by Geoff Rodkey
Each little square figure was about the size of a fist, a blotch of wavy lines inside of rectangles, forming geometric shapes… no, they were hieroglyphs, picture-writing—a bird, a spear, an eye… a face, with long hair and lines radiating out from its head…
Millicent shrieked, startling me so much that I recoiled and hit my head on the ceiling.
“What?”
“Look—” She was pointing down, at something lying across the floor along the wall under the markings. At first, I thought it was just one of the thin, irregular rock formations created by fast-cooling lava.
But no. It was too symmetrical, a double row of slender lines arcing up out of the ground and meeting at a long, smooth plate.
It was the rib cage of a skeleton. I followed the line of the breastbone with my eyes until I found a human skull, dimly visible in the gloom. Peeking up out of the ground in a semicircle under the skull was a broken line of small, colored stones that ended in a little lump of earth just under the jaw. One of the stones glinted brightly, its surface catching a stray ray of sun coming in through the entrance.
I was bending over them for a closer look when I heard Guts say, “More behind ye.”
I turned to find two more sets of bones in jumbled piles on either side of the cave entrance. A pair of leg bones stuck straight out of each pile, parallel to the entrance.
It looked like they’d died sitting up, guarding the entrance, and the skeletons had collapsed as the bodies decayed.
Millicent knelt in front of the skull of the first skeleton, brushing the dirt from the semicircle of stones. As the earth fell away from them, it became clear that they weren’t just rocks but gems: most were obscured under a layer of caked-on grime, but I saw glimpses of what looked like rubies, emeralds, and even a diamond.
“It’s a necklace,” she said. She worked her fingers into the dirt under one of the stones and tugged, pulling loose a limp, dirt-encrusted tendon of something that at first I couldn’t place.
“What’s that?”
“A feather. There was one between each stone.”
“How do you know?”
“Because that’s how the books describe it. Along with this—” She dug under the lump of earth at the base of the necklace until it crumbled, revealing a three-inch pendant. She scraped the dirt from the pendant to reveal an intricate, multicolored bird, wings extending up over its head, with a diamond for an eye and ruby feathers speckled with sapphires and emeralds.
Even clodded with dirt, it was magnificent. Millicent’s eyes were wide with wonder as she stared at it.
“It’s a firebird. That’s his insignia.”
“Whose?” demanded Guts.
“The Fire King’s.”
“Then where’s the treasure?” asked Guts, looking around the chamber. Other than the skeletons, there was nothing in it but a pile of debris in the corner—a couple of small bowls, a rounded stone in the shape of a pestle, and some crumbling chunks of dry fabric that looked like they came from rotted-away containers.
“Maybe my father took it,” I suggested.
Millicent was crouched in front of the painted markings on the wall. “No,” she said. “There’d be too much. And I don’t think it was ever here.”
“’Ow d’ye know?” Guts asked.
“Because why else would they draw a map?”
We crowded around the wall, studying the drawings as Millicent tried to make sense of them.
“Look,” she said. “That third hieroglyph at the top—a firebird, just like on the necklace, with two lines and a dot beneath it—that’s the mark of Hutmatozal. And that one—” She pointed to a hieroglyph somewhere in the middle of the first cluster that looked like a lightning bolt over a fist. “That’s the Fist of Ka.”
“And this…” She made a large, sweeping circle with her finger, taking in the area between the two clusters of hieroglyphs. There was a mess of scattered markings across it—dotted lines, crooked squiggles, X’s, and a few random hieroglyphs. “That’s got to be a map.”
“To what?”
“That must be what the rest of it tells us,” she said. “How to read the map.”
As the sunlight died, I studied the strange pictures and mysterious shapes. They were all gibberish to me. But the closer I looked, the more convinced I was that Millicent was right.
This was what my father had copied onto the parchment he brought with him to Sunrise. Pembroke had let that copy drown somewhere in the ocean along with my family, because he knew he could find the original back here.
This was what he’d killed my family to get his hands on. This was what he was coming for.
It was getting too dark to see. We left the cave and made our way back around the mountain and down to the house, to eat a meal of Quint’s stew and try to decide what to do when the sun rose and the soldiers returned.
WE WERE FINISHING our dinner when Otto turned up at the front door.
“Harvest’s comin’ along,” he said as I let him inside. “Keep the pace up, we’ll be ready to load in when that ship docks.” He looked down at the crates beside the door. “These the guns Stumpy brought up?”
I nodded. He made a quick inspection of them, letting out a low whistle over the grenades.
“Changes things, don’t it?”
“Hope so,” I said.
“Question is, wot’s the plan fer usin’ ’em?” Otto stared at me, an eyebrow cocked questioningly over his good eye. “Don’t s’pose ye got one?”
“Actually, I do.” I’d been mulling over our strategy since the night before, and Guts and I had discussed it at length while we were wrestling the cannon down the hill. “As far as the soldiers know, all we’ve got is a handful of rifles—and your men aren’t necessarily on our side. On top of that, the soldiers won’t open fire unless they have to.”
“How do ye know?”
“I just do.” I looked back at Millicent, who was leaning against the door frame to the kitchen and listening. Pembroke wasn’t going to risk accidentally shooting her if he could help it. “So their plan will be to frighten us into giving up without firing a shot. They won’t sneak up on us, because that could cause panic, and panic could lead to a shootout. So my guess is they’ll send their whole force straight up the road in a show of strength, and only take up battle positions if they run into resistance.
“Which means the thing to do,” I continued, “is for most of your men, all but ten or so, to stay in the lower fields, gathering the harvest. Hide your guns in the fruit crates, look like you’re busy working. Don’t give them any reason to think you’re a threat. They’ll march right past you, up the road to the house. Once they’ve passed, get your guns and slip in behind them from the orchards on either side of the road.
“Guts and I will take up position on the porch with the rest of the men. Lure the soldiers in as close as we can. Then open fire with the cannon—”
“What?!” Millicent cried out.
“Shhh!” hissed Guts.
I did my best to ignore them. “As soon as we do, the rest of you open up in a crossfire.”
Otto nodded. “Not bad.”
“You can’t be serious!” Millicent grabbed me by the arm. “Egg, that’s murder!”
“It’s them or us—”
“You can’t fire first. You’ve got to do everything you can to avoid it!”
“We have to,” I said. “It’s the only way we can win.”
“’E’s right,” said Guts.
“It’s a decent plan, girlie,” said Otto.
She stared at the three of us, her mouth tightening in anger. “You’re pigs. Every one of you!”
She turned her back on us and clomped up the stairs. We heard a door slam.
“Might want to tie that one up in the mornin’,” Otto suggested. “She could be trouble. Other’n that, nice work. Be up to fetch the guns at first light.”
He left the way he came. Guts went over to the crates and started unpacking rifles. “Oug
hta load these.”
I started toward the stairs. “I’ll help in a minute. I’ve got to go talk to Millicent.”
“Long’s ye still can.”
“What do you mean?”
“After tomorrow, she’ll be done with ye.”
“How do you figure?”
He shrugged. “One o’ two things ’appens. Ye die… or ’e does. If it’s ’im, she never forgives ye.”
“But she knows now. What he’s really like.”
He shook his head. “Don’t matter. Kill ’er dad, that’s it for ye.”
There was nothing to say to that, because I knew he was right.
IT WAS A LONG WALK down the upstairs hallway to Venus’s bedroom, because I needed to solve the unsolvable before I got there.
How could I get rid of Millicent’s father without losing Millicent?
I had no idea. I knocked on the door.
“It’s me,” I said. “Can I come in?”
I heard her sigh. “Yes.”
She was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. I shut the door behind me.
“I’m sorry—”
“Stop.” She sat up. “You’ve made your plan. And it’s stupid, and you’ll die—”
“I have to—”
“Just listen to me! I’ve got a better plan. We’ll copy the map, scrub the original off the wall so they can’t find it, and then run.”
“I’m sick of running—”
“Better than dying.”
“But it’s pointless! Say we run. Say we can somehow get off Deadweather without a fight, which I doubt. The map’s useless if we can’t translate it. And the only Natives who can do that are in the silver mine back on Sunrise—”
“No,” she said. “There’re others.”
“Where?”
“In the New Lands.”
“Are you sure? I thought all the Okalu were wiped out.”
“Not all. There’re remnants of them. Somewhere in the north. Might even be some in Pella Nonna. Isn’t that where the cargo ship’s headed?”
I nodded. Pella Nonna was the closest Cartager port in the New Lands, backed up against hundreds of miles of wilderness. I didn’t know much about it, other than it was strange and exotic and I didn’t speak the language.
“I don’t speak Cartager,” I said.
“Well, I do,” she said. “So we just have to avoid my father long enough to get on that ship. Then we’ll be safe.”
“Because he wouldn’t follow us? He’d just give up?”
The look on her face said she knew he wouldn’t.
“I can’t spend the rest of my life running away from your father.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, pursing her lips. She took a deep breath and held it for a long time before she exhaled sharply. “Then you and Guts go. I’ll stay behind. When he comes here, I’ll talk to him. I’m still his daughter, and he loves me—”
“He’ll tell you what you want to hear, then he’ll do what he wants.”
“If I make him promise—”
“He’ll break it.”
“Egg, he’s not a monster—”
“He killed my family, and he barely knew them!”
“He didn’t—”
“Yes, he did! He murdered them! You can’t deny it!”
She started to cry silently, her face wrinkled up and her body shaking.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I don’t know what I was apologizing for, but I hated to see her like that.
I sat down on the edge of the bed, and she buried her head in my chest. I put my arms around her and stroked her hair gently.
“Don’t do it,” she whispered. “It’s suicide.”
“No… it’s going to be okay,” I said, even though I knew it wouldn’t be.
Finally, she stopped crying.
“I have to leave,” she said. “If you’re going to fight him, I can’t stay.”
I nodded. There was a hollow, heavy feeling in my stomach, and my whole body felt like it was getting sucked into it. I took a deep breath, trying to fight back against the heaviness.
“Do me a favor,” I said.
“What?”
“Smile.”
She let out a little half laugh and wiped her eyes. “Why?”
“So I can remember you like that. In case I never see you again.”
“Oh, Egg…” She put a hand on my cheek and gazed into my eyes with a smile full of hurt.
I couldn’t tell if the hurt was because we were doomed to be apart, or because I was a fool for liking her that way and she didn’t know how to tell me.
I looked away. I had plenty of those pictures of her in my head—the ones that asked the question without answering it. I didn’t want another one. They just made me confused.
What I wanted was something that gave me an answer. Like the very first one, that bright pure smile she gave me on the lawn when we were alone together for the first time.
If she gave me that again, just once, I could lock it away in my head and keep it forever. I could remember every detail of it.
That’s what I was thinking when a different answer came to me.
I stood up.
“I’m going back to the tomb,” I said.
“I’ll come with you.”
“No. I need to go alone.”
I TOOK ALL the blank parchment we had and stuffed it in a sack along with an inkpot, a couple of quills, and a copy of The Savages of Urluk, because the cover was big and stiff enough to use as a writing surface, it had fat margins I could write on if I ran out of parchment, and it wouldn’t be much of a loss to burn it when I was done.
Guts came into the kitchen as I was filling a lantern with oil and asked me what I was doing.
“I’ll tell you later,” I said. “Wait here in case Stumpy comes back. If he does, come get me at the tomb.”
On the way up the hillside, I stopped at the woodpile behind the house and got the sledgehammer we kept there for splitting firewood with a wedge. It was heavy, and carrying the lantern and sack along with it was awkward because I had to keep both of them level so the oil and the ink wouldn’t spill.
Managing all of that made for a slow trip up the mountain, and as I climbed through the moonlit orchards, I had plenty of time to think about whether what I was about to do made any sense.
My plan was to memorize the writing on the wall, copying and recopying every hieroglyph and squiggle until I could draw it all from memory.
Then I was going to smash the wall and burn the copies, so there was nothing left except what was in my head.
It wouldn’t solve my problem, exactly. But it seemed to change the rules in a way that would help me. It bound the Fire King’s treasure to me as tightly as if I’d swallowed it whole—Pembroke couldn’t find it without me, and if he killed me, he’d never get it.
Which meant I’d have an advantage over him—and it felt like I should be able to use that advantage to get him to agree to quit trying to kill me. If I could do that, I wouldn’t have to kill him after all.
Which meant I wouldn’t have to lose Millicent.
And I might even be able to keep the treasure out of his hands for good—which, short of killing him, seemed like the best way to avenge my family.
I wasn’t quite sure how to make it all work out in my head—in fact, the more I thought about it, the more confused I got.
But even though I couldn’t figure out exactly how it was going to help me, something about memorizing the map just felt right. I wasn’t spending the night lying around helpless, waiting for the soldiers to march on my home. I was taking action, seizing control of the situation, doing something bold and unpredictable.
There was a little part of it that felt cowardly—the part where, if push came to shove, I could use the map to bargain for my life—but mostly it just seemed clever. So clever, in fact, that I couldn’t even really understand it.
But I’d figure it all out. I was sure of it.
When I got to the
cave, I quit thinking about the plan, because I needed all my brain space to memorize the map. If I couldn’t do it before Pembroke showed up with his soldiers, the whole plan was wrecked.
I didn’t know how much time I had—I guessed it was about midnight when I finally got to the cave, but I could’ve been off by an hour or more on either side. And there was no telling how long it would be before Guts came up the mountain to get me.
Making the first copy was agonizingly slow, not only because I had to keep setting down the parchment to raise the lantern and study the wall, but because the markings seemed to have been drawn with a shaky finger, making the lines fat and indistinct. Add this to the fact that I’d never seen such writing before, and it meant that much of the time, I had no idea what I was looking at.
That feather might be a plant stalk… What seemed like a spear could just as easily be a shovel, or an arrow… Two squarish ovals on either side of an oblong one looked like a butterfly at first… then turned into the eyes and nose of an owl… and then finally, one hopelessly confused minute later, turned back into a butterfly.
And the mess of squiggles, dotted lines, and random shapes in between the clumps of hieroglyphs—what seemed to be the map itself—was even harder to decipher. Was that fat dot actually a circle, drawn too tightly? Was that boxy circle actually a lazy square? That curved splotch at the end of a straight line, next to two nearly identical straight lines: was it a tail? Or a dot? Or just a mistake?
Halfway through the first copy, the uncertainty overwhelmed me, panic tightened my chest, and I had to step out of the cave and lie on the ground for a while, staring up at the stars.
I thought back to a book I’d read about the constellations, one that created absurdly detailed patterns of men and animals by connecting what to me looked like meaningless dots of light in the sky. That helped calm me down, because I realized I didn’t have to choose between an owl’s face and a butterfly’s wings—I just had to memorize the figures well enough to recreate them so someone else could decide what they were.
Eventually, I got through the first copy. Then I made three more, straight from the wall itself, until I settled on what I thought was a fairly accurate version. Then I sat down with my back to the wall and just copied the copy, over and over again, giving whatever names to the figures would help me remember them, giving myself permission not to care if they were correct.