Figures in a Landscape

by Barry England

  ‘He’s got to change his pattern sometime. Till he does, we’re lumbered.’

  ‘But we’ll never get away like this!’

  ‘We’ll never get away if we’re seen.’

  The next hour was one of grinding, remorseless agony: a succession of frantic bursts, too hurried to make anything like optimum progress, interspersed with periods of wracking doubt as, the helicopter once more beating overhead, they lay in rigid, sweating stillness, wondering if their too-hastily-adopted posi­tions were apparent from above. But never long to wonder, for they would be off again, driving their faces through the tearing brush, gulping mouthfuls of dust-thick air, never escaping from the closeness of the baked earth. This was, for Ansell, the most destructive factor of all: never to be able to lift his face from the dirt; to be for ever locked in the ignoble posture of panic. He longed to rise from the stifling confinement, to escape the abject acceptance of their position and the gasping contortions of a beached fish.

  Not one of their breaks carried them farther than twenty feet up the scarp; most, less; and by the time the helicopter had reached the peak, and turned off to return to the foot of the ridge, they had travelled no more than another hundred feet up the height. In an agony of discomfort, they watched as the pilot snouted about, setting up another pattern of search.

  ‘Go left,’ MacConnachie pleaded; ‘go out to the side, you bastard.’

  But the helicopter settled on a pattern which took the scar itself for a centre, and they knew they were desperately placed.

  It was the same man. It had to be. That man would know, he would not need to be told, that MacConnachie and Ansell were in the scarp. There was nowhere else they could be. It was where, in their position, he would be.

  Hating him, admiring him, MacConnachie waited, nagged by the need to go on, watching for the moment to launch himself forward again.

  Above all things he hated this: doing nothing.

  The punishment continued: an unremitting compound of flustered, ineffective activity and confined, tormenting heat. All the while their precious store of time fled them, and their hearts ached. There seemed no escape: just a slow, persistent draining of their reserve. Ansell knew the tears ran down his cheeks, and he lived in terror of losing his grip on the knife.

  At length the helicopter reached the peak for the second time, but it turned, and came back, and started the same pattern of search all over again.

  ‘Oh God, oh God, it’s hopeless, Mac.’

  ‘No, kid! That’s what he wants you to say.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘It’s true!’

  ‘No! No! He’ll not win! He’ll not!’

  But the chopper ground back and forth over their heads, beating the message down, that he knew where they were, that he would never go away, that he would stay and stay until they were broken into the earth.

  You’ll never beat us, you Goon shit, do you hear? Never. We’ll win in the end. We’ll break you. We’ll win.

  ‘Where are the other choppers?’

  ‘With him up there, they don’t need any others.’

  ‘What about the River Boys?’

  ‘It took us a day to reach the last height, it’ll take them half a day at least.’

  ‘They’re not hiding!’

  ‘They’re soldiers, they won’t flog themselves.’

  Ansell stared at the knotted roots a few inches from his face.

  ‘Mac,’ he said, ‘we might have to crawl all the way.’

  ‘We might. If we have to, we will.’

  Ansell had feared nothing more in his life. MacConnachie said,

  ‘But we won’t. He’ll be gone by then.’

  He wasn’t.

  As the sun progressed steadily up the sky to its most fierce height, the unrelenting search went on. No moment of relief, such as had come on the previous days, lifted the pressure from them. The suffocating torture was endless. First their finger-nails went, shredded and torn away, to leave their fingers bleeding stumps. The blood mingled with sweat and dirt to add one more sharp rawness to an already proliferating pain. And their cheeks flowered in a cross-work of multiplying scratches. Their arms and legs began to feel insecure in their sockets, as though stretched beyond their capacity to maintain contact, and necks and shoulders locked in a posture, almost comic, of strained watchfulness. To move at all had begun to demand a quality of will from the stomach that Ansell could feel flowing from him, useless, like spilled fuel.

  At midday they reached a point level with the height on which they had spent the night, and crawled on.

  Ansell’s body slithered in a sickly smell of sweat. His eyes, sightless now, ran with tears. There was no air that wasn’t excoriatingly hot and packed with a fine powder of dust. And all the time the helicopter flitted about with such dainty ease, with so little effort in the clean air, never quite leaving their field of vision, never allowing a moment of respite to rise and ease their wracked bodies.

  There comes a moment when the body rejects pain and un­consciousness supervenes. Ansell prayed for it, but instead every nerve and tissue seemed only to become more agonizingly sensitive to the scraping jar of their journey. If only they could get up, if they could only rid themselves of the terrible anchor of the earth, which held them back with such vast competence. To tackle the slope in the least effective manner outraged his mind and heart, and rifled his store of courage.

  Conviction rises in torment from the stomach until it over­whelms reason. Ansell saw that they would be climbing still when only bones were left, clacking for ever through the mean­ingless motions of ascent. A sort of madness, he knew, had come.

  MacConnachie’s mind grew dim. Should they stop, drink? One moment of carelessness would destroy everything. But what was everything? He laid his face in the dirt and muttered through caked lips, ‘Rest.’

  Ansell lay still beside him.

  ‘Drink in a minute.’

  They fell asleep.

  When the helicopter, scudding low, woke them, it took MacConnachie a moment or two to work out that they had only just dozed off. They had not become stiff, and the sun was still in the same position in the sky. Ansell, too, he saw, had come awake on the instant.

  ‘It’s okay. We only went for a minute.’

  Ansell’s pale, tortured face broke into a faint smile.

  ‘Nothing like a good kip to set you up.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  The helicopter had returned to the foot of the ridge, and now set up another of its patient, unending patterns of search, to the right and back across the scar. MacConnachie smiled; it was no holiday for that man either. Ansell said, with quiet calm,

  ‘We’re really in it, aren’t we?’

  ‘That we are.’

  MacConnachie could see two possible sources of hope, both faint. That the man might run out of fuel, or that his superiors, less intuitive, might order him to search elsewhere if he continued to report no contact. But MacConnachie did not believe that the man would go, or that the Goons, keeping such a dog, would call him off.

  He tried to work out how far the River Boys were behind. Not more than five hours, nor less than four, which would put them on the secondary feature by four thirty. That meant Goons, chopper and daylight all at the same time. That was bad, be­cause he must see over the top of the crest before night came; it was the minimum intelligence requirement. He said,

  ‘Somehow we’ve got to go faster.’

  Ansell said,

  ‘We can’t. And we can’t reach the top by nightfall.’

  MacConnachie was startled, but then he said,

  ‘So what do we do?’

  Ansell said,

  ‘When the River Boys come, why don’t we lie up? As soon as it’s dark, we can move along the ridge to the right. That way, when daylight comes, we’ll be out to the side of our own line of march. It could take them days to find us, and the longer it takes, the wider they have to search. We can march
all night if we have to.’

  That was the thing. Planning ahead. Using the brain. No good dropping in it, then bullocking your way out like he did. Of course they didn’t know where the Goons were on the other side of the ridge, but when dawn came they would still hold the high ground, and they would see the Goons before the Goons saw them. He’d have thought of it in time—at least, he’d have done it; but to think ahead, that was the trick. Not to feel, to think.

  ‘We’ll do it. Drink now, then move.’

  ‘Right.’

  Flat against the earth, under the persistent swish of the rotor blades, they edged the stopper out of the canteen and drank a mouthful apiece. Then they started to climb again.

  It was easy to say, ‘We can march all night if we have to.’ The benefit of their rest stayed with them for less than a minute, then the horror clamped down over them once again. Far from replenishing their store of strength, the rest seemed only to have sharpened their appetite for pain. It came to them from every sensitive part. The weight of the afternoon sun was massive, pressing them into the earth. Each limb seemed grotesquely swollen, each source of power hopelessly diminished. Soon Ansell moved with the dull absence of an automaton, distantly aware that his face was on fire, that his throat raged with abrasive harshness, and that a rod was being passed up his spine to the base of his neck.

  More and more he came to rely on MacConnachie, rising when he rose, crawling when he crawled, falling when he fell. For a time he had raged uselessly at the earth, hating it as a good soldier hates his enemy, wanting to punish it for punishing him; but now he saw only MacConnachie. Whatever coherence remained to him was directed at that man as though, by an effort of projection, he could cause that back to drag up his own body with itself. There was no helicopter, no ridge, no discom­fort; just one sole point of focus, a back, broad and strong, un­touched by suffering, untouchable.

  And a thought that caused him aching pain: in all this time, in all this torment, MacConnachie has never once relinquished his grip on either the suitcase or the gun.

  How can I ask him to carry me as well?

  MacConnachie knew he would have to stop. He was no longer watching the chopper; he was falling into a rhythm, predictable and dangerous, assuming too much. His arms ached as though his hands were wrought in steel which, stretched too far, had set in an unbreakable grip. He fell against the earth like a man struck down.

  Ansell crawled to MacConnachie and, laying his face against his boot, stared unseeing.

  In ten hours they had travelled, as the crow flies, less than a mile. As a man crawls, they had covered eight hundred feet of the scarp, two thirds of the way to the top. But they had never once been seen, they were still out of contact.

  It was MacConnachie who slept and Ansell who kept watch, dull eyes pointed at the secondary height in dim anticipation.

  The helicopter was always with them.

  He woke, or became aware, to see small figures milling about on the peak of the secondary feature. Already the sun was close to the horizon, and the helicopter had gone. It was this, perhaps, the sudden silence, that had brought him to himself. He shook MacConnachie’s boot, and a growl came down to him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’re with us again.’

  ‘Sun’s going down. They’re late.’

  Silence. Then MacConnachie said,

  ‘Go to sleep. I’ll wake you when it’s time to move.’

  ‘Not yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  It was cold when MacConnachie woke him, and dark. Night had fallen. MacConnachie pushed something soft and squishy into his hand and said,

  ‘Eat this.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Last of the fruit from the village.’

  They spoke in hushed tones, for sound travels far at night. Ansell took a mouthful of the rich flesh and crushed it against his gums to release the juices, which he swallowed, gasping,

  ‘Phew! That’s fiery stuff.’

  ‘Saved us a tin of meat.’

  ‘A man could get drunk on it.’

  ‘Don’t do that.’

  MacConnachie checked the gun in the darkness while Ansell, continuing to eat, said,

  ‘It’s as good as a drink. We can save water, too.’

  ‘Tonight we’re having condensed milk.’

  ‘Oh God, I hate that stuff.’

  ‘Now the tin’s open, you’ll drink it. I’ve had mine.’

  ‘You probably like it.’

  ‘Nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Not for you.’

  When he had finished, Ansell sat very still, but MacConnachie noticed and, taking his hand, clamped it firmly round the tin.

  ‘Drink!’

  Ansell shut his eyes, located one of the holes with his tongue and, tilting back his head, tried to swallow it down, as a child might, without touching the sides. MacConnachie grunted with satisfaction, took back the empty tin and packed it. After a moment, Ansell said,

  ‘Can we have a little water now?’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Take the taste away.’

  ‘For God’s sake!’

  ‘It makes me sick, Mac. It really does.’

  ‘All right; just a little. Hurry it up!’

  Ansell opened the canteen while MacConnachie, muttering, roped up the suitcase. Then Ansell said,

  ‘Are you going to have some?’

  ‘No, I’m all right.’

  Silence.

  ‘If you don’t, I can’t.’

  ‘Christ Almighty!’

  The dark shape of MacConnachie loomed up, seized the can­teen, drank, and thrust it back into Ansell’s arms.

  ‘Now drink! And shut up!’

  Ansell washed out his mouth and swallowed. He was much recovered from the day’s ordeal and, looking about, he was struck by a sudden feeling of unease: there was something very strange about the texture of the night. Abruptly he said,

  ‘What time is it?’

  MacConnachie, as though he had been waiting for this ques­tion, hesitated before he replied.

  ‘About midnight.’

  ‘Midnight?’

  ‘Shut up! What are you trying to do—broadcast our position?’

  ‘But for God’s sake!’

  ‘It doesn’t matter!’

  ‘What do you mean, it . . . ?’

  ‘Shut up and listen!’

  Ansell, shocked by a sense of betrayal, clamped his mouth shut. MacConnachie’s face was close to his, their altercation carried out in fierce whispers. MacConnachie was saying,

  ‘We needed the rest! They’ve got the same climb we had, but they’ve got to do it by night. And in a minute we’ll be out to the side—they can climb till Kingdom Come, they won’t find us. So don’t panic, we’re all right.’

  Without a word, Ansell re-stoppered the canteen, rose, turned away, and hitched the strap over his right shoulder, where it had rubbed all day. The left still burned painfully from the day be­fore. MacConnachie swore, and assumed his own burdens. After a moment or two, Ansell murmured, without looking towards MacConnachie,

  ‘Just as long as you didn’t hang about here for my benefit. I don’t need any favours.’

  There was silence, then the voice came back.

  ‘I do nothing for your benefit that isn’t for my benefit too.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Right.’

  MacConnachie brushed past to take up the lead.

  ‘Stay close. When it gets lighter we’ll move up on to the ridge.’

  ‘We’ll show on the skyline.’

  ‘Not till dawn.’

  ‘Give me the gun.’

  ‘What?’

  Ansell took it, fiddled with it, and handed it back.

  ‘It’s still on single-shot.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  MacConnachie started to move, then turned back.

  ‘Tomorrow will be better.’

  It was already tomorrow.

  As they wor
ked their way cautiously along to the right, mounting steadily closer to the peak, their spirits rose in the cool night air, and their pace quickened. Within an hour they were walking upright, taking no more than normal precautions.

  Ansell knew that the first physical and psychological barriers had been surmounted for, although his body ached still, he found that with each moment he marched more strongly and easily.

  MacConnachie, it was clear, possessed the gift, invaluable in the circumstances, of surrender without inhibition to his animal instincts: if it rained, he took shelter; if he was hungry, he ate; if in danger, he killed. And he could sleep, if tired, even in the cannon’s mouth, when there was nothing to be gained by moving.

  To think too much, Ansell decided, is to undo yourself. You scheme, you worry, you try to take everything into account, and you become inhibited. You fail to act. Action is the key to sur­vival. Emulate MacConnachie.

  By five, in MacConnachie’s estimation, they had travelled fifteen miles, and contact was decisively broken. That was the key to survival. If they could remain out of contact for three days, they had a chance.

  There are times when it’s better to do nothing, but I’m no thinker. The kid’ll have to do my thinking for me.

  ‘Sleep now. We’ve done well.’

  Ansell checked the gun and they slept.

  MacConnachie woke with dawn on the fourth day. He had chosen well. They lay in a small depression on the forward slope of the main ridge, just below the skyline, where they could not be approached, under cover, from any direction. Savouring a sense of harmony with his surroundings, he followed the pro­gress of light down into the low ground, until he could see the entire area ahead.

  Immediately to his front, a day’s march away, was a smaller ridge that formed the false horizon. This he christened Little Ridge, and designated in his mind their day’s objective. Beyond, he could see the peaks of the mountains against a colourless sky, and stirred with excitement to have them so close.

  Between Little Ridge and Big Ridge, the name he gave to the crest on which they lay, there was a stretch of terrain so frag­mented that it might have been smashed by a giant hammer, and so heavily grown with scrub that it could only indicate a big river system between the hills and the mountains. It was territory fraught with danger for them, since it offered innumerable hiding-places to their enemies, and no clear view forward to themselves.