As a diversion, he had started well, but he had screwed everything up after that—as usual, Roche summed himself up. Madame Peyrony would expect better of him than that.
And Lexy too—if the Perownes died hard, then what about the Roches?
Out here in the open he was lost anyway. As soon as one of the fellagha snaked up close enough ... it was only pure dummy5
accident that one of them hadn't spotted him already . . . and it was only a matter of time before his time ran out on him.
He had nothing to lose any more—he had had it all, but he had thrown it away, and for no reason that made sense now.
Silence.
But not silence: he could hear sounds building up all around him. They were moving in on him at last, and it was too late for heroics.
He pulled himself upright against the wing of the Delaroche.
He ought to do something, but he couldn't think of anything to do. It seemed a silly way to die, was all he could think.
"Oh . . . shit!" he said angrily to himself, but also to the world at large.
The spurt of flame registered in the ten-thousandth of the second before the impact of the bullet slammed him against the car.
A great light flowered in the sky above him—unearthly, as he expected it to be—but in a point of incandescence which reflected up to the clouds as well as down on the woods and the Tower and the car.
He stared at the light, somehow puzzled by it, and yet at the same time recognising it from out of the distant past.
A thunderclap burst vivid orange-red on the edge of the wood twenty yards away, silhouetting the man who had shot dummy5
him as it exploded—the impact of the sound hit him like a second bullet, pressing him back on the car a second time.
Pain and understanding came together, as a second mortar-bomb exploded to his left, on the far side of the road. With disembodied interest he remembered that a good mortar-man would have half-a-dozen bombs in the air before the first one hit the ground, and the best mortar-man in the French Army could probably do even better than that, even allowing for three-score-years-and-ten and only Little Gaston to help him—
As the third bomb landed a mixture of weakness and delayed instinct slid him down flat alongside the car. Its great bulk was comforting, and the darkness beneath it enticed him to try to roll under it. But for some reason his body at first refused to follow the idea.
And when it did, he fell into a great black hole with no bottom.
EPILOGUE:
Soldier no more
OVER THE LENGTH of days, once the light ceased to hurt his eyes, Roche became obsessed with the ceilings above him.
The first had a complex tracery of shadows, the design of which he could never quite unravel as it floated above him; dummy5
then there were dark bars which made him think of prisons, giving him terrible nightmares interspersed with faces, mixed up with a succession of confusing events. But after that there were several happy days, when a ceiling with interesting cracks and stains appeared above him, which he transformed into the islands and continents of a new world to be circumnavigated on voyages of discovery, with the far-off sounds of creaking masts and rigging, and the changes of watch in his ears to mark the passage of time.
Finally they pricked his arm to cancel consciousness, and he awoke to birdsong, and the knowledge of good and evil, and a plain white ceiling without shadow or blemish; and shortly after that he was allowed to look around, and then to sit up and see walls, and tree-tops through the window; and he was back in England again with a nurse to prove it, soft-voiced but business-like, plumping his pillows.
In fact, it was a very nice room, dazzling and well-furnished and airy. What he didn't like about it, which was different from the French rooms, was its absolute silence except for the bird-song, with none of the French bumps and bangs and distant traffic noises which he remembered in retrospect; from all which he deduced that they had him tucked away in one of their secret places; which didn't surprise him, now that he had failed to die on them, but also didn't reassure him.
And, having deduced that, he concluded then that there was dummy5
really no point in asking anything of his nurse, or of the basilisk sister who superintended her; and the doctors themselves were of course even more out of the question, whatever the question was. So he retreated into the wasteland within himself, knowing that he wasn't going anywhere, and that they would come when they were ready, which would be when he was ready, and there wasn't anything he could do about it.
Only it was Audley who came; and, more surprisingly, he came alone, towards the end of an Indian summer's afternoon.
"Are you all right?" Audley mistook his surprise for weakness, by the inflexion he gave to the routine inquiry.
"I'm fine," said Roche. It occurred to him out of habit that he could spin out the game by pretending not to be fine, but he quickly dismissed the notion as ridiculous. He had nothing with which to play games any more, besides which there were things he wanted to know very badly which Audley of all people might actually tell him.
Or, at least, there was one askable thing, which protruded out of the oily surface of both his daydreams and his nightmares.
"How's Lady Alexandra?"
"Disgustingly healthy." Audley still smiled that lop-sided dummy5
smile, but there was something different about him nevertheless: part of it was greater self-assurance, in so far as that was possible, yet there was also something hesitant, which was new. But that might be because he wasn't used to sick-rooms; or it might just be in the confused eye of the beholder.
"Really?" He dropped the irrelevant thought to concentrate on the important one. "Honestly?"
"Really—honestly." Audley pulled up the chair. "I told you—
the Perownes are practically indestructible by conventional means—they're all built like Tiger tanks. In fact, she's even making the most out of her scar, Lexy is ... she tells all and sundry that she got it duelling at Heidelberg. In fact. . . I've got a letter from her for you somewhere—" but he made no move to produce the letter "—are you sure you're okay? The dragon-lady out there said I mustn't be too long ..."
So the letter had to be earned, and the game had to be played even here, after the final whistle.
"Honestly . . . I'm fine." Roche jibbed at the prospect, but he wanted the letter. "Sister says . . . 'we' have been very ill, but
'we' are on the mend. It's just that . . . 'we' expected someone . . . different." Roche opted for the truth, for want of anything better.
Audley regarded him doubtfully. "Ah . . . well, we have a special dispensation from above—a bit of the old influence-in-high-places, old boy. There will be somebody along to de-brief you formally in due course, naturally. But not yet."
dummy5
"De-brief me?" Roche wasn't surprised by Audley-with-influence-in-high-places. But he knew that self-confessed traitors weren't de-briefed, they were interrogated.
"Uh-huh." Audley fielded his doubts confidently. "Originally they were going to lock you up, and throw away the key. And they're not exactly well-disposed to you even now. . .
naturally. But things have changed." He made a Caliban-face.
"You'll have to resign your commission—and sign a lots of bits of paper . . . And you'll have to come clean on everything
— eh?"
For five seconds Roche was beyond astonishment, then for a moment he was in nowhere. And after that he recognised the familiar features of the wasteland, which were cratered like any battlefield, and full of slimy things which he'd already imagined.