Dennis Wheatley - Duke de Richleau 07 (48 page)

After a moment he swore,
and put the map back. There was no doubt that he was on the road to Bisoka, and
not that to Kremna as he ought to be. When he had reached Užice early that
morning his brain had been so numbed by fatigue after his hundred and thirty
miles’ night drive that it had rejected all thought, except the imperative one
that he must get through the town and out of it, so that he could find a place
to pull up and sleep. lie had forgotten that he should have turned left in its
centre and crossed the bridge.

He dared not go back, as
by now the police in every town in Serbia would be on the look-out for the
Rolls. The only thing for it was to go on until he could find a bridge by which
he could cross the river further up. But in that he was disappointed, as the
road soon turned away from the river, winding north-west between some low
hills.

Three quarters of an hour’s
driving over the most vile track he had yet struck brought him to within sight
of Bisoka. It was the last market town that side of the frontier, and not much
further from it than Kremna. But the latter was considerably nearer to
Yardiste, the railhead on the Bosnian side. From either, the roads up into the
mountains would be little better than goat tracks and quite impassable for a
car. So the time had come to abandon the Rolls.

On his right a pine wood
sloped down towards the town. Bumping the car across a shallow ditch, he drove
it in among the trees as far as he could. Then, getting out the suitcase, he
set off at a brisk walk down the road.

A quarter of a mile outside
the main cluster of buildings he came to the first
Zadruga.
It was a huddle of hutments and lean-tos in which
fifty or sixty peasants were living, apparently all mixed up with their
individual live-stock. A group of women was pounding maize in front of it, and
a patriarchal figure, with a long grey beard, sat nearby on a rickety chair
watching them.

The old man was well
dressed for his class, so De Richleau put him down as the headman of the
community and saluted him politely. Even if the news of the murders had got
this far in the course of the morning, the Duke thought it unlikely that anyone
in the uniform of a Serbian officer would be connected with them, and it was in
order not to give the impression that he might be a fugitive that he had chosen
the clothes he was wearing. He told the headman that his carriage had broken an
axle two miles back in the hills, and that as his duties demanded his presence
in Kremna that afternoon, he wished to buy a riding horse on which to get
there.

As the old man spoke only
a local patois, the Duke had great difficulty in making himself understood, but
with the help of some of the women, who stood round giggling, he eventually
succeeded. A younger man was sent for and a string of horses led out. De
Richleau chose a strong-looking chestnut and produced some of the gold and
silver he had taken from his victims. The price asked was fantastic and he knew
that had he cared to spend the afternoon there, haggling over innumerable cups
of coffee, he could have got the beast for a quarter of what they asked. But
time was more precious to him than gold. He knocked off a third, indicated that
they must throw in saddlery, and told them that if they would not accept he
would try the next farm.

That closed the deal to
their satisfaction as well as his own. Smiling and bowing they then offered him
refreshment. Soon after he had woken he had begun to feel hungry, so he gladly
accepted and made a hearty meal off cold pork, goose-liver, fruit and coffee.
By four o’clock, with his suitcase strapped to the back of his saddle and the
cheerful good-byes of half the big peasant family ringing in his ears, he was
on his way again.

While eating, he had
thought of hiring one of the men to act as his guide, but a casual inquiry
about the roads to the west showed that they were farmers and knew little more
of the mountain country along the frontier than he did; so he decided to put
off looking for a guide until he got to Kremna. Although he had found it
difficult to understand their speech, he felt confident that from what they had
told him, and with the aid of his map, he could find his way there. After
riding through the town, he kept straight on in accordance with their
information that he would come to the river again in a twenty minutes’ ride,
and be able to cross it then.

In due course he reached
the ford they had described but, half an hour after crossing it, he came to
another that they had not mentioned. His map now proved of little help as this
wild frontier region had never been properly surveyed, and the only thing that
seemed clear about it was that the whole countryside was intersected by winding
tributaries of the Morava. Assuming the second stream to be one of these, he
pressed on, hoping to come in sight of Kremna in the next quarter of an hour or
so.

But now, to his concern,
the track left the plain and wound up into the hills, which was contrary to
what he had expected. However, in the next five miles no other track
intersected it, so he had no option but to go forward. For all he knew, Kremna
might be a hill town, or lie in some valley that he had not yet entered, but he
felt that by this time he should have reached it.

At half past five he came
upon a goat-herd, but the man spoke only some mountain dialect which was quite
incomprehensible. Nevertheless, he kept grinning, nodding his head, and
pointing up the road; so De Richleau endeavoured to comfort himself with the
belief that the fellow meant that Kremna was in that direction, Actually, the
man had meant that was the way to the nearest village, and two miles farther on
the Duke came to it. But it was no more than a miserable collection of huts,
and he could not make head nor tail of anything its few primitive inhabitants
said.

For several miles now the
road had been gradually mounting, and soon after leaving the village he came
out on to a wild desolate heath. It was the first time for over an hour that he
had not been shut in by low hills and belts of forest, so he was at last again
able to get a wider view of the surrounding country and attempt to orient its
major features with his map.

The position of the sun
had already filled him with foreboding that his general direction was carrying
him too far to the west, and now his fears were confirmed. A rugged peak rising
well above its neighbours, some five miles distant, could be only Mount
Zhoriste. He was some way past and to the north of it, whereas he should have
skirted its southern flank. A quick check up with the other features of the
landscape showed him that he was now up on the Tara plateau and farther from
Kremna than when he had set out from Bisoka. Evidently he had taken the wrong
track somewhere between the two fords. The Morava must have formed a wide loop
there, and crossing the second had brought him back on to its north bank.

Cursing and fuming, he
wondered what the devil to do. The fact that he was considerably nearer to the
frontier than he would have been at Kremna was little consolation, as he was
nearly double the distance from the Bosnian railhead, and the mountain now lay
between him and it.

It was nearly two hours
since he had left Bisoka, so to go back to the first ford, where he must have
taken the wrong track, would mean a total loss of over three, and he would
still have ten miles or more to cover before he reached Kremna. That meant he
could not now get there much before half past eight. Only an hour and a half of
twilight would be left, and he doubted if he would be able to find a guide
willing to take him across the mountain barrier in darkness. While, if he set
off on his own, he would certainly lose his way again, even if he were lucky
enough to escape a broken neck.

On the other hand, up
there on the Tara plateau he was already half way through the mountains, and
there were still nearly four hours of daylight to go. The frontier could not be
far ahead of him. If he could work his way round to the west of Mount Zhoriste
and down to the Drina river, he might yet reach the railhead by nightfall. In
these wild regions travellers unaccompanied by guides were still quite
frequently set upon and held to ransom by bandits; but he was well mounted and
well armed, so he felt that as long as daylight lasted he need have no great
fear of being captured should he come upon a band of outlaws.

In consequence he decided
on the latter course and rode on. For a mile on either side of him, and two
miles ahead, the heath spread unbroken; a tangle of gorse, heather and rocky
outcrop. It looked beautiful in the evening light, but was so full of snags and
rabbit holes that he dared not ride his horse across it. As it was unbroken by
any cross track, he had to wait until he entered the next belt of pine woods
before veering left.

For some time he rode
southward through the trees, over ground made springy from countless generations
of fallen pine needles. Then he was brought up short by the plateau ending in a
deep gorge. Turning west, he followed the fringe of the wood until the gorge
became less precipitous and he could head south once more. But now the ground
became more broken and treacherous so, coming on a goat-track that led
south-eastward, he felt that he had better take it. The track led to higher
ground, then down into another wood, and there it curved again until he had the
sinking sun behind him. Leaving it, he tried a new cast to the south, but
gradually the trees thickened so that he had difficulty in finding a way for
his horse between them. Exasperated by the slowness of his pace, he turned back
a little way, then headed west again; only to find a mile farther on that in
that direction the wood ended against a cliff face of unbroken rock.

It was now nearly nine o’clock
and almost dark in the forest. He had left Bisoka at four so, with only
infrequent pauses to rest and water his mount, he had been in the saddle for five
hours. As a soldier he had often ridden for double that length of time, and
normally would not have thought anything of it; but the exertions of the
previous night and the constant nagging of his wound had taken a lot out of
him. He was very tired and terribly dispirited. Yet he still hoped that he
might strike the Drina before night had fallen, so he turned back yet again,
then struck out in a new direction.

This time, when he
reached the fringe of the wood, he came out on to coarse grassland which sloped
away into a shallow valley. His depression lifting, he put his horse into a
canter and followed the valley bottom for a mile. It then merged into further
hills, the depression rising to form a pass between two rounded summits. As he
rode between them he stared anxiously ahead, but even in the open the light was
fast fading, and he could see no more than the faint silhouette of a distant
line of hills against the faint after-glow of the long-past sunset.

Beyond the pass the
ground shelved away to another belt of forest. Once in it, he had to ride with
renewed caution, as the darkness there made it difficult to see the trunks of
the trees. For a further twenty minutes he proceeded cautiously, then came out
of the forest to find himself faced by another impassable gorge.

Wearily, he dismounted,
tethered his horse to the nearest tree, and sat down with his back against it.
He could have wept at his inability to go farther and the bitterness of his
frustration. From Bisoka he had estimated that a three and a half hour ride
would carry him across the frontier to Yardiste; so he should have been there
by half past seven and, with luck, caught the last train to Sarajevo. Even had
he missed it, he could have hired a carriage and, with relays of horses, easily
covered the sixty miles to the Bosnian capital before morning. Yet here he was
at ten o’clock at night, utterly and completely lost, without even an idea any
longer in which direction Yardiste lay, and hemmed in by darkness that menaced
himself and his horse with death if they attempted to continue their erratic
journey.

The peasants from whom he
had bought his horse had pressed some raisin cake and fruit upon him so,
getting them and the bottle of Slivowatz out of the suitcase, he made a picnic
meal, sharing the food with his tired mount. Then he scooped a hole among the
pine needles for his hip, covered himself with the civilian clothes he had
taken from Dimitriyevitch’s wardrobe, and tried to sleep.

It seemed a long time
before he dozed off, owing to his intense worry about the Archduke and his
anxiety that he should not sleep too long. That morning he had been too
exhausted to impress his brain before sleeping with the necessity to be on the
road again by mid-day; but, normally, his soldier’s training enabled him more
or less to fix his hour of waking, and it worked on this occasion. At five o’clock
he woke to find it a lovely summer morning: and, there, in the gorge below him,
lay a swirling river that could only be the Drina.

He waited only to take
off his uniform, throw it under a bush, and put on the civilian riding clothes
that he had used for cover during the night. Then he was off. He considered it
unlikely that the Archduke would make his official entry into Sarajevo before
ten o’clock and, if that were so, he still had five hours to work in. He could
no longer hope to get to Sarajevo in time, but by hard riding he ought to be
able to reach the railway, and from there he could send a telegram of warning.