With the sudden flash of thought that is born of deadly danger, my mind took in what the stone post was really for. It was notched at the height of man's throat: the hook on the arm guard was the complementary half of a deadly garrotting setup. One had only to trap one's victim's head against the post in order to break his neck with the hook. But Koen was facing the wrong way for it to operate for me.
So I feinted and shifted all my force to his gun arm and at the same time deliberately eased off his throat. He fell for it and swung to face the post, exposing his neck to the hook-and the kill. It was all over in seconds and needed surprisingly little effort. I hung on when he went limp and the derringer discharged harmlessly into the ground. I think it must have been a dying nerve reflex which tightened his finger on the trigger. When his body started to sag I braced my knee against the post and jerked him backwards over the edge of the cliff.
I climbed slowly over the wall and walked towards Nadine, who was still crouched where Koen had thrown her, her glorious hair dusty and dishevelled and a smear of dirt from Koen's hand across her mouth.
When I came up to her, we simply stared at one another as if in a trance and then I leaned forward and kissed the tiny trickle of blood coming through her torn sleeve. It was salty and warm and near to her breast.
The gesture brought· her with a blind rush into my arms, her mouth crushed against mine, her words hardly distinguishable through her sobs. She tried to kiss and smile and cry all at the same time, caressing my face and murmuring endearments as if her heart would break. 'Oh my love, my darling, my beloved. . there aren't words for this sort of thing. . I want to say prayers and incantations and your name all mixed up together but they won't come. . Guy, Guy, Guy!'
She shook all over and held me: she loosened my arm and slipped off the ivory guard; she drew me back farther from the drop.
Suddenly there was the whang and whine of a ricochet off the stone post and almost simultaneously the blast of a shot from below.
'Praeger!' I said, moving still farther away. 'But I'm sure he can't see us: that's simply blind anger on account of Koen. The hell with him! Before anything else I'm going to attend to that wound of yours.'
'It isn't a wound, it's just a scratch. It was only meant to scare me.'
Nevertheless, I bound up the cut with my handkerchief, thinking that Koen must have been an expert with a knife to have been so precise. As I did so Nadine winced as another harmless bullet bounced off the cliff and screamed into space.
'We're under siege, Guy.'
'In more ways than one,' I replied. "Just look at that sky. I'
ve seldom seen anything more threatening.'
It was a wild-looking morning. In the early light the clouds were black and ominous and they seemed to block every point of the compass as far as the eye could reach. They were low, too, and the horizon was in-drawn, which added to the feeling of being hemmed-in.
'This poor light puts paid to our doing anything more about the isifuba board for the moment,' I said. The terror of her experience was ebbing fast but it had left behind a lovely light in her eyes.
'Let's get our breath back before we start anything else exciting. To begin with, let's learn to live with a siege.'
I caught her light-hearted mood. 'Right! Then the first thing on my list is to clean myself up at the spring.'
'Philistine!' she mocked. 'No soul! Mysteries and magic pavements go overboard in favour of a bath!'
'They'll keep. My dusty body won't.'
At the spring, which had fashioned a crude basin out of the rock by virtue of centuries of dripping, I stripped and rejoiced in the cool water.
I rejoined Nadine at the small pyramid of coloured pebbles. The colour had come back into her face and she was smiling and serene.
'You're not going to have the edge on me — I'm next!' 'It's glorious; absolute heaven.'
She kissed me before going and her eyes were very bright. I said, 'I'll keep a watch on Praeger.'
'I'll be back.'
There was a shade of meaning about the way she said it which I didn't catch. I watched her trim figure disappear, then I moved carefully under cover to the strongpoint at the head of the stairway. There was no need for my glasses because I could see Koen lying near my camp with his head slewed unnaturally to one side. Von Praeger, with Dika, was near, his rifle barrel resting on a boulder and aimed at the summit. For a moment I toyed with the idea of taking a pot-shot at him with the derringer but its short range would have been just the waste of a bullet. I wanted him to know that we were in good heart, so I collected one of the shaped stone missiles and pitched it to fall as close to him as I could judge. The result was spectacular. Von Praeger blazed off a whole volley of shots indiscriminately at the spot where the rock had fallen, the stairway and the rocks all round my hiding place. When the racket had died down I risked a glance below but he was nowhere to be seen.
Then, without apparent reason, but by a compulsion I could not explain, I felt my attention drawn to the tabletop itself. Nadine was standing by the little pyramid, her hair as black as the lowering storm. She was looking across at me, her lips parted, her eyes like stars. Her breasts, dappled with an aureole of drops from the spring, shone luminously white against the backdrop of the storm.
She was completely naked.
The blood throbbed in my ears; then I was taking her to me. A dozen strides covered the space which separated us. The tiny living muscles at the corners of her deep eyes spoke a world of obvious and emphatic messages as well as nuances of doubt about her nakedness, a host of nerve-tingling ambiguities, expressing all things since woman was woman. 'It had to be here!' she whispered. 'Love me-love me right here!'
And the pulse which before had been only in her eyes spread into the thighs and breasts thrust hard against me. But the blaze of emotion which overwhelmed us was matched by the storm, of which we became oblivious. All I know is that a moment before the thunderbolt struck the pyramid and exploded I caught a glimpse of it flaming towards us like a meteor and I threw our locked bodies to the ground out of its path. Then our spellbound world erupted in a burst of flame and dust and at the same time the solid rock under us seemed to split and heave like an earthquake. A fissure opened next to us and raced across the summit like a seam unthreading and there was a heavy rumbling from the heart of The Hill as it started to break in two: while on the river side the tabletop seemed to be toppling over the edge in an avalanche.
Fear emptied veins which a moment before had been pulsing with love.
We clung in terror now to one another while rumble succeeded rumble. Until eventually everything grew quiet, except for the sound of the sluicing rain beginning.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The individual drops were huge, falling cold and raw on to our naked bodies and making muddy little explosions all round us. The horizon was down and the east was a dirty grey the rest of the sky was low and black and hostile. There was a hot, wet smell from the demolished cairn, like steam round an old fashioned locomotive. Our cold bodies clung together and I noticed the tiny rivulets of rain that chased down her breasts and puckered nipples. So we lay in an ebb tide of reaction until pools from the downpour began to form round us. Then there was another small rockfall. We couldn't stay where we were.