I heard the sound of rifle-fire, and I knew it came from the house, a defiant and futile attempt to resist the attackers with shotguns. A gust of wind cloaked us briefly in gorse smoke. There was a huge pneumatic thump, and the house erupted in a cataclysm of fire.
The blast of heat from the explosion seared our faces, and I pushed Victoria down. When I finally looked up again, fleeing sheep shone like phantoms in the fierce light of the inferno. The house was gone.
My eyes were blinded with heat and tears. Then my heart leapt into my throat as someone grabbed my wrist.
It was Bevan.
‘Be quick, now,’ he said. ‘This way.’
Half pulled, half following, we were led up an incline, scrambling over slag and discarded machine parts, slithering up treacherous shaley slopes, the ground sliding under our feet. Victoria was gasping and sobbing the word ‘Please… Please…’ over and over again, though whether she wanted to stop or was desperate to find safety, I could not say.
Then in front of us, in an overgrown wall behind a tangle of hawthorn, a cast-iron pipe jutted out. About three feet wide, it was coated with moss and algae, a dribble of rusty water trickling from it.
‘Right,’ said Bevan. ‘In you go, then.’
Victoria’s hand tightened on mine. All three of us were panting, and I felt as if I might be sick at any moment. The pipe stood at chest height above a stagnant rusty puddle. Its interior was utterly dark.
‘We can’t go in there,’ I heard myself say.
‘Says who?’ Bevan replied. ‘Want them to have you, do you?’
‘The others,’ I murmured. ‘Alex…’
‘You leave them to me. Go on, now. In.’
The sky was lightening rapidly, and I knew we had little time left. His urgency and insistence galvanized me. Quickly I scrambled up into the maw of the pipe. Bevan helped Victoria in behind me.
I wanted him to join us inside, but he did not. Face framed in its mouth, he said, ‘Go in as far as you can, where it’s dark. Stay there until I come back. Don’t make a bloody sound.’
And then he was gone.
The pipe was dank and cheerless. Awkwardly I moved down it, Victoria clinging on to me. About thirty yards in, it broadened and began to curve, slowly eclipsing the disc of daylight as its end. I halted, unwilling to surrender to total darkness.
It was impossible to sit or crouch without getting wet, but our knees and legs were already soaked. I put an arm around Victoria, letting her rest her weight against me, thinking all the while of Alex and the others, praying that they had got out of the house in time. I wanted to say something, to soothe Victoria with comforting words. But I had none.
Time passed, filled only with the sound of trickling water and Victoria’s fragile breathing. The pain in my back grew worse. Victoria was huddled against me like a child. I stroked her hair absently, staring towards the slender ellipse of daylight, feeling wretched.
After a lengthy silence, Victoria said, ‘I can’t bear this any more, Kate.’
Her voice was wavering, on the brink of cracking. I tried to hush her, but she wouldn’t be calmed.
‘Nothing’s worth this. Nothing.’
She began to sob, and I felt hot tears on my neck. I knew she wasn’t just talking about the attack, but the whole three years of our exile.
‘Do you think I find this easy?’ I whispered, battling against my growing physical discomfort. ‘We can’t let them capture us now. We have to hang on a little while longer.’
‘What’s the point? I’d rather be a prisoner than live like this.’
‘Bevan will be back soon,’ I whispered, without real confidence. I patted her head like a parent comforting a child.
‘You will come out now.’
I went rigid, putting a hand over Victoria’s mouth. The voice was male, accented, the voice of our enemy speaking English. It echoed down the pipe.
‘You will come out now.’
Matter-of-fact, decisive, certain we were inside. I moved my hand from Victoria’s lips and shook my head to indicate she should remain silent. She looked petrified.
‘You are being foolish,’ the voice continued. ‘We know you are in there. You will not be harmed if you come out now.’
There was a pleading look in Victoria’s eyes: she was ready to surrender.
‘We have all the others. They are quite safe and unhurt.’
Still we stayed silent. By now my own instinct was to reveal myself, to surrender so that I could find out if Alex was safe. But I fought against it, telling myself that they were bluffing, that they couldn’t know for certain we were inside the pipe.
‘Very well,’ the voice said presently. There was the sound of orders being issued in Nahuatl, though I could not make out the words.
I waited, expecting soldiers to begin clambering into the pipe. But this didn’t happen. All went silent outside, and I was suddenly seized with the fear that the commander would order a flame-thrower fired into the pipe to incinerate us.
Seconds crept by. Still there was no further sound from outside. As the silence extended, so I began to think that the enemy commander had indeed been bluffing. And having received no answer from us, was continuing his search elsewhere.
Then I heard the rumbling. It came from deep within the pipe, and I knew immediately what it meant.
‘Quickly!’ I said to Victoria, pushing her towards the mouth.
My legs were stiff from kneeling, and the cramped space made rapid movement impossible. The rumbling swelled rapidly into a roar, carrying before it a damp breeze.
Victoria and I were almost at the mouth of the pipe when the rush hit us from behind. I was lifted up, cracking my head against the top of the pipe an instant before the gushing water propelled us out.
I landed, entangled with Victoria, cold water pouring down on us. The shock of impact took the breath from me, and it was a moment before I was able to pull us both up on to a grassy bank. Victoria was sobbing wretchedly and examining the skinned knuckles of her hand, her hair in rats’ tails.
Around us, encircling us, were soldiers in green and brown combat uniforms, all armed with assault rifles. Swarthy-skinned and black-haired, some wore forage caps with the stylized gold sunburst emblem. These were no ordinary troops but crack commandos, the cream of the Aztec army. Among their number was a squat figure dressed in an olive-green commander’s uniform. Beside him stood Bevan.
I made an effort to climb to my feet, to stand upright and face them. A wave of dizziness and nausea swept over me, and I felt a rush of hot liquid between my legs.
Two
I woke to a steady engine hum in the gunship’s sickbay. I was lying on a hard bed, a blanket drawn up to my chest.
The moment I stirred, two figures appeared at my side. One was obviously a doctor, the other a very short man in the buff uniform of a non-combatant officer.
The doctor took my wrist and checked my pulse. He was middle-aged, plump, perhaps a Mayan or Quauhtemalan. He peeled a strip thermometer from my armpit, then said in Nahuatclass="underline" ‘Everything appears normal.’
The short man had a broad-nosed face and a turn in his left eye.
‘How do you feel?’ he asked me in English.
‘Like death.’
‘It was a haemorrhage.’ He pronounced the word with difficulty. ‘You lost some blood, but there is no further cause for alarm.’
I knew it was more than that. A child. I had been carrying a child. I felt a vast futile sorrow. For the past two months I had had no period but took little account of it because most of the women in our group had irregular cycles. Yet without acknowledging it to myself, I had known I was pregnant.
‘It was necessary you were examined internally,’ the small man said. ‘The doctor is confident there is no permanent injury. No complications.’