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I was so bewildered at this point I could say nothing at all. But I forced my tongue to work in the dry cavern of my mouth. “How can you know my name? Who is this Brother of which you speak? I do not understand you.”
“Oh, no one expects you to, dear chap!” the Marsh King assured me in a tenderly condescending voice. Beast winked at me with one crimson eye. The Heron continued, “You keep your counsel and the gods keep theirs. My Brother is the Harpoon-Star, who came to visit us some months ago and announced your coming. Sit still and I shall tell you of his audience.”
LAAKEA THE HARPOON-STAR BURNED BLACK THE marsh grass as he came. The smell of it, scorched bread and copper filings, heralded him long before his light appeared over one of the hills. In great circles it scalded, crisped, sizzled. Each step sent up hisses of steam as he walked through the Great Marsh, frogs and eels yelping in wordless terror as the fire of his heels lapped at their oily bodies. I felt the song of the grass steaming before I could see him—it had been many years since my brother had left his hermitage where he hunted moons like quick pale stags.
You’ll forgive the flowery talk, won’t you? Our family does so love to be told they are beautiful. Vanity is an old and venerable habit.
He was white, of course; his sort of Stars—the small and hot-burning ones—are always white. His hair fell like a newly washed sheet, long and flat to his waist, and his skin faded into the pale horizon, the shade of paper turned to ash. A great spear was slung over his shoulder by a strap of white serpent-hide; golden eyes panted beneath colorless lashes. He was barefoot; in fact, he wore no clothing but a bleached cloth over his angular hips, and his thighs were covered in arcane tattoos, the symbols of the Star-tongue. Yet even the ink of these markings was a strange silver that showed only when touched by the trailing marsh mist.
I embraced my brother awkwardly as he entered my hall, sending twigs into tiny conflagrations. I did not, of course, wish to burn my tammies, but the proper affection must always be shown to visiting family. I tried to make the usual pleasantries and invitations to drink, but he would not have it.
“I have news. It cannot wait. Will you for once allow me to speak my piece without interruption?”
I blushed with great dignity and abashed grace. Settling myself to listen, I gratefully mused that Beast was out engaging one of the Princes that come into our realm occasionally, and so there would be nothing to disturb Laakea in his tale. He was not overfond of Beast—Stars care only for their kin. At any rate, they are dreadfully formal creatures, and Beast would be bored.
Removing his spear from his shoulders he sighed heavily, and his voice echoed through the trees like clouds across the face of the moon. “A terrible thing has occurred—a man has killed our sister, the Snake-Star of the South.” He waited for my reaction, but the black Ibis-Emir had already winged north to tell me of her death, to weep his great sapphire tears into my hands. Seeing that I was not surprised, Laakea pressed on.
“I did not realize she had tarried so long in that damned kingdom, that blighted land of festering winds and towers that bruise the sky with iron fingertips…”
I CONFESS THAT I WAS MUCH CONSUMED WITH MY hunt, for I pursued a great rarity—a Firebird, as a wed ding present for my poor, wretched sister—and I tracked him over many a hill and river-carved valley. You know how we can be about things which sparkle and shine. We imagine they will put back something of what has been lost.
Firebirds are overfond of red fruits, and I had hoped to lure him with crimson seeds gathered from the Ixora, the Torch-Trees of the desert—very difficult to harvest, but the Firebird’s favorite delicacy, bright and soft as a cherry, with a pit cased in flint and iron, to light the new tree aflame. Some Firebirds, it is said, even nest among the trees, and return there to lay their eggs in the ash like salmon swimming upriver.
I waited in the salt flats that border the Tinderbox Desert, and the Ixora that fire the night to keep the sky warm for the sun when it has gone below the earth. In the twilight I could see their orange branches flickering, snapping, sparking up like the camp of a thousand soldiers. I saw no Firebirds, but I was not concerned. They are secretive, and the forest of Torch-Trees is wide. I spent weeks searching out the guttering, dying ones, and collecting the juice-filled rubies as they dropped. I combed the ash of those already dead, but found no flaming eggs.
Finally, I had strewn the salt with cherry seeds—they were bright as drops of blood; surely the Firebird would swoop down to snatch them up in his bronze beak.
I waited for three nights, and the Firebird did not come. But on the third night I forgot him entirely. An appalling phantasm caught me on the flats and all thought of my quarry vanished.
Three of our sister’s handmaidens—you know them, of course; sweet little serpent-girls they are, their hair all flowered with jade grass-snakes and emerald vipers—stumbled through the sand, clutching each other for the strength to stand. Their holy vestments were torn as if by a great claw, hanging from their thin bodies like curls of new paper. I turned my head aside to give them modesty, for they were as near to naked as makes no difference, and their pale leaf-light skin was desert-scalded to scarlet. They moaned and screamed in such pitiful tones—a choir of anguish echoing in the desert canyons. I took this at first for simple cries of pain, but it was a lament, a lament and a requiem. They clutched me by my face and turned me towards them, forced me to witness their shame.
Brother, they were so horrible to see I can hardly tell you of their faces—their wounds were a tapestry of broken flesh. And yet even this had not sated the men who dared lay hands on their sacred bodies, but their tongues had been cut out by rough knives, and only ragged stumps remained to form words. One took a strange object from her sister and pressed it miserably into her parched mouth.
“Sssspear-brother,” she hissed, “our mistresssss is ssslain, dead, dead and gone. Thisss is what the men who took her did to ussss. They were pig-demonsss, they mauled our bodiesss with cloven hoovesss. We have walked all this way from her grave to find some part of her family. Pray put usss to death so we may not sssuffer longer than it was necessssary to deliver our messssage.”
I looked on, nauseated, as the second of our sister’s maidens took the object from her sister’s mouth and pushed it into her own. “We have traveled far to find one of our kin to take the burden of knowledge from usss. We are not sssuicidesss; you have to help ussss. But in return we will help you. We are sssseerss, we know what isss to come, we sssee the flux of time like water poured from one cup to another. You mussst go now, to the North, and prevent vengeance from falling into the handsss of one who would pervert what our missstresss has already done in her own name, one who would erase her holy work only to ssscribble over it with his own. Ssshe has died; ssshe has risssen—in his bumbling he will rob her of those things, all a ssshade can own.” She took the lump of pink flesh from her mouth and gave it to the last of the sisters.
“Holy seers, what is this misshapen thing you pass from mouth to mouth?” I asked with trepidation—such terrible magic was at work here I hardly dared speak. The Stars leave divination to those tied to the earth; we do not dabble in the future. Why would my sister have broken with tradition so?
“We ssstole it from the Basssilissk,” whispered the third oracle pitifully, “it isss a tongue, ssso that we may ssspeak to grant you thisss warning. Were we to hunt down three monssssterss? We are sssiblingss; we ssshare among usss.”
The third sister was clearly the eldest, and the bearer of the clearest vision. She closed the one eye that remained to her and spoke without inflection the prophecy they had journeyed so far to disclose.
“You must sssee the Marsssh King. A creature of sssnow and claw will come to him, begging to avenge our missstress in order to incur your favor. He mussst no
t be allowed to pursssue thisss. Sssnakes sssee to their own; ssshe doesss not require thisss animal’sss assssistance. If he should stand in her place, her death will be wasssted—his path musst divert from herss in our sssight. He will only cause her death to be wassssted. Her coilsss are still in motion, and the Quessst of the creature will bring ruin on her plansss. Do you underssstand, Sssspear-Brother?”
I nodded my assent in the traditional manner, pressing my forehead to hers and accepting their burden. With this, the three of them in one movement collapsed onto the soundless sand, their fall as silent as snake-skin on the dunes. They were quite faint, hunger and sun and burning forests having leached all but the last of their light from them. The Basilisk’s tongue rolled out of the third sister’s mouth and onto the hot gold of the earth. Their eyes rolled up in their heads, and their mouths formed pleas I could not hear, but understood well enough.
But I could not do what they asked—even a bird must know that. Death is the wall we dare not look behind, and no Star has ever killed another. I would not be the first murderer of my kind.
Instead, I gathered up the blood-drop cherries from the sand. What good could they be now? My sister could not marvel at the color and the light of the Firebird. One by one, I carried woman and fruit into the Tinderbox true, and laid them out beneath the Torch-Trees. In their blazing light, the maidens seemed to glow as they must have when my sister took them in.
I cut deep into the Torch-Trees’ ashen trunks with my harpoon. The bark is quite black and hard, calcified into iron by the constant fire. But within, within there is nothing but ash and a thin vein of boiling sap, as the trees consume themselves from the inside out. Only when they have burnt themselves to nothing will they drop a seed, the precious seed, and the clever gardener will catch it as it falls, while the tree crumbles into white ash and nothing more, so that the seed will not burst and flare the moment it cracks on the hard desert stones.
Of course, I had a sack bulging with the volatile little things, and no need of waiting till the Ixora died. Carefully, I peeled them and conserved the wet, sweet fruit, piling the flint-pits carefully as an apology to the tall tree, so that when it died for true a veritable jungle would grow in its place. With equal care I broke the sap-vein deep in the ash and dribbled the waxy, scalding stuff onto the mashed red cherry-flesh.
All this I smeared into the mouths of the three oracles, and then—forgive my arrogance, Brother Heron!—I cut into my own arm and let the pale light of my body flow into the searing medicine, into their mouths. We know of no greater sacrament, and I knew of no other thing I could do for them.
