by Jo Clayton
10
Serroi straightened, rubbed at her back, smiled at the lined face of the woman who’d been something of a mother to her. Pria Mellit. She took her turn on the wall with the others, her strong wiry arms hurling the javelins with great accuracy; fed by her stable girls, she could get three or four of the short lances off in as many heartbeats, but that meant she stood for long stretches without much cover. The wound Serroi had just healed was Mellit’s fifth serious hurt. She endured the pain without complaint and went quietly back to the wall when her turn came, handling the pain-memory far better than the younger meien. Serroi helped her sit up, clucked her tongue at the deep bruises about Mellit’s eyes. “Get some rest, pria-mama,” she said gently, knowing Mellit would ignore her this time as she had before.
Mellit got to her feet, straightened her torn clothing. “Not here, child. You’ll need this pallet soon enough.”
Serroi reached out to help her as she stumped toward the tent’s door, but drew her hand back. Mellit would walk where she wanted on her own legs and when she could no longer do that, then she’d die. She wouldn’t appreciate one of her girls, old or new, hastening her toward that time. Serroi watched her look about then move off with that ground-eating stride her Stenda legs gave her and she took a moment to appreciate the old woman’s undiminishing strength, then she started to go back inside.
And froze, mouth open, eyes glazed. Pain. A pain so far beyond description it blanked her mind. Hern. In agony. With a low whining moan she stumbled around, stood staring at the burning tower. “Vuurvis,” she said. She heard it echo in her head, a soft plaintive denying word, then she shook off her temporary paralysis and ran for the only motorcycle near the tent. The rider was dismounting, coming off his shift. She grabbed his arm, pointed. “Take me there. Hurry.” Again the words echoed in her head. She wanted to scream at him, shake him, force him to move faster, but her words came out in a whisper. She hitched up her robe, swung a leg over the long narrow seat above the rear wheel and got herself set as the boy started the machine and roared toward the tower. Everything was floating around her, she couldn’t think with Hern’s agony burning in her. She felt the machine shimmy under her, felt the jolts and vibrations as it raced over the rough ground, felt the bunching and shifting of the boy’s muscles where she clutched at him. The tower came at her fast-fast, yet the ride seemed to go on forever. More vuurvis hit the tower; the heavy, greedy flames ran over the stone, eating pits in it. There were screams and shouts and crashes sounding all along the wall but she ignored those; her entire being was focused on the burning tower.
11
The heat was intense, the smell indescribable. The little healer was off the cycle before Wes got it stopped, running toward the tower’s door, toward the flames and smoke coming from it. He let the machine fall and started after her. She’s hysterical, he thought, killing herself, nothing she can do for him now, she can’t bring back the dead. He reached her before she dived into that mess of stinking smoke, lunged and caught hold of her arm.
Pain ran like fire into his hand and his fingers jerked open. He couldn’t keep hold of her though he tried again. She ran inside, flames licking at the loose robe she wore, at the bounding curls that made her seem such a child until you looked into her eyes. He backed away, coughing and spitting, looked around. There was more than the tower to worry about. Forgetting the food and rest he’d been looking forward to, he muscled his machine up and around and started toward the hospital tent to pick up a medic and supplies and begin doing something about the burned; he’d heard enough stories about vuurvis and what it did to flesh to be glad that his belly was empty and his body tired.
12
Serroi is burning with her own fire as she runs up the squared spiral stairs. Her robe is burning off her, her hair is on fire, but she feels none of that. Up and around and up and around and all the time Hern is dying, dying alone, his stubborn generous spirit burning out of his body. She will not let that happen, she must not, must not, must not, the words echo with the patter of her bare feet on the hot stone, she does not notice that where she steps, where her fingers touch the wall, she leaves a mark on the stone and the fire is quenched there. Hern hangs on, refusing to die. Reaching and reaching, she draws power to herself as she runs, her breath sobbing in her ears, up and around and up and around.
The upper room is awash with flame, but again where she steps, the flame dies. She runs to the blackened hulk, kneels. The fire retreats from her, leaving a circle clear about Hern’s body. She gathers her will and puts her hands on him.
The oil fights her and he fights her, maddened by the agony. She holds him down and pours all the power she has called into him. The Biserica means nothing to her now, Ser Noris means nothing to her, Hern is all, she will not quit until he is whole. She reaches out and seizes all power she can reach, draining the Shawar, draining the Norim, draining even Ser Noris, swallowing whole the fragments of the other norissim, the bits he’d left of them, all this she channels through her body and into Hern, into the blackened hulk that writhes on the stone and threatens to crush her with its uncontrolled flexings. The tower hums about her, turns grass green and translucent and the earth-fire, nor-fire, shawar-fire kills the vuurvis fire and reinforces the flickering glow of life in him, begins rebuilding the life as she stimulates the cells of his body to repair themselves, the dead charred flesh sloughing off, replaced by new, building from the bone out, cell by cell, nerve by nerve, layer on layer on layer of flesh all over his body until new skin spreads over him, but she doesn’t stop there. Eyes closed, body swaying, her will holding her, she keeps his body working until lashes grow back, eyebrows, body hair; his head hair coils out and out, black and pewter as before, until it is long enough to curl about her wrist.
The pale gray eyes opened and looked up at her, knowing her.
And she knew what she’d done, how much harm she could have done, and she snatched the power yet more from the Nor, though she could feel Ser Noris contesting with her for it, snatched it loose from him and fed it as gently and apologetically as she could back to the laboring Shawar. She sat back on her heels, smiling down at him through a skim of tears, her lips trembling.
13
He opened his eyes and saw her. She glowed terrible and wonderful, a green glass figurine in the charred rags of a sleeveless white robe, then he saw only Serroi with tears in her eyes, weariness in her small elfin face. He smiled and caught her hands, held them between his a moment, then reached up, drew his hand down the side of her face, traced the clean-cut elegant curves of her mouth. “There’s half a world we haven’t seen.”
“Yes,” she said. She swayed; her eyelids fluttered; she fainted across his renewed body.
For a moment he was afraid, but the pulse in her throat beat strongly. He eased her off his chest and sat up. His clothes were burnt off him, he’d expected that, but he was startled to feel hair when he brushed his hand over his head. “Very thorough, love.” He lifted her onto his lap and held her close, stroking his hand over the singed curls, then the gentle curve of her back. Through the windowslits he could hear muffled curses and screams and knew he’d have to get her down to help the others, but for a little while he was going to hold her and forget everything else.
In a few moments, though, his legs began cramping and the stone that had burned him was giving him chills in his bare buttocks while air through the window blew off ice. He shifted position, looked down to see her eyes open. “Cold as the slopes of Shayl,” he said.
She smiled. “They never last, do they, our moments, I mean.”
14
Julia tilted the stoneware cha pot over the clay mug and poured out the last trickle of lukewarm liquid. She set the pot back, sipped at the cha. “Getting low on ammo,” she said. “Remind me to snag one of the cycles and call in for some.”
“Um.” Rane scowled at the fragment of sandwich she was holding, threw it in a long lazy arc away from the wall and sat staring at the rag tied round
her calf though Julia didn’t think she saw it.
They were sitting in the sun, a winter sun that did not give much heat, protected from the sweep of the wind by the jut of the nearest ramp. No one went to the eating tent these days; time and energy were both in short supply. They slept in the lower floors of the gate towers, on call for reinforcement whenever they were needed. They were all weary and worn down to simple endurance, men and women alike, falling into their blankets on straw gone musty with the damp, sleeping as if clubbed, rising with only the top layer of tiredness gone, the residue of each day’s weariness added to the last and the next until it seemed they’d never be free of it. Julia thought back to the days when she was grubbing out an existence and trying to write, when she was exhausted and depressed, tired of trying to cope with the complexities of her life and the complexities of her nature and the impossibility of reconciling the two, yet when food and warmth and shelter and privacy were there to take as she needed, when her horizons stretched beyond the visible edges of the world; she thought back to those times and found them curiously hard to Visualize as if they were something she’d written in a novel she’d never managed to finish. She marveled at the difference between the Julia who’d lived then and the Julia sitting with a rifle beside her waiting to be called back into battle. Her edges had narrower limits these days, they chopped off five minutes ahead and stretched out on either side as far as the people she could see and name. She knew them all now, the meien and her own exiles, the mijlockers and the Stenda, knew names and faces, knew how steady or flighty they were in the face of danger, knew them intimately and not at all, especially the folk of this world; the novelist wanted to know their histories, to know the forces that had shaped them into the people they were. What had their lives been like? Who were their friends, their lovers, their acquaintances, their enemies? What were their hopes and fears, their ordinary eccentricities, their communal natures? What stories could they tell about themselves and others? What were the old, old stories all families accumulate and hand down through the generations? She knew nothing of that and she wanted to; she hungered to discover those things about them. But there was no time, you fought, you rested, you ate, you slept. Everything outside this time and this place was as remote for them as her past life was for her, for this reason and others they seldom spoke of anything but here and now.
There was a thump and a brittle crash above. Working the catapults again, Julia thought, then dropped the cup and sprang away from the wall as she felt a leap of heat, a drop of something that ate like acid into her thigh. She heard a scream that would echo in nightmare later, then a burning thing leaped out from the top of the wall. Rane thrust herself up and limped as fast as she could away from the wall. Julia took a few steps after her, then turned to stare at what lay huddled on the ground; it was charred out of its humanity, but the rifle clutched in a burning hand had enough of its shape left for Julia to recognize the carved stock. Liz. Her stomach churned and she looked away, desperately glad that Liz was beyond all help. A second later she brought her own rifle up and put a bullet in the skull of the burning thing. Rane came back and stood beside her. “All you could do,” she said.
Julia looked right and left along the wall, saw half a dozen fires. “Oh god, how many more?”
Rane cupped her hands about her mouth and shouted at the chaos on the wall above them. “Vuurvis,” she shrieked. “Don’t let it touch you. If you don’t know what it is, ask. Vuurvis. Don’t try to put it out. If there’s oil on you, don’t touch it, you’ll just spread it.” She walked along the wall, repeating those words and warnings until she was too hoarse to continue. Others among the older meien took up the calls and began getting the burned fighters down the ramp to wait for the medics and trucks to carry them to the hospital tent.
Julia looked down at her thigh. The vuurvis drop was smaller than a pinhead, but the pain was growing. It was bearable, so she shrugged aside her worry and limped up the ramp behind limping Rane, began helping her to get the burn victims down to the ground. The first time she saw the heavy flame crawling over the flesh of a living woman, she started to try smothering it, but Rane snatched her hand away. “No good,” she said. “All we can do is let it burn itself out. Or let the healwomen cut away the saturated flesh. Nothing helps, nothing will put out vuurvis, you’ll just get it on you.”
She carried the moaning meie down the ramp and laid her on the ground beside the rows of the others, called the medic, a girl named Dinafar, to put her out until the truck came. An eerie hush was settling over the wall, muting the screams of the burned, the grinding of motors coming toward her, stopping, coming on, stopping as the trucks east and west picked up the burned. The medics had arrived swiftly at each of the burn sites but the girls knew enough about vuurvis to know there was nothing they could do but help bring the injured down to wait for the trucks, gently putting the worst sufferers out by pressure on the carotids. Over all this was that straining silence that Julia thought was in her head until she looked along the wall.
The west tower was no longer burning, it throbbed with the clear green light of the healer. Dom Hern, she thought. “Dom Hern,” she said aloud.
Rane grunted. “She wouldn’t let him die.” Lifting her head, she sniffed at the air. “She’s draining us for him.”
Julia shrugged, not understanding what Rane meant. She watched the tower glow, the light running in waves down the stone and into the ground, gasped as a thought seized hold of her. She caught the medic as she went past. “When the truck comes, take the burned to the tower and pack them in the lower floors.”
Dinafar’s eyes opened wide. Not understanding, she turned to Rane. “What…?”
Rane looked at the verdant glow, then at the groaning forms stretched out around her. “Do it, Dina. Get hold of the other trucks and tell them.”
Dinafar pushed the hair out of her eyes, then her weary face lit with a hope she hadn’t had before. She ran to the motorcycle that had fetched her from the hospital tent, spoke into the teletalk strapped to the handlebar, then trotted back up the ramp and worked with a greater urgency to get the last of the injured down.
Julia looked at her watch and was startled to see that less than a half hour had passed since the beginning of the attack. She looked down, looked away. There were five dead like Liz. Dead but their flesh still burning. Two of them with rifles. Exiles. Three of them clutching the burned remnants of crossbows. She couldn’t recognize them, knew them only by figuring out who was missing among the wounded. She whispered the names to herself, a leave-taking of comrades, and tried unsuccessfully to ignore the pain in her thigh and the moans of the burned still alive. She turned her back on them and stared at the tower, grieving for both the dead and the living as she waited for the truck that might save the dying.
15
Tuli lay on the hillside, mouthing all the curses she could recall, furious at herself for her complacent conviction that Ildas had destroyed all the vuurvis oil in that extravagant annihilation in their first raid. The fireborn snuggled against her and tried to comfort her. She stroked and soothed him but she was too angry and afraid to calm herself.
Coperic touched her arm. “Can you…?” He finished the question with a gesture toward the barrels where the Ogogehians gingerly loaded oil into clay melons and plugged the holes in them with wax and wicks, working slowly and with great care to keep the heavy oil from touching any part of hand or face. Three high Nor were there to protect them, the fourth was Kole’s constant shadow. The rest of the norits were clustered about the seven catapults spaced along the wall from cliff to cliff.