There was less smoke than I'd have imagined. Although my eyes stung and watered all the time, that too could be ignored, like the various smells, and for a long time I had not choked, coughed, or been out of breath. I suspected that there must, after all, be a slight breath of air away from us. Perhaps it was a breeze created only by the fire, sucking air from our side.
The firemen were now attempting a desperate enterprise. Now that there was an apparent toehold across in the blazing town, one of the engines was going to attempt to cross the dry river bed.
Personally I thought the attempt was several kinds of a mistake. The last few minutes had shown that the two engines, given an adequate supply of water, could accomplish something from this side of the river. They had won back a little from the fire. And even if it was scorched earth that they gained, an area that the fire had finished with and no longer wanted, even if the area represented only a fraction of one per cent of the total area of Shuteley, the process could be repeated. Unfortunately there was no road along this side of the bank, but the engines could travel along the lanes and reach the bank from other vantage points, the one from which we had first seen the fire, for example, and do what they had done here.
The ladders could be used to enable water to be sprayed over a wide area on the other side. Of course it would turn to steam, but that was all right: it took about six times as much heat to convert water to steam as it did to raise it to boiling point.
Also I thought, that it was too soon to attempt to cross to an area which had so recently been red with inner heat. Water falling on hot stone or metal draws off surface heat, but the glow wells up again to the surface. I doubted that even the firemen in their asbestos boots could stand anywhere across the river yet, and I was quite certain that the rubber tires of the machines would be burned off them in seconds. And although the heat here was just bearable (because we had to bear it), we had been insulated all along by the breadth of the river, which, though dry, had never burned. Across the river the firemen would be on ground which had only recently been surrendered by the flames, and that much nearer the heart of the blaze and its fierce, searing heat.
Besides, I didn't think the vehicles had one chance in a hundred of making the crossing. They were ordinary fire tenders, designed rather for getting to the scene of an outbreak at top speed than crossing impossible terrain. They might cross grass or rough country, but they weren't tanks or tractors. They had four rubber-shod wheels (intact, true, because someone had had the sense to shield the vehicles with wet tarpaulins) and they were heavy.
The bed of the river was a U -- not a deep U, for the Shute was never deep, not even where it ran into the much larger river that flowed on to the sea. Yet the Shute was no brook. It had flowed steadily along the same course for thousands of years, millions for all anyone knew, and the bed had gradually deepened, silted in the middle, perhaps, but with ever-steepening outer walls.
Even if a tender could drive down one side of the bank and cross the swampy bed, could it ever get up the incline on the other side?
I was certain it couldn't.
Sayell, however, was determined. He wasn't going to wait, either. A dozen men were stamping along the bank, grassy here, trying to establish where best to make the attempt.
A fleeting thought occurred to me. Sayell was probably no fool, even if his brother was. He was probably reasonably well trained in fire-fighting techniques. But he was no genius, and the situation which faced him had never faced anybody before.
Fires don't wait for the experts, the bosses, the generals, politicians and scientists to turn up. In an hour or two this area wonid be swarming with people -- all of whom could have handled the situation better than any of us, between cups of tea. I remembered, irreverently but not irrelevantly, how Gulliver put out the Lilliputians' fire. Some man-mountain could have done the same for us, if only he happened to be there.
Unfortunately, we were right out of man-mountains at the present time. Chance had elected poor honest not-too-bright John Sayell as the man in charge. And I knew already, he'd be pilloried. Whatever he did, he should have done better. If Shuteley was annihilated -- and anyone from this side of the river could see it already was -- well, he couldn't have done worse.
But he still didn't have to commit the criminal irresponsibility of staking all on the impossible, thus abandoning the small, yet important, things which were possible.
I strode through his crew. "Sayell . . . " I said.
The look he turned on me was that of a tortured man. "Mr. Mathers," he said, being civil with an enormous effort, "you've done two good things tonight. You found a water supply, and you got your wife to clear the bystanders out of our way. But now we have to -- "
"Now you have to do the right thing," I said, "because there's nobody else to do anything. Have you checked the foot-bridges?"
He said a coarse, derisive word. "They're wooden," he said. "What chance . . . for God's sake, man, get out of my way."
"For God's sake, man," I said, "remember that you didn't think it worth while looking at the Winshell brook."
That didn't reach him: Debating points don't register when you're in the glare of disaster, when you only have to turn your head to see it.
"There's the fire," he said. His voice, I noticed for the first time, was raw. He had been shouting. "We're going to put it out. Please let me get on with it, Mathers."
As he dropped the "Mr." for the first time, his self-control broke again and he added: "Out of my way, man, or by God I'll knock you senseless with my axe."
I stood back. Perhaps I should have fought with him, tried to depose him as overlord of the tiny, laughable army which was the only weapon with which the Great Fire of Shuteley could be fought, at the only time when it mattered, when something still might be done.
But what was the use? He knew something about fighting fires, and I, apart from fire risk, knew nothing. I had failed long before Sayell had a chance to fail. It was up to me, indirectly and yet significantly, to do all I could to see that something like this could never happen in Shuteley. A few years ago, a few months ago, even a few hours ago, I could have saved hundreds of lives which had now ended . . .
My thoughts stopped there. In a disaster such as this, there comes a time when you have to count the cost, but it's only natural to delay it as long as possible.
In the back of my mind I had thought all along: I wasn't here. I don't know what happened. Maybe there was a small fire among the timbered houses on the green. Maybe people stood around watching it, until it spread and they had to move away. Maybe it was gradual, quick but steady, and every area was cleared as the fire took over. Maybe nobody died in the fire. If it was steady enough in growing, that could happen.
There must have been a lot of noise. People couldn't have missed what was happening watching TV, became quite early on the electricity must have gone and all the TVs must have gone off.
Dina would have been one of the first to know what was going on. She must have enjoyed it -- a magnificent bonfire, the greatest spectacle she had ever seen.
Dina, I suddenly realized with utter certainty, had escaped the disaster. Despite her feeble-mlndedness (I used the brutal expression for almost the first time because at such a time the natural tendency was to print everything bold and clear) she had the kind of abilities, physical and mental, which would make her The Most Likely Person To Survive. She would enjoy a fire, untouched by tragedy, uninterested in its wider significance . . . but the moment the fire seemed to be getting out of hand, she would know, with animal cunning (after all, compared with any animal, even the most sagacious, she was a genius) that now was the time to go somewhere else. And she was supremely capable of doing it. She didn't smoke, didn't drink, didn't overeat or take drugs, and had never been ill in her life. Nobody in the whole of Shuteley could get from one place to another quicker than Dina once she had made up her mind.
Dina was alive and well (even if Miranda couldn't be trusted).
&n
bsp; Sheila, I knew, was alive, well, and not even scorched.
Gil, Jota, Miranda -- the other people I cared about -- were probably all right too. Miranda would certainly be all right. She was with the giants. I hadn't had time to think much about the giants since I was driving back from the roadhouse, but I took it for granted that none of them had suffered in the slightest degree in the fire. It was our affair, not theirs. Somewhere, they were standing outside it, watching, enjoying the fun.
So, selfishly, I tried to put the disaster in proper perspective -- for me, it could have been a lot worse.
Yet Sayell was sending the first of his tenders across the river -- and that bothered me. To do the man justice, he leaped on it as it reached the bank at the selected place. Irrationally, like all good commanders, he wouldn't send his men where he wouldn't go himself.
The tender rushed down the incline. Still, the spot had been chosen carefully and sensibly. The vehicle stayed upright, it managed to slow (by gears, not brakes, I guessed) at the bottom and started the crossing.
There was irony and tragedy in what happened to it then. Comic tragedy, I guess, if a town had not been burning to death only a short distance away.
What looked like reasonably solid mud on the left side of the engine was merely earth mixed with water in misleading proportions, if you judged simply by the eye.
The tender keeled over on its side and commenced to sink in the mud.
Chapter Seven
Nobody was hurt, except in spirit. The firemen, mud-covered scarecrows, clambered back up the dry river bank. Sayell saw me and set a course that would take him as far as possible from where I was standing. I could do him a big favor by ceasing to exist.
The tender in the river bed, of some value just a few seconds earlier, was now so much junk. And the other tender could accomplish just half what had been possible a couple of minutes ago.
I knew how Sayell felt. In the face of disaster, continuing disaster, you had to do something. You had to try anything that might do some good. If it failed . . . well, you'd tried.
I left the group of firemen, knowing that if there was somewhere where I could be useful, it wasn't there. Sayell wouldn't listen to me. He was on a razor's edge. The fact that I had been right two or three times and he had been wrong would make it utterly impossible for me even to get him to listen to me again.
Sheila wouldn't need help with the children and old people over the hill. She was young and strong and didn't dither, and in emergency anyone old or young would be glad to obey such a leader. It was when people hadn't a leader, or only a quasi force-of-circumstance unconfident leader like Sayell, that everybody ran about like frightened hens.
I moved back the way I had come, along the river behind the huts. Since there was nothing particularly useful I could do this side of the river, I should get across to the other side. Although I couldn't cross where I was, and would die if I did, it would be necessary to go only a few hundred yards in either direction to be able to cross either the bed of the river or the river above the obstruction.
There might, I thought, be a chance of clearing the blockage which had dammed the river. That would certainly help, if it could be done. A river running past a fire like this was better than a dry bed. At the very least, it was a firebreak.
I wasn't really thinking, merely reacting as a human animal. Most other animals would have put as much distance as possible between them and the fire, but as a human being I had to sniff round the conflagration and see if there was anything to be done.
Some events are numbing, like a blow on the head which doesn't put you out but leaves you staggering through pain and nausea and dizziness and momentary blackouts. This was one. If you stared at the fire . . . well, you couldn't do it for long, and there was really nothing to see but glare and smoke and flame and horror, if you let your mind analyze what you were seeing. But anyway, after you'd had a glance or two across the river, you realized that you couldn't afford to watch the fire.
It was hypnotic as well as terrifying. There was flame motion, smoke pattern, that caught you and held you like the one movement in an utterly still scene. Your eyes could water and smart, but a second would grow to a minute, ten minutes, and it would be an instant.
To retain the power of movement, the power of action, you stopped looking across the river.
I knew perfectly well that if I wanted to find people who had escaped from the blazing town, if I wanted to know how it happened, I should go the other way, downriver. Practically all the roads and lanes and other escape routes came out that way. Upriver on this side there was nothing but the track that led to my house and then curved away from the river to a few farms, and on the other, Castle Hill and a rubbish dump.
But the giants were upriver.
In retrospect it's strange that the giants and their part in what was going on could be practically ignored for so long.
Obviously, as I'd said to Sheila on that mad drive back to Shuteley, they were in this business up to their necks. At the least, they had known what was going to happen. At most, they were entirely responsible for it.
Yet if somebody starts a fire, a little fire that can destroy only a single house or a farm, if somebody standing beside you strikes the match and fires the hay, you don't go for him. Your first move, instinctive and correct, is to deal with the fire. Coldly, logically, it might be valid to go for the fire-raiser, to make sure he does no more damage.
But the fire-raiser might do no more damage anyway -- and the fire already exists.
The giants were still at the back of my mind, with what might well become known as the Great Fire of Shuteley taking all my attention.
Then, as I passed a gap through which the scene across the river could be glimpsed, I saw something that brought the giants right back into the picture.
It was one of those snapshot impressions you get as you pass the end of a lane, or a window, or a gap in a hedge. The brain takes the snapshot like a camera, the picture remaining often sharper and clearer than a scene you've viewed for ten minutes.
Between me and the dull embers of a building across the river which could burn no more, I had seen one of the giants -- over there. He was tall and blond, but he was not Greg. He wore what looked like a plastic coverall over a hump on his back. His eyes were hidden behind thick dark glasses.
The whole thing was so much like something in a horror film that I paused for a few seconds before going back, refusing to believe I had really seen him.
No one could live over there. No one could breathe. Certainly no one could walk in any kind of footwear I could imagine, because the ground was red-hot. And a plastic spacesuit would shrivel up instantly like a fertilizer bag thrown into an open fire.
I jumped back after that moment of disbelief, but of course the giant, even if real, was past my narrow angle of view. I burst through to the riverside, and there was nobody to be seen.
Yet I had seen him. The clear picture in my mind had beaten back the disbelief. He was neither Greg nor any of the giants I had consciously looked at. The picture didn't fade. I could still see it. Shutting my eyes, I could even notice things I hadn't noticed before.
What had looked like a hump must be the breathing apparatus which made it possible to walk through fire. The giant had been hurrying, not quite running, carrying nothing in his hands, under his arms or on his shoulders. He had worn a transparent plastic covering, enclosing his head and all the rest of him. Under the covering he seemed to have nothing but the hump. He was either naked or nearly so. Colors of things seen in such a setting could be anything at all, since yellow-orange-crimson flame filled the sky.
And one thing more -- he had not meant to be seen. You only have to glimpse an incompetent amateur sneak-thief for a moment to realize he's up to something and doesn't want to be observed. There had been something similar in the way the giant was hurrying. Possibly an obstruction had forced him to skirt the river for a few yards, visible from the other side. Deeper in the blazin
g town, he could not have been seen. Flames and smoke, if nothing else, would have swallowed him from view.
Although he had been hurrying downriver, back the way I had come, I didn't change my mind and go that way. If he really existed, if his incredible fire-suit really worked, no doubt he could walk through the middle of the fire as easily as he could skirt the edges. The people downriver would not see him, if he didn't want to be seen.
I went on. If one of the giants was wandering alone through the blazing town, the rest of them might be doing the same.
Including Miranda. "I think I'll be. seeing Dina," she had said. "We'll do something . . . "
She had also said: "No, I shan't see you again, Val."
Maybe she was wrong.
When I saw the blockage it was clear that explosives were going to be needed before the river returned to its usual course.
Snow White and the Giants Page 11