Mortal Fire

by Elizabeth Knox

  “Yes,” said Cyrus. Then he began to talk.

  * * *

  THE FAMILY HAD TO MARSHAL THEIR FORCES against the Lazuli Dam project. They had to hire lawyers. And, though they had land, they didn’t have much money.

  “We were only farming to feed ourselves back then, and producing a little surplus to sell so that we could buy what we weren’t able to make ourselves. Back then people didn’t need so many things. Anyway, the government offered to buy out all the families in the valley. They went house to house—sweating men in suits with attaché cases and blistered feet. It was summer and no one had told them that the road into the Zarene Valley only went as far as Terminal Hill.”

  “The gorge road is more recent?”

  “Yes. It’s a construction road built for the dam project. The dam was meant to go at the Zarene Valley end of the Lazuli Gorge, so they cut a road that far. There used to be a road that wound down from the summit of the Palisades. It ran from Fort Rock to Terminal Hill, the glacial moraine at the top of the valley. Its traces are still there, covered in thorn bushes and grass.”

  “So the government men walked in and went house to house offering to buy out the valley piecemeal?”

  “Yes. But the land was—and is—owned in common. So every house they knocked at, people would say, ‘I can’t sell you anything.’ So—we gave them the runaround. Eventually they sent a letter to every house, citing the Resource Management Act. You do know that there is no such thing as private property in Southland once the government decides there’s not?”

  “I’ve never been entirely sure that private property is a good thing,” Sholto said.

  “You’re not counting tents then, Mr. Mochrie?” Cyrus said.

  The young historian looked as if he was being confronted rather than teased. Cyrus laughed and went on with his story. “My father, Talbot Zarene, decided that we needed a lawyer to fight the government. And we needed money to pay for a lawyer—real money, to pay a really good lawyer. So the men of the family got together and drew lots, and those with the short straw went and signed on at Bull Mine. You see, after it flooded in 1926, the mine was having a bit of a problem with labor. Some of the families who’d lost men just upped and left the district, went to Westport to work in the mills.”

  “So Lealand Zarene was already a miner before the ballot? Because he was one of the men trapped by the flood.”

  “Lealand’s father, Colvin, planned to build a bottling plant. Father and son were both underground raising capital for that. But the plant was never built. We’re still home-brewing cider. And we don’t produce enough of it for it to be seen any farther north than Castlereagh. The Zarene Valley apple orchards were mostly planted by Colvin, for cider. But Lealand has done a lot of grafting over the past twenty years, and now half our apples are export quality. Come picking season we strip the trees, wrap the apples in tissue, crate them in straw, and send them off to Europe.”

  “But you went down the mine because you drew the short straw?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Agnes came in with a tray. Her brother jumped up to shift Cyrus’s big old Columbia radio off the coffee table, where he’d moved it to make room for the recording equipment. The girl knelt down on the floor beside the coffee table. She said, “I’ll pour it in a moment.” Then, “Sholto, you said I should check out the swimming hole.”

  “Is it safe?” Sholto asked Cyrus.

  “It’s deep. But from the bank there are fifteen yards of calm water till you hit the current, and even if you get caught in the current it’ll just carry you along to the shingle bank on the next bend. Some of the older children will probably be there now.”

  “All right,” Sholto said to his sister. “But be back at the guesthouse before dinner.”

  She fixed her gaze on the steam at the spout of the pot. Her fingers twitched, and she twined them together in her lap.

  Cyrus had a thought. If she’d written his calming runes in the steam from the kettle the tea would be cool. So she hadn’t. Of course she hadn’t.

  Smoke and steam weren’t the same. Smoke talked to by sign would then talk to the air, and to things that lived in the air. Steam only talked to water. The teapot was steaming at its spout, so she hadn’t tried writing his bee-calming sign. Besides, watching him once wouldn’t tell her anything except that he was making funny gestures above a beehive. She could see what he was doing, but she wouldn’t be able to interpret or remember it. So why was he so sure she had been dabbling her fingers in the steam and accidentally communicating something to the water?

  “You took your time,” Sholto said to her.

  “I forgot the lemon. I had to reboil the jug,” she said smoothly. To Cyrus she sounded like someone who always had an excuse at hand, and who was rather disgusted at having to produce excuses. Perhaps one of her parents was a bully. That was one way in which bullied children and spoiled ones were alike—their ability to fend people off with an excuse. For a second time the girl reminded Cyrus of Ghislain, who’d been both bullied and fearfully spoiled. It was most disconcerting to be reminded of Ghislain.

  Sholto consulted his notes, then said, “When did you start in the mine?”

  “It would have been March, 1927. I was twenty-three.”

  “And a farmworker?”

  “A beekeeper, as I am now. And I started as a chain runner, working with the coal carts and horses.”

  “Are you good with animals?” Sholto asked, then smirked and glanced at his sister.

  Cyrus was baffled by this, but answered yes.

  “Were you aware of any problems with the mine’s safety?”

  “Nothing I didn’t expect. It was a coal mine. Coal mines are dangerous, and there are always precautions in place. For instance, the horses were all unshod, the carts had wooden wheels and ran on wooden rails. But if you’re asking whether I personally saw trouble coming—no, I didn’t. That day my shift started at eight in the morning and ended at seven in the evening. Shortly after six, I was taking my last load up the gateway when the explosion happened. The explosion was at the working face, so I was nearly a mile from it. I didn’t hear it. The ground didn’t tremble. The shock wave was funneled up through the mine and reached me before I knew anything had happened. It picked me up and threw me nearly sixty yards. I woke up two days later at the hospital in Massenfer.”

  “Okay,” Sholto said, and began riffling through his notes. Cyrus supposed the young man was looking for a question he might ask to which he—Cyrus—would have an answer. He was aware that he was telling the story very badly.

  “So you had an ordinary day, then you woke up in the hospital?” Susan said, clearly hoping for more details.

  “That’s right.”

  Sholto gave a small satisfied grunt then smoothed the page in front of him. “Did you notice any unusual behavior in those horses of yours?”

  Mid-afternoon, when Cyrus was on his third run of the day, his horses had shied at the narrow place in the mine’s main shaft. He had grabbed a handful of stone dust from a bag standing at a crosscut, tossed it into the air in front of the leader’s nose, and quickly inscribed the calming runes he’d mastered as a beekeeper. The horses had settled and gone on without complaint. A chain runner an hour afterward had had the same problem—and didn’t have a remedy for it. That man left his idle team and went all the way down to the inbye to pull his son off shift and walk him out of the mine. The narrow place was clear when Cyrus came back through it on his last run. The other chain runner’s disobedient team had been taken back out into the light—and they lived. Cyrus’s horses were in harness and were hauling several hundred pounds of coal. The shock wave that carried Cyrus up the gateway had wrenched the coal carts off their rails, slammed them into the horses, and shunted them forward. The explosion didn’t so much sweep them off their feet as snap all their legs at the ankle. Cyrus didn’t see what had happened to his horses, but Lealand had, and had told him about it later.

  Cyrus said, “It wa
s the chain runner after me who had trouble with his horses. That was later in the day.”

  The girl poured the tea. She asked Cyrus how he took it.

  “With lemon,” he said, since she’d gone to the effort of offering it.

  She did everything quickly and unobtrusively, handed everyone their cups, then said, “I’ll be off now.”

  “Be sensible,” her brother said without looking up. He was flicking through his notes again. The girl went out the door, and Cyrus turned his attention back to Sholto, who had found what he wanted. The young man looked up at Cyrus, met his eyes, and reddened slightly. “Tell me about the insurance policies,” he said.

  12

  THE CORN FLOUR PASTE that Canny had mixed up in Cyrus Zarene’s kitchen was still good and tacky when she produced the paper on which it was smeared from her pocket, unfolded it, and slapped it onto her forehead. Invisibility spell in place, she set off at a run for the river path and, eventually, the forested hill.

  Forty minutes later she arrived on the immaculate lawn, sweating and out of breath. She paused, lifted the hem of her shirt to mop her face. The strip of paper rustled. She peeled it off.

  The doors of one room were open onto the veranda. There was a contraption just outside the room, a series of wooden trays not unlike the frames from one of the beehives. One tray was propped up on its side. It was filled with a grid of metal squares.

  Drawn by this curious contraption, Canny set off across the lawn. When she got closer she saw that the grid in the frame was made of inch-wide slices through average-size tin cans—rounds that had been hammered into squares and then slotted together into the frame. Behind the frame was an upended apple box with a lump of clay on it, sticky potter’s clay with fingerprints all over it.

  Canny didn’t see Ghislain Zarene till he moved. He was indoors, at a table, with his back to her. When she stepped onto the veranda, he leaped to his feet and quickly pulled a sheet across the work surface before him, hiding what was there. Only then did he turn—then froze, and remained very still.

  Canny scrubbed off the dried corn flour paste on her forehead, then took the paper from her pocket and showed it to him. “I passed right by the wild pigs this time. They sure do look dangerous close up.”

  Ghislain pointed at the floor by the open door. Her sandals were sitting there, toes pointing indoors as if they too were coming rather than going.

  “I went past where I’d left them and forgot to look,” she said. She went in and picked up the sandals by their straps. She fastened the buckle of one to the strap of the other and hung them around her neck.

  Ghislain said, “Why are you back here? What purpose does it serve?”

  “At least you’re not saying whose purpose.” She smiled at him.

  “No,” Ghislain said. “These visits are your own idea. I know that now.”

  The sheet Ghislain had thrown over the table began to convulse, as if it covered a whole litter of kittens who had just woken up and were looking for a way out. Ghislain jumped back as the sheet flung up into the air and tore itself into perfectly even strips. The strips of cloth then formed speedy granny knots and dropped down, inert again.

  Canny stood with her mouth open long enough for spit to pool behind her lower lip and spill over. She clapped her mouth closed and wiped her chin. Ghislain watched this, then burst out laughing. She laughed too. Then she asked him whether he’d known that was going to happen.

  “No!” he said, still laughing.

  She came all the way in to take a look at what he had been doing.

  “It doesn’t matter if I see, does it? It’s only Zarenes you’re hiding from.”

  “And you can’t really read sign yet,” he said.

  “If I can see what the sign is doing I can read it, and remember it, and adapt it too.”

  The table was covered in squares of wet clay, each around three by three inches and perhaps half an inch thick. The tiles were incised with Ideogrammatic sign, some hand-cut into the clay, and some channels so evenly formed they must have been stamped rather than cut. Canny saw the stamps were nearby. They were made of number eight wire, the kind used for farm fences, formed into calligraphic twists with the help of pliers. The pliers were lying beside the stamps.

  There was a fire in the hearth, now only a heap of hot coals. The day was warm, and the room was stifling. Ghislain had his shirtsleeves rolled up and shirt unbuttoned. There was clay on his skin, clothes, and even in his hair. “I can’t stop what I’m doing,” he explained, then impatiently gathered up the knotted strips of cloth from the tabletop and flung them into a corner of the room.

  “Why did the sheet do that?”

  Ghislain brushed his hand over the clay tiles. “These say ‘go away,’ but ‘go away’ in an organized way. I guess the sheet tried to go, organizing itself differently as it did.”

  Canny looked around and took in the tongs on the hearth and the rough-walled, semi-opaque glass bowl with a lid that stood beside a box full of lead soldiers—grenadiers, and one medieval knight minus horse. Canny pointed at the glass container on the hearth. “Is that a crucible?”

  “Yes. I made it from a big quartz boulder my great-aunt Rowan used as a doorstop.”

  The crucible must have taken Ghislain quite some time to carve, Canny thought.

  “Don’t go near it. If it’s broken it won’t mend itself.”

  “I guess not,” Canny said, a little surprised by this schoolmarmish bit of telling off. “So. You roll clay flat, then cut it into tiles with those bits of tin can inside the frame. Then you either stamp the tiles with sign, or carve sign into them. Then you melt down the lead soldiers in your crucible, and you pour the melted lead into the grooves in the tiles.”

  Ghislain just stared at her.

  “You’re making lead sign. What for?”

  He didn’t answer, but did say, “You can give me a hand by rolling that ball of clay into a sheet more or less the same thickness as the other tiles.” He pointed at the marble rolling pin that was soaking in a bucket of water. “Then use my cookie cutter thing to cut tiles for me.”

  Canny put down her sandals and then knelt by the apple box to knead the lump of clay. She flattened and folded it several times then rolled it out and used her wet hands to smooth its surface. She placed the frame over the doughy rectangle and pressed down hard. The squares of tin sliced the clay into eight ripply-edged tiles. Canny picked them up and put them on the table by Ghislain, who was busy cutting sign into a tile with a steel knitting needle. He pulled up a chair for her and moved his own to make room.

  She sat down. “What do I do now?”

  Ghislain’s left arm was inches from her own. Even in the warm room she imagined she could feel the heat coming off him. Human heat. He smelled good, a faint fresh sweat smell over something innocent, a little like oatmeal and brown sugar.

  “Grab the ‘go’ sign and stamp the tiles you’ve cut. Keep well within the edges. And don’t press too hard.” He slid a stamp across the table. Then he tilted his head and watched her sidelong.

  Canny had a moment of uncertainty. The wire stamp in front of her did not say “go.” It said something about when. It was a “when” not a “what” sign. “Go” would be a “what” sign. “What should I do?” “Go.” “When should I go?” was a different question.

  “Oh,” Canny said. “This stamp says ‘now,’ not ‘go.’ Which is why none of the ‘go’ tiles are getting up and going, I guess. Because they need to be told when to go. Signs aren’t resistible, are they?”

  “You’ve resisted a whole lot already. And you’re a sign reader. A real sign reader.” He sounded awed. He’d been testing her.

  Canny gazed at the stamped tiles and stamps, then selected one stamp and met Ghislain’s black gaze. He reached out, tentative, and wrapped one of his hands around her bare arm—then just held on. His hand was smooth with dried clay slip, and warm.

  Canny closed her eyes and dropped her head. She inclined very slowly
till her brow bone touched his shoulder. She wasn’t thinking about anything, but then she surprised herself by asking how often he killed a rabbit.

  “Did that frighten you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I breed them, and that takes time. So I guess I’m having meat six or so times a month at this time of year. Less in winter. I don’t kill my chickens unless they stop laying. Cyrus brings me a box of little chicks once a year. I’m not allowed a rooster. Cyrus brings flour too, and oats. But I usually eat corn and potatoes rather than bread, because I grow them.”

  He really was a prisoner. Canny wasn’t going to ask why his family had him confined, not if the answer would make her stop wanting to be here with him.

  He said, his voice slightly muffled, “You don’t actually read sign, you just understand it.” Canny felt his breath stirring her hair. That’s why his voice was muffled—he had his mouth against her hair. Canny stayed still and breathed shallowly till she thought she’d faint. Then she sat upright again, pushing herself off from him but maintaining her contact with him. It seemed to be the only hope she had of keeping her head—holding him off, but leaving her hands on him.

  Canny didn’t know how to explain what she did do with the Zarene Alphabet. The night he had her follow the carvings she’d tried to take in the sum of it, the spell in total, and the fireworks of her migraine had partly consisted of glowing squiggles of ideogrammatic sign flying apart into their component pieces and reassembling again. And there were clues, things she’d see and her brain would put aside for a time, and then present to her sometime later, once a place to put them appeared. That’s the way her mind had always worked. So she’d recognized that the tile had said “Now” because there was a big case clock in Ghislain’s library that didn’t have hands, but only a blank cover over its face, a cover that revolved and had one tiny window in it that showed only the hour. The other day, when she’d been lying tied up, the number the window revealed was a 7, then an 8, then a 9. Under each numeral there was an ideogram, one with a kind of “Don’t” built into it, like the fine print on the Alphabet in the schoolroom at Orchard House. Canny was absolutely sure that when the library clock struck midnight and the number 12 showed in its little window, the sign with the 12 would say “Now.” Canny deduced the “Now” from the “Don’t,” which was actually a “Not now.” She’d looked at the clock and figured that something was supposed to happen at midnight, and at no other time.