When Fire Hid From the World

In the Kamyaka forest the evening fire was slow to catch. Yudhishthira knelt over the fire-drill himself, as exile had taught him to do, spinning the upper stick in the socket of the lower until a thread of smoke climbed and a flame stood up out of the dry grass. He fed it twigs and sat back to watch it work.

Markandeya, who had outlived more ages of the world than he cared to count, watched him from the far side of the clearing.

"You are looking at that flame," the sage said, "the way a man looks at a servant he has never once thanked."

"I was thinking that we ask everything of it," Yudhishthira said. "Every offering we pour, we pour into its mouth. Every oblation the gods enjoy, they enjoy because fire carried it up. It refuses nothing. And I cannot think of one hymn that praises it for its own sake rather than for its use. Is there anything so used and so little loved?"

"Something in the world once asked exactly that," said Markandeya. "And having asked it, it stopped."

"Fire stopped?"

"Sit," said the sage. "This is the story the altars told when they went cold."

In the first days, Markandeya said, Agni was called the mouth of the gods, and the name was not a courtesy but a description of his labour. Whatever any being wished to send upward passed through him: the sacrifices of kings, the poor man's handful of parched grain, the hermit's one stick of kindling. All of it he carried, and the gods above ate and were strong.

He carried it for ages without complaint. Then one evening, for no reason he could name, he counted.

He had never once been praised for himself. The hymns began with his name and hurried past it toward the gods beyond, because he was the road, and nobody loves a road. So Agni rose out of every altar and hearth and lamp in the world at once and said to no one, "Let them find another mouth." And he hid.

Fire did not die. Fire hid, which is a different thing and a worse one.

The change came slowly enough that men blamed other things. Cooking pots stayed cold and were said to be badly made. Lamps refused the wick. Then a great sacrifice was laid out on a riverbank, the chant was perfect, the butter was poured, and nothing happened.

Above, the gods felt it as hunger. Nothing was arriving. Indra, who had never in his existence gone without, felt his own brightness thinning like a lamp running down.

"Search the three worlds," he told them. "He has not perished; nothing can burn fire. He is sulking somewhere, and until we find him the sky eats nothing."

Agni had gone into deep water. He lay coiled at the bottom of a great still pool, dimmed to the colour of an old coal. But fire in water is still fire. The pool grew warm, then hot, and the frogs were boiled out of their homes among the stones and came up scalded and shrieking, and when the gods passed along that bank they cried out together: "He is here. The lord of flame is under our stones. He is cooking us alive."

The water broke apart and Agni stood up out of it, and his anger was worse than his heat.

"You could not keep your tongues," he said. "Then your tongues shall keep nothing. No taste will ever come to you again. You will eat and not know what you have eaten, all your generations, until the world ends."

And he was gone before the gods could speak. Indra looked down at the frogs, who had not moved.

"A curse spoken in truth cannot be unspoken," he said, "not even by us. But it can be added to. Frogs: taste is taken from you; in its place take voices, many voices of many kinds, so that no two of your nights sound alike. You shall be the first to know the rains. And in the driest season, when the ponds have gone to dust, you shall find food where there is none, and live."

Agni went next into a great asvattha tree standing alone at the edge of a plain, and folded himself into the dark hollow of its trunk, and was still.

Below, the world went on failing. Rites stopped, iron could not be worked, and in the villages people slept in heaps for the heat of one another's bodies and said, without quite believing it, that this would surely pass.

It was the elephants who found him. A herd came out of the afternoon heat to rub their flanks against that asvattha, as elephants had done for a hundred years, and the great cow who reached it first laid her shoulder to the bark and pulled back at once. The trunk was hot. Not sun-hot. Hot from within, like a pot with something living in it.

When the gods came through that country asking their question of every creature, the herd answered without hesitating. The old tusker lifted his trunk toward the hollow. "In there," he said. "The tree burns and is not burnt."

Agni came out of the wood in a column and stood over them.

"Twice now," he said. "Twice I have been given up by creatures I never harmed. You were quick to turn your tongue against me. Let your tongue turn, then. From this day the tongues of elephants shall lie backward in their mouths, reversed, for all time."

And he left them, and hid again.

The gods stayed with the herd in the settling dust. Some among them murmured that the informers had earned what they got.

"No," said Indra. "Think. They betrayed him, and by betraying him they fed us and lit the world. A world that punishes the ones who tell it where its fire has gone will sit in the dark on principle and freeze. Elephants, hear me. Your tongue is turned and I cannot turn it back, but it shall not hinder you. You will eat and drink as freely as any beast that walks, and your voice will carry like a horn across three valleys."

They went, trumpeting, and the sound was the only warm thing in that whole cold country.

The last hiding place was a shami tree, small and thorny, the kind of tree a man walks past without seeing. Agni crept into the wood itself, not the hollow but the grain, and lay quiet as sap.

A parrot had her nest in that shami. She noticed, in the way small creatures notice, that the branch beneath her feet was never cold at night, not even under frost; and when the gods came at last and asked, she told them where he was.

Agni came out of the grain of the wood. "Then speech has undone me three times," he said, "and speech shall be taken. Bird, your tongue is emptied. You will have no voice of your own."

But he did not vanish, because Indra stood in his way and the gods had closed around the tree in a ring.

"Her tongue first," said Indra, turning to the parrot. "You have lost your own speech; take another. Alone among the birds you will speak in the words of men, so that they will keep you in their houses and marvel. It will not be yours. It will still be speech."

Then he turned back to Agni. "And now you. Say why."

"Because I am a road," said Agni. "I am named at the beginning of every hymn and thought of at the end of none. The butter is poured into me and the merit credited elsewhere. Not one of you has ever asked whether the carrying is heavy."

"It is heavy," said Indra. "I am asking now. And I have no one to give it to. There is no second fire. If you stay here the sacrifices stop, and we weaken, and the rains fail, and men die of the cold you invented the cure for. That is arithmetic, not flattery."

Agni was silent.

"Then hear what is owed," said Indra. "You are not the least of us; you are the first. No rite will ever begin with any name but yours, and an offering made without you is made to nothing. And this tree that sheltered you will keep you: men will churn its wood and you will answer out of it, in every age, in every poor man's yard. Come home."

And fire came back into the altars of the world, and the world grew warm, and the cooking pots worked, and nobody thanked anyone.

Markandeya stopped. The small fire in the Kamyaka clearing had settled into its steady red business, and Yudhishthira was turning the two sticks of the fire-drill over in his hands as though he had never properly looked at them.

"Shami," he said.

"Shami," the sage agreed. "The plainest wood in the forest. Thorny, crooked, no use for a beam or a bow. Fire is in it. That is not decoration on the end of the story. That is the story."

Yudhishthira set the sticks down.

"Consider who saved the world," Markandeya went on. "Not one of the great ones. A frog scalded out of its stones. An elephant that wanted to scratch its shoulder. A bird in a nest. Each was maimed for it and given back some crooked gift instead, which is closer to how the world pays its debts than any hymn admits. And consider who left: the one indispensable being in creation, who left because nobody looked at him."

"I made lists in Indraprastha," Yudhishthira said slowly. "Lists of warriors, of allies, of the gifted and the dangerous, and I could still recite them. I never once asked the name of the man who lit the palace fires before dawn so the priests would find them burning. I do not know if he was paid."

"Nobody knows," said Markandeya. "That is the condition of the work. And a kingdom does not fall on the day its heroes fail. It falls on the day the fire quits - when the ones who carry everything and are named in nothing decide, quietly, that they have counted."

"Then what does a king do?"

"Look at them," said the sage. "Look at them the way you were looking at that flame just now, before you knew you were doing it. Ask the carrier whether the carrying is heavy. It is a small thing. The gods had to lose the sun's warmth off the whole earth before it occurred to any of them to ask."

Yudhishthira fed the fire another branch and sat with it a while, in a forest, in the second year of his exile, warm.