‘I am carrying you to safety,’ he says. ‘It isn’t a big fire, but we need to make sure that everyone is far away from it.’
Even as he says it he hears the roar of it, and feels the heat lick the back of his neck like the breath of a dragon.
He places the child, in his bedclothes, on the dew-wet grass. ‘It will be all right,’ he says. ‘It will all be all right.’ No answer comes. With a sudden thrill of fear he bends close to the covered face. He is breathing: shallowly, very fast. He would like more time to comfort the child, but there may not be enough time for all of it as it is.
One of the yellow fever patients is so deeply in the depths of the fever that he seems not to know what is happening: he asks for an iced water, very politely. George almost envies him his state of ignorance. The patients who are most far gone are the hardest to manoeuvre; they are dead weights, impossibly heavy, limbs lolling unhelpfully from the stretcher. But this is not the first time George and Bill have had to do it; memories surface from the time before. Of course, some of those were, in fact, dead.
They are lacking in the fitness they once had, the endurance born of hard marching, but they remember the right holds, the way to use the weight rather than fight it, the strange staggering dance of the feet over rough ground.
How could he not have foreseen this? That being across the water, in this lonely place, would cut them off absolutely from the help of the fire brigades. No, he knows why. Precisely because he somehow could not have imagined such a thing happening, in an isolated building beside the city’s greatest source of water. It flashes across his mind – the strangeness of it. He cannot imagine what could have caused it. But there is no time to think about it, not now. It has reached the ward.
The last patient has been dragged onto the lawn, far enough – for now – from harm. Life has been preserved; this is the most important thing. But the equipment: the precious, carefully guarded supplies of quinine and morphine, these are all now at risk. They must work now to kill the fire, before it can do more damage.
The smoke swallows him, it fills his mouth and nose, steals all the breath from him. He backs away, retching and coughing. It is impossible. But gradually he remembers what he knows of fire. He presses the front of his nightshirt over his mouth, hunkers down upon his hands and knees, and crawls into it, beneath it, like an animal. In the fierce hot dark he gropes for the bottles and vials. Some have broken in the heat already, his fingers find jagged edges. But several are intact, and he thrusts them into the front of his nightshirt. Then there is an explosion right before his face: the violence of it stuns him. The skin of his face and ear feels as though it is consuming itself. He staggers back, hunkered on all fours, gasping with pain. He needs water, but he does not have water. He does not have time to do anything other than attempt to save himself. With a great effort he begins to crawl. His lungs feel as though they have been filled with incandescent coals, and it feels as though someone is forcing the same coals against his cheek and ear. He realises, dimly, that he may not make the distance. Now sensation is fragmenting: he is beginning to be confused, confused by the pain and the smoke as to which direction he should be moving in – it begins to seem that it might as easily be up or down as forward or backward, left or right. In the lucid part of his mind he enumerates his symptoms, almost calmly. The confusion, the agony of his face, the burning airlessness in his chest, the gradual disintegration of his faculties.
The Prisoner
He climbs into the kayık, fumbles for the oars. They are somehow more unwieldy than before – he cannot seem to make them obey him. He knows what the main obstacle is, that his hands are trembling almost too much to grip them properly.
The man saw him. He knows it. Will not do to think about that. It is done. It cannot be helped, now. Ah – but what possessed him to turn back? To have thought for a second that he might be able to reverse the thing he had done, or try to warn those inside. The shame is not in the act, he tells himself now, the shame is in that moment of doubt. It is only a problem if he gets caught. The man has never seen him before, and if he never sees him again, there will be no crisis. Stay hidden, out of sight, it will be easy enough.
He begins to row. Perhaps it is some aspect of the current, heretofore unknown to him, but there seems to be more resistance against the bow. The oars make more noise – before all had seemed silent, effortless. Everything is slower, clumsier. He reminds himself that it is only a little way. The difficult part of it is done.
He tries not to imagine Nur’s face. She will know, as soon as she hears about the fire. His mother and grandmother are too blinded by their love for him to suspect him of any such thing. But Nur is different – her love is exactly the thing that will make her see.
‘Who goes there?’
He stops rowing, hunkers low. Goes as still as he is able, though it is impossible to stop himself from trembling. He tries to think himself into the blackness, to dissolve into it, but the surface of his skin seems almost to shimmer with
