The Fire Night

Once a year the Above goes to war with the sky, and loses, and the hollow has never known what it hoped for.

Grizel explained it in the afternoon, with the ledger open at last year's page and the thirteen before it, all the same page differently spelled. There would be a smell of smoke first. Then dark. Then bangs, a wheen of them, and lights in the sky in the shape of flowers that come apart, and whistles that go up and do not come down, and the Above on the back steps in all its boots watching its own weapons fail. The theology is divided on the purpose. Grizel's position is spite. Nettie's is that Gnomesby started it. Pettigrew's was that it was a display in the Court's honour, and badly done.

The fliskies had no position. The fliskies had the hedge, which is where the bangs come down nearest, and every one of them was up in it, watching the sky go dark, in a state the ledger has settled on calling "festival, with terror in it, or the other way round."

The smell came at dusk, as stated. The first bang came an hour after, from the direction of Gnomesby, and the hollow jumped anyway, all of it, except one.

Mungo held the gate.

He stood on the spot with the lantern out at arm's length and he looked up, which he seldom does, and when a thing went off directly above the hedge with a crack that shook the sign he did not move, and when something fell hissing into the green not ten feet from Pettigrew, who did not move either, on principle, he did not move, and Grizel, at the window, wrote each bang down as it came, one line each, the same three words, until the page was full and she had to turn it: "Not coming in."

Mothy was the difficulty.

There are, on the Fire Night, lamps in the sky. He sat by the lantern for the first bang, and looked up, and his whole face went up like a window, and stayed up, and when the second flower opened over the hedge, gold, and hung, and fell in slow threads, he stood up, and went up the hedge towards it.

Sorrel brought him down. She came off her twig and got him by the fur of one shoulder and turned him, and she set him down by the lantern and said "Stay," and went back up. The third flower was green. He went up again. She brought him down again, and this time she stayed, one hand in his fur and the thorn in the other and her eyes on the sky, and he sat, and looked up at the whole of it, and said, very quietly, "Hello."

Kit was on the wall.

She had gone up it at the first bang without saying why, and Tansy had gone up beside her, and the two of them sat on the coping with their legs over the hollow side and watched. Mine was not on the wall. Mine, which sits on the coping through everything, was in its den under the last tree, chin on its paws, ears flat, amused by nothing, and it is the only time anyone has seen it hide. Tansy got down off the wall and went into the den, and sat against the fox's side in the dark, very small against a great deal of fox, and stayed, and said nothing, and the fox sighed. The ledger has been asked to record that a fox is not comforted by a fliskie, and has recorded that it was.

Kit stayed on the wall alone. From there the back steps could be seen, and on them stood the Above, or its boots, a row of them, black and heavy and lit from somewhere by red, and the hollow looks away from the boots, as it always has. Kit did not. She was looking at the third step. At the height of the third step, which is to say at no height at all, there was a hand, and it was small, and it held a stick that fizzed white and spat and threw sparks down onto the stone, and the hand held it out at arm's length, the way Mungo holds the lantern, as if it might go off. Then a boot moved, and the hand was gone, and Kit sat on the wall and looked at the third step for a while after there was nothing on it.

The sky won at about the time it always wins, which is when the Above runs out of things to throw at it. The last bang was small and far off, and Mungo said "Not coming in" to it himself, and the fliskies came down out of the tangle a few at a time. Mothy fell asleep against the lantern, and Sorrel sat up over him with the thorn.

In the morning the smell was over everything, and the sky was where it had been. Pettigrew has lodged a complaint with it. Forty-three bangs, and none of them came in. The sky has not replied.