Rain & Fire

by Chris d'Lacey

  In real life, the horse on Scuffenbury Hill is based on the white chalk horse at Uffington, in Oxfordshire, England. Glissington Tor itself, although based mainly upon Glastonbury Tor (especially for shape and size), is further influenced by the man-made mound at Silbury, in Wiltshire, England. It is at this site that excavations were professionally made. Nothing unexpected was found there. When it came time to “move” Scuffenbury Hill to its new location for the US edition of the Chronicles, however, there was a slight snag: There are no chalk hills anywhere in the United States! Therefore one was created specially, in (very appropriately) New England. Maine, you now have a new tourist attraction….

  Farther afield again, and in London now (US version: Boston), both in the books and in real life, Apple Tree Publishing (the company that publishes David’s books) is highly reminiscent of Chris’s UK publisher’s old offices….

  The offices of Apple Tree Publishing were wedged between a lumberyard and a bar in a cramped and rundown area of Boston. It was hardly the castle of literary elegance that David Rain had imagined it to be. Redevelopment was everywhere. Half the road was checkered by scaffolding. Boards surrounded the knocked-out shop fronts. The smell of damp brick dust hung in the air. Taxicabs shuttled past, squirting slush onto the snow-packed sidewalks. And from every quarter there came a noise. Hammering, drilling, workers shouting, music thumping out of the bar, the steady buzz of traffic, the rumble of a bus, the sucking whistle of an overhead plane.

  … and The National Endeavor newspaper offices, where Tam Farrell works, of the UK publisher’s new ones.

  According to Gwendolen’s place-finding search engine, the offices of The National Endeavor were in a large glass building on Cambridge Street, half a mile’s walk from the T station. On her map, the thick green line of the highway did not appear especially intimidating, but even though Lucy was no stranger to Boston, the pace of life here in the rush hour frightened her. Cambridge Street was a busy four-lane highway, yet there was traffic congestion on one side of the road, made worse by a fire truck and a clutch of police cars, which were throwing their red lights into the rain…. She just pulled up her collar and hurried on past…. By now, if her bearings were correct, she should be right near the magazine’s offices. A truck powered by, rattling every pane of glass in sight. Then a horn blared, making her squeal in fright, driving her toward a revolving door. She saw the word Endeavor and just kept on moving, glad to let it carry her out of the noise.

  Incidentally, the character of Dilys Whutton, who appears in Fire Star, is an homage to one of Chris’s previous editors, though he won’t allow me to say which one! Probably scared he’ll never be invited to “do lunch” ever again.

  David’s home address, 4 Thousall Road, Blackburn, Lancashire (4 Thousall Road, Blackburn, Massachusetts, in the US editions), is another Beatles reference, from a song called “A Day in the Life,” which mentions something along the lines of there being four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire.

  The Arctic settings (including those mentioned in The Fire Ascending relating to the early days on Earth) are much more generalized, and not often tied to any specific real-life places. The mountainous region of Kasgerden, the Horste and Skoga forests, and the Bridge of Taan are all entirely from Chris’s imagination. The one notable exception to this is modern-day Chamberlain, which is (very loosely) based on the existence of a town named Churchill in Manitoba, Canada. This is somewhere that Chris would love to visit because, for part of the year, polar bears gather there in large numbers, waiting for the sea ice to freeze sufficiently so that they can go out to hunt seal, their staple diet. Whether he’ll be welcome there after the inhabitants read his version of life in that neck of the woods is anybody’s guess.

  “Neck of the woods” isn’t a particularly appropriate phrase to use, in truth, as “woods” or even single trees are almost nonexistent in that area because the weather conditions are not temperate enough for them to survive. Here’s a passage from Fire Star that gives you a flavor of this remote Arctic setting:

  [Zanna] dropped the parking brake and gunned the truck forward. Its rear wheels squealed as they bit the road. Snowflakes as large as lemons hit the screen and were quickly swept aside into a layer of slush. Zanna shifted her gaze to the east. Out toward open water, surrounded by dirt stacks and rusting junked machinery, lay the moody hulk of the grain elevator, a large white ocean liner of a building, blackened with smoke from a nearby chimney, splashed against the bleak gray Manitoba sky. For eight months of the year, when the bay was clear of ice, Chamberlain fed the north with grain. The sight of it reminded her why they’d come. “Got your list?”

  David unflapped a pocket…. The romantic in him had wanted to see a bygone time of people in furs outside their igloos, chewing skins and dressing kayaks. But the latter-day reality wasn’t even close. The “igloos” were rows of painted wooden buildings, mostly squat residential cabins. The only suggestion of a native heritage was a parka-clad figure attending a dog team. The man had a cigarette hanging off his lip and two curtains of black hair sprouting shabbily from under his cap. The dogs, despite the unflagging cold, seemed as happy as a small flock of sheep in a summer field.

  As they turned into the center of the town, David was reminded that one of the principal attractions of Chamberlain was its tourist industry. People came here to photograph bears. There were several gift shops testifying to it, plus an Inuit museum he’d heard Russ and Dr. Bergstrom talk about. On its wall was a sign declaring, FIVE CITIZENS FOR EVERY BEAR. He took this to mean that the town’s population was approximately one thousand, as he knew from his studies that somewhere around two hundred bears passed through Chamberlain annually. Yellow warning signs were everywhere, reminding people of it.

  BE ALERT!

  POLAR BEAR SEASON

  October thru November

  Memorize this number

  The number in question was the polar bear “police.” If any bad guys lumbered in, Chamberlain, it seemed, was ready to run them out of town.

  Most of the other scenes are just out on the ice, nearer or farther away from various real areas, though Chris has invented a village called Savalik, which is where Tootega, an Inuit worker at the Polar Research Station a few days’ journey away, was born and brought up.

  A modern settlement of twenty or thirty large wooden houses, it mirrored Chamberlain in all but size. It was snowbound on three sides, the houses huddled in a cloistered heap like Christmas presents on a large white armchair. Tootega, when he saw it this time, was reminded of something David Rain had said about Inuit settlements looking like a room that you forgot to clean. Anything an Inuk did not need, any broken-down appliance or unused item, he would cast away — but not very far. So it was in Savalik. An incongruous mix of brightly painted roofs and overhanging wires and old oil barrels and junked bent metal and columns of steam. But it was home, and the dogs knew it, too. Their noses lifted at the first scent of seal meat warming in a pot. Their tails wagged. Their paws spent less time in contact with the ice. Orak, the lead dog, whose mapping was every bit as sensitive as his master’s, was tugging his comrades toward the colony long before the whip was up.

  Tootega has come to visit his grandfather, who is very ill, in his home in the settlement. Nauja, Tootega’s sister-in-law, is looking after the old man.

  Tootega went in, bowing his head. The old man, famed throughout the north as a healer and shaman, commanded great respect within the community and even more esteem at home. He gave a thin cry of joy to see his firstborn grandson and called out to Nauja, Mattak! Mattak! meaning she should bring them whale meat to chew. Tootega crossed the floor, surprised to find a woolen rug under his feet. It dismayed him every time he came to this house to see his grandfather a little more absorbed by southern culture. This room, with its wardrobes and lampshades and remote-controlled television, was a painful affliction of the disease called progress. Tootega could readily remember a time when this proud and happy man, now lying in a bed
that had drawers in the mattress and propped up loosely on a cluster of pillows, would have been surrounded by furs and harpoons and a seal oil lamp, with blood and blubber stains under his feet. On the wall above the bed, slightly tilted at an angle, was a framed embroidered picture saying “Home, Sweet Home” in the Inuit language. To see it made Tootega want to empty his gut.

  Progress will always happen, in the High Arctic as well as everywhere else, of course. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. However, Chris is deeply concerned about the effects of pollution, global warming, climate change, and so on, especially regarding polar bears, one of his favorite animals. So much so, that he has David, working at the research base already mentioned, write in a letter back home to Liz and Lucy:

  We spend our days analyzing ice samples. Some of them date back hundreds of years. Zanna is checking for increases in toxic chemicals called PCBs, which can poison bears and other forms of wildlife, and I am melting ice cores down and making the tea — I mean, making interesting graphs to monitor the levels of something called beryllium 10. This is to do with global warming. Dr. Bergstrom thinks that changes in the levels of beryllium 10 coincide with an increase in sunspots or flares, which might be warming the Earth and making the polar ice cap melt. That’s scary, especially for bears. Every year, the ice in Hudson Bay melts earlier but takes a little longer to refreeze. This means that bears are fasting more and more and will reach a point, maybe in the next fifty years, when they will not be able to survive their time ashore and will die of starvation out on the tundra. It’s hard to believe that the natural world we take so much for granted is constantly under threat from climatic change and that creatures like polar bears could so easily become extinct. No one here wants to see that happen. So we are busy searching for long-term answers, feeding the data into our computers to try to predict how long the polar ice will last.

  So how can you and I make a difference? David writes White Fire, of course, to bring these issues to the attention of the public. But Chris feels that such a grand gesture may not be necessary. He believes (and has David and Tam Farrell believe, too) that a solution to global warming can be achieved with a single sentence: Make polar bears an endangered species. Tell this to the big industrial nations. If they approve it, they will be forced to protect the beasts’ icy habitat, and in doing so, they might just save the world.

  One of Chris’s few clear memories of his school days is being fascinated by the ancient stories of gods, kings, and mere mortals as told by the Greeks and Romans. He has had a love for myth, legend, and parable ever since. The opportunity to create a few of his own, therefore, was just too good to miss.

  Instead of stories about flying too close to the sun or leaving threads through mazes, however, most of Chris’s center around polar bears and dragons — with a few sibyls thrown in for good measure. He did come across one genuine old Inuit tale along the way, and that is the story of Sedna, the sea goddess. This made such an impression on him that he decided to not only include the original legend in The Fire Eternal, but also have Sedna appear as a character.

  The legend of Sedna was almost as old as the ice itself. Like ice, it had many variations, fashioned by slips of the tongue on the wind. But the version which came to the Teller of Ways as he watched the sea goddess thrash her tail and squirm from her ocean home was this:

  She had been a beautiful Inuit woman, courted by many worthy suitors, hunters of strength, agility, and passion, all of whom would have crossed the ice for her, drunk the ocean, sewn the clouds together with spears. But Sedna was vain and refused them all. She preferred to sit by her father’s igloo, admiring her reflection in the waters of the ocean, all the while combing her shining dark hair.

  One day, her father grew tired of this. He said to her, “My daughter, we are starving. All the animals have deserted us. We do not even have a dog to slay. I am old and too weary to hunt. You must marry the next hunter who comes to our camp or we will be nothing but sacks of bones.”

  But Sedna ignored him, selfishly, saying, “I am Sedna. I am beautiful. What more do I need?”

  Her father despaired, and thought to take a knife to her and use her as bait to trap a passing bear. But the next day, while he sat aboard his sled, sharpening his blade and his will to live, another hunter entered the camp. He was tall and elegantly dressed in furs, but his face was hidden by the trimmings around his hood.

  The man said, “I am in need of a wife.” He struck the shaft of his spear into the ice, making cracks that ran like claws.

  Sedna’s father was afraid, but he boldly said, “I have a daughter, a beautiful daughter. She can cook and sew and chew skins to make shirts. What will you give in return for her, hunter?”

  “I give fish,” said the man, from the darkness of his hood.

  “Ai-yah.” Sedna’s father waved a hand, for he thought it a poor trade: fish — for a daughter! But fish was better than a hole in his stomach. And so he said this, “Tomorrow, bring your kayak, filled with char. Row it to the headland, and I will exchange the char for my daughter.”

  The hunter made a crackling sound in his throat, but his face did not appear from his hood. He withdrew his spear from the glistening ice, pulling out with it a swirling storm. From the eye of the storm he cried, “So be it.” And he was gone, as if the wind had claimed him like a feather.

  That night, Sedna’s father made up a potion, a sleeping potion squeezed from the bloodshot eye of a walrus, that laziest of Arctic creatures. This he stirred into a warming broth, made from the boiled skin of his mukluks, his boots. “Come, daughter,” he said, singing sweetly in her ear. “Come, eat with your aged father.” And he gave Sedna a bowl of his broth to drink. Within moments, she had fallen asleep at his feet. Her father then wrapped her loosely in furs and in the morning carried her out to his sled. Still she slept on as he tied her to it, unaware of the trade that awaited her. But there was little remorse in her father’s heart. For Sedna was idle, and char were char. With a great heave, he pulled her away from their camp. She had still not woken by the time they reached the headland.

  The hunter stood by his kayak, waiting. Its skins were bulging, brim-full with fish. Their dead eyes watched a soulless father unload his daughter and roll her out at the hunter’s feet. The hunter made a chirring sound in his throat. He told the old man to empty the kayak. The Inuk, driven by greed and stupidity, gathered too many fish in his arms, and slipped and skidded and fell upon his back. As his head struck the ice his gluttonous gaze softened. His dizzied brain recoiled in horror as he watched the hunter pick up his only child, grow a pair of wings, and fly away with her to a distant cliff! “Come back!” he cried, and reached out a hand. A fish slithered out of it and lodged in his mouth. It was rotten from the tailbone through to the eye.

  When Sedna awoke she found herself lying in a nest of hair and night-black feathers. She was on a high ledge, surrounded by ravens. Far below her, the sea was rushing at the rocks, dashing itself to foam and spray. “Oh, my father! Help me! Help!” she cried. Then appeared by her side the hunter who had claimed her.

  “I am your husband now,” he said.

  And he threw off his furs to show himself to be a raven. The king of ravens. The darkest of birds.

  Sedna screamed and screamed, until her voice broke to the cark of a bird. Her fear was so great that the north wind wrestled with her terror for weeks, finally carrying it howling to her father. It beat about his ears, his soul, his heart. How could you do this? it whistled at him. How could you marry your daughter to a bird? Do you want to be known as the grandfather of ravens?

  The old man was wracked with sadness and guilt. He chattered to his heart and his heart chattered back. He must go out and rescue his daughter, it said.

  So, the very next morning, he loaded up his patched old kayak and paddled through the frigid Arctic waters, until he reached the cliff that was Sedna’s new home. Sedna, who now had eyes as sharp as any bird, had seen him coming and was waiting at the shore. “Oh
, my father,” she said and hugged him tightly, smelling his furs, which still reeked of fish.

  “Quickly,” he said, “while the mist is about us.” And they climbed into his kayak and paddled away.

  They had traveled for many hours and still had the calm of the ocean all about them when Sedna saw a black speck high in the sky. Fear welled up inside her, for she knew this was her husband coming to find her!

  “Paddle faster!” she urged her father.

  But her father’s arms were slow with age and exhaustion. The raven was upon their boat as swiftly as a ray of sunlight. It swooped down and set the kayak bobbing. “Give me back my wife!” it screamed.

  Sedna’s father struck at the thing with his paddle. He missed and almost fell into the water. “Trickster be gone!” he shouted in vain.

  The bird caarked in anger and swooped again. This time it came down low to the water, beating one wing against the surface. A ferocious storm began to blow and the waters became a raging torrent, tossing the kayak to and fro. Sedna screamed, but not as loudly as her father. Once more, cowardice had rooted in his heart. With a mighty shove, he pushed his daughter into the ocean. “Be gone! Leave me be! Here is your precious wife!” he cried. “Take her back and trouble me no more!”