Firebirds Rising

by Sharyn November

  “Soldiers? Back there? How long ago?”

  “They’re up ahead of us,” Onion said. “We have to stop now.”

  Mik was looking up at him.

  “He saw soldiers?” the other man said.

  “Naw,” said the first man. Onion could see he didn’t know whether to be angry or whether to laugh. “The fucking kid’s making things up. Pretending he sees things. Hey, maybe he’s a wizard of Perfil! Lucky us, we got a wizard on the train!”

  “I’m not a wizard,” Onion said. Halsa snorted in agreement. “But I know things. If you don’t stop the train, everyone will die.”

  Both men stared at him. Then the first said angrily, “Get out of here, you. And don’t go talking to people like that or we’ll throw you in the boiler.”

  “Okay,” Onion said “Come on, Mik.”

  Wait, Halsa said. What are you doing? You have to make them understand. Do you want to be dead? Do you think you can prove something to me by being dead?

  Onion put Mik on his shoulders. I’m sorry, he said to Halsa. But it’s no good. Maybe you should just go away. Wake up. Catch fish. Fetch water for the wizards of Perfil.

  The pain in Halsa’s stomach was sharper, as if someone were stabbing her. When she put her hand down, she had hold of the wooden doll.

  What’s that? Onion said.

  Nothing, Halsa said. Something I found in the swamp. I said I would give it to the wizard, but I won’t! Here, you take it!

  She thrust it at Onion. It went all the way through him. It was an uncomfortable feeling, even though it wasn’t really there. Halsa, he said. He put Mik down.

  Take it! she said. Here! Take it now!

  The train was roaring. Onion knew where they were; he recognized the way the light looked. Someone was telling a joke in the front of the train, and in a minute a woman would laugh. It would be a lot brighter in a minute. He put his hand up to stop the thing that Halsa was stabbing him with and something smacked against his palm. His fingers brushed Halsa’s fingers.

  It was a wooden doll with a sharp little nose. There was a nose on the back of its head, too. Oh, take it! Halsa said. Something was pouring out of her, through the doll, into Onion. Onion fell back against a woman holding a birdcage on her lap. “Get off!” the woman said. It hurt. The stuff pouring out of Halsa felt like life, as if the doll was pulling out her life like a skein of heavy, sodden, black wool. It hurt Onion, too. Black stuff poured and poured through the doll, into him, until there was no space for Onion, no space to breathe or think or see. The black stuff welled up in his throat, pressed behind his eyes. “Halsa,” he said, “let go!”

  The woman with the birdcage said, “What’s wrong with him?”

  Mik said, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

  The light changed. Onion, Halsa said, and let go of the doll. He staggered backward. The tracks beneath the train were singing tara-ta tara-ta ta-rata-ta. Onion’s nose was full of swamp water and coal and metal and magic. “No,” Onion said. He threw the doll at the woman holding the birdcage and pushed Mik down on the floor. “No,” Onion said again, louder. People were staring at him. The woman who’d been laughing at the joke had stopped laughing. Onion covered Mik with his body. The light grew brighter and blacker, all at once.

  “Onion!” Halsa said. But she couldn’t see him anymore. She was awake in the cubby beneath the stair. The doll was gone.

  Halsa had seen men coming home from the war. Some of them had been blinded. Some had lost a hand or an arm. She’d seen one man wrapped in lengths of cloth and propped up in a dogcart that his young daughter pulled on a rope. He’d had no legs, no arms. When people looked at him, he cursed them. There was another man who ran a cockpit in Larch. He came back from the war and paid a man to carve him a leg out of knotty pine. At first he was unsteady on the pine leg, trying to find his balance again. It had been funny to watch him chase after his cocks, like watching a windup toy. By the time the army came through Larch again, though, he could run as fast as anyone.

  It felt as if half of her had died on the train in the mountains. Her ears rang. She couldn’t find her balance. It was as if a part of her had been cut away, as if she were blind. The part of her that knew things, saw things, wasn’t there anymore. She went about all day in a miserable deafening fog.

  She brought water up the stairs and she put mud on her arms and legs. She caught fish, because Onion had said that she ought to catch fish. Late in the afternoon, she looked and saw Tolcet sitting beside her on the pier.

  “You shouldn’t have bought me,” she said. “You should have bought Onion. He wanted to come with you. I’m bad-tempered and unkind and I have no good opinion of the wizards of Perfil.”

  “Of whom do you have a low opinion? Yourself or the wizards of Perfil?” Tolcet asked.

  “How can you serve them?” Halsa said. “How can you serve men and women who hide in towers and do nothing to help people who need help? What good is magic if it doesn’t serve anyone?”

  “These are dangerous times,” Tolcet said. “For wizards as well as for children.”

  “Dangerous times! Hard times! Bad times,” Halsa said. “Things have been bad since the day I was born. Why do I see things and know things, when there’s nothing I can do to stop them? When will there be better times?”

  “What do you see?” Tolcet said. He took Halsa’s chin in his hand and tilted her head this way and that, as if her head were a glass ball that he could see inside. He put his hand on her head and smoothed her hair as if she were his own child. Halsa closed her eyes. Misery welled up inside her.

  “I don’t see anything,” she said. “It feels like someone wrapped me in a wool blanket and beat me and left me in the dark. Is this what it feels like not to see anything? Did the wizards of Perfil do this to me?”

  “Is it better or worse?” Tolcet said.

  “Worse,” Halsa said. “No. Better. I don’t know. What am I to do? What am I to be?”

  “You are a servant of the wizards of Perfil,” Tolcet said. “Be patient. All things may yet be well.”

  Halsa said nothing. What was there to say?

  She climbed up and down the stairs of the wizard’s tower, carrying water, toasted bread and cheese, little things that she found in the swamp. The door at the top of the stairs was never open. She couldn’t see through it. No one spoke to her, although she sat there sometimes, holding her breath so that the wizard would think she had gone away again. But the wizard wouldn’t be fooled so easily. Tolcet went up the stairs, too, and perhaps the wizard admitted him. Halsa didn’t know.

  Essa and Burd and the other children were kind to her, as if they knew that she had been broken. She knew that she wouldn’t have been kind to them if their situations had been reversed. But perhaps they knew that, too. The two women and the skinny man kept their distance. She didn’t even know their names. They disappeared on errands and came back again and disappeared into the towers.

  Once, when she was coming back from the pier with a bucket of fish, there was a dragon on the path. It wasn’t very big, only the size of a mastiff. But it gazed at her with wicked, jeweled eyes. She couldn’t get past it. It would eat her, and that would be that. It was almost a relief. She put the bucket down and stood waiting to be eaten. But then Essa was there, holding a stick. She hit the dragon on its head, once, twice, and then gave it a kick for good measure. “Go on, you!” Essa said. The dragon went, giving Halsa one last reproachful look. Essa picked up the bucket of fish. “You have to be firm with them,” she said. “Otherwise they get inside your head and make you feel as if you deserve to be eaten. They’re too lazy to eat anything that puts up a fight.”

  Halsa shook off a last, wistful regret, almost sorry not to have been eaten. It was like waking up from a dream, something beautiful and noble and sad and utterly untrue. “Thank you,” she said to Essa. Her knees were trembling.

  “The bigger ones stay away from the meadow,” Essa said. “It’s the smaller ones who get curious ab
out the wizards of Perfil. And by ‘curious,’ what I really mean is hungry. Dragons eat the things that they’re curious about. Come on, let’s go for a swim.”

  Sometimes Essa or one of the others would tell Halsa stories about the wizards of Perfil. Most of the stories were silly, or plainly untrue. The children sounded almost indulgent, as if they found their masters more amusing than frightful. There were other stories, sad stories about long-ago wizards who had fought great battles or gone on long journeys. Wizards who had perished by treachery or been imprisoned by ones they’d thought friends.

  Tolcet carved her a comb. She found frogs whose backs were marked with strange mathematical formulas, and put them in a bucket and took them to the top of the tower. She caught a mole with eyes like pinpricks and a nose like a fleshy pink hand. She found the hilt of a sword, a coin with a hole in it, the outgrown carapace of a dragon, small as a badger and almost weightless, but hard, too. When she cleaned off the mud that covered it, it shone dully, like a candlestick. She took all of these up the stairs. She couldn’t tell whether the things she found had any meaning. But she took a small, private pleasure in finding them nevertheless.

  The mole had come back down the stairs again, fast, wriggly, and furtive. The frogs were still in the bucket, making their gloomy pronouncements, when she had returned with the wizard’s dinner. But other things disappeared behind the wizard of Perfil’s door.

  The thing that Tolcet had called Halsa’s gift came back, a little at a time. Once again, she became aware of the wizards in their towers, and of how they watched her. There was something else, too. It sat beside her, sometimes, while she was fishing, or when she rowed out in the abandoned coracle Tolcet helped her to repair. She thought she knew who, or what, it was. It was the part of Onion that he’d learned to send out. It was what was left of him: shadowy, thin, and silent. It wouldn’t talk to her. It only watched. At night, it stood beside her pallet and watched her sleep. She was glad it was there. To be haunted was a kind of comfort.

  She helped Tolcet repair a part of the wizard’s tower where the stones were loose in their mortar. She learned how to make paper out of rushes and bark. Apparently wizards needed a great deal of paper. Tolcet began to teach her how to read.

  One afternoon when she came back from fishing, all of the wizard’s servants were standing in a circle. There was a leveret motionless as a stone in the middle of the circle. Onion’s ghost crouched down with the other children. So Halsa stood and watched, too. Something was pouring back and forth between the leveret and the servants of the wizards of Perfil. It was the same as it had been for Halsa and Onion, when she’d given him the two-faced doll. The leveret’s sides rose and fell. Its eyes were glassy and dark and knowing. Its fur bristled with magic.

  “Who is it?” Halsa said to Burd. “Is it a wizard of Perfil?”

  “Who?” Burd said. He didn’t take his eyes off the leveret. “No, not a wizard. It’s a hare. Just a hare. It came out of the marsh.”

  “But,” Halsa said. “But I can feel it. I can almost hear what it’s saying.”

  Burd looked at her. Essa looked, too. “Everything speaks,” he said, speaking slowly, as if to a child. “Listen, Halsa.”

  There was something about the way Burd and Essa were looking at her, as if it were an invitation, as if they were asking her to look inside their heads, to see what they were thinking. The others were watching, too, watching Halsa now, instead of the leveret. Halsa took a step back. “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t hear anything.”

  She went to fetch water. When she came out of the tower, Burd and Essa and the other children weren’t there. Leverets dashed between towers, leaping over one another, tussling in midair. Onion sat on Tolcet’s throne, watching and laughing silently. She didn’t think she’d seen Onion laugh since the death of his mother. It made her feel strange to know that a dead boy could be so joyful.

  The next day Halsa found an injured fox kit in the briar. It snapped at her when she tried to free it and the briars tore her hand. There was a tear in its belly and she could see a shiny gray loop of intestine. She tore off a piece of her shirt and wrapped it around the fox kit. She put the kit in her pocket. She ran all the way back to the wizard’s tower, all the way up the steps. She didn’t count them. She didn’t stop to rest. Onion followed her, quick as a shadow.

  When she reached the door at the top of the stairs, she knocked hard. No one answered.

  “Wizard!” she said.

  No one answered.

  “Please help me,” she said. She lifted the fox kit out of her pocket and sat down on the steps with it swaddled in her lap. It didn’t try to bite her. It needed all its energy for dying. Onion sat next to her. He stroked the kit’s throat.

  “Please,” Halsa said again. “Please don’t let it die. Please do something.”

  She could feel the wizard of Perfil, standing next to the door. The wizard put a hand out, as if—at last—the door might open. She saw that the wizard loved foxes and all the wild marsh things. But the wizard said nothing. The wizard didn’t love Halsa. The door didn’t open.

  “Help me,” Halsa said one more time. She felt that dreadful black pull again, just as it had been on the train with Onion. It was as if the wizard were yanking at her shoulder, shaking her in a stony, black rage. How dare someone like Halsa ask a wizard for help. Onion was shaking her, too. Where Onion’s hand gripped her, Halsa could feel stuff pouring through her and out of her. She could feel the kit, feel the place where its stomach had torn open. She could feel its heart pumping blood, its panic and fear and the life that was spilling out of it. Magic flowed up and down the stairs of the tower. The wizard of Perfil was winding it up like a skein of black, tarry wool, and then letting it go again. It poured through Halsa and Onion and the fox kit until Halsa thought she would die.

  “Please,” she said, and what she meant this time was stop. It would kill her. And then she was empty again. The magic had gone through her and there was nothing left of it or her. Her bones had been turned into jelly. The fox kit began to struggle, clawing at her. When she unwrapped it, it sank its teeth into her wrist and then ran down the stairs as if it had never been dying at all.

  Halsa stood up. Onion was gone, but she could still feel the wizard standing there on the other side of the door. “Thank you,” she said. She followed the fox kit down the stairs.

  The next morning she woke and found Onion lying on the pallet beside her. He seemed nearer, somehow, this time. As if he weren’t entirely dead. Halsa felt that if she tried to speak to him, he would answer. But she was afraid of what he would say.

  Essa saw Onion, too. “You have a shadow,” she said.

  “His name is Onion,” Halsa said.

  “Help me with this,” Essa said. Someone had cut lengths of bamboo. Essa was fixing them in the ground, using a mixture of rocks and mud to keep them upright. Burd and some of the other children wove rushes through the bamboo, making walls, Halsa saw.

  “What are we doing?” Halsa asked.

  “There is an army coming.” Burd said. “To burn down the town of Perfil. Tolcet went to warn them.”

  “What will happen?” Halsa said. “Will the wizards protect the town?”

  Essa laid another bamboo pole across the tops of the two upright poles. She said, “They can come to the marshes, if they want to, and take refuge. The army won’t come here. They’re afraid of the wizards.”

  “Afraid of the wizards!” Halsa said. “Why? The wizards are cowards and fools. Why won’t they save Perfil?”

  “Go ask them yourself,” Essa said. “If you’re brave enough.”

  “Halsa?” Onion said. Halsa looked away from Essa’s steady gaze. For a moment there were two Onions. One was the shadowy ghost from the train, close enough to touch. The second Onion stood beside the cooking fire. He was filthy, skinny, and real. Shadow-Onion guttered and then was gone.

  “Onion?” Halsa said.

  “I came out of the mountains,” Onion sai
d. “Five days ago, I think. I didn’t know where I was going, except that I could see you. Here. I walked and walked and you were with me and I was with you.”

  “Where are Mik and Bonti?” Halsa said. “Where’s Mother?”

  “There were two women on the train with us. They were rich. They’ve promised to take care of Mik and Bonti. They will. I know they will. They were going to Qual. When you gave me the doll, Halsa, you saved the train. We could see the explosion, but we passed through it. The tracks were destroyed and there were clouds and clouds of black smoke and fire, but nothing touched the train. We saved everyone.”

  “Where’s Mother?” Halsa said again. But she already knew. Onion was silent. The train stopped beside a narrow stream to take on water. There was an ambush. Soldiers. There was a bottle with water leaking out of it. Halsa’s mother had dropped it. There was an arrow sticking out of her back.

  Onion said, “I’m sorry, Halsa. Everyone was afraid of me, because of how the train had been saved. Because I knew that there was going to be an explosion. Because I didn’t know about the ambush and people died. So I got off the train.”

  “Here,” Burd said to Onion. He gave him a bowl of porridge. “No, eat it slowly. There’s plenty more.”

  Onion said with his mouth full, “Where are the wizards of Perfil?”

  Halsa began to laugh. She laughed until her sides ached and until Onion stared at her and until Essa came over and shook her. “We don’t have time for this,” Essa said. “Take that boy and find him somewhere to lie down. He’s exhausted.”

  “Come on,” Halsa said to Onion. “You can sleep in my bed. Or if you’d rather, you can go knock on the door at the top of the tower and ask the wizard of Perfil if you can have his bed.”

  She showed Onion the cubby under the stairs and he lay down on it. “You’re dirty,” she said. “You’ll get the sheets dirty.”

  “I’m sorry,” Onion said.

  “It’s fine,” Halsa said. “We can wash them later. There’s plenty of water here. Are you still hungry? Do you need anything?”