by Mary Stewart
‘Don’t look so scared,’ said the patient comfortingly. ‘It stopped bleeding hours ago.’
‘Scared? Me? For pity’s sake, where did Lambis get this stuff?’
‘Part of his shirt, I think.’
‘Good heavens. Yes, it looks like it. And what in the world’s this? It looks like leaves!’
‘Oh, it is. More of your healing herbs gathered under a waning moon. It’s something Lambis found, I can’t remember what he called it, but he swore his grandmother used it for practically everything, from abortions to snake-bite, so you’d think—’ He stopped on a sharp intake of breath.
‘I’m sorry, but it’s stuck a bit. Hang on, this will hurt.’
Mark didn’t answer, but lay there with his head turned away, examining the rock above the ledge with apparent interest. I gave him a doubtful look, bit my lips together, and started to sponge the stuff loose from the wound. Eventually, it came.
The first sight of the exposed wound shocked me inexpressibly. It was the first time I had seen any such thing, and the long, jagged scoring where the bullet had ploughed through the flesh looked sickening. Mark had been lucky, of course, several times lucky. Not only had the murderer, aiming at his heart, scored a near miss, hitting nothing that would matter, but the bullet had gone cleanly through, ploughing its way upwards for about four inches through the flesh of the upper arm. To me, on that first shrinking glance, it looked awful enough. The edges were not lying cleanly together, and the jagged scar looked inexpressibly raw and painful.
I blinked hard, braced myself, and looked again. This time, to my surprise, I was able to see the wound without that slight lurching of the stomach. I put the dirty wrappings aside, out of sight, and concentrated.
Find out if the wound was clean; that was the main thing, surely? These dried smears and crusts of blood would have to be washed away, so that I could see . . .
I started gingerly to do this. Once, Mark moved, uncontrollably, and I faltered, cloth in hand, but he said nothing. His eyes seemed to be following the flight of the kestrel as it swept up to the nest above us. I went doggedly on with the job.
The wound was washed at last, and I thought it was clean. The flesh surrounding it looked a normal enough colour, and there was no sign of swelling anywhere. I pressed gentle fingers here and there, watching Mark’s face. But there was no reaction, except that almost fierce concentration on the kestrel’s nest over our heads. I hesitated, then, with a hazy memory of some adventure novel I had read, bent down and sniffed at the wound. It smelt faintly of Mark’s skin, and the sweat of his recent climb. I straightened up, to see him smiling.
‘What, no gangrene?’
‘Well,’ I said cautiously, ‘hope on, hope ever, it takes some days to set in . . . Oh, Mark, I don’t know a damned thing about it, but it honestly does look clean to me, and I suppose it’s healing.’
He twisted his head to look down at it. ‘It looks all right. Keep it dry now, and it’ll do.’
‘All right! It looks just awful! Does it hurt terribly?’
‘That’s not the thing to say at all, didn’t you know? You should be bright and bracing. “Well, my lad, this looks wonderful. On your feet now, and use it all you can.” No, really, it does look fair enough, and it is clean, though heaven knows how. Maybe those herbs did do the trick; queerer things have happened. Though if I’d been in a fit state to know that it was Lambis’ old shirt, that he’d worn at least since we left Piraeus—’
‘These tough types. It just shows what you can do when you leave it all to Nature. Who’d want silly little modern things like antiseptics? Lie still, will you? I’m going to tie it up again.’
‘What with? What’s that?’
‘Nicola’s old petticoat, that she’s been wearing ever since Athens.’
‘But look here—’
‘Lie still. Don’t worry, I washed it this morning. It’s been drying like a flag of truce over that bush just inside the cleft.’
‘I didn’t mean that, don’t be silly. But you can’t shed any more clothes, my goodness. I’ve got your jersey, and now your petticoat—’
‘Don’t worry. I won’t give you anything else. If it comes to that, I’ve nothing else to spare. There, that looks better, and it’ll keep dry. How does it feel?’
‘Wonderful. No, honestly, it does feel better. No more throbbing, just beastly sore, and hurts like blazes if I jar it.’
‘Well, there’s no need for you to move any more. You stay where you are, and keep a lookout on the hill. I’m going to bury these rags, and then I’ll bring up a fresh supply of water, so that we can stay up here if we have to.’
By the time I had got back with the water and fresh kindling, and relaid my fire in readiness, it was a few minutes short of eight o’clock. I lay down beside Mark, and propped my chin on my hands.
‘I’ll watch now. Lie down.’
Without a word, he did as he was told, closing his eyes with that same air of fierce and concentrated patience.
I looked down the long, bare wings of the mountain. Nothing. Eight o’clock of a fine, bright morning.
It was going to be a long day.
6
Push off . . .
TENNYSON: Ulysses
It was, in fact, barely twenty minutes before the man appeared.
I saw the movement, far down the hillside, south-east of where we lay. My first thought was, naturally, that this might be Lambis returning, but then, as the tiny figure toiled nearer, it struck me that he was making remarkably little effort to conceal himself.
I narrowed my eyes against the sun. At that distance I could make out very little, except that the man was wearing something dark, which could have been Lambis’ brown trousers and navy-blue jersey; but he did not seem to be carrying anything except a stick, and not only did he walk openly across the barest stretches of the hillside, but he seemed to be in no hurry, pausing frequently, and turning to stare about him, with his hand up to his eyes as if to shield them from the glare of the sun.
When he had stopped for the fourth time in as many minutes, I had decided – still more in curiosity than apprehension – that it could not be Lambis. Then, as his hand lifted, I caught the flash of the sun on something he held to his eyes. Binoculars. And then, as he moved on, another gleam, this time on the ‘stick’ that he carried under one arm. A rifle.
I lay flattened against the juniper needles that strewed the ledge, watching him, now, as I would have watched a rattlesnake. My heart, after the first painful kick of fear, settled down to an erratic, frightened pumping. I took deep breaths, to help control myself, and glanced down at Mark beside me.
He lay motionless, with shut eyes, and that awful look of exhaustion still on his face. I put a hand out, tentatively, then drew it back. Time enough to disturb him when the murderer came closer.
That it was the murderer, there could be no possible doubt. As the small figure, dwarfed by distance, moved nearer across an open stretch of the mountainside, I caught a glimpse of red – the red headband of which Lambis had spoken – and the impression of the baggy outline of Cretan dress. Besides, the man was patently hunting for something. Every minute or so he paused to rake some part of the hillside with his glasses, and once, when he turned aside to beat through a stand of young cypresses, he did so with his rifle at the ready . . .
He came out from the shadow of the grove, and paused again. Now the glasses were directed upwards . . . they were swinging towards the ledge . . . the shepherds’ hut . . . the way Lambis would come . . .
The glasses moved past us, back eastwards, without a pause, and were directed for a long look at the tree-thicketed rocks above the cypress grove where he stood. Finally he lowered them, gave a hitch to his rifle, and began to make his way slowly uphill, until a jutting crag hid him from view.
I touched Mark gently. ‘Are you awake?’
His eyes opened immediately at the whisper, and their expression, as he turned his head, showed that the significan
ce of my stealthy movement and dropped voice hadn’t escaped him. ‘What is it?’
‘There’s someone out there, some way below us, and I think he may be your man. He seems to be looking for something, and he’s got a gun.’
‘In sight of the ledge now?’
‘Not at the moment.’
Mark turned awkwardly on to his stomach, and cautiously peered down through the junipers. I put my mouth to his ear. ‘Do you see those cypresses away down there? The grove beyond the stunted tree with a dead branch like a stag’s horn? He’s been making his way uphill from there. You can’t see from here, but there are trees above there, away beyond that cliff, and the top of a gorge like this one, only smaller. I think I saw a little waterfall running down to it.’ I swallowed, painfully. ‘I – I said he’d hunt where the water was.’
Mark was craning his neck to study the rocks above and below our own ledge. ‘I wasn’t fit to notice, when we were on our way up here. This place really can’t be seen from below?’
‘No, at least no one would think there was a ledge. All you can see is these shrubs, and they look as if they were in a crack in the face of the cliff.’
‘And the way up?’
‘That’s hidden, too, among those bushes at the bottom, by the fig tree.’
‘Mm. Well, we’ll have to chance it. Can you crawl back into that cave without showing yourself or making a single sound?’
‘I – I think so.’
‘Then get back in there, now, while he’s out of sight.’
‘But if he comes up here at all, he’ll look in there, and there’s nowhere we can hide. It’s quite bare.’ I shifted my shoulders. ‘Anyway, I – I’d rather stay out here. If there was a fight, we’d stand a better chance out here—’
‘A fight!’ Mark’s breath was sucked in with sudden, furious exasperation. What sort of a fight do you think we could put up against a rifle? Penknives at thirty yards?’
‘Yes, I know, but I could surely—’
‘Look, there isn’t time to argue, just get in there out of sight, for pity’s sake! I can’t make you do as I say, but will you please, for once, just do as you’re told?’
I have never seen anyone’s jaw drop, but I’m sure mine did then. I felt it. I just sat there gaping at him.
‘He’s looking for me,’ said Mark, with a kind of angry patience. ‘For me. Only. He doesn’t even know you exist – or Lambis either, for that matter. You’ll be quite safe in the cave. Now, have you got that, dimwit?’
‘But . . . he’ll kill you,’ I stammered, stupidly.
‘And just how,’ said Mark savagely, ‘do you propose to stop him? Get killed yourself as well, and add that to my account? Now get in there and shut up. I haven’t the strength to argue.’
I turned, without a word.
But it was too late. Even as I began to slither backwards from my hide between the junipers, Mark’s good hand shot out, and gripped and held me still.
For a moment I couldn’t see why; then, just a glimpse, nearer through the green, I saw the red head-dress. Immediately afterwards – so close was he now – I heard plainly the grate of his boot soles in the dust, and the flick of a kicked pebble.
Mark lay like an image. He looked, despite the bandaged arm and the shocking pallor, surprisingly dangerous. Surprisingly, when you saw that all the weapon he had was a clasp-knife, and a pile of stones.
The Cretan came on steadily, along the path by which Lambis had gone. It would lead him past the little field of asphodel, below the shepherds’ hut, past the spring which marked the beginning of the climb to our ledge . . .
I could see him clearly now. He was a strongly built man, not tall, but tough looking, with mahogany-dark skin. While I could not at that distance make out his features, I could see the squared cheekbones, and full lips under a thick moustache. The sleeves of his dark-blue shirt were pushed up, showing brown knotty forearms. I could even see the scarlet trimming of the sleeveless jacket, and the swathed sash with the knife stuck into it, that completed the Cretan ‘heroic’ dress.
He lifted the field glasses again. We lay as still as stones. A long, heart-shaking minute passed. The sun poured on to the rock; the scents of verbena and thyme and sage winnowed up around us in the heat. Encouraged by our stillness, a small brown snake crept out from the rock a few feet away, lay for a moment watching us, his little eyes catching the light like dewdrops; then he poured himself away down a hole. I hardly noticed; there was room for no more fear; this was hardly the moment to worry about a small brown snake, while a murderer stood down there at the edge of the alpine meadow, with his glasses to his eyes . . .
The swing of the glasses checked. The man froze like a pointer. He had seen the shepherds’ hut.
If he was a local man, he must already have known of its existence, but it was obvious, I thought, that until this moment he had forgotten it. He dropped the glasses on their cord round his neck, and shifted his rifle forward once more; then, with his eyes fixed unwaveringly on the door of the hut, he moved forward, warily, through the asphodel.
I turned my head, to meet a question in Mark’s eyes. I knew what it was. Was I certain I had removed all traces? Feverishly, I cast my mind back: the bedding; the floor; my bag, and its contents; Mark’s haversack; the traces of our meal; the dressings from Mark’s shoulder; the orange peel. Yes, I was certain. I gave Mark a jerky little nod of reassurance.
He sketched the ghost of a thumbs up sign, which meant congratulation, then gestured with his head towards the cleft behind us. This time there was a smile in his eyes. I returned it, after a fashion, then obediently slithered back, rather in the style of the small brown snake, into the shadow of the narrow cave.
The cleft ran back at an angle to the ledge, so that from where I settled myself, well towards the back, I could see only a crack of daylight, with a narrow section of the ledge, and one of Mark’s legs, from the knee down.
For all its illusion of shelter, the cave was worse than the ledge, for there, at least, I had been able to see. I sat close, listening to my own heartbeats.
Presently, I heard him. He was walking carefully, but in the tranced stillness of the morning his steps sounded loud. They came nearer, moved from grass to stone, from stone to dust, were lost behind a barrier of rock where the trickle of the spring drowned them . . .
Silence. So long a silence that I could have sworn, watching that narrow section of light, that the sun wheeled, and the shadows moved . . .
Then suddenly, he was here, just below the ledge. The soft steps trod through the stony dust. The bushes by the fig tree rustled as he parted them. I saw the muscles of Mark’s leg tense themselves.
The rustling stopped. The footsteps felt their way through dust again, moved away a little, paused . . .
In my mind’s eye I could see him standing, as before, with the glasses to his eyes, raking the crannies and clefts above him for a possible hiding place. Perhaps even now he was discovering the cave where I crouched, and wondering how to get up to it . . .
A shadow swept across the sector of light. The kestrel. I heard, in that deadly stillness, the small sound it made as it met the edge of the nest: I could swear, to this day, that I heard the whiffling of air in its feathers as it braked, flaps down, for the final approach. The hissing, mewing delight of the young ones shrilled as piercingly in the stillness as a double-sized pipe band on the dead air of a Scottish Sunday.
The flake of shadow swept out again. The young ones fell abruptly silent. A twig cracked under the fig tree.
Then all at once, it seemed, the watcher had moved away. It was possible that the fearless approach of the bird had convinced him that there was nothing on that section of the cliff; whatever the case, he had certainly gone. The sounds retreated, faded, ceased. As my pulses slowly steadied, I found that I had shut my eyes, the better to hear that reassuring diminuendo.
Once more, at last, silence. I opened my eyes on the wedge of light at the mouth of the cleft, to see t
hat Mark’s leg had vanished.
If I had been in a fit state to think at all, I suppose I would have assumed that he had merely inched further along the ledge, the better to watch the Cretan out of sight. But as it was, I stared at the empty gap of light with horror, for two eternal minutes, with my common sense in fragments, and my imagination racing madly through a series of nightmare pictures that would have done credit to a triple X film . . . Perhaps, after all, the murderer hadn’t gone; perhaps, even now, Mark was lying, throat cut, staring at the sky, while the murderer waited for me at the mouth of the cleft, with dripping knife . . .
But here, at last, some sort of courage and common sense asserted itself. For one thing, the man had had a rifle, and for another, disabled though Mark was, the Cretan could hardly have shot, stabbed, or clubbed him to death in perfect silence . . .
I craned forward to see. Nothing but a tuft of salvia, purple-blue, with scented grey leaves, flattened where Mark had lain. Nothing to be heard, either, but a faint rustling . . .
The snake. That was it. He had been bitten by the snake. With hideous promptitude, the new picture presented itself: Mark, dead in (silent) agony, lying with blackened face, staring at the sky . . .
If I didn’t stare at the sky pretty soon myself, I should go mad. I crawled forward to the mouth of the cleft, lay flat, then peered out.
Mark wasn’t lying dead, and his face wasn’t black. It was, on the contrary, very white indeed, and he was on his feet, looking as if he had every intention of climbing down from the ledge in pursuit of the murderer. Of the latter there was no sign. Mark was pulling aside the trails of honeysuckle that masked the entrance to the ledge.
‘Mark!’
He turned, as sharply as if I had thrown something.
I was across the ledge like an arrow, and had hold of his sound arm. I said furiously: ‘And just where do you think you’re going?’