I didn’t feel any different when he had finished, but Atticus said I wouldn’t.I think you’ll appreciate not getting burned, though, he told me. Coriander repeated the process for Starbuck and I was proud of him for remaining still the whole time and not sneezing. That’s really hard for him to do.
Coriander and Atticus bowed to each other afterward and the faery wished us well before shifting away to Tír na nÓg.
“The Fae are supposed to limit their presence on the earth, and directly engaging beings from other planes would violate some treaties and maybe even start an interplanar war. If there is anything ahead of us to be banished from the earth, it’s my responsibility.”
“That’s right. Let’s go. Stay close to me and I’ll keep the air bubble moving with us.”
We jogged for about six thousand feet or six hundred fathoms or furlongs or whatever, yeah, I’m not good with distances either.But we saw a whole lot of animals running away from what we were running toward, and one wallaby clearly thought we were just uninformed and tried to warn us with some strangled sounds that there was a fire up ahead. We kept going.
I have to admit that I had an idea of what a forest fire might be like, but the real thing is so much more powerful than the two words imply. It’s a forest—all its life and energy—violently transforming itself to heat and light and poisonous fumes. And up close, it’s terrifying.
When I saw the wall of flames silhouetting the eucalyptus trees like blackened matchsticks and felt the heat on my nose and fur, threatening to singe both, I realized that there is quite a lot of difference between sausage and courage. They are, in fact, not the same thing at all, and metaphors can only take you for a short walk on a tight leash. Wait. Is that a metaphor too? Whatever. I didn’t want to walk into that fire, even if Atticus somehow made a path through it and kept a bubble of air around us and I was supposedly protected by magic swirlies and a cold iron talisman. All my instincts screamed at me to turn around and run away, like all the wallabies and wombats and koalas were doing.
Starbuck said, summing up his feelings about going forward. Just as he had trouble separating the affirmative from food, he had difficulty separating the negative from squirrels.
I asked.
“Unfortunately not. We have to go in. Or at least I do. Would you rather wait here?”
I told him. And apart from that, if there was something behind all this destruction, ruining the homes and lives of so many creatures, it needed to get got.
Starbuck said.
“Okay. I’m going to have the earth smother a path through the fire for us and we’re going to run through, single file. Once we get through this first leading edge, we should reach a burned-out area where it won’t be so hot.”
“Pretty sure.”
There was nothing else we could say. Mostly because Atticus didn’t give us a chance. He bound the earth to rise up and smother a strip of land ahead of us, effectively churning it so that what was underground was now on top and all the burning leaves and things were buried. It was kind of a biblical event, if I were the sort of hound or human who read the Bible—and I wasn’t—but I knew it wasn’t the sort of thing you talked over. The flames still rose in a wall on either side of that narrow strip, though.
Atticus took off, hatchet swinging in his left arm, and hollered at us to stay on his heels. We trotted easily behind, ears back, sphincters puckered. Great green gobs of catsick, the heat was terrible! It dried out my nose and eyes, and my skin felt like it was going to ignite. I didn’t think I would ever stop panting once I started.
Starbuck said, and I worried about him. Bostons don’t do well in the heat. Their smashed faces don’t allow them to cool off very well.
But the intensity lasted only a short while, I think, because we got through the wall, and the firescape changed to isolated trees still burning while the ground cover was all turned to char and ash, and then past that it was a blackened, smoking wasteland where it still felt hot but was cool by comparison to the inferno. Atticus paused there to check on us.
“My goodness. Your fur is smoking a bit.”
Starbuck said.
I told him, but left out the part that his eyebrows were pretty much gone and some of his hair and goatee had curled up and crisped.
“Let’s do something about that.”
He did more of his Druidry, moving the earth again in front of us, but differently this time. A circular sinkhole formed and deepened and I realized he was drilling down to reach the water table. Once he hit it, he pulled some out to rain down on us, and it was marvelously cold. My nose was wet again, and I felt like I could breathe once more.
Starbuck said. He was still panting but didn’t look as distressed.
“Okay, we’re looking for anything moving, basically,” Atticus said. “Because nothing should be alive here unless it’s up to no good.”
