Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits

by Robin McKinley

  Hereta threw her head up and I managed to think, ʺOh, no, we’re just going to fall off again,ʺ when . . .

  . . . the heat really hit me. It wasn’t like a knife any more. More like being rolled up too tightly in a blanket that had been lying by the fire too long, and it’s high summer. And the redness. It was like looking at the sun through your eyelids, except your eyes were open, and there was nothing to see except the redness. And the weightlessness. Or almost weightlessness. That was what made me think we were falling off again, I think, when we weren’t. But you didn’t feel what you were on properly. Sippy and I weren’t quite floating off Hereyta’s face but even if we did we wouldn’t fall very fast. Not here.

  It’s pretty weird to think of a dragon floating like a feather in a breeze, but it was pretty much like that, except there was no breeze. Hereyta’s wings still went on and on and on and on, stretching away on both sides of us, but they lay almost still now, like landscape. With an occasional un-landscape-like tremor, like a hawk on an updraft.

  The Firespace. We’d done it. Somehow. Thanks to Sippy. Thanks to Sippy being totally deranged and stupid and a troublemaker and thinking he could play his game in mid-air and if we got out of this alive I’d tie him up for the rest of his life.

  Noise seemed muffled. Or maybe it was just shock. But there was a funny dull quality to what my ears were trying to tell me. I could hear something going on—I thought—pretty close but at the same time I couldn’t hear it. And then Arac’s head rose over the leading edge of Hereyta’s left wing and several leagues of neck passed Sippy and me still lying on Hereyta’s nose and then Setyep was hovering right in front of us. You can get quite close to another dragon in the Firespace. Everything moved so slowly, and if two of the floating mountains actually collided, it would happen gently, and they’d just drift away from each other again. But Arac didn’t touch us, and there was no backdraft from the soft riffle of his wings.

  ʺI think your brother wants to kill you,ʺ Setyep said in close to his usual laconic manner, although he was having trouble with it. He looked alarmed, amazed, delighted and completely bewildered all together, which made laconic hard to hang on to. It was probably the effect of the Firespace again but even his words seemed rubbed and soft somehow. ʺBut you’re probably safe enough for now.ʺ He shook his head—slowly; it’s hard to do anything quickly when you don’t weigh anything, it seems to turn your muscles to jelly, that and the heat, which makes you not want to try to move anyway. Arac managed to give me quite a sharp look, however, full of all the questions Setyep wasn’t asking, including ʺwhat are you doing on Hereyta’s nose anyway?ʺ

  But I thought about his ʺfor now.ʺ We’ve got here. Hurrah and all that.

  But how do we get out again? Presumably a dragon needs three eyes to get out too. And I wasn’t looking forward to trying to duplicate what we’d just done. Especially the coming out into the ordinary world again and falling off Hereyta’s face. And falling and falling. Although I supposed staying where we were and frying or starving to death wasn’t a great choice either.

  Sippy was puffing away like a bellows; I was panting too, my mouth open, gasping. The hot air tasted funny and felt funny in your throat and lungs; it didn’t feel like air, and you weren’t sure you could breathe it, whatever it was. You felt it pressing against your eyes too. In the murky reddish light Sippy looked sort of maroon, and the usual bright glint of his eyes was dull. When I turned my head I could see that Hereyta had her third eyelids closed; Dag had told me the third eyelids seemed to be some kind of Firespace protection or focus since they were never closed in our world and always closed in the Firespace. Hereyta’s eyes were also half closed. I couldn’t see Arac’s so I don’t know if she was squinting because of the Firespace—how well could she see in the Firespace with only two eyes?—or because of the little things on her nose. She was obviously aware of us though; I could tell by how carefully she was moving her head, keeping it perfectly level as she twisted it around and down, and then down some more. Dragons can scratch the napes of their own necks with their teeth. Or, in this case, they can lower their heads to within reach of someone sitting in a saddle there.

  I saw Dag looking grimly determined, standing on the saddle. He still had his harness on, but he’d untied it from the saddle and it hung in loops around his shoulders; his tapping stick was still in his boot. He made one of his peculiar chirruping dragon-calls and Hereyta stopped her nose where it was and angled it very slightly downwards, not enough to tip Sippy and me out of our convenient hollow, and Dag pulled himself gingerly up over her chin and lips, walked gently up the length of her nose and sat down beside us with a heavy sigh.

  I waited for the lecture. For the shouting and raving.

  It didn’t come.

  For something to do while I waited I looked around. Arac had taken a long slow circle off to one side and now, wings slightly tilted, came sweeping back. His upper wing sailed over me and then some-impossible-how he and Hereyta were floating right next to each other again with their enormous wings as if in layers, and I don’t know, pleated. So Setyep was actually comparatively near us. Hereyta had her neck sort of folded up too, like a scarf, so Arac was only a little bit (in dragon terms) below us. I could see Setyep’s face—a congested-looking bricky red, like Dag’s and I’m sure like mine—and see the expression on it although I wouldn’t have wanted to say what that expression was. The alarm and amazement and so on had kind of all blurred together and become something else.

  I looked at Sippy then. There weren’t even any dark green glints in the maroon; it was like green just didn’t exist here. He was flat out on his side—or as flat as you can get on the wavy scales of dragon skin—and in spite of how hard he was panting the fine fur on his belly was matted with sweat (foogits only sweat on their underparts). He looked exhausted, but maybe it was just the heat. I’d never seen him exhausted before, even in the heat of high summer when everyone else is.

  But maybe he was exhausted from getting us here. And we still had to get out.

  Then I stared at Arac, wondering what the Firespace was doing to my sight aside from eliminating green. Arac looked like a god in the Firespace: noble, incredible, glorious. It was probably just as well I couldn’t see Hereyta properly; it would probably kill me, like it killed the king who actually made it to the Mountains of the Sun and looked into the pool at the top of the tallest one and saw into the heart of the world. There are some things you’re better off not knowing. Although the story says that king died happy.

  Why wasn’t Dag yelling at me for being a dangerous, suicidal, brainless fool?

  ʺThat was interesting,ʺ Setyep offered after a few silent minutes of drifting.

  Dag made a short muffled barking noise like a foogit having a bad dream. It wasn’t a laugh.

  Sippy, as if answering, yipped.

  ʺI suppose,ʺ said Dag, after another reflective spell of drifting, ʺwe could at least go where we’re supposed to.ʺ

  Setyep’s silence this time had a different quality to it. I looked over at him and he was frowning. ʺYou . . . er . . .ʺ

  Dag made the barking noise again. ʺYes. I did learn my route. It seemed only, you know, polite. Since they’d given us one and everything. ʺ Both Setyep and I knew it wasn’t the Academy he cared about being polite to.

  ʺWe won’t be going the same way,ʺ said Setyep.

  ʺI know,ʺ said Dag. He pulled his tapping stick out of his boot and looked at it.

  More worried silence. Nobody knew if a two-eyed dragon could navigate in the Firespace either, but since two-eyed dragons couldn’t get into the Firespace in the first place, there hadn’t been anything to find out. Like a question that begins ʺif humans could fly, then what if. . . .ʺ

  ʺIf I don’t see you, I’ll come back,ʺ said Setyep. ʺI can get the coordinates out of Thispec. And Arac is happy to find Hereyta.ʺ

  ʺThanks,ʺ said Dag. And again, ʺThanks.ʺ

  ʺUm,ʺ said Setyep, and then he tapped Arac
on the shoulder and made a talking-to-dragons noise, and Arac slid away from beside us, unpleating his wing from Hereyta’s; and then he banked and did one of those impossible bird-like turns and was gone away from us. I turned my head to watch them, but they disappeared into the murk almost at once.

  Dag looked at his tapping stick. ʺWe’re trained to use these on their shoulders. They’re trained for us to use them on their shoulders. The idea is supposed to be that our arms aren’t long enough and when you’re flying you want your directions to be as easy and clear as possible. But speaking of easy and clear, nothing ever is here, and the view feels like it’s better from up here, or would be if there were a view. There’s no way to tie yourself in up here for the transitions of course but that didn’t work so well last time, did it?ʺ

  I braced myself again. Now Dag was finally going to yell at me.

  But all he said was, ʺI think all rules are suspended.ʺ He reached over and tapped the tip of his stick as far as he could toward the right-hand edge of Hereyta’s face. ʺHrroar,ʺ he said, or something like that. And Hereyta, still keeping her face perfectly level, did a swing right and set off . . . somewhere or other.

  ʺCoordinates?ʺ I said. ʺIt’s like flying in soup.ʺ

  ʺYes, it is, isn’t it?ʺ Dag said calmly. ʺMost of your second year at the Academy is about learning to work with dragons. Then your third year is about getting around in the Firespace. Ever noticed the little tattoos on the palms of our hands? You get those at the end of your first year, with your first cadet star for your uniform. That’s to give the magic somewhere to stick, and you have to use a little magic. Sometimes they sizzle faintly so you know they’re working—although they don’t make you go in the right direction, they just let you go somewhere rather than around in circles. If Hereyta has trouble . . . Hekhuk,ʺ he added to Hereyta, and she sank a little, through the soup. I was half expecting a squishing noise as she beat her wings, but they were more silent here than in the ordinary world. In our world. After a moment he added, ʺIt’s not like there’s another special mark for if your dragon has only two eyes.ʺ

  Great puffs of redness gusted out under Hereyta’s wings, like clouds, only with iridescent threads through them. Not like soup. I was still glad the navigating wasn’t up to me. I felt faintly sickish, and trying to look around made me dizzy.

  I’m not sure how long we flew through the gloom. Dag murmured and tapped a few times. Once I saw him scratching the palm of his left hand with his fingers—the hand that didn’t have the stick in it. But he and Hereyta seemed so calm. Well, I’d never seen Hereyta anything but calm, and maybe Dag was just in shock. Like me. Sippy’s breathing had slowed down but he was still collapsed. If I hadn’t had a lot of other things to worry about—and having him collapsed was extremely convenient at the moment—I’d’ve been worrying about him too.

  After a while, a short or maybe a long while, I have no idea why, but I started to feel that we were getting near . . . something. Whatever. Wherever. And I guess I was right, because Hereyta . . . stopped. Mid-air and all. Mid-murk. I hadn’t thought about it before, but when we first came through, we’d still been gliding. Slowly, but moving. If there were an up or a down here you might almost say soaring. And it was as if her wings unfolded a whole extra length that they never had in our world, or maybe they’d picked up some of the murk, maybe the murk weaves itself onto the edges of dragon wings . . . maybe my eyes had gone funny. But when she stopped, it was like her wings shuddered out another span, like shaking out a wadded-up bedspread, except Hereyta’s wings already went on forever.

  Dag leaned forward and patted her, her nose, I guess, the part of her nose right in front of where he was sitting. And then he stayed that way, leaning forward. He put his tapping stick down, and pressed both palms against her. Kind of like I had, just before she jumped into the air and started flying. And he bowed his head. I don’t know if he was thinking or . . .

  I didn’t think he saw me. I stood up. Carefully. Even with leagues of wing stretching out on both sides standing on a dragon feels pretty insecure. (How did she manage to stay so still?) When I stood up, I was right in front of the great black hollow that was her missing eye.

  Sippy stood up with me, pressing himself against me. I gently dug his face out of my thigh and turned him to look the direction I was looking—the direction Hereyta was looking, with her other two eyes. I rubbed the place between Sippy’s two ordinary eyes, where the little ridge and hollow in the skull had produced the myth that foogits had once had a third eye. The place that’s supposed to make a foogit lucky.

  And I thought about something Ralas had told me about healing. ʺA lot of the time you haven’t got a clue. It’s not made any easier by the fact that no one will tell you even as much as they know themselves what’s wrong because they’re ashamed that it is wrong. So you just wade in and do it. It’s all you can do.ʺ

  This had been about a year ago. She often told me things like I was another grown-up, or like I was her apprentice, and I never knew whether to shut up and be grateful, like she’d forgotten who she was talking to and if I said anything she’d remember and not say any more, or whether to risk asking her a question—letting her see that it was me paying attention. This time I couldn’t help myself. ʺDo what?ʺ I said.

  She laughed. ʺIt. It.ʺ

  I looked into the murk. I rubbed Sippy’s head. I leaned back against the spiked rampart that was the bottom front edge of Hereyta’s empty eye socket. I chose a direction. I braced myself. I tried to remember Arac and Hereyta and Sippy in the field behind the hsa. I looked at Sippy. He was already looking up at me. And there was a waitingness under my feet too. Hereyta was waiting.

  I chose a direction, and shifted slightly to face it. Sippy shifted slightly too, to face me. Hereyta’s face slowly, slowly turned, and Sippy and I shifted slightly in response. Sippy was watching me intently. I could almost believe he was watching me with three eyes. I stared out over the end of Hereyta’s nose. You know how when you stare at something, anything, too long, it starts to sort of break up and turn into something else? It doesn’t have to be anything specific, like a foogit or a candle flame or the back of your brother’s head. It can be darkness or redness or a pool of water. The nothingness I was staring at was breaking up and turning into something else. I raised my hand and pointed—not so much to point, I think, but to give us, me anyway, something stable to stare at in all the disintegrating nothing. I think all three of us, even Hereyta, although for her it must have been like trying to focus on a gnat standing on her eyelashes, looked at the end of my finger.

  And the heat had got even hotter. We would definitely fry before we starved.

  I nearly fell off when Hereyta dived. Not quite. I grabbed a lesser spike and held on. I lunged at Sippy and got him round the neck. He scrabbled a little, but he didn’t slip either. The redness whipped and churned around us—it was probably just dizziness, but I almost felt it streaming by, like very fine fabric, like the stuff my mum’s best shawl is made of. It wasn’t a steep dive—and it didn’t last very long—although there was a very nasty upside-down-inside-out moment of what I suppose is the crossover and briefly the redness felt like cables, trying to hold us there—

  —and the moment we were back out into the ordinary world, our human world, Hereyta levelled off again, long enough for Sippy and me to sit back down, and Dag threw a couple of loops around us, reflexively I think, but if we fell off we’d all fall off together. And then we swirled and whirled and circled down and down and down—

  And landed in a field almost as enormous as the one we’d set off from, except that it looked like a field of trolls when the sun has just come up. There were a couple dozen dragons and at least a hundred people, but they were all frozen, like trolls in sunlight, staring up—

  At us, twirling down.

  Hereyta landed as gently as a butterfly.

  And Arac roiled forward—trained working dragons mostly move slowly on land, careful of all the little s
quishy humans that are likely to be nearby—and thudded against Hereyta’s side in what I think was a friendly tap, like you might thump someone on the back and say, ʺWell done!ʺ—but it just about shattered our bones, I think, Dag’s and mine and Sippy’s, or at least it made me feel even more fragile and crumbly than I’d already been feeling, since the fragile crumbly feeling had started when I’d seen the nothingness breaking up, back in the hot red murk. I felt like a piece of overdone toast. The thump also knocked us an alarming several arms’-length to one side, but Hereyta just twitched her head like keeping people on her nose was something she’d been doing forever, and we jolted back again.

  Hereyta made a kind of low purring grunt, which was either ʺit was nothingʺ or possibly ʺI have no idea,ʺ which would have made at least two of us, or maybe it was something else entirely, like, ʺbe careful, you clumsy oaf.ʺ Setyep, still gallantly hanging on to Arac’s saddle, suddenly shouted something I didn’t catch—it sounded like one of those old ritual phrases Academy cadets have to learn—but it must have meant something like ʺcheer nowʺ because everybody, and I mean everybody, started cheering like they’d gone mad. Even Fistagh and his girl. I saw them. And maybe they had all gone mad. After all, everyone knows a dragon needs all three eyes to get in and out of the Firespace, and it probably needs them to navigate around inside it too.

  I think they put me to bed right after that. It was kind of embarrassing. I’m more or less used to being small, ugly and stupid, but I’ve kind of imagined I’m fairly tough. But I slept all the way through the rest of that day and halfway into the next.