Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits

by Robin McKinley

  ʺSo, my dear, are you prepared to help, if it can be arranged?ʺ said Welly.

  ʺOh, yes please!ʺ said Ellie.

  That was how she came into the story, and so late on. From their very first meeting, she had felt that there was some kind of a mystery about Dave, and a story to go with it, and as time went by, she became more and more curious, but she was afraid to ask in case they were offended and she wouldn’t be able to come again. On her fourth visit, her resolve cracked.

  By now it was the school holidays and she had come for the middle of a week, three whole days with the two nights in between. This also meant that Dave didn’t have to be careful not to show himself on weekdays. Officially, he lived with his father in London during the week and went to school there, then came up and stayed with his grandmother at week-ends and in the holidays, while his father went mountain-climbing. Since there were no school parties to be guided round, on weekdays he and Ellie had the wood to themselves. They spent the whole of the first day working through a single section of it, doing the trees systematically, filling in the forms that Welly had prepared for them and adding the animals and birds as they came across them. Ellie would do one tree and Dave a neighbouring one, so that Ellie could call to him if she needed help. In the evening Welly entered the results on her PC.

  Ellie slept in a small room at the top of the stairs. She guessed that it was Dave’s, though it was far too tidy to feel like a boy’s room—like her brothers’ at any rate—and that he had moved in with Welly on the other side of the landing so that she could have it.

  Next day they went on with the census and were busy and happy until late in the afternoon, when they were measuring the girth of an oak tree. This was the immense old fellow in whose hollow branch Ellie had photographed the woodpecker’s nest. It had in fact lost more than that single limb, and they had both spent almost an hour up in its crown recording the progress of its decay. Now their joined tapes met round the base. Ellie held their ends together on one side, and Dave drew them taut on the other and read off the inches. He couldn’t be bothered with centimetres, he told her.

  ʺI don’t know,ʺ said Ellie as she straightened. ʺSomehow it doesn’t seem to matter that it’s lost its top. It’s still the emperor of the wood. But that must’ve been a storm and a half, Dave.ʺ

  ʺThat it was,ʺ said Dave. ʺThat it—ʺ

  If he hadn’t caught himself but just carried smoothly on, Ellie mightn’t have noticed the repetition, or grasped what it must mean. As it was, she froze for a moment, then turned slowly and stared at him. He waited, unreadable as ever.

  ʺYou were there, weren’t you?ʺ she said. ʺIt was almost a hundred years ago, and you were there. How old are you really, Dave?ʺ

  ʺOne ’undred and ninety this New Year past,ʺ he replied, untroubled. ʺGettin’ on a bit, you might say.ʺ

  Midwinter 1899/1900

  On the last night of the old century, or the first of the new one, Dave Moffard was woken by a single tremendous crash of thunder. Outside the wind roared through the trees of the wood and whined between his two chimney-pots like a man whistling through a gap in his front teeth. If there was rain, the noise of the wind drowned it. A little later he caught the whiff of smoke borne on the same fierce wind.

  Wonder what’s caught it, he thought. Timber of some kind—leaf-litter burnt with a sourer smell. There were a few dead trees in the wood, but nothing he’d have guessed would catch that easy. Though you never know with lightning.

  Must be past midnight, he thought. ’Ello there, Nineteen-hundred. Never reckoned I’d live to see you in. ’Appy birthday, Dave Moffard.

  He fell asleep and slept on until less than an hour before the late midwinter dawn. For a man his age, Dave didn’t sleep too bad.

  As on all other mornings, he first lit his lamp and riddled the ashes out of the stove, opened the dampers, fed in a few small logs and a couple of larger ones and put the kettle on for a pot of tea and his shaving water. For breakfast he had porridge cooked overnight in the oven, and then a morsel of ham with the tea, chewing slow and careful because his teeth didn’t fit that well. He shaved—harder to do these days, with his left eye so clouded and his right beginning to go the same way—then fed the stove again, put the tea-pot on it to stew a bit more, half-closed the dampers and looked out of the door. Dawn just breaking on a cold, clear day, but dry. No rain seemed to have fallen, then, after all that bluster. The wind had dropped too, to not much more than a breeze. It was still threaded with smoke.

  ʺLet’s go an’ ’ave a look then, shall we?ʺ he said, talking not in fact to himself but to Fitz, an old setter three years dead and not replaced because it wouldn’t have been fair on a young dog, with Dave likely to snuff it first. They never really get over it.

  He fastened his boots, heaved himself into his greatcoat, shoved on a hat and a double pair of gloves, wool first and then thick leather, picked up his stick and went out. Time was he’d have taken a gun, but his eyes weren’t up to it now, nothing like. He’d slowed down disappointingly quickly in the last few months—there’d been days when he’d barely put his nose out of doors—but he was feeling noticeably better this morning.

  He moved upwind at a steady shuffle, leaning on his stick to ease his right leg. Well before he reached it, he guessed the source of the smoke. The Cabinet House. Must’ve caught it good and proper. Yes, there it was, no more than a shell of walls, roof fallen in, nothing left of timbers and partitions except ash and embers on the ground and an odd reek of something sweet and sticky drifting on the breeze. Hundred and twenty years, getting on, it had stood here. Dave knew that because the date was carved into the lintel stone.

  Enter and wonder—1781.

  It was the fifth earl who’d built it, to house his collection. Pretty well all the earls had been mad on something or other, and the fifth had been mad on collecting. Used to go travelling round Europe and beyond with a couple of dozen servants to look after him, buying up anything that caught his fancy, provided it was odd enough. Built the Cabinet House, all little fancy turrets and spires and what have you, to hold his collection in special glass cases. Then he’d got a fever—Egypt or somewhere—and died, and the sixth earl had come along, not interested in collecting but mad on shooting, and planted up Dave’s wood for pheasant-cover, all among grand old oak trees—been there hundreds of years, some of them. Had to have a gamekeeper, of course, so he’d built a house for the fellow—Dave’s house now, because he’d been gamekeeper here following on from his father and his grandfather. So all his long life, there the Cabinet House had stood while the wood grew round it, full of its knick-knacks—dragons’ teeth, locks of mermaids’ hair, funny-shaped nuts, bottles from pharaohs’ tombs, that sort of rubbish. Dave was sad to see it go. Might’ve lasted me out, he thought.

  Forty years back, the eighth earl—book mad, he’d been—had fetched some of his scholar friends along to look the lot through, and they’d gone off with anything worth while for their museums. There hadn’t been anything left to be sad about, really, except memories.

  Dave stood in the doorway gazing vaguely over the pile of ash with the remnants of heat beating up into his face. Warmin’ my old carcass through, he thought. Doin’ something useful at last.

  Sudden as a blink, almost, the sun rose, slotting its rays through a gap where a fallen tree had brought down several of its neighbours. There was a movement in the ashes a little way over to Dave’s right. He peered at it with his good eye and decided it was more than just an eddy of wind stirring the surface. Something underneath. He scuffed the fringe of ashes aside, took a half pace forward, gripped his stick by the ferrule and reached out, trying to rake the thing towards him with the crook.

  Poor beast, he thought. What a way to go. Put you out of your sufferin’, shall I?

  He took a quick stride forward, this time onto hot embers, thrust the crook into the heart of the heap, hooked it round something more solid than ash and dragged it free. It cheeped plaintively as it c
ame, disentangled itself from the crook, and stood, shaking the ashes from its feathers. It was a baby bird, about the size of an adult rook, its eyes newly opened, its body covered with astonishing luminous yellow down that seemed to ripple with the heat of the fire, and the tiny fledge feathers along its wings a darker, almost orange gold. The beginning of a scarlet crest sprouted from the bald scalp. Dave had never seen anything like it before. It was an absurd creature, but wonderfully appealing. It seemed unharmed, though the crook of his stick had blackened perceptibly during its brief raking in the embers.

  Nor did it seem to be bothered by the heat even now. It stayed where it was, gazing imperiously round the ruin, seeming wholly untroubled by the human presence, and finally gazed directly up at Dave with its head cocked a little to one side. Well, what now? It asked him, plain as speaking.

  Dave was too interested to be amazed. Even in a very ordinary bit of English woodland like this there were enough amazing creatures to last a fellow a lifetime—one more didn’t make that much difference.

  ʺUp to you,ʺ he told it. ʺBut if ’eat’s what you’re used to, you’re goin’ to catch your death stayin’ out ’ere. Couple more days and this lot’s goin’ to be chilling off good an’ proper. If you want to come ’ome with me, that’s all right. You can sit on the stove if you’ve a mind. In the stove, for all I care. But you’re goin’ to be too ’ot for me to carry by the look of you, and I’m not havin’ you burnin’ my gloves, and I’ll need my stick. Let me see now. You go back an’ keep yourself warm while I see what I can fix.ʺ

  The bird cocked its head to the other side and settled down in the ashes, shuffling itself down into their warmth. Dave poked around outside the wall and found a half-burnt beam that must have come from immediately under the eaves, to judge by the section of cast-iron guttering still attached to it. The timber had smouldered away enough for him to be able to lever one of the iron gutter supports free with his stick. He dragged it across the clearing to a molehill where he kicked and scuffed it in the loose earth until it was cool enough for him to pick up without scorching his gloves. He carried it back to the doorway and with some difficulty knelt and, propping himself on his stick, leaned as far out as he could, with the back-bar of the gutter-support just touching the ashes. Lifeless though they looked, the residual heat rose, roasting, into his face.

  ʺWell, get on with it,ʺ he gasped. ʺCan’t stay like this more’n a second or two.ʺ

  The bird didn’t hesitate but shrugged itself clear of the ashes, waddled over and climbed on to the support. With even more of an effort than when he’d knelt, Dave got to his feet. He stood for a moment, swaying in darkness, with his heart battering at his ribcage, but when his vision cleared he saw that the bird was still clinging grimly to the gutter-support. He also saw that the life in it was like the fire in a live coal, and that if he didn’t get it back to his stove very soon, it would die.

  By the time he reached his door, he was reeling and gasping again, and a pulse of pain had begun to flood across his chest with every thump of his heart. He nudged the latch up, barged into the room and across to the fireplace, dropped his stick, grabbed the mantelshelf for support and lowered the bird onto the stove. It flopped off the support and huddled itself down onto the hot metal, its hooked beak tapping feebly at the lid.

  Dave dropped to his knees, almost toppling clean over, but caught and steadied himself. He groped in the hearth, found the lever bar and, still kneeling, hooked it into its slot and dragged the lid clear. The bird scrabbled itself over the edge and dropped out of sight.

  Dave closed the lid and with a long gasp allowed himself to collapse forward onto his gloved hands. He stayed there, panting, with his head hanging down between his arms, until his heartbeat eased and the pain in his chest receded. He found he’d been muttering to himself between the heavy, indrawn breaths.

  ʺNear goners, the both of us. . . . Both of us perishin’ near goners. . . . What the devil for . . . did I want to go doin’ a fool thing like that?ʺ

  At length he crawled across the floor and pushed the door shut. He crawled back to the stove, dragged off his gloves, found his stick and used it and the arm of his chair to haul himself to his feet. With shaking hands, he poured out a mug of tea. It was now stewed until it would have tanned hide, which was how he liked it. He added sweetened condensed milk to cancel the bitterness and, still in his coat and boots, settled into his chair. He sipped slowly, thinking about the bird.

  One of the knick-knacks in the Cabinet ’Ouse, he decided. Old earl picked up an egg or two in his travels, didn’t he? Maybe this one needed a bit more ’eat than most to get it goin’, same way sycamore seed needs a bit of frost. Funny all those scholars comin’, and still missin’ it—kickin’ thesselves in their graves, I shouldn’t wonder. Any road, I’ll be keepin’ this to myself for now. Not tellin’ nobody about it, that I’m not.

  From time to time, he heard the bird fidgeting around inside the stove, but without any sounds of distress, so he left it alone. Normally when he fed the fire, provided it was drawing well, he just pitched a couple of logs in without looking and put the lid back on, but obviously he’d have to stop doing that now, so he fetched the tongs, chose a couple of logs, lifted the lid and peered inside. The bird had rearranged the burning wood to its liking and was now huddled down into a regular nest, just like a wild bird out in the wood.

  ʺWatch your ’ead, sonny,ʺ he called, and lowered a log in with the tongs. The bird looked up as it came and nudged it into position. The same with the second log. Quite the little Lordship, thought Dave as he closed the lid. But I could do with a creature about the house again. Been missin’ that since old Fitz died. Better be gettin’ a few more logs in. Wonder what it likes to eat.

  So, on the first day of the first year of the new century, which was also the hundred and first year of his own life, Dave Moffard embarked on a fresh relationship with a fellow creature.

  For the first couple of weeks, he didn’t see much of the bird. It was very little trouble. Regularly, morning and evening, it would cheep loudly, and he’d lift the lid of the stove, reach in with the tongs and lift it gently out onto the top. It would strut to the edge, twist smartly round, raise its rapidly lengthening tail plumes and excrete forcibly over the rim, jet-black tarry pellets that stuck wherever they landed and hardened like rock as they cooled. After the first couple of times, he stood ready with a spare bit of board to catch them.

  It then stayed in the open for several minutes, gazing round at the room with an air both fascinated and baffled, as though Dave’s cottage were the last place on earth where it had expected to find itself. This gave him a chance to study it properly.

  It was fledging fast. As the true feathers showed through the down, it became clear that they weren’t all going to be of the same glowing orange-gold as the primaries, but might be anything from a deep smoky amber to intense pale yellow—any of the colours, indeed, that you might see among the embers on an open hearth with a good fire going. It was also growing. Soon, he realised, it would be the size of a bantam, and he was going to have trouble getting it in and out of the stove. This despite the fact that it didn’t seem to eat anything. He’d tried offering it scraps the first few times it had appeared—bread crumbs, shreds of mutton, a beetle, a little of the buckwheat he used to keep for the pheasants and so on—but it hadn’t been interested. Then on the third morning it emerged with a live ember in its beak. Once it had relieved itself it laid the ember on the stovetop and used its beak to hammer it into fragments, which it then picked up and swallowed as neatly as a pigeon picking seed off fresh-sown tilth. When it had finished them, it stood and gazed at Dave with a bright, unblinking stare.

  ʺAll right, sonny. Got you,ʺ he said, and the bird turned away, satisfied.

  His gamekeeping had given Dave a wide experience of the intelligence of birds, from the idiocy of the pheasants he reared to the wiliness of some of their would-be predators, but even by the standards of magpies and ja
ys he found this impressive.

  He didn’t get a chance to report the loss of the Cabinet House until Tom Hempage dropped by four days after the fire with Dave’s weekly basket of provisions from the Estate Farm kitchen. The bird stayed out of sight and didn’t make a sound while Tom was in the room. He was under-gamekeeper so this was a busy season for him. Not that the tenth earl was specially interested in shooting—politics was his form of madness—but his New Year house party was a major event in the political calendar, and it was important to have sport to offer his guests. Dave’s wood was awkward for a lot of guns to shoot, so they’d been banging away elsewhere. Tom said he’d report the fire, but he doubted anybody would be by until the last of the gentry had left.

  It was another fifteen days before anyone else came, and by then the bird was fully fledged and its mode of existence had undergone a marked change. It was as if the true feathers acted like some kind of overcoat, insulating it from the cold. Perhaps, too, it now had less heat to lose. Though warmer to the touch than any animal Dave knew of, it was no longer literally scorching. At any rate it had abandoned the inside of the stove and taken to perching on top of it during the day, and roosting on a ledge up the chimney, with the flue-pipe running close by for warmth. It could fly short distances from the very first, without any of the normal clumsiness of young birds learning the knack, but as if it already knew how and was limited only by its plumage not yet being fully developed. By now it was a splendid creature, a blazing and commanding presence, like a living embodiment of the sun. In his head Dave had already been calling it Sonny. Spell it either way, he thought. No disrespect. He began to be afraid that once it was fully grown it would decide that his cottage was nothing like grand enough for it and fly off to find its true destiny. Though he had known it less than three weeks, he would have minded that fully as much as he’d minded the death of old Fitz.