Child of Flame Read online

  “You must wait here, Hallowed One,” said Mother Orla once they reached the village gates. “I ask this of you, do not enter the village until the elders have made their decision.” She called the elders to the council house, and the meeting pole, carved with the faces of the ancestors, was raised from the centerpost.

  Adica had learned how to sit quietly as an apprentice to the Hallowed One who had come before her, the one who had been her teacher, but she was surprised to see how patiently Alain waited, sitting at her side. His dogs lay on the ground behind him, tongues lolling out, quiescent but alert, while he studied the village. The adults went back to their work and the children lingered to stare, the older children careful to keep the less cautious young ones from approaching too close.

  In the end, it did not take long. The meeting pole wobbled and was drawn down through the smoke hole. Mother Orla emerged with the other elders walking deferentially behind her. Villagers hurried over to the gates to hear her pronouncement, all but Beor, who had stalked into the forest with his hunting spear. The dogs pricked up their ears.

  “The elders have decided,” announced Mother Orla. “If Adica binds this man to her and lets him live in her house, she can reside again in the village until that comes which must come.”

  “So be it,” murmured Adica, although her heart sang.

  The villagers spoke the ritual words of acquiescence, and it was done, sealed, accepted. The Holy One had brought it to pass, as she had promised.

  Adica had her own duties. She had to purify her old house, which had sat empty for two courses of the moon, and she had to purify the birthing house, since a male had set foot in it. Women who had borne living children passed in and out of the birthing house while she worked. They brought presents, food, and drink to Weiwara as they would every day until a full course of the moon had waned and waxed, at which time the new mother could resume her everyday life.

  But afterward she was free to watch Alain, although she was careful to do so from a distance, pretending not to. She expected him to wait for her at the village gates, shy and aloof as strangers usually were upon first coming to a new place, but he allowed children to drag him from the well to the stockade, from the freshly dug outer ditch to the pit house where the village stored grain. He crouched beside the adults making pottery and the girls weaving baskets, and examined a copper dagger recently traded from Old Fort, where a conjuring man lived who knew the magic of metal-working. He coaxed in a limping dog so that he could pull a thorn from its paw, and scolded a child for throwing a stone at it although surely the child understood no word of what he said. He fingered loom weights stacked in a pile outside the house of Mother Orla and her daughters, and combed through the debris beside Pur the stoneworker’s platform. He spent a remarkably long time investigating the village’s two wooden ards. Adica remembered her grandfather speaking wonderingly of helping, as a young man, to plow fields for the first time with such magnificent tools; all his childhood the villagers had dug furrows with sharpened antlers.

  Alain’s curiosity never flagged. It was almost as if he’d never seen such things before. Perhaps he was born into a tribe of savages, who still lived in skin shelters and carried sharpened sticks for weapons. Why then, though, would he have carried such skillfully made garments with him?

  Although she watched, she was afraid to show too much interest in him. She was afraid that she would frighten him away if he noticed her following after him. She feared the strength of her own feelings, so sudden and powerful. He was a stranger, and yet in some way she could not explain she felt she had always known him. He was a still pool of calm in the swift current that was life in the village. He stood outside it, and yet his presence had the solidity of those things which lie awake and aware in the world, cutting both into what is holy and what is ordinary, blending them in the same way a river blends water from many streams.

  So it went, that afternoon, as Alain explored the village, followed by a pack of curious children whom he never snapped at, although they often pestered him.

  So it went, that evening, when people brought food to her door, as if to apologize for their neglect from the months before, as if to acknowledge her new household and mate. They still would not look her in the eye, but the children sat easily beside Alain, and he showed them how to play a game made by lines drawn in the dirt and populated by moving stones, a clever way of capturing territory and retreating. Urtan made a flamboyant show of sitting next to him as though they had been comrades for ages, like two who handled the ard together at plowing time or spent a lazy afternoon supervising children at play in the river shallows. Beor still had not returned from his solitary hunt, but the other men were curious enough, and respectful enough of Urtan’s standing, that they came, too, and learned to play the game of lines and stones. Alain accepted their presence graciously. He seemed at ease with everyone.

  Except that night, when she tried to coax him into her house and showed him that he could sleep on the bed with her. At once he looked agitated and spoke words more passionate than reasoned. She had offended him. Flushed and grim, he made a bed for himself with straw just outside the threshold, and there he lay himself down with a dog on either side, his guardians. In this way, for she checked several times, he appeared to sleep peacefully while she lay awake and restless.

  An owl hooted, a presence gliding through the night. One of the dogs whined in its sleep and turned over. A child cried out, then stilled. The village slumbered. In their distant cities, the Cursed Ones plotted and planned, but at this moment their enmity seemed remote compared to the soft breathing of the man who slept outside her door.

  At dawn, Urtan took Alain to the weir with his young cousins Kel and Tosti. He went, all of them laughing in a friendly way at his attempts to learn new words. The dogs trailed behind. It was remarkable how good-natured he seemed. She wanted to see how he managed at the weir, but she had her own duties.

  Going to renew the charms in the birthing house, she found Weiwara nursing one infant and rocking the other with a foot where it lay asleep in a woven cradle. The new mother examined the sleeping twin with a look compounded mostly of surprise, as though she had opened a door to admit a tame bear. “Is it true that the stranger brought the firstborn back to life?”

  “So it seemed to my eyes.” Adica crouched beside the sleeping infant but was careful not to touch it. “I held this baby in my arms. Like Agda, I listened, but I heard no spirit stirring inside it. He called the spirit back.”

  “Is he a conjurer, do you think?”

  “No, I do not think so.” The woven cradle creaked as it rocked back and forth. The other twin suckled silently. A bead of clear liquid welled up from a nipple and beaded there before slipping down Weiwara’s skin.

  “I hear he is to be your new husband,” added Weiwara. “Is he handsome? I didn’t truly see him.”

  “No,” said Adica quickly. “He’s not really handsome. He doesn’t look like a Deer man.”

  “But.” Weiwara laughed. “I hear a ‘but.’ I hear that you’re thinking of him right now.”

  Adica blushed. “I am thinking of him now.”

  “You never thought of Beor when you weren’t with him. I think you’d better bind hands with this man, so he’ll understand your intentions. If he came from far away, he might not wish to offend anyone. He surely doesn’t know what is forbidden here, and what is not. How else could he have walked into the birthing house like he did? You’d better ask Mother Orla to witness the ceremony, so he’ll know he’s not forbidden to you.”

  “So I must. I’ll have to show him what is permitted.”

  She walked slowly back to the village, reached the gate in time to see Alain and Urtan and Urtan’s cousins carrying a basket slippery with fish up from the river, a catch worthy of a feasting day. Alain was laughing. He had let the cloth slip from his shoulders, to leave his chest bare. His shoulders had gone pink from the sun. He was lean through the waist, and remarkably smooth on chest and back,
so different than the Deer men.

  “Never did I think to see the Hallowed One at another’s mercy,” said Mother Orla, shuffling up beside her. She walked with a limp, supporting herself on a broken pole that had once served as the shaft for a halberd.

  “Mother Orla! You startled me!”

  “So I did. For you truly were not standing with yourself.” They had to step aside to make room for the four men and their heavy basket to cross the plank bridge that led over the ditch and into the village. Alain saw Adica, and he smiled. She was not quite sure how she responded, for at that moment Mother Orla pinched her hard on the forearm. “There, now, daughter!”

  She had not been touched in so long—except when Alain had brushed tears from her cheeks to see if she were real that she yelped in surprise, and then was embarrassed that she had done so. But the men had already passed, hauling the big basket up to the council house where it would be divided up between the village families.

  Mother Orla coughed. “A stranger who sleeps in a woman’s house without her promise and her binding is not the kind of adult a village can trust as one of its own.”

  “I was hasty, Mother Orla. Do not think it his doing. I invited him into the house without waiting for the proper ceremony.”

  “He did not enter,” retorted Mother Orla approvingly. “Or so I hear.”

  “I hope you will advise me in this matter,” Adica murmured humbly. “I have no experience. You know how things went with Beor.”

  “That was not a wise match.” Mother Orla spat, to free herself of any bad luck from mentioning such an ill-fated decision. “Nevertheless, it is done with. Beor will see that his jealousy has no place in this village.”

  “So easily?”

  “If he cannot stomach a new man in the village, then he can go to his Black Deer cousins, or marry Mother Nahumia’s daughter and move to Old Fort.”

  “I believe it would be better to have a strong fighter like Beor stay here until—until the war is over, Mother Orla.”

  “That may be. But we’ve no need of pride and anger tearing down our community in times like these. There will be no more spoken on this matter.”

  “As you wish.” In a way, it was a relief to be spoken to as if from aunt to niece. It was hard to act as an elder all the time when she was really still young.

  “Let the stranger sleep at the men’s house,” continued Mother Orla. “After all, would you want a man for husband who had so little self-respect that he didn’t expect courtship?”

  Adica laughed, because the comment was so unexpected and so charged with a gratifying anticipation. At first she did not see Alain up by the council house, but she soon caught sight of him among the others because of the dogs who faithfully followed after him. A vision shivered through her, brief but dazzling: she saw, not Alain, but a phoenix, fiery and hot, shining beyond the ordinary with such intensity that she had to look away.

  “Truly,” Mother Orla continued in the voice of one who has seen nothing unusual, “the Holy One chose wisely.”

  II

  MANY MEETINGS

  1

  AT night, the stars blazed with a brightness unlike that of any stars Liath had ever seen. They seemed alive, souls writhing and shifting, speaking in a language born out of fire rather than words. Sometimes she thought she could understand them, but then the sensation would fade. Sometimes she thought she could touch them, but the heavens rose as far above her here in this country as they ever had in the land of her birth.

  So much lay beyond her grasp, especially her own past.

  Right now, she lay on her back with her hands folded behind her head on a pallet made of leaves and grass. “Are the stars living souls?”

  “The stars are fire.” The old sorcerer often sat late with her, silent or talkative depending on his mood. “If they have souls and consciousness, I do not know.”

  “What of the creatures who brought me here?”

  Here in the country of the Aoi, there was never a moon, but the stars shone with such brilliance that she could see him shake his head. “These spirits you speak of burn in the air with wings of flame and eyes as brilliant as knives. They move on the winds of aether, and now and again their gaze falls like the strike of lightning to the Earth below. There, it sears anything it touches, for they cannot comprehend the frailty of Earthly life.”

  “If they aren’t the souls of stars, then what are they?”

  “They are an elder race. Their bodies are not bodies as we know them but rather the conjoining of fire and wind. In their bodies it is as if the breath of the fiery Sun coalesces into mind and will.”

  “Why did they call me child, then?”

  He was always making rope, or baskets, always weaving strands into something new. Even in the darkness, he twined plant fiber into rope against one thigh. “The elder races partake of nothing earthly but only of the pure elements. We are their children inasmuch as some portion of what we are made of is derived from those pure elements.”

  “So any creature born on Earth is in some way their child.”

  “That may be,” he said, laughing drily. “Yet there is more to you than your human form. That we speak each to the other right now is a mystery I cannot explain, because the languages of humankind are unknown to me, and you say that the language of my people is not known to you. But we met through the gateway of fire, and it may be that the binding of magic lies heavier over us than any language made only of words.”

  “It seems to me that with you I speak the language known to my people as Dariyan.”

  “And to me, it is as if we speak in my own tongue. But I cannot believe that these two are the same. The count of years that separates my people from your land must span many generations of humankind. Few among humankind spoke the language of my people when we dwelt on Earth. How then can it be that you have remembered my people’s language all this time?”

  It was a good question, and deserved a thoughtful answer. “Long before I was born, an empire rose whose rulers claimed to be your descendants, born out of the mating of your kind and humankind. Perhaps they preserved your language as their speech, and that is why we can speak together now. But truly, I don’t know. The empresses and emperors of the old Dariyan Empire were half-breeds, so they claimed. There aren’t any Aoi on Earth any longer. They exist there only as ghosts, more like shades than living creatures. Some say there never were true Aoi on Earth, that they’re only tales from the dawn time of humankind.”

  “Truly, tales have a way of changing shape to suit the teller. If you wish to know what the spirits meant when they addressed you as ‘child,’ then you must ask them yourself.”

  The stars scintillated so vividly that they seemed to pulse. Strangely, she could find not one familiar constellation. She felt as if she had been flung into a different plane of existence, yet the dirt under her feet smelled like plain, good dirt, and many of the plants were ones she remembered from her childhood, when she and Da had traveled in the lands whose southern boundary was the great middle sea: silver pine and white oak, olive and carob, prickly juniper and rosemary and myrtle. She sighed, taking in the scent of rosemary, oddly comforting, like a favorite childhood story retold.

  “I would ask them, if I could reach them.”

  “To reach them, you must learn to walk the spheres.”

  The arrow came without warning. Pale as ivory, it buried its head in the trunk of a pine. Grabbing her quiver, Liath rolled off her pallet and into the cover of a low-lying holm oak. The old sorcerer remained calmly sitting in his place, still rolling flax into rope against his leg. He hadn’t even flinched. Behind him, the arrow quivered and stilled, a stark length of white against drought-blighted pine bark.

  “What is that?” she demanded, still breathing hard. In the four days since she had come to this land, she had seen no sign of any other people except herself and her teacher.

  “It’s a summons. When light comes, I must attend council.”

  “What will hap
pen to you, and to me, if your people know I’m here?”

  “That remains to be seen.”

  She slept restlessly that night, waking up at intervals to find that he sat in trancelike silence beside her, completely still but with his eyes open. Sometimes when she woke, half muddled from an unremembered and anxious dream, she would see the stars and for an instant would recognize the familiar shapes of the constellations Da had taught her; but always, in the next instant, they would shift in their place, leaving her to stare upward at an alien sky. She could not even see the River of Heaven, which spanned the sky in her own land. In that river, the souls of the dead swam toward the Chamber of Light, and some among them looked down upon the Earth below to watch over their loved ones, now left behind. Was Da lost to her? Did his spirit gaze down upon Earth and wonder where she had gone?

  Yet was she any different than he was, wondering what had become of those left behind? Da hadn’t meant to die, after all. She had left behind those she loved of her own free will.

  At night, she often wondered if she had made the right decision. Sometimes she wondered if she really loved them.

  If she’d really loved them, it shouldn’t have been so easy to let them go.

  Twilight had little hold on this place. Day came suddenly, without the intervening solace of dawn. Liath woke when light brushed her face, and she watched as the old sorcerer’s expression passed from trance to waking in a transition so smooth that it was imperceptible. He rose and stretched the stiffness out of his limbs as she sat up, checking to see that her bow was ready and arrows laid out. Her sword lay within easy reach, and she always slept with her knife tucked in its sheath at her belt.

  “Go to the stream,” he said. “Follow the flower trail to the watchtower. Do not come out unless you hear me call to you, nor should you wander, lest others come upon you. Remember to take care, and do nothing to cut yourself or let any blood fall.” He began to walk away, paused, and called to her over his shoulder. “Make good use of the time! You have not yet mastered the tasks I set you.”