Child of Flame

But that evening they returned home to a somber scene. During the day, a child had died. By the stoic look on the faces of the dead child’s relative, they’d known it was coming. Alain watched as women wrapped the tiny body in a roughly-woven blanket, then handed the limp corpse to the father. He laid it in a log split in half and gouged out to make a coffin. After the mother placed a few trinkets, beads, feathers, and a carved wooden spoon beside its tattooed wrist, other adults sealed the lid. Together, they chanted a singsong verse that sounded like prayer.

A strange half-human creature emerged from Adica’s house, clothed in power, with gold antlers and a gleaming torso. It took him two breaths to recognize Adica, dressed in the garments of power she had been wearing when he had first arrived.

She blessed the coffin with a sprinkling of scented water and a complicated series of gestures and chants. Four men carried it out of the village as Adica sealed their path, behind them, with more charms and chants. The entire village walked in silent procession to the graveyard, a rugged field marked by small mounds of earth, some fresh, some overgrown with nettles and hops. Male relatives laid the coffin in a hole. The mother cut off her braid and threw it on top of the coffin, then scratched her cheeks until blood ran. The wailing of the other women had a kind of ritual sound to it, expected, practiced; the mother did not weep, only sighed. She looked drained and yet, in a way, relieved.

Maybe the child had been sick a long time. Certainly Alain had never seen this one among the children who ran and played and did chores in the village all day.

The grave was filled in and the steady work of piling and shaping a mound over the dead child commenced. In pairs and trios, people returned to the village, which lay out of sight beyond a bend in the river. Alain remained because Adica had not yet left. Sorrow and Rage flopped down, resigned to a long wait.

Twilight lay heavily over them. Even in the five days he had been here, he noticed how it got darker earlier every night as the sun swept away from midsummer and toward its midwinter sleep. By the harvest and the weather, he guessed it was late summer or early autumn.

A few men worked steadily, bringing sod in a wheelbarrow shaped all of wood, axle, wheel, supports, and plank base. He pitched in to help them while Adica stood by, arms raised, silently watching the heavens or praying in supplication. In her hallowing garb she seemed as much alarming as wondrous, a spirit risen out of the earth to bring help, or harm, to her petitioners.

Dusk blurred the landscape to gray. Other men brought torches and set them up on stout poles so the work could continue, as it did steadily as night fell and the moon rose, full and splendid. Adica shone under its rays, a woman half deer and half human, a shape changer who might at any moment spring away four-footed into the dark forest and run him a merry chase.

He saw them, suddenly, as starlight pricked holes in the blindness that protects mortal kind: he saw the ghosts and the fey spirits, half-seen apparitions clustering around the living people who sought to inter the dead. Was that the child’s soul, clamoring for release, or return? Sobbing for its mother, or screaming that it had been betrayed into death?

Yet the spirits could not touch the living, because Adica in her garb of power had thrown up a net, as fine as spider’s silk, to keep them away. It shone under the moonlight as though touched with dew fallen from the fiery stars. No hungry spirit could pass through that net. Inside its invisible protection, the men labored on, a little nervous in the darkness in the graveyard, but trusting. They understood her power, and no doubt they feared her for it.

Sorrow whined.

That fast, the vision faded, but her lips continued to move as she chanted her spells. The moon rose higher and began to sink. Very late the mound was finished, a little thing, lonesome and forlorn in the deathly-still night. The father wiped his eyes. They gathered their tools and headed back toward the village, not without apprehensive looks behind them.

But Alain lingered, waiting. Adica paced an oval around the tiny mound. Her golden antlers cut the heavens as she strode. Now and again she tapped her spiraling bronze waistband with her copper bracelets. The sound sang into the night like the flight of angels.

Yet what could Adica know of angels? None here wore the Circle of Unity. He had seen their altars and offerings, reminding him of customs done away with by the fraters and deacons but which certain stubborn souls still clung to. Her rituals did not seem like the work of the Enemy, although perhaps he ought to believe they were.

She fell silent as she came to a halt on the west side of the fresh mound. That quickly, she was simply Adica, with her frightfully scarred cheek, the woman whom he had heard in a dream ask the centaur shaman if Alain was to be her husband. She had spoken the words with such an honest heart, with such simple longing.