Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore (pocket ebook reader .txt) 📗

As we pass by him, me in front, the old man dredging there behind, he glances up, sees Olun, and calls out.

‘You have a daughter, then. That’s new.’

‘Aye,’ Olun croaks, replying. ‘Aye, that’s new.’ Thus we pass on and take the path beside the river, yellow dirt trod bald between the scrubs of grass. Bronzed leaves pile against trees that stand like widows, shoulders bare and bent with grief, heads hung and grey hair catching in the riverskin where currents braid to silver, split on twig ends. Looking up from frozen, trudging feet and back across my shoulder, see the soot-gloved gateman leaning, still with face towards the thorn and waiting for the dam to break.

We scrape and clatter on beside the river, counter to its flow. The twig-bed crackles, drawn along the hard-worn path behind me, like a brushfire at my back from which a voice comes now, the old man’s, crackling also.

‘If you’re . . .’ A breath. ‘To follow me . . .’ Another. By these constant, desperate suckings-down of air his talk is broken, sudden eddies in its flow.

‘If you’re to follow me, then you must know my path. If you’re to be the cunning one when I am gone, why, then you have my leavings, but it must be that you have my learnings also.’

Listening to him speak, it comes to me that though he may be old he has his wits about him. You can hear it in the way he fits his words one to another, clear despite the interrupting breath. My mother, younger far than he, says only ‘Cack’ and ‘Wet’ and ‘Where’s he gone?’ those last few moons. This Olun is no fool, and so he has my ear.

The fire voice sputters on, above the litter’s cracklings. ‘My way of learning is my path, still trodden in my thoughts, although my walks in this world are no more.’

He does not need tell that to me, me with my palms all blistered and my shoulders sore from dragging him.

He draws his frantic, drowning breath and then goes on. ‘This track of knowing’s beaten through wild overgrowths of thought by long moons of repeating, yet means nothing if it has no counter in this world, the world wherein we walk and die.’

He leaves the walking up to me and, in return, the dying’s left to him.

‘My path of thoughts is therefore drawn from all the paths about me in the truth of life. These territories that we span are as like spanned within, where there are monuments of notion, chasms, peaks and streams for night-thoughts there to spawn. If you would know my path and follow in its way, then know the land about, both track and willage, in its bridge and in its drownings. Know the outcast rat-shacks, relic stones and gill-halls. Mark each path above and know the underpath below, its secret way from vault to treasure hole.’

My peace is held, all the long while he talks. This word of treasure, though, must not slip by, and bids me to break in.

‘What underpath is this, and how is it for me to walk, if all its ways be secret?’

He is sniffy, waving me away with his reply.

‘We have our Urken-tracks beneath the soil. Only the Hob or Hob-wife know their ways, that pass from hand to cunning hand across the ages. Many treasures of our craft are there, but this is yours to know when you are ready, filled with knowings of the plainer tracks above that are an equal to your calling. On that day, it may well be that you go down and walk the candled leagues yourself, where these old feet of mine once tread the wormslopes and the chilly rock, that only tread there in my dog-dreams now. Before that day you must tread all the paths above, and know the stories set along their way.’

This troubles me. It seems the old man has it in his thoughts for me to drag him all through up and down along these paths he talks about, which does not please me, not at all. As for the stories set along their way, the ones that hang there in the torso garden are already known to me, and it’s not my desire to hear of any more. It strikes me, since we do not pass in sight of those staked carrion, my path of last night gone must lie some way east of this river-walk, which pleases me right well. Trudge on, the leaves all kicking up about my feet.

Now Olun calls for me to stop a while, and bids me look away now from the river to the east, where rises up a hill with white smoke twisting out in ribbons from its top. It is the hill by which my way is made down to the bog-struck valley floor upon my coming here, its crest-fires burning still by day. Far off, across the fields, the little people stood about the blazes on that peak may yet be seen. Their chanting, faint and distant, comes to us with each new shift of wind, one voice of note more strident than the rest, that carries further.

‘That is Hurna,’ says the old man, cackling the while and spraying spit across his pup-faced wrap. He offers up no further word, but bids me heft the poles and carry on. Our shadows shrivel up beneath the climbing sun. The whiles pass by.

Ahead and to my right a meadow swamp of rushes fans away, a hollow of blanched spears that has a crop of solid land knobbed up from out its middle like an island in a lake of reed, and there upon it stands a mound of wood, as for a fire. There are some children playing near it, boys who crouch about another of their kind, who lies upon his back. They jab, and fondle him, and make loud cries.

As we tread nearer, passing them, it comes to me that this is