Much later, when they woke up, the sun was high in the sky. They considered the clothes that Martha had packed in the bag for them. Bart’s pants were four inches too short, and they had to let the hems down to lengthen the legs. Milena was decked out in a dress that could have belonged to her grandmother and a black coat with a fur collar.
“Just look at me!” She laughed, pointing to her hair, which resembled a recently harvested wheatfield. But Bartolomeo’s eyes said, You could wear anything at all; nothing would make you ugly.
“Anyway,” he said out loud, “if any dog-men get up here, they’ll find themselves faced with quite a problem. Our trail ends in this mountain refuge. Sorry, gentlemen, but we’re on our way back down.”
The idea of escaping by crossing the mountains had soon seemed to them unbearable. Their own parents had fled in the past, but at least they had fought before they ran away. They had defied the Phalange. And some people were surely still ready to do the same. Like the woman in the horse-drawn cart who had said it was a shame. They had decided last night they had to find those people and join them. Brute force was obviously on the barbarians’ side, but how could they not believe that the precious memory of life before the Phalange didn’t still live on, lying low in people’s hearts? There must be embers that could be rekindled before darkness covered the world entirely. In their excited conversation at the refuge, Bart and Milena had worked out that there must be a link between the rekindling of that fire and Eva-Maria Bach’s voice. The barbarians had silenced it, and Bart knew how, but it now vibrated on in Milena’s throat. Perhaps anything was still possible.
And Milena, who had only just found her mother’s trail, couldn’t resign herself to giving up so quickly. Every step she took northward was a denial of her heart, a denial of her wish to know more about the woman who had been so like her.
What was more, they had said to each other, how could they leave Catharina Pancek and Basil behind them, imprisoned in detention cells? Their sacrifices called for something better than just hiding.
Bart couldn’t get the secrets revealed by Basil out of his mind. After all, the terrifying Van Vlyck was only a man, and an order from him would surely be enough to open the doors of all the boarding schools. They had to find the man and make him give that order. How? They had no idea, but at least they would have tried. They’d have fought back.
It was with this crazy hope that they had made up their minds: they would stop trying to escape and go to the capital city in the south of the country. Neither Bartolomeo nor Milena had ever been there.
They walked for a long way, came to the river, stole a small boat tied up to a dock, and let themselves be carried downstream, stopping only to sleep and stretch their legs. The great river seemed ready to protect them, offering them its soft murmuring and its slow waters. It cradled them.
“Sing,” Bartolomeo sometimes said, and Milena let the lines appear on the little patch of skin between her nose and her forehead for him.
In the middle of the third night, they passed under a bridge. The clear sky was sprinkled with stars. Bart recognized the four stone horsemen.
“Wake up, Milena! It’s our little town. Look, there’s your school!”
Milena, sleeping under a blanket at the bottom of the boat, put her chin above it and sat up to see better. “You’re right. It feels funny going under the bridge, when I’ve walked over it so often. Look, there are people crossing it now! They look like students from the schools with those coats. What on earth are they doing here at this time of night?”
Sure enough, two figures were hurrying toward the hill. The first seemed to be carrying something heavy on his back, perhaps a sack. The second, who was a little smaller, no doubt a girl, was following close behind. But as the current swept the boat on, they were unable to see any more.
Pastor got out of the bus in a very bad temper. Three of his five dogs had been vomiting for half the journey, and they’d had to drive with the windows open to let in some fresh air. The other passengers, already terrified by the presence of their strange traveling companions, had been freezing cold all night, and couldn’t sleep. The horrible, sour stench made them gag. The other two dog-men, Cheops and Teti, weren’t much better than their comrades. Green in the face, they had been belching disgustingly the whole time, not even bothering to wipe away the saliva slobbering down their chops. Only Ramses had behaved decently. He was sitting beside Mills, and they had both managed to sleep, heads close together like a pair of lovers.
“Told you so,” muttered Pastor, kicking the wheel of the bus. “These creatures don’t travel well. Amenophis threw up all over my jacket. I’ll be stinking right through the hunt.”
“No worse than usual, I can assure you,” said Mills dryly.
When Pastor asked the bus driver why he hadn’t reported the two fugitives last week, he said one of the consolers had told him to “leave them alone,” and he for one didn’t go asking for trouble. The big dog-handler, who had a bump on his head to remind him of an unpleasant experience, had no difficulty in understanding the man’s meaning. They went into the café, where the manager greeted them with a sleepy “Morning.” He confirmed that yes, he had certainly seen the young couple. They’d been sitting at that table by the window over there. Where had they gone after that? No idea. Pastor ordered a large basin of coffee for “his dogs.”
“Your dogs?” asked the surprised manager. “Dogs taken to drinking coffee these days, have they?”
“Mine have, yes,” said Pastor, jerking his head in the direction of the stooping figures visible beyond the curtain over the glazed door.
“Oh, I . . . yes, I see,” stammered the café manager, and he went off with his fat face shaking.
Less than ten minutes later, the two men and their pack were off along the mountain road. Mykerinos had sniffed Milena’s scarf together with Chephren and Ramses, and he led the others with his nose raised to the wind. Mills had given the other three dogs — Cheops, Amenophis, and Teti — Bartolomeo’s boot to smell again, and they too immediately set off.
“Good,” said the police chief. “They went along the road on foot. We can take shortcuts and save time.”
Although the two young people had a head start, he didn’t doubt for a moment that he would catch up with them before they were over the mountains. He had seen the same thing happen more than ten times before: fugitives lost their way, suffered injuries, gave way to exhaustion. Sooner or later they were always tracked down, and then . . . well, official instructions might be to bring them back alive, but Mills had never been able to resist the dubious pleasure of taking a different line. He and Pastor had known each other so long that they didn’t need to discuss it when the time came. Mills would merely nod, and the big dog-handler understood and whispered a single word into the ear of one of his beasts. A word of just two syllables, very simple, but pitiless and deadly: “Attack!” The sight of the kill disgusted Pastor, and he put his jacket over his head rather than watch. When it was all over, he called his dogs to heel and congratulated them. By then he couldn’t even recognize the bodies. Mills, on the other hand, made himself watch to the very end, with his stomach heaving but his eyes wide open. All he had to say in the report was that the fugitives had been armed, their behavior had been threatening, and the police party had been forced to defend themselves.