old houses, now abandoned for the safety of the new village. The grandmothers had not lived in constant fear as people did these days.

  When she reached the outer ditch, she raised her staff three times and said a blessing over the village. Then she walked on.

  By the river three men bent over the weir. One straightened, seeing her, and she recognized Beor’s broad shoulders and the distinctive way he had of tilting up his chin when he was angry.

  How Beor had protested and complained when the elders had decreed that they two could no longer live together as mates! Yet his company had never been restful. He had won the right to claim her as his mate on the day the elders had agreed to name him as war captain for the village because of his conspicuous bravery in the war against the Cursed Ones. But had the law governing her as Hallowed One of the village granted her the right to claim a mate of her own choice, he was not the one she would have picked. In a way, it was a relief to be rid of him.

  Yet, as days and months passed, she missed the warmth of his body at night.

  Beor made a movement as if to walk over to catch her, but his companion stopped him by placing a hand on his chest. Adica continued down the path alone.

  She climbed the massive tumulus alone, following the path up through the labyrinthine earthworks. As the Hallowed One who protected the village, she had walked here many times but never in as great a solitude as that she felt now.

  Nothing grew yet on the freshly raised ramparts except young sow-thistles, leaves still tender enough to eat. Far below, tall grass and unharvested grain rippled like the river, stirred by a breeze lifting off the sun as it sank into the land of the dead.

  The ground ramped up under her feet, still smooth from the passage of so many logs used as rollers to get the stones up to the sacred circle at the height of the hill. She passed up a narrow causeway between two huge ramparts of earth and came out onto the level field that marked the highest ground. Here stood the circle of seven stones, raised during the life of Adica’s teacher. Here, to the east of the stone circle, three old foundations marked an ancient settlement. According to her teacher, these fallen stone foundations marked the halls of the long-dead queens, Arrow Bright, Golden Sow, and Toothless, whose magic had raised the great womb of this tumulus and whose bones and treasures lay hidden in the swelling belly of the earth below.

  Midway between the earthen gates and the stone loom, where the westering sun could draw its last light across the threshold, Adica had erected a shelter out of hides and poles. In such primitive shelter all humankind had lived long ago before the days when the great queens and their hallowed women had stolen the magic of seed, clay, and bronze from the southerners, before the Cursed Ones had come to take them as slaves and as sacrifices.

  She made her prayers, so familiar that she could speak them without thinking, and sprinkled the last of her ale to the four directions: north, east, south, and west. After leaning her staff against the lintel of slender birch poles, she clapped her wrists together three times. The copper bracelets that marked her status as a Hallowed One chimed softly, the final ring of prayer, calling down the night. The sun slid below the horizon. She crawled in across the threshold. Inside the tent she untied her string skirt, slipped off her bodice, and laid them inside the stout cedar chest where she stored all her belongings. Finally, she wrapped herself in the furs that were now her only company at night.

  Once she had lived like the rest of her people, in a house in the village, breathing in the community of a life lived together. Of course, her house in the village had been ringed with charms, and no one but her mate or those of her womb kin might enter it for fear of the powers that lay coiled in the shadows and in the eaves, but she had still been able to hear the cattle lowing in their byres in the evening and the delighted cries of the children leaping up to play at dawn. Any village where a Hallowed One lived always had good luck and good harvests.

  But ever since the Holy One’s proclamation, she could no longer sleep in the village for fear her dreaming self might entice reckless or evil spirits in among the houses. Spirits could smell death; everyone knew that. They could smell death on her. They swarmed where fate lay heaviest.

  Death’s shadow had touched her, so the villagers feared that any person she touched might be poisoned by death’s kiss as well.

  She said the night prayer to the Pale Hunter and lay still until sleep called her, but sleep brought no respite. Tossing and turning, she dreamed of standing alone and small in a blinding wind as death came for her.

  Could the great weaving possibly succeed? Or would it all be for naught, despite everything?

  She woke, twisted in her sleeping furs, thinking of Beor, whom she had once called husband. She had dreamed the same dream for seven nights running. Yet it wasn’t the death in the dream that scared her, that made her wake up sweating.

  She rested her forehead on fisted hands. “I pray to you, Fat One, who is merciful to her children, let there be a companion for me. I do not fear death as long as I do not have to walk the long road into darkness all by myself.”

  A wind came up. The charms tied to the poles holding up the shelter rang with their gentle voices. More distantly, she heard the bronze leaves of the sacred cauldron ting and clack where the breeze ran through them. Then the wind died. It was so quiet that she thought perhaps she could hear the respiration of stars as they breathed.

  She slipped outside. Cool night air pooled over her skin. Above, the stars shone in splendor. The waxing horned moon had already set. The Serpent’s Eye and the Dragon’s Eye blazed overhead, harbingers of power. The Grindstone was setting.

  Was it a sign? The s
etting constellation called The Grindstone would lead her to Falling-down’s home and, when evening came, the rising Grindstone, with the aid of the Bounteous One, the wandering daughter of the Fat One, could pull her home again. The Fat One often spoke in riddles or by misdirection, and perhaps this was one of those times. There was one man she often thought of, one man who might be brave enough to walk beside her.

  Ducking back inside her shelter, she rummaged through the cedar chest in search of a gift for Falling-down. She settled on an ingot of copper and a pair of elk antlers. Last, she found the amber necklace she had once given to Beor, to seal their agreement, but of course he had been forced by the elders to return it to her. Then she dressed, wrapping her skirt twice around her hips, tugging on her bodice, and hanging her mirror from a loop on her skirt. Setting the gifts in a small basket together with a string of bone beads for a friendship offering to the headwoman of Falling-down’s village, she crawled outside. She slung the basket over one shoulder with a rope and hoisted her staff.

  A path wound forward between grass to the stone loom. The circle of stones sat in expectant silence, waiting for her to wake them.

  She stopped on the calling ground outside the stones, a patch of dust shaded white with a layer of chalk that gleamed under starlight. Here, she set her feet.

  Lifting the mirror, she began the prayers to waken the stones:

  “Heed me, that which opens in the east.

  Heed me, that which opens in the west.

  I pray to you, Fat One, let me spread the warp of your heavenly weaving so that I can walk through the passage made by its breath.”

  She shifted the mirror until the light of the stars that made up the Grindstone caught in its polished surface. Reflected by the mirror, the terrible power of the stars would not burn her. With her staff she threaded that reflected light into the loom of the stones and wove herself a living passageway out of starlight and stone. Through the soles of her feet she felt the keening of the ancient queens, who had divined in the vast loom of the stars a secret of magic that not even the Cursed Ones had knowledge of. Threads of starlight caught in the stones and tangled, an architecture formed of insubstantial light woven into a bright gateway. She stepped through into rain. Her feet squished on sodden ground, streaking the grass with the last traces of chalk. The air steamed with moisture, hot and heavy. Rain poured down. She bumped up against a standing stone, her shoulder cushioned by a dense growth of moss grown up along the stone.