Fire Fire (9 page)

Ember was never broken in. Ursula only ever got half mastery, even with a bridle. She taught the horse tricks and on a good day could do everything a normal riding twelve year old would do—jumping, bending, barrel racing, elementary dressage. On a great day she could do what few kids would consider with her bareback stunt riding. On a bad day she could do a fair demonstration of riding a buck-jumper, or cling on wherever Ember decided to bolt.

Siegfried loved goats. He loved them from their little beards to their neat cloven hooves, from the tips of their feathered tails to the points of their curled horns. He loved them for butting things and for the sly sideways looks they gave when they reared high and tucked their chins in the seconds before their horns connected. They seemed to him sophisticated and clever. He cackled at their jokes and his brothers and sisters laughed at him.

Siegfried became Siegfried Siegenbalg, or Ziggy Goatskin, when he was about seven. He took over the care of the goats and developed a herding instinct of a feral kind. Under his tutelage the goats became feistier. He roamed the goats' paddock headbutting them. He developed two little red marks on his forehead where Mars and Pluto's horn ridges made contact. The goats began interpreting the erect stance of humans as the preliminary to a play fight and would meet anyone game to walk past their wood pile on their hind legs, forelegs tucked and chins in, ready for the snaking downward plunge to crashing head contact. Ziggy began head-butting everything.

The night of the solstice, Acantia and Ursula are in the goats' shed with a torch. Acantia looks down on the mother and baby. India, who is Venus's great-granddaughter, grumbles lovingly at the tiny white kid as it shakes itself clumsily at her side. Life is running through it like the water of a thaw-flushed river. It tries to express its feelings in an athletic twist but succeeds only in shaking itself off balance. India looks at Acantia, her eyes both soft and hard as amber, but doesn't move when Acantia touches the baby's silk hair with her fingertips. Ursula watches dreamily as her mother's fingertips brush its side, over its ribs, gently stroking the length of its faun back.

‘Its name is . . . Anatta.' She stretches her arms to the night sky and Ursula looks up too. ‘Anatta will be
free
, one day. She'll escape!'

They walk back to the house together.

Acantia says quietly, staring up at the stars.

‘Life is a wonderful thing.'

A fox calls into the stillness. It is the sound of desire, cold and clear, rushing between the stars and the earth and then hanging there like a stain in the heart and sky after the sound has dissipated.

They all hated the billy Augustine. Whenever anyone went near him, he salivated and slapped his tongue in and out, snorted, stamped and moaned. Too close, his smell was overwhelming. He tried his hardest to piss on people. His penis was nearly always extended. The end of it looked as though it was tied in a knot and when he was bored he licked it or sprayed his forelegs. He was always bored, desperate and chained up. He had a pathetic, hormonally-deranged look in his eye.

He was a slobbering bundle of pent-up semen and saliva.

After a while Siegfried could not stand it any longer. He took Augustine in the middle of the night up the hill, into the bush and over the back fence. There he released the putrid collar and shooed the billy off to go and find the wild goats beyond Acantia's boundary.

Augustine, exiled to freedom, stood at the boundary fence wailing all night.

The next day Acantia sent them all out on a search party and the goat found them easily.

The following year Augustine was the centre of a minor miracle. It even got into the papers.

When the two kids, Martyr and Satyr, were only three weeks old, their mother died of mastitis and joined the other cows, chooks and goats in the mass grave. Siegfried started to feed them with a bottle and they soon developed the scours. Just when it seemed as though the young goats would die, Augustine befriended them. One day, standing in his charmed stench circle, he nudged the babies along his body until their noses were buried in his flanks either side of his heavy bag of testicles. He stood there with his eyes closed, his legs apart and his tongue out. Martyr and Satyr appeared to be drinking, bumping his flanks so hard that the testicles swung, knocking their tiny chests. At first no one could believe this and no one wanted to go up to him and feel up there to see what was going on. Acantia sent Ursula to check. Augustine had little teats high up the sides of his scrotum and was making milk.

Siegfried squeezed his own nipples thoughtfully.

Goats are capable of anything if they put their minds to it
, Siegfried wrote in his goat diary, and inserted the news clipping.

FATHER SUCKLES TWINS: GOAT MIRACLE

Yesterday at Whispers Farm, situated a mile past Deviation Road in our own Witlers Gully, our Photographer Denny Buzzard snapped this world wonder. Nine-year-old Siegfried Houdini here proudly shows us his pet billygoat Augustine, suckling twins.

Professor Alex Daly of the Zoology Department of Toggenberg
University said to our reporter today, ‘Goats are pretty strange. As
mammals they are the stranger in our midst.

‘Some of them actually suckle from themselves, male and female.

‘I can't say I'm the least bit surprised. They are capable of anything.
‘Billygoat milk is extremely rare. I personally have never had the
privilege of witnessing this phenomenon until today.'

Under the goats' guidance, Ziggy became resourceful, brave and creative. Ruth was a pure white goat. She had soft short hair, straight ears and fine legs. Her eyes were large and of a pale straw yellow. You could only tell what she was thinking if you watched her nose and ears. As soon as you looked at her eyes you couldn't be sure. She was going to be eaten for Christmas.

‘Lilo,' Ziggy whispered, ‘I am going to build you a flying car, a helicopter house. It will be for you and Ruth and no one else.'

Lilo didn't believe he could at first, but Ziggy described its mechanics in such detail and with such assurance that she could visualise it.

Lilo dreamed of Ziggy's car. It was long and black, and had both wheels and wings. She could see herself scooting up the driveway. The vessel was designed so that she sat in the front and Ruth stood behind her. Ziggy would build it, for he was the Great Inventor. Ziggy was one of the gods.

‘Ziggy Goatskin Ziggy Goatskin / Achtung, Fertig, Dustbin
,' Lilo chanted, willing the car to be born.

They ate Ruth for Christmas.

Ziggy spent more and more time with the goats and less time inside the house. He spoke goat fluently and the goats, usually incapable of any collective thought or action, united against anyone Ziggy disliked.

Ziggy started sleeping in the goats' shed. But one by one the rebellious goats were shot, eaten, sold or given away.

THE CASTLE

They all knew that they were in that castle. Its turrets gleam wet in the lurid air. A thick streak of Prussian blue lies alongside a scar in cadmium yellow on the aged stone parapet linking the castle to the bridge. The bridge is made for horsemen and is high above a darkened ravine. It has arches like those of a Roman aqueduct. The pillars of the arches extend out of sight into the darkness below. This was the favourite of most of the children as teenagers.

They were there.

The scene is set in the first torrent of a storm breaking. Cadmium lightning straight from the tube scores the sky, bursting from a magenta-hearted cloud. The courtyards are open to the sky, bare and deserted. The bridge is impassable and is the only way out.

This painting was many things for them. It was the gateway, the prison, the place of seclusion, safety, danger, depending on the game it had to illustrate. It was the moment of entrance into the medieval world. Ursula had been in other worlds. She too had brushed through the snow-covered spruces to the other side. She had been drawn, following the golden apples to the land where the shadows lie. The painting was the mirror through which she too could re-enter.

It had a grand story to it.

It was in Germany, long, long ago.

The Houdinis had stopped by a field of rye on the way to the castle. They climbed through the electric fence to have a picnic in the heavy sunlight of unpredictable late autumn weather. They had beautiful grey-brown stoneware plates back then, speckled like curlew eggs. They had left the car door leaning against the fence and Gotthilf got a shock when he reached out to get into the car.

They all laughed but he felt a bit sick.

When they arrived at the mountain Acantia decided to stay in the car and the rest of them climbed the mountain to the castle with Pa. Ursula walked across that bridge as Pa told a story about the captured prince who was to be executed.

Asked if he had any last wishes, he said, ‘Yes indeed. I would like to bid farewell to my horse.'

When they brought him his horse (which, as a precaution, was neither saddled nor bridled), he kissed it and vaulted onto its back. His horse was so loyal that when the bridge was barred by soldiers it leapt without hesitation over the parapet, bearing its rider to freedom. Ursula looked over the parapet. She wasn't convinced by the last part but Pa insisted that they fell into the waters of the moat which used to be there.

While they were in the castle the storm which had been brewing broke violently directly above. The Houdinis and a few other foolhardy tourists had no choice but to wait inside the thick cold walls until it was over. The children shivered, complained, got cold, got hungry. The water ran down the lichen-covered walls.

Acantia, far below, painted furiously. In the height of the violence the car was struck by lightning. She painted on, feverishly, praying that they would be delayed in the castle and that the car would have lost the electrical charge by the time they arrived at the foot of the mountain. The water poured out of the sky and she painted on. They huddled high above her under the darkening turrets. By the time they made it down they were wet and tired and cross. The car was washed safe and the painting was finished.

It is a castle in a storm, as seen from somewhere above the head of the access bridge.

Soya beans and unhappiness went together like winter mornings and ice puddles, but that hadn't always been the case. Ursula and Gotthilf and Beate remembered when the Houdinis had been happy and well fed and willpower had had nothing to do with it. They wondered what secret, silent bomb had blown them up when they weren't paying attention. Beate thought Pa had tried to leave Acantia once, had had an affair in Germany, and had stayed with Acantia
for the sake of the kids
.

It took the fight out of Ursula. They were all at fault. Her limbs went numb and her mind cloudy. To think that Pa might have said such a thing.

The theory wasn't popular at first. Most of them didn't want him to be implicated. He was their solace. Most of them didn't want to be implicated either. However, over the years Ursula embellished the concept so effectively that this idea became an accepted fact. Among the terrible betrayals of Acantia's life, her husband had stopped loving her and had tried to leave her.