Child of Flame

by Kate Elliott

  Urtan started in. “If your mother were alive today, she’d be ashamed to hear you talking like a crow, all loud noises and strutting but without two thoughts to rub together. You treat words like pebbles. Grab a handful and throw them to the winds. Maybe you sleep in the men’s house now, but that doesn’t mean you’re a man until you’ve earned the right to have your counsel listened to.”

  Here, now, began Alain.

  “Nay, let him go,” said Urtan as Kel thrashed away into the brush. “That’ll make his ears sizzle. He’ll think twice next time he speaks.”

  “But what did he mean about—?”

  Pur coughed loudly.

  “Hush,” said Urtan. “Here comes the Hallowed One and Pur back again.”

  Adica made as much noise as possible, coming those last ten steps before she emerged into the clearing where a dozen adults waited, armed with spears or staffs. “Come, let us go to the feast.”

  Mother Orla had died at the solstice of a lung fever and been buried with her gold neck ring, one hundred amber beads, a full bark bucket of beer, and a handsome flint dagger. The villagers had held council for over a month—there wasn’t much else to do in the winter—and finally chosen a new headwoman for the village, one who would bring them luck and prosperity.

  Now, it was young Mother Weiwara who stepped forward to hand Adica a wooden ladle full to the brim with ale brewed of wheat, cranberries, and honey, flavored with bog myrtle. It stung a little, having gone somewhat flat after a winter in storage, but still had a good, strong taste, nothing sour or corrupt.

  It was a balmy night, as sweet as a newborn child. They ate roast pig garnished with bistort and nettle tops, flat loaves of barley bread, stewed hedgehog, and greens, and drank enough ale to fill two rivers while Weiwara told the story of how the ancient queen Toothless built the tumulus with magic. Urtan sang of the hunt of the young queen Arrow Bright, who had captured a dragon and then set it free. If, as the night wore on and the moon cast its dazzling spell over the village, some women went off into the dark with men who weren’t their husbands, no one minded. The Green Man would have his own way in these matters.

  Adica sat beside her husband, content. She had bathed his hair in violet-scented water that morning, and she could still smell it there. He always smelled of flowers.

  He knew songs, too, that he sang in the language of the dead, which none of the living could understand. The dead still feasted and loved and fought on the Other Side. Of course they would need songs, like offerings. They sat by the fire for a long time, watching the flames tumble and lick, hearing the red-hot coals pop or sigh. Everyone else had gone. The moon rode high along her path, and Adica didn’t ever want the night to end, as if they could be stranded here forever, untouched by fate.

  Alain held her close. He stroked her belly and whispered in her ear. “We make a child?”

  One of the dogs, lying to his left, growled.

  She smoothed a thumb over his cheek, found his lips, kissed him. “No child.” She had no more grief to give over to a child who would never be born. Like a loosed arrow, she had to remain fixed and true so that she would hit her mark. The Holy One had given her more than she had hoped for, and she would not let regret stalk her now.

  He misunderstood her. “No child lives here yet.” His fingers tapped her skin caressingly. “We can make a child, yes?”

  She sighed, not wanting to have to make him understand. “No child, beloved.”

  “I will never let you or a child come to any harm.” Suddenly passionate, almost angry, he leaned away from her, still grasping her elbows, so that he could look into her face. “You think I cannot protect you, just like I could not protect—”

  Both dogs growled and stood.

  “That’s the loom! Someone is working the loom.” She leaped up and ran to the gate. Alain and the dogs caught up with her there. He had brought a torch but not lit it.

  “Do you hear the stones?” She waited for the night watch to open the narrow portal and squeezed through, Alain following after. Crossing the bridge, she turned her face toward the hill. Threads woven out of the loom of the sky, drawn down by magic’s shuttle, traced so faint a pattern against the night sky and the glare of the full moon that only an eye trained to magic could discern them. The stones lay out of her sight at the height of the hill.

  “Look!” said Alain as both dogs barked. A torch bobbed high up on the ramparts.

  Who had come? Was it the Cursed Ones again?

  The night watch blew two short calls to alert the village. Alain pulled her back through the portal, barring it behind them. Safe behind the palisade, she climbed the ladder that led to the gate tower. There, she waited as the torchlight approached and as adults of the village gathered outside the common house, ready with weapons.

  A woman she had never seen before approached the gate, torch held high to light her path. In her other hand, she held a spear tipped with a flint point. Her hair, braided with bone and shell beads, gleamed under the torchlight, and her skin was mottled with strange markings, perhaps a scabrous disease.

  But her voice was clear and strong. “Let there be peace among allies.”

  “Let those who suffer join hands,” called Adica in reply. She signaled to the night watch. As he unbarred the portal, she climbed down from the parapet so that if the messenger brought evil spirits in with her, she would be the only one to take harm from them. The crowd gathered at the common house murmured at her appearance, but none called out. They, too, waited.

  The woman had no disease: she bore the tattoos common to Spits-last’s people, who called themselves “Akka,” the Old Woman’s people. She spoke the language of the Deer people with so heavy an accent that it was hard for Adica to understand her.

  “I am a Walking One of the Akka people. This message I bring for the sorcerer of the Deer people from the one who falls down when the spirit rides him.”

  “I am Hallowed One of the White Deer people. Do you bring me a message from Falling-down?”

  “This message I bring from the sorcerer who falls down when the spirit rides him: ‘Walk with the messenger who brings you this message. Danger time this day and tomorrow. Knife of Cursed Ones cuts our threads. They know who we are. Come to the land of the Akka people, of the north country. Come quick quick. There I wait.’”

  The words chilled Adica. “I will come.”

  Alain had the intent look on his face that meant he was working hard to understand words. At once, she realized how long it would be until she saw him again. This the looms demanded: you could never predict how many days or even months each crossing would take. The loom’s burden had never seemed as harsh as it did at this moment. How could she make him understand how bitterly it hurt her to leave him?

  He spoke first. “I come with you to keep you safe.” He turned at once, not waiting for her answer, and sent Kel off to fetch his staff, dagger, and cloak.

  Relief left Adica speechless.

  Mother Weiwara came forward. “Winter departs late in the north country where the Akka dwell.” She sent villagers for water and travel bread, winter clothing, hide leggings and shirts, fur cloaks fastened with precious copper pins, and a complicated binding of grass and leather to protect feet from bitter cold.

  Alain beckoned Beor over. “Put more adults on the night watch. Let all adults walk armed to the fields. If there is danger, if the Cursed Ones are planning an attack, then you must be ready.”

  Beor turned to Adica. “Give me the bronze sword, the one you hid away. If the Cursed Ones attack us and you are not here to protect against them with your magic, then it will go worse for us. It isn’t right that we might have had a weapon in our hands to fight them off.”

  The memory of her vision flashed in her mind, of the bronze sword in Beor’s hand as he wreaked havoc. It was a terrible choice, and perhaps an unfair one, but because she had no time, because the river had caught her in its grasp and swept her forward, she gave in. “Very well. Come with us to the loo
m. I will give you the sword.”

  They made a silent procession, walking up through the ramparts girded with staffs, torches, and traveling pouches slung over their shoulders. Beor admired the Akka Walking One; Adica recognized his belligerent way of flirting. The Akka woman did not return his admiration. She paid no attention to him at all. Indeed, she seemed most interested in Alain’s black dogs. She had the broad features common to the Akka people and the broad shoulders of a woman who has tackled a lot of reindeer, and it was hard to tell whether she contemplated those dogs with such an avid gaze because they looked fit to serve her, or to be eaten for supper.

  Adica made them wait at the base of the highest rampart while she went up alone to dig up the grave of bronze. Six months buried in earth had caused the sword’s metal to fur over with green, and its soul to slumber. But where the starlight’s gleam stroked the blade she felt it waken under her touch, felt it grope upward in the way a hand brushes aside a spider’s web that blocks the entrance to a cave.

  War is coming. The sword had a seductive voice. Free me.

  She had no spells to counter its angry soul, no way to bind it so that it would slumber again. Perhaps Beor was right. If war was coming, then they had to defend themselves. It wouldn’t be right to leave the village with anything less than what the Cursed Ones themselves carried. Perhaps the conjuring man of Old Fort could study this bronze sword and learn the secrets of its making. Perhaps he could make more such swords. Then the White Deer people would not always fight at a disadvantage.

  It still wasn’t easy to give Beor the sword.

  “Go,” she said to him. “I must weave the passage, and you must go back to the village.”

  He drew her aside, looking restless. “I was a good husband to you, Hallowed One.” He pulled on his right ear, as he often did when he was irritated. “But you never said so.”

  He went on without waiting for her reply. “Not that I begrudge you the man. I know he’s not like us. If the Holy One brought him to you, then I’m not one to say ‘nay’ to her wishes, but I won’t have it said that I wasn’t a good husband to you or that I went without protest when the elders made me leave your house.”

  “No, you did not go without protest,” she murmured.

  That satisfied him enough that he left, halberd and sword held triumphantly before him. She shuddered. Light flashed off the tip of the bronze sword, and for an instant she thought she saw blood. Then she lost sight of him.

  “Quick, quick,” said the Akka woman.

  “Stand there, to that side.” Adica stationed herself on the chalk calling ground and studied the stars. The passageway to the Akka loom was made most easily when the Ploughing Man’s Eye rose in the east, but there were other, more circuitous routes to every loom just as there were many ways to pattern cloth. It was too late in the evening to catch and hold the threads of the Bounteous One and her swift, shy child, Six Wings. But the Sisters were rising, and their twin lights could be woven in with the scatter of stars known as the Shaman’s Headdress and hooked to the Dipping Cup as it dipped into the north.

  She raised the obsidian mirror, caught the light of the gold-haired sister and, by shifting the mirror slightly, the silver hair of her twin. Light caught in the stones. As she wove it in with the other stars, threads flowered to life among the flattened oval of the stones to form a passageway leading to another loom.

  She picked up her sack and, with the others behind her, crossed through into a snow as light as feathers, spitting from heavy clouds. They stood on a high plateau composed mostly of boulders tumbled every which way, covered with lichens and mosses and a dusting of snow. The rocky land gave way toward the horizon to heaps of golden stones jutting up like huge tumuli, untouched by snow. No trees gave shelter against the cutting wind. Only the circle of stones and the gleaming hillocks defied the swirling snow. Mountains cut an edge along the eastern horizon. The light was cloudy and gray, lightening with dawn, although Adica could not see the sun.

  Their guide trudged away down a path worn into scant earth, more pebbles than soil, and marked out with a trail of chalk that, curiously, was free of snow. Adica hurried after her. Alain took up the rear guard with his dog-headed staff raised and the dogs at his heels. The path cut down through rock that fell by degrees into a steep valley smothered in trees and snow. Winter still lay heavily on this land. After a time, she saw clearings that had been hacked out of the forest. Pigs and deer had made tracks through these snow-drenched clearings. Otherwise they were a featureless white.

  Down by the valley’s mouth, near the arm of water that bounded the lowest reaches of the valley, rock corrals penned in reindeer. Three boats draped with felt rode high on logs, upturned above the shoreline. A half-dozen smaller, sleeker skiffs lay drawn up on the rocky beach. Ice rimmed the shallows, but the deep waters lay as smooth as glass, unfrozen despite the bone-chilling cold.

  Beyond the corrals, torches ringed a longhouse. This hall served the entire tribe as home, storage, and stable. Even Spits-last, their sorcerer, lived cheek by jowl with them, never knowing solitude.

  Flakes of snow spun past. Although the wind had cut harshly on the plateau above, the shadow of winter burned more intensely within the valley’s heart. The shock of the temperature change made her shudder. She paused once to catch her breath. Alain put an arm around her shoulders to warm her. His expression was grave.

  “This country knows me,” he said in his stumbling way, “and I know this country. In this country was born fifth son of the fifth litter, who became a strong hand.” He shook his head, puzzling out the words. “His hand is strong. Hei! I cannot speak the name. There were children of rock here, but I see them not now. Many children of rock lived here when I saw it. They do not live here now.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”

  “Quick!” The Akka guide beckoned impatiently. “Walking One of Water people dead is, or not dead is. To her you must speak.”

  People came out of the long hall to stare at them. A boy doused torches as weak daylight rose. It was too cloudy for her to mark the position of the sun’s rise against the distant cliffs and ridges. Beyond the hall she saw other structures, pit houses or burial mounds, dug into the ground. She had only visited Spits-last once, in his homeland, and it had been snowing then, too, drowned in winter’s darkness.

  They stepped into the long hall to be greeted by a powerful reek. The long, low space was lit by three hearth fires and so smoky that the air seemed alive with particles. She smelled cattle and sheep, penned farther down. The taint of rotting crab apples hung in the air, a sweet tinge above the thick perfume of human bodies pressed together. Alain spoke a few words to his dogs, and they sat down, unmolested, on either side of the door. Their Akka guide made a path for them through the people by using her spear’s butt to poke and prod everyone aside, but Adica and Alain were not as lucky as the dogs: hands reached forward to pinch her bare skin or fondle the strings of her skirt, until she pulled out of the grasp of one only to find another waiting to handle her. They breathed into her face, gabbled in their hard tongue, and poked and prodded her with their fingers as though to assure themselves that she was a living being.

  Beside the second hearth fire, on a pallet, lay Falling-down side by side with a dead woman half-covered with pine needles. His eyes were closed. For an instant Adica thought he, too, was dead. She knelt beside him and touched his hand, and he opened his eyes at once. He had the hazel eyes common to his tribe, rheumy with age but still sharply intelligent.

  “Adica!” he said with pleasure in his brittle voice. She helped him up to a sitting position. “I sent the Walking One of Tanioinin’s people twelve days ago to fetch you. Alas that the loom brought you here so slow. My cousin is dead now. She died at sunset.”

  “What happened?”

  Alain crouched beside the woman and, without any thought of death’s dangers and taboos, brushed aside pine needles and placed a hand around the curve of her throat, listen
ing.

  Falling-down watched him with bemusement. “Can this be the man the Holy One brought to be your husband? Where did he come from not to fear death?”

  “He was walking the path to the Other Side. I don’t know where he came from before that.”

  Alain sat back on his heels. The people who had crowded up behind him to stare skittered back, as if afraid that he, having touched that which was dead, would infect them. He did not appear to notice them as he looked at Adica.

  “Her soul no longer lives in her body.”

  “So you see,” said Adica to Falling-down. “He knows when a spirit still walks in the land of the living. Why are you here, Falling-down? Why did you leave your tribe? Such a long journey is difficult for you. And it is so dangerous now to walk the looms, if the Cursed Ones stalk us.”

  He lifted a hand for silence. A child brought him a wooden cup filled to the brim with mead. He sipped at it before reciting his tale. The Akka Walking One translated his words to her people, who crowded around to listen.

  “The ships of the Cursed Ones landed on the coast of our land. Scouts of our cousins the Reed people saw them. They sent a Running Youth to alert us. Then another Running Youth came. The ships put to land near the nesting ground of guivres. The guivres rose and feasted on them.”

  Voices murmured in satisfaction at this gruesome and well-deserved fate. The Akka woman spoke sharply, and the people quieted, not without a lot of pinching and protests, so that Falling-down could go on.

  “We feel happy, when this news runs to us. Then the loom opens. This one, my cousin, who is a Walking One of our people, falls through. She is wounded. She brings a terrible story with her.” As he got caught up in the awful tale, his words began to slip; past became present, and his careful use of Adica’s language, learned over a lifetime, became sloppier. “The Cursed Ones attack the people of Horn. All their houses and all their villages the Cursed Ones burn.”

  A general moan spread through the crowd, and was hushed, again, by the Akka woman’s terse command.