Balefires

by David Drake

  Dark Horizonsdidn't pay for its material. My warning to Stuart about the value of gift stories might be recalled here. Having said that, I felt free to experiment on this story. I'm not dissatisfied with the result, though this stylistic form isn't one I've ever tried when I expected to be paid for my work.

  The core of the story is the fact that William the Conqueror swore, "By the face of Lucca!" Lucca is a shrine of the Virgin in Northern Italy, but the source I used stated that the meaning of the oath was unknown. William's career and the fact that his father was called Robert the Devil gave me the basic notion.

  The story's set in Late Medieval Europe, when there was a unique climate for learning. Classical science and literature were returning to the intellectual mainstream, but much was being discovered for the first time as well. Scholars all spoke Latin, so a Catalan and a Bohemian might meet in Bologna, for example, to discuss Arab researches into optics.

  The division between what we now consider science and what we call mysticism were less obvious some hundreds of years ago also. (It's useful to remember that Newton developed calculus to simplify astrological computations.)

  I wish I could have gotten more of the wonder of the period into this story; but I hope at least some of it comes through.

  There is a hierarchy in Hell and this Hermann of Prague knew; but the way of it he failed to grasp, so this is the story of his pride and his ignorance and what came of them. Perhaps he had been born in Prague, but at the end he lived alone in a room cut from the rock of a sea-pounded crag on the western edge of the continent.

  His tower of glass was the key, the tall helix squirming into the air from a bulb of purple fluid, without that the parchment of Andromedes would have been worthless, mere words in the darkness.

  And even possession of the memoirs of the bitter Greek stemmed from the dreaming glass. There had been rumors, hints; but only that until Hermann lit an oil lamp beneath the base of the helix. Then, nude, he smeared his body with an ointment of fats and belladonna before reclining on a couch to watch the purple liquid stir and bubble, lighted by the one lamp alone. As the sluggish blobs of color mounted in the closed tube and the drug took hold it seemed as if the helix lengthened immensely, and Hermann's mind followed the bubbles into a height of discord and whispers. In time the lamp burned out and the fluid dripped back into its reservoir, but when Hermann awoke he knew where the manuscript was hidden and how it might be had.

  ***

  Even so it was three years before Hermann had the parchment to hand, but to argue with necessity is time ill spent and there had been no other way. It was a short chronicle of knowledge and failure, of wisdom made useless by the inadequacy of its goals. In the midst of the Greek a single line in Latin stood out, not a gloss for it too was written in Andromedes' own crabbed hand:

  QUICVNQVE+DAEMONEM+LVCCAE+DOMINVM+CLAMARE+FECER

  IT+CONSPICABITVR+POTESTATEM+INFINITAM. Whosoever shall cause the spirit Luccae to cry "Master!!" shall glimpse unbounded power.

  This line drew Hermann's eyes as the Great Bear does a mariner's and as he read and reread it he began to tremble at its implications. No longer did he dream of the Earth, its castles and fertile vales, but of power that stalked among the aeons and diced with suns.

  In the end he turned again to the ointment and the purple whispers that never questioned, never advised, only answered the questions put to them with a hard, icy truth. He was afraid, now; for though Hermann had no conception of the fullness of the forces he dealt with, he knew of Luccae and dreaded it. But to stop was to die in his own time, and the pride was on Hermann to take what fate offered. And so the tower, and so the dreams; in the morning his fear was greater for knowing more of his task, but he began his preparations.

  And this too was a slow business, for it demanded much of the true mercury with which to lay out the pentacle. If Luccae was to be caught there must be no chance for it to escape later. First the hydragyrum, then the two spells to commit to memory. The first to send him into the place, the time where Luccae danced and waited for the sun to explode; the second to return him and it, at the split-second that would leave Luccae within the pentacle and Hermann outside it: else the magician could crouch in lone safety while all the world besides melted into unholy alchemy.

  So Hermann waited until the pentacle was ready and the stars had united in such a way to make the unthinkable possible. Then he spoke three words that stilled the mutter of the city around him, three words and a fourth that was drowned in the thunderclap which tore a hole in the universe and hurled him through it.

  The great sun hung right overhead, a gorgon that licked at the sky with long serpents of fire. Across the barren rocks writhed the shadows of the three dancers: the first, washed purple by the deep red light, pounded his splay feet in time to the sound that howled through his nose, as long as he was tall. The second pranced, goat-footing it over rocks that sparked beneath him. His mouth was twisted into a rictus of delight and never a sound came from it.

  The third was perched on a low pedestal: it was Luccae and only its face danced. One eye, as moribund as the sun, burned in the center of a thousand shifting patterns; every one of them a dead damned soul, each of them Hermann himself.

  But Hermann stood and whispered the syllables of return without a pause or stumbling. The wailing and click of hooves continued but only Luccae remained, only its face warping and growing and weaving a net for Hermann's soul. But he was drunk with dreams of power and could not be bound; the words rippled off his tongue heedless of the shape that expanded before his eyes until it filled the whole world. As the final word rang out in the sudden silence Hermann stepped back without looking and the sound of sea crashed around him.

  He was safe, and Luccae glared within a prison as ceaselessly changing as its own face.

  And then to the mastering. For the first time the magician's dream spiral failed him and he woke from his stupor with nothing but the memory of fruitless chittering. Hermann was numb with terror by then, but he could not stop; Luccae squatted in his mind though he had curtained off the pentagram. Sooner or later he would make a mistake, would break the line. Unless…

  Hermann's lore was as great as his recklessness in using it to do what his dream had told him could not be done: to crush Luccae to the point it must admit his dominance and lordship. And here Hermann misunderstood as he had been intended; but it was too late by then and his fate was closing on him.

  He took a great smoky garnet and strung it on a silver wire to the ceiling. From his cabinets he took a tiny box of orange crystals and a phial of deep blue liquid. The box he opened and set beneath the stone. Then, though he need not have done so, Hermann ripped away the hangings between him and Luccae. The red eye glared at him and the garnet blazed back. Hermann unstoppered the phial and began chanting the words of congruity. On the twenty-first syllable he tilted the liquid into the box and stepped back as a serpent of smoke shot up to seize the garnet.

  For all the power of Luccae it was trapped beyond self-preservation, for the stone was dead and the smoke that hissed about it was horribly alive. The psychic leverage on the garnet washed Luccae's face to a frozen gray, glazed the fire of the single eye, and held the flicker of souls to a muddy trembling. A minute, another minute – and Luccae spoke.

  It was a sound without earthly counterpart, but Hermann heard it and understood in the final instant his mistake. Then the sea and rock boiled together as Luccae's Master came to free His liege.

  The Dancer in the Flames

  I spent most of 1970 as an interrogator with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. The experience changed my life in many ways, some of them good.

  Most of the changes were not good. When I hear people quote Nietzsche, "What does not kill us makes us stronger," I always think "Yeah, but stronger what?" Not stronger human beings, of that I'm sure.

  I don't think it ever occurred to me to send "The Dancer in the Flames" anywhere but to Stu Schiff. F amp;SF would've taken six months
or more to reply, and I assumed the reply would be a rejection.

  Now I'm not quite so sure. It surprises me that a number of people with backgrounds in literature praise this story as a study in alienation, when I thought it was just a fantasy about Viet Nam.

  To me, Viet Nam was alienation. I wish it had been a fantasy.

  The viewpoint character is an officer. I was not. The setting, incidents, and attitudes depicted are all real. If you ask Nam vets what the most popular song In Country was, they'll all tell you, "We Gotta Get Out of This Place."

  This isn't a story which I like very much. One of the reasons is that I don't much like the person who lived the background I'm writing about here. We've been stuck with each other since 1970, though.

  The flames writhing out of the ashtray were an eyeball-licking orange. For an instant Lt. Schaydin was sure that the image dancing in them was that of the girl he had burned alive in Cambodia, six months before. But no, not quite; though the other's face had been of Gallic cast too.

  The two enlisted men had turned at the sound of the officer brushing back the poncho curtain which divided his tent from the rear compartment of the command track. Radios were built into the right wall of the vehicle above a narrow counter. On that counter rested the CQ's clipboard and a cheap glass ashtray, full of flame. The men within-Skip Sloane, who drove the command track and was now Charge of Quarters, and the medic Evens-had been watching the fire when Schaydin looked in. It was to that ten-inch flame which the lieutenant's eyes were drawn as well.

  He stared at her calves and up the swell of the hips which tucked in at a waist that thrust toward him. She looked straight at Schaydin then and her mouth pursed to call. Above the image hung the black ripples of smoke which were her hair. Abruptly the flame shrank to a wavering needle and blinked out. The compartment was lighted only by the instrument dials, pitch-dark after the orange glare. The air was sharp with the residue of the flame; but more than that caused Schaydin's chest to constrict. He remembered he had called out some joke as he touched the flamethrower's trigger and sent a loop of napalm through the window of the hooch they were supposed to destroy. The Cambodian girl must have been hiding in the thatch or among the bags of rice. She had been all ablaze as she leaped into the open, shrieking and twisting like a dervish until she died. But this tiny image had not screamed, it had really spoken. It/She had said "How did you do that?" Schaydin gasped.

  The enlisted men glanced at each other, but their commander did not seem angry, only-strange. Sloane held up a twenty-ounce block of C-4, plastic explosive. Sweat rolled down the driver's chest and beer gut. He wore no shirt since the radios heated the command vehicle even in the relative coolness of the Vietnamese night. "You take a bit of C-4, sir," Sloane said. His hairy thumb and forefinger gouged out an acorn-sized chunk of the white explosive. Another piece had already been removed."It takes a shock to make it blow up. If you just touch a match to it in the open, it burns. Like that."

  Sloane handed the pellet to Schaydin, who stood with a dazed look on his face. The C-4 had the consistency of nougat, but it was much denser. "We ought 'a air the place out, though," the driver continued. "The fumes don't do anybody much good."

  "But how did you get it to look like a woman?"Schaydin demanded."I could see her right there, her face, her eyes… and she was saying…"

  Evens reached past the lieutenant and flapped the poncho curtain to stir the dissipating tendrils of smoke."C-4makesa pretty flame," the stocky medic said, "but you don't want to get the stuff in your system. We used to have a mascot, a little puppy. She ate part of a block and went pure-ass crazy. Seeing things. She'd back into a corner and snap and bark like a bear was after her… Middle of that afternoon she went haring out over the berm, yapping to beat Hell. We never did see her again."

  The medic looked away from his CO, then added, "Don't think you ought to breathe the fumes, either. Hard to tell what it might make you see. Don't think I want to burn any more C-4, even if it does make the damnedest shadows I ever hope to see."

  The lieutenant opened his mouth to protest, to insist that he had seen the image the instant he pushed the curtain aside; but he caught his men's expressions. His mind seemed to be working normally again. "You guys just saw a-fire?"

  "That's all there was to see," said Evens. "Look, it's late, I better go rack out." Sloane nodded, tossing him the part block of explosive. The medic edged past Schaydin, into the tent and the still night beyond.

  "Time for a guard check," Sloane said awkwardly and reseated himself before the microphone. One by one the heavy-set man began calling the vehicles sited around the circular berm. The tracks replied with the quiet negative reports that showed someone was awake in each turret. The CQ did not look up at his commander, but when Schaydin stepped back from the compartment and turned away, he heard a rustle. Sloane had pulled the poncho closed.

  Schaydin sat down on the edge of his bunk, staring at the morsel of explosive. He saw instead the girl he had glimpsed in the flame. She had danced with her body, writhing sinuously like a belly dancer as her breasts heaved against the fire's translucence. Schaydin couldn't have been mistaken, the girl had been as real as-the Cambodian girl he had burned. And this girl's expression was so alive, her fire-bright eyes glinting with arrogant demand. What had the Cambodian girl been crying? But her eyes were dulled by the clinging napalm…

  The pellet of C-4 came into focus as Schaydin's fingers rotated it. All right, there was a simple way to see whether his mind had been playing tricks on him.

  Schaydin set the ball of explosive on top of a minican, the sealed steel ammunition box prized as luggage by men in armored units. C-4 burned at over 1000 degrees, the lieutenant remembered, but it would burn briefly enough that only the paint would scorch. The flame of Schaydin's cigarette lighter wavered away from the white pellet and heated the case in his hand. Then a tiny spark and a flicker of orange winked through the yellow naphtha flare. Schaydin jerked his lighter away and shut it. Fire loomed up from theplastique. Its hissing filled the tent just as the roar of an incoming rocket does an encampment.

  And the dancer was there again.

  The engineer platoon ran a generator which powered lights all over the fire-base through makeshift lines of commo wire. Left-handed and without looking at it, Schaydin jerked away the wire to his tent's light bulb. The sputtering fire brightened in the darkness, and in it the girl's features were as sharp as a cameo carven in ruddy stone. But the mouth moved and the dancer called to Schaydin over the fire-noise, "Viens ici! Viens a Marie!" Schaydin had studied French as an undergraduate in divinity school, enough to recognize that the tones were not quite those of modern French; but it was clear that the dancer was calling him to her. His body tensed with the impossible desire to obey. Sweat rimmed all the stark lines of his muscles.

  Then the flame and the girl were gone together, though afterimages of both danced across Schaydin's eyes. The lieutenant sat in the dark for some time, oblivious to the half-movement he might have glimpsed through a chink in the poncho. The CQ turned back to his microphone, frowning at what he had watched.

  ***

  Schaydin was more withdrawn than usual in the morning, but if any of his fellow officers noticed it, they put it down to the lieutenant's natural anxiety about his position. The next days would determine whether Schaydin would be promoted to captain and take on for the rest of his tour the slot he now held in place of the wounded Capt. Fuller. Otherwise, Schaydin would have to give up the company to another officer and return to Third Platoon. Schaydin had thought of little else during his previous week of command, but today it barely occurred to him. His mind had been drifting in the unreality of Southeast Asia; now it had found an anchorage somewhere else in time and space.

  The thin lieutenant spent most of the day in his tent, with the orange sidewalls rolled up to make its roof an awning. The first sergeant was stationed permanently in the Regiment's base camp at Di An, running an establishment with almost as many troops as t
here were in the field. In Viet Nam, even in a combat unit, a majority of the troops were noncombatants. Bellew, the Field First, was on R amp;R in Taiwan, so an unusual amount of the company's day-to-day affairs should have fallen on the commander himself.

  Today Schaydin sloughed them, answering the most pressing questions distractedly and without particular interest. His eyes strayed often to his minican, where the paint had bubbled and cracked away in a circle the size of a fifty-cent piece.

  She had seemed short, though he could not be sure since the image had been less than a foot tall when the flames leapt their highest. Not plump, exactly, for that implied fat and the dancer had been all rippling muscularity; but she had been a stocky girl, an athlete rather than a houri. And yet Schaydin had never before seen a woman so seductively passionate, so radiant with desire. Every time Schaydin thought of the dancer's eyes, his groin tightened; and he thought of her eyes almost constantly.

  Come to me… Come to Marie…

  ***

  The activities of the firebase went on as usual, ignoring Schaydin just as he did them. Second Platoon and some vehicles from Headquarters Company bellowed off on a Medcap to a village ten kilometers down Route 13. There the medics would dispense antibiotics and bandages to the mildly ill. The troops would also goggle at ravaged figures whom not even Johns Hopkins could have aided: a child whose legs had been amputated three years past by a directional mine; a thirty-year-old man with elephantiasis of the scrotum, walking bowlegged because of the bulk of his cantaloupe-sized testicles…

  Chinook helicopters brought in fuel and ammunition resupply in cargo nets swinging beneath their bellies. Schaydin did not notice their howling approach; the syncopated chop of their twin rotors as they hovered; the bustle of men and vehicles heading toward the steel-plank pad to pick up the goods. The lieutenant sat impassively in his tent even when the howitzer battery fired, though the hogs were lofting some of their shells to maximum range. The muzzle blasts raised doughnuts of dust that enveloped the whole base. Schaydin's mind's eye was on a dancing girl, not men in baggy green fatigues; the roar he heard was that of a crowd far away, watching the dancer… and even the dust in Schaydin's nostrils did not smell like the pulverized laterite of Tay Ninh Province.