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-w
alk 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.
Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits Page 13
