Fire: Demons, Dragons & Djinns

by Rhonda Parrish

  Wind pulled at me as I ran down the street, and I realized it was the firestorm drawing air even at this distance. At the fire’s base it would be a howling torrent, screaming as it built the flames into a tower which leapt ever forward as its heat began to combust the buildings around it.

  I looked ahead and my heart froze in an icy clench despite the fire. The dome of St. Paul’s rose above the surrounding buildings, lit clearly for every German bomber to target.

  Brand and I made it to Redcross Fire Station and I slipped inside the door. The electricity had gone; the office was lit with a few battery and oil lamps. “The fire,” I gasped. “It’s coming for St. Paul’s.”

  The firemen inside, already soot-streaked and weary, nodded, not wasting time or breath to acknowledge what they already knew. Further within, firewomen worked at the phones, coaxing information out of failing lines.

  “There’s simply no more water,” a woman said urgently into the phone. “The mains are destroyed. You must do something.”

  Another shook her head. “The river is too low,” she reported in professional tones, as if she were not announcing the death of a city. “The pumps are drawing only mud and muck and are clogging. The fire boats cannot reach. The only water is what has been stored ready at the Cathedral.”

  A man finished his terse conversation with a woman and turned, and the firemen trooped out together.

  I turned to the women. “Is help coming?”

  “And the line’s down,” announced a firewoman with controlled frustration, putting down her handset.

  Another firewoman, who by her sooty appearance had run through the street as I had, turned to me. “Yes, as much as we can. The Prime Minister has ordered all units are to concentrate on St. Paul’s, saving it at all costs.”

  This surprised me. Yes, the cathedral was important, but it was a building like all the others. It was important—but was it so much more important than the rest?

  She read my face. “Yes,” she said. She leaned nearer me. “I came here from my own station when I could not remain any longer. The very asphalt had begun to burn around me. I came here, because I knew St. Paul’s would need protection.”

  “But why at all costs? Why not try to save more?”

  “Of course we will try to save more! But we must save St. Paul’s.” She bit her lip and frowned at me. “It is more than a building. It is a symbol—but it is more than a symbol. It is our hope.”

  “Our faith, certainly, and hope—”

  “And our hope for aid.” She held my eyes. “You are an American. You understand?”

  I was an American, but I did not pretend to a knowledge of the complex politics between our countries. “I do not.”

  “My husband works in the Home Office. He says the talk there is that the Americans will not enter the war if they believe Britain is lost. If the continent is occupied and if they have no secure base, they cannot hope to succeed, and so they will remain well out of it rather than commit themselves to failure. If we want allies, we must not fall—and we must not appear to fall. There are photographers and reporters everywhere. St. Paul’s is not just the cathedral, it is London.”

  “Then—if St. Paul’s burns, the Americans will not join the fight.”

  “And if the Americans do not join the fight . . .” She did not say the rest. No one would say the rest. It was inconceivable that Britain would not triumph, with or without the Americans—but it was agreed that it would be easier with them.

  I nodded. “Then St. Paul’s must be preserved at all costs.”

  Brand barked once outside the door, a sound he did not make often, and I went out. The firestorm had reached the cathedral yard.

  “God in heaven!” cried a voice from within the station behind me. “Cannon Street station reports an incendiary on the roof! On the dome!”

  Brand turned and looked at me. This is your task.

  “What?”

  This is for you. Go and protect the Cathedral.

  I looked about me, drew a breath of air to scorch my lungs, and ran for the gates.

  THE WORLD WAS on fire.

  Paternoster Row was ablaze beyond all hope of recovery or control, as maddened flames devoured the millions of books in the publishing houses. Ave Maria Lane was burning, but firefighters held their ground, struggling to wet the buildings with the weakened pressure of their hoses. The fires lit the street as brightly as day, so that I could clearly see the waist-deep rubble and pick my way across it as if in some monstrous children’s game.

  “Look at the dome!”

  I shielded my eyes against the heat and squinted at the glorious, iconic dome, catching the bright smoulder of an incendiary lying on the sloped lead roof. I ran as best I could across the treacherous terrain, mindful of sliding debris and hidden flames. Brand bounded beside me, far more agile.

  I could see members of the Watch scurrying about the Stone Gallery outside the base of the dome, hauling sandbags and stirrup pumps and rushing to several dots of fire scattered about the walkway. High above them glowed the lone incendiary, burning through its thermite.

  When its magnesium load caught, its fire would grow to white-hot, turning the dome roof to butter beneath it and dropping into the gap between the outer dome and the hidden supporting dome, where it would immediately ignite the wooden supports and heat-crack the brick structure, dropping all into the cathedral itself.

  That a single tiny device, less than the length of my forearm, should be capable of bringing down this great symbolic landmark brought me to fury. I rushed into the churchyard.

  The Watch was spread thin about the buildings, fighting fires in the roofs, in the gardens, in the library. Incendiaries had lodged in roof timbers and narrow pockets, and sandbags and individual buckets had to be hand-carried to these all-but-inaccessible nooks to smother them before their magnesium could catch. Everywhere were shouts of alarm and of orders.

  I climbed the stairs to the Stone Gallery and emerged into what should have been open air, but what was a view onto an inferno.

  Nearly two hundred feet below, the streets of London were yellow and orange, with abandoned fire trucks left where their tires had melted. Tornadoes of flame rose spiralling above the burning buildings, clawing high into the sky above me, as if to catch the German planes which had birthed them.

  Buildings on either side were engulfed in flame. All across the roof of the cathedral, men rushed from place to place, attacking smouldering incendiaries and calling locations of devices spotted on other roofs, shouting through the roar of the fires and the crash of collapsing buildings and the hot wind which blew flame and burning embers across roofs to spread anew.

  I turned and ran along the Gallery, looking upward for the incendiary on the dome. It was easy to pick out, burning against the solid backdrop of the dome itself, but I could not reach it.

  Brand had followed me, unnoticed like me in the fierce concentration of the battling Watch, and now we stared up at the tiny, treacherous thing. It still burned only thermite, but even by only the orange light of the towering flames we could see the discolouring around it as the lead exterior softened.

  I had once been inside the exterior dome, a private tour with a handsy guide. Great wooden beams spread across the gap between the decorative outer dome and the brick cone which supported both it and the seven-ton golden cross and ball above. I knew during raids the Watch patrolled along the open wooden beams, with careful balance of their buckets of water and little handheld stirrup pumps to throw water onto small fires.

  There was no means of fighting a large fire there.

  If an incendiary were to penetrate and lodge in one of the joints, there would be a brief scramble to extinguish it before the magnesium ignited and then the intense burst of heat and flame would be caught against wood and brick, and the three nesting domes would collapse together and drop onto the cathedral floor.

  Melt it out.

  I looked at Brand. “What?”

  It lies
on a slope, caught against lead. Melt the lead to the outside, so that it slides down the slope instead of burning through directly beneath itself.

  The incendiary would slide downhill like a child’s sled and drop onto the Stone Gallery, within easy reach of the Watch and their sand and water. “But—how can I do that?”

  Brand’s ears turned outward in irritation. You are a dragon’s child. Use your skill.

  I had no skill but survival. I had never had control of fire. Certainly I could not exhale it like the dragon tales of old.

  Draw it. Pull it. Stretch it.

  I looked up at the firelit roof.

  You can feel it just as I do.

  I knew Brand could sense fire. Could I? Could I—call it? Direct it?

  The wind from the south-west drove a hail of sparks and embers across us, stinging against my cheek. I could only imagine how it burned the Watch fighting fires across the lower roof.

  I concentrated on the incendiary, trying to grasp it in my mind. I had seen Brand alert to fire he could not see, but I had never seen him control it.

  You can sense it.

  Of course I could sense fire—I was standing on island of rooftop among blocks of devastated buildings. All around us was a sea of flames, broken only by the occasional spire of blackened stone which had not yet fallen. Smoke glowed orange and pink above us, a travesty of sunset.

  Brand was insistent. Reach for it.

  I took him literally and stretched my hand toward the glowing device, as if I could feel its warmth above the charring wind which swept the Gallery. I curled my fingers as if I could grasp it, and in my mind I pulled the flame like taffy, tugging it resisting toward me.

  The flame flickered.

  I did not think it was my doing. I had felt nothing, did not even know what I should feel, and there was a strong wind to pull it. But I continued, for there was nothing else to do and I would rather feel silly than helpless.

  The burning canister slid a few inches, catching against a seam of unmolten lead.

  Good, good, called Brand. Bring it down.

  I still believed it the wind rather than myself, but there was no point to arguing. If I were doing nothing at all, at least I was not hurting, and there was nothing else to be done. I tugged at the fire, drawing it toward the lower end of the device, urging it to soften the outer ridge of lead before the sheathing below it. The wind blew a hot gust against my face, making me squeeze my eyes against ash and sparks, and when I opened them the device was a hands-breadth lower.

  Bring it down!

  There were voices near me, the Watch shouting to one another, but I did not let myself be distracted. I clasped my hands before my chest, squeezed my fingers as if I could actually catch the flame within them, and tugged.

  The incendiary rode a smear of melted lead and rolled free, hitting the steep drop of the dome and tumbling to the Stone Gallery. My heart leapt with triumph, even if it were only my imagination that I had done it.

  A host of cheers rose into the hot air, along with sharp cries of “Smother it! Smother it!” I turned and saw several members of the Watch converging on the device, crushing its fire with the pitiful remnants of sand they carried.

  “It must have melted out, maybe the weight on the outside.”

  “Was that the only one?”

  “Only one which stayed on the dome. There was a whole cascade of them what hit it and bounced everywhere. Still fires in the roof timbers.”

  “What are you doing here, miss?” This fireman, streaked black with smoke and sweat, was curious.

  “I came to help,” I said, trying to think of how I might be helping in a way which required less explanation. “I was carrying buckets. The mains are out.”

  He nodded. “No water to be had, that’s the truth.”

  “Help!” This was from someone new. “Fire in one of the pocket roofs, and we have men trapped!”

  We followed him to the fire. It did not occur to the Watch to warn me back; every capable hand during a raid was welcome. While men generally handled the pumps and hoses against the fires, women drove the trucks of petrol through burning streets to refuel the fire-fighting equipment.

  The fire had caught in one of the pocket roofs, the space behind an arch, and penetrated to the timbers in the hidden space between the roof and the nave’s ceiling below. The fire was contained, but only just; sand and water kept it from spreading across the roof, but there was a wall of fire cutting off the far end of the space. We hung back, shielding our faces from the heat.

  “We’ve got them all out,” called a Watch member as we arrived, “all but one. Damned fool won’t rush the flames to come through, but that means he’s trapped for certain against the far wall.”

  “He’s got to come out through that?” One of the men who had come from the Stone Gallery looked dubiously at the flames.

  “We need water. No way to fight that down.”

  “He’s afraid to come out through it,” a man observed without judgment. “Sure, he’ll burn if he does, but he’ll burn if he doesn’t. Least here we can catch him and smother him out. If he stays, he’ll die there.”

  “Where’s more sand? How much do we have? Can we make a path in?”

  “We’ll never find him in the smoke, if he’s even still standing.”

  “We’ve got to try, haven’t we? What have we got?”

  As they conferred, eyes on their dwindling resources, I took a breath and stepped into the fire.

  It took all my courage and more. While I remembered surviving in the projection booth, and while I had touched fire unharmed more than once in the past year, it still required an incredible act of will to step into flames my own height. If Brand had not walked beside me, I am not certain I would have done it.

  Brand seemed to almost disappear in the fire, moving through it as if he were dark flame itself, so it was difficult to follow him and I had to press on in what I thought was a straight line. The smoke was so thick I could not see where I went, despite the flame all around, and what I breathed should have sickened me.

  My blood rushed through me as if I were on a Coney Island coaster. I should have been terrified, should have been thinking of the poor man I’d come to find, and instead I felt a strange thrill or glory.

  Here!

  I found Brand beside the huddled figure of a man, clinging to himself on a patch of exposed brick against the outer wall. His stirrup pump lay abandoned beside an empty bucket. I rushed to them, wobbling as my shoes broke apart.

  You know him.

  I reached the man and seized him. “Come on! Can you walk? We have to go!”

  He looked up at me, eyes wide with terror and surprise, and I saw it was Harry.

  He recognized me, too. He saw the woman he had left to die in an inferno, who now had come for him in the flames at his own death. “I’m sorry,” he whispered through cracked lips. “I’m sorry. I was afraid. I’m afraid now. I’m sorry.”

  For an instant I felt a perverse pleasure in his horror, and then I concentrated on the job at hand like the WVS woman I was. If a job needs doing, it will be done. “Get up,” I said. “We’ve got to get you out of here.”

  He twitched away from my hand. “I don’t want to go,” he said. “Not where you’re taking me. I’m sorry! I don’t want to—”

  I slapped him hard across the face. “Does that feel like a spectre’s hand?” I snapped. “I came to help you to live. Sort your soul once we’re out of this. Come on!”

  I pulled him to his feet and steadied him; the smoke was taking its toll. Brand went ahead of us, passing through the fire, but I had to choose the less intense ways for Harry and myself.

  He was terrified, and I had to drag him forward. “Hurry—don’t give it time to catch you.” He squeezed his eyes shut as we stepped into the flame.

  I knew better now the stretch between us and the waiting Watch, and we burst free in a rush. Cheers went up as two men rushed forward to put out his burning clothing. Harry stumbl
ed and went to his knees.

  “Good Lord, miss,” a Watch member said, “you put us all to shame. We didn’t even see you go until you were already disappearing into the fire.”

  I smiled, patting out my blackened and smoking uniform. The wool had resisted catching fire, which made my lack of obvious injury slightly less implausible. “I didn’t want you to try and stop me.”

  “I’m glad we couldn’t. He’s glad, too.”

  Harry was staring at us. “Can—can you see her?”

  The Watch member laughed. “Did you think she was an angel, coming for you?”

  Harry’s face suggested he might yet think otherwise.

  “Get them down to fresh air—what there is of it—and first aid,” another man ordered. “And let’s do what we can for this.”

  THE ALL-CLEAR sounded, which meant firefighters could work without fear of fresh bombs exploding over them. Dawn revealed the full devastation. The area around the Cathedral was ruins, a wasteland of rubble which, though contained, continued to burn for days. But the dome stood unvanquished, an island of faith and perseverance in the smoky sea of London.

  They called it the Second Great Fire of London. Over one hundred thousand incendiary bombs had fallen upon the city, starting over one thousand five hundred fires which were visible in the night from one hundred miles away, and we had borne up under it. St. Paul’s still stood, towering above the smoke. London could, as ever, take it.

  A few weeks later, two men were waiting for me as I arrived for my WVS duties. They had the suits and undefinable air of government men. One wore aviator sunglasses. “Can I help you?” I asked, taking a notepad from a desk and a pencil from the incendiary tailfin we used as a holder.

  “We understand you were present at the defence of St. Paul’s,” the man without sunglasses said, his hands folded before him. “Is that correct?”

  “I was.”

  “You were seen near where the burning incendiary fell off the dome,” he continued, his voice neutral, “and then you participated in the rescue of an entrapped Watch member.”