Wildfire (29 page)

 

  
I tried to take off my dress because I was too hot. My hands were slow and disobedient, and Galan caught them and held them fast. Riders came to see about the fire, and he spoke to them and they rode away.

 

  
Galan hoisted me and dragged me uphill. My legs weren’t much use. The laundress’s son was just behind us, and Galan turned and looked at him, his mouth set in a severe line. The boy followed nevertheless.

 
  

 

  
The land of the dead is not for the living. I shivered and shook, as cold as if I were still at the bottom of that river. My skin was covered with bumps like the underbelly of a frog. I couldn’t speak for the chattering of my teeth. I lay beside the brazier, wrapped in a feather quilt. Galan sat beside me, heating stones, and when they were warm he wrapped them in cloth and put them under my feet and hands. I couldn’t feel my legs. My hands were too far away to answer to my commands, too far even to pain me when the warmth began to scorch.

 

  
Galan was furious. It was in his face and movements, the way he picked things up and set them down, hard and quick. All I could do was shake.

 

  
There came a time when I couldn’t even do that.

 

  
It occurred to me that I was dead. Death was easier than I’d thought, easier than life. Less caring. I was wandering in darkness so absolute my night eyes could see nothing. I feared I might wander forever and never find an obstacle or any change in the slope or roughness of what was underfoot. I untied the fireflask from my girdle, and pulled out the coal in its swaddling of mossy firewort. The coal tumbled and rolled away, and I felt for it with my fingers. It was cold to the touch—gone out? I took it in my palm and breathed on it.

 

  
I’d called on Ardor to heal the laundress, and Wildfire had answered. But it was Wildfire who made her fever rage, and caused the flames of her hearthfire to escape its bounds. I should have called on Hearthkeeper
instead—these gifts of drawing and giving fire, surely they were blessings from Hearthkeeper herself. I’d failed to see this, and failed the laundress, and maybe hastened her death. We’d been locked together and the heat had ebbed and flowed between us, powerful, unstoppable, until it flowed away into the realm of the dead, swallowed like a river that vanishes into sand.

 

  
I prayed to Hearthkeeper fervently now, and breathed on the coal again and felt a throb of warmth against my palm, and saw a faint glow, the only light in the world. The heat stung, and I hastily put the coal on the ground and fed it strands of firewort, which flared and were consumed.

 

  
The coal couldn’t catch without fuel, and what was there to burn in this desolation? My feet were heavy and stiff, they no longer felt a part of me, having turned to wood. I broke off one toe, then another, the little toes that didn’t matter so much. They cracked like dried sticks. I fed them to the coal. Flames wrapped around the wooden flesh and it hurt—Gods, it hurt!

 

  
Galan put another hot stone by my feet, and crouched beside me. His face was carved of warm wood, with polished curves and hollows, and delicate lines incised around his eyelids and nostrils. I stared at him fixedly because my eyes were frozen. He moved out of my sight, then back in. He held the mirror with the fox handle before my face, and I saw my own empty stare. “You live!” he said, showing me the mist on the mirror.

 

  
The hearthfire in me had a ravenous greed, it ate heat from the stones, and when Galan took my hands I stole heat from him too. He gasped and swore, but he held on.

 
  

 

  
The jacks were taking down the tent. I sat outside and eased up my kirtle to bare my shins to the fire in the brazier. My littlest toes were not broken off after all, but red and spotty and swollen from chilblains. The laundress’s son sat nearby, his bony knees drawn up to his chin and his arms clasped around them. He seemed almost a lackwit, but I supposed he had no other shield against fear and sorrow than to refuse to feel. He cringed when the men came near, especially Bloodspiller. The jack had laughed at him and given him a name, Ears, because his ears were big as jug handles, but the name his mother had given him was Wren.

 

  
The boy scratched so much he made my head itch. I called him to sit in my lap, and ran a thistle nitcomb through his hair. I had diligently kept us free of lice by preparing lousebane and candling the seams of our clothes. Lice didn’t care who was high and who was low, and Wren had brought them to our tent.

 

  
A quarrel with Galan was coming—I knew this as surely as I knew when storms were on the way, and perhaps for the same cause: old injuries starting to ache. I wasn’t surprised when he stood over me and said, “I hope you
don’t think I’m keeping the boy. I daresay you’re sorry you killed his mother, but you can’t keep him.”

 

  
I squinted at him. “I didn’t kill her. Sometimes I can help, sometimes not. Next time I shall do better.”

 

  
Galan looked at me, his face tight and cold. “There won’t be a next time.”

 

  
I refused to quarrel. If I spoke I’d enrage him further and it would be for naught. So I kept the thought to myself:
You can’t forbid me.

 

  
He shook his head and walked away and the boy and I stared after him.

 
  

 

  
That day Prince Corvus returned the captive outriders whom the Crux had tried to rescue. He sent them with gifts of horses, robes, and spices, and a message that he was ready to settle the terms of battle. We learned this from rumormongers before we’d finished raising the tents in our new camp. Auspices made sacrifices and read the omens, for it was beholden on them to know the time and place of battle most favorable to our army. In the evening a delegation of priests set forth to parley with Prince Corvus’s conciliators.

 

  
We were to have a properly conducted battle to decide a properly conducted war. There were other sorts of war, such as the campaign of extermination our king had carried out against enemies to the south of Corymb. He’d slaughtered them without mercy for the abomination of using weapons that killed at a distance. He’d razed their muddy villages down to the hearthstones, and resettled the broad grasslands with horses, and men to look after the horses, and women to look after the men.

 

  
But this war would be fought by two armies drawn up in ranks and contending at a time and place foretold. The battle would begin with rites and sacrifices and end with one or the other army in possession of the battleground, and therefore the kingdom. It was to be bounded like a mortal tourney, so the war would not spill everywhere to the ruination of Incus.

 

  
The conciliators haggled and we waited. Men went off raiding, and the king and queenmother looked the other way. Some of the warriors were trying to get what loot they could now, afraid the conciliators might make peace. Mai claimed the queenmother encouraged plundering to make Prince Corvus more eager to settle, for while he sat in luxury in Malleus, we were encamped on a hillside scoured by winds, freezing one day and mired in mud the next. We were one long march from the city. The battle, which had seemed to recede before us as we crossed Incus, was nearly upon us.

 
  

 

  
The conciliators dillydallied, and the shiver-and-shake came to camp.

 

  
I knew my enemy now. I should have seen it at once, when it killed the
laundress. Every winter the shiver-and-shake had raided our village; last winter, when I was hiding in the Kingswood, it took Na. It was deadly fond of the very old and the very young.

 

  
The shiver-and-shake crept about at night; if its shadow crossed five sleepers lying side by side in a croft, it might embrace one or two or take them all. It went abroad in daylight too, striking people down with sudden pains. Whether it came with a caress or a blow made no difference. The fever killed within a hand of days, or failed in its purpose; those who lived could expect a second visit in a tennight or so, when it returned to taunt rather than kill.

 

  
I was called to a brothel in the afternoon, and I went, since Galan wasn’t there to stop me. He’d told Bloodspiller and Rowney not to let me go, and Bloodspiller did try to get in my way, telling me I’d catch a beating from Sire Galan.

 

  
Two women and three children had taken ill in the crowded brothel, a striped pavilion that stood proud over the ragtag tents of less prosperous harlots. The queans’ pander was nowhere to be found. The skinniest whore, who went by the name of Longbean, spat between the gap in her front teeth and said she hoped he took a good dose of canker away with him when he ran off with the strongbox and his favorite doxy.

 

  
The whore Gentian said we were cursed by the maids of Torrent and the priests of Rift with their vile execrations, and it was no use trying to cure anyone the gods had cursed. She wailed that she was doomed, we were all doomed, the army was doomed, until I put a stop to her crying with a strong dose of soothe-me. But Gentian only said aloud what we were all thinking. If five were sick in this one tent, then how many in the army?

 
  

 

  
There were the harlots Marigold and Jillybell, and Jillybell’s little daughter Blushrose, and the twins Snowdrop and Snowflake, whose mother had gone and orphaned them last year; the girls were too young to whore, and worked as servants. So many at once, I was daunted. But I wasn’t alone facing down the shiver-and-shake. Most of the harlots were more sensible than Gentian, and they’d been keeping their sick companions clean and offering them nourishment. Tansy, the old woman who did the whores’ laundry, was scrubbing linens after sitting up for two nights with Jillybell.

 

  
I went from one sufferer to another, looking for signs that I might understand the nature of their malady and their strength to resist it: the color of skin and tongue and the whites of eyes, the pungent smells, the music of the body—heartdrum and pulse, the timbre of breathing. The taste of sweat and spit. Whether they were hot or cold, dry or damp.

 

  
When I pressed my palms against the skin of their bellies or breasts, I felt
the strength of their hearthfires and fevers. I’d been mistaken, thinking them one and the same. With my touch I prayed to Ardor Hearthkeeper, and she answered, letting me take heat with my right hand and give it with my left. I was careful to touch each person only for a little while, and only as much as I could endure.

 

  
Of all the sufferers, I was most afraid for Jillybell. I knew her as a merry woman, prone to giggling, but now she lay shaking in dread. She’d fallen ill three days ago, after the raid by the priests of Rift. She said she’d seen the shiver-and-shake roaming our camp, a pale phantom. It had taken her by the neck and given her a shake, and made her so stiff she couldn’t turn her head, and now it was crushing her skull slowly, as between the jaws of a nutcracker. She moaned and moaned. I brought her fever down, but by evening she was screaming from pain and fear, and crying out that she was falling though she was firmly on the bed. The screaming was a torment to me, for I didn’t know how to ease her suffering.

 

  
The shiver-and-shake carried a sack full of miseries along with the fever, doling out some to one victim, some to another. It is always so with sickness, that no two people suffer alike, which is why a greenwoman must study the ill person as well as the illness to find the best remedy. I should have been able to think of five or ten plants that might serve Jillybell. The Dame had kept a store of herbs for such occasions, each harvested at the time and season of greatest potency, but that was no use to me now. I had only what I could find in midwinter near our encampment, and my memory was almost as empty as my sack of cures.

 

  
I left the stinking tent so I could breathe, so I could think, and the air outside was as cold and clean as a mountain stream. I took a deep draught of it. I was full of heat, and mist fumed from my breath and skin. The tents of the whores were, like the rest of the market, outside the protective circle of ditch and stakes. I walked away from the noise of the camp, and knelt under a tree on the cold ground, under a thin sickle Moon, the last moon of the month. I took out the divining pouch hidden under my skirts, and held the finger bones in my palm, and felt the touch of those dear shades and was comforted.

 

  
I threw the bones for Jillybell, once for her character, once for her malady, and once for a remedy. The bones of the Dame and Na landed close together on the last throw. They agreed: Wildfire and the Waters must be beseeched for help.

 

  
I threw three times for Jillybell’s daughter, and this time it was the Dame alone who pointed to Wildfire and the Waters on the last throw, while Na landed outside the horizon on the godsign of Torrent—the whole god. I read the bones for the other three sufferers, and certain signs
appeared again in different places—Hunger was one—but always Wildfire and the Waters were the avatars to be propitiated.

 

  
Wildfire for the slow conflagration of fever, Wildfire for the parching relentless thirst. The Waters for the way the fever came in waves like those during a storm at sea, crests of burning, troughs of chills. The Waters for the high tide of delirium and the ebb tide of exhaustion, the most dangerous times for the stricken.

 

  
It was easy to see these two elemental avatars—unbounded, tempestuous—as the cause of suffering. But the bones said they were also the cure. Was there some necessity in the burning and the rhythm of fever and chills, something that helped, if it didn’t kill? One must balance the other: fire against chills, water against fever and thirst, so the feverfire would scorch rather than devour, and a sufferer might ride the waves without foundering. And of course—said the bones—we must beg Wildfire and the Waters to be merciful.

 

  
I went in search of remedies, staying within the circle of the outlying sentries with their dogs. It wasn’t safe to wander alone, and at first I was afraid. But I found I couldn’t remain afraid, there in the garden of the gods, which is the whole world, and yet for me, that night, was bounded by the compass of our camp. It was most fruitful where gods did the tending; not in the fields, but in the boundaries, the hedges and ditches and thickets. The finger bones had pointed to avatars, and it seemed to me the avatars had sown plants that I might find them now, and harvest what was needed: shiny evergreen leaves of the holm oak, barberries, five-leaf root, bullace branches, and tender feverfew leaves that had lingered into winter.