Mortal Fire

by Elizabeth Knox

  She said to Ghislain, “I remember all the pieces, and I move them around in my head till I understand the pattern.”

  A look of beatific happiness filled Ghislain’s face and he said, in wonder, “You’re not a Zarene at all, are you?”

  “That’s what I keep telling you! I’m Canny Mochrie from Castlereagh,” she said. Then, more formal, “I am Canny and Agnes and Akanesi—just to give you all my names.”

  “You shouldn’t.”

  “I want to.”

  She still felt flustered, but less so. She was calm enough now to take her hands off him. She pulled back as if his shirtsleeves were sticky or magnetic and she had to tug to break free. He gave a faint gasp and they both rocked in their chairs. Then they were just two people sitting side by side at a worktable. She picked up the correct stamp. The one that said “Go”—

  —like the signs stenciled on Cyrus Zarene’s beehives, which said, “Go, gather, and return.” She was seeing it all now—the patterns.

  Canny carefully pressed the twisted wire into a clay tile. Then she did another. Ghislain stooped over his work again, first dabbing his fingers in a muddy water glass and wetting the surface of the tile he was working on.

  “I think I’m cleverer when I’m here with you,” Canny said.

  “I’m sure I’m not the necessary ingredient.”

  “No. You make me stupid too.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  Canny shifted another limp, printed tile into a patch of sunlight to dry. She asked him how many he had to make. She wanted him to explain what he was up to.

  “This is the last of the day. I’m running out of clay.” He kept working quietly. When he wet his fingers and ran them over the tile, Canny would watch, mesmerized. He didn’t acknowledge this, but said, “Do you know what this one says?”

  She stared. “No.” She just liked watching his busy, stroking hand.

  “It’s a refinement. With any large, complex, enduring spell there has to be one or two powerful instructions.”

  “Like, ‘Go now,’” Canny said.

  “Exactly. And the rest are refinements like, ‘Not that way, or that way, or even this’—so that every possibility is closed off, except the one you want.”

  Ghislain picked up a dried grass stem and blew through it, cleaning the water from the intricate symbol he’d fashioned. “It’s the refinements that take the most time.”

  “Do you fire these tiles?”

  “It isn’t necessary. Which is just as well, since I don’t have a kiln. When I pour the molten lead there are always some that shatter.” He got up. “Are you finished? Come and wash your hands.”

  They stood side by side at the big basin in the immaculate black-and-white bathroom. Canny rinsed her hands, then looked up to catch him watching her in the mirror. She blushed. He said, “Come on, you can help me water the garden.”

  They went down to the second terrace, where the orderly vegetable beds were. He gave her a watering can and took a zinc bucket himself. They plunged these vessels into the nearest rain barrel, which was full of wriggling mosquito larvae. They filled the channels by the cabbages and broccoli then went on to other rain barrels around the conical hillside. They watered carrots, onions, garlic, and radishes.

  Ghislain stopped beside one caterpillar-ravished bed of lettuce and upended his bucket so Canny could sit on it. He knelt among the plants and began writing sign over them. His fingers flashed. After a time he stopped, and they both watched till Canny saw the caterpillars curl up and drop from the leaves onto the soil—not to die, but to each uncurl and set off, inching their way to the stones that edged the drop to the next terrace. The caterpillars all crawled over the edge of the terrace and out of sight.

  Ghislain said, “Did you pick that up?”

  “The signs? Yes. That was another ‘Go.’”

  “You’re a prodigy.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No. I was always a strong signer. There were some things I could do very, very well. But I was never intelligent, or thorough, or imaginative, like my cousins.”

  “You made a rope out of air,” Canny said.

  Ghislain looked at her. “I’m much stronger than I once was. Stronger than everybody. I don’t know why. If anyone asks me—and by anyone I mean Cyrus, since he’s the only person I ever see—then I pretend I do know, because it worries him.”

  He got up and gave her his hand. They left the watering can but took the bucket and continued on and he showed her the little spring where he’d dug the clay. She helped him scoop some out. Cold water bubbling out of the waxy ooze washed over her chilled hands. They filled the bucket with clay, and he carried it. They stopped to wash at the first rain barrel. Seized by an impulse, Canny tried Lonnie’s pain rune on the wriggling mosquito larvae. Perhaps it would kill them, she thought. She wrote the rune over and over, making little splashes on the surface of the water. But the larvae continue to rise and fall, flicking their happy bodies. “Damn,” she said.

  “What are you doing?”

  She kept trying, and then was pleased to see the larvae begin to wriggle more convulsively.

  Then the water began to steam. Canny snatched back her scalded fingers. The water in the barrel started to boil. Ghislain pulled her away from it—he put his arms around her and held her still. Her ears were ringing. She watched the water boil for a minute, then turned her face to surreptitiously sniff his neck.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Mmmm. No.” Canny’s throat seemed to have turned to wood, while her legs were milk pudding.

  “Are you crying?”

  “No.”

  “Water doesn’t know pain,” Ghislain said reassuringly. “It only knows dissolution. So if you tell it to feel pain, it only tries to evaporate the quickest way it can.”

  “Oh.”

  “You just boiled ten gallons of water in thirty seconds.”

  “Oh. Yes.” There was a silence, then Canny said, “I should open a bathhouse.”

  That made him laugh, and they were off, giggling again.

  Eventually he let go of her, picked up the dropped bucket, and walked on. They went up the steps.

  “Why is the garden a wilderness one terrace down, normal in the vegetable beds, and perfect up here?”

  “The spell is on the house. Its influence flows out like ripples on a pond. When I was a boy, the spell just kept things neat and tidy, spick and span.”

  Spick and Span were characters in a radio advertisement from the sponsor of a popular radio serial. Ghislain had said “Spick” in falsetto and “Span” big and gruff like the radio voices. This reminded Canny that he was in her world as well as this one, a world with a kind of paradise at the top of it.

  “If you’re here at midnight I can show you the spell in action.”

  So, she was right, something did happen at midnight. But she wouldn’t be here. She should be on her way already.

  “I have to put in an appearance at dinner,” she said. “With damp hair. I’m supposed to be at the swimming hole.” She sighed. “Sholto is going to watch me like a hawk all evening. I promised him I’d transcribe Mr. Cyrus’s interview tonight. Though I don’t see how I can since there’s no electricity at the guesthouse.”

  “What interview?”

  “My brother is researching the 1929 mining disaster of which your Cyrus is a survivor.”

  Ghislain averted his head. Canny was sure that he was hiding his face. She said, “I’ve been telling lies to keep my freedom. But I’m going to have to do some of what Sholto wants so that he thinks I’m being good. Good and reliable.”

  They got back to the house. Canny draped her sandals around her neck again. She produced the spell paper from her pocket, dipped it in some clay slip, and pressed it onto her forehead. Ghislain stopped fussing with stuff on the table and said, “Oh fine. Do that then.”

  “Can’t you see me?”

  He squinted in her direction. “I can’t look a
t you. That’s how it works.”

  She put a tentative hand on his arm. “Here I am.”

  “There you are,” he said. Then, “Don’t go.”

  Canny thought of Marli, who’d never say “Don’t go,” only, sometimes, “Can’t you stay a little longer?” She removed her hand. A clammy, shrinking feeling came over her, not about Ghislain, but herself. She remembered her mother saying, of Marli, that it must be nice for Canny to visit someone who she could always know would be there, waiting for her. Was the warmth she felt toward Ghislain, her excitement about him, only a reflection of her feelings for Marli—for someone else who couldn’t follow her if she walked away from them? What was wrong with her? Or, perhaps she should rather ask, what else was wrong with her, apart from her detachment, her frozen face, her secretive habits. “You can’t want me to stay!” she said, passionate. But what she was thinking was: “You can’t want me.”

  She clapped her hands over her ears and hurried off. She could hear Ghislain calling her name all the way down to the wrecked jeep and beginning of the forest.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME CANNY ARRIVED BACK at the apiary she was out of breath, but calmer. She found Susan and Sholto packing up the recording equipment. She told them she’d decided to check out the swimming hole before getting her swimsuit. “It seemed too much bother going back for it. Instead of swimming I had a nap on the grass,” then, blithely, “There’s always tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow you’re transcribing today’s interviews for me,” Sholto reminded her. “Sue and I are going over to Orchard House to see if Mr. Lealand can spare us an hour. We’ll bring the equipment back here tomorrow. Mr. Cyrus says it’s okay for you to work here, but you should ask him what time tomorrow would suit him. You’ll find him in the kitchen.”

  Cyrus Zarene was pasting labels onto slender bottles of something honey-colored and wholly liquid. The bottles didn’t have crown caps, like the cider, but corks. Canny favored Cyrus Zarene with the gloomiest look she could muster. “Why did you have to be so helpful?”

  “About?”

  “Me coming here to transcribe interviews.”

  “I was more helpful than you know. I even offered to keep the equipment here overnight, but apparently the department of anthropology at Castlereagh University is full of ogres.”

  “They’re certainly full of themselves,” Canny said, and rolled her eyes. “The university’s anthropologists want to be seen as a science, but they’re a social science, like psychology, and it’s not the same thing. But they reckon that since history is only an arts subject, it’s even lower in the pecking order. The kids I go to school with—university is a mystery to them. I wish it was more of one to me.”

  The labels on the bottles said “Zarene Valley Mead.” Canny suddenly had an idea. She asked whether she could buy a bottle. “As a present for Sholto and Susan. I’ve given them a lot of trouble, and I want to say sorry.”

  “That’s a nice thought.”

  “I’ll run and get my purse.”

  “Tell you what, Agnes, I’ll let you have a bottle if you give me a hand with the hives in the home paddock.”

  “Okay.

  Cyrus dried his hands and began slotting the bottles into a wooden crate. Canny made to help. “Leave that,” he said. “Go tell your brother that you’re assisting me with something, and that, in payment, I’m giving you some mead. Just so as I know the drink will end up in their bellies, not yours. It’s strong stuff and you’re a bit young for it. Sorry if you planned to surprise them, but you must see what I mean.”

  “Fair enough,” Canny said. She went to tell Sholto she’d be busy for a bit, and to reassure him that she’d be back at the guesthouse by dinnertime. She didn’t mention the mead.

  * * *

  CYRUS TOOK THE GIRL OUT TO THE HIVES. It was late afternoon and the low sun made the chalky paint of the frames glow—Nile green, white, ochre, melon pink. Each hive was wreathed with circling bees. The home paddock hummed. Canny carried the honey box and wore a hat with a veil. Cyrus had a bare head, and his sleeves were rolled up. He paused to drop dried juniper berries on top of the mix of smoldering moss and pine needles in the smoke blower. Canny thought that the smoke smelled like Grandma Mochrie’s parlor at five in the evening when Grandma would say “The sun is over the yardarm” before fixing herself a gin and tonic.

  Cyrus blew smoke into the hive. He picked up the heavy stone used to keep its tin top in place, and then lifted the lid.

  The bees rose in a cloud. They darted around Cyrus and Canny. They seemed sullen and insecure. One settled on Canny’s hand and stung her. She gave a yelp and made to break away. Cyrus grabbed her arm and held her in place. She watched several bees settle on the pale hairs of his forearm and scramble around like people trying to wade through long bracken. The abdomen of one bee dipped, thrust, and deposited its sting in Cyrus’s skin. The bee crawled away, while the sting stayed where it had lodged, pulsing.

  Bees were crawling on Canny’s veil, before her eyes.

  Cyrus released her—he needed both hands for the blower. He blew a thick cloud, like another veil. He flicked two bees off his neck.

  Another bee stung Canny’s leg, then, straight afterward, her elbow. Again Cyrus seized her arm to prevent her from running. She didn’t dare struggle. The bees were around them now, not tens, hundreds—and the tone of the hum had changed from musing to electrical.

  “What are you doing?” Canny whispered. She suppressed her urge to shout and flail. There were dozens of bees crawling along the tops of the frames, tapping the timber and one another with their tiny feelers, passing on some terrible rumor. Canny didn’t know what the bees were saying, but what she imagined was: “There’s a stranger at the hives.” It was a call to arms. Why wouldn’t Cyrus work his magic? Why didn’t he scrawl his signs in the smoke?

  Another bee stung her neck—it had crawled under her veil.

  Cyrus let go and again blew smoke, then lunged after her and grabbed her once more. She had managed to retreat three careful paces. Sparks—a series of stings—touched her, and fire ran into her bones. Her heart was pounding. Before her eyes the smoke was growing thin and increasingly ineffectual. Abruptly Canny raised her free hand and wrote on the air. “Calm. Calm. Calm. Calm,” she wrote.

  Cyrus released her other arm and she used that hand to sign in counterpoint, “Go down.”

  The bees sank through the smoke. It was as if the air in the home paddock was a pot on the stove, and she’d just turned off the flame.

  * * *

  CYRUS’S BEES RELIED ON BEING SOOTHED. They became tense and apprehensive if smoke surrounded them but was empty of information. Cyrus’s spells were part of the weather of their lives. He knew that if he opened a hive, blew smoke, and didn’t inscribe the signs, his bees would react. He knew he and the girl would be stung, and that, with the bees swarming so menacingly, it wouldn’t be too hard to make her hold still for long enough for what he hoped to happen—that she’d break down and beg him to do what she’d watched him doing, settle the hive by writing signs in the smoke. Cyrus wanted the girl to show him that she’d understood he was using magic. But instead of begging him to intervene, her free hand flew up and her fingers flashed the nine separate signs of the spell to soothe. She performed the movements without fault or hesitation and, because he was surprised, Cyrus let her go, and she thrust her other hand into the smoke and improvised. For a moment she was making two separate series of movements. One of nine and one of eleven.

  Cyrus had been told that his great-aunts, Joanne and Rowan Zarene, had worked together to do this—what two Zarenes together could seldom manage, no matter how long they practiced, because the character of their magics would never match. The old aunties were identical twins, so they matched. The old aunties had been the most accomplished members of the family in living history. It was Joanne and Rowan who’d laid the foundations of the house on Terminal Hill, who’d composed the great “Renew, Restore, Repair” spell a
nd carved it into the house’s woodwork, who’d made the house what it was by working together.

  But this girl, her skin blotched with bee stings, performed by herself two very complex spells. And she performed them simultaneously, as if that was the way it was always done.

  The insidious, ever-present humming of the hives in the home paddock had died away, and a breeze could now be heard jostling the leaves of the apricot tree near where they stood.

  Cyrus took a couple of deep breaths, then said, “Now you’ve shown your hand.” In fact she’d shown both of them.

  The girl looked at him, wide-eyed, but her face was frozen. He didn’t understand how much pain she was in till her eyes filled and tears spilled down her cheeks. He touched her arm and drew her well away from the hives, then got her to stand still while he pinched the stings from the red patches on her arms and legs, to stop the venom spreading. She let him do that. But then, when he was rising creakily out of his crouch, she spoke. Her voice was toneless and low-pitched. “It hurts,” she said. Then she bounded backward away from him, fleet-footed. She paused only to shout at him, accusingly. “You kept hold of me! You wouldn’t let me get away!” Then she turned on her heel and took off.

  Cyrus was alarmed. He was right to think she’d been watching him and studying his every move. She might have only supposed he was blessing his beehives, but she hadn’t. She’d watched and seen magic—that was Cyrus’s belief. But she’d also learned how to copy what he did. That was extraordinary in itself. She was very alert, and her memory was capacious. She recognized that what he was doing was more than merely ceremonial. When she wanted the bees to calm down she asked them, as he had asked them. She’d performed a spell. She was completely within her rights to be angry at him for how he chose to flush her out. But he was right, and she could hardly pretend that what he’d done was crazy.