Amazir

by Tom Gamble

  From the left, a group of three advanced through the trees and came to a halt taking up firing positions. Those to the right called from behind the outhouses and there was a sudden, human moan. Badr moved carefully forwards, around the wall and into the clearing, his Mauser kept levelled. The goat, which must have taken a dozen or so bullets, laid twisted and torn, one of its hind legs missing. And then their gaze went towards the house and froze. Summerfield let out a gasp. The windows were blown in, the doors hanging off their hinges. And in front of this, barely three yards from the entrance, were three wooden staves topped by three severed heads.

  ‘It can’t be,’ said Summerfield, breathless. ‘It can’t—’ and his eyes rested in disbelief on the ghoulish sight. The heads were a greyish purple, eye sockets sagging in something resembling a medieval scene of sorrowful repentance, the whole a criss-cross of blood and matted hair. However disfigured, they were unmistakably the heads of Lefèvre, his wife and Soumia, the Lefèvre housemaid. Several yards to the left were their headless bodies, shot through with holes and lying on top of one another in a heap.

  ‘Dear God,’ said Badr, ‘this is not the work of the French,’ and as he glanced at him, Summerfield felt his stomach churn uncontrollably and he was immediately sick.

  ‘It is custom,’ said Badr, once he had led Summerfield into the building. ‘In the northern Rif in 1921 they trapped the Spanish army on the plains and laid out two thousand heads on branches cut from the trees.’

  ‘Barbarians,’ spat Summerfield.

  ‘A custom—and perhaps unfortunate,’ said Badr, looking uncomfortable. ‘But to change the subject, I am thinking of something else—someone else, to be exact.’

  ‘Jeanne!’ Summerfield suddenly looked up. Suddenly, he could hardly breathe. ‘Do you think –?’

  Badr nodded and shouted an order to search the house. They listened in deadly silence, eyes turned upwards as the sound of footsteps trod heavily through the upstairs rooms.

  ‘Nothing,’ shouted a voice. ‘But four beds. Objects. Different clothes—women’s clothes.’

  ‘She was here,’ said Summerfield, dazed. He shook his head. ‘Jesus Christ, she was here. How could I—’

  ‘You should not feel guilty, Harry,’ said Badr, sternly and reaching across gripped his arm. They looked at each other. Badr shook his head. ‘You didn’t know. No one knew.’

  ‘I knew Abrach was in the area—I should have told you,’ said Summerfield, irritably. ‘They were massacred. It’s—it’s disgusting. No pity or chance of escape. What insane vengeance.’

  He heard Badr rise and walk away. Outside the Toubkal men had arrived and he could hear Badr engaged in conversation. A few moments later, the young man returned. ‘It wasn’t them. They didn’t know there were Europeans here. I think—’ Summerfield raised his head from his hands and looked at Badr—‘I think it might be Abslem El Rifni after all,’ finished Badr, guiltily.

  ‘Abrach,’ whispered Summerfield, ‘Why didn’t I believe him? God, I didn’t actually believe he could do such a thing. Remember that time he was seen, Badr? Toubfil came across them. Why?’ he asked, stunned by their—by his—ineptitude. ‘Why didn’t he kill him then? None of this would have happened.’

  ‘Jeanne Lefèvre must be with them,’ said Badr, ‘Unless…’

  ‘Unless she escaped,’ finished Summerfield. He snorted. ‘Escaped! And in this!’ he added, with an angry gesture at the mountains. ‘Four hours in this and she’d die of cold.’

  ‘Four hours have long since passed, Harry, I’m afraid. The killing probably happened sometime yesterday evening. The heads—they are frozen.’

  Nonetheless, Badr ordered search parties off to explore the mountain slopes from east to west. He refrained from mentioning finding a body, but Summerfield knew that it was the principal reason behind the action. Finding a tool, Summerfield began to dig the hard earth behind the outhouses and was joined—he was grateful—by three other men in his group. When it came to hauling the bodies to their graves, he couldn’t bear to look. One of the men, Taffu who had shown so much cynicism at the outset of the mission, brought along the heads and reverently matched them with their respective bodies. When it came to piling the earth and stones on the bodies, Summerfield noticed that the Lefèvres’ ring fingers had been severed, though whether it had been the murderer’s or Taffu or one of the Toubkal men, Summerfield was beyond caring. His mind was singly focused on Jeanne. To think that she had been here, he repeated to himself under his breath, that she had been sitting in exactly the same armchair as I had been only a few minutes ago. When all was finished, Summerfield said a prayer and then the three men who had help him dig stood back and spoke in Arabic for Soumia’s grave with its upright little stone turned towards Mecca. She would never have hurt a fly, Summerfield heard himself saying, it was all so horribly unjust.

  When the search party came back two hours later, Badr came to him with news. Nothing had been found. Just the trace of movement in the snow heading south, and discarded shoes, women’s, two of them at an interval of twenty or so yards. Badr produced one and asked Summerfield if he recognised it. Summerfield shrugged despondently.

  ‘Could be. Who knows. I wasn’t aware of her wardrobe, you know.’

  Badr shook his head sadly and gave a little sigh that betrayed his powerlessness. ‘There are some letters, Harry—and her belongings. Perhaps you would like to take some of them with you.’

  ‘What?’ Summerfield looked up, still dazed. ‘Oh, yes. Thank you, Badr. That’s…that’s very thoughtful.’

  ‘We must go, Harry. It is time.’

  ‘The French?’ said Summerfield. ‘You’re right. In any case, I don’t want to stay here.’ He shouldered his Lee Enfield and then turned to look at his friend. ‘So what do we do, Badr? Give me five men and we’ll track them.’

  ‘Have you seen how the snow has fallen, Harry? It would be difficult.’

  ‘But not impossible. There must be enough tracks left to lead us to them.’

  Badr remained silent, scratching his beard. At last, with another little sigh, his eyes met Summerfield’s. ‘Our mission is not over. We were to engage with the enemy. Abrach is with the Vichy French and therefore he is one of them—an enemy. I say two more days. We can follow what we find. After two days, Harry, we shall turn back and return home.’

  ‘And if we don’t find her?’ said Summerfield, looking directly at him.

  ‘The valley is your home, Harry. You must return there.’

  50

  Her nose was fractured. Every time the monster pressed against her she cried out in pain. It seemed to excite him. As a result, he usually ejaculated quickly, grunting, lifting his heavy weight off of her on his grotesquely twisted hands and wiping himself on her clothes. He was wordless, left her, lumbered away.

  They had raped her four times since they murdered her parents: once by a second man, shortly after they had killed her father, three times by the man they called El Rifni that she recognised as Abrach, the same mad beast who had once tried to abduct her. In the beginning, she had resisted him. Her fractured nose, the bruises and scratches and the gash on her neck were proof of that. And then, the fourth time, she had stopped struggling out of some inner instinct. Survival. She had succeeded in distancing herself, as though she was not there and her body not hers, just a mechanism, an orifice for her attacker to use. Her mind was empty and removed and thus her senses deadened, only the sharp stab of pain in her upper face and the nagging burning sensation in her sex reminding her she was part of some macabre experience in the realness of things.

  They sat her on a mule and covered her with shrouds of materials and skins—the same on which Abrach wiped clean his penis after taking her. She was conscious of a smell, could not discern whether it was him or sweat or the tanned skins, but the very thought of it made her gag so that she could not hold down the food they gave her.

  They travelled slowly, in a column of twelve men, headed somewhere west—towards
the Vichy French or towards his camp, she was unsure. Once, she looked at him as he moved roughly inside her, caught his eyes for a fraction of a second and thought she saw the glimmer of a genteel character that he might have once been: remorse, a wordless apology—and then, shocking in its suddenness: coldness, hatred, as though her aggressor himself had removed his mind and senses from the ultimately mechanical act.

  She thought of killing herself. The rope that tied her wrists would not prevent her falling from the mule and pushing herself off into the precipice. But something kept her going—something that, at moments, she hated even more than her captors for keeping her alive.

  Alive was something that sent shocking images to her mind. They came suddenly and she shook them away just as brutally. Images of first Soumia, hysterical, yelling and whooping in that strange way native women did though this time through utter, uncontrollable fear. They had lifted her skirts—the sight of her nanny’s fattened thighs shocking her—and laughed. Her mother sobbing uncontrollably, clinging to her father, then wrenched free as she and Soumia were dragged to the left of the patio and promptly shot. Her father’s high-pitched, almost feminine scream of anger and the sudden force with which he momentarily tore free and lunged at Abrach. She would never forget. Never forget either the look in her father’s eyes when Abrach began shouting at him, his grotesque hands raised barely centimetres from his eyes. That regard, sideways at her and unflinching, as though what Abrach was ranting about didn’t matter in the slightest—utter resignation mixed with apology and a desperate message of fatherly love. And then the pistol shots, three at point-blank range in the chest which sent her father’s body spinning towards the others and the other shots—maybe seven or so—from the men’s rifles. Pieces of body flew apart and speckled her clothes. Hysterical, she had been dragged inside by Abrach and his adjutant and raped. When they pulled her out into the clearing, the blood streaming from her nose and neck, she had a blurred view of three headless bodies and remembered asking herself, dreamlike, where the heads had gone.

  As they plodded through the deep snow, she fell into a trance, her gaze distant and unflinching on the whiteness below her feet. The notion of time slipped away, punctuated by those ghastly memories. What was it that had forced her to stay alive? What could be worse than what she was suffering, what she had seen? Was it hope? Or was it fear—fear of dying that kept her going, a fear that would enable her to endure the worst of human suffering in a futile attempt to put off the nothingness of death a few moments longer? It was all very odd.

  Her mind took a meandering turn into her past. It was not her, the smiling girl in a cotton school dress. The laughter, the friends as they walked coming together, jostling boisterously and then parting again, were from a thousand miles away, another life. Another person. Faces came to her and voices too. Not words, just the rhythm and tone of happy voices: Sister Marthe, her dear friend Sarah Bassouin, Cécile so loopy, so carefree and Edouard who had had a crush on her and her mother’s mockery. Harry. Harry Summerfield, her first true love. So foolish and impossible. Gone now. She shook her head involuntarily. Those days did not belong to her. It hadn’t been her. No—life began after Jim came into her life, after she had become an adult. How, she thought, would she ever be able to tell him? The sudden shame made her shudder and guilt pushed the air from her lungs. How would Jim ever forgive her for what had happened? Perhaps, she should never go back to him. Perhaps she should live a life of loneliness and keep the secret locked inside her old age. But what was this—she surprised herself—was she hoping? Hadn’t she just projected herself into the future and the afterworld of the nightmare she was living? Again, Jeanne shook her head, but this time conscious that she had just stumbled upon the reason why she could not kill herself. It was Jim: the thought, the certainty almost, that they would meet again.

  On the second day, rising before dawn as the snow began once again to fall, she felt something was different. It was minute, almost imperceptible, but it was there: the feeling that something was to happen. It was like a forthcoming presence. She winced in pain—she was smiling. Was it Jim? Was Jim Wilding coming? Jeanne’s breathing became rapid. Perhaps she was going mad, she thought, but her eyes darted around her at the mountains. He was here, in the air and in the snow. His strength and good humour, his self-confidence that could blow away the darkest of thoughts and problems was…was seeping into her from everything around. And then she felt herself flying, but as she turned her head, she saw that she wasn’t—she was falling. Abrach had shoved her and now he stood, his huge silhouette towering before her against the mountain as her smile went blank and she turned again to stone and steel.

  The fires were doused, little comfort against the shivering cold, and once again she was heaved up onto the mule as Abrach and his men set out. She was trembling uncontrollably. Abrach roughly covered her with yet another cloak and spat into the snow as if ashamed of such a gesture before his men.

  They were going downwards now and the snow had stopped falling. A quietness settled in, so great among the mountains that it almost constituted a noise. After an hour or so, they halted and words were exchanged between Abrach and his men. To Jeanne, half listening, half present, they seemed gabbled, heated words. Perhaps they had decided to kill her after all, she thought, absently. They were pointing at things in the distance—directions. And then, as suddenly as they had come to a halt, they were off again, plodding towards the right and continuing the sunken track downwards. That strange, impalpable presence returned to her then. Jim was trying to reach her. He was far, but he was trying to speak to her and she heard in her mind his rich, deep voice and a warmth suddenly touch her shoulder.

  There was a man slightly in front of her whose job it was to keep a hold on the loose reins around the mule’s neck. Once, scared, the mule had refused to move forwards and first he, and then with the help of several other men, had whipped and pushed the creature until it decided to move. The mule’s indignant braying still filled her ears. The man wore a maroon coloured turban, wrapped in many layers around his head so that it took on an almost conical appearance. Only his eyes, greyish brown and churlish, showed from behind the shroud as he repeatedly looked round to check—the idiot—that she was still there. She supposed that he did this more through fear than anything else, Abrach having entrusted him with guarding her. Or perhaps, she thought, Abrach knew that she had thought of ending her life. She wondered what the muleteer would do if she suddenly jumped down and ran. As she thought about this, the ragged column passed through a terraced olive grove, the trees stark and leafless and grey. It was a sign that they had shed their altitude and were entering the fertile heights.

  Once through the deserted grove, they halted. Ahead of them, the indentation of the track disappeared between two rocky outcrops some thirty or so feet high. The sound of Abrach’s voice, a low, muffled murmur, reached her as he discussed with his adjutant and another man. The large shape, almost clumsy, seemed to hesitate, pondering the oncoming terrain and then turned back to look at her. She met his eyes for an instant and held his gaze and then he turned back towards the track. There was a gruff assent and his left hand came upwards, mittenless and livid in all its hideous disfigurement to wave the column on.

  Jeanne thought suddenly of Jim, the situation and shuddered as she fought back the tears. In answer to her noise, her muleteer glanced back through the slit in his shrouded head, his eyes condemning. And then he stumbled. She wondered, in that split second, what punishment Abrach would dole out on him. But he fell heavily, something red spouting from his stomach. And then a loud crack. The mule bucked crazily and Jeanne saw herself falling through the air, over the mule’s head. The snow seemed to race towards her and when she hit it there was a crumpled sound to the blackness before her eyes. It was then that she realised—they were under attack.

  The shooting became deafening and wild. Around her, Abrach’s men ran for cover. Several of them yelped or grunted, toppling to the ground. One man
held aloft his arm, his wrist pouring blood and seemed to be wailing an incomprehensible prayer. She screamed and her voice turned into a continuous moan as terrified, she witnessed the massacre around her. Wherever her captors ducked, they could not escape. To the left of the outcrop, zigzagging shapes. I’m going to die, she repeated, holding her head between her hands, I’m going to die.

  It was impossible to calculate how long the combat lasted. There was much shouting, the thin, pitiful wails of the wounded, the bizarre fluttering, zinging sound as bullets whirled through the air around her. The shots became sporadic. Two men crawled frantically away and bolted, flinging their weapons behind them. And then silence, the smell of cordite, an odd shot. Jeanne raised her head, saw something move into her line of sight and gave a horrified gasp. It was Abrach, lumbering towards her, his large, mangled hands flapping madly in the effort to wade through the snow. And then another shape, to her left, looking at her—distinctly blue eyes—only to step forwards and bar Abrach’s way. The great shape swayed to a halt and turned to face his captor. Huge clouds of condensed breath billowed from the monster’s open mouth. He lifted his exhausted head to confront the blue-eyed warrior and Jeanne saw the most grotesque look of surprise come across his face.

  ‘Is it you to be the one to release me from my burden?’ implored Abrach, breathlessly.