Buried Fire

by Jonathan Stroud

  "And I suppose you'll be wanting us to extend the trench and all," continued Mr Purdew, gloomily running a hand through lean hair.

  "To uncover the rest of it; yes, of course. Hold on, I've got to have a closer look." Tom crouched on the edge of the trench and swung himself in, landing heavily on the packed earth beside the buried cross. Taking his handkerchief from his pocket, he dabbed eagerly at some of the encrustations of clay on the centre of the cross. Before long his voice rose out of the trench.

  "It might be Celtic, or Anglo-Saxon; I don't think the Vikings came this far west, did they, Elizabeth?"

  "No way near," she replied. "What do they look like, Tom?"

  "Long and sinewy carvings. In the centre at any rate. They wind all over each other. It might be an animal of some kind. Yes! There's a claw."

  "Sounds Anglo-Saxon to me. What do you think, Mr Purdew?"

  "I think it's going to be the devil to shift it. Can the lads go home, vicar, if you're going to be down there all afternoon?"

  "Mr Purdew, I'm sorry! I'll leave you to it. We've got to have this out today!" The Rev. Tom thrust his claggy handkerchief back into his pocket and straightened up. Then he gave an oath. "Oh damn! I think one of the arms might be off. The one that's still in the clay. I can see a ragged edge just here." He ran his finger between the hard wall of the trench and the stone. "Yes. Damn."

  "It's bound to be down there," said Elizabeth. "Come on up, Tom. Let's get the museum on the phone."

  Tom left the cross reluctantly and walked back along the trench to the for end, where a steep ramp led back to ground level. His heart was dancing now. Let Mrs Gabriel chatter how she would – nothing like this had ever happened in the Reverend Staples' time, nor the Reverend Morrison's. It was Tom Aubrey, new vicar of Fordrace, who had dug here – and if this didn't wake the village up a little, he'd be very much surprised.

  3

  Michael had woken up. There was a pain in his mouth, and a worse one in his eyes. His whole body felt raw, with the faint tingling shivering of a fever. He tried to open his eyes, but a piercing light blinded him and he screwed them up tight shut.

  "Bluh'ee heh" he said, and afterwards "Chrith!" when he realised his tongue had swollen so much that he could hardly speak at all. It was like the feeling you got when you burnt your tongue on soup – sore and clothy all at the same time. Michael groaned, with a mixture of pain and panic, and tried to sit up. But his body resisted with a lancing arc of pain, and he subsided back onto the grass.

  Bloody hell, he thought. What's happened to me?

  Then the answer came to him. I've got sunstroke, he thought. Oh God.

  He lifted a weak arm and put his hand to his forehead. Sure enough, his skin was red hot but very dry. I've sweated all the water out of me, he thought again, till there's none left at all. Now I'm overheated, and I'm going to die.

  He tried to remember all the little he had ever known about sunstroke. Stephen had suffered it once, on the first day of the holiday in Tenerife. He had been out on the beach all day without his sun hat and though Michael had been very young, he had never forgotten the embarrassment of Stephen vomiting up all over the hotel lounge.

  Well, he hadn't been sick yet. That was a good sign.

  He recalled Stephen having a cold bath. Michael had had to run to the bar to ask for a box of ice. Stephen had shouted and struggled, all red in the face, lying in the bath with his clothes still on.

  Delirium. That was another sign. And he hadn't got that yet.

  But he was red-hot, and weak, and he'd been out in the sun all afternoon long, like Stephen had. It was sunstroke for sure. And God, his eyes hurt!

  Time to move. Michael forced himself to concentrate. He had to get home quickly, for an ice-cold bath. Or he might die.

  And home was not near. It was out of the Pit, and across the high ridge of the Wirrim and down almost two miles to the cottage, where his brother and sister might or might not be home.

  Never mind. Concentrate. Move. Slowly, his eyes still tight shut, Michael rolled himself onto his side, and then onto his front, until his face touched the cool grass. Which smelt – faintly – of something chemical.

  The scent made him nauseous. (Oh God, that was the first sign of sunstroke!) Frantically, he levered his head and chest off the ground with his hands flat and his elbows shaking. Then he was sick.

  When it was over, Michael felt a little better. He remained with his arms locked, his eyes closed, wishing he had positioned his hands a little further apart. Then he bent his knees, moved to a crawling position, and tried to stand.

  He managed this with a surprising lack of difficulty. The strength seemed to be returning to his body. For a minute or two, he stood with his head bowed into the fresh breeze across the head of the Pit, willing it to cool him, but feeling the blood throbbing in his temples and behind his eyes like a salt tide. Then, covering his eyes with cupped palms, he tried opening one eye.

  The pain was so intense that he cried out, and almost fell. Instead, he was sick again, which dulled the agony, and gave a chance for despair to rise up within him.

  Oh Christ, he thought, if I can't see, I can't find my way out of the hollow. And I can't get down the hill. I might as well be blind! Oh God – maybe I am! He felt a tightening of the chest and a spasm in the bowels. Not that it'll matter much – I can't get home to have my bath, so it's all over.

  The image of the unreachable bath overwhelmed Michael with grief. He bent over, with his hands clamped on his knees, and began to cry. The great washings of tears gave his eyes the first relief since he had awoken. The salt water bathed his eyelids, stinging and cooling them all at once. Yet, as they issued from the corners of his eyes, he experienced an odd sensation, which made him frown even in his pain.

  There was a tiny spitting noise, a low angry hissing, as if a stove-hot saucepan was being dunked in sink-water. And as his burning tears fell onto his cheeks, Michael felt jets of hot air erupt from between his squeezed eyelids and rise up on either side of his head.

  There was no doubt of it. His eyes were steaming.

  "My Go'," groaned Michael, "Woth ha'en'eng oo me?"

  4

  For Stephen MacIntyre, the day had gone downhill since breakfast.

  The key to this had been his sister's mood. It had swung from sunny prospects to darkest gloom with the speed and variation of a berserk barometer. Outlook had become definitely unsettled. At breakfast, she had been an administering angel. She had cooked it, which was rare, and included black pudding, which was rarer. All through the meal, she had chatted happily, without any sign of what Stephen called her 'martyr business'. She had even left the table without hinting once about the washing up, which so startled Stephen and Michael that they had done it automatically.

  By mid-morning things had changed. For a start, Sarah's hay fever had started up again and put a dampener on her mood. Then, in the midst of her snuffles, she had rung the estate agency, and had a tense conversation with her boss that left her smouldering. After that, she had prepared a briefing for her new client, concerning a property in a northern fold of the Wirrim towards Stanbridge. At ten, she had driven off to collect the keys and make the tour. At eleven thirty, when she returned, she was in the blackest of moods, the visit having gone badly. By now, her hay fever was worse than ever. Then she shouted at Michael for resting his trainers on the kitchen table, and at Stephen for walking in at the wrong time to enquire about lunch.

  "I only asked if you felt like any," protested Stephen.

  "So I could make some for you while I was about it," Sarah yelled.

  "I was going to make some for you, actually," said Stephen mildly, and not altogether truthfully.

  "But he won't now," predicted Michael.

  "I don't want any, anyway," said Sarah, looking frazzled.

  "Fine," said Stephen. "How was the house?"

  It had been the wrong thing to say; he realised that now. Well, he'd probably realised it at the time, sort of,
but perhaps he'd hoped that his sister would be less than predictable. She wasn't. When the resulting fracas was over, no one was speaking to anybody. Sarah ate her lunch in her room. Then she emerged with an announcement

  "Tom's coming over for dinner." She spoke it like a challenge. "So don't mess the house up."

  "Oh right," said Stephen.

  "The Pope," said Michael. "Let us pray."

  "Oh shut up," said Sarah. "If you don't like it, you can go out. I don't care."

  After the door had slammed, Michael and Stephen sat for a moment in contemplative silence. Then Michael said, "She's right. It's too good a day for stewing here. I'm going up the Wirrim. See you later."

  And out he had gone, taking a couple of apples and a novel from their grandmother's bookshelf. For a demure old lady, she had been unusually fond of what she called 'racy' fiction. First Stephen and now Michael had found benefits from her collection that their grandmother would hardly have expected.

  Stephen had stayed in the cottage through the hot afternoon, until Sarah, in a suddenly busy mode, had begun hoovering. That was the last straw for Stephen. The rigid drone and the fraught atmosphere finally drove him out of the house and onto his bike.

  Outside, the heat of the summer rose from the garden and hovered in a flickering haze in front of the heavy beech trees and the laurel hedge. Stephen's watch read five thirty. Up on the Wirrim, Michael would be getting fried to a crisp, unless he had the sense to keep in the shade, which Stephen thought doubtful. For a moment, he was tempted to follow the lane to the right, to the bridleway which led by steep degrees to the quarries under the lip of the Wirrim, but the pressing heat bore on him strongly. Far too much like hard work, thought Stephen as he turned the bike towards the Fordrace road.

  The village of Fordrace was clustered around a compact green, beside which, in all seasons and even in the height of summer, a sizeable stream ran, heavy with the rainwater dropped on the Wirrim's ridge. To the north, a thickly growing beech and oak wood, locally known as the Russet, stretched along the foot of the Wirrim's nearest curve. To the east and south lay ancient croplands, some still marked with the strip patterning of the medieval farmers, and all at this time heavily blanketed with wheat. The village itself had expanded little over the centuries. It still retained its ancient visage, except for one small estate of cramped redbrick houses, behind the Parson's Pub, which had been built in the early eighties and regretted ever since. The church of St Wyndham stood overlooking the green, with its Olde Mill (now a tea-room), its millpool, and its collection of glossy well-fed ducks. Elsewhere, a 19th century schoolhouse, a small library and two general stores completed the picture.

  Stephen knew it very well, without feeling quite at home there. He had been there many times in his early childhood, on visits to his grandmother, and from those far-distant days some memories remained: the general store (particularly the penny sweet bags), the ducks, and the dusty boredom of the inevitable Sunday morning services. But then his parents had moved far away to the north, taking Stephen and Michael with them, and their visits to Fordrace had almost ceased. Sarah had not gone with them. She had chosen to go to live with granny, looked after her in her illness, and found herself a job. Stephen could still remember how pleased she had been with this independence.

  And now we're lumped on you again, he thought, as he cycled down the hill. And aren't you glad!

  Stephen tethered his bicycle to the wooden signpost on the fringes of the green. Without any particular purpose, he wandered across it, dodging squalling toddlers and their over-heated parents, until he came to Pilate's Grocery and General Store. The cool interior beckoned him.

  "Yes sir, what can I get you?" Mr Pilate was the kind of shopkeeper who wished his customers to be as efficient as he was himself. The three walls of his Grocery and General Store were teetering from floor to distant ceiling with jars and tins and boxes and hanging objects, all meticulously ordered and arranged. It reminded Stephen of an Egyptian temple, with its coolness and its dark, and the hieroglyphic columns of Heinz and Baxters rising austerly into the shadows.

  Stephen made a spur of the moment choice. Mr Pilate reached behind him with blind assurity and picked up the chocolate and the can from the icebox, smiling all the time at Stephen as if waiting for the real order, the order that would make his time worthwhile.

  "Anything else, sir?" he asked, which meant, 'You're not seriously expecting me to be satisfied with that? Look at the choice on display, think of all the hours I've spent ordering this down from Stanbridge, placing them in neat rows on your behalf, and now you're waltzing in here asking for a Snickers and a Fanta, and you're not even concentrating. I deserve better than that, surely.'

  "No thanks," said Stephen. "That's all."

  Mr Pilate gave a little sigh, and thumped out the paltry sum on his old cash register.

  "Then that will be fifty-seven pence," he said. "Sir."

  Stephen handed it over and took his goods. As he received his change, Mr Pilate said abruptly, "Well, you're my last customer. I'm closing early today. Off to the church."

  "Why," asked Stephen. "What's happening?"

  "They've found an old cross in the churchyard. Buried there. Very old, they say. Museum woman's over now, and they're due to lift it out shortly. Huge thing, apparently. Needs a crane."

  "Sounds worth seeing," said Stephen.

  "Whole village will be there, most likely." Mr Pilate raised the hatch in the counter and emerged. "Your friend the vicar's been bustling about like a blue-arsed fly. Very pleased with himself, he is."

  "He's no friend of mine," said Stephen. "You must be thinking of someone else."

  "Don't you get on? He's pretty thick with your sister, isn't he?"

  Even in the coolness of the store, Stephen flushed. Mr Pilate's teeth gleamed in the dark as he shepherded Stephen towards the door.

  "I won't say anything against him myself. He's young. And maybe a little eager. Our blood runs slow and thick in these parts. He'll learn."

  "Goodbye, Mr Pilate," said Stephen. He walked out onto the green, and leaving the grocer locking up behind him, set off towards the church. Its tower was bathed in evening pink, and a large group of people were thronging against the boundary wall. A yellow breakdown truck with a winch and crane had been reversed up the lane, and now stood with the crane's arm extended out into the churchyard.

  By the time he had crossed the green, Stephen had drunk his can dry. He lobbed it into a bin and squeezed himself into the nearest gap in the crowd. The crane's arm was positioned with its horizontal bar over the side of a long trench. Three thick metal cables had been lowered into the depths. Several workmen stood around the hole, and Tom Aubrey was standing close by them, talking animatedly to a man with a notebook and pen.

  He's loving it, Stephen thought. He'll be insufferable for weeks now.

  At that moment, a short stout woman appeared up a ladder from the trench, climbed heavily to her feet and began barking instructions to the workmen standing round. Stephen turned to a man standing next to him.

  "What's going on?"

  "Looks like they're going to raise it. About time too. I've been waiting here all afternoon. That woman wouldn't give permission for ages, but she must reckon it's safe now."

  "Hope they don't drop it," said Stephen.

  The man nodded. "Yeah. That bloke there's from the Herald, he is."

  "Have you seen it?" Stephen asked.

  "Yeah, took a look earlier. Must weigh a ton. It's got an arm missing, but other than that it's in perfect nick, which is why they're all so worked up."

  The man's voice trailed off, and Stephen realised that the hubbub of the crowd had died away and a stillness had descended. In silence, the workmen climbed out of the hole, Tom and the reporter moved back to a safe distance, and the archaeologist gave a last frowning inspection to the cables. Finally she moved away. Expectancy hung in the air.

  The foreman nodded. A man in an armless denim top vaulted over the w
all, pushed his way through the crowd and made some professional adjustments to the winching system on the back of the truck. Everyone waited. Stephen noticed mat a metal trolley, like the sort driven around in large stations, only thicker and heavier, had been brought to stand on one side of the trench. It was covered with plastic sheeting.

  "When you like, Charlie," the foreman said, and spat his cigarette behind him into the trench. The man by the truck nodded and flicked a switch. With a low smooth whirring, the drum on the truck began to turn and the metal cables were drawn upwards. First they went taut, then there was a moment of stress, and a slight increase in noise from the rotating drum.

  The crowd was silent. The only noise was the hum of the crane motor.

  Now the cross appeared from the trench, caked in earth and longer than a man. Its bulk was securely looped by cables in three places, twice along the shaft and once on its vertical arm. Orange clag clung to it everywhere, making the outline irregular and lumpen. One arm was missing, its shoulder abruptly broken off beyond the stone ring. As the cross rose through the air, Stephen was fleetingly reminded of those rescues where helpless bodies are winched by helicopter from some cliff face or upturned boat. He was suddenly aware he was holding his breath, and that the same mood was shared by the rest of the crowd. Everyone was silent, sober-faced. Even Tom's smile had turned into an anxious line.

  After two minutes of smooth whirring, Charlie flicked the switch again. The cross hung above the trench, two feet above ground level. Without a word, he pulled a lever, which swung the crane arm slowly to the left. At first, the arm moved too strongly. The cross was jerked violently in mid-air; it swayed back and forth with alarming swings. One of the loops of cable slipped a little, towards the end of its arm. With his face white and his eyes staring, Charlie slowed the rate of movement. Slowly, the rocking of the cross became less and less until it was almost imperceptible. By now it was over the trolley, scraping clear of it by a few inches only, and still no one had said anything.