The Birth of Seven, as Told at the Fire

A fireside telling of how six peoples were born from the turning wheel, set down without permission by a listener who admits he shouldn't have — and who was refused, twice, when he asked the teller to finish it.

[The following was set down by one who sat at the fire and did not ask leave to write anything. If the teller ever reads this, I am sorry, and I am not sorry, because it would be a worse thing for the telling to live only in one company's memory. I have changed nothing of what she said. Where I have added a word to make the meaning plain to those who were not there, I have marked it thus: (word).] She began the way she always begins, tapping the ground once with the flat of her hand, and the company went quiet the way company always does. Before there were roads there was a wheel, and the wheel was turning, and it is turning still, though slower now, and further down. At the top of the wheel is the stuff the gods are made of, and it does not sit still — nothing at the top of a turning wheel sits still — and as it turned, it came down, and where it paused, a people was born. First down was the tall folk, the sky folk, the gold-eyed ones who live where they can still see the top of the wheel from where they're standing. They came so early there was nothing yet to stand on, so they built a floor in the air and have stood on that ever since, looking down at the rest of us the way you look down from a cart at a man walking. They are the Vyr, and they were first, and they have never once let anyone forget it. Next down came the fire-people, and where the sky folk are cold in their pride the fire folk are warm in it — warm-blooded, warm-eyed, keepers of forge and grudge in the same house, because the wheel gave them fire, and fire makes and unmakes with the same hand. They are the Asheni, and they will tell you, if you ask, that being first to touch the ground matters more than being first off the wheel, and they may be right. Next down, and the wheel had cooled by then, came the low broad folk, the ones who trust a good wall over a good word — stone-people, born when the fire the Asheni carried finally settled and held its shape. They are the Stoneborn, and everything anyone has ever built, they built first, whether the builders know it or not. Next down, higher up than you'd think for how far the wheel had come, are the mountain folk — Earth reaching for the sky's leftover Air, the boundary between the stone that stays and the wind that doesn't. They are the Korl, and they hold nothing forever except the mountain, which does not need their help to hold itself. Then down, into the water — an old elf-people who did not wait for the wheel to finish its turn but went looking for the bottom themselves, generations before anyone else thought to, and found they could live there. They are the Hessk, and they do not count their years by kings, because water does not keep a court. Last down of the wheel-born — last but one, I should say, and we'll come to that — are the road-folk, born at the place where water finally lifts and goes free, tawny and quick and night-eyed, never quite arriving anywhere because arriving was never the point of them. They are the Reshi. (Here the teller looked round the fire, since half her listeners that night were Reshi, and grinned, and someone threw a heel of bread at her, and she caught it without looking and went on.) So that is six, and six is what the wheel gave. And men were made, after, by a god who is dead. She said this and no more, and let the fire do the talking for a moment, and I confess I expected her to go on the way she'd gone on for the other six — the how of it, the why of it, some grin about muddy hands or lucky latecomers. She did not. I asked her afterward, once the company had thinned, whether she'd tell the rest of it another night, and she looked at me the particular way a person looks at you when they've decided the conversation is already over, and said only that some doors are shut for a reason and she wasn't the one who'd shut that one. I asked twice more over the following two winters. She would not expand it, in those words or any others, and eventually I stopped asking, because it had begun to feel like a very small rudeness, repeated a great many times.

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