Mortal Fire

by Elizabeth Knox

  She had to leave Ghislain, but there’d be no point in doing that if she couldn’t find a way to save Marli—to steal magic as if magic was medicine she didn’t have enough money to pay for.

  After she’d eaten she went to the bathroom and brushed her teeth with her finger. Then she said they should lie down together again. “And at least talk all night.”

  He said, “All right,” and went to get a rug. She lay down on the big leather sofa—and fell into a stuffed, exhausted sleep.

  * * *

  WHEN SHE WOKE, the only light in the room was the red glow of coals in the fireplace. The flames had died down and the coals were cooling and making a hollow tinkling. Ghislain was slumped in a chair he’d pulled up beside the sofa. He was asleep, holding her hand.

  Canny freed her fingers from his grasp and got up. She stood over him for a time, and then very stealthily searched his pockets. A warm metal object rolled out into her searching hand—the key to the locked room.

  * * *

  CANNY MUFFLED THE LOCK WITH ONE HAND and turned the key. The hinges were silent, in perfect working order, of course. The door didn’t creak, or the floorboards.

  She stood in the doorway of the room and waited for her eyes to adjust. The windows had no curtains, and, sometime in the last little while, the sky had clouded over and it had begun to rain. Maybe the moon was behind the cloud, because the sky was radiant, and the rain magnified its light.

  Ghislain’s Spell Cage stood in the center of the room, in a patch of light from the window. It was making a lacy shadow on the floor. It looked sinister and secretive and semihuman. Its first layer was open, flanges bent like beckoning fingers. Canny went to it and pushed the hatch wider. It scraped on the floor. She peered at the door to the inner cage. She found its two catches and picked at them, trying to pry them open. The lead was soft, and she was easily able to.

  She looked about and found Ghislain’s final piece of the spell—the latticework crown of the outer cage. The rope was already tied to it. But of course the hole for the hook on the ceiling beam would have filled itself in at the last Midnight Mending.

  Canny unfastened the crown from the rope and carried it to the Spell Cage. She couldn’t reach the top of the cage, so she dragged a chair over and stood on it. She lifted the cap into place. It fitted perfectly into the open ring at the top of the head portion of the outer “body.” Canny performed this coronation, then stepped back and looked at the space—man-size, Ghislain-shaped—which was waiting for her to fill it.

  Ghislain had said that he’d been arrogant and foolish to go into his great-aunties’ Spell Veil with so little hope of coming back (and none of coming back safely). He’d said that, without a twin, it couldn’t be done. If she climbed into the Spell Cage, who knew what would happen to her? The Spell Cage wasn’t a Spell Veil, with enough flexible length to wrap the body of anyone brave enough to send his soul after hers—and she knew that Ghislain would do that, if he could.

  Ghislain was planning to go, unanchored. To go one way. But the house would keep him alive. Canny wasn’t “of the house.” She’d die of thirst. She could be grappled out of the contraption, but what would she be like? A soulless, floppy puppet, a glazed mute. What she was considering was impossible. Still, looking at the space inside the sarcophagus, Canny had the feeling she got whenever someone asked her a really difficult math question. Not a Math Competition question, but one like those that clever men in the mathematics department at Castlereagh University asked her when they were examining her for her scholarship. Canny never worked through the steps to find her answers. She just fished them up, as if she were looking down into a dark pool knowing that the right fish was lurking there. A number, or a value. She could almost see it now.

  Rain ran down the windows. The room was full of trickling shadows. Canny stepped into the Spell Cage. She turned to the hatches and put a hand on the outer one. She hesitated, and then broke into a cold sweat. Her heart started banging so loudly it seemed to be trying to bash its way out both of her ears. The cap was in place, and if she had closed the outer cage and activated the “Go from now” spell without all the meticulous fine print of the inner cage, then she’d probably already be dead.

  After this stupid near miss, it took some time for Canny’s hands to be steady enough to pull the door to the inner cage closed and pinch its soft lead flanges to fasten it. Nothing happened of course. And nothing would happen, because once she was fastened in the inner cage she couldn’t close the door to the outer one. That was why Ghislain was going to use a rope to lower the cap into place after he was encased in both cages. The cap would activate the spell for him. If Canny wanted to do that now she had to find some way to close the outer cage from inside the inner one. But she couldn’t. Here she was, being bold, and planning some crazy leap of faith, and it wasn’t possible.

  Canny laughed with relief. Then she just stood for a bit feeling a little bored and a little silly, like the last kid waiting to be found in a game of hide and seek.

  Ghislain appeared in the doorway of the room.

  Canny said, “Um. I was just trying it for size.” She felt embarrassed. Not that she’d been caught doing something dangerous, or that she’d picked his pocket for the key, but because he’d know she meant to try to use the Spell Cage, and that she’d failed to understand how it worked.

  He came up to the cage and looked at her through the open hatch of the outer layer. His eyes were as black and as gleaming as the lead the cage was made of—mineral black, as they’d seemed the first time she was this close to him, when he’d manhandled her down from the veranda after she’d escaped out an upstairs window.

  He smiled at her; a small, confiding smile. Then he pushed closed the outer door and, with his clever fingers, pinched its fasteners shut.

  17

  IN THE HAY FIELD the first crop has been cut but not raked and boxed in bales. The sleek dry grass is lying in long mounded rows. Canny knows how slippery it is to walk on. Hasn’t she already gotten to the end of this field?

  But here is Sholto, with Susan, and Iris, and Cyrus Zarene. Cyrus looks exhausted and is slumped on the ground. Canny knows she should say something to Sholto. She’s had him running from pillar to post. (Such a silly saying that, pillar to post.) Sholto, Susan, and Iris look stiff and frozen, like posts and pillars. Like Lot’s wife in the Bible, whose story has always puzzled Canny, since the wife’s only sin seems to have been a nostalgic desire to look just once more at the city where she’d spent a whole life and raised her children, before being hustled out of it by Lot and a bunch of stern angels. A last look—that’s a natural wish.

  Sholto, Susan, and Iris have turned into pillars of salt. Canny studies them and looks around. Everything seems to start as soon as she turns her head. The trees begin to move in a slight breeze. And there are a group of children between the trees, running along the river path.

  Canny looks down at the cut hay. Someone should gather it up now. It will rain tonight (the locked room was filled with glimmering rain-light).

  Canny tilts her head and looks up into the sky at its one dark cloud, a cloud made of roiling, weaving bees. The swarm divides, one half hovering uncertainly over her head, the other drifting after another Canny, the one fleeing along the river path ahead of the pack of children.

  “Oh!” thinks Canny. She now understands what is going on. She drops her chin and meets Sholto’s eyes and tries to say something. But there isn’t time.

  * * *

  BY HER SECOND JUMP CANNY UNDERSTANDS that she’ll never be able to go back. That she has no business being where she is, standing over herself and Lonnie Zarene, who are sitting together on a bench at Massenfer Station. Lonnie is scribbling his pain rune over and over on the front page of the Castlereagh Clarion and Sisema Mochrie’s self-satisfied face. Voyaging Canny casts no shadow and can’t linger, even if she wants to.

  * * *

  SHE IS STRETCHED THIN AND FLATTENED OUT, standing under the oaks in thei
r early summer green. She is on the road that runs between the back door of Castlereagh Women’s Medical ward and the hospital parking lot. She tries to find her feet, and run, run, run.

  The Austin is parked just up the road, a figure in its driver’s seat. It is Sholto—Sholto, who asked her to come home. Canny has to get to him to say sorry, she won’t be coming home, and goodbye. But she should also turn and go back down the hill to the ward and sit with her friend, who has a cold, her friend whom a cold can carry off forever. She should be in the car seat beside Sholto, who will drive her home. She should be with her friend. She is homesick—torn in half by homesickness.

  * * *

  THEN SHE IS SOMEWHERE ELSE. It’s summer and she is walking along the Westbourne waterfront on a windy day. There are two girls going along in front of her. They are carrying their swimsuit bags over their shoulders and are wearing shorts and halter neck blouses. They both have long, crinkly, cloudy black hair. One girl’s hair goes down to her hips, the other’s to her shoulders. It is herself and Marli, and she—voyaging Canny—is walking behind them, as if she is the wind.

  The wind is waiting for its moment.

  The beach is crowded—a city beach on a sweltering day. The little kids all have red flannel sun bonnets. People think the polio is discouraged by the color red.

  The wind pounces, a gust makes Marli’s hair fly forward and wrap itself around her ice cream cone. Canny watches her younger self go into fits of giggles. Marli is trying to pull the ice cream out of her hair, and her hair out of the ice cream. The cone is her favorite flavor, tutti-frutti. But voyaging Canny recalls that it wasn’t very good that day. Both Marli’s tutti-frutti and her orange chocolate chip had been full of splinters of ice. That meant the ice cream had thawed and been refrozen.

  This is their last outing. Tomorrow Marli will have a sore leg, then a headache.

  Voyaging Canny can’t catch up with them—yesterday’s girls. She can’t make herself heard, can’t say, “Drop that cone, Marli. Bin it!” She wants to shout, “It’s the ice cream. Don’t eat the ice cream.” But she is a weak, gusting summer breeze. She can’t knock the smeared cone from Marli’s hand. Marli is going to go on and eat it and its imperfections, because those girls have spent all their spare change and this is the day’s last treat, and they’ve only got enough for the ferry ride back across the harbor.

  Here is the ferry now, sliding into the long pier. The fishermen are reeling in their lines. There is no time.

  * * *

  IT’S A SCHOOL DAY IN THE GYM, and a hateful lesson in folk dancing. Folk dancing is a craze the young teachers straight out of Training College have. They use the word “ethnic.” Canny and Marli think “ethnic” means dolls in national costume, and folk dances.

  Marli and Canny are in the same circle. Voyaging Canny remembers this dance. She waits for the circle to break, to become a spiral, then divide into two circles, one within the other. When it does, she slips her hand into the hand of the boy who is last in the chain of dancers. It’s Jonno; he’s dragging his feet. As she takes his hand, he turns and looks at her, aghast.

  (Canny remembers that, the day after they did folk dancing in physical education, Jonno suddenly blurted out that his nana said that if you got between a person and a person’s ghost it meant that one day that person was going to save your life. He said that to her, and she didn’t know what he was talking about, and told him, “You’re off your head, boy.”)

  Canny must maneuver herself in this dance so that Marli is between her and that younger Canny, the one in a daggy knit top and cotton rompers. (The boys get to wear shorts, but the girls must wear these things with elasticized cuffs on the thighs. Rompers can’t ride up too far and are therefore decent. Girls must never forget decency.)

  The two circles split and partner up and spin around, the dancers’ hands crossed to grip. Voyaging Canny is on her own, drifting like an electron dropped by its atom. Without the other subatomic particles, she is about to turn into a different element. That must not happen. She tries to line Marli up between herself and herself. It’s like lining up a tough pool shot. Her left hand finds the real, clammy, sour, dirty hand of a boy. Once again she enters the figures of the dance, and someone else is cast out. She is going to be able to carry this off, after all.

  But then the dancers all turn to paper, a chain of paper dolls being danced between three mirrors, above Marli’s head. Marli is in the iron lung. Schoolgirl Canny is standing beside her friend, her scissors put aside, dancing paper-chain people back and forth to illustrate a story about this year’s fiasco of a folk dancing lesson.

  She is saying that the boys had played up so badly this year that the teachers split the class into boys and girls. And of course boys were never going to hold hands with other boys.

  Marli’s laugh is like someone playing a harmonica, it sounds as her breath goes out and as it draws in again.

  Voyaging Canny is standing behind both girls, watching all this. She wonders if Marli can see her reflection in that left-hand mirror, the one that shows the windows full of brown oaks and yellow sycamores. But voyaging Canny can’t see her own reflection. She has no body and never will again.

  Goodbye, laughing girls. There isn’t any point in lingering here. She can’t maneuver her friend between herself and her ghost, or hold up her end of anything even as light as a paper chain.

  * * *

  SHOLTO AND A SMALL, DARK GIRL are nursing their glasses of milk, sitting side by side at the kitchen table. Voyaging Canny watches them from the doorway. Little Canny is doing Sholto’s math homework while he makes her an origami crane. Little Canny hears Sisema before voyaging Canny does. Voyaging Canny is shocked by her mother’s force, her physicality, as Sisema breezes past and bangs into the room. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” Sisema says.

  Little Canny: “Sholto is helping me with my subtractions.”

  Sholto looks at his small stepsister with admiration. Butter would not melt in her mouth.

  * * *

  CANNY KNOWS HER MOTHER’S HERMIT CRAB story by heart, so she isn’t surprised to find herself hovering over the street and the figure sitting on the high, white-painted curb, feet in the gutter. She is surprised to see herself there too, her small five-year-old self, half asleep, head resting on her mother’s arm. A poor, tired, sticky child in a too short frock and with purplish scars on her legs.

  (The scars are from boils. Canny had forgotten her boils. It was the mosquito bites. Sometimes she’d wake in the night to hear the bright chirping of a pink lizard clinging to the breeze-block wall behind her head, catching the mosquitoes attracted to her ripe little body.)

  So—she was there in her mother’s great moment of insight.

  The palms are silent. There is no wind. The roaring is the reef beyond the palms, the park, and the strip of crabgrass that is as green and groomed as a golf course. The palms are still, so Canny can hear the glassy chiming of the tree frogs.

  The crab is an ambulatory shell balancing on six pointed feet. Then you see the eyes, swiveling to look down the vast gulf of the gutter, and the claws nervously clipping the air like a bored ticket collector coming along an empty train carriage.

  “We’re not going to get anywhere this way,” thinks voyaging Canny. There is somewhere she’s supposed to be.

  (Her mother went the very next day to Arahura’s shipping office and bought a single one-way ticket to Southland—children under seven could share their parents’ berth.)

  One way. Voyaging Canny is plagued by this thought. There is something she has to get—something like a return ticket. Maybe then she can go back.

  The crab on the curb is perhaps thinking that the sea is down there, and if he can only find a safe way—

  He tests the drop, sidles farther along, tries again.

  Sisema watches him. She is a handsome young woman. Her face is all shapely planes, the hollows of her cheeks are pitted by acne scars, and that change of texture makes her face mor
e sculptural and dramatic. Sisema’s face is hard and disenchanted. It isn’t the haughty one her daughter knows now.

  Canny looks at this young mother and remembers being the sticky girl, always trying, and failing, to make her beautiful mother laugh.

  But even as Canny watches, Sisema’s expression is changing. She is looking at the crab tenderly now. She nudges her sleeping daughter and says, “Shall we help this fellow?”

  Little Canny comes awake, sees the crab and, encouraged by her mother—“Careful, Akanesi”—she picks him up by his shell, puts him down in the gutter, then quickly lifts her bare feet out of the way as he scuttles off toward the drain. Sisema laughs, and little Canny sees she has permission to laugh too.

  The crab with the cockleshell house has found the drain. Little Canny says, “Not down there!”

  Voyaging Canny can only just understand them, her mother tongue is very rusty now.

  “Well, that’s his lookout!” her mother says. Sisema gets up and hoists little Canny to her feet. “Come along, baby.” Then, “What do you think of the crab? He carries his own house. Clever, eh?” Then, “You know, baby, that’s what I liked about traveling with your daddy and his friend. We went off with just as much as we needed and no more. We had to keep washing our clothes. But I liked that. We’d park up somewhere sunny. I’d string a line between the top of the windshield and a tree. I’d hang out our clothes and make us some shade.”

  * * *

  CANNY FINDS HERSELF UP BY THE RAFTERS of the church in Arahura, floating on billows of music. The hymn is less melody than chant. The overlapping choruses of bass and baritone, of tenor, contralto, and soprano all swell and fall like surf. Canny is looking down on the men in their white suits and white shirts and white ties, and the ladies’ hats, made of bleached flax in lacy weaves. On the center of each crown is a flat, glossy shell. The hat brims are covered in flowers, or gathered white ribbon, or coronets of pale seashells. From where she is, the body of the church looks like a lawn covered in fallen blossom.