Wildfire (2 page)

sheath
proudly, and never flinch at it.

 

  
Why then did I suffer a pang of envy to see Mai with Sire Torosus, to think of their many years together, when my time with Sire Galan could be measured by the month? It was foolish of me. She might hoard in her memory years gone by, to be sure, but no more than I, no more than any sheath, could she store up years that might not come to pass. A warrior is a prodigal spender of his days, and not a miser of them.

 

  
I knew this, yet I went on as if Galan would live forever. He might be dead already.

 

  
But that thought was dangerous, it could not be borne or believed. I felt the bond stretched taut between Galan and me, anchored by a hard knot under my breastbone. I would know if that bond were severed. Surely I would know.

 
  

 

  
That night we huddled together under our cloaks, Sunup and I with little Tobe between us. The dog put his head over my ankles. I was weary, my bones ached, and I drowsed and dreamed. When I woke, the dream was gone and there was nothing left of it but the sure knowledge that I’d lost something sweet.

 

  
Tobe squirmed in his sleep until he twisted my old sheepskin cloak about him and pulled it off my back. Greedy boy. Now he kicked as if he were too hot, and I gently tugged the sheepskin away from him and covered us again.

 

  
We’d dallied autumn away in the Marchfield, preparing for war, and already the Crone had visited with her winnowing basket full of snow. Winter wasn’t a fit season for campaigning, it was a season for making and mending. When I’d served in the Dame’s manor, even the shortest days of winter had seemed ample: time enough for the Dame to weave a common jillybell in a tapestry, or for me to steep skeins of wool in a dyebath until the color sang. Time enough for the Dame’s housekeeper, Na, to tell stories when there was a pile of stitching for our chapped fingers; time enough for singing the longest ballads.

 

  
There was sweet pain in recalling the hands of the Dame and Na busy about their work, for they were dead, and all I had of each was a finger bone that I kept hidden in a pouch under my skirts. They had raised me, a motherless child, so well that I never pined for the mother I couldn’t remember. Now they were shades, each on a solitary journey, yet sometimes I called on them for counsel.

 

  
With numb fingers I untied the pouch from the cord around my waist, and I ducked out from under the awning and climbed to the top of a storage chest. While I’d slept, clouds had descended; they hung so low that the ship’s masts scraped their underbellies, and we sailed through the narrow crack between sea and sky. Nothing could be seen of the full Moon but a faint glow. The three galleys of Delve sailed in close company, and beyond them the rest of the fleet was scattered over the sea. As we bobbed up and down, their lanterns seemed to blink, hidden and revealed by the endless swells. I had gotten used to the motion at last; just the faintest flutter in my belly, nothing troublesome.

 

  
I was as alone as I could be aboard ship, with only the sailors on watch and the helmsman high in the sterncastle. I took my treasures from the pouch: the two finger bones and Galan’s pledge to me of a house and lands on Mount Sair, inked on a linen scrip that I kept folded in a neat knot. I’d turned my back on his gift when I chose to follow him, but I cherished it nevertheless. I tucked the scrip in my sleeve for safekeeping.

 

  
The pouch was a circle of leather fastened by a thong, and I loosened the drawstring and smoothed the pouch flat on my lap to show the divining compass painted inside. After my first divining compass had been destroyed in the fire that burned Galan’s tent in the Marchfield, I made this one myself, using an awl and string to scribe the three circles, one inside the other, for the three kinds of avatars, male, female, and elemental. I’d
crossed the compass with direction lines to divide it into twelve arcants, each the realm of a god. Then I’d labeled the arcants, painting the godsigns as neatly as I could around the horizon of the compass, setting the twelve gods in their places one beside the other in the same succession that their constellations appeared in the Heavens. I’d been pleased, in the making, to see how well the compass reflected the order of the world.

 

  
I held the bones in my palm: the Dame’s was dyed blue, and Na’s had a red tip. They were tiny things, these bones, the topmost joints from the pointing fingers of their right hands. Na’s sister Az had given them to me, though it was forbidden to keep relics of the dead. She was a skilled diviner, but I’d seen her throw the bones only once, and after that had to find my own way with them.

 

  
No doubt it was selfish to ask the shades of the Dame and Na to tarry on their journey, and strive so hard to speak to me when I understood them so imperfectly. But I believed—I hoped—they wouldn’t begrudge me an answer, for they’d been fond of me when they were alive. I closed my hand around the bones and whispered into the hollow of my fist: Will I see Galan again?

 

  
I threw in haste and the ship tilted, mounting the slope of a wave, and the bones nearly tumbled from my lap. I snatched them up before they could roll away, and cast again, three times in all, just as Az had shown me, the first for character, the second for time, and the third for the gods who governed the question and must be honored or appeased. I mulled over the signs, wishing—as often I’d wished before—that I had Az’s knowledge of the avatars, that I might understand how each sign bore upon the others. They could not be understood singly.

 

  
The Dame touched Crux Heavens on the first throw, which I took to be her judgment of Sire Galan’s character. In ancient days Crux Sun bore seven sons to mortal men, who founded the seven houses of the clan of Crux, and one of those sons was Sire Galan’s forefather. So it was no wonder that with the god’s Blood in Galan’s veins, he partook of Crux’s attributes. Yet of the three avatars of Crux—the Sun, Moon, and Heavens—I’d always thought Galan most akin to the Moon in his fickle nature. He’d given me reason enough to think so. Had I misjudged him? Perhaps he was indeed more like the Heavens: constant as the stars when he gave his word, and changeable as the weather in his moods. I prayed now for fair skies sailing to him, and a fair welcome when I arrived, but if he greeted me with storms, I was determined not to be daunted.

 

  
In the second cast the Dame landed on Hazard Peril, in the outer ring of the compass that represents the future, and Na touched the Heavens. Galan—the Heavens—in Peril. It was not as ominous as it sounded. If
Galan was in peril, he was still alive. And Peril could mean a shield against danger, rather than danger itself. Either way, I took the two signs together as good tidings, and I would have been content with that—more than content—if not for the third cast, for the gods.

 

  
Both finger bones landed in Ardor Wildfire, but they pointed in contrary directions: the tip of the Dame’s bone touched Torrent Waters, and Na’s touched Delve Will. It was common sense that I should pray to the Waters to permit my crossing, and to Will to protect Delve’s ship that bore me. But I was uneasy that both the Dame and Na insisted on Wildfire, Ardor’s most unruly aspect: capricious, greedy, and wrathful.

 

  
A sign so emphatic must be a warning, and I feared it was meant for Sire Galan. In the Marchfield he had sparked a discord between the clans of Crux and Ardor that had grown into a conflagration. King Thyrse had commanded the clans to satisfy their honor by mortal tourney, and put an end to the feud. Crux had won, and Sire Galan had made enforced peace with the clan of Ardor, but had he made peace with the god Ardor?

 

  
I had my own reasons to propitiate the god. Ardor had saved my life twice—or rather, spared it twice—and also granted me small blessings: a healing song from the firethorn tree, the knack of seeing in the dark, and the gift in my hands of drawing fire from fevers and burns. I was grateful; at times I was even flattered. And yet it was no great boon to become one of the god-bothered. I would rather creep the rest of my life beneath the notice of gods than receive more such attentions.

 

  
I thanked the Dame and Na for their warning, and sacrificed to the gods as they’d advised. I made a small cut on my arm and sprinkled blood on the deck, and prayed to Torrent and Delve. To Ardor Wildfire I gave a hank of hair from my forelock, burning it with a coal from my fireflask. The singed hair smelled foul. I prayed to Wildfire that Sire Galan be spared Ardor’s wrath, for he’d done his best to make amends. Furthermore I vowed that when I got to shore, I would burn at Wildfire’s altar as much myrrh as I could get for a golden coin, which was all the gold I had, and I’d see that Sire Galan did the same.

 
  

 

  
Before dawn the sailors began their daily commotion. I was too restless to try to sleep anymore in our little shelter, which was rank with sickness. I took Mai’s pot to empty it over the side, and leaned on the rail behind the forecastle to watch pleats of foam unfolding in the ship’s wake. I’d left my cloak behind with Tobe, and the wind twisted my gown and yanked at my headcloth as it drove us along.

 

  
They were a noisy lot, the sailors, always shouting. I’d heard some of them call their ship Jouncy, and name her a wanton and a slut; they said she
was the fastest whore that ever lived, and the quickest to capsize for a likely lad. There was pride in their insults. Indeed the ship was hasty, and she moved like a whore who enjoys her business, side to side and up and down. Her body was lean and her prow was sharp and at the rear she was high and round. Bright paint made her look a bawd. Her sails were striped like a harlot’s skirts, and bellied out as if she’d been gotten with child by the wind.

 

  
Between night and morning I’d found my sea legs, and I felt I was astride the ship, riding her. I leaned over the rail to put my hand on her flank as she plunged forward. I adored her just then, the trull, and I felt a kinship with her too, for she came from the Kingswood where I was raised. No doubt her great keel had grown there in a grove of ship oaks, in a tree patiently shaped into the proper curve by woodsmen with cables and stakes, over the course of half a hundred years or a hundred. Her planking was of larch and her three masts of fir. The shipwrights had made a new living thing from these felled trees, and now her sheathing and pegs swelled in the water, her mortises and tenons strained, and she moaned. She was as much a wind creature as a sea creature.

 

  
The Sun rose behind us and colored the sky and sea red. The clouds overhead had lifted, or perhaps they had outpaced us to gather in the west, where a dark shadow hovered over the sea; the Sun’s light did not seem to reach there. We raced toward those clouds, or perhaps they raced toward us, and as we came closer they reared up thunderheads like a range of sky mountains, and their shadows turned the silver water dull as hammered pewter. The clouds let down a billowing gray curtain and the horizon vanished.

 

  
Our sailors hailed the other galleys of Delve, using their own sea language that even the foreigners among them understood, but I did not. There was a great bustle as oarsmen—half of them mud soldiers, for there weren’t enough seasoned mariners in the fleet—ran out the oars. The whiphands played their shrill whistles and the ships drew farther apart. Sailors took down the huge mainsail and hoisted a small square one, so we ran with just the storm sail and the smaller sails fore and aft.

 

  
A sailor went by on his way up the ladder of the forecastle, and said to me, “You might ought to go below.”

 

  
I said, “Will it be bad?”

 

  
“We’re in for a bit of a squall,” he said.

 

  
No doubt the warning was kindly meant, but I was too ignorant to be afraid. I found it exhilarating, the shrill windsong in the rigging, the changeable light on the sea. A priestess of Delve and her attendants were on the high deck of the sterncastle, chanting and shaking copper disks. Cat
aphracts and armigers of the Blood joined them in prayers to ward off the storm and call down Delve’s blessings to strengthen the metal that held the ship together. Waves rose higher, sharp edged, with frills and streaks of foam. We came thumping down into a trough and cold spray doused me, and I shivered and licked my lips and tasted salt. The pigs and cattle penned on deck were restless, and in the hold mules brayed and horses thumped against their stalls.

 

  
I made my way back to Mai and found Tobe and Sunup sheltered in her embrace. The awning overhead was flapping and I took it down. Mai said, “We’re going in,” shouting to be heard above the wind. I took Tobe in my arms and he began to cry. It was hard for Mai to get up, and Sunup and I both braced ourselves to help her. We staggered toward the hatch just behind the mainmast, weaving between the rowers’ benches and the wall of baggage chests.

 

  
Rift’s wind betrayed us, vanishing in an instant. A wind came from straight ahead and the sails fluttered against the masts and sent us lurching back until I thought we might tip over. But the ship righted herself and slid sideways down the face of a wave. And now wayward gusts came from here, from there, and the ship flew before them, running wherever they’d have her go.

 

  
Bagboys and jacks and foot soldiers jostled in the open space around the mast, waiting to go down in the hold with the horses. Mai and her children entered the dark hatch, but I hesitated. We had reached the cloud curtain, and we passed through into a new realm of white and gray, the water dark as charcoal, the air filled with hard grains of snow that skirled around us, snow sprites turning widdershins over the deck and sea. The other ships had vanished. I think Mai called me to come below, but sailors had already lashed down the hatch cover.

 

  
I heard rumbling in the distance, a muffled roar I didn’t recognize until it careened closer. Thundersnow. The whiteness around us flashed as if the Sun had winked. I thought of Na clutching me tightly during thunderstorms when I was little, for her comfort more than mine. She used to tell me thunder was the sound of Ardor Smith at his anvil, and lightning was Ardor Wildfire dancing, and the safest place to be in a storm was home by the hearth, protected by Ardor Hearthkeeper.