They got the door open just as I arrived, and the red furnace burst of flame that leapt up behind it on the instant drove them back as though from a charge of horsemen. I forced my way through them, yelling, “Leave that, you fools! The flames are spreading to the barn roof. Get the stores out!” Pharic and I and a couple more of us, heads down behind our arms, managed to get the door shut again, while Bedwyr was already busy organizing a bucket chain from the well, with any and everything capable of holding water — we had enough men to fight a score of fires, scarce enough water to quench a candle. But there was the snow; it did not serve so well as water, but it was better than nothing. We blanketed the flames with it as best we could, while men swarming onto the roof strove to tear away the thatch and rafters in the path of the fire. The ponies in their nearby shed were shrieking in terror as the smoke reached them, but they were in no danger as yet. Others of us, the women among them, were working desperately to get out the stores. They might have saved the whole, but the door, which we had made ourselves to close the gap where the old one had rotted away, was of green wood because we had no seasoned timber, and prone to jam. It jammed now; perhaps the heat had something to do with it; and by the time it had been broken in, while several of the lads getting onto the roof and tearing up the smoldering thatch, dropped through into what might like enough have been their deathtrap, the fire was there ahead of them.
Our store of mutton tallow added to the blaze, making the whole store shed a torch. Rags of blazing thatch had begun to tear off and whirl away downwind like birds of fire, and I sent men running to watch against other outbreaks. The flames leapt higher, bending over at the crest, and the flickering light beat upon our scorching eyeballs, the thick smoke cloud choked us, and the fire seemed to be in our very lungs. In the end we got less than half the stores out, before the roof came down with a rending crash and a roar of flame, engulfing two men.
The fire was beginning to sink, the darkness creeping back over the fort, and we had kept the flames from spreading to any other building. But that was the best that could be said. I remember, as one remembers a dark dream, men bringing lanterns, now that the fire was low, to light the work of salvage, and myself standing in the trampled slush that was already freezing over again, surrounded by scorched men and half-charred carcasses of meat, and grain baskets with the coarse meal seeping out through the blackened slits in their sides. I was rank with sweat, and the sweat was turning icy on me in the bitter wind, and the palms of my hands seemed flayed and full of pulsing fire. Guenhumara was there too, with a great smear of black across her forehead. I suppose I must have asked her what she did there — I always made her go with Blanid to her own quarters, and bolt the door, when the drinking started — for she said breathlessly, “Carrying water. Was I to stay in my rooms, with the horn sounding the alarm, and men crying fire through the camp?” And then, “Artos, your eyebrows are singed off,” and then in quick concern as Cabal crouched panting against my legs, and I made to fondle his poor scorched head, “Oh my dear, your hands! Your poor hands! Come up with me and let me salve them.”
But I had other things to do just then. There would be time presently for Guenhumara’s salves, there was none now.
We had lost three men, and half the rest of us had burns and scorches to show for that night’s work. Three men not counting the mule driver. We found the charred stump of his body next day, lying in its snug corner behind the millstone with the shriveled remains of a burst beerskin beside it. He seemed never to have moved at all, so deep in drink that like enough he never even realized what was happening until the smoke suffocated him. We did not trouble to give him decent burial, but simply flung what was left of him over the ramparts at the place where the hill dropped almost sheer to the river, and left him to the wolves if they did not mind their meat somewhat overcooked.
That day after taking exact stock of the stores that were left to us, we held a hurried council to decide our course of action. But, in truth, there was little choice left to us. To try to break out and get south to Corstopitum through the drifts and the blinding blizzards would have been nothing but a deliberate marching on death, and it would be equally impossible — as well as useless — to attempt getting a message through to them. The same applied to any attempt to get word through to Castra Cunetium; the deep mountain roads were utterly impassable to anything heavier-footed than a hare, and even supposing that the word could be got to them, and the stores got back again, the garrison was so small that if they parted with enough to make any appreciable difference to us, it would result merely in their starving in our stead. There was nothing to be done but stay where we were and make the remaining food last out as long as possible. After working the matter out carefully, it appeared that if we went on half rations from that day, we could hold out until about midway through February.
“An early spring might save us,” said Gwalchmai, who, though no captain, always had his place at our councils.
And Bedwyr laughed. “The sun cannot complain that we did not make him a fine enough Midwinter blaze!”
But the weeks went by and the weeks went by, and winter seemed to have claimed the world for good. There was never a day that offered a chance of hunting, only snow and gales, and bitter black frost that bound up the land even under its white furs. The snow lay drifted in slow curves to the eaves on the northern side of every building, and every day fresh paths must be cleared to stable and well and store sheds, not that that was altogether a bad thing, for digging keeps a man warm — though it also makes him hungry. Now and then, by putting out the bones of a finished carcass in a good spot of a moonlit night, and then putting a couple of archers on the walls, we managed to get a wolf or two, but they were so famine-thin themselves, poor brutes, that there was little that the women could do with them save make broth; and already the men grew gaunt and hollow-eyed, with heads that seemed too big for their sharp shoulders.
One day Cei came to me and said, “Maybe the Dark People have food. Why do we not go foraging? You know where one village is, at all events.”
“They will have little enough for themselves; they will have none to spare for those that come asking.”
“Asking was not in my mind,” Cei said grimly.
I caught him by the shoulders to drive home what I had to say. “Listen, Cei; the Dark People are our friends. Na na, I am not being womanish, I do but use my head as it seems that you have forgotten to do. They are our friends, but they are not the kind that hold to friendship in the face of an injury. I have no wish to find the water supply fouled and our men on the walls picked off with those hellish little poisoned arrows of theirs.”
So we did not go foraging, and whatever the Dark People had, they kept. We saw nothing of them in all that winter, but then we never did, during the dark of the year. It has often been my thought that the People of the Hills burrow deep into their holes and sleep through the cold months almost as the field voles and the badgers do.