The Secrets of a Fire King Read online

The midwife looked surprised, then troubled. “No, she isn’t dead. Oh, child,” she said, and even though I was nine years old and tall for my age, even though she herself had worked past exhaustion, she picked me up and carried me to my mother’s room. My mother’s breathing was shallow, uneven, she looked as pale as the new babies she had borne. But when I touched her on the arm I felt her warmth, and some string held tight within me started to release.

  “There,” the midwife said, stroking my hair, pressing my head against her shoulder and leading me back to the other room, where the light breathing of my sisters filled the air. She pushed me down on the narrow bed and draped an old sarong across me.

  “That’s better, Eshlaini. That’s it, now. Sleep.”

  I DID SLEEP, but not deeply and with many dreams. When I woke up the house, though very dark, was alive with movement and urgent, whispered voices. The door to my mother’s room was slightly open. I could see my father sitting by the bed, my mother’s hand in his. He was praying. I was only nine, too young to understand the words, but I remembered them from other deaths, I knew the portent of those sounds.

  All that followed is no longer very clear. The words rained down around me, and suddenly I was standing up, illuminated with an idea of how to save my mother. I remember that the floor felt cool against my bare feet, that moonlight came in through the window and lit the crib where my two sisters slept. Their mouths moved, even in sleep, and their hands and feet jerked sometimes with the motions of the womb. In the sudden silence from my mother’s room I reached for a thick pillow and placed it above the sleeping faces of my sisters. I was nine years old, with a literal mind, and I remembered the midwife’s words. If these twins would cost my mother her life, then I reasoned I could save her if they died.

  There is no way to know, now, what might have happened. I might have carried through, possessed as I was with the madness of loss, with the misguided logic of an egocentric child. But I was not an evil girl, or truly demented, and it’s just as possible that I would have stopped. It’s possible that, hovering above my sisters, I would have broken down, retrieved the pillow, and sobbed into the feathers. I can’t know, now, which would have happened, and it no longer matters. For my father found me in that moment of intent. He appeared in the doorway quite suddenly, silhouetted by the terrible and empty light of my mother’s room. He gave a roar so loud it froze the scene forever in our histories. It called my brothers forth; they tumbled into the room like birds spilled from a nest. They were witness to the blow my father gave me, the punch of a grown man inflated with wild fury against a death he was powerless to stop. And they were there to hear it when he gave me, finally, the name I would carry through my life.

  “Take this one,” he said, pushing me across to the oldest boy, the brother who was said to resemble the soldier. “Take her and lock her in her room. She has gone mad, like her grandmother before her. Rohila.” He spat the name out like poison. “This evil girl, she is Rohila once again.”

  ROHILA. It was a name we all knew, but rarely spoke. She was my father’s mother, at one time young and lovely, known for both her beauty and her skill at sewing. Brides sought her out, and rich girls, and she sat night by night in the lamplight, her needle flashing like a minnow in the dark. Her own clothes were so elegant and graceful that she drew the eyes of every man. It is said that when she finally married, another girl was so distraught that she cast some black magic on Rohila. No one could have guessed this, for at first Rohila and her husband were very happy. It was only later that people remembered how she was plagued that year with headaches and strange dreams. Soon she was pregnant, but from the beginning there was something wrong. Rohila grew round without growing plump, and it is said that there was a nervousness about her, a kind of tightness that showed around her eyes.

  Everyone knows about the fevers that can follow childbirth, the precautions that must be taken to prevent them. It was not Rohila’s fault that the midwife was unskilled or forgetful, jealous or enchanted. It was not her fault that the herbs were not prepared, that the offering went unmade, so that after the birth of her first and only child my grandmother fell into a temporary madness. They found her standing on a bridge with the baby, my father, in her arms, ready to drop him into the creek. After that she was cast away by her husband in favor of another wife, the woman of sweet pastries, the woman I knew as Grandmother. Rohila was sent home, to live in isolation. She tended to her aging parents; when they died she went to help her brothers and their wives. I saw her once, a bent old woman who shuffled away from children, who gave us bad dreams. Aside from this I know nothing at all, though sometimes now I imagine that I understand her life.

  For, in the way of our name legacies, her life became mine. I was only a child, but on the day my sisters were born and my mother died, my destiny was fixed. I became Rohila, the one who would not marry, the one who would remain at home to care for my brothers and, in his old age, my father. It was not spoken, but simply understood. Ask my family about the justice of it all, and they would have looked up surprised, they would have called it fate. They, named for the strong and sane and famous, could afford to believe in the preordained. If everything was destiny, then it was not their responsibility to intervene. And yet there was a truth I soon discovered that they never paused to think about. If I was to be an old maid, chained forever to that house, then this was also true: it was my father’s will that made it so. It was his decree, his choice.

  WHAT IS DESTINY, and what is in the power of the individual? By seventeen I was strong but petite, with long slender limbs, and wrists and ankles as delicate as bone. I learned quickly that the body is one destiny. No one who saw me would have guessed my fate within that house. The young men, watching me walking to and from my school, their eyes lingering on my skin like the warm light of sunset, none of them guessed. They followed me, slipped notes into my books that spoke of love and the future, of other lives. I should have been smart enough to see these for what they were, a lure connected to the hook of another predetermined life. I should have remembered my mother, turning her head away when the midwife warned her to make a choice she didn’t have. But I was young and foolish, and those notes in my pockets were as light and persistent as hope. I smiled shyly at the young men, blushed becomingly, and soon they began appearing at my house, hoping to gain my father’s permission to marry me.

  On the night the first young man came, I stood at the upstairs window and watched him ring the bell. I had his note promising to win me, and I had a wild joy in my heart. I thought my father would reconsider. After all, no one wanted an unmarriageable daughter. My suitor had dressed very carefully, his hair had been combed with water until it looked polished. When he disappeared inside the house, I waited to be summoned.

  Time passed slowly for me then. Still, not half an hour was gone when I heard the door slam, when I ran to the window to see that young man walking quickly to the road. The next day I looked for him, desperate to know what had happened, but although I saw him from a distance, across the classroom or the playing field, he never spoke to me again.

  What had my father said, and why? I thought perhaps he’d found the young man unsuitable; he was, after all, a famous and important man, and particular about his in-laws. Which is why I was careful about the other notes I had, and finally chose one from another young man who was not in our school at all, but an officer in the army and stationed near our house. Wasn’t my oldest brother also an officer in the army? My father must approve. After some time had passed, after a flurry of notes and shy glances, this man too approached my father’s house. This time I left nothing to chance. I crouched beneath the window of my father’s study, and listened.

  “But I worry,” my father said, tapping his pipe out in the ashtray. My young officer was seated across from him, hat in his hands, hope on his face. “I worry about this madness she has shown, and what might happen if there were children. You know, my daughter is not quite right. No doubt you’ve heard the stories—
she nearly killed her two sisters when they were only infants. Even now I see her at the park sometimes, watching the children. Her eyes are quite unnatural then, the way they were that long-ago night. We keep a careful watch on her, you see.”

  “I had no idea,” the young man said. There was trouble in his voice. I wanted to jump up, shout out loud, for what my father said about the park, about the children, was not true. Those children held no interest for me. Even the night my sisters were born seemed like a dream, like a story that had happened to another girl.

  “If I were less honest,” my father went on, “I’d let you go ahead and marry my daughter. But I can’t condemn a young man like you to the uncertain life my daughter would offer. You need a strong woman, someone to support you. My daughter will spend her life in this house, as it has been willed. When I die, of course, this place will become hers. I’ve prayed on this, for guidance, and I’m sure that it is so.”

  The night was warm, yet as he spoke I was shivering on the porch, shaking so hard I had to tuck my hands within my armpits to keep my fingers from knocking on the wall. For I could understand the meaning of this night. My father was driving my suitors away, not for their sake, but for his own. He wanted to ensure himself a peaceful old age, someone here to care for him. I, Eshlaini, was to be the one. This was no divine destiny, but my father’s will. The young man was standing up to leave, shaking my father’s hand, expressing his thanks, and the sight impelled me to do what for years I had believed was an impossible thing. I stood up in that window and I spoke against my father.

  “It is not true, what my father is telling you,” I said.

  Both men turned to me, shock on their faces. It was the young man I looked at first. I was so exhilarated at my own boldness, the blood pulsing in my heart, that I expected the same from him. I suppose I thought that he would take my hand and run with me out into the night, but instead he averted his eyes at once. I watched him for a moment, my blood pulse slowing with anger first, then with humiliation. He stared at the wall, a muscle twitching in his cheek. It was my father who finally spoke, in the gentle voice one uses on children and the mad.

  “Rohila,” he said. “This is not for you to decide. Go to your room at once.” The young man turned away. He would not look at me, or speak.

  “Rohila,” my father repeated, but I interrupted him.

  “I have been listening,” I said. I knew that I probably looked half mad, my hair flying around my head, my face streaked with tears, my voice in a shrill pitch. “I heard you promise me the house. If you will not let me marry, Father, then at least do this: add my name to your will with this man as your witness. Ensure me that my future will be as you have decreed.”

  “It is not I who have decreed this,” my father said. But he looked at me so strangely, as if it was the first time he had ever seen me clearly. Then he shrugged. “Nevertheless, it is a small thing. This is the least valuable of my properties, and it will only take a moment to add it to the will.”

  That night I sat up in my room for a long time, the paper in my hand. It was my true name they had used, my legal name, to will this house to me. Though the house was small, worth very little, and though I knew I would never have another suitor, a strange satisfaction mingled with my anger. I had this paper, after all, with my true name. I knew the small victory I had won.

  WHAT HAPPENS to an anger, so fierce it burns the inner eyelids with a white light, when it goes too long unexpressed? I can tell you—it turns into a black nut, a bilious knot in the gut, a dark coiled seed. I could feel it every day, tending to my father’s needs, the years of my own life passing one by one. At night I sat before the mirror, scanning the new wrinkles where none had been, clipping at the hairs that sprouted on my chin. I dreamed of leaving, but in those days there was no place a woman alone could go. I was tied to the house by the great chains of past and present circumstance. My anger leaked out in strange ways. Sometimes I broke things, secretly, that he would not notice missing for months—a small vase from my mother, the fountain pen from some famous general. I buried his medals in the backyard. At times it seemed that I was mad, as he claimed, but I had only to press my fingers against my stomach to reassure myself about the truth. That was where the anger had settled, tense as a muscle. I could feel it there, hard skinned, thick as a chestnut.

  One day, after years had passed, I saw that my father was going to die. He was in his eighties, trim and to all appearances healthy, but that morning I noticed the tremor in his fingers as he ate his breakfast rice, and when he signed the letters I had typed his hand was shaking so badly that I could not read his name. He resisted doctors for the longest time, but when he finally went they confirmed what I had guessed long before: he had a year, or less, to live.

  On that day the dark seed sprang open. I felt it releasing, the sap of it running through my veins. As each day passed and my father grew weaker, new shoots made their way through my arms and legs. I felt myself growing alive from within. When I held my father’s elbow to assist him to the porch, when he took more and more frequently to his bed, I felt leaves unfurling, inner flowers blooming in my fingertips and cheeks. By the time he was bedridden it was nearly complete, a new self about to be born. I hummed as I cared for him, swabbing the loose flesh of his legs, arranging the sheets.

  I began to speak to him too, though I had been a silent girl, curled quietly around my anger. Cancer had eaten through his voice box, and so he could not answer me when I told him what it was I planned to do with that house he had left me. His eyes followed me around the room as I opened windows, dusted the fan, poured water from a glass pitcher and held it to his lips. One day I told him I would burn it down, sending the blue flames high above the trees, curling the walls and furniture into nothing more than ash. Another time I told him I would rent it to people from different faiths, people who would cook pork in the kitchen, keep dogs to wander freely from room to room. A house of illicit women, I murmured, arranging his pillows, with lovers stepping in and out and sighs of passion floating from every room. I stood up, as if struck with an idea, and said I might even bring a lover here myself.

  My father made a noise deep in his throat, and I look down. He was speaking without sound, his lips moving in exaggerated motions, easy to read.

  “Rohila,” he was saying. “No more. Don’t.”

  “Rohila’s dead,” I told him briskly, pressing a damp cloth first against one cheek, then the other. “She’s been dead for decades, you ought to know that.”

  There was a pause, then his hand against my sleeve again. I looked down. He struggled with the words, and I felt a bright tingling just beneath my skin.

  “What was that?” I asked, though of course I had seen it. “Say it again?”

  His lips trembled, his flesh shaped my name.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Eshlaini.”

  Roots shot to my toes, took permanent hold. It was only my name, yet to me it was like a flash of the sun, a trigger for the quick photosynthesis of joy.

  FLESH IS THE ONLY DESTINY. In the end that’s all I will concede to fate. My father lived his life as a powerful man, but even he could not die as he would have wished, quickly and with dignity. Instead he went with agonizing slowness, rotting from the inside out. It was not merciful, the way his body went before his mind did. Toward the end I discovered maggots living in the soft flesh around his few remaining teeth, and I had to watch his eyes, still knowing, while I plucked them out and swabbed his gums with antiseptic cream. Days later he burned with fever, his fingers like smoking sticks in my palm. He seemed to shrink before my eyes, his skin going tight and hard around his bones. He toughened, became nutlike. Though I bathed him with lightly scented water, though I pressed cool cloths against the pulsing heat of his forehead, I could not stop the transformation that was taking place. He shrank within himself, and his skin clung to the new shape. It was days and days before I understood. There he was, his skin gone rough and dark, his body coiled. I stared at him
in recognition, then. He was the dark seed I had discarded.

  As he lay dying, the family came. On planes, by car and train, from the distant foreign cities and the nearby villages, all came. They pressed my hands when they entered the house, they touched their fingers to their hearts and mouths in gestures of intimacy and love, but they did not see the transformation that had taken place, they did not look me in the eyes to notice.

  What drew their attention was the will, and most especially the codicil that left the house to me.

  Of course they knew about the promise, made twenty years ago to seal my fate. Twenty years ago, when mosquitoes clouded the dark rooms of that house, and the jungle rose up like a mystery behind it. No one wanted the house then, the least valuable of my father’s properties, and so it was an easy promise. I, Eshlaini, would be made to give my life, and in return I would be guaranteed a house.

  Twenty years ago. No one imagined then that the city would expand, pressing outward like a deep breath, to make this the most valuable land my father owned. This land, sold now, would make us all rich beyond belief. Before his death I heard them discussing this, in twos or threes. Carrying my father’s bedpan, lifting him from the sheets to clean his sores, I heard the whispers coming from the bottom of the stairs, from around the corner. They could not take it from me, but they wanted it, and this was the most surprising thing of all: I could see on their faces, turned so kindly toward me, that they thought I would give it to them without a fight.

  After my father died, there was a family meeting. The will was read out loud then, and discussed. Finally my eldest brother, named for the soldier, turned to me. He was short, like my father, with the same balding head.

  “Rohila,” he said. “This house is yours, as was once promised, though we can’t imagine that you want it. It is so big, after all, hardly suitable for a woman alone. I would like to offer you a place in my own home, comfort and family for life. In return, of course, you would sign over the house to the general estate our father left.”