Soldier No More

It had been a defensive tower, not a dovecote, that was for sure: on one compass- bearing the archer's embrasure had been opened up into a full-size window, and Audley had had his work-desk built there, to give him light for his work, but the three surviving arrow slits gave the original game away.

Only that wasn't the game he was playing now . . .

He found, and quite quickly from the filed papers and the card-index system, that the man's researches fell neatly into the two parts he had expected—so neatly, so eloquently, that an inner glow of self-satisfaction began to warm away his early morning self-doubting.

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Really, it was quite perfect . . . the contrast between the magisterial— almost ponderous—scholarship on Charles Martel and his 8th century Franks and their Arab-Berber adversaries in Western Europe, and the very different notes on King Gaiseric and his 5th century Vandals, who had popped up in the central Mediterranean like the wrath of God two hundred years before the Arabs.

Except for the identical hand-writing, which was curiously childish and unformed, and the passion for logical and meticulously recorded detail, it might almost have been the work of two different men: the painstaking and respectable Dr Jekyll-Audley, who never strayed outside the facts, and the Mr Hyde-Audley, who slavered over Vandal atrocities in North Africa, with scandalous conjectures about their sexual habits . . . and was plainly and unashamedly committed to the Vandal Cause, where Jekyll-Audley maintained a lofty impartiality appropriate to the author of The Influence of Islamic Doctrines on Iconoclasm in the 8th Century.

But, at the same time, there were distinctive and tell-tale similarities which betrayed the consubstantiation of the two Audleys. Both were fascinated by religion (though, typically, Hyde-Audley inclined towards the Vandals' Arian heresy), and they shared an equal obsession for military detail, Jekyll-Audley's notes on Prankish and Arab weaponry and tactics being equalled by Hyde-Audley's on the development of King Gaiseric's navy—

Hyde- Palfrey-Audley—

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With a start, Roche realised suddenly that he was no longer reading by the light of his torch: while he had been burrowing into the papers and the index, drawn ever deeper into them by his study of the two Audleys, the dawn had crept up on him out of the dark to fill the window right in front of him. Below him the morning mist had already started to fall away from the ridge. It still filled the whole valley, blanking out everything to within fifty yards of the tower, with the shapes of small junipers and scrub oaks indistinct on its nearest margin.

He replaced everything very carefully into the semi-confusion in which he had found it, the topmost file, Town plans of Hippo Regius, Carthage, Leptis Magna, Ostia Antica, Rome— c.500, slightly askew. A trained man would know it had all been picked over, and there were innumerable precautionary traps Audley could have set to betray such tampering at a glance if he was of a mind to be suspicious. But it didn't really matter now, because now and at last Audley himself was next on the agenda, and after that he would take it for granted that Captain Roche had pried around his work-room during the night.

He looked round the room one last time, more out of habit than necessity after that last thought. If he had still been working for one side or the other, for Genghis Khan or Sir Eustace Avery, perhaps Audley wouldn't have been next—

perhaps the burden of responsibility would have driven him to consult with at least one of them first. . . and not Genghis dummy5

Khan, because by now he would already be on the way to their rendezvous. But now he was working for himself, and instinct ordered him to keep one jump ahead of both of them.

His eye came round, past the open trapdoor and the arrow-slit embrasures, over the piles of books and the card-index boxes which he had just closed, to the work-table with its files

— Town plans of Hippo Regius, Carthage—to the window on the world of junipers- and-scrub-oaks-in-the-mist—

The juniper tree moved!

Or ... it didn't move—it couldn't move—but it widened first on one side, then on the other, as David Audley passed in front of it, striding across the rough pasture. Even as Roche watched, the mist started to swallow him.

Now? Roche thought. Why not now? And then thought simplified into action.

The morning chill hit his cheeks, then filled his mouth and throat and lungs as he drew it in. It surprised him that it could be so cold, where he had seen huge yellow butterflies and hovering humming-bird hawk moths busy with the buddleia outside Lexy's cottage in the late afternoon of yesterday. But— now, while instinct and morning courage were in alliance— now he had no time for butterflies and buddleias and hawk moths—

At this level, cheated of the bird's-eye view from the tower dummy5

window, he was no longer sure which juniper tree was the right one, on which to orientate himself.

'Audley!' he raised his voice into the silence of the morning.

The stillness closed back quickly on the sound, damping it down without an echo, like a pebble thrown into mud on the edge of a pond, sending out no ripples beyond its fall.

Roche drew in his breath to try again.

'Hullo there!' The answering words came faintly to him, more distant and at a much more acute angle as though Audley had zig-zagged back on himself, against the fall of the ridge. 'Hullo!'

'My dear fellow!' Audley loomed up ahead of him out of the mist as he brushed through the fringe of scrub oaks. 'You're up early!'

He watched Roche advance the last few steps. 'Couldn't you sleep?' He shook his head at his own question. 'Of course, it wasn't a night for untroubled sleep after . . . what happened, I agree—a bad night tor everyone, I'm afraid. Worse for us, but bad enough for you too.' He shook his head again.

'Steffy . . .' he sighed, and steadied his scrutiny of Roche,