Island of the Doomed

The Fires of Night

The Fires of Night Now the fire is flickering brightly on the beach. The tide is sliding gently in over the sand, and the fire is reflected in the water. But the night has many fires. In Verdisse, the camp fire burned until dawn, the horses shivered in their nakedness, and a giant had slung a necklace of fire over the plain. Then, the stallions snorted loudly just before the explosion came. But the night has many fires. Petrol over the bodies, frozen stiff and breaking like twigs, and then the fires sinking slowly through the ice, leaving behind eighteen graves in Lake Tibirsik when morning came. But the night has many fires. Lying alone and freezing in the heat before the open fire, where all the appleshave already burnt to a cinder, and hearing somebody coming downstairs and a whiplash dragging along behind on the stairs like a rat's tail, then the pain in your back a quarter of an hour too early and then the fire flaring up in response to the drama. But the night has many fires. See the fire smouldering in someone's eyes, feel the heat radiating from a body that wants more fires but for its own part only wants to be extinguished the whole of the long night, and then extinguished more and more, all the 185 timejust covered in ashes,then only ashes.But the night has many fires. Lyingstretched out under a canvassheet and feelinghow hot your fingertipsbecome, feeling the heat running through your fingers and into your hands and into your arms and into your shoulders and down through your trunk, down through your legs, into your feet, into your toes, and knowing all the time, always knowing above all else that the only way of getting rid of this pain is to cool yourself down through contact with someone else's skin,someone else's body, someone else's arms, hands. And fighting with yourself as with the devil, fighting with your own limbs, struggling with your own fingers, resisting with all your strength and still not winning, because in the end you get so hot, you'd burn up if you didn't let your fingers have their own way. And then those hands, those hands that are always so hot, sneak out on to the canvas and slide over towards the person sleeping by your side. He's fast asleep, the glow of the fire is breathing in Boy Larus's motionless face, his eyelids are closed yet alert, and his hand is clenching and unclenching on the canvas. There's a little way to go yet, the heat isgetting worse and worse, it's as if your skin were burning but not being used up, and that's the worst thing of all: that youjust can't burn up once and for all and put the whole business behind you at last, and then that hand clenching for the last time and slappingyour wrist while that look, filled with the deepest scorn imaginable, digs into your face like a needle, your unprotected face. Boy Larus hasn't got up, he's still lying there as usual hunched painfully in a posture made up of equal parts of fear and contempt, exactly the same asusual, but in that case how come the captain now sees him creeping towards him like asnake, 186 his tongue has suddenly grown longer than all the others and is shooting out from between his teeth lightningfast , but before his feet are covered in the patterned skin he gives Tom Solider a big kick, as if to wake him up, to warn him of a very real danger. 'Oh, if only you'd been on your own, you're so cowardly when you're alone,' whispers the captain to the snake but the snake just keeps on creeping nearer and nearer, its head swaying slylyand wearily from side to side, and Boy Larus's eyes are set deep, deep down inside it, as motionless as glass beads. 'If only I'd had an awl,' says the captain, 'a long, cobbler's awl, you'd have been hopelessly beaten,' but the snakejust keeps on coming and there's nowhere to run away to, there has never been anywhere to run away to:just wait for the whip, the strike, the bite, the blow - andsuddenly the snake's head falls onhimlikean...