"For Quim and Christ!" the boy whimpered as he crab-crawled out of the way of the flames.
Here he was, the boy whose words had filled the silence and turned the crowd into this direction. You did it, thought Grego. You tore them away from me.
The boy looked up at him and recognized him. "Grego!" he cried, and lunged forward. His arms enfolded Grego around the thighs, his head pressed against Grego's hip. "Uncle Grego!"
It was Olhado's oldest boy, Nimbo.
"We did it!" cried Nimbo. "For Uncle Quim!"
The flames crackled. Grego picked up the boy and carried him, staggering out of the reach of the hottest flames, and then farther out, into the darkness, into a place where it was cool. All the men were driven this way, the flames herding them, the wind driving the flames. Most were like Grego, exhausted, frightened, in pain from the fire or helping someone else.
But some, many perhaps, were still untouched except by the inner fire that Grego and Nimbo had ignited in the square. "Burn them all!" The voices here and there, smaller mobs like tiny eddies in a larger stream, but they now held brands and torches from the fires raging in the forest's heart. "For Quim and Christ! For Libo and Pipo! No trees! No trees!"
Grego staggered onward.
"Set me down," said Nimbo.
And onward.
"I can walk."
But Grego's errand was too urgent. He couldn't stop for Nimbo, and he couldn't let the boy walk, couldn't wait for him and couldn't leave him behind. You don't leave your brother's son behind in a burning forest. So he carried him; and after awhile, exhausted, his legs and arms aching from the exertion, his shoulder a white sun of agony where he had been burned, he emerged from the forest into the grassy space before the old gate, where the path wound down from the wood to join the path from the xenobiology labs.
The mob had gathered here, many of them holding torches, but for some reason they were still a distance away from the two isolated trees that stood watch here: Human and Rooter. Grego pushed his way through the crowd, still holding Nimbo; his heart was racing, and he was filled with fear and anguish and yet a spark of hope, for he knew why the men with torches had stopped. And when he reached the edge of the mob, he saw that he was right.
There were gathered around those last two fathertrees perhaps two hundred pequenino brothers and wives, small and beleaguered, but with an air of defiance about them. They would fight to the death on this spot, rather than let these last two trees be burned--but burn they would, if the mob decided so, for there was no hope of pequeninos standing in the way of men determined to do murder.
But between the piggies and the men there stood Miro, like a giant compared to the pequeninos. He had no weapon, and yet he had spread his arms as if to protect the pequeninos, or perhaps to hold them back. And in his thick, difficult speech he was defying the mob.
"Kill me first!" he said. "You like murder! Kill me first! Just like they killed Quim! Kill me first!"
"Not you!" said one of the men holding torches. "But those trees are going to die. And all those piggies, too, if they haven't got the brains to run away."
"Me first," said Miro. "These are my brothers! Kill me first!"
He spoke loudly and slowly, so his sluggish speech could be understood. The mob still had anger in it, some of them at least. Yet there were also many who were sick of it all, many who were already ashamed, already discovering in their hearts the terrible acts they had performed tonight, when their souls were given over to the will of the mob. Grego still felt it, that connection with the others, and he knew that they could go either way--the ones still hot with rage might start one last fire tonight; or the ones who had cooled, whose only inner heat was a blush of shame, they might prevail.
Grego had this one last chance to redeem himself, at least in part. And so he stepped forward, still carrying Nimbo.
"Me too," he said. "Kill me too, before you raise a hand against these brothers and these trees!"
"Out of the way, Grego, you and the cripple both!"
"How are you different from Warmaker, if you kill these little ones?"
Now Grego stood beside Miro.
"Out of the way! We're going to burn the last of them and have done." But the voice was less certain.
"There's a fire behind you," said Grego, "and too many people have already died, humans and pequeninos both." His voice was husky, his breath short from the smoke he had inhaled. But he could still be heard. "The forest that killed Quim is far away from here, and Warmaker still stands untouched. We haven't done justice here tonight. We've done murder and massacre."
"Piggies are piggies!"
"Are they? Would you like that if it went the other way?" Grego took a few steps toward one of the men who looked tired and unwilling to go on, and spoke directly to him, while pointing at the mob's spokesman. "You! Would you like to be punished for what he did?"
"No," muttered the man.
"If he killed someone, would you think it was right for somebody to come to your house and slaughter your wife and children for it?"