Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore (essential reading txt) 📕

centre of this queer-mazed round an ember pit throws up a sulking light. Like beads of melted ore it prickles red upon the rubbled ornaments; is caught in painted sailsheets, shadowbacked; cut into smoking slats of pink and greening dark upon the sharpness of their edge. Slabbed black falls on the passageways amongst the useless things, slashed here and there by shafts of bloody forge-light spilling from the heaped-up side-paths of those corners where one channel forks into another.

Saving when they drag through such a chimney-shaft of sudden warfire brightness, nothing may be seen of Olun on his bed of sticks. Following them with ears alone: the pallet’s rasp across the scored black dirt, the woman’s foot-thud muffled, drumming through it, tickling beneath the bareness of my heel. Now losing them about a bend and hurrying to catch them up, come round the turn in time to see the old man’s needle-harrowed face bleed sudden red and bright from out the dark as it drags through a stripe of light. The stripe grows wide. We are stepping out into the ember-lighted round of open space there centring this puzzle-track of piling casks, dream tumbles, rary bits.

Her flat face gleamed with sweat, the woman, Hurna, sets the old man and his pallet down to rest beside the sunken fire, then lumbers off without a word for wood to bring it back to the flame. Lost in a moment, great bear footfalls stumbling off into the maze of relic toys.

The old man’s tired, so sends me off to sleep in one far corner hung with hides and set apart. He tells me not to pay it mind if he and Hurna set and talk about the embers for a time. It’s plain he does not wish me to keep company with them, and so my bed is made from furs, the fireside’s light shut out about me by the hangings.

Soon, there’s the sound of Hurna coming back with wood, the clatter as she throws it down. They talk then, low, the first time that she speaks within my hearing. Why, she sounds more flat and stupid than she looks, which is a thing to say.

It is my hope that they may talk of shanking, or of something good to listen on, but no. She drears about a god that swallows us, which does not sound the god for me. She says once we are swallowed up then we may be born new amongst the gods. As what? A turd that bobs there in their golden midden-hole? Things may be born then swallowed, though it may not be the other way about, not in my reckoning.

Once in a while the old man’s voice breaks in and crackles something sharp with scorn, withdraws again to let the woman’s answer drag away and on and on into the night. She pulls their talk along, a pallet weighed with blunt and heavy words.

Below my fur and naked save my fancy-beads, my eyes are shut but not my ears. Her words float through me. Essence. Spirit-ore. The hobbles of the flesh. Change. Be transformed, refigured in the passion, passion, passion ash . . .

The ashfields. Me a little girl. This snow is dry, warm grey, its smoothed and rounded flanks just right for stepping in, a powder finer than the stone-ground corn, as cool and slippery as water on my foot that now sinks in, and in, expecting ground, and deeper, there’s no firmness underneath the ash to stop me falling . . .

Start awake. The furs piled up about my neck. The hangings, pink lit on the other side and still the woman’s voice beyond them. Sweat all up my back and silky wet between the breasts. These furs make me too hot. Take out my arms and shoulders from beneath. That’s better. Cooler. Turn and roll upon my other side. The beaded hoop of wire now digs into my shoulder that it must be pushed away. There. Now the all of me feels good, so slack and tired that it escapes my thoughts just where my leg rests, or my hand. All one soft piece, that does not know the different bits of me.

The woman’s words, smooth of all meaning now, are only sounds, grey pebbles sleek and wet that tumble slow through nothing, here inside my eyelids: Beasthill. Heartring. Urned with queens. The cheated worm. Bones milled and raked. And when you. And when all of us. When we. When we are sparkborn . . .

In my dark, the colour flukes play blue, no, red, and run to make a ring. It cobwebs out, it cobwebs out and at the centre comes a melt, deep winter green and, glimmering, breaks apart, the ripples, river, river’s edge, and here she comes, the girl, her throat all open but she does not pay it mind, and she is smiling, pleased to meet with me.

‘Come up the river bank a little way,’ she’s saying now. ‘There is a big black dog up there who says he knows of you.’

She turns and walks, leading ahead. Where is the river gone to? There are bushes at each side and piles of clutter stood amongst them, heaping mounts of queer and clever things that are well known to me, although their names are not now in my thoughts. The girl is calling up ahead, along the passageway.

Trying to catch up next to her but something’s tangling my feet and makes me slow. Her voice goes further off from me. She’s talking now to someone, yet her words are flat and have no spirit in. That must be how it is, the talk between the dead. Push on. Push deeper after her. It’s darker now. Is that her calling me? It’s darker now . . .

Light. Morning light. What place is this to find myself awake?

Olun. The old man’s hut. The father of the girl. The girl beside the river’s edge.

Ah yes.

Yet half asleep, still furry in my