Reign of Fire

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  The jostling and noise finally woke the baby, who whimpered at finding herself still bathed in heat. The child’s only covering was the sling itself, yet her little body was slippery with perspiration. Tyril dried her with her tunic and put her to her breast as they moved on through the crowd.

  She readily agreed to act as Susannah’s proxy at the clothing stall. She studied the sketchbook and pencils with a trader’s assaying eye, and led the way to the shops that displayed ready-made clothing. When she asked what piece of clothing was needed. Susannah had to admit that she did not need anything, except to sooth an irritation with her perfectly serviceable but travel-stained ship’s pants and Sawl overblouse.

  “Something… happier,” she shrugged.

  The idea of dressing up for festivities struck a truer chord with the weaver than the multiplication of wardrobe for the sheer sake of variety. With the baby still at her breast, she ushered them through the hot bustling shops, advising on the best workmanship and materials.

  Megan put away her camera to rely on first-hand observation. She noticed many of the young guildsmen from DulElesi milling about, the first-season journeymen, each with a glazed pot or leather pouch or bolt of bright cloth under one arm, their ration from the work of their guild, theirs to barter for some item of personal desire. They chatted and giggled, fingering the finer embroideries, but more often than not, shrugged wistfully and moved on.

  Susannah’s fancy fell at last on a long, sleeveless robe exiled to the back of a tiny stall stuffed with drab, more practical overshirts and tunics. The pale yellow fabric draped across her hand like watered silk.

  “This one,” she said.

  Tyril took the sketchbook and pencils and went to work on the thin, sweating woman in charge of the stall. As she bargained, Megan heard a similar negotiation in the next shop rise into unusual acrimony. It ended abruptly when an older Basketmaker threw down the knitted jacket he had been bidding for and stalked out of the stall. The proprietor was left with his jaw sagging open, the multicolored basket that the other had offered dangling loose in his hand.

  Onlookers exchanged nervous glances. One of the offender’s fellow guildsmen stepped forward with shamed excuses and apologies, and a promise to return the basket to the guild himself. The crowds and the demands of business closed over the incident like the tide, but Megan wondered if she was the only one left pondering the unfortunate coincidence of heat and bad temper.

  Meanwhile, Tyril’s success had been nearly instantaneous. Though the thin shopkeeper had examined the sketchbook dubiously at first, her enthusiasm had increased geometrically as she smoothed a practiced hand across its snow-white pages, admired its laser-cut edges and marvelled over the springy plastic spiral binding that allowed the leaves to lie so flat when the book was opened. Tyril was clearly disappointed that the bargaining was over before she had a chance to enjoy it. She did not even have to offer the pencils and eraser.

  The shopkeeper folded the robe carefully and handed it over with a smile that suggested congratulations to Tyril for having produced so clever a book, while barely concealing worry that the weaver might change her mind and demand more than a simple robe in trade for this paper treasure.

  “Actually the papers they make in DulElesi are much more remarkable,” said Susannah, clutching her new acquisition to her chest as they rejoined the milling crowd.

  “Novelty value,” replied Megan, as usual taking the comment more seriously than it was intended. “She’d never seen a binding like that but she recognized the efficiency of its design. They adore efficiency, these Sawls. They see their ideal selves reflected in an efficient instrument. Efficiency is central to their survival.”

  “Whew! All that from a little sketchbook!”

  “Mock, mock,” said Megan, trying for a rueful smile. But the display of temper at the neighboring stall still haunted her, dampening her mood as they headed back toward the infirmary.

  They found the food wagons along the way nearly deserted, the available fare limited to bread, hard cheese, the ubiquitous kamad root mash and a tepid milk pudding. The FoodGuilders were at market reprovisioning for the return trip, as well as gathering supplies to replenish diminishing food stores at home.

  A young apprentice cut them bread and cheese, and nodded in conspiratorial agreement when they turned down the milk pudding.

  The infirmary was as they had left it, the lamps turned low, pervaded by a tired silence. Ampiar waited beside a fretful old man, patting his scrawny hand and murmuring soothing nonsense as if to an infant. Xifa lay curled in a corner, asleep where she had sat down for a minute to rest.

  Ghirra motioned the women in from the portico and poured water into the stone sink for them.

  “I know a place that is not hot,” he offered.

  “That would be a miracle,” said Megan, dousing her face gratefully.

  Ghirra smiled. “It is.”

  He led them to the lowest level, along the waterline, where there were no shops, only the wide columned walkways, open to the water. The narrow snub-nosed chresin bobbed in long rows, moored to blunt marble posts. Oil lamps threw hard light among the shadows of the beamed ceiling. The briny dark water stirred with oily ripples from the rocking of the boats as cargo was loaded in and out.

  Ghirra wove familiarly through the noisy dockside maze, between the precarious towers of waiting goods and the anxious boatmen vying for space along the quay. The change in schedule had made them frantic and none were willing to take the time to ferry passengers about on nonessential business.

  But near the end of the quay, he found an old man napping in the bow of an empty boat tied stern first to the last mooring. Even in the dim light. Megan could see that the craft was in sore need of a scraping and a new coat of varnish. At least two inches of murky water washed beneath the grating that spanned the curved wooden ribs. But the boatman smiled as he snored, and Ghirra called to him and crouched to rock the boat gently until he woke with a start, blinking.

  He grabbed the bow lantern from its post and thrust it forward to squint at the rude folk who had summoned him from sleep. But when he saw Ghirra, he grinned and cackled, then stood up unsteadily and waved the lantern gleefully before he dropped it back on its peg. With spraddle-legged steps, he jerked his way to the stern while the little boat tossed wildly. He grasped Ghirra’s hand heartily and scrambled onto the quay with surprising agility, chattering like a gossip, herding the women into the boat without a pause for breath. When all were settled, he cast off and launched himself into the stern seat just as the chresin shot forward into darkness.

  Out on the water, the boatman unshipped his long pole. He stood up in the stern, clutching the damp shaft under one arm and gesturing with the other to illustrate his continuing stream of chatter. The waterway was crowded. The dark hulks of loaded boats dwarfed them, passing like sea dragons with hooded lanterns for eyes. The old boatman hardly seemed to notice, consistently waiting until the last possible moment to avoid impact.

  The lighted tiers rising sheer to either side reminded Megan of the decks of a glittering cruise vessel. Caught in a romantic reverie of lamp-lit water and the echoes under bridges, memories of another canal city, she was about to trail her hand in the black water when Ghirra stopped her.

  “This is not safe,” he advised.

  “Ah.” Megan was obscurely disappointed, but Susannah leaned over eagerly to peer down at the schools of phosphorescence sliding through the depths.

  “I wondered why I’d seen nobody swimming. These are not the domestic fish, then? These are poisonous?”

  Ghirra nodded. “The eating fish is growed in the branch where the wild fish cannot go.” Megan hunched in the bow as an overladen chresin bore down on them from the darkness dead ahead.

  “There is also things with hard skin that live in mud,” Ghirra continued calmly. “Also the water plants.”

  “Ah…?” Megan clutched the gunwales, white-knuckled.

  “This is very healthy,” sa
id Ghirra. “The FoodGuild brings to home most that they can trade for.”

  Just as Megan was considering prayer, the old boatman deftly swerved away from their collision course. He exchanged greetings of maniacal cheer with the poleman in the other boat as it skimmed past with mere inches to spare, its lanterns and towering cargo swaying like drunken companions.

  The little craft gained the first intersection without being rammed, and slowed in the crossroads traffic. The old man snaked through the congestion into a wider darker canyon. A steady stream of loaded boats poled up from the open bay, moving slowly against the tide with sails furled around cross-rigged masts.

  The boatman let the chresin drift, carried seaward with the current, then a moment later, dug his pole into the invisible bottom and swerved the boat about with a grunting shove to send it gliding up another steeply narrow waterway.

  The raucous market noises gave way to scattered domestic sounds softened by distance, a child’s laugh or wail, a woman calling to a neighbor. Ghirra studied each glowing window and doorway with a sober questing eye until Susannah was moved to inquire gently. “Where are we now?”

  He drew himself away from his private study and smiled, and Susannah understood finally that this easy smile, his accepted public manner, was a conscious camouflage. He could not be said to be moody; he did not let his disquiet come and go, but kept it always with him, beneath his smiling surface, visible only when he let the mask slip.

  She thought he was letting it slip more often lately.

  But now he brought out the smile and slid into the role of tour guide, pointing out the finely wrought balustrades lining the tiers, the intricate column capitals and the tales of the Goddesses wrapping the sturdy shafts.

  The steep canyon narrowed further. The chresin slipped past a final street lamp, past the last window glowing amber and lavender through tiny round panes. Beyond the bow lantern, the darkness was impenetrable. No one spoke. The boatman steered with nonchalant confidence into the void. He began a little singsong count, swaying the craft to his rhythm. He built to a murmured crescendo and plunged his pole into the water on the final note. Ghirra laughed gladly as the boat skewed into a breathtaking right angle turn. The old man let it glide a while in darkness, then dug into the bottom with renewed vigor to swerve the boat again, returning to its former course. The void parted in front of them like a velvet curtain, sweeping aside to reveal a broad rock-walled arena.

  The water canyon dead-ended ahead. A giant, glowing cave mouth perched like a rising moon at the top of a wide lamp-lit flight of stairs. Sheer walls towered all around, covered with intricate carvings. Layers of incised geometric designs alternated with shallow friezework where the vengeful figures of the Sisters faced each other repeatedly over the heads of the suffering multitude.

  On either side of the cave mouth, a long path twisted down among the friezes from the high rim of the canyon to the paved stone quay at the bottom. The stair to the cave ascended from polished pavement in waves of curved steps, flanked by graceful railings and matched pairs of carved stone lanterns.

  The chresin’s bow nudged the worn edge of the quay. Megan grabbed for a mooring post. The boatman swung the stern around and Ghirra leaped out to tie the bow. Other boats rocked gently against their moorings. A young couple sat in a pool of lamplight midway up the stair, talking in quiet, worried tones while their baby slept in the father’s lap. Ghirra handed the two women out of the boat and led the way up the steps. The old boatman resettled himself in the stern and closed his eyes.

  At the top, the monumental curl of the entry opened into a shining square corridor that burrowed straight and tall into the rock. White marble as smooth as new ice sheathed its sides, broken only by glittering wall sconces of porcelain and blown glass. The end of the corridor dissolved into a golden infinity. While Susannah floated along like a pilgrim in a foreign cathedral, Megan felt for the camera still stashed in her waistband.

  They walked in silence for several minutes before the seamless white was broken by intersecting corridors, all cloaked in the same shining stone, bejeweled with glass and lamplight, but otherwise unadorned. The largest exuded odors of steam and dampness, and Megan heard the faint drip and trickle of running water mingling with a chanting voice or two.

  The narrower corridors were lit only by slim blue flames burning in shallow wall niches. Here and there, Sawls sat opposite the flames on low benches set against the wall. Megan noted familiar faces from the PriestGuild, Kav Ashimmel among others, deep in solemn contemplation.

  The golden infinity ahead grew a dark spot at its center. As they neared, it swelled into a shadowed archway. The arch was a simple half-moon shape cut into the glistening white marble. The smoothness and plainness and whiteness of the walls rendered them insubstantial, as if walls of pure light gathered around a darkness that drew all things inward toward its center. A profound silence emanated from that darkness, together with a hint of blessed coolness. Ghirra’s pace quickened.

  They entered a vast dome of rock.

  The center was unlit, a pocket of deep night. The curving sides were defined by successive circles of light from tall freestanding stone lanterns spaced around the perimeter. The familiar pattern of interlocking circles traced giant salmon-colored loops across dark green marble paving. The lamplight faded with distance as if the central darkness were physical, like a mist or a thin black drape.

  Megan’s impression was of infinite space. The air was in motion. A cool upward spiral brought damp relief from the outer heat. Ghirra pointed straight up. An impossible distance above, the dome opened a small circle to the sky. Stars sparkled against a velvet background of night, less dark than the enclosed void beneath them.

  Ghirra offered another of his carefully considered translations. “Your words name this cave SkyHall.” He crouched and pressed his palm to the floor, smiling and beckoning.

  The stone tile was chill and beaded with a thin film of moisture that reformed the instant it was wiped away. Megan would have been content to flatten herself face-down on the cold stone, but the dignity of the place, as well as her own, restrained her.

  “There is water under,” Ghirra explained. “From the rock. Here it is never hot.”

  Megan laid her chilled palms against her cheeks. “I’d live down here if I were them.”

  “It’s not always this hot,” Susannah reminded her, slipping on her sandals to soak up the coolness through her feet.

  They moved through the darkness into the light of the first lantern. It stood in splendid isolation, like a giant chesspiece, as tall as they and carved of rosy quartz, in the shape of a slim woman hugging a hekker calf between arm and hip and balancing a loaded food basket on the opposite shoulder.

  The lamp flame burned within the lattice of the basket, the translucent smoke of the quartz diffusing the light so that the lithe figure glowed from within. The carving was startlingly lifelike, unlike the sad grotesques of the friezes or the stylized likenesses of the Goddesses.

  Megan traced the graceful line of the back tentatively, as if she expected the statue to move beneath her hand. “A Sawlian Ceres. Isn’t she lovely!”

  The second lantern was a seated male figure whose muscular knees embraced a crystalline potter’s wheel. The pot he was turning formed the lamp, shaped by complex curves and mysterious inner spaces. The stone of his body was opaque, so that his intent face was lit from without, by the light of the work beneath his large, capable hands.

  The third was an old woman, spinning finely wrought handfuls of quartzite wool into a glowing skein that imprisoned a small bright flame. The next was a young man tanning translucent leather, the next a weaver, then a joiner, then a stonecarver who chiseled away at a glimmering lantern that was a miniature of himself.

  “Are all the guilds represented?” Susannah guessed.

  Ghirra nodded, looking proud and satisfied.

  Megan lagged behind, caught by odd markings on the perimeter wall. She moved closer to touch
the dark rock. An incised pattern of lines and circles textured the surface, smoothed to near-invisibility by age and the wear of hands tracking their shape just as she was doing. Above her reach, the lines were sharper, but it was only the sharp, shadowing angle of the lantern light that had caused her to notice them. She stood back to take in the pattern as a whole.

  “Klee,” suggested Susannah at her shoulder.

  “Or more recently, Michaelmas, but even more abstract. This is very interesting,” she added to Ghirra as he joined them.

  “Yes,” he noted pleasantly. “Old drawing.”

  “What does it mean?”

  He spread his palms. “This is nothing, I think. Old drawing,” he repeated, but less securely.

  “Just decoration?” Megan was unconvinced.

  “Why not?” Susannah asked.

  It was Megan’s turn to shrug. “Instinct, I guess.”

  Ghirra stepped closer to frown up at the wall as if he had never seen it before. “You say this drawing has meanings?” He drew them along the curve, in and out of darkness, to the next pool of light. Again, faint lines and circles enlivened the wall, these slightly less worn, some intersecting, curling about one another. Susannah backed away to stand beside the lantern. “You can see it best from here, actually. This pattern’s pretty much the same as the other?”

  Ghirra dogged Megan’s shoulder. “Why do you say this has meanings?”

  “Wait,” said Susannah, moving to the next pattern. “It’s not the same. It’s changing, very slowly.” She hurried on to the next, her bare feet slapping eagerly against the damp floor.

  “Some parts of it are coming together, others drifting apart. See that section of dense markings? See how it moves downward and to the right?” Her pace increased with her curiosity. “It intersects with that strong right-left diagonal by this panel here. And then… damn! Stavros should see this!”

  “But this is not language,” Ghirra objected, following hastily.

  “Art is always language,” said Megan. “These could be like pictographs, for instance. Symbols that do not represent words but ideas and emotions.”