The Fire-Moon

by Isabel Pelech

  “I don’t—”

  “Now!”

  “I don’t have it. Sheskiya took it all.”

  Nairuntu’s eyes bulged. “What?” she asked very quietly.

  “Sheskiya took it all. She said I was trying to cheat her. Firs—Mistress, she did butcher her laying d—”

  “What did you call me?”

  Teshar closed her eyes. “I called you Mistress,” she said hopelessly.

  “You mock me, you ignore me, you buy rotted food, you steal my money, and you try to call me first-mother.” Nairuntu was too angry even to shout. “What have I told you about that?”

  “You’ve told—owww!”

  “Stop sniveling and say it.”

  Teshar didn’t speak; she was too busy feeling her head to find out if Nairuntu had actually pulled her hair out. It certainly felt that way. But the mud-slathered mass was still intact, for what little it was worth. “I told you,” Nairuntu went on evenly, “that you are no part of this family. Even your barbarian true-mother has said so. The child Siotesharet is dead. Your name is Beast-of-the-Desert.” She turned with a flare of skirts. “And,” she added over her shoulder, “you sleep outside tonight.”

  “What?”

  “With all the other wild animals.”

  Teshar took three stumbling steps toward Nairuntu. “But I’ll—I’ll die.” Nairuntu turned and looked over her shoulder, and Teshar swallowed. I remember how you used to play with me, to call me Little Star— Nairuntu looked like a different woman. “They’ll come for me. I’ll—”

  A faint smile flicked across Nairuntu’s face, quick as a darting lizard. She didn’t even have to say the word good.

  And then she was back in the kitchen and the valuable wooden door, with its carven wardings against evil, clunked shut behind her. From many steps away, Teshar could still hear the bolt click.

  I’ll die.

  Stumbling, not even sure where she was going, Teshar turned away from the house and moved into the gathering dusk. I was wrong about the days in the desert. This is the worst day of my life. And the worst night of my life. And, very likely, the last.

  Chapter Two

  Moonlight

  When her tears and her shock subsided to manageable levels, Teshar found herself at the western wall of the farm.

  It made sense, in a way. The western wall marked the boundary between the farm and the desert. The plants changed there, from barley to coarse, scrubby weeds, and past the weeds were endless sand. If anything or anyone came for her, it would come from out there. For the first time, Teshar understood why soldiers so famously wanted to die while looking at their enemies, facing them. Things are more scary behind you.

  Of course, some things are scary no matter where they are. Back when everything went wrong, Teshar had had no such fine sentiments about looking death in the eye. Of course, if I had been braver back then, I would be dead without rites. So maybe I would be the one coming across the desert.

  The stars were coming out. The evening star was first, of course, but after a while Teshar made out Blue Summer Star and some of the ones outlining the Scorpion. I remember how we would watch from the roof, back when we still trusted our amulets . . . As a former desert barbarian, Teshar’s mother had not been frightened of the night like the other women. She had taught Teshar the patterns of the fixed stars and how to recognize the Star Nomads. Menib even joined them once, mostly to prove that he was braver than his wives, and told her how the priests in the great city Ionu could predict all the events of the sky, when the stars rose and when they set, and could read the secret turnings of a man’s life from what they saw.

  They’re beautiful. Looking at the stars was better than looking around her as the world fell into deepening shadow. The barley fields were dark and dense beneath the night, but the desert was still faintly luminous. Perhaps they won’t come tonight.

  But according to all the stories, the dead had ways of knowing things, more ways, perhaps, than even a sorcerer-priest. If that was true, they would know that Teshar was outside tonight.

  Do the dead hate me as much as the living do, or even more?

  What will they be like? In the stories of Blessed Oseros’s country, the dead looked just as they had in the prime of their life, perhaps handsomer and healthier. But ghosts, by definition, had never made that long journey. Some ghosts were well-intentioned, spirits bound to the living world by some nagging or urgent purpose, who would presumably travel onward when their task was finished. Some had been evil in life, and lingered for fear of Oseros’s infallible judgement—not to mention the thing that lurked beneath his throne, waiting for a soul to be judged irredeemable. And some ghosts were people who had never been buried, or never had the proper rites. They wandered. And hungered. And thirsted.

  Teshar hugged herself and shivered. It was cold. Even the earthbake wall was going cold.

  Most people thought of the unburied dead as something that happened in barbarian lands, countries far away from the Khemtesh Empire. Places like Haieln, across the sea, across the whole world, where (the stories said) the dead were simply thrown to the dogs, and all the spirits turned into snakes and hissed for blood to drink.

  No-one in the village of Hasmahi thought that, and had not for a long time. Of all of them, Teshar was the only person who had not seen, or heard, or felt the unquiet dead. After all, she hadn’t been in Hasmahi at the time . . .

  “I begin to think that Hasmahi grows not barley, but fools.”

  Teshar shrieked and spun, heart beating like a bird taking flight. A male voice. An adult, deep male voice. Behind her.

  She could see him, which was in its way a painful relief. Very tall, thin, robed—she couldn’t make out his face, but the voice had been unfamiliar—and she could see the glint of a bald head.

  Teshar went cold again. And, very carefully, bowed.

  “Then you know who I am. Not entirely a simpleton—or, at least, you listen to gossip. So explain to me, girl, what you’re doing outside, after full dark, when you know what comes to this place. And when you know they will come here first.”

  What comes. Not what may come. Will, not if. I’m dead . . . Unless, of course, the sorcerer-priest decided to protect her. And I prove every day that I’m no good at humility.

  Teshar took a deep breath. “My Mistress was angry at—”

  “Oh, please. You’re not a slave, and there are no girls’ schools within a day’s walk of here. And you’re a little bit young to be sneaking out for stolen kisses. Girl—Siotesharet, is it?” Teshar startled, and saw a glint of teeth. “You see, I do know more than your fellow fools think. I have noticed, having two good eyes, that there are no children between six and fifteen in Hasmahi or any of the surrounding farms. None. I have noticed that every time I mention this, sweaty men distract me with flattery and stupid women cook me inedible suppers. And I think, Siotesharet, that if you want to avoid the trouble that is on its way—or the magistrate, who is on her way—you should tell me everything you know. Clearly. From the beginning. Without whining, if you can manage.”

  The last six words were spoken into clear night air, but to Teshar, they rustled like the breeze before a howling sandstorm.

  She was no longer cold. In fact, she could feel her skin heating, and her hands clenching without her will behind it. Nairuntu’s eyes would have bulged. Teshar’s eyes narrowed, and she glared straight at the priest, without fearing that he would see the golden color of them. “So you know so gods-take-it much—good for you! Why haven’t you helped us?”

  The last sentence was a scream. Something immaterial exploded inside Teshar, something she had felt only three times before. Red and orange filled her vision, and her ears roared.

  Teshar swayed. “Oh . . . no . . .”

  Sat down heavily on the wall.

  Her eyesight was still sparking as if she had hit her head. But some of the light was not illusory. There were orange flames on the ground, as if someone had dumped out a pot of coals. The pr
iest was untouched, but beside him a stalk of barley was aflame.

  She could see him clearly now, and wasted a moment in astonishment.

  That . . . no. That’s a clerk who shaved his head. Or a village priest. He wore no jewelry, not even a scrap of faience, and an undyed brown robe. He was tall, yes, but underfed. Far from the demon ugliness or fearsome, prince-like handsomeness that Teshar had unconsciously expected, his face was simply that of an irritable middle-aged man.

  His eyes did give her pause for a moment. They were deep-set, dark and penetrating, the sort of eyes that fit a sorcerer. Right now, they were looking at Teshar—looking into Teshar, really—and against all odds, the priest was smiling. “Interesting,” he murmured, and looked at the flaming barley beside him. “Very interesting indeed.”

  And then the priest plucked the flame off of the plant. Not the part of the plant that was alight, but the flame. It ribboned up from the palm of his hand, no longer orange but white. For a moment, the shadows made his face look so sinister that Teshar shrank back. “So. Can you control what you create?”

  Teshar gaped at him.

  “I’d learn. Your mud’s on fire.” The priest nodded toward the top of her head and closed his hand, extinguishing the light. Extinguishing the sparks on the ground, and all the rest of Teshar’s fire—except the flickering light that seemed to be coming from behind her head, but wasn’t.

  Teshar yelped and slapped at her hair. At length, when the only thing falling around her was crusted mud and not sparks, she felt it gingerly, failed to burn herself, and stared narrowly at the amused priest. All right . . . he does have magic.

  He’s also a camel’s rear end.

  And he knows. He knows about me.

  “To answer your last question,” the priest said quietly, “yes, I know more than you can imagine. But I know less about this place, this village, than one of your five-year-old children. Much as it pains me to admit it, I flung at you most of the information I gathered. I know of the missing children, and I even know who burns with the greatest guilt over it, but I do not know what happened to them. I know your name, but nothing of your position, let alone how you managed to have a sorceress’s First Vision. And I knew I would need this—but I did not know why.” He produced a small bundle from some pocket of his robe. “I hope you find it more palatable than I did.”

  Teshar blinked and peeled back the cloth wrapping.

  And tried to stuff the entire contents into her mouth at once. Duck, duck, good sweet meat, good sweet sauce, oh, I love duck . . .

  “I’d chew.”

  She did her best, but most of the meat vanished the way dogs vanished their table scraps. Even so, it was still the most tender, succulent meat she had ever tasted. There were traces of something white and flaky in the sauce, savory, sourish and sweetish at once, and Teshar realized belatedly that they must be part of the coconut. Maybe that’s why it tastes so good.

  The priest watched her eat, then seated himself on the wall. Unlike anyone from Hasmahi, he swung his feet over to the untilled side. “Siotesharet—you know, that’s too much name for someone your size. Do you call yourself Sio, or Tesharet?”

  “Teshar.”

  “I’m Aeret.”

  Surely he didn’t expect her to call him by name. Teshar was silent.

  Aeret cleared his throat. “I am not accustomed to apologizing. Nevertheless. I should not have been so abrupt with you. I didn’t realize then what I recognize now.”

  He did not continue, and after a moment, Teshar realized that he would not until prompted. “What is that, sir?”

  “That you might be the only person in this benighted district who isn’t giving me the run-around. And making up new titles to flatter me while they do it.” Aeret patted the wall beside him. “Now. Tell me your story, Teshar. From the beginning, leaving nothing out. And then, if I can, I will answer your questions.”

  Teshar eased onto the earthbake wall. “Well—it started when Menib was still my father, and his third wife Kamorn was my mother . . .”

  Everyone had been frightened for more than two weeks now, and since Teshar was only ten, no-one would even tell her why.

  She rode upon her Uncle Beket’s wagon, but they were going neither to harvest nor to market, and it was too late to be traveling anywhere, let alone out here. Teshar and five other children rode further and further into the desert, straight toward the place where the sun had set, with the twilight bluing to darkness around them. In front, Beket coaxed the oxen and ignored whines of, “But when will we beeee there?” Teshar looked at the tracks the wagon left, narrow and winding and endless, like the trails of two synchronized snakes. It was actually a little bit easier to enjoy a wagon-ride here, where the land was smooth and sandy. But Teshar and the children had worn out what little idle chatter they had started with.

  They had never been here before.

  No-one had ever been here before. When they had asked their parents, “What’s that way?” the answer was always a shrug, and, “Nothing.” Until tonight, when the six of them had been taken to the door by stiff-faced or weeping parents, bundled with blankets, and put on Beket’s wagon without an explanation in sight. It was clear to Teshar—clear to all of them—that something grim and adult-serious was going on, but none of them knew.

  Teshar had to admit that if “Nothing” could still have earth and sky, the desert was a fairly good imitation of it. There weren’t even any normal sounds. No birds or bugs or frogs. No rustling and rasping of dry stems, the way the fields sounded in the dry season. There was only a constant scratchy wind.

  Teshar’s mother was B’dou by birth, one of the desert nomads, and she was the only one who had made sure to send water. Between them, the children had emptied Teshar’s first bottle, her largest, leaving her with two child-sized flasks on a B’dou sized belt. Teshar’s mother had had a funny look in her eyes when she helped Teshar strap it on. Then she said, “Just in case—” and hugged Teshar hard and turned away very, very quickly, and that was all the good-bye that she got.

  Teshar had thought at first that the blankets were motherly foolishness, but with the sun down it was growing cold out here. And among the children, even Teshar, who liked to fancy herself a daring barbarian princess, was nervous about being out in the desert in the dark. One of the boys leaned over to her and murmured, “Your mother used to live out here?”

  “Not here exactly. The tribes traveled between the oases, she said.” It was hard to imagine a lush green spot in all this darkening deadness. “Maybe we’re going to an oasis.”

  “We could be going to the Oasis of Beer, but I don’t think it’s likely. Are those buildings way up there?”

  “I think just rocks,” Teshar said, although she had to squint to make the judgment. At least rocks were less nothing-ful than sand.

  The stars came out, and still they drove on.

  After a while, the moon rose. Teshar had to admit that it made the desert look better. She finally understood why her mother’s people had all those songs about moonlight. This must be what the sea looks like, all silver-grey and ruffled. Except the sea doesn’t stand still. And it isn’t so empty. There are merryfish that play like puppies alongside the boats, the stories say. And huge Haieln ships, long and fierce, with eyes painted on their fronts.

  The thought of cresting a sand wave and coming eye to blind painted eye with some foreign galleon seemed suddenly all too real to Teshar. She pushed the thought away.

  One of the younger children began to cry.

  After a time, the sand diminished and they were among rocks. Some of the rocks looked carved, or grown like gnarly swamp trees, and some merely rose up like city walls on either side of the wagon. If the sand had been easier progress than a road, this was much, much harder. At least three of the children were crying at any one time, and Teshar added some yelps of her own as the cart clunked over stones and through small gullies, sometimes slamming her jaws together with such force that all her teeth pained h
er. And Uncle Beket, her kindly, friendly Uncle Beket, didn’t seem to hear.

  They were traveling upward.

  After a long time—Teshar thought the moon had traveled nearly a third of the sky by then—the cart jounced under a rough, grown-looking stone arch, and Teshar saw another standing stone directly in their path. Uncle Beket reined in the oxen, but it hardly seemed necessary; even harnessed as they were, they edged away from the stone with little nervous lowing sounds. Only when the cart was completely stopped did the stone move, and Teshar realized, with a spark of fear, that it was a man in a robe.

  The man stepped forward and shone where the moonlight caught him. His white robe concealed most of his body, but Teshar caught the glint of metal on his face, and when he revealed a hand in a graceful gesture to invite them forth from the wagon, it scintillated golden. Teshar drew in her breath. He must have so many rings on it, rings as close together as serpent scales, to make his hand look like it was gloved in gold.

  “L-lord Utsepekt is a great man.” Beket said unnecessarily. His voice was high and constricted. “A prince under a curse. H-he needed the six best, most gentle-hearted children in Khemtesh to break the enchantment on him. And so we brought you here.”

  Teshar stepped down from the wagon as obediently as the others, feeling dreamlike, but thinking, Khemtesh? Surely he means Hasmahi. Khemtesh was, after all, the largest empire in the world.

  Nevertheless, the sense of walking in a dream or a myth was strong. None of the children cried anymore, or even complained about the steep upward path. Once, Teshar realized Lord Utsepekt was walking beside her, and that gold-spangled hand drifted down to light for a moment on her shoulder. She thought, I’ve been touched by a prince, and looked up into his shadowed face. All she saw was the glimmer of moonlight on bronze.