Act V — First Fire

Page 34 — The Night the Light Did Not Come Back

One of the watch did not come back to the fire.

The lie had been in the fire since the night after the keeping began. I had told the five of them he was alive, and they had taken the telling the way the fire takes wood — without asking, and without spending it. The keeping had begun the day after the answer, and the lie had begun the night after, and the two had burned together since, and neither had asked the other for the keeping.

The watch had been kept since the first night on the broken coast. In the old world the watch was two at a time, four hours each, and the two traded places without a word. We kept the old watch here, and the old watch kept us. Rumzuck kept the first watch of every night, and Smackage kept the last, because Rumzuck was up before the dark and Smackage was up after it, and the two had agreed on the trade the first morning without agreeing on it. Zahlia kept no watch. She kept the fire, and the fire kept her, and the two had not gone to sleep in the same hour since the first night. Wreckreate kept the water's watch, the one that read the dark for us.

That night the watch was Wreckreate and a woman from the tower up the beach, Serevane, the Shore-Keeper. She had come down to the fire every evening since the second day, and the tower had the lamp, and keeping the lamp was the tower's work, and the tower had kept the lamp for longer than the coast had been a coast. She was tall and thin, the color of the tower's stone, and she carried the lamp's light on her hands when she came down, the way the light stays on the hands of the one who has just let it go.

The tower's light had never failed. The lamp and the tower and the coast had kept each other since the first night, and the three had never once gone dark on us. That was the keeping that was not ours — what the world kept for the fire, the one we had not earned, and the one we could not take back.

This night the four hours ran, and the fire went low enough that the dark could have seen the fire, and the fire could not see the dark. The cold came in with the dark, the cold of the new world, the cold the old world's fire would not have held. The coals sat where the coals go, and the ash where the ash go, and the smoke went up and came down the long way, and the wind came off the water with the dark and went across the fire and did not put it out. We sat in the low light, and we kept the keeping, and the fire kept the light low and close, and it did not sell it.

Serevane came down at the fourth hour, and she stood where the light left her, and she did not sit.

"The lamp is out," she said.

She said it the way the Shore-Keeper says the thing the tower gives up — plain, and once, and with the hands already folded over the lamp's stand, though the stand was empty. Wreckreate read the dark before he answered.

"The tower is not dark," he said. "The dark is in front of us."

Rumzuck had his hands folded over the grip, and he did not move. Smackage put his palm flat on the sand, and the ground under him did not answer, and he let it not answer. Zahlia's hands went a little raised, and the air around them went thin. And I read the fire, because the fire was the reading I owed, and the fire did not lie.

We knew the dark was in front of us, and not behind. The dark was not on the water. The dark was between the water and the fire, and we had kept our distance from it since the first night. The keeping had held, and the distance had held, and the only thing that had gone out that night was the lamp up the beach.

Serevane sat down in the sixth seat by the hearth, back from the light, and she did not touch the fire. "The tower kept the lamp for longer than the coast has been a coast," she said. "The lamp is what the tower gives. When the lamp goes out, the tower is done." She looked at the fire. "The tower will not light the lamp again. The tower keeps the dark now."

Wreckreate did not read the dark after that. He read the fire. "Then we keep the fire," he said. "We keep the fire."

The lie was still in the fire. The fire did not know the lie; the fire only kept the fire. And the watch went on, two at a time, four hours each, as it had gone on since the first night on the broken coast.