The Fire Dancer

The firmament’s secret circulatory system was suddenly illuminated by a shriek of ionized air. A vascular blast of light tore from the infinite down to the canopy of a waiting tree. The atmosphere roared in shock as the tree’s leaves rang with blitz-glitter and the branches kindled new light in the dark night. The heat-cracked trunk spat sparks onto the tinder-dry savannah and the world blazed.

Homo Erectus cowered in the scrub, spellbound by the sight of the writhing tree birthing tongues of dawn where there should have been none. The report of the crash of sky and earth colliding rang in Homo Erectus’ ears and she howled in painful harmony as tears of wonderful confusion streaked her cheeks. The rapidly gathering heat of the tree-sun soon became too much, and Homo Erectus fled into the cool darkness of the familiar, unspoiled night. 

Prometheus strained against the thick chains that bound him to the mountain as the Aetos Kaukasios planted its talons in his abdomen and made its first hunger-driven incision. The practiced hunter gouged away elastic skin to find a path under ribs and into the viscera. It butted its clawed face into the home of Prometheus’ soul and set about evicting him.

Prometheus stared, pain-stunned, into the grey clouds of the Caucasian sky where tomorrow’s carrion queued, gliding on rising thermals of air laced with the steam of his exposed liver. The eagle’s internal burrowing punched the air from his lungs. The grating rust of the chains and cold stone of the mountain were gone, displaced by pain that transcended the body that bore it. Memory was the only place he could continue to exist.

He had run from Olympia, momentarily out of the grasp of Zeus, but never far or fast enough that capture was not an inevitability, a future spun for him by the Fates. He had just long enough to hurl the stolen lightning bolt across space to ignite the world of his clay creations. The javelin of impossible energy had no sooner left his grasp than the Aetos had taken him, plucked him like a spring flower from the foothills of Olympus and swept him up into the stars, only to slam him down on to the cold stone of the Caucasus mountains. Bound and gagged by chains forged by Hephaestus, as unbreakable as the sinuous embrace of Zeus himself, Prometheus remembered his day of creation as he waited for the day of his destruction.

His thumbs, slick with watery slip, had gouged out sockets in a skull that could host a mind which would one day conceive of the moment of its own creation. The body that he fashioned after his own would hold a liver that could home a soul. He had found the potential in the crude lump of clay and released it to play in a world away from the slopes of Olympus. But it needed more. Without a catalyst it would never realise the path he had envisioned. It would need time to grow into enlightenment, but the process would not start without a spark.      

A hunter raised his spear and stalked bravely towards the roaring serpent that shook the tree, devouring its limbs and spitting the spoiled parts to the floor. Clutching his antelope cloak against the heat of the beast, he took aim at the danger.  As he loosed the throw that would save his tribe the fire serpent chewed off a great bough which had burned above him. The bough landed in an explosion of light and sound and the hunter was gone.

Over time Prometheus’ body accommodated his chains as the roots and bark of mountain trees can learn to flow and mold themselves around the hard rocks on which they grow. He stopped his fruitless struggle with Hephaestus’ links and thought of his creations and the future that the Fates would have no choice but to spin them. The feeling that would have been joy calmed his soul as the eagle returned day after countless day to open him anew and beak deep into his mercilessly regenerating liver.  

A child had watched the vein of light pour power from the sky into the tree and seed the fire. She now stood in the thrashing light, edging towards the seductive heat as others fled, wild with fear, into the scrub. What was this power that could cause the whole tribe to run, light the night, strike down the mightiest hunter and create heat greater than the sun’s rays or any beating heart? The child saw the fire gorge itself on the tree and begin to starve as its meal blackened and shrank. The hunter’s spear lay on the ground, the sharpened end was ablaze, but a good length of the hard wood was unburned. The child stooped under the still fierce heat and carefully picked up the spear and the fire that was feeding on it. She held it high above her head and swung it slowly through the air watching the light follow the path she commanded it to take, carving the night into shapes of her choosing. She moved around with the spear, carrying heat and light to different places until the flames died and their grey ghosts escaped the spear that had held them. The few adults still close enough to have witnessed the child’s fire dance stared in awe as dawn’s light began to break and weaken the tree-sun’s power.

Prometheus endured over time measured by the cyclical arrival of a hungry tormenter and the departure of a fat one. He was now a creature of rust and stone, his wound a stoma that spoke to the world of the folly of stealing from Zeus. The eternal return of his eviscerator became all he knew and all that gave him meaning. He watched the eagle beating its way through the mountain mist towards its predictable meal. Distant thunder rolled and a golden arrow struck the bird from below, piercing its breast and sending it tumbling silently into the clouds that covered the valley below. Afraid at the loss of the cycle that defined him and his return to a fate that might lead into an unknown future, he raised his head from the rock to see Heracles emerging from the mists, bow in hand. His punishment was over.

From the mouth of a mountainside cave under a ceiling of cloud, the Fire Dancer heard the roll of distant thunder and looked out over the valley. Feeling that the fire fall may still be some time away she returned to tending her flickering hearth. Taking up a charred stick she marked her face with its soft dust and turned to the wall of the cave. By the light of her tamed fire, she used the stick to scrape out the image of a tree-sun, jagged under the power of the fire fall, the vein of light rendered as a line rising high up the cave wall. The Fire Dancer hesitated at the top of the line, and then slowly began to scrape out the image of the sender of the fire.