Chapter 4: Fire
Warning: Some violence and disturbing imagery.
Jet had been outside when the earthquake hit. He'd been playing tops in the hard-packed dirt of the street with Baby Jir when everything shook and jumped. He'd been thrown sideways and hurt his shoulder, and Baby Jir had come down on the tops and cut his arm (not to mention breaking the tops). Everything tossed and jerked, and then settled down as quickly as it had started.
The Jir's cowpigshed had finally collapsed, after threatening to for years ("Just as well it did it widout the animals in there," Young Jir commented), and everyone's houses were rattled and messy, but it really wasn't all that bad. The earth shook a couple more times after that, but they were smaller and Jet didn't even get knocked off his feet.
After the quake, Dad came in from the field. He was helping Mom to clean up the house when they realized that June was missing. After that it had been a lot of running around, talking to the neighbors, and frantically searching the area.
"She probably went back up into the mountains," Jet said. "Even though you told her not to."
That set off all sorts of yelling and tears and worry. Dad was going to get together a search party, but then he had to go and help old Tyin, who had been blocked inside his own house when a shelf collapsed, and then Baby Jir said that Daddy Jir had found June, but when they went to get her they found that Baby Jir had mistaken Nari Win for June from a distance.
So Dad was getting together some people to go up into the mountains and search, even though the sun was lowering toward the horizon and there wasn't that much daylight left. Mom was helping the old lady down the street and worrying. And Jet was supposed to be sweeping the house. But he'd come out into the late sunlight for a minute, and that was when he saw the dust.
He went up on tiptoe, staring out past the village. It looked like a group of men riding hard, from the amount of dust they were kicking up. They might be from another village, come to see if anyone needed help after the earthquake. Or maybe it was the Jir's animals coming back en masse.
Jet scrambled off the porch and ran to find his father.
"Dad!" he panted. "People coming this way! Or animals! Lots of dust!"
Dad turned from where he was talking to a small group of men, his brow furrowing. "Show me," he said, and Jet pointed the approaching dust out to the men.
Dad looked grim. "Probably trouble," he said. "Get your mother. And then go in the house and stay there."
;=;=;=;=;
Jet had never seen a komodo-rhino before.
There were ten of them, giant muscled creatures with vicious horns and massive feet. Their eyes glowed like coals in the dying red light of sunset.
Mounted on the rhinos were men wearing red armor. The Fire Nation. Jet knew they were at war, but it had never occurred to him that the war would come here, to their little village. He watched from the window and hoped that Dad would make it all okay.
Dad stood at the front of a group of the villagers, holding a scythe in his hand. The sharp blade gleamed in the light, but it didn't look like much compared to the many weapons of the Fire Nation soldiers.
"What do you want?" Dad asked, his voice strong. Jet smiled proudly. Dad would show those soldiers.
The man in front grinned unpleasantly down from his rhino. "Oh, we're just passing through," he said. "But we couldn't turn up the opportunity to visit such a charming little dustpile." His eyes flicked across the villagers; then surprise flashed across his face, followed by something ugly. "And it looks like we aren't the only ones." He was staring right at Mom.
Dad stepped in front of her. "Go back where you came from," he said, his voice cold and hard. "We don't want trouble."
"It looks like you're going to get it," the man said coldly.
Jet wasn't quite sure how it happened. It was kind of a blur. The man dropped out of the saddle and approached Mom. Dad moved to block him. The man shoved Dad aside, and Dad swung the scythe towards him. And then an arrow sprouted from Dad's chest, and he stared at it for a moment before falling to the ground.
Jet screamed out, his cry matching Mom's. The next moment, she was attacking the man with her hook swords, leaping and slashing. The man countered with blasts of fire, forcing her back. The other villagers seemed immobile, staring in horror.
Mom ducked and slashed her left sword along his arm. He jerked back with a snarl, blood flowing from the wound, and slammed a massive fireball at her that sent her flying backward to slam into the street, swords gone, neck at an awkward angle.
The villagers seemed to be spurred to action, and moved forward with their makeshift weapons. The other men moved forward, rhinos pawing the ground. The man who had been fighting Mom raised a flaming fist. "Burn it all to the ground!" he bellowed.
;=;=;=;=;
Jet wasn't sure how he got out of the house. He didn't remember much of anything. Just the flames flickering hellishly in the dark, and the screams, and the awful pictures of his parents in his mind. Dad, with the arrow in his chest. Mom, tossed back by a fireblast. An explosion shook the ground in mockery of the earlier quake.
He found himself at the edge of town. People were fleeing, but far too few. Jet didn't want to think about how many people were still in the burning village, fighting… or not fighting.
Young Jir stumbled out, carrying his wife. He set her down and ran back into the village, his clothes burned and tattered.
Aial Win lurched away, bleeding from a gash in her shoulder, screaming that her sister Nari was killed.
An ostrich horse with a rider came tearing towards the forest, wild and crazed.
The sound of the devouring flames was almost drowning out the sounds of people dying.
;=;=;=;=;
When the soldiers mounted up on their rhinos and rode away with the spoils they had found, the village was still in flames. The heat was intense.
Jet didn't care.
He stumbled down the middle street, wide enough that the heat from burning buildings was bearable. There on the left, his house was half collapsed, an inferno of red and gold. There, the Win's place had completely collapsed in on itself, twisted timber and tile dancing with flames.
He moved on, trying not to think about the shapes scattered along the road, some still flaming. His eyes were fixed on the unmoving body still in the middle of the street where it had fallen. Mom!
He couldn't even make any noise, his throat too choked up. He fell to his knees a few feet away and threw up over and over. When the heaving had stopped, he crawled to her side, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Something caught his eye; a glint in the street, firelight playing on a metallic edge.
He got up and went over. It was one of the hooked swords. He looked around and found its mate lying not too far away. Somehow they had survived everything, with the only mar being ash on the handle of one.
The feel of the swords in his hands was familiar, right. But there should have been warm hands guiding his movements and correcting his posture.
There would never be again.
His mother was dead.
His father was dead.
June was dead.
The Fire Nation had taken everyone he loved, everything he had.
But they couldn't take one thing, and that was his hate.
Eight years old, and Jet felt the hate ice around his heart.
The pain wouldn't go away. It would never go away. But the hate would drive him, keep him going every day. He held up the swords then, surrounded by death and fire, and swore that he would never stop fighting the Fire Nation. He would avenge his family.
No matter what it took.
;=;=;=;=;
Jet walked away.
The village still burned behind him, a funeral pyre to the sky. He didn't know how many of the other villagers had been killed, how many had fled. It didn't matter. He was leaving.
Some of the buildings on the outskirts hadn't been burned. He found some food, crammed it into a leather sack, and started away.
The swords hung on his back, clanking with every step. They were too big for him, and he wasn't sure how to wear them. But he would. He would practice with them all the time, until he got good enough to pay back the Fire Nation for what they'd done. And they would never, never hurt someone he cared about again.
;=;=;=;=;
It took June more than an hour to get back to the rockslide, stumbling and tripping in the dark. She squinted ahead, Nyla at her heels, and reluctantly realized that she wasn't going to get home that night. "I'm sorry, Mom, Dad," she said aloud. The unstable slope was treacherous in broad daylight. Trying to cross the tumbled mess of boulders and soil and scree was akin to suicide.
She curled up under a tree, some distance from the slide, hopefully far enough away from the cliff that any further tremors wouldn't squish her under a rockslide. Curled up in the dark, with Nyla's warm body pressed up against her, June tried to get some sleep. It was a lost cause. When she closed her eyes, she kept seeing Feyiph's carcass. Kept thinking about the two cubs whose graves were just across the way.
It was cold, and dew began to form in the night. By the time dawn broke across the sky, June was very cold, damp, and sore. And tired. She had managed to snatch a little sleep during the long night, trying to relax on the hard ground, but it had been restless and broken.
The smell of smoke was heavier in the air this morning, and she could see the faint haze in the air. Big fire, she thought. Maybe they're burning the stubble in the fields? Although I didn't think they were done with the harvest in any of the fields yet…
With the sun rising, its rays deliciously warm, June felt more prepared to cross the rockslide to where the path continued on the other side. She headed for it and, with a deep breath, started to scramble across the treacherous terrain, Nyla following.
It took June half an hour to get across. She had a scare once when the rock she'd been standing on slipped, and she barely got out of the way before it triggered a minislide. She twisted her ankle a little when she stepped on what she thought was a solid patch of dirt and it collapsed into a hole. But after a harrowing half hour, she and Nyla were on the other side.
Looking at it from this side, June could fully appreciate the devastation. The jagged cliff face used to run nearly vertical for upwards of seventy-five feet before sloping up in a more gentle hill. The whole face came down. There was now a giant scoop in the mountainside where the rocks had come down. Fortunately for June, it had mostly come down away from where she had been, so she wasn't squished. Not like Pano and Ginar… The rocks had carved a road of destruction well down the side of the mountain, obliterating trees and smashing the ground.
She took a deep breath and started walking again.
Nyla pawed at his nose and snorted as they walked. June figured it was the smell of smoke, which was only getting stronger as she walked. The sky was starting to take on a faint brownish cast. Unease knotted under her ribs. They shouldn't have been burning this much stubble this early…
When she finally rounded the corner that brought Cunzhuang into view, she froze, a scream beating at her chest and demanding to be released. But shock and horror and disbelief locked her jaw.
It was destroyed.
The village was a black graveyard of charred timber and skeletal structures. Many buildings had collapsed altogether. From this distance she couldn't make out small details, but there were ominous shapes strewn around. There was feeble motion here and there, but it could have well been the breeze stirring the ashes of the town.
A strangled cry finally escaped her lips, tears streaking her cheeks as she fought against the reality of accepting what she saw. Mom! Dad! Jet!
She plunged down the hill, shuddering sobs coming. She wouldn't believe it, wouldn't accept it. It had to be a trick, somehow. When she got home, Mom would be mad at her for staying out so late, and Dad would scold her for scaring them and give her extra chores to do, and Jet would be smirking because she got into trouble, and everything had to be fine, it just had to be…
But when, wheezing from the sprint, she came into view of the town again, much closer now, she couldn't wish it away. As she numbly approached the ruins, the smell of smoke choking her lungs, it was evident that there was no escaping the reality of what had happened.
There were a few dazed figures she saw. She hailed the closest, who happened to be the man who sold fish at the corner.
"Fire soldiers, burned it all to the ground, rode off again," he managed. "Wife gone, house destroyed…" He stumbled off again, tears trickling down into his wiry beard.
June walked through the town, stunned. It seemed impossible that this could have happened.
But then she approached the body lying in the middle of the street, and everything else blanked out.
Seingin's long black hair was loose around her, her dull gold eyes still open in an expression of terror. Her head was twisted, her neck at an impossible angle. The front of her green dress was charred black, and there was a flash of white bone underneath the horrible burn.
June screamed.
;=;=;=;=;
Of the few people she saw, no one even seemed to see Nyla, stumbling at her heels, face twisted at the horrible crash of scents hitting him. She encountered Mrs. Win, Aial's mother, screaming and wailing over her younger daughter's body. She saw Baby Jir and Daddy Jir, carrying something between them. There were bodies everywhere. June did her best not to look at the corpses, but she was trying to find her family. She found what she thought was Dad's body, with an arrow sticking out of his chest, and a charred form she thought might be Jet.
The whole time she felt a kind of numbness that had come on after seeing her mother's body. She felt a kind of dazed unreality, like it was just a dream that would drift away on the breeze. But the breeze itself carried the smell of death and smoke...
After making her way through the whole town, and determining that none of her family was among the living, she made her way out. She couldn't stay, couldn't be here after what had happened. Not with her family's restless spirits still haunting the area.
June didn't know what she was going to do. Her feet took her up towards the mountains to the west. They were less explored by her than the north hills where she'd met the shirshus, but that was all right. They didn't have the terrible memories.
It was early afternoon when she realized that Nyla was flagging. June had been stumbling along in numb shock, not caring about her physical state, but the little cub was falling behind. His whiplike tongue hung out of his mouth.
They were making their way along a grassy slope, and June stopped and sat down on the ground harder than she'd meant to. Her muscles took the opportunity to complain to her and she realized how tired and sore she was as well. Nyla plopped next to her and lay down, side going up and down.
June lay back. There was still morning dew on the grass and it dampened her tunic and arms. The sky was bright blue, laden with sunshine and heat. A few clouds dotted the horizon.
What was she going to do?
She lay there for some time, thinking and trying to forget. If she focused on what was around her she could almost pretend nothing was wrong. A noise in the grass made her sit up, but it was just a furry lizardshrew, hunting for ants.
Nyla's head turned, and he rolled over to face the little creature. It started to run away, but a long tongue caught it on the side and froze it. Nyla snatched his catch up in his jaws and returned to June's side to finish it.
June scratched Nyla behind the ears and sighed. At least he wouldn't go hungry.