Lucchi begins his descent, leading the rider via a gullied pathway down onto the steppe and past a stone barrier built up on their right, as if to dam the wave of grassed hillside mustered upon it. Hollowed from the slope’s midriff are a series of ragged and irregularly sized tunnels, like the warren holes to some troglodyte palace. Enough to hide an entire regiment of deserters, thinks the rider. Each man burrowed into the rock, wary and aboriginal.
Swann is the first to register their arrival, the lance corporal seated at the campfire with Brinkhurst. He alerts the ex-captain, who looks up to regard the latecomers with a keen eye.
‘So where you slackers been?’ says Swann as the rider and Lucchi draw near. ‘Pickin’ flowers?’
The rider looks over their scrappy outpost, supplies dumped haphazardly, food tins scattered alongside Mills bombs, rifles and entrenching tools. He hears a slow, mocking clap from Mawdsley, the archdeacon sprawled on top of the temple’s base, his legs dangling, his back against the stump of a column.
‘You did well to catch up,’ says Brinkhurst. ‘Good timing, too, just about to get a brew on.’
The rider notices that the tabletop of a nearby altar is gummed with feathers, a mess tin containing the bones of a chicken carcass laid across the fire’s embers. Nothing, of course, set aside for himself or Lucchi. ‘Why here?’ he asks, passing his rifle back into Brinkhurst’s extended hands.
The ex-captain fills a mess tin with water and sets it over the fire. ‘Better cover than the plateau. Nobody will travel this far north of the coast road. It’s a good spot.’
Lucchi sits himself on a block of stone and begins to remove his packs and bags. Brinkhurst pours two mugs of tea and brings them over, along with some biscuits and jam. ‘We’ll inventory the food tomorrow,’ he explains. ‘See what’s what.’
‘How long are we staying?’ the rider asks.
‘It’s an amazing place, isn’t it? Graeco-Roman, I think. Looks like the Ities have been doing some restoration work. We found a small cave with running water.’
The rider cups the mug in his hands, pleased to have the warmth of it against his bruised palms. ‘So is this what you were hoping for?’
Brinkhurst looks out across the terrace, his gentler self momentarily evident. ‘Actually, yes,’ he says. ‘This is what I was hoping for.’
With that, he returns to the vicinity of the fire to bed himself down, leaving the rider to ponder the story of their appropriated precinct.
*
The next morning the rider wakes up with a start, certain he has heard the drone of a prop engine. He turns his head to see a honeybee alighting on a sprig of thyme. A bee! He remains quite still as he watches it take pollen from the blossom, the sight moving him almost to tears.
He rises from his bedding to see that he is the last to do so, the others already up and about. Their headquarters put into better order now, the supplies organised into clearly defined depots of food, fuel and munitions. The handiwork of Brinkhurst, no doubt. The rider sees him hanging wet clothing from a guy rope strung between two monoliths, no more respectful of antiquity than any backstreet washerwoman. The instinct and world view of a pragmatist, for all his cleaving to decorum.
Swann is standing on the platform above, stripped naked, busy soaping his freckled and hairless chest, a display of Attic noblesse. And a cleansing none had thought possible before reaching the coast. But now they can enjoy the end of privation, debride at last those cloying layers. Easy to think of it all as a new beginning, if one were so inclined.
The group gather together for breakfast, strips of tinned bacon served up by an uncharacteristically bonhomous Brinkhurst, who is keen to direct their notice to a hazy Mediterranean. To swim in the ocean after such a relentless wilderness: imagine! The rider offers a polite smile, but it is the issue of distance that most captivates. The exact width of the sea crossing to Sicily and then to Italy, the mileage from Switzerland through France and up to the Low Countries, the length of the Channel crossing to England. The overall and precise span of his journey home. Perhaps he will draw a map when he has the chance, arrive at some estimate of scale. A far happier pursuit than any beach trip.
After breakfast the group disperses, each man free to pursue his own distractions. Lucchi takes an exploratory walk over the settlement, while Swann exercises his impulse to affray by trying, Samson-like, to push over several of the temple columns, his most strenuous efforts in vain. Even Brinkhurst appears to have temporarily put aside any thoughts of security, the ex-captain retreating with his clipboard into the shade of an abutment where he sits to make notes and sketches. A memoir, perhaps, or some Darwinian journal.
The rider collects his postbag and steps past a dozing Mawdsley to begin his own tour of the settlement. In sunlight he finds the terrace stripped of its mystery, the site exposed as a grand folly, its stonework vivid against the panorama of richly grassed hillsides, each topped with thickets of cypress, pine and juniper. He can only guess at the colour of the blossom but decides upon lilac or pale blue, something placid, as befitting a mountain idyll.
He follows a route that takes him away from the encampment and up towards the amphitheatre, where he ascends a stone staircase to overlook the theatre pit. Below are fanned out rows of tiered stone seating, the lower ranks tumbled away into the arena, and he settles on a position among the uppermost galleries to look out over the net of crop fields to the shore.
He pulls his postbag close. What those men would have given for such a sight. To see at last some constraint upon distance, when all had been so confounded here by the immensity of space, the lack of compass. And who could blame them for it? One could hardly come into so strange and spare an empire and presume at once to know it.
But they had come nonetheless, their regiments mustered like the armadas of old. And like many a rash fleet they had come to ruin by their own imprudence, thrown haphazardly upon the guns of the enemy. Tanks exploding with a single burst, crewmen tumbling from their hatches like medieval besiegers blackened by vitriol, vehicles holed, rent and punched backward, left to carbonise as marooned wrecks. Outposts whose stories had paused after antiquity had been taken, held, lost and then retaken at ever higher cost – Benghazi, Sollum, Tobruk – each vying with the other for the greater number of graves. Had anybody even been in charge? What had been his name, this squanderer, this dilettante?
Brought to such a precipice, a man might become awake to superstition. He might tie the laces of the right boot before the left, or stir a mug of tea clockwise only. Certain words might go unspoken, like l—t and f—-l, as though artefacts of some forgotten tongue. Yet over all these precautions would rule the principles of physical law. So that a married man might not wear his wedding ring on his finger but instead store it in a tank’s rear stowage bin. This because in the event of fire the locker would be subject to less extreme heat, while the detonation of explosive rounds within the crew compartment would result in an inferno of over nine hundred degrees centigrade. The melting point of silver.
He pulls open the postbag, eager again for her letter.
A stone flies past him and bounces its way down into the arena. Startled, he turns to see a shirtless Swann standing on the upper slope.
The lance corporal smirks. ‘Had you thinkin’ it was the ragheads, eh, Umpty?’ He makes his way down to the stone tiers, pausing to hurl another missile into the pit. He takes a seat next to the rider. ‘So, you got any smokes in that bag of yours?’
‘I can’t smoke.’
Swann nods towards the arena. ‘Poor bastards had to do for one another down there. Did you know that? Just so’s some rich wankers could lay a few bets.’ He leans back and rests his booted feet on the next tier. ‘I’d have told ’em to shove it.’ He tilts his head back and takes a deep breath. ‘Not a bad old spot though, eh? Runnin’ water, hand-carved piss pots. Fucken Ritz, near enough.’
‘I expect we’ll stay a while.’
Swann slaps at an insect on his belly, ma
king the rider start. ‘But not you though, right?’
The rider hesitates. What’s the intent here? To draw him out? Set a trap? ‘I hadn’t thought . . .’
‘It’s no secret. Everybody knows you want out.’
‘I didn’t think I was allowed. Brinkhurst said . . .’
‘Brinkhurst? You think he’s goin’ to bother lookin’ for you? Go off searchin’ the whole mountain? No fucken way.’ He raises his arms in a stretch. ‘’Course, he’s probably wonderin’ what you’re goin’ to say if you do make it back.’
So, the agenda exposed. ‘I wouldn’t tell anybody where you were,’ says the rider. ‘I wouldn’t say anything.’
Swann sits up. ‘Sure. You’d just keep your mouth shut, right? Maybe deliver those letters you’ve got there.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘And you reckon you’ve got the legs for it? To make that distance?’
‘I’m not sure.’
The lance corporal gestures towards the postbag. ‘They’re all dead?’
‘I think so.’
‘No more than poker chips to silver-spoon pricks like Brinkhurst. You tell me . . .’ He points to the amphitheatre’s arena. ‘. . . How is it any different?’
‘People won’t see it like that.’
‘People? I’d have plenty to say to “people”.’
‘You could do that. A letter. A statement of some kind. If you wanted to.’
Swann rises. ‘Not my style, Umpty. Most writin’ I ever did was on fish crates. Neither the use nor the time for it since.’
The rider watches him thread his way from the auditorium. ‘Why “Umpty”?’
‘Don’t know your Morse, eh? Iddy-Umpty. Dot-dash. ’S what y’are, isn’t it? A fucken blank.’
The lance corporal descends the steps to the terrace and treks back to the campsite. He takes a swig from his canteen before proceeding to the escarpment’s edge, where he gazes out towards the coast. Even at this range displaying that familiar impatience, the undeclared appetite for fury.
Yet he stands as a survivor nonetheless, the rider likewise surviving in his company. In part through chance, but also through that same commitment to self-interest, a willingness to throw others aside. Not a deficiency of will, but the distillation of it. And something he can hardly be blamed for, in fairness. Had he by an alternate quirk of fate been introduced into a braver band, then he might have been differently imprinted upon. Such things effected in the realm of the unconscious, quite beyond choice.
He looks again to the lance corporal, now hawking spit down the mountainside, as though in memory of his former sparring partner. The closest to eulogy, the rider imagines, that he is likely to come.
Later in the morning, Mawdsley is persuaded to assume barbering duties, each man taking his turn to kneel beside the grottoed wellspring while he ministers to them like a Baptist, pouring a tin of carbolic-tinctured water over their freshly shorn heads. Only Swann refuses the MO’s attentions, trusting to no one’s hands but his own for such a duty. Roused to a competitive spirit, the lance corporal proceeds to bald his crown in double-quick time then takes his leave, defiantly monkish.
After lunch the deserters devise a game, Brinkhurst rigging a tow rope between two opposing columns in the temple to act as a net. He produces a paper packet of Italian ‘Lucky Silk’ condoms – seda profilactica – from his trove of acquisitions and proceeds to fill several of them with water from the wellspring. The ensuing match sees the ex-captain and Mawdsley facing the rider and Lucky across the net, the objective being to catch and lob back the water-filled condoms without them bursting; a feat requiring both dexterity and finesse. Of the four, Lucchi proves himself the most adept by hurling the balloons back with such force that they cannot be caught without explosion, causing both Brinkhurst and Mawdsley to be doused in turn, each soaking received as a blessing after their waterless voyage. The rider does his best to join the rallies but even a single volley leaves him breathless, forcing him after a short time into retirement, his place taken quickly by Swann, whose earlier dismissal of the game as ‘fucken dumb’ gives way to a boisterous display of one-upmanship as he eggs on team-mate Lucchi. The game at one point draws to a nervous halt as the lance corporal mishandles his throw, causing a swollen condom to rupture above his head, leaving a skin of rubber hanging from his brow. Then he breaks into a grin, allowing the others to do likewise. Even the feted Lucchi permitted to smile. A sanctuary of rare calm, muses the rider, to instil such amiability.
As the game continues, Mawdsley points out that they are not alone. A small group of Senussi have gathered along the overlooking ridge, both the elderly and children alike watching with bemusement. Swann breaks from the game to pick up some pebbles to hurl, but is dissuaded by Brinkhurst, who reminds him that ‘we’re going to have to live with these people’. After the game ends, most of the spectators drift away, leaving only an elderly fellow still squatting, the old man unfazed by Swann’s robust warnings for him to leave.
‘We should talk to him,’ suggests Mawdsley. ‘He might know something.’
‘Want something, you mean,’ says Brinkhurst. ‘We shouldn’t encourage them.’
‘Perhaps he wants to trade.’
‘Trade what?’
‘Mebbe he’s got a goat or somethin’,’ says Swann. ‘Might take a swanky clock for it.’
Brinkhurst sighs. ‘All right, I’ll deal with it. I’ll go and talk to him.’ He pauses to address Swann. ‘If that’s all right with you?’
The lance corporal signals his dispensation with a shrug, and Brinkhurst stiffly trudges his way up the roadway to the higher escarpment. The Senussi stands to meet him, and the two of them soon engage in a conference punctuated by bouts of vigorous and indecipherable gesturing. After several minutes the old man produces from within his robes a piece of paper and hands it over, Brinkhurst examining it briefly before nodding his farewell. He makes his way back down, leaving the old man to resume his watch.
‘Haven’t a clue what he was blithering on about,’ announces the ex-captain on his return. ‘He speaks barely any English and only a little Italian. Though he did have this with him.’ He hands the piece of paper to Swann, who looks it over then passes it to Mawdsley. ‘I did ask him where the person who wrote it is, but he just pointed towards the desert. That’s if he even understood me. Of course he won’t part with the damn thing, so I’ll have to take it back to him. You’d think it was his bloody passport.’
Mawdsley regards the note with dismay. ‘This could have been a recce patrol. Or an LRDG unit.’
‘Let’s not rush into anything,’ says Brinkhurst. ‘If we decide to move on we need to have a plan. We can use this place for now, take some time to scout the area for any better locations.’ And then for Swann’s benefit: ‘Don’t you agree?’
Mawdsley hands the note to the rider, who quickly reads it, astonished that something so casually written could carry such weight:
Nice chap, means well
Avoid his food though, bloody awful, will give you the runs!
Cheerio
He hands the note back to Brinkhurst, who regards it as though the very writing of it has been an act of fatidic sabotage. ‘He’s convinced his English name is “Nice Chap”,’ says the ex-captain. ‘Quite insistent on it.’ He shakes his head and then begins his short trek to return the letter, the others watching as he concludes the second meeting with a handshake and then strides smartly back, more out of breath than he would like to show.
‘Perhaps he could act as guide,’ says Mawdsley. ‘If we wanted to look for another place.’
Brinkhurst deliberates. ‘He doesn’t seem too happy about our POW. If it comes to it, we may have to give him up.’
Give him up. Such a benign expression. The rider looks to Lucchi, still buoyed by the accolades for his sporting prowess.
‘Is OK?’ asks the Italian.
‘Everything is fine,’ insists Brinkhurst, the mollification intended for all. ‘Look, we
’re doing everything we said we would. No need to rush into anything. Do that, and we might as well be back out there . . .’ He makes a gesture southward.
Both Swann and Mawdsley take a moment to regard the overlooking plateau. Brinkhurst tries again. ‘We shouldn’t overreact, that’s all I’m saying. We’ve time to consider our options.’
‘Scoff’s not goin’ to last for ever,’ says Swann.
Brinkhurst displays a moment of exasperation. ‘We’ll do what we need to.’
The rationale does little to restore the deserters’ good humour, but they are commanded nonetheless by the logic of it, the rider taking little interest as they proceed to discuss improved security for the supplies and armaments, ideas on a defence for their commandeered city mooted without irony. Perhaps because they know it will not ever go to the death, that they can at any time turn and run without further disgrace. In his previous life he might have longed for that same recusal.
In the evening, heavy cloud drifts over the mountains, throwing the site into darkness, obliging all to gather to the rekindled campfire. It’s an awkward assembly, such intimacy unprecedented even while in their desert base. But there is little option to do otherwise, any solitary-minded individual running the risk of wandering too close to some hidden drop and tumbling into nothingness. There are no tents to retreat to, no means of privacy, each man’s bond with his neighbour suddenly irrefutable.
After they have eaten supper – German sausage meat cooked with strips of American bacon – Brinkhurst breaks out the bottle of Chianti from his collection. By way of a celebration, he announces. Nobody knows quite what to make of the generosity, and Swann watches with some suspicion as the ex-captain pours out measures into each man’s mug. But once the wine is served even the lance corporal is lulled by the alcohol’s effects, and by the lazy companionability that ensues.
Brinkhurst rises to his feet, mug in hand. ‘Gentlemen. I think we should recognise what we’ve managed to do. And against some odds, I might add. We’ve got ourselves out of the bloody, stinking desert . . .’ he makes an orator’s pause ‘. . . and out of the bloody, stinking war. So here’s to a job well done.’ He takes a long drink, prompting the others – including a nonplussed Lucchi – to do likewise. ‘And I think this is a good time,’ he adds, ‘for us to remember all those poor sods who didn’t get the chance to do what we did. And who are still out there doing their damnedest in a job that was bungled from the very start.’ He sits again, a little unsteady. ‘No doubt about it,’ he concludes more quietly, ‘we did absolutely the right thing.’
The Letter Bearer Page 12