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Chapter 35: A Fire He Could Have Walked Around

Chapter 35: A Fire He Could Have Walked Around

The racks had been running double for nineteen days.

Leon knew the number because Doran had made him learn it. Nine frames of split green wood at the downwind end of the terrace, each one carrying four tiers, each tier carrying what the boats brought in, and under all nine a bed of slow smoke that Nesh kept alive from before light until after dark. Fish, and the strips off anything Tala’s people brought back, and the last of the marsh eels. Everything they had, drying, because dried food did not have to be eaten this week.

Eleven days of the thirty-two sat on those frames.

It was the middle of the afternoon on the twenty-third day and the wind had been getting up since noon.

Leon was forty metres away on the flat stone above the water chain, on his knees, with Panel A laid out in front of him.

The panel could not be tilted any more. The fracture had spread across a second cell on the third day and the whole assembly now had to lie perfectly flat or the crack opened and the string went dead, which meant that in the afternoon, when the sun came across at an angle, it produced about as much current as a polite suggestion. He had rebuilt the rack twice. He was rebuilding it a third time, with three fingers holding a shim, when he smelled it change.

Smoke had been the background of this terrace for nineteen days. He had stopped noticing it around day four.

This was not that.

He looked up.

At the near end of the rack line, one of the frames had a flame in it, low and orange and about the size of a man kneeling.

Leon’s first thought was that this happened. Racks were fire and fat and dry wood, and a rack fire was an ordinary accident, and the correct response was to get water on it before it got into the frame timber.

His second thought was that Nesh was already on it with a wet hide, alone, and that somebody should help him.

His third thought did not arrive in time to be useful.

He was nine steps into the run when the second frame took.

Not from contact. There was a metre of open ground between the two frames and nothing crossed it, and the second frame simply began burning along its whole upper tier at once, as though somebody had drawn a line and lit the line.

Leon stopped.

He knew what fire did. It went up, it went with the wind, it needed contact or an ember, and it took the time it took.

The third frame went before he had finished the thought.

Radiant heat, he thought, from somewhere a long way behind his own eyes. Radiant heat ignites at a distance, and the distance depends on flame temperature, and flame temperature depends on how much oxygen the flame gets.

Twenty-three point four percent.

He had written that number in a notebook on his first day here, made a note about kilns and one about furnaces, and filed the whole thing under interesting, later.

It was not later. It had never been later. Every fire he had ever seen or built or reasoned about had happened in an atmosphere with four-fifths as much oxidiser as this one, and he had been walking around a settlement made of reed and split timber for three weeks carrying a model of fire that was calibrated for a different planet.

"Nesh," he said, and then he shouted it.

Nesh was six metres from the fourth frame and going toward it with the hide.

Kharun did not ask anybody anything.

He came out of the council ground at a run with Ket behind him and the horn already at his mouth, and the note he blew was three short and one long, and Leon did not know that one. Every other person on the terrace did. The children’s platform emptied in the time it took him to turn his head. Ama Solt had them off it and moving west with the smallest two carried and not one of them making a sound, and Leon understood, watching it, that this drill existed, and that it had existed before he arrived, and that nobody had ever mentioned it because why would they.

Sila went past him with a strap over her shoulder and a rolled hide under each arm.

Bren went past her carrying nothing, straight at the racks, which was where Nesh was.

Leon went for water.

It was the only thing his hands knew how to do. The settling jars stood nine metres from him, four of them, thirty litres each, and he had both arms around the first one and was moving before he had finished standing up.

Ket stepped in front of him.

Not gently. A hand flat on Leon’s chest, and Ket weighed less than he did and it stopped him completely.

"Na."

"Aru," Leon said, which was water, and jerked his chin at the racks.

"—not the water, it is the—" Ket said something with the shape of an explanation in it and Leon caught two words of nine. Then Ket gave up, and turned Leon’s head with one hand the way you turn a child’s, and pointed at the fire, and then held up his other hand with the four fingers spread and closed them one at a time, fast.

Four. Three. Two. One.

Then he pointed at the jar in Leon’s arms, and made the sign for carry, and counted the same four fingers down at half the speed.

Leon looked at the jar.

Thirty litres. Nine metres out, nine back, and by the time he had emptied it the fire would be four frames further along, and he would have spent the settlement’s only clean stored water buying about fifteen seconds and would then have no water at all for anybody who came out of this burned.

He put the jar down.

"Ei," he said. "I understand."

The Retha did not fight the fire.

He watched them not fight it and it took him most of a minute to see what he was looking at. Nobody threw anything. Nobody carried anything toward the flames. Kharun’s people went to the ground ahead of the fire, forty metres downwind of anything burning, and began taking it apart.

The drying frames past the sixth one came down in pieces, hauled flat and dragged clear. The strip of cut reed stacked for thatch went into the river. Two of the young men were cutting the standing grass down to the dirt in a line that ran from the bank to the stone, and Oren was walking that line ahead of them with his hand out, moving them two metres this way, three metres that way, reading something in the ground that Leon could not see.

They were not trying to stop it burning.

They were arranging for it to have nothing left to burn, in a specific place, chosen in advance, and they had started doing it about forty seconds after the second frame took.

Nesh came out at the sixth frame with Bren’s arm around him and the wet hide still in his hand, coughing in a way that had nothing to do with the cough he had been carrying for a week.

Both of his forearms were red to the elbow.

He was talking the whole way, fast, at Bren, and Bren was not answering, and Leon caught fish and four and something that was probably left.

***

The wind turned at twenty past.

Leon felt it on the back of his neck before he saw what it did, and he had a moment of pure relief, because the fire had been running along the bank line and the bank line was ending, and a wind off the water would push it back into ground it had already taken.

Then he looked where Tala was looking.

She was up on the stone above the water chain, exactly where he had been kneeling, and she had been up there for a while, and she was not watching the fire at all. She was watching the smoke, and above the smoke, three white birds going over in a line that was not the line they had been going in ten minutes ago.

She came down off the stone without using her hands.

She said one word to Kharun and pointed, and Kharun turned and looked, and every part of him changed at once.

Leon followed the point.

North-east. Away from the river, up the shallow slope, across four hundred metres of grass that had not seen rain in a month, toward the granary they had finished nine days ago and the eastern palisade section that was still closed with a temporary frame.

And past that, two ridges out, forty square metres of turned earth with eleven days of nothing showing in it.

"Varu." Kharun had hold of his shoulder. "Varu."

Leon was already looking at the wrong thing.

He was looking back at the flat stone, at the rack he had built three times, at Panel A lying open to the sky forty metres from a fire that was throwing embers the size of a thumbnail, exactly where he had left it when he stood up.