Firebirds Rising

by Sharyn November

  They must both have looked quite fretful, because her first words were, “Never worry, I have your mother’s letter.” She added as she touched her forehead in greeting and then patted their shoulders, “She didn’t say that you were bringing any more livestock.”

  “He’s very clever,” said Dri, “and I’ll keep him out of trouble. He’s very meek with other cats, they don’t mind him.”

  “Oh, we have no cats. Your cousins will be happy to see him. I suppose he sleeps on your bed. You will want to talk to Numa about that.” She relieved Kiffen of his huge pack, removed Dri’s smaller one from her shoulder with her other hand, and walked off down the northern road, leaving them to follow. Golly bumped his head under Dri’s chin, which was an improvement on his behavior of the previous day and night.

  The walk took perhaps as long as it would to go from Dri’s house to the far end of the Levar’s Park, but it was otherwise unlike any walk she had ever taken. The road was made of gravel, like the gardens at the Tichenese Embassy, except that their gravel was black and red and green and pure white, and this was a dusty gray. The land looked as flat as a griddle, but from time to time one’s legs would give notice that in fact the road was going up and then down and then up again, in a stealthy fashion.

  Dri did not realize that they were near the house until they were almost upon it. It was screened from the north and east by a triple row of mixed cedar trees, which Dri recognized, and leafy ones shaped like an elongated drop of water, which she did not. The house was made of cedarwood and gray and white stone, with a roof of cedar. It had no upstairs, and was very well supplied with windows. When Kiffen remarked on this, Mininu said, “Yes, this country has never been fortified. We have been the cause of many wars, but they all took place on the seas.”

  Mininu, who came from Ombaya, was their thin aunt. Their other aunt, their round aunt, their mother’s sister, was called Sinja, and Dri’s sister had of course been named after her.

  The elder Sinja came running out of the house, trailed by two people taller than she was and one much shorter. Mininu and Sinja were raising three children, two from Ombaya—the tall ones, a boy and a girl called Wari and Welo, respectively—and one from Liavek—the short one, a much younger girl who was called Numa.

  Dri had expected a great many farmhands, and not only cats but dogs. There were none of these, and this seemed a small family to do the work of a farm. They were all usually busy doing something or the other, and whenever Kiffen and Dri, who stayed together like each other’s shadow for the first few days, came across them, work was offered, but smilingly and offhandedly. Apples appeared in bins and goat’s milk in churns, and sometimes even cheese upon the table, without Dri’s being able to see that anybody had picked any apples or milked any goats.

  Fields of tall grass were mown and the grass gathered in cunning hillocks that, Wari explained proudly, would shed even the heaviest rain. But Dri had seen none of the family in the hayfield. The goats moved here and there, but nobody seemed to be telling them what to do. Then again, they were goats. The chickens were another matter, though. She had been shown how to feed the chickens that first night, but two mornings later she forgot and rushed out in a panic, followed by a mewing cat also with a point to make about his own late breakfast, and the chickens were pecking at corn that she had not scattered. She knew where her cousins and aunts had been all morning. Perhaps they worked all night, sneaking out of the children’s common sleeping room after their soft city cousins were asleep. Dri stayed awake as long as she could on the fourth night, but nobody left the room.

  Dri settled down insofar as she knew how to pump water for a bath and where the woodpile was, but she felt, on the whole, unsettled. There seemed to be nothing in the house to read but schoolbooks. She missed the library and the orderly progression of her work there. She even missed Mundri. When she sat or worked with her thin cousins, she felt like one of many nails made without much thought by a skilled smith, or a paper lantern of the cheaper sort that nobody had bothered to paint a special flower or character on. It was Kiffen with his round face and heavy shoulders who looked special. She wondered if she should be eating twice as much as usual, but that had never made any difference before.

  Besides, she hated the food. It was all animal stuff: chicken, eggs, chicken fat, egg fat for all she knew; milk and cheese and milk fat; sometimes goat, and of course goat fat. And it had no flavor to speak of other than its own fat animal flavor. Once they had a dish of lentils and she pounced on it with glee, only to find it coated with chicken fat and bits of meat, and quite inedible.

  Golly loved the food, and began to look rather round himself.

  In addition to being thin while eating fat, her cousins did not talk. This was the way Dri put it to herself. They did talk, really. That first evening at dinner, they exclaimed over Golly and asked his history and his habits; they asked after young Sinja and Melandin and their parents; they asked about Kiffen’s work and Dri’s work and what the railroad was like. They seemed to want only description, though. Dri and Kiffen’s energetic disagreement about the amount of money the Red Temple possesed elicited only a polite silence.

  Ending this silence none too soon for Dri, Mininu said, “Your mother’s letter was rather hurried. I see that the Red Temple is now without a leader.”

  “Well, of course Resh’s deputy Pitullio would—” began Kiffen.

  “I think it would be just as well,” said Mininu, “if this news were kept within the family for the time being. It will arrive from the City by a myriad of means soon enough, but I would prefer that nobody speak of it to anyone until one of us has heard it as gossip first.”

  “But we may whisper it at bedtime,” said Wari.

  “I think not for the present,” said Mininu.

  “May I ask one thing?” said Numa, the youngest cousin. Dri’s only memory of her was of a two-year-old screeching because she was afraid of the black dragonflies in the Saltmarsh, but she seemed steadier now.

  “If your question is kept nameless,” said Sinja the aunt.

  “Why did our cousins’ parents send them out of the City?”

  Dri was much interested, since she was the one whose life had been upended. She watched Sinja and Mininu exchange glances and then nods. How could they talk without talking?

  “A great leader, good or ill,” said Mininu after this silent communication was concluded, “is like the keystone of an arch. Remove her and stones will fall.”

  “Water always rolls downhill,” said Numa.

  “Very sensible, Numa,” said Sinja.

  “But how can you be prepared for that kind of surprise?” demanded Dri.

  Her aunts and cousins looked at her as if she had spoken in Ombayan—except that they knew Ombayan. Tichenese, perhaps. Kiffen said thoughtfully, “Really, you know, how can it be a surprise if it always happens?”

  “Well, silly,” said Dri, exasperated, “if it happens whenever there is an occasion for it to happen but there is not often an occasion.”

  “It’s better not to call names,” said Sinja, very kindly.

  Dri looked at Kiffen, who gave her a very slight shrug. Neither of them said anything else. There seemed a kind of resistance against speech in the room itself, so that to consider speaking was like pushing against a stuck door.

  They had arrived on a Luckday, and after almost a week of the relentless sameness of meals, Dri had begun to think that she would starve or survive on windfall apples and the occasional potato rescued from being boiled, mashed, and smothered in sour cream. Then Rainday came around. For breakfast, there was congee. Dri approached it warily, expecting a huge blob of butter or sour cream or chicken fat, but it was quite innocent of these embellishments. It was full of parsley, chives, and spinach rather than ginger, green onion, and seaweed, but she didn’t care. She devoured three bowlfuls, and Mininu looked at her thoughtfully.

  At lunch they had a stew of potatoes, green beans, carrots, and mushrooms, with garlic and bro
wn sauce. Dri wondered if she could save the leftovers under her bed and eat them all week. Brown sauce was very preserving, her mother said. Unfortunately, Golly liked it. At dinner they had sour cabbage soup with wheat dumplings. Sour cream was offered, but it was not assumed to be everybody’s favorite.

  She was trying to concoct a way to ask about the abrupt change of menu, and whether it might last a long, long time, without sounding snooty, judgmental, whiny, or spoiled, when Wari, the eldest, heaved a gigantic sigh and proclaimed, “How I hate Raindays!”

  Both aunts looked at him warningly; he pushed out his lower lip and, ostentatiously reaching for the bowl of sour cream, covered the surface of his soup with it. Welo rolled her eyes in a sisterly fashion.

  That seemed to settle that. In a normal family, Dri would have asked what was so special about Rainday, but here that would probably be done in sign language of some sort. She might raise her eyebrows, and perhaps one aunt or another would give her a little book for farm children, and the answer would be in the last chapter. This thought amused her so much that she laughed, and got two warning looks of her own.

  “I love Rainday,” she said calmly.

  “There, Wari, you see,” said Sinja.

  Wari rolled his eyes again. Dri bit her tongue on the remark that he wouldn’t see much for long if he kept doing that.

  She tried to repeat this witticism to Kiffen later, but Kiffen was proving a frail reed. Not only did he love the fat animal food, he very shortly vanished into this new family culture as if he had been born to it. Dri wondered if he would even want to come home with her. She caught him in the apple orchard that Rainday evening and asked him outright.

  “Do try not to be insane,” he said, an old family remark that cheered Dri quite a lot. “Of course I wouldn’t want to stay here always. It would be like one endless Festival Week—no proper work and rich food, day after day.”

  “And no proper talk,” said Dri wistfully.

  “Yes, truly, a fine meditative silence.”

  “There is nothing fine about it.”

  “Not being challenged to a duel every five seconds is fine.”

  “Do try not to be insane,” said Dri, but her heart was not in it.

  Kiffen said comfortingly, “I would like to be at my work this moment.”

  “Kiffen,” said Dri, and had to pause and breathe as if she had been running. She wanted to ask a question, but it was very hard. Finally she said, “I think that you know what happened to Resh, and I want you to tell me.”

  “I don’t precisely know,” said Kiffen. “I have an idea. One hears stories, you know, and perhaps I put them together in the wrong order. But Resh wanted the Red Temple to be first in Liavek. He wanted to drive the other temples out. When he was a little drunk, my captain said that Resh had given the orders that destroyed the Gold Temple. I think that perhaps he tried to drive out some faith or god that was stronger than he was.”

  “But, Kiffen! There is nothing one could do that would balance an act like that.” Dri looked up at the sky; she felt that it ought to be falling.

  “I don’t believe that we really understand others’ acts,” said Kiffen. “We only understand how those acts would be if we had done them ourselves. So you or I, we couldn’t balance a huge act like that. But we are not Resh.”

  “And Resh is dead,” said Dri. She thought of a dollhouse, a tall and imposing and richly furnished dollhouse, its rooftree upheld by the striving figures. Resh had ordered the destruction of the Gold Temple; the red figure, then, might hook its heel behind the ankle of the gold one, and then the house would fall on them both. What need of a stronger god to seek revenge when one could bring down all by oneself? She shivered.

  They were looking at each other, feeling at a loss, when they heard their names being called. Welo, who tended toward dreaminess, was trudging through the orchard, calling without bothering to look. Kiffen hailed her, and she looked startled. “It’s Rainday,” she said. “Come back to the house for the Affirmation.”

  She walked off again, and they followed after a moment. Dri said to her brother, “I wonder if the Twin Forces are here, too.”

  “The Twin Forces are everywhere. They hold up the world. They are in all of us.”

  “I wonder if they are in the Way of Herself.”

  “Of course.”

  “I think the Ombayans would say the Way of Herself was in the Twin Forces.”

  “They can say what they like,” said Kiffen.

  Dri glared at him. That was not a cooperative remark. It discouraged argument. He was ingesting more than the wrong food. The effort was great, but she said, as she would have said without a second thought at home, “I thought there were different gods in different places.”

  “There are,” said Kiffen briefly, “but the Twin Forces are above gods.”

  “There is no way to know that,” said Dri, who was not actually possessed of such firm opinions but could think of no better way to phrase her real question.

  “It’s obvious,” said her brother loftily.

  They had almost reached the house, and Wari was already holding the door open for them. This gesture looked polite but actually, Dri and Kiffen had privately agreed, indicated impatience. Dri said hurriedly, “We don’t know what they do on Rainday.”

  “If they don’t tell us, it’s their fault,” muttered Kiffen.

  This was not comforting. However, the Affirmation was brief and wordless. Dri and Kiffen went to stand with the cousins in the big room with windows on three sides where the weaving and reading were done. Mininu and Sinja had taken a red cloth from a wooden chest and opened the lid to reveal a collection of candles and cups stored in a carved tray made of dozens of small sections. They bowed to the children and to one another, lit candles, poured water into various vessels and finally onto the floor, and then lifted a large wooden cup between them and drank from it one after the other. Sinja brought the goblet to Wari; he drank and passed it to Welo, who drank and passed it to Numa; and so it came finally to Kiffen, who sipped cautiously and gave Dri a reassuring wink along with the goblet.

  Dri took a cautious sip of her own and almost gasped. The water was cold and had a complicated flowery flavor. The room was stuffy and warm, and she would have liked to gulp from the goblet, but nobody else had. So she refrained.

  People separated to their various occupations without speaking, but Dri lingered in the big room while Sinja briskly packed everything into the trunk again. She had never participated in a religious ritual before and wanted to think about it. The Red Temple did have rituals involving the Twin Forces, but Atliae had told her that she was not ready for the large public ones, let alone anything smaller and more secret. This first experience had been so everyday and matter-of-fact, except for the shock of the water.

  “I hope that you have something to do, Dri,” said Sinja.

  This meant, “Try not to be idle,” but it was also an inquiry into her well-being.

  “I was going to read some history while the light lasts,” said Dri. Her cousins had settled on the idea that the library she worked in was for historians, and they seemed concerned that she would forget her knowledge if not gently nagged.

  “Good, good. There are plenty of candles,” said Sinja, and went out. She had not wiped up the spilled water.

  Dri walked over to the place where Mininu and Sinja had been standing. The water had reached out a long finger toward the south, and another to the east. Dri was surprised. She took from her pocket a marble that she kept in case Golly should want more amusement than he could provide for himself. She bent and put the marble on the polished wide board next to the pool of water. It rolled north and fetched up under Sinja’s loom. Having done this, Dri was not sure what she had discovered. After a moment she got the largest of the history books and studied the map in the middle of it. Ombaya was south of the plains the farm stood on, and Liavek was to the east. Dri retrieved Golly’s marble and went to get herself a drink of ordinary water fr
om the pump in the kitchen.

  Then she went about the house, with the pewter cup of ordinary water in her hand. In all the rooms that she entered, the water from the pump that she poured out of the pewter cup spread slowly or ran eagerly in the same direction as the marble rolled. The floors of the house were like the land about it; they seemed flat but were really made of a great many small ups and downs. Golly appeared, stretching, about halfway through her activities, and aside from one moment when he rolled in the water and was affronted, he was useful in that he could always find the marble and bat it back to the center of the room. His mishap also made her think of what would happen if anybody slipped on the water she had left, so she went about wiping up all the pools she had left behind. The pool of water from the Affirmation had somehow disappeared on its own.

  She was obliged to omit the kitchen and the room where all the children slept from her roster, since that was where people were in the evenings. She dealt with the sleeping room the next morning by being late to breakfast, but she despaired of the kitchen’s ever being empty. Someone was almost always cooking something or making bread or preserving fruit or using the large table for carving or writing.

  Her natural impulse in such a puzzlement would have been to consult Kiffen, but she felt somewhat hurt over their conversation in the orchard. A little pondering, however, provided her with a very likely idea of what he would have suggested.

  So that night she kept herself awake by reciting songs and poems to herself, and when her supply of these ran dry, by naming all the rivers and mountains in and around Liavek. Then she tried to list all the Levars of Liavek, and their Regents, where those had been necessary. Her knowledge was still too imperfect to let her make much of a list, so she considered instead her scheme to find out which way water ran in all the rooms of the house. She thought that perhaps she had been driven to action because it was so hard to simply ask questions in this house. But there was something homelike, too, in seeing what water would do, even if she had no family members to help her.