I decide to ask. I look at the lieutenant, sitting, staring ahead, eyes hidden behind the black sunglasses. She turns her head briefly as we pass a road junction and a canted but still legible signpost, then looks forward again. I ponder the best way to approach. She takes out her silver cigarette case, opens it and selects one. I lean over towards her, past Karma's intruding knees. “May l?” I ask, pointing at the case as she is about to close it.
The mask that is the sunglasses regards me; I see my own distorted reflection. Her lips twist. She holds the case out towards me. “Sure. Help yourself.”
I take a cigarette; we bend towards each other as she lights mine, then hers. The cigarette tastes acrid and harsh; it must have dried out over a year or more ago to become so bitter. I had wondered where the lieutenant found her tobacco, surmising there might still be some link, however circuitous and unsafe, however much the preserve of smugglers and the desperate, to wherever peace and a semblance of prosperity might still prevail, but these dry tubes have surely been raided from ruined shops or taken from the fleeing dispossessed; no hint here of a fresh supply.
“I didn't know you smoked, Abel,” she says over the noise of the jeep's progress.
“The occasional cigar,” I say, trying not to cough.
“Hmm,” she says, drawing on the cigarette. “Nervous?” she asks.
“A little,” I tell her. I smile. “I imagine you must be inured to this sort of thing by now.”
She shakes her head. “No. Some people get numb to it.”
She flicks ash to the wind, faces forward again. “But they usually die soon after. For most people the first time is the worst, then it gets better for a while, if you have time to recover in between, but after that, usually soon after that, it just gets worse and worse.” She looks at me. “You get better at hiding it, that's all.” She shrugs. “Until you just crack up completely.” Another draw on her caustic cigarette. “Opinion amongst us is divided on the subject of whether it is better to go a bit crazy every now and again and try to get it out of your system, though at the risk of losing it completely, or bottle it all up in the hope we are overtaken by events and peace breaks out, so we can be posttraumatically stressed in comfort.”
Grief, they have even thought this through. “A grim choice,” I say. “But you must have been trained for this, mustn't you?”
Her head jerks back and she makes a sound that may be a laugh. “The army's training was a little rushed by the time most of our little band came along.”
“Were you always?”
The radio crackles; she holds one hand up to me as she raises the instrument to her ear. Wires trail from the base of the radio, leading under the driver's seat in front, I realise suddenly that only the vehicle's engines, and therefore fuel, keep the radios recharged and operating. I am not able bear what is transmitted, and her reply is so quick and terse I cannot make out those words either.
The lieutenant taps our driver on the shoulder and leans forward to speak in his ear; he begins to flash his lights at the jeep in front and wave one arm, while the lieutenant swivels to the rear, gesturing to the trucks behind.
We slow, the vehicles draw up by the roadside, and I am required to stand to one side, kicking stones into a waterlogged ditch while the lieutenant carries out another briefing of her men. I throw the cigarette end into the still, deep waters of the ditch; it hisses once. Beyond, whole fields are flooded, the irrigation and drainage system of the entire plain upset by the lack of human tending.
The lieutenant spreads maps over the front of a jeep, pointing and gesturing and looking in turn at her men, commanding them by name.
We resume our transport, shortly turning on to smaller roads, then taking to a steep track that leads up the side of a small valley. The lieutenant seems tense, and does not wish to talk; my attempts. to revive our earlier. conversation elicit only grunts and monosyllables. She smokes no more cigarettes. Our jeep takes the lead and, after someone has gone on ahead on foot, we arrive at the rear of a farm on the hillside; the lieutenant leaps out and disappears inside the farmhouse.
She reappears a few minutes later, goes to the rear of one of the trucks and is handed down a bag I recognise. It is the one I put the shotguns and my rifle in when we fled in the carriage. By the look of it, it is still as heavy. She carries it into the farmhouse. Behind me, Karma scans the hillsides and woods with a pair of binoculars, tensing to concentrate on one skyline, then relaxing. “Scarecrow,” I hear him mutter.
The lieutenant comes back without the bag. “Okay,” she says to the others in the jeep, reaching in to take the satchel that was at her feet.
Both trucks and one of the jeeps are parked in a tall, threesided barn facing into the farm's courtyard. The lieutenant checks the maps with me. I point out the first part of the route from here while one of the soldiers face painted with streaks of green, black and yellow looks on too. A man I have not seen before a farmer from his dress and manner opens a stable door and leads out a dozen horses. They constitute a mixture of old and young, colts, mares and geldings. There are two that look like thoroughbreds, and a huge muscled pair with broad, hair fringed hooves. Saddles are placed on the smaller animals; packs from the trucks are loaded on to the farm horses” broad backs.
“Hop on,” the lieutenant tells me, climbing inexpertly on to the saddle of a black mare and fumbling with the reins. She looks down at me. “You do ride, don't you?”
I swing up and into the saddle of the chestnut gelding alongside her mount. I pat its neck and settle, ready, while she is still sorting the reins and trying to find her other stirrup.
I stroke my mount's mane. “What's his name?” I ask the farmer.
“Jonah,” he replies, walking off.
I rather wish I had not asked.
Mr Cuts and another half dozen soldiers clamber on to the remaining horses.
Three soldiers take the jeep not secreted in the barn and drive back down the track we arrived on. Two men are left at the farm to guard the other three vehicles. One of the lieutenant's soldiers the one who studied the map with us scouts ahead. He carries a small radio but no pack and is armed only with a knife and pistol. Horses to the front, we set off following him further up the hill, across a steep field and into a dense and tangled wood.
The lieutenant manages to make her nag drop back until for a moment she is level with me. “We keep very quiet from now, all right?”
I nod. She does too, then kicks her horse ahead again.
The path narrows; branches scrape and tug and try for eyes. We have to duck, avoiding, and the heavy horses wait patiently for their caught packs to be freed. Our lessened band plods on, over a succession of jumbled dips and crests in the earth like an ocean swell made solid and fixed aslant to the hillside. The air is still and silent in the dim half light beneath the crowding tracery of boughs and dark towers of conifers. The lieutenant takes the lead, ungainly on her black mare. I alone ride well. My mount snorts, its own breath wavering a reversal in the chilling air.