1Asha kept the horn for forty winters, and in all that time the ember did not once go cold.
2Each spring, when her people came down to the river of reeds, she walked to the flat stone at the edge of the red hand country. Each spring a horn was waiting there, packed by a stranger's hand, with a live coal in it. She took theirs and left hers. Neither people needed the other's coal. It was done so that the path between the two fires would not grow over.
3In time the ones who carried the horns began to wait at the stone and look at one another. Then they sat. Then they ate. After some years there was a camp at the flat stone for the length of a moon each spring. The two peoples traded flint for red earth and dried fish for hides. A girl of the river went to live among the red hand, and no one bled for it.
4But the young man who had once said let them freeze was not young now. His name was Karr. He was the first spear of the red hand, and he had not changed his mind. He came to the flat stone each year because his people came. He sat with his back against a rock and watched Asha as a man watches a snake he has decided not to kill yet.
5"The old Keeper counted wrong," Asha heard him say once, to the child who carried moss for the red hand. "A thing you give away is a thing you no longer hold. Remember it when she is dead and I am not."
6Now hear about the summer of the dry sky.
7For three years the rains had been thin. In the third summer the grass on the plain stood as high as a man's chest and as dry as old bone. It hissed when the wind moved in it. The small streams were cracked mud, so the gazelle went down toward the river, and the people followed the gazelle. Both peoples camped within sight of each other that year, out on the plain, half a day's walk from the water, for that was where the herds crossed.
8Asha had a son by then. His name was Tem, and he was six winters old, and a fever had left one of his legs thin, so that he walked like a bird with a hurt foot.
9On a day near the end of that summer, clouds stood up in the west, black underneath and white above. The people looked up and were glad. But the clouds gave no rain. They gave only light. All afternoon the dry lightning walked on the far plain, and the thunder came late and small, like a man coughing in another shelter.
10Toward evening a boy came running out of the west. He did not need to speak. Behind him the whole edge of the world was smoke, and under the smoke ran a thin line the colour of the inside of a horn. The wind was in their faces.
11Asha had kept fire all her life. She had fed it thread by thread and carried it against her belly. She had never seen it feed itself. Now it came on as wide as the plain. Birds flew ahead of it in clouds. Hares ran, and foxes ran with the hares. A lion went by at the edge of the camp, running beside a gazelle, and neither one looked at the other.
12"The river!" It was her uncle Dorn who shouted it, the same uncle who had once called her worse than a fool. "The river! Leave everything!"
13Asha ran with Tem on her back and the horn tied under her furs. She ran until her breath burned. Then she looked behind her, and she looked ahead, and she began to count, as she had once seen an old woman count.
14The river was half a day away. The fire was coming faster than a deer runs. And all around her were the ones who could not run: the old, and the small, and two women heavy with child, and a man whose leg had been opened by a boar. Karr was among them. He could have run with the fastest. But he had his mother on his back, a woman as light and dry as a bundle of reeds, and he would not put her down.
15They would not reach the river. Not one of the slow ones would. Asha knew it the way she had known, long ago, what a black bead in a horn meant.
16Then she thought of every camp she had ever left behind her. At each one there was a black ring on the ground where the fire had lived. She had seen a small grass fire, once, run up to an old ring like that. It had stopped at the edge, and gone around, and left the ring alone.
17As a child she had asked why the fire ate wood and did not eat stone. She had worked out her answer years since. Fire eats what can be eaten. And it does not eat the same thing twice.
18She put Tem down on his feet. She took out the horn.
19"What are you doing?" It was Karr, with his mother's thin arms about his neck. "Woman, what are you doing?"
20She knelt. She pulled a fistful of grass and tipped the coal into it and blew. It took at once; the grass was hungry for it. She stood and touched the burning fistful to the standing grass in front of them, on the side away from the great fire, where the wind would carry it east.
21Karr set his mother down and caught Asha by the wrist. His hand was like a root. "It is coming to kill us," he said, "and you make more of it?"
22She had some of his tongue by then. "It eats grass," she said. "Look. Look where mine is going."
23The small fire she had lit was moving away from them, pushed by the same wind that drove the great one. It widened as it went. Behind it lay black ground, smoking, with nothing left standing on it.
24"Let it eat here first," said Asha. "Then when the great one comes, there is no meat left for it. It will go around us, as water goes around a rock."
25Karr held her wrist. He looked back at the wall of smoke. He looked at his mother sitting in the grass with her hands over her ears. He was a man who would sooner have burned than be taught anything by Asha of the river. But it was not only he who would burn.
26He let go of her. Then he did more than let go. He tore up a burning handful and ran with it to the north, bent low, lighting the grass in a long line. Asha ran south and did the same.
27They walked onto the burned ground while it was still hot. It scorched through the hides on their feet. In the middle of the black they lay down with their faces in the ash, and they poured what water they had onto skins, and laid the wet skins over the smallest.
28Then the great fire came. It made a sound like a river in flood. The air went thin and the heat pressed down on their backs like a hand. Asha lay over Tem and felt the hair on her arms curl. She thought: I counted wrong. I have brought sixty people to lie down in a hearth.
29The fire came to the edge of the black ground and stood there, taller than trees. There was nothing for it. It leaned over them. Then it broke in two and went by on the north side and on the south side, roaring, and for the space of a hundred breaths they lay on a black island in a sea of flame.
30An old man died there of the smoke, and a baby that had been born that moon. Sixty had lain down. Fifty-eight stood up.
31In the morning they walked to the river over a black land. Along the way they found the ones who had run. The fastest had reached the water and stood in it to their necks. But the fire had caught many in the last stretch. Dorn was among them. He lay within sight of the reeds. Karr's brother lay not far from him.
32At the river the living sat down together, wet and grey, and found that they were cold. Night was coming, and the air off the water was sharp. And now a strange thing was seen. A fire had eaten the plain from the hills to the river, and there was not one live coal left among the red hand. The girl who carried their horn had fallen, running, and the horn was somewhere under the ash.
33There was one ember left in that country. It was in the horn under Asha's furs.
34Karr came to her when the dark was nearly whole. He stood over her. His beard was burned away on one side, and his eyes were red from the smoke, or from his brother. He did not say anything. He held out a horn he had got from somewhere, and he turned it over, and nothing fell out of it.
35She had been waiting thirty years to hear him say that the old Keeper had counted right. She saw that she would never hear it. She saw also that she did not need to. She took a coal from her small fire with two green reeds and laid it in his horn.
36He closed his fingers on it and went away. Later his mother came and sat down beside Tem, and gave him a piece of dried fish out of her sleeve. That was all the thanks there was, and it was enough.
37The people looked out at the plain and said: it is dead. There was no grass and no gazelle, only black dust that rose and walked about in the wind. The elders spoke of leaving the river for the hills and not coming back. "The ground is killed," they said. "Nothing comes from a killed thing."
38Asha said, "Wait one moon." She did not know why she said it. She only knew she had seen grass come up inside old fire rings, and that it came up greener there than anywhere.
39So they waited, and fished, and were hungry. Then the first rain of autumn fell. Ten days after it, the black land was green from the river to the hills. It was not the old tall grass. It was new grass, short and soft and sweet, thicker than anyone living had seen it. And the gazelle came to it. They came from the unburned country to the north in herds that took a morning to pass.
40The next autumn, when the old grass stood dry again on the far bank but the air was still and the dew lay heavy, she walked out alone to a tongue of land where the river bent. There was water on two sides of it. She knelt and lit the grass.
41Men came running with spears. Karr came last. He was grey with anger, and he was no longer a man who ran. "My brother is under that ash," he said. "Your own uncle. And you feed the thing that ate them?"
42"They are under the ash," said Asha, "because the grass stood three summers deep from here to the hills, and one spark from the sky had all of it at once. I am giving the fire its meal in small pieces. I choose the piece. I choose the day. One piece here this autumn. One there the next. Then when the sky throws down its fire again, it finds my black ground lying in its road. And it stops, as it stopped for your mother."
43Karr watched the tongue of land burn out against the water and go dark. "You would burn today," he said, "for grass you will not see until spring."
44"I carry a coal all day for a fire I will not need until night," said Asha. "It is the same work."
45He did not say she was right. He never said it, to the end of his life. But in the spring he stood at the edge of the green with his spear and took two gazelle there. And the autumn after, two men of the red hand walked out with her, carrying wet hides to beat down the edges of her fire.
46After that the people burned one piece each autumn and never the same piece two years together. They gave the pieces names. The children learned the order of them the way they learned the names of their kin: the Bend, the Long Bank, the Lion's Rock, the Place of Dorn.
47When she was old, and her hands shook too much to pack a horn, she gave the ember to a girl named Ren. Ren's mother was the river girl who had gone to live among the red hand, and Ren's father was Karr's own son. So the horn of the river people passed into hands that were of both fires, and no one could say any longer which people held it.
48In the last autumn of her life they carried Asha out to watch the burning of the Long Bank. Ren knelt beside her with the horn. The girl was nine winters old, and she asked too many things.
49"Who is the new grass for?" said Asha, before the girl could begin.
50"For the gazelle," said Ren.
51"And who are the gazelle for?"
52"For us."
53"I will not be here in spring," said Asha. "Karr will not be here. Which us?"
54The girl looked at the old grass and at the small flame going through it. She frowned. "For whoever is here," she said slowly. "For them."
55"Carry the moss," said Asha, and she laughed, for she had heard those words before from another mouth.
56She went through her own door before the green came. But the green came. The gazelle came to it. And a people who were by then one people stood at its edge with their spears, in a spring that Asha had lit for them and did not see.