The banging stepped up its pace, hard and sharp enough to rock the box. For one unwilling second, Elim pictured the boy curled up inside, slamming the back of his head against the wood over and over, desperate not to be left behind.
That was enough. “Hang on,” Elim said, clambering back up into the bed with every ounce of quickness he had left, dragging the coffin back until he could wrestle it up and over his shoulder. “Hang on, buddy – I got you.”
VUCHAK STAGGERED FORWARD, blinded by smoke. The wall of heat behind him was going to broil them alive – would have done already, if Weisei’s holy cloak weren’t shielding them both. He clung to Vuchak’s back, his hot scaly hands clasped tight around his neck, his bony knees pressing Vuchak’s shirt to his sweat-drenched sides.
Minutes before, Vuchak had been afraid that they were going to burn up. Now he was afraid that they wouldn’t – that by the time the first tender lick of fire touched them, they would be nothing but smoke-strangled corpses. Already he was gasping for air. Already his right ear was consumed by the sound of Weisei’s coughing, and his left was deaf to everything but the oncoming roar of the flames. They were infants tottering perilously close to the fire, and no holy parent was coming to save them.
“– Way-Waiting took –” Weisei’s voice was a choking, indistinct mumble. Vuchak thought he recognized the name of the Ohoti Woru trader who frequented the billiards table back in Island Town, but that was surely a mistake. And then, again: “Way-Waiting took me to bed.”
That time, there was no mistaking it. Weisei was delirious, or else making some bizarre final confession. Somehow, that was more terrifying than anything yet. “Don’t talk,” Vuchak gasped. “Breathe.” He stumbled on as quickly as he could, his eyes watering as he squinted, desperate for a glimpse of the road. It was close. It had to be.
“He has a mark – a winestain mark on his inside thigh, and –” Weisei broke off, coughing.
Vuchak urgently needed him to shut up. His ears thirsted in vain to hear something over the sound of his own coughing – some sound from the half or Hakai, some shouted plea to not give up, to come forward just a few steps more –
“– and he clutches his fruits in his sleep, just like my Vuchak!”
A whisper of a breeze kissed Vuchak’s sweat-streaked face, and brought with it an epiphany. Weisei wasn’t talking to him. He was talking to the West Wind.
And this time, the West Wind was listening – because this time, it was hearing the truth. Here at last was a still-living spirit who could intercede for them, one they would not fail to please.
“I do,” Vuchak agreed as loudly as he could, seeding the air with fresh gossip. “And I wet the bed until I was almost ten –”
“– and he always made me switch with him so To’taka wouldn’t punish him for it –”
“– and when Weisei told me that he had an appetite for Savat the medicine man, I was so ashamed that I cried myself to sleep.”
Weisei was coughing too hard to make any reply, but that was fine: Vuchak could feel a faint, fresh gust of air on his face – and he could feed it anything it wanted. “But I’m not ashamed of him. I’m not. I’m ashamed of myself. I’m ashamed of Pipat – who lets me eat from her second-mouth, by the way, and likes to be taken from behind – and I’m ashamed of Huitsak, and what he makes us do for money, and I’m ashamed of all the things I do for respect.”
Vuchak coughed, tripped, staggered and nearly fell, but the faint headwind grew stronger, pushing him back to balance, eager to hear more. “I’m sorry that I stole from the Ikwei, when Grandfather wanted us to help them. I’m sorry that I said blasphemous things about him, too. I don’t hate him. I don’t. I hate myself. I’m sick of being angry and frustrated and resentful all the time. I’m scared that I’m not good enough for anyone, that nobody can like me or want me – that I’ll die and the crows won’t want to eat me. I want to like myself. I want to be someone else. I want to try again.”
And if Vuchak had any doubts when he started to speak, they had all blown away by the time he finished. The rumor-hungry wind picked up, turning the breeze into a gust, and then a strong, steady bluster. It blew back the smoke, and slowed the advancing fire, and cleared the air until he could see Hakai and Ylem there, not even twenty yards ahead. Vuchak wiped his eyes on his shoulder, and gave Weisei’s knees an encouraging squeeze. “Hold fast, marka – we’re almost there.”
And then, just to be sure they didn’t lose the fresh affections of their new, fickle friend, Vuchak went talking on. “Thank you, reverend wind. Now, what else will you like to hear? Oh! Has anyone told you yet about Faro? He’s a fishman, if you didn’t already know, who works for Miss Addie the whore-madam, and he murdered the Eaten boy Halfwick, probably for greed, and Huitsak made us take the blame for it. And none of that would have happened if Weisei hadn’t been making woman-eyes at Halfwick all that night, and THAT wouldn’t have happened if Brant hadn’t poured drinks for him and then left him sitting right next to us. He probably did it on purpose, too. He’s an ugly yellow-haired Eaten man, and he works for Miss Addie too, and he’s always playing rotten little games like that – turning people into gossip and spectacles, so nobody will notice who he’s going upstairs with...”
Vuchak was marinating in sweat, his eyes and throat angry from the smoke, and his clothes and hair unspeakably filthy – and yet he felt cleaner, lighter, and better than he had in days. He walked on forward, into the fresh night air, and let the rest blow away in ashes behind him.
THE WIND HAD shifted – thank God! – and taken the smoke with it, but Elim still worried about the fire. He’d long since brought Do-Lay back to the hollow on the far side of the road, and set to helping Hawkeye tear out all the nearby brush. The fire’s edge was a wavy, snaking line now, burning slower and lower to the ground, leaving a black smoldering emptiness behind it.
That wasn’t to say it had stopped. By the time Bootjack made it back and slung Way-Say safely down into their makeshift ditch, the nearest blistering bulge was hardly more than a stone’s throw away – and still coming. Elim watched the fire flow around and underneath the wagon like so much burning oil, and then start crawling up the wheels, the shafts, the tripod that had been leaned up against the side and abandoned –
“‘You, Elim.’”
Elim turned at the uncommon tone in Hawkeye’s voice, and belatedly found the reason for it: Hawkeye was speaking, all right, but they were Bootjack’s words. “‘Show me your attention.’”
Hawkeye stood beside his master, hands clasped behind his back. Bootjack, still half-breathless from his exertions, paused to cough. That left Elim with time enough to scrape up a confused nod. When the pigtailed Sundowner spoke again, the severity of his face meant that Elim did not need to wait for the translation to understand that this was not going to be a friendly conversation.
“‘You have behaved recklessly, stupidly, and without regard for anyone’s life. Your interference nearly killed us all.’”
Elim’s first instinct was to ask what interference that was: hauling their goods out of harm’s way, or carrying Do-Lay to safety. Then Bootjack nodded at the wound in Elim’s side, and he recollected that other, earlier emergency – the one where he’d brought a fist to a knife-fight, hell-bent on stopping the heathen taking aim at his horse. Elim steeled his gut, waiting for the inevitable torrent of anger.
But Bootjack only folded his arms over his sweat-drenched filthy shirt, perfectly calm and collected as the fire continued its creep. “‘We have already seen what happens when you do thoughtless things. We have already paid a heavy price.’”
Elim declined to follow Bootjack’s uplifted chin: he already knew about the coffin lying behind him. More arresting by far was the pillar of flames from the wagon: it now stretched ten feet up into the night, throwing Bootjack’s ash-mottled face into red relief.
He seemed to take no notice. “‘Just so, we have seen you serve us at the expense of your own interests.’” Another nod a
t the coffin. “‘So if you wish us still to consider you a civilized person, I will hear you promise me that you will never again interfere with my orders or my weapons. Is this much clear to you?’”
What was clear to Elim was that promises weren’t going to put out that blaze. But if it was a miracle that they’d survived this far, it was nothing short of a wonder to hear the strong, steady tone in Bootjack’s voice, to see the calm set of his glistening soot-smudged face, and to meet his fearless gaze. Something of him had burned up back there.
“It is,” Elim said, “And I do. I’m sorry.” Sorry for his knee-jerk reaction, and for whatever had happened to poor Ax – for whatever might be fixing to happen to them now. The heat was unbearable.
Hawkeye began to translate, but he was using too many words, and he sounded anxious. Probably hinting to his boss that this maybe wasn’t the best time for a powwow. Still, Elim got the nod from Bootjack, and returned it in kind.
And now what?
Elim looked from Do-Lay’s box to the wagon in flames, from Bootjack’s stoic self-control to Way-Say’s coughing cloak-wrapped figure. They had all stopped. The fire hadn’t. And that was holy fire, too – nothing natural could have made it come out of nowhere and streak out in a big fiery line like that. The wind had turned after Elim retrieved Do-Lay, so that was a step in the right direction... but it wasn’t enough. Something was still undone. What was it?
Elim ran his fingers through his hair as the Sundowners conferred, beating back lightheaded confusion as he watched the wagon collapse in a cloud of red embers, and the fire blaze dangerously closer. Holy fire. God. Something neglected. Something not done.
No, that wasn’t it. The wagon’s front axle snapped, sending up a burst of floating cinders. Something not given.
Elim stooped and rooted through the bags, the long flickering shadows vexing his eyes. Finally, his fingers closed around that one sewn-up sack of dried beans – and with one smooth motion, he swung it upwards and hurled it out into the flames.
“Nankah!” Bootjack barked, full of indignation. “Hihn ene yekwi?”
Hawkeye’s voice was more moderate. “Sir, what are you doing?”
Elim staggered back a step and went right back to the luggage again. “It’s Aron’s fire,” he said. “It’s – it’s in the story in the Verses, when his wife went off to the city of salt. She stuffed her bags full of it –”
“– even though he begged her not to,” Hawkeye finished, “and when she turned around to take it home and sell it, God turned her to salt – just like all the others.”
“Ahuh!” Elim threw an empty water-skin over, aiming for the unburnt grass just in front of the fire’s nearest edge. It ate up the offering and kept coming – barely ten yards away now, steaming the words out of him. “And he had to build the fire, remember, and burn everything he had, even though he was the poorest fellow in town and didn’t hardly have nothing to start with –”
By then, he was talking for his own assurance, as Hawkeye had already started to translate for the Crow. And the story didn’t fit quite right, of course: for one thing, Aron was a good, saintly man, and that didn’t describe anybody here except maybe Way-Say. But Bootjack seemed to get the idea: they had stolen from those seven dead Sundowners, and it had to go back somehow. All of it.
The Crow knight hefted up a cord of kindling with a strength Elim wouldn’t have guessed he still had in him. Hawkeye came forward to help too. Then the three of them set to it together: the dishes and the water-skins and the dried fruit – every last one of those squashes and the basket they came in – all of it went arcing out into the night, thrown to the left or right or dead down the center, wherever that burning perimeter looked most hungry for penance. And not a moment too soon: by the time they ran out of ill-gotten gains, the nearest edge of that divine fiery whip was licking at the road – testing it – pushing to cross over.
“That’s everything,” Hawkeye said as he dropped to the ground. “Get down!”
By then, they were all lying flat against the roadside edge of the ditch – three sooty Sundowners looking at Elim as if waiting to hear what else his strange, angry god could want. He was glad they didn’t ask, because he wouldn’t have known how to answer.
But there had to be something else. It wasn’t enough to just give back what they hadn’t used yet. What about the water they’d already drunk, the food they’d already eaten, the drowned souls they’d already passed by?
Elim dropped to his knees and fished up his gunnysack – his own bag, the one he’d brought from home all those days and ages ago. It was all full of horsey things, mostly, useful things, practical things, but those wouldn’t do. Aron had had to burn the lock of his daughter’s hair – his most-loved thing, the last bit of her he had left. That was the whole point. Elim flung out Will’s canteen and Molly’s spare shoe, but those were only sentimental, not actually...
His hand closed around soft cotton, and before Elim exactly knew what he was doing, he was holding two-handed to the dumbest, most obvious thing in the world.
That was his good blue shirt. The nice button-up one with the soft collar – the one he’d worn to dinner with Sil on the last night of the fair. The one Merry had made for him on his last birthday, right before she’d rabbited off and married that chinless salute-snapper of hers.
Elim laughed out loud, dizzy with thirst and blood loss and the sheer dumb-assed ridiculousness of the joke he’d played on himself. “If that don’t beat all...!” Here was him, marching a hundred miles in a horrible heathen poncho, grinding sweat and hair and scratchy woolly misery into his sunburned back every step of the way – and toting his nice clean dinner-shirt around the whole time.
Well, it didn’t quite fit the story – Merry was still alive and happy, even if she was all so many miles away – but it was the best Elim had left. He pressed it to his face, enjoying its heavenly soft almost-clean smell one more time. Then he let it go.
The west wind snapped it up in a second, and sent it billowing out into the dark. Elim didn’t wait to see where it went, but plopped down in the dirt and settled himself in between his ashy companions to wait and hope and pray. Well, Master, I hope that pleases You, cuz I got nothing else left.
There was really no telling about that. But for the first time in a long time, Elim was at least reasonably pleased with his own self.
SIL COULD NOT have said when the fire started. By the time he noticed the bright red glow, it was already quite something: a long arc, almost a straight line – like an arrow whose tip pointed exactly at him.
That was a bit disconcerting. Sil was no expert, but he had a vague notion that wildfires could move at a fairly good clip – well faster than any human being, anyway. What was one supposed to do, though? Something about the wind?
Sil sat up, put a finger to his mouth, and then held it up. But either there was no wind, which felt rather unlikely, or else he had no saliva.
That was considerably more disconcerting. Sil stared at the fiery line, which was already expanding like an opening eye, and tried to think sensibly. If it came down to it, which side did he want to end up on?
Then again, what did he care? The fire was behind him, a natural act dividing one empty desert expanse from another. Everything that mattered was still ahead.
Presently, Sil gathered up enough sense to take advantage of the extra light, and got up to resume his walk.
SÍA DID NOT stop when her fire ran out. She did not stop for the stitch in her side, or the spreading chill in her bones, or the pain in her feet, though they all conspired to slow her down.
In the end, she stopped only when she ran out of certainty – when she felt God’s hand leave her, taking all His perfect surety with Him, and leaving behind a rational, doubting speck of a human being stumbling aimlessly through the night.
Or rather, standing still, panting and shivering and staring, paralyzed with awe, at the torrential wall of fire on the eastern horizon. That was her. She had done
that. But what had she actually done?
The dog was not much comfort just then. Going.
“Yes,” Día said, “but tomorrow. In the morning.”
The dog circled and whined, her eagerness uncomfortably sharp. Going. Going.
But Día was wrung out, cold and exhausted and absolutely dead on her feet. “I can’t, Mother Dog. I’m sorry. I really can’t.” And with some vaguely apologetic thought, she turned back the way she had come. There was no telling about the strange, sinister beings she had so violently divided, but Día could at least guard herself against the fire.
So she retraced her steps until she found a place where one of her last infernal bursts had devoured a few hundred square feet of dry brush, and walked with tottering footsteps to its burnt-out center. This seemed as safe a place as any to rest: it was hard to tell from this angle which way the major part of the blaze was moving, but if it did come back this way, it would find no fuel anywhere in Día’s vicinity.
So she lay down amidst the ashes, drawing her knees up to her chest and clutching the last of her prayer beads between them. The dog eventually consented to join her, a welcome source of warm fur and body heat, but Día fell asleep long before she could dispel the chill inside her.
SHEA STAYED AWAKE long after the others had lost interest in the great glowing red novelty to the southeast. One by one, they returned to the water to sleep, until at last she watched alone. It had been easy to tell them that a powerful wizard like Yashu-Diiwa could summon any horse of his choosing to take him out of the fire’s reach. The hard part was believing it.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
STOVE IN
VUCHAK STAYED AWAKE for hours afterwards, though not for any lack of interest in sleep. He could not have said who had started the fire, but Grandfather had used it to test them – to see whether they were worthy of his forgiveness. And having tentatively earned his way back into his god’s good graces, Vuchak would not forfeit his place a second time.
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