Jo Clayton: Changer’s Moon

Julia looked down at her thigh. The vuurvis drop was smaller than a pinhead, but the pain was growing. It was bearable, so she shrugged aside her worry and limped up the ramp behind limping Rane, began helping her to get the burn victims down to the ground. The first time she saw the heavy flame crawling over the flesh of a living woman, she started to try smothering it, but Rane snatched her hand away. “No good,” she said. “All we can do is let it burn itself out. Or let the healwomen cut away the saturated flesh. Nothing helps, nothing will put out vuurvis, you’ll just get it on you.”

She carried the moaning meie down the ramp and laid her on the ground beside the rows of the others, called the medic, a girl named Dinafar, to put her out until the truck came. An eerie hush was settling over the wall, muting the screams of the burned, the grinding of motors coming toward her, stopping, coming on, stopping as the trucks east and west picked up the burned. The medics had arrived swiftly at each of the burn sites but the girls knew enough about vuurvis to know there was nothing they could do but help bring the injured down to wait for the trucks, gently putting the worst sufferers out by pressure on the carotids. Over all this was that straining silence that Julia thought was in her head until she looked along the wall.

The west tower was no longer burning, it throbbed with the clear green light of the healer. Dom Hern, she thought. “Dom Hern,” she said aloud.

Rane grunted. “She wouldn’t let him die.” Lifting her head, she sniffed at the air. “She’s draining us for him.”

Julia shrugged, not understanding what Rane meant. She watched the tower glow, the light running in waves down the stone and into the ground, gasped as a thought seized hold of her. She caught the medic as she went past. “When the truck comes, take the burned to the tower and pack them in the lower floors.”

Dinafar’s eyes opened wide. Not understanding, she turned to Rane. “What…?”

Rane looked at the verdant glow, then at the groaning forms stretched out around her. “Do it, Dina. Get hold of the other trucks and tell them.”

Dinafar pushed the hair out of her eyes, then her weary face lit with a hope she hadn’t had before. She ran to the motorcycle that had fetched her from the hospital tent, spoke into the teletalk strapped to the handlebar, then trotted back up the ramp and worked with a greater urgency to get the last of the injured down.

Julia looked at her watch and was startled to see that less than a half hour had passed since the beginning of the attack. She looked down, looked away. There were five dead like Liz. Dead but their flesh still burning. Two of them with rifles. Exiles. Three of them clutching the burned remnants of crossbows. She couldn’t recognize them, knew them only by figuring out who was missing among the wounded. She whispered the names to herself, a leave-taking of comrades, and tried unsuccessfully to ignore the pain in her thigh and the moans of the burned still alive. She turned her back on them and stared at the tower, grieving for both the dead and the living as she waited for the truck that might save the dying.

Tuli lay on the hillside, mouthing all the curses she could recall, furious at herself for her complacent conviction that Ildas had destroyed all the vuurvis oil in that extravagant annihilation in their first raid. The fireborn snuggled against her and tried to comfort her. She stroked and soothed him but she was too angry and afraid to calm herself.

Coperic touched her arm. “Can you…?” He finished the question with a gesture toward the barrels where the Ogogehians gingerly loaded oil into clay melons and plugged the holes in them with wax and wicks, working slowly and with great care to keep the heavy oil from touching any part of hand or face. Three high Nor were there to protect them, the fourth was Kole’s constant shadow. The rest of the norits were clustered about the seven catapults spaced along the wall from cliff to cliff.

Tuli scowled at the barrels, shook her head. “Too much Nor, Ildas couldn’t get near.” She pulled the back of her hand across her face, felt the rasping of dry, chapped skin against dry skin. She almost couldn’t smell Coperic anymore; she was about as ripe as were he and the others. He was gaunt and grimy, his hair lank and too long, the front parts sawn off with his knife to keep them out of his eyes. None of them had been out of their clothes for more than a passage, the only water available to them cost a day’s trip along the road across the pass. She watched him, hoping the clever mind behind that unimpressive face would find a way to attack the vuurvis. His eyes were slitted, his mouth open a little, his hands were closed hard on a clump of grass.

“One spark,” he whispered, so softly she almost didn’t hear him. He was right, a spark was all that horrible stuff needed. But it looked impossible. The Nor wouldn’t let fire get near those barrels, and they were sticking tight as fleas.

Bella stirred, turned her face toward them. She was worn too, was brown and dark as damp earth now, her cousin Biel was brown and dark; dirt and oil and sweat and soot had dulled the fine gold patina of their skin, had darkened the bright gold hair to the color of last year’s leaves rotting back into the earth. “We can get close,” Bella said. She chuckled. “Long as we try it down wind.” She sobered. “They’re focused on the wall. Look at them. Gloating, I’d say. And the Ogogehians are staying well away from the barrels, look how careful those men are to keep the fumes from blowing on them. And look there. And there.” She began pointing out clumps of brush and cracks, working out a line of progress along the slopes that would take a careful crawler close to the hollow where the barrels were.

Coperic followed the darting finger. “Mm.” He watched a mercenary ride his macai at a slow walk away from the barrels, holding a net sling of clay melons stiffly out from his side. One of the Nor left the barrels and rode beside him, shielding him from anything off the wall. “Nekaz Kole,” he whispered.

Tuli took the words as the curse they were. “He don’t miss much,” she said.

The two Nor sitting on the knoll above the barrels suddenly pulled their macain around until they were facing the mountains, their eyes searching the slopes. Hastily Coperic and Tuli went flat, the others ducking down beside them, shoving their faces into the dirt. Tuli felt the Nor eyes pass over her like an itch in the back of her neck. She didn’t move until Ildas cooed reassurance to her. She lifted her head, exploded out the dead air and sucked in a hard cold lungful of new. The others sat up and began breathing again. “Seems like they don’t want folk watching them,” Tuli said softly.

Coperic glanced through the screen of brush. “They calmed down now.” He eased around and went snaking down the slope into the small socket eaten out of the mountainside where they usually slept. Little sunlight got through the brush, so it was chill as any icehouse. He squatted at one end and waited until the others had crowded in and settled themselves. “Had a thought,” he said.

He let a moment pass, his eyes shut, his brows drawn together, fingers of one hand tapping on his bony knee. Shadow seeped into the wrinkles of his face and hands, carved heavy black lines into his flesh. The muscles of his face shifted just slightly, enough to turn his face into a changing web of light and dark around the strong jut of his nose. Watching him, Tuli measured the change in herself by the change she saw in him; as the days slid past, as tenday slid into tenday and the stadia dropped behind them, he had stripped away his sly bumbling tavern-host mannerisms, dropping one by one as they moved down the Highroad and settled above the army. Now he was a prowling predator, limited to a single aspect of himself, little left of the complex man she’d caught glimpses of in Oras. They were all narrowed by the hunger, the stress, the killing, the danger, with the softer sides of their natures put away for the duration of the war. Sometimes she wondered if she would ever see those times again, gentler times when she could laugh and smile and run the night fields, sometimes she wondered if she’d be able to slough the memories that even now gave her nightmares. She realized suddenly that tomorrow was her birthday. Hers and her brother’s. Teras. Fifteen? How strange. She felt more like fifty.