So that evening they feasted, and when they’d done Nedli told them Tandin’s Story. She had reshaped and reworded it, with many repetitions, and told it in the high, wavering story-teller’s chant, making it into a story that would sit beside the stories of long-ago heroes that they all knew by heart, and would live in people’s memories for generations after they were all dead. When she’d finished, Tandin explained what he thought the story meant and how it showed them the way to kill the fireworm. The hunters discussed it, of course, everyone having their say, or they wouldn’t have been hunters, but no one disagreed, except about which of them should go.
ʺLet Tandin choose,ʺ suggested Merip, but Tandin shook his head.
ʺNo,ʺ he said. ʺI am not the leader of the hunt. Let me be your tracker in the spirit world.ʺ
Clearly relieved, they picked Barok, and he chose six others, Vulka, Bast, Sordan, Dotal, Merip and Bond, to go with him. Next day they made ready, collecting food and extra furs, and binding them into bundles, and cutting shaped pieces of fir branch that they could bind to their feet and so walk on soft snow.
The morning after, Tandin was standing a little aside watching the rest of the party gather at the mouth of the cave with their families milling around them to wish them safely home when Mennel pushed her way out of the group and stood in front of him, her soft round features haggard, her firm young body sagging and listless, her brown eyes red with weeping. She, like all the others, knew the price he had paid, because Nedli had made that part of her story. He took her by the hands. She stared up into his face. Beneath the weeping, beyond the grief, he saw a bitter determination in her eyes. A bloodless whisper emerged from between his unmoving lips.
ʺSister of my father, I have paid your price. This is Mennel. She is the pain of my wound. Give her to a good man.ʺ
He seemed to listen to an answer, but she heard nothing. She shook her head, refusing that future also, and turned away.
At this season, in the world where people live and die, it was a full two days’ journey to the foot of the glacier, so at nightfall the hunters dug themselves a snow-hole in which to lie covered in furs and keep each other warm.
They did the same next night on the side of the valley in which the glacier lay, but this time Tandin didn’t join them. Instead he turned himself into a bear, found a hollow under a fallen tree where he could safely leave his bear body for a while, and entered the spirit world. Once there, he started nosing along the snow-covered moraine, the tumble of rocks below the ice wall at the foot of the glacier, until he found the place he was looking for.
He knew it before he reached it. Just as, when he’d been spirit-walking through the fissures and tunnels that led to the fireworm’s lair, the path along the ridge that he’d followed with the Blind Bear had become suddenly vivid overhead, so now he was instantly aware of the lair itself, vivid beneath his feet.
Having made sure of that, he climbed the moraine and nosed at the ice wall, probing for the spirits beyond it, different from those of the imprisoning ice—the spirit of the lake-water itself, and the spirit of fire, rising from deep below the mountain. Yes, of course. That was the same heat that warmed the cavern and kept the lake from freezing when winter froze the world, and created a weakness in the ice wall that each spring, year after year, gave way and let the top half of the lake come roaring out, tumbling the rocks of the moraine aside and carving a deep gully down the mountain, while the covering ice collapsed and the remains of the lake were left open to the sky.
He was padding back towards the snow-hole where the others lay when a clamour of snarls broke out from the wooded slope on his left. Wolves, bringing down their prey. He turned aside and climbed between the snow-draped trees and found a small pack snarling and wrenching at the body of a young caribou.
Wolves will normally face and fight a single bear, however large, rather than leave their kill. But when Tandin growled at them the secret word that the hero Jerast had tricked out of the Wolf-father, the whole pack slunk away into the dark.
The caribou was struggling to rise. Tandin broke its neck with a blow and dragged the carcass back to the snow-hole. He buried it in a drift, meat for the next few days, then turned himself into the human Tandin and joined the sleepers under the furs.
They breakfasted before dawn and climbed down into the valley to look at the task ahead. Tandin showed the hunters where the fireworm’s cavern lay.
ʺGood,ʺ said Barok, pointing at the cliff of ice towering above them, and the glittering ice-fall that had been the last outflow from the lake. ʺThat’s where the water’s going to break through, so that’s where we’ve got to melt the ice.ʺ
ʺWe can’t melt the whole fall,ʺ said Bond.
ʺThe melt-water runs in the gully,ʺ said Bast, always on the look-out for anything he could object to. ʺIt will put out the fire if we build it there.ʺ
ʺSo we build two fires,ʺ said Dotal, ʺone to either side of the gully, right against the cliff. There’s a lot of weight in that ice-fall. If we can weaken the cliff either side of it, it will pull the whole slab of cliff out.ʺ
ʺAnother thing,ʺ said Vulka. ʺThe timing’s going to be tricky. We don’t want the cliff breaking before the bastard’s dug his hole up to our fires. Water’s bound to put them out then, and he’ll give up.ʺ
ʺQuestion is, how fast can the brute dig?ʺ said Bond.
ʺAnd how long to melt the cliff?ʺ said Sordan.
ʺLast thing, he was having a nap, Tandin said,ʺ said Merip.
They looked at Tandin.
ʺI don’t know how fast he can dig,ʺ he said. ʺWhen he wakes and starts, perhaps. I’ll see tonight, if I can.ʺ
ʺRight,ʺ said Barok. ʺWe’ll start by building a decoy fire. There.ʺ
He pointed to a place a little way down the slope where the further wall of the gully had collapsed, half blocking it with a low pile of rock. ʺBest if he comes out there,ʺ he added. ʺThen, when the water fills the gully, it will flow down his hole. And tonight Tandin can see if the fire has woken him. All right? And we’ll build two rock platforms close against the ice-cliff either side of the gully for our main fires. That way, when the melt-water starts to flow down the cliff it’ll run out under the rocks. Then we’ll all set about fetching fallen timber out of the woods.ʺ
ʺIt’ll all be wet,ʺ said Bast.
No one paid any attention. They were used to Bast. They shared the tasks out, and by the time the main party had heaved and trundled rocks from the moraine to build the platforms for the two larger fires, Vulka and Sordan had found enough small dry timber for Vulka to work his firebow and get the decoy fire started. Then they split into two groups and scoured the woods on the flanking slopes for burnable timber among the tangles of fallen branches and dragged it down to the gully. Tandin rested, minding the fire, and no one nagged or mocked him for not joining the work.
At nightfall the hunters retired exhausted to the snow-hole. Tandin joined them, but when it was his turn to keep watch, he fed the fire and then settled cross-legged with the bear pelt around him, entered the spirit world and probed with his spirit down through the snow and the permafrost into the rock beneath, and on down through that for the fireworm.
Yes. It was there, he sensed, but still sleeping. There was something uneasy about its sleep, though, like a troubled dream. How had it experienced their earlier encounter? he wondered. It can’t have been totally unaware. Though, on the surface, events in the spirit world have no effect on their counterparts in the world where people live and die, at a deeper level they are the same event. Defeat and death in the spirit world aren’t necessarily followed by defeat and death in this world. They may be felt only as a nightmare troubling the sleeper. But still, surely, there has to be some weakening, some loss.