Enchanted Fire

by Roberta Gellis

  Orpheus and Eurydice had scarcely exchanged twenty words between their return to Kyzikos city and their setting sail anew. He had gone with Jason and the army while she had attended the wounded on the ship. When she heard of the plan to hunt down the Gegeneis after the funerals, she sought Orpheus out and protested vigorously that he was a musician, not a fighter.

  He had laughed at her arguments. “I can fight well enough,” he said.

  “I am sure you can,” she replied, acidly, “and when it is necessary, it is necessary. It is not necessary now. A whole army is following Kyzikos. A chance blow across your hand could deprive us all of your music. Can one man—who is no Heracles, you must admit that—add anything to the fighting force that is worth that risk?”

  Orpheus’ eyes grew dark, his face as hard as marble. “I am pledged to Jason and the crew. We all sinned against our host, but I in particular, out of hubris, did so. Reparation for that sin must be made.”

  She walked away without another word. What she saw in his face precluded more argument, and, in any case, if he did not think it more important to remain with her when they had an opportunity to be together, then she was a fool to care about him. She decided she must begin to think seriously of leaving the Argo. She had no further obligation to them since she had told Jason about Phineus of Salmydessus. Moreover, she was no longer trapped on a narrow nearly uninhabited spit of land. Perhaps it would not be necessary to go to Colchis. While Jason and his crew joined the people of Kyzikos in mourning their dead king and setting the corpses on funeral pyres, Eurydice considered whether she might remain in Kyzikos. It was a tolerant city, even welcoming to strangers and strange ways.

  She had time enough to examine the possibility thoroughly. When the prayers and funeral gifts had been offered and the dead had been burned, Jason and his men set out with Kyzikos and his army to wreak vengeance on the Gegeneis. From Polyphemus and Koronus, who were not yet whole enough to fight and whom Eurydice still attended, she learned that this time Kyzikos did not intend merely to teach the raiders to choose another target or to make their living without raiding. This time the Doliones were intent on extermination. They would search every valley and follow every trail. They intended not only to kill the fighting men but to burn out every village and take every living being they found to sell into slavery. When they returned, there would be no stock of Gegeneis to breed and attack the city ever again.

  So much the safer Kyzikos would be for her, Eurydice thought, and set out to investigate the possibilities of earning a living there. She found that it would be possible. Several of the Dolione wounded that she had treated had survived. They had high praise for her skill and would recommend her. Instead of being grateful, Eurydice found herself wishing them sicker rather than better. She squashed down that unreasonable reaction. It was only that she did not wish to allow her hopes to rise too high, she told herself. After all, a few clients would not be enough; Kyzikos was a very expensive place to live.

  The thought voiced aloud with a brisk regret was refuted. Not so, said a sister of one of the recovering wounded. Beyond the marketplace, which was the best place to set up a booth for Healing, were houses in which she could find shelter at a reasonable cost. The kindly woman blinked at the flicker of fury Eurydice betrayed before she schooled herself to smiling, offering thanks, and saying she would go to the marketplace and see what she could find.

  What she found was all good and yet brought her nearer to weeping than to joy. She learned at once that the Gifted were not openly persecuted in Kyzikos. There were several booths and even two doors marked with signs that offered services that only Power could render. It seemed that Kyzikos was a safe place, at least as safe as any place outside of a temple was, for a person with a Gift. Feeling as if a mountain had settled on her chest, Eurydice prepared to test the final source of potential trouble—her own kind.

  Walking like the condemned approaching the scaffold, she went to the Argo and carried a blanket and the few supplies for physicking back to the market. In an empty space, she laid her blanket, took a seat cross-legged upon it, and began to cry her wares. “What you have lost, I can Find. Bring me your ills, and I will cure them.”

  No one shouted at her to be quiet. A few curious glances were cast at her from the other vendors in the area, but none were Gifted, and her neighbors did not seem to object to her presence. One even smiled at her, but he was a young man and his smile may not have been purely of welcome. She had no immediate response to her offer of service either. The burden on her lightened. Perhaps there were so many Gifted offering the same skills that she would get no clients. But before she could in good conscience feel she had tried, give up, and leave, she saw a tall, broad-shouldered man with a hard expression approaching. Eurydice prepared to snatch up her belongings and run away, but he did not loom over her with questions or orders. He sank down onto the blanket and asked, “You can Find?”

  She named a fee, took his hand and asked that he think upon what he had lost. A ring—it had been slipped from his finger by a woman and now lay knotted into the leather mattress strap in her bed. Eurydice opened her eyes, said she had found his ring, and held out her hand for the agreed-on fee. He dropped the coin into her cupped palm and she told him where it was, described the room and the woman. “My own wife,” he said, his mouth gone hard.

  He came back an hour later. Eurydice looked up almost hoping her skill had failed, but he gave her another small coin and told her her Finding had been exact, and she had saved him much future trouble. When he was gone, a woman with a veil covering most of her face came and sat on the blanket. She wanted to find a man.

  By the time the sun set, Eurydice had enough to buy a meal, enough to pay a little toward a week’s rent of a suitable room, but she was not hungry and felt too tired to look for a place to live. She went back to her blanket on the Argo. She was angry and grew angrier as the days passed, but her business remained adequate—she made enough to buy a selection of unguents and herbs and clean rags for bandages. One danger remained—the jealousy and greed of the other Gifted—but that, she learned, was controlled by the order of Kyzikos. No restraint of trade, not even one merchant upon another, was permitted. All who were threatened or molested would be heard by the scia-Kyzikos (there was another, a young man with old eyes) and retribution for their injuries would be levied. At the end of the second week, she had found a chamber in the house of a respectable widow, and she was beginning to take a little pleasure in her success.

  She had a little tent by the middle of the third week hung with the symbols for what she could do. The widow with whom she lodged had lent it to her for a small increase in her rent. Word of her skill at Finding had begun to spread, and she had clients enough to keep her in bed and board. There were other Healers, though not as Gifted as she was, but presently she was glad not to come in conflict with them. When she was better known, better established, she would challenge or, perhaps, join forces with the leading Healer in the city. He had the reputation of being a good man, and she guessed from what she had heard about his successes that, while he was a better herbalist than she, her Gift was far greater. She wondered about whether she dared expose herself to the envy of another Gifted or why she should want to do so, even to one reputed to be a good man. Then a shadow darkened the doorway. Eurydice did not bother to look up because she knew she would not be able to see the person except as a silhouette against the light.

  “Please drop the door cloth and sit,” she said, gesturing at the folded blanket opposite her. And when the tent flap was down and she sensed the client turning toward her, she added, “How may my Gift serve you?”

  For once unbeautiful, harsh with rage and anxiety, Orpheus’ voice asked, “What in all the levels of Tartarus did you mean by that message you left for me with Polyphemus? What do you think you are doing?”

  Eurydice’s heart stopped, then leapt and raced. She raised her head and met blue eyes, puzzled and hurt. Her hand twitched to rise toward him, but
she clenched it in her lap. What right had he to be hurt and puzzled? She had stated her position: as his woman she did not want him to go to war; that should have been enough, but she had added good sound reason—that he would be of no particular value to his leader or companions by accompanying them and that he might harm everyone if he were hurt and they were deprived of his Gift. And he had stated his: that he was indifferent to her desires and that he had equally little use for her reasons. Her message had not repeated the argument, however, merely said that she liked Kyzikos and had decided to stay there.

  “I am making my livelihood,” she said. “I do not believe I owe any debt to the Argo. I have paid my fare thus far by telling Jason the name of the man who knows the way to Colchis and the name of the city in which he lives. I no longer need to go to Colchis myself, so I will no longer burden the Argo with my presence. This is a fine city, a kind city that protects its Gifted. I wish to stay here.”

  “But I am responsible for you,” Orpheus protested. “How can I leave you in a place where you are an utter stranger, where you have no kin, not even companions who can speak for you?”

  “I can speak for myself,” Eurydice said, lowering her eyes to her clenched hands. “Would you not have left me alone if you died in the fighting against the Gegeneis?”

  There was a little silence, then Orpheus laughed softly, dropped to the blanket, and caught her into his arms. “Oh, Eurydice, you are a wonder among women! Only you would prepare to sustain yourself if I were lost to you. But it is not needful. I swear it is not. Oath-brothers assume any burden of one who is lost. If I were dead, Jason and every other man of the crew would combine to care for you just as they would set aside and bring back to my village my share of profit—if there should be any—from this voyage.” He laughed again. “I could not understand why you were angry when I said I must go with the others, but I do not blame you if you thought I was leaving you without succor.”

  She should have been furious at his assumption that she would allow herself to be handed, like an unwieldly parcel, to a new carrier when the first went lame. She should have pushed him away, told him to go back to his ship and his companions, that she did not need him or them, but such a flood of joy overtook her when he embraced her, when his face came alive with relief and his voice, beautiful again, murmured into her ear, that she went all boneless in his arms. He was stained from travel and he stank. He had come for her before he even bathed or changed his clothing. Suddenly the small satisfactions she had felt in establishing herself became totally irrelevant. Those, she now saw with painful clarity, were no more than scabbing over a hideous ulcer of loneliness. Orpheus’ anger and anxiety, his haste to find her, his assurances that he had never failed to consider her, all came together to Heal that sore.

  “I was angry,” she murmured, “but not because I feared to be left to fend for myself. I was angry because you would not listen to me, because you did not care that I feared for you.”

  He chuckled deep in his throat, hugged her tighter, and then pulled away far enough to look at her. “I was delighted that you feared for me, but that was sheer silliness. I was one man in a whole army. You said so yourself, that my presence was as unimportant as one drop in an ocean. Why then should I be the one hurt?”

  “Why not?” she snapped. “Do you mean to tell me that no one was hurt or killed? You could have been that one.”

  He laughed again. “But I was not.” Then he said more seriously, “Eurydice, like every other man of the crew, I gave my oath to Jason to stand by him until he found and won the golden fleece. You should be glad that I held by my word. A man who can set aside one oath—even for his woman—is likely to set aside another, as likely as not his oath to her. A man without honor is only a beast that walks on two legs.”

  She made an impatient sound. It was true and not true. She did not believe that a woman who held a man only by oath-bond was likely to be in a happy case, so honor had little effect on the tie of man to woman. Of course, a man of weak character was a bad bond for a woman. In this case, where she had been in no danger, perhaps to yield to her fears would have betokened a weakness of character, a need to grasp at an excuse to avoid peril. But she was quite certain that Orpheus had no desire to avoid peril; he had come with Jason precisely because he enjoyed adventure. Moreover, she had not the smallest doubt that Jason would gladly have excused him from the campaign. Jason had a very clear notion of Orpheus’ value, of how much more precious were his graceful hands playing the cithara than wielding a sword. For all she knew, Jason had offered to excuse him and he had insisted on going. So had Orpheus ignored her pleas and her reasoning out of honor or simply out of self-indulgence?

  She pushed at him, angry all over again, but when her lips parted to speak her thought, he bent his head and closed them with his own. In that moment, argument disappeared from her mind. The wall she almost always kept raised against the emotions of others lest she be whirled away and torn apart by all the joy and anguish, pain and pleasure, dullness and excitement of a thousand strangers thinned away. So close, so strong, his emotions blocked out all others. She felt his need of her, his joy in holding her. The arms she had set against his breast lost all their strength. She had great trouble pushing them upward until they rested on his shoulders and she could lock her hands behind his neck.

  “I thought of you,” he whispered, and his breath tickled her ear. Somehow, that sensation made her nipples rise and harden. “I sang to you.”

  One hand slid down her back, up again, caressed her nape. He kissed the ear into which he had been whispering, kissed the edge of her jaw, the edge of her mouth, and then her lips. He opened his mouth, slipped his tongue between her lips, gently, teasingly, then withdrew it in invitation for her to invade him. He stretched one arm around her back as far as he could reach and stroked the side of her breast with the tips of his fingers. Eurydice sighed, let her locked hands slip apart, let one hand slide down his back while the fingers of the other followed the line of his ear.

  “Are you willing, Eurydice?” he murmured.

  “I am,” she breathed.

  He tipped her backward to lie down on the blanket, one arm behind her, the hand carefully holding her head so that she would not bump it down too suddenly. The other hand ran down from her shoulder over her breast. She had pulled up his short tunic and found the top of the cleft between his buttocks. Against her thigh, his shaft was hot and hard. Her head touched the ground softly. Her legs spread—

  “Finder!” A woman’s voice shrilled with terror. “Finder, I have lost my child!”

  Orpheus jerked upright, Eurydice following him so swiftly that their heads bumped.

  “Finder!” the woman screamed, and thrust against the tent flap.

  Orpheus had dropped it when she bade him, but had not stopped to tie it shut. The woman’s push thrust it aside and she, expecting resistance and finding none, stumbled in, tripped on the blanket and fell atop Orpheus and Eurydice. In the ensuing disentanglement, all but the memory of their passion was quenched. Setting the sobbing woman upright, Orpheus rose to his feet.

  “Your need is greater than mine,” he said to her. “A child comes before all else.” And then to Eurydice, he said, “I will return to finish our business.”

  “Not before the sun goes down,” she said. “I, too, have promises to keep.”

  “Finder,” the woman cried, seizing her hands.

  Eurydice had an instant image of a very beautiful little boy, and as if his image had been a stone dropped into a pool, concentric ripples of searching moved out, out, whirled together into a new image. Eurydice’s eyes widened.

  “This is not good,” she breathed.

  “Dead?” the woman screeched.

  “No, but taken by a slaver.”

  “Who? Where?”

  The woman was climbing to her feet. Eurydice caught her wrist. “You will do the child no good by going there alone. They will deny you, drive you forth—and then, likely, since you have
found him once, they will kill him. Have you money? Does the scia-Kyzikos know you? We will need peacekeepers with us to take the child back.”

  “We? You will come with me?”

  “I have a line to him now. He cannot be hidden from me.”

  “Hurry,” the woman cried.

  “There is no special need for hurry,” Eurydice said, allowing her to rise and also getting to her feet. “The need is for men to seize back the child.”

  That took time. It was after sunset before Eurydice and her client made their way with a troop of peacekeepers to confront the slaver. They had had to take their case to many, to the sergeant of the peacekeeper guard post, to the captain of the guard and, finally, to scia-Kyzikos. Like all other traders, the slavers of Kyzikos had the support of the ruler, and the scia-Kyzikos was reluctant to accuse one on the word of an unknown stranger. Eurydice then said that Orpheus, the singer of Jason’s crew, would be her surety of honesty.

  That took more time. Orpheus was not on the Argo. He was furiously searching for Eurydice in the marketplace and he had to be traced and found. When he appeared, Eurydice reiterated her accusation and the scia-Kyzikos ordered a group of peacekeepers to seek the child. Slavers were supposed to buy or import their wares like any other merchant. Ordinarily, they did. The price of children was cheap in the stews of the city. But it had always been known that a child or two disappeared from families that would never think of selling their young ones, children of particular beauty or special talents. The scia-Kyzikos did not wish to annoy the slavers, but he did not wish a respectable woman to scream aloud to the entire city that he would not claim back her son, who had been stolen.

  The slaver confronted them bland-faced and calm, shaking his head. “She wishes to blame me. Likely the child was killed in the street owing to her neglect, and she is afraid to tell her husband.”

  “No!” the woman screamed.

  Eurydice detected that her client was sodden with a cold, grey guilt. The woman had lost the child by neglect, leaving him to play in the street while she dallied with a lover. That was none of Eurydice’s business, and to punish the woman, in this case, would bring a far more terrible punishment on the innocent child.