Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits (23 page)

Soon after sunrise, when the hunters hauled their first load of fresh timber out from the woods on the western slope, they found three men standing on the edge of the gully, staring up at the deep cuts that the fires had carved into the cliff either side the of ice-fall. They turned when Barok hailed them and came striding across the rocks, frowning, hands on axe-helves.

ʺThe one on the left is Findri,ʺ muttered Dotal. ʺI gave him my elder daughter. They come from Upmountain Cave. Let me speak to him.ʺ

The others watched as he walked confidently forward to greet his son-in-law, calling his name. The scowls softened only slowly as he gestured and explained. The strangers turned to stare at Tandin, sitting wrapped in the bear pelt, as motionless as the rocks around him. Dotal came smiling back.

ʺTricky,ʺ he said. ʺThe glacier's their protecting spirit. But they've had the fireworm too—drove it off the same way we did—knew the stories, of course—they'd be glad to be shot of it. I told 'em what Tandin did. It's a good four generations since they'd a spirit-walker in their cave. They're going to give us a hand.ʺ

With the extra workers the log-stacks were quickly replenished and the fires roared up anew. The stream in the gulley was now a torrent. Twice more Tandin returned to the world where people live and die and told the workers that the fireworm was very near and looked like breaking through well before dark, but the third time it was different. Only a man's height from the surface and directly below the decoy fire, the fireworm had stopped digging and gone back to the cavern. Despite all the female's unceasing pleadings and scoldings, it was now deep asleep. But he had sensed no sudden alarm or caution before the withdrawal, only a feeling more like weary satisfaction.

ʺIt's waiting till nightfall,ʺ he said.

The men had stopped work to eat and were sitting on the lower boulders of the moraine, gnawing the last bits and pieces of caribou and tossing the stripped bones down into the nearer of the two fires. Now they began to argue about when the ice wall would give way. As the fires had carved into the cliff either side of the ice-fall, the two competing teams had driven them steadily deeper by swinging fresh logs clean over the blazing piles to feed the further sides. The funnelling effect increased the updraughts, and large logs began to crumble into embers almost as soon as they had burst alight. In the short time the men had been eating, both fires had reduced themselves to great, glowing mounds and the noise from them dwindled to a fluttering murmur. In a pause in the talk the ice wall groaned.

The sound wasn't huge, just a slow, deep creak. They froze, and looked up at the ice-fall, towering almost immediately over them.

ʺLet's be getting out of here,ʺ said Barok.

The sound had hauled Tandin from his dream. He woke and heard the men calling to him as they scrambled down the moraine, and followed them along the track they'd cleared through the snow by their steady hauling of timber down from the hillside. Where the ground began to slope upward, they halted and turned.

It was now half-way through the short afternoon. The air, freezing even at midday, was already chilling fast, and seemed bitingly cold to bodies that a little while ago had been almost sweating in the glow from the fires. Again Tandin moved a few paces apart and returned to the spirit world, while the others huddled down in the lee of a low crag and waited to see what would happen.

Twice more the ice wall groaned, loud enough for the men to hear where they sat. But the fires were visibly shrinking. They seemed to glow as strongly as ever, but that was only in contrast to the fading light. Much as the cold of the coming night crept into their bodies, so tension, boredom and impatience suffused their minds. Continually they glanced to where Tandin sat oblivious and withdrawn. He gave them no sign at all until, with the last light fading and the stars plain to see, they heard a voice. Not Tandin's voice, but a voice speaking directly to them out of the spirit world, forcing itself between his unmoving lips, as eerie as the groan of the glacier:

ʺThe fireworm wakes. He comes.ʺ

The hunters tensed, staring at the heaped embers of the decoy fire. Its outline blurred and wavered as the rising heat sucked in night-frosted air from the sides, heated it in an instant and drove it upward. Twice more the glacier groaned. None of them perceived the actual moment of change, the point at which the fireworm broke through and the embers began to slither down into the shaft it had drilled. The first they knew of it was a shuddering indrawn sigh from Tandin, and his own voice saying, ʺHe's come. He's here.ʺ

Now they could see the ember-pile collapsing, sifting away inward and down. When it was two-thirds gone, with a pit at the centre and the sides of the surrounding pile no longer steep enough for the embers to tumble down, it stopped.

They waited, expecting no more. But now a shape began to emerge above the dully glowing heap, rising further and further—the huge, blunt snout of the fireworm, then its massive head and shoulders, black against the still fierce glow of the two main fires. The hunters leaped to their feet, gripping axes and spears, poised to charge down on their enemy. The hunt was on, and Barok took control. They looked at him for the order.

ʺWait,ʺ he said. ʺHe will hide in his hole. Let him come farther.ʺ

Somehow wedging itself with its hind legs against the walls of its shaft, the fireworm reached out and began systematically scooping the remaining embers towards itself, rotating its body in the pit as it did so, in order to clear the whole ring.

ʺWhen his back is towards us,ʺ said Barok.

They waited.

ʺWhy do we not sleep?ʺ muttered someone. ʺAll slept in the stories.ʺ

ʺToo far?ʺ suggested someone else. ʺOr his breath is blown away, out here.ʺ

ʺMove forward,ʺ said Barok. ʺNo, wait, he has heard us.ʺ

The fireworm, its back now almost towards them, had paused in its steady rhythm of work, and visibly tensed, like an animal suddenly alert. Its great head angled up, but as if to sniff rather than listen. Puzzled, they watched it heave its whole body out of the shaft and start to crawl towards the nearer of the two main fires, moving with great difficulty over the rock-strewn slope because it was dragging beneath it, immensely distended and glowing with the stolen embers, the pouch that Tandin had seen in the cavern. And still it wanted more.

Seen like that, despite its size, it looked utterly vulnerable and clumsy.

ʺNow,ʺ whispered Barok.

The hunters stole confidently forward.

The fireworm reached the nearer fire, but instead of scooping up embers wholesale, as it had done before, it began to pick and nose through the fringes, choosing only here and there. The hunters were about half-way towards it when the glacier groaned again.

They paused. This was a different noise, with a sharp, cracking onset and then rising and increasing.

ʺBack!ʺ shouted several voices, and they had already turned and were racing and scrambling over the rocks when the ice-cliff gave way and all other sounds were swallowed in its thunder.

Only Tandin, watching from the slope where they had waited, saw it happen. There was no visible warning. The sheer ice split open like a seedpod either side of the ice-fall. The section of the cliff that held it tilted out and crashed down between the fires, and the dark green wall of prisoned water launched itself into white and bellowing freedom. The central gully vanished in an instant. The fires were drowned. A few instants more and the fleeing hunters, though already on rising ground, were struggling in the fringes of the flood. Tandin saw one man swept away, and another almost, but grabbed from a rock by Bast and hauled to safety as he passed below. The survivors scrambled up the slope, glancing now and then over their shoulders at what they'd just escaped. When all were well above the flood-line they turned to look. Too exhausted by their efforts, too stunned by the colossal results, they were in no mood to exult or triumph, but could only stand and stare sombrely at the careering water.

Of the fireworm they could see no sign.

They found its body next morning, as they followed the still roaring torrent down the mountainside, looking for their lost comrade, a hunter from the other cave named Illok. They had no luck with him, but they came across the fireworm lying sprawled among the rocks where the first great outrush had hurled it. Its pouch had relaxed in death, losing almost all the embers it had so striven for, and lay in flabby folds beside its belly.

Though they had seen the monster the night before, that had been at a distance and in the uncertain glow of the ember-piles. Now they could stand round it and realise its true size.

At first they merely prodded the body with their feet and poked at it with their spears. Then Sordan slapped Barok on the shoulder, Dotal loosed the hunter's yodelling cry that signals a successful end to the hunt, and in a moment they were all glorying in their achievement, whooping and prancing and baying to the skies, the sound of their voices floating up over the snowfields towards the summit of the mountain.

Once again Tandin stood to one side. His feelings were very different from theirs, and at the same time utterly different from his exhausted but triumphant return after his contest with the fireworm in the spirit world. There was no hero in this part of the story. This had been something else, a team of men bringing off a difficult and dangerous task. Nedli might tell the tale, so that people in after time could know of a way to kill a fireworm, but she wouldn't do it in the manner in which she told her stories of heroes, because it is in the spirit world that they do their great deeds, not here.

Sordan was trying to hack off one of the fireworm's feet, to take back to the cave as a sacred object to hang on the wall, but his sharpest flint made not a scratch in the monster's hide.

That was as it should be, Tandin thought dreamily. He felt a strange fellowship with the fireworm, far deeper than he felt with the rejoicing hunters. It too didn't belong in the world where people live and die. No weapon of this world should harm it, even in death. It had taken a spirit force, the huge, cold spirit force of the lake, to destroy it. That was what the Blind Bear had been telling him when she'd given him his weapons in her cave.

His dream-state deepened. There was life of a kind still there in the great carcass, he realised. Just as a light still gleams in the eyes of a deer after the blood has stopped pulsing from the death wound and the breathing died away, so there was something, some last element of the fireworm's fiery being, still seeping out of its cooling hulk. But not out into this world above the rocks, into its bitter cold and wet. Back down into the world of fire beneath the mountains.

Like a lone wolf on a scent, Tandin followed the difficult trail, down and yet further down, until he entered the world of fire, and became one of its creatures. There were other creatures there, of many kinds, just as there are in this world above, and just as people were the masters here, so were fireworms in the world below. They had thoughts, like people, and loves, and longings.

They lived in the heart of the fires below, and fed upon substances in the fiery rocks, but they could not give birth there. Just as toads must leave the air to mate and lay their eggs, so a pregnant fireworm must go up among the chill rocks above to give birth, and her mate must carry up burning rocks to keep her and her unborn brood alive.

That was hard, but not dangerous, unlike her other need. To feed those unborn young she must have substances that couldn't be found among the rocks, but only out in the dreadful world above, in places where a fire has consumed the flesh of some animal and its ashes are scattered among the embers. This might happen, perhaps, where forest creatures have been trapped in a blaze, but far more reliably where humans make their lairs and roast their meat.

Perhaps that was only a guess, but the love was certain. The love of the fireworms for each other, and her need, and his courage in trying to satisfy it. He had watched over her, cosseted her, fostered her and made long and dangerous forays into the world above to fetch the precious substances—all so that the marvellous race of the fireworms should not be lost. And he had failed.

Tandin came dazedly back into the world of air with this thought in his mind, that what had happened was not a triumph, but a tragedy. And there was a hero in this part of the story after all, the one now lying defeated on the icy rocks of Bear Mountain with the hunters rejoicing round him. Some of the best of Nedli's stories, the ones that sang on in the mind long after she'd told them, were like that, tales of a hero who had triumphantly performed mighty deeds, and in the end perished in fulfilling the final one. Did the fireworms in the furnaces below the mountains tell each other such tales? And who would go back to the world of fire below to tell them what had happened?