Fire

Prologue

Fire.

Vulnerable as any newborn. Like a child, you give it life, pray that it will thrive and repay your care. Yet how will it survive its first moments in a harsh world?

Take the lit taper from a neighbour. Softly now, softly – even in the few steps to your room, it has so many ways to die. Despite your cupped hand, draughts beset it. It flickers, shreds, re-forms in waves, bends to you as if craving protection, shrinks. You think you’ve lost it, you stop – and it revives, rising straight again, a final boldness. Now you must be quick.

Over the threshold, across to the stub of candle on the mantle, lower flame to wick. So – it catches! Dropping the taper’s end onto a pewter plate, you cross and close the door. The swirl of your motion blows a tiny ember to the floor. You do not note its fall. How can it matter anyway when it is all but dead?

The flame lives now in the candle. You could snuff it in a cone of metal, extinguish it with a snap of fingers, destroy it with a breath. Instead, you pause to admire the yellow spear with cobalt at its heart, the burning eye of the wick. It streams high in three slender fingers and you give thanks to God for life renewed, for warmth, for heat. Now you will be fed as you have fed.

You transfer fire to the grate. Kindling catches and flames move upon the small logs you offer it. You bend to add breath. The chimney draw is not enough, so you cover the hearth with a blanket, seal it from the room. Silence – then a whoosh. Through threadbare wool, you see fiery arms reach high. Folding the blanket fast, you smother any new life within it.

Larger logs now – and your tender babe becomes a brawling youth. As it grows, so does its appetite. Soon it is all the fire you need. You swing a pot over the flames and cook your supper.

Heat makes you drowsy. But you know that unattended fires can be dangerous. You add one last, larger piece of wood to last into the night, put a metal guard before the hearth and sink into your chair.

You doze before the dwindling light. And though some worry tugs at the edge of your mind, you lose it in sleep.

That ember. That tiny ember from the taper. That orphan. Most orphans in this city perish and this one would have too – if it had not fallen first onto a fragment of leaf, shifted onto an edge of rug, finally settled onto a dropped wool stocking. There a little draught reaches it, gently, and the ember glows and grows ever slowly into the night.

Until it is hungrier.

Then it moves more quickly. Consuming all that is beside it, it begins on everything beyond. It reaches out to its cousin fire almost faded on the grate. Revives it, becomes one with it.

Smoke fills the room. You, the parent before the hearth, are dead before you are consumed.

The window’s lead is melting, its glass is bowing out. Within the plaster walls, horsehairs crisp in filaments of fire. Soon there is nothing left of the room – wood, wool, flesh, all gone. So now, like any living thing, flame has a choice: feed or die.

Across the threshold, a city sleeps.