“What?” Atkins looked up. Another rock fall completely buried the metal face. He had hoped to blast a hole in the metal wall, but the bomb seemed to have had the opposite effect. “Bugger!” His shoulders slumped. Nellie came up to inspect his injuries, but he brushed her off. She had her webbing and pack all stuffed with field dressings and whatever medical supplies she could beg or steal. Atkins suspected she was almost as good a scrounger as Mercy.
“Porgy, mark it on the map. Lieutenant Everson can send another party along to investigate it.”
“If we don’t push on and find that tank, there might not be anybody else left to investigate it,” Gazette reminded him.
Atkins was in low spirits. After Nobby’s death they all were, especially Prof. For a brief moment, Atkins had hoped the mysterious metal wall hinted at a way back to Blighty. All these months, thoughts of Flora had driven him on. Now he felt he had lost her again. He lashed out and kicked a stone.
Gutsy stepped forward to comfort his mate, but Porgy shook his head.
As they headed for the mouth of the canyon, Atkins thought his spirits couldn’t get any lower.
He was wrong.
CHAPTER EIGHT
DESPONDENT, 1 SECTION left the canyon and picked their way over a fan of debris down on to a great fractured plain with deep cracks and fissures crazing the landscape.
Mercy pushed his battle bowler back on his head. “Bloody hell, just when you think things might get easier.”
“My wife says the same thing about our marriage,” said Gutsy, slapping him on the back.
An escarpment behind them, through which the canyon ran, rose several hundred feet and stretched away on both sides into the distance. With no compass reading worth spit on this world, landmarks like this scarp were invaluable. Atkins scratched another ‘13/PF,’ their battalion abbreviation, on a boulder by the canyon mouth to mark their trail before they moved off across the plain.
It was hard going for all, so Atkins cut Chandar’s wrist bonds to help it to deal with the uneven terrain. It now scurried about, to Atkins’ mind, like the insect it was.
Unable to follow the tank tracks directly across the wider gullies, they had to pick their own way. They scrambled and slid down the sides of great rocky protrusions like giant’s steps, before they reached level ground. There, the gullies narrowed and the rocky terrain between levelled out.
It took them longer than anticipated to cross the plain and pick up the tank’s tracks again. It was coming to mid-afternoon when they found the bodies of the jabberwock and the stone beetle on the fractured plain beyond the canyon. They could smell them on the wind before they even saw them. Nellie clapped a handkerchief over her mouth and blinked away tears.
When they came across the carcasses, they couldn’t see them at first. A moving carpet of flat, woodlouse-like scavengers the size of Labradors were burrowing inside the rotting carcasses. As the section approached they slipped into the surrounding cracks and fissures with their prizes. The sight caused the party to avoid the cracks wherever possible.
The tank tracks headed towards the belt of vermillion and damson vegetation in the distance.
“Not more bloody forest. I hate forests,” said Porgy. “You know, I didn’t see a lick o’ nature until I joined the Army. Gimme brick an’ cobbles any day.”
“See them tank tracks?” said Atkins conspiratorially.
“Yeah?”
“Where do they go?”
Porgy knew where this was headed. “Into the forest, Lance Corporal.”
“So that is where we’re bloody well going. I don’t like it any more than you do, Porgy.”
They followed the tracks into the jungle as it closed in about them completely. Atkins hated this. He hated what these places did to him. Every noise was a potential threat, every pair of eyes, every screeching call, a potential predator. The unrelenting tension was exhausting. Trying to breathe lightly so as to hear better only to have the rush of blood in your ears drown out the advantage. Starting at every crack and rustle around them. Napoo’s presence helped little in negating that. A man’s sudden death might be the only warning the rest of them got and none of them wanted it to be them. Still, thought Atkins in an all-too-brief flash of optimism, if they kept to the tracks they didn’t have to worry about things like sting-a-lings, the spring-loaded barbed plants that had killed two of their section when they first arrived.
His body ached from the fall down the scree. It was a bed of bruises that had begun to bloom purple, blue and yellow. Small lacerations itched and stung beneath his heavy serge uniform. A bruise on his face swelled and stretched his skin uncomfortably, but he forced himself to ignore it.
“What are the chances we’ll find the tank crew alive eh, Only?”
“Well, as I heard it told, Chalky, ain’t no more than five things that can happen to a soldier: nowt, wounded — bad or cushy — prisoner, killed or doolally.”
Napoo disappeared up ahead and every so often came jogging back into sight. Scouting. “Footprints. Urman footprints.”
“After us?”
“No, too old. With tank. With Ivanhoe. Their footprints cross the beast’s tracks.”
“It’s not a beast, Napoo.”
Napoo shrugged. “I know what I know.”
Atkins could never be sure whether the man was simple or mischievous. He suspected Napoo knew a great deal more than he let on.
“These tracks?”
“They were with it. Urmen were accompanying it.”
“Stalking it or escorting it?”
“I cannot say.”
Urmen had generally been friendly towards the Pennines, so that was good. There must be an enclave nearby. They could restock with supplies, maybe rest up. Sleeping out in the wild here was not easy, it was nigh on impossible. If the urmen had been following the tank, they might know its whereabouts, or at least which way it went. After all, it was hard to miss.
So was the totem they came across with the body of the urman lashed to it.
Gazette regarded it nonplussed, “Well, if this was them, they don’t seem too friendly, like. Talk about your crucified Canadian. Fritz has got nothin’ on these fellers. Jesus.”
“You don’t think this is what they do to captives, do you?” asked Mercy.
Chandar let forth a sound that could have been a sigh. It wandered up to the body and stretched out a chitinous arm, its long slender fingers reaching out to touch it.
Napoo stepped forward and grabbed it by the wrist.
“No.”
Chandar flicked its gaze to Napoo, then back to the gutted corpse, enraptured. “This is wonderful,” the chatt rasped, its fingers fidgeting, eager to touch it, but it restrained itself. “Wild urmen. I have never seen such a thing. What is its function? What is it for?”
Gutsy’s lip curled in disgust as he watched the chatt enthuse over the poor sod.
“Can’t we cut him down?” asked Nellie.
Napoo glanced around, examining the area around the totem without touching it. “No. It’s a warning. A totem to ward off jundurru — bad magic. Its power is strong.”
“To-tem,” repeated Chandar, its fleshy mouth palps moving thoughtfully, as if committing the word to memory.
“At least somebody’s happy,” muttered Mercy.
They walked past it, each man intent on following the tank tracks at their feet, avoiding the hollow-eyed gaze of the totem sacrifice.
THEY HAD NOT got far beyond it when the section found themselves surrounded by urmen with spears and bark shields. Long blowpipes were aimed at them. The Tommies raised their bayonets to the guard position.