Wildfire (60 page)

They went on mocking their taskmistresses in verse after verse, and soon others joined them.

 

  
Catena sat smiling and clapping, a little apart from me, with her knee touching a friend’s knee. Perhaps I reminded her of an ordeal best forgotten. She led the life she had been given, and I should be glad she’d found some contentment in it. Was it any wonder she preferred eating to going hungry, and warmth to frostbite, and a roof and walls to the terrifying immensity of the mountains? Yet I did wonder. How could she be content to stay in the manufactory, working day after day, year upon year until she had spun all the thread of her life?

 

  
I clapped too, and sang along. But all the while I was searching the faces of the women for signs. One of them had stolen from me. I distrusted them all, all save Catena.

 
  

 

  
In the dark room I spread my shawl over the rushes and counted beadcoins and skeins of thread.

 

  
Lychnais sat up and said, “Is that Feirthonin?”

 

  
“Who else?”

 

  
“Where have you been? You promised to say when you would be out late.”

 

  
“This one tells Meninx instead.”

 

  
Lychnais must have heard the clinking of the beadcoins, for she said, “What is there?”

 

  
“Money. How much is needed for a dowser?”

 

  
She edged closer. The room was small, she didn’t have far to go. She said, “Perhaps fifteen pewter beadcoins as thanks for the dowser, and five for the dancers. Ten for the feast.”

 

  
“Food must be bought?”

 

  
“Sweets and nuts, and a hen, of course. It wouldn’t do to be thrifty-stingy, it would displease the meneidon.” Thrifty and stingy were one and the same word in Lambaneish.

 

  
“This one can get good food for free, as good as can be bought. If you get the hen, ein? So then is needed twenty-five of the pewter. Here are eighteen, and two skeins of blue wool and one white and one green skein of linen.”

 

  
“Where did you get all that? Did you steal it?”

 

  
I opened my last packet of sweetrush root and said, “It sells this. Take a taste. Good, ein?”

 

  
“The honey is all gone,” she said. “If they catch you, they’ll blame us both, and cut off our fingers.”

 

  
“It is for Meninx. So she does not be haunted—be a haunt. This Lambaneish illness, this one doesn’t know how to cure it. So if it gives you all this, you find a dowser and dancers and a hen, ein? If more money is needed, you give the rest. This one gets food.”

 

  
She made a face, thinking I couldn’t see her in the dark, and I’m sure it was because I was behaving like a taskmistress, when she ought to be telling me what to do, for she’d been here longer. Still, she took what I gave her; I suspected a few coins might stick to her fingers, but I didn’t doubt she would arrange it for Meninx’s sake.

 
  

 

  
That night I dreamed of the Dame. I descended the steep stairs in the chasm down to the shrine, and found her sitting on the floor of the cave, in front of the painted Katabaton. She held a long stem of swallowwort in her hand. The small yellow flowers shone against the dark green of her gown. She said, “How could you forget what I taught you? The hatchling is born blind, but the fledgling sees both far and small.” She sang a riddle and its answer:

 

  

 

  
What hones the swallow’s sight

 

  
Before it takes to flight?

 

  
It blooms when the swallow is nigh,

 

  
And dies when the swallow flies.

 

  

 

  
The melody belonged to the swallowwort. I knelt before the Dame, and we gazed at each other eye to eye. She seemed younger than when she died, but careworn. The hem of her gown was muddy. “Perhaps I forgot to teach you that verse,” she said, looking away. “It has so many.”

 

  
When I awoke, I remembered the Dame had told me a tale hidden in the song: she said swallows dropped the yellow-orange sap of swallowwort into their hatchlings’ eyes to give them keen eyesight, day after day until they fledged. Had I misinterpreted the omens that led me to the plant? Swallowwort had many uses, and though it seemed to have done Meninx some good, perhaps the cure had been meant for me. To hone my sight, to remove the web in my right eye.

 

  
Lying in the dark, I tried to dream my way back into the dream, to ask the Dame questions. I found the shrine again, but she had left. There was Katabaton on the wall in white paint, and as I drifted toward the surface of Sleep, too buoyant to stay under, I remembered what must be mixed with
the swallowwort sap to protect the eye from the rasp that sharpened sight: mother’s milk.

 
  

 

  
In the morning I looked at my right eye in the reflection in a basin of water. The web used to look like a faint haze of light on the surface of the iris; now it was nearly opaque. I feared that soon the eye would be useless as a pebble. I begged Nephelais for a small cup of milk from her breasts, and she was generous enough to give it to me when I told her why I wanted it. I bathed my eye with a mixture of milk and orange swallowwort sap. It didn’t sting. I thought perhaps it should, to prove it was working, so I added more sap.

 

  
It was certain the world looked yellower than usual through my right eye. Perhaps a little sharper, perhaps not. I must keep trying.

 
  

 

  
The dowser came in the evening three days later. She was an old woman with webeye in both eyes, and despite her blindness, she didn’t need to be led. Indeed, she led us, down the stairs and along the tharais tunnels and back again, in search of the meneidon who was killing Meninx. She held a hazel rod split down most of its length, the forked ends in her outstretched hands and the joined end upright as she walked. We followed the dowser like so many goslings after a goose. Her four dancers were as old as she was, and they shuffled along with their hands tucked under their shawls. Long after sundown we returned to our room, where Meninx lay on a bed of sweetrush, for she was much too weak to search with us.

 

  
“Did you find…?” she asked, and Lychnais shook her head.

 

  
We entered the bathing room, which was safe enough, as the room wasn’t used so late in the evening. I was uneasy nevertheless. We used no lamp lest a light be seen through the high windows.

 

  
By the pool with the tiled goldfish and the heron fountain, the dowsing rod wavered, but did not dip. The dowser followed the water over the lip of the pool into an open channel, and across the room through a passage in the wall to the courtyard. But the rod no longer quivered. She circled the room, and when she got to the corner that held the drain, the cleft rod shook as if it were trying to wriggle away. She held on tightly, and the rod twisted in her hands to point downward, and we all said, “Ah!” The hazel split at the join with a loud crack, and the dowser held two sticks instead of one. She cast them on the ground.

 

  
“Bring Meninx here,” she said. We spread rushes near the drain, and Lychnais and I carried Meninx to the bathing room and laid her down. She was weeping quietly, from relief or grief or some mingling of the two.

 

  
“How did this one offend the meneidon, ein?” Meninx asked. “It tried to be so careful. Did it not beg pardon when pouring water? When scrubbing
the floor? Did this one not give you flowers?” One of the dowser’s dancers knelt beside her with a bowl of water in which floated tiny white blossoms of wood-rover. No one plants wood-rover, it springs up where it likes, in shady places, but it is not despised for all that it’s a wanton grower. Meninx tried to toss a handful of blossoms into the drain, but she was too weak. The drain was merely a hole, a throat that had to swallow whatever we gave it. How could it be a vessel for anything, how could it contain even a meneidon? I crouched and brushed the wet flowers into it. For a moment I felt dizzy, as if the drain were going to swallow me, and I stood up and backed away.

 

  
“Has the meneidon a name?” the dowser asked. No doubt it did, but none of us knew it. “This one will find it out,” she said. She crept on hands and knees and leaned down and mumbled into the drain. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. She put her ear over the drain hole and listened. When the answer came, we all heard it. To me it sounded like a stomach growling, but to the dowser it spoke a name, Poton.

 

  
The dowser stood up and began to dance, bobbing and swaying over the drain. The four old women joined her, scuffing their feet across the tiles, back and forth. The dowser sang, she flattered Poton and called him mighty, and asked pardon on behalf of Meninx, saying she’d brought gifts of flowers and a hen—which was even now stewing with salsify crowns and roots on the brazier in the other room. I hadn’t eaten meat for some time, aside from my ration of lard, and my stomach growled as loudly as the meneidon in his lair.

 

  
Lychnais joined the dancers, lifting her feet higher than the old women, and setting them down with a slap of her soles on the tiles. She beckoned me, and I shook my head in refusal. She gestured more sharply, and I got up. The steps were easy, back and forth, yet I was awkward, an instant ahead or behind. Afraid to be ensnared by it. Easier to stand outside, thinking I had wasted my money on a cozener. I stamped, stamp stamp stamp, and just like that, I gave way to the rhythm of it.

 

  
The high windows of the bathing room were shapes carved out of the purest midnight blue. The room was full of darkness. But I saw the dowser pull something from under her shawl and drop it down the drain—no, she didn’t drop it. She shook one end of a cord strung with fist-size beads of clay or wood or metal, and the beads struck against the clay walls of the drainpipe. If I’d not seen her, I’d have believed the banging issued from the drain itself.

 

  
The dowser had pleaded with Poton at first, but now she threatened and insulted him.
This one is coming down to you,
she sang in her quavering voice.
This one is climbing down, ai, ai, ai. Leave Meninx be, old misery. Leave the woman be, ai, ai, ai.
The drain rumbled and the sound seemed to come from deep, deep.

 

  
The dowser began to spin and sing faster. Lychnais turned too, stamping her feet and holding her arms outstretched. Her eyes were closed and she trod near Meninx, and stepped on the basin of water and flowers, and tipped it over. Water flowed toward the corner, and tiny white petals of wood-rover swirled and spilled over the lip into the dark maw of the drain.

 

  
The swallow sees both small and far,
so the swallowwort song goes. My ordinary eye saw the dowser spinning. My webeye saw white speckles on blackness, near enough to skim the watery surface of my eyeball and also far away, moving swiftly down. There was no light in the room to cast a shadow, yet I saw my shadow stretching toward the drain, a dark iridescence pouring with the water, and I fell, following the lure of the petals, past the dowser’s ladder of cord and beads, down which she was climbing to confront the meneidon.

 

  
I fell, I flowed with the waters down the clay pipe into the great drain under the street, which was a street itself, with a narrow raised path beside the water channel for the koprophagais. The drain branched, it went everywhere under the palace district, and the water was divided. The wood-rover petals scattered. I had thought the mountain was solid, but its stone was folded like so many layers of cloth, and water found the voids between the layers, and as it seeped downward it was cleansed.

 

  
I recognized her now; it was Penna who lured me on, Penna in the torrent that divided and divided again, and as I chased the petals I too was divided into rivulets of shadow. I’d lost my voice and couldn’t beg her not to lead me to a drowning. Some petals were trapped in crevices and deep underground pools; some surfaced in a spring that dripped into a stone trough in an olive grove. One solitary petal found its way into the fountain house near the street of dyers. Others were carried by water seeping through a crack in a half-ruined room, part of the rubble foundation of a palace; faded paintings on the wall depicted women in a hilly landscape, gathering stamens of crocus for saffron. Other petals were swept along in waterfalls that plunged from cliffs below the Inner Palace and into the river.

 

  
The river moved swiftly southward, but underneath the surface, rushing waters churned over rocks, and currents writhed, and the flowers were caught in this tumult and so was I. The river was a meneidon, strong as a god, for wasn’t it part of the Waters, just as the meneidon of the fountains and wells were manifestations of Wellspring? The Lambaneish did not acknowledge Torrent as a god, but everywhere they worshipped it.

 

  
A few petals surfaced in an eddy near the shore and floated among sweetrush. An ibis on orange stilt legs bent its long neck and cocked its head to look at the reflection of the half Moon.

 

  
Someone emptied a jug of water over my head and shook me, saying, “Feirthonin, what is wrong?”

 

  
My head was sore. I sat up and groaned, and found a hen’s egg of a bump on the back of my skull.

 

  
“You fell over,” Lychnais said.

 

  
White speckles bedazzled both my eyes when I tried to stand, so I sat by Meninx and held her hands. Now the dowser roared wordlessly, her voice as gruff as a man’s, and she moved like a young man, staggering and twisting and leaping as she grappled with something I couldn’t see, neither with my left eye or my right. I swear there were deep booms and thuds from under our feet that could not have been caused by the cord and beads she shook in the drain. Poton was riled, and I felt his anger in the clammy draft that stirred our hair. Meninx’s hands trembled like moths between mine.

 

  
The dowser stomped and shouted, bidding Poton begone, and then she fell to her knees and slumped over, panting. Lank hair clung to her face, and her wrapper and shawl were drenched with sweat. She straightened her back and held up one hand, clasping something invisible between her finger and thumb. She crawled to Meninx on her knees to show her this invisible thing, which caught the thinnest streak of moonlight. A single long brown hair. The dowser stared at Meninx with her blind white eyes, and Meninx stared back, and for a time all was quiet, until the dowser could speak without gasping.