‘What’s going on?’ she asked, her voice a feathery whisper.
Robert shrugged his ignorance and then looked across at the woman opposite and raised his eyebrows.
She met his look of mute enquiry and at first it seemed that she was going to maintain the same distance that had protected her when the gigolo accosted Ann. But this was even more dangerous. She relented. ‘Sometimes,’ she said in a rich contralto voice which half-sang a liquid mixture of French and N’Kuru which Ann could only just follow, ‘the police stop the trains looking for Lions.’
‘And do they ever find Lions?’ asked Robert, frowning, his eyes sliding busily around the carriage already, looking for an avenue of escape.
‘Always. Or N’Kuru men and women who they say are Lions.’
‘And do they arrest these people?’
‘No. They make them fly away home.’
The distant, falling cry was repeated. Ann had spent a lot of time on or near the sea during the last few years. The noises made her think of gulls who had forgotten the art of flight.
This cry was much nearer than the last one had been. A wind of concern blew through the carriage. Robert was in action at once. He reached up and grasped the Remington with one hand while pushing her roughly with the other.
‘Out.’
Without thinking, she obeyed, opening the door and rolling through it with her camera bag clutched to her belly.
She stepped down out of the high train onto the very edge of a sheer cliff. On her right the black rock reached out into a stubby pulpit as though a high diving board had been started but never finished. On her left, a ridge of rock spread in a thin pie-crust over the abyss. Immediately in front of her was next to nothing. A metre of gravelled black rock ledge, surely no more, then a sheer drop of hundreds of metres straight down to the cracked mud of the river bed. Spewing stones over the black rock lip as she moved, she hurled herself backwards under Robert’s feet as he climbed down. He came very close to tumbling over her and pitching right over the edge himself. Instead he collapsed straight down between her and the side of the train, rolling backwards under the carriage as he landed. This was only halfway towards being an accident. As soon as his square body was on the cinder road bed, he scrabbled further back beneath the carriage. ‘This way!’ he hissed. She was glad enough to follow, but it soon became obvious that there was nowhere, in fact, to follow to. The inner edge of the train was almost as near the foot of the cliff as the outer edge had been to the drop. The inner side might have felt safer, but it was every bit as exposed. The best cover offered was a thin mess of scrub lying defeated in the angle between the horizontal and the vertical rock.
Robert swore once, foully, and began to push her back beneath the train. She took the lead now, rolling across the hot, stinking cinder road bed and out onto the narrow ledge between the pulpit and pie-crust overhang. This time, her face came close to the sheer drop and her hair actually swung out into space. She made to jerk her head back as though her hair would suck her down after it. But then she stopped. The drop was not sheer. The vertiginous smoothness of the cliff was an illusion. The same forces which had pushed out the thin overhang of rock had also fashioned a second ledge beneath it. Invisible to all but someone lying here with their head hanging over the edge, the rock folded inwards sharply to a depth of a couple of metres.
Made desperate by the lack of any alternative other than surrender and death, she swung outwards and dropped over the edge. She landed with a thump which covered Robert’s gasp of horror, and shuffled backwards as quickly as she could, pushing detritus off the rock shelf with the soles of her desert boots as she moved. A moment later, his head thrust out over the edge and an instant after that he was swinging down to join her.
Like gulls nesting in the cliff, they wedged themselves into the narrow mouth of black rock. From this position it was obvious that the cliff was nowhere near as smooth and glassy as it seemed. The black rock was riven with cracks and crevices from side to side and up and down to depths which varied widely. All that lay below and in front of them, however, was the thick hot air. It stretched out to the quivering tawny and blue distances ahead; it reached temptingly, seductively, down and down and down to the hard red river bed.
And the air here was as crowded with ravening hordes of flies as that around the train had been. They settled on Ann’s body as soon as it was still; landed and crawled and bit with agonising power, each pair of jaws apparently armed with a red-hot needle to be thrust deep into her tender flesh.
As much to keep her eyes from tempting the rest of her over the edge and down that long fall to safe oblivion, Ann wriggled round so that she could see past Robert’s hulking shape and understand something of the rock surfaces surrounding her. At once it became obvious that, although there was no direct line of sight up to the ledge above their heads, it would have been possible to see this place if they had ventured out to the end of the pulpit and looked carefully, for the end of the short rock platform was clearly in their view.
Any further speculation was brought abruptly to an end by a spray of cinder and black gravel which spat over the edge of the cliff as impatient military boots strode along the outer edge of the carriages above their heads. Raucous voices shouted orders in Kyoga-accented French and N’Kuru. A resigned grumble of protest answered and it became clear that a number of people were being ordered out of the carriage.
Orders, questions — incomprehensible to Ann who could guess their meaning only from their tone — were bellowed. Grudging answers were given in a range of voices which fell silent one by one until only a liquid, French-accented contralto persisted. The Kyoga voices yelled and snarled more and more forcefully, but the soft N’Kuru voice maintained a steady flow in a tone of innocent ignorance. And indeed, thought Ann grimly, if the police were asking about Robert and herself then the fat woman who had sat opposite them, the owner of the beautiful voice, was indeed ignorant. No one on the train could possibly have any idea where she and Robert had vanished to.
But the woman’s protestations were clearly not enough to satisfy her inquisitors. There was the sound of slaps and blows, and the rich contralto rose in a shriek of outrage and pain.
The gravel spat over the edge of the precipice once again as a large body was obviously moved under close restraint. The contralto tones faded into the middle distance still protesting innocence, ignorance and outrage.
New voices entered the conversation, cold, commanding voices. At once the woman’s tone moderated. The outrage left it to be replaced by naked terror. The N’Kuru word for chief, one of the few that Ann understood, began to feature prominently. And, once or twice, incongruously, ‘milor’ in French. Now who in heaven’s name, Ann wondered, could the powerful N’Kuru matron be calling ‘my lord’?
The cold tones soon ran out of what little patience they had ever possessed. The voices became abrupt, dismissive. The woman’s voice rose to a wail of protest. The cold tones rapped out orders like a rifle on automatic.
And incredibly, shockingly, the bustle of motion became not only audible, but visible. A group of bodies worked their way out along the pulpit. Two solid Kyoga men in immaculately pressed blue uniforms dragged the writhing bulk of the unfortunate passenger out to the end of the rock pulpit. They released her and retreated at once. She whirled and would have run back towards safety, but the two soldiers were replaced by three other men. Both Ann and Robert hissed at the sight of these three, but they did so for varying reasons.
Ann’s first hiss of surprise came from the sickened recognition of her would-be assailant in the carriage. The same Western haircut, gold chains, bright shirt and pale blue slacks. The young man was shouting and gesturing to the woman and to the other two men. The other two men were obviously the possessors of the cold, commanding voices. Both wore the immaculate, razor-creased uniforms of senior officers, though one uniform was blue and the other green. The officer in blue was a squat, square man whose black skin and full face showed him to be of Kyoga descent. The man in green was white. Everything about him was albino white, cadaverous, consumptive; distastefully sick-looking.