The Secrets of a Fire King (20 page)

“His error cost a great deal of money,” she acknowledged.

“Still, I am not so concerned with the loss itself, which may open up a new path, a better path. That is always the advantage of failure. But Jonathan’s reaction does concern me. He has not made much progress on the new plans. He’s become too afraid to be bold.”

“He loves this place,” I said, dismayed, for I understood her implication, and the irony. Jonathan had brought me here; now he might have to leave.

The wind swept at Yukiko’s hair. She took off her glasses and polished them on the hem of her shirt. “I know,” she said. “It would be a loss if he left. But the community will survive. It is only Gunnar, finally, we could not spare. His vision is essential to us all.” I nodded, feeling helpless as I remembered his voice in the underwater room, the sound of Pragna weeping.

When I got back to the chalet Jonathan was sitting at the table, peeling a mango. We’d hardly touched in weeks, but now I put my hand on his shoulder.

“I spoke with Yukiko,” I told him.

Jonathan put the knife on his plate and stood up. He walked over to the window, and when he spoke his voice was bitter.

“Great,” he said. “That’s just terrifi c.” And suddenly, out of worry and frustration and a sense of impending loss, a fierce anger rose up in me. I remembered Jonathan sitting beside me in the atrium on that first day, watching me ap-prehend all that had been hidden. I remembered him putting the delicate shell into my hand saying,
This, too, is a test.
How disoriented I’d felt, as if the world were no longer a steady place, but something that swam and glittered and changed in every instant.

Aristotle’s Lantern

129

“I know how you feel,” I said, trying to stay calm.

“You can’t possibly,” he snapped, and something in me broke loose.

“You’re right,” I said, preparing to be cruel and taking pleasure in it, too. “I’ll never know what you’re going through. After all, I passed the test.”

I slammed the door and walked to the atrium, where a group was already drinking on the balcony. Gunnar was there, on his second beer, and I found myself watching him, remembering our time below the water, what Yukiko had said. There was a bright sheen of red on the water, phosphorescent algae that traced the waves. Someone suggested a night dive. I was a little drunk already, and I ran to collect the waterproof flashlights and our gear, then joined the others on the beach, where Pragna and Gunnar were arguing. Pragna was holding Analia, her voice rising above the waves.

“Gunnar,” she said. “This is madness.”

“It’s perfectly safe,” he insisted, and I remembered the play of skeletal light on his skin as we stood together in the silent dome, his fingers on my leg as he made his clumsy sutures. The others had already gone as he stepped into the waves, and when Pragna called to him again he did not stop. After a moment I followed him, swimming to the beam of light he held. The waves crashed hard against the rocks and the currents pulled at us. I touched his arm.

“It’s Anna,” I said.

“Anna.”

“Gunnar!” Pragna’s voice came to us, broken by the waves, edged with anguish. “Gunnar! Please, Gunnar. You are frighten-ing me. Come back this instant! Gunnar! Do you hear me?”

“Ah, she is ruining it all,” he said, and there was anguish in his voice, too. “She wants to leave. She wants us all to leave.”

“No,” I said, trying to imagine staying here without him. “No, don’t, Gunnar. You can’t.”

Our hands brushed one another in the water and he reached for me. I couldn’t seem to help myself. I ran my hand along Gunnar’s leg. He did not speak, but faced me as he had on that other day, that last and first day, when we passed the regulator back and forth and each one, each time, saved the other’s life.

130

The Secrets of a Fire King

We swam, breaking a path through the phosphorescence, past the rocks to the black sand beach, where we shed our gear, our suits.

Sand gave way beneath our feet and then our bodies were on that sand, half in the sea and half on land, and with every movement the water eased from beneath my back and his. Faint light from the plankton trailed across his skin and mine, glowing where we touched each other—the line of his jaw, the curve of my shoulder, our lips.

For a long time after we lay there, touching length to length, fading slowly back to darkness. I knew, of course, that the future might evolve in a thousand different ways, but in those moments I believed Gunnar would stay. I believed he would stay with me.

When he sat up, without speaking I knew what it meant.
Freedom fi rst,
he’d said one night, long ago. His lips were on mine again; his hands touched my face, leaving coolness in their wake this time.
Anna,
he said.
You are so beautiful. And I—I am so sorry.

Then I heard the splashing, glimpsed the momentary break in the phosphorescence—he was gone.

I stayed where I was for a long time. I’d lost the fl ashlight.

Also, my suit. Even my hands were invisible in that darkness. I felt my way to the edge of the path and began to climb, slowly, gradually, through dense foliage, feeling the air change, faintly, as the path rose. When I reached the ridge, the atrium was visible, swelling from the edge of the cliff and glowing softly.

I stopped, suddenly afraid. Loss gaped like an abyss. For I understood that I would leave this place, and that my leaving had been seeded long ago, when I handed Gunnar my regulator, when the live wire had fallen, twisting, to the lawn where fi sh swam, when Pragna had called out, her voice laced with anguish.

When Gunnar, yes, had turned to me.

I gazed out into the darkness of sea and sky, thinking of that hidden room, the secret locus of all yearning. A faint wind moved through my hair. I thought of Phil, conversing with the dead, and then of Gunnar, swimming. I imagined the fields of sea urchins unfolding beneath him, their perfect, hidden bones curved to hold the light, their thorns repelling, interweaving. So beautiful they were, so strange.

Echinodermata: Echinoidea, with a thousand eyes, all blind.

The Secrets

of a Fire King

Jasper,” she whispered, her shadow mooncast against the

“

tent wall. Night smell of damp canvas and a dark wind off the river. My mouth watered, I imagined her lips as they rounded out my name. She whispered “Jasper!” And I told her, “I am coming.” I said, “Wait,” struggling into my clothes. “I am coming.” I crawled right over Ogleby the snake man, who was snoring with his mouth wide open, his big feet blocking the door fl ap. She moved beside me, beyond the canvas wall, yet with me, just inches away. Then her shadow drew up suddenly and fell into the greater darkness. By the time I got outside, she was gone.

I stood there, searching, tents and wagons an eerie white in the moonlight. We were camped in the fairgrounds by the river.

I listened past Ogleby’s great snores and the nearby rustle of the animals and the tin pans of the mess wagon tapping in the breeze.

I listened hard, to the susurration of the water rising up, to the air moving lightly through the trees. It was quiet but for the
132

The Secrets of a Fire King

wind and thus, when the preacher spoke, his voice breaking the silence like a whip, I jumped a mile.

He said, “You are treading near fire, Jasper. You had better beware.”

My fists clenched at his words, for I knew my young and willing girl was gone, my hours of sweet talk wasted.
“The righteous need no candle,”
he went on, mocking my night blindness,

“neither light of the sun.”

“Leave me alone,” I demanded, turning toward his voice. “Do you hear?”

“Oh, I hear you,” he said, his voice so soft I had to strain to listen. “But the great question is, do you hear? Jasper? Do you hear what the spirit sayeth?”

He shifted, stepping from the shadows. Moonlight streamed down his pale skin, caught on his ring, heavy gold, stones inset like a fireburst, which he waved before the sinners in each new town like a tiny piece of heaven, hard and shiny, of value beyond reckon-ing, nearly impossible to attain. The next day I might even see my sweet-talk girl hovering beside him, bedazzled and saved and lost to me forever. I stood poised, waiting. I would not stagger after him like a fool, but like a fool I was furious enough to fire the argument that had been smoldering between us all these years.

“You saved me once already,” I reminded him. “And once was too much for any lifetime.”

“Blasphemer,” he said, his voice a whisper now, floating to me amid the tree sounds, the water murmurings. “You will burn in a lake of fi re.”

I knew he was gone. But of course, so was she. I walked to the edge of the river, leaving the cluster of tents behind me, willing her to appear, firm and supple, draped with light. The wind rustled in the leaves, tapped the hanging pans, but he had scared her good, and despite my longing she did not come again.

They called him Father the next morning when they gathered at the river.
Father, will you save me?
He stood among them, his white robes catching the wind, bits of paper and refuse from the campground skittering through the long grass and settling in the
The Secrets of a Fire King

133

flowing water. I stood a safe distance away—on higher ground, in a copse of trees—as he called the chosen forth, one by one, and had them kneel together at the river’s edge. An elderly woman in her threadbare best, a bearded man whose wrists hung out below his coat sleeves. A slender girl, with eyes as blue and pale as the sky at the horizon, who was pulled from the crowd by her thick-waisted mother. Four souls, only, yet the preacher acted as if he’d gathered fifty, mayors and businessmen among them. He waded in, his robes catching the current, the elderly woman’s hand in his. There was shock on her face as the cold water climbed her clothes, and she had hardly taken her hat off when he dunked her under. She came up gasping, dazed, her white hair pulled loose, stringy down her back.

The bearded man was next—he rose up with a whoop and holler—and then the mother, all shades of gray, grasping both of the preacher’s hands and stepping gingerly, rock to rock. The girl was last. The river eddied around her bluish skirts, climbed darkly to her waist, spread like a stain up the bodice of her dress.

She was slender, but strong and supple as a sapling, and she held her hands high, open palmed, refusing help as she waded in waist deep. She was reluctant, that was clear, and when the preacher reached for her she jerked away from him so hard she slipped.

Slowly then, like a leaf falling, she disappeared beneath the water. Right away the preacher dove. His hands flashed and he came up gasping twice, the river streaming from his hair, his robes. The world hung suspended, silent, as the minutes passed, and the crowd rose to its feet, stirring and straining like some great animal, certain that the girl was lost. But when the preacher rose up a final time he had a skirt snagged in his fingers. The girl was unconscious, maybe dead, her white arms limp against his back as they rose out of the water.

The crowd gathered close as the preacher began thumping on her back. Her face was pale and streaked with dirt, her thick hair wet and tangled. I watched from the hillside, feeling the blows on my own flesh. He’d pulled me from a different river, years before, under other circumstances, but then, like now, he’d pounded on my back until I’d coughed up enough muddy water to fill a cistern.

134

The Secrets of a Fire King

“Praise God,” he said that day, sitting back on his heels.

“Young man, you are a miracle incarnate, the answer to a prayer.”

I opened my eyes, taking in the sudden brilliance of the sky, and laughed.

“A lot you know,” I told him. I pushed myself up and wrapped my arms around my knees, for it was late spring and cold. I was just fourteen, run away from the mission home two weeks before. I’d had my fill of preachers there, and I hadn’t eaten in ten days. Nothing in my situation was funny, not my hunger, not my past, not the preacher sitting by my feet, making calculations, yet I kept on laughing, digging my fingers into my legs. After a while the preacher seemed to fi gure something out, for he gave up on praying and pulled two hard biscuits from his pack. I stopped laughing and sat up straight, my mouth already watering with desire.

“Hungry?” he asked.

I nodded, but he merely turned the biscuits over in his hand.

“You’ve got to earn it first,” he said.

I hardly heard him as he talked, telling me about the farm down the road, with five fat chickens and only the farmwife home. He’d go to the front door and work to save the wife, while I went round back and brought a chicken to salvation. I’d get the biscuits for myself, and we’d split the chicken, fi fty-fi fty.

“Well,” he said. “You willing?”

I’d never stolen anything before, but I didn’t hesitate, and a few hours later the preacher watched me suck the meat off every bone, firelight gleaming on his bald head. He was like no preacher I had known before, and he took me on, offered me instruction in his craft. For almost three months I studied with him, learning plenty. How to get an old woman to sign over all her worldly goods. How to speak in tongues, raising people to a fever pitch, and how to slip their wallets from their pockets as they shouted praises. How to get the young girls so heated with the word that they would step into his tent without a second thought.

Yet though I slept in his tent and sat through his services and kneeled dutifully beside him every night, I was a sullen disciple,
The Secrets of a Fire King

135

an unwilling miracle, my attention wandering all the while. Of all the acts in that traveling show—the snake man, the acrobats, the sword swallower, the luminous dancers—the Fire King was the one who held me fast. In his flames I saw the beauty, the power mingled with the danger. He could pour molten lead into his mouth, then spit out solid metal nuggets. He ate burning coals with a fork, as if they were a pile of new potatoes. I had hung around to see if he was scarred in secret places, and I had pestered him so much, and so insistently, that when I showed up at his door one night with everything I owned, he simply waved a weary arm and took me on as an apprentice. He was a skilled old man, but he was a drunkard too, and although he never missed a show, there came a day when he inhaled accidently while chewing on a wad of burning cotton, and seared his lungs, and died.