By the time they reached the scorched and ragged edge, where the flares had fallen to set the forward wall on the move, the press of heat had become constant and breathing was difficult. Sweat poured from them. The back wall was no more than four minutes away.
The helicopter had started to behave as though panic had seized its occupants, repeatedly coming right down low as though to remind them that, once they had indicated their surrender, it would need time to land and take them off. MacConnachie smiled. That man should know, if any man did, that surrender was out of the question.
And then the helicopter rose to settle forty feet feet above, waiting for the end, and MacConnachie raised his hand in acknowledgement. The pilot had a clear duty, all else failing, to kill them rather than let them choose their own death; but he, too, raised a hand in salute, and the compact was made.
The moment they stepped on to the smouldering refuse of stalks in an effort to edge closer to the wall of flame before them, Ansell knew they were finished. The heat that came up from the blackened earth was staggering, making him gasp for breath and screw up his whole face in an attempt to escape the scathing radiation behind a shield of his raised arms. In front, through slitted eyes, he saw the figure of MacConnachie picking his way as though he walked on eggshell, the case in one hand, the gun still in the other; it was difficult to make him out properly against the swaying flames beyond.
Now Ansell was afraid, his legs trembled. It was the size of the thing, his inability to make the smallest act that could affect the outcome; he felt hopelessly abandoned, like a child at the mercy of vast, impersonal, adult concerns. The heat possessed him. He could have cried without the least embarrassment.
MacConnachie knew he had been right. The heat was so intense that, when the back wall reached the scorched area, the flames would leap forward to join the front wall without the need of any intervening combustible material; they would be snuffed out just like that.
He couldn’t accept it. Nor would he. Outrage and grief forced an odd cry from his lips, and he turned to the boy for one last time.
Against a shimmering background of fire, Ansell saw MacConnachie’s face. It was covered in scratches and blood.
‘Tell me! Tell me! What—to—do!’
Ansell knew it wasn’t fear; tears ran down MacConnachie’s cheeks, but he wasn’t afraid. Ansell began to cry.
‘I don’t know!’
MacConnachie let out a grunt, then struck him in the face with the gun—not hard enough to knock him over, but painfully on the cheek-bone, a crude and yet refined blow. In shock, for an instant, Ansell saw clearly. There was thinner smoke, or paler smoke, behind MacConnachie. And something important was floating out of MacConnachie’s forehead.
‘Tell me!’
As MacConnachie raised the gun to strike again, Ansell refocused in the panic of a self-protective reflex, and saw the black dots wheeling in the sky beyond MacConnachie’s garish head.
‘There! Up there!’
But when MacConnachie turned, the writhing streaks of smoke were swirled together to shut off his view and Ansell let out a little cry of pain at the unfairness of it. Then the smudges whirled apart and the sky was visible again.
‘You see!’
‘They’re shite hawks, that’s all.’
‘There’s water! They circle over water!’
MacConnachie looked again with a growing sense of hope—to the birds, the ground, the birds, the ground. Forty yards. Maybe less. To the point over which the birds are circling. Can’t be the river. What is it? Who cares? Forty yards.
Ansell was shouting,
‘Come on, Mac! There’s water!’
‘Wait!’ He seized Ansell’s coat, restraining him, peering in the smoke for a sight of the chopper. He said firmly, ‘We wait.’
And then Ansell lowered his head, and MacConnachie knew that he had seen what MacConnachie himself had appreciated from the first: whatever the water, it lay on the far side of the raging left-hand wall. Ansell mourned.
‘Oh God, how can we reach it? How can we ever reach it?’
MacConnachie loosened his grip on Ansell’s coat and began absent-mindedly to stroke the back of Ansell’s head and neck.
‘We’ll reach it. Don’t worry, we’ll get there.’
His mind was on another problem.
The canopy of rushing smoke above their heads was getting thicker and thicker as the flames approached. It must be increasingly difficult, MacConnachie thought, for the pilot to keep track of us; if we wait until the very last and then run into the fire, they may lose us altogether. They might even think we’re dead. Of course if we don’t get through, we shall be. He watched the back wall of flames, waiting, calculating.
After a moment or two, he became aware that he was standing close to Ansell, touching him. He dropped his arm, and Ansell turned away. MacConnachie couldn’t remember tucking the case under his gun arm, but now he returned it to its proper hand. The din was so fierce that he had to shout, and this imparted to his words a note of desperation that annoyed him.
‘We wait! At the last minute, run towards the birds! With luck, we’ll lose the chopper!’
Ansell turned, quite composed, and nodded. Then he touched his cheek where MacConnachie had struck him, and looked at the left-hand wall. MacConnachie shouted,
‘You go first; I follow. When I say!’
Again, Ansell nodded.
Ansell looked at the flames into which they were about to plunge. They would hit the left-hand wall some twenty feet back from its point of conjunction with the front wall. It was a calculated risk. If they hit the wall fast enough, and could keep going long enough, they should come to water. The one factor that favoured them was the tendency of the fire to travel towards the river, thus encouraging forward rather than lateral spread. With luck, the left-hand wall might be as little as fifteen feet deep. But it could be very much more.
He crouched to give himself maximum spring-off. They had a run-up of twenty-five feet. He found that fear had been replaced by lassitude; that his interest in his body’s reactions, when he could arouse it, was greater than his terror of them. Dimly he was aware that MacConnachie had crouched beside him.
The back wall came closer, moving faster and faster, the flames leaping and cascading into the sky, sparks showering, the whole structure leaning and twisting, bending and moaning in a vast sheet of destructiveness. The sound was stunning, roaring, rushing upwards, folding over and around them. The air shimmered and stung, hurled about disorderly as it was, and the earth shuddered beneath their feet. Breathing became more and more difficult, the stuff they swallowed harsh and abrasive, hot and scouring. But still MacConnachie delayed, and Ansell trembled in the threat of overbalance. The smoke whipped, and spun, and whirled about them in darting confusion.
‘Now!’
First one and then the other, they ran into the raging fire, and flames came together behind them.
For the first six or seven seconds nothing happened. They ran easily, lightly, rushing through the fire, untouched by pain. Then the flames began to bite, and the vicious sting of heat got through to them. First their throats and nostrils seized up, excoriatingly dry, as flesh clung fast to flesh and they creaked open-mouthed. The bottoms of their noses and their cheeks seemed to have been scraped suddenly raw, and raged as though salt were being rubbed into the wounds. They ran on, lashing their bodies to the limit in a screeching rush of sound and raging fire. Smoke sprang from their hair to be sucked instantly away, and their eyelashes shrivelled. All sweat had evaporated, their clothes took on the smudged outline of dissolution. Ansell was screaming, MacConnachie cooed oddly. Saliva had no time to form before it was boiled away. The effect was of being flayed alive, each nerve and vein and sinew laid bare to the scorching air. Ansell staggered, foundered dully, his shape losing definition, crumbling into a smouldering presence. The other moving thing that was MacConnachie crashed against him, gathered him up, and the combined creature blu
ndered on, smoking. There was a smell of burning meat.
The earth gave way, and they fell through the green scum of many years, releasing a great gout of putrid gases, and screaming and thrashing as the pain hit them.
For many moments, they were properly conscious of nothing but pain, as water bit into raw flesh, and their bodies pitched and twisted to escape this further outrage. Then it was distantly but urgently borne in on MacConnachie, in a renewed access of heat, that the ordeal by fire was not yet ended; from some direction it came at them again.
In an agony of scorched and gasping distress, he peered about him to see what they had fallen into. It was an irrigation ditch or canal of some kind, six to eight feet deep, with four feet of scum-thick water in the bottom. The whole was rough-hewn as a trench and gave every indication of having lain, before their arrival, undisturbed for many years. Wherever he looked, across the surface of the water, which it hid, and up the sides, there lay a rich carpet of dank, proliferating growth, culminating in an outbreak of clinging creepers that had forced their way upwards with groping tendrils to establish a stranglehold among the stalks of the fields above. The trench was deeply shaded and rank. In normal circumstances, it might have been cool.
He found that he and Ansell sat facing one another, with the carpet spread about them at the level of their chests. Ansell’s face was drawn fine in suffering. Every now and then he retched, depositing a small quantity of viscous fluid on the surface of the slime. It was only where their abrupt descent had ruptured the fibrous growth that water showed. It was black and still; clearly it had no running source, and was never refreshed by anything but rain. From the entire tacky ooze there issued, in pungent waves, the appalling and pervasive stench of permanent stagnation.
He could not for the moment move. His face raged rawly and, as it did for Ansell, the sickness rose up in him again and again. Oddly enough—for Ansell’s pain could hardly be less than his own—it seemed to him that Ansell looked not so much damaged as comic: there was more hair at the bottom of his face than the top, he lacked eyebrows and lashes, and his crown was neatly encased in a skull-cap of green algae. MacConnachie supposed he must look the same. He leaned forward and wiped the filth from the top of Ansell’s head and then from his own. Close at hand the suitcase sat sluggish amid the surface weed.
Remembering that he still clutched the gun, he heaved it up and held it before him. It came free from the glutinous mire richly clotted with every variety of muck from bright green to jet black. That needs cleaning, he thought, and wiped it vaguely across his chest; but the sense of urgency had left him, only the memory remained.
Finally he made the attempt to rise and, moving with the suspended caution of an animal that although skinned is living yet, stretched every nerve and muscle to reach the bank on his left. Twice, unable to lift his feet clear of the coarse mat of vegetation, he fell full length. His outstretched hands pierced the scum, the gun was plunged once more into the black deeps of the trench, and his chest, coming flatly into contact with the spongy substance, was buoyed up for a moment to set the whole surface-area into slow undulation, before the shreds parted and the water seeped through to meet him. With every movement he released more of the vile, poisonous gases.
By the time he reached the bank, floundering and heaving and choking on his own smell, there was nothing to separate the gun from his arm, or the man from the swamp. He was loaded down with filth and so uncertain of his balance that he let the gun fall, reached up to the nearest stalks, and hung there recuperating.
Coherence had returned to Ansell less quickly but more demoralizingly. As the worst of his nausea subsided and the pain became more embraceable, he had been betrayed by his imagination. He sat now quite rigid, afraid to move, suffering one of those moments of paralysing doubt, familiar from childhood, in which the mind knows that something terrible has happened to the body and refuses to acknowledge it. So long as he remained absolutely still, he could not drop apart.
The beginnings of urgency had returned to MacConnachie. They could not stay here; he must orient himself. He laid his head back and looked at the sky. Thin billows of smoke puffed out occasionally over their hiding-place, but were driven at once towards the river. So the river was down there, and he clung in fact to the right-hand bank of the trench. But smoke was coming also from behind him. He arched right back, hanging from the stalks, to peer into the sky above the left-hand side of the trench. Yes, there was another fire, coming fast but not yet level with the ditch. How did it get there?
He shook his body in an anguished attempt to think. Of course, it was the second layer of incendiaries the pilot had put down outside the left-hand wall of the burning field. The pilot would be a hard man to convince. He would want to see remains. But could he reasonably expect to after so raging an inferno? Yes. I would.
Ignore the pain, think some more. The Goons have got a tiger by the tail. If they can’t put out the fire, it will destroy the village. So if they think we’re dead . . .
It was no good. He had to rest. He lowered his face for a moment into the relatively cool sludge of the bank. Then he groped for and found the gun, turned up the bottom edge of his native coat, and tried to find a cleaner patch with which to wipe it. It made little difference, but at least the weapon took on the approximate outline of a firearm.
He looked again at Ansell, screwing up his eyes with the effort of concentration, and setting the stinging rawness of his face throbbing and jangling once more. The stench was suffocating, making him cough; if they didn’t get out of this place soon, they’d be gassed to death.
Ansell looked curiously calm, sitting among the weeds like a man in a bubble bath, his eyes cast in the thoughtful and distant aspect of a day-dreamer.
‘Kid!’
Silence.
‘Kid—wake up!’
Ansell didn’t seem to hear him. What was strange was that MacConnachie couldn’t hear himself, except at the muted and disturbing level of a man with damaged eardrums. Alarmed, he stuffed the gun up among the creepers, and put his hand to his ears; then, having diagnosed the trouble, he chuckled as he gouged the muck out of them.
The boy was less than six feet away, but if MacConnachie relinquished the support of the bank he’d be down in the dross again for sure. So, taking a firm hold on a stalk with one hand, he extended his body as far as it would stretch, reaching out towards Ansell with the other. His fingers remained a few inches short of Ansell’s face. He waved his arm about and shouted, ‘Ansell! Wake up! Snap out of it!’
Ansell didn’t, and MacConnachie was causing himself wrenching agony. He lowered a foot into the filth and kicked some of it up at Ansell’s face. The boy turned to look at him with an expression of puzzlement and fear. MacConnachie renewed his gestures, shouting louder, hurting himself.
In MacConnachie’s face, Ansell saw his own, and it gave him hope. The eyebrows were gone, the lashes and most of the hair. The ears protruded startlingly, a glowing red at their extremities. All of the face was burnt bright red, the sides of the neck as well, and the eyes were deep hollows of shock. But his friend was moving, his mouth opened and shut. He still had a full complement of facial skin, the bones were nowhere visible, and that was an arm. He even had a nose to his credit.
As his eyes travelled downwards, Ansell thought, how did he get so dirty? Then he saw that MacConnachie was shouting and gesticulating. He tried very hard to catch the words, but something had happened to his ears. He was stone deaf.
‘For Christ’s sake clean your ears out!’
Recognition was coming slowly into the boy’s eyes.
‘Your ears, man—your ears!’
MacConnachie plunged a finger back into one of his own ears, waggling it about by way of demonstration. Ansell imitated him and said,
‘What did you say?’
MacConnachie burst into irresistible laughter at the forlornness of it, wrenching his face painfully again.
‘How do you feel?’<
br />
‘Sick and sore.’
‘So do I. Come over here.’
Then, as Ansell put down his hands to lever himself up, apparently surprised to see the swamp, MacConnachie added, ‘Carefully!’
Ansell stood up, the strap of the canteen pulled tight about his neck, the weight reasserted itself, and he disappeared face down into the filth. Again MacConnachie roared with laughter.
‘Oh God, what’s the use?’ He released the stalk resignedly and stepped forwards, reaching out with his arms. ‘Come on, kid.’
As Ansell came up spluttering and vomiting, smeared now from head to foot with clotted slime, he made a wild grab at MacConnachie and they both went down. MacConnachie couldn’t stop laughing, it rose up in him irrepressibly.
‘Jesus God!’
He seized the nearest part of Ansell, which happened to be his chest, and heaved him over to the bank. But Ansell, with no chance to take hold of anything, simply cannoned off it and, as MacConnachie skidded after him through the squishy muck at the bottom of the trench, fell back on top of him again.
MacConnachie surfaced screaming comically.
‘For Christ’s sake, stand up!’
He took hold of Ansell in farcical desperation, turned him about, pinned him to the bank, then, seizing one hand, clamped it firmly round a stalk. At which, his balance exhausted, he fell back to sit with a tremendous crash and a gout of spume, once more encased in the vile ordure of the ditch but still laughing. Ansell stayed upright.
The newly released stench was appalling, the surface of the mire only slowly settling to rest, the suitcase bobbing heavily. He reached for it, dragged it with him to the bank, and somehow got it wedged with the gun among the creepers above. Then he embraced Ansell from behind, holding with his longer arms to more distant stalks, supporting the boy with his own body and resting against him.
Figures in a Landscape Page 12