Despite his anxiety about Dorotea, Cesare grins. ‘No!’
Gino nods and beckons Marco over. He has lost even more weight than they have; his skin is sallow, his eyes dull. But his expression brightens when Gino mentions MacLeod, who, he confirms, carries a pocket mirror and a moustache comb.
‘How can he comb it, though, a coglione? A bollock cannot be beautiful.’
Gino gives a shout of laughter and Cesare joins him, but then there is a sound, like a clap of thunder and he is lying on the ground, his face against the rock.
For a moment, he cannot understand what has happened.
He sees the black pair of guard’s boots, and looks up to see MacLeod’s blurred face, which is entirely expressionless, as if he is inspecting a rock.
Cesare blinks to clear his vision and tries to heave himself upright. As he does so, MacLeod hits him again, and he goes down.
‘You lazy Eyetie.’ MacLeod raises his baton and Cesare flinches, covers his head with his arms. But the blow never comes.
Marco grabs MacLeod’s arm, wrenches the baton from his hand, and then throws it across the quarry. The whole group is frozen, waiting.
MacLeod stares at Marco for a moment, then pulls his gun from his holster and, as Cesare shouts, No! MacLeod smashes the gun barrel into Marco’s face. The sickening crunch of metal on bone and Marco falls backwards, his head striking a rock.
He lies still.
Cesare doesn’t even think, but hurls himself at MacLeod, fists flailing.
As a boy, Cesare had never liked violence, had drifted above it. No one had bothered to try to beat him up: he’d seemed too dreamy; but he’d often stepped between boys who were fighting. Sometimes he’d misjudged it and been punched himself. The trick was only to retaliate when you needed to. The trick was to read another man quickly: the tension in his face and muscles, the line of his mouth, the force of his fist. You don’t have to be the strongest or the fastest to be able to dodge the blow, then elbow a man in the throat as he goes down.
But Cesare hasn’t accounted for MacLeod’s strength, for his own hunger-weakened muscles, for the lightness of his body after two months of digging in the cold.
MacLeod shoves him off and leaps to his feet. Cesare scrabbles for a rock, his spade, anything to defend himself, but MacLeod brings his boot down hard on Cesare’s hand. Cesare howls in pain and tries to stand, but then stops, because MacLeod has raised his gun.
Cesare knows that he is a dead man.
A man’s heart is the size and shape of his clenched fist. Cesare remembers studying the pictures of Da Vinci’s dissections. He used to run his fingers over the tracery of veins in the drawings, then place his hand on his own chest. Now, his heart is thudding hard enough for him to feel it in his throat.
MacLeod points the gun at Cesare’s chest. He can feel the other prisoners watching, can feel the tension in his muscles, the pull and push of the air in and out of his lungs.
A body holds about seven pints of blood. If a major vein is hit, a man might bleed to death in minutes. Or a bullet could lodge itself in an arm or leg and be removed. Or it might pass through a man’s body, puncturing his liver, his lungs or his bowel.
In the desert in Africa, Cesare had held Alessandro for two hours after the bullet had gone into his chest. His final breath had sounded like the far-off rumble of a waterfall. There’s an indescribable silence in a dead man’s eyes. Cesare wonders what the last colour he sees will be. Red, he supposes, or black.
He hopes for blue. The sky. Her eyes.
MacLeod flicks the safety catch.
Someone cries out – Gino? One of the other men? Or maybe the shout is his own? It is hard to tell – everything is slow, dreamlike.
Cesare closes his eyes and counts. He pictures mountains and olive trees and the arch of a church roof overhead. He pictures a woman with red hair. He thinks of the shape her mouth makes when she says his name.
Another shout, a crash, a flurry of noise. Cesare’s eyes snap open, but he cannot see MacLeod, only a wall of brown uniforms, thin bodies, battered boots.
He realizes that the other prisoners have stood between him and MacLeod, that they are blocking the path of the bullet that the guard would have fired. The bullet that would have found his heart.
And, one by one, the prisoners are dropping their spades and clapping. It is a slow, rhythmic beat, like the marching of a far-off army, but as more of the men join in, the individual claps blur into an ocean of sound, a thunderous roar.
MacLeod is in the centre of the circle of men, his gun still cocked, but pointing at their feet as he spins around, shouting at them. His words are lost in the sea of noise and Cesare stands to join them, cradling his throbbing hand, which is dripping blood down his leg, but he doesn’t care, he does not care, because, mio Dio, just look at the shock on that guard’s face! And the prisoners, shouting and clapping – every one of them stands taller. Every one of them seems to have cast off some great weight, some grey cloak that has bowed his shoulders and made him flinch and cringe, but no more, not now.
And more guards are running over now – English guards, with their batons raised. But they freeze at the sight of the wall of prisoners, who are shouting and clapping still.
Cesare looks up to the top of the hill and sees other groups of Italians stopping their work, throwing down their spades. And perhaps he is imagining it – perhaps he creates the idea later – but it seems that he hears the engines of the
