Page 128 of Circle of Days

The farmers had reaped their wheat and stored the grain. They had plowed up the stubble. There was now no need to carry water from the river to the fields: they would not sow seeds until the spring. Pia’s back no longer ached.

There was still plenty to do. They collected nuts and forest fruits and stored them for the winter. Yana made plenty of cheese, mixing the goat’s milk with mallow leaves for a hard product that would last.

The younger farmers were curious about what the herders were doing on the edge of West Wood. One morning Pia, carrying Olin, strolled along to look, and found half a dozen others, including Duff, watching. There was a cold east wind, and Olin was wrapped in a lambskin.

The work was almost finished. They had built the bank and ditch and were now clearing a space on the west side of the strip, turning the earth, making a dark pathway a couple of paces wide.

Pia pointed at the dark pathway and said to Duff: “What is that strip for?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I asked one of the herders and he didn’t know either. He said Scagga just wanted it that way.”

Between the bank and ditch and the dark pathway was a pile of vegetable detritus half as high as Pia and about twenty paces wide. It would have to be cleared before the path could be used by cattle. That job would take many days, she guessed.

Scagga was lining up his workers along the strip, facing into the new gap and with their backs to the wood. Pia noticed that each of them carried some kind of implement: a flat shovel, a wide piece of wood, an old worn leather mat.

Then several more people came along with blazing torches, setting fire to the pile of cut greenery in the middle. “Oh!” said Pia. “I didn’t know they were going to do this!” It would be a lot quicker than carrying the debris, she realized.

Duff said: “The dark path is a fire break, to prevent the flames spreading to the rest of the wood.”

Pia frowned. “I wish it was wider,” she said.

Duff said: “The people standing there with shovels and so on are there to beat the fire if it threatens to spread.”

Pia was somewhat reassured.

The debris caught quickly and blazed up. Everything in the wood was dry after three summers of drought. It was surprisingly fierce, and Pia and the other farmer spectators moved away and stood behind the line of beaters, for safety.

The fire made a roaring sound. Smoke rose in the air, and Pia could feel the heat. The flames reached higher, and sparks flew over the heads of the beaters into the virgin wood. The beaters moved quickly to put out small fires. Pia and the other farmers moved farther back.

Pia noticed that some woodlanders had appeared and were watching with scared faces from behind the bushes.

She wished she had not brought Olin. She decided to get away from the fire and just go home. She turned toward the river.

There was a gust of wind. Suddenly dozens of small firesbroke out around Pia. The beaters could not put them all out, and those they failed to reach spread quickly. Pia’s way to the river was blocked by flames, and she turned west, breaking into a run, heading deeper into the wood. Olin instantly felt her stress, and began to cry.

The fire grew with terrifying speed. Trees were aflame, their branches and leaves blazing; bushes and saplings crackled and smoked; the dry brown grass was consumed. The beaters gave up and ran with the farmers, and a feeling of panic spread. Pia suffered the appalling fear that she and Olin would be caught in the flames and would burn to death. Terror gave her a choking feeling.

It was hard to run in the dense woodland. In her rush she stumbled and fell to her knees, but no one stopped to help her up. She struggled to her feet and staggered on.

Forest animals came out of hiding and ran past her: a pair of roe deer, a fox family with cubs, a dozen hares. Countless smaller creatures scurried between her feet: voles, dormice, squirrels, and hedgehogs.

The other farmers were getting ahead of her, because she was encumbered with Olin and could not run so fast. Then one came back to help her. It was Duff. He took Olin from her so that she could move faster. She saw that he held the baby securely, pressing the little body to his chest, with one hand under Olin’s bottom and the other behind his head. Together they stumbled and dodged through the vegetation. The heat on Pia’s back eased and she knew she was getting farther away from the advancing flames. Duff might have saved her life.

He angled southwest, heading for the river, and she followed. They ran just ahead of the flames. Suddenly Pia felt an agonizing pain on the top of her head and realized that her hair had caught fire. She screamed. At that moment they burst out of the wood onto the riverbank. Duff put an arm around her and the three of them fell into the water. Pia’s head went under and the agony on her head changed to soreness. She surfaced and looked for Olin.

Duff was swimming on his back, holding Olin in front of him so the child could breathe, heading across the river. Pia could have wept with relief, except that she did not have the energy to cry. She was not much of a swimmer but she could doggy-paddle a short distance, and they both made it to the other side.

The vegetation was low scrub. No sparks flew here from the fire: the wind was in the wrong direction for that. All the same, Pia and Duff moved away from the river as far as the start of the hill before they sat down, exhausted.

Pia took Olin from Duff. She removed his lambskin, now sodden, and rubbed him dry with leaves from a bush. It was only when he fell silent that she realized he had been crying ever since she started running.

She slipped her shoulders out of her tunic, held Olin to her bare chest, and let him suckle. The heat of her body and the warm milk soothed him.

She looked across the river. West Wood was ablaze. She could feel the heat even from here. The fire was rapidly moving west, driven by the east wind. Surely, she thought, it wasn’t possible that the entire wood should be consumed? Then where would Bez and his tribe live?

She looked at Duff. “You came back for me,” she said to him. “No one else helped me, but you ran back into the fire.”

“I saw that you couldn’t run fast enough, carrying the little one,” he said. “The fire was going to catch up with you.”