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

And with this he turns away. The hammer lifts and falls. Its deafening chime dismisses me, driving me from that charcoal glade, back to the path that twists beside the Beasthill, down towards the valley floor. Descending, in the far south-west the settlement may yet be seen, long shadow fingering the fields. Late afternoon.

Behind me, going down, the hammering grows faint. Above the distant huts, a pall of smoke.

Unease. It gnaws in me and yet its name may not be said, nor where it comes from, like a low horn sounding in my heart, a cold that rimes my bladder. Is there something going wrong here?

Beasthill, fen and torsos. Finally, the willage gates come into sight, but all thereby is clamour and commotion. Smoke hangs everywhere, that wreathes the sinking sun and drowns the settlement in smoulder-light; great choking banks that seem more made of noise than vapour, cloaking the lament of ghosts, the yowl of unseen babes. My pace grows faster, running now towards the wall of tangled thorn and fume.

The young man with the birth-stained face leans from his gatehouse when he hears me call to him.

‘What’s happening here? Is . . .’ Now the smoke bites in my throat and makes me cough, unable to speak more.

The tears gleam on his mottled cheek, though born of grief or from a smut-stung eye is not for me to know.

‘A fire, amongst the eastern barns. It’s out now. No one’s killed, but there’s as many huts as claws upon an owl’s leg put to ash.’

Making my way between the coiling drifts, the veils flapped open by a breeze to show me now a woman crouched to wipe her soot-blind infant’s face, or now a pair of men that stand beside a guttering ruin, making sour jokes with one another.

‘You see how our Dad gets out all right, then?’

‘Aye, and me half set to grab his lazy arse and drag him back.’

The veil drifts back. They laugh, and do not see me pass them by.

Beyond the settlement’s south reach sets Olun’s hut, untouched by fire nor troubled much by smoke by reason of a south-west wind. This same draught brings me now a noise that quickens once again my pace. Olun is squealing louder than the great black swine who run before the deadgod’s hunt. Reaching the hut and making now my way inside, it echoes from the avalanche of hex and foe-skin drums, a shrill that guides me through the morbid huddles to the centre round.

Naked upon his bracken bed he writhes and weeps, with Hurna knelt beside him, meat-faced as she dabs wet rags about his breast, half lighted by the fire pit.

Stepping nearer, crouching now to have a closer look at him, it’s clear he has a monstrous burn below one shrivelled nipple. Weeping blisters udder from the scorched and gritted flesh amongst the tattooed shell-curls, hoops and signs. He squeals again, then sinks to fever-talk.

Shifting my gaze to Hurna now, who meets it with her own, the stolid eyes as flat as nail heads.

‘How is Olun burned? The blazing in the willage does not come as far as here.’

She shrugs her ploughboy shoulders, grunting her reply. ‘It’s when the fire starts, over in the eastern huts, before they bring us news of it. Your father yells and bids me look to see, and there it is upon his chest, this awful burn.’

She wrings a little smirk from out between her rind-thin lips. ‘You ask me, it’s a sign for him to change his faith.’

The old man screams again.

If fire burns a willage, may its welts be raised on one who thinks he is a willage? Does the smoke gust from his lungs and from the settling’s narrow paths alike? A blaze for curing fish runs out of hand and half a league away a breast yet blisters in its heat? No. Such things may not be, unless the footsteps of our days are echoed in his veins; unless it is the piss of dogs on distant stumps that yellows now his tooth. Do our skies darken if he shuts his eye, our banks burst if he wets his litter in the night? That sour-meat breeze that wafts amongst our huts, is that his breath? And does the dead girl bob downstream through his intestine, so that blood clouds up from where her corpse-nails dredge the sponge-soft bed, brought up at last against the log-dam of his fundament?

No. No, it must be that the old man burns himself, unless this Hurna sears his breast for sport. It’s one way or the other, for a place it not a person, nor is there a sympathy ‘twixt flesh and field.

We die. The track endures.

The shifts, the crumbles and collapses barely heard within the dulling coals are all that mark the passing whiles in Olun’s hut. That, and the gradual fading of the old man’s plaint, the slowing of his pained contortions into but a twitch; a shudder now and then.

His moans come softer: no less urgent, yet they sound as if they hail from further off, the old man wandering lost away from us, his cries for help grown faint as he recedes down dusk-paths woven through the queer and complicated willage of his dreams. Naked upon the bed of wefted twig he stills; he sleeps.

Sat there to either side of him within our cone of ember-light, big Hurna and myself do not have much to say. We share a bowl of curds with crusts torn from a thigh of bread to make our sops. From the surrounding steeps of curio, dead birds observe us as we dip and slop and wipe our chins. Their eyes unsettle me, filled with bleak knowledge of demise.

On finishing her bread and curds, Hurna sits silent for a while, a strange look on her face until she looses a great belch that rumbles on and on like toads in chorus.