Turning Back the Sun(62)

Rayner added quietly, “Do they try to water the tree?”

“Yes.” The corporal shrugged almost angrily. “Djannu is a kind of ceremony. My father …” But he stopped and added expressionlessly, “They try to stop the sun going down.”

The sergeant said, “They what?”

The corporal stared back at him. At that moment, it was impossible to tell if he was a soldier or a native. He said, “They try to turn back the sun.”

“For Chrissake!” The sergeant”s laughter bellowed in the silence as he lumbered back to his men.

Rayner asked quickly, gently, afraid that the corporal would also go away, “Do they believe they can do that?”

The man said, “Yes, they believe one day it will work. That if they stop the sun dying everything will be all right again.” Then he himself laughed, but like a thin echo of the sergeant”s. “People will believe anything, eh!”

The men were reassembling. The officers, Rayner noticed, had opened the flaps of their holsters, and the Lewis gunners carried their firearms at the hip. As he fell in line, he guessed they were planning to ascend the bluff.

For several minutes they wound directly below it, and were fearfully exposed. Rayner saw every man”s face clenched as he glanced up. The skyline of the cliff became terrible. Their rifles swivelled and jerked in their hands. At any moment the sky above them might erupt with men and the air whisper down a rain of spears.

Another path led them up. Under their boots the toeholds in the stone came worn and small, gouged by bare feet. Hoarse bird cries shrilled in the chasm. Every time Rayner turned, his first-aid box banged against the stones and the men had to sling their rifles over their backs to claw themselves higher. He had the sensation that they were being beckoned up. The way could have been held by a single native tossing rocks. Yet nobody appeared.

Then the path levelled out and below them they saw the whole oasis from which they had come, locked in its gorge by the infant river. Beyond it, the sky of the wilderness was thickening and dimming into violet light as the sun declined, and a pair of eagle hawks circled over nothing.

By now the soldiers had clambered to the summit and were reforming. In front of them, as they followed the cliff”s rim, the plateau at first looked empty. Then, where a long promontory reached into space, they saw that the rocks were alive with men. The savages had not yet emerged fully onto the spur, and only their heads were visible among the shrubs, but they seemed to number hundreds and even from this distance Rayner saw that their faces were painted a dead, unnerving white.

Ivar yelled an order and the patrol took cover. The troopers crawled into line and steadied their rifles on the boulders. Even the Lewis gunners folded their bipods and wedged their barrels between rocks. But in front of them all, where the plateau”s curve separated them from the promontory, gaped sixty meters of empty air. Rayner lay on his stomach a short way from Ivar, and stared across.

At first, nothing happened. The distant outcrops and acacia bushes only stirred slightly with a half-submerged life. Then, in twos and threes, the savages started to materialize and coalesce. Their naked bodies were whitened by ritual designs, which appeared to clothe them, and they were clasping shields and swinging thongs. They were still emanating from the rocks when the vanguard broke into a lope—more than two hundred men, they seemed— merged in a long phalanx which rolled and undulated along the plateau”s brink. The soldiers” barrels were already following them when Ivar yelled out “Prepare to fire!”

Rayner turned his head in horror. The order had sounded jubilant, but he could see no expression under Ivar”s cap. And now the barrels were levelling on either side of him. The Lewis gunner at his elbow advanced the snout of his gun beyond the rocks and tensed the butt against his cheek. Ivar was crouched on his haunches, staring through binoculars. They all went still.

Yet the savages were not advancing toward them along the plateau”s edge, but filtering onto the spur above the chasm. Their lope was less a run than a light, ritual stamping, which scarcely carried them forward. They were not facing the soldiers at all. By now the last of them had issued from the rocks, and the whole procession began to ripple and dance along the promontory. They were barely eighty meters away, and within helpless range. But they moved forward oblivious, with a plunging, tremulous motion toward the spur”s end.

Ivar bellowed again, “Prepare to fire!” Rayner twisted round and their eyes met. Ivar was pouring sweat, and his lips tensed back from his teeth. He jerked his eyes back to his binoculars.

It was impossible that the savages had not noticed the patrol. It was lit up on its clifftop like a stage set. But above the slow-motion pitch and throb of the natives” legs and torsos, all their heads were staring in front of them beyond the headland”s drop to where a crimson sun was falling toward the earth. They seemed to be moving on a different stratum of time. With their hair and beards hardened by pipe clay into clinking locks, and their bodies quartered with bars and diagonals of chalk, they looked coeval with the rocks on which they trod. And when Rayner glanced behind him he was astonished to see a crowd of women and children gathered within a stone”s throw—women in bark and sedge cloaks, tattered dresses, kepis—all gazing at the spectacle over the soldiers” heads.

He sank his face onto the boulder in front of him and shut his eyes. He waited for the final order. The lints and bandages in his kit would not suffice for a tenth of the wounded. But instead of gunfire there rose from across the gulley”s silence a rhythmic, high-pitched singing. It wavered over to them with an uncanny melancholy, and when Rayner looked up again he saw that the savages had reached almost to the end of the spur, and that their heads were thrown back. In front of them, and level with their bodies, the sun was descending and the whole horizon reddening. He realized that a different order had been passed down the line. The level gleam of rifles had gone. Their barrels now rested upright against the rocks, or on the ground. The Lewis gunner had plucked the cartridge belt from its breech, and Ivar was leaning forward against a boulder with his head turned away.