Act II — First Ground

Page 11 — The First Fire

The wood was black. Not the black of the rock — a different black. The black of a thing that has been broken and has not decided what to be. And it was dry in the wrong way. The wood of the old world earned its dryness; the sun and the wind took it, year by year. This wood had been kept rather than grown, and it was dry as a thing that waits. A wood that has been kept is a wood that has been waiting, and I did not ask what it had been waiting for.

Smackage broke the first of it. The first sound of our making in the new world was a hammer on black wood. He is the ground-reader, and his breaking is not a blow. He put the hammer on the wood like he puts his palm on the ground: an inch, and the listening, and then the breaking. It was the quietest breaking I have heard a thing of that size give.

The breaking went out over the black sand and the black water. In the old world a sound goes out and the world takes it; the trees take it, the walls take it, the distance takes it. Here the sound went out and the world did not take it. This was not an echo. An echo is a thing the world gives back; you throw a stone in a valley and the valley answers. This was the world not taking. The sound stood out on the sand, and it stayed where it went.

The fire took a long time to be a fire.

The black wood did not give up its smoke. In the old world the smoke comes off the wood as it burns; here the wood kept it. I watched the black pieces sit there keeping it, and the match went out three times. Then it gave it up. All at once. The smoke stood up out of the wood in one piece, and then it stopped. I have seen fire keep a thing like that once before, in the old world, and the fire had been keeping something it did not want to say.

When the fire was a fire, the coals came up out of the black wood one at a time. That is the first lesson of the new world: here, the taking is slower than the giving. In the old world the fire took the wood without looking up. Here the taking had to be done, and the slowness is a thing we build on. A group that builds on the speed of the old world will be built on a thing this world does not have.

The smoke went up. Up. Not out, not over — the sound had stood on the sand, and the smoke did not stand. Smoke goes up in every world that has ever been. I have not written down a right thing since the gull. I will write down this one: the smoke went up. It went up, and it did not come back down. In the old world the smoke went up, and the wind took it, and the world forgot it by the next breath. Here the smoke went up and stayed going up, and the staying was a thing I could test, and testing it was the work of the morning.

The five of us sat around it. The fire was the first thing that was ours. The sand was not ours; it had taken us without looking up. The air was not ours. The dark that was coming in from the water was not ours. The fire was. The wind came out of the water and went over the fire, and the fire did not go out. I watched the world try. It did not take the fire. Rumzuck watched the wind with his hands still on the grip, and he did not take them off. It tried, he said. It is going to keep trying. It was the first word spoken over the first fire, and it was a fact, and the fact was enough.

I will not tell you what we said by the first fire. I will tell you what we did not say.

We did not say the name of the world we had been in. I have the name in me. The name was not said on the third morning, because a name said in the wrong world is a name the wrong world can hear, and the wrong world has ears I have not yet met.

We did not say the name of the world we were in, because there is no name for it. I have looked. The world does not have a name. The rock does not have a shape. The world has the color, and the color is what the world keeps where a name would go.

The new world took the sand, the air, the dark, the sound. It did not take the fire. The fire stood where I had put it, and the standing was the first thing the new world had to keep. The air was next. The air is mine to test — the four planes are mine — and I would test it before the sun had fully come up.