Fire Fire Read Online Free Page B

hair. Gotthilf thought he should leave, but stood, blankly, soaking up the mystery of it. Acantia and Pa broke the spell, separating, going together to her room, returning to Gotthilf with the sleeping baby. He flicked a glance at each of them in turn and breathed out. He wasn’t in trouble. The others trickled in and Pa showed them little Arno Zoroastre Houdini and his long fingers and delicate blue eyelids.
    Arno, the quietest and the sweetest, child of Acantia’s blue period, was the dreamer.
    The kids’ room served as sleeping space for all the children, a temporary measure that lasted several years. They fought over Arno, cuddled like a kitten or a hot water bottle in the bed of whoever could wheedle him with promises and scary torchlight to crawl in with them. Acantia hoped to repair some of the rooms under the stage but by the time the children were reaching their teenage years, they were too tall to stand up in them. The damp crept further forward year by year, slowly eating away anything that was rock or mortar under the timber beauty of the front of the house, while armies of white ants, spitting acid and leaking minute puffs of methane, rose steadily through the timbers from ancient caverns beneath the earth.

    In winter the grass, the mud, the clothes, the people, the walls and the beds were cold. The fire, the cats and the fresh cow pats were warm. Everything was wet. They loved the fire, fought over the cats and stood barefoot in cow pats.
    It was Gotthilf’s job to find and cut the wood and Ursula and Siegfried’s job to gather kindling. The kitchen was dank and miserable when the fire had no fuel or the wood was mean and wet. A steady breeze blew down and in from the auditorium. Gotthilf chopped piles of wood out in the drizzle under the big radiata pine. The chips flew, spattering through the air and landing with small wet sounds in the mud. He swung the axe with a dogged determination until he had chopped just enough to coax the fire through the day, and then came inside with a dripping armload of wood and his hair plastered to his forehead.

    Acantia and Ursula stood on the verandah watching the goats. Venus stared balefully at Acantia from the shed. Acantia eyeballed her until the goat turned away, and then Acantia slowly shook her head.
    â€˜That goat does not like me,’ she said to Ursula. ‘But she does carry art around on her head.’
    What is that on that beautiful child’s head? Oh, let me touch. My goodness gracious, horns! You are blessed, child, and will have a rare spirilli hornspan of five feet. Golden, too. Just like your hair.
    Remarkable! You must be very proud of your daughter, ma’am. She will have art wherever she goes.
    They had bought four goats when they moved into the house: Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Pluto. Jupiter had a spiralled, rippled horn-span of almost two metres. He had a long curly beard and looked like an ovine Father Christmas. He had grimy hair but was gentle, if aloof. Acantia said he was impotent because he didn’t stink the way a billygoat should. Venus had a fine-boned, dished face framed by locks of white hair and a high brow divided in two for the twin arcs of her horns. These spiralled outward in a still, symmetrical image, rippled like tidal flats. She had bright golden eyes with mesmerising oblong pupils. She was wild, by reputation untameable. Ursula hung about her just out of jabbing reach. The wild goddess slowly began to tolerate her company but Ursula was never sure if Venus really befriended her. Blood and yellow lumps appeared in her milk and Venus died before there was time to find out. Her kids were hand-raised.
    The children worked together burying Venus. They dragged her carcass down to the bottom paddock and began to dig a huge hole. Beate gathered flowers with solemnity and Siegfried stood holding herbs to put at her mouth. Helmut, Gotthilf and Ursula dug until they were standing in a hole up to their chests,