Mortal Fire

by Elizabeth Knox

  Canny handed her crusts to Sholto, who ate them. She asked Susan, “If the folktale you want to hear isn’t about Fort Rock, what is it about?”

  “Magic,” Susan said. “Supposed local witches.”

  Canny laughed happily.

  Susan, misinterpreting the laugh, said, “I know you pride yourself on your scientific worldview, but I’m an anthropologist, and anthropology is the study of how people live, and their stories and beliefs.”

  “Look, look, look,” sang Fort Rock.

  Canny got up and brushed crumbs from her skirt. She walked away around the formation. She made a point of watching where she was putting her feet. Everything before, and behind, and beside her was beautiful. She walked till she was on the side of the formation opposite to where the path climbed from the road. She closed her eyes. The colors swarmed through her head, singing, as if she were falling headlong through a flight of angels with rainbow-colored wings. At any moment she really would fall—she’d be facedown on the springy turf, enveloped in its earthy perfume.

  Canny raised her head to face the valley and opened her eyes. There was wind, and green vagueness. There was nothing worth looking at. Canny felt bereft. She closed her eyes again and felt hot tears run down her cheeks and meet beneath her chin, where they turned cold in the wind. And then that thread of cold began to threaten to solidify and tie up her jaw so that she wouldn’t be able to open her mouth. She didn’t try to open her mouth. Instead she clenched her teeth and opened her eyes again.

  The Zarene Valley lay before her. There was a long fall of slopes, covered first in thick tussock, then in forest. The forest climbed again at a humped hill, which sat by itself at the head of the valley. The hill was a glacial moraine, an aeons-long accumulation of boulders left by a glacier that had long ago disappeared. Canny recognized what the moraine was from her geography lessons, although its rocky bones were well covered in trees. A river appeared beyond the hill as if emerging from underground. It flowed on, turquoise in the sunlight and green in the shade of trees, making a big lazy S between the gently sloped hills to either side of the valley. Canny could see orchards and several clusters of box beehives. And she could see, on the very top of the moraine, in a clearing in the forest, a large white-painted timber house. The house was perched on a lawn at the top of a terraced garden.

  As soon as she spotted the house, Canny relaxed. She stopped falling and threatening to dissolve. She no longer felt that she was foolishly turning her back on the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. The billowing banners of Extra had subsided into a very proper silence, as if she’d just said something to shut them up. Canny saw the house—and the command to look the other way immediately relented. “So,” she thought. “This is what nobody is supposed to see. What no one would want to spare a glance—this hidden house.”

  4

  CYRUS HAD COME UP through the forest to the house on Terminal Hill to help Ghislain shift his single beehive. Ghislain kept a hive so that its bees could pollinate the fruit and flowers on his garden’s immaculate top terraces. Every six months he and his cousin would shift the hive between the east and west sides of the second-to-top terrace, always moving it clockwise for luck. They’d move it in the early morning when the bees were still waking up, and would carry the stacked boxes—the whole little tower—all in one go.

  The plan was the same today, but Ghislain noticed that his cousin was getting older and would need to watch his feet when he walked. He asked, “Is it easier for you to go forward or backward?” And Cyrus only gave him a keen look and said, “How thoughtful you are,” then didn’t express a preference, wouldn’t even give Ghislain that much. Of course this was a family trait. Ghislain’s father had been just the same. If he was in a bad mood sometimes he wouldn’t even answer when you asked him if he wanted a pickle with his sliced ham.

  Cyrus picked up the smoke blower.

  Ghislain said, “Do you really need that?” He wasn’t expecting an answer. He was expecting the usual barely concealed impatience, the silence that said that this was a very big thing Cyrus was doing for Ghislain—that anything was.

  But, to Ghislain’s surprise, Cyrus did reply. “We don’t want them to swarm.”

  “Even if they haven’t anywhere to go?” Ghislain said. He was trying to keep the conversation going.

  Cyrus held out his arms. His sleeves were rolled up. Ghislain could see the warm sign moving like ant trails along the paths of sinew on Cyrus’s tanned and freckled skin. “I’m not about to let myself be stung,” Cyrus said. Then he passed Ghislain the hat and veil he’d brought along. Ghislain took them and then put them down on the grass.

  “I’m going to open the hive and inspect it first,” Cyrus said. “You might want to step back, or put those on.”

  Ghislain told him to go ahead.

  Cyrus picked up his smoke blower and opened its lid. He took some dried sumac berries from his pocket and dropped them on top of the smoldering pine needles. Then he closed the lid and pumped the bellows, blowing smoke into the gaps in the hive and over the hidden frames. The smoke would prevent the worker bees from being roused by the hive guards. It would make them sleepy, and encourage them to go and feed. They’d fill themselves with nectar and, fat and stupefied, wouldn’t put up a fight when the hive was opened.

  Cyrus blew a cloud above the hive and then raised his hand to scribble his calming runes in the hovering smoke.

  Doodling and noodling, Ghislain thought. He was offended by the fussiness of Cyrus’s magic, though one part of him knew that this scorn wasn’t his own feeling. After all this time he was so attuned to the Great Spell on the house—the massive, static spell that was everywhere, in the brilliant green of the close-clipped and rolled lawn, and the sharp edges of the timber trim around the windows, and the impossibly stainless brightness of the brass plate on the front doorsill—that, when Cyrus made his signs, Ghislain could feel the house lift an eyebrow and look down its nose. So he too lifted an eyebrow and looked down his nose at the hive and told it, “Be quiet.”

  The humming tapered off, then stopped. The hive was silent.

  “If you’ve killed them, I’m not giving you another one,” Cyrus said. Then, “I don’t know how you do that—without even lifting a finger.”

  Ghislain said he didn’t know either. He was happy that his cousin had actually said something real to him. But he could see that Cyrus didn’t believe him, and for the next few minutes, while he raised the lid and removed a couple of frames and brushed the bees off them, Cyrus didn’t speak to Ghislain, or look at him.

  * * *

  THE BEES WERE CRAWLING STILL, but their wings were immobile. Cyrus could see that the hive looked healthy despite Ghislain’s having quelled it with a single phrase. He ran his finger down the dripping honeycomb that filled one frame to taste the honey. Cyrus’s bees made honey from the clover and blue borage that grew on the lower slopes of the hills, and from parrot’s beak, and honeydew creepers and other forest flowers. Ghislain’s bees only worked his garden—the lavender and roses, the stocks, sweet peas, pansies, and carnations. Ghislain’s honey didn’t have a particular flavor, it was only sweet.

  Cyrus closed the hive. They bent their knees and picked it up and began their slow shuffle through the rows of lettuces, then behind the bean frame, then through the squash patch. They finally set the hive down between Ghislain’s two pear trees.

  Cyrus straightened and flexed his back. He said, “What other people feel when you lie to them is shame. I feel ashamed that you’re trying to fool me, and ashamed for you.”

  “Thanks for the sermon, Cyrus. But I think you spend too much time talking to children. You’re sounding stuffy.” Ghislain looked at Cyrus’s hands and added, “Old and stuffy.” One of the bees then roused and stung him. He clapped his hand to the place, but by that time the bee was crawling away, a line of internal membrane stretching from its torn abdomen to the throbbing sting. The barb pulsed, pumping venom; Ghislain used his thumbnail to sc
rape it from his skin. The bee fell onto the grass and clenched up in its death throes.

  The hive began to hum again.

  Cyrus unhooked his blower from his belt and filled the air with smoke. He scribbled more soothing symbols. The smoke dissipated. The little spell became invisible and then began quietly to degrade. Cyrus walked to the edge of the terrace and emptied the smoldering pine needles into a wet compost of old apple cores, potato peelings, melon rinds, rabbit bones, and the ash from the house’s hearths. Cyrus could see that, though the compost was breaking down, the heap would eventually reach the top of the terrace wall. He said to Ghislain, “You should start dumping your scraps somewhere else.”

  “So that in three hundred years, when I’m filling in the last chink in the wall of compost surrounding my house, I’ll be able to console myself by saying, ‘Think how bad things would be now if I hadn’t followed my cousin’s advice.’”

  “Now you’re just being melodramatic,” Cyrus said.

  “I’m a teenager,” Ghislain said. “Teenagers are sometimes melodramatic. It says so on the radio.”

  Cyrus looked at Ghislain—his smooth skin and strong shoulders and the flag of bright black hair flowing back from the widow’s peak in the center of his forehead. He shook his head and walked away again.

  He went up the steps to the top terrace, climbing into the concentrated stillness there. He passed between rosebushes whose blooms were all perfect, as if each one had a deity’s attention focused solely on it. The air on the top terrace was as clear and shining and slow as the gelatin they used in the movies to make the heroine’s tears brilliant and lingering in close-up—Cyrus had read that somewhere. Cyrus picked some roses and wove them around the crown of his straw hat.

  Ghislain went by him and jumped up onto the veranda. He said, “I still have some cider. Would you like some?”

  Cyrus moved the hat and flowers into a patch of shade and absentmindedly started up the steps after Ghislain. He was thirsty. It would be nice to sit down with his cousin and—

  —he got to the top of the steps and looked at Ghislain—who was beyond the shining brass doorsill, standing in the hallway and looking back with eyes that glinted with mirth.

  Cyrus stopped.

  “I’ll get you one day,” Ghislain said, and disappeared indoors.

  Cyrus retrieved his hat and blower and climbed down Terminal Hill, descending from perfection to an ordinary orderly garden, then a scruffy garden, then a wilderness of weeds and brambles. Finally he went into the forest.

  * * *

  CYRUS FOUND HIS COUSIN LEALAND in the big kitchen at Orchard House, labeling jars of apple jelly. The jars were ranged along the table and bench tops, gleaming and jewel-like. These were the early apples and the jelly was pale pink. The jelly’s color deepened as the season went on. The big pans had been washed and put away, but the sugar and apple smell was still in the air, mixed with that of the paste used to stick labels to each jar. Half the jars were labeled. A girl was helping Lealand, slotting jars into crates painted “Zarene Valley Apple Jelly.” The kitchen was warm; there was yeast rising in a bowl on the range top, and wisps of steam showed at the vent in the lid of the big soup pot.

  The back door was open and Cyrus could see several of the older boys out in the home orchard trying to fashion a prop for the drooping branches of an ancient apple tree.

  Cyrus took a look at all the industry and pitched in. He carried the full crate out to the back porch and brought in an empty one. He and Lealand filled it. They cleared the end of the table. Then Lealand poured them both a glass of cider and they carried their glasses out to the side porch. Lealand told the two big girls he found there to put down their knitting and get the bread on. One went straight in, the other clapped her hands to summon the nine-year-olds, who were playing in a puddle by the tank stand.

  The Zarene children were evenly divided between Orchard House and Cyrus’s sister Iris’s place, which had a compound of bunk rooms one field away from the guesthouse. Iris managed the guesthouse. She had the older girls to help with the cooking and cleaning, and two big boys as general handymen. The rest of her charges were all five to eight and tended to run wild. She’d say their contribution was to keep the valley’s walkways clear by trampling along them in shoes all winter and barefoot all summer. Sometimes Cyrus or Lealand would call on Iris’s eight-year-olds if they needed more hands in the apiary or orchard, or in the vegetable gardens. But Lealand had his own permanent charges. They all had their jobs and were obliged to spend some of their time passing on their skills to the younger ones. So it was normal, for instance, to see twelve-year-old Bonnie showing a couple of nine-year-olds how to beat the rugs draped over the clothesline, or twelve-year-old Lonnie encouraging several wiry ten-year-olds to tackle the wheel on the cider press.

  Iris’s charges all came to Orchard House for lessons. Every morning of the week the big schoolroom upstairs was full of kids. Like many country children, the Zarenes were correspondence students. Their weekday mornings might be spent listening to the school’s broadcast from Founderston, or filling in correspondence school worksheets, ready for the Thursday post. But two hours each afternoon the lessons were devoted to the Alphabet—or at least the Alphabet in the first two of its three forms, Basic for the five- to nine-year-olds, and Tabular for the older children. Cyrus was occasionally called on to give a lesson, or to host some of the older children at the apiary, but only the stolid, untalented ones. Anyone with ability tended to be too sensitive to the go-and-wander-and-gather-and-come-back-at-sundown spell he had on his worker bees. At the apiary, children could never be counted on to stay and finish anything. But Cyrus was a conscientious man, so rather than have kids at the apiary, he’d go along to the gardens and help the boys and girls with their work there. The kids could manage to plant and hoe, but needed adult help with the heavy spadework. With that, and the little workings that discouraged aphids and caterpillars.

  Everyone in Zarene Valley worked—and only Iris’s little ones didn’t work all the time. The Zarenes had their way of life, and they were used to it. But it was a make-do way of life, and they hadn’t exactly chosen it.

  The cider was chilled and the glass sweating. Cyrus sipped then wiped his hands on his pants. “I thought you might want to see me,” he said. “You did, didn’t you?”

  Lealand nodded. He didn’t speak for a bit—then, when he did, it was only to call to the boys that they’d need a sturdier prop, and they should stop trying to use what was on the farm and go to the forest at the top of the valley and cut a branch of tea tree. “Take the mule. You have an hour before dinner.”

  Once the boys were off along the trail, Lealand looked at Cyrus and said, “Last night the remnant of the old ward activated.”

  Cyrus was surprised he hadn’t felt it. “Don’t you get twinges from it now and then?”

  “I won’t anymore. It ignited, and then every remaining bit of it was extinguished. I was out of bed and at the window in time to see the fragment over the home orchard catch fire and float up like burning paper.”

  “Could you read any of it?”

  “Bits,” Lealand said. He pulled a notebook from his shirt pocket and handed it to Cyrus.

  Cyrus looked at the curls and angles of sign and the dotted lines running between them. Lealand had been trying to figure out the original form of each sign from the trajectory of the fragments as they flew apart, which was a task less like trying to figure the center of a bomb blast from the distribution of debris, than trying to reconstruct the charge inside a bomb by putting the molecules of its detonating chemical back together again. Lealand could make an attempt, but Cyrus knew he wouldn’t be able to do it.

  When the family first settled the valley, the Zarene forefathers had put up wards beyond the mountains encircling it. Those forefathers—Aron and Elek Zarene—were very powerful and insightful men. The old wards had simply worked. And unlike the newer great magic, they hadn’t cost anyone anything.

&
nbsp; Cyrus asked Lealand whether he’d told Iris what had happened.

  “Last night, straight afterward. Since I was up, I went over to the guesthouse and spoke to her. Then I went down to my favorite fishing spot and put a line in the river. I was there at eight when a couple of Iris’s guests hiked past. I heard them talking about their crazy hostess, so I suppose they’d had some exhaustive genealogical interrogation with their full cooked breakfast.”

  Cyrus laughed.

  “It isn’t funny,” Lealand said. Which only made Cyrus laugh more. Lealand had an amusing turn of phrase and anyone would think he found things amusing—but he didn’t. He was stern and grim, and had been for thirty years.

  “Lealand, are the old wards any great loss? They were only remnants.”

  “They were meant to keep certain people out of the valley. But I guess nowadays Iris’s registration process filters out any direct descendants of the other four of the Five Families.”

  “When the wards activated, do you think it was because they recognized a threat? Or did they just finally collapse?”

  “I couldn’t tell. But don’t worry—anyone recognized by the old wards won’t disturb our spells. The old ones and ours have opposite purposes. The old ones were to keep things out, ours are to keep them in.”

  Cyrus nodded. “You’re right. But we should keep an eye out.”

  They sipped their cider.

  5

  THE AUSTIN HAD A COOL run down the far side of Fort Pass and they reached Massenfer in the late afternoon. There was no camping ground near the town. Massenfer wasn’t a vacation destination. It was all industry—coal mines, quarries, and a rail yard. It had a town hall, a library, two movie houses, and a street of shops including one humble department store. It had an ice cream parlor, a couple of tearooms, two restaurants, and two hotels—one converted from an old dream palace and now sporting a large circular dance hall on its first floor. The hotels served farmers coming to the railhead to sell livestock. Everything else was for the residents—so cheap and battered. The mining company had built the first houses, timber cottages that were all on the east bank of the Taskmaster River and near the long black tailings that glittered on the slopes around the original mine. That mine was long since closed; the more recent diggings were all farther from town.