the field.
A bullet struck the warrior in the centre of his sweat-glazed forehead,
leaving a perfectly round black hole in the gleaming brown skin, and
the man slithered backwards and then rolled down the hull,
coming to rest at last upon his back, and he stared up at the swiftly
lightening sky with wide, unseeing eyes. Out between the slack lips
dropped a set of artificial teeth, and the old mouth collapsed and fell
inwards.
The Count was shaking still, but then quite unexpectedly a surging
emotion swept away the terrors that had gripped him. He felt a vast
proprietorial sense of emotional involvement with the man he had killed
he wanted to take some part of him, some trophy of his kill. He wanted
to scalp him, or take his head and have it cured so that he might
preserve this moment for ever, but before he could move, there was the
shrilling of whistles, and a bugle began urgently to sound the
advance.
On the slope ahead of them, only the dead lay in their piles and
mounds, while the last of those who had survived that crazy suicidal
charge were disappearing like wisps of smoke back among the rocks.
The road to Sardi was open, and like the hard professional he was,
Luigi Castelani seized the chance. As the bugle sang its brassy
command, the Italian infantry rose from the trenches, and the formation
of tanks rumbled forward.
The corpse of the ancient Harari warrior lay directly in the track of
the command tank, and the rumbling steel treads pressed it into the
rocky ground as it passed over, squashing it like the carcass of a
rabbit on a highway, as it bore Colonel Count Aldo Belli triumphantly
up the gorge to Sardi and the Dessie road.
At the wall of rock built right across the throat of the gorge, the
armoured column ground to a halt, blocked at the very lip of the
valley, and when the Italian infantry, who had moved under cover of the
black steel hulls, swarmed out to tear the wall down, they met another
wave of Ethiopian defenders who rose from where they had been lying
behind the wall, and immediately attackers and defenders had become so
entwined in a single struggling mass that the artillery and machine
guns could not fire for fear of gunning down their own.
Three times during the morning the infantry had been thrown back from
the wall, and the heavy artillery barrage that they had directed
against it made no impression on the granite boulders. When the tanks
came clanking and squealing like great black beetles hunting for a
breach, there was none, and the trace had clawed sparks from the rock
but been unable to lift the great weight of steel at the acute angle
necessary to climb the wall.
Now there was a lull that had lasted almost half an hour, and
Gareth and Jake sat shoulder to shoulder, leaning against one of the
massive granite blocks. Both of them were staring upwards at the
sky,
and it was Jake who broke the silence.
"There is the blue." They saw it through the last eddying banks of
cloud that still clung like the white arms of a lover to the shoulder
of the mountain, but were slowly smeared away by the fresh dry breeze
off the desert.
A ray of brilliant sunlight burst into the valley, and threw a rainbow
of vivid colour in a mighty arc from mountain to mountain.
"That's beautiful," murmured Gareth Softly, staring upwards.
Jake drew the watch from his pocket, and glanced at the dial.
"Seven minutes past eleven." He read the hands. "Just about right now
they'll radio them that the clouds are open.
They'll be sitting in the cockpits, eager as fighting cocks." He
patted the watch back into his pocket. "In just thirty-five minutes
they'll be here." Gareth straightened up and pushed the lank blond
hair off his forehead.
"I know one gentleman who won't be here when they come.
"Make that two, "Jake agreed.
"That's it, old son. We've done our bit. Old Lij Mikhael can't grouse
about a couple of minutes. It will be as close to noon as pleasure is
to sin."
"What about these poor devils?" Jake indicated the few hundreds of
Harari who crouched with them behind the wall of rock all that remained
of Ras Golam's army.
"As soon as we hear the bombers coming, they can beat it. Off into the
mountains like a pack of long dogs-" after a bitch, "Jake finished for
him, and grinned.
"Precisely."
"Someone will have to explain it to them."
"I'll go and fetch young Sara to tell them," and he crawled away, using
the wall as cover from the Italian snipers who had taken up position in
the cliffs above them.
Priscilla the Pig was parked five hundred yards back in a grassy
wrinkle of ground, under a screen of cedar trees, beside the road.
Gareth saw immediately that Vicky had recovered from the state of
collapse in which they had found her, although she was haggard and
pale, and the torn rags of her clothing were filthy, stained with dried
blood from the long flesh wound between her breasts. She was helping
Sara with the boy who lay on the floorboards of the cabin, and she
looked up with an expression which told of regained strength and
determination.
"How is he doing? "Gareth asked, leaning forward through the open rear
doors. The boy had been hit twice and been carried back from the
killing-ground of the gorge by two of his loyal tribes men.
"He will be all right, I think," said Vicky, and Gregorius opened his
eyes and whispered, "Yes, I'll be all right."
"Well, that's more than you deserve," grunted Gareth. "I left you in
charge not leading the charge."
"Major Swales." Sara looked up fiercely, protective as a mother. "It
was the bravest-"
"Spare me from brave and honest men,"
Gareth drawled.
"Cause of all the trouble in the world." And before Sara could flash
at him again he went on, "Come along with me, my dear. Need you to do
a bit of translating." Reluctantly she left Gregorius and climbed down
out of the car. Vicky followed her, and stood close to Gareth beside
the side of the hull.
"Are you all right? "she asked.
"Never better," he assured her, but now she noticed for the first time
the flush of unnatural colour in his cheeks and the feverish glitter in
his eyes.
Quickly she reached out and before he could prevent it she took the
hand of his injured arm. It was swollen like a balloon, and it had
turned a sickly greenish purple. She leaned forward to sniff the
filthy stained rags that covered the arm, and she felt her gorge rise
at the sweet stench of putrefaction.
Alarmed, she reached up and touched his cheek.
"Gareth, you are hot as a furnace."
"Passion, old girl. The touch of your lily-white, "Let me look at your
arm, "she demanded.
"Better not." He smiled at her, but she caught the iron in his voice.
"Let sleeping dogs lie, what? Nothing we can do about it until we get
back to civilization."
"Garet
h-"
"Then my dear, I will buy you a large bottle of Charlie, and send for
the preacher man."
"Gareth, be serious."
"I am serious." Gareth touched her cheek with the fingers of his good
hand. "That was a proposal of marriage, "he said, and she could feel
the fiery heat of the fever in his finger, tips.
"Oh Gareth! Gareth!"
"By which I take it you mean thanks, but no thanks." She nodded
silently, unable to speak.
"Jake?"he asked, and she nodded again.
"Oh well, you could have done a lot better. Me, for instance,"
and he grinned, but the pain was there with the fever in his eyes, deep
and poignant. "On the other hand, you could have done a lot worse." He
turned away abruptly to Sara, taking her arm. "Come along, my dear."
Then over his shoulder, "We'll be back as soon as the bombers come.
Get ready to run."
"Where to? "she called after them.
"I don't know," he grinned. "But we'll try to think of a pleasant
place." Jake heard them first, so far off that it was only the
hive-sound of bees on a drowsy summer's day, and almost immediately it
was gone again, blanketed by the mountains.
"Here they come," he said, and almost immediately, as if in
confirmation, a shell burst under the lee of the rock wall, fired from
the Italian battery a mile down the gorge. The yellow smoke from the
marker poured a thick column into the still sunlit air.
"Move!" shouted Gareth, and placed the silver command whistle between
his lips and blew a series of sharp blasts.
But by the time they had hurried along the wall, making certain that
all the Harari had understood and were running back down the valley
into the cedar forests, the drone of approaching engines was growing
louder.
"Let's go!" called Jake urgently, and caught Gareth's good arm.
They turned and ran, pelting back across the open ground to the lip of
the valley, and Jake looked back over his shoulder as they reached
it.
The first gigantic bomber came out of the mouth of the gorge, and the
spread of its black wings seemed to darken the sky. Two bombs fell
from under it; one burst short but the second struck the wall, and the
blast knocked them both off their feet, slamming them savagely against
the earth.
When Jake lifted his head again, he saw through the fumes and smoke the
gaping breach it had blown in the rock wall.
"Well, now the party is definitely over," he said, and hauled
Gareth to his feet.
Where are we going?" shouted Vicky from the cabin below them, and
neither Jake in the driver's seat nor Gareth in the turret replied.
"Can't we just drive up the road to Dessie?" Sara demanded; she sat
cross-legged on the floor of the cabin with Gregorius's head cushioned
on her lap. "We could fight our way through those cowardly
Gallas."
"We've got enough gas to take us about another five miles."
"Our best bet is to drive to the foot of Ambo Sacal." Gareth pointed
to the towering bulk of the mountain that rose sheer into the southern
sky. "Ditch the car there and try and make it on foot across the
mountains." Vicky crawled up into the turret beside him, and thrust
her head out of the hatch. Together they stared up at the sheer sides
of the Ambo.
"What about Gregorius?"she asked.
"We'll have to carry him."
"We'll never make it. The mountains are crawling with Gallas."
"Have you got a better idea?" Gareth asked,
and she looked despairingly around her.
Priscilla the Pig was the only thing that moved in the whole valley.
The Harari had vanished into the rocky ground on the slopes of the
mountains, and behind them the Italian tanks had not yet come in over
the lip of the valley.
She lifted her eyes to the sky again, where only a few wreaths of cloud
still clung to the peaks, and suddenly her whole mood changed.
Her chin came up, and new colour flooded into her cheeks her hand shook
as she pointed up between the peaks.
"Yes," she cried. "Yes, I've got a better idea. Look! Oh, won't "you
look!" The tiny blue aircraft caught the sun as it banked in steeply,
turning in under the rearing granite cliffs, and it flashed like a
dragonfly in flight.
"Italian?" Gareth stared up at it.
"No! No! Vicky shook her head. "It's Lij Mikhael's plane.
I recognize it. It came to fetch him here before." She was laughing
almost hysterically, her eyes shining. "He said he would send it,
that's what he was trying to tell me before he was cut off."
"Where will it land?" Gareth demanded, and Vicky scrambled down into
the driver's compartment to direct him towards the polo field beyond
the burned and still smoking town.
They watched anxiously, all of them except Gregorius, standing on the
edge of the open field close beside the bulk of the car, all their
heads craning to watch the little blue aircraft circle.
"What the hell is he doing? "Jake demanded angrily. "The Eyeties will
be here before he makes up his mind."
"He's nervous," Gareth guessed. "He doesn't know what the hell is
going on down here. From where he is, he can see the town has been
destroyed, and he can probably see the tanks and the trucks following
us down from the gorge." Vicky turned from them and ran back to the
above her head.
On the next circuit the little blue Puss Moth dropped lower, and they
could see the pilot's face in the side window of the cockpit peering
down at them. He banked steeply over the smoking remains of the town,
with the lower wing pointing directly at the earth and then he came
back at them, this time only ten feet above the field.
He was staring at Vicky, and with a lift of her heart she recognized
the same young white pilot as had flown Lij Mikhael. He recognized her
at the same instant, and she saw him grin and lift a hand in salute as
he flashed past.
As he came out of his next turn, he was lined up on the field for his
landing and he touched down and taxied tail-up to where they stood.
As the light aircraft rolled to a halt, they crowded up to the cabin
door. The wash of the propeller buffeted them savagely and the pilot
slid back the pane of his window and shouted above the noise of his
engine.
"I can take three small ones or two big ones." Jake and Gareth
exchanged a single brief glance and then Jake jerked the cabin door and
roughly they thrust the two girls into the tiny cramped cabin.
"Hold it," Gareth shouted into the pilot's ear. "We've got another
small one for you." They carried Gregorius between them, trying to be
as gentle as haste would allow. The pilot was already turning the
machine into the wind and they staggered after it lifting the boy's
body into the open door as it was moving.
"Jake-"Vicky shouted, and her eyes were wild with grief.
"Don't worry," Jake shouted back, as they tumbled Greg.
onus across the girls" laps. "We'll get out j
ust remember I
love you."
"I love you, too," Vicky called back, and her eyes swam with bright
tears. "Oh Jake-" He was struggling to close the cabin door,
running beside the fuselage as the aircraft gathered speed for the
take-off, but one of Gregorius's feet was holding it open. Jake
stopped to free the foot, and rifle-fire snapped past his head, and
twanged into the canvas fabric of the fuselage.
He looked up in time to see the next shot star the side window of the
cockpit and then go on to strike the young pilot in the temple,
killing him instantly, and knocking his body sideways so that it hung
drunkenly out of the seat, held only by the shoulder straps.
The aircraft slewed sideways at the loss of control, and Jake saw
Vicky reach over the pilot's body and close the throttle, but he was
turning away and running back towards Priscilla the Pig.
More rifle-fire kicked up spurts of dust around them as they ran.
"Where are they? "he shouted at Gareth.
"On the left." Jake twisted his head and glimpsed the Italians in the
scrub and grass two hundred yards away on the edge of the field.
Beyond them was parked the transport that had carried them ahead of the
lumbering tank formation.
Priscilla's engine was still running, and he headed her in . k turn
for the riflemen in the grass. Above him, a qUIC Gareth fired the
Vickers and the Italians jumped up and ran like rabbits.
One quick pass scattered them and a burst of Vickers fire exploded the
transport in a dragon's breath of flame, and then Jake swung the car
back to where the little blue aircraft stood forlornly on the edge of
the field. He parked the tall steel hull close beside her to screen
her from Italian snipers.
Sara and Vicky between them had dragged the pilot's body out of the
cockpit. He was a big man, heavy in the shoulder and belly, and the
blood oozed from the bullet hole in his temple into the thick mop of
his hair as he lay on his back in the short grass under the wing.
Vicky turned away from him and scrambled up into the cockpit settling
herself behind the controls.
"Jesus!" said Jake, relief shining on his face. "She said she could
fly." A . rifle bullet spranged against Priscilla's hull and went
wailing away over their heads.
Gareth glanced down at the pilot's body. "He was a big one, poor
beggar."
"There's room for one more now," Vicky shouted from the cockpit; "with