We entered a large room not unlike a kitchen, with all manner of things boiling and drying and blanching and bubbling. The short man seemed to forget I was there, monitoring everything that sent steam and scent into the air. I finally cleared my throat and he looked up, startled as a sparrow.
“Oh. Death, wasn’t it? Yes, here.” And he rummaged behind a large cabinet for a moment before producing a dusty object with a stage magician’s flourish.
It was a large glass jar, filled to the brim with dirt.
“You have wasted my time, old man,” I sighed.
“Not at all, boy. You wanted Death? This is it. Dirt and decay, nothing more. Death translates us all into earth.” He frowned at me, his cheeks puffing slightly. “Are you disappointed? Did you want a man in black robes? I’m sure I have a set somewhere. A dour, thin face with bony hands? I’ve more bones in this house than you could ever count. You’ve been moping over half the world looking for Death as though that word meant anything but cold bodies and mushrooms growing out of young girls’ eye-sockets. What an exceptionally stupid child!” Suddenly he moved very fast, like a turtle after a spider—such unexpected movement from a thing so languid and round. He clapped my throat in his hand, squeezing until I could not breathe, just like those awful days when I hung on the wall and gasped for air. I whistled and wheezed, beating at his chest, and my vision blurred, thick as blood. “You want Death?” he hissed. “I am Death. I will break your neck and cover you with my jar of dirt. When you kill, you become Death, and so Death wears a thousand faces, a thousand robes, a thousand gazes.” He loosened his grip. “But you can be Death, too. You can wear that face and that gaze. Would you like to be Death? Would you like to live in his house and learn his trade?”
I rubbed at my throat, panting. “You’re just like the others,” I rasped. “You lure me to your house with the promise of wisdom and give me nothing but your fist.”
“Oh no, I am nothing like the others. I am a Wizard, Indrajit’s man, and I am as true a Death as you will find. Keep wandering after your phantoms if you like—eventually someone will strangle you for a scrap of food and then my lessons on the nature of mortality will be, let us say, unnecessary. Or stay with me and learn, stay with me and one day you will stand over a man as I have stood over you and he will know you to be Death, black of eye and sleeve. You may be stupid, but it is not every child who burns so to become Death’s prodigy. I am offering what you want, if you are wise enough to take it.”
I stared hard at the floor. “Would I have to wear a collar like yours?” I mumbled finally.
“It is always a choice,” he said softly, “and I chose it. Magic is a many-sided glass—”
“My mother says magic comes from the Stars, and I have about as much light in me as our cow.”
“Some believe that. Some of us, who find magic in things, in stones and words, in grass and leaves, long ago realized that it is unimportant where the leaves got their power, only that they have it. And of those, some folk, men and women and monsters, decided in days long past to trade their freedom for power. They took a collar, yoked themselves to a ruler. If you want power, you will do the same.”
“Magic is power,” I protested.
“Magic is magic. If you want to boil up cough medicine for local brats and keep your hair from turning gray, you’re more than welcome to it, and need nothing but an iron pot. But power, power to control one’s fate and the fates of others, real power, and certainly the power to become Death, to be Death writ large in the eyes of the lost—well, a monarch’s protection is useful, and their resources go far beyond grass and leaves.”
I glanced at the jar of earth and licked my lips. After all this time, Death was at my window again, and at my shoulder, and I stood at his door, and this time I could see, I could see everything he offered.
I STOLE A GLANCE AT HIS PALE NECK. MY THROAT was dry as birch bark. “But you don’t have a collar.”
He leaned very close to me, and his breath was sickening-sweet, like too many flowers covering a corpse. “I stayed in that place for many years, and the plague of my skin never returned. I progressed through lessons as best I could—though I was never a prodigy. What I know was hard-won, and I treasure it with the passion of a lover often denied. And then”—a rush of color lit his cheeks—“and then I saw an extraordinary thing happen in that dark and glinting Palace, a thing I could not forget, though I tried, I tried. I won my freedom, tree-child, and no King calls me doulios now. I have spooled out my liberty searching for a way to repeat that extraordinary thing, and I am near to my goal—I need the Ixora to further my work. But I am tired, Ravhija, I am tired of pounding the earth with my feet. It is unbecoming and I have had my fill of picking through measly gardens for the smallest seed. If you do not have an Ixora, you will have to get me one.”
“Sir!” I cried. “If you know what I am, you know I cannot leave the garden! How am I to get a tree that grows in the desert?”
“That is none of my concern. I was resourceful; so must you be. You will get it for me, or I will burn your orchard to the ground.” He scratched absently at his pale neck. “I will make all your trees into flaming Ixora, and you with them, for I doubt you will live much beyond the last fluttering ashes of your golden tree. Death will find you, and his gaze will be very black.”
He swept away with six baskets of my rarest crops and a promise to return with his dancing blue flame in the fall. He swept away, and I stood helpless at the wall.
“WHAT A BEASTLY MAN,” I BREATHED.
Ravhija nodded miserably, stepping down from her branch. “And the summer is almost through, and I with no Ixora. No surprise, really. I have asked for it in trade, but no man is brave enough to reach into the heart of a burning tree just to pull me out a little berry.”
“No man,” said I, moved as a rock rolled aside from a cave, “but a bird may, and there can be no bird more suited to the Torch-Trees than I. You do not know how simple a thing this is! The Ixora are my home, and to take a few flinty fruits is as easy as picking corn out of a basket! Even if you did not hold my feather, beautiful mistress of pumpkins, I would go, and happily, to the desert for you.”
With glittering green tears in her eyes, Ravhija kissed my downy cheek, and reminded me to wait until the tree had nearly died before prodding about in the ash. She needed at least three, she said, but I could have all the fruit I wanted when I returned. She clucked behind me like a mother sending her boy to school, pointing out this and that and warning me not to scorch myself, though that last was hardly needed. I nibbled at her ropy hair in farewell—this means affection, gray-cheeked girl.
It tasted just exactly like pumpkin.
It is a long flight into the desert. Many countries are crossed, and their colors are as varied as a jester’s coat. I watched them fold and unfold underneath me. One by one, they all turned thirsty, turned empty, turned to sand. But even when one has crossed the line in the earth that separates the green from the desert, there is still farther to go to the white sands and salt flats where the Ixora grow.
I know the land very well.
But once I crossed the last of the green lands, I knew I was followed. Little gosling, I will teach you this, too. It is a quiet, subtle thing, to know when you have an uninvited companion, but any bird should know it as surely as he knows which wind will take him into the clouds, and which down to the water. But I had never been hunted as surely as this. The hunter’s footsteps were lighter than breath, and though sometimes I thought I saw him, a speck on the land below me, more often I felt him beside me in the air, and I was unnerved.
Knowing I was hunted, I could not go to my cousin’s nest-side and nuzzle her before collecting the cherries. I did not know what other part of the forest might be ready to seed. I circled for days, the strange hunter close behind me, avoiding any place I knew a Firebird to nest. It made for a curling, snarled path through the fiery groves, and I lost many days to it. Finally, circling back to the salt flats, I saw
what I wanted, laid out like a feast on the white ground.
I am not a stupid bird. The hunter had laid me a trap that, even had I not been sent by the beautiful pumpkin-girl, would have been hard to resist—what does anyone like better than their mother’s own dish? I looked down at the fruit, the dozens of cherries that might have quickened a whole forest, and it was like tearing myself in two to turn away from them. But turn away I did.
And it was strange, but the feeling of being hunted did not follow me into the forest. It was gone, vanished like a breeze in a storm. There was no one around me, whatever had stalked me had lost my scent or given up, and it was no matter which, for I could finally go to my cousin’s side, and spill what few cherries I had kept in my gullet onto her nest-stoop like a stork vomiting fish. She pecked at it, but her meal was bitter. She wept and wept and could not stop, her tears like burning oil blackening the sand below her ashen nest.
“Lantern, the chicks,” she gasped through her sobs, “the chicks, he took them all.”
“What?” I cried. “Who took them? What do you mean, cousin? Your eggs are still there, I can see their colors under your down! Stop crying and tell me what happened!”
Sniffling, she whispered in terror, “A thing came into the desert, and he was all white, and he smelled of scorched bread and copper filings, and he went into every dying tree that might have been a nest, and pulled out the sap, and pulled out the seed.” I choked in horror. “And as if that was not enough, he fed the meat to his women, and piled the seeds up like trash.” She burst into a storm of weeping again, and her breast shook so hard I feared her eggs would crack. “They kicked them over,” she murmured, so soft I could barely hear. “The women kicked them over like a child’s marbles, and there were no eggs for them to strike. It will be years before any other hen will lay her nest.”
I held my cousin in her grief and reeled in my own. Of course, you could not understand, poor gray-heart. It is our greatest secret, and I tell you now so that you will trust me to never withhold wisdom when I have it to give. My cousin’s eggs have no rooster; they are quickened by the dying tree. The flint-seeds spark the new tree, yes, but also the new bird, and the first roots of the new Ixora are born out of the egg with the chick. The flint must have something to catch its spark—it must have both feather and bark. We need each other, you see. The Zhar-Ptitza drakes only protect the nest. We are like bees—we cannot mate, at least not with our hens. I have heard that some few once managed to pull eggs from a tree and fire them with their own skin, but even their names are lost to ash now. All my family is mothers, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles—and no fathers. There will never be chicks which are mine. The Ixora is the other half of us.
So you see why it is that I answered Ravhija so readily, even though it meant giving her three seeds which might have been three Firebirds. Why, I would have done as she asked even without the feather. I thought, I hoped that if my cousin could hatch a tree’s eggs, perhaps a tree—but that doesn’t matter now.
There was nothing I could do. I had to wait. The clutch was born and there can be nothing finer than eight new Firebirds cracking their shells, but they, and I, had to wait until the next crop of Ixora went to ash before their black little bodies could burst into flame, before the other hens could quicken their eggs in the flood of sap, before Ravhija’s seeds could be spared.
It was five years before I had what she needed. I flew back over the countries, which changed from gold to green under me, sick and as full of dread as a hive of honey. I told myself that she had found some other source, that she had found the strange hunter some morning at her wall, who happily gave over the little red seeds. Someone, I told myself, will surely have saved her. She will wave happily from her tree, and her orange hair will shine in the sunlight, and she will tell me it was all right, don’t be silly, it all turned out well in the end.
But I knew it was a lie. The orchard was black as a chimney when I finally found it, the wall smashed and crumbled. The trees were stark skeletons against a gray and brooding sky—nothing grew; there was no fruit, only a mash of dead sweetness that had once boiled glazing the earth. It was all gone, all gone. I flew over the wreckage and I could hardly keep myself in the sky, so great was my guilt, hanging around my neck like an anchor.
Except that it was not quite all gone. In the center of the garden, where that beautiful tree that had filled me with secret hope had stood, there was a slender green sapling, almost too pale to see when the sun was behind it.
Beside it sat a little girl playing in the scorched soil.
“Oh!” she cried out when she saw me. “Aren’t you a pretty bird!”
I landed next to her, my blazing tail dragging in the ash of the old tree. “Ravhija?” I asked, nosing her uncertainly.
“Oh, no, I’m Ravhi!” she cried, bouncing up to stroke my feathers like any other delighted child. She beamed up at me through green lashes; her hair was short, but already twisted into little ropes of pulpy orange.
Of course I understood. No child of an Ixora could miss it—the tree had dropped its seeds in the earth, and no soil is richer than that of a forest after a fire. A new tree had been born, and a new mistress.
I gave her the seeds. It was all I could do.
She thought they were very pretty.
“BUT YOUR FEATHER,” I WHISPERED, AS A COLD AND snowy lake country fluttered below us like a huge white flock.
Lantern shook his glittering head. “Ravhi didn’t have it, and it was no use asking her where it went—she remembered nothing of the old tree, or the old gardener. I think the Wizard must have taken it when he played Death. I feel it still, like an eye or an ear I have misplaced. It was not burned, but it is not near, and no one has called me with it.”
I flew a little closer to the warm bird, basking in his heat. Snow melted from my beak. “I’m sorry she couldn’t nest with you, like you wanted,” I said bashfully.
He smiled and squinted in the flying flakes. “Drakes aren’t meant to nest. It was a silly hope. And if she had, we should never have met, little web-foot, and that would have been very sad.”
He flew with me all winter and into the spring, fed me grasses and mice and dandelion heads, until I grew, and my neck was long. When the geese came back, I did not want to go with them, and he did not make me go. I flew under his wings, which were wide as sunset clouds, as chapel doors or cedar shades, and I was safe from Falcons. Together we crossed the wide purple sea and back again, and rested in the fronds of palm trees. He taught me many songs and the language of the Starlings, and the Storks, and the Seagulls. And he did teach me to steal as well as any burglar. I never wanted for cherries.
For us there was no time, only the flying, and the clouds in our mouths. I was happy. I was his. We needed no others. I did not cry. But after two summers I saw that the trees were familiar, and the shadows of the birth-nest were again on the horizon. I shivered in fear.
“I have brought you back home, little one,” Lantern said, “for there is a new flock, and they are calling on the moon and sun to find you.”
“I want to stay with you.” I wept, and he held me in his wings, which were as the evening sky closing over me.
He shifted wretchedly from foot to foot. “We are not the same, gray-heart. Only those who share feather and beak can remain together always. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken care of you at all, but you were so poor, and so dear, and I have never had a chick to love. You will be all right now, I know it. You should have a flock, and a nest. I could give you only a burning tree and cold fruit. And… there is something pulling at me, here, like a finger hooked into my breastbone. My feather wants me, and I cannot refuse.”
“But I don’t want a new flock! And you can refuse; you can turn around and fly the other way as fast as you can.”
He sighed, and even his brilliant colors, his oranges and golds that lit my world, seemed muted and dull. “It isn’t like that, my love. When my feather calls, I have to go. I can n
o more fly in the other direction than I can fly underwater.”
I still did not cry, but it was very hard. We perched on a crooked oak stump outside a great courtyard, and something was there, on the cobblestones, something that smelled like memory. A curl of smoke was rising from it, smoke, and then bright fire, sparking in the morning fog.
“We are not the same,” Lantern repeated, “but there is fire, and you can go towards it without dread, and be born again with your own birds, born in fire just like me. There will be a little of what made me, in you.”
The smell pulled at me—I knew it, I knew it, and the air above the pyre was now filled with birds, birds with the maddening, wonderful smell on their wings. It was like horses, horses and milk and damp, dark rooms.
It was my mother’s smell, and Lantern put his hearth-warm head to my back and pushed me towards it. I flapped my wings slowly and glided into the mist. I did not look behind me; I knew he did not want me to, and there was Mother before me, Mother, whom I had given up all hope of finding. But it was as though my own feathers were ripped from me, each dripping with dark blood.
When my mother burned, I was not afraid. I cut her bonds with my mouth and kissed her flaming lips. All around me were birds that looked just like me, with long necks and gray feathers and webbed feet. They were my flock, they knew me for their own, and she was my flock, and I loved her. I felt no fire, only the path to her, and I helped her rise up from the ash, just as Lantern must have risen when he was a little black chick; I helped her rise up and steal away into the night.
“I WAS THEIRS. I AM NOT YOURS. ONLY FLOCK CARES for flock.” Aerie looked at him with her large black eyes, full of mourning and distrust.
“But we are family; we are the same… clutch,” Leander protested quietly.
“We are not the same. Your father you will put under the claw. He is not my father.”