David Drake - Balefires

For all the power of Luccae it was trapped beyond self-preservation, for the stone was dead and the smoke that hissed about it was horribly alive. The psychic leverage on the garnet washed Luccae's face to a frozen gray, glazed the fire of the single eye, and held the flicker of souls to a muddy trembling. A minute, another minute – and Luccae spoke.

It was a sound without earthly counterpart, but Hermann heard it and understood in the final instant his mistake. Then the sea and rock boiled together as Luccae's Master came to free His liege.

The Dancer in the Flames

I spent most of 1970 as an interrogator with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment. The experience changed my life in many ways, some of them good.

Most of the changes were not good. When I hear people quote Nietzsche, "What does not kill us makes us stronger," I always think "Yeah, but stronger what?" Not stronger human beings, of that I'm sure.

I don't think it ever occurred to me to send "The Dancer in the Flames" anywhere but to Stu Schiff. F amp;SF would've taken six months or more to reply, and I assumed the reply would be a rejection.

Now I'm not quite so sure. It surprises me that a number of people with backgrounds in literature praise this story as a study in alienation, when I thought it was just a fantasy about Viet Nam.

To me, Viet Nam was alienation. I wish it had been a fantasy.

The viewpoint character is an officer. I was not. The setting, incidents, and attitudes depicted are all real. If you ask Nam vets what the most popular song In Country was, they'll all tell you, "We Gotta Get Out of This Place."

This isn't a story which I like very much. One of the reasons is that I don't much like the person who lived the background I'm writing about here. We've been stuck with each other since 1970, though.

The flames writhing out of the ashtray were an eyeball-licking orange. For an instant Lt. Schaydin was sure that the image dancing in them was that of the girl he had burned alive in Cambodia, six months before. But no, not quite; though the other's face had been of Gallic cast too.

The two enlisted men had turned at the sound of the officer brushing back the poncho curtain which divided his tent from the rear compartment of the command track. Radios were built into the right wall of the vehicle above a narrow counter. On that counter rested the CQ's clipboard and a cheap glass ashtray, full of flame. The men within-Skip Sloane, who drove the command track and was now Charge of Quarters, and the medic Evens-had been watching the fire when Schaydin looked in. It was to that ten-inch flame which the lieutenant's eyes were drawn as well.

He stared at her calves and up the swell of the hips which tucked in at a waist that thrust toward him. She looked straight at Schaydin then and her mouth pursed to call. Above the image hung the black ripples of smoke which were her hair. Abruptly the flame shrank to a wavering needle and blinked out. The compartment was lighted only by the instrument dials, pitch-dark after the orange glare. The air was sharp with the residue of the flame; but more than that caused Schaydin's chest to constrict. He remembered he had called out some joke as he touched the flamethrower's trigger and sent a loop of napalm through the window of the hooch they were supposed to destroy. The Cambodian girl must have been hiding in the thatch or among the bags of rice. She had been all ablaze as she leaped into the open, shrieking and twisting like a dervish until she died. But this tiny image had not screamed, it had really spoken. It/She had said "How did you do that?" Schaydin gasped.

The enlisted men glanced at each other, but their commander did not seem angry, only-strange. Sloane held up a twenty-ounce block of C-4, plastic explosive. Sweat rolled down the driver's chest and beer gut. He wore no shirt since the radios heated the command vehicle even in the relative coolness of the Vietnamese night. "You take a bit of C-4, sir," Sloane said. His hairy thumb and forefinger gouged out an acorn-sized chunk of the white explosive. Another piece had already been removed."It takes a shock to make it blow up. If you just touch a match to it in the open, it burns. Like that."

Sloane handed the pellet to Schaydin, who stood with a dazed look on his face. The C-4 had the consistency of nougat, but it was much denser. "We ought 'a air the place out, though," the driver continued. "The fumes don't do anybody much good."

"But how did you get it to look like a woman?"Schaydin demanded."I could see her right there, her face, her eyes… and she was saying…"

Evens reached past the lieutenant and flapped the poncho curtain to stir the dissipating tendrils of smoke."C-4makesa pretty flame," the stocky medic said, "but you don't want to get the stuff in your system. We used to have a mascot, a little puppy. She ate part of a block and went pure-ass crazy. Seeing things. She'd back into a corner and snap and bark like a bear was after her… Middle of that afternoon she went haring out over the berm, yapping to beat Hell. We never did see her again."

The medic looked away from his CO, then added, "Don't think you ought to breathe the fumes, either. Hard to tell what it might make you see. Don't think I want to burn any more C-4, even if it does make the damnedest shadows I ever hope to see."

The lieutenant opened his mouth to protest, to insist that he had seen the image the instant he pushed the curtain aside; but he caught his men's expressions. His mind seemed to be working normally again. "You guys just saw a-fire?"

"That's all there was to see," said Evens. "Look, it's late, I better go rack out." Sloane nodded, tossing him the part block of explosive. The medic edged past Schaydin, into the tent and the still night beyond.

"Time for a guard check," Sloane said awkwardly and reseated himself before the microphone. One by one the heavy-set man began calling the vehicles sited around the circular berm. The tracks replied with the quiet negative reports that showed someone was awake in each turret. The CQ did not look up at his commander, but when Schaydin stepped back from the compartment and turned away, he heard a rustle. Sloane had pulled the poncho closed.

Schaydin sat down on the edge of his bunk, staring at the morsel of explosive. He saw instead the girl he had glimpsed in the flame. She had danced with her body, writhing sinuously like a belly dancer as her breasts heaved against the fire's translucence. Schaydin couldn't have been mistaken, the girl had been as real as-the Cambodian girl he had burned. And this girl's expression was so alive, her fire-bright eyes glinting with arrogant demand. What had the Cambodian girl been crying? But her eyes were dulled by the clinging napalm…

The pellet of C-4 came into focus as Schaydin's fingers rotated it. All right, there was a simple way to see whether his mind had been playing tricks on him.

Schaydin set the ball of explosive on top of a minican, the sealed steel ammunition box prized as luggage by men in armored units. C-4 burned at over 1000 degrees, the lieutenant remembered, but it would burn briefly enough that only the paint would scorch. The flame of Schaydin's cigarette lighter wavered away from the white pellet and heated the case in his hand. Then a tiny spark and a flicker of orange winked through the yellow naphtha flare. Schaydin jerked his lighter away and shut it. Fire loomed up from theplastique. Its hissing filled the tent just as the roar of an incoming rocket does an encampment.

And the dancer was there again.

The engineer platoon ran a generator which powered lights all over the fire-base through makeshift lines of commo wire. Left-handed and without looking at it, Schaydin jerked away the wire to his tent's light bulb. The sputtering fire brightened in the darkness, and in it the girl's features were as sharp as a cameo carven in ruddy stone. But the mouth moved and the dancer called to Schaydin over the fire-noise, "Viens ici! Viens a Marie!" Schaydin had studied French as an undergraduate in divinity school, enough to recognize that the tones were not quite those of modern French; but it was clear that the dancer was calling him to her. His body tensed with the impossible desire to obey. Sweat rimmed all the stark lines of his muscles.