Darkburn Book 1: Fall by Tayin Machrie - HTML preview

Chapter 40

Yaret looked for what felt like a long time – a lifetime in shocked disbelief, although it was probably only minutes in reality. She searched the landscape for signs of human life: and she saw none. Beneath the hanging cloud of smoke the blackened area stretched in a wide radius all around the town. Nothing stirred. She realised that the smell was more than woodsmoke. Other things had burnt there too.

She hardly dared look over to her right. There, a couple of miles east of Obandiro, the familiar stand of trees appeared to be untouched – as far as she could tell from this distance. In a clearing amongst those trees was her grandparents’ farm.

At last she nudged Poda into a sedate walk towards it. She did not rush. In one way she wished never to arrive there. She could still – just – imagine her grandmother in the yard, looking up at her approach to say, Well, here you are at last! She kept scanning her surroundings and checking Poda for any sign of panic that might signify a darkburn; but Poda remained calm.

Some trees were indeed untouched. But as she drew closer to the farm more and more of them were burnt and broken. The track here had been trampled. The hedge was turned to a dark skeleton. She put out a hand to it as she passed and the burnt leaves crumbled in her fingers.

Beyond the hedge, the vegetable patch had been destroyed. Charred carcasses of goats lay in the ash-strewn paddock by the ruined remnants of the fences. The farmhouse – what was left of it – was a tumbled heap of black and grey. She dismounted from the horse and walked into the yard.

Something lay in the yard amidst the grey ash. Two burnt somethings. She could not tell which was which except by their relative sizes. She knelt down beside them.

“I’m so sorry,” she said into the smoky silence. “Oh, gramma, I’m so sorry. I should have been here.” She said Oveyn, twice, although it was wholly inadequate. Then she left the bodies of what were no longer her grandparents, burnt objects that were now meaningless, and walked slowly over to the house as if they might be there after all in some other guise.

But no memory of her grandparents or anything else remained in the ruins. The wooden walls had been demolished by fire. The two looms had fallen through the kitchen ceiling and lay amidst the ashes. There was nothing left to rescue. There was nothing to pick up and hug. She stood in the kitchen trying to take it in, trying to believe it, because her brain kept denying it and telling her those things outside were just… what? Trees? Goats? And that any moment Gramma would walk in, and purse her lips, and say,

“Well! What a mess. Just as well that we were out…”

But Gramma would not appear even in her imagination. There was nothing but a blackened stump where Gramma had once been.

Yaret stumbled out into the yard and threw up, violently, over the ashes of the wash-house. Then she sat down on the stone sink, weak and shaking. When she had fallen off the cliff she had felt no dread or shock or emptiness equal in any way to this. Her brain felt wiped of all sensation except the attempt to grasp the silent horror. It loomed in and out in great tides of nausea. This was real. This could not be real. This was real. While she sat, Poda ambled round the yard in mild bewilderment, looking for something to eat.

At last she got up on her feet again. She walked back into the house. This time she made herself touch the singed stones of the hearth and the charcoaled wood of the dead looms. All completely cold. A fire this size would have taken a long time to cool down. This had happened many days ago: a week at least. She stood still again, her mind a total blank until she forced it into thought.

She picked her way around the room. The cupboards were all burnt, any food they had contained now transformed to lumps and grains of black. One corner held shards of pottery. She picked up a smoke-stained bowl and watched it fall to pieces in her hand. A pile of spoons lay fused together on the floor.

Yaret looked up. There was nothing where the ceiling and the looms had been, except the open sky, grey like the ash around her, but a cleaner grey. She wished she was up there somewhere. Anywhere far away so that she did not have to experience this.

But it was her grandparents who had experienced it, not her. Of all the things they’d built their home from, sixty years ago, was nothing to remain? If anything was left, she had to find it.

The cellar. It was accessible only by a wooden trapdoor set into the stone flags of the floor. The trapdoor was half hidden now, between the fallen looms. Although it too was burnt to black its wood remained intact enough to cover the cellar’s entrance.

As soon as she tried to lift it by its iron ring, the trapdoor broke and crumbled. Beneath it the ladder was scorched but was still propped in its place; and when she began to descend cautiously it did not give way beneath her.

She stepped down to the bottom and in the dim light saw the sacks of oats and a smaller sack of flour, the boxes of apples, the shelf laden with cheeses. The roots that she had planned to dig up this week were piled in a corner. Gramma had been busy. Everything smelt of smoke but the food appeared to be unharmed. Well done, Gramma. Thank you. She lay down amongst the sacks for a while and thought of nothing but the smell of roots and earth and apples that seemed to go deeper than the smoke. She wanted to sleep. And not wake again.

Then she got up and climbed the stair back to the kitchen and went out to Poda. After leaning against the horse’s shoulder for a moment, she began to walk her first around the farmyard and then in a widening spiral round the farm.

There was no clue as to how it had begun. The cloth-house reeked of burnt wool, but not so much as a strand remained in there. The stable which once held her donkeys now held silence. In the orchard the blackened bones of trees stood to attention. Slowly she realised that the Farwth must have known of this burning. She touched a tree and wondered if some record of her touch would reach the Farwth through it. But no, this one was well and truly dead.

So were all the goats, not just in the paddock but the orchard. She started to count their bodies and then gave up, because there seemed to be no point. The sheep out in the fields might have survived but she had no inclination to go and look for them.

It took a while for her to find a patch of grass where Poda could be left to graze. Then she returned to the farmhouse. The objects that had once been her grandparents seemed to greet her as if they had already grown familiar. They looked not totally unlike darkburns. But they thankfully lay still.

Because she did not know what else to do she descended once more to the cellar and ate an apple and some cheese. Then she lay down again, and wept, and then slept, probably, because darkness came and went and left this next thing that must be another day. Somehow it had to be got through. But how? For what?

Slowly a plan formed. Not a plan, really, just a task. Something to do. Yaret climbed out of the cellar and trudged through the remnants of the house. Outside she found the small spring behind the cloth-house that was still bubbling into a pool of sodden ashes. There she washed and filled the waterskins, and forced herself to eat some biscuit. Remembered filling a waterskin beside a river: the smell of the approaching darkburn. A creeping shadow in a shroud of fear. The anger, grief, and desolation. The heat. The end of everything.

Darkburn. The thought came to her again when she fetched Poda and found the mare skittish and nervous. But that was probably just the smell and strangeness of the place, because once Yaret was mounted, Poda quickly settled down again. She trotted blithely along the narrow wooded track that led from the farmhouse to Obandiro and came out of the trees just above the mill.

Burnt, of course. But this was as good a place to start as any. So Yaret dismounted and led the horse down the track and to the mill, which was built of stone, not wood. Yet it was as thoroughly ruined as the farm, although unlike her own house the ruins were still warm. The fires had burnt for longer here.

She walked on to the miller’s house at the edge of town. Burnt, empty but for ashen relics. When she whispered her Oveyns her voice had almost vanished. The huge silence of the streets here overwhelmed it. In several places low loose drifts of smoke unwound and wound themselves in the caressing breeze: they were the only things that moved.

Street by street, leading Poda by her bridle, she carefully patrolled the town. As she walked she spoke aloud but quietly the names of those she knew. All gone, that was too evident. Menlo, Coret, Dalko, where are you now?

There was no one to reply. Nothing left except their names echoing into silence. In places the town was unrecognisable; yet elsewhere some stone buildings appeared almost intact until the blackened hollows of the windows gave away the nature of what lay inside.

Along her path lay numbers of charred corpses, like burnt effigies – so many of them that she almost gave up saying Oveyn. Some of them might have been trying to defend themselves: she saw amidst the ashes the grey glint of a knife. Intruders had been here then, either before or during the burning. Someone for them to fight.

In a corner of the village square she found the first dead stoneman. He was burnt too and identifiable only by the halo of stones set into his skull. She walked in a long circle round the town: more of the same, corpses, ashes, silence. A warmth still lingered in the ruined walls. The ash that filled the streets was damp with rain and roughly trodden down by many feet with strangely patterned soles – stonemen’s, presumably. At the north-east edge of town a second dead stoneman lay outside the forge next to what might once have been Shay the blacksmith.

She stepped across the bodies that were not even bodies, into the forge which was cold and still. Three swords were hanging on the scorched stone wall, their steel blackened. She stared at them for a long moment before nodding and stepping out again. They would be there later if she needed them.

Walking back into the Cross-street, for the first time she heard a noise.

At once she stopped and put a hand on Poda’s neck. Should have taken down one of those swords after all. Too late to go back now. But handier with a knife in any case. She drew it from her belt.

And then she thought more clearly. It had been a stealthy, scuffling, furtive noise. She did not think a stoneman had just made that sound. As she understood it, a stoneman would simply yell and charge, not hide.

So she put her knife back in her belt and said loudly, in Bandiran,

“Hallo? Is anybody there? I’ve been away for weeks. I’ve only just got back. What’s happened here?”

She waited. Nothing.

“I’m Yaretkoro, Ilo the weaver’s grand-daughter from the farm on the east road. Ilo is dead. I need to know what’s happened.”

Still silence. But a different sort of silence. And then there was a rustle: and a boy emerged from behind a wall and stood before her in the street, his clothes streaked grey with dirt and ash. He was, she judged, about fourteen. His eyes were wide and wary.

“Is there anybody else?” he said.

“I’m here alone,” said Yaret. “What’s your name?”

“Charo.” He stared at her as if she was not real.

“When did this happen, Charo?” she said gently.

“Two weeks ago. Where have you been?” His voice was urgent, almost accusing.

“Peddling cloth,” she said. “I got held up.” And now for the first time since arriving home she felt terribly afraid, in case those two weeks had been spent in desperate loneliness. “Charo,” she said, “are you the only one? Are you alone?”

“No.”

She felt a huge relief flood through her at the answer.

“But I’m the oldest. There are four of us.” He looked at her with a strange twist of his mouth. It might have been an attempt at something like a smile. “Five, now,” he said.

*

*****

*

End of Book 1

The tale continues in

Darkburn Book 2: Winter

*