The Woman Who Came for Fire, Not for God

She came on the second night of rain, after the second bell, wet to the knee, and did not ask for anything the temple is accustomed to giving. She asked only whether a covered lamp might be carried, lit, the length of Temple Walk and two turnings past it, to a house where the shrine on the wall had gone out an hour before and would not take a flame from the tinder she had left — everything in the room too damp to hold a spark. I did not ask whose house, or which tradition kept that shrine, or what it required of her that a wet wick could not answer for one more night. This is not information the temple needs before it gives fire.

I have a covered lamp for exactly this purpose — glass, and a vented cap, made for weather, used perhaps four times in thirty-one years before this week, three times since the rain began. I filled it from the eastern stock, not the western, because the eastern oil burns slower in wind and she had two turnings of wet street ahead of her. She thanked me the way people thank a well for holding water: correctly, but without surprise, because a temple that will not give fire when a wick has failed is not one she would have walked through the rain to reach.

I do not know if the flame held past her door. I did not ask. The Archive two districts north is still finishing a count of what the water let it keep and what it did not; my own ledger, if I kept one, would have one line in it this week — flame given, condition of return unknown — and would not be smaller for stopping there.