“A salamander, with a little ‘s’, that’s like a lizard or a newt. But people once believed that salamanders lived in flames, so when we talk about a Salamander with a big ‘S’ then we’re talking about what’s called elementals, spirits of the fire.”
Marjorie interjected here, reflected firelight flaring from her spectacles.
“The ones that govern water are called Undines. The Nene Hag, who almost got me when I had me accident down Paddy’s Meadow, she wiz one of them. Snail-shells for eyes, she’d got. Then there’s the ones what rule the wind, they call them Sylphs although the only ones I’ve ever heard of have been horrible old men who stand a mile high. Spirits of the earth, they’re what’s called Gnomes officially, although round here we call ’em Urks or Urchins. You don’t see ’em much above ground, but they ride round the tunnels underneath upon these big black dog-things what are known as … oh, hang on. Looks like they’re off and running.”
The drowned girl was pointing up towards the rooftops, where the brace of Salamanders were commencing an outlandish waltz along the ridge of the thatched buildings. The incendiary beauties clung together tight, helpless with mirth, whirling each other round with an accompanying flame-tornado rising from the parched straw at their heels as they progressed from roof to roof. The dozens milling in the lane below watched helplessly as cottage after cottage was consumed by the fire-spirits’ unseen choreography. Unwittingly, the mob were following the sisters’ dazzling performance as they moved with the west wind along St. Mary’s Street towards Horsemarket, kicking up a loud din as they did so. There were curses, groans, despairing cries and several different sorts of weeping. An old man with cataracts was calling up above the clamour in a high and reedy voice, declaring that the fire was punishment from God as a result of papists in the Parliament withdrawing Charles the Second’s Declaration of Indulgence for dissenting congregations. A cross-looking youth who stood beside the raving ancient pushed him over in the mud and was immediately set on by two burlier and crosser-looking fellows who’d seen what the boy had done. A fight broke out in the already-distraught byway while, above, the Salamanders danced amongst the chimneypots with sheets of flame rolling and billowing about their bare legs like flamboyant ball-gowns. As the pair approached Horsemarket, people at that eastern end of Mary’s Street were already evacuating their doomed dwellings, moving what they could of their meagre possessions out into the frantic and stampeding avenue.
Michael ran hand in hand with Phyllis through the crowd, literally in some instances, as the Dead Dead Gang kept up with the devastating Salamander ballet. By the time the incandescent nudes had reached the wide dirt track of Horsemarket that sloped north-south across the thoroughfare’s far end, both sides of Mary’s Street were angry walls of fire with burning straws from the disintegrated thatching carried on the wind across the road. Chains of combustion snaked off down the incline towards Gold Street while at the same time the brilliant rivulets trickled uphill into the Mayorhold. Pausing only to squat down in turn over the chimney of the last house in the row and piddle streams of golden sparks into its darkness, the two sisters swarmed face first down the end wall, both snickering like cracking hearth-logs.
Hopping from one burning, bolting wagon to another they crossed Horsemarket and scampered gaily eastwards up St. Katherine’s Street, with townsfolk scattering before them, the ghost-ruffians and their after-pictures hurrying behind, not wanting to miss anything. When they were nearing College Street the redheads stopped before the gated entrance of what seemed to be a family-business tannery. The gorgeous monsters gazed towards the premises, then at each other, struggling to keep a straight face as they did so.
Each one with an arm draped chummily around the other’s naked shoulder, the two giggling sisters stepped through the now-blazing gateway, vanishing from sight into the walled yard. Before Michael, Phyllis and the gang could follow them, the whole establishment blew up. It didn’t just ignite in a great rush like all the other buildings had done; it exploded, with a tower of fire erupting up towards the overcast September sky and needle-shards of debris trailing threads of smoke behind them raining for a hundred yards in each direction, falling through the spectral children while they stood there gaping in astonishment.
Michael spoke first.
“Whop wiz all that big clangerbang?”
John shook his head, staring in disbelief as the two Salamanders stepped from the inferno of the flattened workplace with volcanic lava-coloured tears of mirth now streaming down their silvery cheeks, holding each other up to stop themselves collapsing in a quaking, sniggering heap.
“I’ve no idea. That wiz like an artillery shell. I’d always wondered how the Great Fire spread from Mary’s Street to Derngate in just under twenty minutes, but if there were blasts like that to help it on, I’m not surprised.”
Drowned Marjorie’s moon face was crumpled by a frown, as if she was considering some problem, turning the alternatives this way and that inside her mind. Whatever she was thinking, the bespectacled child didn’t seem to come to a conclusion that she thought worth mentioning. Marjorie kept her ruminations to herself as Phyllis led the gang along the roaring corridor after the fire-girls, who were by that time advancing merrily into the tinderbox of College Street, or College Lane as the incline was currently referred to, Michael noticed from a signboard that he read without the least surprise that he could do so. Pyrotechnic trails unravelled from the sisters, bowling through the slanting lane in both directions, turning everything with which they came in contact to another glaring torch. Appearing to pick up their pace, the clearly-tickled creatures sauntered through a charring gate on College Street’s far side and disappeared into the long dark passageway that Michael knew would later on be called Jeyes’s Jitty and which cut through to the Drapery. Chirping and twittering their happy nonsense, the two pretty engines of destruction wandered off into the alley’s blackness with their fiery tresses sputtering behind them and the grey ghost-children in pursuit.
It wasn’t until they stepped out into the Drapery that Michael realised the full scale of the disaster. People in their hundreds wept and bellowed as they fled in mortal dread or else charged impotently up and down the busy high street dragging pointless, slopping buckets as they tried to save their businesses. Vast flocks of startled birds flowed from one abstract shape into another under palls of smoke that turned bright morning into twilight. Just south of the alley entrance, the top end of Gold Street was ablaze and a slow river of incinerating light was starting to roll inexorably away down Bridge Street, driving soldiers, sheep and shopkeepers before it. Half the town was burning down, and it had only been ten minutes since the baby pulled the fruit bowl from the tabletop.
Across the way, the timber pillars holding up a wooden version of All Saints Church were on fire. The sisters watched for a few moments until they were certain that the building had caught properly and then proceeded up the Drapery, tripping amongst the milliners’ and cobblers’ stalls and pausing to inspect some item every now and then, like fussy ladies on a shopping jaunt, looking for something in particular. On the rough cobbles just outside a pitch displaying boots and shoes, they evidently found what they were after. Stopping dead they gazed towards some barrels standing in a row against the avenue’s east wall, then both threw up their hands and shrilled with glee. Holding their sides they staggered round in fiery rings, bent double with amusement and convulsing at some private joke apparent only to the two of them.
Drowned Marjorie gave a tight little smile of satisfaction. Clearly, she’d worked something out.
“So that’s it. That’s why the whole town burned down in under half an hour.”
The younger of the Salamanders, the slim thirteen-year-old with the flat chest and lone curl of pubic flame where her plump older sister had a brush-fire, suddenly sprang into action. From a standing jump she made a ballet dancer’s leap through the cascading smoke, her hair in a long orange smear behind her shedding sparks like dandruff, to alight on top of the end barrel, standing on her pointed toes with skinny arms curled up to either side for balance.
She’d just hopped to the next barrel when the first one in the line blew up, smashed from within by a huge fist of liquid fire that sent its wooden staves sailing into the sky and sprayed a burning dew over the as yet untouched properties to either side. The slender little girl danced nimbly onto the lid of the third container as that of the second took off like a rocket: a black, flaming disc that disappeared over the roof into the Market Square beyond. A lake of blazing fluid began crawling down the Drapery. The sprite skipped from one barrel to the next and they exploded like a deafening string of jumping jacks while the performer’s older sister looked on and applauded, jigging on the spot in her enthusiasm. Everything in sight was now on fire. Drowned Marjorie gave the assembled phantom kids the benefit of her considered verdict.
“Tannin. It wizn’t a strong west wind all on its own what made the town burn down so quick. It was the tannin. As long as there’s been a town here, it’s been known for gloves and boots, and that’s because we had all the right things here to make leather. We had lots of cows, and lots of oak trees. You need oak trees for the tannin, from the bark. The thing is, tannin wiz like aeroplane fuel. It speeds up a fire and makes it worse. That’s why the tannery in Katherine Street blew up, and that’s what’s in them barrels that she’s dancing on. I mean, you think of all the tannin that wiz in the Drapery, and then over the back there on the Market Square, that was the Glovery – ”
The little girl broke off as the whole top end of the street went up with an enormous boom. From the direction of the market came what sounded like the racket of a big jet aircraft taking off until Michael remembered that this was the sixteen-hundreds, realising that the noise was actually that of a lot of people screaming all at once. Squinting between fountains of flame and through a lowering curtain of black, fuming fragments he could see the elementals as they climbed once more towards the rooftops, sticking to the blazing walls, a giggling pair of orange-crested reptiles.
Just uphill the lower end of Sheep Street was now also catching fire. A riderless and burning horse was spat out of the ancient byway’s mouth to gallop terrified in the direction of All Saints, rolling its eyes. Nothing was safe and almost everything was flammable. By mutual assent the children raced around the top east corner of the Drapery into the caterwauling nightmare of the marketplace, into the bright core of the cataclysm, which made all they’d seen so far a preamble.
The Salamander sisters, having skittered up to the thatched ridges, had abandoned their pretence at dancing and commenced to race around the upper reaches of the square like two competing sprinters. That, however, was where all human comparisons were swept away: the pace at which the women ran along the roofs was so unnatural as to be genuinely horrid, like the unexpected speed of spiders. The sight would have been upsetting even if it hadn’t been attended by the realisation that the people in the square, and there were scores of them, were now contained in a sealed box of fire.
The tradesmen in the premises that ringed the marketplace ran back and forth, arms laden with whatever items they could carry from their threatened shops as they deposited the rescued wares in at least temporary safety on the cobbles of the square. As the extent of their predicament began to dawn on them, however, the trapped townsfolk for the most part became less concerned with saving their possessions than with getting out alive. Not all of them, though. Some were plundering the burning stores, and there were dreadful scenes towards the bottom of the market where an over-greedy looter who’d caught fire was being driven back inside the blazing building he’d been trying to rob by angry market t
raders armed with poles and meat-hooks. Individual squeals and bellows were inaudible, subsumed within one deafening common shriek as people stormed through the familiar enclosure that had turned into a crematorium, desperately looking for an exit.
Not only were living townspeople attempting to escape. Amongst the various establishments that ringed the marketplace were several taverns, notably the coaching inn there on the square’s far side, and these vomited spectres. Gushing from the doors and windows, leaking through the wooden walls in forms inseparable from the surrounding smoke, four or five hundred years’ worth of accumulated gentleman spooks, medieval ghouls and shapeless ancient apparitions joined the panic-stricken living hordes who were unfortunate enough to be at market on that fateful day. Dead dogs streaked past with photo-finish images strung out behind them like a greyhound race, and up above it all the lovely human fireworks crowed and leapt and somersaulted as they overlooked their handiwork.
Out from the flaming, overflowing cauldron of the town square, tributaries roared up Newland and through Abington Street, Sheep Street, Bridge Street, Derngate, the whole town turned to a burning cobweb with the market crowd stuck struggling at its centre. Michael started crying at the awfulness of all the people who were going to die, but Phyllis gave his hand a squeeze and told him not to worry.
“Nearly everyone wizzle get out of ’ere all right, you’ll see. In the ’ole town only eleven people died, and that most likely wizn’t many more than yer’d get on an ordinary day. Ah! There, yer see? Over the market’s other side, there at the bottom end of Newland, where the crowd are makin’ for …”
She pointed to the northeast corner of the square, towards which the majority of the great panicked herd seemed to be heading. Men were waving, shouting something as they urged their fellow escapees to follow them. The phantom children drifted in the same direction as the fleeing mob, and as they neared the far side of the market’s upper reaches Michael saw that everybody was converging on a single building at the foot of Newland, a place which by his day would have been transformed into a funny little sweetshop that had coats-of-arms and things like that carved in the plasterwork above its door. These decorations, he saw now, had been a feature of the house as far back as the sixteen-hundreds. The trapped people in the square were filing underneath the plaster heraldry as they all tried to cram themselves into the house, like circus clowns attempting to get back inside their too-small car. As the gang stood and watched this almost-comic exodus, Phyllis explained to Michael.
“That’s the Welsh House. I dare say it wiz a sweetshop when you wiz alive, same as it wiz fer me. Before that, though, it wiz like the paymaster’s office fer the drovers what ’ad brought the sheep from Wales. The ’erds would all arrive in Sheep Street, and the chaps who’d ’erded ’em across the country would all come dayn ’ere to pick their money up. As yer can see, it’s mostly stone and it’s got slates up on its roof instead o’ thatchin’, so it doesn’t burn as quickly as the ’ouses all araynd it. Everybody’s gooin’ in its front and comin’ ayt the back into the alleys, where they can all get to safety.”
It took very little time for the humanity-filled bladder of the burning marketplace to empty itself through the pinched urethra of the Welsh House, flooding with a great sense of relief into the backstreets further east. Most of the square’s ghosts also chose this method of escape from their predicament, traipsing invisible along the house’s passageways amongst the living. They appeared reluctant to just walk out through the market’s flaming walls, perhaps because the way they’d learned to treat fire when they were alive still had a hold on them now they were dead. Michael saw one such phantom looking more confused and frightened than the rest, constantly glancing back over his shoulder in alarm at his own tail of fading images as he fell in with the long, shuffling queue of spooks and citizens who were evacuating the condemned ground. After a brief stint of puzzled peering, Michael recognised him as the looter who’d been driven back into the blazing building by the vengeful tradesmen only minutes earlier. The toddler watched the hunted-looking spirit, stumbling through the crowd-crammed doorway with the other fugitives, until he was distracted by a yell from Reggie Bowler.