1In the days before the first wall, when the ice had only lately gone back to the mountains, a people lived along the river of reeds. They had no name for themselves but we.
2They did not make fire. No one living knew how. Fire was a thing that fell from the sky into a dry tree, once in a lifetime, and after that it was kept. It was fed like a child. It was carried like a child. When the people walked, the fire walked with them, asleep in a horn packed with moss.
3The one who carried the horn was called the Keeper. In that season the Keeper was an old man named Oru, and with him walked a girl named Asha, who was his daughter's daughter, and who carried the dry moss.
4Asha was nine winters old, and she asked too many things. Why does the fire eat wood and not stone? Where does it go when it goes out? Is the fire in the horn the same fire that my mother saw, or its child? Oru would say, "Carry the moss," and she would carry the moss, and ask again.
5Now it happened that the people crossed the high pass late, for a birth had kept them. Snow caught them on the far side. They sheltered under a ledge of rock, forty people and their fire, and the wind came hunting for them all night.
6In the dark before morning, Oru woke Asha with his hand on her mouth. He held the horn open. She looked in, and there was nothing looking back. The moss was grey. The ember was a cold black bead.
7"I slept," said Oru. That was all he said. He was the Keeper, and he had slept.
8Asha looked at the people lying close together under the ledge. She understood what the black bead meant. It meant raw meat, and that the small ones would sicken. It meant no light to keep the lions back. It meant the long cold, and at the end of the cold, fewer people. All of that was inside the horn.
9"There is the other fire," she said.
10Oru said nothing, for he knew what she meant, and he was afraid of it.
11On the plain below the pass lived the people of the red hand. They had a fire of their own, and they were not friends. Two summers before, there had been blood over a kill. Since then each people walked wide of the other.
12"They will not give it," said Oru.
13"They do not need to give it," said Asha. "A fire is not smaller when another is lit from it. I have watched. You light the night branch from the horn, and the horn is not less."
14The old man looked at her a long time. It was a thing he had seen ten thousand times and never once thought.
15He could not go. His legs would not carry him down the mountain and back before the people woke and learned what he had done. So he put the horn in her hands, and the last dry moss, and he said, "Do not run on the scree."
16She ran on the scree.
17She came down out of the snow at first light and saw the smoke of the red hand people rising straight in the cold air. She lay in the grass a long while, watching. There were dogs. There were men with spears. In the middle of the camp, on a flat stone, an old woman sat feeding a fire with her eyes half closed.
18Asha thought of creeping in. She thought of stealing a brand and running. She counted the dogs, and she knew she would not reach the grass again.
19Then she did a thing no one had taught her. She stood up, and she walked into the camp with her hands open, holding out the dead horn so that all could see what it was.
20The dogs came and the men came. A spear point touched her throat. She did not have their words, and they did not have hers. So she turned the horn over, and the black bead fell out onto the ground between them.
21Everyone there knew what that was. There was not a people on the earth who did not know what that was.
22The men looked at the old woman on the stone. She was their Keeper. She looked at the child a long time, as Oru had looked. Asha thought: she is counting something.
23One of the young men spoke quickly and angrily, and pointed at the mountain. Asha did not need the words. Let them freeze. Then the river of reeds is ours.
24The old woman answered him with only a few sounds. Long after, when Asha had learned that tongue, she asked what the words had been, and she was told. The old woman had said: "And when ours dies? Who will we walk to?"
25Then the Keeper of the red hand took a coal from her fire with two green sticks. She laid it in the horn of a stranger's child, and packed it round with the child's own moss, and closed the child's fingers on it.
26Her fire was not smaller.
27Asha climbed all that day with the horn against her belly under her furs. She did not run on the scree. She breathed on the coal when it dimmed, and fed it thread by thread, and spoke to it. She reached the ledge at dusk, and the people were sitting in the dark, and no one was speaking, and Oru sat apart from them with his head down.
28She knelt and tipped the coal into the cold ash and bent over it. For the space of ten breaths there was nothing. Then there was a thread of smoke, and then a small light, and forty faces came up out of the dark around her.
29No one cheered. It was too near a thing for that. But an old man put his hand on the top of her head, and it was shaking.
30That night Oru gave her the horn to keep. "I am done," he said. "I slept."
31"You woke me," said Asha. "That was not sleeping."
32And in the spring, when the people came down again to the river of reeds, Asha did what had never been done. She walked alone to the edge of the red hand country, and she left there a horn of her own packing, with a live coal in it, on a flat stone where it would be found.
33They had not asked for it. Their fire had not died. Her mother called her a fool and her uncle called her worse.
34"It is so there will be two," Asha said. "So that if one sleeps, the other is awake."
35She could not have told you why this was right. She had no word for it. She only knew that on the mountain she had held a dead thing and a living thing in the same horn on the same day, and that the difference between them was all the mornings there would ever be.
36That was the first fire that was given and not only kept. It is burning still. You have warmed your hands at it. Now hear what came after.