Cry Wolf - Smith Wilbur - Страница 55

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or thereabouts. I have had my scouts study the Italian encampment, and

they report an effective strength of under a thousand. Even with their

armaments, we should hold them here for many days "Unless they are

reinforced, which they will be, or bring up armour, which they will do,

"said Gareth.

"Then we will withdraw into the gorge demolishing the road as we go,

and resisting at each strong place. We won't be able to use the cars

again until we reach Sardi but there in the bowl of the mountains there

is good open ground and room to manoeuvre. It is also the last point

at which we can effectively block the Italian advance." They were

silent again and the sound of an engine came up to them. They watched

the armoured car reach the foot of the gorge and begin growling and

nosing its way upwards, at the pace of a walking man, except where it

had to back and lock hard to make one of the sleep hairpin bends in the

road. The Lij roused himself and sighed with what seemed a deep

weariness of the spirit.

"One thing I must mention to you, gentlemen. My father is a warrior in

the old style. He does not know the meaning of fear, and he cannot

imagine the effect of modern weapons especially the machine gun on

massed foot soldiers. I trust you to restrain his exuberance." Jake

remembered the bodies hanging like dirty laundry on the barbed wire of

France, and felt the cold tickle run up his spine. Nobody spoke again

until the car, still blazoned with its crimson crosses, drew up level

with where they stood and they scrambled down the bank to meet it.

Vicky's head appeared in the hatch. She must have found an opportunity

to bathe, for her hair was newly washed and shiny and caught behind her

head in a silk ribbon. The sun had bleached her hair to a whiter gold,

but the peachy velvet of her complexion had been gilded by that same

sun to a darker honey colour. Immediately Jake and Gareth moved

forward, neither trusting the other to be alone with her for an

instant.

But she was brusque, and concerned only with the injured girl who was

laid out on the floor of the cab on a hastily improvised bed of

blankets and skins. Her leave-taking was off-hand and distracted while

the Lij climbed in through the rear doors, and she pulled away again up

the steep track followed by a squadron of the Prince's bodyguard

looking like a gang of cut-throats on their shaggy mountain ponies,

festooned with bandoliers of ammunition and hung with rifles and

swords. They clattered away after the car, and Jake watched them out

of sight. He felt a sense of deep unease that the girl should be up

there in the mountains beyond any help that he could give her. He was

staring after the car.

"Put your mind back in your pants," Gareth advised him cynically.

"You're gain" to need it for the Eyeties, now." from the foot of the

gorge to the lip of the bowl of land in which stood the town of Sardi

was a few dozen miles across the ground, but the track climbed five

thousand feet and it took six hours of hard driving for Vicky to reach

it.

The Prince's labour gangs were working upon the track still, groups of

dark men in mud-stained shairmias, hacking away at the steep banks and

piles of boulders that blocked the narrow places. Twice these men had

to rope up the car to drag and shove it over a particularly treacherous

stretch with the torrent roaring in its bed a hundred feet below and

the wheels of the car inches from the crumbling edge of the

precipice.

In the middle of the afternoon the sun passed behind the towering

ramparts of stone leaving the gut of the gorge in deep shadow, and a

clammy chill made Vicky shiver even as she wrestled with the controls

of the heavy vehicle. The engine was running very unevenly, and

back-firing explosively at the change of atmospheric pressure as they

toiled upwards. Also Sara's condition seemed to be worsening rapidly.

When Vicky stopped briefly to rest her aching arms and back muscles she

found that Sara was running a raging fever, her skin was dry and baking

hot and her dark eyes were glittering strangely. She cut short her

rest and took the wheel again.

The gorge narrowed dramatically, so the sky was a narrow ribbon of blue

high above and the cliffs seemed almost to close jaws of granite upon

the labouring car. Although it seemed impossible, the track turned

even more steeply upwards so that the big back wheels spun and skidded,

throwing out fist-sized stones like cannon balls and scattering the

escort who followed closely.

Then abruptly Vicky drove the car over the crest and came out through

rocky portals into a wide, gently inclined bowl of open ground hemmed

in completely by the mountain walls. Perhaps twenty miles across, the

bowl was cultivated in patches, and scattered with groups of the round

tukuL-, the thatch and daub huts of the peasant farmers.

Domestic animals, goats and a few milk cows grazed along the course of

the Sardi River where the grass was green and lush and thick forests of

cedar trees found a precarious purchase along the rocky banks.

The town itself was a gathering of brick-built and white, plastered

buildings, whose roofs of galvanized corrugated iron caught the last

probing rays of the sun as it came through the western pass.

Here in the west, the mountains fell back, allowing a broad gentle

incline to rise the last two thousand feet to the level of the plateau

of the highlands. Down this slope, the narrow-gauge railway looped in

a tight series of hairpins until it entered the town and ended in a

huddle of sheds and stock pens.

The Catholic mission station was situated beyond the town on the slopes

of the western rise. It was a sadly dilapidated cluster of tin-roofed

daub buildings, grouped around a church built of the same materials.

The church was the only building that was freshly whitewashed. As they

drove past the open doors, Vicky saw that the rows of rickety pews were

empty, but that lighted candles burned upon the altar and there were

fresh flowers in the vases.

The church's emptiness and the sorry state of the buildings were a

reflection of the massive power of the Coptic Church over this land and

its people. There was very little encouragement given to the

missionaries of any other faith, but this did not prevent the local

inhabitants from taking advantage of the medical facilities offered by

the mission.

Almost fifty patients squatted along the length of the veranda that ran

the full length of the clinic, and they looked up with minimal interest

as Vicky parked the armoured car below them.

The doctor was a heavily built man, with short bowed legs and a thick

neck. His hair was cropped close to the round skull and was silvery

white, and his eyes were a pale blue. He spoke no English, and he

acknowledged Vicky with a glance and a grunt, transferring all his

attention to Sara. When two of his assistants rolled her carefully on

to a stretcher and carried her up on to the veranda, Vicky would have

followed but the Lij restrained her.

"She is in the best hands and we have work to do." The telegraph

office at the railway station was closed and locked, but in answer to

the Prince's shouts the station master came hurrying anxiously down the

track. He recognized Mikhael immediately.

The process of tapping out Vicky's despatch on the telegraph was a

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