Child of Flame

“Why did they call me child, then?”

He was always making rope, or baskets, always weaving strands into something new. Even in the darkness, he twined plant fiber into rope against one thigh. “The elder races partake of nothing earthly but only of the pure elements. We are their children inasmuch as some portion of what we are made of is derived from those pure elements.”

“So any creature born on Earth is in some way their child.”

“That may be,” he said, laughing drily. “Yet there is more to you than your human form. That we speak each to the other right now is a mystery I cannot explain, because the languages of humankind are unknown to me, and you say that the language of my people is not known to you. But we met through the gateway of fire, and it may be that the binding of magic lies heavier over us than any language made only of words.”

“It seems to me that with you I speak the language known to my people as Dariyan.”

“And to me, it is as if we speak in my own tongue. But I cannot believe that these two are the same. The count of years that separates my people from your land must span many generations of humankind. Few among humankind spoke the language of my people when we dwelt on Earth. How then can it be that you have remembered my people’s language all this time?”

It was a good question, and deserved a thoughtful answer. “Long before I was born, an empire rose whose rulers claimed to be your descendants, born out of the mating of your kind and humankind. Perhaps they preserved your language as their speech, and that is why we can speak together now. But truly, I don’t know. The empresses and emperors of the old Dariyan Empire were half-breeds, so they claimed. There aren’t any Aoi on Earth any longer. They exist there only as ghosts, more like shades than living creatures. Some say there never were true Aoi on Earth, that they’re only tales from the dawn time of humankind.”

“Truly, tales have a way of changing shape to suit the teller. If you wish to know what the spirits meant when they addressed you as ‘child,’ then you must ask them yourself.”

The stars scintillated so vividly that they seemed to pulse. Strangely, she could find not one familiar constellation. She felt as if she had been flung into a different plane of existence, yet the dirt under her feet smelled like plain, good dirt, and many of the plants were ones she remembered from her childhood, when she and Da had traveled in the lands whose southern boundary was the great middle sea: silver pine and white oak, olive and carob, prickly juniper and rosemary and myrtle. She sighed, taking in the scent of rosemary, oddly comforting, like a favorite childhood story retold.

“I would ask them, if I could reach them.”

“To reach them, you must learn to walk the spheres.”

The arrow came without warning. Pale as ivory, it buried its head in the trunk of a pine. Grabbing her quiver, Liath rolled off her pallet and into the cover of a low-lying holm oak. The old sorcerer remained calmly sitting in his place, still rolling flax into rope against his leg. He hadn’t even flinched. Behind him, the arrow quivered and stilled, a stark length of white against drought-blighted pine bark.

“What is that?” she demanded, still breathing hard. In the four days since she had come to this land, she had seen no sign of any other people except herself and her teacher.

“It’s a summons. When light comes, I must attend council.”

“What will happen to you, and to me, if your people know I’m here?”

“That remains to be seen.”

She slept restlessly that night, waking up at intervals to find that he sat in trancelike silence beside her, completely still but with his eyes open. Sometimes when she woke, half muddled from an unremembered and anxious dream, she would see the stars and for an instant would recognize the familiar shapes of the constellations Da had taught her; but always, in the next instant, they would shift in their place, leaving her to stare upward at an alien sky. She could not even see the River of Heaven, which spanned the sky in her own land. In that river, the souls of the dead swam toward the Chamber of Light, and some among them looked down upon the Earth below to watch over their loved ones, now left behind. Was Da lost to her? Did his spirit gaze down upon Earth and wonder where she had gone?

Yet was she any different than he was, wondering what had become of those left behind? Da hadn’t meant to die, after all. She had left behind those she loved of her own free will.

At night, she often wondered if she had made the right decision. Sometimes she wondered if she really loved them.

If she’d really loved them, it shouldn’t have been so easy to let them go.