Firebirds Rising

by Sharyn November

  “Kisandrion Dorlianish! You must not hate your aunt!” said her mother.

  “Why not?” said Kisandrion, who did not actually hate her aunt but was deeply in awe of her, which was a very uncomfortable feeling; hatred would have felt cozier. “I don’t have to live with her.”

  “You may one day.”

  “Why?”

  “Should the pot of Liavekan politics ever boil over,” said her mother, “I’ll send you all to her by the fastest way.”

  “If the pot boils over,” said Kiffen, while Dri stared horrified, “will the water run downhill?”

  “Indeed it will,” said their mother.

  “What if potboil runs downhill?” cried Sinja.

  “What if Dri came to work with me after school?” said Kiffen.

  “I don’t want to be a guard,” said Dri.

  “They want another clerk in the library. You could do that.”

  “Would I get to read the books?”

  “They haven’t books, really, they have archives.”

  “But would I get to read them?”

  “I don’t know, Dri. Come to work with me and find out.”

  So Dri, whose childhood ambition had been to own and pull a footcab, catching nefarious villains in the process, came to work for the Red Temple. She did not ask about reading the archives. Mundri, the chief librarian of this branch of the Red Temple’s documents, was almost as forbidding as Dri’s not-hated, nonarguing aunt. Mundri did not brook much argument either. When Dri pointed out that one’s spiritual advisers told one to argue, Mundri said dryly that Dri could argue with the priests all she liked, but she was not to argue in the library.

  Dri liked her priest, a young placid woman called Atliae. Atliae argued with her, but Atliae also let her talk. At home, unless one happened to be bleeding heavily or running a fever, it was more or less impossible to speak more than a sentence without having it discussed in detail. Their mother had had to be very firm repeatedly before the bleeding and the fevers were let off the general requirement of discussion. Dri enjoyed home quite a lot, but talking about herself in paragraphs was enchanting, like eating as many cinnamon cakes as you wanted and neither being scolded nor ending up with a stomachache.

  This happy state of affairs lasted for a month or two, and then the stomachache showed up. Atliae greeted Dri one Luckday morning by saying, “You have got on so well that we can go on to the second chapter of your training sooner than usual.”

  In the second chapter, Dri did not get to talk about herself in paragraphs; instead, she got to tell Atliae about five choices she had made in the preceding week, and Atliae would then tell her why the choices were not good ones. For every choice she had made, whether it was to lie to her mother about whom she fancied at work or school, to tell her sister the truth about who ate the last cinnamon cake, to buy her mother a bottle of lavender water or to adopt a litter of kittens that were living under the house, to read a poem or write one, to write a letter to her country cousins or to throw a tantrum about the necessity of doing so, she had to contrive a deed that was that choice’s opposite in magnitude and nature, and then do that.

  They had a terrific shouting match about the kittens. Dri’s first suggestion was that she put them and their mother back under the house, and she had to suffer a long and, for Atliae, impassioned lecture about how impossible it was to undo anything, ever, under any circumstances. Dri did not much heed this at the time because she wondered whether Atliae had somehow divined her intention of continuing to feed and brush the kittens even when they were back under the house.

  Her second suggestion, that she give away the cat puppets that had taken a lot of her time and thought before she found the kittens, evoked a much calmer but equally long lecture about the inefficacy of symbolism and substitution in such a situation. Dri finally suggested that she give Sinja away instead. Atliae said briefly, “Sinja is not yours to give.” Dri had no way of telling whether Atliae knew the suggestion was not serious or whether, much more intriguing, she would have entertained it if Sinja had been Dri’s child instead of her sister.

  “What do you suggest, then?” demanded Dri.

  “You could find another litter of kittens and drown it,” said Atliae.

  Dri got up. “No,” she said.

  “Sit down, Dri; we haven’t finished.”

  “I am not sitting down with a drowner of kittens.”

  “No, indeed now you are not, though certainly you have done so many times unknowing.”

  “Good people don’t let their cats have dozens of kittens!”

  Atliae looked dubious. Dri, her belief in Atliae’s wisdom eroding rapidly, said in exasperation, “All you have to do is give them Worrynot.”

  “Some people’s cats don’t like the taste,” said Atliae. Dri opened her mouth to provide a list of methods of giving medicine to cats whether the cats liked the taste or not, but Atliae went on, “In any case, a person can be too good.”

  “Well, I know that,” said Dri, thinking of her eldest cousin on her father’s side, who was a model of deportment, according to himself and also to Dri’s parents. Then she thought through this initial thought, as Atliae had taught her to do. What was good about deportment, after all? You could bet that it didn’t feed anybody—in fact, it slowed down how well you could feed yourself at the table—and it didn’t save any kittens either. “Good at what?” she said cautiously.

  Atliae grinned at her. She did not look like a person who would drown kittens. “That is a useful distinction,” she said—this being perhaps the highest praise Atliae could bestow on a remark as opposed to a deed, “but it is sideways to our purposes. Hark now.”

  At this signal of a long speech, Dri sat down with her feet on the floor and put a cushion firmly behind her back. Atliae did not like it if you let your feet go to sleep and then tried to wake them up again while she was talking.

  “Here is the fashion of the world,” said Atliae. She was not a very dramatic speaker, but her voice took on a faint tinge of the storyteller’s rhythm. “Two great forces there are, continually at war. We call the one Good, and the other Evil; and yet they remain upright only by virtue of the pressure that they exert, the one upon the other. Should either of them vanish or be vanquished, the other would collapse. Whether the other force would vanish also or merely assume a form so alien that the world would fail, we do not know, though many rolls of paper and gallons of ink have been expended in essays to prove the inevitability of one or the other event.”

  Dri was thrilled. She thought of the two forces as astrological drawings, their forms imposed on the wandering patterns of the stars, one gold and one red, arms upraised, eyes shut in concentration, each forcing the other upright so that the world of kittens and sand and spicy lentils and family and rain and railroads might continue.

  “We are all part of this struggle,” said Atliae. “In each of us it goes on in miniature.”

  Dri thought of herself as a dollhouse with the sky painted on the wall. She was somewhat less thrilled.

  “And though few of us could bring down the world entire, we can all bring down the world that is our particular self.”

  I’d rather bring down the world entire, thought Dri. Atliae probably knew this, but Dri preferred not to say it just the same.

  “The Twin Forces of good and evil must be balanced,” said Atliae. “They must be truly twins. You must strive to keep them equal in yourself.”

  That said, Dri was still deeply preoccupied with the kittens. She knew without having to consider the matter that she was going to keep them and was not going to harm them. If behaving so brought down the equally braced forces of her particular self, perhaps it would be interesting to see what that was like. But her decision did not matter to whether the argument must go on. “If I found a sick cat,” she said, “and took it to a healer and it had to be put down…”

  “I’m afraid you are very literal,” said Atliae, shaking her head.

  Dri had heard this
before from her parents and was not much impressed. In fact, as usual, a comment upon her literalness made her take it further. “Well, if you won’t let me do anything opposite,” she said, “what if I rather sneaked up on the middle again in little steps by doing smaller and smaller good things until I did a not-good, not-bad thing?”

  Atliae actually clapped her hands and exclaimed, “Well done, well done!” This was when Dri realized that the Faith of the Twin Forces was made for her.

  Matters proceeded in this pleasing fashion for most of a year. The kittens grew long-legged and were given to the baker on Dri’s street, whose cat was getting too old to be interested in mousing; to the healer two streets over, who looked lonely to Dri; and, astonishingly, to Mundri, who, it developed, liked cats much better than she liked people. Dri was left with the ugliest kitten, not having troubled to mention his patient disposition. He even let them see whether water would roll downhill on his fluffy unevenly striped tail. It was lucky that nobody thought of seeing if potboil would boil downhill on his tail, because he would probably have let them try that, too. He was much interested in all family activities, and was so often tripped over that they named him after Ghologhosh, the god of small curses.

  Not long after the making of this momentous decision, suddenly it was the twelfth day of the month of Flowers, and Dri turned fourteen years old. She was not interested in her inborn luck; the danger and trouble of investing it into a usable object so that she could perform magic did not seem to her worth the rewards. She thought that she would prefer to rely on her wits. There had been, naturally, a great deal of argument about this decision all through her childhood, but after this birthday, nobody brought up the subject again.

  She did not talk about it with Atliae, and perhaps oddly, Atliae did not ask her about it either. Dri puzzled herself over the matter for some little time. Surely it was a momentous decision, to abandon one’s birthright and decline the acquisition of power. But like the decision to take care of the kittens, it seemed to be beyond argument, a thing she would simply do, like breathing. She did, once her birthday was a week or so past, ask Atliae whether a thing that seemed as natural as breathing might be viewed as a choice by the Twin Forces.

  Atliae, after a much longer pause than usual, said that one should strive to make as few of one’s actions in life like breathing, and as many like taking a life or having a child, as possible. Dri remarked that many people did both those things pretty much as if they were the same as breathing, and Atliae was rather short with her instead of arguing. Dri put this down to the late Spring heat, which Atliae didn’t like, and thought that she would wait to bring the matter up again until Fog or even Frost.

  Once her birthday was weeks and weeks past, her family became so embroiled in enthralling discussions of what should happen at her coming-of-age party that neither water’s running nor potboil’s boiling was mentioned at all except in purely practical terms.

  When the pot did boil over, it was not the entire pot of Liavekan politics, but a different pot. It was the Red Temple.

  Dri’s experience of the Red Temple was limited to her brother, Atliae, Mundri, and her fellow clerks, who acquired their positions and left them with irregular frequency, usually after either repeatedly professing boredom or having a huge battle with Mundri over some minor detail. People did come to use the library, but it was always Mundri who talked to them. Kiffen, however, saw and spoke to ten times as many inhabitants of their faith as Dri did, and he always kept her well informed of all the gossip. So she knew quite well that the head of the whole affair, His Scarlet Eminence, Regent of all Liavek until the Levar came of age, was named Resh, and was both soft-spoken and much feared. She did not specifically fear him herself, since he did not seem to be interested in her library, and since Mundri’s behavior and remarks implied strongly that among Mundri’s high and sacred duties was the doling out of a proper amount of fear in His Scarlet Eminence’s direction. He seemed more an eccentricity of Mundri’s than an active force.

  On a dazzlingly hot day in the month of Fruit, Kiffen came breathlessly into the library. Even in the midst of crisis, he upheld Mundri’s rules. He came in at the beginning of the recess allowed Dri for her luncheon, and he said nothing to her until they were outside the library proper. Then he took her elbow and hustled her out into Gold Street. “We’re going home,” he said.

  “I haven’t time to—”

  “We must go home.”

  Dri contemplated him. He looked as if his cat had died. She hoped hers was all right. If not, though, surely he would just say so. She fell into step with him. She did not stop arguing, but she did not stop walking either. They went home through the empty noontime streets, squinting at the dancing of dust motes in the dry bright air.

  Their mother was preserving garlic, but did not scold them for interrupting. She put down her knife.

  “Resh is dead,” said Kiffen.

  Their mother slid off her high wooden stool, picked up the jug of vinegar, put it down again. “Quick, Dri, bring me my pen and ink,” she said.

  Dri, going, heard Kiffen say in a voice that began low and firm and squeaked halfway through, “I can’t leave the City.”

  Sinja had borrowed the ink again, and had also sequestered the paper under her bed. While discovering these facts, Dri thought that she could not leave the City either. Her work, her cat, her coming-of-age party; the necessity of preventing Melandin from disgracing them all or killing himself accidentally; the necessity of educating Sinja not to be like Melandin; fireworks in the Levar’s Park and the long-legged white cadies wading in the Salt Marsh; the escaped white geese and the wild white ducks on the Cat River; her friends in the next street, all condemned to years more of school to become apothecaries, who listened so breathlessly to her tales of the real outside world. No, she could not leave the City.

  When she returned to the kitchen with the objects she had been sent to fetch, Kiffen was sitting at the table with a lowering expression and her mother had filled up two more jars of garlic. “I am writing to your aunts,” said her mother. “Go and fill one pack for each of you. Dri, I will be good to your cat.”

  “Why can’t I take Golly with me?” demanded Dri, and was immediately aware of having made a mistake.

  “Don’t fret, Dri, I’ll look after him,” said Kiffen.

  Dri opened her mouth and then shut it again. She had always felt, even before first Kiffen and then she came of age, that their arguments had force, that they were attended to, if sometimes laughed at, that they helped to keep the house standing and people in a right relation to one another. But the way her mother was writing and not attending, as if she had suddenly gone deaf, made speaking seem useless. Kiffen’s blithe tactic, of speaking as if what he wanted had already been accomplished, usually got him just what he wanted, to Dri’s intense annoyance; but it was not working now. She thought there must be a thing to say that would restore rightness, but she did not know what it was.

  Sinja arrived at that moment with a tremendous noise of slapping sandals, ready for her lunch. She looked around and did not ask why it was not ready. She edged up under her mother’s unoccupied elbow and announced, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Sinja can help me look after your cat,” said their mother, still writing.

  “Why can’t Dri—”

  “Because she is going to the great plains on a visit.”

  “Why?”

  “Because His Scarlet Eminence is dead.”

  “Dri! Did you kill him?”

  Dri sat down and laughed. There was nothing else to do except pack. After half a moment’s serious consideration, she packed her cat. If she carried the bag in her arms instead of pulling the drawstring tight and putting it over her shoulder, he would be able to breathe. She put only a shirt or two of her own in the bottom of the bag. She had the vague impression that farmers were very poor—a great many stories told in the marketplace began, Once, my excellencies, there was a poor farmer who—But i
f she must go about wearing a flour sack, it was all the same to her. Who would see her in the country, after all?

  She got Sinja’s attention while their mother was talking Kiffen out of taking his entire wardrobe, and showed her Golly curled in the pack, and told her to wait until after dinner and then tell her mother where the cat was. Sinja’s ordinary response to being told anything at all was to balk, but she nodded solemnly, rubbed Golly’s nose, and said, “After dinner and before sweets, or after sweets, too?”

  “After sweets, too, unless she asks you,” said Dri.

  In other circumstances, the journey might have been exciting and full of interest. Dri did her best to be excited and interested. Riding out of Liavek in a cart full of cloth and earthenware was nothing new. She had done it many times on her own, staying at the shore or in the marsh for the day and making her return trip in a cart full of cabbages or mint or fish. Kiffen had shown her how it was all done. He had shown her hawks, dragonflies, river rats, sea otters, blackbirds, bluebirds, redbirds, and mockingbirds. He had discoursed on the military difficulties of the desert and the tides in the Saltmarsh and the building of the railroad.

  Now, however, as they rode in a small cart and then a large cart and then a very small cart, farther and farther into a huger and huger blue sky, while the accustomed shapes of the earth dwindled and flattened and the road narrowed to a point like an impossibly long waxed-paper cone of soup bought in some giants’ version of the Levar’s Park, Kiffen did not discourse. He sulked. Dri showed him a red hawk and a blue dragonfly and a running camel, possibly the one carrying a mailbag that included her mother’s letter to the aunts, warning of her and Kiffen’s coming. But he did not even look at her.

  Her cat was not troubled by the first cart, from whose driver one could purchase tidbits of fried fish; nor by the larger cart, which was full of dried seaweed; but even though the smallest cart held jars of cream, oddly being driven away from the City rather than toward it, he protested about every bump and jostle, and did not purr at anything. By the time the driver put them down on a crossroads distinguished from all the others by a clump of three gnarled trees and a parcel of goats, they were a disheveled and grumpy bunch. Before they could also become lost, Mininu stood up from where she had been talking to the goats and walked to meet them. In the City she had always looked to Dri like the goddess of night, so tall and so dark with flecks of white like stars in her crown of black hair. Under the empty sky of the country, in her brown tunic and leggings with a cap on her hair, she seemed smaller and more like a person.