Fire Star (11 page)

T
EGA! ZANNA! GET BACK HERE! NOW!” Russ was calling out a warning from the helicopter cabin, pointing urgently toward the oncoming bears. He fired the engines, rupturing the stillness. As the blades began to whirr and shred the air once more, the raven took off and circled low. Zanna laughed and opened her arms, welcoming the spiraling mist of snowflakes the bird was magically creating with its flight.

“Aye-yee,” wailed Tootega, who could take no more. He threw the tooth at her (it bounced onto the ice), then ran for the safety of the waiting aircraft.

“ZANNA!” Russ called out again.

But the girl ignored him, or possibly couldn’t hear him, for she was kneeling down now, removing her
glove. She picked up the tooth and squeezed it tightly in the center of her palm. Instantly, her head jerked back and she cried out to the shifting sky. The auma of countless generations of bears spread through her clenched fist and up along her veins. In her ears a man was shouting and a raven was screeching and somewhere on the none-too-distant horizon, paws were thudding against frozen water. But all that Zanna saw were pictures in her mind, of a time when bears and men had warred, when the Inuk, Oomara, and the pack leader, Ragnar, had both been consumed in a blaze of white fire, until … “David,” she whispered, falling forward. “David, I know what has to happen. Forgive me.” And though her conscious mind queried the wisdom of her actions, she could not seem to prevent herself from placing Ragnar’s long-lost tooth under the tongue of his latter-day descendant.

Immediately, the tooth found a life of its own and rooted itself in Ingavar’s jaw.

With a surge of power, he woke and rose.

“God in heaven,” breathed Russ, skidding to a halt. He had come to haul Zanna away. Now he found
himself unarmed, within ten yards of a bear, and caught in the midst of a freak snowstorm.

The bear, still groggy, steadied himself and focused his gaze into a menacing squint. A long low hiss issued out of his throat, drowned by the irritating hum of machinery. He shook his head freely and stamped both forepaws, blowing the heat from his freshly worked lungs in wisps of fast-disappearing steam.

“Zanna, can you hear me?” Russ said evenly. No response. She was on her side, curled up, not moving, just behind the ice bear’s massive bulk. He took a pace back, praying that the girl was simply playing dead.

With a yap more akin to a dog than a bear, Ingavar dashed his paw against the ice, tilling the surface with strands of his fur. Taking heed of the warning, Russ backed off farther, slowly removing his cowboy hat. He waved it like a stick, raising glints of curiosity in the bear’s eyes, then growled the word “fetch” as he tossed it aside.

Ingavar looked disdainfully at it.

“That hat cost me sixty bucks,” Russ said. “You could at least trample it. Move or die, you crazy lump.”

Ingavar stood his ground and scented. The north wind spoke of bears approaching. They were close. Very close. One of them he recognized. An old male. Thoran.

A shot rang out. Ingavar yowled and swayed his head in anger. He had not been hit, but the sound of the bullet had scorched his eardrum, sharply reminding him of all that he had been through. He roared and swung a paw at the man in front of him, but he still did not move away from Zanna.

Russ was jumping back before the paw came out and was never in danger of being mauled. He could not believe Tootega had missed, and this irked him for a moment till the second shot exploded by the ice bear’s paw, spraying its chest with dirt and snow. Then he saw Tootega’s logic. Killing the animal outright might mean it falling across Zanna’s body. And even if the half-ton weight didn’t crush her, she would be badly pinned
down. One man could not move a large bear alone, especially when three others were fast approaching.

So in desperation Russ retaliated in kind, leaping forward, screaming, gesturing rage. He’d heard stories of hunters throwing punches at bears, and he was drawing back his fist to do just that when his reach was shortened by a squealing tangle of feathers and claws. The raven was in his face. The bird squawked and rained down a multitude of wingbeats, its talons seeking flesh, its beak tugging hair. Russ crossed his forearms to protect his eyes, and never did know what happened next. But he felt the ground shudder and the north wind blow and he fell back helpless, praying for a miracle.

It came, but not in the way he had hoped.

Suddenly, all the clamor died down and the raven, for reasons only it knew, flew away to become a shrinking thunder cloud in the sky. Russ scrambled to his feet and hurried through the whiteout toward the droning helicopter.

There he found Tootega, seated, in shock, staring back at the place where the bear had been. The rifle
had slipped through his trembling hands and was lying inert on the floor of the cabin. Russ shook the Inuk’s knee but he did not move. Around the seat was a strong smell of urine.

“I’ll be back,” Russ panted, and grabbed the gun. “Zanna!” he called out. “Zanna! Zanna!”

He went on like that for the next five minutes, sweeping back and forth across the tundra, searching for any sign of the girl.

All he found was a favorite item of her clothing: a rainbow-colored bobble hat. It was wet with snow and trodden hard into a paw print amongst the sedge.

One soggy woolen hat.

Zanna, and the bears that had come for her, were gone.

B
ears!” squawked Gwilanna as she landed with a flap inside the mouth of the cave, scattering snow and loose earth ahead of her.

Lucy, her knees drawn up to her chin, gave a little start as the large black raven clattered in, crashing through the mouth-shaped window of light which looked out onto the frozen ocean. Her hand closed around a small, sharp rock. It felt warm against her skin. The whole cave did. She had never stopped thanking Gawain for that. His body, though petrified in this island and robbed of its rightful dragon fire, nevertheless radiated something of his warmth. She gritted her teeth, playing the rock through her fragile fingers. How many times had she prayed to the dragon to give her
the courage to draw warm blood from Gwilanna’s head? One good throw or blow might do it. But how would she cope in the aftermath? Alone. Lost. Starving. A killer. And, of course, she might well miss….

“I hate bears!” Gwilanna squawked again, preferring to strut around in circles for a moment rather than change into her sibyl form. “Interfering, paddle-pawed lumps. They’re beginning to make me just a little bit
peeved.”

“Well, I like them,” Lucy snapped defiantly, scratching a line into the smoke-charred wall to remind herself of how many days she’d been here. Three so far. Three too many. She threw a twig onto the small fire guttering by her feet, her best source of light this deep into the cave. “What have they done to you?”

“He
came, with his
Teller,”
said Gwilanna, treading her claws in a pathetic little gesture of birdbrained fury.

“Who?” asked Lucy, sensing a possible glimmer of hope. Every day, she prayed for a rescuer to come. Her mother. Her dragons. Her hero, David.

“Thoran,” said her aunt, at last growing into her
human features. “That irritating lump of shaggy gristle they deign to call a shaman.”

Lucy sighed and gripped the rock hard, tempted to throw it out of sheer frustration. Thoran? Who was Thoran? And why did Gwilanna always have to speak as if people were supposed to read her mind? “I don’t care what happened,” she said in a huff. Though of course she did. For in this lonely hermitagelike existence the only comforts she received were the warmth from Gawain, the glistening beauty of the Arctic ice (and at night, the iridescent lights in the sky), and these useless, if irritating, dialogues with the sibyl. At least they carried news of the world outside, and reminded her she still had a tongue to exercise. One day, she might need to scream for help.

“Be silent,” said Gwilanna, “I need to think.” She ripped up a handful of the mossy black weeds that grew limply out of the cracks in the rockface, pushed the stalks roughly into her mouth, and chewed them till saliva was trickling down her chin. Lucy sank her head between her knees in disgust. Weeds, berries, all manner of
wild-growing mushrooms (peeled), stale birds’ eggs, and saltless fish formed her daily diet now. What she wouldn’t give for a chicken drumstick or one of her mother’s custard tarts.

“They are trying to take the tooth back,” said Gwilanna, still muttering at Lucy as if she were a mirror.

This did cause Lucy to raise her head. “You mean the island?” she asked, pointing upward.

The sibyl’s response was unusually calm. Instead of the raging fizzle of anger that typically surfaced when Lucy asked a question, Gwilanna spoke in a measured hiss. “In a way, yes. The girl has fallen under their spell and that conniving Ingavar has tried to double-cross me. I had to save his woolly-haired bones again to keep him from taking the tooth to his grave. They think by planting it in his jaw that I will not be able to have it. Arrogant, squinty-eyed, waddling fools. When the fire star comes, he will carry the charm here and then he will die. The dragon will swat him like the insect that he is. It will spare me the need to do it myself.”

Lucy gave out another aggravated sigh. She was, by now, lost as to which tooth was which and would have given up her questions entirely had it not been for the mention of a “girl.” “Do you mean Zanna?”

Gwilanna gave a snort of deep contempt.

Lucy knew then she had guessed this correctly. She sat up, shouting, “What have you done to her?”

“Nothing, you fool. The
bears
took her.”

“What? Where?”

“Don’t screech, child. Your squeaky little voice is enough to make the dragon shed every scale he’s got!”

On cue, there came a rumble from deep within the mountain and Lucy felt the bedrock beneath her shudder. A silt of dust and very fine grit sieved its way through the fissures in the cave roof, most of it falling into her hair. “What
happened?”
she insisted, shaking it out.

Gwilanna waved an idle hand. “She picked up the tooth your tenant was given to protect him against … well, against me — and seemed to have a reaction to it.”

“What does that mean?”

“She fell over!”

“Is she —?” Lucy was shaking so much she could not bring herself to say it.

“Dead?” said her aunt. “It wouldn’t be much of a loss, but I doubt it. No, they carried her away, under cover of
my
storm!”

“B-but,” Lucy spluttered, “that doesn’t happen. Bears don’t take humans away.”

“Hmph,” went Gwilanna and rubbed her fingers over the aged wall of the cave. The surface cleared as if a window had been wiped. There, etched out, in what appeared to be charcoal, or the burnt end of a stick, was a tableau of primitive drawings.

Lucy picked up a firestick and went to look. “That’s a bear,” she said, pointing to a reasonable attempt at one. Faced by the flickering orange flame, the figures appeared to be almost dancing.

“Yes,” said Gwilanna, with her usual intolerance. “And the erect figures are people, Inuit people, and this is the sun, and this is the moon, and this is your great, great next of kin.”

Lucy looked at the picture of a human figure, a
woman (she could tell by the shape of her body and the long flowing hair) being hailed as some sort of goddess or spirit. “Who is she?” she asked.

Gwilanna sighed. “Has your mother taught you nothing?”

Lucy looked again. “Is it Guinevere?” she gulped.

“NO!” screeched Gwilanna, her voice echoing through the intestines of the mountain. More silt fell. The rocks grumbled again. The small fire flickered brightly and the flames fell flat. “Of course it’s not Guinevere. She disappeared with the first white bear.”

This was news to Lucy, but she didn’t interrupt.

“She was
my
daughter,” Gwilanna said bitterly, stabbing her finger at the drawings again. And Lucy was shocked to witness what appeared to be a pang of bereavement in her aunt. “I created her,” the sibyl rattled on, “from Guinevere’s hair and the scale of Gawain and the clay of the Earth and the blood of my womb. I delivered her into this world and she …”

But she would not say any more than that. She swept her hand across the wall again, returning it to its
dark, damp state. “Eat,” she said. “You need to stay strong and your hair must continue to change and grow.” And taking another handful of weeds, she stalked away to the furs in the corner, rolled herself into them, and closed her eyes.

Lucy pulled at the knot at the back of her head and let her hair fall loosely about her shoulders. In the short time she had been here it had grown half the length of her ear and wasn’t stopping. It was nowhere near as long as the woman’s in the picture, but by February, when the fire star came, she was sure it would be. “I know who she is now,” she said in a whisper. “She ran away, didn’t she? To live with the bears.” And Lucy finally understood why she felt such affinity for their kind, and why a bear had come to speak to her in person during the heavy snowfall in Scrubbley. They revered her distant ancestor. The redhaired child of legend: Gwendolen.

D
ust,” said Henry Bacon, flicking some off his dining room table, then spraying the wood liberally with furniture polish and buffing it up with a soft yellow cloth.

“Dust?” David repeated doubtfully.

“That’s where we came from. Cosmic stardust. All a bit beyond your simple brain. Takes more than the tumbleweed and windmills in your head to understand the origins of the universe, boy. Stand up, need to polish that chair.”

David pushed himself out of his seat and moved to another on the far side of the table. “Henry,” he asked rather tentatively, “do you have to wear an apron and disposable plastic gloves while you’re cleaning? You’re doing household duties, not forensic science.”

Henry gave him a baleful look. “Paid sixty dollars for these pants, boy. Don’t want them ruined by a lacquered finish.” He gave the spray can a truculent squeeze. “If you took a bit more pride in your appearance you’d be half the man that I am, and that’s saying something.”

David glanced down at his pale blue jeans. Dare he confess that either leg of the factory-ripped denim was probably worth more than Henry’s casual slacks? Maybe not. “OK, where did the stars themselves come from? What was there before we had stars?”

“A rather curious void,” said Henry. “A vacuum containing no light or sound or time or space or matter. Have you spilled tomato soup on this chairback?”

“No,” David pouted. “I put food in my mouth, not over my shoulder. Besides, I haven’t eaten here for weeks.”

This only made Henry wince with suspicion, as though the culprit could not possibly be him and therefore the stain had been in place for weeks. He exchanged his duster for a dampened cloth and cleaned the chair thoroughly, legs as well.

“A void,” David repeated thoughtfully. “An emptiness. A nothing. How can all
this
grow from nothing?” He waved his hands to indicate the “this.” “When you open a vacuum flask you don’t see stars coming tumbling out. It’s ridiculous. It doesn’t make sense.”

Henry gave an impatient sigh. “It’s creation, boy. A miracle of design. It takes vast amounts of energy to make something out of nothing.”

David wiggled his nose at that. “At school, in physics, they taught us you can’t make something out of nothing.”

“Quite. And therein lies the cosmic riddle. Only the creator knows how it happened.”

“God, you mean?”

“Of course I mean God! It wasn’t a caveman rubbing two sticks together, was it?”

“You believe in him, then?”

“I suppose you don’t?”

David held his tongue. He didn’t care to enter a religious debate, not with a stuffy old stick like Henry. But
to tease him lightly he tried another angle: “Liz says a dragon called Godith made the world.”

Mr. Bacon made a strange kind of whimpering noise. “You’ll be telling me next that a squirrel knocked this table together from an oak tree. Wonderful woman, Mrs. P. Does have some fanciful notions, though. Ever studied Einstein?”

David shook his head.

Mr. Bacon gave a snort of despair. “Try reading something other than cereal boxes one day. Very profound and clever man, Einstein. Helped us understand how the universe works. Geniuses like him have allowed modern science to trace our origins back to one billionth of a trillionth of a second after the big bang.”

David sat up brightly. “I’ve heard of that! So it all began with an explosion, then?”

“No.”

“You just said it did! A bang is a bang.
Ker-poww. Ba-boom!”

Henry shuddered manfully and took off his gloves as
though it was going to be an awfully long morning. “It was more of a rather large stretching out, like ripples on a pond, like God breathing.”

“Or burping,” said David. “That’s more explosive.”

“Don’t be facetious,” Henry said. “What you should be considering, boy, is why the scientists can’t go all the way back to the ‘bang,’ but have to stop one billionth of a trillionth of a second after it.”

“Yeah, so what’s the answer?”

“No one knows.”

“That’s not an answer!”

“Of course it is. Read your Bible.
John: chapter one, verse one.
‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word
was
God.’”

David sat forward, jostling his knees. “Well, here’s the gospel according to David. In the beginning was the word and the word was … durr? You can’t plant God in there just because it suits you. You have to prove it.”

“Nonsense. Proof’s all around you, boy. Air. Aquarium. Carpets. Rubber plant. All part of the grand plan. God put energy into the void. The void expanded,
creating heat and simple elements: hydrogen and helium, giant clouds of gas. When the gases cooled, gravity condensed them into stars. Each star was a giant chemical factory, transforming the simple elements into far more complex ones, ninety-two in all. Those ninety-two bits combined together to make planets, worlds, all
life
as we know it.”

“Even me?”

“Unfortunately, yes. And that’s only the stuff we can see.”

“Eh? We can see all of it, can’t we?”

Henry flicked his duster. “No. And that’s another godly conundrum. Only about ten percent of the known universe is visible. The other ninety is made up of dark matter.”

“Dark matter?” said David, perking up. “What’s that?”

“No one knows.”

“Whaaat?”

“Don’t squeak!” said Henry, tucking his elbows into his sides. “Makes my capped teeth grate.”

“Well, don’t keep dangling metaphysical carrots, then taking them away from me, then! Is there
anything
about the universe we know?”

Henry set his beady eye hard upon his neighbor. “The Lord made it, in his vast mysterious way, and for some unfathomable reason chose to include you. This is giving me a headache. I need a drink.”

“Too right,” said David. “What have you got?”

Henry opened the cabinet in his sideboard. “Sherry for me; orange juice, in the fridge, for you.”

“Very generous. I’ll pass,
thanks.
OK, let me get this straight: Everything we see is made from stardust?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“What if a new star appeared? What would that mean?”

Henry knocked back his sherry and said, “Wouldn’t see a new star forming, boy. More likely an old one, dying out. Supernova. Massively bright cosmological spectacle. Huge release of energy. Blast wave felt throughout interstellar space.”

“You can see a star
dying?”
Was that what was happening with the fire star, David wondered? Somehow, that didn’t feel right.

Henry popped the decanter and poured another drink. “Probably from thousands of years ago. Takes a long time for the light of the explosion to reach us.”

“And when it does, what happens then?”

Henry gave a shrug. “Bit more stellar radiation passing through.” He patted his tummy. “Get it all the time.”

“So, it wouldn’t have
any
effect on the Earth or any … creatures on the Earth?”

Henry wiggled his mustache, spraying a droplet or two of sherry. “Not in your lifetime, boy.”

“Even if I’d seen one, in the Arctic?”

“Without a telescope?” Henry hooted loudly. “You probably saw a shooting star — or knowing you, lights from the alien mother ship.”

“Very funny,” David muttered, as the telephone rang.

Henry picked it up. “Bacon residence? Ah, Mrs. P. Yes, he’s here.” He passed the phone to David.

“Hi, Liz. It’s me.”

“Can you come home?” she said. “I need to talk to you.”

“Sure. I’ll be there in a minute. You OK?”

“I need to talk to you,” she said again, after a pause. “Please don’t be long.” The telephone burred and David slowly lowered the handset.

“Everything all right, boy?” Henry said, easing the phone from the tenant’s grasp and cleaning the mouth part thoroughly with his duster before replacing it on the cradle.

“Um, yeah,” said David. “Thanks for the info. I need to go.” And falsifying a smile, he walked away, gradually increasing the pace of his footsteps until he was outside and jogging across the driveway. He could sense that something wasn’t right, for in the half-second gap between Liz ceasing speaking and hanging up the phone, he had clearly heard her sob.