Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits (27 page)

ʺWhen the time came, I took the form of an artificial salamander and caused a woman who dealt in magical objects to buy me from a street vendor, and then to choose you. This was to keep you safely hidden, and ready for our purpose. The rest you have seen for yourself. Now you are Tib again, with your human life to live. The blessing of the salamanders is on you.ʺ

The salamander withdrew its tongue and crawled swiftly down Tib's body and across the rocks. It paused on the rim of the crevasse and turned its head. For the last time he looked into the depths of those purple eyes, and then it crawled on down out of sight. With another desert-shuddering groan the crevasse closed.

Now that he had his natural body back, Tib could feel the heat of the rising sun. As he looked around for shade, a glint caught his eye. He went to look and found a golden nugget, still too hot to touch after having been squeezed up, molten, from the central fires between the lips of the crevasse as it closed. As he waited for it to cool, he saw another a little further on, and another beyond it. He walked along the line of the closed crack, picking the nuggets up as he went, until the trail ran out. Near that point stood a huge leaning rock, forming a kind of open-sided cave and casting the shade he needed. There were strange painted patterns on its under-surface, and a rough stone hearth to one side.

Tib settled down and waited. His position was apparently desperate, a naked man with nothing to his name but a double handful of useless gold, and nothing to give him hope but an abandoned hearth and some old painted patterns. But he was filled with the same confident calm that he had felt after the magician had left him in the dark of the cellar, waiting for whatever had been going to happen next. There was something still to come. The gold was a sign to him, a reward from the salamanders for allowing himself to be used as he had, and that meant he would live to spend it; while the hearth and the paintings meant that people came to this place, and would come again.

Sure enough, they arrived well before the sun was overhead, a dozen adults, very dark skinned, wearing nothing but little leather aprons patterned with blue and red beads, and a few naked children. The men carried flint-headed spears and short bows, and the women yellow gourds slung in nets. Silent as ghosts, they stole along the floor of the canyon in single file. The line halted in front of the rock. They turned towards him, stared for a moment and then with a low, sighing moan, knelt and touched their foreheads to the ground.

One grey-haired man came crawling forward while the others remained kneeling. Tib rose and went to meet him. The man looked up, imploring, from his crouch, but Tib took him by the wrists and pulled him upright. The man raised a shaking hand palm forward. Smiling, Tib placed his own palm against it. The man gave a great shout, stepped back, flung up his arms in a gesture of exultation and shouted again, and the rest came crowding round, whooping and laughing.

Tib stood smiling in the middle of the melee until they had shouted themselves hoarse and drew apart. A woman offered him a gourd of water, pleasantly flavoured with some kind of aromatic bark. He thanked her and stood aside, watching them prepare a meal, gathering fuel, kindling a spark from a fire-bow, opening gourds and satchels, cutting the meat of two small animals into strips with a flint knife, chattering and laughing, even the smallest children knowing their tasks.

He understood what was happening. He had heard of these desert people, older, far older, than Haballun itself. The hunter who had first found him must have been of their kind. This was one of their sacred places—the paintings showed that. They had heard the double groan of the crevasse as it opened and closed, so had come to ask the desert spirits what it meant, and had found him waiting for them. That was enough. He was sacred. They had seen his little pile of gold and left it alone—it was sacred too. They would feed him and clothe him and guide him to the edge of the desert.

And then what? Slaves do not own anything, let alone nuggets of gold. A thought struck him. He reached behind his shoulder to the place where the salamander had rested just before it had talked to him. His fingers touched not the ridged scars of the slave symbol that he had felt so often before, but smooth skin. The slave-brand had gone. He was free. He was also rich. He could go anywhere and do anything he chose. He realised that he had already chosen.

He would go back to Haballun and find Aunt Ellila and help her run her stall. Objects connected to high magic might have lost their powers, but they had been only a minor part of Aunt Ellila's trade, and there'd still be a good living to be had from the rest for the two of them. Or rather, for the three.

He was wondering what Zorya would turn out to be like when the grey-haired old hunter came and bowed before him and took him by the hand and led him to be the guest of honour at their feast.

ROBIN McKINLEY

 

M
y parents had it planned that I'd be a wizard. Eldest son dragonrider, second son spiritspeaker, third son wizard, you know? My dad was a carpenter, but he was a fourth son. I think that was part of the problem, he felt he had something to prove, even though his next-older brother wasn't a wizard but a merchant. A wealthy merchant, so everyone thought, oh, how clever of him, since most wizards are poor. And my mum made candles, but then she was a daughter, and daughters get to choose what they want to do. (There aren't very many women dragonriders, spiritspeakers, or wizards. There are some, but not many.)

Obviously not every first son is a dragonrider but it's every family's dream, and the problem is, my mum's family had done it right, and now my dad's local brother's family had started doing it right (the other two brothers lived on the other side of the country and were easier to ignore). Their eldest had just graduated from the same academy his dad had gone to, and had already been assigned to his first working dragon. Although it was only a little civilian one that ran up and down our coast and his rating was only Fourth Wing, he was still riding his own dragon. And their second son had just been apprenticed to a popular spiritspeaker.

I'd've hated being a dragonrider because I don't like heights, and I would've hated being a spiritspeaker because they're all so stuck on themselves. (Both my mother and my father admit that their spiritspeaker brothers are a trifle self-important.) I think I would have liked being a wizard, but it wasn't going to happen. I was all thumbs and I couldn't do the maths. You're always having to measure stuff when you're a wizard. If Mum sent me out for a dozen apples I'd come home with eleven, and even I can count to twelve. It's just something that happens with me.

And then Dag got into the dragon academy, and not just any academy but
the
Academy, the first, oldest one. When the Academy started we weren't even a country yet. Fhig, our cousin, had gone to Whimbrel Academy, which is only about three hundred years old, so we were one up there. Dag wouldn't admit it but he was dead chuffed, and when our parents assumed that he'd go, he let their pride and enthusiasm sweep him along. But he told Kel and me when he was home for his first half-year break that it was nothing but rules and history and getting the form right when you addressed anybody and the air smelled of eight-hundred-year-old dust and he hadn't even seen a dragon yet.

He'd sat for the entrance exams assuming he wouldn't get in, but he's too honest not to have given it his best shot, and he's the big bold capable type so he passed the physical just by showing up. I'd always privately thought he was a shoo-in but I may be a little prejudiced. He was the big brother who'd saved not only me but the bagful of kittens I was trying to rescue from drowning—I'd just got hold of the bag when the bank gave way, and the river was running hard in the spring rains. Dag dove in after me and we all got swept downstream but it was Dag who kept his head and pulled us out. He didn't even yell at me afterward. (One of the kittens has been keeping Dad's workshop a rodent-free zone for the last five years.)

But it was really bothering Dag that he knew Mum and Dad were staying up all night to earn money for the fees and there was still Kel and me to come, and he didn't even want to be a dragonrider, especially not if it was tangled up in all this pointless rigmarole. ʺAnd of course it would be,ʺ he said gloomily. ʺNobody ever crowns sheep.ʺ In any war pretty much as many dragons as human soldiers are awarded the crown medal for courage, and most of the Academy tutors and dragonmasters were ex-army. Dag had wanted to be a farmer.

Mum and Dad didn't seem to mind working all night. They were also busy trying to get Kel signed up to apprentice to this speaker named Jwell who was even more stuck on himself than usual and Kel was pretty dismal about it.

It was kind of depressing because of the three of us I'm the only one who wouldn't have minded the training I was due for. Although it wasn't exactly a wizard I wanted to be. I had this fat-headed idea that I wanted to be a
healer.
It takes a lot of work to learn and then nobody wants to know you after they find out what you do for a living. Nobody's supposed to get sick. And if you do it's probably your fault. And then it's a huge loss of face to admit you don't seem to be getting better on your own and need help. But everybody gets sick, and almost everybody at some point has to go to a wizard who admits doing healing (not all of them will; it's rough being a social exile), so pretty much nobody will risk saying any more than ʺgood dayʺ to a known healer for fear someone will see and draw the wrong conclusions.

Injuries are even worse than getting sick. Injuries, unless you got them in battle, mean you're a careless slob. Before the king made duels illegal about a hundred years ago, there were a lot more duels than were fought, if you follow me, so people had an excuse for having hurt themselves (ʺAnd you should see the other guy!ʺ). But real duels also killed a lot of people, so it was a good thing the king forbade them.

The only healers that make any money are the smoothers—the ones that make the evidence go away, the scars and so on. But they're not respectable. You don't invite them to dinner or encourage them to marry into the family. Even soldiers don't go to smoothers, although they wear their medals and duty badges outside their clothes so everyone knows they're soldiers. My dad is a seriously good carpenter, and a smoother once tried to interest him in making artificial limbs. A really good smoother can give a wooden arm or leg some movement like a real one, but the fake one has to be nearly perfect. Working with a clever smoother would have meant more money, but my dad wasn't interested. My parents are nothing if not respectable.

Since I was always bumping into things, maybe that's why I had some sympathy for the careless slobs of the world. Every mother (and most fathers) knows about gimpweed for bruises. Nobody's going to advertise that they might need it by growing it in their own garden but you can find it near the edges of any deciduous forest. I used to pick it when I saw it as a kind of charm against bruising and I think it must work because I don't have nearly as many bruises as I should for all the running into things I do. It also means that I can kind of slip a stem or two to anyone I can see needs it and because I'm only a clumsy kid and no threat to their dignity they mostly let me. One or two of the mothers in the village have even told me that it seemed to work better when it came from me but I knew that was just them feeling sorry for me. Or too busy to go find some themselves. I did tell them that they didn't have to say that, I was happy to let them have some any time.

Our village did have a wizard, an all-sorts wizard, which is to say she did a little bit of everything. Most all-sorts aren't very good at anything but she was good at almost everything, good enough that if she told you she didn't feel like doing something you believed that she didn't feel like it and it wasn't that she couldn't. Nobody could understand why she stayed here in Birchhome. She'd come when I was three or four and she was still here. She could get you or your parcel somewhere faster or easier than a horse or a messenger could, if dragons made you nervous. Her love philtres were so good that she had an almost equally good business in antidoting her own philtres, and if you needed a few words to say over your new house or your pregnant wife or sister or your winter solstice party when you really needed a better year next year, she'd give you some weird little verse that didn't look like much but that you could feel
thunk
into place when you said it out loud.

She'd made Dad one of her verses the year his workshop burnt down (he and the cat got out but nothing else did). He was standing in the framed-out door for the new shop, which didn't even have walls yet, and he was afraid we were going to run out of money before the walls got built, and Mum was mad at him for spending money on the verse. So it wasn't a great atmosphere for any charm with Mum standing there throbbing with annoyance, and Dad was so tired and discouraged he couldn't even straighten up properly and he read the words in such a low mutter you could barely hear them.

And then there was this really strange pause that didn't seem to have anything to do with time, and you could feel something like a big wet fog of discouragement roll itself up and go away, and then Dad straightened up and Mum sort of got shorter as the anger drained out of her, and they looked round and smiled at each other, so then Dag and Kel and I did too.

But what I really liked about our wizard is that she also did healing, and she did it like it was no big deal. Wizards, even all-sorts, are really conscious of their dignity, aside from worrying about whether anyone will ever talk to them again if it gets out that they do healing or that they don't make you beg for it first. Maybe they make a big fuss about dignity because they're only third on the list after dragonriders and spiritspeakers.