The Man who Missed the War (38 page)

With a yelp of pain and fright the victim fled screaming, his small friend close on his heels.

Now being armed, and having shown that he still had some teeth left with which to bite, Philip felt a trifle more sanguine about facing further attacks; but the effort to deal with such a situation while he still tugged the dead weight of Gloria had prove almost too much for him.

For a long time past she had been delirious, and he, too, was now running a high temperature. Yet, he knew that he must not give up until he reached the shelter of the Palace. After ten minutes’ rest and another drink he set off again.

The last two miles were unadulterated hell. His leg was a red-hot flame behind him, his hands were blistered and bleeding, his knees torn even through the pads, the sweat was pouring off him, and he could hardly see out of eyes that were rimmed with dust and sunken right back in his head. At last, panting, gasping, trembling, he lurched across the compound of the Palace, pushed open the door of the sitting-room and flopped down inside it, with Gloria babbling incoherently on the sledge just behind him.

How long he lay there he had no idea. He blacked out, came to through a haze of pain, managed to undo the cloth that bound Gloria to the sledge and get her on to the pile of skins, then fainted again.

When he fully regained consciousness it was the middle of the night. Gloria had ceased her raving and was sleeping. The fire had gone out, and the room was in complete darkness. His leg now was just a dull, throbbing ache. He knew that there were all sorts of things he ought to do; but the darkness was an almost impossible handicap, so he lay there until the grey light of morning percolated through the small windows.

Moving cautiously so as not to disturb Gloria, he left the room and made his way to the servants’ quarters, hoping against hope that the cooks and scullions, or at least Gog and Magog, had remained at their posts; but the whole place was deserted. Fortunately they had not sacked the larder before leaving, and in it he found a good supply of food and blaeberry juice.

Having lit the kitchen fire, he put some water on it to heat and undid the bandages to look at his leg. It was a horrid sight, and he thought that, had he received such a wound on the battlefield, an Army surgeon would have had his leg off below the knee. He felt that it ought to come off, as otherwise there was a grave risk of gangrene from it killing him within the next few days; but, although he had heard of people amputating their own legs in such circumstances, he decided that such a job was absolutely beyond him; the best he could hope to do was to cauterise the wound.

He put a poker in the fire to heat, washed his leg carefully with soap and warm water, and applied the red-hot iron first to the edges of the wound, then, with an effort that took all his will,
to its centre. He had expected that this would make him faint, but it did not. The pain was hideous and made him sweat, but it was just bearable. After a rest to regain his breath, he put clean bandages round the wound, rested his foot in a sling he had made for it while the poker was heating, and, using a broom as a crutch, tried moving about upright for the first time since he had been shot.

It proved a bit tricky at first, but he thought that after adjusting the height of the crutch and the length of the sling he would be able to get about fairly well. Putting some soup, llama’s milk and blaeberry juice in a basket, he hopped back to Gloria. She was still asleep, so he lay down near her. He felt terribly tired now, and he wondered how, seeing that this morning’s effort had proved so exhausting, he had conceivably managed to drag Gloria all that way the day before.

He realised now that he had been delirious a good part of the time and remembered that people suffering from delirium are said to have superhuman strength. His head felt very heavy, and a little pulse in his temple was beating in time to the throbbing of his leg. His temperature was mounting again, and the burning pains from the cauterisation were now beginning to give him hell. For hours he lay there moaning and twisting, and only the gradual darkening of the room told him that evening had come.

Making an effort he crawled over and lit two of the rushlights. It was only then he noticed that Gloria was no longer asleep. Her blue eyes were open and, looking abnormally large in her white face, stared up at him. As he knelt beside her couch her pale lips framed the one word: ‘Boy?’

‘Yes,’ he said, and he noticed that his own voice was harsh and cracked, even as he smiled and tried to make a joke by adding: ‘It’s all right, my sweet. He’s dead. I’m the King here now, and you’re the Queen.’

Her eyes just moved as though she understood, but she was obviously too weak to talk. Having kissed her lightly and held her hand for a little, he took up his crutch and hobbled over to the kitchen to heat some water with which to wash her wound. Unlike his own, it had been fully protected from the dust and dirt of the hard journey from the pass, and when he examined it there were none of the blue edges to the ragged flesh which
had so frightened him about his leg. The bullet had gone through her side and out of it, so there seemed no reason why in healthy flesh like hers the wound should not heal up, and his impression was that her weakness and delirium were mainly caused by shock and loss of blood.

After attending to her, he tried to settle down for the short night, but his leg pained him so that he would have given much to be able to cut it off, and he did not get to sleep until the long dawn twilight of this season had begun.

The week that followed was a nightmare time of hopes and fears. After that first recovery of consciousness Gloria lapsed into a coma, broken by periodical bouts of delirium; and for several days she could keep nothing down. Philip’s fever subsided after forty-eight hours, but he was alarmed to see the lower part of the larger of his two wounds, where the bullet had emerged from his leg after smashing the bone, was going a bluish-purple colour, so he had to cauterise it again. This time, having been even more drastic with himself, he did faint, and the shock of the burning set him back by making him feverish once more. But, eight days after their desperate encounter in the gorge, neither of them was any longer running a temperature. Gloria was not strong enough to move, but she could talk a little and Philip knew that, although he would limp for the rest of his life, the danger of his wound going gangrenous and killing him was past.

In the latter part of the week there occurred an unexpected and startling phenomenon in the shape of a violent electric storm. There was no rain but deafening peals of thunder rolled round and round the mountains that enclosed the valley, and the most terrifying forked lightning zigzagged up and down without ceasing for the best part of two hours. At the time Philip and Gloria were in no state to give their full attention to this mighty spectacle, but, on thinking about it afterwards, Philip came to the conclusion that this great electric disturbance had something to do with the amazing fact that the valley enjoyed a temperate climate, although it was situated well within the Antarctic circle.

His reason for this assumption was that, whereas it had been pleasantly warm when he first arrived in the valley, the weather had gradually declined up to the time of his departure for the raft, and ten days later, when he had carried Gloria in, it had
actually been quite chilly, with clouds obscuring the sun and a cold mist rising at night from the lake in the valley bottom; yet, after the electric storm, the late Prince Solgorukin’s kingdom was within an hour restored to the enjoyment of the equitable and balmy climate which had been its most staggering feature when its monarchs to be arrived there just on a month before.

During his long hours of compulsory inaction, Philip had thought a good deal about the Prince’s last cryptic utterances. He had said quite distinctly that you could make the weather you wanted with human blood, that the secret of doing so belonged to the Lords of the Mountains—whoever they might be—and finally that he would like to see Philip taken by ‘The Dog’. But where to? And what Dog? There were no dogs in the valley or any animal even remotely resembling them. Perhaps he had been speaking of metaphysical things and referring to the passage in the Book of Revelations which speaks of ‘the power of the Dog’ as a synonym for the Evil One and had simply meant: ‘I’d like to see the Devil fly away with you!’ Or perhaps these seemingly mysterious pronouncements were no more than the nonsensical ravings of a dying man.

Philip would have liked to think that, but was prevented from doing so by his memory of the Prince’s references to the great chain of mountains to the south and the strange things that could be done with human blood on the first evening, when they had gazed together from the barren plateau down into the fertile valley.

Yet, once he was able to hop about on his crutch without enduring a spasm of agony every time he jarred his injured leg, he had little time for such speculations. The desertion by the Palace staff had left its occupants with only limited stocks of food and other necessities such as rushlights and wood for the fires. A very limited diet was all they could have managed in any case for some days after their return, and, although Philip would have liked more milk for Gloria, they existed fairly well on the things that had been left; but now the time had come when fresh supplies positively had to be obtained.

If he could have spoken the little people’s language he would have gone out and explained to some of them that all men from the outer world were not as selfish and brutal as their late King,
and that, if only they would give him their trust and help, he would find many ways of repaying them; but, as this was out of the question, he intended to try to make his actions speak for him. The only items of any quantity in the Palace which were suitable for barter were the llama skin rugs, and of these there were at least a hundred.

Rolling one of them up Philip put it in a basket and hobbled off to the nearest farm. The little wrinkled-faced good-wife saw him coming through the open door of the kitchen, and fled with a squeak of alarm. Philip went in, helped himself to some chopped meat that was on the kitchen table, vegetables, milk and butter, and left the llama skin lying there in exchange.

As he came out of the house a stone whizzed past his ear, and as he went down the lane he was pelted for some little distance from behind the hedge; but only one stone hit him and that not hard enough to inflict more than a momentary hurt.

The following day he tried another cottage, but this time in exchange for a skin he took a baby llama from the yard and carried it back with him under his free arm to the Palace enclosure. He wanted to start breeding llamas in due course, so that in time he would have his own supplies of all their products and no longer have to extract them from the poor little peasants by threats, as the Russian had done.

It was now December. Gloria, although still too weak to get up, was improving daily and, with Philip’s help, was able each morning to get out into the enclosure and spend the day in the bright sunshine. She was also able to dress his leg for him and, although the wound was now healing, it remained a nasty sight, as the lower leg where the bone had splintered remained as thick as his knee. Whether he would ever be able to walk on it again still remained doubtful, and it looked as if several months must elapse before it would even be fit to hobble on. This alone put out of court for that winter any prospect of getting to the whaling station they knew now to be on the MacKenzie Sea. In consequence, they determined to make themselves as comfortable in the Palace as they could.

By Christmas Day Gloria was able to get up and take on the light work of the house, including feeding the young llamas, of which they now had four. Philip meanwhile was able to get a
little further afield and so to spread his requisitioning in exchange for llama skins over a greater area. He had hoped that after a bit the pigmies would come to realise that he was paying for the things he took in the only way he could, and begin to bring their surplus produce to the Palace in exchange for skins, or at least show some signs of friendliness. But they did neither, possibly because they never traded among themselves and were still too undeveloped to comprehend the intention of barter. They still fled at his approach, and occasionally the more truculent among them threw stones at him.

By Christmas, although it should have been the hottest season of the year, the temperature had perceptibly declined again, owing to increases in the cloud formations which shrouded the mountain tops and, at times, swelled to such dimensions that they met over the valley and shut out the sun. Then, on Boxing Day they had another electric storm which was followed by cloudless skies and the warmest sunshine they had so far experienced there; the good spell lasting well into the New Year of 1942.

There was a third electric storm on January the 23rd, and on their working it out it seemed that these storms occurred quite regularly once every twenty-eight days; so Philip formed the theory that they had something to do with the New Moon.

Gloria was now quite recovered, and Philip’s leg was as good as it was likely to be for some months to come. He still could not bear to put his foot to the ground for more than two or three steps at a time, but it no longer pained him if he put no strain upon it, except for a dull rheumatic ache which bothered him during periods of damp weather or just before an electric storm was due.

A thing that now began to worry him was that his barter system looked like breaking down, and he wanted to keep it up even if the pigmies did not appreciate it. He was down to fifty skins; he did not wish to part with more, and his own llamas were still far too young to give the supplies he needed.

It was now the harvest season, and he would have done a day’s work on each of the nearest farms, had his leg permitted, but he was still almost helpless without his crutch. This wish to do something in return for the goods he commandeered decided
him to put into operation a plan that he had conceived before going to the raft, when it had looked as if he would spend some weeks at least honeymooning with Gloria in the valley before they made any attempt to reach the whaling station. But for this scheme he needed the tools that he had abandoned with all the other supplies up in the gorge.