A Kind of Courage by John Harris

Author:John Harris [Harris, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: A Kind of Courage
ISBN: 9780755127733
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2013-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

2

As the thin light of early morning increased and the pearliness vanished and turned silvery with the dawn, they were able to pick out the stable as it emerged from the darkness. With the roof burned away, it had a skeletal appearance, like a blackened set of ribs among the rocks where the Hahdhdhah had once scratched a living. The land and the huddled hamlet beyond looked parched, the colours strident browns, yellows, crimsons and purples. Beyond that the plain seemed empty and the silence thunderous, only the yellow grasses and thorny bushes moving in the gritty wind.

Brooding on the rampart above the gate, Pentecost frowned, his mind nagged by the disappearance of Lack. He felt sick with guilt about it. Yet the stable had been a sound and solid fortification and should have been held, and only Mohamed’s forgiveable agony had started the chain of events that had caused it to fall. He had been icily furious with Mohamed, cold and deliberately cruel, but it was impossible not to be sorry for him, especially when a Hawassi frog pedlar from Addowara appeared outside the fort, with his tiny flayed wares strung on a stick like spread-eagled naked human beings.

‘This is what your wife and daughter will look like after we’ve raped and killed them, Mohamed,’ the chant went up.

Old Fauzan, his face grim, shot the pedlar between the eyes with a borrowed rifle and he vanished head over heels into the rocks, but no one was surprised when Mohamed vanished over the wall the next night.

It hadn’t brought Lack back, either, and the sporadic firing from the trees it had started had driven them out of the courtyard into the shelter of the walls. Forty-eight hours had elapsed now since the loss of the stables and they were all waiting for daylight, knowing that when the sun rose and the night colours vanished they were once more reasonably safe for another day.

‘I think, Sergeant—’ Pentecost stood on the ramparts, in the increasing light, watching the chattering Dharwas in the square below, and talking over his shoulder to Fox ‘—that we’ll have to set up a sortie to get one or two of those trees down. We’ll make a note today which are the most troublesome and send a strong patrol out with saws.’

‘Very good, sir.’

‘And that leads me to another point. We can’t spend the whole day crouching under the walls. There’s got to be a better method of getting about the place. How about getting a few people to work with crowbars? The whole rampart’s resting on the rooms below and the interior walls are only mud. Join them all up so we have a corridor, and make holes by the stairs up to the ramparts, so there’s no running across the courtyard every time the alarm goes. How about getting Mr Beebe on to that? Chestnut’s going to be busy for some time getting us in contact with Dhafran again.’

When Chestnut arrived with his report, however, his

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