Wings of Fire

by Jonathan Strahan

  The chamber was vast, yet not airy. Evils were done here, it was easy to tell; their equipments reared and languished in the shadows, away from the men grouped torchlit in the middle of the room.

  The woman was in a cleared space at their centre, as straight as if she stood on a hilltop stretching to glimpse a distant beacon. Her back was to us; her dress-cloth was shredded into her flesh from the whipping; her blood ran freely down.

  “Her legs,” said the King. You could tell him by his seatedness and stillness; if a gathering can have two centres, he was the other.

  Two soldiers hoisted up her skirts, from bare dirty heels, from white calves. The backs of her knees made my insides shrink, the vulnerable creases of them, the fine skin.

  “Her buttocks, too,” said His Majesty.

  Something gave, in the crowd of men—a kind of relief, or excitement. The soldiers pulled the skirts up above her thighs and buttocks—all I could think was how soft, how that flesh would sting to the whip. My own buttocks clenched at the sight, my own thighs expected that sting. But the woman herself, she stood straight and trembled not at all, as if there were no indignity in what they did, let alone any pain to come.

  They made her hold her own skirts aside; the first strokes striped, then diamonded her flesh. She did not wince, or cry out. Her back glittered crimson in the torches’ light, and black with the wet threads; now the stripes on her thighs and calves began to join together red; now the first gleam of blood showed there.

  “The arrogance of her!” growled the Captain to himself, and this seemed to remind him that he had a voice, and he took my arm harder, and shook it. “You see? This is what’s done to girls who will not be bid!”

  He met my eye and he was all hot rage, that this demonstrating to me was even necessary. He could not turn me by the power of his words. He could raise his voice as loud and long as he liked, but he could not control me by the raising, as once he’d used to. I will see whom I please, I’d said. I will marry whom I please. It is Klepper I want, not some rock-headed legionnaire you owe a favour to.

  “Cease,” said the King’s cold voice onto the congested air, and there was no sound but the breathing of the soldiers who had been taking turns to beat the woman. “Let me see her,” he said.

  She did not wait for them to turn her, but dropped her skirts, and spun on the wetness of her own spilt blood, to face him. The soldiers moved to take her arms, much as the Captain had mine, but the King waved them aside, a casual movement, but involving many weighty rings, from which red light flashed, and a shard of kingfisher blue.

  They stepped back from her; she stood, tall and full of joy, and truly my breath stopped in my throat for several moments, for it was clear what drove the King to want to marry her. She was the model of an Aquilina: broad-browed, straight-nosed, full-lipped, strong-jawed, all strength and delicacy combined. Her eyes were clear, green, open; they gazed down at the King, almost in amusement, I thought. I loved her in an instant myself, for what they had done to her, and for why. But he is the King!, I thought. What does she have, that she can dismiss the King’s wishes? That she is not dazzled by him, that she holds her own ground? I wanted to know, and I wanted it for myself.

  “What have you to say, shepherdess?” There was steel in the King’s voice, for he saw, as all of us could see, that she had defeated him with her carriage and beauty.

  “I have nothing to say, sir,” she said happily.

  “Are you mad, girl?” said a courtier at the King’s side. I had seen that man before. I didn’t like him; he was all bones and brains. “Have your pains driven you mad, that you affect such cheer, such insolence?”

  She glanced at him bemused, then returned her gaze to His Majesty. “I assure you, I have all my senses at my own command.”

  “You will marry me, then,” he said, his voice momentarily softer, fuller, with something in it that would have been pleading, had this not been the Aquilin king, who pled with no one, not prelate or general or sultan or sent prince from foreign parts of anywhere in the world.

  “I will not,” she said. “As I have told you, I belong body and soul—”

  “To your lord,” said Mr. Bones-and-brains disgustedly. “Yes, girl, we have heard all that.” He waved her to turn her back on us again. “Bite deeper, lads! Scatter the floor with her flesh!”

  Willingly she turned. But a gasp went up, from me and from all around me. For though her blood had stained all the back of her skirt, though she stood in a puddle and her feet were red with it, her flesh within the torn dress-back was white, was clean, as if no whip had touched it. And when they lifted her skirts, her calves there, and then her thighs and buttocks, were unwelted and unbled, restored entirely to wholeness, to perfection.

  Astonishment stilled them all, the soldiers agape, the nobles hands to mouths. Then gradually all turned from the marvel of the woman’s recovery to His Majesty. He gazed on her grimly, up and down, his eyes a-glisten with moving thought. What would he do? What power was being shown him, that undid this work of his upon this woman’s body? Whom did she have behind her, and how would he conquer them?

  “Put her in the pot,” he said very softly—you see, Father, how much power a soft voice can carry? “We will make a soup of her.”

  There, again, the air changed; the excitement pitched itself a little higher, into a kind of gaiety. All was business and haste to obey him, our King our church our god and saints. I had never seen it so direct, how his will drove us, how he sat at the centre and played us all like game-pieces, or as a spinner’s foot sets the pedal, then the wheel, in motion.

  Pale-faced, the Captain pulled me back against the wall. “She is some kind of monster!” He watched the summoned servants run for kindling.

  “She is one of us,” I said. Her Aquilin hair gleamed motionless, smooth black around her head, caught away forward over one shoulder so as not to snarl with the blood-wetted whip. “And she is a miracle. If truly it is her Lord—”

  He slapped my cheek, hard.

  I regarded him, half my face burning from the blow, my eyes drinking back the tears that had sprung from the shock of it. His fear and weakness were written strong as his rage in his face. Don’t think I cannot force you, he had said to me. But I did think it; I knew it. My sisters would bow their heads and do what he told them, but I—he had this weakness in him, when it came to me. He had this softness. I would have my way.

  “We should worship her as a miracle,” I said evenly, coldly, straight into his eyes.

  “We should kill her, and smartly! She is a demon! The longer she lives, the longer she dazzles such fools as you! You will see,” he hissed close to my face, “how pretty she is, all red-boiled and bursting. You will see what insolence will bring you, and thinking you can please yourself!”

  It took some while to ready the pot, though boiling water was brought down from the council-house kitchens. It was a large pot, big enough to boil several people at once, I would have thought. They built the fire so high that the walkway around the top of the pot began to scorch, and a man was sent up there, to keep it wettened, and not catch fire himself. Every face about me, except for the King’s and the more important of the courtiers’ imitating him, was alive with surprise and curiosity, or with a kind of greed—whether for more suffering by the Aquilina or more embarrassment of the King I could not tell—and some with suppressed mirth. Whatever his state of mind, every man here, at this moment, contained very little more than the vitality of his interest in what would befall them next, this woman and this king, what damage would be done by each upon the other. I was glad the maid had her back to us still and did not see any of this, how eagerly men wished her ill, and the lengths they were going to, to see her harmed and to have that harm endure.

  They led the woman to a spread net of rope, such as is used to tangle and tie a mad bull in, and subdue it. They made her stand in the middle of it; they threw the corner-ties over a ceiling-beam and the net rose around her and lifted her, and u
p it carried her to the railing of the pot-platform, where a hook held it aside from the rising steam. Up went the King and his nearest; one of these turned and beckoned for more to climb the wooden steps, and my father was high-ranked enough that he could bustle me up there, and press me to the front of the crowd, where a second railing kept us from pitching forward ourselves into the bubbles, into the cauldron full of torch-flash and darkness.

  “You see what fate awaits you, girl,” said the King, stilling the murmur around him that the sight of the water had started.

  Silence from the net.

  “Answer His Majesty!” snapped some official.

  “His Majesty did not ask a question,” she said coolly; I could not see her face for stripes of rope-shadow. But her voice was clear enough, fine and light among these rumblers and roarers. “Yes,” she said, “I see my fate there in that water, in that fire—is that the answer you wish for?” A green eye, only, looking sharpish out.

  “You know the answer I want, girl,” said the King, and truly he did look most handsome and noble, regarding her fiercely and gently both, as if he could not quite believe what he had come to, as if he might take pity on her at any moment, did she show any sign of distress, or of indecision. “Marry me and you live. Refuse me and I lower you to boiling.”

  “Then lower me, Your Majesty, if those are my only choices. For my body and soul are not mine to give to you.” And her fingers, strong and lean and sun-browned, sprang through the netting and grasped it in preparation.

  Soldiers unhooked her, and let her out to swing in the steam, in the silence but for the fire-noise, but for the water bursting and rolling. Within the ropes, she looked up and listened, as if she were a child hiding, waiting for the seeker to find her, for her amusement to begin.

  The King gave a sign. Some other behind him passed it on, and the men below began to let out the rope.

  It would have been most unsatisfactory for His Majesty, for the drowning woman let out not a whimper, let alone a scream or a begging for mercy, but went down into the water silent as a turnip or her bouquet, and the water closed over her head, and her dark hair lifted and snaked on the bubbled water a moment among the ropes. Then, only the weighted corner ropes stood stiff out of the turmoiling water, and the steam buffeted all our faces, without cease.

  “There,” said the King. His be-ringed hand gestured for the bringing up of her body. Little sighs of accomplishment sounded around us, murmurs of excitement at the prospect of seeing what had been done on her, but my father the Captain only leaned, with his wrists on the rail and his hands fisted, looking down, watching the woman boil.

  Up they hoisted her, but we could not see her immediately for the steam pouring up and the water pouring down, and then she was only a slumped thing in the net there. The man with the hook-stick caught and pulled the net towards the platform, and a space was made, several people having to move down the steps to make room.

  But not us; we were only one layer of watchers from where she was brought to land. Her small foot hung white below.

  “You said she would be boiled red,” I whispered to the Captain.

  The foot touched the wooden platform and dragged as if it were dead—but then the touch woke it, and it braced itself against the boards, and in the moment that the net was loosed from above and fell open about her, up rose the shepherdess, the miracle girl, to standing. The steam of the boiled rope, of her boiled self, rushed up, rushed out. “Praise my Lord and Lady and all the Saints for their works and wonders!” came her clear, happy voice out of the cloud, and there she was, not a mark upon her, no worse for her wetting, or for being wrapped in boiling-wet cloth and cloaked in boiling-wet hair.

  All fell back from her—in horror, in wonder, in both—and the Captain pulled me back too, so it should appear I did the right thing, instead of standing forward and laughing and clapping my hands with delight, as I was tempted to do.

  The King? I saw a flash in his eyes, just a moment there and then gone, of the rage I had seen in the Captain’s face, hissing and pressed close to mine. Then the handsome man was dead-pan again.

  “Bring my robe and mask,” he said, and on the word mask his voice broke to a growl. “Bring me a flask of spirit. Bring reeds, bring knives—you know what I need.” He did not look at those he commanded; his gaze was fixed on the steaming, smiling woman.

  The courtiers looked to Bones-and-brains, who was a little forward of them, startled-faced and on the point of speaking. But the King was motionless, watching the shepherdess like a hunter keeping a faun in sight as he fits an arrow to the string. Mr. Bones stepped back into the servants’ doubtful silence, not taking his eyes from his master. “You heard His Majesty,” he said sharply over his shoulder.

  The whole platform about us was glances like knives or darts thrown hither and thither, the very air dangerous with them. The Captain kept his grim face so steady that I could watch in his eyes the last of the steam rising off the lady, but the rest of the court and chamber were too nervous to speak or stay still. “Where should we be?” hissed someone. “Is it safe for us?”

  The King stepped towards the outer railing, men scattering like shooed flies before him. He looked down on the great room; there was standing-room for many watchers around the rack, and the wheel, and on either side of the cat-pit. “Along the wall there,” he said with a large gesture.

  “All along, sir?” said Mr. Bones, with doubt in his voice, then, “Very well,” he added most obediently.

  “What is he doing? What is he planning?” I hissed under the turn and shuffle of people around us, the quiet exclamations around the King’s iron silence.

  “He does it in battle,” said the Captain, his voice dead of opinion or feeling. “Only a King has this power; the priests awaken it when they invest him.”

  “Power to what?” I knew a dozen outlandish stories: that the King could fly, or call down thunderbolts, or conjure great winds to flatten the enemy like a field of grain stalks.

  The Captain only watched. No one seemed ready to climb down from our platform here. Men ran about below, and castle-servants came with arms full of reeds, of all things, green harmless reeds, and were told where and how to lay them on the flags. Mr. Bones directed them very quietly and calmly, perhaps hoping to be halted in this work by his king, and not wanting to miss hearing that command.

  They laid out a wide shape with the reeds lengthwise up and down it, something like a very fat, very flattened scorpion, legged and tailed. Then bags and bags, they brought, of tiny knives with nubby handles smooth as finger-bones, and the blades also short like fish-fins, with one vicious edge. I had seen someone draw the shape in the dust somewhere, whispering, and sweep the shape away when I asked what it was. Dozens of these knife-lets they laid out in a kind of crown around the shape’s head, and in a double line fanning inward down its middle, then flaring outward and edging its tail. All while they worked the King watched closed-mouthed from the platform, and the shepherdess behind him at the centre of her net and her strangeness stood sodden and proud-backed, clasping her hands before her, her face neither raised in arrogance nor lowered in humiliation. She met no one’s gaze and spoke not a word, but only was fully engaged with her own thoughts and her own will. Around her grew a fear and a thickening silence, pricked by knife-clinks on the flagstones, underlined by Bones-and-brains’s soft voice.

  The shape was complete upon the floor; now a priest approached the platform, a pile of darkness in his arms. He was an older priest, not frail—no Aquilin priest lacks bodily strength—but honed almost to a skeleton by his life of privations and the cruel torchlight.

  “Wait, I will come down,” said the King, and a sigh of terror and doubt sounded around my father and me, a tiny wind, quick-suppressed. The King turned at the top of the stairs: ‘Bring her!” he cried, and with a shock I thought he meant bring me, but of course he spoke of the woman there. “Come, men.” He glanced at the assembly, and I took care to put my face behind a man’s shoul
der, so that he would not see and dismiss me. “Stand like men behind your god and king.”

  The Captain held me back, while others with many doubtful glances at one another shuffled stairwards and down. Soldiers took the woman in hand. She came awake at their touch, but did not resist it, and allowed herself to be taken as if this were a favour being done her, not a punishment being administered. And as the guard passed with her, she saw me, unshielded now by any man but only in my floury apron, with still my sleeves rolled up for the baking and my hands half-wiped of the makings, and the strings of my house-cap dangling down.

  I stifled a curtsey; she saw that. She saw, I was sure, all my thoughts and words caught in my throat, too many of them to say. It surprised her greatly to see me here so domestic, so unbelonging—she paused, and the guard allowed it, and she held her mouth on the point of its blossoming into a smile. Her gaze touched my Captain’s hand upon my arm, the tightness of his grip. She gave the tiniest, tiniest tilt of her head and a nod to me, in the fleet moment in which we met, and she went on, her wet skirt drawing a train of water across the boards of the platform. I felt myself to have been blessed. Every moment rang and swelled with meanings now, death had been so close, and the wonders so great by which she had evaded it.

  “We stay here,” said the Captain. He drew me to the corner of the platform and penned me there, standing behind me. I felt very vulnerable, with my clear view, vulnerable to dismissal, vulnerable to whatever evil might happen below. I shielded my own father, who had called himself my protector once, who had stood to my defence in tiny battles I had had, against my sisters, my mother, my fellows. Now he had sworn himself my enemy over this matter with Klepper; he wanted me to feel the full brunt of the world, as punishment for having gone against him.

  All eyes were on the priest. His face was haughty as only a priest’s can be and not be laughed at. He accepted the empty spirit-flask from the King, and laid it in a wooden box made perfectly to its size. He unravelled the dark stuff from his arms and draped it upon His Majesty with great care. What was it made from? It seemed not more than shadow or gauze, but sometimes great clots and knots came out of the pile, to be loosened or left in their mass, like the clothing of beggars, or indeed of whipped people’s garments, cut to threads and then re-matted by the beatings. Was it black, was it purple?