Strange Fire

by Tommy Wallach

  They didn’t really know what it was they were looking for, and if it had been winter, with the short days and the road all covered with snow, odds were good they would’ve missed it. But even a rarely used road makes itself known in the slanting afternoon light of July. There weren’t any ruts from wagon wheels or telltale footprints, just a slight sparseness to the yellow grass and a smoothness to the dirt beneath it.

  “Could be a homestead,” Eddie said, stopping at the intersection.

  Burns pulled up next to him. “Could be. But I don’t see any farmland.”

  “Only one way to find out,” Honor Hamill said, and kicked his horse’s flank.

  The trail curved around a gnarled finger of gray stone and over a stream, then passed through a wood made up primarily of aspen trees, their white trunks ringed and layered, as if they’d been wrapped in bandages. After about an hour, the trail bent upward, growing steeper as it went. The trees grew more thickly here, aspens augmented with ash and white oak, and the path itself was blanketed with leaves and branches and acorns. Finally the ground leveled out again, but just as it did, the trail ran straight into a wall of rocky earth about ten feet high.

  A small cabin had been built against the escarpment, topped with a healthy thatch of moss-covered straw that angled gently upward. There didn’t appear to be any windows, but the column of rocks piled up on the thatched roof was almost certainly a chimney. Honor Hamill tried the lichen-dappled door, but it was locked, and nobody answered when he knocked. Meanwhile, Burns clambered up on the roof to see if there was any sort of trapdoor or skylight.

  “Who would wanna live way out here?” Clive asked.

  “You kidding?” Eddie said. “This is paradise. No people around to muck everything up.”

  “What do you think this is?” Burns shouted down to them. He pointed to a slim gray tube that protruded from the corner of the thatching, running along the edge of the cliff face and then arcing off a dozen yards or so to the east, where it connected to some sort of bracket built into the boughs of an oak tree. From there it stretched over to yet another tree, and then on again, until Clive lost track of it among the branches.

  “Could be for water,” he said.

  Eddie snorted. “There’s a stream not a hundred yards back down the trail. Nobody’s that lazy.”

  “We need to get inside,” Burns said, climbing back down from the roof. “So unless one of you has a better idea, I think I’ll get to kicking in that door.”

  “You’d break your foot first,” Eddie replied.

  “That’s what you think.”

  “It’s what I think and what would happen.”

  “The point’s moot,” Honor Hamill interrupted. “Our suspicions don’t give us the right to break into a man’s home.”

  “I didn’t know the Filia had a problem with violence against doors,” Burns sneered. “Could you quote me chapter and verse on that?”

  “We’ve passed beyond the official borders of the Descendancy, Sergeant. I won’t have these people’s first introduction to us be vandalism.”

  “So what do you suggest?”

  Honor Hamill pointed off into the woods, back the way they’d come. “On the way in, I noticed a rabbit hanging from a snare. It couldn’t have been more than a day old. Someone’ll be coming to check on it before long. All we have to do is wait.”

  “Wait, huh?” Burns put his hands behind his head and gave a derisory snort. “I fucking hate waiting.”

  “That’s a fine stone you’ve got there.”

  Clive jolted awake. They’d been sitting outside the hut all day, and the heat, coupled with his general exhaustion, had conspired to put him to sleep. Now the sun had set, and the air was beginning to turn chilly.

  “What’d you say, Da?”

  “That stone there. It’s nice.”

  Clive hadn’t even realized he was holding Clover’s crystal; he must’ve been worrying at it before he passed out.

  “Clover gave it to me. And told me he’d want it back in the very same breath.”

  Honor Hamill laughed. “Well, I’m glad to hear you two are getting along.” Clive thought about correcting his father’s misconception, but decided against it. “Truth be told, I’ve been worried about him. He took your birthday harder than I’d expected. And I’m sure he didn’t much like seeing Gemma kiss you good-bye back there.”

  “Probably not.”

  “I’m a younger brother myself, you know. It’s like being born into second place. You always feel like you have something to prove.”

  “Clover doesn’t have to prove anything to me. He’s smarter than I’ll ever be.”

  His father didn’t deny it, but Clive wasn’t offended; saying Clover was smarter than the rest of them was like saying that grass was green. “Yes, our clever little Clover. He’s got more brains than most anyone I know, but he still can’t figure out what to do with them.”

  “Other than be jealous of me.”

  “Num custos fratris mei sum ego?”

  “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Clive translated. Anyone preparing for a life in the Church was expected to have a working knowledge of Latin and Greek.

  “I recognize that one,” Eddie said. “Kayin and Hevel.”

  “Indeed,” Honor Hamill said. “Clive, why don’t you tell us all the tale.”

  “Right now?” Clive asked.

  “It’d be good practice. An Honor must be ready to speak at a moment’s notice.”

  Though Clive had given short sermons at some of the smaller gatherings, a horde of vicious butterflies would still kick up in his stomach every time he rose to the ambo. He could feel them there even now, though his audience was only three members strong. “So Kayin and Hevel were brothers,” he began. “They were the children of Aleph and Eva. Both of them wished to marry their sister, the beautiful Aclima, so Aleph suggested they both present a gift to God, who would then choose which man deserved her. Hevel was a shepherd, and so he gave Aclima his fattest sheep. Kayin, a farmer, could give her only a handful of seeds. The Lord preferred Hevel’s gift to Kayin’s, and bestowed Aclima upon the shepherd.”

  “I don’t blame him,” Burns said.

  “Soon after, Kayin and Hevel were out working in the fields, and Kayin picked up a rock and smashed his brother’s head in.” Clive realized he was still holding the stone his brother had given him. It was white as bone. “Afterward, the Lord appeared to Kayin and asked where Hevel was. ‘I don’t know,’ Kayin said. ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ But Hevel’s blood screamed out from the ground, and the Lord knew what Kayin had done. And so he set a mark upon him, and all his descendants unto the fifth generation, that they would be known as murderers. And that’s the end of the story.”

  “Very good,” Clive’s father said, “but I have one correction. The mark wasn’t there to warn people that Kayin was dangerous. It was there for his safety. Otherwise, anyone who saw him would kill him. The mark warned others that Kayin still had the Lord’s protection.”

  Clive frowned. “But why would the Lord protect him and curse him at the same time?”

  “Because death is a release,” Honor Hamill said. “The Lord wanted Kayin to suffer. Now tell me this, why was the mark also put on Kayin’s children? After all, they were entirely innocent of their father’s sin.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think about it.”

  Clive replayed the story in his head. The Lord was just. He didn’t punish the blameless.

  “Well, maybe it was his way of telling them that the world was going to mark them anyway,” Clive said hesitantly. “That when you do something terrible, it doesn’t just stop with you. There are . . . echoes.”

  Honor Hamill smiled. “Yes. I like that. Echoes.”

  Everyone was silent for a moment.

  “If something interesting doesn’t happen in the next five minutes, I’m gonna smash my own skull in,” Burns said. He slid over and pounded the door with the back of his head. “Hello! Is an
ybody in there? Save me from all these preachers!”

  “Heathen,” Eddie muttered.

  “Actually, I think the sergeant might have a point,” Honor Hamill said. “Whatever this place is, we’ve marked it on the map, so the Protectorate can check on it the next time they come through the area. Maybe it’s time for us to move on. Clive, what do you think?”

  “What?” Clive said, before realizing that his father was soliciting his opinion. It was strange to suddenly be included in the decision making, just because he’d turned eighteen. “I don’t want to leave the others any longer than we have to,” he said, after pausing long enough to make it clear he wasn’t taking the question lightly.

  “Fine by me,” Eddie added. “We’ve still got a couple hours of light left.”

  Clive’s father nodded. “True enough. Let’s pack up our things and get moving.”

  But just as they were untethering the horses, there was a loud creaking sound from behind them. Clive turned to see the door slowly swinging open, spilling a wedge of yellow light onto the path.

  A silhouette, and a glint of a blade.

  “Well, look at that,” Burns said. “Guess somebody’s home after all.”

  9. Clover

  HE FOUND HIMSELF HYPNOTIZED BY the music of Gemma’s inhalations and exhalations—the measured cadence, the expansion and contraction of the lungs—and wondered how it was possible that even someone’s breathing could be beautiful. Neither of them had said a word since they’d left camp. The practical silence they’d started out with, so as not to wake anyone, had shaded into a kind of philosophical silence, a reverence for the peaceful soundlessness of the dead hours after midnight.

  He would’ve preferred that they go around Amestown, but they needed to keep to the trail. At least it was late enough that most everyone in town was asleep. The only signs of life were the few forgotten candles in the windowsills, left to burn down to nubs. Once, Clover caught a flash of movement in the bushes and nearly kicked his horse into a gallop—some part of his brain was waiting for Dominic to reappear, to finish what he’d started down by the river—but it was only an old dog chasing after the horses for something to do.

  Just outside of town, the road diverged.

  “What do you think?” Clover asked. His voice was husky; it was the first time he’d spoken in hours.

  “No way to know, is there?”

  “One way maybe.” Clover dismounted. He walked down the path on the left a few hundred yards, scanning the ground as he went. He found what he was looking for almost right away, but just to be safe, he checked the path on the right, too.

  “It’s the left one,” he said, remounting Almondine.

  “How do you know?”

  “They’ve got four horses. One of them was bound to”—he hesitated, his mother’s voice chiding him in his head—“you know.”

  Gemma laughed. “I see. Couldn’t it belong to some other horse?”

  “You think I don’t know fresh horseshit when I smell it?”

  “Didn’t mean to offend you. I forgot you’re a horseshit expert.”

  Clover felt a warm bubbling in his blood, as he always did when joking around with Gemma—foolish hope. Then the image of her and Clive kissing came back to him, and the bubbling stopped. She’d had to get up on tippy-toe to do it—because you had to reach and reach to kiss a tall boy like Clive. Clover still hadn’t had his first kiss, outside of the meaningless ones everyone got in primary school, when the girls still chased the boys instead of the other way around. A strange transformation, from pursuer to pursued, occurring with a kind of choreographed simultaneity, as if everyone had agreed upon it beforehand. And what was at the root of it? What made the voice drop and the thoughts stray, the hair sprout and the pimples proliferate? What made you so disgusted by the girls begging you for a hug in the school yard, then suddenly so desperate for just a scrap of attention from one of them?

  Bernstein said there were hundreds of volumes in the anathema stacks devoted to the subject known as “biology”—the science of life. Clover had the feeling that the answers to all his questions could be found in their pages, but he wouldn’t be allowed to read them until he became an attendant himself, which was at least a decade away. Might as well be forever.

  They rode hard through the night, stopping every couple of hours to stretch their legs and have a bite to eat. Only after the sun was high and starting to scorch did they look for a place to settle down for a few hours of shut-eye. They found a glittering benison of a stream (The river is sacred, for it cleaves always to the ground, seeking out the bosom of the Lord, as the Filia said) and, after watering the horses, arranged their blankets in the spotty shade of a chokecherry. Gemma lay down close enough that Clover could smell the jasmine-tinged sweat on her skin.

  “You worried about your brother?” she asked. The question seemed to come out of the blue, but Clover figured there was something about lying down next to someone, the shift from vertical to horizontal, that lent itself to intimacy.

  “Of course.”

  “Me too.” She put her hand against his cheek. “I sure gave you a doozy of a black eye.”

  “It was nothing.”

  She smiled, then nestled her head down into the blanket. “Let’s not sleep too long,” she said, already halfway gone.

  “All right.”

  He woke up again in the full heat of the sun, the shade having slunk away across the grass while he slept. Gemma was down by the stream, cupping water in her hands and splashing it across her face. She’d taken off her dress, leaving her in nothing but smock and knickers. The water threw spangles of sunlight across her skin, little diamonds dancing on the sinews of her exposed calves and the graceful curve of her neck. She looked over at him, and because he didn’t want to seem as if he’d been caught at something he was ashamed of, he held her gaze. She gave him a little wave before returning to her washing.

  He got up and saddled the horses, and before too long they were on the road again. The sun was already dropping, and when it hit the line of the horizon, the whole sky seemed to burst into flame. They had to slow down when the darkness came; the road was almost invisible even in the daylight. If they weren’t careful, they’d lose it and never find their way back again.

  It was Gemma who first spotted the glimmer in the distance—a spark of orange light moving slowly across the plain.

  “Is it them?” she asked.

  “Could be, only I think that light’s coming toward us.”

  “They could be on their way back already.”

  “Maybe.”

  They kept on riding, and the light only grew brighter as they went. Just when it seemed they were about to run headfirst into whoever was behind it, the light veered away from the road and floated off to the north. A few minutes after that, it winked out completely.

  “Should we follow it?” Gemma said. “I mean, if it’s not them—”

  “It has to be them. Who else could it be, all the way out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  “I couldn’t say. Bandits? Wesah? Ghosts?”

  She smiled, a pale crescent glimmering in the starlight. Clover wasn’t about to look like a coward in front of her. “We’ve come this far,” he said. “Guess we have to see it through.”

  “Well, consider me officially inspired. Lead the way, my hero.”

  They turned the horses in the direction the light had gone, keeping their eyes glued to the ground until they located the vague outline of a trail. Tall, spindly trees blocked out much of the light, so they navigated by sound. There was the gurgle of running water, the crunch and shuffle of the horses walking through dry leaves, the wind soughing through the aspens. Almondine and Dart were breathing more heavily now, as the trail had turned steeply uphill. It plateaued in a small clearing, where ten or so horses were tied up to nearby trees. Even in the dark, Clover recognized the four ministry horses, but the other animals were unfamiliar.

  “Look over there,” Gemma whispered.
She pointed toward the escarpment about a hundred feet beyond the horses. A wan rectangle of light floated in the center of his vision.

  “Is that a door?”

  Gemma nodded. “They must be inside.”

  The breeze died down, and Clover could make out the sound of muffled, angry voices—an argument.

  Gemma jumped down from her horse. “Da’s in there,” she said, more loudly than was safe. “I have to help him.”

  “Gemma, no!”

  But she was already running headlong for the door.

  10. Clive

  “WHOOEE, BUT Y’ALL GAVE ME a fright! Thought I was about to meet my maker!”

  His name was Harry Pardo, and once he’d gotten over the surprise of finding a whole Descendant ministry on his doorstep (and put his puny dagger away), he’d invited them inside. Apparently, this was his hunting cabin; there were a whole lot of nasty-looking traps hanging from hooks on the walls, and a small table near a thin tick mattress bore the remains of a hearty dinner: apple core, rind of cheese, strip of gristle. Against the back wall was an assortment of ramshackle cabinets and a large wardrobe, all shut. The place had a strange smell to it—cloying, with a layer of toxicity beneath the sweetness, like a ripe red berry you knew was poisonous—but otherwise it was pretty cozy.

  Harry looked to be about twenty-five or so, dressed in canvas overalls smudged with black dirt. The lantern in the corner of the room inflamed his ginger hair and the million tiny freckles dotting his face.

  “Didn’t you hear us knocking a few hours back?” Burns asked.

  “I’ll confess I was having a bit of a snooze. I keep pretty strange hours out here.”

  “Doing what, exactly?”

  “Hunting. Foraging. This and that.”

  “I’m surprised you can get any sleep at all with that stench,” Eddie said.

  “Eh, you get used to it. It’s a powder I make from mixing up a couple of local berries—keeps the rats from eating me out of house and home. Speaking of which, you boys hungry? I should have something around here. . . .” He poked around in the cabinets and came up with a wooden bowl of cherries. “They may be a day or two past their prime, but nothing’s rotten yet.” He set the bowl down in front of them and popped one of the cherries into his mouth. Clive tried one himself: sweet and tart at once.