Travels in Nihilon

Chapter 27

The progress wound its way from town to town, and on the wooden throne at its head sat Mella who, after the incredible hardships of her young life, was now wheeled high on a seat of honour by the soldiers of the new revolution. At first she had insisted that Edgar sit on her knee as she went along, though after argument and tears she had finally agreed that he should take his place by her side on a separate and more ordinary chair, but certainly close enough for her to reach out and take his hand whenever the motherly impulse came upon her.

Far from feeling annoyed at her milder attentions, Edgar now began to enjoy them, for having separated from his wife some years ago it was comforting once more to be the only person a woman doted on. And it was obvious to anyone that Mella cared for him alone, except during those moments when she was sadly reflecting on the fate of her father.

During their triumphant way towards Orcam, when Edgar was out of his chair and walking by Mella’s mobile platform, he saw in the distance a figure pushing a wheelbarrow. Whoever it was moved slowly, for the wheelbarrow was laden with suitcases, but he eventually drew level, a man with the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up, a jacket draped over his suitcases, and a white handkerchief on his bald head as protection from the sun.

At the sight of armed men, and the medieval contraption on which Mella was seated, he moved well into the side to let them pass. Edgar noticed, by the large labels on his luggage, that they were compatriots. In other circumstances he would have taken this as a warning to keep clear, but now that Nihilon was boiling with insurrection and trouble he called out a friendly greeting. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked, when the man came over to him.

‘I set out from Nihilon City yesterday, on a motor bike,’ he was told. ‘But then it broke down, so I managed to buy this wheelbarrow.’ The convoy stopped to rest and eat, and while food was prepared, Edgar told the man how he had recently landed at Shelp and was on his way to Nihilon City to write a guidebook.

‘I wouldn’t go if I were you,’ the man said. ‘There’s trouble there by anybody’s standards. I was on holiday, but I’ve given it up. When I got back to the apartment I’d rented, after a stroll, I found that an artillery shell had blown half of it to pieces. So I came away, because if I’d stayed till the end of the month there’d be trouble over the inventory. They’d want to know where the wall went. You know what these Nihilists are — they’re just a pack of vicious misers.’

Edgar gave him some of the convoy’s food. ‘Isn’t it difficult to rent a flat in Nihilon City?’

He talked with his mouth full: ‘I thought it would be cheaper than a hotel, you see. I tried to be cunning, by taking a furnished flat in the capital. I came by train, and got the address and key from the tourist office at the station. I can laugh about the experience now, but it wasn’t funny at the time, though I suppose I was ready for a bit of an adventure.

‘It was a dull day,’ he went on, ‘so as soon as I went into the flat, I switched on the light — and a radio started blaring. There were small loudspeakers in every room, I found. The only way to switch them off was to put the lights out. Not to be defeated, I took out my electrician’s kit even before opening my luggage and adjusted the lights, so that they stayed on and the radio went off. I grinned to myself, and started to unpack. When that was finished I wanted a cup of coffee, so went into the kitchen. I filled the kettle, and when I turned on the gas-taps, music again blared through every loudspeaker. When the music stopped, they started to read the Lies.

‘Well, a chap can’t live that way, can he? By sheer hard labour, and a damned lot of ingenuity, I worked on that problem half the afternoon till I got some peace into the flat at last. Then I went for a walk and to buy some cigarettes. When I came back and opened the door, music came on again. It made me sweat with rage, I can tell you, but after an hour’s work I found out how to stop it. Silence once more. I went into the lounge to relax, but opening the door brought the Lies on again, a long account of that dirty space-rocket due to go up soon. Every door of the flat, I discovered, switched on news or music when it was opened, and didn’t turn it off when it was shut. I slaved all day and half the night to fix every door so that it could open peacefully. I breathed a sigh of relief and went into the lavatory for a few minutes. When I pulled the chain, it brought the martial music back — all over the damned place. I tell you, I wasn’t all that sorry when that howitzer-shell shattered it. You could hear the music cracking all along the street then, but I’d given up already. I’m on my way to Shelp to get a boat home. If there aren’t any ships I’ll trudge to the frontier. It’s not far from there. I wanted to get a plane back but the airport’s closed. I’m all of a sweat when I take the handle of this barrow, in case the music should start when I push it, or bring on the Lies, which is worse. Never again.’

‘Why leave Nihilon now?’ Edgar wanted to know. ‘It’s getting interesting at last.’

‘You won’t say that when you see Nihilon City,’ the man said with a sneer, getting into the shafts of his wheelbarrow, ‘that’s all I can say.’

Edgar was sorry to see him go, though he couldn’t have said why. During the next day’s progress the column grew to more than two thousand soldiers, a disciplined and dedicated force which wheeled north across the fertile central plain of Nihilon with its network of railways, roads and canals, its numerous towns and villages.

Wherever they stayed the night, whether at some humble village house, or on rocky ground in the open air, an almost royal bed was laid for them, with four guards posted a little way out from each corner. Edgar considered them to be still too close, for Mella, even though he was exhausted by the changing scenery of the day’s trek, uninhibitedly threw off the bedclothes and coaxed him into making love, behaving as if there were no other being within sight.

After one such connubial encounter she fell to kissing his hand tenderly, and said: ‘When the war is over, my love, we shall live together, not in the presidential palace, of which I have too many unhappy memories, but in a new one that my grateful people will build for us.’

Edgar shuddered at this news, for though he was fond of his passionate protectress he could hardly envisage them settling down as man and wife. Still less could he see himself as the husband of the President of the Republic — or whatever else she would be called after the change of power. All these events would be no more than memorable material for the book he intended to write on his personal experiences during the Nihilon insurrection, an account which would mark him out for fame in his own country.

‘I had never dreamed of becoming the President of the Republic, my dear,’ she went on, ‘but now that these honest soldiers want me to, I can’t refuse. I have my dead father’s memory to consider. But after five or ten years, when the country is honest, peaceful, and prosperous, I shall hand over my office to some other worthy person, so that my husband and I can then give ourselves up to eternal happiness, and to the education of our children.’

She shed tears at her speech, wetting the back of his hand with them. All he could hope for, in his fear of such a future, was that the war would go on for a long time. ‘Are you fond of children?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she said sadly, doing her best to stop weeping. ‘I’ve hardly ever known any. But I’m sure I am, and that I shall adore our own.’

Orcam was a locality of low square houses and unpaved streets extending some way into the plain. Most of the built-up area lay at the confluence of two rivers, which made the town easy to defend. Mella’s column marched into the squalid suburb on the south side of the river. An advance party had already tried to rush the bridge, but all thirty had been shot down, and their dead bodies lay scattered along the straight street. This rebuff put Mella and her soldiers into a very gloomy mood, though Edgar felt selfishly hopeful on realizing that the war might not be over as quickly as everybody in the column had thought during the euphoria of the last few days.

A deserted house was found for them, out of the line of fire, and they occupied a low-ceilinged empty room on the ground floor whose only door led into a back-yard. The wide bed was covered by a hot, lumpy mattress. In spite of the depressing fact that they had at last met real military opposition, Mella kissed him in an excess of cheerful passion when she got into the bed, her naked body hot and soft against him. He could not but respond, and they were soon locked in a slow-moving but feverish bout of copulation.

When she was peacefully sleeping, one of her arms possessively across his chest, he felt utterly unable to close his eyes. Far from soothing him, the lovemaking had exhausted him to the marrow, so that in their insomnia his thoughts turned towards escape.

He eased himself up and stood by the bed. If he walked rapidly he could be back at Shelp in two or three days, where he would no doubt find the man with the wheelbarrow also waiting for a boat.

If he begged a lift on some vehicle he might even get there in a few hours, in which case he’d be there before him. Certainly it would be safer and more convivial sitting at a bar by the harbour, drinking the local brew, than pushing on into the savage interior of Nihilon with Mella and her column of incompetent freedom fighters.

He hurriedly dressed, holding his breath while she turned over. The inevitable shots were heard from the centre of Orcam, and he hoped these would now increase to divert attention from his escape. Outside in the small high-walled courtyard he peered hard through the darkness, glad that there was no guard nearby.

It wasn’t easy to undo the bolt of the gate in the far corner which was caked in dry rust, and squeaked noisily when he forced it. He expected to hear Mella’s loving voice call him back, but she seemed even more exhausted than he was for once. He walked along an alleyway formed by two walls, blessing his luck that it was deserted. Even the dogs seemed to have gone from Orcam. But breath scraped in his lungs, as if he were out of condition after being so long carried on wheels. He’d hardly used his feet in the last few days, and now paused to rest, looking up at the clearly defined stars, where all seemed really peaceful — though he knew it was not so.

He discovered an outlet between two houses, leading into the main street. A cool breeze came from the river, and he found himself a few hundred metres from the heavily guarded bridge which led to the centre of Orcam. But the taste of freedom was sweet, even though he was still too close to Mella.

He must have taken the wrong turning from the courtyard, though he gradually increased his distance from the bridge by keeping well into the sides of the houses. He began to breathe freely for the first time since leaving Mella’s bed, and decided to turn right at the next intersection, so as to get on to the Shelp road. The street was empty, and he wondered where the two thousand soldiers of Mella’s brigade had gone. A feeling that they had deserted her cause made him sweat, and pause in his slow painstaking footsteps.

A green signal-light wriggled like a tadpole into the air. The silence haunted him. He fancied a faint hissing sound as a small rocket went up, which meant that it had been fired from close by. Left and right along the intersection, both streets were crammed with soldiers — standing, sitting, smoking, looking at nothing, waiting perhaps for another signal-light. A bayonet was thrust against his chest: ‘Where are you going?’

The slight irritant of the point made it difficult to speak. The man glared, and repeated his question, this time in a rasping whisper that terrified Edgar far more than a bawling voice.

‘To the bridge,’ he answered, to prevent the bayonet being thrust into his lung.

A rifle was given to him, and a belt of ammunition draped over his shoulder. ‘Take off your shoes,’ said the soldier.

Another light went up, this time red. A score of soldiers came from each street, walked towards the bridge in single file along the left line of house-fronts. All were in bare feet, so as to make no sound. The uneven surface of the pavement was painful to the skin through Edgar’s thin socks. The soldiers had a thicker wadding of cloth round their feet and could therefore concentrate on not being seen, instead of on avoiding the discomfort of stones and potholes.

He did not know what to do with his rifle, and wanted to throw it away. Why had such an important attack been kept secret from Mella? Because she would have exposed herself to danger by joining it, he reasoned. She would have led her band on like a fearsome queen, her presidential future jeopardized by any stray bullet or piece of shrapnel.

He mistook the ache in his head for a feeling of excitement, which he didn’t like, preferring to acquire it in the more useful project of threading his way back towards Shelp. Getting involved in this pointless fight was a terrible misunderstanding. When a yellow signal-light showed over the bridge he became frightened and wanted to shout for Mella. He opened his mouth as if to do so, but before any sound came, a bayonet caught him in the back and prodded him on. A whistle shrieked from behind, blown by someone still at the safety of the intersection, and Edgar cursed it for an entirely unnecessary noise.

The street was filled with two blinding lights, one red and one blue, and those caught in it began running towards the bridge, as if to get back into the darkness even if it killed them. Faces fixed in the pallor of the beams ran forward, and Edgar, whose marrow had collapsed, clung to a drainpipe, knowing that something cataclysmic was about to happen.

Machine guns began a dreadful stutter from three hundred metres, and the forty men melted into the stones, though only half as many were hurt. Edgar let go of the drainpipe, and ran back towards the intersection, when he spun like a top as if a ball of ice had smashed into him below the shoulder. He cried out, not from pain, which wasn’t yet apparent, but from the indignity of having to put up with the unexpected. When someone tried to lift him from the road he cried out that reinforcements were needed at the bridge.

The officer, assuming him to be a messenger who had come back with this information at the risk of his life, passed it on to someone of higher rank in case anything could be done about the obvious failure of their surprise attack, on which so many hopes had been placed. Before his eyes closed, and he fainted, Edgar saw several dozen more unfortunate soldiers make their way out into the Nihilists’ field of fire. His mind bit hard on the fact that if he hadn’t run back, and faked this message to cover his cowardice, they might not be going off to get killed. But even the bitterness of this reflection didn’t stop him thinking what a pity it was that he should be dying in some nightmare battle, when only a few days ago he had been nothing more (or less) than a happy-go-lucky tourist.