Robin McKinley - Fire - Tales of Elemental Spirits

ʺThat’s lovely!ʺ

ʺThat’s Sonny, that is. You better get on, Welly, or we’ll all be fallin’ asleep.ʺ

ʺYou’re going to tell me why you really want me. Aren’t you?ʺ

A pause, and a sigh from Welly.

ʺWe can’t make ’er. An’ Sonny won’t. Tell ’er that.ʺ

ʺI suppose it’s a place to start. You see, my dear, after that first time, I used to join a dig and go back to Egypt every winter. Dave would come for a little while and I’d take a break to be with him, and wherever my dig was we’d go to Heliopolis and visit Sonny and his temple. So I got to read all the hieroglyphs and the scrolls, one of which was about the temple ritual. The important thing was that there were always two special priests—sometimes one of them was a priestess—and one of them was getting older and the other one was getting younger. And on ritual days, especially the midwinter solstice, the other priests would make a fire on the altar and the Phoenix would appear and bathe in his flames to renew his strength. Then, right at the end of the cycle when one priest was a very old man and the other was a babe in arms, they’d build a special pyre on the altar and on that last midnight they’d lay the baby—the priest who’d been growing younger—on the pyre, and the Phoenix would appear and nestle down onto the baby as if it were brooding a chick. Then, on the stroke of midnight, the baby would be unborn, and the Phoenix would take its spirit into himself and the pyre would burst into flame. In that same instant, somewhere in Egypt, a new baby would be born, and the old priest would start to live backwards.

ʺThe priests would watch all night, and in the dawn light they would see a pile of ashes where the pyre had been, and on top of it a great jewelled egg. Then, as the sun rose, its first rays would shine through the eastern portal of the temple and strike the egg, and the shell would open like a flower and the baby Phoenix would be there, ready to begin the cycle again. All that was then needed was for the child who had been born at the sacred moment to find his or her way to the temple and be recognised.ʺ

ʺWeren’t like that when poor Sonny were born, not a bit. ’Ad to make it all up for ’isself. Touch an’ go from the start. Still is.ʺ

ʺExactly. We don’t know what went wrong with the cycle. The pyre must have been built and lit and the egg formed, but something prevented it ever being hatched. It may even have been Sonny’s way of enduring the Christian centuries when it would have been difficult for the cult to survive. But the fifth earl picked up the egg up somewhere, still described as a phoenix egg—that’s another mystery—and brought it to the Cabinet House, and Dave was born close by at midnight on the turn of the century, and the cycle could begin again. We don’t know whether Sonny arranged for that himself, or whether it was just the bit of luck he’d been waiting for.

ʺBut I don’t think he can have known about me, or he’d have arranged it differently. I’ve got this hereditary disease. My mother died when she was forty-eight, and one of my sisters when she was fifty-three. None of us who’ve had it has ever lived beyond sixty, that we know of. So Sonny’s kept me going thirty years beyond my time. He can do that. There’s no record in the scrolls of any of the growing-older priests having died before the cycle was up, and it was a hundred and twenty years then, remember. That’s a tremendous age at any time. A lot of Egyptian mummies have been carbon dated, and their average age at death was thirty-one.ʺ

ʺTaken it out of ’im, it ’as, an’ then some, doin’ it for Welly. An’ the summers, they aren’t nowhere near ’ot enough for ’im, not comparing to Egypt, and flyin’ out an’ ’ome spring an’ fall, that’s takin’ it out of ’im too. ’E gets old, same as anyone else, each time round, on’y ’e’s found this way o’ stayin’ immortal. But like I say, it’s goin’ to be touch an’ go for ’im this time, an’ touch an’ go for Welly, an’ that means touch’ an’ go for me. Don’t care to think what’ll happen if I get to be unborn ’thout Sonny bein’ around to sort things out.ʺ

ʺIn a few years’ time, Ellie, I’m going to be almost completely helpless, and Dave’s going to be five, going on four, and Sonny’s going to be trying to survive our English winters on sun-lamps and log fires. In Egypt there were always other priests who helped our predecessors survive those difficult years. Now we are alone.ʺ

ʺAnd you want me to help.ʺ

ʺWe are asking you to join the Priesthood of the Temple of the Phoenix until the cycle of the death and rebirth of our god is fulfilled.ʺ

ʺAll right. Can you wait till I’ve finished school? I don’t think my dad will want me go to university, not if he has to pay for it.ʺ

ʺI think we can do better than that. I’ve already talked to his lordship. When you’ve finished school, he’ll take you on as assistant forester on the estate, with special responsibility for the wood. I’ll introduce you to some of my forestry friends—I still keep up with them by e-mail. You’ll have the diaries, and once we’ve gone, there’ll be no need for you to keep the wood secret. You’ll have an absolutely unique resource to bargain with. Any university that runs a forestry course will be thrilled to have you.ʺ

ʺI don’t need any of that. Really I don’t. I . . . I’d do it whatever it cost me.ʺ

ʺMebbe you would, too, but Sonny aren’t goin’ to let you. ’E’ll look after you, ’cos of ’e pays ’is debts. Not a lot o’ gods you can say that of.ʺ

At long last Ellie drowsed off into sleep. Her last conscious thought was I wish I’d been at their wedding. It must have been wonderful. Perhaps Sonny will send me a dream.

He did.

Midnight, 31 December 1999

A cold night, almost clear. The moon already set. A swath of brilliant stars overhead, and another to the east above a horizon of low hills, visible through a gap in the trees. A large hand torch illuminates part of the clearing, in its beam a pyramidal pile of logs with a flattened top. A light ladder rests against the pile, and an elaborately patterned cloth is draped over its top.

The person holding the hand torch turns. Now the beam illuminates an object something between a hospital stretcher-trolley and a high-tech wheel-chair. Propped on it, swathed in shawls and piled with rugs, lies a very old woman with a bundle on her lap. The torch is settled on the foot of the bed, so that it once more illuminates the pile. Its bearer moves up beside the bundle, opens it and holds its contents to the old woman’s face, as if for her to kiss, and moves into the light of the torch. Now it can be seen that she is a young woman, heavily wrapped against the cold, but the baby she is carrying is stark naked, though apparently almost newborn. Carefully she climbs the ladder, kisses the baby, places it in the centre of the cloth and folds the four corners over it. The underside of the cloth is brilliant with jewels that flash with all the colours of fire in the torch-light. She descends and returns to the trolley, bringing the ladder with her.

Now she folds back some of the bedclothes from a mound near the foot of the bed. The mound stirs, stands, and reveals itself as a large bird. It shakes itself, spreads its wings, and flies heavily to the top of the pile, where it nestles down onto the cloth that wraps the baby, like a hen brooding its chicks. In the torch-light its plumage seems to glow dull orange, and when the torch is switched off continues to do so.