Firesong

by William Nicholson

  He sang a line of the song in an unexpectedly sweet voice.

  ‘Where have you gone, little chicks, little chicks? Oh! oh! and oh!’

  These last exclamations were, it seemed, the lost chicks reappearing from behind Pillish.

  ‘So you see, they’ll come willingly to school. Yes, our homeland school will be a happy place. They’ll love their teacher too, don’t you think?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Seldom Erth.

  Mumpo strode along at the head of the marchers, dreaming no dream of the homeland. The little girls had left him, and he must be alert, watching out for danger; and anyway, he had no dream any more. He glanced back down the line, and let his eyes rest for a moment on Kestrel, who was walking with Sisi. For as long as he could remember he had loved Kestrel. He knew every line of that agile high-boned face, every mood of those restless eyes. But Kestrel did not love him. He accepted this, feeling it to be natural and fitting. Who was he, that Kestrel should love him? But without her, what was left? It was as if a hole had been cut out of the future. So he went on his way in a kind of puzzlement, not grieving, but without any real hope of happiness to come.

  Kestrel was unaware that Mumpo had looked back and watched her. She was concerned about Sisi.

  ‘You should be eating more,’ she told her. ‘We have a long way to go.’

  ‘There isn’t much food left,’ said Sisi quietly. ‘Let the children have it.’

  ‘Then you’ll get too weak to walk, and we’ll have to carry you in the wagon. That just makes more work for the horses.’

  ‘You can leave me behind.’

  ‘Oh, Sisi. We’d never leave you.’

  ‘I don’t see why not. I’m not Manth, like you. I’m not any use to anyone. I’m not even – you know.’

  ‘Not beautiful?’

  ‘Not beautiful. Not a princess. Nothing.’

  ‘You think people who aren’t beautiful princesses are nothing?’

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘Everyone admires you, Sisi.’

  ‘Not everyone.’

  Kestrel didn’t pretend not to understand her.

  ‘Bowman too.’

  ‘Has he said so to you?’

  ‘I know what my brother feels. He came and talked to you, didn’t he?’

  ‘I was sewing. He said I was doing good work.’

  ‘There you are, then.’

  ‘Oh, Kess, please! Don’t you start pitying me too.’

  It was a flash of the old Sisi. Kestrel took her arm affectionately.

  ‘I like you better when you’re cross.’

  ‘No you don’t.’

  But she was smiling.

  ‘Come on, Sisi, admit it. You’re not as good and humble as you make out.’

  ‘Yes, I am. I’m the simplest, humblest person in the world.’ She smiled as she spoke, making Kestrel smile too. ‘I’m the princess of simplicity. I’m grandly, beautifully, proudly, simple. I’m magnificently humble.’

  She started to laugh, and couldn’t go on. Lunki looked round approvingly.

  ‘There, my pet. It does my heart good to hear you enjoying yourself.’

  ‘You’re very unkind, Kess,’ said Sisi when she had calmed down. ‘You make me say things.’

  ‘So you’ll stop starving yourself, will you?’

  ‘I’ll have what the others have.’

  ‘Good. That’s all I ask.’

  ‘But Kess, I truly don’t mind if I live or die. I’m not saying it to show off. Since I’ve been with your people, I’ve started to see everything so differently. It makes me ashamed of how I’ve been. You Manth people, you have such strong family feeling, and you’re so considerate to each other. You’re so serious, and thoughtful, and most of all, good. Such quiet, good people.’

  ‘I think you’re talking about one person.’

  ‘Maybe I am.’

  ‘He has his faults too.’

  ‘Sometimes I think he’s too sad, and keeps himself too much alone. But I don’t see any faults.’

  ‘Ask him. He’ll tell you.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t think of it!’

  What Sisi didn’t tell her friend was that secretly she believed she could make Bowman happy. But even as this thought was passing through her mind, she remembered that she was no longer beautiful, and so there was no reason why he should choose her.

  ‘I keep forgetting. Everything’s different now.’

  She reached up as she did a hundred times a day, and touched the scars on her cheeks.

  By now, everyone had forgotten the fly that had stung Hanno Hath. The marchers were in better cheer than they had been for days. Some even sang as they marched, a song of the road that went back to the earliest days, when the Manth people had been a wandering tribe. Kestrel joined her mother and father, and tried once again to persuade her mother to ride in the wagon, for at least part of the way. But Ira Hath insisted on walking with the rest.

  ‘We’ll be stopping at sundown. I can last till then.’

  Bowman and Mumpo, far ahead, kept watch over the bleak land. Once Bowman looked back, and saw Kestrel walking close by his mother, holding her hand. He saw Sisi too, walking steadily beside the wagon, her scarred face to the cold wind, her lustrous amber eyes gazing ahead at nothing.

  Sisi never heard the faint whine in the air behind her. When there came a tingling itch at her throat, she reached up one hand to scratch it, and thought no more about it. For a little while afterwards there was a tender spot at the base of her neck, in the soft hollow between the collar bones.

  3

  Sisi’s kiss

  The cracks were becoming more frequent, and wider. They ran in random zigzag patterns all over the land, as if the ground had been baked too long in some distant summer and had shivered like a badly-glazed plate. At first the cracks were only inches wide, and inches deep; but as the column of the Manth people marched on north, the cracks grew in size, until they were too wide to step over, and they had to find a way between them.

  There was no made road, but the path taken by other travellers before them was easy enough to see. Here the tough grasses had been beaten down by the tread of men and beasts, forming a winding route that made its way through the cracked land. After a while the path began to descend, and so entered a natural groove in the plain, which seemed to be the bed of some long-ago dried-up stream. This path, no more than a dozen yards wide at the base, snaked its way here and there between the sudden fissures, descending all the time. The downward gradient was barely noticeable, but little by little the slopes rose up on either side, until they were higher than the travellers’ heads.

  Hanno Hath didn’t like this stream-bed of a road. He sent scouts up the side slopes to look for some other route, Mumpo to the west and Tanner Amos to the east. The surface of the sloping sides was crumbling and littered with loose fragments of stone, which made them hard to scramble up. Every step kicked free a few of the loose stones, which skittered down in miniature avalanches, picking up smaller stones as they went.

  ‘What do you see, Mumpo? Is there another way?’

  ‘No,’ Mumpo called back. ‘The cracks are too wide.’

  From his viewpoint on the west slope, Mumpo could see that the land-cracks had increased and widened and deepened in every direction. The dried-up riverbed was the only way through.

  By mid-afternoon, when they stopped to rest again, the road had cut deeper still into the land, and was now running down a steep-sided valley. Mumpo and Tanner descended the slopes, picking their way with care, then taking it at a run, racing the rolling rocks to the bottom.

  ‘Still nothing?’

  ‘Just cracks, everywhere.’

  Hanno Hath turned to his son. ‘Are we near water, Bo?’

  Bowman shook his head. Sometimes he could sense the presence of springs or streams, but right now he felt nothing.

  ‘I can’t smell anything.’

  ‘My dear?’

  This was to Ira Hath, who ha
d sat down and was composing herself on the ground, her back leaning against a wagon wheel. She closed her eyes. Several times a day she repeated this process, in order to make sure that they were going the right way. It was a little like sensing the direction of the wind, only it wasn’t wind she felt on her upraised face, but warmth. The sensation was faint, but clear. It told her the way to the homeland. There was another part to the feeling, which was harder to describe: a sense of gathering hush, the prelude to a storm. Ira never spoke to the others of how much she feared this coming time. They could travel no faster than they were doing. There was no point in spreading panic. To herself and to Hanno, she called it the rising wind: every day, a little more every day, the wind was rising. They must seek shelter, they must reach the safety of the homeland, before the storm broke; or the coming wind would carry them away.

  Her husband squatted down before her, and took her hands in his.

  ‘Are we getting closer?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Closer.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’ll live to see the homeland. Haven’t I said so?’

  He gave her the last of the bread that he’d saved from his own ration, together with a cup of milk. She ate a little and drank a little for his sake, but she wasn’t hungry.

  ‘You’re getting thin.’ He pretended to be cross. ‘You must eat what you’re given.’

  She smiled and watched his anxious face and thought what a good man he was.

  ‘We each have our part to play, Hannoka. Then it will be time for us to go.’

  ‘Not yet,’ he said, like an order. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  While the marchers rested, Sisi became more and more agitated.

  ‘Sit, my pet,’ said Lunki. ‘We have two more hours of walking before sundown. Take the ache off your feet.’

  ‘Lie down, I should,’ said Scooch. ‘Get your feet higher than your head. That’s the trick.’

  ‘Higher than your head?’ Lunki was mystified.

  Little Scooch lay on his back on the stony ground and supported his heels on the wagon’s step-board.

  ‘Like this. It makes all the heaviness drop off the feet.’

  Lunki lay down beside him, with her heels on the step-board alongside his.

  ‘Yes!’ she cried, amazed at the sensation. ‘I can feel the heaviness dropping off!’

  She turned to urge Sisi to follow her example, but her mistress was gone. She was some way off, pacing round and round in restless circles.

  ‘What’s the matter with her? Why can’t she settle?’

  ‘Too thin,’ said Scooch.

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘No doubt about it. A body needs padding, or the nerves stick out.’

  ‘My poor baby! Her nerves do stick out, you’re right. She feels things too much.’

  What Sisi was feeling was a sudden and insistent need to go to Bowman, and talk to him, and – and she hardly knew what, except that it would end in humiliation. Her pride held her in check, but the longing was becoming more powerful all the time.

  Bowman was some way off, talking quietly with Kestrel. He was as agitated as Sisi, but for very different reasons.

  ‘I want it to be over,’ he said. ‘I want them to come for me, and for it to be over. Why don’t they come? Every hour that passes, I feel it, the wind is rising. They must come soon.’

  ‘They’ll come for you when they need you,’ said Kestrel. ‘I don’t want you to go before you have to.’

  Kestrel knew her brother believed it was his destiny to join the Singer people, but she didn’t understand how they could be parted.

  We go together, she thought. We always go together.

  Bowman heard her thought.

  ‘I don’t want to go. But I can’t go on like this. You don’t know what it’s like.’

  ‘I feel it, a little.’

  She could feel the turmoil in him, his spirit a field of endless battle. Bowman was so open, he could resist nothing, he was like the sky, he absorbed all things. The nomad dreams of the Manth people, the fierce power of the Morah, the sweet wordless songs of Sirene, all swept the horizons of his mind, chasing each other like wind-borne clouds.

  ‘I don’t want to leave you,’ he said. ‘But I must be with them, when the time comes.’

  ‘And after?’

  ‘There is no after. Not for me.’

  ‘Am I to go on without you?’

  Don’t ask. Forgive me.

  As Kestrel received these unspoken words, she felt a movement against her skin, beneath the fabric of her shirt. It was the silver pendant she wore on a string round her neck, that had once been the voice of the wind singer. She had worn it so long she had almost forgotten it was there. Now it stirred and pressed on her chest, and felt warm, as if it was part of her. At the same time, as she sensed its familiar shape and weight, a door opened in her mind, a door she had not known existed. Through the doorway she saw herself and Bowman together, just as they were now: but a little further away, in a time she knew had not yet taken place, she saw her brother without her, lost and heart-broken, calling her name.

  He seemed so real, and so lonely, that she called out to him with her mind.

  I’ll never leave you. Even if I seem to be gone, I won’t be gone. I’ll always be with you.

  Bowman heard her and was astonished.

  ‘What do you mean, Kess? Why do you say this?’

  ‘These things that are coming,’ she said aloud, speaking slowly, finding the thoughts only as she formed the words, ‘these things the prophet has written, the time of cruelty, the wind on fire, these things are greater than us.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Far greater.’

  ‘We aren’t the makers and the un-makers of the world.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Our task is only to play our small part, for our brief moment, in what must happen.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then we should neither hope nor fear. We must wait for the call, and then do what we must.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She stroked his cheek lightly, tenderly.

  ‘It’ll come soon enough, brother. Don’t wish it any sooner.’

  Sisi could control herself no longer. She must be with Bowman, whatever the consequence. Holding her head high, and looking before her with the distant imperious gaze she had so often used when she had been a princess, she stalked past the other marchers to where Bowman and Kestrel stood. Sisi knew that what she was about to do would shame her for the rest of her life, but the desire was too strong to be resisted. She would do it, and let the future take care of itself.

  As she approached she saw both Bowman and Kestrel staring at her in surprise. Do I look so different? she thought to herself. Is it written on my face?

  ‘Leave us, Kestrel,’ she said. ‘I want to talk to Bowman alone.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Kestrel wonderingly. Bowman signalled her with his eyes, calling, Don’t leave me. But Kestrel was already on her way.

  He was alone with Sisi. Her eyes were fixed on him so intently that he felt himself blush.

  ‘We’ll be moving on any minute,’ he said. ‘We should rejoin the others.’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Sisi.

  To his astonishment, she laid one hand lightly on his arm. She had not been this bold since they had left the Mastery.

  ‘I know you can’t love me,’ she said, ‘since I’ve lost my beauty. But I can love you.’

  ‘Sisi, you mustn’t speak like this.’

  ‘Why not? All I have to lose is my pride. I’m tired of my pride.’

  ‘You don’t understand. Whether you love me, or I love you, it makes no difference. In a little while someone will come for me, and I’ll leave with him, and you’ll never see me again.’

  ‘Oh, in a little while. Who cares about that? Here you are, and here am I.’

  She stroked his arm.

  ‘I don’t know what I can do for you, Sisi.’

  ‘I do.’


  She made him meet her eyes: made him become still.

  ‘Just for now, just for a few moments, pretend you love me.’

  ‘Please, Sisi, I think this is –’

  ‘Touch my scars.’

  He stared back at her, filled with confused feelings.

  ‘Do my scars disgust you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Touch them.’

  So he raised one hand and touched one fingertip to the livid stripe on her cheek. He felt the residue of scar tissue, and the softness of new skin where the scab had crumbled away. He did it out of pity for her, and because her will was strong.

  ‘Now touch my lips.’

  He felt her lips: so soft, and moist.

  ‘What do you want from me, Sisi?’

  ‘I want you to kiss me.’

  The great amber eyes gazed at him unashamed. For the first time, Bowman stopped thinking about his own confusion, and attended to the change in her. Sisi would never make such a request, so directly. Something had happened to her.

  ‘Kiss you?’ He needed time. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I love you.’

  ‘We’re not betrothed.’

  ‘I don’t care. Do you care?’

  This was not Sisi speaking to him, he was sure of it. This was the passion fly within her. He needed closer contact, to reach into her mind.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ she was saying. ‘Then you won’t see the scars. The kiss will be just as sweet.’

  He closed his eyes. He felt her come into his arms. He felt her lips reach up to his. As they kissed, he felt a shiver of delight go through his body, and for a fleeting moment he was aware that he’d never kissed before, not like this. There was a closeness to it that was both tender and eager. He felt her body press against his, and the feeling of her body was part of the kiss. He held her tight in his arms, and his hands felt the shape of her slender back, and his lips moved against hers, sharing secrets –

  No! He jerked his mind free. He reached through the kiss, beyond the kiss, into her desire-possessed mind. As he pressed closer, she kissed him ever more passionately, ever more desperately, as if only in kissing him was she safe. Pushing, probing, burrowing into her, he found it at last, the creature curled within her. He seized it in a firm grip, and still holding Sisi in his arms, he dragged it, tore it, ripped it out of her. One last spasm of resistance, and it let go. He heard the whine of its wings as it flew away.