Robin McKinley - Fire - Tales of Elemental Spirits

Tandin came dazedly back into the world of air with this thought in his mind, that what had happened was not a triumph, but a tragedy. And there was a hero in this part of the story after all, the one now lying defeated on the icy rocks of Bear Mountain with the hunters rejoicing round him. Some of the best of Nedli’s stories, the ones that sang on in the mind long after she’d told them, were like that, tales of a hero who had triumphantly performed mighty deeds, and in the end perished in fulfilling the final one. Did the fireworms in the furnaces below the mountains tell each other such tales? And who would go back to the world of fire below to tell them what had happened?

But the story should still be told, if not there, then here. When a hero is forgotten, he dies a second death. Yes, once they were back at the cave the people there would want to know everything that had happened, and then one day, not yet, Tandin would take Nedli aside and tell her his thoughts, so that she could make a new story, as strange as any that she already told, The Fireworm’s Story, to live in people’s minds for generations not yet born.

Spring came. The hillsides streamed and the ice-locked rivers loosed themselves and roared and foamed with snow-melt waters. The days drew level with the nights and the Amber Bear returned from his wanderings, dragging the sun with him, and the Blind Bear woke and together they fought the Great White Owl and amid ferocious gales drove him northward.

This year there were no uncoupled young men in the Home Cave to go journeying to the other caves along the range in search of a woman for themselves. But the White Owl had taken Golan’s woman, Sinasin, with a sickness he caused, first making her very sad and then, one night in the darkest part of the year, causing her to slip away while the watchers were changing places and lie down in the snow on her fur with nothing to cover her. Golan had found her there, frozen and dead, in the morning. So now he went to look for a new woman, confident that as a seasoned hunter he could have his choice. As well as the usual gifts he took something even more welcome, a new story, Tandin’s story, which he told from cave to cave along the mountain range.

Now all summer others beside the woman-seekers came visiting the Home Cave on various excuses, but in fact to gaze at the hero, and Tandin found himself more and more marked out and set apart. So it had been all his life, one way or another. First he had been pushed aside as a fatherless child and a man without honour. Now he was the son of the Amber Bear. A hero. A spirit-walker who had paid as great a price as any of the old heroes. No one despised him for this, as they would have despised any other womanless man. It was a matter for awe.

But the aloneness was hard to bear, so more and more he retreated into the spirit world to roam the ghost paths and converse with the spirits of trees and of waterfalls. There was great kindness in trees, and great wisdom in waterfalls, a deep understanding of the flux and change of the world. The visitors to the cave would find him sitting all by himself on the bear pelt, his eyes like stones, his breathing slow and deep, his flesh chill to the touch, and know that he was spirit-walking far from that place, and stare at the hero.

One afternoon late in summer Tandin was on such a journey when he felt himself suddenly called—he didn’t know how, or by whom. But the call was urgent, a desperate need, so he sped back along the ghost-paths and re-entered the world where people live and die. He found himself sitting in his usual place, on the bear pelt, and looking at a small group in front of the cave, two visitors listening to Nedli, and at the same time gazing at him with the usual wondering stare, and, a little apart from them, Bast, Mennel and another stranger, a man about Bast’s age.

Bast was talking to the stranger, but Mennel was gazing at Tandin with a totally different look from that of the wonder-seekers, a despair and need so piercing that it had somehow broken through into the spirit world and called him here. And something else. For her—perhaps for her alone in all the world—Tandin was still who he had always been. But there was no hope in her look. She too knew the price he had paid.

He gazed at her dreamily, and for a moment he became a woman, thought a woman’s thoughts, felt her feelings as she stood being bartered away by her father to be some stranger man’s, his possession, his toy, his child-bearer.

All fell silent as he rose and drew the pelt over his shoulders. They watched to see what he would do. As he walked across he seemed to them to be floating an invisible distance above the ground. Bast and the stranger fell back a pace. Tandin took Mennel by the shoulders. She closed her eyes, and he licked them and sealed them shut and drew her to his side, pulling the bear pelt round her to enfold them both.

ʺBe a bear,ʺ he muttered in her ear.

She rubbed herself against him, flank to flank, purring deep in her throat. The stranger bowed his head in acceptance while Bast visibly calculated the prestige that might accrue to him from this new alliance.

Keeping pace without effort, Tandin and Mennel started down the path, still with the bear pelt around them. As they drew further away the shape they made seemed to become less and less like that of two humans wrapped in an animal’s skin and more like the hindquarters of two shorter, bulkier beasts walking close together. By the time they disappeared into the forest, that was indeed what they might have been.

SALAMANDER MAN

PETER DICKINSON

Long before the man reached Aunt Ellila’s stall, Tib recognised him as a magician. Though many people practised cottage magic, the high magic practised by professional magicians was illegal throughout the country. But the town of Haballun chose to be different, in this and many other ways.

Slavery, for instance. This was also illegal, yet Tib himself was a slave, bought by Aunt Ellila direct from the school, with an enforceable guarantee from the Guild that if he escaped and was free for more than a month, the purchaser would be compensated by a payment twenty times his purchase price. To make the guarantee effective, the Guild had hired a magician to design a system whereby each slave was branded on his left shoulder-blade and the brand then tattooed with an individual mark, linked to a scrying stone in the Guild head office. If Tib went missing, a clerk would dig out his sale-parchment and lay the stone on the copy of his mark, and an image would appear in the crystal showing exactly where he was hiding. Once recaptured, he would be punished for as long as he had been free in a manner that caused intense pain but did no physical damage, and then returned to his owner. As part of his schooling Tib had been made to watch would-be escapers undergoing this torment. Since he had been brought to the school almost newborn, he had sometimes wondered what freedom might be like, but if he’d ever felt tempted to try it he had only to reach over his left shoulder and feel the ridges and hollows of the brand to abandon the idea.

Aunt Ellila wasn’t in fact a bad owner compared to some that Tib had heard of. ʺAuntʺ was a purely formal title, dating back to the early days of the system, when owners needed to pretend to be blood relatives of their slaves in order to have an apparent right to keep them as servants. If Tib had had an actual aunt or uncle he would have called them ʺGada Thisʺ or ʺGado That.ʺ

Tib was Aunt Ellila’s only slave. He cleaned the house and ran errands, but his main job was to help stack the heavy hand-cart and then haul it down to the market in the morning, with Aunt Ellila walking beside it and carrying the basket of her more fragile stock on her head. He then unstacked the cart, set it up as a stall, rigged the awnings and the screened area behind it, assembled the shelves and showcases, and finally unpacked the crates and brought the goods to Aunt Ellila to arrange as she wanted them. During the long, hot day he ran errands, parcelled up items sold, and so on, and minded the stall in the slack period at midday while Aunt Ellila went off to Defri’s bar to dice and drink bhang soda with her cronies.