Leaves danced gently above me, scattering the sunlight across the rich ground. The breeze from outside the copse carried the scent of grass in its cool embrace and I found myself imagining what it might be like to wade through that sweet green sea, hands trailing against the seeded grass heads.

But I am no fool. The notion faded at once and I remembered the screams with a hard, cold jolt in my chest. Nobody walked out on the grassland. Not any more.
I felt a cautioning concern touch me. My guardian, Emym, was warning me against the wild excitement that the breeze had aroused in me. She came across the moss patched, loamy floor of the copse to join me, graceful and delicate, yet decisive in movement. I sat up.

‘I know, I know Emym. I won’t go out there.’

Relief flowed from her as she leapt skilfully to the crook of my half extended arm, and then to my shoulder, where she sat, carefully balancing her comforting weight, her silk-soft tail gently embracing my neck. The pads of her little hand rested against my cheek for a moment, and I felt the tiny points of her claws pinch for a moment. Her manner was protective, and the feelings she was sending into me were reproachful. I was not to consider entering the Field again.

‘I wouldn’t really have gone.’ I said sulkily, and she pretended to bite my ear. With my left hand, I stroked her behind her tufted ears, ruffling her black fur there to reassure her. ‘Let’s go home then.’ This pleased her. At once she cascaded to the floor again and began to lead the way.

Emym went upright, though as she ran – I never saw her go anywhere slowly – her tail would flit behind her like a banner. She barely came up to my knees, and even in her finely crafted wooden armour weighed very little, yet she considered herself my guardian. I could still remember the first time I felt her emotions mixing with my own, as I had stared into her deep, bright eyes as a small boy.

Emym was the fourteenth child of Omma, the matriarch of her people in my village. Most of her brothers and sisters had left, looking, as far as we could make out, for another family to join with. When I had asked Emym, years ago, how many of her people there were, she had expressed loneliness for a few, teary seconds and then closed her heart to me.

The tears had been in my young eyes, not hers. The emotion she and her kind expressed was always intense, yet I had never seen them outwardly express it. Her pain had wounded me, which was probably why she had ceased to share with me. The Birim feel far keener than we.

The Birim had come out of the Fields before I was born, bringing with them such incredible fear that it had paralysed the village. My mother used to tell me about that night, and how the wind had howled across the Fields, blowing leaves from the copse into the caves. Before that night, we had been able to go into the Fields, she said.

Once it had been safe.

Finding my parents, then children, stricken down like all the others in the village, the four Birim set about comforting us. We are five times their height and yet they saw us as weak, emotionally delicate. From that moment they felt for us compassion, stronger even than the fear that had crippled us, forming the bond by which we and the Birim were joined.

Before the Birim came, my mother said, we had been living only in the caves, collecting fruit and fishing in the lake. After they had joined with us, the village had moved out from the cave into the clearing which the copse surrounded on three sides. Beyond it were the Fields, beyond them, the lake. We didn’t go to the lake anymore.

I stepped out from the cool of the copse into the heat. A haze swam across the dusty ground, blurring the shapes of the buildings. They had all been built as my parents had grown up, with the four Birim showing the way. The little creatures’ understanding of wood far exceeded ours, and each wore evidence of their skill proudly about their small, sleek persons, in the form of elaborate armour, in overlapping plates of carved wood, carefully lacquered in the Birimith, the building they had made for themselves atop the Big House, where we all met in the evenings to talk and eat. Emym’s armour was lacquered blue and green, with symbols and shapes that I did not understand for decorating.

Now there was only Emym, her mother and two of her brothers in our village. The rest had gone, climbing the cliff far higher than we could go, to find out what lay at the top. I did not remember their going. I had been very young. A few years after, Emym had decided to become my guardian.

The reason that the other Birim had left was also the reason that Emym had decided to commit herself to me. Her father, one of the four original Birim to flee the Fields, died when my elder brother, who I do not remember, went out onto the Fields. My mother and father do not know why he went out among the gently waving grass stems. He knew what all of us knew, that whenever we began to contemplate leaving the boundary of the copse, a Birimi would warn him off. He knew of the danger.

But still he went.

Emym’s father and his brother put on their shining chestnut wood armour and followed him. None of them had come back. One of my earliest memories was of the grief-wracked screams of my mother.

In a way, it was understandable why Emym, for two years separated from the village out of choice, isolated in her misery, chose to spend her time afterwards with me. I did not feel the pain of my brother’s loss like my parents, and I was probably as comforting a presence for her as she was for me.

In the village centre, Emym’s two brothers were carving the intricate detail on a symbolic statue. It meant something to them, I knew, because Emym paused to stare at their progress, radiating contentment and pride. The carved image was almost my height.

The statue was slender and curved, feminine, it seemed to me, surmounted by a spiked crest like a crown, or the rising sun. The figure – it was definitely a figure, I decided – was robed in what looked like stylised flame.


That night, sleeping on the leaf strewn floor of my parent’s house, I dreamt that my brother was standing in the doorway, looking down at me.

Like a ghost, I rose. He beckoned, and I felt the slightest push at my emotions, as if this image of my brother, whom I had never seen before, was able to send feeling like the Birim. I drifted towards him, strangely weightless. As I neared where he stood, he became more difficult to see. It was as if the details of his likeness had been blurred like the heat haze had blurred the village.

I followed my brother out into the night. The sky was awash with stars, but as I moved after my brother’s strangely graceful figure, one by one, they began to turn red. By the time we had reached the copse, the sky was pricked all over with crimson. If it had begun to rain, I might have expected blood to fall.

At the copse, I felt that cold, hard feeling punch up into my chest again. My brother was going out into the Fields. I knew it. He had died there once and now he was going again. I did not want to see how he had died out there in the whispering grass.

I turned back and went towards the village. The statue, the Birim, where were they?

There! Where there had been nothing before, now there stood the figure of the Birim, and here in the night-world she was alight. Fire danced across her form, sending cool breeze out across the airless village to where I stood, bodiless and stunned.

The Birim were standing in attitudes of worship about their wooden goddess. The cool fire was licking out towards them, and they stood, Omma, the two brothers and my Emym, frozen like statues themselves, heads bowed, arms raised towards the figure. Flame embraced and anointed them, and I felt their joy.

Emym, who had never spoken before, spoke in my head.

‘Tonight you will see.’

A Birimi I had never seen before came whirling, graceful and elegant in its dance like movements, out of the fire of the Birim goddess. It was a male, whiskered white against its black fur. A younger one followed. At once, in the same way that I had recognised my brother, I saw that these were the father and uncle of Emym. They ran lightly past me, tails flickering and swishing for balance. Emym spoke to me again.

‘The Fields will be healed. Go with your brother, Arir!’

It made my heart leap to hear her speak my name.

‘Come with me!’ I tried to stretch out my hand, but Emym was once more focussed on the fire. The statue was alive with light.

So I went. The copse was silent under the red stars. The grasses swayed in the Field, as if troubled. My brother stood, looking on.

And then the grass began to writhe. Holes opened in the ground, yawning like they ached to gnaw at the red-lit sky above. Hissing rose, like wind in grass but fierce, and harsh, and desperate. I longed for Emym.

Through the trees, there came a woman. Her skin was dappled with greens and browns, her eyes alight with strength. I could not look directly at her. For moments after she passed, the ground was graced with footprints of white fire, but the blaze faded, leaving the earth untouched. It was a moment before I realised that she was the statue.

The Birim goddess smiled, and I wanted to fall to my knees. She stretched out her hands.

The Field screamed. As if in an attempt to eat itself, the ground humped up, roiling and pulsing as if it were the grassed skin of some monstrous animal. Then, trembling and shaking violently, it fell into itself.

I woke up with the eyes of the goddess smiling in my memory.


The village was quiet. In the square, Emym met me. She ran up onto my shoulder like always, and her hand rested on my cheek.

The statue was gone.

Dazed, as if I were still truly in a dream, I made my way through the trees. The copse was cool, and quiet, and birds sang.

As the sun rose into a cloud-streaked, clear blue sky, Emym and I looked out on the peacefully swaying grasses. The sun was beginning to warm the nodding seed heads. Emym radiated calm. A touch of affection pushed me onward, and for the first time in my life, I stepped out onto the field.

Emym spoke, as I had always known she could, into the secret place of my mind.

‘This is why we came. This is why we came.’

And there was no fear.