Birth of the Firebringer

by Meredith Ann Pierce

  Jan cast a long, longing glance after the bright, turning swirls, contracting to the size of stars among the other stars. They were nearing his own sun now, with its own little dance of worlds. The closeness of their passing beside the yellow star made Jan’s blood sizzle. He and his guide hovered above the swirling, blue-white planet, its moon overlying it like a disc upon a disc.

  “Why have you shown me this thing?” he asked.

  “What have I shown you?” countered his guide.

  “You. . . .” He faltered. “You have shown me the great dance, the Cycle—the one the Renegade spoke of, the one beyond even our own moon and sun. You have shown me the stars’ dance.”

  “Aye,” the presence said. “And what is my Dance?”

  “It is motion,” Jan told her, “energy, turning.”

  “It is rest and stillness also,” she replied.

  “Is it life, then?” Jan answered. “All things that live.”

  “Life, aye,” the presence nodded. “And . . .”

  “And?” Jan murmured.

  “The wyverns also are part of my Cycle, and murderous gryphons and wheeling kites. Fire which can destroy and the Serpent-cloud which flings all things to dust.”

  “Death, too,” ventured Jan, “is in the Dance.”

  A little silence then.

  “Why have you brought me here?” Jan started. “No one of my people ever has had such a vision as this.”

  “Ah, so you see this for a vision.” The presence smiled; he felt her smile. “Well, you are a dreamer, well used to dreams.”

  He denied it with his thoughts. “I never dream.”

  The presence laughed. “Jah-lila took away the waking memory of your dreams. This day you have won them back again.”

  Jan shook himself. “Tell me why. . . .”

  Again the presence’s quiet laugh. “So importunate! But is this not what you have always wanted, to apprehend the workings of the Dance? You have looked for it only half knowing, and found it only in little bits: in the roiling of stormclouds and the workings of fire, in the fluting of pans dancing under the moon—in the depths of danger in a gryphon’s eye. In the rolling vastness of grasslands that call out, ‘What lies beyond me? Come see!’”

  Her voice had grown so familiar now, as though she knew him to the marrow of the bone. He had not known even a god could read his inmost heart. “What are you, then?”

  “I am Mystery,” she told him, “that goads intelligent beings to understanding. I am Curiosity. I am Solution. I am what is, demanding to be known. Those things that you have always been asking, I have answered now, a little.”

  “No!” cried Jan. “You have given me only questions, a thousand more.”

  “Good,” the presence laughed. “Spend your energies seeking their answers, not on colts’ games and trickstering.” Jan flinched a little beneath her bluntness. “Understand things, Aljan,” his guide told him, “by learning to think as they do: enter in. Study the world and see how it works—make it work your own ends, if you can.”

  “But what are my ends to be?” Jan burst out.

  A long silence. At last she said, “I leave that to you.”

  “Then why was I alone chosen to see these things?”

  “Many have I given this vision to, Jan,” she said. “Though none till now have I let return.”

  “But I will return.”

  He felt her nod of affirmation and fell silent then. He could think of nothing. He understood nothing.

  “Come now,” his guide replied, a little mocking. “You cannot be so dumbstruck as all that. Have I not whispered all your life that you were born to see great things?”

  Jan felt his mind constrict. “Great things,” he murmured. “Will I . . . will I see the coming of the Firebringer?”

  “You have already,” his guide returned. “The Firebringer is among you now.”

  “Is it . . . ?” Jan stumbled to a stop. He hardly dared say it. “Will my father be the one?”

  The presence seemed to turn away a little then. “Perhaps,” she said, indifferently. “Who knows?”

  “You do!” cried Jan.

  The goddess laughed. “Aye. I do that. But that is not yet yours to know.”

  “My people need a Firebringer,” Jan insisted. “To rout the wyrms. The Vale is growing too close for us, and the gryphon said....”

  “I know what the gryphon said.”

  A sudden urgency burned in Jan. “Her people hate us. They are planning to fly against us and drive us from the Vale. . . .”

  “Have you told your father that?” the presence interrupted.

  Jan shook his head, startled. The gryphon had charmed him—he realized that now—telling him while he gazed into her eye as in a dream. He had not remembered until this moment.

  The goddess said, “But if you won back the Hallow Hills before that time, the gryphons could have your Vale and welcome; there would be no need to war.” It was as if she had spoken his own thoughts back at him. “Is that what you were beginning to say?”

  “My father is a great warrior,” Jan answered her. “He could rout the wyverns from the Hallow Hills. But the legend says he must have fire. The wyverns’ dens would go up in a blaze if. . . .”

  “There are many kinds of fire, Aljan.”

  Jan hardly heard. “But my father knows nothing at all of fire. I am the only unicorn who knows—but I know nothing, hardly anything!”

  “Then you’d best make a study of it, hadn’t you?” the presence remarked. “You’ve only a few years’ time before the gryphons fly. List, now,” his guide said suddenly. “The time grows very short. Ask me what question you will, and I will answer.”

  “I . . .” started Jan. He could feel the vision’s end looming, and burst out with the first question that came to him. “Why do the gryphons hate us?”

  “You already know the beginning of that.”

  “Why do the pans speak so differently from us, then?” He struggled. Time slipped from him. His body burned.

  “Again,” the goddess told him, “you may find that for yourself. Hist, be quick.”

  “Then, then . . .” stammered Jan. He racked his thoughts for some riddle worthy of a god. “Why must we bind ourselves to the Circle of Warriors?”

  “Who tells you you must? Not I. I do not make kings, or Rings of Law. Those things are yours to make, or to unmake, just as you choose.”

  “Why does my mother tell me to follow my own heart, not Korr’s?”

  “Ask her,” the goddess said.

  “Who is the Red Mare the Renegades spoke of?”

  “Ask her.”

  Jan felt himself beginning to fall. He struggled desperately to remain aloft. “But why does your voice sound so familiar to me? I have never met you before in dreams.”

  “Whom do I sound like?” the presence demanded, bearing him up for a moment more.

  “Like Jah-lila,” said Jan, “and like Korr. Like Ses my dam and like Khraa the king. Like Tek and Dagg—Tas, Teki, Leerah....”

  “Who else?”

  “Like the three-headed wyvern,” Jan replied. “Like the gryphon in the cave, like the fluting of pans, or Renegades crying, like. . . .”

  “Like?”

  “Like sea, like earth shifting, like wind and like fire.”

  “And?”

  “Like myself,” said Jan, coming suddenly breathless to a halt. He had quit struggling. “Like me.”

  “I am you,” the Mother-of-all replied, “and much, much more besides. I am everything you have ever known and that has ever been. I surround you all, and am within you, and am you. You are my kindling; I am the Fire. I am the Circle. I am the Dance. Learn to know me. Come.” A moment passed. “The time’s at hand. You must return.”

  Then he felt what had been supporting him vanish. He was descending in a rush toward the bright, pale-blue world and the gray pitted moon before it. The world grew large, more varicolored. Its gray companion, within its disc, also increased. Jan
felt himself falling toward the heart of the moon.

  “Alma,” he cried out. There was no need. The presence had not left him. “Did you not tell me I would return to the world?”

  The other nodded in his mind. “Aye. Back to the Hallow Hills and your three companions.”

  The moon loomed, burning silver in the white light of the sun. Perfectly round, it seemed to lie upon the surface of the world like a lake of still, bright water.

  “But Alma,” cried Jan, “the moon. . . .”

  “Nay, Jan,” the goddess told him, departing now. “The Mirror of the Moon.”

  He felt a splash and heard the sound of it. Then he was aware of three unicorns: Tek, the red mare, and Dagg. They had staggered from the woods, dragging the wyvern skin. Stumbling under its weight in the midafternoon sun, they waded out into the water.

  He felt the wet slosh about their knees, and the strain against their teeth and jaws. The wyrmskin on which he lay touched the surface and buoyed up. Cool liquid spilled in at the slack places, bathing him. The fire in his blood swabbed out.

  He heard the angry hiss of water mingling with the wyrm’s blood on the skin, and the air was suddenly thick with acrid steam. He heard whinnies of alarm, then snorts and choking. The wyvern skin fell abruptly slack. It floated. The golden bowl slid off and sank.

  He could not get his eyes open, could not see what was happening. He struggled weakly to raise his head. There was thrashing in the water nearby him: he heard gasps, and then two, three dull thuds upon the sand. The acrid air around him hung suddenly, utterly silent, until the harsh vapor invaded his senses at last. He knew nothing more.

  Homecoming

  18

  Jan came again into awareness slowly. He felt himself floating, the coolness of water against one side, and the soft, sinuous membrane bearing him up. The sun on his other side was warm and drying. He opened his eyes and blinked. Raising his head with difficulty against the yielding surface of the skin, he saw he lay on the sacred pool, near shore. The sun overhead shone midafternoon.

  He floundered off the floating hide and onto the white sand of the shallow bottom. His limbs no longer burned with fire. The golden bowl lay submerged, sun-gleaming, a half pace from him. He got to his feet and champed his teeth. His nose and heel were plastered with chewed milkwood buds. The taste of water in his mouth was sweet. He bent and took a long drink from the pool.

  Lifting his head, he spotted the others. They lay on the bank, fallen in midstride. Jan felt his heart go cold a moment, but then he saw the rising and falling of their sides: they were alive. He waded toward them, and halted in the shallows beside the red mare.

  He recognized her now. She was Jah-lila, Tek’s mother, the lone unicorn—she his father had called once, long ago, to come sing away his dreams. Jan bent and nudged her with his nose. She stirred then, snorting, and rolled to get her legs under her, but did not rise.

  “Well glad I am to see you alive, prince-son,” she told him at last, then shook her head, as if groggy still. She managed a laugh. “The Mirror of the Moon is strong proof against poison.”

  Her voice was very like Tek’s, but fuller and a little more deep. Jan nodded, eyeing her, feeling strange and unsurprised.

  “I heard you singing on the night of Moondance,” was all he could think of to say.

  The wild mare nodded. “Aye. I was singing a charm on you, little prince, to keep you from seeing me. But my power over you is all ashes now.” She sighed, still smiling, and gazed away. “No ears but yours were meant to hear that song, but I think Tek heard it, too, for she came looking for me.” Jah-lila glanced at him.

  “She looked for you in the Pan Woods, too,” said Jan, “and again upon the Plain. But she never . . .”

  The other laughed, gently. All her moves were careful and unhurried. “I did not mean for her to find me—or for you. But of course it was mostly your father I meant to . . .” But Jan hardly heard.

  “You called out to me in the Pan Woods,” he said suddenly, “and led us away from the others to the goatling’s Ring.” The realization jarred him. “You began to bury the Renegade.”

  The red mare nodded. “I did those things.”

  Jan bit his breath, stopping himself. “The Serpent-cloud,” he said. “You led the storm away.”

  The healer’s mate smiled. “So you saw me then, too?” She sighed, laughing. “Already you were stealing back your dreams.”

  A little silence then.

  “Why did you come?” he asked, at last.

  “On account of you,” Tek’s mother said, studying him now. The green in her eyes was very dark. “I meant to stand unseen among the milkwood at Vigil and sing back to you what I had taken once, at your father’s bidding—for none may behold his fate upon the Mirror who cannot dream.”

  She shook her head.

  “I told your father that, when first I sang you, that you must have back your dreaming sight before you got your beard. But he did not wish it, argued against it. He is very much afraid of dreams, ever since, a very long time past, a wyvern tried to speak to him in one.”

  Jan felt his skin prickling.

  The red mare said, “He did not send word to me, as I had bidden him, when you were to go on Pilgrimage. Your mother did that.”

  Jan gazed at nothing, striving desperately to remember what the wyvern had said: I tried to reach your father once . . . when Korr was young and not yet prince . . . tried to send him a dream to ruin him, send him running wild Renegade across the Plain. . . . The red mare gazed back at Jan, her quiet tone gone rueful now.

  “But I could not be with you on this night just past. I had to run a long way across the Plain with that storm in my teeth before it blew itself to nothing. It has taken me all this time returning.”

  Jan shook his head. His mind was full. He could not take in any more. “You could have given me back my dreams in the Vale, at Moondance.”

  Lying with folded legs beside the water there, I shook my head. “No. I took your dreams by the dark of the moon, and so by the dark must they return.”

  Would he understand that? I hoped so. The ways of magic are limited, and strange. Then I told him a little more of the truth, speaking slowly, that he might follow me.

  “But there is another reason I held back. On a night many years past before ever you were born, prince-son, when first I felt the weight of a horn upon my brow and my body becoming a unicorn’s, I stood beside this Mere, beholding a dream. It told me I must one day return to the Hallow Hills, and deliver a unicorn safe out of a wyvern’s belly.”

  I stood up then, shaking the sand and damp from me, unsure how much of what I had said he had been able to grasp. The young prince continued to stare at me, and for the first time he seemed to realize how my black mane stood up in a brush along my neck and that my tail fell full and silky as a mane. No beard grew silken on my chin, no feathery fringe about my heels. He saw my hooves then, which are round and single as the day I was foaled, for all that a horn now sprouts on my brow.

  For I was not born among the unicorns. In that, the Renegades were right. I come from a place far to the western south, beyond the shallows of the Summer Sea. But I fled away in time, and found the unicorns in their Vale. Their beauty, when first I saw them, was so great I ached to join them. But I held back, sick with longing, for I was not like them—until I learned of a sacred well across the Plain that makes the unicorns what they are, and a young prince told me the way.

  But that is another tale.

  “What are you?” whispered the prince’s son, falling back a pace to gaze on my beardless chin and single hooves.

  I tossed my head. What could I tell him? He wanted it all in a word, and I myself only barely understood what it was I had been, and was now, and was yet becoming. Still, I tried to answer him.

  “I am the midwife,” I told him, “who stands between the womb of Alma and the world. I do not make, but I help what has been made to be born.”

  Did that make sense
to him? I studied his face, but what he made of my words I could not tell. I tried again.

  “I am a dreamer, and a little of a magicker. There is a race of two-footed creatures, Aljan, great movers and builders. They keep many burden-beasts to haul and carry for them.” I could not quite keep the bitterness out of my voice as I said the last. “I was such a bearer once, until I came away.”

  Then the young prince surprised me. “I saw you,” he told me, soft, and did not draw away from me, as others do. “I saw you among the two-foots in my vision.” And I knew then, for him to have seen that, he must be a far-dreaming seer indeed. He looked at me. “But your coat was another color, then. It was roan.”

  I smiled a little. “The blossoms of the milkwood which I ate made my coat this color, and the bitter waters of the Mere gave me a horn.”

  “So you are the Red Mare the Renegades spoke of,” Jan answered quietly. “They said my father helped you somehow.”

  I nodded, remembering. “He was very like you then— wild, hotheaded, and proud, though not so clever or far-seeing by half. Though it was against all custom, he told me the way to the unicorn’s Mere and, in doing so, broke the Ring of Law and opened himself to a wyvern’s spells. I kept them at bay, barely.”

  The young prince stood, not seeing me, looking inward then. I told him, “And afterward, I sang much of that memory out of your father’s mind, just as I once sang away your dreams. One day perhaps I will give it back to him—if he will have it back. He is not a seer, Jan, and has no understanding of magic and dreams.”

  The other’s dark eyes pierced me then, urgent and fire bright. “Give me the tale,” he whispered. “I must know. Sing me the tale.”

  “I will give you the tale,” I replied, turning away. “But not just now. Another time.”

  The prince’s son said nothing then, watching me.

  “Are you not cold, little prince, with your coat still full of water?” I asked him. Behind me I could hear Tek beginning to stir. “Shake off,” I said, turning to rouse her. “The afternoon grows late.”