Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits

FIREWORM

PETER DICKINSON

This was the story Nedli told:

Long ago there was only the Great White Owl, the spirit owl, so there was always ice and snow and darkness. There was never any thaw, never any long, warm days. No people lived in the mountains. Then the Sun sent his children, the Amber Bear and the Blind Bear, to drive the Great White Owl away beyond the mountains, so that people could live here. She was not the Blind Bear then, but as they fought the owl he pecked out her eyes.

Never was such fighting. The earth shook, and the mountains smoked and flamed and poured out burning rocks, but in the end the two bears drove the owl away, and the sun came, and the long, warm days.

The sun brought people, and animals for the men to hunt, and roots and nuts for the women to gather. But the people did not have fire, so they ate their food raw.

Now the two great bears grew fat and lazy in the good times, and they found a cave far up Bear Mountain and went to sleep, and the Great White Owl came back, bringing the snow and ice and darkness.

The forest animals did not know to go south, so they froze and died. But the people huddled into a cave. They broke branches from the forest and made a wall to keep out the wind and snow. But still they were cold, cold, and they had nothing to eat, and soon they would die. So they cried to the bears to save them.

Their crying woke the Blind Bear, and she said to her brother, “I cannot sleep for the crying of the people. Make yourself into a snow bear and go to the people and give them your old pelt, your amber pelt, to keep them warm.”

The Amber Bear did as she said, and as he journeyed the Sun came up for a little while and saw a great white bear crossing the glacier, carrying an amber pelt across his back. The Sun’s light struck sparks from the pelt and they fell on the glacier and melted a hole in it, and that is why in summertime there is a lake in the middle of the glacier. Only a few little sparks stuck in the hairs of the pelt.

When the Amber Bear reached the cave, he found the entrance blocked with branches. He pushed his way through, and as he did so those few sparks fell out and set the logs on fire. He left his old pelt on the floor and went back to the Blind Bear.

The people woke and found a great amber pelt on the floor of the cave and a fire at the entrance. They rushed down to the forest to fetch more branches to feed their fire, and there they found the frozen body of a deer. It was hard as ice, so they put it by the fire to thaw, but they piled so many branches onto their fire that when they came to eat the deer they found they had roasted all one side. So they learned that meat is best if it is cooked.

Now they had both warmth and food, and could live through the White Owl season, until the two bears woke feeling mean and hungry, and fought the owl again and drove it away and brought the sun back.

That was the first of Nedli’s stories. If you asked her whether it was true, she would tell you, ʺIt is true in the spirit world. My stories are a way of seeing, and a way of saying.ʺ

Tandin knew he was dreaming. The cave he was in wasn’t the Home Cave, but some kind of a dream cave. It was pitch dark, but he knew that the Blind Bear was there, though he couldn’t see her or smell her or touch her. Dream terror welled up, shuddering through him, forcing him out of his dream.

Just as he was waking, the Blind Bear whispered in his mind.

One word.

Fireworm.

And now he was swimming up out of sleep, sleep deeper than he had ever known. Only the Blind Bear’s whisper drove him into wakefulness, ordered his eyes to open, forced him up onto his elbow, to stare around the Home Cave. And all seemed well. The fire glowed in the entrance. It glowed through the cave, lighting the overarching rock, glinting off the hairs of the great bear pelt that hung on the back wall, casting shadows among the huddled bodies of the sleepers around him.

There was a strange, sweet reek in the cave, dragging him back into sleep. His body sagged.

Fireworm.

What did it mean?

ʺListen to your dreams,ʺ Nedli would say. ʺMostly they are silly, but some are messages from the spirit world. You will know when it is one of those, but they come as riddles, and you must guess their meaning.ʺ

This was one of those, Tandin was drowsily sure. Fireworm? Another of Nedli’s stories said that the Great White Owl hated fire, because it came from the sun, and sent the fireworm to take it away. For three winters people tried to fight the fireworm, but in the end they gave up and moved away. That was long ago, among different mountains. Probably it was only a story, a way of seeing, or a way of saying, but the dream had been so strong. . . .

He settled back down, but still the nightmare kept him from sleep. He tried to drive it away by imagining that he was lying with Mennel in his arms, where she slept among the women on the far side of the cave. Bast, her father, had forbidden her to speak to him, but he knew from the way she looked at him—

Fireworm!

The Blind Bear’s whisper broke through the flimsy dream. Again he eased himself up onto his elbow and stared at the fire. It had burnt down to a heap of embers, with a few ends of branches smouldering round the edges. Why hadn’t whoever was on watch been keeping it fed? Above the glowing heap he could see a section of the night sky, hard-starred, with the glittering flank of Bear Mountain cutting it off to one side. In front of that whiteness Barok sat with his back against the wall of the entrance, wrapped in his furs and fast asleep with his head on his knees. That was strange. Barok was a good man. Often he led the hunt. He wouldn’t sleep on watch.

The heap of embers seemed to settle a little. The movement continued. Tandin sat right up, then rose swaying to his feet, wrapping his fur round his shoulders. His mother was dead and no one knew his father, so he slept in a place without honour, well away from the fire. He staggered between the sleepers towards it. Twice he stumbled on limbs, but no one woke. Now he could see a hollow forming in the top of the mound, embers slithering down its sides, like the sand in the little traps some ants make in summer. Any prey that steps into them loosens the sand and slithers helplessly down to where the ant waits at the bottom. . . .

Faster and faster. Tandin came wide awake.

ʺFireworm!ʺ he croaked. And louder, ʺFireworm!ʺ again.

No one stirred. He nudged a sleeper with his foot, prodded him hard. Dead? No, in Nedli’s story the fireworm put everyone to sleep with his breath. . . .

Yes! That sweet odour . . .

Tandin stumbled to the entrance and into the harsh, clean mountain air. It scoured the sweet stench out of his lungs. His mind cleared, and he remembered how the men in the story had fought the fireworm. He laid his fur on the path, ran back to the cave entrance, grabbed Barok’s axe from the rock beside him and started to hack chunks of compacted snow from the piled drift beside the path, heaping them on the fur. He folded the back legs over the pile, forming a bag which he could drag by the legs to the fire.

By now the hollow reached down to the floor of the cave, where it became a fiery pit going on down, with the embers still slithering into it. The pile was already more than half gone. With a huge effort, Tandin swung the bag up over the remaining embers, let go of the back legs and shot the snow pile down into the pit.

From down below came a hooting scream like the sound of a blizzard howling through a rock cleft. The sleepers began to stir.

ʺFireworm!ʺ Tandin yelled, and staggered back gasping to the snow-drift. Before he had half filled his fur, the hunters were stumbling out. As their minds cleared, they remembered Nedli’s story. They elbowed Tandin out of the way and finished filling his fur. Two of them dragged it off to the fire while the rest hacked out more snow.

Inside the cave the women used some of the branches stacked ready for burning to rake as many of the embers as they could into a pile well away from the fire, and then fed them with broken branches. As the hunters flung bag after bag of snow into the pit, the howl from below rose to a deafening scream, which then faded away as it sank further and further down into the rock. Long after it had dwindled into silence, the hunters toiled steadily on, while the women swept and swept to clear away the black but still scorching embers that littered the floor.

At last they gave up and settled round their new fire, coughing and spluttering because it was no longer in a place where natural drafts carried the smoke out of the cave. No one slept again. Nedli retold the story of the fight against the fireworm, and they then sat mulling it over in sad and anxious voices, knowing that the monster was no tale-teller’s invention to while away an evening, but was a creature of the real world, their ancient enemy. And it had found them again.

Towards dawn the hunters were discussing how to keep themselves awake on nights when the fireworm came. Someone said, ʺIts breath is very strong. All of us slept, even Barok, who was on watch.ʺ

ʺIn the old days they made a snow-hole outside and went out two at a time to keep watch, coming back often to check the fire,ʺ said another voice. Others joined in.

ʺAnd still some could not be woken when it was their turn.ʺ

ʺThe howling woke me.ʺ

ʺAnd me.ʺ

ʺIt couldn’t send out its breath when it howled.ʺ

ʺBut Nedli says the fireworm comes in silence. What made it howl? Someone must have thrown snow on it. Who was awake?ʺ

ʺVulka was already at the drift when I came there.ʺ

They turned to Vulka, who shook his head, puzzled.

ʺNo,ʺ he said. ʺThe howling woke me too. But someone . . . his fur was half filled with snow . . .ʺ

Frowning, he gazed round the shadowed faces. Tandin did nothing to catch his attention, but when their glances met and locked, he rose. A man without honour is no better than a woman. He dared not stay seated when speaking to hunters.

ʺYes,ʺ he said. ʺThe Blind Bear woke me. I dreamed I was in her cave. . . .ʺ

He told them about his dream and what he had done on waking. They stared at him and turned to Nedli. She didn’t only tell stories. She was their Old Woman, who remembered things that had happened before any of them were born, as well as all the lore of long ago, things that generations of Old Women had passed down. She sat among the women, and spoke for them, but spoke as an equal with the hunters. She looked round the circle and then rose.

ʺLet the hunters come with me,ʺ she said, and led them to the back of the cave.

ʺWho knows the name of Tandin’s father?ʺ she said. ʺWas it any of you . . . ? No . . . ? Lay your hands on the pelt of the Amber Bear and swear to me it was not.ʺ

All did as she told them.

ʺPerhaps the fellow’s dead,ʺ said Sordan. ʺOr perhaps he was from another cave.ʺ

ʺPerhaps,ʺ said Nedli. ʺBut the Blind Bear has called Tandin to her and spoken to him in his dream. I think he is a spirit-walker and it was Amber Bear that took human shape and fathered him, as long ago he fathered Tarr and Undarok.ʺ

ʺThose are only stories,ʺ said Vulka.

ʺLast night you thought the fireworm was only a story,ʺ said Barok.

ʺIn that case let Tandin walk the ghost path,ʺ said Bast. ʺLet him ask his father to help us.ʺ

The other hunters ignored him, well aware why he should say that. There were ghost walkers in one or two of the other caves, but most who had tried to take that journey had either died or returned too crazed to live long.

The Blind Bear whispered in Tandin’s mind.

Son of a bear, come.

He left his place by the wall, joined the circle of hunters and laid his hand on the pelt.

ʺYes,ʺ he said. ʺLet me walk the ghost path. Set me on the way.ʺ

ʺYou’re too young,ʺ said Barok. ʺGrown hunters have died. Remember what Nedli has said. ‘The ghost path is splintered ice beneath the feet, thorn bush tearing the flesh, bitterweed on the tongue, ice in the heart. It runs on the very edge of life, with a sheer drop down into the dark land of the Great White Owl.’ʺ

ʺThere is always a price to pay for anyone who walks the ghost path,ʺ said Daskan. ʺAn arm, or an eye.ʺ

ʺOr his mind,ʺ said Bast, with relish. ʺOr his life.ʺ

ʺThe Blind Bear calls me,ʺ said Tandin.

That settled it.

Nedli knew the ritual. She set everyone to preparing a feast but told Tandin to take extra furs and go and wait outside. As he went out into the pale and icy dawn, the Blind Bear whispered in his mind again.

Bears sleep at this season. Son of my brother, be a bear.

Something in him understood her meaning. He chose a place on the northern side of a boulder, so that the brief noon brightness shouldn’t wake him, and scooped a hollow in the snow. Deliberately, bit by bit, he slowed his heart and his breathing. His eyes were open, but he was neither awake nor asleep. When Mennel passed him with two other women, going to fetch roots from the pits where they were cached, she turned aside and stared down at him in wonder. Tandin perceived her as if from very far off, and knew who she was, but did not stir.

The others feasted and boasted and sang, and as the sun began to sink, they came out and carried Tandin inside. By then his flesh felt as cold as raw meat would have been on a summer morning, but he was still slowly breathing.

On Nedli’s instructions they had taken the amber pelt down from the wall and spread it on the floor. Now the women stripped Tandin of his furs and laid him on it and wrapped it twice round him and bound it in place with thongs. Six of the hunters hoisted him onto their shoulders and carried him down to the burial tree, with the rest of the people groaning and wailing the death chant as they followed.

The burial tree stood a little way into the forest at the top of a mound too rocky for anything else to have taken root. All round rose the cairns of long-dead hunters. The tree was very old, and dead all down one side. Most of the trees in the forest were pines of one kind or another, but this was an ash tree and leafless at this season. Two of the hunters climbed into the tree carrying thongs, which they passed over two branches growing side by side, a little way apart, one dead and one still living. The men on the ground tied one end of each thong round the roll of pelt with Tandin at its centre and hauled him up into the tree. It was almost dark by the time they turned away, still singing the death music, and left him there, hanging between life and death.

Though he could see nothing from inside the pelt, Tandin had been aware of all this and knew what was happening to him. Now he could feel the night gathering itself round him and the utter cold in which nothing could live beginning to seep through the layers of fur and hide and into his still-sentient flesh. Slowly it moved deeper, but before it reached his centre, a strange warmth began to pervade him, a glow without heat, a peace. The feeling made him drowsy, and he slept.

He was woken by a savage thump on his chest, a battering of wings and a tearing sound. The bundle he was wrapped in rocked violently to and fro. The pelt that covered his face was ripped clear, and he gazed up into a strange dark shape, outlined against moonlit sky. At the edge of his vision, on either side, two curving silvery lines pulsed to and fro, glinting where the moonlight caught plumage on the leading edges of the beating wings.

Now, knowing what he faced, he could make out two dark and shining rounds, faintly gold, in the dark shape above him. The eyes of the Great White Owl gazing down at its prey. And below them the gleaming curve of the black beak, poised ready to strike.

This is the price I must pay, he thought, to be blind, like the Blind Bear. If this is what she chooses, I am ready.

Something buffeted into the tree-trunk. The leafless branches clattered together. Twigs rattled down. A roar of challenge rose from below.

The White Owl screamed, leaped into the air and hurtled down, savage talons reaching for the challenger. Something thudded against the tree. The violence of the impact snapped the dead branch from which Tandin was suspended. His whole bundle swung down, still held by the thongs at the lower end, and continued to swing heavily to and fro while the battle shook the forest. From time to time he caught glimpses of the fight, the owl plunging once more into the attack, or the monstrous bear it fought reared on its hind legs, fangs gleaming in the moonlight, forelegs held wide, with immense hooked claws extended. At one point he saw its mask clearly. Where the eyes should have been there were two scarred pits. Yet it turned its head to follow the owl’s flight and tensed to meet the next attack. He didn’t see an actual clash, or how the fight ended.

But the owl was gone and the fight was over. Then, as the swinging motion diminished, he saw the bear chewing at the thong that still held him, where it was lashed and weighted with boulders at its further end. It parted, and he was lowered to the ground. His face was licked by a great rough tongue. A strange, fluid moment followed, in which his bones seemed to melt into flesh and both together into a juice which almost instantly solidified into flesh and bone. Dazedly he rose to his feet.

His four feet.

And the pelt he had been wrapped in was no longer fastened around him. It was part of him, his own hide.

His nostrils were filled with a wonderful, complex reek. He swung his head towards the other bear. Her features were dim and blurred, but her scent was as vivid as any human face, and as individual as a name: Blind Bear. She was in heat.

She nosed along the ground and picked up in her jaws a bit of broken branch with a length of thong attached to it, then turned away with a grunt and walked off down the mound and into the trees. Tandin followed her, snuffling her scent.

The ground sloped more and more steeply upward. They climbed between snow-draped trees until they reached open ground, a plunging snowfield on the flank of an immense spur of Bear Mountain, which soared majestically up on their left, though in the dim vision of a bear it was no more than a huge white blur. The Blind Bear climbed steadily on, twisting to and fro to avoid the deeper drifts. When she reached the ridge at the top of the spur she turned left. Tandin padded eagerly after her.

Still climbing, they followed a desperately narrow track along the spine of the ridge, often no more than a finger-width from sheer falls on one side or the other. On their left, below them, lay the glacier, and nothing but the darkness and killing cold and whistling blizzard of an arctic night. To their right it was somehow broad day, with the lulling odours of summer drifting on the breeze. So they climbed between life and death to the cave of the Blind Bear.

The entrance was a dark slot in an ice-sheeted cliff. Here the Blind Bear paused, rose to her hind legs and batted a large icicle from the archway. She sniffed at it briefly, marked it with her scent and padded on. Tandin sniffed at the icicle as he passed it. Its scent was entrancing. He didn’t want to leave it, but neither did he want to lose the Blind Bear, so he picked it up in his mouth and hurried after her along a twisting tunnel. Other tunnels led off to the side, but the scent trail was clear and he found her waiting for him in an immense cavern, deep inside the mountain.

The darkness here was absolute, but her odours told him all he needed to know.

He put the icicle down and came up alongside her, rubbing his body against hers, then faced her. Both bears rose to their hind legs, clutched each other round the chest and with deep, rumbling purrs rubbed their neck-glands against each other. They fell to their feet and stood nose to tail, flank rubbing flank and noses snuffling at the other one’s anal scent-glands. When both were fully prepared, he mounted her, and they coupled in the utter dark of her cave.

Tandin woke in his human body. He was lying on the bear pelt, naked, but the air was no colder than it might have been in high summer. He was still in the Blind Bear’s cave, and she was there, and again he knew it before she spoke in his mind.

Your seed is in me. You will never mate with any human female. This is the price you must pay to walk the ghost path.

ʺI pay it,ʺ he answered, and like a witness to his oath, the rock returned the echo of his voice.

Now you must fight the fireworm. Twice you must fight it. The first time alone, in the spirit world, and again with your friends in the world where people live and die. Your weapons are by your side. Use them in both worlds. Now come with me.

Tandin groped by his thigh and found a piece of rough timber with a bit of thong knotted around it. It could only be the broken branch of the burial tree that the Blind Bear had carried all the way to her cave. He didn’t recognise the other object. It was hard and smooth, about as long as his arm and as wide at one end, but tapering to a point at the other and, when he picked it up, heavier than any timber he knew. He rose. The Blind Bear grunted and turned away. He drew the bear pelt round him and followed the soft pad of her feet. He could still smell her, but no longer locate her by smell. Her scent was now only the heavy reek of some large beast.

She stopped as soon as he could see the pale slot of the cave entrance, its icicles glinting in the moonlight. He realised what his second weapon must be. Why had it not melted at all in the warmth of the cave? It was as dry as the dead branch and no colder to the touch. Strange, but no stranger than what had happened before.

ʺMy honour and my thanks,ʺ he said as he came up beside her.

She grunted and he walked on until he stood at the mouth of the cave, looking out along the impossible path by which they had come. He didn’t hear her come up behind him, or know she was there until her nudge against his spine sent him hurtling along the narrow path. He took an instinctive stride to regain his balance, and another, and another, and found he was racing along the twisting path, each stride a bound the length of a fallen tree, but light and easy and sure. So sure that there was never any moment when he felt a risk of missing his footing. It was as if the path were constantly reforming itself to meet his foot.

He understood what was happening to him from one of Nedli’s stories. This was the spirit-walk. The hero Jerast, who had paid the price of an ever-running sore to walk the ghost path so that he could fight the Wolf-father, could do this. He sped effortlessly along the ridge, down the steep snowfield and into the trees. The forest barely slowed him. He twisted and jinked, but there was always a way. And the climb to the Home Cave was as easy as if he had been weightless.

He paused at the entrance and considered the weapons in his hand. For the moment he could see no use for the bit of branch, but the unmelting icicle seemed a ready-made stabbing stake. He was reminded of one of the hunters’ main weapons; poles or shorter and stouter lengths of wood, sharpened at one end and the point then hardened in the fire. Some had thongs attached to them so that they could be pulled from the stricken prey with less danger of the hunter being trampled or gored in the process. So Tandin loosened the thong from the log, tied one end round the butt of the icicle and coiled the rest around his waist, tying it so that the icicle hung at his hip.

He laid the bear pelt down on the patch of rock that they had cleared of snow the night before and looked up at the moon to check how much of the night was gone. It was almost full, and still climbing the eastern sky. It struck him that this could be the last time he would see it.

In Nedli’s story the people who had fought the fireworm long ago had found it was useless to block its entrance hole with rocks, because it chewed its way through them almost at once. It was better to keep filling the hole with snow night and day, so Sordan and Dotal were sitting by the entrance, ready to do this next time. Their eyes were wide open, but Tandin was still in the spirit world and they seemed not to see him as he passed between them, not even when he thrust the end of his log into the embers of the fire and set it blazing. Instead of soon smouldering out, as a log would do in the world where people live and die, it continued to burn brightly, lighting the whole cave.

The new fire was close to the right wall, and the men and women were sleeping in two groups along the left-hand side, where a draft seemed to keep most of the smoke clear of the floor. The hole by which the fireworm had come was a black pit in the solid rock. The last load of snow had all but melted away. The hole went straight down. Its walls were almost smooth, without handhold or foothold. Confident in the near weightlessness of the spirit-walker, Tandin stepped calmly into it and floated down, with the flame from the log streaming above him, until he reached the bottom. This turned out to be a natural fissure in the rock, through which the fireworm must have made its way until it was directly below the Home Cave. It was no more than a boulder-strewn crevasse, almost impassably difficult going in the world where people live and die, but the spirit-walk carried Tandin along it with the speed of dream.

Several times he came to tunnels which the fireworm had bored through the rock to make its way from one fissure to another, and there he slid the icicle in against his back, beneath the windings of thong, and dropped to all fours, but still sped along, not crawling on hands and knees like a human but somehow shortening his legs and lengthening his arms so that he could run like a fox or a deer.

As he twisted his way through the massive foundations that underlay the familiar mountain landscape, he found himself becoming steadily more aware of their nature and structure, almost palpable to him in the spirit world in which he was moving, the unimaginable pressures and resistances that held them in place, the huge, uncaring, alien essences that informed them. Ahead and to his right, dominating them all, rose Bear Mountain. He could feel a core of heat deep below it and rising up through its centre, narrowing as it rose towards the summit.

The air in the tunnel grew steadily warmer. He sensed the forest-covered valley below the Home Cave as a slight easing in the pressure. The fissures and tunnels turned to follow it for a while, then turned again, and he could feel the renewed weight of the mountain spur up which he and the Blind Bear had climbed earlier that night. The ghost path along the ridge was like a streak of lightning in his awareness as he crossed beneath it, a vivid, jagged line, a landmark. And then something new, massive again, but different. Another sort of spirit, a great force locked into stillness. The spirit of ice, waiting through the endlessly returning seasons for the world to change, and the sun to return and release it into water. The glacier.

Now the fissure turned again, and then widened suddenly and became a large chamber filled with a strange, smoky glow. The air was warmer than a summer noon and smelt of earth and embers. Immediately he was aware of the presence of the fireworm. It had been asleep, but his coming had it startled into wakefulness. Not Tandin himself, but the flame he carried. He retreated round the bend in the tunnel and wedged his log between two boulders. It seemed to have burnt down its length hardly at all. Leaving its betraying flare behind, he stole forward.

He reached the cavern and looked down into a wide hollow. He could see places that seemed to have been shaped by the same method that had shaped the tunnels through which he’d come, but here they had carved out the cavern floor to form a great nest-like hollow in the solid rock. The glow came from a stranger creature than Tandin had ever imagined, lying on a darkly glowing mound of rocks at the bottom. At first it seemed to be nothing more than a huge, pale globule with fiery ripples pulsing over its surface, regular as a heartbeat. The only things he had seen anything like it were the fat, whitish edible grubs that could sometimes be found under the bark of rotting tree-trunks, but this was enormously larger. It would have filled the far end of the Home Cave.

There was a domed mound at its nearer end, on which, as he watched, a small round hole opened and emitted a wailing hoot. Further back, on either side of the mound, two cupped flaps had risen, which he recognised as ears. So the hole must be a mouth, and the two black spots a little above it must be eyes. The mound began to rotate to the right, paused and returned to the left, and returned again, hooting each time it paused, then waiting, and then resuming.

Until now the sleeping life in the creature had been veiled by the far stronger presence of the fireworm. On waking, its ache, its need, had instantly asserted themselves. And now, behind that, he could faintly sense the swarm of half-formed lives inside it. He couldn’t for the moment see the fireworm, but felt it to be somewhere in the darkness between himself and the hooting creature. Then it came lurching into view.

It was at first sight less strange. Not as huge as he had expected, but still several times larger than any creature the hunters met in the forest, with a body like a tree-trunk, but smooth and oily, and a dismal, whitish colour, the pallor of a plant that has tried to grow beneath a stone. The head was away from him so he could see no features; the creature was blunt at the rear, tailless, with short legs thicker than a man’s body, ending in wide and muscular feet with immense hooked claws.

When it reached the other creature, it uttered a soft hoot, as if to say ʺI am here.ʺ It seemed to have no neck and a head almost as blunt as the rear, with a huge dark eye and a small ear visible, but no sign of any nostrils, mouth or jawbone. They were mates, Tandin now saw, a male and female fireworm, however strangely different. And she was swollen to this shape by the growing brood of half-formed fireworms inside her.

He watched, sweating in the heat, while the fireworm reared onto its haunches. A flap opened across its belly. It scooped down into the pouch with its forepaws, and brought them out with the paws cupped around a heap of dark fragments. Somehow it lowered its head and blew on them from the mouth Tandin still couldn’t see. He caught the faint glimmer of embers coming to life and watched while the fireworm shuffled itself sideways round the female, delicately tipping them in between its bulging underside and the glowing rocks on which it lay. With what sounded like soft moans of relief, the female subsided into a globule while the fireworm busied itself around it rearranging the heated rocks to cradle it yet more closely.

Satisfied, the male rose again onto its haunches and started to swing its head questioningly round the cavern. Now Tandin could see the mouth clearly, though he wouldn’t have recognised it as such, a wrinkled and pitted area in the middle of a flat, round surface. Before the fireworm’s search reached him he withdrew into the fissure.

There was no hunters’ lore to tell him how to fight such a creature. He must get in at least one good strike, but where? Did it have a heart, even, to pierce, and blood to shed? Was there some kind of bait he could use, so that he could attack it from the flank? Yes, he had fire, the flaming log. If he could . . .

The rudimentary plan was still forming and he was unwinding the thong from his waist when he heard a movement from the cavern, a shuffling footfall, and another, and another. The fireworm was moving towards him. It had somehow sensed where he was, and now it was coming.

He snatched up the log and retreated to a point where the fissure widened. There he wedged it between rocks again, and, just as the fireworm came round the bend, scuttled behind a large boulder lying against the right-hand wall. Through a slit between the boulder and the wall, he watched it approach. As it came the puckered mass at its front end unfolded, stretched, and became a single circular lip surrounding a mouth as wide as the whole head and lined on all the surfaces that he could see with row behind row of blunt but savage-looking teeth. The front row protruded forward, while the whole head rotated steadily from side to side, as if already grinding its way through solid rock, each row of teeth replacing the one before it as that wore down.

The monster wasn’t built to move fast, but it came steadily, picking its way over the tumbled surface. In places its low-slung body slithered on the rocks. As it moved out of sight behind the boulder, Tandin turned and tensed, gripping the icicle at the balance point, with the other end of the thong looped round his left hand.

The head came into view. The monster’s whole attention was on the flaming log. Though one eye faced in his direction it seemed not to notice him—but the instant he moved the head swung towards him and that terrible mouth was less than a pace away. A waft of its sickly-sweet breath flooded over him. He could sense its numbing power, but here in the spirit world it could not touch him. With all his strength he flung the icicle into the grisly pit of a mouth, and immediately leaped aside.

He had already chosen a landing place, and another a stride further on, but he needed to take his eye off the fireworm to reach them. When he turned to face it, he found that its head had followed him round and the monster was already lurching towards him. It seemed not to have noticed the icicle down its gullet or the thong trailing out of its mouth. Desperately Tandin jerked on the thong as he retreated another pace. In the same moment a violent spasm shook the fireworm. Its body arched up, with its front legs heaving clear of the floor, and it emitted an enormous coughing roar, spewing the icicle out of its mouth while Tandin’s tug on the thong brought his weapon flying towards him, passing over his shoulder and landing just beyond the blazing log. He pounced on it and swung towards the monster, without thought reversing the icicle in his grip, ready for a fresh throw. The flame from the log wavered for a moment as the weapon passed through it.

Tandin didn’t notice. All his attention was on the fireworm. Another spasm shook it, far less violent than the first, and another even less. It turned towards Tandin and came slowly forward.

There was no time. Get round to the side somehow, he thought. Strike low and into the soft patch behind the leg, to where the heart might be. Use the—

The icicle twitched in his hand. He glanced down and saw it was streaming with water from its thicker end, so strongly that it was starting to wriggle and squirm. In a moment the stream had become a jet and he could barely control it, let alone throw it. In desperation he reversed it again and swung the jet on the fireworm, straight into the gaping mouth.

Instantly the creature recoiled and turned away, vomiting steaming water, and retreated down the fissure. Tandin pursued it, wrestling to keep the torrent of water aimed at it. He reached the cavern almost at the end of his strength, but with an enormous effort he managed to jam the icicle down between rocks again, with the force of the jet wedging it into the crack and holding it firm, and the water streaming down towards the central hollow.

By the time he had fetched the blazing log out of the fissure, the torrent had become a stream, tumbling down over the rocks, and still the flow-rate rose. It was as though all the winter snows of Bear Mountain were thawing together and forcing their way out through this one opening. He could even smell the familiar odour of snow-melt given off by the green and foaming cataracts of suddenly unlocked rivers in spring.

He turned to see what had happened to the fireworm. It had reached the other creature and was circling round her, rubbing its body against hers while they mourned together. Faintly through the roar of the torrent he could hear their hooting cries.

The water was now in the bottom of the hollow and was beginning to swirl round their nest. Clouds of steam rose from the burning rocks. Tandin caught only glimpses of the fireworm and his mate. He seemed to be making no attempt to leave her, but as the flood rose and the rocks of the nest cooled and blackened she seemed to shrink, and before long was visibly the same kind of creature as her mate but with a much smaller head and short, feeble legs. Now she started to scrabble her way down to the water’s edge and with a despairing lurch plunged in and tried to wade for safety of the slope beyond. The fireworm followed. But they had left it too late. The water was already too deep for her and she sank. For a little while the fireworm struggled to heave the submerged mass on, but then with a last agonising hoot gave up and collapsed and sank beside her.

Tandin watched for a while, but neither of them reappeared. His sense of exhausted triumph was threaded through with something different, something like regret, like loss. In their very strangeness, in the fireworm’s tenderness towards his mate, in their love for each other, they had been wonderful. He was suddenly aware of his own utter isolation. The Blind Bear had told him he must fight the fireworm alone, and so far he had simply accepted it, but now it struck him like the chill of winter whistling into the warmth of the cavern. Never before had he been on his own for so long. He had been born into a crowded cave, played and fought and learnt to do simple tasks with other children, dragged home logs with them as they grew older and stronger, helped the women gather food, run as a flanker on the hunt—never before anything like this. It was as if his only friends in the spirit world had been his enemies, the fireworms, and they were gone. And from now on it was going to be like this, always. Even when he was with the others back in the cave, inwardly it would be like this.

Sighing, he picked up the log. The flame still burnt, but far more feebly, and was weakening all the time. The spirit strength that had been his through the long night seemed to do the same, until he felt no more substantial than a puff of smoke. Like smoke he floated along the fissure, up the hole that the fireworm had made, and into the Home Cave. His kin still slept by the wall. The fire still burnt. He threw the log onto the embers and it burst into flame all along its length. He drifted between Sordan and Dotal, still watching by the entrance. Again, neither saw him pass. The bear pelt was where he had left it. He lay down and wrapped it round himself and gazed up at the sky. The moon was in the same place among the stars as it had been when he had entered the Home Cave. He drew a loose fold of the pelt over his head and went to sleep.

The hunters woke and ate before dawn, and at first light started down to the forest. Tandin slept on in the spirit world, so they didn’t see him lying by the entrance. Instead, they found his body as they had left it, slung between two branches of the burial tree. They lowered him to the ground and realised that he was still breathing with faint, slow breaths, and that despite the freezing night his flesh was still as warm as meat might be on a summer morning. So they carried him up to the cave and set him down in the cleared space by the entrance and went into the cave to tell Nedli what they had done. She said that they must let him be and he would wake in his own time.

At dusk Tandin drifted up out of the spirit world and found himself in his own body, in the world where people live and die. He sat up, settled himself cross-legged and pulled the bear pelt over his shoulders. He saw the people going to and fro, preparing for the night and for a possible attack by the fireworm, but in his eyes they were like shadows or like dreams. They glanced or stared at him for a moment but left him alone. Someone brought out food for him from their evening meal and set it down by his side, but he didn’t touch it. In his mind he was reliving everything that had happened, sorting through it, searching for its meaning.

It must have a meaning. It was a story that he had lived through, like one of Nedli’s stories, a riddle. Nothing that had happened to him in the spirit world had changed anything. Before it could do that, everything had to be done again in the world where people live and die. He must fight the fireworm twice, the Blind Bear had told him. And using the same weapons. But the icicle was still in the spirit world, buried under the rocks in the fireworm’s cavern, and the log was ashes on the fire in the Home Cave.

That was the riddle. The trick of a good riddle, Nedli said, is that things are and are not what they seem. The log had looked as if he might have used it as a sort of club, but what use would that have been against a creature like the fireworm? It hadn’t become useful until he had thrust it into the fire, and then it had been the light that had guided him through the fissures and tunnels, and the bait that had lured the fireworm to him, and the heat that had released the stream of water from the icicle. And the icicle itself. It had looked as if he could have used it as a throwing-stake, but could he really have driven it through that thick and slithery hide to the monster’s heart? And when he had struck his blow, flinging it down the fireworm’s gullet, the fireworm had coughed it back out. But as soon as he had passed it through the flame of the log it had changed and become truly a weapon that he could use, first to drive off the fireworm and then drown both him and his mate.

So his true weapons had been not a bit of dead branch and a chunk of ice but the powers locked inside them, waiting to be freed. Fire and water, water and fire.

Everything else, he was confident, was as he had seen it. Nedli said that things in the spirit world were like reflections in still water. The clouds in a pool on a summer’s day show what the clouds in the sky are like. You can shatter them with a thrown stone, but the clouds in the sky move on untroubled.

So the fireworm and his mate were still as he had seen them in the spirit world, and their nest was where he had found it, just below the glacier.

The glacier. Ice. Water waiting to be released. By fire. The lake that had been formed by a spark falling from the pelt of the Amber Bear. It opened every summer and froze over when the snows came, but was always there, deep in the heart of the glacier, a mass of water, more than enough to feed a torrent like that which had flooded into the fireworm’s cave.

It was after midnight when Tandin came out of his trance. By then the food that had been left for him was frozen hard, so he took it into the cavern. Merip and Bond, watching by the entrance, rose staring to meet him. He greeted them quietly and went on, thawed the food by the fire and ate it. Then he wrapped himself in the bear pelt and lay down a little apart from the others and slept for a night and a day and a night.

He woke a different man. Still Tandin, but changed. He had dreamed during that long sleep in the bear pelt that the spirits of all those who had worn it before him had each come to him in turn. They had spoken no word, but laid their fingers on his eyes and blown in his nostrils and their breath had carried into his mind all the secrets that each of them had known. Then they had left him with their blessings. He had started on his adventure as a young man without honour, a sleeper by the wall. He returned as confident in his own authority as if he’d been a long-time leader of the hunt.

When he woke and sat up, the others were already eating their morning meal. They fell silent, watching him. He was a spirit-walker, a figure of awe. He rose, drew the pelt over his shoulders, folding the forelegs together to hold it in place, and raised both hands in greeting. They returned the gesture, still in silence. He scooped a palmful of mashed root from the roasting-stone, beckoned to Nedli and went outside.

Though the sun had risen it had no strength, and the bitter night frost still hung in the air. It was too cold for an old woman, so when Nedli joined him he made her sit beside him, wrapped the bear pelt round both their bodies and kept her warm with his own warmth while he told her what he had done and seen.

ʺTell the others,ʺ he said.

ʺTonight,ʺ she answered.

ʺGood.ʺ

He sat for a while after she’d left him, simply becoming accustomed to his new self, then went down alone into the forest, where, still in the world where people live and die, he turned himself into a bear and began to become accustomed to that self also. He snuffled around, bear fashion. By smell he found a large, edible soil fungus, and a nest of honey bees in the leaf-litter at the bottom of a riven tree. He left them where they were for the moment but as the sun went down dug the fungus up and ripped the tree apart to get at the bees’ nest. Then he stopped being a bear and with his clever human fingers hollowed the fungus out, putting the flesh inside into his pouch, so that he could scoop the honeycomb into the rind and carry it back for the evening meal.

So that evening they feasted, and when they’d done Nedli told them Tandin’s Story. She had reshaped and reworded it, with many repetitions, and told it in the high, wavering story-teller’s chant, making it into a story that would sit beside the stories of long-ago heroes that they all knew by heart, and would live in people’s memories for generations after they were all dead. When she’d finished, Tandin explained what he thought the story meant and how it showed them the way to kill the fireworm. The hunters discussed it, of course, everyone having their say, or they wouldn’t have been hunters, but no one disagreed, except about which of them should go.

ʺLet Tandin choose,ʺ suggested Merip, but Tandin shook his head.

ʺNo,ʺ he said. ʺI am not the leader of the hunt. Let me be your tracker in the spirit world.ʺ

Clearly relieved, they picked Barok, and he chose six others, Vulka, Bast, Sordan, Dotal, Merip and Bond, to go with him. Next day they made ready, collecting food and extra furs, and binding them into bundles, and cutting shaped pieces of fir branch that they could bind to their feet and so walk on soft snow.

The morning after, Tandin was standing a little aside watching the rest of the party gather at the mouth of the cave with their families milling around them to wish them safely home when Mennel pushed her way out of the group and stood in front of him, her soft round features haggard, her firm young body sagging and listless, her brown eyes red with weeping. She, like all the others, knew the price he had paid, because Nedli had made that part of her story. He took her by the hands. She stared up into his face. Beneath the weeping, beyond the grief, he saw a bitter determination in her eyes. A bloodless whisper emerged from between his unmoving lips.

ʺSister of my father, I have paid your price. This is Mennel. She is the pain of my wound. Give her to a good man.ʺ

He seemed to listen to an answer, but she heard nothing. She shook her head, refusing that future also, and turned away.

At this season, in the world where people live and die, it was a full two days’ journey to the foot of the glacier, so at nightfall the hunters dug themselves a snow-hole in which to lie covered in furs and keep each other warm.

They did the same next night on the side of the valley in which the glacier lay, but this time Tandin didn’t join them. Instead he turned himself into a bear, found a hollow under a fallen tree where he could safely leave his bear body for a while, and entered the spirit world. Once there, he started nosing along the snow-covered moraine, the tumble of rocks below the ice wall at the foot of the glacier, until he found the place he was looking for.

He knew it before he reached it. Just as, when he’d been spirit-walking through the fissures and tunnels that led to the fireworm’s lair, the path along the ridge that he’d followed with the Blind Bear had become suddenly vivid overhead, so now he was instantly aware of the lair itself, vivid beneath his feet.

Having made sure of that, he climbed the moraine and nosed at the ice wall, probing for the spirits beyond it, different from those of the imprisoning ice—the spirit of the lake-water itself, and the spirit of fire, rising from deep below the mountain. Yes, of course. That was the same heat that warmed the cavern and kept the lake from freezing when winter froze the world, and created a weakness in the ice wall that each spring, year after year, gave way and let the top half of the lake come roaring out, tumbling the rocks of the moraine aside and carving a deep gully down the mountain, while the covering ice collapsed and the remains of the lake were left open to the sky.

He was padding back towards the snow-hole where the others lay when a clamour of snarls broke out from the wooded slope on his left. Wolves, bringing down their prey. He turned aside and climbed between the snow-draped trees and found a small pack snarling and wrenching at the body of a young caribou.

Wolves will normally face and fight a single bear, however large, rather than leave their kill. But when Tandin growled at them the secret word that the hero Jerast had tricked out of the Wolf-father, the whole pack slunk away into the dark.

The caribou was struggling to rise. Tandin broke its neck with a blow and dragged the carcass back to the snow-hole. He buried it in a drift, meat for the next few days, then turned himself into the human Tandin and joined the sleepers under the furs.

They breakfasted before dawn and climbed down into the valley to look at the task ahead. Tandin showed the hunters where the fireworm’s cavern lay.

ʺGood,ʺ said Barok, pointing at the cliff of ice towering above them, and the glittering ice-fall that had been the last outflow from the lake. ʺThat’s where the water’s going to break through, so that’s where we’ve got to melt the ice.ʺ

ʺWe can’t melt the whole fall,ʺ said Bond.

ʺThe melt-water runs in the gully,ʺ said Bast, always on the look-out for anything he could object to. ʺIt will put out the fire if we build it there.ʺ

ʺSo we build two fires,ʺ said Dotal, ʺone to either side of the gully, right against the cliff. There’s a lot of weight in that ice-fall. If we can weaken the cliff either side of it, it will pull the whole slab of cliff out.ʺ

ʺAnother thing,ʺ said Vulka. ʺThe timing’s going to be tricky. We don’t want the cliff breaking before the bastard’s dug his hole up to our fires. Water’s bound to put them out then, and he’ll give up.ʺ

ʺQuestion is, how fast can the brute dig?ʺ said Bond.

ʺAnd how long to melt the cliff?ʺ said Sordan.

ʺLast thing, he was having a nap, Tandin said,ʺ said Merip.

They looked at Tandin.

ʺI don’t know how fast he can dig,ʺ he said. ʺWhen he wakes and starts, perhaps. I’ll see tonight, if I can.ʺ

ʺRight,ʺ said Barok. ʺWe’ll start by building a decoy fire. There.ʺ

He pointed to a place a little way down the slope where the further wall of the gully had collapsed, half blocking it with a low pile of rock. ʺBest if he comes out there,ʺ he added. ʺThen, when the water fills the gully, it will flow down his hole. And tonight Tandin can see if the fire has woken him. All right? And we’ll build two rock platforms close against the ice-cliff either side of the gully for our main fires. That way, when the melt-water starts to flow down the cliff it’ll run out under the rocks. Then we’ll all set about fetching fallen timber out of the woods.ʺ

ʺIt’ll all be wet,ʺ said Bast.

No one paid any attention. They were used to Bast. They shared the tasks out, and by the time the main party had heaved and trundled rocks from the moraine to build the platforms for the two larger fires, Vulka and Sordan had found enough small dry timber for Vulka to work his firebow and get the decoy fire started. Then they split into two groups and scoured the woods on the flanking slopes for burnable timber among the tangles of fallen branches and dragged it down to the gully. Tandin rested, minding the fire, and no one nagged or mocked him for not joining the work.

At nightfall the hunters retired exhausted to the snow-hole. Tandin joined them, but when it was his turn to keep watch, he fed the fire and then settled cross-legged with the bear pelt around him, entered the spirit world and probed with his spirit down through the snow and the permafrost into the rock beneath, and on down through that for the fireworm.

Yes. It was there, he sensed, but still sleeping. There was something uneasy about its sleep, though, like a troubled dream. How had it experienced their earlier encounter? he wondered. It can’t have been totally unaware. Though, on the surface, events in the spirit world have no effect on their counterparts in the world where people live and die, at a deeper level they are the same event. Defeat and death in the spirit world aren’t necessarily followed by defeat and death in this world. They may be felt only as a nightmare troubling the sleeper. But still, surely, there has to be some weakening, some loss.

Troubled himself, he didn’t know why, Tandin withdrew from the spirit world, fed the fire and then watched the slow rising of the stars until it was time to go and wake Vulka.

Next day was much the same. All day they toiled at timber gathering, tying thongs to the butts of fallen trees and forming teams to drag them down to the glacier. At first Tandin joined the work and they seemed to welcome him, but still he didn’t belong. They were a team of men, doing what men do—in the hunt, in guarding the cave from wild beasts, in confronting aggressors—understanding how these things were done by a team to achieve ends they couldn’t have achieved as individuals. If Tandin had been merely a new recruit, they would have treated him roughly, putting him down, letting him make mistakes and then jeering at him for them and so on, until he had earned his place. Instead, they treated him with respect, warning him of risks, giving him the lighter end of a load, standing out of his way. It was not the same, and he sensed their hidden relief when he withdrew to rest after the midday meal.

By dusk they had enough piled up at the foot of the moraine for half a moon of ordinary fires, and had begun stacking it ready to light on the platforms either side of the gully. Meanwhile they let one side of their decoy fire burn down enough to provide a good bed of embers, and at nightfall roasted chunks of caribou meat over it and feasted, boasting and teasing, tossing the gnawed bones back into the fire.

That night, as before, they kept watch by turns, and as before, when Tandin’s watch came round, he fed the fire and settled down and entered the spirit world. But this time there was no need to probe for the fireworms. Both of them were instantly clear to his inward senses, the female this time more strongly—her intense and desperate sudden need, her pleading. And his reluctance, his despair, his dread. He had nothing in his pouch to give her. The humans in the cave had driven him off with the terrible cold weapons of the outer world, and now, night after night, blocked his entry with the same things. They were ready to fight him again should he make a new tunnel. . . .

The cavern seemed to fill with the odour of charring flesh.

A change, a sudden attention, a focussing. A hope.

The fireworm had become aware of the new fire, almost directly over its head.

Now it began to move. Sideways at first—it couldn’t reach the roof of the cavern to begin its tunnel—into the fissure, perhaps. . . . Ah, now, much more slowly it had begun to climb. It was drilling a fresh tunnel, upwards. Tandin could sense the steady, continuous effort, the pure power.

Merip, whose turn it was to watch next, woke of his own accord and went to see what had become of Tandin. He found him sitting trance-held by the fire, so he kept his own watch and woke Bond in his turn. The others joined Bond before dawn for a breakfast of cold roast caribou and mashed root. Then they continued all morning with the task of gathering timber and were having their midday meal when Tandin returned to the world where people live and die.

When he woke, he told the hunters what he had seen.

ʺSo how soon will the bastard finish his hole?ʺ said Vulka. ʺHe’s been going for a night, roughly. How far has he got?ʺ

ʺAbout a third of the way—a bit less, maybe,ʺ said Tandin.

ʺGive him a day and a night and a bit more—he’ll be through tomorrow noon, then. We’d better get the big fires lit, Barok,ʺ said Bond.

ʺIt doesn’t matter if we don’t get it melted till after he’s through,ʺ said Barok. ʺThe hole will be there.ʺ

ʺProvided he doesn’t go blocking it up again,ʺ said Bast.

ʺI’ve been thinking,ʺ said Sordan, slowly, as if to indicate the speed of his thought processes. ʺThey didn’t wake up first night after we’d lit the fire, though it had been going long enough, surely—it was good and hot by then. But last night, all of a sudden, there was the female, wide awake and all eager. And Tandin said he smelt burnt meat down there. Right? Remember Denini and the birds’ eggs?ʺ

All the others laughed, even Merip, though the laughter was at him. He was a small, cheerful man, nothing like a typical hunter, never on his dignity but affable and easy-going. The women said that the other hunters had only allowed him to join them because he was a brilliant tracker. Denini was his woman, and he doted on her. When she’d been pregnant with her first child, she had craved birds’ eggs, and Merip had had to spend good hunting days climbing trees to poke the nests down. The other hunters had mocked him for his solicitude, but he’d only laughed and said that it was for the sake of his unborn son, so that he could grow to be a hunter, fleet as a bird. And then the child had been a girl, and he’d doted on her too.

All this was good for a fresh round of teasing. Only Sordan, rapt in the seriousness of his thought, didn’t join in.

ʺNo, listen,ʺ he said, as soon as he got the chance. ʺWhat was the difference between last night’s fire and the one before? Answer, we’d roasted caribou and chucked the bones on it. Now suppose somehow the female had gone and smelt that, down there—suppose Tandin had taken it down with him—ʺ

ʺNo need for any of that supposing,ʺ said Vulka. ʺWhat Tandin does is a sort of dreaming, far as I can make out. So you’re dreaming, and a gust of wind blows a bit of smoke towards you, and you smell it in your sleep and make it part of your dream. Right, Tandin?ʺ

ʺI don’t think so,ʺ said Tandin slowly. ʺI started my watch well past midnight, and there wasn’t any meat smell then, not with this wind. And I suppose there is something a bit like Denini about the female—ʺ

ʺShe’s not fat, not even when she’s whelping,ʺ said Merip indignantly. ʺAnd she doesn’t hoot either.ʺ

That, and the whole absurd idea, was good for a fresh bout of laughter and teasing, which finished with Barok saying, ʺWell, I reckon we’ll get the big fires lit before we pack in tonight, and if all we’ve got to do to bring the brute up here is sling our scraps into the fire, it’s no great hardship.ʺ

He set the example with the rib-bone he’d been gnawing, and they all went back to work.

That afternoon they lit bundles of small stuff at their fire and poked them into the tunnels they had left for that purpose in the main wood-piles. More small dry stuff already laid in the tunnels quickly caught, and almost at once the flames were racing up through the logs with a jerky, scampering movement like squirrels running up a tree. Even in their weariness and anxiety the men laughed in triumph as both piles roared into flame.

Almost at once the fires were too hot to stand beside, and soon it was impossible to approach them for more than a few instants. The men had to choose their moment, strip off their furs, dart in with a branch or log, fling it onto the furnace and dart away. The flare lit the wooded slopes on either side of the valley. Now, from any distance, they could see how the separate updraughts either side of the ice-fall were carving two steadily widening and deepening slots into the cliff. A stream of melt-water came gushing down them, under the boulders of the platforms, down into the gully, where they became a single stream, slicing into the snow in the bottom of the gully, freezing into fresh ice-falls as they tumbled from boulder to boulder.

The three combined fires would have given light enough to work all night, but after a while the hunters became anxious that the ice wall would give way too early, so they broke off for their supper and then four of them left to rest in their snow-hole, while the others continued to feed the fires. Tandin took no part in their work now, but sat alone and apart, deliberately upwind of where they had eaten. Deep in the spirit world, immune to the appalling cold, he watched the fireworm’s progress. Again the smell of charred meat seemed to reek through the cavern, and again each time the fireworm returned there to rest the female soon drove it back with fresh entreaties. As it neared the surface Tandin began to be able to sense the exact point at which it might emerge. Sure enough, it seemed to be aiming not for the two great blazes by the ice wall, but for the far smaller decoy fire, where the hunters had roasted their meat.

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?

But the story should still be told, if not there, then here. When a hero is forgotten, he dies a second death. Yes, once they were back at the cave the people there would want to know everything that had happened, and then one day, not yet, Tandin would take Nedli aside and tell her his thoughts, so that she could make a new story, as strange as any that she already told, The Fireworm’s Story, to live in people’s minds for generations not yet born.

Spring came. The hillsides streamed and the ice-locked rivers loosed themselves and roared and foamed with snow-melt waters. The days drew level with the nights and the Amber Bear returned from his wanderings, dragging the sun with him, and the Blind Bear woke and together they fought the Great White Owl and amid ferocious gales drove him northward.

This year there were no uncoupled young men in the Home Cave to go journeying to the other caves along the range in search of a woman for themselves. But the White Owl had taken Golan’s woman, Sinasin, with a sickness he caused, first making her very sad and then, one night in the darkest part of the year, causing her to slip away while the watchers were changing places and lie down in the snow on her fur with nothing to cover her. Golan had found her there, frozen and dead, in the morning. So now he went to look for a new woman, confident that as a seasoned hunter he could have his choice. As well as the usual gifts he took something even more welcome, a new story, Tandin’s story, which he told from cave to cave along the mountain range.

Now all summer others beside the woman-seekers came visiting the Home Cave on various excuses, but in fact to gaze at the hero, and Tandin found himself more and more marked out and set apart. So it had been all his life, one way or another. First he had been pushed aside as a fatherless child and a man without honour. Now he was the son of the Amber Bear. A hero. A spirit-walker who had paid as great a price as any of the old heroes. No one despised him for this, as they would have despised any other womanless man. It was a matter for awe.

But the aloneness was hard to bear, so more and more he retreated into the spirit world to roam the ghost paths and converse with the spirits of trees and of waterfalls. There was great kindness in trees, and great wisdom in waterfalls, a deep understanding of the flux and change of the world. The visitors to the cave would find him sitting all by himself on the bear pelt, his eyes like stones, his breathing slow and deep, his flesh chill to the touch, and know that he was spirit-walking far from that place, and stare at the hero.

One afternoon late in summer Tandin was on such a journey when he felt himself suddenly called—he didn’t know how, or by whom. But the call was urgent, a desperate need, so he sped back along the ghost-paths and re-entered the world where people live and die. He found himself sitting in his usual place, on the bear pelt, and looking at a small group in front of the cave, two visitors listening to Nedli, and at the same time gazing at him with the usual wondering stare, and, a little apart from them, Bast, Mennel and another stranger, a man about Bast’s age.

Bast was talking to the stranger, but Mennel was gazing at Tandin with a totally different look from that of the wonder-seekers, a despair and need so piercing that it had somehow broken through into the spirit world and called him here. And something else. For her—perhaps for her alone in all the world—Tandin was still who he had always been. But there was no hope in her look. She too knew the price he had paid.

He gazed at her dreamily, and for a moment he became a woman, thought a woman’s thoughts, felt her feelings as she stood being bartered away by her father to be some stranger man’s, his possession, his toy, his child-bearer.

All fell silent as he rose and drew the pelt over his shoulders. They watched to see what he would do. As he walked across he seemed to them to be floating an invisible distance above the ground. Bast and the stranger fell back a pace. Tandin took Mennel by the shoulders. She closed her eyes, and he licked them and sealed them shut and drew her to his side, pulling the bear pelt round her to enfold them both.

ʺBe a bear,ʺ he muttered in her ear.

She rubbed herself against him, flank to flank, purring deep in her throat. The stranger bowed his head in acceptance while Bast visibly calculated the prestige that might accrue to him from this new alliance.

Keeping pace without effort, Tandin and Mennel started down the path, still with the bear pelt around them. As they drew further away the shape they made seemed to become less and less like that of two humans wrapped in an animal’s skin and more like the hindquarters of two shorter, bulkier beasts walking close together. By the time they disappeared into the forest, that was indeed what they might have been.