Deep Water (33 page)

“Why have you brought me here?” Gris asked with a croaking voice. He cleared his throat. “What do you want?”

Dotta moved closer to Gris and looked into his eyes. “You’ll need this place, girl, when you make your search. This is a place
where calling is done. When you need the earth spirits, come here and call them.”

“What are you talking about, woman?” Gris said, his mind feeling deeply unsettled. But Bramble was tense with frustration.
How?
She wanted to shout.

Dotta smiled, the toothless mouth gleaming wet in the flickering light. “How?” she echoed. “The way the hunters drew the prey
to them. How else?”

She touched the wall lightly where the dark, rounded shapes were. Shadows flowed across them as the bone swung back and forward,
making them seem to move, seem to writhe and deform. “The prey must be called with love, though, or it does not come. Remember
that.”

Bramble stared at the drawings, trying to remember the sequence of passages and turns that had brought them here.

“You can go now,” Dotta said casually, and as if at her command the waters rose and carried Bramble away.

M
Y AUNTY
L
IG
was one of three sisters, as her mother had been, and her mother before her. She was the middle child. Brond was the eldest
and Gledda the youngest, and they lived together. The way I was told it, Brond was Mim’s mother, both of them black-haired
charmers, and she was carrying a second girl. Gledda was sure that the father was the traveling skald who’d been around the
season before.

“Well, we’ll never know,” Lig said philosophically, “for sure as ash follows flame, Brond’ll never tell us, and there’ll be
no telling from looking at the baby.”

She knew the new baby would have red hair, like Lig. And the third girl, which was me, whom Brond would bear in a couple more
years, would be chestnut-haired, like Gledda, flame there, but buried deep. It was always so in our family: three girls, the
first black-haired, like charcoal, the second with hair as red as flame, the third with hair like banked embers. But only
one of them would bear children, and then there would be three daughters, and three daughters only.

Our lives had been so for as long as memory, since the first Mim had made her bargain with the Fire God and brought down a
piece of the fire mountain to warm the hearth of her people. The Byman girls, our family were called, which means burning,
and alone of all the women of our people, we didn’t attend the ritual at Spring Equinox, because the wildfire was with us
all year round.

The Byman girls didn’t have much need for men, except to get their daughters. We did for ourselves, as crafters of one kind
or another, but mostly potters. Over the generations our old stone house had filled with the results of our work and it was
like walking into a treasure chamber, with old wall-hangings and shining platters on the wall, with glazeware in every color
gleaming: pale green and midnight blue, and the special deep red glaze that people from as far away as Turvite came to buy.
That red glaze made looking into a bowl like looking into the depths of the earth, and there were some who said that the recipe
for it had been given to the first Mim, from the Fire God himself. But when I asked one of my aunts, all she would do was
smile and say, “I learned it from my mother, and where she learned it, only she knows.” Which was no help at all because their
mother and their aunts were dead, since the winter after young Mim was born.

That was the way it always happened, too.

Lig told me she had always hoped that she would be the one to have the children. When she was little, she planned what she
would call them. Bryne, perhaps, or Ban, for the bone the first Mim had carried down the mountainside, full of fire. Or even,
daring thought, Rosa, the name of her friend from the village. She played with dolls, while Brond and Gledda were only interested
in messing around with clay. Even her mother thought she would be the one to carry on the line.

“Look at her,” she would say to her sisters, watching Lig croon a dolly to sleep, “she’s made for it.”

“Well, I hope so,” the girls’ Aunt Bryne had answered once, thinking Lig couldn’t hear, “for she’s not half the potter the
others are.”

Lig knew it was true. Brond and Gledda were potters born, crafting reasonable bowls before they could sew. So as she grew
up she took on most of the cooking and the cleaning, and left them free to perfect their craft, sure that she would have the
most important role of all, to mother the next batch of daughters.

But by the time she was old enough to dance the Springtree and run off to the woods afterward with a sweet young man, Brond
was already pregnant with Mim. That first Springtree morning had put a sharp taste in her mouth, the taste of uselessness.
For if Brond was bearing, then she and Gledda were barren. That was the way of it. Poor Ham the farrier hadn’t known what
to do when she’d rolled away from him, after, and cried into the new grass. She’d tried to reassure him, but to the day of
her death when he looked at her a cloud went over his face, as it will over the face of a man who remembers failure. He married
Rosa and had six children who followed him around like puppies. Lig had always known he’d make a good father. She didn’t go
to their house much, though, and her old friendship with Rosa withered away.

Brond had been glad enough to let her look after Mim, especially during the bad time, when they were dealing with the shock
of their mother’s death, and then their aunts’. Even though they knew it was coming, it was still a shock. No one had told
them what to expect until after Mim was born.

“You mustn’t tell her or the other girls, when they come,” Aunt Bryne had said sternly, coughing her life away with fever.
“For then they’d never try for a child until you were all dead, and it might be too late. Just let them choose their own time,
and be thankful.”

“Aye,” their mam said. “We’ve made a good bargain with the Fire God. He gives us health and prosperity, he protects us from
ill, and he gives us a quick death when the time comes. But he likes his servants to be young, and vigorous, like him. Small
blame to him.”

“Our line will never die,” Aunt Aesca breathed. “Remember that. Never so long as the fire burns.”

That was small comfort to Lig or to the others, as they watched the three of them, their three beloveds, waste away and die.
Afterward, though, they clung to it as a solace. At least there was a reason for the deaths. Most people, Brond pointed out,
die for no reason at all. Surely that would be harder to cope with.

Lig wondered.

Watching Brond feed Mim had been like a pain, like an ache in her own breast, but it was bound up with the general pain of
grief and misery they all lived in at the time. Since then she had grown to love Mim as her own.

But she didn’t think she could bear to see Brond have another daughter, and this one a girl with flame hair, like hers.

“She should be mine,” Lig muttered to her pillow. “We should have one each. That would be fair.”

As Brond rounded out and slowed down, sitting more by the fire in the kitchen than by the potter’s wheel in the workshop,
Lig found it hard to be in the same room with her. She spent more time in the garden. She raised most of their food anyway:
vegetables and herbs, fruits, chickens and ducks and eggs. There were two gardens: a walled garden next to the kitchen, and
an orchard which ran from the other side of the house down to the river.

In the walled garden she grew vegetables and herbs and kept two espaliered fruit trees, apricot and cherry. Her aunt Aesca
had tended the garden while she was alive, and she had believed that it was no use growing anything you couldn’t eat or use
for medicine. There were no flowers, except the few plants she let grow to seed for next years’ planting. Nothing there just
for the beauty of it.

“A rose,” Lig thought one day, on her knees by the carrots. “A white rose. That’s what I’d like. A white rose.”

It was only a small tradition she was breaking, but it felt satisfying all the same. She traded a blue bowl for a cutting
of a white rose from Vine the thatcher’s garden, and planted it and some cornflower seeds, for good measure.

She tended that baby rose all through spring and all through summer, mulching and watering it, soaping off the aphids and
using dark brown ale on the thrips. She left the kitchen to Brond, before and after the baby’s birth. They called her Blaise
and she was as red-headed as Lig.

Lig couldn’t help but love her, but this time she left the tending of her to Brond, along with tending the fire.

The fire didn’t like it.

That was what they told me, when I was old enough to hear the story, when my chestnut hair was down past my shoulders and
I could climb Aunty Gledda’s legs like climbing up a tree, her strong hands helping me. They said that Lig had made a mistake,
thinking that the Fire God only cared about the ones he’d blessed with children, when he cared more, maybe, about the other
two, the ones he had all to himself.

Lig decided, they said, that if she couldn’t leave a child in the world, she’d leave a rose. A perfect white rose, more beautiful
than any anyone had ever seen. So she begged cuttings from anyone who had a rosebush, and she went out searching the hillsides
for wild roses, and she moved the carrots and the spinach and the onions out to the edge of the orchard, and took over the
walled garden for her roses.

Some had small, tender buds. Others were wide, blowsy things with few petals but a rich, heady scent. I can just remember
the smell, dizzying in the walled summer garden. Years it took her, to match and cross the blooms.

With each year of neglect for the vegetable garden, the fire grew angrier.

Not that it wasn’t tended. No, all of them tended it. Brond and Gledda, both, and Mim, too, when she was old enough. And then
Blaise. Even me. And Lig, when she felt like it, when she was passing.

But she didn’t sit staring into the flames anymore, and she didn’t sing softly to it as she went about the cooking and the
cleaning, for she was thinking about her roses. She smelt of rose, now, not of charcoal and warm wool. Even in winter. She
made rose-petal jam, rose-leaf pillows and rosehip tea. After much trial and error, she learnt to make an unguent of roses,
and the merchants who came to buy glazeware began to buy her vials of perfume and unguent as well.

It soothed an old hurt, I suspect, to be able to bring silver into the house as well as food from her garden.

The fire smouldered.

Then came the year when Lig achieved her goal. The perfect white rose. She ran into the house one spring morning and dragged
us all out to the garden. My feet were cold in the dew, I remember, and I couldn’t understand why Aunty Lig was so excited
about a tiny rosebush, no bigger than I was, with only one rose on it.

We went into breakfast, Lig floating.

“If I never do anything else in my life,” she said. “I’ve done this. The perfect rose.”

The fire blazed up in a roar.

I remember it. The terror of it, the sound, the fierce heat. I remember Mam Brond grabbing me and running, calling for Blaise
and Mim, screaming to Lig to run, run,
run
!

For Lig was standing there, staring at the fire as if bespelled. As if in love.

“For me?” she said. “You’ve come just for me?”

I looked back from the door and I saw him. I saw him reach out for her, and I saw her smile and walk straight into his arms.

He consumed the house and everything in it. Only the stone walls were left. But he left the orchard and the pottery alone.

We huddled in the street, watching, and Mam Brond and Aunt Gledda stopped anyone going too close or trying to put it out.
The heat drove us back fifty paces. The thatch flamed so bright we couldn’t look at it. Then it was gone. Just gone in a moment,
as if it had never been.

We spent the night at Vine’s, sitting close together, not talking. Blaise cried, they say, and I just sucked my thumb and
clung to Mam. In the morning we went back.

The main room was still uncomfortably warm. There was nothing left, not even the shapes of things. Everything was consumed
except the glazeware, which was all cracked and broken, crazed and dull, but there. The floor was slate, and it had cracked
as well, but it was so well packed down on the earth below it that we could walk on it safely. The ashes crunched beneath
our feet. Gledda cried as she walked.

The crock where the silver was kept had cracked open and the silver had melted into a sharp-edged puddle.

The kitchen was just a shell. Here, even the glazeware hadn’t survived. All that remained was the chimney and the hearth.
There were no bones, no sign of Lig at all. In the hearth, burning cheerfully as though this were any ordinary morning, was
the fire.

Gledda went out straightaway to get it some kindling. Mam went into the garden.

He had swept through the garden so fast that he just sucked the moisture out of everything and left it charcoal. Each rosebush
was a ghostly black image of itself. On Lig’s special bush, her perfect bud was still there, every petal intact, black and
crisp and dead as Lig itself.

“It was a warning,” said Mam Brond.

“It was a punishment,” said Gledda, tending the fire frantically.

“It was a bloody temper tantrum,” Mim said, years later, but only outside, in the market, away from the fire.

Blaise, whose daughters grew up to tend the Fire God in their turn, said, “It was love abandoned.”

But I saw it, over Mam’s shoulder, and it was murder and love fulfilled, both at once. I saw it, and I wondered, all through
the years of my girlhood: Does he love all of us, or only Lig? Was it simple jealousy of her time and care, or a deeper jealousy
of living things?

After Blaise had her first daughter, and I knew there would be no children for me, I wondered: Would he come for me if
I
planted a rose?