فصل 08 - بخش 02

EIGHT

The winter wind was howling like an animal. All night long it had been growing stronger, blowing from the sea, across the salt marsh, through the trees. The four winds rule the coast, as they rule the sea itself. The white men knew them even better than my own people did; it was by catching the wind in the sails of their ships that they had come here. But though they were brave in chancing their lives to the sea and the winds, they would never be able to control them.

As the wind grew louder and louder outside the Medlycott house, I could feel its voice driving into John’s sleep. He woke, suddenly, like a fish jumping. The dark little room that he shared with Thomas and Ezra was creaking under the force of the gale.

Ezra was snoring, oblivious. Thomas lay silently asleep. The air was very cold. John curled himself into a ball under his rough blanket and tried to go back to sleep, but his body began to tell him that it required him to get up. He ignored it. He curled himself tighter. Get up! said his body. Get up, or I’ll have you piss the bed!

John sighed. He rolled sideways out of the blanket, to sit on the wooden platform that he shared with Thomas, and he reached for the chamber pot that waited in a corner of the room for their nighttime emergencies. It wasn’t there. Somebody had taken it away to be emptied, and forgotten to bring it back.

The wind moaned through the chinks in the planked wall of the house. Thomas made a snuffling sound and turned over, taking much of the blanket with him. John sighed again. He pulled on his jerkin, pushed his feet into his shoes, and lifted the bar that held the outside door shut. The wind snatched the door so fast that he was outdoors in an instant, pushing it back, reaching for the bar that would hold it shut from the outside. When it was secure he pushed his way against the wind to the trees at the edge of the yard, where he could relieve his insistent body without the piss blowing back at him.

Buttoning his pants, he looked up at the clouds scudding across the starlit sky—and suddenly froze. Up on the roof of the Medlycott house, sparks were showering out of the log chimney, a long stream of sparks like a blazing fountain. The wind caught them up, whirled them about, dropped them on the roof. As John watched, paralyzed, he saw a flame leap up with the sparks.

And the wind whirled the flame down from the chimney to the thatch, and in an instant the roof was ablaze.

“Fire!” John yelled. “Fire!”

He ran forward to the bucket of water that stood always outside the door, but the water was solid ice.

“Fire!” he yelled again.

There was a banging inside the door in front of him, and he realized that he had shut Ezra and Thomas in. Hastily he pulled up the wooden bar, and they came tumbling out.

“Never latch that door with folk inside!” Ezra yelled at him angrily—and then he saw the burning roof, and his voice changed. “Thomas, wake everyone, get them out! John, buckets from the workshop—come with me!”

Thomas dived back to the room and through its inside door, shouting urgently. John ran across the yard with Ezra to the workshop. The wind blew billows of black smoke around them from the burning thatch, and the flames crackled in the chimney-top. Inside the workshop, John groped up at the wall where the buckets hung, and began pulling them down.

“The ladder first!” Ezra shouted to him, and together they hauled a short heavy wooden ladder out into the yard.

William Medlycott came rushing out of the house holding a musket, his jerkin flapping, his hair wild. He headed for the trees.

“Are we attacked?” he called.

“The roof!” John yelled. “It’s on fire!”

For a second Medlycott gazed uncertainly into the darkness, then swung round to where John and Ezra were propping the ladder against the edge of the burning roof. The flames roared in the wind.

Ezra ran back to the workshop, grabbed an axe, and began chopping at the layer of ice on the giant water butts that stood near the well and its pump in the yard. They were kept always filled; it was one of John’s regular tasks every evening.

“Buckets, John!” Ezra shouted, and John ran for them.

Medlycott, bigger and stronger than either of them, dropped his gun and came to dip the buckets and swing them down. Turn by turn John and Ezra carried them to the ladder and tried to throw the water up at the flames. Much of it splashed back at them, soaking them, ice-cold. The fire blazed on.

“Stop!” Medlycott yelled. He turned back toward the house, where smoke was starting to drift out of the door. “The house is beyond help, in this wind—come, make sure everyone is out!”

So they ran through the smoky back room and into the kitchen, where Mistress Medlycott and Thomas were herding the children through the front door, grabbing blankets off the beds to wrap round them. The younger boys were seizing pots, clothes, furniture—anything movable that could be saved from the fire. Small Sarah was sobbing. Her mother gave her a quick hug, then looked round, alarmed.

“Matthew! Where’s Matthew?”

John was standing beside the ladder that led to the upper floor; he knew the children slept up there. He stared up, and could see only smoky darkness. Taking a big breath, he clambered up the ladder and into the low room; it was filled with smoke and very hot, and he could see streaks of fire through the planks above him. He crawled all round the space, but found nobody—only two blankets, which he dragged out behind him.

“He’s not here!”

Choking in the smoke, he dropped the blankets down the ladder and followed after them. Ezra, waiting, looked wildly round kitchen and bedroom, and saw that a corner of the big bed was still covered by the curtain that these people hung round their beds to keep out the winter cold. He pulled down the curtain and found the little boy hiding terrified behind it, curled into a ball.

“Matthew! Come out!”

John was bent over, coughing. With his free hand Ezra grabbed him by the sleeve and dragged him, along with small Matthew, outside into the air. The yard was full of the snapping of the fire now, and flames were licking up into the sky, blown sideways by the wind. It was not blowing directly at the other buildings, but in the flickering red light of the flames the roof of the workshop looked perilously close.

Medlycott came rushing out of the house with a great armful of metal plates and mugs. “That’s the last! Priscilla, no one must go in anymore—the smoke can kill.” He stared up at the roof, his face glistening with sweat. “We must wet down the workshop roof, so that the fire will not spread. Ezra, Thomas, come with me. Willie, help thy mother with the little ones. John—are you all right?”

John took a wheezing breath. “Yes,” he said hoarsely.

“Run to the farm for help. Though only the good Lord can help us now, I believe.”

John was halfway out of the yard when he heard Ezra yell after him, “Be careful of the ice!”

Even so, he slipped and fell twice on the uphill track to the farm of their nearest neighbor. In winter, even the swiftest runners of my own tribe were slowed down by the frozen earth. The track was dark, but he could see his way by the glow from the burning roof. At the farmhouse, John yelled, “Fire! Help! Fire!” at the top of his voice, and because there was a constant danger of fire amongst these people, as amongst my own, the instant the farmers heard him they knew what to do.

In a very short time several men were running back down the hill with John, carrying a cluster of buckets made not from wood but from deer hide, as we make ours, and with long twig-brooms. The farm must have been the community’s center for the fighting of fire. Two of the men even pushed a great tub already filled with water, set in a frame with a wheel on either side.

But no men and no water could help the Medlycott house by the time they arrived there. It was fully ablaze, with flames leaping out of its windows, and the voice of the fire was triumphant and loud. Mistress Medlycott and the children had retreated to the barn where the animals were kept, dragging all their saved possessions with them, and that was a good thing, for very soon, with a great whoompf sound, the roof of the burning house fell in. Scraps of burning wood flew all over the yard like fiery birds.

The men scattered, but not for long. Within moments they joined the work of wetting the roofs of the other buildings, with a chain of people moving buckets of water from the well, where John and Thomas were taking turns at the pump. And together they saved everything that the Medlycott family owned, except the house in which they had lived. The strong wind that had spread the fire also drove it to burn down very fast, so that the blazing walls shrank lower and lower, and the danger to the workshop shrank with them.

Outside the barn, Mistress Medlycott began to sob as her house disappeared, and the youngest children clustered round her and tried to make comforting noises, as if they were the parents and she the child.

The chain of buckets stilled and the farmer came to the pump to stop Thomas and John. “Well done,” he said.

“James Burton, I am greatly in your debt,” said Master Medlycott wearily.

Burton put a hand on his shoulder. He was a heavyset man with thick white hair, full of cinders now. “We are all children of the Lord,” he said. “And praise God that nobody is hurt. Take heart, William—we shall all help thee rebuild.”

Where there had been a fine tall house, there was now a great wide mound of glowing embers, with flames still ruffling to and fro as the wind blew. John could see the stars again now, prickling the dark sky; all the clouds had blown away, and the wind was not so strong as before. Master Burton set two of his men to watch the embers, and the animals in the barn, who had been to leeward of the fire and smoke but made restive by the noise and light. William Medlycott insisted on staying too. John saw that he had his musket with him again.

Burton took everyone else to his farm, where his wife made hot drinks and bundled the children into bed with her own. The others crowded round the wide fireplace, looking with new eyes at the log chimney above it. In all these houses, as in our own, people could only survive the winter cold by keeping a fire banked with dirt overnight, sleeping but alive.

“You must build your new chimney of stone,” said Mistress Burton to Mistress Medlycott, “and so should we.”

Priscilla Medlycott nodded. She sighed, and sipped her chamomile tea. “Stone was too costly and too slow when first we came,” she said. “But if we had not built our chimney out of logs and clay, the house would still be there.”

Ezra was sitting on a stool in the shadows, with John and Thomas. “The chimney may not have been at fault,” he said. “Perhaps a savage set the fire. They have been known to fire burning arrows at thatched roofs, Master Medlycott said.”

“Not here in Marshfield,” Mistress Burton said.

“Nor in Plymouth,” said John. “And I saw our chimney catch fire tonight.”

“In other places,” Ezra said doggedly.

“I heard that too,” said one of Burton’s sons. “We kept watch every night against savage attack, when first we built our house.”

Ezra said, “We should keep watch still. The heathen is not to be trusted.”

John had been feeling friendly toward Ezra for the way he had rescued him from the smoke, but the friendliness suddenly faded. He said, surprised by his own boldness, “In Plymouth I saw a house burn down, but that was the same, a chimney that caught fire at night, and no Indian came shooting burning arrows ever.”

Ezra turned his head and looked at him with scorn.

“John Wakeley,” he said, “you are a child.”