Pearl of Fire
Deborah J. Ross
Book View Café Edition
April 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61138-158-0
Copyright © 2012 Deborah J. Ross
www.bookviewcafe.com
Pearl of Fire
I traveled by river barge as far as I could, as the forested hills I had known all my life fell away into rocky pastures and then fields of barley and millet. When my path led me south, I joined one trader’s caravan and then another. A decrepit camel brought me across the broken, withered lands, and at last, I reached Ixtalpi, refuge of thieves and outlaws and all manner of desperate souls, huddled in the shadow of the black, volcanic Viridian Mountains.
o0o
I never expected to become the guardian of the Pearl. It had always passed from father to son, a closely-guarded family secret. True, I wondered why, with so few men to defend Sharaya, we had never fallen, why the dregs of the Duke’s armies never harried us, why we had always been able to fend off Eaglehurst, with whom we had long maintained blood-feud.
The Pearl had been intended for my brother. Devron was fourteen, just beginning to grow broad in the shoulders, when Great-grandfather fell ill. No one knew exactly how many winters the old man had survived, but this one would be his last. He called us to him one blustery morning, when the clouds were more black than gray, and sleet rattled against every loose-paned window.
As usual, Devron could not be found. He was probably hiding in the stables. My mother and father and uncles stood around Great-grandfather’s bed. The headboard was carved with the scene of a hunt, the stag at bay, yet fighting on, with the dogs lying dead at its feet. The rows of candles from the night before had almost burned out. I remember watching one and then another gutter into curls of smoke, still tinged with the honey scent of beeswax. I was, I suppose, a little afraid of Great-grandfather, who was wrinkled and gruff and had never so much as patted me on the head in all my ten years.
I could hear Great-grandfather’s rattling breaths in between the gusts of wind outside. As the soft golden light of the candles died away, his skin turned whiter. I had the fanciful thought that when the last one had burned itself to ash, his life would end.
A feeling welled up in my child’s breast, of loss and tenderness and a great yearning to speak before it was too late. I had been standing beside my mother, the way I did when I was little and hid myself in her full skirts. Something drew me forward. Only two candles remained, and one flickered, leaping and struggling as if the storm outside had penetrated the room.
Great-grandfather had closed his eyes, but now the lids jerked open. His eyes were full of lightning and clouds and things I could not name. His lips—so withered, so dry!—moved. I thought I heard him speak a name, but whether it was Devron’s or my father’s or that of someone dead long before I was born, I could not tell.
The next to the last candle went out. The stone walls shivered and grew still, expectant. My father and uncles waited, motionless, hardly breathing. I felt the pressure of my mother’s fingers on my shoulder.
Again, the old man struggled to speak. Tears sprang to the corners of his eyes. A pain shot through the center of my own chest.
Great-grandfather lifted one hand, one poor bony hand that quivered like a twig in a gale. The skin was all dried out and mottled with huge liver-colored spots.
No one moved.
Suddenly, I could bear it no longer, that he should be calling out, reaching out, and no one would answer him. No one held him in loving arms. He had never been kind to me, but he was hurt and lost and alone.
I broke away from my mother’s grasp and rushed to him. What did I know? I took his hand between both of my own.
“Great-grandpapa!” I cried out in my child’s voice. “I am here!”
At first, he did not seem to know me, but when I pressed my lips against his shriveled cheek, he roused. “Is it you? Is it time at last?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“Rayzel, no!” My mother’s voice seemed to come from far away.
Before anyone could stop him, Great-grandfather shifted on the bed, rising up enough to slip a long silvery chain over his head. I had seen the chain before, glinting through the opened neckline of his shirt, and assumed it was some sort of priest’s medallion, such as those old people wore for protection against joint-bane and fever. What dangled from it, however, was no slip of metal, but a glowing marble set in a cage of silver wire. I caught a flash of bronze in its depths, red like fire.
Then, with a grip so fast and hard it left me breathless, Great-grandfather pulled me close and looped the chain around my neck. Heat flared though the layers of my dress and shawl, as if the pendant, whatever it was, had been plucked from a fire.
One of the men—my second oldest uncle, I thought—shouted something, but I could not understand. All I could hear, above the pounding of my heart, was the whispered sigh that came from Great-grandfather.
“It is done, then.”
The last candle went out.
Devron burst through the door and everyone started shouting at once, except for my mother, who was screaming, and me. I felt numb and on fire and shaken to my bones, unable to grasp what had just happened.
“It’s his!” my father yelled, meaning Devron. “Give it—”
“You fool! It’s been given! To her!”
“But he didn’t mean—he thought she was the boy—
“Oh, that I should live to this day!” my mother wailed. “My own daughter!”
“Then take it back!”
“How can we? Until she dies....”
“Doom! Doom has come upon us all!”
“Oh, my poor sweet child!”
I slumped to the floor. I could not understand anything beyond Great-grandfather being dead. Of that, I was certain. His life had gone out of him, and I had held his hand, and surely that was not a bad thing. Why did the room seem filled with curling bronze-red smoke? Why did my chest burn as if someone had placed a live ember there? Why was my mother weeping as if I had been the one who died?
At first, I was overcome by a great weariness. My mother brought me milk and bread, and tucked me into bed. I slept for three days, and when I awoke, I felt strong and clear and hungry. My father looked grim as he told me that from this day forward, I must be like a son to him. I must ride a warhorse instead of my gentle pony, and fight with a sword, and study the plans of ancient battles, and learn how to command men. I was young enough to consider it a great adventure.
The days and weeks and years went by in a blur. I grew tall, and strong from the strenuous exercise. How had all of this happened? Why was I set apart? Why did animals, even the house cat, shy away from my touch? Few of the horses would carry me, sweating and white-eyed, for more than a few minutes. Why did my brother suddenly cease his old taunting, bullying ways?
Why was I never cut or bruised, even when my knife slipped at table or the blade of my sparring partner slashed through my guard?
Why must I always wear the Pearl, but never openly, tucked safely between my new breasts?
Sometimes, when the moon was rising, swelling towards fullness, and I stood in the darkening practice field, weary and aching, searching for the strength to lift my wooden sword one more time, I caught a glimpse of the faces of my uncles. I did not know how to read what I saw there. Pity and sorrow, I thought, and grudging respect....
They left it to my mother to explain. On one of those nights, after practice, she came down from the house. My oldest uncle, who had taken charge of my sword training, gestured a halt, and my brother and the other men retreated gratefully into the twilight.
My mother beckoned for me to come with her. We sat on the fallen log beside the horse trough, talking quietly a
bout daily events. The house cat had returned from her rambles, and we would have kittens soon. The cook had burned the bread. The goose girl was to marry a farm hand.
The men finished tending the horses, and for a long time, silence hung over us, except for the animals tearing at the hay and the distant sound of chickens clucking, the clink of pans in the kitchen. I had been sweating hard, and now shivered in the cooling night. An owl swooped soundlessly from the top of the barn across the shadowed fields.
My mother lifted her face to the moon. It turned her into a stranger, a woman of silver.
“You want answers, Rayzel? You must see them for yourself, what the Pearl of Fire has made of you.”
She led me to the trough. The water was very still. I could see the moon reflected there, glorious and shining and pure. I stepped closer, into the place my mother indicated. The cold bright light touched me, too.
“Look.”
I bent over, expecting to see my own face, streaked with dust and sweat, a smear of dried mud over one cheek bone, my hair disheveled and tied back with a bit of string.
My breath froze in my throat. I shied away, for an instant unable to absorb what I saw in the water’s smooth surface. An illusion born of moonlight? A fragment of a forgotten nightmare?
My mother’s strong hands held me fast. Where could I run to, anyway? Slowly, slowly, I looked again.
A dragon glowered back at me, every curved metal scale and jagged spinal ridge, each fang like a curving dagger, limned in sharpest clarity. Bronze tinted the moon-silver reflection. Molten crimson lurked behind the opaque eyes.
“What magic is this?” I breathed.
Why did I feel no fear, only a sense of fatality, of resignation?
“You see?” My mother’s voice belonged to someone else, harsh as a crow’s. “You see what cannot be undone? Why you cannot be harmed by sword or lance or dagger?”
The Pearl had done this to me...but what could be done, could also be undone. I fumbled for the chain around my neck. It stuck to my skin as if it had melded to my body. I could not budge it. My mother stilled my hand with a touch. She shook her head. “Are you so ready to die, my daughter?”
“No, to live!”
“The Pearl of Fire passes only from the hands of one who has surrendered any hope of living.” Her voice trembled with inexpressible sadness. I had never before felt so loved, or so alone.
“Who would you pass it on to? Who else will use its power to defend us? Your father, with his bad heart? His brothers, who think of nothing but their own pride? Devron? He is my son and I love him, but I know what he is.”
A coward and a bully.
I left the chain around my neck. I bent to my lessons, pushing myself ever harder, hastening the day when I would stand between my family and the dangerous world. Every year, since Great-grandfather’s death, the Eaglehurst raiders had grown bolder. Soon, I would go up against them, I with my hide of dragon’s bronze, I who could not be harmed.
o0o
Just past my fourteenth birthday, I went on my first foray against our old enemy. Eaglehurst had been raiding the long green valleys, burning villages and looting. We lay in wait for them, my youngest uncle in command, for my father had been laid up with chest pains. Under the stark midday sun, we hid behind the ramshackle communal barn, so that the smell of hay and barley overlaid that of fear.
The village was laid out in a series of open yards bounded by thatch-roofed cottages, storage sheds, and livestock pens. Chickens scratched in the dust and a few sheep, too stupid to run for safety, bleated as they stood in the opened gates. Not a child ventured forth to greet us.
I held my breath and caught the jangled rhythm of hoof beats, the clang of bridle rings, men shouting.
“Wait until they pass,” my uncle said, holding up his hand.
The rangy, leather-mouthed dun mare, one of the few horses who tolerated me, pranced beneath me.
My uncle pointed at me. “Go.”
My sword slipped free. I clapped my heels to my horse’s sides. With my uncle and his men at my heels, I burst from cover.
The dun mare leaped forward like a loosed arrow, racing toward the Eaglehurst men. They had slowed, searching for resistance. There were so many —twice our own numbers. Some carried lighted torches, a few of them, crossbows. The sun glinted off their swords, their eagle-headed helmets of leather and steel. Their captain was shouting orders, pointing at which cottages were to be burned first.
I bore down on the nearest raider. He wheeled his horse, but too slowly. I could not see his face. His sword came up. The momentum of my charge drove my sword deep into his body beneath the arch of his ribs. The impact shivered through my whole body, almost jerking my sword out of my hands. My mare kept going and it was all I could do to hold on to it as we swept past.
My vision clouded, crimson. The taste of fire and red sulfur and blood filled my mouth. Men and horses swept past me, stumbling, bleeding. Wildfires raged behind my eyes. My skin, where the Pearl lay cradled between my breasts, burned with exquisite desire. I gulped deep breaths of air and spewed forth a charnel wind.
The hunger of the Pearl raged through me. My sword smoked with blood and more blood.
I hardly noticed when a terrible stillness fell on the common. A few riderless horses skittered away from the fallen bodies. My uncle directed his men to put out the single fire. Two of our own men were down, one unmoving, the other struggling to his feet, clutching a slashed thigh.
The dun mare came to a halt, trembling, her hide hot and wet. The fire died within me. The sky shifted from red to shivering gray. I swayed in my saddle. My sword fell from my limp hand. I felt utterly empty, used-up, bereft.
Dimly, I felt my uncle’s hands catch me as I toppled. Later, one of the men told me that he had carried me home in his arms.
o0o
Some years later, we enjoyed a glorious golden summer. I had been leading our men along the borders for enough seasons now that Eaglehurst had pulled back, licking its wounds. For once, the Duke was at peace with his neighbors; no mercenaries or refugees wandered our mountains. I rode watch with my uncles, but with much less urgency than before.
I also rode alone. The forest that bordered our lands and Eaglehurst, once too dangerous for even armed travelers, had now become a series of abandoned sunlit glades. The last of the spring wildflowers still lingered in the moist pockets beneath the largest trees. The very air smelled of growing things, of rich earth, of the dust that gently settled along shafts of brightness.
I swung down, loosened the girths, and tied my horse by a halter so that she could browse. The air was still and warm, the only sounds the faint whisper of a breeze and a far-off bird. Leaving my sword tied to my saddle, I dug into my saddlebags, beneath the packet of food, the whetstone and cloth for cleaning steel. My fingers brushed finely woven wool. I pulled it free, took one last look around, and skinned out of my men’s tunic and breeches. The boots I could do nothing about, as my feet were too tender to run barefoot.
The dress fell around me in lamb-soft folds, emerald trimmed with lace-flower and daisies. I’d found it in a cedar chest last winter. It was probably my grandmother’s, and a bit too short. I spun in circles, relishing the feel of the skirts as they swirled outward. I pulled my hair free, combed it with my fingers. For an hour, a blessed hour, I might pretend the Pearl was a love token given to me by a gray-eyed stranger. I might be just an ordinary girl.
The hour passed too quickly, leaving me wanting more. I folded the dress, tied back my hair, tightened the girths, and went home. But I came back as the wildflowers were drying and bees buzzed around the burgeoning queen’s-lace and painterbrush. I came, and danced, and wept when it was time to go.
All too soon, the summer neared its end, and the faint scent of must and honey hung in the air. The leaves had turned that intense, almost fiery green, when he first came.
I was dancing and singing some mindless tune I learned from the horse boys. My feet were bare now, h
aving toughened over the months. Although I heard nothing, I knew I was not alone. With a sense that was half-human, half-dragon, I felt his presence. A man, yes, I knew that, and young as I was young. Unsure and cocksure and enthralled as if by magic, drawn to my voice, yearning for something magical, beyond the ordinary. Even before I saw him, I loved him.
He stepped from the shadows. My eyes noted his ordinary hunter’s clothing, vest and shirt and pants in shades of green and brown, wide leather belt around slim hips, russet hair tumbling over muscled shoulders. My heart saw only the light in those gray eyes, the catch of wonder in his breath, the way he looked at me as if I were the most wonderful, most tender thing he had ever seen.
I paused in my dance, and the green skirts fell still around me. We stood in a pool of slanting light. We talked. We danced to the music that rose, wordless, in my throat. When he reached to take my hand, a shadow passed over me. I drew back and he, taking it for maidenly modesty, plucked a strawflower, kissed it, and then held it out to me.
It was impossible, our love. Perhaps I was intoxicated. Certainly I was heedless. I kept on, as the leaves turned orange and then crimson and then brown. He laid his cloak on the crisp leaves and we lay on it, murmuring secrets to one another.
In my madness, I kept meeting him, even when the forest was no longer safe. The Eaglehurst raiders had struck again. He never failed me, my sweet, gray-eyed lover. The hidden part of my heart, the part I thought dead forever when I accepted the Pearl, the part that was mine alone, came alive in his presence.
Of course, I did not tell him who I was. Nor did I ask. He was a younger son from one of the bordering families, it did not matter from which side.
o0o
As winter lowered over the forested hills, Eaglehurst pressed us hard, seeking revenge for their past defeats. One gray afternoon, we met them at the river where the slate-dark water frothed and pitched between steep, rocky banks. Here we held fast, skirmishing back and forth. As usual, I placed myself in front. I urged my horse half-way across the river, blocking the narrow ford. The air reeked of wet rocks, horse sweat, and blood.
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