but the branches of the knob-thorn spread overhead and all around him the bush closed in, limiting his vision to about fifty paces.
He dragged himself to his feet and turned up the rocky slope, hoping to reach high ground, and behind him an owl hooted, a mournful, funereal sound.
He was blind and shaking again when he fell, and he knew he had torn his shin for he could feel the slow warm trickle of blood down his ankle, but it seemed unrelated to his present circumstances, and when he lifted his hand to his face, it was shaking so violently that he could not wipe the icy sweat from his eyes.
Out on his left, the owl called again, and his teeth chattered in his head so that the sound was magnified painfully in his ears.
Mark rolled over and peered blindly in the direction of the hooting owl, trying to force back the darkness, blinking the sweat that stung like salt in his eyes.
it was like looking down a long dark tunnel to light at the end, or through the wrong end of a telescope.
Something moved on a field of golden brown grass, and he tried to force his eyes to serve him, but his vision wavered and burned.
There was movement, that was all he was sure of, then silent meteors of light, yellow and red and green, exploded across his mind, and cleared, and suddenly his vision was stark and brilliant, he could see with unnatural almost terrifying clarity.
A man was crossing his flank, a big man, with a head round and heavy as a cannon ball. He had a wrestler's shoulders, and a thick bovine neck. Mark could not see his face. it was turned away from him, yet there was something dreadfully familiar about him.
He wore a bandolier over his shoulder, over the khaki shirt with military-style button-down pockets, and his breeches were tucked into scuffed brown riding-boots. He carried a rifle at high port across his chest, and he moved with a hunter's cautious, exaggerated tread. Mark's vision began to spin and disintegrate again.
He blundered to his feet, dragging himself up the stem of the knob-Thorn and one of the sharp curved thorns stabbed deeply into the ball of his thumb; the pain was irrelevant and he began to run.
Behind him there was a shout, the view-halloo of the hunter, and Mark's instinct of survival was just strong enough to direct his feet. He swung away abruptly, changing direction, and he heard the bullet a split second before the sound of the shot. It cracked in the air beside his head like a gigantic bull-whip, and after it, the secondary brittle snapping bark of the shot. Mauser, he thought, and was transported instantly to another time in another land.
Some time-keeping instinct in his head began counting the split instants of combat, tolling them off even in his blindness and sickness, so that without looking back he knew when his hunter had reloaded and taken his next aim. Mark jinked again in his stumbling, unseeing run and again the shot cracked the air beside him, and Mark unslung the P. 14 from his shoulder and ran on.
Suddenly he was into trees, and beside him a slab of bark exploded from a trunk, torn. loose by the next Mauser bullet in a spray of flying fragments and sap, leaving a white wet wound in the tree. But Mark had reached the ridge, and the instant he dropped over it, he turned at right angles, doubled up from the waist and dogged away, seeking desperately in the gloom for a secure stance from which to defend himself.
Suddenly he was deafened by a sound as though the heavens had cracked open, and the sun had fallen upon him sound and light so immense and close that he thought for an instant that a Mauser bullet had shattered his brain. He dropped instinctively to his knees.
It was only in the silence that followed that he realized lightning had struck the ironstone ridge close beside him, and the electric stench of it filled the air around him, the rumbling echo of thunder still muttered over the blue wall of the escarpment and the huge bruised masses of cloud had tumbled down out of the endless blue vault of the sky to press close against the earth.
The wind came immediately, cold and swiftly rushing, thrashing the branches of the trees above him, and when Mark dragged himself to his feet again, it billowed his shirt and ruffled his hair, inducing another fit of violent shivering. It seemed the sweat on his face had been turned instantly to hoar-frost; in the rush of the wind, an owl hooted somewhere close at hand, and it began to rain again.
In the rain ahead of Mark, there was the gaunt, tortured shape of a dead tree. To his fever-distorted eyes it had the shape of an angry. warlock, with threatening arms and twisted frame, but it offered a stance, the best he could hope for at this exposed moment.
For a few blessed moments, the darkness behind his eyes lightened and his vision opened to a limited grey circle.
He realized that he had doubled back and come up against the river. The dead tree against which he stood was on the very brink of the sheer high bank. The river had undercut its roots, killing it, and in time would suck it into the flood and carry it away downstream.
At Mark's back, the river was already high and swift and brown with rain water, cutting off any retreat. He was cornered against the bank while the hunters closed in on him. He knew there were more than one, the owl calls had been signals, just as they had on the escarpment of Ladyburg.
Mark realized that perhaps his only hope was to separate them, and lead them unsuspecting on to his stance, but it must be quick, before the fever tightened its hold on his sense.
He cupped one hand to his mouth and imitated the sad, mournful call of the Scops owl. he leaned back against the tree and held the rifle low across one hip. Off on the right his call was answered. Mark did not move. He stood frozen against the tree trunk, only his eyes swivelled to the sound and his forehead creased in his effort to see clearly. Long minutes drew out, and then the owl hoot came, even closer at hand.
The rain came now on the wind, driving in at a steep angle, ice-white lances of slanting rain, tearing at the bush and open grassland beneath it, hammering into Mark's face with sharp needles that stung his eyelids, and yet cleared his vision again so that he could see into the swirling white veils of water. Carefully Mark cupped his mouth and hooted the owl call, bringing his man closer. Where are you? a voice called softly. Rene, where are you? Mark swivelled his eyes to the sound. A human figure loomed out of the sodden trees, half obscured by the sheets of falling rain. I heard your shots, did you get him? He was coming towards Mark, a tall lean man with a very dark brown sunscorched face, deeply lined and wrinkled around the eyes, with a short scraggy growth of grizzled hair covering his jowls.
He carried a Lee-Metford rifle at the trail in one hand, and a rubber ex-army gas-cape draped over his
