Wildfire (37 page)

 

  
The dead were everywhere. I do not speak of the discarded bodies, but of the shades. They were shadows as thin and vanishing as the mist we breathe out on a winter’s day. They crowded all around the horizon of my vision, flickering in time to the beat of my blood and Mouse’s indignant gulping cries. They left me less and less room to see. In the twilight the snow turned blue, and the blood in the snow was black.

 
  

 

  
Mouse and I took the road to Malleus in the dark. I didn’t fear getting lost, for we followed a wide trail trampled by many horses. In time the path led us uphill to a temple, and there I was baffled. There were hoofprints all around the temple and hilltop, but no road down other than the one I’d climbed. Had our army stopped here to worship? The hill was steep, a long way to climb if it wasn’t on the way to Malleus. It was quiet, except for Mouse’s cries, and a few owls hooting and Frost’s hooves crunching in the snow. Not a light to be seen. They must have come and gone again.

 

  
It was too much trouble to wonder about it, and I didn’t care. I could go no farther, not tonight. Mouse was hungry and I was weary, and here might be food and shelter for us both. I dismounted, and led Frost up the worn marble steps to the temple portico, which had columns as tall as the trunks of ancient firs, and huge bronze-clad doors. There was a smaller door at the side for mudfolk, and I hammered on it. A temple as grand as this would not be without priests, nor the priests without servants.

 

  
A porter opened the door a crack and I saw him edged with lantern light. He had a gray beard and fear in his eyes. His sword winked down by my belly.

 

  
“Help?” I said in the High. Mouse said it better. His face was red and he
opened his mouth wide with every cry, showing his pink gums and flailing tongue.

 

  
The porter peered around the door to see who else was with us. Frost cocked her ears toward him and whuffled through her nose. He pulled us in, even the mule, and barred the door behind us.

 

  
His pallet was on the floor of the corridor. He wore an undyed tunic that fell short of his knobby knees, and his sword proved to be the sort of everyday long knife any varlet might have. His eyes were watery and kind.

 

  
“Did you come for healing?” he said.

 

  
It seemed safest to answer yes.

 

  
He clucked his tongue. “A fine night to be traveling. Haven’t you heard there’s a war?”

 

  
I jiggled Mouse and said, over his cries, “He’s hungry. I have no milce for him, no milk. Have you a wetnoise?”

 

  
“He’s a stout fellow, isn’t he?” The man lifted his lantern and led us down the plastered passage, while Mouse’s ceaseless
Mnaah! Mnaah! Mnaah!
bounced off the walls. He pointed to a stairway. “You go along to the kitchens down there, get some milk for the babe, and I’ll have a stableboy see to your mule.”

 

  
I put the saddlebag over my shoulder and gave Frost a pat, saying to the porter, “Mind the boy grooms her now, she’s been hard at work,” and headed downstairs.

 

  
The kitchen was underground in a windowless room. Here was noise and heat and bustle, all hidden from the quiet cold night outside. There were fires in hearths and loaves of bread stacked up high and cooks hard at work, so many I wondered if they were preparing for a festival. A baker with floury arms and a gauze kirtle sticking to her legs with sweat made much of Mouse, and I let her hold him. He stopped crying and began to look about, his round eyes blinking at the people in the kitchens. “Did you bring him for healing?” the baker said, tickling his belly. “What’s the matter?”

 

  
I said, “For mither’s milk. Have you any?”

 

  
“Have you dried up? I have a salve for that. Sometimes milk lets down late, so you must keep trying.”

 

  
“He isn’t mine. His bearer wouldn’t have him, she refused.”

 

  
“So you’re to be a temple boy, are you?” she asked Mouse, hoisting him up to have a look. He dangled in her strong hands and seemed content, which pricked me with a small needle of vexation.

 

  
“What tremble is this? What temple?”

 

  
“The temple of Lynx, of course.”

 

  
I began to laugh. I laughed so hard I felt stabbing pains in my sides, and
I tried to tell her the fine jest that the boy’s name was Mouse and all along he had belonged to Lynx Mischief, but I couldn’t speak for laughing. I cracked open, and I slid off the bench onto my hands and knees on the floor and hunched my back and wept, my forehead against the tiles, while the baker asked, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” and a curious ginger cat rubbed against my legs. I fell on my side and curled up and howled, not numb, thank the gods, no longer like a shade, but oh, it was unbearable, Tobe lost and Mai so still and stubborn, and she might yet die, despite having won through her travail—and the dead and maimed on the battlefield, and Sire Galan maybe lying dead among them. Mouse and the baker gaped at me, and I rolled on my back and looked up at them and couldn’t say a word.

 
  

 

  
The baker’s husband had a cousin who had a friend in the laundry who had just lost a child, and Mouse was taken from me for the night. I was grateful. The baker gave me half a loaf of bread to eat, fine bread of the kind served to Auspices. Better still, she gave me a basin of water to wash myself and my dress. Mai’s blood was all over the skirts, and I rinsed off the worst of it, and hung the wet dress by a hearth. I curled up in a corner, in my underdress and cloak, with my saddlebag as a pillow. The ginger cat padded around me and over my chest before she deigned to curl up beside my hip. She purred.

 

  
I knew I wouldn’t sleep no matter how weary I was and in need of healing, for sleep had long been denied me. But in the temple of Lynx I was not denied. I fell asleep and had a dream.

 
  

 

  
I lay me down on my pallet stuffed with sweetfern on the porch of my house, the house I thought of as mine. My black cat Gowdylakin sprawled across my belly. It was a cold night, clear as spring water. I could see my breath. I never slept indoors unless I had to. I liked the moving air. I liked to see weather when I awoke. The house was perched high enough that sometimes the weather was below me in the valley over the Wend River, and sometimes above, and sometimes I was in a cloud. I smelled sweetfern and smoke from the brazier. I was tired and it felt good, for I’d done a good day’s work between one chore and another, and I’d walked far to get aspen bark to dye wool, down to the stream that flowed to the Wend. I was thinking about which mordant to use to get a bright orange when I fell asleep and had a dream.

 
  

 

  
On the riverbank, amongst reeds of dull gold, on boggy ground made perilous by round stones and puddles under ice skins, I saw King Thyrse. I knew him by his gilded armor and his helm with the golden antlers of a
stag. The king had fought and killed someone. He put his foot on the fallen warrior’s cuirass and yanked his scorpion out of the eye slit of the helmet. His blow had gone deep and there was gore, red and gray, on the scorpion’s sting. He wiped the blade with a handful of reeds. To judge by the dead warrior’s cuirass, which had a belly round as a kettle, he had been a fat man. But his legs were thin.

 

  
“Don’t take off the helmet,” I said, but the king didn’t hear me. He unfastened the helmet and pulled it off. The warrior had a bloody socket where the right eye used to be. That eye was squashed and hanging on the cheek. The other eye stared upward, fixed in startlement. The corpse was a boy, nothing but a boy, with a round face and freckled nose. His eyebrows were as orange as the fur of a ginger cat. I couldn’t see his hair, for he wore a red padded cap as helmet lining.

 

  
It wasn’t the warrior’s face that interested King Thyrse, but the helmet made to look like the head of a hooded serpent. Gold wire outlined diamond scales inlaid with red and white enamel. He squatted beside the body and turned the helmet in his hands as if admiring the workmanship.

 

  
Then I remembered. This wasn’t our king, the king was dead. Maybe his shade filled the armor as it had once inhabited flesh. Or maybe the armor was empty, and it would soon fall apart, helm, cuirass, greaves all scattered. But no—a living man wore the king’s gilded armor, a living man who pushed up the visor of his helm to wipe sweat from his brow with a rag that had been tucked under his gauntlet: Sire Galan.

 

  
Sire Galan tied the rag to the dead warrior’s baldric, and it was not a rag at all, but one of the king’s golden banners, embroidered with the leaping stag of Thyrse’s house, and he was marking the corpse for the tally.

 

  
He took a swallow from a steel flask. He had blood seeping here and there between the plates of his armor, on his arm, his calf. There were no sounds of battle, which failed to arouse wonder in me. It was quiet except for some gray wagtails fussing at him from the reeds.

 

  
“Give me that helm,” Queenmother Caelum said, holding out a slender hand. She rode a white mare in white leather barding, and she wore a long split surcoat stitched from the narrow skins of ermine with the heads left on, showing their pointed teeth and false eyes of onyx; the black-tipped tails hung like so many tassels. Her surcoat marked her as the clan of Prey, but her long gown, which draped over the flanks of her horse, was the scarlet of Rift, the clan of her dead husband.

 

  
Sire Galan stood and leaned on the tall ironwood shaft of his scorpion. He leaned with insolent ease, in a way that plainly said he was not under her command.

 

  
She had a pack of Wolves with her. The foremost of them had a cloak of
wolfskin with the paws tied around his throat. The helmets of the other Wolves were all alike, iron gray and faceless, and their horses were likewise gray.

 

  
“Give it to me,” she said, and snapped her fingers.

 

  
“I don’t think so, Queenmother Caelum,” he said.

 

  
“You may be in my brother’s armor, but you don’t command here.” Pink spots had risen on her cheeks. Her thin nose was already red from the cold.

 

  
There were Wolves behind him too. How they’d gotten there without jingling a bridle, I didn’t know. I stood still in the tall reeds, hoping the drumming of my heart wouldn’t give me away.

 

  
Sire Galan looked behind him and on either side. He smiled. “No, I don’t think so. The kill is mine, he’s mine.” His voice was calm and his hand loose on the scorpion’s haft.

 

  
The Queenmother laughed. “
He
is yours! Did
he
fight hard, or was he easy? Easy as a trollop, I warrant. This warrior you are so proud of killing is my son’s wife, Kalos, and I thank you for ridding me of her and her unborn spawn. I’ll give you a purse of gold to compensate you for her armor, if you please. Because I doubt that you, Sire Galan dam Capella by Falco of Crux—you see I know your name—as I say, I doubt that you would like your illustrious name coupled with hers in the songs of rumormongers long after you are dead. And you will be dead if you don’t give me the helm.”

 

  
Sire Galan said, “My king fought here, haven’t you heard? He will have the fame of this kill—or the shame of it, if all is as you say.” He crouched by the corpse and pulled the quilted cap from its head. The hair he loosed was long and curly and ginger in color, only a little browner than the eyebrows.

 

  
“Oh gods,” he said. “I didn’t know. She fought…She fought, not well, but well enough. She even cut me, on my leg I think. I thought she was a portly man, an out-of-breath old man. And when I took off the helmet I thought she was a boy. Gods.” He stood and handed the helm to the queenmother. “Take it. Take it. I want no gold for this.”

 

  
“Where is her horse?” the queenmother asked.

 

  
Sire Galan shrugged. “Run off.” He backed toward the reeds where I stood hidden. He was near enough that I could smell his sweat and blood.

 

  
Queenmother Caelum said, “One of you give me your horse, quick now.” A Wolf dismounted and led his warhorse forward. “Put her in the saddle. No, not like a sack of turnips—sit her upright! Tie her on.” She was impatient, as if her men should have known what she wanted. The horse sidled and whinnied, displeased to have a dead rider. The Queenmother edged her mare up to the stallion and grabbed the reins. She leaned toward
her daughter-in-law, who slumped with her head cocked sideways and the broken eye still stuck to her cheek. Queenmother Caelum jammed the helmet over the corpse’s head, and rapped her knuckles on the round-bellied cuirass. “Still alive in there, grandson?” she said.

 

  
Sire Galan turned his face away from that sight and I saw him swallow again and again with a sour look, and I knew he swallowed his own rising bile, foul as bilge water.

 

  
When Queenmother Caelum told her men to set Kalos on fire, and drive her horse toward the field where Prince Corvus fought, beset by many warriors—for quiet as it was in that bend of the river, the battle was not over—when she ordered this, Sire Galan raised his voice against it, calling it a vile deed that would anger gods and men.

 

  
She didn’t trouble to answer him. One of her Wolves crept up behind while Sire Galan shouted, and felled him with a heavy blow. Sire Galan didn’t hear my warning. He groaned and turned his head so his cheek rested on a stone, and by that I knew he was alive.

 

  
The Wolves stuffed reeds and sedges under Kalos’s armor and tied bundles of reeds to the saddle and set them alight, and I smelled the smoke. The warhorse screamed in outrage and tried to flee the fire. He bucked and dodged, his hooves digging through the ice and mud of the bog, but no matter where he ran he could not escape what was burning. The corpse flopped on his back. Several Wolves galloped after to herd the horse where they aimed it to go.

 

  
Queenmother Caelum watched in silence until they disappeared from view. I couldn’t understand the look on her face, which was neither satisfaction nor pleasure. She seemed solemn, as one who watches a holy procession. She rode away with her wolf pack, but not before she’d tossed a sack of coins toward Sire Galan as she’d promised. He wasn’t able to naysay her.