Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits by Peter Dickinson, Robin McKinley Page B

dig because I seemed to be such a lucky guesser—they used to joke about my having second sight. And then on the last night of the year—we’d told them it was our fiftieth birthday, but of course it was really Dave’s hundred and fiftieth, only his fiftieth from when he began to go backwards—ʺ
    ÊºSonny’s, too.ʺ
    ÊºIn this cycle, anyway, though . . . Yes, Ellie?ʺ
    ÊºThey didn’t have our centuries did they? Back in ancient Egypt, I mean.ʺ
    ÊºTakes what ’e can get. We got centuries now, so that’s what ’e uses.ʺ
    ÊºHe has to have some kind of a cycle that the humans he lives among find important. In Egypt it was a hundred and twenty years, but it’s centuries now. Anyway, my friends on the dig held a party for us, and when it was over Dave and I walked out into the desert and Sonny met us and took us to his temple. It was buried deep in a dune, but Sonny called and a patch of sand slid away and there was a hole we could crawl through—pitch dark, but as soon as we were in, Sonny blazed into light and there it was. Oh, Ellie, it was perfectly wonderful, quite small, but untouched—never been found by anyone, or looted or excavated. Every wall covered with paintings or hieroglyphics, all looking as if they’d been done yesterday. . . .ʺ
    ÊºAn’ that’s where ’e married us.ʺ
    ÊºYes . . . that was where he married us. . . . I’m sorry . . . I’ve never been able to talk to anyone else about it before . . . that’s why I’m crying. It was so beautiful. It sounds lonely, but it wasn’t, because he brought them all back, everyone who’d ever helped him before, the way we’re doing, not to see or hear or feel, but there , crowding into his temple to welcome and bless us, his fortunate, fortunate friends. . . .
    ÊºOf course, when I got back to England I longed to tell my old professor about it, but I couldn’t. So Sonny sent him a dream instead—ʺ
    ÊºPayin’ ’is debts again.ʺ
    ÊºYes. There’s a sacred text carved onto a stele at Luxor. It’s so battered that no one could read it, and scholars had been arguing for years about what it meant. When we got back from Egypt, I found a letter waiting for me from my old professor, telling me that on New Year’s Eve—the night we got married, remember—he’d dreamed he saw the stele as it was when it was new. It seemed to be lit by flame, and he could read it right through. And he was so excited that he woke up and found that he still remembered it, so he switched on his bedside light and wrote it down. He got up next morning thinking it would be complete nonsense, but he looked at it and saw that it must be right. The Society of Egyptologists gave him their Gold Medal for the paper he wrote on it, and he told me that now he could die happy. He was over ninety.ʺ
    ÊºThat’s lovely!ʺ
    ÊºThat’s Sonny, that is. You better get on, Welly, or we’ll all be fallin’ asleep.ʺ
    ÊºYou’re going to tell me why you really want me. Aren’t you?ʺ
    A pause, and a sigh from Welly.
    ÊºWe can’t make ’er. An’ Sonny won’t. Tell ’er that.ʺ
    ÊºI suppose it’s a place to start. You see, my dear, after that first time, I used to join a dig and go back to Egypt every winter. Dave would come for a little while and I’d take a break to be with him, and wherever my dig was we’d go to Heliopolis and visit Sonny and his temple. So I got to read all the hieroglyphs and the scrolls, one of which was about the temple ritual. The important thing was that there were always two special priests—sometimes one of them was a priestess—and one of them was getting older and the other one was getting younger. And on ritual days, especially the midwinter solstice, the other priests would make a fire on the altar and the Phoenix would appear and bathe in his