Wildfire (30 page)

 

  
With each plant, a harvest of memories: the Dame teaching me its riddle song, or showing me how the god had marked the plant with signs when it was created—in the ridges on the bark, the taste of a leaf, or the color of a root—so that we might know its uses and be forewarned of its hazards. And back in the tent, as I prepared what I’d gathered, every task invoked the Dame and Na. I scraped bark from bullace twigs and mashed red barberries with a mortar and pestle, and it was as if we worked side by side, as so often we’d done when they were alive. Memory resided in my hands, which knew what to do.

 

  
There were such agreements between signs and plants that I was assured the remedies would be potent. But no healer can cure if the gods are unwilling. I told Gentian that sacrifices needed to be made to Ardor Wildfire and Torrent Waters on behalf of the sick, generous sacrifices, and she collected enough coins from the other whores to make an offering of two sheep.

 

  
Late in the night came a quiet time. The old woman Tansy kept vigil with me, her head nodding. I sat watching and listening to the sick, touching
them sometimes. There was no longer even a flicker from Jillybell’s hearthfire when I gave her warmth. She had fallen into a stupor and was wandering between the realms of the dead and the living, where I didn’t dare follow. I wondered if I could have helped had I been called to her earlier.

 

  
The Queen of the Dead took Jillybell. Wildfire and the Waters relented and let the children and the other whore live.

 
  

 

  
I ducked under the tent flap. Spiller was cooking frybread, and Rowney mending a hole in one of Galan’s boots. Sire Galan was up early, or perhaps he’d never slept. He sat on the camp bed with his weapons around him. It soothed him at times to give the blades the sharpest edge, and polish and oil them to make sure no rust marred the steel. A clay lamp in the shape of a dove hung from an iron crook next to him, illuminating his unkempt hair, the brown skin of his face and neck, burned from days and days of walking, and the paler skin where his shirt hung open. The cords of his neck were taut. He snicked his longsword into its sheath and propped it at the end of the cot.

 

  
Before, facing down his jacks, I’d thought that I might get a thrashing, and that was bad enough. Now I thought I’d been too trusting. I shared his tent and his bed on his sufferance. Did I take it for granted he wouldn’t cast me out? I’d been too sure of him and too complacent. I took the measure of my defiance—of which I’d been proud—and found it after all a weak and paltry thing that wouldn’t withstand the threat of losing him.

 

  
Fleetfoot made haste to leave, taking the slops with him to empty in the ditch. I crossed the tent to Galan but stood out of his reach.

 

  
“I hope it was worth it,” he said. “I hope you saved some whores. I’ve already flogged Bloodspiller and Rowney for disobedience, but I can’t quite decide what to do with you.”

 

  
He had his dagger belt in both hands. He wrapped the strap a couple of turns around his right fist, keeping the heavy buckle against his palm. It would be worse if the buckle were free.

 

  
“That was injust, for you to punish them on becount of me.”

 

  
“They needed reminding that they’re under my command, not yours. Especially your swain here.”

 

  
I glanced over at Rowney and saw him watching us, his face tight and angry.

 

  
“I did what I must,” I told Galan.

 

  
“So did I,” he said. “I can’t abide disobedience.”

 

  
We’d woken Sire Edecon. He rolled his eyes and pulled the blanket over his head. I saw the boy was still here, curled up in the darkest corner of the tent. His eyes glimmered. He was sucking his thumb.

 

  
I said, “If you don’t want me to disobey, don’t forbid me from my duly, duty.”

 

  
“I was mistaken, I see, in thinking your duty was to me.”

 

  
“The sliver-and-scrape is amongst us and folk are dying of it and what little I can do I must, even if it means I don’t lie along of you the whole sight long.”

 

  
Galan raised his voice. “You did not used to
want
to leave my bed, nor did you receive so many summons, nor spend your nights among cankered and flea-bitten whores! You have nearly killed yourself to make others well, and they died anyway. I want you to admit they die anyway—you put yourself at hazard for nothing, you put us all at hazard. Suppose the shiver-and-shake follows you back to this tent? You don’t know what you’re doing, this is just your ignorance and obstinance, your pride and willfulness to set yourself against me. If you don’t wish me for a master, why did you follow? You could have done as you liked. I gave you that and you flung it back in my face, and why? Why?” He stood up with the strap in his hands and I took a step backward. He was so close, but I felt the world between us. I couldn’t understand how he could think I’d answered a summons to heal just to defy him. How selfish he was.

 

  
He said, “My uncle asked me that and I thought I knew the answer. I thought it was for me you came, not my money or any other cause, but as you have so little regard for me, I have to wonder.”

 

  
He seemed to become aware that he was shouting. He stopped and took a breath and leaned over me, pulling the strap tight between his hands, and he said in a low voice that was worse than a shout, “I don’t know which is worse, a canny or a cozener. I saw with my own eyes what you did to the bagboy—that horrid piebald glove, what was that? And what did you do to me, set a fishhook in me to see me dance? Like you did in the field that night, hmm? My dangle jerking upright at your command, just as my uncle always said.”

 

  
I caught hold of the strap, my hands between his hands, and though our flesh didn’t touch, I felt a spark. There was not the whole world between us after all. We were but a hairsbreadth apart. Had I not just been thinking what he’d said aloud, that I was jerked about wherever he led?

 

  
I whispered, “That was mistress, Mischief. I was not myself then.”

 

  
“If you’re not yourself, who are you? Or what?”

 

  
“I am what…Ardent made me. I think the brightening made a crack in me and I am opened up.” I touched the crown of my head. “So I am visioned, visited. You understand?”

 

  
“So I suppose you cured the whores tonight?”

 

  
“One was lost of the five who had it. I could not…” My throat closed
up. I was weary of all of it, of sickness and fear and rage and quarreling, of the struggle to speak when he lacked the patience to hear me out. His words and voice were angry, scornful, but in his face I sought contradictory signs. It was not only cannies, as Mai claimed, who had uneven faces. We all had them. And Galan’s divided face betrayed a divided mind. On the left side I saw his fury that I’d disobeyed, and his fear of me and what I might be. On the right I saw his vexation that I’d risked myself so recklessly, and his fear I might come to harm over it.

 

  
I wanted to reach for Galan, to hold him and be comforted, but I knew he wouldn’t tolerate my touch. I said, “Of course I have regret, regard for you, of course. You
know
why I followed. But the god gave me a…theft—Illfire did—a a…gefthe, a…gift to heal the ill. I’m oblieged, I must do what I can, you see? And don’t you think I wish I had more…witdom? The got, the god stole from me too—the strickening took much of my knowdom, what I used to have of the green…the greenlorne, and I am just now recollecting it. I couldn’t save…Jenny, Jinnybell, but I was able to be of some servant to them, the other whorelets. So I beg you, don’t forbeg me, don’t punish your japes for what I must do. I’d rather take blights on my own back than suffer them to suffer for me.”

 

  
Galan threw down the strap and pushed past me and out of the doorway. I sat on the bed, my legs gone weak. I heard Bloodspiller say to Rowney, “I told you he wouldn’t do it. You owe me four copperheads.”

 
  

 

  
I didn’t get any rest. Not long after Galan left, another summons came, this time to the tent of the Auspices of Hazard. The priestess of Chance was down with the shiver-and-shake, as was the priest of Fate and three of their servants. The carnifex of their clan was a vigorous old mudman who welcomed my arrival. We worked together through the day and evening, he with the men and I with the priestess and her handmaid. He had a store of herbs laid by. We were both puzzled that the shiver-and-shake was striking down people in their prime as well as children and old folk. It seemed fiercer here than in Corymb.

 

  
The Auspex of Chance was elderly and frail. When she was a young dedicate she’d offered her eyes, and her eyelids had been stitched shut so she’d be as sightless as her mistress. She greeted me courteously when I came in, and touched my face to see me. She said, “You have the red hair, I hear, so pray to Chance for me. She hasn’t always repaid my devotion.”

 

  
I left the tent so I could throw the bones for the priestess and her maid in secret. By the signs I expected them both to live, and I had what was needed to hand, in bark and roots gathered the night before, and herbs the old carnifex gave me, dried vervain and wormwood and seeds of parsley. I
took heat from the Auspex and she slept placidly. But as I made ready to leave, the fever rose again. She stiffened and jerked, and gray spittle foamed at the corners of her mouth, and I feared she was going to die after all. When I put my hands on her, I felt her hearthfire churning and sullied with smoke. I stroked my fingers along her limbs and torso, trying to comb the flames so they would flow like a smooth river instead of roiling like rapids. Her fit stopped, and she eased into sleep again.

 

  
I left before she woke, when Rowney came to say I’d been sent for elsewhere. He led me to a lean-to of sticks thatched with rye stalks. A couple of sorry two-copper whores lived there with their pander, who was scarcely more than a lad—the son of the older whore, Dogrose, as the younger whore was her daughter. The daughter was sick, her eyes glazed, and the son was awake and scratching. He said to his mother, “I hope she doesn’t charge much,” meaning me, and Dogrose said, “She won’t ask a copperhead, and suppose she did? What’s it to you? You’re not the one who has to flip up your skirts to earn it.”

 

  
Rowney took offense on my behalf—it would be a poor sort of greenwoman who took money for healing, a gift of the gods. I didn’t mind. I grinned at Dogrose and bent over her sweaty daughter. She was hardy and her hearthfire burned steadily; even before throwing the bones for her, I felt sure she’d live.

 

  
On the way back, a laundress found me and said her friend Sloeberry was sick, and would I look in on her? So I did, and then I visited the priestess of Hazard Chance, and found her sleeping quietly.

 

  
I went to the tent of the whores to see how they fared. The sick ones were mending, but Tansy, the old woman who had been so stalwart, had fallen deathly ill. I’d never seen the shiver-and-shake strike so hard and fast. Tears tinged with blood oozed from her swollen eyes, and her nose bled and dark bruises showed where no one had struck her. I threw the bones for her there in the tent, sitting beside her pallet, facing the canvas wall, hardly caring that someone might see. There were certain combinations of signs that frightened me: the Smith again, the same as for Jillybell, and Prey Hunger. The lice were dead on Tansy’s head and body, just as on the laundress in the briars; that was a frightening sign too, of her blood turning poisonous, or the fever burning too hot to be endured. I stayed with her, stroking her hands. She shook and shook, cooling too fast, and I gave her what I could, but my own hearthfire was burning low. Before the end her hands turned gray, turned to clay.

 

  
By then the Sun was well and truly risen, and another day and night had passed—an endless time, I had thought while I was in it, and yet afterward it seemed to have gone by with unaccountable swiftness.

 

  
As I walked back to Galan’s tent, I saw priests of Torrent dragging a dog
cart around the camp, calling for everyone to give up any loot they had of Torrent’s clan, so it could be burned to avert the curse. Cataphracts and drudges and queans and drabs threw armor and coins and seashell trinkets into the cart. The Auspices were solemn and they sang sonorous prayers. Behind the dogcart came an oxcart pulled by two bald priests of Rift, asking for sacrifices, and behind them supplicants slashed themselves in ecstasy.

 

  
Dread came over me and darkened my vision, and filled me with the conviction that every effort was futile. A burden of weariness bore me down. I looked each man in the face and thought,
Dead man, dead man.
I saw a gaggle of whores in striped skirts, and I knew it was just my fear that clothed them, one and all, in the drab guise of shades.

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  

  
  
  
CHAPTER 12
  

  
Council of the Dead
  
  

 

  

 

  

 

  

 

  
I
sank deep into Sleep’s ocean, but instead of rest I caught a terrifying dream. I dreamed I gave birth to a tiny mouse, a small pink thing like a morsel of ham, and I tried to care for it like any other child, but I lost it among tousled and reeking bedclothes.

 

  
I sat up, sure I’d dreamed of Mouse, Mai’s unborn child, ready at last to be born. It was bright outside, late afternoon by the look of it, and I’d slept most of the day away. I wasn’t accustomed to so much sleep and I felt dazed, as if I’d come a long way back from elsewhere in waking. The door flap was open and there was a smell I hated on the wind, pyres burning outside the camp.

 

  
The laundress’s boy, Wren, was sitting beside Rowney, helping to polish Sire Edecon’s greaves. Of course there wasn’t a speck of rust to be found on the armor, Rowney had seen to that. I wondered if Sire Galan would keep the boy, no matter what he said. Perhaps the Dame’s husband had acquired me the same way—taken me in as a kindness to an orphan—rather than stealing me as a red-haired talisman to bring him luck, as Sire Pava once had claimed.