Mortal Fire

by Elizabeth Knox

  The ewe seemed to understand she meant to help. It came up to her and jostled against her, then licked the lamb’s head, melting the dried clay with grassy spittle.

  Canny got a grip on the lamb’s fleece and tried, tentatively, to pull it free, only gently testing the grip of the clay. The lamb cried out—an almost human scream. The ewe pattered away, bleating in distress, then immediately returned and pushed between Canny and her lamb.

  Canny got up and backed off, then she plunged into the forest and ran as fast as she could downhill, in search of help.

  * * *

  BECAUSE THE KIDS TENDED TO GET GLUE all over themselves whenever he asked them to mend the irrigation hoses, Lealand had taken his bicycle repair kit out among the Golden Queen peach trees to do it himself. He was working on a section near the river trail when the girl came into sight, stumbling with tiredness, scratched, and sweat-soaked right up into the roots of her hair.

  She left the trail and headed straight for him. He got up and hurried to meet her.

  She stopped at the orchard gate and hung over it, taking great whooping breaths.

  Lealand waited for her. “Just take a moment,” he said.

  She gestured behind her, then turned to properly direct her gesture. She was pointing to the hill at the head of the valley.

  Lealand relaxed, because there was no real trouble. But he continued to regard her attentively, because that was what she’d expect.

  The girl was tall and slender, but not willowy. He wasn’t sure how old she was, somewhere between fifteen and eighteen. A hiker.

  Since this hiker had hurried to get help, she must have gotten a long way up the hill. To have gone so far she must have meant to climb—though Lealand couldn’t imagine why she would want to. The last person turned back by The Injured Animal was a geologist, who had been interested in the hill itself, the composition of its soils and stones. The geologist was a highly motivated adult. That was almost six years ago now, and the spells on Terminal Hill got stronger every year.

  The girl finally caught her breath. “There’s a lamb buried in a slip—halfway up the hill, on the southeastern side, about fifteen degrees above the rock face.”

  There were a number of remarkable things about the girl’s news and directions. How specific she was, just for starters. The clearing on the old overgrown road was, come to think of it, fifteen degrees above the rock face. But since when did girls give directions like gunners aiming an artillery piece? There was that—and that she said a lamb. She said buried in a slip.

  Lealand said, “I’ll have to get some tools.” He took her arm. “Come along with me. You’re exhausted.”

  She followed him, and then overtook him, hurrying him on toward Orchard House.

  The big boys were busy in the home orchard cementing stones around the base of the tea tree branch they’d cut to prop the leaning apple tree. Lealand told one to run and fetch Cyrus. The boy took off, his bare heels raising dust once he reached the track. Lealand continued on to the house. He led the girl up onto the porch and told her to take a seat. She did and was immediately surrounded by fascinated youngsters, one of whom thought to ask her if she’d like a drink of water.

  Lealand went to get tools. He always kept the tools for this task ready at hand. He gathered up an awl, bailing twine, a brush, and Stockholm tar, then, after some thought, collected a shovel and a big canvas bucket as well.

  * * *

  THAT BOY LONNIE WAS LYING on a wicker sofa on the porch when Canny arrived. He had a cold flannel on his forehead and a jug of juice beside him.

  The smaller children claimed Canny’s full attention for a time. They wouldn’t stop asking her questions—though none about what kind of emergency had brought her to Orchard House. They had no idea how to talk to strangers. They kept firing off random and disconnected questions as if she were an exhibit in a classroom and their teacher hadn’t properly prepared them for her visit.

  Lonnie got up, came over, and thrust a few kids aside. He sat next to Canny. “Leave her alone,” he told them.

  They ignored him till he raised his hand, then they shrank back and fell silent.

  Lonnie said, “I’m the one who should be asking questions about the world outside the valley. I’m being packed off on Saturday, even though school doesn’t start till summer is over.”

  “Where are you going?” Canny said.

  “Middleton, on the plains. My mother’s there.” He made shooing motions at the kids and they melted away, most setting off along the path the messenger had followed. Lonnie said they were heading over to the guesthouse to get their lunch. “We had classes here this morning.”

  Canny said, “I went for a walk.”

  “I gather you found an injured animal?”

  Canny nodded.

  “Our uncles will take care of it.”

  “Its mother was so distressed.”

  Lonnie frowned. “Mother?” he said. Then he looked away for a time. Canny watched his face change. He began to look sly. “Farming folk don’t like to let city folk know what they usually have to do with injured animals,” he said. “City folk like to think they’re helping when they come running in asking someone to rescue some poor beast.”

  “I’m not soft. I know the lamb’s back is probably broken. But there’s no need for it to go on crying. Or for its mother to have to listen to it. And I couldn’t kill it. It’s not mine,” Canny said. “I don’t have the right to make that decision.”

  “I wasn’t trying to shock you. I thought you’d like some plain facts.”

  “The facts I’m most fond of aren’t plain ones,” Canny said.

  Lealand came across from the barn and put the tools and bucket on the steps. He told Lonnie to go lie down again.

  “The kids were bothering Miss Mochrie,” said Lonnie.

  Lealand pointed at the couch and Lonnie went back to it.

  “Are you staying at the guesthouse, Miss Mochrie?”

  “We were last night,” she said. “My brother wants to go back to Massenfer.”

  “The bright lights of Massenfer,” said Lealand.

  Canny laughed. “We went to a restaurant, and our bread rolls were still frozen in the middle. The place is a bit dismal, but Sholto is supposed to be doing some work there. And Susan.”

  “And Susan’s doing some work?” Lealand said, and Canny saw that she’d said that Sholto was doing Susan. She blushed. “Yes. Research. Both of them. Susan is Sholto’s fiancée.”

  The wind chimes on the porch stirred and tinkled, though there wasn’t any wind.

  Lealand said, “The forest is very thick on the hill. If you’re right about the place then you were a good way up. What on earth were you doing?”

  “I was lost,” Canny said.

  Again the wind chimes stirred in the still air. Canny looked at them, then carefully down at her hands. She turned them over. “I’m so dirty. I tried to pull the poor animal out.”

  “You’ll want to wash.”

  “Yes, thank you.” She finished her water and looked at the clay prints left on the glass. “I followed a path,” she said. “I think pigs had made it. I saw a wild boar. A big beast with a broken tusk. I was frightened. So I stopped going the way I was going and went a different way.” All of this was true. The chimes were silent. Canny thought of something to test them. “I hurt my hand,” she said. It was her leg that was sore—the one with the scratch. The chimes made only one faint, bright correction. Canny wondered whether, if she was to shout out that she wasn’t looking for a way up to the house on the hill, the chimes would erupt in an unholy clamor as if about to be ripped from their hooks by a hurricane. And, anyway, what did these people do on windy days when someone came to the house and lied?

  A tall man was coming back through the orchard, accompanied by the boy sent to fetch him. He had extraordinarily thick white hair, as glassy as the hair on a ninety-year-old but of a youthful texture, springy, and flowing. He was spry, but had a slight limp.

/>   Lealand pick up his tools. Then he stayed a moment to introduce them. “Cy, this is Miss Agnes Mochrie. Miss Mochrie, this is my cousin Mr. Cyrus Zarene.”

  Canny asked Cyrus whether he was a brother to the Iris who ran the guesthouse. He nodded.

  “Like Bonnie is a sister to Lonnie, I suppose?” she said.

  “Bonnie and Lonnie are cousins,” said Lealand, regarding her closely.

  “Don’t you get confused?”

  “We don’t,” said Cyrus. Then he gave her a friendly wave and set off toward the forested hill. Lealand told the girl at the other end of the veranda, the one reading a book while pressing the treadle of a butter churn, that she should show Miss Mochrie where she might wash up.

  The girl was very conscientious. She took Canny to a large upstairs bathroom and ran a bath for her. She put some cotton balls and iodine on the floor by the bath and said Canny might like to disinfect her scratch. She unlocked a big linen press and handed Canny a towel, then left her to it.

  Canny opened one of the bathroom leadlights and looked out. She glimpsed the two men through a gap in the trees, then lost them again. Canny wondered about them. There was something old-manish about them—and old-womanish about Iris Zarene. But they were indeterminately middle-aged in the way they spoke and stood and moved. They were sleek and healthy and scarcely wrinkled—but they had a kind of placid gravity that middle-aged people didn’t generally have, as if they were older. The kids seemed normal, though their weird rhyming names and their living arrangements certainly weren’t. But the adults were somehow strange in themselves, in a way that alarmed Canny but that she also found attractive. People were often a slippery challenge to her, but at least these people didn’t make her feel awkward and misshapen.

  Canny turned off the taps, removed her clothes, and eased herself into the bath. Her scratches smarted. She washed quickly. The door was locked, but she was in a strange house. The rooms around her sounded empty, but she could hear voices out the back, and in the orchard. Someone was hammering. Someone else was beating a rug. And there was the gentle thump of the butter churn.

  Canny finally washed her face and then got out and let the bath drain while she toweled herself dry. She put her dirty clothes back on. When the bath was empty, Canny could once again listen and track the movements in and around the house. She opened the door a crack and peered through. The hallway was empty. She crept out, holding her sandals.

  She went along the hall, looking into each room. There was a bedroom with four bunks, and then another, the same. Then she found a schoolroom. The desks were in inward-facing groups, like those in the friendly and informal city primary school Canny had attended, though there were none of that school’s drying lines hung with paintings on cheap wrinkled paper, or murals with leaves collected from nature walks pasted onto them.

  The blackboard was wiped clean but was cloudy with chalk dust. There was a big old radio on the teacher’s desk and a stack of textbooks from the correspondence school. But the thing that really drew Canny’s eye were the friezes around the top of the wall. There were the numerals and examples—one nose, two eyes, three hanks of hair to make a braid, four fingers, five toes. There was the alphabet, from A for Apple to Z for Zipper. And there was another alphabet, without illustrations. Two hundred symbols, rendered in black paint on yellowing white cards.

  Canny walked into the room and went close. Under each symbol was a line of small print, also in symbols. The same line on every card. It took Canny only a few moments to work it out. She didn’t read it, but got its meaning intuitively as she had with the other signs she’d encountered. She understood the small print negated any magical effect each letter of this alphabet might have. Part of the small print looked like the spell she’d put on the tents. It said something like “Disregard.” But if it had only said “Disregard” Canny wouldn’t have been able to see the alphabet at all, and the pupils who studied in this classroom couldn’t have looked at the letters to learn them. Canny guessed that what the whole line of small print said was “For demonstration purposes only,” or something very like it.

  She stepped back and her eyes went around the walls. The signs were inactive—rendered so—but as she studied them, something lit inside her. Each symbol smote her. If she ever had a chance to tell Marli what had happened to her, that was how she would put it. She was smitten. She was assaulted, and in love. These were her things—her very own. But also each recognition was like the stroke of a bell, a long sad tolling, as if at the death of a monarch.

  Canny was pulled out of her reverie by the sound of children running up the stairs. She realized that she didn’t have time to get out of the schoolroom. She was going to be caught snooping. The curtains on the room’s windows were thick and floor-length. Canny ran lightly across the room and plunged into their dusty folds. She pinched her nose and tried to breathe only through her mouth.

  The kids stopped at the bathroom door, which Canny had closed behind her. They whispered to one another for a time, then came on into the schoolroom.

  Canny couldn’t guess how many of them there were. They were obviously trained to habitual quietness indoors.

  “How big is big?” one was saying softly as he came in.

  “You know. Whenever you go to Massenfer to the movies you see them in the streets. Like the ones who hang around the milk bar.”

  “Does she have…?”

  “Yes. But little ones.”

  “Pointy?”

  “Rounded. Quite nice.”

  A giggle.

  “Boys!” This was said in disgust.

  A desk lid creaked.

  “Why do you think Uncle Lealand sent for Uncle Cyrus?”

  “How should I know?”

  “She was telling lies. Do you think that’s why?”

  “No, silly. That was later. On the veranda. I was there, making butter. If she was lying, Uncle wouldn’t have known till she got to the house.”

  A new voice. “People lie all the time. Everybody does. I even forget sometimes and lie here, the usual little stuff that everyone politely ignores.”

  “Uncle Lealand never lies. He just says, ‘You don’t need to know.’”

  “What say we did need to? Have you ever thought of that? Or—what say Orchard House disagreed with Uncle Lealand? Would the chimes sound?”

  “It’s Uncle Lealand’s spell. It has to have the same opinions as he does. It isn’t for when people are mistaken and say something that isn’t true. It’s to catch deliberate falsehoods. Uncle Cyrus says that the Wards are philosophers, not machines. He means that they sort of think about things and make their own judgments.”

  It was Bonnie who was speaking now—Canny was sure of it. She breathed shallowly and tried to ignore the tickle in her throat.

  A desk lid banged. Footsteps pattered back out into the hall.

  “But, Bon,” said the first kid, her voice farther off now, “why did Uncle Lea call Uncle Cy?”

  * * *

  FIVE TIMES OVER THE LAST THIRTEEN YEARS Lealand had had to set off toward the hill at the head of the valley carrying his rifle and a bag of tools—the awl, the bailing twine, the brush, and the little pot of Stockholm tar. Of all the people who had gone far enough up the hill, somehow defying its difficulties to encounter The Injured Animal, only one of them had wanted to go back with Lealand and help him. The geologist, six years ago now, hadn’t defied anything to climb the hill. He’d had his own powerful magic—the ordinary magic that extraordinarily interested people always have. He had suffered tumbles and scratches, but hadn’t felt the spells themselves because he was so absorbed in his own pursuits. The soil here, the bare bones of rock there, all the different minerals the glacier had disgorged and piled up over hundreds of thousands of years. The Injured Animal had stopped him though. It was as far as anyone ever got. It was a horror: a creature that needed help and probably couldn’t be helped. It was a pity. It was the worst that happens. The worst that always eventually happens. The Inju
red Animal sent absolutely everyone back down the hill. Only the geologist had insisted on returning to the clearing on the course of the old road, to see for himself whether something could be done for the poor cow who had blundered onto the stake of a snapped sapling and had torn her abdomen open. And, because The Injured Animal was a Great Spell, the greatest its maker had ever cast, it wasn’t just a spectacle—a sweating, trembling, bloodied, distressed cow with intestines bulging and threatening to pour right out of the gash in her belly. It wasn’t just sounds—grunts, labored breathing, the way the cow stamped her feet, goaded by pain to move, and then punished by pain for having moved. It was a Great Spell, so when Lealand had the geologist hold the cow’s head while he pushed her intestines back into her, the geologist had felt the cow’s whiskers, and her slobber, and her strength. And Lealand had felt the heat in the wet entrails, and the tension on the skin he pulled together and punched with the old sailmaker’s awl and threaded closed with binder’s twine. And when he’d finished sewing up, and had sealed the wound with a thick paste of tar, his hands were sticky with blood, and the geologist was tired, and his foot was sore because the cow had stepped on it.

  This time Lealand carried the bag as well as his rifle up the hill because the spell was a story and required him to honor its truth. The cow could be mended, or the cow could be put down. But whatever he did, the cow would be there, ruptured and suffering, for whoever next happened along.

  Lealand also took Cyrus with him because it was Cyrus’s spell, and the girl had reported seeing not a cow, but a lamb buried in a mud slip and still alive, under the helpless eye of its mother.

  They took the pig path uphill, Lealand pushing his own personal warning ward ahead of him so that the pigs would steer clear of them. Cyrus stopped to use his knife to cut a leafy branch from a whitey wood sapling so he could use it as a walking stick. He complained that this was the second time in a week he’d had to climb this hill, and his leg was giving him trouble. Before they got to the clearing they heard the distressed lowing. They found the cow, trampling her own blood into the mossy turf, the ball of glistening guts bulging out of her side. She was noisy, so Lealand placed the muzzle of the rifle against her head and pulled the trigger. The shot echoed all over the hill. The cow dropped onto her knees, then slumped sideways, kicked once, and was still.