Banked Fires Blaze by Chestnut_pod  

Banked Fires Blaze

At the bottom of the sea stood a fire pot on three stout legs of clay. A cat squid lived in it, lending it a glow inapt to its surroundings, but it pleased the spirit of fire who lived in the fire pot to give light even in the depths. The squid would leave one day, but a snail, or eel, or colonial jelly would come and light the round, red clay walls, which always stayed above the silt and mud of the abyssal floor. A whale had once fallen on top of the fire pot, but as with all things in that nearly lightless place, it was eaten away, and once it was no more than bones the fire pot still stood sturdily there in the dark, and soon a red-crown jellyfish moved in and sent a rusty light which gratified the spirit out into the black depths.

The fire spirit was trapped by the wisewoman Eija soon after the Root Queen spat out the Sun and Moon seeds from the Great Trees, when a great forest fire begun by the trickery of the Endless Ice threatened her village. The world is full of river-daughters, barrow-wights, air sylphs, balrogs of lava, and such Maiar and Umaiar, but the fire spirits are more fleeting than all of them, for they live so long as their fires persist and wink out like sparks with the last embers. Unless they are trapped, of course, which this one was. Eija brought the burning ember in her bare hands to the potter Totte, who invented the wheel, and Totte used it to light the kiln fire which hardened the clay fire pot into earthenware, and the fire spirit along with it.

Totte made grander works than that pot, and Eija did greater deeds, but the fire pot was a good one, never rocking, spilling embers, or cracking. Eija gave it to her son’s wife, whom her son had captured from a neighboring people, as was often the way of things. The fire spirit grew to like her, for in its crackling way it saw their kinship. Kaari, for that was the wife’s name, would hold the fire pot under her clothes during the harshest winters, liking that it never scorched her. As was proper, she rubbed the fats from her own skin and hair on the fire pot’s walls and carefully cleaned its stocky legs so the soot and ash never clung too thickly. The more she tended to the pot and held it close to her belly in the cold nights, the more the fire spirit came to realize that it liked to warm her and keep her coals for the morning, and liked just as much to spit sparks at her husband, Eija’s son, when he sought to use it.

It was Kaari’s great-great-great-great-granddaughter Helvi who crossed the Blue Mountains and carried the fire pot with her. By this time, the fire-pot was burnished to a chestnut glow by seven generations of the hair and skin oils of the wives who tended the hall fires. Some of these, like Helvi, were true daughters in Eija’s line, and the fire pot was good enough for them, for Totte Wheelmaker had been a great crafter. Some, like Kaari’s granddaughter Elna and Helvi’s mother Mauri, were brides of abduction, and for them the fire pot was always warm, never scorching, and shed its ash willingly, and felt good in the hand or pressed against the breast in the long, cold nights. The fire pot carried their coals, lit the fires that warmed them and fed their children, and over the course of long years learned much of light, darkness, warmth, and cold which forest fires never come to know.

Helvi was mother of Brodda, and therefore, briefly, the mother-in-law of Aerin. That her mother Mauri had been kidnapped into the Wolf People was of little consequence to her when it came to her dealings with her daughter-in-law, for that was the way things were across the Blue Mountains, and those adopted by the Wolf People were Wolf People, and so to her mind Aerin was a Wolf Woman and little different from herself. That Brodda did not treat her so was his shame, not hers. Indeed, she professed herself fond of Aerin when other Wolf People asked. She lived long enough to teach Aerin her ways of burying fish and brewing rye ale, then passed away, content that she had done her duty. Aerin inherited the fire pot and the brunt of Brodda’s grief.

Her days in Brodda’s hall seemed always filled with cold, no matter how the sunlight shone upon the familiar trees outside. To stand in the doorway of Brodda’s hall — for it was not her hall, though she poured the mead and laid the fire each day — and look out on the ring of mountains, the stream bank and weather patterns she had known all her life, and know that she had nonetheless been dispossessed of all of it chilled her too deeply for summer's warmth to remedy. Thus she clutched the fire pot to her and might often be found weaving new rush mats to insulate it, though it never seemed to threaten her with burns. Perhaps embracing Morwen, or her friend Cordofil, or even the children who began to populate the village might have warmed her, but Brodda ensured that she could not, or would regret it if she did. So she held the fire pot to her to soothe the various pangs of occupation: of loneliness, of bruised ribs, of the spasms of cramp that went through her when she ensured she would not grace Brodda’s line with more daughters, or worse yet, sons. And the grease of her skin soaked into the fire pot and made it shine.

All the while, she made the house more welcoming than it would otherwise have been. Brodda was a cold man, but his hearths, which Aerin kindled, were always warm and could be relied upon for a meal in lean times. If she grasped the fire pot by two of its three legs, she could carry it with an easy glide. The excuse of taking a few coals to an outlying house — say, Morwen’s — which had let its fire go out gave her an excuse to be out of doors, away from Brodda’s sharp eye. When Aerin brought fire, she cast light and heat in more ways than one, lit paths as well as fireplaces.

So it was when Túrin arrived, and it was through her workings that he was brought broth and settled in a place of warmth near the fire she had started. Had he possessed the sense of the fire pot, then, on the pretense of bringing coals to the old people through the deep snow, Aerin would have found him and told him all she knew of the fate of Morwen and Niënor. But he held his black sword to Brodda’s throat and forced her answers from her before all the Easterlings, whom she now knew to call Wolf People, except for Grandmother Maila in the back, who had been of the Marten People, and Grandmother Wivi, who had been taken from the Elk People. But they were two, and the rest of the Wolf People as well as Túrin did not care for their origins. Wolf wives were Wolf People to Wolf People, and Easterlings were Easterlings to Túrin, and a traitor was a traitor to them both.

Nevertheless, the fire spirit in the fire pot knew them, and it listened as Aerin told her story, at first timid, then steady, then almost roaring the words, and it warmed her with a comforting warmth as Túrin threw Brodda across his hall and painted the floor with the blood of his thanes. It warmed her even as she stood and faced Túrin, who called her faint of heart, made for a kinder world.

The round belly of the fire pot was warm as Aerin, standing before the hearth as Túrin fled, faced the old people over the bodies of the Incomers — Maila too, though she did not see Wivi. It listened as she bade them go, and blazed hot when they would try to grasp her and drag her from the hall with them, and its fitted lid which never rattled or fell burst off when Aerin willed it and scattered the hot coals for the morning’s fire on the bloody rushes of the floor. It watched as the old people fled from the licking flames, and it urged on the hot tongues to catch in the hangings, the rafters, and the thatch. Aerin stood hunched in a clear circle where she had stood and addressed her doom. She clutched the fire pot to her chest, coughing a little, but making no effort to run for the door, still visible though wreathed in flame. Where she stood, the warmth was pleasant, almost — a change from the cold. Last of all, the fire spirit in the fire pot blazed up with all the heat of the forest fire where it was born, and all the heat besides of eight generations of fire-tenders. Aerin knew only a bright flash and no pain. Her heart was not faint.

It took some little while for the roof of Brodda’s hall to collapse, and some time more before the last embers smoldered out beneath a blanket of dawn snow. The fire pot, unscorched and uncracked, stood on its three stout legs of clay beneath the charred timbers. Things went the worse for the people of Dor-lómin after that, but no one disturbed the ruins where the fire pot guarded the blackened hearth ring.

The fire spirit in the fire pot, though born in the restless leaping of a great conflagration, had learned from its mistresses, from Aerin, Mauri, Elna, and Kaari, the arts of patience and keeping warmth. It waited as Brodda’s hall emerged from the snow in spring. It waited as it greened over, for even the dead timbers burnt the hands of those who sought to move or salvage them. It waited through many winters and springs more. Even when the Nen Lalaith turned salt and burst its banks, it waited. The ocean oozed up to cover Dor-lómin, and the fire pot waited. It knew of the return of Túrin at the last battle, and of the Fate of Men besides. Its heart was not faint. It had patience. It waited, and while it waited, it cast warmth and light upon the sea.