Child of Flame

Page 14

A leather belt fastened with a copper buckle held tight his kneelength skirt, all sewn of a piece. The cloth lay so smooth and soft over the body that she could not help but touch her own roughly woven bodice and the string skirt. With such riches as they had, why did the Cursed Ones bother to attack humankind at all?
But didn’t they look upon humans as they did upon their own cattle? Maybe it was true that, before the time of the great queens, humankind had roamed like animals, eating and drinking and hunting and rutting, no different than the beasts. But that wasn’t true now.
Hanging a sachet of juniper around her neck for protection, she picked out four dried leaves of lavender, then walked to the north and crumbled one between her fingers. Its dust spilled on the ground. To the east, south, and west, she did the same, forming a ring of protection. Standing to the west, she crouched and cupped her hands over her nose to inhale the fading lavender scent, strong and pure. She murmured words of power and protection into her hands.
The water boiled. With bone tongs she lifted the copper bowl off the heat and brought it over to her basket. She dropped old thistle into the water and waited, hands raised, palms out.
The spirit manifested in her palms as a tiny vortex. Then she saw it rising from the body, slippery and white. It quested to the four corners but could not break free, bound by the spell of lavender. As it spun like a whirlwind, its plaintive voice first growled then mewled then whined, and suddenly the cloud of the spirit, like a swarm of indistinct gnats, sprang heavenward, running up the tunnel made by the four directional wards. She jumped forward to sprinkle lavender dust on the corpse’s eyes and dab lavender into the corpse’s ears and nostrils and over its lips. Pulling up the skirt, she wiped paste of lavender over its man part, then rolled the corpse over so she could seal it completely.
Far above, she heard a howl of despair. She clapped her hands three times, stamped her feet, and the sensation of a vortex swirling in her palms vanished. The spirit had fled to the higher world, up the world axis made by the wards.
Yet it had left a treasure behind: under the corpse lay a bronze sword.
Cautiously, she ran her hands over the metal blade. It, too, had a spirit, fierce and implacable. This blade had bitten many lives in half, and sent many spirits screaming from their bodies. Yet who should carry such a dangerous and powerful being? No one in the White Deer tribe, not in all the nine villages that made up the people, had a sword like this.
She found vervain in her basket, rolling it between her hands and letting it fall onto the sword, to placate that vengeful spirit and to temporarily mute its lust for blood.
In addition to the bronze breastplate, the helmet, the sword, the belt, and the loose linen tunic, the dead one had carried a knife, and also a pouch containing four common river pebbles, a sachet of herbs, a conch shell, and a small wooden cube engraved with magical symbols.
After stripping the corpse, she dragged it into the burned house and covered it with firewood. She marked the ruined threshold with hexes and threw the dead man’s sacred pouch and his warrior’s mask in after. As she shoveled hot coals onto the fallen thatch, the pyre began to burn.
Seeing smoke, Ulfrega led the others out of the wood. “No one will settle here again,” observed Ulfrega before she hurried after Beor to examine the treasure.
“Do not touch it,” said Adica quickly. Smoke boiled up from the funeral pyre. “The Cursed One’s magic lives in those things.”
“But I use this halberd, and it was taken from the Cursed Ones.” Beor eyed the bronze sword with naked hunger.
The vision hit her so hard that she couldn’t breathe.
Beor runs with the sword in his hand, leading a crowd of wild-eyed young people, running east to fight their own kind, humankind, burning their homes and stealing their cattle and goats.
This was the madness that the Cursed Ones had brought into their hearts!
Gasping, she found herself braced on her hands and knees. Everyone had stepped away from her. She was sweating, although a cloud covered the sun.
Unbidden, she wept, torn by grief. What would the White Deer people become, after she was gone? Were none of them strong enough to resist the implacable spirit that lived in the sword? Was this what the vision promised her, that her people would be consumed by its anger and lust? Were they fated to be poisoned by this legacy of the Cursed Ones, called war?
The rank smell of burning flesh washed over her, and she floated on that smoke into a more complicated vision, one without beginning or end.
There would be peace and war, kindness and cruelty. There would be honor, and shame.
All this would come to humankind.