The Burning Stone

Was it the heavens that moved, east to west? Or was it the Earth, revolving west to east? Both Ptolomaia, writing centuries ago, and the Jinna astronomer al-Haytham, writing only ten years before, believed that physical law and observable fact proved that the Earth remained stationary at the middle of the heavens while the heavens rotated around it. But more ancient authors had argued otherwise. Indeed, the fact that no one truly knew the answer made the questions all that much more interesting to her.



Sanglant grunted as she worked through a knot in his back. God knew he didn’t truly belong here in this nest of mathematici. And yet, why not? He needed a refuge, too. He needed to rest; he needed a place where he could be at peace. He had fewer nightmares now, and he didn’t act quite as much like a dog as he had before. But sometimes she worried that he would grow bored with nothing to do but fell trees and help Heribert build things. She wasn’t ready to leave yet. There was so much to learn that it hurt sometimes, knowing that she had finally come to a place where they would let her learn without punishing her for what she was.



And yet…



She stroked his cheek gently. “Why do I never feel I can trust them?” she whispered, leaning to his ear. The servants curled and hid everywhere, and she never knew what they reported to Anne, who controlled them. “Why don’t I trust my own mother?”



But he had fallen asleep.



In truth, maybe he would never know the answer. Maybe he could never know it. He couldn’t do everything for her. Nor could she let him.



She kissed him, slipped on her sandals, and left. She trod the accustomed path, worn smooth now, to the pits out beyond the settlement. The night lay cloudy and cool around her, but she had no trouble seeing in the dim light; she never did. With her pregnancy, she had given up wearing leggings because it was so inconvenient and wore only her old tunic, belted loosely now so it draped over her swelling abdomen and fell to her calves. None of her companions ever said anything out loud, but it was clear to her that they disapproved of the casual way in which she and Sanglant dressed—she like a commoner, he like a soldier. Yet although the magi themselves wore robes of the finest cloth, that cloth was now worn threadbare; they cared little for such trivial considerations as clothing—or so they claimed. And anyway, Da had always said that, “Fine feathers don’t make a duck, swimming does.”



But their censure made no difference in any case. She had no cloth for new clothing, and no way to get any unless the servants could weave a robe for her from stray beams of light or the silk of spiders or the veins of leaves. No doubt they’d do it if they could, if only to please Sanglant. She could just see a dozen or so twined around the jutting eaves of the old shed, but as she walked down the path to the stone tower, only one servant followed her. It was always the same one, a femalelike daimone with the texture of water, flowing, translucent, yet it wasn’t truly interested in her but in what grew inside her, as if the fact of her pregnancy had laid a compulsion on it to remain by her side. The others still seemed to fear her.



She pushed open the tower door, found a lantern on the table, and opened its milky glass door. Licking forefinger and thumb, she touched them to the wick. Light flared, oil caught, and the lantern burned steadily. Anne had taught her this trick, had schooled her in the habits of mind that allowed her to control such insignificant amounts of fire, like to a child learning her letters so well that she need not think consciously of them to know them instantly on sight. The servant flicked away from the fire, frightened of it, but the creature did not leave the chamber, only hovered nearby like an anxious nursemaid. Liath set tablet and stylus down on the table and unlocked the book cupboard where the ephemerides lay stored among other such treasures, the repository of centuries of knowledge hoarded and saved from the ravages of time and ignorant men. So Anne always said.



Her hand touched the spine of the well-worn ephemerides, but instead, distracted, she drew out Ptolomaia’s Syntaxis. She opened it to the second chapter where the esteemed author set down the six hypotheses. One, that the heaven is spherical in shape, and moves spherically; Two, that the Earth is spherical; Three, that the position of the Earth is at the middle of the universe; Four, that in size and distance the Earth has the ratio of a point relative to the sphere of the fixed stars; Five, that the Earth is at rest, not experiencing motion from place to place; Six, that there are two motions in the heavens, one daily motion that carries everything from east to west, and the motion of the Sun, Moon, and planets along the ecliptic from west to east.



She rose again and stepped outside. Was it pregnancy that made her restless, or the sudden infusion of knowledge, the constant studying, the pressure of her five companions in the arts whose expectations pressed on her endlessly? They wanted so much from her. She wanted so much from herself. Only Sanglant expected nothing of her, and yet that wasn’t true either; his expectations were only different than theirs, less open and forceful but perhaps more insidious.