The City was deceptively quiet, basking in the respite from the relentless heat. But beneath the surface, terror had begun to stir. Jehan won passage through the midday crowds with his size and his determination, searching with desperate hope for a familiar white-fair head.
He had hoped for it, but he did not credit his eyes when he saw it under the arch of a portico. For an instant he feared some calamity, illness or violence or perhaps true madness. But Alf met Jehan with clear eyes and a forbidding frown. “Why are you following me?”
“Why are you waiting for me?” Jehan countered.
Alf’s frown darkened. “You’re an utter fool.” He gripped Jehan’s arm with that startling strength of his and drew him forward. “Stay with me and keep your head covered.”
They heard and scented it before they saw it, screams and cries and an acrid tang of smoke that caught at the throat. As they rounded a corner, fierce heat struck them like a blow. Flames leaped to the sky, dimmed and thinned by the sun’s brightness.
All the strong current of the crowd rushed away from the fire, carrying everything in its wake. Alf breasted it like a swimmer, battling it, borne backward one for every two steps he advanced. Once he stopped; Jehan braced himself, expecting them both to be hurled down and trampled. Yet, although the panic-scrambling was as wild as ever, Alf made his way forward again all but unimpeded.
The roaring in their ears, Jehan realized, was not simply the clamor of many voices raised in terror, but the fire itself as it devoured everything in its path. He saw it leap from roof to roof across the narrow street, take hold on dry timbers and flare upward like a torch. Black demon-figures leaped and danced within it, casting themselves forth, shrieking as they fell.
Here and there amid the inferno were islands: lines of people struggling to hold back the flames, beating at them with cloaks and blankets and rugs, running from the cisterns with basins and buckets and jars; winning small victories, but losing ground steadily as wind and fire conspired to overrun them.
Alf passed them. The air shimmered in the fire-heat; as if by a miracle the crowd had thinned to nothing. Figures staggered about: a man bent under a heavy chest; a small child clutching at one still smaller and crying; a charred scarecrow with a terrible seared face, that wheeled about even as Jehan stared, and plunged into the flames.
Alf halted so suddenly that Jehan collided with him. “God in heaven,” he said softly but distinctly in Latin. Jehan, peering at his face through eyes smarting with smoke, saw there neither fear nor pity but a white, terrible anger. He swept the children into his arms, murmuring words of comfort, and passed them to Jehan. “Take them to safety,” he said.
The children were limp, passive, worn out with terror. Jehan settled them one on each arm, with the absent ease of one who had had numerous small siblings. “And you?”
“I’ll come back to you,” Alf answered.
Jehan hesitated. But the children whimpered, and Alf’s eyes were terrible. He retreated slowly at first, then more swiftly.
Left alone, Alf stood for a moment, his face to the fire. It tore at him, buffeted him, strangled him with smoke. He reached inward to the heart of his strangeness, gathered the power that coiled there, hurled it with all his strength against the inferno. The flames quailed before it. He laughed, the sound of steel on steel, with no mirth in it.
Yet the fire, having no mind, knew no master. It surged forward into the gap it had left, and reached with long fingers, enfolding the slim erect figure. Enfolding, but not touching. That much power he had still.
He laughed again briefly, but his laughter died, and with it his anger. Pain tore at his sharpened senses, mingled with terror. There were people in the heart of that hell, alive and in agony or trapped and mad with panic. He set his mind upon a single thread of consciousness, and followed where it led.
Jehan, setting the children down within the safety of the fire lines, saw Alf cloaked in flames. He cried out and bolted forward; a stream of fire like a shooting star drove him back.
He would have advanced again, but hands caught him and held him, in spite of his struggles.
“Will you show some sense?”
The voice was sharp and familiar. He stared blankly at Thea, who glared back. She was dressed as a boy, her hair caught up under a cap.
“You kept him from being burned,” he said. “Now he’s gone and done it, and where were you?”
“Don’t be an idiot.” She let him go. “He’s perfectly safe. The last thing he needs is to have you blundering after him and getting killed before he can stop you. Here, see if you can talk these people into getting upwind and staying upwind, and keeping the fire back.”
Already she was drawing away from him. “Where are you going?” he called after her.
“To be an idiot.” She vanished as Alf had, into a wall of fire.
o0o
The sun crawled across the sky. Beneath it, steadily, inexorably, the flames advanced. Not only wood but fired brick and even stone fell before them. With the sun’s sinking, the City wore a girdle of fire from the Sea of Marmora to the Golden Horn.
Jehan lowered his burden to the ground and coughed. Pain lanced through his scorched throat. The woman he had carried from her smoldering house moaned and twisted, overcome more by hysteria than by the smoke. She could heal herself, he thought with callousness born of a long day’s horrors. He coughed again, more weakly, and nerved himself for another foray.
A shape grew out of fire and darkness. Its face seemed vaguely familiar, but he saw only the cup it held out, brimming with blessed water. He snatched eagerly at it, caught himself with a wrenching effort, dropped stiffly to his knees. The woman gulped the water greedily. and cursed him when he took the cup away half full to give the rest to the boy who lay beside her.
Gentle hands retrieved the cup, returned it filled. “That is for you,” Alf said firmly.
He drank slowly in long sips. With each he felt his strength rise a little higher.
When no more remained in the cup, he surrendered it. Alf hung it from his belt and set his hands on Jehan’s shoulders. They were warm and strong, pouring strength into him, soothing his hurts.
“Where—” Jehan croaked. “Where—”
“We’ve opened Saint Basil’s as a field hospital. Thea is there, and Bardas—Sophia had no luck in fetching him to safety.”
“But you—the fire—”
“We’ve been bringing all the worst wounded to Saint Basil’s. Come with us and help us.” Carefully, without waiting for an answer, Alf raised the boy who had drunk the half of Jehan’s first cup. The woman he ignored, though she tugged at him, whining.
Saint Basil’s lay on the very edge of the inferno yet separated from it by a circle of garden. Streamers of fire, wind-driven, seemed to pass over it or else to fall short of it. The air felt cooler there, and cleaner; even amid the cries of agony and the bodies crowded into every space, there remained a sense of order and of peace.
After Alf had seen the wounded boy settled, he brought Jehan to a tall hard-faced man in blue who surveyed them with a grim eye. Jehan knew how unpromising he must seem to a master surgeon of Constantinople: filthy, stumbling with weariness, his mantle long lost, the rest of his garb charred, tattered, and all too obviously that of a Latin priest.
Alf laid an arm about his friend’s shoulders and said, “I’ve found the man I spoke of, Master. He’s trained as well as I am, if not better, and he speaks excellent Greek.”
“Do you now?” said Master Dionysios. “Prove it.”
“He flatters me, sir,” Jehan answered, “but then, he did the training. I suppose he’s entitled to brag a little.”
The Master glanced from the soot-streaked young face to the one that was somewhat cleaner and seemed a good deal younger. Whatever his thoughts, he only growled, “I suppose you know what a bath is for. When that’s done, you can find work enough to do.”
Jehan bowed.
“And,” Master Dionysios added grimly, “mind you, sir Frank. If anyone dies here, he won’t be sent to Heaven or Hell by a heretic. We can use your hands, and your training if you have any. Leave the prayers to those who can say them properly.”
Jehan’s eyes smoldered, but he held his tongue and bowed again with frigid correctness.
o0o
Deep night brought no relief, no slackening in the flood of wounded and dying. With all the hospital’s rooms and corridors filled, Master Dionysios sent the rest into the garden to be tended by the light of lamps and of the fire itself, a fierce red glow all about them.
Bathed and shaven and dressed in a fresh tunic that strained at every seam but was at least clean, Jehan labored in the garden. The scent of flowers was sweet and strong even over the stench of smoke and burning flesh; it refreshed him as the water had when he came out of the fire. Sometimes he saw Alf, marked by his luminous pallor, tending those whose hurts were greatest. Once he thought he recognized Bardas’ heavyset figure, if truly it was His Majesty’s Overseer of the Hospitals who held a man’s head while a surgeon cut away the remnants of a hand.
Thea attached herself to Jehan soon after he began, still in her boy’s clothes but without her cap. “I thought you’d be helping Alf,” he said.
She handed him the knife he had been reaching for. “He doesn’t need any help.”
“And you think I do?”
“l have no talent at all for healing,” she said, “but I’m good at holding heads and at talking sense into people.”
“And at keeping fire away from hospitals?”
“Maybe.”
“Well enough then,” he said. “If anyone asks you, you’re my apprentice.” He had a glimpse of her swift smile before she bent to comfort the child who lay at their feet, his eyes fixed in terror upon Jehan’s knife.
o0o
Alf saw the sunrise from the roof of Saint Basil’s, whither Master Dionysios had driven him with orders that he not return until he had rested and eaten. Food, he could not face; his body, stronger than a man’s, was not yet desperate for sleep. Others of the healers tossed and murmured under a canopy drenched with water to keep off the fire, with Jehan among them, sleeping like the dead.
He sat on the roof’s edge and clasped his knees. The dawn light seemed a feeble thing beside the fire that raged still in the City. It had retreated somewhat from the hospital, feeding now to the southward; flames had crept forth to lick the dome of Hagia Sophia. All between blazed or smoldered or crumbled in ruins: tenements, gardens, palaces, churches, and the arches and columns of the fora.
“People are saying that it’s the wrath of God,” Thea said, settling beside him.
“The wrath of man can be well-nigh as terrible.”
She leaned against him and laid her head on his shoulder. “If you’re tired,” she said, “I can shield us alone for a while.”
He sighed. “I’m not as tired as that. House Akestas is safe; Saint Basil’s will be now, I think.”
“Unless the wind changes.”
“Pray then. God ought to hear one of us.”
She was silent. His arm had settled itself about her shoulders; he seemed unaware of it, staring out again over the ravaged City. His eyes were bleak. “All our power,” he murmured, “great enough in old days to make us gods. But neither of us can do more here than keep the fire away from a pair of houses.”
“Have you tried?”
“A little.” He shivered. “Not enough to do any good at all.”
“It’s too big now for only two of us, and one all but untrained.”
“I know that. It’s only…I saw this, Thea. I saw it. And when it started, when I could have done something, I couldn’t move. I could only stand and gape like a fool.”
“When I was in Rhiyana,” she said, “the King’s sister fell ill. She was mortal, you see, and not young. Gwydion has great powers of healing, almost as great as yours, and his Queen has no less. They stayed with the Lady Alianora through every moment of her sickness and did everything they could do. But she died. We all mourned her, Gwydion most of all. She had been his favorite, his little sister who loved her changeling brother more than anyone else in the world. But…she died. Some things none of us can change.”
“Death and fate and the destruction of cities. I can bear that because I must. What’s unbearable is that I have to know it all before it happens.”
“Have to, Alf?”
“I’ve always been able to see at will in that place inside of me where my power lies. It looks like a tapestry with its edges stretching away into infinity. But when fate is strong or disaster imminent and inevitable, I can hardly think or feel or see. I only know what must be, and what no effort of mine can change.”
“It’s been heavy on you ever since Jerusalem.”
He nodded. “When Morwin died, he wanted me to find peace in the Holy City. For a little while I did find it. But I forgot what I should have known, that neither happiness nor peace can long endure. Not in this world.”
“Of course not. We need to be miserable to know what it really is to be happy.” She rose, drawing him with her. “We can’t work as much of a miracle as this city needs. But we can do more than most. Especially when we’ve put a little food in our stomachs.”
“I’m not—”
“Hungry,” she finished for him. “You never are. But you’re feeling very, very sorry for yourself. How much sorrier you’d feel if you’d lost your house and all you owned, and most of your family, and a good part of your skin besides.”
He started as if she had slapped him; flushed, and paled. “I could learn to hate you,” he said.
“You could. I’m too fond of telling the truth, aren’t I, little Brother?”
“And I can’t become a falcon to fly away from it.”
That struck home, but she laughed. “See? You’ve caught it from me. Come down with me and be kind to your poor body for once, the better to fight the rest of this battle.”
He hesitated. She turned her back on him and began to pick her way among the sleepers.
As he followed her, the sun climbed at last over the rim of the world, its great orb the color of blood or of fire.