of the bedroom open behind him, and the door of the apartment, and the woman whimpered and the child cried. He jogged down the stairs. Ham thought only of Penn, and his fear. The compliment, that Benny Stein would not have recognized, was that he was the most popular, the most revered, the most talked about driver in the aid convoy team sponsored by the British Crown Agents. Going off through those bloody awful people, through their bloody awful villages, was not worth thinking of without Benny Stein to humour them along. The Seddon Atkinson, his lorry, was loaded full, eight tons of wheat flour, yeast, sugar, and seed.
And now the damn tricky girl was playing up on transmission, the only one of fifteen Seddon Atkinsons in the lorry park that was contrary. Two engineers worked with Benny Stein to get the tricky girl road worthy for the morning, and two more of the drivers had come back after their hotel dinner to the lorry park out by the Zagreb airport to see if the tricky girl would ride in the morning across the Turanj crossing point and down through Sector North and on into Sector South.
If it had stood up and slapped his face, Benny Stein would not have recognized a compliment, but it was one hell of a big compliment to him that two engineers were prepared to work as long as it took through the night to get the tricky girl road worthy and two of the other drivers had come the long drag out of the city centre to check how they were doing.
Past midnight, and the convoy manager had joined them to peer down into the exposed engine space, and leaning forward behind the convoy manager was the convoy administration manager, quite a crowd to get the tricky girl road worthy Not that Benny Stein, long-distance lorry driver, overweight, middle-aged, stubbed height, shiny bald head that was alive with oil smears, would have noticed. An aid convoy going down through Sector North and on into Sector South might not be safe if Benny Stein wasn't in the line, might not be fun. When the transmission was fixed, when he'd gunned the engine, when he'd driven round the lorry park lunatic fast, when he'd crashed the gears, done the emergency stops, when he'd put the tricky girl through the hoops, Benny Stein pronounced himself satisfied.
He tried not to think of the past, but to concentrate on the present.
The image of the fox was the past.
Penn's present was each footfall of ten strides, then the listening and the silence, then the moving again. He could not kill the image of the fox. The present was going forward in the dawn and he had slept too poorly to have wanted to eat before there was enough light for him to leave the timber men's hut, and he counted himself lucky that the rain showers that had beaten on the tin roof of the hut had been cleared by the wind. Ham's map was finished, and the map bought in the shop in Karlovac was too small a scale to help him with much beyond the lines of the roads. He could get a rough bearing from the early movement of the sun and that was sufficient to guide him. He was deep in the woods and going well, but always there was the prickle of nervousness at his back.
The past was the image of the fox.
There had been chickens inside a walled and roofed wire cage at the bottom of the tied cottage's garden. It had been his job through his childhood, each evening, to feed the chickens and to collect the eggs. It was easy enough for a fox to approach the cage, to sniff the wire mesh of the cage. But approaching the cage, sniffing the cage, didn't fill the gut of the fox. The fox had to find a way through the wall of the cage, scratch back the loose seams of the wire, dig frantically under the wire, chew at the frame of the door, if the fox were not to go hungry. And scratching, digging, chewing, aroused the frightened screams of the chickens. It was easy enough to get close but the bloody awful bit, for the fox, was doing the business. With the cackle of the chickens came his father with the shotgun, and the dogs from the shed and the big flashlight from the shelf beside the kitchen door. Three foxes were killed near the chickens' cage during his childhood, two shot by his father when caught in the flashlight, one trapped by the dogs against the panel fence by the fruit bushes. One fox had made it in. It was the night when his father and his mother had taken him to the pantomime in Chippenham, a foul wet night, and before the expedition to Chippenham he had fed the chickens fast under the rain and not latched properly the gate frame, not hooked the chain onto the bent nail. Penn couldn't count on it, that the frame door to Rosenovici would have been left open. It was easy enough for him to get there, but when he roused the chickens… But he was trying not to think of the past.
Penn could hear the sounds of tractors.
He had been going along the side of a hill that was close set with trees. He had no path to guide him, no trail. He could move well and quietly on the mat of damp leaves. He was drawn forward towards the engine sounds of tractors.
Suddenly, he was looking into the valley. There had been a fine rock in front of him, weather-smoothed and lichen-coated, and the rock had blocked the valley from him. Past the rock, and he saw the valley. There was a stream going fast, well swollen, that cut the valley into halves. Two tractors worked in the grass fields on the far side of the stream from him, and both pulled old laden manure spreaders. The fields on his side of the valley were unworked and weeded up.
He saw the contrast, and he understood.
His eyes tracked the progress of the stream past a pool where the water ran slower with the white spume giving way to dark depths, and he thought it would be a place for trout. Beyond where the tractors heaved out manure there were cultivated strips and he saw women working, dark shapes in the early morning mist wrapped in thick coats against the cold and bent over hoes and forks. On his side of the stream there were no cultivated strips, no women, nothing planted.
His eyes moved on, attracted to the soft colours further down the valley. The apple trees were in blossom, there were cattle grazing across the stream and children played amongst routing pigs and a dog drove sheep along a track, and it was all on the far side of the stream.
Yes, he understood.
He saw the smoke climbing from the chimneys of the village across the stream, and when he squinted his eyes and shaded them from the low sun he could see the shape of the houses and the block of the church and the brightness of flowers. He saw a car pass another car. His gaze roved across from Salika, over a linking bridge, rested on the twin village that was his side of the stream. He saw at first the mirror image, then the reality came. The broken church, the small houses without roofs, the foliage of brambles and nettles growing high in a lane. It was difficult for him at that distance, more than a mile, to see the detail of Rosnovici. But he saw that one village lived and one village had died. And at the edge of his vision, blurred by mist coming off the dew on the grass, he thought he saw a grey-black scar in a corner of the field that was immediately before the village that had died.
A cock pheasant faced him.
He saw nothing that was danger. The valley was at gentle peace. He knew the fox would have thought the chickens' cage was a place of gentle peace until the birds screamed and the gun came and the dogs were loosed. It was where Dorrie Mowat had been… and where Dorrie Mowat had been knifed and bludgeoned and shot to death.
The cock pheasant rose up on its clawed feet, beat its wings, shouted the warning.
He looked again across the stream to the ruin of Rosenovici. He had taken the money, and when he had taken the money he had given his commitment. He wanted to earn his own pride… He sat in the shadow of the big rock, where he could see down the valley, where he would wait through the day. When he could no longer see the apple blossom, and when the tractors had driven back to the living village, and when the women had trudged home, and the children, then he would move again and work his way under the cover of coming darkness towards the village that had died… He wanted to make a report that would earn his own pride.
The cock pheasant careered away in noisy flight down the length of the valley at gentle peace.
Eleven.
So nearly… First would have come the crows, and after the crows had taken carrion there would have come magpies and jays, and after magpies and jays there would have been rats, and after the rats there would have been crawling insects, and the worms would have come for the final feast. The jaws seemed to laugh at Penn, the eye sockets seemed to stare at him. He had so nearly stepped on the skull. Two winters and a summer, he thought, had given every chance for the birds, rodents, insects and worms to strip the flesh and muscle and tissue from the face of the skull. The mouth leered, the eye sockets challenged him. Walking a pace to the side of the track in the late
