Cold Fire

“Do you doubt me?” He seemed a little offended. “I washed. You’d best wash, too.”

I pulled on my shift and stepped out from under the shelter to consider the pool. Its sides were so round that the fathomless blue waters seemed like an eye staring heavenward.

“How deep is this pool?” I asked.

“It’s a sinkhole. Around here, they say it goes down forever, into the subterranean world that is not this world but another world linked to ours.”

I jumped back from the edge. Into the spirit world.

“You can’t wash there,” he added as he pulled a length of wet linen from the pot. He wrung it out as he walked over to me. “The Taino call it a sacred place.”

Trembling, I accepted the blessedly hot, damp rag and washed my face and, more gingerly, the skin around the bite. “Did you really heal me?”

He took my arm and pressed his lips to the bite. A tickle of heat spread through my body.

Maybe I gasped. Maybe I sighed.

He released me with a chuckle. “You’re not one bit shy. Alas, I have duties I must return to, or I assure you we’d linger awhile in the shade. However, you fell asleep and I’m in trouble already. They don’t like me because I’m a maku. A foreigner. They despise us foreigners. You’ll see.”

I handed him the cloth. “But did you heal me?”

He took my chin in a hand and met my gaze with a serious one. “No taint of the plague, no teeth of the ghouls, runs in your blood. That’s the truth. Avoid the pens, and don’t get bitten again.”

“What are pens? Where are we?”

“We’re on Salt Island. Under Taino law, all salters must be held in quarantine here.”

“Who are the Taino?”

“The Taino are the people who rule this entire region, all the islands of the Antilles. I’ll answer the rest of your questions later at the behica’s table.”

“What’s a behica?”

“A fire mage. Like me. I warn you, she’ll want to know how you got here. Don’t tell her anything. She’s an impatient, grasping sort of woman. Like all Taino nobles, she has a great sense of her self-importance. Do me a favor and don’t mention we met in Adurnam. I promise to explain why later. Now I really have to go. Here is Abby. She’ll find you a pagne and a blouse.”

“What’s a pagne?” I saw the girl from the beach lurching toward us through the trees along the sandy path. I was being abandoned to the care of a stranger. “Can’t I come with you, James?”

With his gear in his arms, he kissed me on the cheek. “We’ll be together later. Call me Drake. Everyone does.”

He set off down the path. Passing the girl, he spoke phrases that sounded like a forgotten tartan of Celtic, Mande, and Latin, the cadences a different music from the melody I was used to.

The girl limped up. She ventured an awkward smile, as if she wasn’t used to smiling and thought perhaps she had forgotten how. “Yee want a bath and cloth.”

“Is your name Abby?”

“I have dat name Abby. Yee have dat name Cat’reen?” A dapple of sunlight through leaves caught on her face to give her dark eyes an odd gleam as she looked down the path to make sure Drake was out of earshot. “Dat maku heal yee?”

“Can he really heal people?” I held my breath.

She wheezed in a breath, as if at a stab of pain, and let it out. “All behiques have dat power. He one, even if he a maku.”

“A maku is a foreigner. A behique or a behica is a fire mage. Is that right?”

She scratched her nose, sorting through my foreign way of speaking. “Dat right. Na.” Come.

She limped away down the path. I drew on my drawers and laced up my bodice, then gathered everything else and hurried after her. It was not, I reasoned, that she was unfriendly. But even the most generous soul might envy a gift of priceless worth granted to a stranger that has, even if by chance, been denied to a friend, if the man on the beach was indeed her friend.

“Drake told me we’re on Salt Island. In the Sea of Antilles, which is the sea that lies between North and South Amerike. Is that right?” She threw a bewildered glance at me, and a knife cut my heart, for I felt I was bullying her without knowing why. “It doesn’t matter. How pretty it is here!”

The shadows drew long as we emerged from the trees and walked along a shoreline where vegetation met a sandy white beach. It was really quite beautiful, and it would have been even more beautiful if it had not been so cursedly hot. I was sweating even though dressed only in undergarments that, in Adurnam, would embarrass a prostitute to be seen wearing in a public venue. The path wound up a headland. Birds dove in squalls. A turtle flipped sideways and skimmed away. The water was so clear I could see every stone and fish beneath the surface against shimmering stretches of sand.