Mike had figured that with any kind of luck fifteen of the thirty of us might get away. “It could be a lot worse,” he said. So it could. But now the enemy seemed to be fast asleep. We were quiet, God knows; we knew how to be quiet because we had been living like worms underground. But within only a little distance of the dump somebody sensed us. He could not have seen us. He could not have heard us. Whatever it was, he let loose a burst of machine gun fire in our general direction.
At a sign we lay still. Nobody knew where we were, or whether we were ten or a thousand strong, until they fired a flare, a white flare, which went off in the sky with a shaky light. Under that light we must have been as easy to see as cutout silhouettes. A violet flare went up then and—believe me!—it was a dream, every man with half-a-dozen shadows, all dancing, as Mike threw out his hand in the sign that means Forward. Then we charged, muddy-bellied as wild pigs, every one of us with his machine pistol and his grenades.
You would have thought that all the guns in the world had gone off at once. As the white flare died, another went up; only some fool of an enemy fired a green one. Shooting at shadows? So they were; only they filled the air with lead in a double enfilade. Mike went forward all the time and I was the first behind him. I said it was like a dream. But it was not a bad dream. Everything was so quick and bright, you wanted it not to end. And if this is child’s talk, let it be.
We cut our way into the dump. Mike threw me a case of dynamite. The Ox took it from me and put it under his arm. He was as calm as if all this had been arranged in an office. Pulling the pins with his teeth, he threw four grenades. A machine gun stopped suddenly and I heard a man screaming, “Mother! Mother!”
Mike gave me four tins of fuses and two of detonators which I could get inside my jacket. Then he caught hold of another box of those round bombs you can crack a tank with, and we ran.
I was at his elbow. All of a sudden he went down on one knee. When I saw him fall I stood over him. He was wounded, horribly wounded, split open; a terrible sight to see. What kind of strength is it that is put into a man? Torn to pieces, how does he still go on? The rain was a kind of curtain. The next flare made a double rainbow. “Back to the bridge!” Mike said. I hesitated: I was bound to obey, but it was my duty to die with him. Then he ran— not back to where we had come from, but straight into the enemy dump. He was hit a dozen times. My head was cut by a bullet, which knocked me down but brought me to my senses. I remembered that I was carrying detonators and fuses.
So I caught up with the few who were left of us at the foot of the slope. You may say without lying that young Martin was the last out.
I was blind with blood. A green flare and a white one went off, and it was just as if the night had turned to lead. Then something cracked. I recognized the thundery noise of dynamite and the snapping of Mike’s box of bombs. He had got to some of the heavy stuff, because after that the dump burst in a red and white flash. A long time later (as it seemed) there was a burning wind which sucked the breath out of our bodies, and a shower of branches, leaves and bits of metal; and the rain was mud and blood.
This is the way Mike died.
We caught our breath. There were only nine of us left now, and one of us wounded—the best of us all. His name was John. The Ox said to him, “Well, friend, you’ve got it good. One of you lend a hand with this box of stuff. Don’t take it to heart, John—I can carry you twenty miles.”
So he could have. At first sight you might have thought the Ox to be nothing but a silly-faced fat man, as broad as he was tall. You would never have made a bigger mistake in your life. He was the strongest man any of us ever saw, and he seemed to be made of a sort of tough, resilient rubber. Heavy as he was, he could move like a cat. It was impossible to tire him or wear him out. I have seen him fell a tree with a double-bitted ax, using only his left hand. His last stroke was as powerful as his first. It seemed to me there was no weight the Ox could not move. He picked John up as easily as a woman picks up a baby, and in much the same way, although John was not a little man. He kept saying, “Leave me, leave me,” but the Ox took no notice of this, but cradled him in his enormous arms and carried him ahead swiftly but ever so gently. I heard him say, “Leave him, he says! Christ Jesus, for all I know we might be the last free men left in the world!”
So we might have been. There was no way of knowing otherwise.
That great downpour of rain which had curtained us when we came out had stopped. It was not going to cover our, retreat. The night was clearing and there was a little new moon no bigger than a clipping from your thumbnail. After that awful bang with which Mike went out of the world, everything seemed strange and quiet, almost peaceful. You felt that your troubles were over. It was peace, as I have heard old men talk of it. In a few minutes I would find myself walking home.
But when I saw John gritting his teeth in his pain, I knew there was no such thing as home, and peace was an old man’s story. It did not take much to remind me of ashes and dust and the thirty-two winds.
* * * *
I was in the forest when the enemy came through our place. When I came back there was nothing but dirt and darkness where the village had been. The enemy were punishing us for something somebody had done—I don’t know who and I don’t know what. My family had lived there a long time. Where our little house had been there was only half a wall, smoldering. Among the burnt stuff I recognized part of the table we had eaten at all our lives. We were clean people. The table had been scrubbed and scoured until the soft parts of the grain were worn away and there was a pattern in the wood I could have recognized anywhere, blindfold, just by feeling it. They left the bodies unburied. I buried my father and mother, first covering my mother with my shirt, she being stripped naked. I put my brother between them. They had picked him up by the heels and beaten his brains out against the floor. He was three years old.
Yes, there was plenty to remember.
I said, “Ox, I’ve got fuses and detonators under my jacket. I would have stayed with Mike if it hadn’t been for that, honest to God!”
He said, “Keep the stuff dry, then. This is no time for heroics. For all I know we are the last of the free men.”
This made me feel better. I said, “Mike ran into that dump with a dozen bullets in him.”
The Ox said, “He might have done worse. He might have run away from the dump with a dozen bullets in him.”
Mike’s brother Thomas spat and said, “Shut up, you goddamn Ox.”
He was a strong man too, and a brave man, but he would never make a leader. This, as I once heard John say, was because he did not know how to take an order. He liked to argue. Leaders don’t argue. He could give a command, but if he did so, you had the feeling that he didn’t really expect to be obeyed. With Mike an order was a law; where he went, you followed.
Thomas was a good man, though. So were they all; everyone had been through fire and water and knew what it was to bed down in hell. John used to say that all the best men have been to hell. As the storm proves the boat, trouble proves the man, he would say.
John was a man. He was thirty years old, well educated; a man without fear, and in battle a wildcat. When John spoke, even Mike listened. The enemy captured him once and (being short of guards) broke his leg with an iron bar so that he could not run away. They tortured him for weeks. He let them concentrate on his fingernails and all that while the bone knitted. All the time he never spoke. One dark night he crawled away and escaped.
He had suffered his share—yes, indeed—and now he was dying. He said, “Ox, Ox, put me down. I am leaving a trail of blood for anybody to follow.”
We had reached a little clearing in the forest, so disguised with brush that it would take a woodsman to find it. At that, a woodsman who knew that particular part of the woods. The Ox sighed. He felt the life going out of John. He set him down on a bed of moss so that his back was supported by a tree, and said, “Better let me ease that belt a bit.”
“Take it off, Ox, and
keep it. Keep the knife, too. It is a good bit of steel. Keep it. I won’t need it now.”
The Ox took the belt and the knife in silence. Then John looked at me and took out a little leather book, and gave it to me. He said, “For you, Martin.” I took it. It was, I think, some book of poetry, but it was all gummed together with blood. I said, “I will learn to read.”
He smiled at this. “Now go on and leave me, friends. I am a dead man. The dead weigh heavy. Go.”
We said nothing. Then the Ox said one word, “No!”
We stared at him. Nobody ever heard his voice sound like that, hard as iron. He said, “While there’s life there’s hope. I carry you as long as you breathe. The free men don’t leave their kind to die.”
Thomas said, “Hold it, Ox. I assume command, Mike being dead.”
“By all means,” the Ox said, “you are general officer in command, you are anything you like. Command. First of all, though, let me tell you what we’ve got to do.”
He had the case of dynamite open and was handing out the sticks in bundles. “First and foremost we’ve got to get as much of this stuff home as we can, so we divide it equally and each carry a few pounds. Fuses and detonators —they’re precious. Divide them up likewise. Stow the stuff away and we’ll get going. Once we get across the footbridge we’re all right. But by now the enemy is over its little shock and after us in force. Let’s go.”
“I’m in command here,” said Thomas.
“Sure, sure.” The Ox lifted John up again. He climbed out of the hollow, light and fast, and we all followed him as if we had been in the habit of doing so all our lives. Then we were deep in the woods again. We followed him because we could see that he knew exactly what he wanted to do. Although he moved so fast, I think that if John had been a bowl filled with water to the brim he would not have spilled a drop, he carried him so gently and steadily.
He reached the stream ahead of us. There he stopped dead. I knew that something bad had happened. Catching up with him, I saw that where we had left a swift but shallow brook the day before, there was a rushing torrent. There must have been a great cloudburst high up in the hills.
We were at the narrowest part where the little wooden bridge was. Only now there was no bridge. The flood had torn it down and tossed it away.
Between us and the other side lay twenty feet of foaming water driven by a current strong enough to whisk you away like a twig. Only a few of the piles of the bridge were standing a foot or so above the surface.
This was bad. Then, as we looked at one another, a little boy came running. He was too young for fighting, but he carried messages. He shouted above the noise of the water, “The enemy is coming. A strong force. Hide yourselves. They are no more than three miles away.” Then he was gone.
Thomas said, “We must scatter and hide.”
The Ox said, “Got to get this stuff across the water, friend.”
“But there’s no bridge!”
“Then we must build one,” said the Ox.
We looked at him. We thought he had gone crazy. He said, “The enemy can’t get through three miles of these woods in under an hour.”
I said, not knowing what I was saying, “That’s right, we must build one.”
Something in my heart told me that if the Ox said we had to build a bridge, he knew how to do it, and I was ready to follow him. He winked at me.
Just then I saw two people appear on the opposite bank, an old man and a girl.
We all knew them well. The old man was the girl’s grandfather, and his name was Martin, the same as mine— Grandpa Martin. He had been a farmer, once, but had lost everything. Now he was one of us. He lost his farm, he lost his son, worst of all, he lost his granddaughter Beatrice. She was about fourteen, and the prettiest girl for miles around, blue-eyed and with chestnut hair, when the enemy carried her off. I am not ashamed to say that I was in love with her, the way little boys are—I being only eleven at that time. Everybody loved Bea, as she was called. But she had no eyes for anybody except John. The men laughed at her for this, in a good-natured way. Once, when he was out on a raid, I heard her saying under her breath, “Let him be wounded—but not badly—and then perhaps he will let me nurse him.” For John never looked at her; for all he cared, she might have been a thousand miles away.
The Ox said of her, “She is a well-developed girl. In the old days she would marry well and have ten strong sons.”
“You are an Ox,” Thomas told him. He, too, had a weakness for old Martin’s granddaughter.
But the enemy was short of pretty girls. They made her one of their women, kept her in a tent. By one means and another she got all kinds of useful information out to the free men of the woods. She had learned the Patheran, the sign writing with twigs, stones and movements of the fingers that the tramps and the gypsies used in olden times. We got her out after two years. It cost us four good men. She was worth it. But she was no longer the same Beatrice. Tall, yes, and with a shape to take your breath away. But her voice was hoarse and her eyes hard.
She said to Mike, “Let nobody touch me. Let nobody drink out of my cup or use my spoon. I am sick. And where you boys have killed your hundreds, in one month I have killed three hundred generations of the enemy—them, their wives, their sweethearts and their children. Understand?”
Thomas said, “We have no doctor and no drugs. Can’t we perhaps snatch one of their doctors with his black bag?”
She laughed and said, “They haven’t any drugs either, much. As for their medical officer, I fancy he will be wondering how to cure himself.”
Still, seeing her on the other side of the water, I felt strong as three men, and I shouted to the Ox, “What are we waiting for?”
Thomas said, “Talk is cheap, Ox. The enemy will be here in an hour. I vote we scatter and hide.”
The Ox said, “They know we’ll have come here. There wasn’t any other place we could come to. The woods are too thin hereabout. We’ve got to get across.”
Big Steve said, “Ambush ‘em—fight it out!”
The Ox said, “And the dynamite, the detonators, the fuses? I am going to blow up the transportation bridge.”
All the time his eyes were darting here and there. He was getting everything into one simple picture in his mind—the river, the distance, the piles, the trees and the scattered timbers of the old footbridge on the bank. The clouds were gathering. More heavy weather would break again soon.
“Axes,” the Ox said. “Axes and machetes.” We each carried one or the other. “And rope, rope!” Every one of us had a length of strong cord tied around his waist— generally, that is. But on this fast raid most of us had traveled light. Among us we had no more than thirty feet or so of tough cord.
“Now,” the Ox said, “we want a few long light logs. Martin, take my ax. There’s something I’ve got to do.”
He picked up John and carried him up the bank. There he put him down again. It took only a second. Then he ran back, snatched away Big Steve’s automatic rifle and took it to John, and said, “Have you strength enough left to watch the woods?”
“Yes.”
But John was dying, his back against a tree and his knees bent up to support his wounded body. His eyes were in black hollows, as if they had burnt their way in.
Then I forgot about him. There was wood on the bank. I picked out a young spruce that the water had carried down from the mountain. The ax was a good one. I took off the top of the tree, and it cut like cheese. Then the lower part above the roots. I may be young, but I was bred hard. Still, when I tried to lift the trunk it was too heavy for me, although I was working the way some men pray. But then the Ox was with me. He picked up the log all alone and carried it to where one of the piles of the bridge stuck out of the mud on the bank.
“The water is rising,” Steve said.
Thomas said, “And the enemy is coming.”
The Ox simply said, “Oh, shut up!”
I wish he were here to tell you what happened then. I
know, I saw; but I was working with all my heart and soul. A man is made to work only at one thing at a time. The only people who look left and right are those who weren’t there. John told me once that all the world loves a bridge. In ancient times “Bridge-builder” was one of the highest titles the Romans could offer a man. He told me that there have been steel bridges that spanned oceans. But I shall always believe that the most wonderful bridge ever built or even attempted was the bridge we started to build across that flooding stream with a few bits of line and some fallen trees, with less than an hour to spare and the enemy on our heels.
The Dumb Ox said to me, once, “Actually, son, my name is Clem, but I don’t mind if you call me Ox.”
The Year's Best Science Fiction 11 - [Anthology] Page 30