Soldier No More (46 page)

Through the weeds, and in between the thicker stems of some kind of bush … and then the shallow ditch opened up before him, half filled with coarse grass.

He wouldn’t be able to stop that grass moving, yet it might not show above the top of the ditch, and the light was bad now—but was it bad enough?

Anyway, the man covering the back shouldn’t be watching the ditch— they’d hardly have looked over the Tower expecting this sort of siege—

Siege? He examined the ditch again, and saw that although shallow it was wide—even wide enough to be the remains of a defensive moat round some petty
hobereau
’
s
fortified manor, of which the Tower itself was the last relic. And the wideness encouraged him to make himself believe that it was deeper than it seemed.

He crawled—and crawled as he had been taught to crawl at OCTU, with the fear of Staff Sergeants above him.

And at last stood up,
and ran
—

He had not the slightest idea where he was at first, but Audley had said turn left, and somehow the geography of the ridge came to him as he ran—it curved into a re-entrant, such as the army map-reading experts loved—until there at last, black-towered among the treetops, was the Château Peyrony.

The gloomy woods didn’t frighten him now, he was too breathless to be frightened, but the door wouldn’t let him in.

He banged on it—hammered on it, starting up echoes which the house had never heard before, and went on hammering.

“M’sieur!” The old crone was outraged even before she saw his appearance. “
M
’
sieur
—“

He pushed past her, taking the stairs two at a time, scattering the house-ghosts headlong.

The light was glowing under the door, exactly where he remembered it—there was no need to knock—
she was expecting him
—
and not only because of the noise he had made, coming to her now
—
she had known all along that death was loose in her country
—

“Madame—“

She didn’t move, she didn’t turn a hair and she didn’t interrupt him as he spoke, until—

“Gaston! Put that thing down—
at
once!”

Roche turned into the twin mouths of a shotgun, with his own pistol hanging uselessly at his side. The old man was breathing heavily—and, for God’s sake, the old woman had something in her hand too, just behind him! Madame Peyrony stood up. “Angélique: you will telephone the Police and tell them that Algerian terrorists are attacking the Englishman’s Tower—they must come this instant. Then, you will telephone M’sieur Galles with the same message.
At once
!”

“Oui, Madame.” The old woman didn’t turn a hair either—she might just as well have received orders for supper. She simply vanished from the doorway.

In her place, with a scampering slither, a small boy appeared behind Gaston, wide-eyed and tousle-haired.

Roche drew in his breath. It was there, just as he had known it would be—the last treachery of all, deep inside him, where he had always known it would be, waiting for him.

He looked at Madame Peyrony. Nobody could do more, or more efficiently, than she was doing. And no one could blame him for waiting here with her for the distant sound of the police klaxon—he was only one man, and too far away from the Tower to get back there in time. Whatever happened now, there was nothing more that he could do.

“Yes, Captain?”

He could feel her read his mind, through every twist of his fears, right down to the bedrock of cowardice.

“I must go back to the Tower—to … divert them,” he said thickly. “I promised.”

“Of course.” She inclined her head graciously. “How many of them are there … to be diverted?”

“I don’t know.” His mouth seemed full of pebbles. “But I must go now—at once.”

“But of course.” She nodded again. “So you must take the car—that will divert them.”

“The car?”

“Petit Gaston—“ she threw the command past him “—you will start the car for M’sieur le Capitaine.
At once
—and then attend your grandfather!” She came back to Roche. “It is complicated to start, so I am informed, but the child will do that for you.”

Roche was momentarily diverted by the scampering sound behind him, and then by the look on her face.

“You have a weapon.” She nodded down at his hand. “So you must do your best—as you promised.”

He looked at her speechlessly.

“Off you go then!” Her voice became an order. “And, for your information, Captain … I have disliked that car for over twenty years—you understand?”

Roche went—it was as though he was moving in a dream—down the staircase, across the hall—into a darkening world eerily lit by light streaming out of the courtyard on the left of the door, which drew him towards it.

This wasn
’
t
how it was meant to be
—

The Delaroche Royale was already alive and waiting for him, with huge headlights blazing, but only the faintest
thrumming
of the engine buried deep inside it.

The child swung out of the driver’s seat, making way for him.

“How do I make it go?” He looked despairingly at the bank of instruments. “Where’s the gear-lever?”

The child came up at his shoulder, standing on the running-board. “There is a switch—
there
—“ he pointed “—and then m’sieur presses upon the accelerator pedal—down
there
—and then the brake is off, and she goes—“

Roche snapped the switch and felt for the brake—the monster was already moving—there was no gear lever—
Christ
!

The child dropped away. “
Turn quickly, m
’
sieur
!” he shrieked at Roche.

The wall on the other side of the courtyard was looming in the blazing light—Roche twisted the wheel in panic—his foot had hardly touched the accelerator pedal—the gateway of the courtyard came to meet him—
but too fast, and it was far too narrow
—

Something crashed ahead of him—scraped hideously alongside him— and then was lost behind. A whole wood of trees, sharply picked out in ranks by the searchlights, sprang into view on either side of the car: it was a steep drive, by the angle of the car—but not by the way the monster breasted it, without effort.

Turn left, along the ridge—he had done something wrong, so that the engine was roaring at him now, angry at his stupidity—

And he was going too fast, even though he didn’t know why—the slightest touch on the accelerator made the monster go mad—and he had to turn off, down the Tower drive, the moment the trees thinned—and they were thinning already—
Christ
!

And—
Christ
!—there were figures dancing in the road—scattering left and right—

The last temptation was the worst of all, because it was the least expected:
he could put his foot down and drive for ever, and nothing this side of Hell could catch him
!

But he swung the wheel to the left with all his might instinctively, and jammed his foot down on the brake without consciously weighing up the temptation—
apt to make rash decisions underpressure
would have to do as an epitaph.

The monster tried to turn in a civilised fashion, but its weight and the laws of motion were against it: it slithered, and the wheels locked, and it lost control of itself, as Roche himself had already done. Trees—a tree—and bushes, and black space—and finally the Tower itself whirled in front of him, like a newsreel. Then it crashed sideways into something solid, half throwing him out of the soft body-fitting seat.

The engine stalled, but the lights still searched out every detail of the Tower—every small unevenness and shadow, everything pale bright yellow or black—and the cottage way past it, trailing creeper and blank windows, and a man throwing himself down out of the door—

He rolled down sideways as the window starred and cracked and burst in on him, even as the noise of the automatic weapon caught up with the sound of the shattering windscreen.

Everything went dark around him—inky black, pitch dark, after the brightness. He fumbled for the pistol, which he remembered out of the past—he had put it on the seat, ready to hand, as he had entered the car. It wasn’t there—he felt around for it—it wasn’t there—
it wasn
’
t anywhere
, and it was too late to go on searching for it.

The door on the driver’s side had already burst open with the impact, so that his legs were sticking out of it; he pushed himself in the same direction, holding on to the wheel to enable him still to keep his balance as his feet felt the ground. But then standing upright no longer seemed sensible:
hit the ground
was what the Staff Sergeant always shouted—

He dropped flat, willing the earth to open up. But it was hard as rock under him.

Silence.

He lifted his head cautiously. It wasn’t really night, he realised—not now that the bright light had been extinguished: it was almost night—there was a thick quilt of cloud high above him, illuminated by the moon far above the quilt… but he could still see too much, and could be seen too easily if he moved away from the shadow of the car.

The sudden sound of breaking glass broke the stillness. Then a sharper
crack
—the crack of a pistol—fixed the sound ahead and above: Audley had fired out of the high arrow-slit in the Tower, smashing the window first like the cowboys in the films.

Silence settled down again.

“You bastards down there!” An American voice rang thin but clear from above. “You just keep your goddamn heads down—okay?”

Bradford was buying time—and he was buying it in the belief that the crash or the burst of fire which had blacked out the lights had finished off Roche’s rescue attempt, and Roche himself with it.

As a diversion, he had started well, but he had screwed everything up after that—as usual, Roche summed himself up. Madame Peyrony would expect better of him than that. And Lexy too—if the Perownes died hard,
then what about the Roches
?

Out here in the open he was lost anyway. As soon as one of the
fellagha
snaked up close enough … it was only pure accident that one of them hadn’t spotted him already … and it was only a matter of time before his time ran out on him. He had nothing to lose any more—he had had it all, but he had thrown it away, and for no reason that made sense now.

Silence.

But
not
silence: he could hear sounds building up all around him. They were moving in on him at last, and it was too late for heroics.

He pulled himself upright against the wing of the Delaroche. He ought to do something, but he couldn’t think of anything to do.
It see
med a silly way to die
, was all he could think.

“Oh …
shit!
”
he said angrily to himself, but also to the world at large.

The spurt of flame registered in the ten-thousandth of the second before the impact of the bullet slammed him against the car.

A great light flowered in the sky above him—unearthly, as he expected it to be—but in a point of incandescence which reflected up to the clouds as well as down on the woods and the Tower and the car.

He stared at the light, somehow puzzled by it, and yet at the same time recognising it from out of the distant past.

A thunderclap burst vivid orange-red on the edge of the wood twenty yards away, silhouetting the man who had shot him as it exploded—the impact of the sound hit him like a second bullet, pressing him back on the car a second time.

Pain and understanding came together, as a second mortar-bomb exploded to his left, on the far side of the road. With disembodied interest he remembered that a good mortar-man would have half-a-dozen bombs in the air before the first one hit the ground, and the best mortar-man in the French Army could probably do even better than that, even allowing for three-score-years-and-ten and only Little Gaston to help him—

As the third bomb landed a mixture of weakness and delayed instinct slid him down flat alongside the car. Its great bulk was comforting, and the darkness beneath it enticed him to try to roll under it. But for some reason his body at first refused to follow the idea.

And when it did, he fell into a great black hole with no bottom.

Soldier no more

OVER THE LENGTH
of days, once the light ceased to hurt his eyes, Roche became obsessed with the ceilings above him.

The first had a complex tracery of shadows, the design of which he could never quite unravel as it floated above him; then there were dark bars which made him think of prisons, giving him terrible nightmares interspersed with faces, mixed up with a succession of confusing events. But after that there were several happy days, when a ceiling with interesting cracks and stains appeared above him, which he transformed into the islands and continents of a new world to be circumnavigated on voyages of discovery, with the far-off sounds of creaking masts and rigging, and the changes of watch in his ears to mark the passage of time.

Finally they pricked his arm to cancel consciousness, and he awoke to birdsong, and the knowledge of good and evil, and a plain white ceiling without shadow or blemish; and shortly after that he was allowed to look around, and then to sit up and see walls, and tree-tops through the window; and he was back in England again with a nurse to prove it, soft-voiced but business-like, plumping his pillows.

In fact, it was a very nice room, dazzling and well-furnished and airy. What he didn’t like about it, which was different from the French rooms, was its absolute silence except for the bird-song, with none of the French bumps and bangs and distant traffic noises which he remembered in retrospect; from all which he deduced that they had him tucked away in one of their secret places; which didn’t surprise him, now that he had failed to die on them, but also didn’t reassure him.