Jerusalem Fire

by R. M. Meluch

  What he had done was to begin turning into a warrior-priest.

  Aghara children came to the mountain by instinct. Drawn to the Aerie like spawning salmon on Earth. They answered an impulse to be with their own kind. From all parts of the world they hunted the hidden valley and climbed the mountain to become warrior-priests. Or die trying.

  Xanthan blurted out before thinking, “I want to make him a warrior-priest.”

  “That?” The voice was Roniva’s.

  The boy scratched his runny nose. His hand left a smear of blood there.

  Xanthan looked up to the second level where Roniva stood. “He hath the heart.”

  “Thou mistakest madness for courage,” Roniva said more gently.

  An Elder’s hand came to rest on the nape of Xanthan’s neck. “A human child, Xanthan? He will die.”

  “He doth not want to die. I will not let him,” Xanthan said.

  “He will endure not the ordeals. At best he will bore.”

  “Then let him bore,” Xanthan said, feeling utterly alone. He thought his was a natural decision. What great foolishness did the others see that he did not? “Let him fail for himself and return to his own kind of his own choice. He came here like a warrior cheela.”

  As he was speaking, everyone turned away, and Xanthan’s blood turned cold, knowing who approached. The crowd parted.

  The berinx padded through the parted way on heavy paws with lowered head, its fanged jaws agape and drooling. It stopped in front of the Earth boy, shook its brindle mane, yawned wide, and sat with a woof like a real berinx.

  “Where is thy master, Chaulin?” Xanthan asked in weary ritual.

  The berinx snarled. Thy master also.

  The Fendi came slowly in his familiar’s wake. He wore his naxa cloak thrown over one straight shoulder, its chain passing under his sword arm. His cloak was always black now. His wispy hair was too thin to be bound. He held himself strictly erect as one who begins to feel gravity too much.

  Eyes like hard green glass chips fastened their gaze upon Xanthan, then upon the little Earthling.

  The Fendi extended his blue-tinged, fragile-looking hand. The boy made to bite it, but, quick as a katalin’s wingbeat, the aged Fendi closed his grip on the boy’s lower jaw and held it unyieldingly.

  He turned the child’s head first to one side, then the other, examining his face, his yellow skin, his exotic eyes sunk deep in his hunger-stark skull.

  Finally, the Fendi released the Earthchild’s jaw with a slight firm push that prevented the creature from snapping at his withdrawing hand.

  The Fendi turned slowly to pat the head of his fanged berinx. He talked to it. “If he climbed up the mountain, then he can climb back down in his own time.” The Fendi’s hard glittering green eyes slid to his youngest warrior-priest. “Xanthan, he is thy cheela.”

  Xanthan stared, blank, for a long moment, then smiled and looked to his new cheela in joy.

  The boy knew the meaning of smiles. Something good had happened. Lovely Xanthan was happy. The boy started to return a wan grin gapped with missing baby teeth.

  Then his eyes rolled back, and he crumpled to the path in a dead faint.

  7. Wolf by the Hearth

  5839–5850 CE

  XANTHAN CAME TO THE BEDSIDE in the ranga cave and watched his sick cheela. Asleep, the child looked even younger than he actually was. His closed eyes were smoky-ringed in his starved face. He took up such a tiny corner of the wide mattress.

  Then the eyes opened, dark like a ranga’s and slanted like no other creature’s in the world. The boy blinked sleepily.

  “How is it with thee, Earthchild?” Xanthan asked.

  The boy’s black brows lowered at the name Earthchild. His tiny bow mouth curved down so hard his chin puckered. His little fists balled, and he sat up and spat in hatred of his own kind. He made it clear he was not an Earthchild. He bit his upper lip and glowered at Xanthan.

  “Be thou then no more an Earthling,” Xanthan said. “Only let go thine hatred.”

  The boy fell back on the bed, exhausted.

  “I have something for thee,” Xanthan said. He held up a closed hand.

  The boy uncurled his scrawny claw fingers to receive the blue gemstone Xanthan dropped into his palm. The boy brought it up close under his eyes and watched the stone move with his pulse.

  “Lapis is thy courage and thy will,” Xanthan said. “That is one. There are eight. When thou hast eight, thou wilt walk the fire.”

  The boy grabbed Xanthan’s ring hand and pulled it to him to inspect the warrior’s carved signet stone. “That comes ninth.” Xanthan smiled. “Not till thou art a warrior. That is for my clan—the topaz twins. We walked only two years ago. I am a very new warrior.”

  As he was speaking, a white bird appeared from nowhere and alighted on Xanthan’s shoulder. The boy gave a startled cry. Unperturbed, the dove preened a snowy wing, puffed up its ruff, and rearranged its long plumed tail. “My familiar,” Xanthan told the child. “That comes tenth—I know not from where.”

  The boy frowned dubiously.

  “This creature I have named Asha,” Xanthan said. “What is thy name, my cheela? I need something to call thee.”

  But the boy wouldn’t speak. His hand clamped shut over his gemstone, and he retreated under the covers.

  “Please tell me,” Xanthan said. “Or they will call thee Wolf.”

  The boy nodded, his native gesture of approval. His lips were pursed, his brows knit, but not unhappily. Wolf would do fine for a name.

  • • •

  The first thing Wolf needed to learn, if he was to be mute, was the way of silent speech. There were many signs and attitudes in use, so he could go a long way without speaking. And it was well that he spurned the chatter of little birds and ranga. Eagles and warrior-priests soared silent and alone. A warrior-priest didn’t disturb the silence without a reason.

  Wolf was soon healthy again. Flesh covered his ribs, and his skin turned from sickly yellow to an odd but vital sun-darkened brown gold.

  Once Wolf was fit, Xanthan began to tap on his door in the mornings.

  “Sae duun. Sae duun, cheela.”

  The boy was always outside on the first tap. Then Xanthan didn’t need to tap at all. Wolf was awake ahead of the dawn and listening for Xanthan’s footsteps. Xanthan would approach with soundless tread, and still the boy was outside.

  For the first year he did no fighting, but learned to fall and jump and listen and feel and see and breathe. He had already had a great deal of martial training among humans. It was obvious in the way he used his inner strength and the way he moved—not sticklike and unnatural in the usual human fashion.

  In the first year, Xanthan was learning as well, discovering the oddities of his small charge.

  Xanthan woke, the first time of many times, in the dead of night in his solitary cave on Aerieside to find Wolf asleep, curled under the blanket at the foot of his bed.

  Xanthan lifted him by his shoulders to face him.

  Sleepy eyes blinked back.

  Xanthan’s white skin was smoothed cold like marble in the dim starshine that spilled into the cave. His warrior’s gemstones gleamed darkly in the polished rock wall. Xanthan told the boy his place was across the way at Haven with the ranga.

  The boy shared a cave with eight male ranga, as most aghara did while they were children. The ranga lived in heaps. Warriors lived alone. Wolf cared for neither arrangement. He wanted to be with Xanthan.

  Xanthan would wrap a cloak around Wolf and send him back to Havenside, except when the wind brass sounded. Then Xanthan would either carry him across the swinging bridge himself, or let him stay, breathing softly at the foot of the bed.

  The next surprise came on a cool and breezy day in what passed for summer on the mountain when Xanthan took his cheela hunting runner-b
irds.

  Xanthan soon spotted a trail, and he trotted over the ridges and down the gullies and inclines in pursuit, his cheela dogging him faithfully.

  Then the trail split, a bird and mate. Xanthan told Wolf to take the low trail. Xanthan would climb the steep rocks. And Xanthan bounded up the treacherous rise. The boy just stood in the ragged brown grass, bewildered. Xanthan stopped on his rock perch, perplexed and annoyed. “Follow thou, before it fades!”

  The boy turned a complete circle, searching for something fading.

  Xanthan became cross. “Art thou blind?”

  As soon as the words were out, the young warrior recalled something spoken once of humans being blind. He leaped down the rocks and rolled in the grass at Wolf’s feet. He jumped up. “Come thou with me.”

  They abandoned the hunt and returned to the Aerie. Xanthan sought his own master, Roniva.

  “Azo!” Xanthan saluted the Elder with his sword fist on his left palm. “Hanina, knowest thou of humankind?”

  “I know some small thing.” She strolled across the cave and ran her fingers through Wolf’s hair. It was coarse and black like her own. Wolf had learned by now not to bite everyone who tried to touch him. “Ask thou,” she bid her warrior.

  “Are humans somehow blind?” Xanthan asked.

  “Heat blind,” Roniva said. “Infrared they cannot see. They see one octave only. The lower frequencies are invisible to them. To thine wolf, this cave is dark.”

  Xanthan was numb with shock.

  “Knowest thou wherefore I opposed thee, cheela-nu?” Roniva said as Xanthan began to realize how difficult a task he had taken upon himself in this human cheela. A cheela needed every sense and every strength and skill he had to become a warrior-priest. “I wanted not to see thee break thine heart.” Roniva drew her saffron shawl around her and stepped out of the cave into the wind.

  Xanthan turned to his cheela and took his glowing hot face in his hands. The boy must have some other strength somewhere, something only humans had. Xanthan sensed it pulsing between his hands, knew it as he knew some part of his spirit would transcend death, knew it without having any reason to believe. The boy had to have something else. He must.

  Because Xanthan, like all warriors, could not fail and live.

  • • •

  It was Roniva who taught Wolf to write and to count in the Itiri way. “It uses its left hand,” she said to Xanthan. “Mark thou on that?”

  Xanthan had noticed. The boy would carry a sword in his left hand. “It—” Xanthan began, then caught himself. It.

  Roniva smiled with white teeth and admonished, “I trapped thee in my circle, Xanthan. Be thou more careful.”

  “Yes, hanina.”

  “And feed it.” She squeezed the boy’s arm. “It needs to be fatter.”

  “I fear the winter,” Xanthan admitted.

  Roniva demurred. “Not if it be fat. I wish I were built like thine creature. Its stock cometh from mountains. Look thou at it. How short its fingers and toes. How flat its face. How thin and small its lips. How short it is. Its blood has less a journey from its heart and will not cool. See the fold of fat over its eyelids. Those eyes will never freeze, nor that flat nose. Its stature looks as if it will broaden if he grows. I would spend my winters easier had I that build and those fingers and toes.” The tall, lithe warrior-priestess felt the cold quickly in her long tapered extremities if she didn’t bid her heart to work faster. “He hath mountain eyes like mine. Dark eyes burn not in the light at these heights where the air is too thin to blunt light’s cutting edge.”

  Xanthan blinked his kohl-lined green eyes. “He.”

  “Cheela?”

  “Thou said he.”

  “Ah.” Roniva spread her long spidery fingers. “I am weary of thine savage. Take it with thee and go.”

  • • •

  Wolf survived the winters well, and in the year of the Topaz Beacon, Xanthan began to teach him to fight with his open hands.

  Days were idyllic on the mountain, and, with no other humans around him to remind him, Wolf started to forget, truly forget, what he was.

  Then, in the year of the Topaz Serpent, humans were brought to the Aerie. They’d been found drifting in space without power, victims of a war humankind was waging across the stars.

  Wolf hated them.

  “But they are thy kind,” Roniva said.

  Wolf motioned a negative. He would not be human.

  “The girl, perhaps?” Xanthan said. “Thou wilt need a mate someday.”

  No. No. No.

  And to Wolf’s bitter glee, the humans couldn’t endure the cold winds on the rugged mountaintop. All but one of them retreated to the mild climate of the Lower Aerie, so Wolf did not have to look at them.

  Only the one named Montserrat stayed, a timid woman, full grown, who kept to herself on Havenside.

  Wolf wouldn’t hurt her. Such would violate his emerald. He took out the stone and gazed into its clear green crystal whenever the hatred boiled up inside him. The emerald was for kindness. Wolf had been given the gemstone for his generosity to the eagles. The boy had an affinity for the talassairi.

  He still didn’t talk. He howled if he was hurt or left alone. He still came to the foot of Xanthan’s bed at night—so stealthily that the warrior sometimes didn’t waken. All those practices came to an end in the winter of the Topaz Serpent.

  Wolf was given his own cheela-cave on Havenside. It was a small solitary chamber, a proper home for a warrior in training.

  Wolf hated it worse than he hated the cave full of ranga males. He spent little time in it.

  But he had no choice come winter, when, on the eighth of the River, Shandee returned for its annual maraud, and all activity came to a standstill and everyone took to his home as the deadly jet wind raged through the mountain peaks nonstop for twenty days.

  Wolf had never spent twenty days alone before.

  The forsaken pleading in his eyes when Xanthan shut the door on him to seal his shelter haunted Xanthan back to his own winter prison.

  Shandee howled. Or was it the boy? Sometimes Xanthan could hear both and thought his heart would break.

  After five days he heard only Shandee.

  At the end of twenty days, in the abrupt silence of the winter wind’s leaving, Xanthan burst from his cave in a flurry of snow and sailed across the bridgeless crevasse with a running cat’s leap to dig out his cheela from the piles of blown snow.

  The cave door opened with the cracking of ice.

  Xanthan saw nothing at first in the dark cave, then perceived the heat aura of the solitary figure in the corner. Wolf was alive. But he didn’t move, or whimper, or fly into Xanthan’s arms. The boy was silent, his eyes open. He was there, but not there, lost somewhere inside himself.

  Xanthan hugged him and cried, “Come back. Come thee back.”

  But Wolf stayed rigid through the nightfall, and Xanthan carried him back to Aerieside on the new bridge, set him at the foot of his own bed, and waited. The boy didn’t curl up there. He’d always curled up. He stared at the ceiling.

  Xanthan caught him up, held his stiff unyielding form, and cried on his black hair. “Oh, little Wolf, what hast thou done to me? Who ever had such a stupid cheela?”

  “I am not stupid.”

  Xanthan was shocked out of his tears. “What sayest thou?” he whispered.

  Calm eyes riveted to his, and Wolf spoke distinctly. “I am not stupid.”

  Xanthan couldn’t speak. The boy was perfectly composed. “I will drink now,” he said, and Xanthan gave him water. Then Wolf said, “I will eat now.”

  And when he was fed, he returned to his lonely cave and slept.

  He never came to crawl into Xanthan’s bed again to sleep at his master’s feet, and Xanthan was very sorry for that, the last gentleness gone from the child. Wolf
had been taught to stay by himself, and Xanthan wondered if it hadn’t been a mistake.

  Wolf now cherished his solitude with a vicious fervor. Patience he also acquired. It was a weird and unworldly kind of patience, not like turquoise at all, and he took hurt without sound. This wasn’t the peace of eagles. This was fire in the mountain.

  He was a different Wolf ever after, grown, with an Itiri warrior’s reserve and dignity. The ranga said Shandee was still on the mountain and that it lurked within him. They sensed something odd in his kind of quietude.

  And the eagles were afraid of him.

  • • •

  In the year of the Topaz River, Wolf was taught his first weapon. It was a sword, the tungsten-plastic kind. “When thou wilt walk the fire, this will be thine,” Xanthan told him.

  Wolf ran his palm along the flat of the ancient blade, his dark eyes alight.

  Xanthan’s white bird trilled on its perch over the lintel by an inset ruby rose.

  “Why do we not teach a sword to wield itself?” Xanthan posed the question to his cheela.

  Wolf scowled. He pulled at the cuffs of his rough-woven cheela’s tunic. He’d outgrown another one. “Because it is impossible,” he said.

  “No,” Xanthan said. “Had we want, we would find a way. Thine answer shows a want of thought. Topaz is wisdom. Thou hast it not.”

  “Then I don’t know why we don’t teach swords to wield themselves,” Wolf said.

  “Because a sword hath no virtue,” Xanthan said.

  Wolf wore his virtues on a leather thong around his right wrist. He had four: lapis for courage, emerald for kindness, diamond for honor, zircon for modesty. Xanthan closed his hand over the bracelet and squeezed Wolf’s wrist. The stones bit into his brown flesh. “Keep these little stones in mind when thou hast thine own sword,” Xanthan said.

  He showed Wolf a few simple moves with the sword and let him practice until his wrist and forearm tired. Then Xanthan brought him the felt cover in which to wrap the sword and replace it in its scented wood chest.

  Wolf’s eyelids fluttered uneasily at the covering. “The Gurkha never sheaths his kukri unblooded.”