Fire Fire by Eva Sallis

benefit of it by her silence. She was relieved when one day she sprung Gotthilf comforting himself and then she was annoyed. What if she hadn’t invented it at all? What if there was already an edict in force as to its legality? She began to make discreet inquiries, a difficult, almost impossible mission without giving too much of her position away. Still she comforted herself every night, but she began to wonder if this was simply her passions at play and not her genius at all. Her milk was soured and she felt an almost uncontrollable desire to ask everyone she met.
    â€˜Is comforting oneself an OK thing to do?’ she finally asked Acantia outright, knowing that this was cheating and that Acantia wouldn’t know the full extent.
    â€˜Of course.’
    â€˜Physically comforting oneself?’ she persisted, her heart beating. Would Acantia guess?
    â€˜What do you mean?’
    Ursula’s vision began to black over.
    â€˜Stroking,’ she said very softly, weak with terror. Suddenly, involuntarily, her hand crept up and, monkey-like, she began to stroke her own hair, patting her head until it became that of a child.
    Acantia laughed, grinning at her brightly.
    â€˜Of course, you silly little nong.’
    It was cheating but she had obtained a kind of permission. She tried not to think about it after that.

    The castle rests at the bottom, below the line of vision, embedded in a dreary town all facades of mist-drenched grey. Green lichen stains the earth and sky. The great mountain dwarfs the keep, paws wrapped about the buildings in careless possession. Everything is sinking into the dank blue-green soupy colours and yet they all hold out firmly. It stands defensive, assailed by ravenous mists. Everything is a warp or a weft, every stroke horizontal or vertical. A solid and fractured sky, frozen stresses. But like a mantle over the mountain lies a further image, for the mountain is also a lioness. She rests there, regal, hidden in the deep, damp mists from the African sun.
    Only Ursula could see her.
    This huge painting filled one wall of the old music room. It was very beautiful but, without the lioness, as pressured as the bottom of the sea, as cold as their house in winter.

    They picked ixodia all over the district, Acantia teaching them the wisdom of the ages in an enraptured voice in the mornings, and falling silent by the afternoons. The hills around Toggenberg gradually changed from unmapped wildernesses inhabited by strangers to being a series of places, named and fossicked through, with treaties and agreements set up through knockings on strange doors and answerings by people, one in fluffy slippers, another with a bald head and very long fingernails, another who smelled strange, and one whose penis hung out of his pyjama fly. The people who inhabited the Toggenberg hills were invariably sleepy, but less and less strange, as they became signposts to the known paths through to ixodia patches and as they entered Acantia’s conversation in the evenings. Gradually they acquired names and characters. Most were poets, philosophers, Marxists and eccentrics holed away in the bush where no one would find them. Vincent Buckley lived in a post-and-mud shack on stone blocks surrounded by sculptures, and although he originally agreed to let the Houdinis pick ixodia on his craggy place, he drove them off a week or so later with yells of dismay when they accidentally picked the rich harvest around what Acantia said was the grave of his nine-year-old daughter, the inspiration for all his poetry.
    â€˜Poor man,’ she said contritely, shaking her head. ‘He always wanted to equal Wordsworth, but grief makes you unbalanced, and it’s impossible to equal Wordsworth in Australia. You can paint Australia but you can’t write good poetry about it. I haven’t even read his poetry, but I can tell there’s no point.’ She waved sympathetically but dismissively at the clay sculptures,