Flesh and Fire

by Laura Anne Gilman

  Malech chuckled, the sound of water over rocks. “A true Vineart in the making, then. Put food in your mouth, boy, and be ready to go as soon as you swallow.”

  Jerzy almost choked, belting down his meal, and was ready before Master Malech had finished his drink.

  The cobbles felt different underfoot through the leather of his shoe than they had barefoot, and Jerzy was aware of the fact, suddenly, that he walked differently in them. In the House, it wasn’t noticeable. Here, where he had spent most of his life either barefoot or wearing the heavy wooden pattens inherited from an older slave, every step he took made him feel as though everyone were staring at him.

  In truth, nobody looked as they walked across the road and down past the vintnery building. A new slave was in the spot Jerzy had been only a week before, but the bustle of activity had slowed considerably. While they passed, a wagon came up the road, drawn by one of the three thick-muscled white horses that spent most of their time in the enclosure behind the icehouse. A single driver held the reins, and the wagon itself held two wooden casks lashed to the frame. Jerzy’s nostrils flared, although all he could smell in the cool air was the familiar scent of dirt and horse.

  “From the southern enclosures,” Malech said, watching the wagon turn off toward the great sliding door that led to the vatting room. “A light yield this year, but I have hope for it. That’s what you were sensing in those barrels. Come.”

  Malech led him deep into the field, pausing occasionally to check a leaf here or a vine there to make sure that nothing had been damaged during the harvest.

  “Even the most delicate of hands can pull too hard,” Malech told him, lifting a vine that had come off the supporting stake and tying it back up with a piece of twine he took from his pocket. “There is stress that is good, and stress that is bad. Letting the fruit touch dirt—does what?”

  “Increases the chance of rot, or animals reaching the fruit.” Any slave knew that.

  “And after Harvest, when there is no fruit to rot or be eaten?”

  Jerzy looked at the vine in his master’s hand, the twisted brown plant as thick around as his wrist and gnarled like an old man’s face, and had no answer.

  “The vine must be stressed, but it must also be respected,” Malech said. “Lift it to the sky so air moves under the leaves and moisture runs freely to the root, and the fruit responds. Leave it hanging, discarded once the magic is taken, and the next year’s harvest will be poor. Remember that always, boy.”

  Malech frowned, then bent with an ease that mocked his age and plucked a small cluster of fruit from a vine in the next cluster. The fruit was small but deep red and should not have been overlooked. Jerzy braced himself against the ire that would doubtless erupt from the Vineart at such waste.

  “Ah.” Malech did not sound angry, and Jerzy risked looking at his master’s face.

  “Here,” and Malech plucked a single grape from the bunch and held it out to Jerzy, an offering.

  “Master?”

  “Place it on your tongue and crush it gently. Use the roof of your mouth, not your teeth.”

  His muscles froze even as he was reaching out to take the fruit, as his mind understood what Malech was saying, telling him to do.

  “Master?”

  “It’s all right, Jerzy. It’s all right, now.”

  Still uneasy, expecting at any moment to be knocked to the ground for his blasphemy, Jerzy took the fruit and did as instructed. The skin burst against the roof of his mouth and he tasted the clean clear juice running down his throat, tingling and itching and tickling all at once, the tingling of what he realized was magic fainter than from the barrel of mustus, but unmistakable nonetheless.

  It was a revelation, a moment that etched into his memories, and no matter how many times after that he tasted one, no matter how many times Malech took him into the vineyards, the tingling was never so intense.

  A WEEK LATER, the Harvest ended with the usual feast. A long wooden table was set out where the crusher had been, and slaves and hire-workers mingled freely, filling wooden mugs with vin ordinaire and ciders. Detta and Lil had produced seemingly endless loaves of bread, stuffed with roasted fowl and cheeses, and a massive wild pig was roasting over a fire pit, Per watching carefully to ensure none of the younguns got too close. Cai, off to the side, was playing a thin reed instrument with two local farmers accompanying him on drum and tambor, and a few of the slaves, suddenly finding new energy, were dancing, arms linked in a circle.

  It had been a good Harvest, and Master Malech was pleased, which meant that everyone was happy. The Vineart brought a mug of cider over for Jerzy and lifted his own in toast. “Warm days, cool nights.”

  “Warm days, cool nights,” Jerzy echoed, and sipped at the tart liquid. They had no pear trees of their own, but a local brewer always brought over enough for the celebration every year. Some of it was sent to the other enclosures, where smaller versions of the feast would be occurring as well.

  In earlier years he might have been among those dancing. Now it was as though he had never been part of it, and they did not see the young student any more than they acknowledged the Master. Slaves kept their eyes down and never asked questions.

  “Master?”

  “Hrmmm?” Those cool blue eyes weren’t quite so terrifying anymore. “Why are the healgrapes so dark red, but others are so much lighter?” He was thinking, especially, of the greenish-pink flesh of firegrapes. “If it’s not—”

  “It’s not a foolish question, no, although if you’d listened to the Washer preaching, you would know that already.” A Washer had come by on the last day of Harvest, as was traditional, to say a blessing over the depleted vines and take his customary cask of vin ordinaire, but Jerzy had been too busy to attend, working in the courtyard with Cai.

  “All grapes are blooded, touched by Sin Washer’s sacrifice,” Malech explained now. “How deep a touch they received is shown by the color of their skin. The darker the skin, the closer to the source the origin grape was, and the more specialized it became.”

  Jerzy watched the dancers go around and around, laughing harder the faster they spun. “So a grape with a pale skin. . .is not as powerful?” That didn’t feel right: the bonegrapes had almost no red to them, and yet they mended cracked and bent bones that might otherwise take months to set. And when he tasted one, the pulp on his tongue and the juice running down his throat, he felt the magic rising within.

  Malech stared out into the sky, looking, as always, for a hint of weather change to come, even now with the harvest safely in. “Not less powerful, no. Less specialized, and therefore more difficult to craft into something useful. Legend says that the First Growth was pale and thin-skinned, easy to crush for its juice, ripe with limitless magic. We have no white-skinned grapes left; Sin Washer took them from us as you would take a knife from a baby.”

  “That is. . .a good thing?” The Washers said it was, when they preached Sin Washer’s gifts, but Master sounded almost wistful.

  “It is a good thing. But the knife is shiny, and the First Growth was powerful, and we all wish to grow up enough to be trusted with the things we are denied. The blooded grapes are enough for us, Jerzy. We have no other choice.”

  THE WEEKS AFTER Harvest passed, and Jerzy spent even more hours every day in the vatting room, now filled to capacity with mustus from all the enclosures. He moved the liquid within the vats with his long-handled rake, punching the thick surface down so that the skins and juice mingled and mixed. His arms ached, and the smell of the grapes would not leave his skin or hair, and even the fascination of being so close to mustus wore off after a while.

  The advantage to vattage work was that it required no thought, and he could let himself consider what Malech, Cai, and Detta were teaching him, allowing it to sink into his understanding the same way the skins sank into the liquid, the magic swirling and deepening with every turn. Slowly, speaking into the quiet echoes of the vatting room, he built a new vocabulary, words taking on m
eaning, his speech patterns changing until not even Detta could find fault with his recitals.

  It was not all physical or mental labor, however. Although Master Malech typically ate in his study while Jerzy took his meals in the hall with Detta and her kitchen children, one eve-meal he came to join them, sitting on the wooden bench next to Detta, eating off a wooden trencher and passing bread and a pitcher of ordinaire as though they were all of equal status. Michel, Geordie, and Roan were struck dumb, but Lil and Detta kept up with their discussion of the meats they would need to put away for the winter, and what spices Detta should order when the traders passed through town next. As though reminded by that thought, Malech reached into his pocket and removed three small green fruit. Jerzy had never seen anything like them before. They were shaped like hen’s eggs, although the exterior was rough, but when Master Malech sliced one open, the inside was pink and juicy.

  “They’re called pieot,” the Vineart told him, taking a slice and eating it with obvious satisfaction. Jerzy took a slice as well, watching to see how to eat it without getting juice all over his face. The moment the fruit hit his tongue, however, he forgot to worry about eating cleanly, as Cai had taught him, and instead gaped in wonder.

  Master Malech laughed, while the others at the table busied themselves with their own plates and pretended not to notice. None of them took any of the fruit themselves.

  “It tastes like. . .” Words failed him. It tasted like sunshine and straw, like bitter anjas traded from Leiur to the west, those meaty nuts that looked like the knuckles of a man’s hand, but this carried a sweetness to it that Jerzy could not identify.

  “It tastes like bonegrape,” he said, almost in a whisper, as though suddenly afraid to identify it. How could a table fruit taste like one of the most essential of all healwines, second only to bloodgrape?

  “There is a similarity, yes.” Master Malech was openly pleased. “A Vineart must be able to identify flavors and scents, which means opening himself to new experiences. Good ones, and occasionally bad ones. This—” and he took another slice of the fruit “—is one of the better ones. They’re from Iaja, a land warmer than our own. Like limon, with a harder, greener finish.”

  Jerzy had no idea what a limon was, but if it tasted like this, he thought, it must be wonderful.

  STRANGE NEW FOODS and experiences, a comfortable bed, and only the occasional clip to the head when he made a mistake: Jerzy was not fool enough to doubt his good fortune now. You did not come under the slavers’ hands without learning what would be expected of you the rest of your life: food and care, yes, but work, endless work, until your back broke and your arms failed. To have that suddenly, magically change. . .

  And yet, it was difficult. Harvest might have been backbreaking as a slave, but now Jerzy crawled into bed every night, his arms aching from the seemingly endless vat-work, often sore across the legs and ribs from Cai’s ongoing lessons, and his head whirling from letters and numbers that would not disappear even when he closed his eyes and slept like a dead thing until the morning chime woke him, and the now almost-boring cycle began again. In that, at least, the five weeks since the spill had passed very much like his life before, in a constant repetition of meals and chores. Worse, because after the promise of that first day in Malech’s study, despite the constant exposure to the mustus, feeling that nascent power constantly pressing underneath his breastbone, there was no spellwine. No crafted magic.

  Every day he thought that today might be the day he asked, and every night he fell into bed, the words unspoken.

  One night, however, he woke quietly, immediately, the way a slave learned to, and realized that it had not been sunrise that alerted him. He lay on his back, arms holding the blanket to his body. The pillow lay on the floor; he had pushed it off the bed at some point during the night, as usual.

  The single window was open. He had closed it the night before, against the lashings of rain coming down off the ridge. The rain was not a disaster now: Harvest was complete, with the grapes from all the fields gathered, crushed, and vatted, the soil protected and prepared, and the slaves set to repairing the stone wall of the enclosure before the weather turned colder. Master had seemed pleased, if distracted, and missed the eve-meal two nights in a row because he was off doing something with samples from each of the vats Jerzy had been punching.

  The night sky was clear now, but the stars were blocked out by a thick gray shadow perched in the middle of the window.

  “Guardian?”

  It could be none other, to come in through the window without an alarm being raised. The soft thump of something landing on the floor, allowing the stars to be seen again, confirmed his guess. The Guardian had accompanied him everywhere the first few days, but he had seen it less recently as time went on. He rolled out of bed, picking up the pillow and replacing it on the cot, then turned up the lamp on the desk, raising the flame until the room was illuminated.

  The stone dragon waited on the floor, patient as only an inanimate thing could be.

  “I’m to come with you?”

  The Guardian could not speak, and its stone muzzle could not convey expressions, but Jerzy nonetheless got a distinct sense of “what else?” from the creature.

  “All right. Let me get dressed.” It wasn’t cold yet outside, but for all that the House was grander than any sleep house, it still had corners where a chill could and did linger once the sun went down. Detta had given him three pairs of pants and two brand-new shirts, plus a sleeveless jerkin and a quilted jacket that actually fit him across the shoulders. He put on a pair of those pants, a shirt, and the jerkin, and picked up the hard-soled shoes he was supposed to wear when outside, just in case. Lastly he wrapped the leather belt once across his hips, fastening it with the dragon-head buckle that was a smaller version of the Master’s own.

  Whatever Master Malech had in mind, he was ready.

  Chapter 5

  The House was silent, even the usual night-quiet sounds hushed. Guardian took him down the stairs by Master Malech’s study and through the stone hallway to a room he had not seen before, one with walls that seemed rounded at the corners in a way that confused the eye and made him slightly dizzy. Unlike the rest of the workrooms that held only tables and stools and cabinets of tools, there was actual furniture here, and a tapestry on one wall. What caught and held Jerzy’s attention, however, was the large mirror leaned up against the opposite wall. Jerzy knew, now, how much the simple looking glass he had used on his first day cost, how very rare it was, so the sight of this one took all of his attention, and it was only when a cough sounded before him that he realized that his master waited there, seated behind a wooden desk, a glass of vin ordinaire in his hand.

  Jerzy didn’t know how he knew it was ordinaire rather than magica, but he knew it, the way he knew his hand was attached to his wrist.

  “Good evening, Jerzy.”

  “Good evening, Master Malech.” Even after these weeks studying with the Vineart, it was still strange to see the Master and know that he didn’t need to avert his eyes or fall to his knees or fear being cuffed by the overseer for insolence. Stranger still, to see his master relaxing, his quilted dressing robe over dark gray woven pants and an open-necked shirt of some deep blue color, his feet bare against the cool stone of the cellar floor.

  Jerzy came all the way into the room and took what seemed to be the expected position on the wooden stool placed directly in front of the desk. The seat was worn smooth, and the height was just enough that he could tuck his legs underneath comfortably. He thought it might have been made for him, except the sheen of the wood suggested that it had been carved long before he had been born.

  Guardian flew up into the ceiling, settling on a scarred wooden beam, its stone tail dropping straight down like a sculpture, save for the occasional twitch of its pointed tip.

  “Are you ready, Jerzy?”

  Ready for what? “I don’t know.” He might have lied, but what was the point? The room was cooler t
han expected, and he was glad he had taken the time to dress warmly.

  “A fair answer, considering you don’t know what is in store. Nicely diplomatic. Your lessons are beginning to pay off.”

  Jerzy didn’t know what Master Malech meant by that, either, so he just sat quietly and waited.

  Malech placed his glass on the table in front of him. “The Washers tell the story of how Vinearts came to be: the guardians of a limited, reduced magic, the heirs of our forefathers’ foolish arrogance. How we now, by Sin Washer’s Command, turn inward and husband our vines rather than power over men. We are more than what the stories claim, and less. We are not the mages of generations past, no. And yet, a Vineart crafts more than spells, Jerzy. He crafts solutions, possibilities. Some are good. Some are. . .not good. Some heal; some cause harm. None of them are anything more than tools. A man who drinks a spell-wine and kills another man, is he any different from the man who takes a knife and kills? No. The responsibility for the action is the same.

  “There are those who say that we who craft these tools are responsible as well. That it is our hand that kills. . .and our hand that heals, as well.”

  Malech paused and looked at Jerzy, as though expecting him to say something. So Jerzy asked the next question that came into his head. “Can spellwine make someone do something they don’t want to do?”

  His master touched his bearded chin with a forefinger, his dark blue eyes half lidded and his expression thoughtful. That wasn’t, Jerzy realized, the question his master had expected, but the Vineart answered it anyway. “In the southern regions of Altenne grows a spellwine, a healwine they call Lethá. It fogs the mind, but you must drink deeply and allow it to take effect. Can a spellwine cause a man to do a thing he does not wish? No. Not even a Master Vineart can do that, not with the most potent of grapes, no matter how deeply he might drink.”

  “Could the prince-mages do it?” Jerzy held his breath, sure that this time he had asked a forbidden thing. No matter that Malech himself had spoken of the old vines, the First Growth of the prince-mages; merely to mention them was to receive a lecture from the Washers about the wages of arrogance and prideful folly.