Wildfire (4 page)

  
It sometimes happens in battle that a soldier doesn’t know he’s been stabbed, and only later feels a weakness come over him and finds the wound in his side—so I’d been surprised to find I was smitten by Galan, after I lay with him behind a hedge on a festival night.
Easy to find, easy to forget,
we say of such chance meetings during the UpsideDown Days.

 

  
Galan refused to be forgotten.

 
  

 

  
A bird perched in the rigging and sang,
I live, I live, I live!
It was nothing but a small puff of feathers, the possessor of a single song that it offered to the wind with all its might. It was a long way from any shore. Surely it would stay with us until landfall rather than dare to cross so much water again. But it flew off, out of sight. I used to know what sort of bird it was.

 
  

 

  
The sun climbed behind us, and therefore we were sailing west. She sent a ray of light through a gap in the clouds and struck my eyes.

 

  
I remembered. We were sailing west and to war.

 
  

 

  
Tobe was crying and Sunup was trying to feed him porridge. Tobe and Sunup. Naming people fastened them to me, and fastened me to where I was.

 

  
So much noise nearly drowned out the buzzing of Sire Rodela. Everyone and everything talking at once, Tobe wailing and Sunup coaxing and waves mumbling against the hull and wind whispering through the rigging and drudges chattering and sailors shouting. My head hurt.

 

  
A man said, “Lukaterwillyu? Thotsheedsleepfrever.” He was standing up, looking down on me. He was swaying—the ship was swaying, he was standing still, holding on to ropes. I picked at the noise to separate his voice from the hubbub. I understood the rough tune and tone of his speech: the rise and fall of question and statement, the nasal lilt of mockery, and even the humming undertone of fondness. Then, after a delay, I understood the words:
Look at her, will you? Thought she’d sleep forever.

 

  
I knew that fellow; he was named Trave, and he was one of Mai’s varlets, or rather he served her cataphract. But already others were speaking, more than one at once, and the wind roistered about and scattered their words out of reach.

 

  
Pinch said, “Didjasee howt jumptoer? Thlightning jumptoerboom!” and he clapped, “En thruerdown, thruercros thedeck. Sheotta bedead,” and meanwhile the waves said, “Shushshushshush,” and a gull said, “Aship aship plentitoeat,” in a long fading caw overhead, and Mai said, “Leaver alone.” She elbowed Trave out of the way and leaned toward me. “Canyu situp? Sit up?”

 

  
My limbs were feeble and slow to obey. My right arm trembled and refused to help bear my weight. I panted.

 

  
Mai said, “Can you hear me? I thought maybe you went deaf onaccounta you were bleeding from anear.”

 

  
When I concentrated on Mai and watched her lips move, I could understand. Mostly. But it was laborious.

 

  
The blanket slipped and Mai pulled it up around my neck and over my shoulders.

 

  
I tried to speak. “What, what…what upended…what opened?” I knew just what I meant to say, yet I couldn’t find the right words or the sounds to make them. Words seemed far away, and I had to travel toward them with slow, halting steps. This vexed me. I tried again. “What…hammered…hampered?”

 

  
Mai didn’t seem to notice. “Lightning blew you out of your slippers—picked you up enflungu enufetcht up in a heap. You looked deadas dead, your clothes alburntintatters. I’ve never seen such a sight before and I hope I never do again. Nothing broken, praise the gods. You couldve split open your skull! But yortufasan old root.”

 

  
I lifted my left hand, my obedient hand, and she pressed it against her cheek.

 

  
“I’m glad, Coz,” she said. “So glad you’re better.”

 

  
I wanted to be glad. But I was afraid. I’d become a laggard, a simpleton.

 
  

 

  
I sat on a rower’s bench and stared at the sea, the smooth swells that lifted us and passed on, and smaller waves that crossed the swells at an angle. Now and then three large waves would march by, one after another, adorned by whitecaps. Behind us a spreading fantail of ripples broke the surface of the water into blue and gray slivers of light.

 

  
After the chaos of the storm, it was soothing to see the distinct and orderly patterns of the waves, which reminded me of designs weavers made from the play of warp and weft, color and interval. Was this what sailors saw when they looked at the sea, did they recognize and name these patterns as weavers named theirs? Though I could not, just now, name one design among the many the Dame had so painstakingly taught me. The names were gone, and all that remained was the memory of the quiet in the weaving room, and the steady growth of order as the shuttle crossed back and forth between the warp threads.

 

  
There were ships about us with their sails full of wind. And coming nearer, bobbing in our wake, things that marred the pattern of the waves: drowned men, broken spars, an upturned hull black with pitch.

 
  

 

  
Mai tried to pull a garment over my head, one of her winter underdresses. I wanted to help, but my right arm was so weak I couldn’t raise it above my head. Though I could twitch the fingers of my right hand, which pleased me so much that I wept, saying, “See how the little ones, the…the diddles…the fidgets—how do you call them?—the things that finger things, see how they fiddle now!”

 

  
Sunup and I could have fit inside Mai’s dress together and left room for another. Even so, I was grateful to be covered, for it had occurred to me, somewhat too late, to feel shame at my nakedness. Mai hitched up the skirts about my waist so they wouldn’t trail on the deck, for she was considerably taller than me, and she pleated the bodice, tying it about me with crisscrossed cords the color of new-minted copper. Such was her skill that it looked as if it were meant to be that way, or so she said with satisfaction, “And not as if you’re a foul trust for roasting.” She fashioned a headcloth for me from a scrap of the green wool dress I’d been wearing.

 

  
Foul trust? I puzzled over that.

 

  
Fowl trussed
for roasting. Always this gap between sound and sense.

 

  
“I’ve no shoes to fit you,” Mai said. She handed me a heavy cloth sack on a long cord.

 

  
“What’s these things?” I could feel hard disks through the cloth.

 

  
Mai laughed. “Why, it’s everything of yours I could find. I think I got most of the money you’d stitched into your hem and seams, all but what some light-fingered whoreson sowpricker of a sailor found first. But your girdle and all that you carried in it were destroyed. So you take this.” She searched under her skirts and brought out an oilskin packet. “I had saved some for myself, but I shan’t be needing it until after the child is born, and maybe by then you’ll have found some more. You’ll be wanting it yourself soon, I daresay.” She winked and I took the packet from her.

 

  
I unfolded it and saw two handfuls of white, black-eyed berries. I thought I should know what they were, but I’d misplaced the meaning as well as the word. I looked at Mai.

 

  
“You don’t know what they are?”

 

  
I shrugged. Mai tucked me under her arm and pulled me close. I rested against the great sloping shelf of her bosom. “Ah, Coz, poor dear! You gave me these berries. They’re childbane, and you and I sold them all over the Marchfield to whores and dames alike, to keep them from conceiving. You truly don’t remember?”

 

  
“Truly, truly, Mine…Mai, I mean.” My throat closed up. “There are, there are…it’s as if my find is full of halts, you see? My my empery is like my…drapes…the cloth thing I wore—all charred. It’s holey.”

 

  
She gave me a little shake. “You’re upside down and backward now, but you’ll get better. It was a gift, you’ll see. Once the rumormongers get hold of the tale, everyone will know that Ardor Wildfire gave you a big blessed buss, that you’re thunderstruck.”

 

  
“You call this a…blissing? A besting?”

 

  
“The god branded your cheek with lightning and left you lopsided. A lopsided face is a sure sign of a cannywoman, and every harlot in the army will seek your advice, and be willing to pay dear for it too.”

 

  
Mai had called me a canny before, and this time I didn’t trouble to deny it; but why did she call me lopsided? I touched my face and discovered my mouth was sagging on the right. I pinched my cheek hard. “My face is just slipping. Sleeping. Surely it will wake!”

 

  
She said, “It comes out muddled, doesn’t it?” She still had her arm around me. I pulled away, hearing mirth in her voice as well as sympathy. I couldn’t bear to be laughed at just now.

 

  
Mai was a canny herself, I remembered that much, and she was lopsided too. I wondered I’d never noticed it before. The left side of her face had a
smile of plain good humor, from the dimple beside the mouth to the crinkled crow’s-feet around the eye; the right had a sneering upper lip and a shrewd gaze.

 

  
I stared at her with distrust, and she stopped smiling. Then all at once I saw her whole again, and saw her fondness for me, and no longer doubted it. I tried to tell her how grateful I was for the way she’d cared for me, always there when I awoke, and while I fumbled to speak she waited with a pained, patient expression. But the words were too distant, and I couldn’t reach them. When I wept in frustration she kissed the back of my hand. “Never mind, dear heart,” she said. “Never mind.”

 
  

 

  
I awoke in the night to find a priestess leaning over me, guarding a candle flame with her hand. A gust of wind made wax drip on my arm. We stared at each other, the priestess and I. She wore a diadem of coiled copper wire over a wimple. She touched my unbound hair, like in color to the burnished wire, and then my left cheek. She muttered a blessing over me and went away.

 

  
I sat up gingerly. Mai slept on the deck beside me, her cloak draped about the peaks of her hips and shoulders like the folds of a mountain’s skirts. I felt for the pouch I’d kept hidden under my kirtle, and then recalled that Mai had given me a cloth sack. I tugged it out from under my bodice and found the divining compass pouch inside the sack, nestled amidst the coins.

 

  
I tipped the bones into my palm, glad I hadn’t lost them. I felt the touch of the Dame and Na. One placed her hand on my arm, the other on the crown of my head, so softly I could almost mistake the feeling for the caress of the wind. I wept for gratitude that they had not left me. And I wept for pity that they were dead, and I’d never see them again in this life.

 

  
I spread out the divining compass on my lap, and kissed the bones and cast them, and leaned closer to peer at the godsigns, to see which avatars the Dame and Na had singled out. And I discovered I could no longer read. The godsigns around the horizon of the compass were mere marks, no sense attached to them. The Dame had taught me to read, and with that gift she’d honored me and raised me above her other servants. I’d prized the knowledge, and now it was gone.

 

  
Sire Rodela’s buzz had faded until I almost forgot to hear him. Now he began to whine in delight, louder, nearer, taunting.

 

  
It was a clear night. I looked up and searched for the godsigns writ in the stars by the gods, the constellations we copied in ink, making dots large or small according to whether the stars were bright or dim. The skyfield was
so much more intricate than I remembered; I could find too many patterns, patterns upon patterns, and all meaningless.

 

  
If I couldn’t recognize the godsigns, could I remember the gods and their avatars? I counted them on my fingers, starting with Ardor, though I couldn’t tell which sign on the painted compass belonged to the god. First Ardor Wildfire. Then Ardor Smith. What was the third avatar, the woman? I couldn’t remember, nor could I summon the name of another god. Wildfire had stolen my speech, the godsigns, and knowledge of other gods. Was Ardor so jealous?

 

  
I stared at the divining compass. How satisfied I’d been, when I painted those circles and lines, and inscribed each arcant with the name of a god, to think that I was re-creating within this small compass the orderly arrangement of the world. I might as well have tried to draw fixed lines upon the surface of the water. The tiny circle contained a vast deep sea, a place of currents and turbulence. Gods moved within it, nameless to me now, nothing to divide them, nothing to contain them. Uncertainty spilled outward from the compass, and I feared I would wander in this unmapped ignorance forever.

 
  

 

  
Warriors carried torches and swords and pikes through the streets of a town. The stuccoed buildings were three and four stories high, side by side and face-to-face along a narrow cobbled street so steep that in places it became a stairway. Painted wooden balconies were on fire above me, and flames and smoke and screams billowed through the fretwork shutters. A carved blue door burned and broke away from its top hinge. There were bonfires in the streets, heaps of blazing furniture with bodies discarded upon them. The stink of pyres.

 

  
I was little. I knew I wasn’t supposed to make a sound, but I was sobbing. A linen chest lay open on its side, white cloth spilling into the mucky gutter. Down the street a woman sprawled on the ground. I couldn’t see her face because her skirts had been pulled up over her head. Only her red hair was showing. Her bare legs and belly were smeared with blood. One knee was up, the other down. One arm was bent backward under her, the other stretched out, the palm open and empty.

 

  
Sparks and embers ate holes in the linen that used to be kept safe in the chest in the house. I watched a wisp of smoke forming above it. Warriors ran past me, making a joyous uproar that didn’t sound human; they wore helmets, and their faces were hidden behind visors shaped like animal snouts. Wildfire loose in the town.