by JH Fletcher
‘They can stay here overnight. In the corner,’ she said, as though she’d been both expecting and resenting them, the strangers bringing with them echoes of unwelcome change.
‘I’ve already told them that.’
‘They’ll need blankets.’
‘I told you we don’t want to be any trouble,’ said Helena.
The woman at the stove ignored her protest just as she ignored the unseemly spectacle of a woman in breeches. ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’ she asked.
Michelangelo answered: ‘The soldiers burned the village.’
Helena nodded. ‘That’s right. And the farmhouse. My parents are dead. We’ve nowhere to go.’
‘In the morning he’ll take you over the mountain to the road on the other side,’ the woman said. ‘Perhaps you’ll find someone there to take you further.’
Nobody suggested where that may be; that was tomorrow’s problem, and Helena’s. Michelangelo left to see to his mules and his vegetables, and the woman turned back to the stove.
5
After a night when exhaustion had drowned fear and grief, the light came silently.
The woman got off the bed, put on the same black skirt and blouse as the previous day and dragged her grey scrag of hair into an untidy knot on the back of her neck. She went out to the lean-to at the back of the house and then took the cow to the pasture. When she came back, Helena said: ‘I would like to help. If I may.’
The woman ignored her, raking the firebox, laying and lighting the new fire. Again Helena said: ‘I would like to help. Please.’
‘I’ve done this for nigh on fifty years. I don’t need no-one showing me how it should be done. Nor get under my feet while they’re doing it.’
And clanged the pots ferociously to threaten the new day.
‘Out of my way!’
She fetched a broom and bucket of water and began to sweep the dirt floor with short, angry strokes, chucking water, careless of whether they got wet or not.
Helena took Marija outside. The rain had stopped during the night and the sky was clear, the air cold in this high place, and she remembered Michelangelo’s prophecy of snow. Michelangelo followed them out, grouchy and unspeaking, scratching his furred chest. He squinted at the pale sky before disappearing behind the back of the house.
Marija looked up at Helena.
‘Are we staying here?’
‘No.’
‘Where are we going?’
Helena didn’t know but her pride would not allow her to think about it. Michelangelo, a peasant, had told her they could not stay here. Very well. She was only eighteen but she was a Sforza. She would not plead, or tolerate in Marija the fear she would not acknowledge in herself. ‘Don’t be afraid. We shall manage very well.’
The woman thrust her head out of the doorway behind them. ‘Come and eat.’
There was coffee and bread, coarse and hard.
Then: ‘Michelangelo will take you to the road.’
Helena would not permit herself to doubt. As a child on her way back after climbing the mountain, she had insisted on walking rather than permit the villagers to see how weary she was; the same courage sustained her now. She set her lips.
‘Very well.’
She heard the clop of hooves and rumble of wheels as Michelangelo brought the cart out of the shed. They went outside. She lifted Marija into the back of the cart, where a few vegetables remained. She clambered up on the driver’s bench. She stared ahead of her. She did not speak. Like Michelangelo’s woman, her expression became one of stone.
6
Michelangelo dropped them at the place where the track joined the road. They had seen no-one since leaving the coomb. The road itself, little more than a lane flanked by poplars, was also empty.
He looked down at them standing in the muddy lane and pointed south. ‘Head that way.’
Helena refused to speak. Since the catastrophe of the burning village, her jaw felt as though it had been cemented shut. She had been thinking of going to her aunt’s, which was in the other direction, but she would not talk about it, or anything, to this man who had chosen to abandon them, it might be, to their deaths.
Perhaps he read her thoughts. He said: ‘Go the other way, you’ll likely run into the soldiers. Here, take some vegetables. You may need them.’
She did not move, so he threw them down beside her: a cabbage, a cauliflower, a handful of late nuts. She put into her voice all the arrogance she could muster.
‘Thank your wife.’
If wife was what she was.
He raised the hand holding the reins. She could not have said whether it was a gesture of farewell or to convey a message to the mules. The cart broke into its arthritic movement. Side by side, she and Marija watched it head back up the track into the mountains. Only when it was out of sight did she bend to pick up the vegetables he had thrown down to them. She turned to the child.
‘We’d best be getting along. We’ve a way to go before dark.’
CHAPTER TWO
1
Water was Ted Fisher’s god. Small wonder, when he’d been born two hundred miles south of Lake Eyre, the driest corner of the driest continent on earth. He wouldn’t have put it like that; most of the time he wasn’t even conscious of it. A harsh land: that he knew, in his bones and blood, in the earliest awareness of his being. Beautiful, too, to those who could read the beauty in the stone, the distant blink of salt pans, the sunsets flooding sky and plain with a pink seemingly too fragile for the harsh and empty landscape. Not that he would have dreamed of saying such a thing. Ted, tall and spare, with pale, almost colourless eyes and a shock of tow-coloured hair, wouldn’t have had the words. He’d never been much of a talker. As for opening up his feelings to anyone else …
Forget it.
There was something else that first the boy and then the man knew: that the vastness, like the preciousness of water, and the heat and dust, was a fundamental part of life, both a freedom and a jail. The emptiness that gave him breath also imprisoned him. There was so much he did not know, out there beyond the emptiness. He was brought up on the cattle station where his father worked as mechanic, horse doctor, roustabout, a jack-of-all-trades as bleached and taciturn as the land itself. The station was vast, without boundaries either physical or psychological to separate it from the even greater vastness beyond its borders. That was all there was: the emptiness that was life, the ache that was also life and that said to him: Out there …
Out there was what took him, when the time came. His mother, driven scatty by loneliness, had taken off when Ted was twelve. Six years later his dad died in a fool accident with a runaway horse. Driven by an impulse that was more than a simple longing for water yet had all the characteristics of thirst, he travelled the hundred and some empty miles to the recruiting office where he agreed to fight for a king and country of which he knew nothing and another country, his own, that he knew hardly better than he knew the king. They sent him first to a dust-and fly-plagued camp, then to France, a name on a map as Sydney and Melbourne were names on a map. In France he found water in abundance, and other things.
2
Ted knew he was lucky to be alive, although there were times when he wondered whether the dead were not the truly lucky ones in a world where death was the only constant.
Yet this life was what he had chosen. Chosen twice. And continued to choose, every day: because there was always the alternative. Everyone in the squadron had come to recognise the look on the faces of men who, beneath the grins and cheery acceptance of danger, had reached the point of fracture. The signs were as recognisable as death itself and, like death, came in several guises. The nerve twitching beneath the eye; the fingernails bitten until they bled; the fingers that drummed unconsciously, incessantly, on knee or table or the air itself. Afterwards there was the aircraft that crashed on take-off or landing or that, unwounded, fell like a shot bird out of the sky, spiralling earthwards, deathwards, the fragile wings of cloth and
wire ripping away under the stresses of the dive until that moment of fiery immolation when aircraft and pilot broke and burned upon the ground. There was yet another way: the solitary pilot taking on an enemy flight, diving with blazing guns into a dogfight as brief as it was hopeless, with death as the inevitable and welcome consequence.
So many ways since he had enlisted at the beginning of the war. That had been the first choice. He’d hoped to see the world, had found mud. Mud and death, which had been a novelty then, like the endlessly falling rain that was a strange sight to a man from the desert, where rain once a year was something to crow about.
To begin with there’d been no fear; that had come later. He had been made a machine gunner, promoted to corporal, and in 1915 had been offered the chance to transfer to the Royal Flying Corps.
In those days the planes had been so fragile that a dirty look was all it took to knock them out of the sky.
‘Go up in one of them things? I’d have to be crazy.’
Nevertheless, he had gone, to get away from the trenches, the mud, the clatter and hot stink of the machine gun that obliterated the enemy as efficiently and impartially as the wind erasing kangaroo tracks in the sands of his childhood. That had been the second choice. Still there had been no fear but now he discovered that, with his transfer to the three-dimensional world of flight, his war had become a good deal more personal and dangerous. The Vickers .5 machine gun he and his gunlayer had used in the infantry had been accurate over a mile: more than enough to insulate him from the actions of gun and gunner. Distance, in those days, had eradicated guilt but now death was no longer a mile away. The way to win a dogfight was to get in close. At a range of fifty feet you could see whether your opponent had shaved that day or not: you could damn near tell what he’d had for breakfast. No room, now, for the impersonality of distance; you saw the blood, the expression of fear and disbelief as your bullets bit home. When you killed a man, you knew as much about it as he did, perhaps more. You became the man you killed. Death was no longer a concept, remote and unbelievable, but an intimate companion that watched you every minute, as closely as a lover.
They had made him what they called an observer-airgunner, flying in a BE2. Twin-seater planes were death waiting to happen; somehow, by luck and a steady aim, he had survived at a time when few did.
If you could call it survival.
That was when the fear started. In his case, too, it flickered in the pulse below the eye, the teeth-ripped nails and staccato clicking of fingers, yet still he survived. He transferred to the faster and more manoeuvrable Bristol F2B. More enemy planes went down before his guns. Now death became the only thing in life. Most of his mates were gone. Each day he flew. Each day he fought: Vickers against Spandau. Each day fear settled more comfortably on his shoulder, making itself at home there.
3
‘Italy? What the hell’s down there?’
Wine and warmth and signorine, or so they hoped. Anything had to be better than this world above a brown and green landscape, the barely discernible lines of trenches scribbled in the sullen earth, where Albatros, Sopwith and Bristol wove their deadly rituals on wings as brightly coloured as the plumes of fighting cocks. They flew south to discover not wine, warmth and signorinas but another facet of the same war. The Italian army had broken at Caporetto and was in full retreat, that was all they knew. That was why they were here: to stabilise the front.
‘What the hell can we do?’
The squadron leader stroked his throat with nervous hands. The pulse jumped beneath his eye.
‘Show the flag. Otherwise the Eyeties may pull out of the war altogether. Bye, bye Verdun, if that happens. The French are shit-scared of that.’
Which made their presence in this new land, so close to the mountains, sound as though it had something to do with strategy. Very grand; although the war itself seemed no different from the one they’d been waging for the last two years in Northern Europe.
As for wine and signorine …
They were stationed at an airstrip that had been hastily thrown up on a stretch of barren land north-east of the town of Udine. They had hoped for good things from Udine but for all they’d seen of it they might as well have been stationed in the Carso, the mountainous plateau twenty miles away that people said was a howling wilderness of baking summers, bitter winter winds and stones as sharp as knives. Udine could have been packed to the rooftops with beautiful signorinas but since they never got there they had no way of finding out.
‘I don’t reckon they exist at all.’
Such was the popular opinion, one that Ted Fisher shared.
4
With his friend John Hegarty at the controls, Ted Fisher buckled the strap of his leather helmet beneath his chin and clambered aboard C2677, the aircraft that had seen them through a good many months of combat; to prove that, it carried on the front interplane strut the symbols of their kills, marked in white paint.
Ted hated the braggart marks and would not look at them. He had a superstitious fear that they were an invitation to providence to kill them, too. They were there only because the mechanics, who never took their feet off the ground, liked to boast about the successes of the planes they serviced. If it had been his choice he would have got rid of them but it was the custom and so they stayed.
One after the other, engines bellowing, the planes that made up the sortie taxied across the grass, turned to face the light breeze and took off into a pellucid dawn. Planes were at their most vulnerable when they were just off the ground and they climbed swiftly before assuming formation and heading north-east, where there’d been reports of German Albatroses harrying the retreating army.
The reports were not to be wondered at; beneath them the whole country seemed to be on the move. Ted stared down at roads clogged by a sluggishly moving tide of men, by columns of unmoving vehicles and peasants’ handcarts piled high with the bits and pieces of their lives. Here and there the retreat had spilled across the paddocks, leaving vehicles axle-deep in mud, with individual groups heading this way and that without apparent purpose. Away to starboard, near the supple green curve of the river, a house was on fire. They turned and flew low over it but could see no sign of activity, simply the house with fingers of flame thrusting through the broken roof. Perhaps an enemy plane had bombed it, perhaps soldiers had looted it: there was no way to know.
Before they had taken off they had been told that tens of thousands of men had surrendered, perhaps more. They had also heard that the Italian battle police were pulling officers off the road and shooting them. Perhaps it was true. It made as much and as little sense as everything else. The looting and violence was real enough, though; it proved to anyone who had doubted it that a defeated army could be as dangerous as the enemy.
They flew on, eyes watching the skies for the first sight of enemy planes. Which came, on cue, diving out of the east with the rising sun a blaze behind them.
The air was filled with a swirl of brilliantly patterned wings, the howl of stressed engines, the clatter of gunfire. An Albatros with red-and-black chequered wings dived head-on at them, lifting at the last instant to climb over them, coming so close that its wheels almost touched them. In the open cockpit Ted swung the machine gun frantically, firing at the Maltese Cross on the other plane’s side as it powered past. He missed and felt his cheeks tighten as John Hegarty threw the Bristol into a side skid that took them away from the enemy fire. It was only a momentary respite. They were outnumbered and outgunned. Evasive action was their only hope, and only if the accompanying Sopwiths came quickly to their aid. Fortunately they did; within seconds the air was full of the smoke of tracer bullets, a burst of fire from an Albatros ripped away a section of the lower wing, they lurched as a strut parted then were clear as the enemy aircraft made off northwards with the Sopwiths in pursuit.
Bloody hell.
Panting with adrenaline-soured mouth, Ted stared over the side of the cockpit. For the moment they seemed to have lost contact
with the retreat. Far below them, the countryside was empty of people. A solitary farmhouse sat amongst a spinney of trees. A track led up to it from a lane bordered by poplars. There was no sign of movement. So peaceful … He felt a lust for peace, for freedom from fear. The sensation was so sudden and intense that he caught his breath, bemused that he, a man of the desert, should be so entranced by the close green landscape lying below him. He shook his head, trying to smile at such thoughts.
Waste of time.
The Bristol flew on, yet the image remained, the farmhouse with its sturdy walls immersed in the emerald landscape seeming to epitomise all that was desirable and unattainable in life.
‘Where is this bloody army, anyway?’
He spoke aloud to himself, to the empty rushing air. Below them the land that a minute ago had witnessed what might so easily have been their deaths was now tranquil, as though the war did not exist.
At the end of the valley that branched off the main pass leading from the mountains, they again joined the retreat: a mass of trudging figures that filled the road, that spilled onto the paddocks on either side, that seeped into the deserted valley with the isolated and peaceful farmhouse above which they had just flown.
Perhaps the house that moments earlier had filled him with such yearning would be spared. He hoped so, but with little confidence. From what he had seen in France, it didn’t seem very likely.
CHAPTER THREE
1
It was incredible, but for two days Helena and Marija had been moving through a countryside where commonsense said an entire army was on the move, yet they never saw a soul. The rain had not come back; the weather was pleasantly warm for November with not even a hint of snow and the barren mountains had given way to a lane that meadered through poplar-spiked meadows. There were no people, no sounds but the wind in the trees, the wings of birds. It was as though no human had ever set foot in this soft and fat-seeming land.