Wildfire (46 page)

 

  

 

  
Who made the bread to rise?

 

  
I did with my leaven

 

  
Who made the bread to bake?

 

  
I put it in your oven.”

 

  

 

  
She had a thin voice, and I could hardly hear her over the noise of the ice and wind. She said, “I sing,
Who made the bread to rise?
Then you begin while I keep going.”

 

  
“It’s a silthy song,” I said, and Catena giggled.

 

  
She began and I sang next, and I stumbled at first, but soon we were going round and round, her voice climbing in a question while mine was descending in an answer, and then mine rising while hers was falling. Chunner joined Catena, and Marestail sang with me, and before long others were singing as well, a small knot of us making a clamor in defiance of the frightful sounds of the mountain.

 

  
Mox sang a drinking song. He said his dead father, the old sot, had taught it to him in a dream. The song went:

 

  

 

  
I, even I, must die,

 

  
So why should I bother to try?

 

  
It is better to die drinking,

 

  
Than to lie thinking,

 

  
That I, even I, must die.

 

  

 

  
A very fine song, it was agreed. Too bad there was no ale to go with it. We bellowed it over and over and I saw cataphracts and armigers singing too.

 

  
I said I had a song to keep them warm. I said each of them had a hearthfire inside that they must tend carefully so it would not go out. When they had need of warmth, they could sing this song Ardor gave me, and when they did, they must think about adding wood to their hearthfires to make them blaze up. I was daunted by their sudden silence, but I sang out anyway:

 

  

 

  
Burn bright, burn fast.

 

  
Give what light you can,

 

  
The rest is ash.

 

  

 

  
I sang it three times alone, time enough to conclude it was a poor song after all. But when Catena took it up she made a chain of it, and the links fit together as if they were meant to be sung that way. For a few more rounds it was just the two of us, her clear voice and my lower one. I faltered, and a deep voice joined in and gave me strength, and another and another. The mountain seemed to take notice. Ice cornices cracked and fell from the ridge, and snow slid like waterfalls down rock faces, and plumes of crystals rose glittering in the moonlight.

 

  
I looked at the faces of the men, their heads thrown back or bobbing, mouths stretching wide, singing out to keep from fear. Some of them had done cruel things, I’d seen this for myself—they’d taken food from the mouths of poor folk, burned houses, forced themselves on women and girls, robbed from each other. There were some among them who’d let another man die rather than suffer the inconvenience of helping. At times I’d thought it would be for the best if the Ferinus swallowed all the king’s men.

 

  
But now I saw them flickering in the wind like candle flames. How could I wish any of them dead, when we burn for such a short time and are so easily snuffed out?

 
  

 

  
I threw the bones in the darkness under my cloak, while Catena was sleeping, and asked the Dame and Na for help, as I had asked many times. I went to sleep thinking of the godsigns they’d shown me, and some of them—the Sun, the Stallion, the Warrior—were woven into my dreams that night. I had a true dream of my father, the third I’d had of him, and it began the way the first dream had ended.

 

  
We were going home after selling the colt, riding over a saddle between two mountains. Before us was a narrow lake in a valley far below; behind us, on another mountain, was a line of horsemen bearing black banners. The line stretched around the mountain’s flanks and we couldn’t see the end of it. There was snow on the mountain peaks, but the sunlight was hot and glaring. I smelled dust. My father had a pointed reddish brown beard and a hat of embroidered blue felt. He shaded his eyes, looking back at the horsemen. “Come now,” he said. “You must get on the horse with me.”

 

  
I said, “But, Fedan, I’m not a baby. I can ride by myself.” Fedan was not his name, it was a word meaning father in a language I’d forgotten. I’m not sure what language we spoke in the dream, but we understood each other.

 

  
I was on my sorrel pony. Her hair was like my own in color, and she was as sure on the mountain trails as my father’s roan gelding, and I said so. Fedan leaned from his saddle to untie the lead from the pack mule’s halter. He flicked the mule on the rump with the rope, and she took a few steps and stood bewildered. My father was frowning, and he spoke in the voice he used when he was vexed with me. “Come here! Hurry now!”

 

  
I was frightened by his anger and did as he asked. I slid off my pony’s back and handed the reins up to my father, but he wouldn’t take them. He said, “Take off the bridle. She’ll find her own way home.”

 

  
My father dismounted to lift me into his saddle and he got up behind me. He’d let me ride his horse Ganos before, so I wasn’t afraid for myself, but I was sure wolves would eat my pony. I let the tears fall, but I didn’t sob; I didn’t want him to know I was crying. We went at a gallop over the bare
turf of the pass and down through the forest of stunted trees and down until we reached a precipice. When we halted, Ganos had dark patches of sweat on his withers. I could smell the horse’s sweat, and my father’s.

 

  
We stood on the cliff’s edge looking down past flocks of clouds to the floor of the valley, where our town was one of many nestling in folds of the mountains by the lakeshore. Ancient pine trees grew in crevices on the rock face below our feet, some upright, some leaning or twisted, but all lopsided, with branches on one side only, growing toward the void. No man would dare cut those pines. I knew that without being told, the way one knows things in dreams—just as I knew there was a trail down the precipice.

 

  
Yet when I awoke, I was doubtful. There were things in the dream that made no sense. Surely I was too young to be riding to market over the mountains—in the dream I was too small to reach my father’s stirrup. I remembered that in the second true dream I’d had of him, he had teased me, saying he needed me to do the haggling or he’d sell the colt too cheap. I wondered why I’d been so favored. Had I no brothers?

 

  
I wondered also why I’d never seen my mother in a dream, the mother who must have embroidered the red and yellow checks on my little felt cap. I shied away from thinking of her. Better to think of my father, his strong weathered hands, and the familiar scent of him, hard work and leather and horses. But his sweat had been pungent with fear.

 
  

 

  
The king summoned me in the morning. He sat on a seat hacked from ice and covered with a wolfskin, and he had a red silk cloth wrapped around his face against the cold, so that only his eyes were showing. He was a man of tawny complexion, but the cold had pinched away his color. His skin looked waxen, and his black eyelashes and brows were stark against it. The silk fluttered when he spoke. He asked the question he always asked.

 

  
I’d made up my mind to help him, but I didn’t want him to know it. I lifted my left hand and Catena’s swollen right hand rose with it. She whimpered when I pulled on the chain. “I did dream,” I said, “but why should I tell you?”

 

  
The king’s eyes were slits above the red cloth. “Why should I let you live?”

 

  
Catena knelt down and hid her face against my side and whispered, “Don’t, please don’t. He’ll kill us.”

 

  
I’d made up my mind he wouldn’t kill us—no, certainly he didn’t intend to kill us—no more than he meant to kill all the men who’d died in his service. I shook the chain and said, “If you find me a way out of these mangles, I might find you a way out of the mountains.”

 

  
Garrio, standing behind his master, made a warning face at me.

 

  
The king said, “Earn your freedom. Dream ten true dreams for me, and I’ll strike the shackles.”

 

  
“Five.”

 

  
“Are you trying to bargain with me?”

 

  
I shook my head and raised my manacled hand again. “Not bargain—beg, I’m begging. Do you see how Catna’s hand is sullen? If it festers, she might lose her life to the tarnishing, and then I’d be handfast to a curse, a corpse. How would that serve you?” Catena pulled on the chain, trying to make me lower my hand, saying truly her hand didn’t hurt. She could bear it.

 

  
The king said, “You’ll run.”

 

  
I gestured at the mountains. “Where? I too wish to find a way out. Five gleams should be enough.”

 

  
He said, “No. Ixa.”

 

  
I refused, showing him the five fingers of my right hand and saying, “Dene.” Then I realized we had both spoken in a foreign tongue. It had been a long time since he’d spoken that language to me—the language of Lambanein.

 

  
“Ha!” he said, striking his hand against his knee. “I knew you came from Lambanein, you have the look of it.” He asked me a question in the other language, and when I shook my head, he raised his voice and I could tell he was berating me.

 

  
I felt as I had after the lightning struck me, that his words were just the wrong side of meaning. I twitched the fingers of my left hand, remembering
kave peta cato yane ixa,
six seven eight nine ten; and then the right hand,
nea avo eta setra dene,
one two three four five. My hands made fists and I bent down and covered my eyes. There was a lump in my gullet hard enough to choke on, and I swallowed it down. I said, “I dreamed of black penance, banners. Whose color is black?”

 

  
“No one’s.”

 

  
“Black banners carried by whoresons riding through a path, a pass.”

 

  
“In winter? Now?”

 

  
“No. It was hot.”

 

  
“Are you sure the banners weren’t indigo, like mine?” King Corvus said.

 

  
“Maybe. They were dark, they could have been. I dreamed these horsemen rode through mountings.”

 

  
King Corvus said, “What mountains?”

 

  
“They had snow taps in summer. How many are so high? Do you know them?”

 

  
“I should,” he said. “We are lost in them now. Tell me the rest.”

 

  
I told him I’d dreamed of a valley with a long lake, and around the lake
a bright necklace of towns. I said there was a hidden path, too steep for horses, down the precipice at the head of the lake. The king asked if the lake bent in the middle like a crooked finger, like so, and if the hills were terraced where the land fell steeply to the shore, and I said yes. He said the lake was called Sapheiros, and his father, King Voltur, had taken that valley in a war with Lambanein, having long coveted it. He supposed I had dreamed of his father’s army.

 

  
So it was true then, and Penna had guessed aright: I was Lambaneish born, from this valley with a crooked lake—though the word
Sapheiros
was unfamiliar to me, unlike
ixa,
unlike
fedan.
And it could be, it must be, that the warriors my father feared were King Voltur’s men.

 

  
I’d heard rumormongers sing of King Voltur’s last war, and how after his victory he was killed by the Firsts of five rebel clans, and the queenmother had punished them for their treachery. That was some twelve years ago. About that many years ago, I had arrived at the Dame’s household, a small child, part of her dead husband’s baggage. Perhaps her husband had sold his sword to King Voltur for the campaign to win the Lake of Sapheiros—a warrior might travel far to a war that offered rich plunder. Or there had been an alliance between Incus and Corymb. Our kingdoms weren’t always enemies.

 

  
King Corvus said, “Your so-called dream is useless. By any reckoning we’re leagues and leagues to the west of the Lake of Sapheiros and the pass that leads to it. Did the arkhon instruct you to lead us astray?”

 

  
“We are astray through no fate of mine; it’s not I who led us here. And I don’t know what this arcant is.”

 

  
“So you still pretend you are not Lambaneish.”

 

  
“I think maybe I was born there, in that victory with the lake I dreamed of last night. But I have no remedy of it, I was too young when I left. I didn’t even know that I knew those little ones.” I held up my hands, showing him my fingers. “Those little counting words, the…mumbles.”

 

  
“Then answer me truthfully: where do you come from? It’s plain you’re a foreigner, though you’re learning our language quickly. Day by day you sound more like someone born to it.”

 

  
“I told you before,” I said. “Where I come from, this is the language we speak. It was because…Addled Wildfire struck me—because of the lightning that I can’t speak prosperously.” I was surprised to hear the king say I was speaking more clearly, when I must struggle to make myself understood, which was wearisome to both of us. And yet it was true—I stumbled over one word now, instead of three or four, before finding the one I sought. I’d always supposed a cure—if there was one—would come all at once, like the lightning. I’d failed to recognize this slow and arduous healing.

 

  
“You still haven’t said where you come from. Where is your home?”

 

  
I said, “I am a sheath, so home is wherever my shade, my blade is.”

 

  
“Your blade’s name?”

 

  
“Sire Galan dam Capella by…Falchion…Flacon—by Falco of Crux, I mean.”

 

  
“Ah. From one of the bastard houses of Corymb. Why didn’t you say so?”

 

  
“Because we are venomous, enemies. I feared you’d kill me.”

 

  
“I think it’s time you told me how a Lambaneish woman became the sheath of a warrior from Corymb. And how you came to be at the temple of Lynx at Mount Quaer, dreaming a dream of my wife.”