by R. M. Meluch
Xanthan asked, “Art thou one of these Gurkha?”
“There is one in my ancestry,” said Wolf. “My brother owns a kukri. There is much blood on the blade.”
“It’s a foolish custom,” Xanthan said, enclosing the tungsten-plastic sword in red felt. “How is one to practice with one’s actual weapon? Thy Gurkha brother must have many scars.”
Wolf was about to speak and suddenly frowned, as if catching himself at something forbidden. “I forget,” he said.
• • •
In the year of the Topaz Veil, Wolf was taught his last weapon, the taeben. The Itiri called the beam guns “eyes” because the taeben were useful and powerful, and they lured their users into letting their other talents atrophy. Relying solely on a taeben was seductively easy.
“A gun is a coward’s weapon,” Xanthan said. “Any child can kill with a gun. It is also thy most powerful weapon, not thy sword. The sword is art. The sword is discipline. The gun is life and death.”
Wolf had handled guns before and became quickly expert. He was also quick to put the taeben aside and polish his other skills. He didn’t like the weapon. Guns were too human.
• • •
As the short years passed, Wolf was becoming a young man. His frame broadened as Roniva had predicted, and his muscles filled out with great strength and un-Itiri bulk. He stretched hard to keep his form sleek. Bulging thews were for Earthmen.
And toward the close of the Topaz hexadecade, more Earthlings were brought to the Aerie, refugees of the human war. They were surprised to find a human cheela among the legendary warrior-priests, and the young women thought him breathtaking. Wolf was disturbed and confused, and he kept his distance from them, which made him all the more attractive.
He stood on the highest level of Aerieside, glowering across the crevasse, his head held high, his disdainful slanted eyes directed downward. He wore only dark trousers, a sash belt, and a wide red band across his forehead to keep his human sweat from his eyes. His arms were crossed defensively over his bare chest. And the girls peered up at him from the lower level of Haven and giggled.
“What is wrong with them?” Wolf said.
Xanthan crouched beside him on one knee, his sword planted point down before him like a staff. “What is wrong with thee, cheela-nu?” he said. “Thou art bright as plague fever.”
Wolf’s heat aura glowed vividly about him to Itiri eyes. “Be this something human?”
Wolf burned more brightly still. And scarlet blushed down his neck and chest. “I am not human,” he said.
Xanthan considered the young females across the way. They were a varied group in color and size. Xanthan didn’t know what was the desirable standard for humans. Itiri came in two basic types only—the tall, slender, blond, green-eyed aghara, and the short, stocky, red-haired, black-eyed ranga. Humans came in all sorts. “Thou findest none of them an acceptable mother for thine child?”
“No. I am Itiri.”
“Thou canst not give child to an Itiri woman,” Xanthan said.
“Then I will have no mate,” Wolf said. “I need no children.”
“Thy choice,” Xanthan said.
• • •
In the year of the Carnelian Sword, to begin the new hexadecade, Xanthan embarked on a trek with his cheela on foot across the mountains to visit outlying ranga villages and show Wolf there was more to Iry than one mountain and one valley. They were gone for four years.
When they returned, Wolf would have been twenty-one years old by Earth count. By Iry count, he was thirty-four. Onto his leather bracelet Wolf had added turquoise, which was patience, topaz, which was wisdom, and sapphire, which was control and strength.
At nightfall, Xanthan came to Wolf’s chamber and sat at the foot of his bed. Wolf rose in puzzlement.
A cold wind of coming winter moaned outside.
In the almost dark, Wolf could see his master’s beloved face, soft eyes, and golden hair braided into a crown. Angels looked so in the dim early memory of gentle times when Wolf was still a baby and carried a human name.
Xanthan pressed a pebble into his hand in the dark. Wolf held it up to see fiery-colored flecks within a milky white blaze. The colors shifted in the hearthlight. An opal, which was integrity, soundness, and wholeness. The gem was his eighth. The last. His training as a cheela was over.
Xanthan bowed his beautiful head, his face happy, sad, proud, and troubled. “When the spring cometh, the fire is for thee.”
8. Wolf in the Fire
5851 CE
THE PLACE OF FIRE was open to the sky. Its hearthstones had been laid into a level breezeless garden court where its flame burned upright, though the slopes beyond it were blasted by stiff winds that bared the rocks. Sharp crags isolated the fire garden. It was a difficult approach from whichever way one tried.
Wide, flat squares of marble checkered the courtyard, alternating red and black. Leathery plants circled round about the sanctuary or trailed inside it on tendriled vines. At one side of the square an ancient spring still bubbled to life from time to time. Heat from the water flowing hidden within the rocks kept the snow from sticking here.
The tiles at the center of the courtyard were discolored where flames had licked and where sooty feet had trod.
In the year of the Carnelian Beacon, on the first of the Sword, only one cheela was walking. That was not proper. But the one was expected to fail.
Not to taint the fire for others, Wolf would go alone.
The Elders ringed the court. Painted kohl lines extended in flowing curves from their eyes and drew lashes down to the broken red scars on their cheeks. They wore eight jewels in their hair with their Elder’s stars. Their swords lay unsheathed across their knees as they sat cross-legged on the marble. Their familiars crouched, perched, or sat to their left sides.
The warrior-priests who were not Elders sat with their fire clans. There were no ranga here. This was the one place ranga couldn’t go. But no fretful mother and father would be hovering in the snow at the sanctuary boundary this time.
Wolf gazed into the flames. His trousers were rolled up and tied below his knees. Around his head he wore a red band. Around his neck he wore a thin leather strip which he would untie on the far side of the firepit.
A walk through fire. Easily done if done at all.
Xanthan waited on the far side with his own clan of the topaz twins. He was angrier than Wolf had ever seen him, upset that his cheela’s walk was to be solo, that no celebration was prepared, that everyone was already trying to forget this day.
Wolf tried to catch his eye. Watch this! But Xanthan couldn’t see through the wall of heat above the fire.
Wolf tossed back his head. I am Itiri. I shall not burn. And he stepped into the fire.
He smelled it before he felt it. Pain and utter shock arrived at once.
Wolf leaped from the firepit and fell to the marble tiles hard on his knees. He dropped over onto his side, writhing in pain, digging his fingers into his thighs as if to cut himself off from his charred, oozing black-and-red feet.
Repulsed and embarrassed faces were turning away.
Wolf ran, scrambled, from the place of fire, out of their sight and into the snow. He tumbled down a jagged embankment and landed in a drift.
He buried his face in the icy snow, breathing fast, the pain inside greater than the searing throb of his burns that racked his body and made him tremble and sweat in the cold.
All his agony and shame couldn’t change what happened. And it happened over and over with every blink of his eyes, branded into his mind.
Ice melted on his feverish skin. With a will born of extremity, he blotted out the physical pain. It was not there, so he gave it no mind. No mind at all. Nerves brought pain pulses to tap at his brain and found the gates locked fast.
He rested, breathing, trying not to t
hink. There was only one thought.
Clouds moved in, closing up the sky. The snows would return.
After an eternity, Wolf tore his red headband in two and wrapped his ravaged feet in the rags. Then he hiked the tortuous blowing path back to Aerie.
On the high terrace he caught sight of a tall slender figure dressed in plain brown, hooded, arms folded into wide sleeves. All Wolf could see of her was her blue-black feet. Roniva was in mourning.
Wolf was puzzled. She would not be mourning him, so who? Who was dear to Roniva?
Wolf’s heart caught.
No. What had to be could not be. Wolf forbade it. No! NO!
Roniva’s hooded form moved like a shadow, retreating from his sight.
Wolf stumbled to her at a hobbling run. She didn’t stop for him. One did not speak to the hooded, but Wolf fell to his knees as he reached her and he cried, “Where is my master?”
Roniva’s eyes were hidden, the hood pulled far forward. She continued away, soundless.
Wolf clutched at the hem of her long sleeve and held fast. “Where is Xanthan?” he screamed.
The hooded figure stopped, withdrew a spidery hand from her opposite sleeve, and pointed a long black finger to the bridge, where a ranga woman was weeping and yanking out tufts of her red hair and tossing flowers, gems, and pretty things into the crevasse. Wolf knew her. She was Xanthan’s mother.
Roniva pulled her cloak out of Wolf’s numbed grip and walked away with spectral steps.
Wolf crawled down the terraces to the bridge. A whining snarl squeezed from his tightening throat as he grasped the ropes, and Xanthan’s mother fled in terror.
Wolf dragged himself onto the bridge and clutched at the scattered flowers she had left. He whined at the pretty flowers, tears coursing down his cheeks. “Why? Why? Why?” He collapsed in sobs.
He couldn’t see downward. Tears blurred everything in that direction. He tried to look over the edge where Xanthan had gone, where Wolf was supposed to go now. He was expected to jump.
Just as he’d been expected to fail.
In sudden fury he was on his feet. Crushed blossoms fell off the knees of his trousers. He ran from the bridge and away from the Aerie on wounds that felt nothing as the spring snow began to fall.
• • •
Warmth came late to the Aerie. The snows quit in the mountains and true spring came at last, without Xanthan, and without Wolf. It was assumed that Wolf had gone off alone to kill himself in his own way. The season passed in fleeting brilliance.
The valley was still cloaked in summer when autumn crept quickly over the mountain. Seasonal grasses turned red and gold. Desiccated plants crumbled to ash. Winged keys and clouds of tufted seeds drifted and tumbled in the brittle wind. Eaglets flew. The berinxes left the high slopes, and a sharp burned-wood smell hung in the air. Burrowers went into hibernation, and Itiri stocked their caves with food. Soon Shandee would be upon them again.
He appeared over the summit on scarred feet after a cold rain, come like a dark spirit, changed.
He was taller, his chest deeper, the youth fully a man. The leather thong of a fire walker was still tied around his thick neck. He stood above the Aerie.
The berinx padded up the high trail, its thick brindle coat catching burrs, its long tongue hanging from the side of its heavy jaws. It woofed at the rogue cheela.
“Where is thy master, Chaulin?” Wolf said.
The Fendi’s familiar couldn’t snarl its ritual answer: Thy master also.
The rogue cheela had no master. Wolf ought not to be here.
He ought to be dead. The berinx didn’t know what to say. It scratched at its mane in distracted confusion, then vanished. The burrs from its fur fell to the ground.
The Fendi came slowly up the path the berinx had taken. The Fendi’s glass-green eyes were narrowed to slivers against the drying air. Moisture came hard to old eyes. Withered hands held thick cloaks around his slight, once-powerful body.
Wolf crouched before the monarch in an attitude of humble favor and asked to walk the fire again.
“Never done.”
The answer wasn’t the Fendi’s. It was the Elder Roniva who spoke. She stood behind the Fendi and placed another cloak over his head and shoulders.
“Never done because never tried,” the Fendi said, his voice a whisper in the thin air. “Never asked. No one ever lived to try again. It was not because of a law.”
“Natural law,” Roniva said.
“If natural law can be broken, it is the law, not the violation, that is wrong.” The Fendi beckoned his berinx. It appeared at his side out of the air. The old man scratched the beast’s ruff. “I must consult the archives,” he told his familiar. “Something must govern this matter.”
• • •
The Great Chamber was a nine-sided place with a great gray stone dome, tall lancet windows, fluted pilasters of colored granite, and opalescent white alabaster fittings. A fire blazed in the hexagonal firepit set into the floor of honeycombed red tiles. Black smoke sooted the high dome.
For a second attempt to become a warrior-priest, requirements were three. For the first, the cheela must combat a full warrior-priest and win. The volunteer for combat was Sentalla of the fire clan of the topaz twins.
Smell of deadly intent hung close and tense in the wide chamber. Wolf tested his grip on his sword. He crouched on a black hexagonal tile across the Great Chamber from his warrior foe. Wolf’s black hair was cut short, out of his eyes and off his ears. His wrists and right forearm were wrapped in leather. The soles of his feet were rosined to keep him from slipping on the stones that had been polished to a glassy sheen.
Wolf had nothing to lose here. He was, to his own mind, already dead. All from now was gain, and he was free. He had only to let himself do what his self knew to do. Anger he had locked away in some deep part of him. An angry warrior defeats himself in combat, Xanthan had told him.
Sentalla had a personal grudge in this battle.
At the command to begin, Wolf swung his sword and sprang across the floor with a screech, but Sentalla had already fled his place on an oblique line and turned to slash at Wolf’s flank. Swords met with a dull clash, then strained crossbar to crossbar. Both pushed and sprang back out of sword’s reach to circle more warily now, having failed at their first shock tactics.
They stalked, feinted, shifted feet. Sentalla’s sword switched hands. Wolf charged in with a yell. Sentalla parried, countered, was blocked, and danced away.
Wolf screamed again, leaped, slashed.
Sentalla sidestepped, placing his blade into Wolf’s flying path.
Wolf batted the sword away with his own, turned in the air, and landed facing Sentalla.
Sentalla danced lightly back and circled. He had done really nothing yet, watching. He was nearly ready. He had seen enough. His jade-green eyes took in all of his opponent at once.
His beloved Xanthan had always said that his fire brother used his eyes too much.
Wolf circled behind the blazing firepit and disappeared from Sentalla’s view behind its rising curtain of heat.
Sentalla approached the pit cautiously, eyes darting both ways, ready for whichever direction Wolf might reappear. Sentalla circled the firepit silently to his left, but Wolf circled also, staying exactly opposite him across the pillar of heat.
Among the spectators, Roniva bolted to her feet and stood like a quaking statue. She could see that Sentalla didn’t know—Xanthan had never told him—that Xanthan’s cheela was half blind. Heat blind.
The odd thing with this blindness was that it left no veils before Wolf’s eyes. The heat barrier over the fire was only opaque to one of them. Wolf couldn’t see the heat. He could see through it. Roniva wanted to shriek a warning. It wasn’t her battle.
Sentalla, he can see you!
The fire crackled and spa
t up sparks.
Wolf crouched to leap, neither left nor right, but straight over the firepit. Few warriors would risk a blind attack. For Wolf it wasn’t blind.
He sprang.
Wolf appeared out of the wall of heat, silent, and suddenly there, blade slicing. He turned at the last instant to smack Sentalla across the midriff with the flat of the sword hard enough to stagger the warrior.
“Stop!” the ancient Fendi cried, and his berinx appeared between the combatants to divide them. “That is a victory.”
Sentalla was winded and scored with two long curving red lines across his belly. Had Wolf not turned his blade, he would have sliced Sentalla in two.
Wolf blinked soot from his eyes, slightly dazed, victorious. He didn’t move from his place.
Someone came to take the sword that was not yet his from him. Wolf’s short fingers uncurled slowly from the grip, reluctant.
“Thy mercy does thee credit,” an Elder said, wrapping the sword in felted cloth and taking it away. It was the first thing anyone had deigned to say to him directly since his return.
Wolf lowered his eyes and bowed his head.
His hair was singed, the edges curled up in thin coils that broke off with a touch. A black hand reached over to brush him off. It was Roniva. She sniffed at the burned stench. “Very resourceful, my cheela’s cheela. Making a virtue of handicap.”
“Hanina,” Wolf acknowledged.
Roniva was dressed all in black bedizened with diamonds. She ran her hand across the shimmering stones. “But where are thine?”
His diamonds, she was asking. His honor. She meant he should have suicided for honor’s sake instead of subjecting everyone to this insanity when he should know he could not succeed. Should not have succeeded if he were a true Itiri warrior-priest.
“My honor is that I cannot know defeat,” Wolf said.
Roniva clamped her teeth and lips tight. The thought, the possibility was daunting—the existence of a thing that never breaks, that could come crawling out of the lowest gutter and prevail.
The Itiri had never conceived of a mythical phoenix. Such a creature didn’t exist even in Itiri dreams. The tasks to reach his goal were impossible.