Wildfire (23 page)

 

  
I opened out my compass to compare its godsigns with those on the linen. With the help of the colors, I could tell one sign from another, but I still couldn’t read. Each godsign could be written five ways, with one of three avatar marks, with none, or with all; a small sound belonged to each of those ways. Add sounds together to make words, and godsigns could say anything. But my memory was a coarse net, and nothing so small as a piece of a word could be caught in it. I’d remembered many things since the lightning, but in this too Wildfire had not relented.

 

  
Yet it seemed to me the scrip could be read in another way, as a chant or a prayer, the names of gods and avatars one after another. I bent over my work, deciphering the signs, murmuring the names. The Dame had told me that a godsign shown with the three avatars together is the god as it appears to us in its manifestations; a godsign shown alone is the whole god, what we know and what passes our understanding.

 

  
Someone stirred behind the door flap of the tent, and I hastily balled up the compass and tucked it in my sleeve. Galan ducked out with the feather-stuffed quilt around his shoulders and said, “Aren’t you cold? What are you doing?”

 

  
I pointed to the white linen unfolded in my lap. “I’m trying to see if I can
read these little ink things, the godsings. I have remembered which belongs of which god, but I can’t make them—I still can’t remember the songs they are supposed to make, when they are march one after the other—so as to make worths, to mean somewhat.”

 

  
“You’ll ruin your eyes trying to read in the dark.” He plucked the scrip from my lap and tilted it to catch the moonlight. “You still have this?”

 

  
“Of course I do. It’s a pleasure to me, a treasure. But I wish I could hear what it says.”

 

  
“Why? Do you wish you were back in Corymb?”

 

  
“Never.” I slid my hand up his arm, under the quilt. His skin was warm. “But you were fond of this place, this haunting lodge, so I am fond of it too. Didn’t you say you used to hunt there when you were just young, with those birds, you know the kind—beckons…felcons? Will you tell it of me?”

 

  
“Come back to bed and I’ll tell you all about it.”

 

  
“Best tell me first,” I said, laughing.

 

  
“My feet are too cold.” He’d come out barefoot and he was standing on thawing ice.

 

  
“If you promise.”

 

  
Inside the tent he lit an oil lamp and hung it from a hook under the bed canopy. We sat with the coverlet wrapped around us, and he read to me in a low voice from his gift. “It says, ‘Bear witness that I give my sheath Firethorn tenancy, for her lifetime, of my holding that lies on Mount Sair—’”

 

  
“Show me my name. Which sights are in it?”

 

  
“Here—see?”

 

  
“And Mound…Mount Fair, how far is that to where I’m from?”

 

  
“Mount Sair is five days’ ride from Ramus—that’s why we stopped going there, father said it was too far from his duties—and from Ramus to Sire Pava’s lands is about another tennight, I’d say. So—to go on—‘my holding that lies on Mount Sair and is bounded by the Needle Cliffs to the north’—you should see those, they’re marvelous, thin spires of golden stone—‘and Wend River to the east and south, and to the west the Athlewood; the stone house and byres, the lands, and rights to coppice, pasture, and spring.’”

 

  
“Is someone living in the stolen house, the stone house?”

 

  
“There used to be a gamekeeper there, years ago. I suppose it’s neglected now, but the house has a good slate roof, and I daresay it would still be sound.”

 

  
“A slant, slate roof? Is there an an ornate, I mean an ornament, a place of trees, of…amples, apples, and…plumps and paricots and pears, and lazynuts and such, down on a trace belied the house? To the west of it?”

 

  
“An orchard? Yes, a small one. It must be all overgrown by now.”

 

  
“Very,” I said. “It lacks pruning.”

 

  
I should have known the dreams I’d had of gardens and orchard and wood and a slate-roofed house on a mountainside were true dreams, for they were redolent of scents: dirt, smoke, mountain winds, my own sweat. If they were dreams of the land Galan had offered me, did that mean I would live there someday, despite having refused his gift? It frightened me that I’d never dreamed of Galan there; I was always alone.

 
  

 

  
Now that we had a bagboy to manage the mules, both jacks accompanied Sire Galan on the march. Ev usually rode with them, on Sire Edecon’s spare mount, a gelding without much to recommend him except that he was large. Today Ev tarried to ride with his friend Fleetfoot in the baggage. Frost lagged behind them; I watched the boys as they talked, Ev leaning down toward Fleetfoot on the lead mule.

 

  
In a little while Ev slowed down to visit with me. He seemed worried. Perhaps he was overworked, and if so it was my fault, as I’d asked Galan for him. Most cataphracts had a horsemaster and a couple of horseboys; Galan had Ev. Sometimes I forgot how small he was. He had to stand on a stump to groom Sire Edecon’s warhorse.

 

  
“Are you tired?” I asked. “There are too many hornets and mules in your charge—too many horses—aren’t there?”

 

  
He said, “Fleetfoot is sore troubled. He can feel his hands and fingers—what was cut away—and they pain him terribly. He thinks he’s mad or hexed, so he won’t seek help.”

 

  
“He hides it well.” I hadn’t guessed Fleetfoot was suffering, even when he was silent or sullen, even when I heard him restless in the night as I myself was restless. His hands had healed, by outward appearance, the skin growing pink and shiny over the flesh. This deeper hurt of which Ev spoke—I’d never heard of such a thing.

 

  
“Can you help him?”

 

  
“Me?” I was surprised to be asked. Fleetfoot had no open wounds that could be tainted by a woman’s touch, but even so—even if I knew how to help, which I did not—I doubted he would accept succor from me. Only little boys turned to a woman for healing; it was not for a lad who fancied himself a man.

 

  
Ev said, “I just thought…”

 

  
I waited, but he didn’t say more. “I don’t see how,” I said.

 

  
“I thought…Everyone says you’re touched, you know things. That a god tells you things.”

 

  
“Oh, I’m touched indeed. You can hark in my babble that the god
dumbfounded me. There’s no
use
in it. I go on inspired of it, I mean in spite of it. You should ask Divine Shyster, the harmifex. He knows more of such grievous inquiries…injuries than I—perhaps he’ll know what to do.”

 

  
Ev started to turn his horse away. I thought of the touch-me-not flower and how it closes up when roughly handled, and reached for the gelding’s reins. “Of course I’ll help…Flicktooth if I can. I’ll try.”

 

  
I didn’t dare approach the carnifex directly. Ever since he’d given me the black drink, and I’d said too much, I’d ducked behind tents and carts to keep out of his way; when our paths had crossed, I’d averted my eyes. And sure enough, when I’d pretended not to see him, he had pretended not to see me.

 

  
I asked Sire Galan for help that night when we were under the quilt on the folding bed, in that place which belonged to just us two.

 

  
“Poor lad,” Galan said. “He doesn’t complain of it.”

 

  
“Do you think he’s gone mad? Or is he acrossed?”

 

  
Galan lifted my hand and flattened it against his cheek. I knew the landscape of his face by touch, by its hollows and ridges, rough and soft. He said, “I’ve heard of this before. My sister’s husband lost a foot in the battle of Rivalis three summers back, and yet the foot pains him still, as if someone was stabbing him in the heel with a mercy dagger.”

 

  
I moved my hand away from Galan’s face. “You have a sitter?”

 

  
“A what?”

 

  
“A a sister.”

 

  
“I have three, as it happens. They’re long married. I hardly see them.”

 

  
“I suppose you have…fewmets and nieces too?”

 

  
He laughed. “Oh yes, plenty of them.”

 

  
I turned on my side, away from him.

 

  
“What’s the matter?” He turned too, fitting himself around me with his legs crooked behind mine, and one arm under my neck and the other over my waist. “You’d rather I didn’t have nephews and nieces?”

 

  
“No, of course not. It’s no meddle, no matter.” I schooled my breathing to ease the tightness in my chest. Such foolishness, this jealousy. “So this man with the missing hoof—what does he do against the plaint, the pain?”

 

  
“He drinks himself into a stupor every night,” Galan said, against my neck. “But I don’t think that would suit the boy, do you?”

 

  
“Will you ask Divinster what to do?”

 

  
“He’ll say there’s not a thing to be done.”

 

  
“But will you ask?”

 

  
“Mmmm,” Galan said.

 
  

 

  
Sire Galan made occasion during the next day’s journey to speak with Divine Xyster about Fleetfoot’s complaint, and the priest said the lad was
neither mad nor cursed by a malicious person; he was afflicted by Rift, and more’s the pity. He must ask Rift for aid, for no man could cure him. The boy had run onto the tourney field in the riot, and had his fingers cut off, and it was clear the god was not yet satisfied that his violation of the sacred precinct of the tourney had been requited. When Sire Galan told me this, I asked what his wife’s husband had done to Rift that caused him to be afflicted the same way, and he said he’d never heard a word against him.

 

  
It gave me no joy to take the carnifex’s answer to Fleetfoot. When the lad went walking with Piddle after supper, I accompanied him, saying I had a treat to give Frost. It had taken but a word from Ev for me to see all that I’d failed to see before: how Fleetfoot winced for no reason, or went about with his body stiff and his teeth clamped together. He sometimes reached out with fingers that weren’t there, and looked astonished and dismayed when he failed to grasp a bowl or a buckle.

 

  
But this evening he seemed untroubled. There was a spring to his step and he watched with a smile as Piddle dashed ahead of us. We followed a path trampled in the snow.

 

  
“If told me,” I said.

 

  
“If what?” Fleetfoot looked at me sideways.

 

  
“If, Ev told me about your haunts. About how it hurts.” I held up my own hands to show him what I meant.

 

  
“I told him not to say.” He scowled and plucked a dead branch from the hedge with his three-fingered right hand and flung it for Piddle.

 

  
I said, “Garland, Sire Garland, Galan says this same thing happened to his sister’s wife. He lost a boot and it still harms him.”

 

  
Fleetfoot turned toward me with a smirk. “His sister’s wife?”

 

  
“Oh, you know—her her houseband.”

 

  
He broke off another branch and swept it before him like a scythe, hacking at dried weeds that stood up above the snow. Piddle tried to drag the branch away from him, and Fleetfoot scowled again.

 

  
I said, “You have not gone mad.”

 

  
He raised his half hand and shook it at me. “No? Why then do I feel my fingers making a fist?” The stump of his thumb pressed against his palm.

 

  
“I know,” I said. “It’s very painful, I know.”

 

  
Fleetfoot met my gaze with defiance at first. Then he looked away and shrugged. “It can’t be helped, can it?”

 

  
“Tomorrow we’ll make a scarcity, a sanctity, a sacrament to, to…Rift, for the Aspect says this foment is sent to you by the god for some transgracious.”

 

  
“I haven’t got two copperheads. How can I make a sacrifice?”

 

  
“Gift likes blood,” I said.

 
  

 

  
After the plenty of spring and summer and the harvests of fall, winter seems a stingy season, but dormant plants have much to offer in their sap and bark and twigs, roots and buds and seeds. That evening I made a tisane for Fleetfoot like the one I’d given to Mole, steeping the fissured bark of an old willow with dried leaves of soothe-me. I thought the priest spoke the truth, and Rift needed to be placated, but it would do no harm, meanwhile, to try to ease the boy’s pain and help him sleep.

 

  
So many mudfolk had trespassed during the mortal tourney between Crux and Ardor, myself among them, one of a mob of spectators pushed pell-mell downhill onto the field. The warriors had turned from their battle to attack us, killing in a god-inspired frenzy. We ran lest we be trampled, then we ran from the killers. We were all to blame or we were all blameless, for how can one drop of water in a flood swim where it wills? Why was I spared while Fleetfoot still suffered Rift’s enmity? It is one of the mysteries, why the gods punish some transgressors and let others go untouched.

 
  

 

  
I never liked to visit Rift’s pavilions, though I had a few acquaintances among the sheaths of that company. To judge by women’s gossip, the cataphracts and armigers of Rift were much like any other men. The priests were another matter. The clan had more than their share of priests, a whole troop of bald Auspices dedicated to Rift Warrior. It was said these priests liked to keep their enemies close enough to embrace; the more they advanced in the arcana of war, the shorter their blades, until the most adept fought barehanded. They held themselves to be superior to other warriors, and for that—as their superiority was hard to dispute—they’d earned envy. They also held that coupling with women made a man weak; for that they’d earned the scorn of whores.

 

  
I took courage from the red cord around my waist, and went with Fleetfoot to sacrifice at Rift’s shrine. The altar was a large block of stone they carried from place to place on a red oxcart. An Auspex of the Queen of the Dead sat nearby on an ironwood chair inlaid with ivory skulls. I’d seen her making sacrifices before tourneys in the Marchfield, wearing red robes and a tall red hat with a sharp prow and wings on either side like great sails. This evening she wore a plain red wimple. Her lips made a thin seam between the deep vertical lines bracketing her mouth.