Thimblewinter (13 page)

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”.

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.

“Snow,” Cal said to Rachel, “it means they are not going to be able to move easily.”

She was so exhausted she didn’t seem to grasp what he said.

“The Sergeant thought that we might have done enough to dissuade them, to move them on. But now they can’t move, so it’s a question of survival; them or us.”

“But it may just be a snowfall,” Rachel said, “nothing much.”

Cal stared at the fire, as if looking for an answer there.

“The Constable thinks it’s the big snow and he’s usually right.”

They didn’t say anymore and, as I sat there and dozed, I let it all slip away and I started to dream that all that had happened was some sort of nightmare and that, really, we were all here in our house safe from everything outside, guarded by the garden wall and beyond that the street and our neighbours, and then the perimeter wall and the ditch, but every so often I would awake and the realisation of the truth of things would chill me.

Over the course of the night the snow had come like the Constable had said and the village was covered with a layer of white, which tidied up the streets and made the barricades and emplacements look like benign white mounds. My grandmother had told me of the joy that she and her school friends would take from the snow, but we could not share in that anymore, for to us snow meant cold and hunger and the long, dark nights that made you forget spring and summer, or almost so.

I did not want to move from my bed that morning, I could see by the clear, sharp quality of the light that forced its way through the gap in my curtains that the snow had come and, by my breath misting in the air as I raised my head, I knew how cold it was. But Rachel would not let me lie at peace, she made me leave my pile of blankets and get out about my tasks.

There was little to do in our makeshift hospital, there having been no fighting in the night, so she sent me to help at the kitchen, which had been set up behind the chapel to feed the men and the women manning the wall. I tried to stay by the kitchen fires as long as I could, but I was spotted soon enough and sent down to the gate carrying the usual pail of soup, with a sack of what passed for bread on my shoulder.

After I had made the rounds of people, not so many now as most of the gate guards were at rest in their houses, I sought out Nes, at her usual post in the lower storey of one of the gate towers.  

“I can never get used to this,” she said and I knew she meant; the cold.

“I’m a child of the Equator, I’m just not equipped for this.”

I knew it was a good sign, that she was no longer so exhausted, if she could again take up her usual complaining ways.

Just as we were there, exchanging our woes about the morning and its burden of cold, we heard a hailing call coming from across the market place in front of the gates. I looked out through the loophole of the tower, at Nes’ shoulder as she levelled her rifle in the general direction of the noise.

“It’s a white flag!” Someone shouted from the storey above us.

“So they want to talk again,” Nes said, under her breath, almost to herself.

A strange procession came on, when bidden, across the open space in front of us. Great Coat had come, swathed in two coats this morning, escorted by two guards, one bearing aloft the stained and dirty sheet which passed for their white flag. He also had with him a white-haired man in the remnants of a suit; a once-fat man, who now looked deflated, as if he had been starved of the excess flesh, but the skin couldn’t keep up. He looked reluctant, but eager to please. Once he stumbled and one of the guards yanked him to his feet by his arm, hurting him in the process. He looked like he wanted to cry, but daren’t.

Great Coat looked nervously at the walls as he approached and stopped well short of the gate, waiting for the Constable to motion him forward. However, when he felt more secure and at ease, he adopted his familiar tone:

“You’ve fought well and earned our respect, but it’s time now that we came to an agreement.”

His words met no response, so he went on:

“As you can see,” he raised his arms in a theatrical gesture and looked around him,

“we’re not going anywhere. So it’s in your interest that we work something out.”

Still no response, which seemed to somewhat disquiet him. Though he quickly recovered himself and, at a nod from him, one of his escorts pushed the once-fat man forward.

“Just to reassure you,” Great Coat went on. “I’ve brought with me an associate, or rather I should say a friend.”

The white-haired man, standing before him, was shaking so much that he could hardly stand. It could have been the cold, I suppose, but most likely it was fear.

“Let me introduce,” Great Coat went on, indicating the man with a sweep of his hand, “Mayor Davies from Pont-y-Brenin, who has recently become part of our brotherhood; embracing us, and in turn, safe in our embrace.”

“He runs off at the mouth, that one,” Nes said, muttering to herself rather than to me.

The ex-mayor was pushed further forward, more gently this time, and started his speech.

“Friends, comrades,” he said, "you have nothing to fear...”

His voice was thin and broken, his shaking getting worse. Great Coat’s men looked disgusted, glancing at their leader for a word, a command, but the man shook his head at them and the mayor went on.

He was telling us how things had been so bad, all down the valley, and in Pont-y-Brenin they had been starving and dying. He got all biblical and described the wailing of infants, the tears of mothers and the sobbing of the elderly.

“I think he’s working to a script,” Nes said, thinking aloud. I didn’t quite understand what she meant.

I lost most of the rest of what he said, but I caught the gist. The man’s obvious terror betrayed the meaning of the words he was saying, giving an opposite effect, an alternative message. At the end he bowed his head, probably guessing that his body had betrayed him and ultimately done for him. But by this time I was distracted.

At some point Rowena had come up on us, cat-like as always, moving so silently that it seemed that she just appeared. She gave Great Coat an appraising look, wet her thumb and raised it to the air, then nocked an arrow to her bow and drew it. But then May came up the ladder and hissed at her, trying to keep her voice quiet:

“Stop it now, for fuck’s sake. They are under a flag of truce. We’ve got enough to contend with, without you ballsing it up further.”

There was little love lost between the two women; I think there was some gap of understanding between them, such were their differences.

Rowena glanced at her sullenly and my first thought was that she was minded to ignore her, but May was near her now and had hardened her look and tightened the grip on her weapon. There was a moment of stillness, of anticipation of what would occur, but then Rowena lowered the bow and laughed.

“Okay for now,” she said, as she moved off past May and down the ladder, “but I’ll get him in the end.”

When I looked back over the corrugated iron of the parapet, I could see that Great Coat was speaking again.

“So as my friend here said,” he indicated the once-fat man, “you have nothing to fear by joining us. You’ve fought well, we admire your courage, and you’ve proved yourself worthy. The brotherhood waits to welcome you.”

A silence fell on us then, all along the walls. The morning mist had not lifted yet and the people all seemed to be shut into their own thoughts.

“But this is a time-limited offer,” Great Coat went on again. “You have until dusk to decide. Choose wisely!”

At last he stopped speaking. I thought then that the Constable would reply, but instead I heard the Sergeant’s voice breaking the spell of our silence:

“You have two minutes to get back to your lines,” he said and as if to emphasise his words, Dai started counting the seconds off.

There was little dignity left to Great Coat and his men after that, as they stumbled and cursed their way over the icy ground back to their camp. But no cheer went up from our walls this time. The man’s words had made all of us ponder the future. I did not think anyone would believe him, place any trust in an enemy who had already showed us such a cruel nature. 

Time, as is often the case, proved me wrong.