The old folk of the Flaming Mountains tell children the fire rat's story at bedtime: in the great burning mountains of the west lives a rat whose fur grows three inches long and does not char in flame; weave the fur into cloth, and when the cloth is soiled you wash it not with water — you cast it into fire, and it comes out white as new snow. That cloth is called fire-washed cloth.
The story is about my family.
Our clan has lived in the earth-fire grottoes of the Flaming Mountains for generations beyond memory. We eat fire-moss, drink from the hot springs at the lava's edge — and our fur is our treasure: wadded into frostbite salves it draws out cold; woven, it becomes the only fire-washed cloth under heaven.
The cloth is precious. We do not sell it. Clan law: fire rat fur trades for lives, never for money.
What does trading for lives mean? Ask the fire brigade of Scorched-Earth Keep. When a house burns with people trapped inside, a fireman in a fire-washed coat can go three entries deeper into the blaze. The brigade's twenty-four fire-washed coats were all accumulated, molt by molt, across generations of my family. And the price is fixed: one coat, one life carried out — accounts square. If the life is not saved, we pay the forfeit: a whole litter's first molt, to begin the next coat early.
Why so foolish a rule? The ancestors were plain about it: this unburnable fur was heaven's gift. A gift from heaven must be paid back to everyone under it.
When the mountains' fire died three hundred years ago, we followed the earth-fire down and down. Three years ago the mountains burned again, and we moved back — and on the first night home, Great-Grandmother posted sentries at the grotto mouth.
Because she had smelled it: this fire was wrong.
A fire rat's nose is the most fire-literate nose in the world. Earth-fire has its smell — roasted, sulfur-edged. Wood-fire has its smell — sweetness in the smoke. But mixed through these eight hundred li of flame is a third smell: rankness. How can fire smell rank? Great-Grandmother says her grandmother's grandmother left one saying: when fire smells of flesh-rankness, it is burning what was never meant to burn.
Then came the matter of the fur.
At molting season we cast the shed fur into fire to purify it — out it comes snow-white, ready for the looms. But this half year, the molted fur will not whiten. It comes out with a grey film at the roots that nothing removes, like snow stained with oil. The weaving aunts say fur like that makes dead cloth — the coat's power is half in the fur and half in the purity. Impure fur protects no one.
A fire that cannot purify fur — is it still fire?
Great-Grandmother led us to test every flame across the eight hundred li. The old fire in the deepest grotto: purifies. The stove-fires in the Keep's kitchens: purify. The samadhi flame at the Holy Infant King's fingertip: purifies most perfectly of all. Only one kind fails — the wrongful fire that seeps up from the seed-flames of Shixuan's shattered furnace.
Wrongful fire cleanses nothing. It is not fire. It is something else, wearing fire's skin.
We reported the finding to the Holy Infant King. He was silent a long while, then stroked my back-fur and said: little one — this coat of yours has become a demon-revealing mirror.
A mirror. Yes. Wherever the fire cannot whiten our fur, there the wrongful seed is planted.
So when the medicine-basket boy set out west, Great-Grandmother tucked me into his basket, along with a small bundle of snow-white fur. Her instructions were exact:
at every fire along the road, test. If the fur whitens, the fire is honest — cook and warm yourselves without fear. If the fur stains, the fire is wrongful — mark the place, and send word to the King.
And there is the one thing Great-Grandmother did not say aloud, though I know her thought —
the wrongful seeds travel by the earth-veins. And the earth-veins rise in the west.
If, on the day we test the westernmost fire of all, even the ever-burning lamp before the Buddha cannot whiten our fur…
that will be the news that truly ends the world.