Mortal Fire

by Elizabeth Knox

  At dinnertime Susan knocked on the door and asked Canny if she wanted something to eat. “I’ve shamelessly raided Iris Zarene’s kitchen again.”

  Canny called through the door, “I just need to sleep.” She was surprised at how croaky her voice was. Susan went away, or perhaps took her turn guarding the bedroom door. Canny didn’t know, because for a time she fell into a feverish, shallow sleep, curled around her sculpture.

  About an hour before dawn she climbed stiffly to her feet and stood for a time listening to rain dripping from the eaves. The fire was dead, the grate cold. Canny turned to face the fireplace and stooped to pick up the now dry sculpture. She stood straight, squared her shoulders, and, after a slight breathless hesitation—during which she blushed, as if deeply embarrassed—she took one step across the rag rug.

  Canny’s body came to a standstill a foot from the hearth, her hands held out before her, empty.

  But her spirit floated forward to settle slowly onto the polished floorboards of the upstairs hall of her home in Castlereagh, right outside her brother’s bedroom door, in a hall brightly lit by moonlight shining through the claret, amber, and lilac panes of stained glass on the landing.

  Canny carefully set her Master Rune down on the hall runner. She looked at the door. “Knock knock,” she said, then stepped back and leaned on the wall opposite, her torn hands concealed behind her.

  After a moment the door opened and Sholto poked his head out, looking a little bit like a grumpy turtle.

  “Sholto,” Canny said, calmly, but with all the love she felt.

  He peered blearily at the Rune. “What is this?”

  “An artwork,” Canny said.

  “You’re giving me an artwork?” He sounded doubtful.

  “Yes,” Canny said.

  “Why are you giving me an artwork?” He sounded suspicious, as if he thought she’d gone to all this effort only to tease him.

  “So you can look after it for me,” Canny said simply.

  “In the middle of the night, you’re giving me an artwork so I can look after it for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And,” said Sholto, with immense sarcasm, “does this mean I’m supposed to take it with us? Do you think I should put it in the back window of the car, with our sun hats?”

  “No, that wouldn’t do at all,” she said, mild. “I want you to keep it here, at home.”

  Sholto’s eyes strayed from hers to the Rune. For several long minutes he just gazed at it, lost to himself. Then he said dreamily, “Where am I?”

  “Home,” said Canny. “It’s Thursday morning, on the day before we set out, and I’ve brought you this artwork. It’s a papier-mâché sculpture, made of chicken wire, and strips of newspaper, and the tissue used to wrap apples. I want you to put it away somewhere and keep it safe for me.”

  She watched Sholto pick the Rune up, fumbling a little when the suspended compass shifted inside it.

  “Thank you,” Canny said. “I know I can rely on you.”

  “You can go back to bed now,” he said, impatient. “I’ll take this—Lady Senator’s fancy hat—and find a corner for it.”

  Canny’s brother went into his bedroom and used his foot to close the door. “Thank you, Sholto,” Canny said again, then pushed off the wall and stepped forward—

  —and back into her body. She stumbled and just caught herself by seizing onto the warm mantelpiece above the fireplace with her empty, lacerated hands.

  * * *

  THEY LEFT THE GUESTHOUSE VERY EARLY, before anyone else was up. Sholto was carrying both Canny’s and his own pack. It was still raining and he led them an indirect way, along a track that went from ruin to ruin through the gardens. He picked some tomatoes, skins split from too much rain. He passed a couple to Susan, who ate them greedily. He held one under Canny’s nose, which was all he could see of her face under the dripping hood of her coat. She shook her head. She was going slowly and dragging her feet, but she stayed upright and kept on.

  Cyrus Zarene was waiting for them in the meadow. He was standing beside the Austin, enveloped in a stiff old sou’wester. He had a wheelbarrow with him, a tarpaulin covering whatever it held.

  Sholto unlocked the car. Cyrus pointed at the trunk, so Sholto unlocked that too. Of course what Cyrus had was the anthropology department’s precious reel-to-reel tape recorder.

  Cyrus and Sholto carefully transferred the machine to the dry trunk.

  Cyrus said, “I’m sorry for everything that happened, and everything that’s about to happen.”

  Sholto looked at him in disgust. “Can’t you people open your mouths without issuing threats?” He stepped closer, thrust his face into Cyrus’s. “If my sister ends up with a teenage pregnancy I’ll slap such a lawsuit on you, your heads will be spinning.”

  “How strange,” said Cyrus. “You’re already forgetting.”

  “I’m forgetting nothing, mate. I might not be able to cast spells, but I can pay lawyers.”

  Cyrus stepped back. “If you really want revenge just start reminding people of the Lazuli Dam project.”

  Sholto was outraged. Why would the man say that! Sholto was incapable of doing anything like that. He might want to discomfort Lealand, Cyrus, and Iris, but the idea of drowning the valley’s apple and apricot and cherry orchards made him sick to his stomach. “What do you think I am?” He turned and squelched over to the driver’s door and got in.

  Unfortunately Sholto wasn’t going to get his graceful exit, or the last word. He had to climb out again and ask Cyrus’s help in pushing the mired Austin back onto the road, both of them laboring side by side while Susan steered and Canny waited, silent, swathed and dripping.

  Once the Austin was safely on the gravel, Sholto said, “Look. Thank you. And thanks for bringing our stuff.”

  “Look after her,” Cyrus said.

  Sholto fired up again. “Of course I’ll bloody look after her!”

  * * *

  THE GORGE WAS VERY GREASY and visibility poor. Sholto drove hunched over the wheel. The windshield wipers labored, throwing water about and only making brief quarter-circle transparencies through which the road ahead could sometimes be seen.

  Canny was in the back with their packs. Now and then Susan checked her in the rearview mirror, but the girl hadn’t removed her wet coat and was almost indistinguishable from the packs and soggy, bundled sleeping bags.

  Once Susan craned to look out the passenger-side window. She saw the Lazuli, its water a wicked, opaque caramel color; the current humped and sinewy. She quickly looked away.

  They came around a tight bend and there, before them, was a slip. Rubble and clay blocked most of the road. The mass of earth must have come down hard, for the road had a long crack in it a few feet inside the crash barrier.

  The Austin slid to a stop.

  There were lights beyond the slip. Headlights, flashing amber warning lights, and the red revolving light of a patrol car belonging to the Massenfer Sheriff’s Department.

  As soon as they came to a stop, cold air came into the car. The back door was open. Sholto and Susan swiveled to look into that not quite so full backseat, and then spun forward again to see Canny climbing, picking her way up the unstable slope of the slip.

  “God!” said Susan. “What the hell is her hurry?”

  “Marli,” Sholto said. He jumped out of the car and shouted his sister’s name.

  Above Canny, a drooping sapling came free, with its footing of roots and earth, and tumbled down the slope. Canny stepped back and let it go by. It bounced on the crash barrier, fell into the current, and was whipped away downstream, traveling at an impossible speed.

  Sholto set off after his sister, turning back a second to say, “You stay there, Sue. Promise you’ll stay there.”

  Susan stayed put and watched her boyfriend struggle up the slope after his sister.

  He caught Canny at the top. She slithered and fell to her knees. He teetered and righted himself, keeping his grip on her coa
t.

  Then, with a shift and sigh, the whole edge of the road broke away and slipped as a single mass into the river. A great wave washed up the far side of the channel, scooping another large hunk of earth loose. Sholto and Canny were now balanced at the edge of a clean cliff face of rock, the river below them. Sholto leaned back and began to kick up the slope, away from the edge, pulling his sister with him. Canny didn’t resist, or assist him. Her heels dragged and her free hands made little gestures at the drop.

  The crumbling edge froze and re-formed, as if invisible hands were patting the sods back into place.

  * * *

  SHOLTO REACHED THE CREST of the humped landslip and let himself slither down the far side, his sister partly on top of him, as if his body were a sled. He could hear Susan shouting his name.

  A deputy and a couple of husky men in plastic rain slickers came and picked them up and brushed them off. “You were nearly gone there, son,” one man said. He guided them toward the lights. Sholto found he was quaking with shock. Then someone climbed out of one of the cars, shook a dry umbrella open, and said, “Akanesi. Sholto.”

  It was Sisema.

  * * *

  SHOLTO DIDN’T COME WITH THEM in the sheriff’s car. He wouldn’t leave Susan. Once Susan had seen that they were safe she’d gotten back in the Austin and carefully reversed it around the corner, away from the crumbling road. They could see she was still waiting there, because of the raindrops shining in the cones of light cast by the hidden car’s headlamps.

  Two road repairmen and Sholto eventually trod a thin track back across the middle of the landslip. The men returned without Sholto and, a moment later, he reappeared, hurrying head down around the corner. A little after that the lights of the Austin withdrew as one of them, either Sholto or Susan, continued to drive, in reverse, back along the gorge to find a wider section where they could turn and head back to the valley.

  * * *

  ON THE RIDE INTO MASSENFER, Sisema told Canny that she’d gotten the SAF to send one of their B-52s to fly her from Calvary on the Shackle Islands to Ardour Air Force Base on the southern end of the Peninsula. “Massenfer Valley is too twisty for a long runway. Those planes are big, but that means we were able to do the trip from Calvary all in one hop.”

  Sisema seemed pleased with herself. She said she’d called in the debt they owed her.

  Canny felt dull, as if a warm cloud were settling in around her head: something overpowering, hot, and perfumed, like steam from a commercial laundry.

  Her mother said, “Didn’t Sholto tell you how worried I was?”

  “He didn’t tell me he’d spoken to you.”

  “Well, you hearing that your mother wanted you ferreted out of that place probably wouldn’t have helped his case,” Sisema said. “Sholto may be lackadaisical, but he’s not stupid.”

  Canny slid sideways and rested her wet head on her mother’s shoulder. Sisema put up an absentminded hand and stroked her face. She raised her voice to talk to the sheriff. “If my stepson comes to complain to you later just bear in mind that he has a tendency to exaggerate. He likes drama.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the sheriff.

  “Why would you say that?” Canny muttered.

  “Straight to the railway station, if you would be so kind,” said Sisema to the sheriff.

  “Whatever you say, ma’am,” said the sheriff.

  “And I’m surprised this man isn’t asking more questions,” Canny said, as if to an invisible audience. She saw the sheriff’s eyes flick to meet hers in his rearview mirror. He looked wary, then he looked wooden.

  “Oh,” said Canny, still to herself. “He’s scared of them.”

  19

  SISEMA HAD PURCHASED a first-class compartment on the Peninsula Express, destination Westport. She had a porter at Massenfer Station run for blankets and tea and then sat Canny in the least drafty corner of its decayed waiting room. “I wanted to change trains at Kinnock Junction, but they told me that the first train to Castlereagh wouldn’t come through for two hours, and it was a slow local. So I’ve wired ahead to arrange another first-class compartment from Westport.”

  Did she expect her daughter to congratulate her? Canny was too tired to form a sentence. She’d sprung a leak, and the dry matter in her head was liquefying.

  Sisema pulled off one of her lilac cotton gloves and laid a soft palm on Canny’s brow. “It’s just a cold, I hope,” she said.

  “You rushed back because I had a cold?”

  “No, darling.” Sisema got up to help the porter with the tray. He apologized that the tearoom was closed.

  Sisema said, “This will do very nicely.” She tipped him. He beamed and asked did she need anything more. Another blanket perhaps?

  “Is the train on time?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Sisema smiled and sent him off with a wave.

  Canny couldn’t taste her tea, even when it had cooled.

  * * *

  AS SOON AS THEY WERE on the train Sisema had the attendants make up one of the beds. She got Canny out of her clothes and into it, then sat on the red leather seat opposite. Canny stared at the decorative ironwork on the station awning and then flinched as the train shuddered and began to slide out of the station. The station clock sailed by overhead, midday looking like midnight.

  “I mustn’t sleep,” she said. If she stayed vigilant how could this thing creep up on her? She could feel it coming, softening the edges of the world.

  “If you’re not eager to sleep then perhaps I ought to start now,” Sisema said. She wasn’t looking at Canny. Her gloved hands were folded into her lap, though she’d unpinned her hat and placed it on the seat beside her.

  The brick walls of the rail-side warehouses slid past, and the valley opened up. The train followed the curve of the river. All Canny could make out through the rain was the top of the black coal tailings on the slopes above the Taskmaster.

  Sisema said, “I was afraid the people in that valley would find out who you were. I was afraid that someone had seen me, all those years ago, and would put two and two together. You see, my grasp of geography is very bad. I’m sorry about that. You’ll see what I mean when I explain.”

  Canny fixed her eyes on her mother, who it seemed was finally going to tell her something.

  * * *

  “WHEN I FIRST CAME TO SOUTHLAND,” Sisema said, “people were very kind to me. The people in the know, that is. They kept an eye on me and set me up on dates with groups of nice young people. Groups, so there’d be no poor fellow having a brown girl foisted on him. Sometimes I felt like I was the only brown girl in Castlereagh. The people from the archipelago never ventured farther north than Pitt River, and my own people hadn’t started coming here. I was different—a bit of a hot potato. And though there was goodwill, none of the folks being nice to me knew what the goodwill was about, so they were kind of thinking, ‘We’ll see,’ about it all. People don’t have faith without having the story.

  “So I was lonely. And there was this man. A very funny, attentive man. I worked for him, and I was in love with him, but he was married. In the summer of 1942, late November, I said yes to this man’s suggestion that I go off on a trip with him. He’d booked a hotel in Esperance, on the tip of the Peninsula. We took his car. He’d been hoarding gas. Anyway, we got there, and I couldn’t go through with it. I spent the night in the hotel lobby. He was very cross with me. The manager’s wife came and threw me out before breakfast. She said, ‘Go away. We don’t want your kind in this establishment.’

  “So, there I was, standing by a phone booth on Main Street, looking at the coins in my purse, when a jeep pulled up. Two marines were in it, a private first class and a corporal. Alex and Jim. They offered me a ride. Said they were going back to Castlereagh slooooowwwly. So I got in. We spent the next few days driving, and swimming in rivers, and lying around in the grass. We’d park in the afternoons, and I’d string a rope between the windshield of the jeep and a tree, and I’d do
our washing. Then I’d hang it out to dry; I’d make shade. We’d lie about in the shade of our laundry and drink. The marine boys had purchased a whole crate of that moonshine they sell in jars on the Peninsula. Those boys weren’t really sleeping. They’d been popping bennies. The military used to give them drugs to keep them awake during battles, and they’d gotten a taste for it. James especially. He was a little crazy from too much. Amphetamines—never go near them, Canny. Alex went a bit easier on the drink and pills. He wasn’t well; he had a parasite from the jungle. He was a mess, really. They’d seen some terrible things. Pill-popping lushes, that’s what they were, but they were also real gentlemen.

  “We got into a bit of trouble at Massenfer and were chased out of town by the sheriff. The boys’ jeep was a match for the sheriff’s car and we got ahead and cut down a side road near the summit of the Palisades. We switched off our lights and waited for the sheriff’s car to go by. James wanted to turn back the way we’d come, but Alex thought he could make out a road going down the hill. There was one, very bumpy and overgrown. It took us all the way down the narrow head of a valley, then up a kind of driveway that went in a spiral around a forested hill.

  “The driveway stopped by some old garages belonging to this gorgeous house. We could see the lights of other houses down in the valley, but there was only one person living in the house on the hill, a guy about my age who said he was there because he couldn’t leave. He was very hospitable even if he was a little strange, so we cracked a jar with him and kept drinking.

  “I’ve thought about it, and thought about it—and I think we were there two days and one night.” Sisema fell quiet and brooded.

  “Ma?”

  “I don’t remember when it was he told us he couldn’t leave.” She looked at Canny. “There are things I have to get right so you’ll understand everything. One of those things is that I forgot to tell you that no one knew James and Alex were gadding about together. James was the driver for some major, an officer who was on furlough and holed up in a posh Peninsula holiday home with a local lady. This major had said to James, ‘You push off, and be back on the twenty-second.’ Alex had been on medical leave and was mooching about in Esperance. He’d only just hooked up with James before they found me. So, no one knew they were together. The other thing I have to try to make clear is that we thought there were two perfectly explainable things going on with that boy. Possibly he was a bit neurotic and scared of leaving his home. Either that, or he was telling that story about himself because he was nearly of age and should have been thinking of signing up.”