Roald ran down the steps, towards the child and the bow. ‘Don’t shoot, Liv!’ he called out. ‘I promised your mum to help you, and I’ve got something—’
He slowed his pace when the child suddenly stood up and pointed. ‘Stop!’ she screamed. ‘Go the other way around the cooker.’
Roald reacted instinctively. He screeched to a halt and took a step back to run the other way around the pile with the old cooker on the top. A second later the cooker crashed on to the path with a mighty bang.
The girl tossed aside her bow and clutched her head with both hands.
Roald’s heart was in his throat as he ran towards her. That poor child, was the only thought going through his mind. That poor, poor child.
She slumped to her knees as he came closer. And that was when he realized that she wasn’t staring at him. But at something behind him.
Inferno
Roald turned around to see what Liv was looking at. It wasn’t, as he had initially feared, Jens Horder emerging from the front door, brandishing a knife.
It was Jens Horder’s house giving up.
First the roof ridge sunk down, as if the house were taking its last breath. Then the entire building exhaled in a deafening sigh. It crumbled. Everything seemed to fall inwards – with the exception of the front door, which was flung across the farmyard.
Roald held the child in a tight grip when he saw a red glow through the first-floor window. The flames were quick to follow. Soon the ground floor was also engulfed in fire.
The child wept quietly but pitifully amidst the noise. Roald squatted down behind her with his arms around her sobbing body and his head on her frail shoulders. The soft feathers on the arrows tickled his throat.
‘My mum,’ he heard her say. ‘And my dad.’
‘Your mum was already dead when we got up there,’ he said, as gently as possible. ‘She died in her sleep. She didn’t feel a thing. And your dad was with her. The last thing I saw was him kissing her.’
Roald briefly considered whether he had a duty to try to rescue Jens Horder from the burning house, however small the chance, but it was an inferno of flames and smoke. No one would get out of there alive.
‘It all happened so quickly,’ he said then. ‘Your dad didn’t feel a thing either.’
‘Good,’ the girl sobbed.
Roald carefully but firmly turned her around so that she was facing him, and then lifted her to standing. He placed his hands on her shoulders.
‘You and I are going to go now,’ he said. ‘I’ll take care of you, but we have to leave now. The fire will spread soon.’
The girl nodded again and picked up her bow. As she stood there with the quiver of arrows on her back and the bow in her hand, she resembled a small, brave soldier.
She looked up at him. Roald didn’t know what to say next. Her eyes were filled with tears, but she was subjecting him to the most intense scrutiny he had ever experienced. She examined his eyes, searching for something. He wasn’t even aware that he was also crying until he felt the tears roll down his cheek.
Then she looked like she had come to some sort of conclusion, because she put down the bow, resolutely lifted the strap of the quiver over her head and chucked her ammunition down beside her weapon without giving it a second glance. The soldier’s acceptance that the war was over.
‘Good, then let’s—’ Roald said, but he was interrupted.
‘There are traps, so don’t follow me,’ the girl ordered him, with admirable resolve in her little voice. ‘I’ll be back in two secs. Stay here.’
Before Roald had time to protest, the brown-and-orange sweater disappeared through the piles, using God knows what route, but she was heading for the barn.
He sized up the house again. They probably had some time, but not much. The heat pressed against him and his eyes began to sting.
He spotted Jens Horder’s coat thrown over a barrel in a nearby pile. Roald picked it up. It was heavy and falling apart. The suede had been worn shiny and the lining was fraying in several places. In one of the big front pockets was a thick buff-coloured envelope. Roald stuffed it into his own front pocket and quickly examined the rest of Horder’s coat, while looking out anxiously for Liv.
In the inside pocket was a folded letter.
Roald hesitated. He had always respected the confidentiality of other people’s letters and had never read as much as a postcard which wasn’t addressed to him. But then again, this situation was rather…
He unfolded the letter and started to read.
Dear Jens
There’s no denying it has been a long time, and that’s entirely my fault. For that reason, writing this letter isn’t easy…
When at that very second Liv came running from the barn, he quickly folded the letter and stuffed it into his inside pocket. Behind the girl he saw the clapped-out dapple-grey horse and some smaller shadows disappear in the direction of the forest.
‘Come on!’ she called out as she ran past him. Roald forgot about Horder’s coat and followed her across the farmyard, zigzagging between the heaps. He looked back towards the parts of the house where the fire had yet to spread, but it was only a matter of time before flying sparks would reach the piles of junk and the other buildings.
It was an odd sort of fire. There was howling and hissing from the house and a deep rumble underneath it all. At the same time, thick, dark smoke crept around the building, as if guarding it. Above this scene, however, the sky was bright and blue, ignorant of the pain below. As if the drama didn’t interest it, as if it couldn’t be bothered with the smoke. It seemed simply to have withdrawn from all of it and be waiting patiently for a time when it could spread out again.
‘Wait there!’ Liv called out again, and Roald obeyed her orders instinctively. He understood that the child was in charge now. He had come to save her, but the truth was that she would be the one to get them out of here safely. He looked at the old silage harvester. Somehow, he had always believed that contraption to be the least terrifying of all agricultural machinery; it reminded him of a good-natured herbivore from the dawn of time. Now he was sure that he could never see a silage harvester as anything other than a monster ever again.
He watched her run through a door in the wooden building. It must lead to the workshop people had spoken about. He called out to her, knowing full well that she couldn’t hear him. They really had to leave. For God’s sake. He would have to go and get her.
Then suddenly she reappeared. ‘I’ve got it,’ she called out. ‘Come on.’
Roald ran as if pulled by an invisible string. She was holding something in her hand, a small clip frame, he believed, and another item, smaller and different, but he couldn’t see what it was.
She ran down towards the gravel road but stayed frighteningly close to the fire.
‘Don’t you think we had better go the other way round?’ he called out anxiously, but he continued to follow the child. She made no reply, merely beckoned him on.
‘Run to the end of the workshop and stay close to it,’ she called out now, doing so herself. He copied her and ran right behind her, with his hand on the cladding. He noticed that she was still armed. A dagger was dangling from a leather sheath in her belt, slapping lightly against her thigh.
He looked back. The fire had reached a tree near the house where flames stuck out of a small gable window like orange tongues. Some roof tiles fell on to the gravel, and without warning a huge spruce branch swept across the road with enormous force. Roald bellowed in terror as the branch passed him at chest height. It had to be a trap, and if he hadn’t followed Liv’s orders, the branch would have knocked him clean off his feet. He couldn’t get out of this place fast enough.