‘We must get him some medicine,’ said Jambit to 12, ‘or he will die.’
12 sighed heavily and his brow creased with worry.
‘It is kept at the big house and not worth my life,’ he said.
‘And your freedom?’ groaned Bastian from the ground.
‘Many men have talked of escape and I have seen the lucky ones die in the sun.’
‘And the unlucky ones?’ asked Jambit.
‘I have heard their screams at night as the baboons eat them alive, tearing them limb from limb.’
‘Listen carefully to my plan old man,’ croaked Bastian through fevered lips.
Jambit knelt beside and held Bastian’s arm.
‘Can we trust him?’ he asked of 12.
‘Do we have a choice?’
Bastian used his remaining energy to beg favour.
‘You’re a pilot?’ 12 asked.
‘Yes and I’m his navigator,’ said Jambit.
‘But what use is that here?’
‘None, unless we reach the hot air balloon hidden in the next town,’ replied Bastian.
‘I have heard of such a balloon once before and many years ago. It’s a myth.’
‘It’s real, believe me.’
‘Like the fires in the sky some men swear to have seen. But everyone knows there ain’t no balloons allowed near Angole.’
‘It’s there,’ gasped Bastian.
‘I will fetch the medicine,’ 12 finally said before Bastian passed out.
* * *
12 slowly removed the cloth wrapped around Bastian’s back with the smell offending his senses. He cleaned the wound with gauze before pouring antiseptic lotion over the raw flesh.
‘It’s fortunate he’s already unconscious,’ he said.
He took the syringe and injected a broad-spectrum antibiotic into his patient’s arm.
‘Won’t they miss any of this?’ asked Jambit, as 12 applied a dressing.
‘They have salvaged too much from the towns to care, and they don’t dare keep records.’
Jambit threw the medicinal paraphernalia far into the bush where no one trod for fear of the poisonous spiders and snakes.
‘He’ll be in pain for a while yet, but he’ll live as long as he takes two of these for the next ten days,’ said 12, tapping the top of a white packet. ‘Help me get his shirt back on and carry him to his bunk.’
‘What if anyone notices?’
‘Pretend he’s drunk on the potato hooch.’
It was Jambit’s night to rest but Bastian was out cold, and try as he might to stay awake he fell asleep in the bunk above his friend. 12 kept a lookout for them both with the sound of hyenas in the distance surrounding their prey and tearing its flesh apart.
12 had been a model prisoner for thirty-five years. He was fifty-nine with two months left to retire, and there was no one over sixty in Angole. They were sent to the Outer Hebrides to eke out an existence without taskmasters until they faded away, if you believed the commissars.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
It was daybreak, three months after Bastian and Jambit’s arrival and they were having a cold shower outside the hut with water pumped from an underground well. There were no towels and every other day they washed with their clothes on, dried by the heat in five minutes. A trustee went down the line of prisoners handing out new bars of soap to each one that held out his hand, each bar stamped with a number and ‘Scotland’. Once a week on Saturday, the day of rest, their hair was shorn by a trustee and he was a careful not to cut anyone lest a scorpion became his bed fellow.
Bastian and Jambit climbed into a waggon with seven other men, 12 amongst them. They travelled to the next town on a scouting mission, with a commissar riding alongside and ready to log any irreverent materials to recycle, favourite amongst these were parking meters, house name plates, and banned sports trophies and medals especially boxing and fishing. As Edward had once screamed to a fanatical audience of cheering commissars, ‘If thy right eye offends thee, recycle it.’
Tumbleweed rolled across the deserted streets and the nervous taskmasters held rifles close to their chests should a big cat or alarmed gorilla rush towards them. Heat rose from the ground as a wavy haze causing everything behind to appear bent.
Brightly flowered green and yellow foliage stretched to the rooftops of houses once divided by low wire fences and over which you could see your neighbour, before the rusting generation pulled up the drawbridge to the castle and hammered high fence panels into the ground.
‘Listen up, fanyanas,’ shouted the commissar. ‘You will be split into groups of three and return by twilight. Grab a sack each. Those that find fuel shall be rewarded with hippo steaks and cider upon their return.’
There was a loud cheer from the prisoners. Bastian, Jambit, and 12 went west with a taskmaster guarding them from his camel.
At the first street he barked, ‘Check the houses one by one,’ then went to sit in the shade outside a derelict shop with two flagons of wine and his letters from Siberia. When they returned, he was fast asleep and they were forced to wake him up.
‘Anything?’ he asked, rubbing his eyes.
‘Only these,’ replied 12, as the contents from their sacks noisily flowed onto the floor.
‘Christ, I never seen so many trophies in one place,’ said the taskmaster taken aback, proving that when everybody was somebody, then nobody was anybody.
* * *
On the seventh day when the prisoners were throwing various metal signs onto a heap, Bastian noticed a nameplate on a pile of scrap, ‘Skywards Entertainment.’
‘Who found it?’ he asked Jambit, whilst trying to remain calm.
Jambit shrugged his shoulders. The light in his eyes had faded this last month and he no longer fought for the scraps of meat 12 would bring to the hut. He was withdrawing fast and no longer believed in escape.
In the waggon on the way back, Bastian traded the location of Skywards Entertainment for a month of his evening ration. But he didn’t intend on staying around that long.
* * *
It was five days before a dust storm interrupted their work and each intervening day, Bastian had been terrified another would uncover the balloon before him. As
