Mortal Fire

  Sholto sensibly stopped at the sheriff’s office to ask where they could pitch a tent and not be moved on in the middle of the night. A deputy showed Sholto a map and pointed to a gravel flat by the river, between the willows lining the water and the stop bank that protected the low-lying streets of company houses.

  Susan and Sholto decided that they’d have a hot meal and put up their tents when dusk fell, rather than put them up and leave them unattended near those houses. “They aren’t people of means,” Susan said, “and we don’t want to expose them to temptation.”

  Massenfer’s main street was cold, windy, and gray. It was a Monday night and the restaurants had signs saying that their kitchens closed at eight. The Chinese restaurant was full, so they went to a place called Maisie’s, which advertised “wholesome home-cooked food.” They took their seats and were handed menus in limp leather covers, and once the waitress had gone, Sholto leaned across the table and whispered, “You have to imagine Maisie wheeling a tea trolley stacked with stew pots through the night-cart lanes to the back entrance of the restaurant.”

  “Yes. It should say home-style cooking,” Susan said, pedantic.

  Canny watched her stepbrother and his girlfriend as they frowned over their menus. They looked perfectly normal. She said, “So, you don’t feel bereft?”

  “You mean because they’re not offering Îles Flottantes?” Sholto said, gesturing at his menu.

  “No. Because you had to leave Fort Rock.”

  “Fort Rock. Roquefort. Mmmmm,” said Susan, then, “I’m so hungry I’m obsessing.”

  Canny stared at her, disbelieving. “You couldn’t take your eyes off it.”

  “Fort Rock was spectacular,” Susan conceded. “Worth a detour, just like they said in the guidebooks.” Then, “I’m going to have the stroganoff.”

  “I’ll have the goulash,” Sholto said, and shut his menu.

  “You were bewitched,” Canny said.

  “Weren’t you?” Sholto said. “It was nature really putting on a show.”

  “But what did you think of the view?”

  They looked at her blankly.

  “The view of the valley below Fort Rock.”

  Sholto shook his head. “Missed it.”

  Canny knew that just because Sholto and Susan hadn’t seen the house, that wasn’t proof that magic was hiding it from them. Canny might be imagining things. Seeing the symbols, seeing the house as special, seeing Sholto and Susan’s behavior as strange. She needed some independent proof, and she had no idea how to get it.

  The stroganoff and goulash weren’t hot enough. They had skins on their surfaces as if they’d been drying out in a pie warmer. Their bread rolls were still frozen in the middle. Susan complained, but when it was time to pay, the place shamelessly charged them the advertised price. Susan stubbornly withheld part of what they owed, and words were exchanged over the register.

  Canny escaped into the street. It was drizzling. The hills were halved by low cloud. Sholto joined her. Canny said to him, “If Susan doesn’t hurry we’ll be putting up our tents by torchlight.”

  “Don’t you start. I can’t put up with both of you complaining about each other. I’m afraid you’ve got to be the one who has to bite her tongue.”

  “Why do I have to?” Canny was outraged.

  “There are things about Susan that aren’t perfect, but you can’t change people.”

  Canny put her finger in her ear, the one facing Sholto, and scratched it vigorously, as if she were digging out his words before they had a chance to settle and lay their eggs. “People do change,” she said. “Marli used to be all noisiness and bounce, and now she’s thoughtful.”

  “That’s just a lack of vitality.”

  “It isn’t just. Time is different for her. And she’s always talking to nurses, who look after people, instead of other schoolgirls, some of whom don’t even make their own beds.”

  “Okay, people do change, but that doesn’t mean you can change people.”

  “If people can change, then people can change people,” Canny said. “It’s simply logic.”

  “People aren’t logical,” Sholto said with smug finality.

  Susan appeared, flushed with triumph. She said she had worn the woman down. Then, “We’d better get those tents up before it pours on us.”

  * * *

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT the light rain turned into a downpour. Canny woke to the sound of solid drops blown into the canvas and the tent fly flapping wildly. She lay listening, worrying that the fly would come loose. But it stayed in place, and after a time, though the rain continued, the wind seemed to decide it had fulfilled all its heraldic duties and would now let the storm get on with it. Canny couldn’t do anything about the weather, and she was draggingly tired, her head still sore from last night’s slaps. She pulled her sleeping sheet up under her chin and drifted off again.

  Sometime later—it was still dark—she felt something clammy pat her cheek. She twitched away from it, only to feel the clammy something cover her face, cupping her mouth and nose. She freed her arms and batted at it. It made a sodden gulping noise. Her fingers found her flashlight and she switched it on.

  Her tent had subsided; the two wet cheeks of yellow canvas were poised above her head as if about to sit on her.

  Canny scrambled out of her sleeping bag, unable to do so without touching the walls of the tent. Wherever the bag touched it immediately sponged up big blots of water. Canny climbed out of the tent and shone her light around. She saw that the tent pegs had all come loose. They’d been far too easy to hammer in—they were camping well above the river, but the ground was river gravel. Canny was soaked. She pointed her light at the car. Its windows were white with mist. She squelched over to it and tried its door.

  Susan was curled in the backseat in her coat, with her wet hair plastered to her forehead. Sholto was in the front. He’d made a cushion of his coat and put it on top of the handbrake so he could stretch across both seats.

  Canny prodded Sholto till he shifted off the passenger seat, then she climbed in and sat, dripping and shivering. Sholto scarcely looked at her. He unrolled his coat, handed it over to her, then leaned on the driver’s window and closed his eyes again. Canny pulled the coat on, its silk lining sticking to her wet legs.

  It was a long time till she was warm enough to doze off, and she was only able to sleep fitfully, finally opening her eyes on gray morning light and the water-distorted sight of Sholto and Susan collapsing the tents.

  The tents wouldn’t fit in the tent bags—and couldn’t go in the trunk. The recording equipment was in the trunk and couldn’t get wet. Canny ended up sitting in the backseat next to the sodden bundles of canvas, with the equally sodden sleeping bags piled around her.

  They drove back into the middle of town and had a breakfast of tea and toast. When they leaned on the tabletop their sleeves left damp patches.

  “Let’s go home,” Canny said.

  Sholto told her to shut up.

  A man at another table turned around and said it was only raining this side of the ranges. They could go all the way back over the Palisades, or try Zarene Valley. “It’s only an hour’s drive, and it’s in the rain shadow.”

  Sholto asked for directions.

  The man came across to their table and sat next to Canny. He pressed his leg along hers and she scooted over till she was crammed against the streaming window.

  The man drew on a paper napkin with a squared carpenter’s pencil. “You go downriver out of town, till you see the turnoff to the mine. There’s a bridge. You go over that, turn up the mine road, and keep on going till you go right back past the town on the other side of the river. You’ll reach a fork. Turn left there. The bigger, right-hand road goes up to the pits. The small road will take you into Zarene Valley. It meets up with the Lazuli River at Pike’s Landing and goes on through the gorge.”

  The man looked up at Sholto, who nodded.

  “The road comes to an end about he
re,” the man said, making an X on his paper napkin map.

  “It’s a private road after that?” Susan said. “Or are there really no roads in Zarene Valley?”

  “None, only walking tracks. It’s very pretty there. And there are good places to pitch a tent without having to go too far in. If you do go in, well, they’re friendly enough, but they’ll ask you questions.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “Your names. Who your people are. The Zarenes put a lot of stock in names. Theirs all rhyme. They’ve all got brothers and sisters called John, Don, Yvonne, Leon, and so on.”

  Susan looked thrilled. “I’ve heard about this.”

  Sholto said to Susan, “If we have to spend more on gas coming and going from the Zarene Valley, then at least we’ll save on camping fees.”

  “Is there a store?” Susan asked the man.

  The man shook his head. “You can just ask the farms for food. Eggs, fruit, vegetables, cider. They’ll sell you it, unless they want you to leave, in which case they won’t. There’s a guesthouse; people stay there when they’re hiking up to Fort Rock.”

  “So the Zarenes will be able to explain Fort Rock,” Canny said, thinking aloud.

  The man gave her a sharply speculative look.

  Canny looked back at him. “Geologically,” she said.

  “Sure,” the guy said, and shrugged.

  “Thanks.” Sholto pocketed the map.

  The man said good day and left them.

  Susan looked out at their car, which was standing in a curb-high puddle. “Shall we scratch today? Come back later. When’s your first appointment, Sholto?”

  “Thursday. With the mine safety manager, George Mews. He was a draegerman in 1929.”

  “Thursday, then,” said Susan.

  * * *

  THEY CROSSED THE TASKMASTER ON THE BRIDGE that served the mine. It was a two-tiered construction, with a single car lane above a train track. The road was only a layer of thick ironwood planks between crisscrossed girders, and when they were on it, Canny could see through the gaps in the planks to coal trucks sliding by below her. The road to the mine ran alongside the rail line, both gradually climbing above the river. The road was black and glittering with coal dust. The Taskmaster was gray and opaque, smooth, with small faults of current near the middle of its channel.

  They reached the turnoff to the mine and took the smaller road. Its surface was greasy and corrugated by runoff. But there was no more coal dust. They went slowly, and met no other traffic—only one boy on a mule going the other way. He, his mount, and his saddlebags were covered by a huge army-issue rain poncho.

  Canny pressed her face to the rain-spotted window. She watched the edge of the road. The river was a long way below. For a time she couldn’t see the water, only the bluffs opposite, bare but for the odd tenacious tree. The river broadened—or rather they reached the confluence of the two rivers, where the graveled road they were on dipped down to a pier and landing. The road sign said “Pike’s Landing.”

  The Taskmaster disappeared from sight around a spur of land. The road veered to cross the Lazuli on a high trestle bridge, then followed the river up through its gorge.

  The Lazuli was a very different river—smooth like the Taskmaster, but milky with snowmelt in the shade of the forested gorge. Then, as the forest dwindled and the road dropped closer to the river, the river began to broaden, brighten, and clarify.

  The rain turned to drizzle, and then they drove around the corner and into sunshine. Everything sparkled. The bank by the road wasn’t bare rock anymore but covered in ferns and dotted with tiny pink and white orchids. Then, around the next bend, the road was damp and steaming. A few minutes later they were driving in full sunshine, with a blue sky overhead.

  The road began to look more like a cart track—with a strip of green grass down its center. Then it came to an end. Before them was a field of sleek green grass and the river, brilliant turquoise in color and lined with willows and ash trees.

  Sholto stopped the car and they all got out. They gathered their drenched tents and damp sleeping bags and followed a path to the water. Susan and Sholto draped the sleeping bags over the limbs of willows and spread the tents over some bushes covered in rolls of cloyingly sweet purple flowers.

  Sholto lay down on the grass. Susan joined him and nestled close. They were soon asleep.

  6

  CANNY WAS LIGHT-HEADED with tiredness. She tried lying down, but when she closed her eyes the peach-colored screen on the inside of her eyelids filled with the billowing streamers of Extra she had seen over Fort Rock.

  Canny was usually able to remember whatever she gazed at with real attention. On those rare occasions when they got to discuss a novel in her English class—as opposed to writing business letters and working on public speaking projects—Canny would always be saying, “But on page 41 it says…” or “The author uses the exact same odd word in the second paragraph of page 90…” Her classmates would ask her, “How do you do that?” Canny’s only answer was that she’d just remember. But she’d given up offering that answer, since she was tired of hearing other kids tell people, “Canny has a brain like flypaper. She’s good at rote learning and math.” As if different kinds of intelligence were mutually exclusive, so that a person couldn’t have a memory and an imagination, in the same way that someone couldn’t be short and tall, or thin and fat. And besides, noticing two significant uses of an odd word in a book wasn’t a feat of memory—it was seeing a pattern.

  Canny’s flypaper brain was keeping her awake, so she got up and wandered back to the parked car. She clambered onto its roof to see if she could look up the valley to the forested hill and the house no one was supposed to see.

  The valley curved, and only the edge of the hill showed. She couldn’t see the house, and she suspected that it was visible from nowhere in the valley or even the hills on either side. She decided that, despite her light head, she’d walk a little way along the river. She jumped down, grabbed her change purse, put it in her pocket, and set off.

  * * *

  THE PATH CONTINUED BESIDE THE RIVER, passing between willows with fronds hanging in the water—drowned leaves, yellowing and furred with algae—and a gentle slope covered in young birches and elderflower bushes. The uphill scrub was filmy, and Canny could see through it. Before long, she saw the path was going past orchards, long disciplined rows of trees that marched across the level ground and partway along the slopes on one side of the river. On the other side was rough pasture. She heard a distant clatter of bells, then saw a flock of goats flowing over a stony slope.

  The valley went on like that, with cultivation on one side and livestock on the other, where there was less flat land.

  Canny passed some vegetable gardens sheltered by hedges of lemon and feijoa trees. In one garden three dark-haired children were hoeing between rows of squash plants. Canny hurried by. She felt shy, as if she was trespassing. One boy stopped work and stood watching her, his hand shading his eyes, till she was out of sight.

  The river was sinuous and blue green. Its surface was smooth. Canny glimpsed some trout hanging in its transparent depths, perhaps ten feet underwater. It was only when Canny saw the fish, but no sign of the river bottom—not even the shadow of it—did she understand how deep the river was. A little farther on, there was another break in the trees, and she looked out into the middle of the stream to watch a turn in the current, water torquing around some deeply submerged rock.

  Canny’s head was spinning, so she left the clearing and followed the river path into a stand of high poplar. The ground was white there, as if it had been snowing. When her eyes adjusted she saw that the snow was a creamy drift of fallen poplar seed, inches deep, a semitransparent film with last year’s dead leaves caught up in it.

  Canny was standing, staring stupidly at the suspended leaves as if their wizened brown curls were writing she could read, when she was surprised by a cavalcade of children. They came running around a twist i
n the path, all barefoot, and in shorts and shifts and worn shirts, all tangled-haired, and surprisingly silent. There were fifteen of them. (Canny never had to count—she’d always just see the number, another little peculiarity that made her classmates say “How do you do that?”)

  The children pattered to a halt and stood staring. It seemed as if they had been playing some game that involved writing in ink on the inside of their right arms. Canny glimpsed the ink, then really looked at the marks. She thought she saw her Extra, only—

  The arm she was staring at fixedly was tucked behind its owner’s back.

  Canny stepped off the path and into an ankle-deep drift of poplar fluff. She waited for the kids to go by.

  One of the little ones took the hand of a girl who looked to be about twelve and said in a loud whisper, “She’s very brown.”

  The older child said, “Shhhh.” Then, “Hello.”

  The loudly whispering child went on. “She is a big, big girl. And very, very brown.”

  Canny said, “I may not be a normal shade in these parts, but I am a perfectly normal size.”

  “Sorry about my cousin. She doesn’t mean any harm.” The girl stooped, gave the child’s hand a fierce little shake, and whispered, “You remember the big kids, don’t you?”

  The little girl shook her head, said, “She is the same size as my mummy. But Mummy wasn’t brown.”

  The big girl shoved the little one ahead of her and said, “You go on,” to the rest.

  “Where are we going?” said a boy.

  “I don’t care. I’m going to stay here a moment and make peace with this visitor. You go and entertain yourselves.” The girl then hid her right hand and wrist in her apron pocket and turned to Canny. The others hesitated a moment, then hurried on, picking up their pace till, as they passed out of sight, they were sprinting again.