Phoenix and Ashes em-4

by Mercedes Lackey

  He looked so sad; there were so many lines in his brow that only unhappiness and pain could have put there.

  In fact, he looked so very vulnerable that she began to feel uncomfortable about watching him like this; it seemed a violation of his privacy.

  She began to look around, feeling more and more uncomfortable. And that was when she saw—Them.

  Horrible, ugly, deformed little gnomes.

  She could tell, just by the sickly yellow-brown shimmer around them, that they were not something that most people would see. So they must be Elementals. They ignored her completely, concentrating avidly on Reggie, as if he was something tasty, and they were ravenous.

  They had mouths full of nasty, yellowed, pointed teeth, tiny eyes like black beads, and they drooled. No two of them were alike, but they all looked misshapen, and all were colors that just seemed unhealthy.

  They stood on the edge of the meadow, just under the trees, skulking in the underbrush, and as she stood up, slowly, she saw that they had formed into a rough circle, completely surrounding the place where Reggie was sleeping.

  The sight of them absolutely infuriated her, for no reason that she could name, except perhaps that these evil little creatures were clearly ganging up on a sleeping, helpless man.

  She stood up, and quick as a thought, cast a Fire shield around both of them.

  That certainly got their attention. The expressions on their faces changed abruptly from the sort you might see on the face of a schoolyard bully, to startled alarm and shock.

  Now they looked at her—and she glared back. Can I call a Salamander here? Now? Without a physical fire around? She didn't think she dared try anything larger and more powerful, but she didn't know if the Salamanders would answer her here, either—

  Nothing ventured, nothing gained. She sketched the proper signs in the air, and concentrated, not commanding, but entreating. The last thing she wanted to do now was to anger an Elemental by commanding it. Not when she was so new to this sort of thing.

  To her amazement and delight, she was answered immediately, and not by one, but by a bevy of the fiery little creatures, who appeared within the shield as she had specified, and swarmed all over her, twining around her ankles, her arms, around her head and neck like so many fiery ferrets. And then, suddenly, they all stopped moving. And their heads moved as one, as they stared at the evil gnomes ringing the meadow.

  They hissed; it sounded like a hundred steam-kettles, and there was absolutely no doubt that whatever those things were, the Salamanders hated them on sight.

  "Go!" she whispered. "Get them!" And the Salamanders flowed off her, surging across the perimeter of the shield, and heading for the gnomes at a speed that made her blink.

  The gnomes apparently did not intend to wait around to see what the Salamanders could do to them. They made no sound, or at least, no sound that Eleanor could hear, but they turned with looks of frantic fear and began swimming into the turf.

  It wasn't digging, because the ground remained physically undisturbed, without so much as a blade of grass being displaced, and the motions they made reminded her far more of swimming than of digging. But there was no doubt that they were trying to escape the Salamanders, and when one of her Elementals caught up with one of the gnomes that was a little too slow, she saw exactly why.

  The Salamander writhed around the gnome with blinding speed; there was a "pop" like a champagne cork, and a puff of muddy brown smoke, and the gnome was gone.

  No more than a couple of the gnomes were too tardy to escape, however. The rest were under the turf by the time the Salamanders reached them.

  The Salamanders surged around the periphery of the meadow like terriers hunting for rats, but the vast majority of the gnomes had escaped, and the Salamanders didn't seem able to follow them underground. Finally they gave up, and flowed back to her, winding around her again until she giggled under her breath, clearly wanting to be told how clever and brave they had been. She obliged them, though keeping to whispers, not wanting to awaken poor Reggie. Finally they seemed content with the praise, and she sensed they were ready to be dismissed. With a wave of her hand and the proper glyph she obliged them, and they dispersed, fading into the sunlight, leaving nothing of themselves behind but the faintest of warmth around her ankles and wrists.

  Which left her still with the unanswered question of what to do about Reggie. Finally she dispersed the shield, picked up her basket and walked to edge of the meadow. Once there, she did the only thing she could think of. She began to whistle, and saunter along as if she had only just arrived.

  As she had hoped, his head popped up immediately; eyes a little startled, but she ignored that. "Hullo!" she called, waving her hand. "I've brought some nice things for tea, if you want some!"

  "And I've brought ginger-beer," was his reply, as he sat up, shaking his head, and rubbing at his eyes. "Hang if I didn't doze off—must've been the sun, makes a chap sleepy."

  She paced up to him as he stood up and took the basket from her. "I say," he said, a little shyly. "I'm awfully glad you came. I've been here nearly every day, hoping you would."

  It was her turn to blush and feel shy. "It's hard for me to—to get away—I have to work, you see—" she managed, around her stepmother's prohibitions. "Perhaps you shouldn't waste your time."

  "It's my time to waste, isn't it?" he retorted, and softened the words with a smile. "Besides, this is probably exactly what the medical johnnies have in mind for me, dozing out in meadows and what-all. They'd probably be perfectly happy about it. In fact, if it will make you feel any better, I'll write one of 'em and ask her to write out a prescription for just that. Before I came out here she was threatening to descend on Longacre to make sure I rested; I'm sure she'd be pleased to find out I had a reason to want to."

  Her smile faltered a little. "She?" she replied. "A lady-doctor?"

  Of course, and a lady-doctor would be just the sort of woman he'd be fascinated by; able to stand up for herself and clever, and able to talk to him about all manner of things—

  "Oh, yes, the only one I really know personally, Doctor Maya Scott," he said happily, completely oblivious to the fact that she had gone quiet. "Married to a friend of mine; capital wench, and does she know her business! If there were any justice, she'd be head of surgery at least, maybe head of an entire hospital." He shook his head, as she belatedly reacted to the words "married to a friend of mine" and brightened again. "Well, maybe she doesn't want that, come to think of it. Can't say I would."

  "If she is a really good doctor, she probably doesn't want to be made head of anything, so long as she's left to do what she feels is right, and that she needs to do," Eleanor replied, thinking as she spoke. "It seems to me that taking a good doctor and making her into a—a glorified clerk—isn't the sort of thing that a good doctor would want." "You probably have something there," Reggie said, with a nod. He patted the blanket. "Well, you're here now and I'm glad you could get away. Come sit down and we'll have our tea. What have you been doing with yourself all this time?"

  "Work," she replied truthfully. "Not at all glamorous. Servant's work, to tell the truth." That last was pulled out of her, almost unwillingly, but she felt she owed it to him.

  He reached into the basket and handed her a sandwich without faltering. "Our good vicar would tell you that there's no shame in an honest day's labor," he replied. "And I'd second him. We got all sorts in our air-wing. Not just the mechanics and the orderlies, either—truth is, I never saw where being a cockney guttersnipe or a Yankee cowboy made a fellow a worse pilot, or being a duke's son made him a better one. Opposite, more often than not, in fact." He bit hungrily into his sandwich, cutting anything else he was going to say short, and she nibbled on hers to keep from having to respond. It was a rather astonishing thing for him to have said; he certainly wouldn't have felt that way before he went off to war.

  Yes, and he's been spending all his time down at The Broom, and not at the Broom Hall Inn, hasn't he? she answer
ed herself.

  "Did you meet a lot of Americans?" she asked, seizing on his last statement as a way to draw him out a little more.

  "More Canadians, which aren't quite the same thing." He ate the last few bites of his sandwich neatly, then uncorked a bottle of ginger beer and handed it to her, before taking one from his rucksack for himself. "The Canadians were—quieter. Didn't seem so intent on making a rowdy reputation for themselves. Mind you, the Australians are at least as loud as the Yanks. Only ever met a few of the Yanks, and they were all cut of the same cloth—right out of a Wild West show, tall, loud, rough. Good lads, but seemed determined that they were going to show all of us that they were larger than life."

  She laughed a little at his quizzical expression. "Maybe they only thought they had to live up to what's written in their novels?" she suggested. "And the only novels I've ever heard of that had Canadians in them were all about the mounted police, not about cowboys and outlaws."

  "Which came first, the novel or the stereotype?" He grinned and shook his head. "Well, if I could answer that, I'd be a wiser man than I am. All I can tell you is that the Yanks fly like they're trying to ride a wild horse, all seat and no science. It makes them either brilliant, or cracks them up, and nothing in between. The Huns are all science and no seat—"

  "And the French?" she prompted.

  "Ah, the French. Science with style, and a great deal of attitude." He nodded wisely. "They fly like their women dress. They take a little bit of nothing and make everything out of it, throw themselves at impossible targets and often as not, pull the trick off on the basis of sheer savoir faire. Then when you try and congratulate or commiserate with them, you get the same answer. 'C'est la vie, c'est la. guerre,' and then they beg a cigarette off you and make off with the whole pack, and you end up feeling privileged they took your last fag-end." He shook his head again, chuckling.

  She smiled. He seemed easier talking about the war and flying today than he had been the last time she'd seen him. But she didn't want to press things too hard, so she asked him what he had been doing since they'd last met.

  He sighed. "Oh, being horribly lord-of-the-manor. Meeting my tenant farmers. Looking at alternatives to some of what we've been raising—things that won't need as much labor. Going over the books with my estate manager. Mater didn't bother; mention the accounts to her and she flaps her hands and looks a bit faint."

  "Poor thing," Eleanor said, feelingly. "I hate accounting. I keep thinking I've put numbers in all the wrong columns, even when I haven't."

  "Well, she would do just that and never know it, and that's a fact." He set his empty ginger-beer bottle down, and rummaged in the basket inquisitively. "I say! Tea-cakes!"

  "They're from a tin," she warned.

  "That's the only kind we could get, over there," he replied. "Wouldn't remember what a proper one tasted like. We were always starved for sweets, on account of it being so plaguey cold and never really able to get properly warm except during summer. All tents do is keep off the rain—and sometimes not even that." "Well, have my share," she told him generously. The rest of the afternoon went by much as the first had; in inconsequential chatter. Any time he started to run dry of inconsequentials, she prompted him with something else light. Somehow she knew that this was what he needed. When he talked about the war, he shouldn't be talking about the war, itself, but about things on the periphery. And above all, she was not going to ask him about fighting.

  Books, though—that was a safe enough topic. And he had read an astonishing variety. It seemed that once someone was done with whatever volume had been sent him by friends, lover, or relatives, if it didn't have sentimental value, it became common property. A surprising amount of poetry ended up making the rounds of the barracks—somehow he had ended up memorizing a great deal of it, and without too much coaxing she got him to recite quite a bit of it. It wasn't too much of a surprise that he found Kipling to his taste; when he recited "The Bridge-Guard at Karoo" she could almost see the scene played out in front of her, the sound and lights of the train coming out of the hot, dark silence of the desert night, the men on their solitary, isolated duty grasping desperately for the few moments of civilization they were allowed, and then the train moving on again, leaving them—"few, forgotten, and lonely"—to their thankless post.

  She thought that he could see it, too. Perhaps that was why he recited it so feelingly.

  Then he had her in stitches as he related the rather improbable tales found in some of the American dime novels that had been left with his air-wing.

  "How can anyone take any of that seriously?" she gasped, after a particularly funny confrontation between the hero and an entire tribe of Red Indians, complicated by a buffalo stampede and a raid by the James Gang. It probably hadn't been intended to be funny, at least not by the original author, but it was so utterly impossible that it ended up being a parody of itself.

  "I have had men swear solemnly to me that such things, if they hadn't happened to them, personally, had certainly happened to a friend of a friend, or a distant cousin, or some such connection," Reggie replied, as she held her aching side. "Great tellers of tall tales, are the Yanks. Even the ones who never got farther west than New York City in their lives seemed to think they should be cowboys."

  She looked down at her rosemary sprig, and saw with disappointment that it was starting to wilt. "Oh, bother," she said aloud. "Reggie, I would so like to stay here until suppertime—"

  "No, no—I quite understand. Stolen hours, and all that." He said it with surface lightness, but she saw the quickly veiled disappointment, and it gave her a little thrill to realize that he had enjoyed being with her, and he wanted her to stay.

  "I have to go," she said, honestly. "I don't have a choice. I can be here tomorrow, but after that—I can't tell you when the next time I'll be able to get away will be."

  She was packing up the basket as she spoke. They both reached for the same item as she finished the sentence; she flushed, and pulled back her hand. He placed the saucer in the basket, and said, "If I had my way, you'd be a lady of leisure—but I haven't been getting my way very often lately."

  "I don't think any of us have been," she replied, again truthfully. "So we muddle through however we can. Tomorrow?"

  "Tomorrow," he pledged.

  She couldn't help herself; she looked back twice as she trudged away, and each time he was watching her, and when he saw her looking, he lifted his hand to wave.

  She carried that image with her all the way home.

  Reggie decided not to go down to the pub tonight; he returned to Longacre feeling more alive than he had in a long time, even though his nap on the cold ground had made his knee ache abominably. He left the motor at the stables and limped his way up to the main house, entering by the terrace-door as the sun began to set, only to find his mother waiting for him in the sitting-room with a letter in her hand, and her father beside her with a scowl on his face.

  "Reggie, did you invite Brigadier Mann here to visit?" she asked abruptly, before he could even so much as greet her.

  Ah. That's what this is all about. I did not ask the king her father for permission to bring a guest here.

  "As a matter of fact, yes, I did," he replied, "I am the head of this household; he wrote to ask if he could come for a visit and see how I am doing, and I of course was delighted to invite him."

  His grandfather bristled all over at that. "Now you see here, you young pup—"

  "No, Grandfather, you see here," he interrupted, throttling down an irrational fury that was all the worse because his good mood of the afternoon had been spoiled entirely. "It was all very well for you to play at being the head of this house while I was away, but I'm back now, and I'm perfectly entitled to invite one of father's oldest friends for a visit if I choose."

  "And put more work on your mother!" the old man snarled.

  Well, that was the feeblest of feeble excuses. "Oh, please," he snorted. "There is a house full of servants here for
the three of us, and what is more, I can distinctly recall mother entertaining forty guests for the better part of three weeks during the hunting season with hardly more staff. Are you suggesting she has suddenly become such a ninny-hammer that she can't arrange for an extra plate at meals or bear the conversation of one more old man?"

  "Please," his mother said in distress, putting the letter down as if it had burned her, "don't argue."

  "I'm not arguing, Mater, I'm standing up for you. Your father seems to be under the mistaken impression that you've regressed to the mental capabilities of a child. I'm correcting that impression." He looked down his nose at the old man, who was going red in the face. "Besides, it isn't as if the Brigadier needs entertaining. He'll probably want to use the library for his researches, he'll be looking forward to the odd game of billiards, and I might persuade him to go riding. I think we can manage that."

  "That—so-called friend of your father's can't even be bothered to speak a civil word to me!" his grandfather got out from between clenched teeth.