Fiction: The Fire in their Heads

Oh, it is strange this thing. He could not know from where it rose that thought of his and yet so simple it was, a mere lift and drop of the hand to spin water to invisible fire and then to smoke. She’d hollowed the stone as he’d asked, spending days beneath the sun to flense gravel and sharp little motes of dust from the dip of it. It looked like a valley, like the valley they were sitting in, just the two of them and her all brightlooking turning pale to pink as above her the throw of the sun described an arc and along its unseen back were those invisible eyes which would wink and flicker in the deep old night. They both wore nothing but pelts and oftentimes not even that, an imagined blooming in the spring where he surveyed the curve of her hips and oh so gentle and oh it could be his he thought from where her back fell and leapt up again to round in turn and form a thing above her legs which his eyes found most pleasing. Just then as she knelt naked by the churning spinning river, foamflecked and sparking, and he eyed at how her buttocks pressed down upon her heels and he smiled as he rested sidespraddle upon a mossy boulder beneath an enormous and steaming oaktree. He listened to the sharp gentle flaking away of the stone. She used a wad of quartz to file the dipping curve. He picked a blade of high grass down by his toes and began to thread it through his teeth and turned to face the river and laughed. She looked back at him and sweat had beaded her brow like the brow of some shelf of stone by the river’s edge where it would catch the spray from passing ripples.

            —Laughing, are you? she said without finding the will to hold back her own giggle.

            —Yes, I’m laughing!

            —And why is that?

            —Because I am happy.

            —And no doubt you are happy for the reason that I kneel here labouring whilst you sit up there grazing and tanning in the sun.

            —I love it up here! It’s my perch. I feel like a bird.

            —You do remind me of a bird sometimes.

            —And why is that?

            —Because you won’t stop squawking! Now quieten down.

            He laughed again and stood up, feeling the mossy stone all wet from the morning showers and from under his feet he saw small pearls of water like dew spring forth and trickle down the flanks of the boulder leaving dark trails hindside to their descent and in the water drops he could see tiny flecks of moss and grit tumbling through them irrespective of their downward trail as if there was contained inside those lobes of earth tears the rotation of some other kind of orbit.

            He leapt down from the boulder and announced that he was off for a swim. She only rolled her eyes and kept filing away the stone. She knew she shouldn’t feel too upset with him for leaving her with all the work. It was not his place, after all, as the Seer Man to go about the labours himself and since she was the only one there with him it was her obligation to carry out his instructions. As he waded out into the water throwing up furls of liquid which splashed and sent trembling creases out along the flowing surface she thought about the rest of the tribe where they rested upriver in the cave. Their wanderings had brought them here, that great circuitous march of centuries wherein the threaded loop of footfalls contained an inherited map of trackways walked by thousands before them, a trickle down the ages and the suns from turning to turning and to what end they could not say and they could not know and yet they walked those paths without question and drew blood on them to trees and stones where they lay captured at their roots like earthbound idols stuckfast amidst the blooming of some higher order, a spark which would fence them in concentric rings of flame and first they would worship the trees, these wanderers, as they always had and they would speak with them and hear their tales though eventually their minds would slip and no longer would they huddle beneath the creaking boughs and no longer would they hear those voices slipping by them on the high breezes. All this was stirred to flurrying along the inward seam of his cranial vault, that Seer Man, though he had not the words to convey it and so instead he bid her carve him up a stone and it was the world that she was carving.

            Across the river he spotted a trail of goldeneyed ducks and above the reeds there rose a fleece of redthroated divers hanging in the air like one long drape of wings and as their precession tilted them upward against the earth’s axis they dove across the face of the sun reducing it to a blot of shadow like a stain across the outside of a rock. He nearly wept seeing it for it was within him that he carried an urge, indeed a longing, to capture those fleeting moments and preserve them for every passing eye. As he pondered these things he sat down in the water allowing the gentle flow to span crosswise against his chest and back, his whole frail figure listing slightly with the pulsing tide and he closed his eyes and though still awake, he slept. They were impatient with him, he knew. How could they not be when he’d led them so far off their given route? It was not a natural course, they’d said, and when they asked him why it was he’d led them so far from comfort all he could do was shake his head and say he did not know yet and this dismayed them, all save for her who knelt beside the river now and was always by his side, her who insisted that one day she would be the first Seer Woman and find new shores for them to wander.

            It had not been easy, those past turnings. Many deaths, many who succumbed to sorrow and strode off into the trees to allow the land to take them back. The wind would lead them, they’d said. They would not be afraid.

            During the colder turnings it seemed as though the clouds would never thin, the snow would never cease to fall. They’d slit the throats of young fawns and fed the steaming blood to treeroots and as the sun descended to its bed there had still been no answer on the wind and so they’d had no choice but to follow the Seer Man along whatever path had been woven for him by the land for it was the land that whispered in his ear, he only did as he was bid, the same as she who was bowed there over her waning stone.

            Her hands had turned pale and powdery, motes of stone shavings drifting up to billow about her downward face and she would cough and hack up clods of it caught in her phlegm and spit it out in the grass and occasionally she’d watch as some mite emerged from the soil to clamber over a blade of grass and get its legs stuck in that mass of filth and throatspill. She stood up and breathing hard looked out to where he still sat in the water. —I can’t do anymore! she called. In slow rotation his neck craned back and he eyed her and smiled. He took a deep breath and stood from the water, droplets slithering down over his skin, hairs slowly rising up again as the lather of water spilled back down into the river. She thought him very beautiful. They were the same age and yet to her his eyes contained a glint that even the elders did not. He raised his arms skyward and stretched, yawning loudly, and the muscles around his shoulders and down his back flexed and tightened and then rested again.

            —It has come to me, he said as he waded back to shore.

            —What has?

            —How it may be that a stone can turn water to flame.

            —Oh. Will you tell me?

            —I will show you. Let us light a fire.

            —The sun has not yet faded.

            —We must light a fire.

            With a sigh she did as he said. He handed her the flint and sparkstone she would need from among his hide wrappings and together they knelt and clapped the two earthen nodes together over a pile of kindling and dry moss and soon a small fire was lit. He got up and waded back out into the river, telling her to wait there. As she did so she eyed the thin spool of smoke rise twisting up to meet the clouds and thought of how joyous it must be for the smoke to be sifting the air and on its way to tie bonds with others of its kind for that was what clouds were, everyone knew, the smoke from a thousand fires still hanging there to dapple and tread the blue immensity of the sky and it made her think that up there somewhere was smoke from a fire her mother had lit or her grandmother or her mother before that, back and back and back, untethered into the flume of a thousand curling flames each marking a distance measured in soot and in charred bones and embersparks.

            He returned with a smooth pebble taken from the riverbed and he sat down beside her with the stone she’d hollowed, now filled with riverwater, and dropped the pebble into the flames. She frowned and cast him a look and he could not help but laugh.

            —What are you doing? she asked.

            —Just watch.

            And so she did. They sat there in silence and occasionally he would roll the pebble out of the fire with a gentle crackle of burning twigs and a low burst of embers and briefly dab his finger upon it, shake his head and roll it back into the fire. They waited so long that the sun was setting. She closed her eyes and listened as the birds began to sing their sleeping songs and then opened her eyes again and looked up at the first stars as they burst and split the darkening blue and the deeper run of violet haze that misted the outer edge of the sky and soon there were so many that she could not count their number and oh how it was that they marched there along their unknowable course to their unknowable end? Just as she was about to look away, for she could no longer bear the beauty of them, she saw a rush of embers spray and burst into sight and heard him roll the pebble off the fire again. —It is ready, he said. It was becoming cold now and she was beginning to shiver.

            —I’m going to get my bearpelt, she said.

            —No, he said, grabbing hold of her arm: Look!

            He grabbed the pebble, cracked and sootmarred, and, as if he could not feel the heat at all, he dropped it into the hollowed-out stone filled with water. Immediately the water hissed and thrashed, bubbles burst forth and churned to foam. She leapt back and he rose, very slowly, and stood over it. His eyes widened and the light from the fire flung long and wavering shadows upon his features making him look deeper and darker and for the first time in her life she was frightened of him.

            —What did you do? she asked, her voice faltering.

            At first he did not answer, enraptured as he was, the steam obscuring his face.

            —I’m so frightened, he whispered. It is the meeting of two worlds, two spirits. It is something we have not known, happening down there below. The spirits too are frightened because they cannot understand what is happening to them for they are like the fish in the river being carried downstream and where to, they do not know. I could not see it before now. Listen to me. It is so strange but we, all of us, are alike to those fish and to the joining spirits and oh if this is so then who is it that looks down on us as we look down on the fish, as you and I now watch this water turn to smoke?

            She noticed he had not blinked once since he stood and he raised a trembling hand and laid it against the side of his head and his teeth were clattering violently in the cold and the panic and he looked down at her where she lay sprawled and weeping now and he shut his eyes tightly and began to mutter under his breath:

            —It is us. This hollow stone, our skulls. There is a fire inside our heads that burns, it’s always burning, I can feel it now. I can feel the pebble drop inside my skull, my skull is a cave, and it is rolling, this pebble, and oh it is thunderous. There is a whole deep frailty that has run from you to me to all of us winding round in circles as we have marched since the land birthed us. Something has given me this and yet I cannot understand what it is. They have dropped it inside my head! Oh, this fire inside my head! It burns so brightly!

            And indeed she could see his eyes blazing luminous in the duskfolded land and all the birds could see it too from their roosts as sweat poured down his quivering muscles.

            —We must stay in this place. By this river, by the cave beyond the trees where even now our people rest their weary brows upon the lip of something they cannot understand. It will give us knowledge. Our marching shall now be rooted here. Here, where the land and the stars have given me these things to glean!

            He was weeping. He fell to his knees before the flames and the boiling water and drool spilled down over his chin, his eyes red and welling.

 

 

This story is an excerpt from a chapter of what will be Aidan Scott’s second novel, which is currently a work in progress…

Aidan Scott is a 22 year old writer from Canberra, Australia. He mostly writes fiction based on history, mythology, the occult, and dreams. His book The Garden is out now with Anxiety Press.