his palm. Yet even in his dreadful anger, Jake was studying the ground
and marking the Italian positions. On his other hand, Gregorius Maryam
was praying softly, his smooth young face turned to a muddy grey with
horror and the words of the prayer forced between tight lips like the
last breaths of a dying man.
'Oh God,' whispered Vicky in a tight, choked voice, as the mortar
bombing began, dropping relentlessly into the depressions where the
survivors huddled for shelter. 'Oh God, Jake, what can we do?' But he
did not answer and it went on and on. They were caught in the
nightmare of it, powerless in the grip of this horror watching the
mortars continue the hunt, until the woman with her two infants burst
out into the open not three hundred yards ahead of them.
'Oh God, oh please Jesus,' whispered Vicky. 'Please don't let it
happen. Please make it stop now.' The guns hunted the woman and they
watched her die, and the child rise to its feet and stand lost and
bewildered beside the mother's corpse. The thud of galloping hooves
sounded in the wadi below them and Gregorius swung around and cried,
'Sara! No!' as the girl rode out, crouched low over the stallion's
neck. She rode bare-backed, a tiny dark figure on the big white
animal.
'Sara!' Gregorius cried again, and would have followed her, running
out alone into that deadly plain, but Jake grabbed his arm and held him
easily, though he struggled and cried out again in Amharic.
The girl rode on unscathed through the storm of fire, and Vicky's
breathing stopped as she watched. It was impossible that Sara could
reach the child and return. It was stupid, so stupid as to make her
anger leap even higher and yet there was something so moving about that
frail beautiful child riding out to her death, that it filled Vicky
with a sense of her own inadequacy, a sense of great humility for even
in this proud moment, she was aware that she was incapable of such
sacrifice.
She watched the stallion rear, and the girl lean out to gather the
small brown infant, saw the machine guns find their target at last, and
the stallion whinnied and went down in a tangle of flailing hooves,
pinning both the girl and the child, while the bullets continued to
spurt dust and slap loudly against the still kicking body of the
stallion.
Gregorius was still struggling and blab bering his horror, and Jake
turned and struck him an open-handed blow across the face.
'Stop that!' Jake snarled, his own anger and outrage making him
brutal. 'Anybody who goes out there is going to get his arse shot
off.' The blow seemed to steady Gregorius.
'We have got to get her, Jake. Please, Jake. Let me fetch her.'
'We'll do it my way,' snapped Jake. His face seemed carved from hard
brown stone, but his eyes were ferocious and his jaws clamped closed
with his anger. Roughly he shoved Gregorius ahead of him down into the
wadi, and he dragged Vicky after him. She tried to resist, leaning
back against his strength, her head turned towards the plain, and her
reluctant feet sliding in the loose earth.
