“Put your backs into it,” growled Hobson. Gutsy and Pot Shot swore and swung their picks, grunting vigorously with each impact in a practiced alternating rhythm. After a few minutes, the surface began to pit and flake. Then it began to crumble. Blood stopped, panting, to wipe his brow.
“Good work. Change over,” said Everson.
The men changed over. It was no use doing all the fatigue work only to end up too knackered to fight once you’d actually breached the wall.
Atkins heard a clatter of refuse skittering down the far slope of the midden pile to their left and signalled the men to stop digging. Slowly, eight loaded Enfields converged toward the sound as something clambered towards them.
EVERSON LICKED HIS lips and cupped his pistol hand in his free palm to try to disguise the fact that it was shaking. He couldn’t let the men see. The clattering grew closer. He flexed his trigger finger and caught Hobson’s eye. The Sergeant gave him a barely perceptible shake of the head and patted his trench club, ‘Little Bertha’. The cruelly customised truncheon, its end studded with hobnails, had seen good service in many a trench raid. Everson felt a surge of disgust at the sight but thankfully lowered his revolver, realising that its report would give them away. He watched as the burly NCO tensed himself, his face compressed into a twisted snarl of hatred ready for whatever came over the brow of the slope. A small hand appeared over the lip and, a second later, there emerged a small boy, no more than six or seven years old. The Section let out a collective sigh. All except Gazette, who kept the boy in his sights.
FOR ATKINS IT was like looking at his own past. He’d been a boy such as this one, running round the streets of Broughtonthwaite, so far away now, in soot and grime and clogs. The boy was thin and covered with dirt and sores. He wore a tunic of animal skins and breathed heavily though his mouth, his nostrils plugged with dried green mucus. He continued to stare at the soldiers with a surly pout.
Poilus started to approach the boy, but Hobson raised his arms and stepped towards the child, snarling in the manner of an ogre. The boy took fright and ran off down the slope. “There, that’s got ’im.”
“You’re losing your touch, Sarn’t,” said Mercy, nodding his head downhill. The boy had stopped someway down and again stood staring at them resentfully before disappearing round a bluff.
After five minutes, Gazette and Atkins were up on pick-axe duty, taking over from Mercy and Half Pint.
“Just imagine it’s Ketch’s head,” said Mercy.
Atkins was glad of something to do. The nervous expectation of being caught by a swarm of gigantic insects was almost interminable. It was much better to keep yourself occupied. As they continued to swing, the picks bit deeper and deeper into the wall. It was some twenty minutes and four feet before Porgy’s pick broke through to the other side. Hobson crouched by the opening and beckoned the men closer.
“Right,” he said in a low voice, “just like Trench Clearance. You know the routine.”
Except this was worse than trench clearance and Atkins knew it. He still had nightmares about the mines. Nevertheless, he swallowed hard and tried to put it to the back of his mind as, one by one, the Black Hand Gang entered the short tunnel. Blood took the lead as ordered, slithering through the hole and disappearing into the darkness. There was a brief, tense moment of silence before he hissed back the all clear. They passed through the extra rifles and grenades, boxes of ammunition and a couple of Lewis guns, before following.
Atkins looked back at the silent urchin, now watching them again, sitting atop a pile of bones. “See you,” he said with a wink and joined his pals in the Chatt-ridden gloom beyond.
HIGH ABOVE, IN the labyrinth of tunnels and chambers, Jeffries, having successfully passed the ritual, had spent the last few hours recovering from the ordeal. Thankfully, they had hauled the snivelling Padre back off to the gaol chamber. He had no idea what the chaplain had experienced but he did hope it wasn’t pleasant. As for himself, he only felt mildly disconcerted by his vision. He had no idea how long he had been under the influence of the oil; it could have been a couple of hours or a couple of days.
The Khungarrii saw the Rite as one of submission, of acceptance to the colony, but, on a more personal level, for him it had been one of control, of discipline. His will against theirs. And he had won.
His Great Working had taken months to prepare and years to perfect. Only a handful of people would have understood the significance of what he had done on the Somme, of what he had achieved or, more gallingly, attempted to achieve. Everything he had read, everything he had learned had led him to believe that the Old One would be summoned within the great pentacle laboriously calculated and etched on the battlefield; that the blood of thousands would have summoned him and confined him in a crucible warded by a circle of geographic proportions. When their transportation to this world had occurred in its stead, he’d felt confused and angry. Loath though he was to admit it, there had been several small flaws in his calculations. There was the fact that vital commentaries to the Ritual had been long since lost, and that the ritual itself was an Enochian translation of manuscripts that Voynich, the old antiquarian book dealer, had discovered and got rid of, not knowing what they were but rather fearing he knew what they were.
Had this whole experience been a salutary case of ‘be careful what you wish for’? Had his invocation inverted, torn them from Earth only to deposit them in Croatoan’s own domain? A case of ‘if the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the mountain,’ as Everson had so innocently suggested? A lesson in humility? If so, then he was suitably humbled, but not by these insects. These Chatts were a step on the road to his personal mountain, so to speak, and he had no compunction about treading on ants to get there.
Napoo’s mention of Croatoan, his recent ritual vision, his Great Working; there had to be a connection. Was he brought here as an unforeseen consequence of his working? Were these insects just a means to an end?
“When you are ready, Sirigar has instructed this One to share knowledge about Khungarr society as you asked,” said Chandar, watching intently as Jeffries tore hungrily into the loaf of fungus bread. “Then you will deliver your herd.”
Jeffries looked up and regarded the old Chatt. That something had passed between Chandar and Sirigar, Jeffries was now quite sure. Now he knew there was a crack in their relationship, all he had to do was apply pressure.
“This One has made its work to study wild Urmen,” said Chandar, “and you are unlike any others this one has come across. You have a keen intelligence almost matching the One’s own. Your garments are complex and of a quality this One has never smelt, yet the scouts report that you live in your filth, among your own dead. It was these odours that the breath of GarSuleth carried to us spinnings ago, alerting the scentirrii and dhuyumirrii to your presence on Khungarr territory. Sirigar and Rhengar are of conflicting opinions, although each has their views rooted in holy scentures. Even now the Khungarrii Shura debate your presence. Some hold that you should be culled without consideration for your initial resistance but it seems to some that your earth workings and burrows imitate, in a primitive fashion of course, the great tunnels and chambers of the Ones’ own colonies. It marks your herd as different. This, and your bargain, is what has what saved you,” Chandar said.