Thimblewinter, page 12
“Open your gates!” He said. “Open up now and you’ll keep your lives!”
The Constable gave no response.
“Our men are tired and hungry. If they have to take the place by force, I don’t want to even start to imagine the things they’ll do to you. So open up now!”
I could see fearful eyes looking up at the Constable. Even then, after all the preparations they had made, I’m sure many there would have opened the gates and hoped for the best, to survive in any way they could.
Great Coat had sharp eyes, I’ll give that to him. He had spotted the soldiers and their weapons, and other faces there that looked like they didn’t fit.
“I can see that you’ve got some - how can I put it - professionals among you and I’m talking only to them now. You can depart without fear of harm, but you must go immediately!”
Faces, now, were turned towards the Sergeant.
“I’ll go when the job’s over,” he answered, both to Great Coat’s question and also, I think, to that unasked question, which was in the eyes of the people all around him.
Great Coat did not respond and then the Constable spoke:
“We’re free people and this is our village. If you want what we’ve got, you’ll have to try to take it, but it will be the ruin of you. You can go now, depart, and we won’t harm you or bear you ill will.”
A few people laughed at this, laughed at the way the Constable had turned the threat around, but mostly we were too scared.
Great Coat shrugged: “You have until noon to decide.”
And then the bikes turned and were gone.
Someone was crying now and others were close to joining in. Angry words were being spoken, arguments were breaking out.
“Go to your posts,” the Constable said, “do what you’ve been told. This day will pass and we’ll still be here tomorrow.”
Many, I think, doubted the Constable’s prediction, when the first attack came. It was well into the afternoon, later in the day, just when the light was going. There seemed no plan to it, no stratagem, just a brutal hammer blow delivered onto the gates and the front of the village. They came in a massed charge on foot, riders on ponies lapping around the flanks of the place looking for a weak spot, but the bulk of their forces coming head on for the gate.
The Sergeant had given the Kalashnikovs to people who knew how to use them, like Nes and the younger one of the brothers, and four of the villagers who showed some aptitude. The automatic weapons, including the soldiers’ SA80s, had been assigned to the towers and strongpoints of the walls. The skilled archers, like Rowena, were to act as snipers, selecting targets, especially any leaders amongst the attackers.
The Constable had wanted to man the walls as fully as possible, but the sergeant had suggested another tactic. He would position a limited number of people on the walls, but keep in reserve a small force, which could reinforce the perimeter wall, wherever it seemed in danger of being breached. The Constable had also wanted to destroy the bridge over the ditch that lead to the gateway, but the Sergeant wouldn’t let him
“Leave it,” he said, “it will help to funnel them in.”
I had stayed by the gate-way as everyone had been too busy to send me home. Cal came past carrying a crate of bottles with wrapped around rag fuses, Molotov cocktails he called them. He was about to send me home, but thought better of it.
“Go help Rachel,” he said.
My aunt had set up a makeshift aid post in one of the houses next to the gates and was busy tearing sheets for bandages and checking our meagre supplies of medicines and drugs. But before I could go to join her, I was pulled into cover below the palisade by Rowena. She said nothing, but motioned for me to keep my head down.
They came at the gate in the full confidence of their repute and renown, this blood tribe. Their reputation had served them well before and they had carried villages and towns in this first terrible charge. They came on at a run, howling and screaming, so fired up that I suspect they were drugged. I could hear the Sergeant’s voice from the tower above saying:
“Steady now! Steady! Wait for my order.”
Rowena, of course, ignored his words and she was already up on the parapet, selecting targets and letting fly. Then I heard the Sergeant’s order to fire and all hell broke loose. As it was, I only saw the patch of ground that I buried my face in, but later there were enough stories told about what had happened.
The enemy had come straight for the bridge and the gates, as the Sergeant had known they would. They were met with automatic fire and a brace of Molotov cocktails pitched at them by Cal. Faced by the burning fuel many of them had jumped into the ditch, which Cal had mined. These mines were crude devices and some of them didn’t go off, or they were too lacking in explosive power to do much damage.
They did enough though; the ditches beneath the towers were soon clogged with maimed and dead men. There were the spikes as well; many of the winged skull warriors tried to jump across the ditch or into it without seeing the spikes set there.
Around the flanks of the village some of the horsemen had tried to storm the ditch and the fence, but these were cut down by the crossfire from the towers and strongpoints. Any that survived were dispatched by shotgun blasts or close-quarter weapons at or beneath the wall.
I watched Rowena and saw a sort of savage glee on her face, but I just felt sick with the stench of it; the acrid fumes from the explosives, the butcher shop smell of torn bodies and the obscene tang of burning human flesh. There was a cacophony of noise too; the screams of the horses, the unearthly sounds that the dying made and the terrible din of gun-fire and explosion.
Though it seemed awfully long to us, that first attack must have been over in half an hour or so. The enemy fell back in some disorder, as the Sergeant described it. Cal told me later that you could almost see their certainty of victory draining from their eyes, their confusion as they ran away from us. The Sergeant stopped the firing as soon as they broke. We were too short of ammunition to waste it and besides, he said, we shouldn’t finish off their wounded as they would be an added burden on them.
Their chief had been out there on the plain with his bodyguard urging them back, trying to stem the rout. Rowena had a shot at him, but cursed when she missed and, when an answering rifle shot clipped the palisade beside her, she crouched down next to me,
A cheer went up all along the wall from our people, but Rowena laughed at this.
“They’ll be back,” she said.
Chapter 16
Our initial jubilant mood changed, as we settled down into a day and two nights of sniping and raiding. They would ride up and loose shots at our sentries or try and creep up to the wall under the cover of darkness.
“They’re trying to test our strength and to rattle us.” The Constable told us.
As far as I could see they were succeeding; after our first flush of victory people were scared again, you could see the fear in people’s faces, smell it on their sweat.
I had spent most of the second day helping Rachel with the wounded, though few of our people had been injured in the attack. The enemy had been so sure of victory that they hadn’t even bothered to do much firing before the initial assault. They thought they could carry us with their shouting and a few loosed rounds.
No-one really slept for those two nights; we all snatched sleep where and when we could. Apart from the constant fear of attack and all the alerts we had through the night, the sounds coming from the enemy camp were chilling. We could hear screaming and sobbing; cries of anguish amid laughter and singing. And our minds raced with imagined scenes of death and torture.
The Sergeant got everybody at work on the second day, building barricades on the roads and alleyways, forming an inner perimeter. Our interior strongpoints had already been prepared, but he set people to work to improve the fortifications and to build extra emplacements. He paid special attention to an emplacement just back from the gates, constructing an earthen bunker, which he put May in charge of. At the time I thought him cruel to work the people so hard, but afterwards I realised that he was just keeping people busy.
I saw Nes on the second night; she looked drawn and pale and stank of sweat and acrid smoke. She had come down from the tower to eat and rest under the shelter of the ramparts. I sat by her to take my food, but we were both too tired to talk. Soon enough, by silent agreement, she and her comrades went back to their posts, but as she stood, slinging her weapon, she touched me on the shoulder and handed me the automatic pistol she carried at her belt.
“There are eight rounds in the clip,” she said. Then she was gone into the darkness.
The second attack came at dawn on the third day. I had taken a billycan of soup to the people in the gate towers and had stayed beside Nes to drink my own, so this time I was a witness. The weather had changed in the night and a mist hung over the valley. We could hear the muffled sounds of their preparations and soon saw the ghostly figures emerging from the mist. They were strangely silent this time.
They shuffled forward, these indistinct figures, and we could also hear the noise of engines behind this first wave. Then we heard voices:
“Don’t shoot!” They kept repeating.
I heard the Sergeant’s voice saying:
“Hold your fire, until I give the order!”
Then I heard a gasp from the young woman who was next to Nes.
“It’s the prisoners. They are driving them forward as human shields.”
She looked at Nes, panicked by what she had seen.
“Just see to your weapon and listen for the order,” Nes said.
I looked out and could see the army of ragged ghosts advancing and it seemed to me that we were all paralysed and they would walk over us and consume us. Then someone clattered down the ladder from the top storey.
“When the order comes, fire one round over their heads.”
Then the man disappeared down the ladder and out onto the palisade.
“Fire!”
The order sounded like an obscene oath, breaking the silence, breaking the spell. The volley rang out and, as if on cue, the ghosts dropped to the floor.
This confused the winged skull people. They thought at first that we had shot their hostages and it took them a while to realise that they had all dropped to the ground of their own accord. By the time they had grasped this, our people had opened up on them, reckoning that anyone standing was a fair target. I think some of the captives broke and ran and got cut down, either by us or by the enemy, but I’m not sure if there were many. By this time Nes had pushed my head down and told me to keep in cover.
When the people dropped, we first saw the vehicle. It was a Land Rover with a timber battering ram set on a frame that was fixed to its bonnet. They had used corrugated iron to shield the driver from bullets and it was headed straight for the gates.
“Open up!” the Sergeant said, but he had to repeat the order as the gate guards were confused.
“Save the gates! Open up!” He shouted again.
They opened just as the Land Rover rattled over the bridge.
It was the enemy’s turn to cheer as they saw the gates breached, thinking their battering ram had done it, and they charged straight for the open gateway. The Land Rover, seeing the barricade and emplacement in front of it at the end of the street beyond the gateway, turned right and ran into the hastily laid caltrops that slowed it, shredding the tyres, but didn’t stop it. Two of Cal’s Molotov cocktails eventually ended its journey.
I had stood up when the gates were opened and crossed to the other side of the platform looking out at the inner gate as the blood tribe people came charging through. I knew then that it was all over and felt the paralysis of sheer terror gripping me. But then I heard a staccato sound, the beat and pulse of a big gun, and saw the enemy falling in droves as they were stitched by an arc of fire from the emplacement beyond the gate.
As they fell or staggered to the side to escape the machine gun, people fell on them from the houses and the wall, using whatever they had to halt them. I saw old women with shovels, men with scythes and axes, anything to stop these people.
After a few minutes of slaughter, the order came to close the gates. The gate guards had a problem with this, as their free manoeuvre was impeded by so many bodies. So it was lucky that the attack had once more petered out, breaking up in confusion again. But there was no cheering this time. We had seen too much death.
Later, the Sergeant inspected the killing ground inside the gate with May and the Constable.
“It was an old Bren gun,” he said, “we found it when we attacked that toll house on the road below. I was keeping it as a surprise.”
He shrugged, as if embarrassed.
“Well, we had to clean it up and test it, you know. See it actually worked before we raised your hopes.”
At close range the winged skull people didn’t look so frightening; they looked too human, too much like us. Some were not dead and I could see that the Constable didn’t know what to do with them. We hadn’t thought of prisoners and had little to offer those who were seriously wounded.
Later on, out of earshot of the winged skull wounded, the Sergeant said:
“We can’t rely on the Bren again. We used up nearly all the ammunition”.
Chapter 17
There was a lull after that, like the eye of the storm that they talk of. The winged skull people had fallen back in some disarray and, to add to their unsettled mood, the Sergeant had sent out their wounded, dragging themselves anyway they could over the ground or pulled by their fellows.
“We haven’t got the medicines or food to spare,” he said, “let them take care of their own.”
It was a sad, forlorn procession, this parade of the maimed, but I could not feel much for them, as I knew what our fate would have been if they had won the day.
The mist lent a sense of unreality to the scene, to the whole valley. Apart from the cries of the wounded and other cries, the provenance of which I could not make out, the place was unnaturally quiet. Within the confines of the wall and palisade, the people were also still and unmoving. Where there should have been jubilation and rejoicing, there was none. People looked down at their bloodied hands and wondered what they had done to other human beings. Not all felt this way though; some had found a pleasure, previously undiscovered, in the slaughter. Others, like the Sergeant and the soldiers seemed inured to it, resigned.
I busied myself with helping Rachel. There were people of ours injured, not many but enough for us to deal with, with our meagre supplies. The Hall had now become our hospital and we had to lay out the wounded as best we could amongst the caches of supplies and equipment that had been brought to the strongpoint. My aunt worked hard that afternoon, while the fighters took what rest they could.
Even in the cold of that draughty hall, the sweat poured off her as she cleaned wounds and tied bandages, did what she could to mend and when they were beyond mending, did her best to comfort. I did what she told me, fetching and carrying; meek, for once, with her, having no inclination to argue.
Nes came in later in the afternoon. I filled a basin of hot water for her, when the wounded had been seen to, and she washed in the old kitchen off the main hall. I made her tea, or what passed for tea in our village, and she gratefully drank it. She had no conversation in her and no concern as she stripped to her waist and washed herself with a rag, finishing by wetting her hair, all straggly now. Her body, usually thin, looked gaunt, and she moved in that measured way of the bone weary, as if every action was a calculated effort.
I made more tea, as Rachel drifted in, one eye still watchful of her charges, though those who could, had gone or been taken to their homes. I stood, making myself busy with tasks, as the women sat in silence. Eventually Rachel spoke:
“Will it end now?” She asked, though I don’t know if it was a question or whether she was just putting voice to a thought.
Nes looked at her for a while, and then shook her head.
Later in the day, as the dusk was coming on us, I took a pail of soup - as soup was all we were cooking and eating in those days - to Mrs. Sharma, who had been taken badly by a chest infection these last few days.
The schoolroom and library next to her house looked like a fort, with windows removed, the glass carefully stored, and the gaps made into loopholes with sandbags and whatever else was to hand. The Constable had tried to persuade her to move into the strongpoint, but she wouldn’t leave her house. She lived on her own and I feared that I had neglected her over these three days of fighting, but others, of course, had seen to her.
She sat up in her bed, seemingly unperturbed by all that was going on around her, even joking with me that she, at the most eventful period of the village’s history, should fall ill and miss “all the fun”, as she put it. I knew, of course, that she was putting a brave face on it, partly to help lessen my own fear.
I helped her with her bowl and spoon and broke some bread for her. It was then, as I raised her on her pillows and put the tray in her unsteady hands, that I realised again how frail she was and how much the trip to the town had cost her, not so much in loss of strength, but in loss of hope.
The Constable came by as I was reading to her and he sat for a while, then we both bade her goodbye as a neighbour came in to watch her. We both left together and just as we stood at her door and I was about to slip away, down the back alley to my house, he asked:
“Can you smell that on the wind?”
He was staring to the west, up to where the mountains were already drifted with white, sniffing the air like a hunting dog. But then I could smell it too, that cold, wet, fresh scent that was blowing out of the west at us and I knew what it meant.
“Snow,” he said, and shook his head.
Sometime later, I understood. I sat with Cal and Rachel as they both took some time away from their allotted tasks and we were a family again, sitting in front of the fire in our living room, curtains drawn against the dark and the world outside.
