Hepton panned his imaginary camera across the scene again to find Corporal Riley and Tonkins having a pissing contest over the lip. The awe-inspiring sight was clearly lost on the two soldiers.
“Philistines!” Hepton muttered.
MERCY WAS SAT on the lip of the crater, feet hanging over the edge, oblivious to the height and happily tossing small stones into the jungle canopy below.
Porgy watched Hepton set up his camera. He took his cap off and preened his hair. “Think I’ll try my luck, see if he wants a grin and a wave for the folks back home.”
“What?” said Porgy, at their sceptical looks. “It’s a chance to be famous, innit? When his film gets shown in all the picture houses, yours truly is going to be a matinee idol. The shop girls are all going to want my autograph.”
Pot Shot shook his head. “I’ve seen the size of your ‘autograph’, it’s nothing to write home about.”
Atkins made his way over to his section.
“What did the Lieutenant say?” Gutsy asked.
“Might have to send people down there after them.”
“By ‘people’, you mean us?”
“Probably,” said Atkins. “That’s the way our luck runs. In the meantime he wants us to set up a rear guard by the ruins, against any Zohtakarrii patrols, so look sharp.”
USING THE VINE rope that had been left there by the tank crew, 3 Section, led by Corporal Talbot, descended into the crater to salvage the tank, Walker, Hardiman and Fletcher, going down first to secure the ground and cover the rest of the party. Hume, Owen, Banks, Preston, Cooper, Mitchell and Jackson climbed down after them and waited on the scree as the others advanced into the jungle.
The trail left by the tank was obvious. Not even Hardiman could miss it.
“Keep your eyes peeled,” said Talbot as they edged down the verdant tunnel the ironclad had left in its wake, wary of every crack and rustle. If the tank crew had been here, they weren’t here now. Anything might have happened. Wise to the ways of this world, Preston and Mitchell kept their rifles pointing up, scanning the canopy overhead. The whoops, squeals and shaking branches set them on edge.
They found the tank in a crushed bank of tangled foliage, broken saplings and trampled shrubbery. Anything that stayed still here was soon strangled by the ever-present pale creepers, and the tank was no exception as the thick, pallid creepers spread their grip over the ironclad.
“We’ve got it!” Corporal Talbot hollered back to Walker at the jungle’s edge, who relayed the news back up to the crater rim.
“Below!” came the reply as several hundredweight of rope and chains tumbled down over the edge, snapping and unspooling as they crashed down the crater side.
“Jesus!” yelped Fletcher as the chain whipped down past them in a flurry of dust and gravel. “Nearly took my bleedin’ head off!”
While half the rest of the section set to work with their entrenching tools, hacking the tank free of the creepers’ unwanted embrace, Talbot, Hardiman and Walker set about hauling the heavy lengths of rope and chain towards the tank and securing them.
The all-clear was relayed up to the top. The drums of petrol fruit fuel had been unloaded from the battlepillars and stacked by the crater ready to refuel the tank, and the ropes had been connected to the battlepillars’ jerry-rigged harnesses.
From his howdah, Woolridge urged Big Bertha and Big Willie to take the strain. The great ropes thrummed taut as the huge larval beasts edged forward towards the prospect of food at the forest’s edge.
In the crater, the chains clinked as the slack was taken up and took the weight of the tank. The remaining creepers, unwilling to give up their prize, clung desperately to it, like a mother at a railway station whose son was setting off to war. But in this case, as with that, the army’s pull was relentless. It ripped the tank from the creepers’ grip, and those that didn’t release their hold were wrenched from the ground by their roots as the ironclad machine was dragged inch by inch from the crushed and broken tanglewood that had saved it.
“Whooooo!” Owen waved his battle bowler as the Ivanhoe advanced foot by foot through the pulverised bower, back along its own track towards the jungle’s edge.
When, with agonising slowness, the tank began to crawl up the scree slope, Talbot pushed his steel helmet back on his head. “You know, I never reckoned this would work, but they’re only bloody doing it.”
Fletcher clapped him on the shoulder and grinned. “That’ll be a tanner you owe me, then.”
ATKINS AND 1 Section took up position in the ruins of Nazarr to defend the approach to the Croatoan Crater, along with the men of 2 Section. The ruins had collapsed inwards on the subterranean tunnels, leaving obstinate pinnacles of wall standing here and there. Had it not been for the exotic vegetation already reclaiming the barren ground, it could have been any small Belgian village bombed to buggery by German shells.
“We’re so close I can feel it,” said Atkins as they kept watch on the jungle beyond the ruins. “We should be down there, going after Jeffries.”
“You’re certain Jeffries knows a way home, then,” asked Gutsy.
“Not certain, but he claimed to have brought us here. I just want to get back to Blighty, and if there’s the slightest chance he knows how, then I think we have to take it.”
“I thought you said he was just a bloke,” said Gazette. “Are you telling me you believe all that magic stuff now? You’re not starting to believe your own press, are you, Only?”
“Blood and sand, of course not!” protested Atkins. “You know what happened. I told you. I didn’t start those bloody rumours about me battling black magic. In case you forgot, it was believing those tales that got Chalky killed. Whether that diabolist gubbins has any truth to it, who knows? All I know is I didn’t see any.”
“You have to admit, that mumbo jumbo stuff does seem to follow you around though,” Porgy chipped in. “There’s that thing with the chatt, Chandar, too – all that Kurda stuff about how you two were connected by some web of fate or something.”
Atkins rolled his eyes. “Give me a break. Look, I’d just like my soddin’ life back, all right? My life, to do with as I please, not have all these people with expectations, telling me what I should be, and what I should be doing.”
“Shouldn’t have joined the army, then,” said Mercy with a smirk.
“So you don’t put much store in Mathers’ mad prophecy, last time we were here, then,” asked Pot Shot, mischievously. “In the spira when the Breath of GarSuleth grows foul,” he intoned portentously, “the false dhuyumirrii shall follow its own scent along a trail not travelled, to a place that does not exist. Other Ones will travel with the Breath of GarSuleth, the Kreothe, made not tamed. Then shall Skarra, with open mandibles, welcome the dark scentirrii. There shall emerge a colony without precedent. The children of GarSuleth will fall. They shall not forsake the sky web. The anchor line breaks.”
The rest of the section just looked at him as if he’d gone doolally.
“I memorised it,” said Pot Shot warily.
Atkins raised his eyebrows with disbelief. “You memorised it.”
“I thought it might be important.”
“And is it?”
“I couldn’t say,” Pot Shot admitted with a lop-sided grin and shrug. “I don’t know what any of it means.”
His mood lightened, Atkins shook his head softly, smiled, and cuffed the lanky Fusilier around the head with his soft cap. “Daft ha’p’orth.”
A thing the size of a man’s forearm, like a corpse rat crossed with a spider, skittered out of the undergrowth.