The massive gates of the fortress swung back. Instead of the coordinated column of military hardware Aubrey expected, a single lorry rolled out. Behind it, a dozen soldiers ran out of the gates, shouting. The lorry stopped and the soldiers – some of whom looked only half-dressed – threw themselves into the back. With a belch of smoke, the lorry lurched onto the road and ground its way past Aubrey and his friends. Picking up speed, it followed the road through the gap in the earthworks.
‘I hope someone is going to barricade that gap,’ George said. ‘It’s like leaving the front door open.’
‘I’m sure they will,’ Aubrey said, thinking that, if the worst came to the worst, he’d do it if no-one else did. A displacement spell, carefully sited on the top of the ramparts, would tip a few tons of earth and rock onto the road.
He was sorting through the elements for such a spell when a glint in the air near one of the columns of smoke made Aubrey squint. ‘Is that an ornithopter?’
He looked around. George and Sophie had moved away a little, and were speaking urgently, in whispers. Caroline glanced at them, then answered. ‘A scout, I’d say.’
‘Or battle observers.’
The thunder had intensified. It was now almost continuous, a bass drum beat that was frightening in its regularity. ‘It’s no skirmish,’ Aubrey said. ‘That’s dozens of guns.’
He had a heart flutter of fear. The rational part of his brain told him it was a natural response to prospective annihilation, but he found he still had to swallow to keep his insides under control.
Streams of erstwhile picnickers hurried past. Aubrey wholeheartedly agreed with their decision to leave. ‘Erstwhile picnicker’ would be a poor thing to have carved on a gravestone.
Sophie’s voice rose. ‘But you must.’ Aubrey turned to see George and Sophie in close discussion. She turned and appealed to Aubrey and Caroline. ‘Aubrey, all of you, you must leave Divodorum now, with me.’
‘Sorry, Sophie. You go. It’s probably best. We can’t. We have things to do.’ As lame excuses went, Aubrey realised, that was probably one of the lamest. Any lamer and it would have been taken out and shot.
The image didn’t cheer him at all.
Sophie was on the verge of tears. She was about to speak again when more lorries roared out of the fortress. Most of these were packed with soldiers in rather better state than the first detachment, and most towed artillery pieces ranging from light field guns to heavy howitzers. This was brutality unleashed.
‘Sophie!’ George cried over the roar of engines. ‘We can’t leave! You go!’
Sophie glared at the military column, which now included horses and carts, and overladen pack mules trailing behind. Commotion was spreading through the civilian part of the city as the picnickers arrived with the news.
Gallia had been invaded.
Sophie bit her lip. She looked after her countrymen, then at the dust raised by the military column, then at the distant and ominous smoke. ‘No,’ she said in a small voice, after glancing at George. ‘I must stay.’
Aubrey was the one who convinced George that arguing with Sophie could be done while they walked back to the city. While they made progress in that direction, however, George made no progress with Sophie. Once her mind was made up, it appeared, it was set. She refused to be moved by his entreaties, his logic or his passion. Her response was inevitably, and inarguably, ‘You are staying, George. So will I.’
Aubrey had always admired his friend’s easy manner with females. George liked them and they liked him. He found it straightforward to engage them in a light-hearted manner that most found appealing. Aubrey, however, always found such a thing a mystery.
So it was with some ambivalent satisfaction that Aubrey watched George’s becoming more and more tongue-tied as he tried to persuade Sophie to leave. It didn’t help, of course, that George enjoyed Sophie’s company so much that he actually didn’t want her to leave. That sort of double thinking was Aubrey’s typical downfall, second-guessing himself constantly.
He imagined George and he would have much to talk about.
They crossed the bridge over the Salia, which was hastily being sandbagged by a squad of local militia. The workers were being shouted at by an extravagantly moustachioed man dressed in a Gallian uniform that was at least forty years old. To emphasise his points he brandished a sword that looked as if it had come from a museum.
Aubrey paused on the city side of the bridge and looked back. The fortress had snapped out of its lethargy and was now the centre of activity. Engineers were sprinting to the earthworks with wheelbarrows. Tractors towed lengths of steel and bales of barbed wire. Soldiers were rushing out of the city toward the fortress, all thoughts of leave abandoned. Aubrey noted their faces. Grim resolve was the standard demeanour of the older troops, while anyone younger – officers and enlisted men alike – had the mixture of bravado and shifty-eyed panic that comes from the unfortunate combination of inexperience and imagination.
The city itself was working up to a state of pandemonium. From appearances, many residents had been waiting for this moment, for fully laden motorcars and carts were already on their way out of the city, heading south and west, away from the artillery noise that was sounding more and more like drum beats. Shops and markets were being besieged both by those fleeing and those staying. Aubrey was grateful for George’s preparation. Their base had enough food for weeks, depending on how many it had to support.
And it looks as if we have one more than I expected, Aubrey thought. George was looking dour as he guided the diminutive Sophie through the thronging crowds, using his bicycle as a flying wedge to part the way. With Sophie right behind him, and Aubrey and Caroline following, they made their way past the Post Office, around the
cathedral – which was doing brisk business – and back to their base.
The area was even quieter than usual, apart from a line of barges signalling that some people were creative in their fleeing techniques.
Inside, George made coffee while they sat around the battered oval table that was the everyday meeting place on the ground floor. Nothing revealed that the place was a secret base. They’d gone to some lengths to make sure it looked like a solid, if messy, book bindery with ramshackle shelves, bales of paper divided into reams and quires ready for printing, materials for marbling end papers, presses, glue vats, racks of hand tools, sewing tools and gilting tools.
To a casual eye, Aubrey hoped it would be convincing. A not-so-casual observer wouldn’t take long to become suspicious, but Aubrey hoped in that time they’d be able to do something about said suspicious observer.
And Sophie? he wondered as he took his seat. Is she a casual observer or a suspicious one?
Sophie looked pale and solemn as she sat at the table. She clutched the mug of coffee George gave her as if she were cold, but she didn’t put it to her lips. She studied each of them in turn. ‘What are we going to do?’
Aubrey knew what they had to do, but he had no idea what they were going to do about her. He caught George’s eye, then Caroline’s. ‘Sophie, we can tell you some things, but there are other things we can’t tell you.’
‘You are with your security services, aren’t you?’
Aubrey stared.
‘I told you she was sharp,’ George said.
‘We’re part of a larger team,’ Caroline said, without waiting for Aubrey. ‘We’ve been asked to do some reconnaissance in this area.’
‘Caroline,’ Aubrey said sharply. ‘That’s enough. I’m in charge of this team and–’
‘Aubrey dear, I know that’s what they told you, but we won’t have any of that nonsense, will we?’