Edith Pattou - Fire Arrow

Brie crouched in the bottom of the rocking boat, cradling her torn fingers. She looked over at Sago, who stood, holding on to the mast, still with that wide, reckless smile on his face. The boat pitched from side to side as the sumog continued butting against the hull.

They were trying to capsize the boat.

"Raise the sail!" Brie cried out.

Sago shook his head, smiling, his eyes fixed on the water.

"Sago!" she shouted.

"A sailor sailed the sea, sea, sea, to see what he could see, see, see...," Sago sang.

Thump went the sumog.

Brie turned cold. What had possessed her to follow this ancient wraithlike man out into the middle of the sea, to hunt sumog? She must have been as mad as he.

The tilting boat suddenly seemed very small in the vast dark sea.

THIRTEEN

The Wedding Dance

Brie rose and took a step toward Sago, thinking to push him aside so she could get to the sail, but she stopped and stared. Some kind of light was coming from the Sea Dyak sorcerer, a golden glow from under his skin. His face, his hands, even his stalklike legs, were lit with a fiery radiance, burning brighter than a hundred lanterns. Then he gestured with a golden hand toward the sumog.

Brie turned her gaze on the writhing, undulating mass under the boat. There must have been fifty or more sumog in the water. She could feel the evil pulsing from them.

Turning to look back at Sago, she had to shield her eyes, for bursts of light began to appear on the surface of the water all around the boat, like tongues of flame. As she watched, transfixed, the movements of the sumog began to slow. The bright shafts of light were widening and thrusting down under the water, spreading like some kind of undersea wildfire. The sumog had gone still, and as the light lapped over them, they too began to glow, the brown serpentine bodies becoming suffused with light.

Brie was just about to avert her eyes when, with a flash, one sumog near her burst into pinpoints of light, and then there was nothing left except tiny phosphorescent specks floating in the water.

Hypnotized by the sight, Brie watched as one by one the sumog exploded, like so many iridescent soap bubbles. Then the sumog were gone, and the water around the boat sparkled with thousands of tiny motes of light.

Brie wheeled around to look at Sago, suddenly, irrationally afraid he, too, was going to burst. But the light was already fading from his body, and he gave her a smile.

Then he crossed to her. His arm was glowing only faintly as he took her injured hand. Wiping the blood off her hand with 3 cloth, he looked closely at the jagged cut across the backs of her fingers. Abruptly he lifted them to his mouth and sucked. Brie winced.

Then he spat into the twinkling water. For a moment he looked almost otherworldly, his pale face still radiant, with the red of Brie's blood around his lips. At last he wiped his mouth with the cloth.

"There is poison in the sumog tongue. I got most of it, but you may be sick for a day or two."

Brie stared at him in a daze. Then she sagged onto the bench, suddenly exhausted. Sago raised the sail and, as he took the tiller, Brie's eyelids closed. She slept all the way back to Ardara.

For the next few days, Brie was feverish and her head ached. When she tried to stand, everything had an annoying tendency to spin, so she stayed close to her pallet. Lom brought her books of Dungalan lore, which she read until her head pounded, then she slept again. When Sago had left her at the door of Jacan's hut that night, he had asked Brie not to tell the villagers of the sumog hunting expedition. "Life is more peaceful for an old Sea Dyak sorcerer if the people come only for fishing advice." So Brie told Lom and Jacan she must have caught a chill.

Sago did not visit during her sickness, but Lom reported that mysterious flickering lights had been spotted out on the water each night, and Brie knew what occupied the sorcerer.

When the sumog sickness had mostly passed, she went to see Sago at his mote. She found him a little paler than usual, but otherwise unchanged. He sang her a nonsense song about taten-pisc and custard, showed off a highly prized parrot fish he had caught that day, and said offhandedly that the fishing should be better now in Ardara. And it was.

The Ardarans credited their good fortune to a change in the current and wind direction. Later, when Brie heard the innkeeper and his cronies deride Sago as a useless, witless old man, she wanted to tell them of the radiant sorcerer who had turned a monstrosity into innumerable, beautiful specks of light.

But she did not.

***

The days grew shorter until the sun was winking below the horizon only a few hours after the midday meal. Brie was unused to the shortness of winter days in the north, and the perpetual darkness began to weigh on her like a full basket of dead fish, except that there were no full baskets; there was little fishing at all. During the dark months, Dungalans turned to storytelling and music to pass the time, and Brie could now see why Travelers were so highly valued.

When no Traveler came to Ardara, homegrown storytellers presided over the long nights, along with fiddlers and singers. There was also dancing, though Brie continued to demur when asked. At first she told herself she was weak from the sumog poison; for a long time after the sumog hunt, just the thought of moving in any direction resembling a circle made her head spin. But after the sickness had finally worn off, Brie still remained on the side of the room, watching. It became a standing joke between Brie and Lom; he swore that by spring he would have her up and twirling on a dance floor. And she swore, equally adamant, that he would not.

Although Brie had become part of the weave of life in Ardara, she was yet held at a distance by many of the townspeople. She was most comfortable with the fishermen, who had come to respect and accept her.

Brie wasn't quite sure how it happened but word had gotten around of her skill with bow and arrow. And one day a young village boy named Dil appeared at the door to her hut and shyly asked if she would teach him. He was a slight fellow, though tall for his age, with a head of unruly coppery yellow hair.

Though it was a windy day with the threat of rain, Brie took Dil to a sandy bay north of the harbor and immediately began his lessons. They started by fashioning a bow out of a piece of driftwood. Then Brie loaned him an arrow and a piece of bowstring, saying that arrow-and string-making would be part of their next lesson. Dil nodded eagerly.

As she guided his hands and directed him how to aim the arrow, Brie remembered herself long ago with her father. "Open your stance, Brie. Back straight, head upright. I said up, not down!" And "What are you trying to do, strangle the bow?! Don't grip so hard, relax your fingers."

At the end of the lesson Dil's eyes shone, and Brie found herself promising to meet him again the next day.

That night there was a gathering at Farmer Garmon's barn to hear the tales of the latest Traveler who had come to the village. The Traveler had an unpleasant face, long with a small oval of a mouth and red lips, which he licked often. But his stories were captivating, if a little frightening. Several of the children had to be taken, crying, from the barn by their mothers.

After readying herself for sleep that night, Brie took out the fire arrow. She had begun doing this in the past week, at the end of the day. At first she told herself it was because the arrow really ought to have a daily cleaning and polishing, but she was coming to believe that, for some reason, the arrow wanted her to hold it in her hands. At any rate she found it comforting, in a peculiar way, to feel the arrow humming under her fingers. After a while it was almost as if she needed to touch it. As the wyll Aelwyn needed her cup of cyffroi in the morning, Brie needed to feel the arrow humming against her skin before she went to sleep. And as this became a nightly ritual, she noticed that her dreaming changed, became more vivid, more acute.