The Firebird

by Nerine Dorman

  Guilt is a peculiar thing. Eventually the burden becomes a part of the body, an extra useless limb that trails along in the dirt. I would be so much freer without it, but I’ve grown so accustomed to dragging its weight with me that I cannot imagine life without it; it pains me when there is little else to distract me from its existence.

  You did this.

  You alone.

  And the night-whistler calls, forlorn, and shudders course through my body as I tremble, though I am far from cold.

  Mama always said to us that we must sleep before the tenth hour, for the night-whistler is an emissary for the vyra desiring bodies to possess, seeking out any child still awake before the deepest night. The labourers tell other tales, of how the night-whistler comes to a house only when someone is about to pass beyond the Veil.

  Nonsense, I understand now. Nothing but superstitious tales used to scare people into opening their hearts to evil. And yet...

  That forlorn call doesn’t abate. It follows me to my pallet, where my skin soon adheres to the rough hemp bedding. The humidity and heat is such that I cannot bear to have the sheet pulled over me but then the whine of the mosquito adds its own uneasy counterpoint to the damnable bird outside.

  The dreams that come are fitful wisps that steal my vitality as a washerwoman wrings laundry. Like water, these phantasms trickle between my fingers, impossible to catch but for one. I wake before dawn, my chest tight, to the dull thuds of a nala beetle battering itself senseless against my shutters. I don’t recall closing my window during the night but I must have. Normally I’d kill the bug on sight—their grubs, after all, do so much damage to any wooden structures, and there are so many of them this time of year that they get into everything. But there is something nearly magical about the blue-green metallic sheen of its carapace, the way it scrabbles futilely on my palm. The little legs move at a furious pace. Then I open the window and, as if the creature tastes immediate freedom, its carapace lifts to reveal a delicate lacework of wings, and it buzzes away into the dusky predawn.

  Wishes, Ailas always told me. The beetles carry wishes to the gods.

  Which gods?

  I must make a wish, some dim part of me thinks, but the words die before they reach my lips.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Second Trial

  Penitents are stacking wood for the pyre when I cross the square at dawn. No one else is up, and most of the windows high in the terraces are still tightly shuttered. It’s barely light and already I am gasping for breath in the muggy air. The sky has gone the colour of old bruises, and the penitents are sheened in sweat while they work.

  A few years ago this task would have fallen to me, garbed in a plain hempen tunic that barely reaches my knees, with dirt permanently crusting my fingernails. The penitents go about their business with their heads bowed, each task executed so as to cause minimal disturbance. This is the first lesson, to move without upsetting the natural order, to not be the stone causing the ripple but to be the river flowing.

  The knotted wood looks like last season’s prunings of tala berry, cropped from the plantations, but I can’t quite shake the sense that these are amputated limbs carefully stacked, drier than usual, so the fire will be hot, and the condemned will die of painful burns instead of smoke inhalation. I don’t know what’s worse. It doesn’t require a great leap of the imagination to imagine myself tied to the stake, watching the ally kiss the torch to the kindling, to see the hungry tongues lick up in their haze, and to feel the heat lap against my skin.

  A shiver wracks me before I realise I’m staring into the middle distance, paused like a gawker at a spectacle when I have a place I need to be, my own tasks that remain undone. The crushed shell grinds beneath my sandals as I hurry to the subterranean cells. The door is a grim rectangular patch of darkness set in rough-dressed blocks of volcanic stone and will swallow me whole.

  Incurious allies glance at me from their post in the guardroom when I help myself to the key then take the stairs down to the sub-levels. I should have had breakfast, but the mere thought of eating anything before today’s Ordeal has turned my stomach. A foolish notion, for the day will be a trial not only for the prisoner, but also for those of us who have to administer the Ordeal.

  Maybe he died during the night. The wild hope flutters beneath my breast as I descend into the choking darkness. Many of the crystals have been allowed to out or maybe it’s because the air is so bad that even this quiet magic will struggle no matter what.

  I pause on the last step and peer into the blackness, waiting for my eyes to adjust. The foetid miasma forces me to breathe through my mouth. The silence presses down so heavily my ears are ringing and my own breathing sounds like the bellows in Uncle Mikos’s forge.

  “Is it time already?” the prisoner murmurs.

  I start, and press a hand against the algae-shrouded wall in order to steady myself.

  He lives!

  My heart constricts, and I’m not sure if it’s bitter disappointment or the joy of a silk-winged Sunai-moth the night before a storm. I reach for the rack next to the doorway and grab a baton.

  “On your feet, prisoner,” I grate as I stride forward.

  “Sister, dear, no need to be so formal.” He chokes out a wheezy laugh. “Thanks to your tender ministrations yesterday, I’m a bit worse for wear, so a little sympathy might be in order.”

  “On your feet.”

  He doesn’t reply, but groans faintly, and I hear him shift.

  “Are you standing?”

  “Barely.”

  “I’m going to unlock the cell. No trouble from you, you hear?”

  “Bossed around by my baby sister.”

  “Shut your mouth!” I smash the baton against the bars so that the resultant clamour crashes through the interior. My guilt is instant, crippling.

  After that he is silent as he hobbles ahead of me, hunched over and clutching his abdomen as if the skin might split open to spill his entrails onto the ground. The allies watch solemnly as we pass through the guardroom and shuffle along to the chambers where the second day of the Trial must occur. The prisoner doesn’t so much as glance at the piled wood around the stake, though he must see it from the corner of his eye as we pass.

  I am the vyra goat, bringing another of my kind to the slaughterhouse, except the prisoner is certainly cognisant of his fate—unlike the hapless livestock that bleat out their last blood on the grubby stone floor.

  Meek, he shuffles down the steps, pausing every once in a while to catch his breath. Bruising or broken ribs, it matters not in the end. He must endure this on top of whatever else we inflict. His lot could so easily have been mine; I won’t forget that. It is not unheard of for allies themselves to undergo the Ordeal. That blade rests on all our necks.

  Today we attempt in earnest to separate the demon vyra from the flesh. My work is to ensure that the cloying fumes of the assorted herbs and resins burned on hot coals are continuous. Every time I am sent up the stairs for more water I am grateful to clear my lungs of the fog and the stench of blood.

  Today Elder Susin makes a thousand incisions with an obsidian blade, into which he rubs an assortment of ashes, tinctures and oils, all the while intoning the ritual words to cancel out the power of the entity.

  At first the prisoner lies still, spread-eagled on the stone slab. From whence he summons the wherewithal to remain calm I cannot fathom. Perhaps he has retreated into himself because his eyes stare off into distance; that is the only explanation I have.

  Rarely do the condemned last this long into the second day. Or so I’ve been told. I cannot bear to watch, and I can only imagine that my own gaze appears as distant as I stand next to the elder, awaiting the man’s next order. The twins are sentinels by the door, intoning the words, the beating of the ritual staves adding a hypnotic percussion to the nightmare. The sacred lamps struggle, their flames low and sputtering.

  And the unresisting flesh becomes a canvas for precise incisions that slowly resol
ve into the passages drawn from the Word of Fennar. Elder Susin is a master of his art.

  The prisoner breaks shortly after noon. We return after a brief respite, having left him alone and sobbing in the darkened chamber. The hour, Elder Susin tells me with great enthusiasm, is so that he might reach his nadir, the separation of flesh and spirit devoid of any sensory stimuli.

  The prisoner’s scream is shrill, more that of a wounded kama bird when Elder Susin douses him with cold water.

  “Begone, you vile spirit!” Elder Susin commands. “You have tormented the fane of this man’s souls for too long. You have despoiled the flesh, putrefied the heart and spread corruption throughout his mind. Begone!”

  Whether it’s the water spreading the concoction of substances coating the prisoner’s body or the shock of the sudden wetness that makes him jerk and screech, I cannot tell. I wish to clap my hands over my ears and avert my gaze but the twins stand behind me, and their knowing grins press against the back of my head.

  They will report any anomalous behaviour. I must be stoic. Unassailable.

  And yet...

  A thousand years ago there was a little girl who played hunter-and-kama-bird with her brother, up, up in the ruins of the old temple, high in the ravine where her mama said she must never go. But it was all right. Her brother was there. It was fine. Truly, it was.

  They crawled, crept and stalked among the snakelike roots of the lamin trees, from where the ghost lemurs might watch them with wide amber eyes, until the little girl found the perfect hiding place. Only the well was a lot deeper than she’d anticipated, and the precarious lip upon which she perched crumbled when she shifted, and she slipped into the yawning throat and only just managed to snag a root. Those pebbles she dislodged rattled into the nothingness for a long, long time.

  There she hung, like a spider’s meal, until her brother came. Try as he might, he could not reach her, and as they struggled, she slipped further and further into the blackness.

  “I’ll never leave you,” Ailas told me as he carefully clambered down. “I’ve got you. I’ll never let you go. Trust me.”

  I’ll never forget the feeling of his work-roughened fingers the moment he grasped my hand and helped me climb to safety. I am grateful for the darkness in this chamber of horrors, for the drips of moisture from above, because they disguise my tears.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Remorse

  The night-whistler is insistent; it’s as if he’s sitting right beneath my window. Three days now and no afternoon showers. Even the allies are muttering, turning accusing glares at an overcast sky that provides no answers. I cannot breathe, cannot gain any comfort, so I hunch in the close dankness of my cell, hands on my sweaty knees as I fight to draw deep enough breaths.

  Somewhere, far beneath the Place, is a cell even darker and grimmer than mine, without a window, and possessed only of slimy walls and rotten palm fronds for a bed, where unnameable things skitter and crawl across unguarded limbs.

  My brother lies there, mouth agape, gaze glassed—nearly a corpse. I had no words for him when I helped lay him down this day past. I had no succour to offer, not even anger, for one of the twins remained behind to keep watch while I sluiced his body with water.

  Have they noticed a shift in my demeanour? Do they suspect that hairline cracks are fingering through my resolve? Certainly I was gentler late this afternoon, bit back a remark when Gabris or Peris—I can’t tell them apart—nearly brained Ailas on a doorframe as they brought him down the last steps into the row of cells.

  Our ministrations were particularly detailed when it became clear that the demon could not be dislodged, despite my brother’s screams. Elder Susin even apologised to Ailas, said we had one more day to try so that he could die a free man. And what did my brother do then?

  I swear he laughed. Or tried to at least. A pained smile twitched the side of his face but then he became corpse-like again.

  I scrub furiously at my eyes but I can’t dislodge that vision, and it hurts so much—a deep splinter wedged in my heart.

  Tomorrow they will place him on the Throne. The seat, backrest and arms are covered in spikes liberally coated in poison distilled from the hira bush’s roots. No matter how he shifts or tries to seek comfort, he will only succeed in embedding the myriad points deeper, and his agony will be intensified as the hira works its way through his bloodstream. His entire being will be awash in agony. Death by fire will seem a blessing if he survives the Throne.

  All the time, when I was a child, Ailas was there for me, and yet, here I am, his accuser. Our parents’ deaths weigh down my chest as well. I cannot place all the blame on Ailas, even if my heart was filled with righteousness at the time. It is fine and well to consider the Word of the Fennar when it is not your own flesh and blood being torn to ribbons, but now my doubt gnaws at me, relentless like a burrowing mole.

  I did wrong by our parents, that much I understand, but is it not stated in the Word that one must sometimes judge whether to counteract the greater wrong with the smaller? We use this very same phrase to justify our Trial. Can it not be turned the other way?

  No. I am seeking justification.

  Always seeking justification.

  What if I never sought Fennar in the first place?

  That other life teases—prosperous vadis-farmer and his family. Perhaps a bigger farmhouse. I’d be married now, with two or three little ones. My husband would help my father. Every once in a while Ailas would visit with his family, or we’d go visit him on his in-laws’ plantation. Our children would get muddy in the furrows after the rains. Their mouths would be stained crimson with tala fruit.

  What is this sterile life I lead in the Fennarin? Am I truly happy?

  There is structure, the surety of ritual and routine, with the rise of the sun and the setting of the moons where the allies circle each other like pariah dogs over the carcass of a dead mule. Snarling and snapping, drawing blood, but never quite going for the kill until one of them has been mortally wounded.

  I see the blazing joy in my brother’s eyes when he heals the broken wing of a paradise bird. Of the sharp-pinioned swifts that dip and weave in greeting when he crosses the courtyard. The way the vadis orchids release their sticky-sweet scent when he enters the grove, the heavy white bells soft to touch, their lips moist.

  Papa praising his gifts, stating how the next harvest will mean enough income for us to send me to the college in Ferion City so I can gain the proper book-learning to become a scribe, so that we can show those stuck-up Binmah that Shiwen are as good, if not better than they are.

  How all the while I clasp the copper bar of my station, on its woven-grass thong, and see allies in their charcoal robes, stern-faced and determined; I think to myself that is how I want to be, to have power.

  Only now I’m garbed in drab hues myself and all I can think of is those damned dogs with their curled-back lips over dagger teeth. Perhaps Ailas always had the right of it in his wild, unfettered joy, and within me coiled the serpent of jealousy, waiting to strike because I wanted what I could never have.

  It hurts to make these admissions in the deep dark of the night when souls flee the body, and children are born squalling and bloody into the world. Tonight I stand on a cusp; I realise that in the secret recesses of my heart still untouched by the Word of Fennar. I cry for that hazel-eyed girl who’s lost her path, who’s been waylaid by silver-tongued dogs. They said I was precocious for even endeavouring to ascend to their ranks. Jumped-up Shiwen trash. Yet that challenge has been like leaving syrup for the ants, so far as I am concerned.

  Sleep will remain outside of my grasp this night, no matter what I do. That damned night-whistler is relentless, trilling, its liquid voice cracking on the higher notes as if suffering incredible strain. Perhaps the bird is here to carry away my soul to the Eater of the Dead deep within the mountain’s heart. It’s easy to believe in those old stories when no one who’s in their right mind should be awake.

  I stand o
n the lip of a great abyss, and all I need to do is take that first step to fling myself into the emptiness from which there is no return. If I do not leap, I will forever be gnawed at by the memories of this night, the regret of not knowing.

  A sixteen-year-old girl stands at the threshold of the Place of Fennar all those years ago, her mouth dry, her tongue a heavy worm in her mouth. Her feet hurt from the run down the gravel road, her ankle still smarting from where she stepped badly in the rut left by a wagon wheel.

  She could have turned around, gone home, and everything would have stayed as it was, the same way I can now hold my peace trapped within an untenable situation, a fly adhering to the milky latex weeping from the lamin tree.

  Either way I’m damned, will be consumed from within by vyra-demons of my own making, that no amount of Adorations will ever dislodge, or I’ll join my brother tomorrow on his pyre when they catch me going to him in the dead of night.

  When, not if.

  Or.

  The seditious thought prickles, stretches its spine and shakes out its fur.

  I could free him.

  Why?

  So I can assuage my own share of the guilt?

  Ailas might be ungrateful, might kill me out of spite, yet at the same time I understand that this particular fear is groundless. He still refers to me as his baby sister. Is that the stance of someone bent on murder? I too am an accomplice to his capture, incarceration and torture.

  My breath rattles as I pull on my robes over clammy skin. No shoes. I need to feel every tremor through the ground. I pull the obsidian leaf-blade dagger from its sheath. It’s a ritual object but it cuts the spirit from the body as surely as it parts skin and slashes vital arteries. The facets catch slivers of lamplight and the face I examine in the cracked mirror looks pasty, the usual warm ochre tones more like clay.