Uprooted(23)
They didn’t even look like cows anymore, their bodies swollen and misshapen, horns grown huge and heavy and twisted. Here and there one of them sprouted arrows or even a couple of spears, thrust deep into their bodies and jutting out like horrible spikes. Things that came out of the Wood often couldn’t be killed, except with fire or beheading; wounds only maddened them worse. Many of them had forelegs and chests blackened where they had stamped out the earlier fires. They were lunging against the heavy wooden fence of the pen, swinging their heavy unnatural horns and lowing in their deep voices, a dreadfully ordinary sound. There was a knot of men and women gathered to meet them, a bristling forest of pitchforks and spears and sharpened stakes, prodding the cattle back.
Some women were already hacking at the ground, mostly bare of snow here near the pens, raking away the dead matted grass. Danka was overseeing the work; she waved my father over, our horses whuffling uneasily as they drew nearer and smelled the corruption on the wind. “All right,” she said. “We’ll be ready before noon. We’ll heave wood and hay over, in among them, and then light torches with the potion and throw them in. Save as much of it as you can, in case we have to try a second time,” she added to me. I nodded.
More hands were coming as people were woken from their rest early to help in the final great effort. Everyone knew the cattle would try and stampede out when they were burning: everyone who could hold even a stick took a place in the line to hold them back. Others began to heave over bales of hay into the pen, the bindings broken so they smashed apart as they landed, and my brothers began throwing over the bundles of firewood. I stood anxiously beside Danka, holding the flask and feeling the magic in it swirling and hot beneath my fingers, pulsing as though it knew soon it would be set loose to do its work. Finally Danka was satisfied with the preparations, and held out to me the first bundle to be fired: a long dry log split halfway down the center, twigs and hay stuffed inside the crack and tied around it.
The fire-heart tried to roar up and out of the bottle as soon as I broke the seal: I found I had to hold the stopper in place. The potion fell back sullenly, and I whipped out the stopper and poured a drop—the least, the slightest drop—on the very end of the bundled log. The log went up in flames so quickly that Danka had scarcely a moment to throw it over the fence, hastily, and afterwards turned and thrust her hand into a snowbank, wincing: her fingers were already blistered and red. I was busy jamming the stopper back in, and by the time I looked up, half the pen was engulfed, the cattle bellowing furiously.
We were all taken aback by the ferocity of the magic, though we’d all heard tales of fire-heart—it figured in endless ballads of warfare and siege, and also in the stories of its making, how it required a thousandweight of gold to make a single flask, and had to be brewed in cauldrons made of pure stone, by a wizard of surpassing skill. I carefully hadn’t mentioned to anyone that I didn’t have permission to take the potions from the tower: if the Dragon was going to be angry with anyone, I meant for him to be angry with me alone.
But hearing stories about it wasn’t the same as seeing it in front of our faces. We were unprepared, and the sickened cattle were already in a frenzy. Ten of them clumped together and bore down on the back wall, smashing against it heedless of the waiting stakes and prods. And all of us were terrified of being gored or bitten, even of touching them; the Wood’s evil could spread so easily. The handful of defenders fell back, and Danka was shouting furiously as the fence began to give way.
The Dragon had taught me, with endless labor and grim determination, several small spells of mending and fixing and repair, none of which I could cast very well. Desperation made me try: I climbed up onto my father’s empty sled and pointed at the fence and said, “Paran kivitash farantem, paran paran kivitam!” I had missed a syllable somewhere, I knew it, but I must have been close enough: the largest bar, splintering, jumped back whole into place and suddenly put out twigs with new leaves, and the old iron cross-braces straightened themselves out.
Old Hanka, who alone had held her ground—“I’m too sour to die,” she said afterwards, by way of dismissing credit for her bravery—had been holding only the stump of a rake, the head of it already broken off and jammed between the horns of one of the oxen. Her stubby stick turned into a long sharpened rod of bright metal, steel, and she jabbed it at once straight into the open bellowing maw of the cow pushing on the fence. The spear pierced through and through and came out the back of the cow’s skull, and the huge beast fell heavily against the fence and sagged dead to the ground, blocking the others from coming at it.
That proved to be the worst of the fight. We held them everywhere else, for a few minutes longer, and the task grew easier: they were all on fire by then, a terrible stink going up that twisted the stomach. They lost their cunning in panic and became merely animals again, throwing themselves futilely against the fence walls and one another until the fire brought them down at last. I used the mending charm twice more, and by the end was sagging against Kasia, who had climbed into the wagon to hold me up. The older children were running everywhere breathless with buckets of half-melted snow to put out any sparks that fell on the ground. Every last man and woman labored to exhaustion with their prods, faces red and sweaty with heat, backs freezing in the cold air, but together we kept the beasts penned, and neither the fire nor their corruption spread.
Finally the last cow fell. Hissing smoke and fat crackled on inside the fire. We all sat exhausted in a loose ring around the pen, keeping out of the smoke, watching as the fire-heart settled down and burned low, consuming everything down to ashes. Many coughed. No one spoke or cheered. There was no cause for celebration. We were all glad to see the worst danger averted, but the cost was immense. Jerzy wasn’t the only one who would be impoverished by the fire.