Wildfire (93 page)

 

  
Someone threw a rag at me, a tharais wrapper, torn and dirty. Likely I had never received a gift more precious to the giver, for a rag was a treasure here among the poorest of the poor. I thought people were watching me from the dark huts as I sat down in the road and awkwardly, painfully, freed myself of the bridle and the rope around my arms. I tore strips from the rag and bound up my fingers. They had stopped bleeding, but I couldn’t bear to look at them, the ragged meat and splintered bone.

 

  
Untying my arms had eased the strain, but as the blood rushed into my numb hands it burned like fire and venom. I moaned as I walked, until I became aware that I was moaning and stopped the awful sounds.

 

  
I trudged all alone, dressed in the tharais wrapper. Even the shades had deserted me. I went in the direction I’d been shoved, moving my feet because there was nothing else to do. But in time it occurred to me I was walking in the wrong direction. I turned back toward Allaxios, and saw it again as I’d first seen it, rising terrace upon terrace to the gilded palace that crowned the mountain.

 

  
I had remembered I was rich. I didn’t have to go naked and poor into exile, to wherever I was going.

 

  
I tried to reach Katabaton’s Cleft from the south, walking upstream on the riverbank. The city wall was built nearly to the water’s edge, and I crossed mudflats and reed beds in its shadow. I passed the marshes and the shallows below the street of dyers where cloth was staked out in the river to be rinsed, and I walked under the arches of the bridge we’d crossed on our pilgrimage to Mount Omphalos. But soon I could go no farther. The terrace walls were too steep, and they came right down to the river’s edge. I must go all the way around the city to approach from the north side, and use the current to carry me around the bend in the river that embraced Mount Allaxios.

 

  
It was the only thing left to me to do. One imagines in Fate’s realm a path that branches, each branch a choice leading to further choices. But sometimes many paths converge on one, the inevitable and only path, and whether one is fearful or fearless, one must take it.

 

  
It took a day and a half to walk around the city, much longer than I expected. I stayed far away from walls and roads, and slept in a dry gully and drank water from an irrigation ditch.

 

  
Northeast of the city I came again to the river. I found a downed tree with a tangle of gray roots, and I dislodged it with great effort from a sandbank. The current tugged the tree away from shore, and I went with it, my right arm draped over the trunk. I saw the aqueduct high overhead, and the trunk rolled suddenly and I went under. I was nearly caught in the roots, but I dove down, and the tree passed over me, scraping my back, and within the green river I opened my eyes and thought, if I breathe now I will drown. And I almost did. But I kicked and went up to the roil and froth of rapids that pummeled me and tossed me against a heap of boulders, great shards of the mountain, broken teeth in the maw of the cleft.

 

  
I crawled out of the water and lay across a flat boulder, gasping. The reeds between the rocks were noisy with frogs and warblers. The river had torn away my rag and I was naked again, and everywhere bruised and scratched. But I lived. Every breath said so.

 

  
Mount Allaxios towered over me, turning a stony back to the river, the road of the dead. The Sun had risen over the mountain and she stared down as if amazed to see such a peeled sprawling creature as me. Swallows stitched back and forth between the walls of the chasm, beating their wings to rise, dipping down and rising again.

 

  
It was already hot, but I was shivering. I sat up and rested my head on my hands and was startled to discover the moonflower wreath and my net cap with valuable beadcoins. Some of my hair was still entwined around the wickerwork spiral, fastened by serpent pins with obsidian eyes.

 

  
I ate three faded, limp moonflower blossoms, such a gift. With Moonflower, pain was not pain, but superb lacerating awareness. Oh why did the gods let me live? For what purpose?

 

  
I clambered over the boulders of the cleft floor and the slope that led to the stairs outside the cave; my left arm was almost useless, and all my limbs trembled. I sat on the last stair. Already my throat was dry, my eyes were dry, and I felt a flush rising, the surge of my heart. Vertigo bloomed in me; I clung to the cliff, fearful of swooning, and felt the earth sliding sideways.

 

  
When the ground stood still again, I groped behind the tapestry of bluebind and pulled treasures from the cliff. I dressed myself in saffron and fastened the wrapper with the jade disk and golden cord Tasatyala had given me. I used the flint I’d given to Katabaton to kindle a fire in the shrine, and put a clay pot of water on to boil.

 

  
What are you doing? Sire Rodela asked, but I ignored him. Of course he had returned. He liked moonflower. I was not at all surprised to see the Dame and Na there too; the Dame watched me gravely, and Na scolded Sire Rodela and shooed him out of the shrine. I’d never been able to dismiss him so easily.

 

  
I untied the rag from my neck and spread out the bloodstained cloth. My two severed fingertips looked so strange, so dead. The fingernails were purplish; the skin was yellow and the meat brown; the bone looked gray. I could tell the fingertips apart because the nail on my left forefinger had been trimmed in the beak style.

 

  
It made my fingers hurt to look at the parts that had been torn from me. I understood for the first time what Fleetfoot had meant, how the pain was not caused by absence, but by the presence of something invisible; how it pinched and throbbed.

 

  
I boiled the right fingertip first. The smell of cooking flesh made my gorge rise, but I didn’t falter. When the flesh and nail loosened, I pulled the whole joint from the top of the finger. I rubbed swallowwort sap on the bone to stain it yellow, and I told the Dame it was hers as much as it was mine. I promised to dye it indigo when I could, and invited her to speak through it when it pleased her. The bone of my father finger, my tharos bone, my Blood bone, my rightbone.

 

  
Next I put the left fingertip in the pot and watched it bob and boil. I freed the top joint with its splayed knuckle end and notched tip, and colored it with red dye used for lips, from an alabaster jar I’d hidden tennights ago. This bone was to speak for Na, if she wished: the bone of my mother finger, my tharais bone, my mud bone, my leftbone.

 

  
Here in Lambanein they divided the left hand from the right, tharais and tharos; in Corymb and Incus they divided mud from Blood. I had been one thing and another, and for a long time I believed I was what people called me. No doubt I would have gone on believing had I been raised by my Lambaneish parents, or lived out my life in a small village in the Kingswood.

 

  
I no longer agreed to these distinctions. I wouldn’t be bound by them.

 

  
I poured the finger broth on the ground as a libation for Katabaton, and it turned dirt to mud. I drew a divining compass in the mud that was two handspans across, twice as large as the cloth one. I wrote the godsigns in their places, sure of the marks and their meaning, sure of their order around the horizon.

 

  
Outside the cave, in the brazen heat and light of a summer afternoon in Allaxios, only the insects were awake and chirring. Inside it was dark and cool and silent. Moonflower troubled my sight and made Katabaton’s hair of serpentine roots seemed to writhe. I felt, as I had at times before, that other gods watched me through Katabaton’s unblinking eyes. I darkened my eyelids with charcoal, as Az had done when she threw the bones for me; I put swallowwort sap in my webeye, as the Dame had taught me. I cast the pair of bones three times to reveal my nature and how I would meet my fate, three times for the past, present, and future, and three times for the gods. The bones touched signs, and the signs whispered and murmured, in a low susurration that did not resolve into speech. I hoped to see images bright and clear as Moonflower dreams, showing some way forward or some way back, for I could go no further on this road.

 

  
I thought I deserved foreknowledge. The gods had given me a deed to do with my two finger bones, and I had done it without shirking, despite my horror of it. Why shouldn’t my own bones speak to me more clearly than those of the dead?

 

  
I bent close to the compass, the better to see and hear. On the very last cast, the yellow rightbone had landed on Artifex, and the red leftbone on the Warrior. This was the ninth throw and I had seen many signs and many patterns. Here I was being asked to worship them both: Eorőe Artifex the maker and Rift Warrior the destroyer.

 

  
I would rather owe allegiance to the dead one, Artifex, the one without
temples and Auspices; Artifex who made our forebears. Some of the Blood called her the Potter, and disdained her because she’d dirtied her hands with clay. I used to think it a pity she had died, and couldn’t protect us from the meddling of other gods. Now I saw her death was necessary. Otherwise we would be her creatures, the making only half finished. She had pinched our ancestors out of clay, like little oil lamps that bore the press of fingers, and she’d breathed into them to awaken their fires, and didn’t I too burn with the fire bequeathed to me?

 

  
Such a strange gift she had given us all, for the fire had been there already, it was always there. But she had separated it into small buds of flame, in vessels that could be broken—these bodies—so that we loved what was mortal and feared to die. So that while we lived we thought ourselves single and singular, yet we craved never to be alone.

 

  
Did Artifex make us just for the pleasure of making something well? She had made us so beautiful that even gods desired us. I saw Aghazal in the kitchen, scolding Aunt Cook Angadataqebay for extravagance, with her thick black hair in a plait down her back and her brown skin glistening, and a damp patch of sweat on the back of her wrapper—just as comely as when she appeared before her patrons in her finery. And there was Mai, with her belly round and pale and perfect as an egg, sleeping between her throes—so dear in her exhaustion, so lovely because she was beloved. And Tobe, the little boy, always in motion, as if the hearthfire of a large man was burning in him and he could not be still, not for a moment, not until he sickened and the fire flickered and went out.

 

  
The fire did not go out, it never went out. It was part of the one fire I had glimpsed in Ardor’s temple. I used to believe the shade was all that endured, but Sire Rodela had taught me better. The shade lingered, refusing to be joined, but like smoke it dissipated in time. Artifex had given us this perilous gift, and we clung to it even after we died.

 

  
But the red bone, the leftbone, pointed to Rift Warrior on the divining compass. Rift for what divided us. Men, knowing they could not live forever, tried to make their names immortal. Sire Galan and King Corvus were both warriors. Did I love them despite that or because of it? To me they shone more than other men, and I felt more alive in their presence, and I had learned to call that feeling by the various names of love, and what was it but the longing to feel the heat of the inward fire, and to be illuminated by its light? Yet I was drawn to what was mortal in them, even the crescent-shaped scar on Galan’s back, or the way Corvus’s left eyebrow showed his doubt. In me, love had been entangled with rage—rage being another way to kindle a blaze, and now it seemed to me I had sought after it, furious even in desire.

 

  
I’d given myself over to Galan’s wants, and then to the king’s purposes, but always imperfectly, in my disobedient, wayward way, so that we would burn brighter and hotter. At times I’d prided myself on serving one important man or another; in my most prideful moments I’d thought I served one god or another. If a god used me, I was not insignificant. Yet I never thought to ask myself whether I admired the purposes I served—whether I wanted to further them.

 

  
Did my bones tell me I must worship Rift Warrior, and must I obey them? I’d seen enough of war to know I hated it. Rift Warrior was loose in Incus, and now every kind of cruelty abhorrent in peace was permissible there. I couldn’t lend myself to Rift’s purposes—nor to the king’s and Galan’s, not while they served the Warrior.

 

  
I’d been given many gifts, the hot left hand and cold right hand, the knowledge of fire, the sharp eye and the webeye, shadowsight and true dreams, and visions of other worlds like veils about our own. I’d been given the gift of healing, and I had neglected it, pursuing Moonflower dreams and other kinds of knowledge, and flinging myself like a moth against Desire’s lantern, to be scorched by jealousy and lust.

 

  
The power to heal was such a humble gift, maybe that’s why I hadn’t been content with it. War and plagues and famines killed by the thousands, and a healer saved one by one, staving off, for a little time, a certain end. But even to give a little time was precious, as the easing of pain was precious. It was something I could do, and be glad of doing.

 

  
Where war was, there was surely the greatest need for healers.

 

  
I scooped up the finger bones and put them in the pouch and drew the drawstring tight. While I’d leaned over the bones to see the signs and listen to their faint whispers, I’d forgotten my pain. Now all I’d held in abeyance came rushing back, and I fell on my side and curled up in agony, and I cried out against Artifex for making us so imperfectly. Why had she given us pain? Why had she made us frail?

 

  
Not frail. Look at how much we could endure.

 

  
I went on enduring. I spent days uncounted in Katabaton’s shrine, in her cleft. My sinews ceased to burn and ache, and my bruises faded, and my left shoulder settled in its socket, and fresh pink flesh covered the naked bones of my fingers. By the grace of the gods, by the labor of life within the marvelous clay, by the hearthfire burning in me, I was healed.