Just Like You

Chapter 9: The fire in the forest

The war began sooner than Qama had expected. Caran came back very early in the morning two days after the explosion, this time with a hundred men. Most of them stood guard in case any Woodlanders were nearby. The others set fire to low-lying bushes and fallen branches at the edge of the clearing and waited as the flames spread to the trees.

The grass in the clearing went on fire too, but after allowing it to burn for a while the men stamped on it to prevent further damage. The ruined earth, with all life scorched out of it, acted as a barrier, so that although the fire gained ground in the woods it could not come near the crater. Caran, pleased that good work had been done, ordered the men to return home.

They came back the next morning to find a level of devastation which Caran thought satisfactory. An enormous area of forest had disappeared. The fire had been stopped mostly by lakes, rivers, large rock formations and the eastern coastline, though there also were places where it had mysteriously faded out. (The reasonable explanation was that it had encountered damp ground which prevented it from spreading further. According to a more fanciful one, it was content with the damage it had already caused, or perhaps its conscience would not allow it to cause any more.)

Animals had been burned alive, unable in their final agonies to escape because they could no longer control muscles which were being consumed by the flames while their lungs filled with thick smoke. Ten Woodlanders, three of them children, suffered the same fate because friends and relatives desperate to save them were forced back by the unbearable heat. Fifty more, who had spent their whole lives in this part of the forest, were now trying to make a living in areas unfamiliar to them.