The Burning White (78 page)

“She’s half my age, and hasn’t borne three children, and as you said, I’ve not been—”

“Do you think I’m a man who could fall in love with a woman I don’t respect?” I snap.

“A man will believe almost anything if one properly addresses what’s below his waist.”

“You think in four weeks—”

“The brief time makes it
worse
, Andross! I don’t fear that I’m not the equal of that poor girl; I fear I’m not the equal of your imagination. A man can’t fall in love at first sight with a woman; he falls in love with what he imagines she is. She is the canvas onto which he casts his hopes and dreams. And if the reports are right, this girl was a particularly lissome and nubile canvas indeed.”

“What am I, seventeen?!”

“Why, because men old enough to know better have never traded their aging wives for younger, stupider ones?!”

“You know me too well for this. This is madness dressed up as fear. I’ve proven my troth a thousand times. You know about all the women who have tried to seduce me since we married. You know about the old lovers who’ve tried to ignite my interest again since I became the Red. I hold you in my eyes, Firuzeh Eszter Laleh Dariush. My Felia, my Felia Guile, how could I trade
you
? What kind of magic cunt would a woman have to have to even tempt me for an instant? From you?
You!
A woman who could be empress, should she will it? You think I would trade that girl’s gullibility, her weakness, for your strength?”

But I still see fear in her eyes.

“If you believe that,” I say, “you haven’t lost me, you’ve lost yourself.”

She searches my eyes, for any falseness, I suppose. If I could play so many others so skillfully, so cruelly, could I not play her, too? I try to open my gaze to her, as we did when we were young, but I can only see red.

After only a moment, I can see her gaze turn inward. “I don’t feel strong. Not anymore.”

“You’re strong enough.”

“I don’t think so,” she says.

I point and raise my voice. “Door’s that way.”

It’s a slap in her face. She literally gasps. “Would you let me go? Easy as that? After all we’ve been through? All we’ve done?”

“Letting you leave me would be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But this is war, no matter that only you and I see it now. If you’re going to turn coward, I need to know before I trust you with my future and the world’s.”

“I’m not strong enough—”

“Strength is a choice. Courage is a habit. Unfortunately, cowardice is, too.”

She looks me in the eye for the longest time. “We haven’t made love since you got back.”

I raise my hands, palms up. Whose choice was that?

But then I understand. Even this many years into our marriage, this new circumstance requires new responses: knowing her wounded, I’ve made overtures only. Hurting, reactive, she’d needed determined pursuit instead, while I had been certain that determined pursuit would get me an explosion of anger.

It would’ve. I see that now.

But perhaps we’d needed that to lance this boil.
I
hadn’t needed the fight, hadn’t wanted the mess and fallout of a huge argument, so I thought
we
didn’t need it. An error.

She lets it go. Looks down. Turns back to the table.

She says, “The worst of it is that I’ve seen copies of this scroll before. So at first I thought it was all for . . . nothing.”

As she finishes the sentence, I walk up behind her. I breathe in her hair, looming over her, hands bracing on the table to either side of her, but I don’t touch her.

She puts her hand on my sleeve to push open the cage of my arms, but I hold, and she doesn’t push hard.

“I need your everything, Fee,” I tell her. “Without you, I am utterly alone in this world. A candle on a rampart with a storm coming. An ox dragged from the path by the weight of the empty yoke where his partner belongs. I can’t do the work set before us without you, heart of my heart. I need your wisdom. I need your kindness. Your perspicacity. Your hand on the oar. I need that strength in you that you’ve always underestimated. Your hidden ferocity.” I kiss her neck softly and am rewarded with a wave of gooseflesh. “You are my compass, my windlass, and my following wind. I need you like a singer needs a voice, like a tune needs a tempo, the chorus its pitch. I need you like a spearman needs his shield, the charger his harness, like the archer his bow. I need you like the crops need the sun, the dyer her colors, a drafter the light. I need you as the stars need the night. I need you as a poet needs words . . .”

Still she says nothing.

“And I want you. I want you like that night out in the vineyard at Stony Brook. I want you like that very unstealthy Sun Day Eve in our tent right next to your parents’. I want you like that morning atop the red tower with the luxiats banging on the door, wondering how it had been locked from outside.” My voice lowers below a whisper of warm breath in her ear. “God, how I want you . . .”

The moment stretches, a privation and a punishment as I breathe the sweet scent of her. I long to grab her and take her, to make the decision for her that I can tell she doesn’t want to make. But I don’t.

Never has our union been of a weaker partner bowing ever to the whims of the greater. Nor can it be. In all the world, she is the one flower I will not crush beneath the wheels of the great siege engine that is my will.

She doesn’t move.

The moment stretches beyond bearing.

I won’t wait forever. I won’t see my need turned to weakness, my hunger turned to starvation. I pull back.

But she snares my sleeve, and as a rider controls all the raging mass of a charging warhorse with a few narrow strips of leather, I am stopped.

Is this a partnership after all?

Sometimes I wonder if she is not far the greater of us.

She doesn’t make me wait long enough to pursue the thought. She wants to know she has my full attention. She tilts her neck a little, to let her hair fall clear of the spot I kissed before.

I know she needs this. I know she wants to punish me a little. I know she needs to feel my pursuit, but it irks me, too, to be bidden like a dog. I am Andross Guile.

I shake my sleeve free of her grip and pull away, but before she can turn, before she can say a word, I grab her hair and kiss her roughly on the other side of her neck. Twisting her, I lift her onto the table and find her lips.

In the tales, every time true lovers come together, it is with such fervency and effortless skill that the heavens and the earth are shaken and nothing can ever be the same. Such is a lie, of course, but it’s another expression of the central flaw of the glass that drama holds up to reality: everything depicted in that glass
matters
.

In reality, lovemaking rarely changes things. Most isn’t even that memorable. In most lives, the heavens and the earth are shaken rarely by lovemaking, or perhaps never.

But sometimes they are.

Even with the ancestral gift of the Guile memory, the next minutes disappear in the turbulence of feelings unmoored from thought and pulled into the deep waters of passion.

“Sorry,” I mutter, some time later.

I had absolutely intended to tear her Ilytian lace undergarments to show her my unbridled desire for her. The roughness following that had . . . not been the result of a rational internal dialectic.

“You can make it up to me—”

“I can, huh?”

“—but there’s nothing to forgive.”

“What?” And then it hits me. “You
hexed
me?”

“You can’t hold it against me after I confess it, right?”

“Felia!” I don’t know whether to be mad or a little proud of her. She used to be such a stickler for the Chromeria’s rules.

“I wanted you to be rougher,” she says matter-of-factly.

“You could’ve asked.”

“I wanted you to apologize afterward. And to have to make it up to me. Speaking of which, you still need to.”

“Make it up to you?”

“As in, right now. Carry me to our bed. I’m not sure I can walk.”

* * *

“There were a couple of words that have changed meaning in our own language since those earlier translations, but it was all solid scholarship. And then I saw this.” She points to a single point on the lambskin, right where the redaction begins.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“A flaw in the leather? A stray quill mark? A stain of any kind from the intervening centuries.” She shrugs. “A good translator or copyist wouldn’t speculate, but only communicate what she knows. But when I look at the whole scroll, and see what’s missing and how, it seems to me that whoever redacted this was in a hurry here. There are numerous places where he or she was sloppy. These three dots here at the end of the line, if I guess where the lines of text fell, could be all that remains of the three horns of a ‘
shin
.’ This could be the foot of a ‘
khaf sofit
.’ It could as easily be ‘
resh
’ or ‘
nun sofit
’ or ‘
tsadi sofit
’ or ‘
zayin
’ or ‘
dalet
,’ but when I compare his earlier handwriting, his ‘shin’s were tall and elegant, and his ‘khaf sofit’s extended a little lower than the others.”

She’s getting into the minutiae. But she sees my impatience.

“If I’m right,” she says, “then this dot”—she lays a piece of parchment over the area and draws a delicate curve—“is part of an aspirate, a breath mark, as in the way ‘Or’holam’ was once written. It’s the right time period. Breath marks in punctuation only started falling out of scholarly usage some eighty years later, with Polyphrastes’
Dictions
.”

“But this mark obviously isn’t for ‘Orholam.’ You’ve discovered something else,” I say.

“ ‘Discovered’ is too strong. I’ve ‘
speculated
.’ ”

“Tell me.”

“I’ll show you instead.” She lines up the parchment edge over the original scroll so that one edge just touches the breath mark and, farther down the absent line of text, the three dots of the missing ‘khaf sofit’ protrude. “You understand, what I’m doing here is by no means ‘translation.’ It’s a guess, not scholarship.”

I say nothing, and she picks up a quill, shaved precisely as the ancient Parians shaved theirs to give the proper calligraphic quality to edges and curves. Her lettering is not only beautiful, it is also such a match for the Scriptivist’s handwriting that it would make a forger proud. The spacing and size of the letters is exact. She starts from the breath mark and moves left, unhurried. “There is nothing internally or in the other writings of the Scriptivist to support this,” she says as she draws the ‘khaf sofit,’ its three horns coming above the edge of her parchment to touch the three dots on the scroll. She finishes the phrase and steps back.

“ ‘
On a broken stone, the black fires of hell, on earth once more shall unleash the two hundred falling glories of heaven.
’ Literally, ‘the falling stars.’ But when it’s ‘two hundred,’ it’s never literal. The ‘two hundred falling stars,’ or ‘fallen stars’—it’s a euphemism sometimes shortened to ‘the two hundred.”

“The celestials,” I say. “The elohim, the old gods.”

“Those who rebelled against Orholam and were cast from His court.”

“Or marched out in defiance of the tyrant, if the heretics have it true,” I say.

“The Braxians?” Felia asks. “The Cracked Landers believe anything that justifies their thirst for power.” She grows quiet. “Like all of us do, perhaps.”

“You mean you and I?” I ask.

For a moment, her eyes are an open door to the soul bleeding within.

I forget, sometimes, that her greater sensitivity means that she suffers more than I even can.

“I don’t want this,” I say. “Do you? Are you perverting this translation so that we can do this to our boys? That’s not the Felia I know you to be.” Before tears can gather once more in her eyes, I say, “So don’t lump us in with those desert assassins.”

She is defeated. “My lord husband, look at Gavin’s last letter to you.” She hands me a parchment, not Gavin’s letter, which was in code, but the decryption of it.

“How did you get this?” I ask.

“Read.”

She’s made a mark next to a paragraph: ‘Father, I have him on the run now. Dazen doubtless hopes to retreat to the mountains around Kelfing, but we’ve a plan to entrap his army at a bend in the river near a town called Rekton.’

I look at the map Felia has spread on the table. She sweeps a hand over Tyrea, and the little dot that is Rekton on the Umber River. In orange luxin, names appear—old names, though. “At the height of the Tyrean Empire,” she says, “there was a city here, its name lost to time. It was a holy city, consecrated to Anat Sub-red, before Karris Atiriel or her followers demolished it. There’s a great dome of rock there. Anat’s Dome, or Anat’s Furnace, the Lady of the Desert’s milk-swollen breast or her pregnant belly, they say. Upon it, the ancient Tyreans sacrificed their sons and fed their blood to the sands, begging the goddess to make their desert bloom.” Her voice grows distant. “How blithely I condemned them as monsters, Andross. What mother worthy of the name could murder her sons and believe that, of such enormity, good would come? I couldn’t imagine . . . How could we let this happen?”

“Felia,” I say, “how can you even ask that? While you translate this? If there’s no Lightbringer, we’re doomed. Everything. Everyone. I—”

She brushes it off. “Karris Atiriel or her followers demolished the temple and city and put to the sword those who wouldn’t flee. The wrecked town was settled by refugees from other places, who eventually called it Rekton.

“Andross, if Janus was right about Dazen, and if all these leaps of intuition are somehow correct . . . What if ‘the black fires of hell’ means ‘burning hellstone’? ‘Living hellstone’? ‘A great rock’ could be ‘the Great Rock’ . . . Andy, it could mean, ‘Breaking the Great Rock, black luxin shall unleash the Two Hundred once more upon the earth.’ ” She takes a deep breath. “Gavin is trying to trap Dazen at Anat’s Great Rock.”

“And,” I say, a dread birthed full grown from my heart in an instant, “Dazen can draft black luxin.”

She looks out the ship’s porthole. “What we’ve sacrificed—and what we’ve stolen from that poor librarian—has bought us all we needed to know to avert catastrophe, but too late. Gavin sent this letter a week ago. There’s no way we can get to Rekton in time to stop them.”