Child of Flame Page 4

  “Yet perhaps—” The Holy One hesitated. In that pause, hope whispered in Adica’s heart, but she was afraid to listen. “Perhaps there is a way to find one already touched by the hand of death who might be your companion. That way you would not be alone, and he would not be poisoned by your fate. You are youngest of the chosen ones, Adica. The others have lived long lives. You were meant to follow after your teacher, not to stand in her place at the great weaving. It is not surprising that you find it harder to walk toward the gate that leads to the Other Side.” Did a hand touch her, however briefly, brushing the nape of her neck? “Such a promise should not be beyond my powers.”

  Hope battered her chest like a bird beating at the bars of its cage.

  “Can you really do such a thing, Holy One?”

  “We shall see.” It was painful to hope. In a way, it was a relief when the Holy One changed the subject. “Have you seen any child among the White Deer people who can follow after you, Adica?”

  “I have not,” she murmured, even as the words thrust as a knife would, into her gut. “Nor would I have time to teach an apprentice everything she would need to know.”

  “Do not despair, Child. I will not abandon your people.” A sharp hiss of surprise sounded, followed by the distant hoot of an owl. “I am called,” the Holy One said suddenly, sounding surprised. That quickly, her presence vanished.

  Had the Holy One actually traveled through the gateway of the stones? Had she stood behind Adica in her own self? Or had she merely walked the path of visions and visited Adica in her spirit form? The Holy One was so powerful that Adica could never tell. Nor dared she ask.

  Truly, humans had the smallest share of power on this earth. Yet if that were so, why did the Cursed Ones make war against them so unremittingly? Why did the Cursed Ones hate humankind so?

  Wind clacked the bronze leaves of the cauldron. She thought, for an instant, that she could actually hear flowers unfurling as the sun rose.

  A horn call blared: the alarm from the village.

  With more haste than care, she hurried back to her tent, took off her holy garments, and ran down through the earthworks. She got to the gate of the village just as a slender girl with strong legs and a wiry guard dog in faithful attendance loped up. The girl threw message beads at the feet of Mother Orla, who had come to the gate in response to the summons.

  Mother Orla’s hands were so gnarled that she could barely count off the message beads as she deciphered their meaning. She moved aside to allow Adica to stand beside her. At her great age, Orla did not fear evil spirits or death; they teased her already.

  “A skirmish,” she said to those who assembled from all the houses of the villages. “The Cursed Ones have raided. From what village did you come, Swift?”

  A child brought mead so strongly flavored with meadowsweet flowers that the smell of it made Adica’s mouth water. The Swift sipped at it carefully as she caught her breath. “I came from Two Streams, and from Pine Top, Muddy Walk, and Old Fort before that. The Cursed Ones attacked a settlement just beyond Four Houses. There were three people killed and two children carried away by the raiders.”

  “Did any of Four Houses’ people go after them?” demanded Beor, shouldering up to the front. He’d been up early, hunting. He carried his sling in one hand. Two grouse, a partridge, and three ducks dangled from a string on the other. The guard dog nosed the dead birds, but the Swift batted it away until another child ran up with a nice meaty bone for the animal. It lay down and set to chomping.

  “Nay,” said the Swift, “none of the Four Houses people pursued the Cursed Ones, for those killed were Red Deer people. There were two families of them moved in close by Four Houses two winters ago. They come out of west country.”

  “What does it matter to the Cursed Ones whether they kill Red Deer folk or White Deer folk?” Beor had a good anger about him now, the kind that stirred others to action. “We’re all the same to the Cursed Ones, and once they’ve killed and captured Red Deer folk, who’s to say they won’t come after White Deer folk next? I say we must fight together, or we’ll all fall to their arrows one by one.”

  People muttered in agreement. Young men looked nervous or eager by turns.

  “What does the Hallowed One say?” asked Orla with deceptive softness.

  Everyone fell silent as Adica considered. The Swift finished the mead and gratefully started in on a bowl of porridge brought to her by one of the boys she’d beaten at the races the summer before. He eyed her enviously, her lean legs and the loose breechclout that gave her room to run. He looked as if he wanted to touch the amber necklace and copper armbands the girl wore to signify her status. At the Festival of the Sun last year, when all the villages of the tribe met at the henge to barter and court and settle grievances, this girl had won the races and with that victory the right to the name “Swift,” one of the favored youths who carried messages between the villages of the White Deer people.

  “Already the Hallowed Ones of the human tribes work in concert, and we count as our allies the Horse people. Yet the Horse people are less human than our Red Deer cousins, and we accept their alliance gladly.” Adica paused, hearing their restlessness.

  The Swift finished off the porridge and hopefully held out the bowl, in case she could get another portion.

  “In this next sun’s year is the time of greatest danger. If the Cursed Ones suspect that we mean to act against them, then they will send their armies to attack us. We need every ally we can find, whether Red Deer, or White Deer, or Black Deer. No matter how strange other tribes may seem to us, we need their help. If you are still alive after the next year’s dark of the sun, you will no longer have to fear.”

  Orla made the sign to avert evil spirits and spat on the ground, and many did likewise, although not Beor. The younger ones withdrew to get on with their work or to check their bows and axes. As the villagers dispersed to their tasks, only the elders and the war captain remained.

  “I will go with the war party,” Adica said.

  They had no choice but to agree.

  She went to her old house to gather healing herbs and her basket of charms. Inside, the small house lay musty, abandoned. She ran her fingers along the eaves. One of the rafters still leaked a little pitch, and she touched it to her lips, breathing in its essence.

  Outside, Beor waited with a party of nine adults whom he trusted to stand and fight, should it come to that. They walked armed with bows, carrying spare arrows tipped with obsidian points, and axes of flint or copper. Agda had a stone ax, and Beor himself carried the prize of the village: a halberd with a real bronze blade fixed at right angles to the shaft. He had taken it off the body of a dead enemy.

  As they set out, the Swift loped past them with her dog at her heels, but she took the turning that would lead her on to Spring Water: Dorren’s village.

  No need to think of Dorren now. Adica could enjoy, surely, this transitory peace, walking under the bright sun and reveling in the wind on her back. It wasn’t as hot as it had been on Falling-down’s island home. She walked at the back of the band, keeping an eye out for useful plants. When she spotted a patch of mustard and stepped off the path to investigate, Beor dropped back to wait for her. The others paused a short way down the path, out of earshot but within range in case of attack.

  She ignored Beor as best she could while she harvested as much mustard as she could tie around with a tall grass stem and set into her traveling basket. He fell in beside her as soon as she started on down the path. She did not look at him, and it seemed to her, by the way he swung the shaft of his halberd out before him, that he did not look at her. Yet it was still comforting to walk beside another person, companions on the long march. Ahead, the rest of the band set out, keeping a bit of distance between them.

  “The elders spoke to me yesterday.” His voice was a little hoarse, the way it got when he was aroused, or irritated. “They said that the reason we never made a child between us was because your magic has leached a
ll the fertility from you. They said that if I don’t give up thinking of you that evil spirits will drain me, too, and I’ll never be able to make a child with another woman.”

  Her feet fell, one step and another and another. She couldn’t make any thoughts come clear. The sun was bright. The path wound through woodland where a fresh breeze hissed through leaves.

  “I never wanted any woman like I wanted you. But that has to be done with now. So be it. The elders say that Mother Nahumia’s eldest daughter over at Old Fort just last moon set her man’s hunting bag outside the door and made him leave. She’ll be looking for a new man, then, won’t she?”

  “You’d have to go to Old Fort,” said Adica, since he seemed to expect her to say something. “You’d have to live there.”

  “That’s true. But I’ve a mind to leave. I’ve even thought of walking farther east, to hunt for a season with my Black Deer cousins.”

  “That’s a long way,” said Adica, and heard her own voice trembling, not able to speak the words without betraying the fear in her own heart.

  “So it is,” he agreed, and he waited again, wanting her sympathy or regret, perhaps, or an attempt to talk him out of this rash course of action. But she couldn’t give him more. She had already offered her life to her people, and the magic hadn’t even left her a child to keep her name alive among them.

  “You’re a good war captain, Beor,” she said. “The village needs you. Will you at least wait until my work is done before you go? Then maybe it won’t matter that they lose you.” Here she faltered. It was forbidden to speak aloud of the great weaving, because words were power, not to be carelessly cast to the four winds in case the Cursed Ones overheard them. “At least wait until then.”

  He grunted but made no other answer, and after a bit picked up their pace so that they fell in with the others. Since the others feared speaking to her, and would not look at her, she might as well have been walking alone.

  The sun had risen halfway to noon by the time they reached Four Houses, a scatter of a dozen sheds, huts, pit houses, and four respectable compounds, each one boasting a round house at each corner with a thatched roof and a rock wall built into storage sheds between. A half-dozen adults labored at a ditch, digging with antlers and hauling away the dirt in bark buckets.

  The war captain of Four Houses was a stout woman with two scars who went by the name Ulfrega and who wore the string skirt that marked her as a woman old enough to choose a marriage partner. By the evidence of the pale birth threads that decorated Ulfrega’s belly above the band of her low-slung skirt, she had survived several pregnancies.

  Ulfrega led them down past the river, through woodland rife with pigs, and along a deer trail that led to the Red Deer settlement. Two round houses and six storage pits lay quiet under the summer sun. Strangely, one of the round houses was entirely burned down to the stone half wall while the other stood as fresh and whole as if it had been built a month ago and lived in only yesterday. There was also a stone corral and a hayrick and a very neatly laid out vegetable garden, lush with ripening vegetables. Flies buzzed. A crow flapped lazily away as they approached. Even the village dogs had fled the carnage. The village lay empty except for a single abandoned corpse.

  The Red Deer settlers had begun digging a ditch, too, and had gotten a rampart and ditch halfway around the settlement.

  “Too little, too late,” said Ulfrega, gesturing toward the half-dug ditch and the fallen and partially burned rampart. Debris from the fight lay everywhere: arrowheads; a shattered spear shaft; and one of the Cursed Ones’ swords, a flat length of wood edged with obsidian, although most of that obsidian was broken or fallen off. Ulfrega picked up an arrow shaft and fingered the obsidian point quickly before tucking it away into the leather satchel she wore slung over one shoulder.

  “You’re late to build a ditch as well,” said Beor.

  She shrugged, looking irritated. “The other raids always came over by Three Oaks and Spring Water.”

  “It’s not so far to travel between them, not for the Cursed Ones.”

  “Hei!” She spat in the direction of the corpse. “In open country they may move quickly, but they’re slower when they bring their horses into the woodland. There’s a lot of dense growth between Three Oaks and here.”

  “That didn’t save these people.”

  The rest of Beor’s people fanned out to scavenge for obsidian points and whatever was ripening in the garden. They avoided the corpse.

  “I’ll chase the spirit away,” said Adica. No doubt the Four Houses people had been waiting for her to settle the matter. Both Beor and Ulfrega made the gesture to avert evil spirits and delicately stepped away from her. She rummaged in her basket and got out the precious copper bowl, just large enough to fit in her cupped hands, that she used for such workings. At the outdoor hearth she struck sparks with flint and touched it to a dried scrap of mushroom to raise a fire, then poured blessing water from her waterskin into the bowl and set it on a makeshift tripod over the flames to heat. The others vanished into the woodland to seek out the trail of their enemy or to hide while she worked magic.

  While the water heated, she stared in silence at the corpse.

  His fall had torn his wooden lynx’s mask from his face. He had proud features and a complexion the color of copper. His black hair had been coiled into a topknot, as was customary for his kind, and all down his arms various magical symbols had been painted with blue woad and red ocher, one twined into the next. Yet truly his sex mattered little: it was an adult, and therefore dangerous, because it could breed and it could fight.

  No animal scavengers had touched the body. The Cursed Ones protected their spirits with powerful spells, so she would have to be cautious. Luckily, none of the Four Houses people had tried to strip the corpse, although he wore riches. A sheet of molded bronze protected his chest, so beautifully incised with figures of animals that she could not help but admire the artistry. Across the breastplate a vulture-headed woman paced majestically toward a burnished sun while two dragons faced each other, dueling with fire. It was hard to reconcile the creatures who stalked and terrorized humankind with ones who could fashion so many beautiful things. His bronze helmet, crested with horsehair, had rolled just slightly off his head, lying askew in the dirt. Someone had trampled the crest during the fight, the crease still stamped into the ground.

  A leather belt fastened with a copper buckle held tight his kneelength skirt, all sewn of a piece. The cloth lay so smooth and soft over the body that she could not help but touch her own roughly woven bodice and the string skirt. With such riches as they had, why did the Cursed Ones bother to attack humankind at all?

  But didn’t they look upon humans as they did upon their own cattle? Maybe it was true that, before the time of the great queens, humankind had roamed like animals, eating and drinking and hunting and rutting, no different than the beasts. But that wasn’t true now.

  Hanging a sachet of juniper around her neck for protection, she picked out four dried leaves of lavender, then walked to the north and crumbled one between her fingers. Its dust spilled on the ground. To the east, south, and west, she did the same, forming a ring of protection. Standing to the west, she crouched and cupped her hands over her nose to inhale the fading lavender scent, strong and pure. She murmured words of power and protection into her hands.

  The water boiled. With bone tongs she lifted the copper bowl off the heat and brought it over to her basket. She dropped old thistle into the water and waited, hands raised, palms out.

  The spirit manifested in her palms as a tiny vortex. Then she saw it rising from the body, slippery and white. It quested to the four corners but could not break free, bound by the spell of lavender. As it spun like a whirlwind, its plaintive voice first growled then mewled then whined, and suddenly the cloud of the spirit, like a swarm of indistinct gnats, sprang heavenward, running up the tunnel made by the four directional wards. She jumped forward to sprinkle lavender dust on the corpse’s eyes and
dab lavender into the corpse’s ears and nostrils and over its lips. Pulling up the skirt, she wiped paste of lavender over its man part, then rolled the corpse over so she could seal it completely.

  Far above, she heard a howl of despair. She clapped her hands three times, stamped her feet, and the sensation of a vortex swirling in her palms vanished. The spirit had fled to the higher world, up the world axis made by the wards.

  Yet it had left a treasure behind: under the corpse lay a bronze sword.

  Cautiously, she ran her hands over the metal blade. It, too, had a spirit, fierce and implacable. This blade had bitten many lives in half, and sent many spirits screaming from their bodies. Yet who should carry such a dangerous and powerful being? No one in the White Deer tribe, not in all the nine villages that made up the people, had a sword like this.

  She found vervain in her basket, rolling it between her hands and letting it fall onto the sword, to placate that vengeful spirit and to temporarily mute its lust for blood.

  In addition to the bronze breastplate, the helmet, the sword, the belt, and the loose linen tunic, the dead one had carried a knife, and also a pouch containing four common river pebbles, a sachet of herbs, a conch shell, and a small wooden cube engraved with magical symbols.

  After stripping the corpse, she dragged it into the burned house and covered it with firewood. She marked the ruined threshold with hexes and threw the dead man’s sacred pouch and his warrior’s mask in after. As she shoveled hot coals onto the fallen thatch, the pyre began to burn.