Snow White and the Giants (13 page)

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).
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 blazing 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.
Shuteley Castle had stood on Castle Hill, the one piece of high ground
on the north side of the river, just above the Old Bridge. A ridge ran
along the south side, but on the north, only at the eastern extremity
of the town did the ground rise to any height. There the castle stood --
or had stood.
It had glowered across the town from a curious round mound which looked
so artificial that historians argued about the possibility that Saxon
serfs had piled Castle Hill high with nothing more than picks and shovels.
Anyway, the fire had spread round the bracken which fringed the hill. It
seemed that the bracken itself had held up the hill, for when it was
gone, the castle and most of Castle Hill had collapsed into the river,
taking the Old Bridge with it.
Above the obstruction the river tumbled into a hole which had not been
there before, making a small but quite impressive waterfall before dashing
itself against the huge mound of rubble which was all that remained of
the castle and the hill on which it had stood. The river tried to climb
over the mound, which was ten feet too high, and then took the path of
considerable, but least resistance and streamed off southwards in about
a dozen rivulets through a gap in the south ridge.
Until then I had not worked out that I'd either have to cross this side
of the obstruction or cross twice, first the diverted river and then
the river itself.
I didn't like the look of the streams rushing behind the ridge. They
were shallow but very fast. It would be impossible to keep my feet if
I tried to wade through, and when water flings you about you're liable
to crack your head on a stone.
It would be hazardous to try to cross the river bed on the west side of
the mount of rubble, because it was steep and very loose. And back the
way I had come the heat across the river was too fierce. Only close to
the blockage, where what remained of Castle Hill afforded some protection
from the heat, and where there was nothing left to burn on the other side,
crossing might be possible.
So I started picking my way across the obstruction itself.
After I'd gone about ten yards, climbing toward the top of the mound,
I found I couldn't go back. Loose earth and stones were sliding down the
slope under my feet, and the best I could do was slip two feet back and
gain three. If I tried to go back, I stood an excellent chance of being
buried alive.