Strange Fire, Page 2

  “Eighteen years old.” Honor Daniel Hamill gave a little whistle, then clapped a firm hand on Clive’s shoulder. “I never thought I’d see the day.”

  “He doesn’t look like a man to me,” Burns said, in that way he had of joking and not joking at the same time.

  Eddie Poplin squinted into the horizon. “We should get moving,” he said. “Only a couple hours of light left.”

  Eddie was Gemma, Flora, and Michael’s father, as well as the ministry’s official handyman (or, more technically, “factotum”—a word Clover had always liked, but that he liked even more now that he knew enough Latin to translate it: “do everything”).

  As Clover finished his meager helping of pie (the slice had been closer to fifteen degrees than twenty, and the bottom was burnt from the pot), he watched his brother head off with the other men, toward the clearing where the gathering would be held. Clive gave Gemma a little wave good-bye, and she waved right back, smiling coyly.

  Some dark burrowing demon of jealousy quickened in Clover’s belly; he felt like taking a swing at someone, or throwing up. Maybe he would’ve, too, if not for the pair of arms that wrapped around him from behind, still powdered with flour. He made sure Gemma wasn’t watching, then allowed himself to relax into his mother’s embrace, softening like stale bread brought back to life with a bit of water and a few minutes in the oven.

  “You look a hundred feet off the ground, darling. Everything all right?”

  “Sure, Ma.”

  Ellen Hamill followed her son’s line of sight, out to where the men had begun laying out the tent poles.

  “You know your time’s gonna come. Two years is nothing.”

  “I know.”

  She turned him around and gripped him by the shoulders. Of the million injustices the Lord had visited on Clover, perhaps the most painful was his height—where Clive seemed destined to take after their father, who towered over almost everyone he met, Clover had gotten the literal short end of the stick. Face-to-face with his mother, his eyes were on the exact same level as hers.

  “You believe this or not, but growing up isn’t all roses and kittens. Your brother might be a man in the eyes of God now, but being a man means bearing a man’s responsibilities.”

  “I could bear ’em.”

  “I’m not saying you couldn’t. I’m saying you should enjoy the fact that you don’t have to. It doesn’t last.” There was a deep tenderness in his mother’s eyes, such that he had to look away. “You know your father and I are awful proud of you, don’t you?”

  “I know you are.”

  “Daniel is too. He’s just not good at showing it.”

  “He shows it to Clive.”

  “Clive’s chosen a simpler path. Or not simpler, maybe, but one your father understands. You getting noticed by the Library, learning all those things . . . I think you scare him a little.”

  Clover rolled his eyes at this obvious lie. “What’s there to be scared about? I barely learn anything. You wouldn’t believe how many rules they’ve got.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with rules, Clover. What does the Filia tell us about knowledge?”

  There were a number of verses his mother could’ve been referring to, but Clover knew her tastes well enough by now. When it came to the Gospels, she’d take Jiehae and Ivan over Armelle (and she never wanted to hear any Nelson). “Learning is a lightening,” he quoted.

  “That’s right.” She drew him into a hug. “I just don’t want you to float away before you have to.”

  “I won’t.”

  She gave him one last squeeze. “You should get started tuning. The work’ll be good for you.”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  He wiped his pie-sticky hands on his trousers and headed for the small wagon. Down in the clearing, the men had smoothed out the canvas, which lay on the grass like some sort of huge, flat mushroom. Burns had taken off his shirt, revealing his heavily muscled chest and the quilt of scars that were the origin of his nickname (if you could call it a nickname, given that nobody knew his actual name). Though they’d been on the road together for nearly four months, Clover still didn’t trust the man. Burns was a sergeant in the Descendancy Protectorate, tasked with keeping them safe as they preached the word of God along the Tails. But they’d been on plenty of tours before this one, and they’d always gotten by without any protecting. Was the world really getting more dangerous, or was Burns’s presence yet another example of the Protectorate’s increasing involvement in the doings of the Church?

  Clive said he’d heard all sorts of rumors about the sergeant back in the Anchor: that he’d been born outside the Descendancy, that he’d been married to a captured Wesah warrior woman, that he once pulled out a man’s eyeball in a bar fight. But so far as Clover could see, all the sergeant ever seemed to do was make off-color jokes and brood. And why didn’t he ever bow his head during service, or sing along with the hymns? What was he looking for when he scanned the crowds that gathered beneath the tent to worship, his eyes narrowed like those of some hungry bird of prey?

  Eddie and Honor Hamill finished fitting together the pieces that made up the tent’s main post, and then all four men dove under the fabric, little lumps moving like feet beneath a bedsheet. The tent seemed to lift itself up by the center, as if the devil himself had reached down from the sky, pinched the sheet of canvas, and pulled. They emerged through the front flap a minute later, red-faced and sweating. Raising the tent was hard work, and now that Clive was a man, he’d have to do it before every gathering.

  It was some slight consolation, anyway.

  Inside the small wagon, the soft leather cases in which the instruments were kept were roped tightly to the walls. Clover unpicked the knots and laid them all out in a row, and then he pulled out the tuning fork—a gift from his father on his tenth birthday.

  Not a lot of things stay constant in this world, Honor Hamill had said. But this will.

  And it was true. No matter the time of day or the orientation of the stars or the clemency of the weather, the fork rang out its piercing G like a call to arms against chaos.

  Clover tapped the metal against the wooden floor of the wagon. There was something magical about the way the sound just appeared, pulled out of the very air. Not for the first time, he considered the question of just what made one tone different from another. If he’d had to put it into words, he would’ve said it had something to do with how fast the note shook in your ear—only that wasn’t quite right. He’d asked Attendant Bernstein to explain it to him once, but it turned out acoustics was yet another subject he was too young to learn about.

  He began with his own instrument, the mandolin, then went on to Gemma’s fiddle, his father’s bass, and his brother’s guitar. It was anxious, delicate work. They only had so many extra strings to last them through the tour, and given the heat of the days and the changes in humidity and elevation as they’d passed over the Teeth—the mountain range to the east of the Anchor—breaks were inevitable. Two tours back, Clive had had to play a five-stringed guitar for a whole month.

  Luckily, today was a good day, and all the strings remained intact. Clover put the guitar back in its case and began carrying the instruments one by one to the tent, which was now fully stretched out and staked. Inside, Eddie was hanging the big annulus, while Clive and the two younger Poplin children cleared away any rocks that might trip someone up during the dancing. Just as Clover was making his last trip from the wagon, Gemma came in with a couple mugs of pine tea. She handed one to her father, then offered the other to Clover.

  “What about Clive?” he asked.

  “I already made him one. It’s his birthday, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is.”

  But she was always looking out for Clive first. Didn’t matter that it was his birthday one bit.

  Gemma Poplin was seventeen years old, born right smack-dab between the two brothers. Clover thought about her in ways he knew he wasn’t supposed to—not just because lustful thoughts we
ren’t holy, but because she wasn’t his to think about. Eddie had been Honor Hamill’s best friend since they were boys; it only made sense for their firstborn children to marry. Clive knew this, of course, and as a result, he treated Gemma exactly the same way he did all the girls who fawned over him: not mean or anything, just careless, the way you treated anything that had been handed to you, that you’d never had to fight for.

  Of course, even if Gemma hadn’t been promised to Clive, it wasn’t as if she ever would’ve fallen for Clover. No girl wanted a husband younger than herself, especially one with all the social graces of a wild dog.

  So he would always be the little brother in Gemma’s eyes, however much he wished it different.

  “Something got you blue?” Gemma asked.

  Clover hoisted the double bass up onto the platform, then hopped back to the ground. “Everybody keeps asking me that. What would I be blue about?”

  “I don’t know. Your brother turning eighteen, maybe? I know it’s not easy—”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Good. ’Cause I won’t be dancing with any moody boys tonight.” She leaned over (an inch taller than him, of course) and whispered in his ear. “You’ll save one for me, won’t you?”

  Clover couldn’t help but smile. “Slowest song there is.”

  Gemma put on a bit of an outerlands accent. “Then I’ll be waitin’ for you in the darkest corner of the room.” She gave a little flash of the eyes, then turned on her heel and swept out of the tent.

  They talked to each other like that, but it was just playing at words. They wouldn’t ever meet in the darkest corner of the room. And if they danced tonight, it would be like a couple of kissing cousins, not sweethearts.

  All part of the good Lord’s plan, Clover’s father would say. But that thought was seldom as comforting as he made it out to be. In fact, a good portion of the time, the good Lord’s plan seemed a downright mess.

  2. Clive

  IT WASN’T AS IF CLIVE had expected to wake up on his eighteenth birthday and find himself transformed, but he’d hoped he would at least feel a little different. More mature, maybe. More confident in his convictions. Less anxious about the future.

  But no: he woke into the same body and the same mind he’d always had. He said the same morning prayer and sat down to the same breakfast. His pre-gathering duties had shifted, from helping his mother and the other children clean up after dinner to helping the men prepare the tent, but this turned out to be a terrifically unfavorable trade. He didn’t have much to add to Eddie and Honor Hamill’s conversation about the fraught political situation back in the Anchor, and though he had plenty of questions he wanted to ask Burns, there was something about the sergeant that discouraged idle chatter. Clive missed being up at the big wagon, where Michael and Flora would be running around tickling each other, and Clover would be going on and on about some tree or beetle, and Gemma would be all smiles and sweet looks.

  Clive glanced uphill and saw her, long blond hair tinted rose by the last rays of sunset, and felt such a complicated snarl of emotions that he couldn’t have separated out the strands if he’d wanted to.

  “So how many people we expecting tonight?” Burns asked. Clive was glad to have his train of thought interrupted.

  “Should be a good turnout,” Eddie said. “Amestown proper’s got about four hundred souls, and there’s twice that number working the land nearby.”

  “That’s a lot of people to keep track of.”

  “You expecting trouble?” Clive asked.

  “Maybe. Amestown’s been part of the Descendancy for five years now, and they still haven’t sent a shekel in taxes.”

  “It’s hardscrabble out here,” Eddie said, an edge to his voice, as if he were speaking up for one of his own children. “There’s nothing extra to go around.”

  “It’s the principle of the thing. We haven’t asserted our authority, so they don’t respect us.”

  “We don’t have to assert our authority,” Honor Hamill said. “That’s what God is for.”

  Burns snorted. “Well, God’s got a bad habit of not showing up when you ask him to. So we mortals occasionally have to make our own plans.”

  Clive covered his mouth so his father wouldn’t see him smirking.

  “Your plans are your own, Sergeant. We work for the Church, not the Protectorate. And I’ll thank you not to fill my son’s head with nonsense.”

  “My apologies, Honor,” Burns said, but Clive could tell he wasn’t really sorry.

  They finished raising the tent just as the shadows of the trees at the edge of the clearing began to stretch out and dissolve into the general darkness. Soon after, Clive spotted the first lantern bouncing up the path from town. Eddie was right that there was likely to be a big crowd at the gathering. Though Amestown had a local novice who ran Sunday services, there hadn’t been an official visit from an Honor since the town’s incorporation. In these times, and at such a remove from the Anchor, nobody within ten miles was likely to pass up the opportunity for a little bit of preaching and a bigger bit of dancing.

  The whole ministry was in the tent now, helping to get all the last details squared away. Clive sat on the edge of the stage, looking over his father’s notes for the evening’s sermon—Honor Hamill insisted his son provide him with at least three constructive suggestions every week—but he was finding it difficult to concentrate. Gemma’s younger brother, Michael, was making a big show of trying to play Honor Hamill’s double bass.

  “These strings hurt my fingers,” he said.

  “Because it’s too big for you,” his twin sister, Flora, chided. “That’s why you play mandolin and I play fiddle.”

  “But I’m bored of the mandolin. Clover won’t teach me any new songs.”

  “I told you,” Clover said, “nothing new until you can play ‘I Came Me Down to Ground’ without making any flubs.”

  “But it’s so haaaard!” Michael turned the last word into a good three-syllable moan. He and Flora were both ten years old, so cute it made you want to kick them in the shins sometimes. They were still new to music, and only allowed to play tambourine and shaker during gatherings.

  “You think the mandolin is hard?” Clive asked, putting his father’s notes aside.

  “It is hard!” Michael said.

  “How hard?” Clive reached out and caught the boy around the waist, lifting him up off the ground. “As hard as I’d have to throw you to hit the top of this tent?”

  “Don’t do it!” Michael squealed.

  “Do it!” his sister squealed even more loudly.

  Clive rolled Michael out onto the grass, tickling him mercilessly. “I would, but your da would give me hell if I broke all your toes.”

  “You would not!” Michael said through his giggles.

  “Try me sometime. You’ll see what you get.” Finally he allowed the boy to escape his clutches. “Now you and your sister better scoot. Gathering’s gonna start soon.”

  The first few parishioners had already found their spots close to the stage, and more were streaming in all the time. They were dressed in their Sunday best: long muslin dresses dyed yellow and red, white linen shirts, straw hats, even a couple of suits. Though a couple of chairs had been carried up from town to accommodate the oldest members of the congregation, the majority of the crowd sat on wool blankets on the ground. Each family arrived with at least one tallow dip—all of which would be lit and set in brackets pinned to the inside of the tent—and a basket full to the brim with food and liquor; Descendant gatherings were about religion, sure, but there wasn’t anything in the Filia about keeping sober.

  Clive went out behind the tent, hoping to finish reading over his father’s sermon, but his brother followed right on his heels.

  “It’s not a joke, you know,” Clover said. “That boy refuses to practice.”

  “You mean Michael? He’s young. He’ll come around to it.”

  “But he’s lazy!”

  “He’s ten! Don’
t be so hard on him.”

  Clive turned his attention back to the sermon, but he could sense his brother still had more to say. Something had been weighing on Clover all day; Clive had never seen him look so joyless in the face of a sugar cake. It had to be the fact that Clive had turned eighteen. Here was the one math problem Clover couldn’t solve: How was it that no matter how much older he got, his brother managed to remain even older?

  “Clover, I’m sorry if today’s been tough on you, but you have to underst—”

  “Are you gonna marry Gemma when we get home?”

  The words had come quickly, tumbling over one another like rocks in a landslide; already, Clover looked as if he wished he could put them all back in his mouth again. Once upon a time, Clive’s younger brother had talked about his crush on Gemma openly, as if it were the most unembarrassing thing in the world. But as soon as it became clear that Honor Hamill and Eddie had more or less promised their firstborn children to each other, Clover had gone quiet. For the last two years, in spite of sleeping just a couple of feet away from each other every night, Clive and his brother had managed to avoid the subject of girls entirely—all so they wouldn’t have to have this exact conversation.

  “I don’t think anyone wants us to get married before I get my robes,” Clive said, choosing his words carefully.

  “But you do want to marry her.”

  A question without a question mark, to which Clive could only provide an answer that wasn’t an answer.

  “It’s what we’re meant to do.”

  His brother took a moment to absorb this, then turned and stepped back through the tent flap without another word. Clive called out after him, but he knew it wouldn’t do any good: Clover was nothing if not stubborn.

  He gave up on his father’s sermon. Too many questions were bouncing around inside his head: Why had he made it sound as if he saw his impending marriage as a burden, rather than a blessing? Why did the thought of being Gemma’s husband fill him with such a terrible feeling of disquiet? And if he did marry her—no, when he married her—how long would it take his brother to forgive him? Would they ever get back to the easy affinity of childhood, when the only things they argued over were where to build the tree fort, or who would play the hero in their games of bandits and soldiers?