Shadow of the Moon (88 page)

All about him wet furry shapes were dragging themselves onto the warm white sand, licking their fur and shaking themselves before crawling or scuttling away towards the distant line of trees, and Alex freed himself from the rope harness and dragged the makeshift raft forward until it grounded.

He turned then at last, and saw that they were all there. The shivering goat, the baby lying placidly in its box, the monkey still clutching its round-eyed offspring, Lou Cottar on her knees, staring blindly ahead of her and breathing in deep gasps, and Winter lying full length in the shallows with her long hair cloaking her slim body in blackness and her chin on the edge of the raft. He walked over to her unsteadily and reached down a hand to pull her to her feet.

‘I can't,' said Winter, and laughed up at him. ‘I've got no clothes on.'

‘I like you without your clothes on,' said Alex, and pulled her up into his arms and kissed her, holding her cool wet body close to him and tasting the water that ran into his mouth from their wet faces and their dripping hair. He held her for perhaps a minute, oblivious of Lou Cottar, and then released her gently, and putting her away from him, bent to untie the goat.

The monkey, abruptly taking fright, leapt from the raft and fled across the sand. And suddenly they were all laughing. Laughing helplessly from strain and overwhelming relief, and because they were still together and still alive. They stopped at last, and turned to look at the wall of flame that was the bank that they had left: and saw that they had left it only just in time, for hissing, burning branches were falling into the water and there was nothing but flame to the turn of the river that hid the broken bridge-head. The Hirren Minar must be somewhere in the centre of that furnace, and tomorrow there would be nothing but miles of black, smouldering desolation where yesterday there had been dense jungle.

A hot spark fell on Alex's bare arm and he winced and swung round suddenly to look at the line of trees behind them and beyond the long stretch of the sand. Lou Cottar, following his look, said with a catch in her voice: ‘It can't reach as far as this!'

The flames could not leap that wide expanse of river, but the wind was
carrying stray sparks across it, and the jungle everywhere was tinder dry. But they could not remain exposed to the brilliant light at the edge of the shallows. They would have to make for the trees.

Alex bent without a word, and untying the box from which Lou had removed the baby, filled it with the various things that they had brought with them, while Winter retrieved the wet folds of her sari from about her ankles, and dragging the goat followed them across the wide level of the sands to the shelter of the grass and the casuarina scrub that fringed it.

The long swim across the river had cooled them, but now they were hot again. Unbelievably hot. The air scorched their lungs with each breath that they drew, and the river and the wide sandbanks and the line of the jungle were lit with a bright pulsating glare as though it were a stage in the full blaze of footlights and gas-lamps. Every blade and leaf and twig of the jungle behind them stood out from its fellows, highlighted and black-shadowed, and here and there a floating spark would alight and wink and go out, or catch at a brittle powder-dry spear of grass and show a brief spurt of flame.

A tuft of pampas grass twenty yards from them caught alight and flared up, and Lou caught her breath in a harsh gasp, and snatching at the end of Winter's wet sari, dragged the end of it free and drew it across the child's face. She said desperately: ‘It's almost dry already! We shall have to get back to the water. Alex—'

Winter saw Alex's face stiffen queerly and knew that he was visualizing taking to the river again and going down with the current - for how far? And for how long? They might have to go for miles, hemmed in between two walls of fire, with only that makeshift bamboo raft to hold to. Then suddenly and unexpectedly he gave a dry sob of relief, and holding out his hand, palm upwards, said: ‘Rain!'

It was the monsoon at last.

Unbelievingly, incredulously, they turned their faces up to the furnace of the sky, the hot drifting ash and the falling sparks, and felt something warm and wet splashing upon their parched skins.

‘Wait here,' said Alex. ‘I'm going to get the raft.' He leapt down the bank and they saw him race across the sands as the first heavy, blessed drops began to fall. He upended it and shouldered it and presently he was back again, panting and breathless. ‘Get in among the trees; under the thickest stuff you can find,' he said jerkily. They forced their way into the thicker jungle with the raindrops splashing onto their shoulders and the glare from the burning trees on the far bank lighting their way, and using the raft as a roof, wedged it at an angle to carry off the rain and make a rough shelter among the trees, stowing the bundles and the baby under it as the first slow drops turned to the full, drumming downpour of the monsoon.

They stood out in it, letting it pour over them as it roared out of the sky like some tidal wave such as the one that had overwhelmed lost Atlantis,
drowning out the roar of the burning jungle. It was not rain as Winter had known rain. It was a solid wall of water falling on them and smothering out thought; and cool - and cool—

The glare diminished and died at last, and they were in wet darkness in the drumming, drenching rain. The thick jungle and the platform of bamboo and matting were an inadequate shelter against that torrential downpour, but they did not care. It had cooled the appalling heat and they could breathe again.

It was still raining when the dawn broke greyly over the drenched miles of blackened smoking wasteland, the pock-marked face of the river and the sodden jungle around them where the canes and the tall grass sagged under the weight of water.

Winter heard Alex stir, and opened her eyes to see him walk out into the pouring greyness. She sat up, pushing the wet hair back from her face and shoulders, and saw that Lou was still asleep, wearing nothing but the cotton chemise in which she had swum the river, and with her arm about the box in which the baby slept. They had propped up the lid with sticks last night so as to provide extra shelter for the baby and the various belongings that were wedged at one end of the box, and the baby, though presumably damp in the manner of babies, appeared to be otherwise dry.

Winter rose to her knees and wringing out her wet hair plaited it, and looked ruefully at her damp sari. But there was nowhere in the jungle that was dry. The warm rain drummed on the leaves, pouring off them in fountains and cascades and runnels, and the steady voice of the water drowned out all other sounds. There would be no need to bathe in the river today, thought Winter; and then realized with a sense of shock that it was not going to be so easy to reach the river from this bank, since to gain the brink would mean exposing themselves at the edge of a wide belt of open sand a long way from the safe shelter of the trees.

Struck by this thought she turned to rummage cautiously among the few articles they had brought with them from the Hirren Minar, and found a cooking-pot which she set to catch the water that was sluicing off the roof of their temporary shelter. The noise and the movement failed to wake Lou, who slept on while Winter instituted a search in the nearby jungle for any fuel dry enough to burn. Only yesterday the whole forest could have been lit with a single match, but this morning it was no easy matter to find a handful of grass and dead leaves with which to make a fire.

Presently the baby raised a feeble wail and the sound woke Lou, who sat up rubbing her eyes, and after a time came out and joined Winter. She looked up at the grey, weeping skies and round at the sodden jungle and said briskly: ‘We shall have to build a hut.'

Winter looked at her and smiled, remembering Lou's previous restless desire to escape from the jungle, and contrasting it with her present and instant desire to construct a more permanent shelter so that she could remain
safely in hiding during the coming months. Lou returned the smile. They could still smile in spite of all that had happened to them, and they were still smiling when Alex returned, pushing through the drenching undergrowth. But at the sight of his face their own faces were suddenly sober.

‘What is it?' asked Lou sharply.

‘That bloody goat!' said Alex forcefully.

Lou gave a choked cry and ran to the side of the shelter where they had tethered the goat, but there was nothing there but a chewed piece of rope, and the goat had gone. ‘We must find it!' said Lou. ‘We must! How am I to feed Amanda? It can't have gone far.' But the goat had gone for good.

‘I can only hope that some wet and hungry tiger has made good use of it,' said Alex sourly. ‘It will be a richly deserved end. Don't be silly, Lou! Give it some rice, or boil it some flour and water. No one is going to notice smoke today.'

‘Will you stop calling her “
it
”!' snapped Lou in sudden and irrational fury.

Alex grinned. ‘You're getting damned maternal, Lou. One day you'll persuade yourself that it - sorry, she - is your own child.'

‘She is,' said Lou, and went to join Winter who was building a fire in a hollow tree that she had discovered some twenty yards from their shelter.

Alex looked after her with a half-smile that turned into a grimace of pain. He went into the shelter and found the small tin of opium pills and swallowed down a few of them with brandy. ‘I cannot go sick now,' thought Alex dizzily. ‘Not now—'

But no amount of brandy and opium could keep the fever at bay, and half an hour later Winter, bringing him hot food on a plate of leaves, found him lying under a tree a few yards from the shelter, his body jack-knifed with pain and his breathing harshly audible above the steady patter of the rain. His brown, sun-burned skin had an oddly grey tinge and seemed to be stretched too tightly over his cheek-bones, and there were dark patches under his closed eyes. Winter put the food down very carefully, surprised to find that her hands were steady when her heart was beating with such terrified swiftness. She laid a hand lightly on his forehead.

The harsh heat of it appalled her, and Alex opened his eyes and looked at her between narrowed lids. He seemed to have some difficulty in focusing her. His forehead creased in a scowl of pain and he said in a blurred, difficult voice: ‘Be all right … only … dysentery. Tell Lou … keep that baby away … dangerous …'

There had followed a nightmare interval of days and nights - none of them could ever have said how many, it had seemed like a month and was probably no more than three days - in which Alex's body had been torn and burned and wasted with dysentery and raging fever, and it seemed to Winter that he could not live. She had not known the meaning of dysentery, for though
it was a plague common to all India, any explanation of it, or of what a severe attack entailed, was not considered a suitable subject for the delicate susceptibilities of ladies. She had stayed with him day and night, doing everything that it was possible to do for him, endlessly and tirelessly; holding his head on her lap, forcing the brandy and opium that were the only medicines they possessed down his parched throat, feeding him with boiled rice and rice-water, listening to him rave when the fever mounted, and feeling every cramping pain as though it were a pain in her own body.

She slept only when exhaustion overtook her, and then with her hand on him so that she woke when he moved. She had never in all her short life seen an illness like this, or imagined it, and at times it seemed worse to her than the birth of Lottie's baby had been. But Alex held onto life, and it was, in the end, Lou who had betrayed them.

Lou knew something of dysentery, having experienced a mild attack of it herself and seen Josh suffer a worse one. She told Winter all that she could remember of the course of the illness and its treatment, and she had looked at Alex and said: ‘I don't think it's only dysentery. I think he's got some sort of fever on top of it. Josh wasn't as bad as that. Unless - unless it's cholera.'

She had kept away for fear of carrying the infection to the baby. But the pouring rain, and the sudden breaks when the rain would stop and the sodden jungle steamed under the molten heat of the sun, had not suited the baby as the dry heat of the Hirren Minar had done. The baby wailed endlessly and heartbreakingly, and vomited up the rice-water and the thin gruel that Lou made with flour and coarse country sugar. And the supplies of even those commodities were running low.

‘She will die without milk!' said Lou, wild-eyed and desperate. ‘She must have proper food - she must!' She had walked up and down, clutching the wailing infant to her breast and said passionately: ‘Why can't I feed her myself? Why aren't we made so that we could if we wanted to? She needs it, and I can't give her anything -
anything
!'

Winter did not hear her. She had been watching Alex's haggard burnt-out face and dry, cracked lips, and her mind and her heart were as desperate as Lou's. She did not even notice when Lou went away, and it was only when she found that there was no fire lit - for Lou had been dealing with all the cooking - and no food prepared, that she found that Lou and the baby had gone. And even then she imagined that they could not be far away.

The rain had stopped and the jungle that had been so brown and brittle only a few days ago was now a hot, humid greenhouse in which new grass and leaves and creepers and every variety of growing thing had sprung up overnight in lush abandon. The damp heat was less bearable than the dry heat had been, and Alex seemed to struggle for every breath he drew.

The sound of his laboured breathing tore at Winter's heart, and for the first time in the long weeks since she had run from the Lunjore Residency she turned her face away and wept: wept hopelessly and helplessly and
silently; the hot tears running into the grass roots as swiftly as the raindrops that had poured down onto them the day before.