Wings of Flame

by Nancy Springer

  Dusk, at last. She dropped down from her perch and moved off cautiously on all fours, down the slope toward a place where she hazily remembered the presence of food—led as much by instinct as by memory, dim vision of a place once visited, long before. Singing arose in the distance. There was no guard, for everyone had joined the feast; the prince and his bride had come down from their bower.

  Chapter Twenty

  He had awakened her with a kiss from an hour’s gentle slumber. Sula. Sleeping, she looked all childlike innocence, but Kyrem had reason to believe she was a woman, or very nearly so, and she was lovely, and love of her suffused him; he could scarcely believe his incredible luck, that he was to spend the rest of his life with her. They went down to their supper, the two of them, all smiles and soft glances and the touch of warm hands. Kyrem could not stop smiling. And the best of it was that no one dared to laugh at him, not even Nasr Yamut, for he, Kyrem, would be king.

  The others had feasted all afternoon; therefore what the prince and his bride ate was not so much supper as the continuation of the ceremonial dinner in many courses. They ate heartily this time. And as they sat in their places of honor on the platform, Sula’s mother was brought to join them. Kyrem had sent trusted servants to find her. The woman had been in hiding since the hour of the Choosing, fearing her mistress’s jealous wrath.

  She came before the royal couple with a sort of humble dignity, kissed her daughter and answered Sula’s embrace with a few tears and a smile. She was dressed in plain, dark clothing and she walked with a limp, but it was evident that she had once been beautiful, though her raven hair was now touched with gray.

  “You will be kind to my daughter, lord?” she asked, or rather declared. “She is very young—too young to wed, really, but I have no husband, we are poor, and I knew she would never have another such chance.”

  “I have loved her for these many months,” Kyrem said, “in the form of her counterpart, whom you spurned.”

  The woman went pale, but her gaze did not waver. “Where is the other?” she asked.

  “Wait,” Sula exclaimed. “Then it is true, I have a sister, a twin? I thought I remembered, I dreamt—but you told me there had been a baby who was dead.”

  “I could not tell you the truth,” the woman said to her. “Best beloved, please do not be angry with me.”

  “But, Mother—” Sula gave her a hurt glance and turned to Kyrem. “You have loved her? Where is she?”

  “Dead, indeed,” he told her gently, “or I would have been wed with no Choosing. I am sorry,” he said to the mother.

  She stood pale but firm. “You think me a monster, both of you,” she said. “Another woman my age would understand how it was in those days, how a young wife did what she was told—but now that I am older, how I regret it.”

  Indeed Kyrem had thought her a monster, many times, before he met her. She, the mother who had forsaken Seda! But looking at her, and thinking of Sula, he knew he must somehow have been mistaken. The monster had been of his mind’s making.

  “I would like to hear your story,” he said. “Sit down.” He rose to make a place for her on the platform, on the cushioned couch next to her daughter, and after a glance at him, she took it. He leaned against the table to face her.

  “Tell me,” the woman requested, “what was she like, what was her life like, how did she fare, how did she … die?”

  “First tell me how her life began.”

  They talked through sunset and dusk and into torchlit darkness. It took that long for the tale to fully unfold. Sula was of Devan blood, but she had lived half her life in Vashti. Her mother and father had fled there from Deva before she was born.

  “It is hard to describe the man,” her mother explained. “I should not have married him. Parents, aunts, uncles, they all warned me against him. But I loved him because he could charm the birds. He was of the old wild blood, not Devan, older than Devan, feared. He was never really accepted in Ra’am, not by my family, not by anyone. I loved him; he was handsome, he was intense, he needed me. No one else would pity him as I did. Then there was a poisoning of an important person and he was blamed. He was beaten and driven out of the city. That night I stole from my room, took food and followed him. I found him and nursed him and we were wed by the ceremony of his ancestors, in secrecy. Then we made our way by foot over the mountains into Vashti. My family was searching for me, but we eluded them.”

  The man was used to living by his wits. The pair wandered through Vashti earning their food any way they could, sometimes stealing it. Those were hard days, but good, the woman said. Finally an opportunity offered, a cottage was secured, a permanent dwelling place. The man was clever and could do whatever his lord required of him. The woman was a seamstress at her lady’s command.

  “It was terribly important to him that we should be accepted,” she explained. “He tried in every way he knew to be settled, respectable. It was impossible of course. We were Devans, intruders, upstarts in the lord’s affection; we were never much liked. But he thought that maybe in time, if we adopted the customs.…” Her voice trailed away, and she stared at an empty place, air, beside her daughter.

  “So that is why we had to abandon the other babe,” she said.

  No one spoke, and after a while she went on, reluctantly, as though forced by something within herself to relive a time she had long tried to forget.

  “When she was three, the very day after she had turned three, he took her away to the Kansban and left her somewhere with only her clothes for shelter.… I cried for weeks. I loved her, even though I had never been allowed to give her a name. And I grew to hate him.”

  “He had crippled you as an adultress?” Kyrem asked.

  “Yes. On the day the babes were born. Of course he did not really believe that of me; how could he? But the custom had to be followed, even if it turned him against his loved ones, against nature.… He became a stranger to me. Yet I had to do as he said. I was only a wife; I could do nothing without him.”

  “Mother, is that true?” Sula exclaimed.

  “No,” Kyrem answered her.

  “I thought it was true.” The woman stretched her mouth into a bitter smile. “Later, when he left me, I found out how false I had been, to myself, to my poor baby, my child.”

  “That was when I was seven,” Sula gravely informed Kyrem. Already she had lost much of her silence, her shyness.

  “Why did he leave?”

  “He had gone mad as a jay,” Sula said.

  “I had felt it coming for years,” her mother affirmed. “Our house had filled up with hatred. I blamed him for all my pain, and he twisted the blame away and cast in on Vashti. He went through his days dealing pleasantly with the people he encountered, trying to be liked, trying to be no longer different, and all the while inside him I felt menace building, growing, and I could not help him, I could scarcely help myself. He moved farther and farther away from truth. He became a living, walking deceit, a poisonous man—”

  “Had he actually done that poisoning in Deva?” Kyrem asked curiously.

  “I do not think so. But because people thought he had—it took years for the change, but he became capable of such killing.”

  Living her days as though in a trance, watching as the bird watches from the cage, a dozen times she had thought the crisis must come, and a dozen times it had been pushed a little farther into the looming future. Finally one day the man erupted with an eagle’s scream, or the scream of some raptor stranger than an eagle.… The woman caught hold of the girl and ran out of the cottage before he could reach them. He took his club, a vicious weapon with knife blades embedded in the tip, and he went through the village knocking down walls and pillars and everything that stood in his way, sending people fleeing before him, spitting and shrieking the whole while. Finally he stood in the empty village square, amid desolation, and pronounced his curse. Those few who hid nearby heard every blasphemous word. The woman heard some of it too, as she clutched a few salva
ged belongings and fled with her daughter toward Deva. The man cursed Vashti and Deva, the two kingdoms of Suth, the places that had scorned him, and he cursed every soul in them. He cursed them with the most powerful of curses. He would set them like stallions at each other, wreaking war upon war until the streams ran red with blood, even streams where no streams had been before, until not a mother’s son stood whole upon his legs and the winds were full of the wailing of inconsolable women. The wild things and the flying things would help him, he said. All free things hated Vashti and Deva. Vashti and Deva! They had taken from him his manhood and his child; he would be avenged!

  “And then, so I later heard, he went up to the holy mountaintop,” the woman concluded. “It was as well; he could do little harm there. I have heard no more of him, these seven years past, and I did not go back to my family for fear that he would find us. Sula and I supported ourselves by our sewing, made ourselves a humble home. We were poor, but we lived simply, we survived.”

  “He killed her,” Kyrem whispered. His face was ashen.

  “What, my lord?”

  “He killed his own daughter, the source of all his sorrow—I mean, she for whom he mourned—twisted, twisted!” Kyrem hid his face momentarily in his hands. “He killed her and, in a way, himself,” he said at last. “Though I struck the blow.… How horrible. Did he know? How could he have done it, knowing.…”

  Sula stood and put her arms around him to comfort him, and the woman reached out to him as well, her face as hard and white as the walls of Avedon. “It is better,” she said flatly, “that they are dead.”

  The evening was taking a darker turn. Weird, whistling music began, and Kyrem straightened himself, his face growing still and grim. “It is time for the horse ceremony,” he told Sula.

  The music came not from the instruments of the musicians, but from elsewhere—the priests. They came slowly advancing and playing on flexible pipes called snakes, each one fashioned from the windpipe of a sacrificed horse, the cartilege cut into a mouthlike vee at the end, a vibrating slit. The priests moved the pipes in sinuous, dancelike rhythms as they drew nearer, and the burbling, buzzing, whistling music undulated with the twistings and ripplings of the pipes.

  Everyone listened, shivering. Sula listened breathless and wide-eyed, Kyrem with suppressed horror. The music quickened, but Nasr Yamut lowered his pipe and handed it to a novice to hold. From another novice he took a heap of bright garments embroidered in gold, and he brought them forward.

  “Ceremonial robes,” Kyrem explained, putting on his own, helping Sula on with hers. She had a headpiece to wear, her dark hair drawn back on either side to be fastened by its upraised wings of gold. Kyrem laid his red cap aside. His crown awaited him at the sacred grove, along with the royal buskins. He wondered how best to refuse the footgear. He thought of Nasr Yamut, of Omber and the death that awaited the sacrificial horse, and his heart grew sick, even though he had had weeks in which to harden himself.

  “But you look like a queen now, child,” Sula’s mother murmured to her in wonder. “Such beautiful work—” She was examining the fabric of her daughter’s robe.

  “Mother,” Kyrem said to her, “believe me, I know something of what you felt about the lost babe. I also have been forced to abandon one whom I love to a cruel and undeserved fate.”

  She stared at him, not understanding. He smiled at her and shook his head. “Mother, when we go to the grove, stay close by my father and his men or by Auron, and I think your mistress will not dare attempt to harm you.”

  “I will not be able to go back to Deva with her,” the woman said.

  “Of course not. You are to stay in Avedon with us.”

  Then the warbling of the pipes sounded louder, and the priests ranked themselves in their order of colors, and Kyrem and Sula took their places just behind the leaders; Nasr Yamut, shining yellow in the torchlight, and his three epopts in green. The others fell in behind the novices and boys, all utterly silent; the pipes sounded shrill and clear in the chill midnight air.

  Then, in solemn procession, in moonlight and torchlight, everyone walked to the sacred grove where few except priests had gone since Auron was made king.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Omber was gloriously arrayed. He had been bathed in milk and his mane and tail combed with scented chrism before being braided with lapis beads and thread of gold; his very hooves were gilded. His headstall was of scarlet leather hung with scarlet tassels and glittering with gems; the largest one, a massive crystal jargoon, was centered on his forehead with the plaited forelock framing it. A great flowing torsade of finest gold chains adorned his neck and chest, and great flame-shaped wings of scarlet damasin rose from his shoulders. His body was draped with caparison of seven-colored baudequin over which lay a net of gold, and the whole of him was bestrewn with powder of real gold; even the fine hairs of his fetlocks had caught some of it, and he shone starrily in the night. People murmured in awe as they approached him.

  Even with Nasr Yamut’s aid—and many times Kyrem had bitterly regretted ever having allowed the fire-master to touch the horse—even with Nasr Yamut’s assistance, the priests had been hard put to handle Omber, and that fact afforded the prince some dark satisfaction. “Years ago it would have been me going to the knife, lad,” Auron told him, sensing his uncertain mood. “I feel, perhaps unreasonably, that I owe you a debt of gratitude.”

  “Quite unreasonably,” Kyrem grumbled.

  They stood in flickering torchlight. The moon had gone dark, and rumblings sounded in the sky. Omber was tethered at the base of the Atar-Vesth, the place of fire, and on his headstall the great crystal jargoon glimmered whitely as distant lightning flashed. Not far away, the white glimmer of the Suthstone answered the victim’s borrowed gem. But that starlike glint continued after the lightning had dimmed; the effigy of Suth was awake and watching. Many eyes stared at it uneasily.

  “There is a presence here,” Kyrem muttered to Auron.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. Something quite wild. I felt it on Kimiel as well.”

  “A creature of the wild? Such are common in groves and unpeopled places.”

  “Yes—but this is no common creature. There is a power here.” Kyrem stood with every sense strained, but learned no more; all was dark that night.

  “Let the bride come forward to meet the scion of the god,” Nasr Yamut intoned.

  With only a single questioning glance at Kyrem, Sula went to Omber. She had learned from Auron what she had to do, and she had unlearned in Deva the Vashtin holy fear of horses; she had never ridden, but she knew how to greet a steed by rubbing its forehead. This steed wore a jewel on its forehead—Omber needed a special greeting. So she held her hands to his betasseled cheekbones, her face to his soft face. Then, with the assistance of the epopts, she turned her back to him and crouched for a moment between his forelegs.

  The storm drew nearer, thunder sounded louder and lightning threatened, all was darkness and flickering shadows. The Suthstone shone pulsating purple.

  Crouching in the sheltering shadow beneath that great stone Suth, the girl-creature gazed intently on the happenings. She had eaten the bread and fruit from the niche in the pedestal and, her belly at last full, had chosen this cavelike nook to doze in. But now she was keenly alert. The presence of a great golden knife on the pedestal troubled her. That, and the crown and a pair of royal buskins—she faintly remembered having seen something like them before, and the memory stirred her to unease. But she did not recognize anyone in the crowd before her, not in the dark and at the slight distance; they were all featureless forms to her. Men, priests, damsel, horse. She did not recognize even Omber in his trappings, and she never considered that Auron might be present, or Kyrem. What might be the weighty occasion of state? And what was to be done to the hapless horse, the stallion?

  “Oh, glorious large-eyed horse of heaven.…” Nasr Yamut began the sacrificial liturgy.

  “Oh, glorious large-eyed h
orse of heaven,” everyone responded.

  “Oh, glorious get of godmare and mistral,

  Soon thou goest to join thy grandfather wind,

  To speed along the easy, dustless ways of sky,

  To canter on the yellow clouds of sunset

  Where no hand of man may follow thee.

  So let not the breath of mere life oppress thee,

  Let not the knife of gold affright thee,

  But, in the spirit world may there come wings upon thee,

  Upon thy head, thy shoulders, thy fetlocks wings of gold,

  Upon thy shoulders wings of fire and sunlight.

  Let thee run the heavenly ways along with the seven wild sons of Suth,

  And let Suth thy sire kiss thee with the greeting of horses,

  Let thee know the blessing of Suth.

  Go to thy doom in happiness, grandson of the mistral.”

  From the summit of Atar-Vesth flames shot up. The bower had been set ablaze, and stacks of dried spiced applewood had been added to the pyre to make a fragrant conflagration suitable for the roasting of sacred horse flesh. But in the next moment a terrible crack of thunder sounded amid a blaze of lightning, and rain poured down, sheeting in a sudden wind. The trees tossed wildly, tossed and plunged like so many steeds, sending shadows flying everywhere. The Suthstone shone blue then yellow then green, blazing out like the lightning, then fading dim. The wind roared, and the fire hissed loudly in the rain. Folk huddled together in terror.

  By the time he leads Omber three times around the fire, Kyrem thought eagerly, it will be drowned. The ceremony will be invalidated—

  But Nasr Yamut was not so easily to be deprived of his victim. He moved at once into the liturgy for the immolation, leading Omber over to stand directly beside Suth’s stone pedestal and taking up the great curved golden knife. He flourished it three times over his head and showed it to the onlookers.

  “Knife of gold, knife of sunlight, with the stroke of this knife, the sacred king of Vashti takes possession of all that lies under the course of the sun, of east and west, of the four cardinal points, of all that lies under the running hooves of the horse of heaven, of Trodden Lands and Untrodden Lands; everything that lies under the sun, Suth gives into the possession of the sacred king of Vashti with the stroke of this knife. Such is the power of Suth.”