The Ironclad Prophecy (5 page)

The three men shouldered their rifles and moved off.

Napoo and the Clan elder came over to Atkins.

“This urman is Haradwe,” said Napoo.

The urman Clan elder grinned in hospitality, white teeth beaming out of his weathered face, but his eyes betrayed his sorrow and pain. Atkins held out his hand only for the man to reach out and clasp his forearms.

The elder shook his head. “I have heard tales of your Clan, the Tohmii; the Urmen who challenge the Ones and who have Skarra fighting by their side. Naparandwe says you will protect us.”

“If you’ll accompany us back to the encampment, to our enclave, and add your number to ours. Gather your people together and we’ll take you now. Mercy, help them round things up, just what they can carry – and don’t nick anything.”

He saw Nobby running back down towards him through the trees. “Only! Corp! Gutsy told me to tell you he’s found something for you.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a surprise, Gutsy said.”

Atkins mouthed an obscenity and followed Nobby as he trotted out of the trees and up a small hillock. Gutsy and Gazette were lying just below the crest. Atkins crawled the last few yards to keep out of sight.

He was aware of an insistent thrumming. “What’s that bloody noise? Sounds like something crunching with its teeth.”

“I think we’ve got a problem, Only.”

“We wouldn’t be the bloody Pennines if we didn’t,” said Atkins bitterly.

Gutsy thrust his chin towards the summit. “See for yourself.”

Enfield cradled in the crooks of his arms, Atkins crawled up the crest on his elbows, lifted his head cautiously above the lip and peered out across the open veldt.

“Fuck!”

He slid back down a few feet in shock and looked back at Gutsy, who gave him an apologetic shrug.

Atkins crawled back to the top again. Not taking his eyes from the plain in front of him, he thrust his right hand back, feeling blindly in the air until Gutsy put a pair of binoculars into it. He peered through them.

There, far across the veldt, he saw chatts. Khungarrii. Thousands of them, column after column of a vast army on the march. Great caterpillar-like beasts writhed along in front, clearing a path through the tube grass, followed by massed ranks of Khungarrii scentirrii, their rear-most ranks lost in the dust cloud of the vanguard.

The rhythmic thrumming he heard was the marching step of the chatts muted by the distance, as they banged swords, spears and electric lances against their thorax plates.

They were marching on the British encampment.

CHAPTER TWO

“All Our Might and Main...”

T
HEY RAN.

Atkins and his men half-jogged, half-walked, sure they were hidden from sight of the approaching army, but cajoling the weary and frightened urmen on anyway. The speed of their initial flight had gained them some ground, but now the logistics of moving families slowed them down.

They briefly stopped to let the last of the stragglers catch up, an urman urging on an old woman, and casting anxious glances behind them.

The Khungarrii were in no hurry to reach the Tommies’ stronghold. Their pace was steady and persistent and their chanting and clicking relentless and pervasive.

Chalky mumbled something. Gutsy bent his ear to listen.

“Nah, don’t you pay it no heed, boy. That racket there, it’s meant to frit you. Don’t you let it get to you. Bloody hell, Jerry’s done worse than that. They’re just chatts out there. No artillery, no trench mortars. Once we’re back in the trenches they can’t touch you, so buck up, lad.”

Atkins was reminded of the Old Contemptibles’ tales of the Battle of Mons, as the BEF retreated across Belgium before an advancing German army. He’d seen photographs in the newspapers and war news magazines of fleeing Belgian peasants, on the move with nothing more than they could carry. Then, the British had turned up and made a stand. And they would here, too. But right now they still had a way to go.

Atkins scanned the sky, hoping Tulliver might be up there in his aeroplane, but he realised he hadn’t heard the insistent drone of its engine all day. Tulliver would have spotted the chatts’ movements in plenty of time. These days, however, Everson didn’t allow Tulliver to go up except for urgent missions. His machine may have been a marvel of modern mechanics but it was made from spit, string and paper and there were things here that would tear it out of the sky in an instant.

Nobby stumbled and fell, and Prof picked him up.

“Not now, there’s a good chap,” he rasped. “Be terribly inconvenient.”

The clumsy private dusted himself off and mumbled an apology.

Gutsy rolled his eyes at Atkins. He shrugged his shoulders in return. Nobby suffered from a natural-born clumsiness and was the bane of many an NCO’s life, which was how he ended up in Atkins’ section as a replacement. Atkins wondered how he managed to fall over in the first place since he never raised his eyes from his feet.

“Going to be one hell of a scrap,” said Gazette, cradling his rifle.

“Aye,” admitted Atkins.

“First decent one we’ve had since we got here, if you don’t count the trench raid on Khungarr. I hope we’ve not got soft and flabby. The Lieutenant’s a good man, but I think the troops may be getting away from him a bit.”

“Aye. He needs something to bring ’em along. This may just be it,” said Atkins. Inside, he felt the familiar pull in his stomach as the tide of fear sucked at his soul with its insidious undertow. “Or it may be his undoing.”

“Holy Mary, mother of God!” yelped Gutsy, snatching his foot back from a large crimson growth almost the colour of the soil. It shrank back into itself. “It moved! The damn stuff moved!”

“What the hell is it?” Atkins asked Napoo.

“Urluf, good djaja,” replied the urman with an eating mime.

Some of the urmen quickly harvested the mass, tearing chunks off and eating it on the run, passing the lumps around young and old until it had all been consumed.

Gazette nudged Gutsy with his elbowas he jogged past. “You know that stuff the mongey wallahs have been putting in the broth to pad it out, that you thought was bully beef?”

“Uh huh.”

“That’s it.”

Gutsy gave a dry retch. “And I thought onions in me tea was disgusting enough.”

“Well the MO said it was fit to eat.”

“What does he know? He’d give a number nine pill to cure the shits.”

A
TKINS PUSHED HIS
men and their wards on as hard as he dared, driven by the awful, insistent gnashing and drumming. Ahead of them across the plain Atkins could see the hills start to rise as they ran towards the valley. From their current position, the stronghold was still out of sight, beyond the spur.

“Who’s the replacement that knows iddy umpty?”

Mercy smirked. “That’ll be Chalky.”

Atkins hung his head. “Bloody hell.”

Chalky was summoned.

“I want you to get your mirror out and send a message to the hill-top OP. Warn the dozy buggers, if they haven’t already seen them, that there’s an entire chatt army headed their way. I reckon we’re only an half an hour or so ahead of the bastards, if that.”

“Yes, Corporal!” he said snapping a salute and turning smartly to carry out his orders.

Atkins groaned. “Blood and sand, anyone’d think I’d just gazetted him.”

He felt a tug at his leg. Tearing his gaze from the ominous dust across the veldt, he looked down to see a young urman child pulling at his trousers. He looked around for a parent. His eyes met those of a fair-haired Urman woman, who beckoned the child away from him. It was only when he looked again, as the child threw himself round her legs, that he noticed the roundness of her belly. She was with child. A desperate longing filled him, an ache he could not ease.

T
HE HILLS GREW
larger, although much more slowly than Atkins would have liked. At last, they rounded the foothill and came to the valley mouth. He heard the faint, reassuring sound of a bugle on the wind.

Prof slapped Nobby on the back and they began marching with renewed vigour towards the mouth of the valley. “There you go, lad. Home soon.”

Atkins stopped and counted his men past, along with forty-three urmen.

“Come on! Get a move on. We haven’t got all day,” he urged.

The party made for the encampment at the double, while the noise behind them droned on incessantly until he wanted to stop his ears up.

They reached one of the main paths radiating out from the stronghold, trampled down by the passing of many feet. Through the tube grass, the odd blood-red poppy bloom caught his eye, until they found themselves walking through a drift of poppies populating the charred cordon sanitaire.

Atkins could see frantic activity now as, beyond the wire entanglements, platoons moved up communications trenches to man the fire trench. All along the front line, barrels of guns and tips of bayonets flashed cold in the light as the NCOs bellowed orders.

Over to his left, he heard the impatient putter of the aeroplane’s motor as it ran up. At each new sight, each new sound, his optimism that they could hold the line grew.

The clashing beat of the massed Khungarrii army’s approach began to echo off the valley sides, amplifying it and momentarily dousing his confidence.

He had to stop and get his bearings.

“Well, don’t just stand there, Corporal!” bellowed a familiar voice. Sergeant Hobson beckoned from the trench parapet beyond the wire weed entanglement. He pointed to a section some hundred yards along to his right.

Wire weed had been trained over a small wooden tunnel to provide a temporary sally port under a ten-yard-deep stretch of entanglement. The wire weed writhed lethargically as Atkins ushered the urmen through. They had to crawl on their hands and knees through the tunnel. For every urman that stopped, getting clothes or skin caught on the spreading weeds, for every child that had to be bawled at and pushed through the barbed thorns, the Khungarrii came closer. At length, the last of the urmen were through and were being escorted back to the safety of the trenches and the encampment beyond. He glanced back over his shoulder to see the Khungarrii army stretching to fill the entire valley mouth.

Without warning, the wooden tunnel collapsed, the wire weed falling to the ground on top of it. Some nervous private, whether through fear or incompetence, had yanked the shoring struts that held up the tunnel. Their way back to the trenches was blocked.

1 Section were stranded in No Man’s Land, between their own front line and the approaching Khungarrii army.

B
ACK BEHIND THE
lines, in one of the tented Casualty Clearing Stations, Nurse Edith Bell and Nellie Abbott, the FANY, prepared for the first waves of wounded to come in, setting out trays of clean field dressings commandeered from soldier’s kits and bandages made from boiling old ones and cutting up the flannel shirts of the deceased.

“So how are you and Alfie the tanker getting on?” asked Edith casually.

Nellie scowled at the insinuation. “That’s Mister Perkins to you. We’re good pals we are, and don’t you go getting other ideas,” she protested, before confiding, “but he is nice, isn’t he? And I do worry about him so. The
Ivanhoe
was due back yesterday. It only has a range of twenty-three miles on full tanks of petrol, and –”

“Goodness, Nellie, if only you could hear yourself. You sound like a man. It isn’t feminine to talk about things like that. No one will thank you for it.”

“Perkins will.”

“But you can do better than that, Nellie.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

“Well, on your head be it.”

“I ain’t too worried, though. He’s in the safest place, isn’t he? Nothing can get to him in there. That’s why Everson sends ’em out, ain’t it?”

An orderly thrust his head into the tent.

“Nurse Bell, it’s the shell-shock patients. They’ve got the wind up, well, more than usual. I can’t do nuffin’ with them. They’ll respond to you.”