the Maxim into his shoulder and fired a single short traversing burst, aiming a fraction low to counteract the natural tendency to shoot high at a downhill target.
Mark Anders hardly felt the mighty hammer strokes of the two bullets that smashed into his back.
Fergus MacDonald was crying. That surprised Sean, he had not expected it. The tears slid slowly from pinkrimmed eyes, and he struck them away with a single angry movement. Permission to take out a patrol, sir? he asked, and the young Captain glanced uncertainty at Sean over the Sergeant's shoulder.
Sean nodded slightly, a mere inclination of the head. Do you think you can find volunteers? the Captain asked uncertainly, and the red-faced Sergeant answered gruffly. There'll be volunteers, sir, the lads have a feeling for what that youngster did. Very well, then, as soon as it's dark. They found Mark a little after eight o'clock. He hung in the rusting barbed wire at the bottom of the slope, like a broken doll. Fergus MacDonald had to use a pair of wire- cutters to cut him down, and it took them nearly another hour to get him back to the British lines, dragging the stretcher between them through the mud and slushy snow. He's dead, said General Courtney, looking down at the white drained face on the stretcher in the lantern light.
No, he's not, Fergus MacDonald denied it fiercely. They don't kill my boy that easy. The locomotive whistled shrilly as it clattered over the steelwork of the bridge. Silver steam flew high in a bright plume, and then smeared back on the wind.
Mark Anders leaned far out over the balcony of the single passenger carriage and the same wind ruffled the soft brown wing of his hair and a spattering of ash particles from the furnace stung his cheek, but he screwed up his eyes and looked down into the bed of the river as they roared across.
The water flowed down under the dipping reeds, and then met the pylons of the bridge and swirled sullenly, flowing green and strong and full down to the sea. Water's high for this time of year, Mark muttered aloud. Grandpapa will be happy, and he felt his lips tugging up into the unaccustomed smile. He had smiled only infrequently during the past months.
The locomotive hurtled across the steel bridge, and threw itself at the far slope. Immediately, the beat of its engine changed and its speed bled away.
Mark stooped and hefted his old military pack, opened the gate of the balcony and clambered down on to the steel steps, hanging with one arm over the racing gravel embankment.
The train slowed rapidly as the incline steepened and he swung the pack off his shoulder and leaned far out to let it drop as gently as possible on to the gravel. It bounced once and went bounding away down the embankment, crashing into the shrubbery like a living animal in flight.
Then he swung down towards the racing earth himself and, judging his moment finely as the train crested the ridge, he let go to hit the embankment on flying feet, throwing his weight forward to ride the impact and feel the gravel sliding under him.
He stayed upright, and came to a halt as the rest of the train clattered past him, and the guard looked out sternly from the last van and called a reprimand. Hey, that's against the law. Send the sheriff, Mark shouted back, and gave him an ironic salute as the locomotive picked up speed on the reverse slope with explosive grunts of power, the rhythm of the tracks rising sharply. The guard clenched a fist and Mark turned away.
The jolt had hurt his back again and he slipped a hand into his shirt and ran it around under his armpit as he started back along the tracks. He fingered the twin depressions below the shoulder blade and marvelled again at how close one of them was to the bony projections of the spine. The scar tissue had a silky, almost sensuous feel, but they had taken long months to close. Mark shuddered involuntarily as he remembered the rattle of the trolley that carried the dressings, and the impassive almostmasculine face of the matron as she stuffed the long cotton plugs into the open mouths of the bullet wounds; he remembered also the slow tearing agony as the bloody dressing was pulled out again with the glittering steel forceps, and his own breathing sobbing in his ears and the matron's voice, harsh and impersonal. Oh, don't be a baby! Every day, day after day, week after week, until the hot feverish delirium of the pneumonia that had attacked his bullet-damaged lung had seemed a blessed relief. How long had it been, from the V. A. D. Station in a French field with the muddy snow deeply rutted by the ambulances and the burial details digging graves beyond the tented hospital, to the general hospital near Brighton and the dark mists of pneumonia, the hospital ship home down the length of the Atlantic, baking in the airless tropics, the convalescent hospital with its pleasant lawns and gardens - how long? Fourteen months in all, months during which the war which men were already misnaming Great had ended. Pain and delirium had clouded the passage of time, yet it seemed a whole lifetime.
He had lived one life in the killing and the carnage, in the pain and the suffering, and now he was reborn. The pain in his back abated swiftly. It was almost mended now, he thought happily, and he pushed away the dark and terrible memories and scrambled down the embankment to retrieve his pack.
Andersland was almost forty miles downstream, and the train had been behind schedule it was noon already. Mark knew that he would not make it before the following evening, and strangely, now that he was almost home, the sense of urgency was gone.
He moved easily, falling into that long, familiar stride of the hunter, easing the pack on his back slightly as soon as the newly healed wounds stiffened, feeling the good sweat springing cool on his face and through the thin cotton of his shirt.
Absence of so many years had sharpened his appreciation of the world through which he moved, so that which before had warranted only passing attention became now a new and unfamiliar delight.
Along the banks the dense riverine bush was alive with riad life. The bejewelled dragonflies that skimmed the surface on transparent wings or coupled in flight, male upon female, his long glittering abdomen arched to join with hers; the hippopotamus that burst through the surface in an explosive exhalation of breath, and stared at Mark upon the bank with pink watery eyes, flicking the tiny ears, and wallowing like a gargantuan black balloon in the green swirling current.
It was like moving through an ancient Eden, before the coming of man, and suddenly Mark knew that this solitude was what his body and mind needed to complete the healing process.
He camped that night on a grassy bluff above the river, above the mosquitoes and the unpleasant darkness of the thick bush.
A leopard woke him after midnight, sawing hoarsely down in the river bottom, and he lay and listened to it moving slowly upstream until he lost it among the crags of high ground. He did not sleep again immediately, but lay and examined, with the pleasure of anticipation, the day ahead of him.
For every day of the past four years, even the very bad days of darkness and ghosts, he had thought of the old man. Some days it had been only a fleeting thought, on other days he had dwelt upon him as a homesick schoolboy tortures himself with thoughts of home. The old man was home, of course, both the mother and father Mark had
