The Beastly Bride

THE SALAMANDER FIRE Marly Youmans

“Out gathering tufts of wool on some slope below the crags? Picking bits from the laurel?” Startled, Alexander Prince — Xan to his friends — let a handful of ramps scatter onto the metal table.

“Hey, you’re all right,” the farmer said, clapping a hand on his shoulder and letting loose a laugh that had all the bounce and mounting roar of barrels rolling merrily down an incline. A robust fellow of in-between age, Charlie Garland had coarse, rumpled hair and an oddly pretty mouth inherited by the daughters who helped him at the open-air market.

“Sorry.” Xan laughed back at him. “Maybe I was wool gathering: groping for wisps of a dream, listening for echoes. When I woke this morning, I heard the most bewitching music, like glass chimes—”

“You’re a real glassman, for sure.” Garland tweaked the bill from his fingers and filled his palm with silver. “Your kind would’ve cut down a myrtle tree and made a salamander in the olden days.” He held out a sack of ramps and another of lettuce and radishes, far more than Xan had picked out.

“You’re giving it away,” he protested, but the other only laughed and waved him on, saying that it wouldn’t be spring in the Carolina mountains without a fresh mess of ramps. What do you mean by ‘making a salamander’?” Xan asked the farmer. “You don’t mean the kind like a little wet lizard, do you?”

Garland sold more ramps and a bag of spinach before he answered. “You’re right, it’s not a lizard, it’s a creature of fire. In the Talmud, when King Ahaz tried to sacrifice Hezekiah to Moloch, the boy’s mother saved him from the fire by daubing him with blood from a salamander.”

“I’ve never heard of any such thing!”

Garland shrugged. “A glassblower like you ought to know the lore of fire.”

“So how do you know this stuff?” Xan asked.

“Oh, I was a strange kid. When chores were done, I’d lie in the clover and read volumes of my grandfather’s encyclopedia of marvels. Still have it — if you come by after lunch, I’ll have my wife bring S to T.”

“All right, I’ll do that. Look for me.” Xan tossed the bags into his pack and moved off, glancing over his shoulder when he heard the farmer’s laughter and thinking that Garland hadn’t told him what the salamander was, not really.

The rest of the morning was spent in driving to Black Mountain. An elderly glassblower had died, leaving him a marver and a crate of straight shears, diamond shears, tweezers, and paddles. Although accustomed to rolling hot gathers of glass on a sheet of steel, Xan would now have a marver of marble.

The other glassblower’s studio was strangely cool and empty.

“Russ thought the world of you,” his wife, Eva, told him.

It was a funny saying. The world was a blue-green ball too big for any gaffer to cut and tweeze into shape. Tears pressed at his eyes and Xan blotted them away. At the burial, after the others had flung their roses onto the coffin in the grave, making a bed of petals, he knelt and let fall a trillium of glass.

“My first husband was thoughtless, but Russ was tender.”

“You two had a long go of it.”

“Yes, there’s that.”

“He and Harold taught me the mysteries.”

“They were such friends, one from the coves and the other from the city. Never jealous, always glad to see each other’s work.” Eva caressed the marver, snow-white with bolts of darkness. “There’s a phrase, lacrimae rerum, in Virgil. This calls ‘the tears of things’ to mind. See?” Her fingers brushed the side of the slab where three owners of the marver had written their names and birth dates. In other hands, two dates of death were marked.

“Amazing that it’s still intact.”

“Here,” she said, bringing a bottle of India ink and a dip pen, “add your name to the others. Just promise it to a young gaffer some year when you’re getting older. Are you twenty-five now, Xan?”

“Just twenty-four.” Saying it made him feel ashamed, as though it were somehow his fault that Eva had grown old.

“When he was twenty-four and I was twenty-six, we lived on an island near Charleston. Now all that’s gone to condos and hotels. The world changes until it’s not ours.”

She dipped the pen and added a gleaming date to the marver. Afterward, Xan bent to scratch his name in ink below his friend’s wavering inscription.

“You’ll be the fourth to use this marver.”

“Yes.”

“You need a wife who’ll mark the stone when you come to dust.” She gave him a quirk of a smile that discomfited him.

“I hardly have time for a wife.”

“You’re married to the glass,” Eva said.

The absence of Russ had disarranged the space between them. They both felt it. Xan was glad to ease the marver onto his dolly and load it through the hatch of the car. He felt distressed for Eva — there was something he had failed to say or that simply could not be said. Yet she was the last scrap he had of anything approaching family. Prince was a common enough name in western North Carolina, but he hadn’t tried to find kin, not even up in Little Canada. He swept a hand across the marble and slid the box of tools on top.

“Good-bye, dear Eva.” In his embrace she was as brittle as a green man in winter, all snapping twigs and dry stalks.

Then he climbed in his truck, and Eva diminished as he pulled away on the familiar drive that curled around the studio before slinging itself downhill. After that there was nothing but highway and mountains and an occasional flare of flame azalea until he reached the turnoff that led toward Sylva, Cullowhee, and Dillsboro.

Xan checked his watch: almost time for the market to close. Hoping Garland hadn’t already left, he headed straight for the farmer’s rickety table.

Garland waved him over.

“My wife brought the book you wanted. See here—”

He turned the volume so that Xan could see the heading, SALAMANDER, FIRE (NATURAL AND LEGENDARY). The farmer tapped the gilt-edged page with his thumb.

“Right here: ‘If a glassblower will stoke the furnace with myrtle wood for seven days and seven nights, the great heat will give birth to a creature called the fire salamander. The glassblower should not let the cunningness of the form dissuade him, but cut until it bleeds plenteously. If he smears a hand or any part of the body with blood, he may become proof against fire.’ ”

“You don’t—”

“Believe it? My young friend, wonders are all around us and we see them not. The world is a tangle of mystery, rolled into a ball, and soaked in the tears of things—”

“What?” Xan was startled, remembering Eva’s words about the marver.

He thumped the book. “I learned that from the encyclopedia. It’s a kaleidoscope made from splinters of wisdom and craziness. Here Pliny says that a salamander resembles ice and puts out fire. Aristotle talks about a fire moth: ‘Winged creatures, somewhat larger than our housefly, appear in the midst of the fire, walking and flying through it, but dying immediately on leaving the flame.’ And here’s our boy the China traveler, Marco Polo, touting cloth-of-gold woven from salamanders.” He slapped the page. “This is a dream hoard for artists. If you like, borrow the book — so long as it comes back — the encyclopedia’s all I have from my grandfather.”

“Garland, what a character you are!” said Xan, smiling at the other man’s excitement. “Whoever heard of a farmer like you?”

He grinned. “There are plenty of oddballs in the farming trade. The encyclopedia forced me to be an outdoorsman — showed me nature packed with the sublime.” He tucked a leaf in place as a bookmark and shoved the volume across the table. “Just don’t thrust it into one of your ovens, all right?”

“I hate to take it. ”

“I’m pretty fond of S to T, but I know the best entries almost by heart. Right now I’m reading C to Dto my girls.”

Xan settled the book in his arms. “That bit about the creatures like flies of fire? They must have been flakes of oxidized copper or some other metal.”

“Then what’s the salamander?” Garland asked.

“I thought you’d be telling me!” Surely the salamander was nothing but pulsating coals seen by an overtired gaffer, his eyes swimming.

Xan begged a bag from Garland and slipped the encyclopedia inside. “Come by if you need it,” he said, scribbling directions on a scrap of paper, “or just stop in for a visit. Or to fish — I’ve got a trout stream.”

And so the volume was deposited on the marver beside the box of tools.

At home Xan unloaded his inheritance, stowing the gear in his studio. The room was as tidy as a bakery after hours. Tomorrow he might be pulling glass and twisting it like taffy, but today he sat in a rocker, flipping through the book, drinking strong coffee.

“Listen to this,” he said to the cat. “Magicians expected help from salamanders when their houses burned.”

She lay on the ledge before the glory hole, switching her tail.

“Be born a writer, I wouldn’t need to make one of those fire salamanders.” He read aloud: “ ‘ The fire of hell does not harm the scribes, since they are all fire, like the Torah — if flames cannot hurt one anointed with salamander blood, still less can they injure the scribes.’ Garland must have peculiar dreams after reading this book. What do you say, Fritsy?”

The yellow cat leaped down and rolled on the stone floor. Xan had tried to keep her away from the studio but eventually decided that she was indestructible. She must have eaten a peck of glass dust, and her fur occasionally glittered in the sunlight. Fritsy had learned to stay out of the batch, the powder for making glass, but loved to fool with beads or millefiori and had won her name by a fondness for playing with colored frit. More than once he had found her curled in the empty crucible.

His place was a mix of old and new. With the help of a stonemason, he had built the studio on two acres of slope deeded to him by Harold Queen — Queen was an even more common a name than Prince among mountain names — but had left the cabin that had belonged to Harold’s father much as it was. His friend the mason had bartered labor for glass at a time when collectors were beginning to ask for Xan’s work. He was lucky; he knew that. He had been brought along by notable craftsmen. If not for Harold and Russ taking a shine to him, he would be waiting tables in Sylva or pounding nails all summer long to support a glass habit.

He had been struck by glass fever at a fair during a demonstration of lampworking. A seldom-watched foster child of eleven, Xan stayed until dusk and returned the next morning to help the old man set up shop. By thirteen he held an apprenticeship with Harold that demanded three hours after school and all day on Saturdays and vacation days. So deep had been his unhappiness at home and school that he often said the glass saved his life. Harold introduced his young charge to buyers, provided him with tools that he still used, and treated him like family. After his mentor died, Xan dropped out of high school. He was sixteen, strong and determined. Russ and Eva took him in, insisting that he stay with them and finish out his apprenticeship. They never once suggested that he return to school, though Eva gave him books and taught him a smattering of Latin. When asked about college, Xan would declare that Eva was his Alma Mater. But Harold and Russ had made him a gaffer, and the magic and surprise in working the glass still brought him joy. He didn’t need talk of fire moths and magic myrtle fires and salamanders to make him see the craft as wondrous.

The queer thing was this: he owned a load of myrtle. Crape myrtle wasn’t the one proper to the Middle East, not the kind of myrtle that Zechariah saw in a vision of branches and red horses and an angel. But it was what sprang up when a Southerner thought of “myrtle.” If mixed with resinous pine and the windfall oak that he had split and stacked, perhaps that would do.

“What if I did that? What if I worked the glass for seven days and seven nights? Even if I didn’t end up with a living creature in the coals, it would be a feat.” Like many another wedded to a craft, he’d gotten into the habit of talking to himself. Some days his own was the only voice he heard. He got up to see that his blowpipes and punty rods and all the gear and tackle of his trade — the puffer, the tagliol, the blow hose, the threading wheel, the pastorale, and so on — were in order, ready for the first gather from the furnace. He shifted squares of beeswax so that they lay beside the jacks, and ran his hand across the shears and paddles. Satisfied, he went to the door. April humus mixed with the fragrance of an unknown flower, and a rampant scent like bruised garlic pleased him — he could have gone hunting for his own greens, but he had a liking for Garland and thought that he would like to know the man better.

Xan split wood until bedtime and afterward dreamed of nothing but a slow fall through a well of night, ending with strands of a glass dawn. In the morning he kindled the fire with splinters of fatwood and some split crape myrtle. After heaping on oak, he shut the cat in the cabin — separated from the realm of flame by a dogtrot — and went out for groceries. On return he poured cullet into the furnace and began planning the day’s work while Fritsy batted and chased a ricocheting pellet of glass. Animated by the blaze, glass cracked and bounced in the crucible. He left it alone and took a nap, curled on a daybed. When he woke, the fire sat just above two thousand degrees and the glass was a sunny orange in the bowl.

“For you, Russ.”

The first gather of the day was colored with blue and white frit. Xan rolled the glass on the dead man’s marver and afterward brought the blowpipe to the bench. He seated himself close to one of its arms, with his jacks and diamond shears on the table and wood blocks in a bucket of water. While shaping the vessel, he wished for an apprentice to help him with the large gathers. He set the pitcher in the heated garage to wait for a lip wrap and handle. When he was ready, the body would be heated once more, this time in the glory hole; using a punty rod, he would bring a dollop of glass from the furnace and attach the handle and thread the lip.

He kept quiet much of the time. If he spoke, it was to the cat. Intermittently he whistled a minor tune.

All day long he worked, moving from furnace to bench to garage, from garage to glory hole to bench, from bench to the annealers, where the pieces would slowly cool. When the cullet was finished off, he melted the batch and left it alone to “fine out,” bubbles slowly seeping up to the surface. He stripped off his damp T-shirt and dozed again. On waking he took a pipe from the water barrel and heated it.

Before nightfall the annealers held bowls, pitchers, and vases. Strands of ruby and gold trailed through glass the color of a wild persimmon after first frost. A series of tiny fluted bowls and vases were blue and green with a peacock’s metallic luster; he had tossed newspaper into the glory hole to rob it of oxygen and “reduce” the color.

“Today I worked fast, Miss Fritsy. Filled orders for a big sky blue pitcher and a group of smalls. Next I’ll be fussy and start with a shimmery vase with green stems and leaves. Bloodroot. Or uvularia.”

He yawned as he threw on more wood, and that night his brief sleeps had no trace of dream.

Days passed, sometimes snailing as slowly as lampwork — time stretching out like a glittering length of twisted cane. Other times it seemed to fly as swiftly as a teardrop of hot golden glass spiraling around the belly of a vase.

By the sixth day, shadows had gathered under the glassblower’s eyes, and his ears rang with a noise like a hundred delicate glass ornaments shattering at once. At two A.M. he looked from the window as a twinkling star leaped over the horns of a crescent moon. He had become fixated and paused only to nap or shower. Sometimes he forgot to eat. Long moments he spent staring into the crucible, for it gave him a strange joy to see the living glass breathe and sparkle. Meanwhile the annealers were jammed with pieces, iridescent, opalescent, and clear. Half-asleep, he looked up and saw a child close to the still-hot vases, but when he cried out, she vanished. He felt more conscious of his body than ever before — the sorely tested strength in his arms and back and legs, the weariness that lay along his neck and made it droop.

On the seventh day he wanted only to rest but forced himself to go on; he was too close to success and could not let the fire die. Everything he made that day and the following night was a shadowy blue and purple and green flecked with gold. The wares in the annealers looked like dream glass — vessels the inhabitants of another world might take for granted, but never of this. The yellow cat patted at a drop of twilight sealed to the floor and bolted away. Xan caught himself reaching for the hot glow of a bowl and slapped his cheek. He was being pulled hard toward slumber. Shapes were dwindling. He made a tiny pot on four legs, the dream kettle of a witch. He made a thumbprint vase. He made a fluted vase, a flower vase, a fat-bellied vase: slightly crude but lovely. Drifting into a doze while holding the blowpipe, he ruined a calyx and woke, shaking his head like a dog fresh from the stream. The sleep flew away in drops, but a fresh tide of drowsiness rose up to drown him.

In the last hours of morning before the end, he made a vase small enough to hide in his fist. It was as mysterious and dusky as the others. Never had he made so much glass — never had it come as such a surprise. When he looked in the annealers and on the countertops, the vases and bowls and pitchers seemed a fanciful townscape from an alien realm, sweeping from the dawn brightness of the early days toward the twilight pieces of the last.

His heart was stirred by the shapes and colors and the light spangling on surfaces. Tears blurred the toy landscape.

“It’s good.” The words washed against his ears like syllables heard in a shell.

Glove raised to protect his face, he peered into the rippled fire of the furnace. The orange glow laved the coals like bright water over stones.

“What—”

Backing away, he stumbled. His glance settled on shadowy vases that only increased his unease. What had he seen? He groped for a blowpipe and carried it to the furnace. Probing the depths, he grew certain: something was creeping in the bed of coals.

He shivered, the tiredness in him moving like ice in his marrow.

Taking the long-handled pastorale, he scooped up coals with the flat plate and drew it from the furnace. His face burned, though the temperature was dropping; he had quit laying on fresh wood. With shears he nudged the coals away until there was only one left.

A creature had curled around the shuddering orange as if for warmth and camouflage.

Xan groped at the mystery with a gloved hand: it shrank from him. Grasping the coal with tweezers, he shook it gently. In response, the little animal hugged itself tightly against the glowing wood. Then, all at once, it sprawled onto the plate.

He spilled the incandescent creature onto the marver. As he bent to examine what the fire had done, a surge of delight made him tremble. Slowly the orange flush began to ebb. The substance of the body proved clear at the outer edges but was tinted a pale ruddy color elsewhere, with coppery flecks on the back and front legs. It was unmistakably a salamander of living glass.

He hesitated. Would it sear him? Holding his palm over the backbone, he could feel heat rolling off the skin. The creature seemed to flinch from the shadow of his hand. The ruby eyes swiveled in its head, looking up apprehensively. He dragged over a chair and waited for more of its warmth to be leached by the cold marble. The salamander played dead, eyes narrowing to slits. After some time had passed, he tested a pad with his fingernail but judged it still unsafe to touch. The skin twitched.

Hadn’t he fired the furnace for seven days and seven nights — despite the fact that part of him was sure the idea was mad — in order to anoint his hands with the blood of the salamander?

He hoped that it could not feel pain.

The shears seemed too large and threatening, so in the end he used a pair of sharp tweezers to pierce the delicate hide. Though the salamander appeared to have neither heart nor veins, rosy juice spilled across the marble.

Xan washed his hands in the hot liquid. It steamed but cooled quickly on the stone. He tore off his shirt and smeared blood on his arms and neck and chest. A surprising amount remained, so he stripped naked and anointed every inch of his body, even the soles of his feet. Soaked to the roots, his hair was stiff with the life of the salamander. He splashed blood in his eyes until the room seemed rinsed red. A Fra Angelico portrait of the crucified Christ — the eyes two pools of vermilion staring at forever — glanced through his mind.

The little being drooped, its lids almost closed.

“I’ve killed it.” Why had he hurt the thing — was it so important to be immune to fire? He had gone twenty-four years without such a gift. What nonsense to fantasize that blood could protect! The whole business seemed a madness born from lack of sleep.

With tweezers, he slowly pinched shut the gaping hole. The head wavered, as if to look up.

Need to sleep pressed down on his shoulders. Closing watery eyes, Xan stood as still as one of his own vessels. He appeared to have been sprinkled with sadness.

“What should I do?” The words fell from his mouth, startling him.

Forgetting the risk, he cupped the salamander in both hands and found the skin had cooled. He was so spent, any idea that the blood had already worked its magic did not occur to him.

Drenched by pity and hot grief, he impulsively lifted the creature to his cheek and held it there. In his weariness, tidal feelings seemed liable to wreck him. From a distance came a sound like a thousand windblown bells.

“Glass would crack. I wonder if you will. Maybe you’ll be nothing but morsels of frit in the morning.”

He reeled, shivering, his body wanting nothing but to lie prone. But there were the soft pads, tacky against his flesh. Using the pastorale, he slipped the salamander onto the coals. The cooling glory hole might be right to help in healing.

It lay without moving in the oven.

“Let it live.” His mouth could hardly form the words.

Sleep slammed against the naked man. He pulled on his pants, staggered forward, and collapsed onto the daybed. Like a stone shot from a sling, he plunged into the deep.

He woke to Fritsy’s damp nose pushing against his neck, her breath whiffling — evidently he smelled interesting. A tongue rasped against his jaw. Rolling onto his side, Xan groaned. She settled on his ribs, purring and kneading her paws.

“Out.” When he flailed an arm, the cat arrowed from the bed. He cracked open an eyelid; it was daylight, though earlier than before — he must have slept for a day and a night. The glory hole had come open. Closing his eyes, he tried to dive back into sleep, but an image of the door ajar kept niggling at him.

“All right,” he exclaimed, setting his feet on the cold stone and rubbing his face. When he felt his hair, clumped and stiff, he remembered.

Alarm flashed through him; a sheet of spun glass, coppery in color, hung from the ledge. He coaxed the door open the rest of the way, standing several feet back.

Cramped in the glory hole was a naked girl, who now opened her eyes and stared at him with eyes the color of pennies. She pushed herself up on one extraordinarily pale arm.

He knew; knew instantly. He didn’t have to ask who or how and wasted no time in doing so. Her oval face was ruddy on the upper cheeks, where freckles like bits of copper seemed to float. The rest of the skin was fair and so translucent that he could see the blue veins in her neck. A great eagerness seized him. Would she have a tail and legs with pads or be human in appearance? Reaching for her hands, he helped her from the glory hole. She gave off an attractive odor of burned myrrh and cinnamon and proved to be without tail and completely human in limbs. A faint silvery sheen lay in hollows around her collarbone, at her temples, and on her eyelids. Her body was perfectly formed and as smooth as glass. Suffice to say that there were portions of her more beautiful than any seen since Eve walked in the garden, as innocent and bare as the dawn. Xan, a well-built specimen of the male mortal, felt coarse and unfinished next to her.

“Can you speak? Do you have a name?”

She didn’t answer. The gaffer shut his eyes, opened them again. Still there: she wasn’t a dream; he was wide awake. Joy cut through him straight to the heart. He had never imagined a woman so mysterious and lovely, and he could have stared at her for hours had it not occurred to him that nakedness was no longer the natural state of Eve’s children. He jerked the rod from the window and slid the curtain away. She seemed not to know what he meant by this offering, so he began to wind the cloth around her, his hands trembling. Tucked into place, the fabric made a passable sarong.

Taking her hands once more, he stared into her eyes, wondering at the fine crackled lines — bright gold and pumpkin had infiltrated the iris. She didn’t seem to mind his attention and soon leaned against him in a way that suggested trust. He didn’t mean to kiss her, but he did and not just once. She was a quick learner, pressing against him as eagerly as he against her.

“Xan! Xan!”

The voice called, a world away. Slowly he drew back from the girl, yet not so far that — being mesmerized by its sparkle — he couldn’t comb his fingers through the spun threads of her hair.

He turned to see Garland at the screen door.

“I’m sorry—”

“Don’t be! Come in, please.” Xan was glad, because who else in all the known universe could understand what had happened?

The girl looked from his face to Garland in surprise. Perhaps she had thought him the only such being in the world.

“This is my friend,” he told her.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt. Just dropped by to pick up S to T. You’re a bit of a mess, aren’t you?” Garland laughed, surveying him. The farmer held out his hand to the young woman, introducing himself, and she took it between her own and began scrutinizing the green-stained nails and the dark hair at the wrists. Clearly he admired her and had politely failed to notice that her spring attire was somewhat lacking.

“A mess? It’s nothing, just the blood. This is—”

Xan hesitated, unsure how to explain, but the other man simply smiled at the girl’s odd behavior and tweaked her nose, as though she were one of his own daughters. “The salamander.”

“What?” Garland tilted his head.

“I made it. The salamander. Well, I didn’t make — it appeared. Not like this but like a newt. And I punctured its side and blood spurted out, the way the book said. See, look at the marble—”

Garland’s lips had parted, as if to drink in the news.

“I felt terrible knowing it would die. The creature was marvelous — not as beautiful as the girl but a wonderful glass creature — and I was so happy and even a little afraid to see the thing — a miracle of glass — my heart went out to it — I couldn’t bear for it to be lost—”

His voice died away. Was he babbling? Perhaps there was no fit way to tell the shape-shifting strangeness of what had happened.

Putting her arms around his waist, the girl leaned her cheek against his bare chest. Xan wrapped his arms around her, and in that instant knew that he loved her because she was everything otherworldly that he had tried to claim in his art, the visionary beauty that he saw in glimpses of glass or sometimes in the fire heaving with life.

“And so I pinched the wound together and thrust the body into the glory hole and hoped — prayed it would live. While I slept, the salamander changed.”

Garland stared at the girl in a handwoven curtain and the young gaffer.

“You must be careful, Xan. She has no soul—”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t be angry with me — the angels have no souls. And don’t need them. Fairies as well. Demons most of all.”

Xan pulled her close. “She’s no — she’s not any of those things. She’s a woman; I’m sure.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Garland glanced around the studio.

“Have you ever made witch balls? With a web of color? Streaks and loops around an orb?”

“That’s tourist work,” Xan said, shrugging.

“A farmer always knows the date. It’s almost the last of the ramps: it’s the eve of Beltane when witches take their spring tonics and get frisky. On a few country greens, villagers will be setting a peeled tree trunk in the earth, decking it in ribbons and flowers, and asking young women to dance. You see? Like the ash poles set up to Ashtaroth long ago.”

“Why should I make a witch ball because children dance around a maypole?”

“The ball catches the spirits of air! They get lost in the maze, or so it’s said. You could try to protect her.”

“But there’s no such—” The gaffer laughed. What was he saying? He gathered the strands of the girl’s hair in one hand, wondering at its fine glassine texture. She was so precious — he would do anything not to lose her. Hadn’t she come to him as mysteriously as a gift from another world? “Garland, I’d be a fool not to take your advice,” Xan said. “You were the one to tell me about the salamander fire. Help me tote the wood, and I’ll make a gaudy sphere for every door, window, and chimney in the house and studio.”

The girl persisted in trailing after him. He couldn’t make her understand that when he crossed a sill, he hadn’t vanished and would return shortly. She seemed to know little except how to kiss, though she had managed to arrange the curtain so that she could move more freely. The glass on the shelves and in the annealers allured her, and she gestured from him to the vessels in what seemed comprehension.

At last satisfied that out of sight did not mean gone, she perched on a stump as the two men ferried split lengths between woodshed and furnace.

Garland paused to look up, squinting.

“What’s that?”

Xan’s arms were loaded with myrtle and oak. He glanced up to see an enormous sky blue pitcher plummeting from the sky. Astonished, he recognized a copy of the vessel he had made on the first morning of his challenge. When it slammed into the earth near the stump, he let the wood crash to the ground.

The foot sprouted legs; the belly, arms; and with a thlomp! a big ugly head popped from the spout.

“No!” Xan flew toward his salamander girl, Garland pounding at his heels, but the demon grinned, snatched her up, and tossed her into the mouth of the pot. As it bounced across the clearing, she learned how to shriek. Her clamor made the demon roar with glee as he leaped toward the top of the mountain opposite the cabin. He hung in the air, the lip and handle looking like clouds and the body of the pitcher almost invisible, and then plunged to land and vanished.

“I’ll find you!” Xan dropped to his knees. The pitcher did not return to sight.

“Get up.” Garland hauled him onto his feet. “The car—”

They were off, whirling away from the studio, headed toward Cullowhee Mountain.

“You saw where they went?” Xan craned out of the window, staring toward the tiptop of the slope.

“Her hair’s fire in the sunlight. Near the summit road.”

Fifteen minutes later they ducked under branches that bordered the asphalt, Garland apologizing for the sack flung over his shoulder. “Might find some late greens.”

For an hour they tramped up and down the ridge before they stumbled on a fissure in the earth.

Wisps of steam and voices filtered up.

The farmer held a finger to his lips.

“Scag, did you see the glass doll? Pretty thing. We’ll enjoy tormenting her!”

“Phew! Nothing but a salamander. I haven’t seen one of those in a coon’s age.”

“Ignorant spark of pipe-guts! You golleroy! I saw one last week at a smithy in Central Asia.”

“You’re lying—”

“I snatched out my tongs and grabbed the thing by the tail and flew off before anybody noticed me fiddling in the flames. I’d been having a bask and was roasting my toes when the salamander trickled from a log—”

“Dottle-pated fool!” There was a crack as of club meeting skull, a howl, and a stutter of noise like an exploding string of firecrackers.

The two eavesdroppers moved away from the cleft and squatted by a mound of trillium and trout lily.

Xan caught the older man’s wrist. “When I find her, how do I manage to get her a soul?”

The farmer gave a slight shake of his head. “That’s not in the encyclopedia, not spelled out for sure. Some of the old fairy tales say to marry. And baptism may work if it doesn’t kill. But I don’t think anybody knows. What you really need is some fellow with a spare one. But who’s got that?”

“I’d give her half of mine if I knew how. I’m going down there. If I’m not back in three hours—”

“I’ll wait. You’ll be clambering up in a jiffy. Here.” He reached in his jacket and pulled out a dark apple. “Fresh from the cellar, an Arkansas Black off our trees. Better take it — you might get hungry. Want to borrow my jacket?”

They had sped away so quickly that Xan still wore nothing but pants and battered clogs slipped on at the door. He stuffed the apple into his pocket.

“You may need it. I have a feeling that I won’t be cold,” he said.

Garland leaned over the gap to watch him go.

Xan shimmied down the walls of a corkscrewed passage. “So long,” he whispered. He could see the other man’s silhouette against the sunlight.

Barely had he caught the answering reply when he lost his grip and began sliding. His hand found but couldn’t seize hold of slits in the rock. He drew up his knees, rocketing down a chute toward faint blue light until he shot into the air and splashed into an immense pool. He leaped upward, shocked that this was not water but fire that lapped the walls of an underground cave. It tingled all around him, warm but somehow insubstantial — distant, he thought, scooping up handfuls of blue. Looking around, he saw nothing of Scag and his companion.

An immense stone, tilted to one side, made an isle that reflected light like a moon. White splinters and spears of brightness broke the surface of waves, and here and there figures lay underneath or floated on top. Eyes open, they were not looking at him but seemed to gaze at something far off. The bodies were pale or dark, the hair floating, and they appeared as oddly simplified as if they were carved Cycladic dolls. Perhaps their details had been worn down by the tide of fire.

He paused to check each one, in case the salamander girl sailed under waves, her staring copper eyes now coins for payment to the ferryman of the dead. Once, wading near the shallows, he hauled a woman to the surface. Slowly, slowly, her eyes groped toward his face. But he couldn’t force her to answer his questions. A mist clouded her eyes; she fell into dream. Others had been skewered by the glowing white darts, and on these a golden flame played where shaft met flesh. Recalling the virtue ascribed to the salamander’s blood, he wondered if the waves could be hotter than they appeared.

Exploring the cave lake was harder than he had expected and made him think of crossing a glacial moraine. On a trip to Canada, he and Harold had toiled over rocks, trying to reach the source of a glacial stream, but it was farther than it had seemed. In the end, the old man wearied and turned back. A pang of longing like a white arrow pierced him. He had loved Harold and Russ better than any foster father, and now they were both gone, perhaps floating in some pool of lost time. What would he do if he met their faces here?

His limbs grew drowsy as his mind drifted, anchorless. A single burning point of pain settled under a shoulder blade. Gusts of wind roiled the waters and howled into distant windings of the cavern. After the last echo died, sheer silence filled up the chamber.

“God,” he said. He meant it as a prayer, and perhaps it was.

The journey stretched out like a sheet of hot glass. The white boulder in the lake seemed no nearer. He waded into a dreamlike state, automatically checking faces, swimming sluggishly when the flames grew too deep.

At last a pattering and splashing alerted him — treading fire, he hid behind a thicket of white spears. He was now much closer to the stone.

A shape in a tattered dress shirt, herringbone vest, and wool pants wormed out of the waves and hunched on a rocky ledge where the wall began to slant upward. Crouching, he licked at streaks of a mineral deposit.

“Hey,” Xan called, making up his mind to collar the figure if necessary. “Hey!”

The other sat up, nosing the air, and revealing a lean face with moth-eaten tufts circling a bald pate.

“Over here.” Xan swam closer to the heap of stones. “Have you seen a pretty girl flying by — have you seen a blue pitcher? Maybe that sounds too—”

“Look! If it’s not Adam, the red man!” He barked with laughter. “I haven’t seen you in fifty years or more. You ripped through here, searching for some kid you’d misplaced; I’m sure of it.”

Xan was confused until he remembered that his skin was stained by blood. Didn’t adam mean red? Had Adam been made from a mud like the rust of mountain clay?

One corner of the man’s mouth drew up. “Don’t you recognize me? They call me Attorney — or Atty or Fox-marrow or Sir Greedy Bones. What will you give me, Adam, if I squeal? Hair like copper? Eyes like coins?”

So he had seen her. Xan considered. “A shoe.”

“One shoe?” Attorney leered, looking sidelong as his tongue wriggled out. “Just one?”

“Yes, just one.” What else did he have to offer but his shoes?

“The shoe of Adam. Let me see.”

The gaffer waded nearer and then slipped off a clog.

“Nice, very nice,” Attorney cooed, cupping his hands. “Pitch it here.”

“Not until you tell me.”

“I could squall for the demons.” Flinching, he darted a look around the cave.

“Go ahead and squall.” Xan tapped the sole of the shoe against his palm.

“All right, be that way. She’s just there, on the other side of the boulder. Lashed on with ropes and a rag stuffed in her mouth. Easy! I made faces and her eyes went big.” He nodded, pleased. “I canoed over on a fire-bather — one of the silver ones. My favorites. You know them? They can’t tell what’s happening to them, not until the cocoon breaks up. It’s the goddess the girl’s tied to — that fat pebble! The demons pinch me, but she never makes a peep, just rocks when the earth quakes. Get it? Rocks!” A high-pitched whinny shook echoes from the walls.

Xan shivered in revulsion, imagining silver-lidded eyes and strange hatchings under the fire. “Here.” The shoe slapped onto the ledge. He didn’t trust Attorney, though he seemed to be telling the truth — at least his pride in scaring the salamander girl could probably be relied on as a true confession.

“Don’t get riled, Red Man. I’ll tell you how to whisk out of here if you give me the mate.” He caressed the clog and licked at a loose thread.

“Tell me a shortcut. If it’s good, I’ll give you the other shoe.”

“Got another, do you? I’d rather have a loafer with tassels.”

The young man reached for his other clog and held it up. A trembling under his feet signaled a tremor deep in the earth, but he saw that it must be the usual order of business because Attorney took no notice.

Instead, he gestured toward a slanting fold in the rock face. “See that crease? There’s a staircase cut in the stone. Easy as pie. Oh, I used to love pie, pie, pie. Apple, raspberry, peach. Give the shoe now,” he said, lowering his voice, “or I’ll be forced to serve a writ that neither of us will like.” Attorney beamed as he caught the other clog. “Stench-blossom. The shoe stinks like a human.”

Xan regarded him with curiosity. “But you’re human.”

“Not for long. By the time these shoes wear out I’ll be growing a tail and proto-wings and be buzzing the fire-bathers for kicks. Baal has promised to make me a pseudo-demon. The goddess, she’s one of his three daughters. Either that or there’s a demon jailed in the rock like a maggot in a Mexican jumping bean. They lie — even Baal. When I earn my wings, I’ll perch on her dome. The demons won’t call me Atty-boy anymore! I’ll have a new name. I’ve been thinking about names for the past twenty years. I’m partial to Metacarrious. Do you like it, Adam?” He turned the clog in his hands, inspecting the heel.

“For a demon, maybe.”

“Exactly!” Attorney’s face brightened. “None of this eternal lolling about in the flame baths for me. Baal says I was half a demon when I came here. If I can only jettison the baggage of my soul—”

“Your soul.” A tremor passed through Xan. He had nothing left to trade but his pants. And Attorney already had on a ragged pair.

“You wouldn’t like to swap for a pair of pants, would you?”

Attorney sneered. “Why do you ask? You like mine better than yours, don’t you? Well, so do I!”

“Fine, fine. Could I take a look at your soul? Maybe you’d like me to relieve you—”

“No! No pro bono, see? It has to be barter. De-sir-a-ble trade. That’s rules.” He nodded with vigor. “Fair, square, devil’s hair,” he chanted. “And I don’t want those jeans.” Attorney scrunched his face in disgust. “But I’ll show you. It’s come loose — tries to fly away.” He turned away, body writhing as he hacked and spat.

When he swung round again, something lay in his hands — a mass of sputum clotted onto a rainbowlike substance, delicate and thready. A portion resembled a dragonfly’s damaged wing, partially blackened and crimped.

“I’ve killed most of it,” he said cheerfully. “There’s a scrap remaining if you want to haggle. Maybe you’ll think of something.”

“Would you trade if I did?” Xan scanned the waters around him but saw nothing but the purified face of a woman, her features almost burned away. The pain at his back was making him dizzy, so he splashed blue onto his face before remembering that it was only fire.

“Yes, yes, I’d be busting my seed coat and sprouting a tail-root and wings so quick! But it’s funny that you want it and have nothing to swap. Poor Adam! Because I don’t want those ugly, ugly pants!” Reeling with laughter, Attorney slapped his shanks. “Ugly pants! Ugly pants!”

Xan wondered if he could climb the stairs, find Garland, and trust the would-be pseudo-demon to wait. Probably the creature would go paddling off. Tired of mocking, Attorney scrambled along the lake’s edge and began to lick the walls. The soul was crammed in his fist, though one wisp feebly moved between his fingers. An image of Eva, handkerchief upraised, gathered in his thoughts — held itself whole for an instant and then shattered.

A blessed silence overshadowed the lake. The gaffer listened for the whip of wings but heard nothing; he felt that the hush wanted to tell him something. Slipping hand into pocket, his fingers closed over Garland’s apple.

“What kind of pie did you say?”

“Blackberry, gallberry, apricot — no, not a nasty apricot — but I loved my mother’s apple pie best of all. She was a cruel old witch, yet she knew how to pinch the pastry and roast the pies in her ovens. Bash my poor fingers with the rolling pin if I tried to snitch a little dangle of crust or a bead of hot syrup.” His face crumpled, as if he would cry, but the future Metacarrious shook off the urge with a quiver. He began to sing in a piping falsetto:

When he slavered, greenish strings of saliva splashed hissing into the waves, giving off an odor of rotten eggs.

The apple seemed strangely soft. Pulling it forth, Xan realized that the fruit had cooked in his pocket. So the lake’s temperature was definitely hotter than it seemed. All at once the Arkansas Black split, tears of sap sliding down the dark cheek onto his palm.

“Roasted apple. Would you swap your soul for an apple?”

Attorney blinked. “Adam a pock-picketing magician, is it? Is that the game? The demons put you up to playing tricks.”

“No, nothing like that. I just had the apple in my pocket. I got it from a friend.”

“A friend.” Attorney pondered. “Oh, yes, a friend. I remember friend. A rack with spikes for the broiler, was it?”

Xan didn’t answer. The spear point of pain under his shoulder blade widened. “I can put it back in my pocket.” He brought the apple to his nose and sniffed its fragrance. Nausea brushed up against him. “Or I can eat it myself. Maybe I should. Maybe you should keep your soul.”

“No, no — never that. I’ll trade. An unencumbered exchange of goods, mind.” He thrust the damaged soul into Xan’s free hand and reached for the apple.

“You’re sure, absolutely sure?” The gaffer wanted the struggling remnant but felt uneasy; perhaps such a swap might leave an inward scar.

“Yes, yes. This and not the ugly, ugly pants,” he caroled.

Xan let the piece of fruit fall into the long-nailed hands. Attorney glided onto the steep bank and began worrying the apple, licking and rolling and biting.

The game was finished. It was time to be gone.

Until the fire lapped neck deep, Xan walked in the waves. All the time he was tugging at his prize as he might a bit of glass reheated in the glory hole. As blue fire seared away the blackened frill, the soul began to expand under his fingers. The floor of the cave dropped away, and Xan began swimming swiftly toward the stone. When he reached the far side, he found that Attorney had not lied. His salamander girl was lashed to the rock, a torn strip of curtain between her lips. He tugged away the ropes and unstopped her mouth.

“What took you so long?” Hair flooded her pale shoulders; crackles of gold and saffron shone in the penny-colored eyes.

“You can talk!”

“The demon put words in my mouth.” Flinging her arms around Xan’s neck, she laughed with a sound like glass bells.

“Did he do anything — to hurt you?” He cradled her, the coppery hair spilling over his chest.

“Only the words, so much, all at once. that stung me. And Mullygrubbious will come flying back, lickety-cut, with a gang of demons. That’s what he said.”

They floated in the blue fire, and before he taught her how to swim, Xan gave her one long kiss — and something else.

“Open your mouth,” he said. When she did so, he pushed the gauzy soul inside and barred the way out with his fingers.

The first tears pooled in her eyes. She held on tight, and they rolled over the waves and the simple faces of the dead. Afterward Xan swam toward shore, towing the salamander girl while she fluttered her arms and legs to some little effect. When the surface fell to waist level, they began to wade. Soon they were skimming along in the shallows. As they fled up the steps, Attorney bellowed for the demons to come quickly and see his plumule of a tail. Xan flung the girl through the slit at the top of the stairs. They tumbled onto an island of ramps and bellwort, with curled sprouts of black cohosh snapping under their bodies.

“I’ll be.” There was the farmer, his sack almost full.

“Garland,” cried the girl. A single clear note of laughter sprang from her lips.

“Let’s go home,” Xan said, casting a backward glance at the rocks. “My lovely Salamandra needs a trout from the stream and some just-picked ramps for dinner.”

“She can talk!”

“Demon’s work. He forced words in her mouth.”

“You’re barefoot and half-naked.” Garland surveyed them and smiled. “The sun’s going down, so my wife will be worried. But I’ve got ramps.” He hoisted the fragrant bag to show his pickings. His sleeves were rolled up, the trousers stained green at the knees. With a flick of the wrist, he cast a handful of ramps into the crack in the earth.

“That’ll hold your sky blue friend a while — a whiff of the sweet incense of creation. And your Salamandra’s got a laugh that’s as sweet as a bell. It’ll make their ears itch.”

More than ever, Xan felt a liking for the older man, seeing him there in the dusk with a ramp tucked behind his ear.

“Garland, take a look at something, will you? Below the left shoulder blade. It feels as if an arrow point struck me there.” Ripples from a stone lobbed in a pool of flame, pain washed across his back.

The farmer touched him tentatively. “Hard to make out in this light, but it looks like a raggedy splotch of metal. Or a silver flame.”

“Or it might even be a curled salamander,” the girl offered, stroking the offending spot.

Xan shivered at the caress. “If that’s all,” he said, “let’s go.”

I must’ve missed a half inch of skin. A chink in the armor. He would find out soon enough whether the hurt was going to stay. If so, the goal had been worth the price. She was worth it. He knew how to live with a burn, because he had taken one often enough in his apprenticeship. “Chasing after beauty has a cost,” Russ had said, bringing an ice pack to hold against his skin.

Xan and Salamandra followed Garland’s footsteps to the road, where all three stopped to peer into the valley. The blue of day had been swallowed up. Night lamps in rural yards were already burning like fallen stars as the sunset flung up veils of persimmon and ruby. Here and there, clusters of silvery tin roofs on houses and country churches softly reflected the colors back. Slowly the sky became shadowy as strands of color altered to purple and green and cobalt with streaks and spatterings of gold. Spires and houses stood like a dream kingdom of glass in the valley.

The pain dimmed like a flame seen through a smoked lens.

“I want to learn the glass and the colors like you, Xan.” Salamandra slipped her hand in his. “And I want to see things that go with the words inside.”

“You’ll make a marvelous gaffer. We’ll make glass that no one’s ever seen before. Because the salamander’s blood is on me and in you.”

“I want to live happily ever after,” she whispered.

“Did the demon put those words in your mouth? How could that be?”

“With you, Xan. And yes, he did. He put all the words in my mouth, the good and the bad, even the ones made from tears and the blasphemies that should never be spoken.” She laid her head on his shoulder.

He saw now that all things could be bent to evil. The world could be hot glass twisted in the claws of a demon. But it hadn’t been meant so at the start, that perfect gather of blue and green glass.

“She’s going to be awfully surprised when she finds out that you’re not always dyed cinnabar from head to toe,” Garland remarked, slinging the bag of ramps over his shoulder. He eyed the younger man’s hair, caked with blood. “Pleasantly so, I reckon.”

“These jeans, do you think—”

“What?”

“Nothing.” The gaffer let out a spark of laughter. “Not a thing.”

The roofs in the valley glimmered and faded, and sparks of stars blew in from the hearth of the sky and made the girl cry out in fear and joy. She’s really only a newborn baby, Xan thought, despite the words. So he would sleep in the studio and yield the cabin to her. He would have to let her grow a while before they could promise to live happily ever after. A year and a day floated into his mind; surely he could wait a year and a day. But it was already in him to love her, as it had been from the moment he had helped her from the glory hole — perhaps even when he had lifted the salamander to his cheek. Her blood on the marble had claimed him as her own as surely as if the marver had been not a glassmaker’s tool but some pagan goddess — a boulder of granite stained with the blood of children, set up in a grove of stunted acacia trees, somewhere hot and distant and long ago. But she wasn’t of that cruel world. She had been burned in the glory of the glass fire and owned a soul.

He shuddered, remembering the stone in the lake of blue flames and the faces drifting beneath the waves. Glancing down, he saw the girl’s bare legs glowing white above a drift of dwarf iris leaves. Oh, he longed to remake the world to be as smooth as glass for her feet! Garland was unlocking the car, tossing the ramps into the trunk. Xan felt that he would never be done thanking the man for telling him about the living creatures born from fire. He and Salamandra would visit Garland’s farm; then he would go see Eva and show her what sort of woman he could win for himself. Though the widow might be sad because change is often sad for the old, she would welcome them in. There were strands of color in the bewitching ball of Earth — enough to hold them secure in its web.

“Listen!” Salamandra stepped forward. A spine-tingling sound like a waterfall of crystal swept toward them. “The music of the spheres,” she said, her face as naked in delight as an infant’s.

An enormous windblown tree blossomed in Xan’s imagination, its leaves splashed with raindrops, its twigs and branches hung with an endless number of glass bells. Sweet as a mountain breeze, the sureness came to him that all his life to come would be more radiant than before. He sighed with pleasure, gripping the girl’s slender fingers. He had feared the stain of Attorney, but now he was certain: the soul had found a better place to nestle and, like a wing of thinnest glass, would unfold and flash with rainbow colors. She would make it her own. Before they turned toward Garland and home, he and his salamander bride-to-be looked up at the glory of the constellations, now strengthening and shining in the furnace of night, and one or the other spoke.

“Before the stars were made, we were dreamed and meant to be.”

MARLY YOUMANS is the author of seven books of fiction and poetry. Her most recent fantasy is Ingledove. Her novel The Wolf Pit won the Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction. Val/Orson, a novella set in the California treetops and drawing on the legend of Valentine and his wild twin, Orson, was published in 2008. Her first book of poetry is Claire. Her short fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Salon Fantastique; Logorrhea; Firebirds Soaring; We Think, Therefore We Are; and Postscripts, and reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and Fantasy: The Best of the Year. Her Web site is www.marlyyoumans.com.

When The Beastly Bride tugged at my sleeve, I had been daydreaming about glass and its marvelous transformations. I thought immediately of a girl metamorphosed from the mythical fire-born salamander. Fiery and metamorphic glass led me to the furnace, the underworld, and a mix of earthly and otherworldly beauty.

The history of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina is one that includes magic and mythic beings. Tiny bones and small tunnels of the Little People had been found during construction in Cullowhee, where I grew up. Cherokee tales mixed in my mind with folk ways and stories handed down by settlers from Scotland and Ireland. Later, the magic of these regional tales tinged The Curse of the Raven Mockerand Ingledove and crept into some of my other novels, poems, and stories — as in this one.