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I put a hand on my hip, which had long since grown its own fine dress, though I admit I still dream of the muslin my peddler might have bought me. “As long as you have good trades, I’ll do my best to give over whatever you need.”
“Ah, there it is. You see, I do not trade. I make a policy of it. Why lose perfectly good belongings when it is just as easy to take what you want?” He snapped his fingers and a small blue flame appeared above his palm, crackling and hissing. “I d
o not believe that a tree needs further explanation. Immolation is a fate none of us would wish for ourselves. Let me in.”
Well, what choice had I? Either he would burn it all to the ground, or, if he knew my nature, he would drag me across the wall and plunder us anyway. I walked the rows with him as if he were a landlord, though no one but me had ever set foot in the garden. I tried to fill his list, which was very strange, and full of herbs as well as fruits, and bark and sap and bits of soil as well. I had nearly all of it; I am not famed for nothing.
But the last, oh, the last.
“It should be plain that I do not have an Ixora,” I whispered, refusing to meet his eyes and shying from the dancing flame he still held in his hand. “Surely you would see the smoke if I did.”
“But I was told that you have everything that grows under the sun. I need the Ixora; without it the rest is useless.”
“What do you need all this for?” I asked plaintively, holding back my tears as best I knew how.
“My dear lady, I am a Wizard. It is enough that I require a thing. Some are born with magic floating inside them like a fly caught in a glass. The rest of us are not so fortunate…”
IT SEEMED CLEAR TO ME LONG AGO THAT IT WAS better to be a wizard than not to be one. Better to close oneself into a room not so different from a kitchen and brew the world in a glass pot than to scrabble in the dirt for mean roots and carry milk from bony heifers and scratch at your cheeks until they were blood-run as a butcher’s.
I could never stop scratching, you see.
From the time I was born, my skin peeled and paled, sloughing off as though I could not wait to be out of it, and it itched, oh, it itched, and the scratching never really helped, but I had to do it, I clawed my arms and my chest and my neck, my cheeks and even the creases of my eyelids—there was nothing of me that did not burn.
Folk gasped when they saw me, a boy determined to shed his skin, thin bits of flesh wavering on my body like bits of paper blown by a harsh wind. Doctors and witches and even wizards came, but no one could cool my flaming body. Finally, my mother wrapped me in swaddling clothes and tied my arms to boards so that I could not scratch, and propped me against our damp store wall. There I stayed and grew, fed with a pitted spoon: carrot mash and carrot soup, carrots steamed and baked, carrots raw and burnt and beaten into cakes, carrot-blossom tea and carrot-crusted bread. All we grew were carrots in our few fields, and all my days were filled with orange roots, spooned into my peeling mouth by my frightened mother.
I hung on my boards and my skin crawled. My breath became shallow and quick, I could never seem to get enough air. When I was no longer a baby but a young boy, and still hung up on the wall like a portrait of myself, my skin hardened into something like scales and my hair fell out, but still my flesh itched and scalded and still I could not scratch. The lightest waft of carrot-breeze through my window was agony, stealing my breath and cutting through my bandages to sear my skin.
“Death is at the window,” my father would whisper to my mother after a meal of carrot-broth and carrot-greens. I looked—but I could see nothing at the grimy window but the sickly moon like a seed in a black furrow.
“He’s at Death’s door,” my mother would whisper to my father when my breath came sparse and whistling as weeds in the root-rows. I looked—but I was bounded in a bedroom, and nowhere near our thick, warped-wood door.
And when I was very sick, and orange vomit trickled from my mouth to pool on the floor, they would shake their heads and say: “Death stands at his shoulder.” I twisted to see him, to glimpse his shape behind me, but there was nothing.
Finally, when I was not much older than twelve, it stopped. As though some strange creature had passed its hand over me in the night, my scaly, peeling skin smoothed and my breath swelled up again, and in time even my hair grew back. It was as though I had never been ill, and with a joy in her great as bushels lashed together, my mother unwrapped the swaddling clothes and took my arms down from their boards, revealing a grown boy, one she had only glimpsed when she changed the bandages: dark of hair and eye, with skin like a drought-blasted field, scars already fading, and a stare she could not meet.
They were eager to get me working the land, as I had missed many years of farm-chores, but I would not cease scratching my flesh only to scratch at the earth.
“All these years you have said Death was nearby, and I have seen nothing. Before I give my life to carrots and cows, I will find Death and ask him why he did not want me, when he lived at my house and shared my board for so many years.”
My parents looked at each other and feared the illness had made me mad. “You cannot find Death,” they said. “Death finds you. Be glad we were passed over and learn to pull roots from the soil so that they do not break.”
But I had a child’s understanding, and in my heart Death was a tall man in black who perhaps did or did not ride a black lion—I could not decide—and if he had been so near me and seen my suffering, then we would surely be friends, since he already knew me so well. I would ask him why, if he was my friend, he let me burn and did not take me.
They forbade me, and I did the sensible thing: I crawled out of my window in the dark of the world and crept over the sprouting fields. Perhaps they missed me; perhaps they cried. I do not know, and I never returned.
I pursued my goal in a most logical way—I sought out all the places Death was likely to frequent. Sick men and stillborn children, wasting women and plague-houses and hospices, battles when I could find them and walk behind the lines in the supply trains, looking for the direst of wounded soldiers. I even befriended poisoners so that I could be near their victims at the last moment. I was resourceful, and my young body seemed to want to make up the time it had spent suspended. I was strong with walking and clever with the many lies I told so that a child might be allowed in the presence of the dying. It was, after a manner of speaking, an education, and certainly slashed and moldering flesh taught me far more than carrots and rainwater would have.
But I could not find Death.
I asked every doctor and midwife, every soldier and assassin, and they all replied the same: “You do not find Death; Death finds you.”
Finally, grown long and taut as a knotted wire, I came in my wanderings to a kingdom whose sun blazed an unimaginable red, whose jungles were damp and squelching, whose King was a terror and whose roads were mud tracks through the green. Not far from the capital, I was wet to my hips with the slapping of wide-leaved bushes and the splashing of silt-gilded water. The road was not much better than the forest, and I was in a foul mood when a stranger strode up beside me.
“Hello, boy,” he said, a short, gnomish man in brightly colored robes who had tied his hair back in complicated patterns, and who wore a wide bolted iron collar that obscured all of his neck and the beginnings of his shoulders. His cheeks were very round and his voice rough as old fence- posts. He nodded a greeting.
“Are you on pilgrimage?”
“Of course not, why would you say that?” I barked.
