As she weakened, Padre Rand seemed to draw strength from the trial and began muttering prayers; not meek prayers, begging to be spared from this tortuous test, but rather of strength, asking for the fortitude to bear it. It seemed to Edith as if his faith was an old, much loved, but discarded coat that he had newly rediscovered and was trying on again for size, and found it still fitted.
LIEUTENANT TULLIVER NEEDED to get his Sopwith 1½ Strutter above the shoal of Kreothe drifting implacably towards them and, given the rapidity with which they were approaching, he needed to gain height fast.
They were flying at a thousand feet, but still hadn’t cleared the height of the great voluminous air sacs that kept the creatures aloft. The sun had disappeared, blocked out by the Kreothe that now filled the sky above them, and it filtered through their translucent bodies, casting a weird green twilight on everything below. It was like flying in the vaulted nave of some obscene flesh-built cathedral, the tentacles dropping down like clusters of gargantuan columns. There was nothing to do but fly through them until they could find a way up.
Several smaller Kreothe drifted by beneath them. Tulliver glanced down past his fuselage as they slipped by a hundred feet below. They looked for all the world like misshapen kite balloons, and he could deal with balloons.
First, he had to avoid the death-dealing tentacles as they found themselves weaving through a forest of the things.
Tulliver glanced up through the transparent pane in the upper wing above him. Overhead he could see the underside of the mammoth air sacs of a great Kreothe. It bulged with several huge fleshy globules and growths. One cyst-like swelling resembled a large udder from which extruded three slick, wet lipless mouths. A circle of long tongue-like members surrounded each one of them, one of which was feeding a flayed lump of raw wet flesh into an open maw. Tulliver noticed scraps of khaki serge uniform hanging from it as a flock of dark green winged creatures gathered round it, squawking and tearing at the offal, like gulls in a trawler’s wake.
Filled with disgust and fury, Tulliver worked rudder and stick, threading the machine between the tentacle roots, up towards the swollen cupola above, before letting loose a prolonged burst of machine gun fire, wishing he still had burning tracer bullets left.
The winged creatures turned their attention to the Sopwith as it banked away, swooping down as one, towards the machine, with raucous harridan shrieks.
Maddocks turned the rear machine gun on them as they flew past the tumorous mouth bag.
Tulliver felt a downdraft of warm, foul-smelling air that briefly buffeted the machine as they passed beneath the maws and their writhing tonguedrils.
He had to get away from the damn things before they tore the aeroplane apart. The winged creatures seemed to keep away from the great harvesting tentacles, flocking instead around the mouth things. Perhaps they weren’t immune to the juices with which those things dripped.
“Hang on,” he bellowed over his shoulder at Maddocks.
Putting the machine into a spin, he went corkscrewing down around a tentacle. Maddocks peered back, to see the scavengers dropping away and returning to easier prey, and once more resuming their mouth-tube squabbles.
Tulliver levelled out, seeing a patch of bright blue sky between the huge sacs above, and put the aeroplane into a steep climb, racing to rise above a monstrous Kreothe, whose size dwarfed the tiny fragile machine.
At it passed from the green twilit world of the Kreothe’s underside into the bright glare of the sun, the Strutter’s shadow crossed the taut skin of the giant air sac, like a bott fly among a herd of horses — and he was going to bite. Tulliver continued climbing to gain the height he’d need for the attack. Below him now, the tops of the Kreothe were spread out in a landscape of bulbous towering sacs.
Tulliver pushed the Sopwith into a steep dive towards the Kreothe he’d targeted. He loosed a quick burst from his forward facing machine gun. The stream of bullets raked the huge billowing field of skin stretched out below them. Parts of it seemed to deflate, crumpling slowly under the withering fire of the Lewis gun, but the whole did not collapse, suggesting chambers of buoyancy.
He pulled out of his dive and flew along the Kreothe. There was nothing else they could do. They weren’t going to bring one of those things down, so, instead, he pulled back on the stick and climbed, just for the sheer exhilaration of it.
The shoal of Kreothe shrank below them, the blue sky expanded to meet them and, briefly, Lieutenant Tulliver felt at home.
IN THE FIRE trench, Sergeant Hobson craned his neck and looked up at the huge translucent fleshy canopies as they passed overhead, went to the storage box and brought out a Very pistol.
“What are you going to do, Sarn’t?”
“What am I going to do, Draper? I’m going to give one of those things a very nasty surprise.”
He fired the flare pistol. The flare arced up into the sky, bursting brightly against the soft moist nodule attached to the under side of a Kreothe air sac.
An involuntary shudder ran through the tentacles that hung below it, and the nodule itself seemed to shrink and contract from the burning white light that seared through the skin.
The men watched from the trench, mesmerised.
“It’s shrivelling like your balls on a wiring party, Coxy!”
“Fuck off, Draper.”
The great air sac that carried the creature aloft began to burn and wither and, with its buoyancy lost, the Kreothe began to sink slowly, its now limp tentacles dragged along the ground like anchor chains, weighting it down. It descended slowly, like a holed titanic ocean liner, sinking down to its final resting place further up the valley, beyond the trenches.
The other Kreothe, if they knew or cared about the fate of their shoal member, did not react. They drifted by overhead, oblivious to the ruin they left behind, feeding off stragglers from the fleeing herds further up the valley.
THE KREOTHE HAVING drifted on, Edith, Sister Fenton and Padre Rand staggered into camp with the two soldiers, Jones and Miller, that they had managed to save. The pair were now practically comatose.
“Stretcher bearers! Stretcher bearers!” called the Padre.
Stretchers were rapidly found and the party ushered across what was left of the encampment, to the Aid Post down in the support trench.
“What have we here?” asked Captain Lippett, his concentration on a man’s gashed scalp before him as he threaded a needle through the skin.
“The only two surviving neurasthenia patients, Mr Lippett. They all just walked out in the veldt and waited, waited… to be eaten by those… things,” Sister Fenton informed him.
“And these two weren’t, eh?”
“We dragged them into a chatt ditch.”
“Quick thinking, Sister.”
“It was the Padre’s idea.”
“Good show, Padre.”
“Just looking after my flock, doctor.”
Lippett looked up at Edith. “I thought that was your job, Nurse Bell. You know the men call you Little Bo Peep, do you?”
He obviously knew she didn’t. The remark rankled with Edith. She had got used to being belittled and bullied and she had borne it. She knew her position. But she didn’t have to like it. It was funny, but before she came to this world, she would have just taken it meekly and perhaps had a cry to herself later. Now, she felt incensed. She had tried to tell him there was something wrong with them, but he didn’t listen, he wasn’t interested, not in malingerers, not in cowards. She clenched her fists and felt the nails bite into her palms. She stepped forwards. Doctor or no doctor –