Liberator

by Richard Harland

  He tried to jink from side to side, but the soft, wet earth dragged at his soles and made him leaden-footed.

  Eight paces, ten paces, twelve paces . . .

  He was almost out of the light when something struck him on the hip. Except it didn’t strike flesh, only the gunnybag at his side. There was a metallic reverberation and a blow like a hammer that knocked him off his feet. He fell flat and helpless in the mud.

  He waited for them to finish him off. But the coup de grâce never came.

  Did they think he was already dead? Was he too hard to see lying prone and almost out of the light? He flinched at every crack of rifle fire, but no shots came his way. They had turned their attention back to the duckboard refuges.

  He crawled forward, dragging the bag. Still nothing happened. He kept on crawling until he was completely out of the light.

  Then he rose cautiously to his feet and moved on in a crouch. The line of duckboards leading back to the barracks was just a short way to his left. He veered onto it and began running again.

  The flashes of gunfire were behind him now, both on the embankment side and the storage stacks side. But crossing over the embankment was another matter. As soon as he climbed up to the trolley rails, he would be fully exposed.

  He was thinking to make a wide detour when he noticed something circular at the foot of the embankment. A pipe? A drainage pipe?

  He swung across and ran up to it. It was made of iron, flaky with rust and green with slime. The bottom part was filled with silt, but it was wide enough for his shoulders to fit. Peering inside, his eyes met absolute darkness. However, he could hear the convicts’ clamour with an echoing sound, so it probably went all the way through.

  He got down on elbows and knees, held the bag in front of him and wriggled forward. Darkness closed over him – along with a stench of stagnation and decay. He fought down the urge to gag and kept crawling.

  The pipe sloped fractionally downwards, and the silt filled up more and more of it. He pressed himself flat as his back scraped against the iron at the top. He had no idea what lay ahead: fresher air, an upward turn? Or less and less space and an impassable blockage?

  I can breathe, I’m okay, he told himself. The air was foul and clogged his throat, but he could still take it into his lungs a little at a time.

  The space continued to shrink, the silt continued to rise. When he could no longer use his elbows, he stretched his arms out in front and propelled himself forward with just the leverage of his toes.

  If he couldn’t force a way through, he doubted he would be able to move in reverse. The roof of the pipe tightened over him until he was half-submerged in silt and had to twist his head to the side.

  Desperation kept him going, and in the end desperation paid off. The air stayed foul, the pipe maintained its downward slope, but gradually the tightness eased and there was more space above the silt. He was past the narrowest part.

  He wriggled along faster and faster. Soon he was pushing the bag out of the pipe, emerging headfirst into the open, gulping beautiful clean air.

  He would have liked to rub his aching muscles and take a minute to recover. But the convict quarters were straight ahead, and he had a task to finish first.

  He moved out from the shadow of the embankment. The sky was lighter than before; not long to sunrise now. Looking over his right shoulder, he could see a line of silhouetted soldiers along the top of the embankment, stretching all the way to the Residence. They were kneeling, rifles to shoulders, firing down at the besieged Filthies. There must have been a hundred of them.

  Col could only hope they stayed focused on the Filthies. He set off running across the open ground. Before him, the convicts were massed along the wire fence that caged them in. They shook the wire, shook their fists, cursed and roared and screeched. It was an ugly, brutal sound, full of threat.

  Some noticed Col as he ran up. They began shouting at him, creating even more of a din. To Col, it sounded much the same as their fury against their oppressors.

  He stopped ten feet away and rummaged in his bag. Pliers . . . wrench . . . spare clamps. He brought out the pliers and eyed the fence. It was fifteen feet high, with barbed strands along the top. He wondered if the pliers could snip through wire as thick as that.

  The convicts had all seen him now. Their faces were full of wild passion as they pushed forward against the fence until it bulged. That gave him a new and better idea.

  The posts supporting the fence were braced on the out- side by struts that angled back to iron plates in the ground. With the weight of so many bodies pushing together, only the struts kept the posts from collapsing. And the struts were fixed to the plates by great bolts with protruding bolt-heads . . .

  He dropped the pliers and took up the wrench. He ran to the nearest plate, knelt and adjusted the wrench to the size of the bolt-heads. He turned his back on the convicts to shut out their distracting racket.

  There were three bolts and Col unscrewed them one by one. He sensed the strut bowing and bending under pressure from the fence behind. When he applied the final twist to the final bolt-head, the bolt sprang out of its socket and the wrench flew out of his hand.

  He jumped to his feet and spun around, just as a whole section of fence gave way. He leaped back as the barbed strands crashed down nearly on top of him.

  In the next moment, the convicts streamed forth, trampling the fence under their feet. Men and women, old and young, all in brown hessian uniforms with numbers on their backs. Cheering, whooping, cursing, they surged forward on a tidal wave of sound.

  The mass of bodies knocked Col flat to the ground. He curled up in a ball, shielded his head with his arms and waited for the trampling feet to pass. He didn’t see the Imperialist soldiers turn to face the new threat, didn’t see them start shooting. He heard only a chaos of gunfire, yelling and screaming.

  By the time he was able to rise to his feet, a multitude of dark figures were struggling hand-to-hand all along the top of the embankment. Obviously the soldiers had failed to halt the horde with rifle fire. Col hadn’t just opened a new front in the fighting; he had unleashed a convulsion of rage and violence.

  He stood watching, no more than an observer now. The figures were outlined against a brightening glow in the sky, pink and pearly. Sunrise had come at last.

  After a while, a fresh movement started up. The soldiers on the embankment had been slaughtered or driven back, and the convicts were rushing towards the Residence.

  He hoped the Filthies would grasp the situation and seize their chance to attack while the Imperialists were in disarray. Dunga for one would understand what was happening. That is, if Dunga was still alive . . .

  He made his way towards the embankment. Everything was happening so quickly. The convict quarters were deserted, the fighting on the embankment was over, already the convicts were storming the Residence.

  At least he didn’t have to crawl through the pipe again. As he climbed the slope, a faint distinctive smell came to his nostrils. Smoke?

  He had a better view when he reached the top. The convicts milled around the marble steps that surrounded the Residence, while officers fired shots from the roof and upper verandahs. Tendrils of smoke crept out from the lower windows and main door. Some of the attackers must have penetrated the ground floor and set fire to the building.

  On the other side, the barracks side, it was a scene of death and devastation. Col crossed the trolley rails and looked out over the boggy ground.

  The Filthies had seized their chance to attack. They had thrown aside the duckboards and turned on the soldiers shooting from behind the storage stacks. Many of the soldiers had retreated to the cover of stacks further back; others had abandoned the fight and were fleeing the field.

  But that wasn’t what made Col’s heart contract. The boggy ground was dotted with sad, hu
ddled bodies, like sea creatures abandoned by a receding tide. The near-horizontal rays of the sun picked out each individual shape and cast a long, thin shadow of their death towards the embankment. Col couldn’t bear to count, but it looked as though a third of the Filthy attack force had been slaughtered.

  Minimal bloodshed, he thought bitterly. The Imperialists had shot them down for sport.

  He scanned the area for Dunga. The duckboards of their refuge now lay flat on the ground; and there between them lay two motionless bodies. Even at a distance, he could recognise Dunga’s close-cropped hair. Had she died in the time he’d been gone?

  He scrambled down from the embankment and squelched his way towards her.

  She lay curled on her side in the middle of a patch of blood-reddened mud. But he didn’t think she was dead. As he came up, he sensed a flicker of movement, eyelids and mouth.

  He had a lump in his throat as he bent over her. ‘Are you okay?’

  Her response was a babble. ‘Who did it? Who did it? Who did it?’

  ‘Did what?’

  She didn’t recognise Col and probably didn’t understand the question. But her next words gave him his answer anyway.

  ‘Someone’s to blame . . . betrayed us . . . revealed our attack . . .’ Her voice faded, and she lapsed into delirium.

  Col examined the wound. She was half-covered in mud, and the blood was still seeping out through the mud that caked her leg. No point trying to clean away the mess, which at least helped staunch the flow.

  He stripped off his jumper and shirt, then ripped one shirtsleeve away at the armpit. He tied the sleeve round Dunga’s thigh and made a tourniquet above the wound. But he still needed something to tighten it.

  He found the solution almost at once. Dunga herself was carrying one of the sharpened metal spikes that the Filthies used as weapons. He slid the spike in under the knot and twisted it around and around. Then he sat on the mud beside her and held the spike in place.

  ‘I let out the convicts,’ he said. ‘Just as we planned.’

  But Dunga was beyond listening. Col looked away, and became aware that the light had changed. Smoke blanketed the sky, and the sun that came through was an eerie orange.

  He swivelled towards the Residence. Now the whole building was in flames. Even as he watched, a verandah came crashing down and a corner of the roof caved in. Then officers appeared, bursting out through the main doors, coughing and staggering.

  Although the convicts had backed away from the steps, they stood waiting on the muddy ground. When they saw the officers, they let out a bloodcurdling roar, and converged. The fleeing men didn’t stand a chance.

  So many lives lost, thought Col, so senseless. All because the Imperialists couldn’t bear to trade with Filthies. A melancholy mood washed over him. There should have been another way. He didn’t know what it was, but there should have been one.

  For a long while, he was hardly aware of time passing. At regular intervals, he loosened the tourniquet for a minute or two, then tightened it again. Dunga seemed to have sunk into a more natural kind of sleep. He felt sleepy himself. He hunched forward and half-closed his eyes.

  ‘Hey! Who’s this?’

  He blinked and looked up at two female Filthies standing over him. He didn’t know whether they were talking about him or Dunga.

  ‘Dunga,’ he said.

  ‘How badly hurt?’

  ‘Bad. But she’ll survive.’

  They were staring at him curiously, he realised. Though his face was blackened with ink and still unrecognisable, he was bare from the waist up – and his build was not the thin, wiry build of a typical Filthy.

  He let go of the spike, which immediately swung round in a half circle.

  ‘Look after her,’ he said.

  He sprang to his feet, collected his jumper and what remained of his shirt, and left them to it. Twenty paces away, he checked over his shoulder and saw that they were attending to Dunga.

  He pulled on his jumper and discarded his shirt. Then he turned to survey the Residence.

  The scene had changed; the convicts were gone. The fire had burned itself out, with only a few wisps of smoke still drifting up into the air. The building was no more than a skeleton of bare, blackened ribs. Several Filthies strode around on the marble steps, inspecting the ruins.

  One of them looked like Riff, except that there were no streaks of blonde in her hair. But if Riff had blackened her hair for the attack . . . had she? He’d only seen her in the dark, he couldn’t remember.

  It had never previously crossed his mind that Riff might have been shot and killed. But it crossed his mind now. In sudden panic, he hurried towards the ruins of the Residence.

  It was Riff. She was leaning forward, probing about in the ashes with the tip of her rifle. No doubt the ashes were as hot as the bits of charcoal that littered the marble steps. Col burned his foot on one as he ran up the steps towards her.

  ‘You’re okay,’ he cried.

  Riff was preoccupied with something in the ashes, but she turned at the sound of his voice. She stared into his face for a moment.

  ‘It’s you! What are you doing here?’

  Col couldn’t find the words to reply. He was just relieved to find her still alive.

  ‘Hah! I might’ve known you’d find a way to come along.’ She swung back to the ashes. ‘Look at this.’

  She pointed with her rifle. The blackened, blobby mess no longer bore any resemblance to a human being, but the stench of burnt flesh was unmistakeable.

  ‘See?’

  ‘What?’

  She prodded at something round and shiny under the ash. Metal and glass . . . a fob watch!

  ‘Sir Peggerton Poltney!’

  ‘Yeah, that’s his watch. And that’s him. His wife’s just over there.’

  Col shook his head. ‘It should never have been like this.’

  Riff turned on him, eyes blazing. ‘You think they didn’t deserve to die?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘They’d have shot every last one of us. We’d all be dead if the convicts hadn’t broken out.’

  ‘They didn’t break out by themselves,’ said Col. ‘I let them out.’

  Riff’s fierceness faded. ‘You did?’ She pursed her lips and considered.

  ‘Where are they now?’ asked Col.

  Riff turned from the ruins and swung her rifle in a wide gesture. ‘All over.’

  Looking out across the marshy areas on the convict-quarters side of the embankment, Col saw a hundred scattered groups, near and far. The convicts sat or sprawled in the mud, and appeared to be singing.

  ‘They looted the Residence before it burned down,’ Riff explained. ‘Made off with the Governor’s store of wine and spirits.’ She shrugged – then suddenly stiffened. ‘What’s that?’

  Col had heard it too. Somewhere close by, the sound of a drawn-out groan.

  Bodies lay at the foot of the steps, where they had rolled down after the fighting. Some in the brown uniforms of convicts, some in the red jackets of soldiers, some in the black jackets of officers. One of the bodies seemed to move.

  ‘Alive,’ muttered Riff. ‘Let’s see if he knows.’

  ‘Knows what?’

  Riff didn’t bother to reply. Col followed her down the steps to where one of the officers lay sprawling. The man’s midriff was soaked in blood and his right leg was bent out at an impossible angle.

  Col recognised him at once. ‘It’s that officer who sat at the front of the trolley! Remember? When they escorted us to the Residence.’

  ‘I remember.’ Riff gave the officer a push with her foot. ‘How did you know about our attack?’ she demanded. ‘Who betrayed us?’

  ‘I won’t tell,’ said the officer faintly.


  ‘I think you will.’ Riff gave him a harder push with her foot.

  Col was about to protest when a male Filthy burst upon the scene.

  ‘Scum!’ he yelled, and aimed his rifle at the officer’s chest.

  Riff swung her rifle before he could pull the trigger. Barrel smashed against barrel, and both weapons fell to the ground.

  The male Filthy snarled and whirled. Most of the blacking on his face had already rubbed off, and Col recognised Shiv’s pale eyes and sharp features.

  ‘Imperialist scum!’ Shiv reached in under his singlet and pulled out a long-bladed knife with a pearl handle. ‘Kill ’em all!’

  Riff’s reactions were instantaneous. She sprang forward and grabbed hold of Shiv’s arm before he could cut the officer’s throat. The officer struggled to draw away as the knife quivered six inches in front of his face.

  For a moment, it was a frozen tableau of straining arms and legs. Then Shiv seemed to relax.

  Riff addressed the officer. ‘I want answers. Or I let him kill you.’

  The officer was going cross-eyed from staring at the blade.

  ‘You even knew the exact time,’ Riff continued. ‘Who told you?’

  She made a move as if to release Shiv’s arm. The officer flinched and gave in.

  ‘Nobody,’ he muttered. ‘It was a note.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Pinned to a barracks door. We found it yesterday morning.’

  ‘Saying what?’

  ‘It said, You die tomorrow. Attack at dawn.’

  Shiv lowered his arm and let out a savage, humourless laugh. ‘What did you expect? A Swank betrayed us.’

  Riff nodded agreement, but Col didn’t understand at first.

  ‘Why does it have to be a Swank?’ he asked.

  Shiv’s narrowed eyes focused on Col. ‘Only Swanks can write.’

  It was undeniably true. Many Filthies had learned to read since the Liberation, but none of them had yet learned to write.

  ‘The saboteur, then,’ Riff mused. ‘Must’ve been.’