Cold Fire

His eyes opened as at a shot. “No!”



“Then I could never actually know.”



He pushed up onto one elbow, dislodging my head from its pleasant resting place, and brushed hair from my cheek. “You can’t possibly have any complaints.”



“But I do.”



His hand stilled. “Name one.”



“You’re talking.”



He smiled and bent to kiss me.



Things were proceeding in just the way I had planned when a series of hollow pops rattled the roof. He released me and rolled off the bed.



“Do you need me?” I asked as he quickly dressed in a pair of faded and clumsily mended workman’s trousers and a singlet he pulled off a shelf.



“Of course I need you, Catherine, but not in that workshop. You were fortunate yesterday. They’re obsessed with my ability to kill combustion. They keep lighting different combinations of things on fire and adjusting me for distance, angle, and substances placed between me and the fire. Eventually they’re going to burn the whole place down.”



He went out the door so fast he forgot to close it behind him. I used a foot to hook my pagne off the floor and tied it just above my breasts the way we women had at Aunty Djeneba’s when we went down to shower, the cloth covering me from armpits to knees. I stuck my head out the door, but the little courtyard was deserted since the professora slept on the other side of the compound and all the other rooms in this wing were empty.



I hurried to the outhouse set out from the compound’s outer wall, which Vai had shown me in the middle of the night. Built into the wall was a washroom furnished with a brass tub, and a sideboard on which sat a copper basin, three pitchers, and threadbare pagnes to use as towels. The water we had splashed all over in the middle of the night had dried up. I filled the pitchers from the pump outside. I combed out my hair with my fingers and braided it, then twisted the braid around a stick from the garden and pinned it up on my head so I could wash. Afterward, I refilled the pitchers and hung up the towels to dry.



Back in the room, I tidied up the bed and the precautionary sheaths Vai had been so prudent, and confident, as to obtain the night of the areito. Smiling like a besotted fool, I shook out and folded the clothes we’d strewn all over. In my haste to get off his dash jacket, I had accidentally torn two buttons off a cuff, so I draped the jacket over the back of the chair for mending later. A cedar traveling chest tucked in a corner caught my eye. Kneeling, I opened it. Gracious Melqart! How many fashionable dash jackets and waistcoats could a man own?



How could a woman who loved cloth resist stroking each neatly folded garment? He favored vivid colors: deep browns as dark as his skin, burnished golds, kingly reds, and warm bright oranges, one midnight purple as dark as ecstasy, and indigos so saturated they would drive a peacock to envy. The stronger the patterns the better: plaitwork and interlace, dyed damask beaten and pounded until the fabric was stiff, bold geometric designs, and some strange, crazy block prints. At the bottom, folded between sheets of paper as if to hide it, lay the spectacular red-and-gold-chained dash jacket he had worn the night of the areito.



The door shut. “I have soot all over me, and you look so clean and inviting. But close the chest first.”



I kept the lid open. “Don’t you dare!”



He didn’t shift from the door, but somehow his tone made me feel as if he were nuzzling the nape of my bare neck. “Then wash me like you did last night, my sweet Catherine.”



My grip wavered on the lid as my flesh began to melt.



“Oh, curse it.” He opened the door just as I realized someone was walking up outside, and he spoke in a changed and entirely polite voice. “Peace of the morning to you, Professora.”



“Peace of the morning. My apologies.” When he stepped back, she appeared in the door, wearing a loose floor-length robe of cotton dyed in an undulating purple. A four-winged messenger bird balanced on her arm. It had an alert gaze and startling barb-like talons on its forelimbs. What I had taken for the second pair of wings was better described as the feathery ornamentation of its hind limbs. Like her gown, its feathers shaded from a deep purple to a pale gray. “I’ve a message for you, Maestressa Barahal.” She handed me a scroll and, with an understanding smile, stepped back. “There is rice porridge if you are hungry. Just come to the kitchen.”



She left.



I unrolled the scrap of paper to see Bee’s distinctively grandiose handwriting. “I hope all is well because I must assume you either found a way or made one and I am sorry to write but I just got word that I am to be handed over to the cacica at dusk so please come.”