Strange Fire

by Tommy Wallach

  Of course that was what she wanted to know about, Clive thought. She already had a male slave right here: Clover, waiting on her hand and foot, bowing to her every whim. Or maybe she had two slaves, come to think of it. After all, it was Clive who’d helped her cover up a murder, taking her at her word that it had been committed in self-defense. And since that night, had she ever bothered to thank him? Of course not. That would have required spending ten seconds away from Clover.

  Thank God the girl was finally going back to Eaton, where she couldn’t manipulate either of them anymore.

  “Lii nisklaav lamoor,” Burns said. “Love slaves. But in the Descendancy, we call ’em missives. They do all the cooking and cleaning, and whatever grunt work the tribe requires. And of course . . .” He trailed off.

  “Of course what?” Gemma asked.

  “Use your imagination, girl.”

  After a moment, Gemma gasped. “Really?”

  “Sounds like a damn fine life for a man,” Garrick said.

  Burns chuckled. “Depends on the man.”

  “And how does this Andromède stay in power?” Clover asked. “I mean, if nobody ever sees her, she doesn’t have much opportunity to prove her value to the tribe.”

  “I can answer that one,” Gemma said. “Because women don’t waste all their time fighting amongst themselves to prove who’s got the biggest willy.”

  “Well, if the Wesah are so smart, how come they don’t have their own city?” Clive asked.

  “Maybe they don’t want one.”

  “Who wouldn’t want his own city?”

  “Her own city.”

  “Quiet,” Burns said. “I think I heard something.”

  They’d entered a small, sparse copse of gold-leaf aspens and stumpy ponderosa pines. Clive watched a sparrow slip like a dead leaf from the end of a branch, then swoop upward just before touching the ground. There was a moment of expectant tranquility, then a phalanx of slim shadows separated themselves out from the larger shadows cast by the trees. Faces emerged, each one bifurcated by the thin line of a bowstring. Though Clive knew they were all women, many weren’t recognizable as such at first glance; most had cut their hair short or shaved it off entirely, and the furs and cured leather they wore would’ve fit as naturally on a male body as they did on a female’s.

  Burns jumped down from his horse, bowed his head, and began to speak. At first Clive thought he couldn’t understand the words because the Marshal was mumbling. Then he realized that Burns was speaking in the tongue of the Wesah. When the marshal had finished, the tribeswomen conversed among themselves for a surprisingly long time.

  “They’re as chatty as all the other women I’ve met,” Garrick said.

  “Shut your mouth,” Burns said sharply.

  A moment later one of the Wesah warriors lowered her bow and stepped forward. She was young—no older than Irene, probably, and with far fewer tattoos than most of the other tribeswomen—but it was immediately clear she spoke for the naasyoon. In spite of the thick mantle of white fur over her shoulders and the dozen copper bracelets around her left arm, Clive could see the girl was all muscle.

  “I lead this tribe,” she said, in a heavily accented but intelligible English. “I am called Athène. Now who are you, chee.”

  “Marshal Burns, from the Anchor. Taanishi, kaniikaniit.”

  “Taanishi, Marshal Burns of the Anchor. It is your man comes to us with steel yesterday, chee.”

  Clive realized she was talking about Nathan.

  “Yes,” Burns said. “And for that, we apologize.” He laid a canvas sack of deer meat and dried fruit on the ground between himself and Athène. “Lii prayzaan, in the hopes of peace between us.”

  Athène ignored the gift. “Your people always travel by the roads. Now you move through the rocks, chee.”

  “We don’t wish to be seen. Our business is our own.”

  The chieftain laughed, and her tribeswomen laughed along with her. Somehow, their arrowheads hardly wavered.

  “Your business is our business today, Marshal Burns.”

  Clive heard his brother whispering to Irene just a few feet behind him. “That chee sound seems to signal a question. They don’t inflect their terminals.”

  “We have reason to believe there is a city to the east that threatens the Descendancy,” Burns said.

  “Your Descendancy does not extend from water to water,” Athène answered.

  “The Descendancy knows no physical boundary!” Honor Gordon announced. “It is the Lord’s Kingdom on Earth.” In retrospect, Clive was surprised the man managed to keep quiet as long as he did.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Burns murmured.

  “Teaching them to respect the one true Lord and his Daughter.”

  “Your Daughter is a story!” Athène said. Again she laughed loudly, and again her fellow tribeswomen followed suit.

  “The Daughter is your savior and redeemer, savage!”

  Athène’s laughter died as suddenly as it had started. She raised her left hand and made a small twisting motion. A twang and a whistle sounded from the woods. The arrow caught Honor Gordon in the center of his Adam’s apple, stopping halfway through his neck. Wide-eyed, he looked desperately from side to side, as if a solution to his present difficulty might be found somewhere near at hand.

  Clive took a step forward but was pulled up short by Burns’s whispered command. “Don’t move. Nothing to be done.”

  That reality seemed to be occurring to the Honor now too. A strange light had come into his eyes, like a revelation. Was he feeling the pull of Holy Gravity? Seeing God? Touching the Daughter’s face? It looked as if he wanted to tell them something—to deliver a message from the other side—but his last words were reduced to sputters and clicks, and finally he slumped sideways and fell from his horse.

  “Much better,” Athène said.

  3. Clover

  SILENCE. STILLNESS. THE HONOR LAY heaped on the ground, blood oozing down his neck to disappear beneath the collar of his purple cassock. Clover thought about the man that Gemma had killed so many months ago, outside the pumphouse. Was the Wesah chieftain feeling any sort of remorse for what she’d just done, or had she and her tribe transcended such simplistic morality? And which was more barbaric: to kill as a rational being, or to kill like an animal?

  The girl called Athène went on talking as if nothing had happened. “I am told you don’t believe in war,” she said. “Now you go in search of it, chee.”

  “We’re only investigating a rumor,” Burns said. “Please allow us to pass through your lands without further violence.”

  “We have no lands.”

  Burns conceded the point with an open-handed gesture that also happened to serve as a subtle reminder of the gift they’d brought.

  Athène stepped forward and, slipping off a moccasin, nudged the flap of the canvas sack open with her foot. When she’d finished examining the contents, she stepped back again and raised her right fist. Clover braced himself for an arrow through the chest, but apparently the gesture had the opposite meaning. The Wesah warriors behind Athène dropped their bows. Two of them came forward and picked up the canvas sack.

  “They hold fire in their hands to the east,” Athène said. “Their arrows fly faster than sight. You go to your death, chee.”

  “Because we must.”

  Athène nodded, as if this response made perfect sense. “Then you may go.”

  “Thank you,” Burns said. “May all your dreams be nightmares.”

  Athène nodded. “Kahkiiyow pawatamihk kiishkwayhkwashi,” she said—and the cadence made it clear this was a repetition of the same phrase in the Wesah tongue. She turned away and began walking toward the trees.

  “Look at her! Look at her shine!”

  Athène spun back around, seeking the source of the shout.

  “You sparkle,” Gemma said directly to the chieftain. “You sparkle so lovely.”

  The Wesah looked bewildered, but Clover unders
tood what was happening. Over the years, he’d learned to recognize the bizarre eruptions that sometimes preceded Gemma’s fits. Sure enough, her eyes rolled back in her head a few seconds later, and then she was on the ground, shivering and kicking as if something evil inside her was doing its damndest to get out.

  Within a few seconds, the general mumble of consternation among the Wesah had grown into a dreadful cacophony, one in which the word dimoon seemed to feature heavily. The warrior women sounded fearful and angry at once, chittering away in their high-pitched, consonant-heavy tongue. Clover glanced over at Clive, but his older brother looked as bewildered as everyone else in the glade. Only Irene had had the presence of mind to actually do something useful; she’d been closest to Gemma when the fit started, and she’d immediately rolled the girl onto her side and slipped a hand under her head.

  A few of the Wesah warriors were reaching for their quivers now, frightened by what they couldn’t comprehend. Burns advanced on them with his hands up.

  “She’s not a demon!” he said. “She has a sickness! Shit, what’s the word for sickness? Malaajhii Malaajhii!”

  For her part, Athène also seemed to be trying to convince her fellow tribeswomen not to shoot, waving at them wildly, but not all of them were paying attention. Clover noticed one warrior in particular—a woman at least twice as old as Athène, with a wild thatch of curly hair and a slight but palpable madness in her eyes—who’d already nocked an arrow. Clive saw her too, and he immediately dove forward to shield Gemma’s body with his own. Only just then, Gemma bucked particularly hard—a shudder that seemed to start at her belly and ripple outward like a double whip crack—and Irene, who’d been holding the girl’s hand, was wrenched to the side, knocking Clive over and putting herself directly in the line of fire.

  Clover reached into his saddlebag and pulled out the gun—a parting gift from the Epistem—then pointed it at the curly-haired warrior.

  Squeeze the trigger.

  “What are you doing?” Irene screamed. “Shoot her!”

  Squeeze the trigger.

  The Wesah warrior squinted her right eye and drew the bowstring back.

  Squeeze the trigger.

  Oh God: it was the pumphouse all over again. And though he knew there would be blood on his hands either way, he couldn’t bring himself to take that final leap. A plangent twang sounded as the arrow was loosed.

  “No!” Clover shouted.

  But the arrow flew well wide of its target, disappearing into the trees.

  A moment later, the Wesah warrior dropped to her knees and coughed up a thick gout of blood. And now Clover could see the black leather hilt sticking out of her chest. Thirty feet away, Clive had yet to move, his arm frozen in the position from which he’d thrown the knife. The injured warrior coughed wetly a few more times, then lay still. The glade went silent.

  Clover found the presence of mind to point the gun at Athène. Hopefully she hadn’t noticed he didn’t have the guts to actually use it.

  “One man for another,” Burns said softly. “Balaansii.”

  Athène’s lower lip quivered with rage. Her eyes were wide as moons. “Balaansii, chee.” She took a step toward Clover. Then another. He didn’t move; even if he’d been capable of shooting, it would have meant all of their deaths. Athène was close enough to touch now. He saw the delicate tracery of a tattoo on her neck: a swirling pattern, like water eddying behind a boat.

  “Paa balaansii,” she whispered, then leaned forward and pressed her forehead into the barrel of the gun. Her lips curled up into a terrible smile. “Paa miina,” she said. Then, pushing even harder against the gun, she let out a long, piercing scream. Then she turned her back on the gun and followed the rest of the naasyoon back into the woods. It seemed an eternity before the foliage finally swallowed her up.

  As soon as she was out of sight, Irene came rushing into Clover’s arms, squeezing him tightly. “We’re okay,” she said. “We’re all okay.”

  “What did she say there at the end?” Clive asked Burns. “It sounded like a threat.”

  “It was,” the marshal answered. “She said ‘Not even. Not yet.’ ”

  Everyone was silent for a moment. Then Garrick snorted loudly. “Look at that.” He pointed to a nearby tree, where the canvas bag had been left hanging from a leafless branch, its contents completely intact. “The bitch didn’t even take her present.”

  Clover gently stroked the spines of the prickly pear plant—they were sharp and unyielding, eminently practical. This was a healthy specimen, with big purple flowers and dark green paddles. The fruits, brownish-red cylinders that were a favorite of plains animals, had all been eaten, but more were already growing.

  It was the cover story he’d been provided by the Epistem: the Library had sent him along with the Protectorate contingent in order to scout the flora of the eastern reaches of the Descendancy for potential medicinal components. For the sake of verisimilitude, he’d spent his last couple of weeks in the Anchor reading up on botany. He now knew over a thousand different Latin names for plants. He could prescribe herbal treatments for more than twenty-five common ailments, from headache to pinkeye. He’d learned to classify various monocots by the size of the florets and the shape of the leaves. All so he could lie just a little bit more effectively.

  “A shekel for your thoughts?” Irene said, appearing out of the darkness.

  The rest of the contingent was camped out about a quarter mile away. They’d spent the day traveling east as fast as they could manage, expecting a Wesah counterattack at any moment. But either Athène had decided they weren’t worth the trouble, or she was simply biding her time. Whatever the explanation, the situation had left all of them tense and exhausted.

  “My thoughts aren’t worth that much.”

  “Don’t be so modest.” Irene knelt down next to him in the tall grass. “You ever eaten prickly pear?”

  “No. Have you?”

  “Sure. Tastes a little like watermelon. My momma used to make jam out of it.”

  “She use it for anything else, like when you were sick?”

  Irene shrugged. “You know how we outerlands folk are. Everything’s a miracle cure.”

  It was meant as a joke, but Clover couldn’t rally a smile. Irene put her hand over his. “What’s wrong, darling?”

  What was wrong? Everything, obviously. His parents being dead was wrong. Clive being a soldier was wrong. It was wrong what he’d learned that night in the anathema stacks, and it was wrong what the Epistem had asked of him, and it was wrong that he’d have to leave everyone he loved behind when they reached Sophia.

  Irene began to gently stroke his arm. “It’s lonely, isn’t it?”

  “What is?” His voice sounded husky in his throat, and he realized he’d been about to cry.

  “Keeping secrets.”

  “I don’t know what you—”

  “Shh.” She put a finger against his lips, then slid it down to his chin so she could give him a lingering kiss. “You think I haven’t been able to tell? Ever since the night of the plebiscite, you’ve changed. You’ve been hiding something.”

  He didn’t know what to say. He’d promised he wouldn’t say anything about what he’d learned inside the Anchor wall, or what he was meant to do in Sophia. But what a relief it would be, not to be alone with the weight of it anymore.

  “Marry me,” he said.

  Irene frowned. “What did you just say?”

  “I said marry me. I love you, Irene. And a husband can tell his wife whatever he wants. So if you and I get married—”

  She cut him off, kissing him again, pushing him back onto the ground and straddling his hips. After a while, she sat up straight, looming over him, backlit by the gibbous moon.

  “Yes,” she said. “My answer is yes.”

  “Really?”

  “Of course.” She leaned down, embowering his face with her hair. “Now what’s this big, bad secret of yours?”

  But even then, after they�
��d promised themselves to each other for life, Clover felt hesitant. In telling Irene his secret, he would be breaking his word to the Epistem—and to God, in a way. Perhaps it would be better if he said nothing after all. At least now he knew she’d wait for him. If he survived his mission, they could settle down together. He’d work in the Library, and she would stay home with the children, and they’d need never discuss the risk he’d taken for the Descendancy.

  “Clover,” Irene said, a note of chiding in her voice, “I’m starting to think you don’t trust me.” She ran her hand down his cheek and neck, his chest and belly, the waist of his trousers. He could feel his resolve melting away.

  “Silly boy,” she whispered. “Don’t you know you can tell me anything?”

  And so he told her everything.

  4. Paz

  MARRY ME. I LOVE YOU.

  He’d said it just before he relinquished his last secrets and became hers entirely. And now she lay next to him in his tent, restless and tense, the hours passing slow as clouds. In that small space, Clover’s even breathing was like a bellows, and she began to imagine it was only getting louder with each exhalation, as if something were chasing her and slowly catching up. She escaped into the fresh night air, into the tranquil chaos of the sylvan biome: arrhythmic clicking of crickets, plangent hoots of owls, gentle flutter of bats winging overhead. The campfire was still smoldering, but the makeshift benches of dead wood the soldiers had placed around it were all empty.

  Paz sat down and warmed her hands at the embers, trying to get her head around everything she’d learned in the past twenty-four hours. She’d long known that the Filia was just a collection of fables, and that the first generation of men had been destroyed by some sort of natural disaster—Clover’s revelation just filled in the details. Apparently the “Conflagration” had been caused by something called an asteroid, which was nothing more than a big rock. Interestingly, Clover still believed that both explanations for this disaster—Daughter and asteroid—could be true at the same time. Funny how the mind could rationalize almost anything.