Текст книги "Fire Logic "

Автор книги: Marks Laurie

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“Listen,” she said to the others, who stood in an aimless, stunned group. “The Sainnites have bigger plans than this tonight, or they wouldn’t be troubling themselves to secure the beacon. We need to learn what they are doing, and then we need to run messages to Willis, Perry, and Emil. Some of us need to go to the nearest farmholds to get help for the wounded and to carry away the dead. Do any of you watchers have a spyglass?”

They all walked the short distance to the overlook, where more bodies lay. It was impossible to see much in the dark, but the column of soldiers marching briskly towards them across the valley along the east‑west road would have been difficult to miss. Zanja handed back the spyglass to its owner. “I’ll carry the news to Perry and Emil,” she said, and began to run.

The pallid light of dawn was warming Zanja’s shoulders when the road began to edge its way around an appealing meadow, where anyone with any sense would break their journey to rest and water their horses, if they had them. She herself paused to fill her canteen at the brook, and then stood for a while, wasteful though it seemed to stand so quietly while disaster unfolded around her. Her thigh muscles quivered with fatigue, but surely the Sainnites also would be weary after marching all night, and even on a forced march would have to take the time to rest and eat. This meadow seemed a likely place for it.

She took herself up a gentle hillside on the far side of the road, and settled down among the dappled shadows to eat her honeycakes and fight off desire for sleep. Soon, a few outriders arrived on worn‑out horses, and while the horses were being watered, the riders searched their immediate surroundings for lurkers. The bulk of the army arrived soon after: 150 soldiers, Zanja counted, all heavily laden with the kind of gear that might support a long and rigorous journey.

Perry’s encampment now lay a hour’s journey to the south. Zanja got heavily to her feet, and as soon as she had found a deer path to follow she began to run again, which relieved her from the need for further thinking, until the path abruptly popped her into the channel of a chattering brook. On the other bank, Emil sat waiting for her. Stupid with exhaustion, she gaped at him. Two of his messengers lay under the trees nearby, apparently sleeping.

He said, “I sent a message to Perry some time ago, and I expect his entire company will arrive shortly. Have you alerted Willis and Daye?”

“Daye’s dead,” she gasped. “Attacked last night. Most of the company was killed. I was with them.” She sat down where she was, rather too quickly as her legs gave out under her. For a little time they sat in silence, with the brook between them. Then, Emil breathed in, white‑faced, and asked calmly for more information. She told him all she knew.

He sat silent. She groped for something more to say. “How did you know to send for Perry’s unit?”

“I heard a voice in my sleep. But when I awoke, it kept talking to me for a while. A voice in the sky. It was very strange. Perhaps,” he added, not much seeming to care, “I am losing my mind.”

Zanja looked around for any sign of a big, black bird. “Well,” she said, in a neutral tone. But in the midst of her exhaustion, she felt an extraordinary relief.

Chapter Twelve

Throughout the afternoon and into the evening, until they could no longer see the way, Zanja and her twenty companions made a swift, hectic journey through the woods, following a path cut through the wild lands that they jokingly named Bandit’s Road. The older Paladins told how that path had first been cut–how in the interval between planting and harvesting, Emil had recruited farmers and dray horses from all across the region to help in the enterprise, which none of them had thought necessary. Every year since then, a grumbling expedition walked the length of the path with saws and axes to clear away the year’s growth and deadfall. Now, more than one old timer patted Emil’s shoulder and apologized for cursing him behind his back.

The Bandit’s Road paralleled the east‑west road, but rather than meandering around the hills and wild lands, it cut directly through whatever lay before it, straight as a compass could make it. Zanja and her companions could not know how far ahead of the Sainnites they traveled, but that they were in fact ahead of them seemed certain.

That first night, Zanja awoke from exhausted sleep, and tottered out to the edge of their haphazard encampment. There she found Emil sitting by himself, weeping for his dead where no one could see him. She sat with him, dry‑eyed. In time, he wiped his face and in a rough voice admonished her for not resting when she had the chance.

“I’d say the same to you,” she said, “if you were not my commander.”

“My blasted knee keeps me awake. But I drank a potion for it and should be able to sleep soon.” He tilted his face back so the starlight shone on his deeply creased skin, and added, in a voice still hoarse with sorrow, “I’ve heard no speeches from the sky tonight.”

Zanja said seriously, “Surely the voice will speak again if it seems we need more guidance.”

“You believe we are watched over?”

“I believe the gods take the shapes of birds when they choose to speak to us.”

“I am not a religious man.”

They sat in silence, until Zanja said, “I imagine the Sainnites have their seer with them, and he will have realized by now that we are running ahead of them. So if we cannot take them by surprise, how are we to stop them from crossing the bridge?”

“Have you ever tried to shoot a mouse with a pistol?”

“I should think,” Zanja replied after a moment, “that any self‑respecting mouse would no longer be where it was, by the time the pistol ball arrived.”

“Exactly. And where would the mouse be instead? I doubt even the mouse knows.”

“So our best strategy is no strategy?”

“When seers predict the future, they are simply telling themselves stories, as you and I tell stories to each other. And they have the gift for knowing which of many possibilities are the most likely. The better educated they are, the better the stories they can tell themselves. But if all the possibilities are equally likely, then how will our enemy know where to point his pistol, and when to pull his trigger?”

“He will not know.”

“That’s what I hope. I suppose it depends on just how smart he is.”

After a moment, Zanja added, “No strategy? Willis won’t like that.”

“Don’t tell him I’ve been hearing voices.”

*

When Zanja last crossed this bridge, the river had been flooded. But even though spring thaw and mud were long past, it remained a most intimidating river that muscled its temperamental passage between the steep shoulders of the hills. It could not be safely forded, someone told Zanja. Before the bridge was built, the river was so much trouble to get across that few people bothered, which explained why Darton had so few inhabitants to this day.

A cottage stood by itself on the hillside above the sturdy bridge and the wild river, with a vegetable plot in the back and a fat, pampered cart horse running loose on the grassy hillside. As Zanja and her companions came down the road, having reached the end of Bandit’s Road and arrived at the east‑west road with no Sainnites in sight, a peculiar old man came trotting down the hill to meet them. “You pay a toll to cross this bridge,” he said, and counted heads and began doing calculations. Perhaps haggard, heavily armed brigands were an everyday sight to him.

Emil stepped forward. “Sir–”

“Don’t interrupt!”

“Sir, I am Emil, Commander of Paladins, South Hill Company. I regret to inform you that we have come to tear down the bridge.”

The bridgekeeper gaped at him. “You’ve got no right!”

“I am a ranking commander, authorized by the Lilterwess Council to act on behalf of the Shaftali people. I do have the right.”

Zanja had flopped down with the others by the side of the road, too stupefied with exhaustion to even consider the enormous labor that yet had to be accomplished that day. When the bridgekeeper submissively started his way back up the hill, Zanja somehow got her legs under her and tackled him, and almost immediately regretted it. The man uttered a harridan’s screech and swung his fist wildly, narrowly missing her nose. Still screaming, he fought her like a crazy man, slamming a foot into her shin and getting a good punch to her ribs before she managed to get him to the ground, with a dagger at his throat and a fist in his hair for good measure. “Check the cottage!” she shouted to her companions. “Stop fighting!” she yelled at him.

He let his muscles go limp, but then, wild‑eyed, turned his head and sank his teeth into her forearm. Zanja cut him then, and though it apparently took a moment for his pain to register, the man released his teeth from her flesh to shout in outrage, “You’ve killed me!”

“Dead men don’t argue,” said one of Zanja’s companions dryly, having come over, somewhat puzzled, to help restrain him.

Emil came down from the man’s cottage. “That little house is built like a fortress and is crammed with guns. With the clear shot he’s got of the bridge he could have held us off all day.”

They trussed the bridgekeeper to a tree, where he screamed curses until they plugged his mouth with a kerchief. Besides the cut in his neck, he had broken his hand punching it into the pistol that came between his fist and Zanja’s ribs. Anger seemed to be keeping him from feeling it, but he certainly would regret losing his temper soon enough. Zanja went up to the cottage to have the bite in her arm washed with soap. She and her companion returned to the bridge, lugging baskets of food ransacked from the cottage: preserved meats, bottled pickles, dried fruit, tins of crackers. Emil and the others had finished inspecting the bridge by then, and, standing in a group, they fished pickles from the jars with their fingers, chomped the dried fruit, and smeared preserved meat on crackers and ate them in a single mouthful. The luxury was wasted: they would have eaten raw horsemeat with just as much enjoyment.

“A good team of dray horses is what we need,” said one. “But that little horse on the hill won’t be worth the effort it will take to catch him.”

“What we need is Annis and a couple of bags of explosives.”

There was a murmur of agreement.

“What we have, however, is a couple of axes and our bare hands,” said Emil.

They glumly studied the sturdy bridge, jaws working, passing the pickle jars. “I guess we’d better get busy,” someone finally said.

They chopped through the massive timbers one by one, and pulled apart the rubble pilings, stone by stone. By sunset, the bridge had begun to groan. The river joined the game, pushing and pulling at the teetering structure, until the bridge collapsed into the water, and the river broke it up as though it were no more substantial than a sugar cake. Not one member of the company was unbloodied by then, but no one had been carried away in the collapse of the bridge, so they found the energy to utter a ragged cheer that was more relief than jubilation. Then Perry looked around at the battered company and said wryly, “Well, we’re in slightly better shape than the bridge, though not by much. Good thing there’s been no sign of the Sainnites. Rather than fight or escape, I’d beg them to put me out of my misery.”

The sun was setting. They dragged themselves a little way into the woods and lay down on the ground like wounded animals.

Zanja awoke with rocks embedded in her cheek and big black ants crawling through her hair. The members of her company were strewn like corpses across the hillside. Others moved among them in the mist, shaking them awake, offering to fill their porringers with porridge spooned from the kettle that two people carried between them. She turned and saw Willis squat down beside Emil to shake him vigorously by the shoulder.

“What were you thinking? You left the bridgekeeper tied to the tree, and he told us exactly where you had gone. If the Sainnites hadn’t turned around in their tracks–”

“What?” said Emil in a voice blurry with exhaustion. “When did they turn around?”

“We met them on the road before dark.”

“That was before the bridge fell.” Emil sat up, rubbing his face. “Shaftal’s Name! Were they just a decoy? What are the Sainnites up to in the flatlands, while all of South Hill Company is out of the way?”

Zanja felt a peculiar, urgent impulse to be alone. She got to her feet with difficulty, and limped into the woods, where night had not yet given way to dawn. With the awakening voices of her company sounding far away behind her, she sat upon a fallen tree cushioned with damp moss. She felt only half awake: some part of her still dreamed of the ringing ax and the scraping away of her skin on the heavy stones. Her wandering thoughts vaguely considered a young man, a Sainnite, cleverer and further‑seeing than she, who knew before she did what she was going to do next, and danced her on strings like a puppet at a fair. She noticed that in her bloody hand she clasped one of the bridgekeeper’s crackers, and she gazed at it in some bewilderment.

“What am I doing here?” she asked. Then, the storm‑battered doors of her mind creaked slowly open, and she broke the cracker to pieces and lay them on the log beside her. Like a shadow untouched by daylight, Karis’s raven appeared from the shadows and landed softly beside her.

These seven months of her reclaimed life had largely been filled with hectic and dangerous effort. In the peace of the wood, Zanja felt how illusory was all this activity, how empty her life truly was.

In a voice as racked as any smoke addict’s, she said, “Good raven, I brought you this bit of bread.”

The raven ate. Zanja said, “Your help has been vital these last few days. Even though the Sainnites may have tricked us, I am sure that if we had not destroyed the bridge, the Sainnites would have crossed it.”

The raven, his cracker eaten, turned on Zanja an intelligent gaze. “Zanja, at dawn for just a little while, my soul inhabits the raven.”

“Karis!” Zanja saw her hand reach out under its own power, as though to grasp the muscled arm of her friend and not the raven’s rasping feathers. “Karis!” she cried, but said no more, for the words that crowded forward were dangerous and filled with longing.

Karis said through the raven, in a voice as hoarse and frayed as her own would be at this hour, “I also am surprised. The raven is not supposed to be in South Hill.”

“I understand that. But I think he is watching over you. He intervened to help prevent the Sainnites from crossing into Darton.”

The raven–Karis–was silent. Whether her silence meant confusion or displeasure was impossible to know.

Zanja said cautiously, “Surely you did not think it would be too difficult for me to realize you live in Meartown.”

“Well, you aren’t supposed to know.”

“Like everyone in South Hill Company, I have good reason to protect the forges and furnace that provide our weapons. My reason is just more personal than most.” Zanja added, “And thank you for my dagger. It is such a fine blade that I sometimes think it could fight on its own. I often wonder why you have not made more of them.”

“Every time you bloody the blade, I know it, and I feel my responsibility. Therefore, I make carpenter’s tools, mainly. They are rarely used for killing.”

Zanja said, “Dear gods–and Norina allowed you to forge me a blade?”

“I never told her. I have the same problem with her blade, but she rarely has to use it. Listen, we haven’t got much time to talk.”

Zanja said hastily, “There’s a danger here that you should know about. The Sainnites have a seer, who is now in South Hill, using his vision to direct the actions of the soldiers. Do you know what happened in Rees?”

“Yes, I have heard about it.”

“That was the work of this seer. And now the same disaster is happening in South Hill. Emil and I together are clever, but I believe the seer has just proven to us that he is more clever still.”

The raven stared, then said in a low voice, “Now I am unnerved.”

“No more than I.” And Zanja, was, indeed, deeply afraid, with the kind of fear no soldier dares admit to, upon realizing that defeat was all but predestined.

Karis said abruptly, “I must go.”

“But won’t you tell me what you can do to help us?” Zanja cried. But the raven spread its wings and was gone, and she sat alone in the bird‑loud wood, as the rising sun dropped down through the darkness a thousand streamers of gold.

Chapter Thirteen

In the disordered camp of South Hill Company, Emil took the first few steps of the day, his face white with pain. Five years ago, when a pistol ball had shattered his knee, for a while he had both hoped and feared that his career as a Paladin commander at last would be over. But Jerrell had put his knee back together again, and, disappointed, he had continued on.

In South Hill’s river valley, the farmers stood in their fields, puzzled by the pall of smoke that sunrise had revealed. What had burned? Why had the fire bells not been rung? Someone spoke of hearing faraway screams during the night, and thinking it was a dream. Slowly, they began to fear that something terrible had happened.

In the Sainnite encampment by the east‑west road, a young man sat up in his blankets, fumbled for his spectacles, and cried in the language of his mother, “Oh, what have I seen?” A camp cook turned from his busy stirring to glance over at him curiously. But, even with his spectacles on, the young man saw only his vision–and it was like nothing he had ever seen before.

The raven flew east and north across the Midlands for three days, until he came to Norina’s cottage in the woods. There she had returned for a rest from her wanderings up and down the length of the region, where she ceaselessly rewove and repaired the fabric of the law, which the Sainnites tore apart again, before and behind her.

The raven tapped on the window to wake her up, and she went into the kitchen to let him in. She bore the weight of the child lightly enough, but she did not awaken as easily or gracefully as she used to. She fumbled at the window latch and then sat heavily by the cold hearth, rubbing her face. “You’ve been gone over twelve days.”

Embodied in the raven, Karis said, “This raven went to South Hill again. And I’ve spoken to Zanja.”

Looking through the raven’s eyes was strange, for he had two fields of vision and could see Norina in only one of them. As she leapt to her feet and cried out, “What!” then strode in agitation across the length of the kitchen, she moved from one eye to the other. “I ought to wring your neck!”

“You’re right; you ought to. Why don’t you do it, then?” Karis flew the raven over so Norina could reach his black neck easily.

Norina’s hands unclenched. She lifted them up as though to directly entreat the goddess Shaftal for assistance, though she could hardly be described as devout.

“Zanja told me that it was a Sainnite seer that caused such havoc in Rees last year. And this year he’s in South Hill.”

Norina walked back to the hearth and sat down. Her face had lost its color and the scar across her cheek stood out like a brand. “Tell me everything that she said. Every word.”

Karis told her. Norina stirred the coals and then sat without moving until the few flames that she had coaxed out of the ashes died down from neglect. She covered her face with her hands. When she looked up, she had slipped from dismay back again to anger. If her infant could survive a tumultuous nine months in Norina’s womb, Karis thought irrelevantly, the rest of the child’s life surely would seem easy and restful by comparison.

Norina said, “What you don’t see, and she can’t see, is how she endangers you with her concern. If it is in fact true that the only seer in all of Shaftal is a Sainnite–and that the only person in Shaftal besides myself who is devoted to you has made herself his enemy–it will not be long before the seer begins to dream of you. If it has not happened already.”

Karis, muddled by air logic, rather plaintively said, “I am not sure I understand you.”

“He will know of you through thinking of her. Perhaps he will know more of you than she does–and certainly, she knows too much already.“

“For all these months, Zanja has kept her counsel–”

“She will not tellthe seer. She will not have to. It will come to him, that’s all.” Norina leapt to her feet and started pacing again. “We have to get her out of South Hill.”

Karis said flatly, “She will not go. Not without an explanation.”

“She will do whatever you ask her to do, Karis. Her obligation to you–”

“Her obligation to me is counterbalanced now by her obligation to her company, to her commander. They are in desperate straits. She will refuse to abandon them without a reason–a compelling reason.”

Norina stopped in the middle of the room. “No,” she said. “I will not tell her more, when with every breath I wish that she knew less.”

“Well then, it seems there’s nothing we can do but hope.”

“Hope!” Norina spat it out, like a curse.

Karis, more present in that kitchen than she was in her own body, which, unattended, fought its daily battle to overcome the paralysis of smoke, could feel the closeness of sunrise. This conversation would soon end.

“You have to leave Meartown,” Norina said.

“You know I will not.”

“It won’t take long for this seer to realize that when you’re under smoke you’ll walk up to him as trustingly as a newborn lamb. Your first obligation is to survive unharmed. Not just for the people of Meartown, but for the people of Shaftal.”

Karis said nothing, which Norina would recognize as rebellion. Norina said, finally, “I’m going to write to Mabin. Perhaps she can do something.”

Karis tried to remind Norina that Mabin hated her and probably wouldn’t care if she were killed by the Sainnites, but the words came out garbled, and she realized that she had come back to her own skin, speaking inarticulate sounds with a mouth still paralyzed by smoke. A speckling of sunlight lay upon the eastward‑facing windows, and she heard faintly the sound of Dominy stirring up the coals of the kitchen fire.

He came in with a pot of tea later, and found the garden doors flung open and Karis standing in the doorway, neither outside nor inside, pulling on the twisted locks of her hair as though they were ropes connected to thoughts, and her thoughts were drowning. It would not be one of her good days.

Before the weary Paladins arrived at Midway Barn, where Emil’s messengers anxiously awaited his reappearance, worrying shreds of news had already reached them: tales of farmsteads razed and entire families disappeared. Emil came out from his solitary hearing of the messengers’ reports, looking drawn and gray with pain and exhaustion. Four highland farmsteads that had been steady providers of bread and supplies to South Hill Company had been burned to the ground; and of the farm families, even the children, no one remained, though no bodies had been found. Some hundred people in all had gone missing.

He delivered no inspirational speech, but left to closet himself with Linde, whom he had selected to replace Daye, along with Perry and Willis. Zanja sat among the others, a filthy, bloody, half‑starved band of ruffians, and waited for her turn behind the healer’s curtain. The smell of chicken stew cooking seemed about to drive them all insane, when the one‑armed bread runner fortuitously arrived with the donkey, Zanja’s old companion, heavily laden with great wheels of flat bread. Without butter or broth to dip it in, the bread was dry as sawdust, but they ate it gratefully. Slowly, Zanja began to hear a murmur of her companions’ old stout‑heartedness. She sat with them, and ate dry bread, and plotted revenge.

Later, after a chilly bath of water splashed from a stream, with her poorly laundered clothing drying in the hot breeze, and her bitten arm, blistered feet, and raw hands bandaged and salved, Zanja let herself enjoy the illusion of rest and comfort. She was asleep in a patch of sunshine when Emil woke her. His drawn face, dirty clothing, and even the staff on which he now leaned, reminded her how desperate their situation had become.

“That bite in your arm isn’t festering, is it?” he asked.

“No, Emil.”

“That’s fortunate, I suppose. Jerrell tells me that the surviving Paladins are going to fall ill or succumb to one or another infection if they don’t get some rest and a few decent meals in them.”

“I ate some bread.”

He responded with a flash of his old humor. “That’s practically a feast. And you’ve slept, what, an hour or two? That should be more than enough.”

“What do you want of me?”

“I want you to find Annis, but it can wait until tomorrow.”

“You don’t know where she is?” Zanja had thought of Annis in passing, but had been willing enough not to think of her too long. Her name had not been on the list of dead or injured, so she assumed there was no reason for concern.

“No one knows where she is. Her family, though, is one of the three that has disappeared. Her home is burned, they tell me. When she came in from her experiments, she would have heard all this. I am a bit concerned about what she might do.”

Zanja got to her feet–stiffly enough, but apparently with enough grace to win her a glance of unabashed envy from Emil. This grueling journey had all but crippled him. “There are others who know her haunts better than I.”

“None of them are fire bloods who have been her lover.”

She muttered, “Nothing escapes you, does it?”

“By the land, I wish that were true!” He put a hand upon her shoulder. “Listen: you need a place to shelter out the winter. To partner with the daughter of an established farm family can only be to your benefit. But if it turns out you have to bring her to me at the end of a rope, do you think you could?”

“I’d rather not.”

“If you had to?”

She said reluctantly, “Yes.”

“Good.” Emil added, rather bitterly, “But do hold onto what shreds of decency you can.”

The next day, Zanja made her way to Annis’s family farm. There, the black, burned‑out walls of seven buildings gaped like the jaws of corpses. All around them spread lush fields of knee‑high grain and white‑blossomed potato plants. Zanja stood at the edge of an orchard, where a din of insects made the voices of the man and woman walking through the field seem very far away. Zanja had been watching them for some time. They had walked from building to building, looking in at the tangles of charred wood contained by each stone shell. Once, they ventured inside, but came out again quickly, coughing and wiping away tears. Now they walked meditatively through the fields, pausing sometimes to discuss something vehemently, with sweeping gestures that seemed to include the entire landscape.

As they drew close to the orchard, they spotted Zanja and stopped short in confusion. She stepped briskly out into the field, taking care to avoid trampling the seedlings, but stopped at a distance so they would not be too frightened of her, and bowed. “I am Zanja Paladin of South Hill Company, a friend of Annis’s. You are her kinfolk, yes?”

The two of them clutched each other in dismay, but the woman said cautiously, “Everyone in South Hill is her kin.”

They looked enough like Annis that it seemed certain all three of them had a parent in common, but then the South Hillers seemed peculiarly indifferent to ties of blood; what united them into families was the land alone. Now that Annis’s family was gone, the land they had farmed was an orphan, an event as rare in South Hill as the orphaning of a child. This event presented the entire community with a problem: Who was now obligated or entitled to tend the crops? This must have been the problem this brother and sister had been pondering.

The man said, “South Hill Company should have no interests here. Where were you when the farm was burning?”

“We were chasing the enemy and burying the dead,” Zanja said.

“I hear you were off on a hare‑chase, tearing down Darton Bridge for no good reason when you should have been here.”

The woman jerked his arm roughly, and he fell into sullen silence.

Zanja said, “Please, if you see Annis, would you tell her that I’m looking for her? I’m worried about her.”

Both the farmers seemed startled at the suggestion that someone might actually care for their eccentric sister.

“I’d like to look at the buildings. Would you mind?”

The siblings did not respond. Zanja walked over to the remains of the commonhouse. Portions of the walls remained standing, though the roof had collapsed in a crazy tangle of charred timbers that filled the interior. Cradles had hung from those rafters. Now the acrid stink of destruction seared Zanja’s lungs, and suddenly she couldn’t breathe.

and pain ballooned in her skull as she stumbled through the fierce heat of the flames where people were trapped and screaming and she followed the rhythmic signal of a newborn’s cry: the na’Tarwein infant she had last seen in a basket beside her sleeping mother. And the blazing fire swam in her vision, now close and now far, hot enough that it seemed her flesh must cook upon her bones, and she stumbled through smoke, walking on embers, following the sound

“Madam!”

and the infant’s voice fell silent and as Zanja stumbled up to the na’Tarwein clanhouse the roof collapsed and the roar and pressure of flames drove her away, wheezing and reeling in a daze of pain and horror

“Madam Paladin!”

The farmer spoke with sharp impatience, but when Zanja turned her face, she stepped hastily backwards. Zanja put a hand to her face and found it wet, not with blood from her head wound or a dead Sainnite, but with tears. “Some of them burned alive,” she said.

The woman took another startled step backwards. “But we have not found any bodies.”

“In my own family.” Zanja rubbed the side of her head, where the rough terrain of a scar crossed her scalp. Until this moment, she had forgotten that, bleeding, dazed, scarcely even conscious, she had walked through the burning village hoping and failing to save just one life from the disaster, a single child.