Turning Back the Sun(60)

Ivar said, “But they”re still savages.”

He had replaced his bush cap as if intentionally to shadow his face. But his body expressed him just as eloquently: a plastic trunk whose limbs showed little hair and no obvious muscle. All its parts flowed together, as if melded by subcutaneous fat, and made his movements boneless as a snake”s. Rayner imagined Zo? in his arms, and felt momentarily, wretchedly, estranged from her. His voice came angry:

“So you think you”ve a right to kill any native you find? Are you planning to wipe out a few then, as a sop to the town? Get yourself promoted? Why don”t you drive back and get the bastards who murdered those farmers, instead of looking for a soft target?”

Ivar said implacably, “You know very well that this is the only target. The others fade away.”

“It”s an irrelevant one,” Rayner said. “People just come there on pilgrimage. How will you know they”ve had anything to do with the town?”

“We”ll know if they”re bellicose.”

“Of course they”ll be bellicose! With thirty armed men arriving!”

“That will be up to them.”

With Rayner it was an obscure item of belief that a man who planned to kill innocents must in some way be ill, perverted. But Ivar”s voice continued almost gently impersonal, and when Rayner hunted back into their boyhood he could remember no time when Ivar had been cruel. But he heard himself say, “You”re not the same fellow I used to know, Ivar. I used to think you were, but you”re not.” Then he recalled the moment on his aunt”s terrace a few days before. “Do you remember when we caught that lizard? It was you who let it go.”

Ivar said impatiently, “Don”t get sentimental with me. These people are as savage as their name.” He was nearly angry at last. “They”ve murdered fourteen of our own people. If that lizard had attacked me, I”d have stamped on it.” He leaned down and extinguished the lantern at his feet as if to end this talk. “And I”ll stamp on these people too.”

Now that the lamp had died, they could see more clearly the sleepers in the camp. The starlight barely touched them, but in their white envelopes they lay row by row, like victims in a morgue. Then Ivar murmured, “Odd of Leon …”

“Yes.” Occasionally Rayner felt as if Ivar”s only decency lay in the past, in the capital, in his remembrance. But he didn”t say anything more.

Then Ivar got to his feet, strapped on his revolver and walked away without a word to check the sentries, while Rayner at last threw off his shirt and sprawled out on his sleeping bag. In the dark his betraying rash might have been any other shadow. He felt the sweat dry over his chest. When he shut his eyes his mind dazed under the dinning of the cicadas, which sometimes splattered down on his naked body. But he did not sleep. Somehow Ivar”s childhood knowledge of him, and his of Ivar, made their antagonism more painful, as if they had judged each other”s deepest self, and found it valueless.

He turned on his stomach and folded the sleeping bag over him. His eyes closed against its roughness. Then, mentally, in mixed bitterness and passion, he lifted Zo? out of Ivar”s arms and returned her to his own.

For an hour after dawn they travelled in coolness. The ground was shadowed and the sky still pale, with a few clouds, and the grass formed an amber ground mist under the trees. The land seemed to be sighing under them. It lifted to unnoticeable ridges from which they glimpsed low ranges swimming in haze along the horizon. For a while a dried riverbed carried them between its banks, then out again into a silvery wash of porcupine grass. Once or twice isolated hillocks appeared, their rocks like cinders heaped together, stuck with a few acacias. Twice the officers mounted these with binoculars and compass, but Rayner could not be sure what preoccupied them. Sometimes they seemed to be reassessing their line of approach, but often they stared at the sky where for the first time among the light clouds a few floated dark-edged, as if some artist had failed to integrate them. So the rain, ironically, had become a threat. The first downpour, he knew, would glaze the whole land in water within a few hours, mulching the earth to a slippery pink mud where even the jeeps would gain no purchase.

But by mid-afternoon the clouds were still high and few. For hours the hills had retreated before the convoy in dim palisades, but now one group separated itself from the rest. It was barely two hundred meters high, but in this flat land it rose harsh and precipitous, topped by porous crags like a man-made wall. At its foot, where it broke into gorges, the jeeps could go no further, and the men disembarked into a soft, still air. It was utterly silent. The scarps fell to their feet in a debris of shale. On the summits the northwest wind had twisted all the trees one way, but in this stillness you could believe that no breeze had ever disturbed the place.

They entered the bluffs in single file, with two Lewis gun sections bringing up the rear. The way was no more than a shallow defile. Their boots clanged on its rocks. Once it opened into a stony valley and the first signs of human life appeared: a small salt pan where skins had been staked out to cure. Until now Rayner had hoped vainly that the place was uninhabited, but soon afterwards they passed a quarry littered with silcrete flints, and a pair of graves.

He edged up the line of march until he was trudging behind the half-caste corporal, and asked him, “Who are the people here?”

The man turned a blank face on him. “They used to be Yiljerong.” He turned his back again. “But I heard people come here from everywhere now.”