They stared at me, Reece and Hacket standing by the door, the others sitting in the canvas seats.
‘Who?’ Hacket asked.
‘The mule, you bastard!’ I screamed at him. ‘Do you think I’m going without my mule?’
Reece came towards me. ‘Steady, Farrell,’ he said. ‘We can’t take the mule.’
‘You’ll bloody well take him or we don’t go at all. You leave him there, trailing that cart—’
‘All right. We’ll cut him loose from the cart. But we can’t—’
‘You’ll get him on board or I don’t fly this plane out.’
‘Have some sense, man,’ Racket said. ‘I’m very sympathetic about animals, but, damn it, there’s a limit.’
If I hadn’t been so tensed-up maybe I’d have seen his point. But George was something more to me than just a mule. He’d got me out of Santo Francisco. Just as I wouldn’t leave him in that building, so I wouldn’t leave him now to be slowly burned up by the lava. I went down to the door and wrenched it open. And then Sansevino caught me by the arm. My flesh cringed at his touch. ‘You must not become upset over the mule. After all, what is a mule? He wouldn’t be happy in the plane and anyway we could not get him into the fuselage.’ He was talking to me like a child — like a doctor talking to a mental patient — and all my hate of the man flared up.
‘How would you like to run from the lava trailing a broken cart and then at last be overrun by it and die, smelling your flesh burning?’
‘You have too much imagination. That was always your trouble, my friend. You forget it is an animal, not a human being.’
I had a sudden wild idea of leaving the damnable little doctor harnessed to the shafts of the cart. The mere thought of it brought a bubble of laughter to my lips. I heard him say, ‘Pull yourself together, Farrell.’ He was speaking to me as though I were mad. I saw his eyes dilating in sudden fear of me, saw the way his nose had been twisted by Roberto’s fist, and then I saw nothing as I drove my own fist with all the force I possessed into his face, lusting in the feel of pulping blood and tissue, the satisfying thud and crunch of impact and the beautiful pain of my knuckles. Then I was looking down at him, sprawled on the sheet-metal floor of the fuselage, his face broken and bloody. I was trembling. The details of the plane began to swim round in my eyeballs, nausea crept up my throat and into my brain. Very far away I heard my voice say, ‘Get the mule into the plane.’ Hacket and Reece were staring at me. Then without a word they climbed out.
Seeing them go like that without question gave me a sense of command, and with it confidence. I jumped down and found some planks to form a ramp. Hacket came into the barn leading the mule, its cut traces trailing behind it. I went up to the animal and rubbed its velvet muzzle, talking to it, calming it with the sound of my voice. It baulked at the ramp, but pushing and pulling we got it up and into the plane. I backed it so that its rump was against the toilet at the rear and we roped it. I stood talking to him for a bit and then I turned to go fo’ard to the cockpit and found myself face to face with Sansevino. He was holding a bloodstained rag of a handkerchief to his broken face and his eyes looked from me to the mule with a malevolence that halted me. ‘You touch that animal,’ I said, ‘and I’ll kill you.’
He smiled and said nothing. I turned to Reece. ‘Keep him away from that mule,’ I said.
‘The mule will be all right,’ Hacket assured me.
I hesitated, staring at Sansevino. You can’t kill a human being in cold blood whatever sort of a devil he is, but by God I wanted to. Then Hilda was at my side, leading me back to the aircrew’s cabin. I heard the door of the fuselage clang to and then I was in the pilot’s seat, my hands resting on the controls. ‘Anything I can do?’ It was Reece.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Go and keep an eye on that damned doctor.’ I didn’t want Reece near me. I didn’t want him to see that I was trembling and sweating. He went and I said, ‘Tell them to fix their safety belts and then shut the door, Hilda.’
I heard her passing on the order and then the door to the crew’s cabin slid to and she was back in the seat beside me. I pressed the starter button. The port engine sprang into life. Then the starboard motor was turning, too. A cloud of dust swirled through the barn. The noise was shattering. I taxied out then, bumping through the ash towards the vineyard. Automatically I ran through the final routine check-up — flaps, rudder, oil, petrol, brakes, everything. All the time I kept the tail swinging back and forth as I tested out the strength of my dummy leg on the rudder.
At length I swung into position at the road end of the vineyard, facing the villa. I put the brakes on then, revving the engines, watching the dials, trimming the airscrews. From behind in the fuselage I thought I heard the frightened whinny of the mule and the clash of hooves on metal. Then I throttled back till the screws were just ticking over and wiped the sweat from the palms of my hands. There was nothing now between me and take-off except the trembling ache at the back of my knees.
Hilda’s hand touched mine. I looked across at her. She smiled. It was a slow smile of friendliness and confidence. Then she raised her thumbs and nodded.
I turned to face the runway. It stretched ahead of me, a grey plain of ash marked out with bush vines drawn up in straight, orderly lines, each a drab, pitiful object under its mantle of ash. And at the end was the lava outcrop and the villa. I thought perhaps I ought to take off from the villa end. But then suddenly my hand was on the throttle, revving the motors. If I taxied the length of the vineyard, feeling each bump, I knew my nerve would be gone. It was now or never.
I took the brakes off, felt the plane begin to move, checked the trim of the motors and braced my feet on the rudder bar, my left hand gripping the control column. The thing that worried me more than anything was the ash. How would the plane react when it gathered speed? What bumps did that damned carpet of ash hide? But there was no going back now. I opened out to full throttle. The ash was streaming past us now. Little grey bushes fled beneath us faster and faster, the villa on its lava outcrop raced to meet us. I braced myself, waiting for the tail to lift, my hands on the control column. We began to swing. I checked the swing with my left foot, checked too much and felt the tail swinging across in the opposite direction. For a second all my mind was concentrated on adjusting the rudder. And then at last I had it and at the same moment I felt the tail rise. The villa grew large till it seemed to fill the whole windshield and then I was pulling back on the stick, sensing the sudden lift of the wings, hearing the motor noise soften to a drone, and the red-tiled roof of the villa slid away beneath us.
I relaxed with a sense of relief. Hilda’s hand pressed mine. I looked out through the perspex and beyond the port wing tip I saw there was nothing left of Santo Francisco now, just a black welt of lava.
And then some Jinx got hold of the wings of the plane, shook them, slammed us down and then rocketed us up towards the black pall of the sky. I knew what it was even as we were flung upwards. We were caught in the uprush of hot air from the lava stream that had outflanked Santo Francisco. I fought to keep myself from panicking, to keep control of the plane. As the uprush lessened we began to bump about, tossed here and there like a shuttlecock in the turbulence of the air-streams and all the time I was fighting with stick and rudder to hold us on our course. The lacerated stump of my leg was agony each time I had to put on left rudder.
And then quite suddenly I was at home there in the pilot’s seat — at home and at ease. I knew we’d get through all right. I knew I could still fly. And as though in conquering myself the elements recognised defeat, the turbulence suddenly ceased and we were flying straight and steady without a bump as though we were floating in space.