Kate Elliott - Cold Fire

I dropped to my knees on cool white sand as fine as the sugar we tasted at festival days. The warmth of the wool riding jacket toasted my skin, making heat prickle down my arms and across my back. I fumbled with the buttons and yanked it off. My tightly laced linen bodice and the loose linen shift plastered my body. Sucking in air made me retch. I coughed up seawater and my dreams and hopes and fears until my throat was raw. But I was pretty sure I was going to live.

Two people limped toward me across the beach, a male in front and a female behind. He wore a dirty sleeveless shirt and loose trousers unraveling at the hems. She had on a patterned skirt tied around her hips and a loose, sleeveless shirt that exposed her brown arms from shoulder to hand, a sight rarely seen in Adurnam except in high summer.

As the man lurched up, I rose warily and spoke in a friendly way but without cringing.

“Greetings of the day to you, Maester. Maestressa. Salvete.”

He extended a hand in the radicals’ manner of greeting.

I reached out in answer, and only then did I think to wonder why his skin had an ashen cast instead of being brown and healthy; only then did I notice the dead, flat shine of his eyes.

He grabbed my wrist and yanked me toward him.

The woman screamed.

And he bit me.

He bit me.

I shrieked. I kicked him in the knee hard enough to topple him as I yanked my arm out of his grasp. I freed my cane and began pounding him over the head and shoulders. Yet he kept trying to get up. He grasped for me with my blood on his lips, smacking them together as if I were water and he parched.

“Let up! Let up, yee!” The woman stumbled to a halt out of range of my cane, holding her side as if winded. She was my age, with black hair twisted into locks and dusted with sand.

I leaped back, cane raised. She crouched beside the man. My blood smeared his hand, and he started licking it.

From the direction of the barely-seen tower, a high sweet bell tolled over the island like a warning call.

“He bit me!” He had bitten right through the sleeve of my undershift just below my elbow, leaving a tattered edge.

She jerked her chin sideways, and the spasmed blink of her brown eyes made me recoil. “Reckon yee wait. Dey come quick.”

My blood spotted the sand. When I glanced toward the green-blue sea, I was sure I saw a finned shadow churn the depths. I raised my bitten arm toward my lips.

She said, “Yee don’ want a touch dat. Let dey behiques suck it. Or yee become he.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Where yee hail from, maku?”

She had a firm grip on the man’s ankle. He was sniffing the air and groping toward me, but she was strong enough to hold him down.

A greasy slime of fear slid right down my spine. “What’s wrong with him?”

“He a salter.”

“A salter? Like salt plague?” I reeled backward. His dead flat eyes skimmed over me, looking not at me but at what lay beneath my skin: my hot, pumping, salt-laden blood. “Are you saying he’s riddled with the salt plague? The salt plague which makes your mind and body rot? The salt plague for which there is no cure?”

“Owo,” she said, which meant yes in one of the Mande languages.

The urge to retch rose so strongly I ran to the shade where vegetation probed the sterile sands. On hands and knees among the stiff-leafed plants I vomited up bile. My arm throbbed as if hot needles had been jabbed into my flesh and were engaged in a frantic dance aided by a swarm of impatient wasps. His flat, mindless gaze, as dull as an imbecile’s and less cunning. His lurching gait. The salt plague ate your body and your brain. There was no cure, no palliative, no hope, only a slow deterioration into living death.

The thud of footsteps made a counter-rhythm to the fear and pain drumming in my head. Maybe I was going to die, but I wasn’t dead yet. I shoved myself up. Figures swam into my vision.

“Salve. Salve, Perdita.”

Greetings, lost woman. The formal Latin soothed my ears.

A person moved toward me with palms outstretched in the sign of peace. “By Jupiter Magnus! It is Catherine Bell Barahal. How in the unholy hells you got here I cannot imagine.”

I brandished my cane. I wasn’t going to get bitten again. “Don’t come closer. I’ll kill you.”

“Catherine Bell Barahal. Look at me. We’ve met before.”

Five people stood in a cunning circle around me, so I couldn’t bolt. Behind, still on the beach with the sun’s glare washing their skin to the color of rotting corpses, the young woman was tugging on the thing that had bit me, trying to drag it away as it strained toward me. Three men and two women faced me. Four of the strangers were foreign. They had thick straight black hair very like my own and they looked a little like Rory but a lot more like someone else entirely: broad across the cheeks with high, flat foreheads and deep-set brown eyes, fit and healthy. In fact, they looked like people, nothing like the lurching man-thing that had bitten me. At least the monster in the water had been terrible in its perfectly awful beauty. Wouldn’t it have been better if it had killed me and I’d bled my life away in the water?

Blessed Tanit! I was going to die in the most horrible way imaginable.

My knees gave way. First I was standing and then I was on the ground.

One of the men crouched beside me, out of range of my cane.

“Catherine,” he said in a quiet voice. “I’m not a salter. Hold out your arm.”

His calm tone convinced me to hold out my arm. A woman upended a vessel. Salt water poured over the wound. I must have yelped, but all I could hear was the pain.

“You’re faint. Drink this.”

I was dead anyway so if he meant to poison me it would be preferable to die quickly instead of slowly. He handed me a hollowed-out gourd and unsealed its cork. I lifted its rim to my mouth. A sweet liquor with the kick of strong alcohol coursed down my throat. I began to chug it, until one of the women spoke curtly, and the speaker took hold of my undamaged wrist and stayed me.

“Wait. Let it settle. Then you can have more.”

Its searing after-bite blasted along my throat. Finally he came into focus. He had hair the reddish-gold color commonly seen in western Celtic tribes who had not mixed with Roman legionnaires and the Mande refugees from the empire of Mali.

“You were with Camjiata,” I whispered. “In the law offices.”

“That’s right. I’m James Drake. You do remember me?”

The liquid churned in my belly. I broke into a sweat. “Was that man a salter who bit me?”

“Stay calm.” He spoke to the others. By their voices, it seemed they were haggling.

“My mind must be rotting already,” I cried. “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

They came to a grudging consensus. The others moved off, taking the creature and the young woman with them. For some reason, the creature did not attack them.

“That’s because we’re speaking Taino,” he said, turning back to me. “It’s the common language in these parts. Drink up. It’s the local drink. It’s called rum.”

I drained the vessel. The liquor cleansed my mouth; it numbed and dazzled, spiking straight to my head. “Will rum cure me?”

“No. Rum can’t cure the salt plague. The seawater has flooded his saliva away. But I want to wash the bite again. You have to come with me. Please put the sword back in your belt. No need to wave it around.”

The sight of the jagged tooth marks bruising my forearm and the blood leaking sluggishly along my skin made me clumsy. I fumblingly fastened the cane to its loop. With a hand pressed to my back, he steered me to a sandy path that led into the trees. Birds clamored in a brazen assault on my ears. Where it was bright the sun was a lance piercing my eyes and where it was shadowed the earth was a monstrous presence trying to devour me. I could not get my balance despite my companion’s solicitous hand and respectful silence although I would have liked it better if he had talked to drown out my whirlpooling terror.