13
He opened his eyes and saw her. She glowed terrible and wonderful, a green glass figurine in the charred rags of a sleeveless white robe, then he saw only Serroi with tears in her eyes, weariness in her small elfin face. He smiled and caught her hands, held them between his a moment, then reached up, drew his hand down the side of her face, traced the clean-cut elegant curves of her mouth. “There’s half a world we haven’t seen.”
“Yes,” she said. She swayed; her eyelids fluttered; she fainted across his renewed body.
For a moment he was afraid, but the pulse in her throat beat strongly. He eased her off his chest and sat up. His clothes were burnt off him, he’d expected that, but he was startled to feel hair when he brushed his hand over his head. “Very thorough, love.” He lifted her onto his lap and held her close, stroking his hand over the singed curls, then the gentle curve of her back. Through the windowslits he could hear muffled curses and screams and knew he’d have to get her down to help the others, but for a little while he was going to hold her and forget everything else.
In a few moments, though, his legs began cramping and the stone that had burned him was giving him chills in his bare buttocks while air through the window blew off ice. He shifted position, looked down to see her eyes open. “Cold as the slopes of Shayl,” he said.
She smiled. “They never last, do they, our moments, I mean.”
Julia tilted the stoneware cha pot over the clay mug and poured out the last trickle of lukewarm liquid. She set the pot back, sipped at the cha. “Getting low on ammo,” she said. “Remind me to snag one of the cycles and call in for some.”
“Um.” Rane scowled at the fragment of sandwich she was holding, threw it in a long lazy arc away from the wall and sat staring at the rag tied round her calf though Julia didn’t think she saw it.
They were sitting in the sun, a winter sun that did not give much heat, protected from the sweep of the wind by the jut of the nearest ramp. No one went to the eating tent these days; time and energy were both in short supply. They slept in the lower floors of the gate towers, on call for reinforcement whenever they were needed. They were all weary and worn down to simple endurance, men and women alike, falling into their blankets on straw gone musty with the damp, sleeping as if clubbed, rising with only the top layer of tiredness gone, the residue of each day’s weariness added to the last and the next until it seemed they’d never be free of it. Julia thought back to the days when she was grubbing out an existence and trying to write, when she was exhausted and depressed, tired of trying to cope with the complexities of her life and the complexities of her nature and the impossibility of reconciling the two, yet when food and warmth and shelter and privacy were there to take as she needed, when her horizons stretched beyond the visible edges of the world; she thought back to those times and found them curiously hard to Visualize as if they were something she’d written in a novel she’d never managed to finish. She marveled at the difference between the Julia who’d lived then and the Julia sitting with a rifle beside her waiting to be called back into battle. Her edges had narrower limits these days, they chopped off five minutes ahead and stretched out on either side as far as the people she could see and name. She knew them all now, the meien and her own exiles, the mijlockers and the Stenda, knew names and faces, knew how steady or flighty they were in the face of danger, knew them intimately and not at all, especially the folk of this world; the novelist wanted to know their histories, to know the forces that had shaped them into the people they were. What had their lives been like? Who were their friends, their lovers, their acquaintances, their enemies? What were their hopes and fears, their ordinary eccentricities, their communal natures? What stories could they tell about themselves and others? What were the old, old stories all families accumulate and hand down through the generations? She knew nothing of that and she wanted to; she hungered to discover those things about them. But there was no time, you fought, you rested, you ate, you slept. Everything outside this time and this place was as remote for them as her past life was for her, for this reason and others they seldom spoke of anything but here and now.
There was a thump and a brittle crash above. Working the catapults again, Julia thought, then dropped the cup and sprang away from the wall as she felt a leap of heat, a drop of something that ate like acid into her thigh. She heard a scream that would echo in nightmare later, then a burning thing leaped out from the top of the wall. Rane thrust herself up and limped as fast as she could away from the wall. Julia took a few steps after her, then turned to stare at what lay huddled on the ground; it was charred out of its humanity, but the rifle clutched in a burning hand had enough of its shape left for Julia to recognize the carved stock. Liz. Her stomach churned and she looked away, desperately glad that Liz was beyond all help. A second later she brought her own rifle up and put a bullet in the skull of the burning thing. Rane came back and stood beside her. “All you could do,” she said.
Julia looked right and left along the wall, saw half a dozen fires. “Oh god, how many more?”
Rane cupped her hands about her mouth and shouted at the chaos on the wall above them. “Vuurvis,” she shrieked. “Don’t let it touch you. If you don’t know what it is, ask. Vuurvis. Don’t try to put it out. If there’s oil on you, don’t touch it, you’ll just spread it.” She walked along the wall, repeating those words and warnings until she was too hoarse to continue. Others among the older meien took up the calls and began getting the burned fighters down the ramp to wait for the medics and trucks to carry them to the hospital tent.
Julia looked down at her thigh. The vuurvis drop was smaller than a pinhead, but the pain was growing. It was bearable, so she shrugged aside her worry and limped up the ramp behind limping Rane, began helping her to get the burn victims down to the ground. The first time she saw the heavy flame crawling over the flesh of a living woman, she started to try smothering it, but Rane snatched her hand away. “No good,” she said. “All we can do is let it burn itself out. Or let the healwomen cut away the saturated flesh. Nothing helps, nothing will put out vuurvis, you’ll just get it on you.”
She carried the moaning meie down the ramp and laid her on the ground beside the rows of the others, called the medic, a girl named Dinafar, to put her out until the truck came. An eerie hush was settling over the wall, muting the screams of the burned, the grinding of motors coming toward her, stopping, coming on, stopping as the trucks east and west picked up the burned. The medics had arrived swiftly at each of the burn sites but the girls knew enough about vuurvis to know there was nothing they could do but help bring the injured down to wait for the trucks, gently putting the worst sufferers out by pressure on the carotids. Over all this was that straining silence that Julia thought was in her head until she looked along the wall.
The west tower was no longer burning, it throbbed with the clear green light of the healer. Dom Hern, she thought. “Dom Hern,” she said aloud.
Rane grunted. “She wouldn’t let him die.” Lifting her head, she sniffed at the air. “She’s draining us for him.”
Julia shrugged, not understanding what Rane meant. She watched the tower glow, the light running in waves down the stone and into the ground, gasped as a thought seized hold of her. She caught the medic as she went past. “When the truck comes, take the burned to the tower and pack them in the lower floors.”
Dinafar’s eyes opened wide. Not understanding, she turned to Rane. “What…?”