Firebirds Rising

by Sharyn November

“We are before you in the air.”

  “I guess I can’t,” said Dri, staring before her. She saw only the air, just as they did when they looked at her. She spared a glance for the group down at the house. They were now hidden by the windbreak, but she could hear them singing something.

  “But who are you?” she repeated firmly.

  “If you cannot see us, you will not hear our names.”

  “What do you do?”

  “What we are bid.”

  “Really!” said Dri, entertained. “I know a great many parents who would trade their children for you.”

  Several laughs overlapped in the empty air. The same voice said, “That is not bidding as we mean it.”

  “Do you mean luck, magical bidding?”

  “No, luck has no power over us.”

  “Really!” said Dri. She felt warmed, released, returned to herself. All the questions she had suppressed since she arrived, in the shut-door pressure of that house below, seemed to make a pressure of their own in her heart, pushing these new questions before them. “What about the Twin Forces?” she said. “Do they have power over you?”

  “Power over us is held by water, word, and will.”

  Dri looked again at the house. The group of people and animals had come around to where they started, and Mininu was speaking again.

  “Is that what they are doing down there? Getting power over you?”

  The several laughs came again. Dri wondered how she knew it was laughter. It was more like, like, she was not sure what. But she felt laughter. The voice said, “They do not know us. They seek those who have fled.”

  “The city spirits?”

  “Our cousins of the stone, indeed.”

  Dri swallowed hard. “Why did your cousins leave?”

  “That which drove them out has in its turn been driven.”

  “Oh,” said Dri.

  To speak to the voices of the air had been an action like breathing, an unconsidered choice. But Atliae might say that it should have been considered more than it was. She was glad that Atliae was far away. She wished that she knew of a way to tell whether one of the striving figures in herself was about to hook the feet from under the other. What would it feel like? She felt more herself than she had since they left Liavek. Perhaps some previous choice had made her totter and now she had restored herself. Would Atliae know? Dri did not know what she thought.

  “What did they do, your cousins,” she asked, “when they were here?”

  “All tasks of ours; to guide the grain, to guard the house from moth and mold and the garden from mouse and mold and moth, to guard all things and yet harm none.”

  “Is that really possible?”

  “If we are well bid.”

  “But they didn’t bid you, they bid your cousins from the City?”

  “Their bidding is too—sly.”

  “Oh!” cried Dri, and clapped her hands. “It is, it is, it truly is! They say that they hope you have an occupation when they want you not to be lazy, they, they, oh, yes, sly is a grand word!”

  “They have need of us now,” said the voice, “but they know not how to make us love them.”

  Dri sobered at once. “Why don’t they, do you suppose?”

  “They do not know that they have the need; even knowing, their way is not our way.”

  “Is that the Ombayan way?”

  “We have toiled and created for Ombayans who were not sly, but there are many Ombayan ways. What would you call a Liavekan way? Our cousins of the City were as sly as yours of the plains.”

  “Things are always more complicated than you believe they are,” agreed Dri.

  “Unless they are simpler.”

  “Do you think we never see things truly, then?”

  “We do not know. When we say ‘we,’ we have not been accustomed to think of the creatures of the earth in that wind. And yet you speak as properly as could be wished.”

  “Not if you ask Mininu,” said Dri.

  “It is she who must ask us.”

  Dri sat down on a fallen branch, staring down at the antics of her family and the animals. She no longer wanted to laugh. Their way was not her way, but she could tell well enough from her week’s stay that they were happy in it. It had fed and clothed them, and had put horrid goat cheese and disgusting chicken eggs in the market for people who liked them; it had tended apple trees and barley fields; it had put that now missing sparkle in the landscape. She had wrecked it. However her interior structure might feel, it was necessary to restore the wreckage. She wondered what Atliae would say, but, as with tending to the kittens, what Atliae would say did not matter. Dri rubbed her tired eyes and firmly addressed the air.

  “Do you live here, on their—on this land that they live on?”

  “We do, and have always.”

  “Do you like your tasks, when you are well bidden; do they please you and feed you, and make things beautiful?”

  “They do, and have always.”

  “You can’t have had a very happy time of it, can you, while your cousins were here,” said Dri.

  “We cannot.”

  “Tell me, then,” said Dri, “who is it that may bid you well?”

  Before she went down the hill and back to the house, she scuffed thoroughly through the brown tea-smelling oak leaves that she had thought to take a nap in. On the bare earth thus revealed she saw a few affronted worms and some hastily retreating roundbugs, just as she might find in her father’s garden at home. Those would be good for growing things, she supposed. There were no snakes or mice.

  “Thank you,” she said to the air, not for the first time, but she had no reply. Her companions were busy.

  Dri started down the path with a sigh. If she were behaving in Mininu’s way, she would need to say nothing of what had passed. But since she must behave in her own way to restore what she had damaged, she must tell Mininu everything. Now that order was restored, she could only feel chastened for a few moments before she wanted, once again, to laugh. Mininu would be able to do as she liked, as she always did, in her household, but to conciliate the resident spirits of the air, she would have to ask questions and make statements and even, from time to time, to argue. “I am in such a great leafpile of trouble,” she said, having gotten used to talking to the air in the past few hours. “I wonder what they will do to me.”

  Perhaps they would send her home.

  She smiled at the thought, and then stopped smiling. Perhaps they would call her back once every year, to speak as Mininu would not, and eat fat cheese except on Raindays.

  Golly came trotting out of the tall grass with a mouse in his mouth.

  “That will be the last of those you see hereabouts,” Dri told him.

  But perhaps they would send her home first.

  PAMELA DEANis the author of six fantasy novels and a handful of short stories; five of the stories are set in the same world as “Cousins.”

  Firebird has reissued her Secret Country Trilogy (The Secret Country, The Hidden Land, and The Whim of the Dragon) and Tam Lin; a reissue of The Dubious Hills is forthcoming. She is currently working on Going North, a sequel to both the Secret Country books and The Dubious Hills.

  She lives in Minneapolis with some congenial people, a lot of cats, and an overgrown garden. You can find a few photographs, links to interviews with her, a bibliography, and the occasional announcement at www.dd-b.net/pddb.

  AUTHOR ’S NOTE

  Sharyn says I should tell you why I wrote this story. There isn’t one reason, of course. I wrote it because she asked me to; and because I loved the first Firebirds anthology and wanted to be in such good company. But the reason that those other reasons could be gratified is that Kisandrion, my protagonist, had a story in her. She and her family come from a novel I’m writing. It’s set in a shared world called Liavek, about which five volumes of stories were published in the 1980s. The other characters in that novel are people I’ve written about before, but she was new, and she had a lot of opin
ions. The novel is mostly about other people, so that her opinions about family and food and how to conduct a conversation, about religion and how one chooses right actions, did not have very much room to grow. I wanted to give her a landscape to try her thoughts out on. I also wanted to write a story that did not have certain usual complications, so that other complications caused by Kisandrion’s opinions could also have room. I wanted the story to have no romantic element and not much darkness in it. When I began to write, I thought that when Kisandrion got to the country she would learn to garden. I had no notion at all that she would talk to the air, or what would happen when she did.

  Emma Bull

  WHATUSED TOBEGOODSTILLIS

  Porphyry is a volcanic rock. Maybe that’s why it happened. Maybe it was because the hill that became a pit was named Guadalupe, for the Virgin of Guadalupe, who appeared in a vision to a Mexican peasant a long time ago. Maybe it’s because walls change whatever they enclose, and whatever they leave out.

  And maybe it could have happened anywhere, anytime. But I don’t believe that for a second.

  I expect I wouldn’t have taken too much notice of Sara Gutierrez if my pop hadn’t. I was a senior at Hollier High School, varsity football first string, debating team, science club. Sara was the eighth-grade sister of Alfred Gutierrez, who I knew from football. But the Gutierrezes lived in South Hollier, down the slope from the Dimas shaft, on the other side of Guadalupe Hill, and we lived on Collar Hill above downtown with the lawyers and store owners and bankers. Alfred and I didn’t see much of each other outside of football practice. The only time my father saw Alfred’s father was when Enrique Gutierrez had his annual physical at the company hospital, or if he got hurt on the job and Pop had to stitch him up.

  But one night I was up studying and heard Pop in the kitchen say, “I don’t know if that youngest Gutierrez girl is simple or plain brilliant.”

  Pop didn’t talk about patients at home as a rule, so that was interesting enough to make me prick up my ears.

  “Probably somewhere in between, like most,” Mom said. Mom didn’t impress easily.

  “She came into the infirmary today with her chest sounding like a teakettle on the boil. If I can keep that child from dying of pneumonia or TB, I’ll change my name to Albert Schweitzer.” He paused, and I knew Mom was waiting for him to come back from wherever that thought had led him. She and I were used to Pop’s parentheses. “Anyway, while I’m writing up her prescription, she says, ‘Dr. Ryan, what makes a finch?’”

  “I don’t suppose you told her, ‘God,’” Mom said with a sigh.

  “I didn’t know what to say. But when she saw I didn’t get her drift, she asked why are house finches and those little African finches that Binnie Schwartz keeps in her parlor both finches? So I started to tell her about zoological taxonomy—”

  “I just bet you did,” Mom said. I could hear her smiling.

  “Now, Jule—”

  “Go on, go on. I won’t get any peace till you do.”

  “Well, then she said, ‘But the finches don’t think so. We’re human beings because we say we are. But the finches don’t think they’re all finches. Shouldn’t that make a difference?’”

  A pause, and the sound of dishes clattering in the wash water. “Sara Gutierrez spends too much time on her own,” Mom said. “Invalids always think too much.”

  I don’t remember what Pop replied to that. Probably he argued; Pop argued with any sentence that contained the word always.

  By the time I came home for the summer after my first year of college, the matter was settled: Sara Gutierrez was bright. She’d missed nearly half her freshman year in high school what with being out sick, but was still top of her class. Pop bragged about her as if he’d made her himself.

  She was thin and small and kind of yellowish, and you’d hardly notice if she was in the same room with you. The other girls in town got permanent waves to look like Bette Davis. Sara still looked like Louise Brooks, her hair short, no curl at all. But that summer I saw her at the ballpark during one of the baseball games. She looked straight at me in the stands. There was something in her eyes so big, so heavy, so hard to hang on to that it seemed like her body would break from trying to carry it.

  Nobody ever suggested that Sara was bright at anything likely to be of use to her. A long while later I looked her up in the Hollier Hoist, the high school yearbook, to see what her classmates must have made of her. She’d been a library monitor. That was all. No drama society, no debating team, no booster club, no decorating committee for the homecoming dance.

  I guess she saved her debating for me. And she danced, all right, but you won’t find that in the yearbooks.

  Hollier was a mining town—founded in the 1880s by miners and speculators. The whole point of life here was to dig copper out of the ground as cheap as possible, and hope that when you got it to the surface you could sell it for a price that made the work worthwhile. The town balanced on a knife edge, with the price of copper on one side, and the cost of mining it on the other.

  And that didn’t apply only to the miners and foremen and company management. If copper did poorly, so did the grocers, mechanics, lawyers, and schoolteachers. What came up out of those shafts fed and clothed us all. Pop was a company doctor. Without copper, there was no company, no one to doctor, no dinner on the table, no money for movies on Saturday, no college tuition. He used to say that Hollier was a lifeboat, with all of us rowing for a shore we couldn’t see. The company was the captain, and we trusted that the captain had a working compass and knew how to read it.

  Underground mining’s expensive. The shafts went deeper and deeper under the mountains following the veins of high-grade ore, the pumps ran night and day to pump out the water that tried to fill those shafts, and the men who dug and drilled and blasted had to be paid. But near the surface, under what farmers call dirt and miners call “overburden,” around where the rich veins used to run, there was plenty of low-grade ore. Though it didn’t have as much copper in it, it could be scraped right off the surface. No tunnels, no pumps, and a hell of a lot fewer men to pay.

  Guadalupe Hill was a fine cone-shaped repository of low-grade ore.

  The summer after my sophomore year at college, I came home to find the steam shovels scooping the top off Guadalupe Hill. You could see the work from the parlor windows on Collar Hill, hear the roar and crash of it funneled up the canyon from the other side of downtown. Almost the first thing I heard when I got off the train at the depot was the warning siren for a blast, and the dynamite going off like a giant bass drum. From the platform I could see the dust go up in a thundercloud; then the machinery moved in like retrievers after a shot bird.

  As Pop helped me stow my suitcase in the trunk of the Hudson, I said, “I’d sure like to watch that,” and jerked my head at Guadalupe Hill.

  “I’d take you over now, but your mother would fry me for supper.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean before I went home.” I would have meant it, but I knew he’d be disappointed in me if I couldn’t put Mom before mining.

  Once I’d dropped my suitcase in my room and given Mom a kiss and let her say I looked too thin and didn’t they feed me in that frat house dining room, Pop took me down to watch the dig.

  It was the biggest work I’d ever seen human beings do. Oh, there’d been millions of dollars of copper ore taken out of the shafts in Hollier. Everyone in town knew there were a thousand miles of shafts, and could recite how many men the company employed; but you couldn’t see it. Now here was Guadalupe Hill crawling with steam shovels and dump trucks, men shouting, steam screeching, whistles, bells. It went as smooth and precise as a ballet troupe, even when it looked and sounded like the mouth of hell.

  And the crazy ambition of the thing! Some set of madmen had wanted to turn what most folks would have called a mountain inside out, turn it into a hole as deep and as wide as the mountain was tall. And another set of madmen had said, “Sure, we can do that.”

  L
ater I wasn’t surprised when people said, “Let’s go to the moon,” because I’d seen the digging of Guadalupe Pit. It was like watching the building of the Pyramids.

  Pop stopped to talk to the shift boss. Next to that big man, brown with sun and streaked with dust, confident and booming and pointing with his square, hard hands, Pop looked small and white and helpless. He was a good doctor, maybe even a great one. His example had me pointed toward premed, and medical school at Harvard or Stanford if I could get in. But looking from him to the shift boss to the roaring steam shovels, I felt something in me slip. I wanted to do something big, something that people would see and marvel at. I wanted people to look on my work and see progress and prosperity and stand in awe of the power of Man.

  Over dinner, I said, “It makes you feel as if you can do anything, watching that.”

  “You can, if you have enough dynamite and a steam shovel,” Pop agreed as he reached for a pork chop.

  “No, really! We’re not just living on the planet like fleas on a dog anymore. We’re changing it to suit us. Like sculptors. Like—”

  “God?” Mom said, even though I’d stopped myself.

  “Of course not, Mom.” But I’d thought it, and she knew it. She also knew I was a college boy and consequently thought I was wiser than Solomon.

  Conversation touched on the basketball team and the repainting of the Women’s Club before I said carefully, “I’ve been wondering if I’m cut out for med school.”

  Guess I wasn’t careful enough; Pop gave me a look over his plate that suggested he was onto me. “Not everyone is.”

  “I don’t want to let you down.”

  “You know we’ll be proud of you no matter what,” Mom replied, sounding offended that she had to tell me such a thing.

  “I’m thinking of transferring to the Colorado School of Mines.”

  “Might need some scholarship money—being out of state,” said Pop. “But your grades are good. The company might help out, too.” He passed me the mashed potatoes. “You don’t have to be a doctor just because I am.”